Future Salon

Age of Anxiety Future Salon

Listening to Ray Kurzweil at the AC2005 conference over a week ago was reminding me about the power of accelerating change. If you follow his argument the pace of change is not linear, it is itself accelerating. In the coming decade the rate of change will be about 10 times greater than it was in the last 10 years. Weren't they quite breathtaking already?

Change especially rapid change brings a great deal of uncertainty with it and we humans don't like uncertainty. We often rather stay put even if we are in misery, at least it is a known misery.

We already have a tough time to keep up with what is going on right now and right here. How on (this) earth are we going to cope with even more even accelerating change?

All that change and uncertainty is leading to growing anxiety. Sanjay Khanna will make the case at the next Future Salon that a new Age of Anxiety is upon us. We will discuss ways to cope with it and how to see change as a chance for a better future for all of us.

(Above picture from Jay Cross who has some more details to Ray's talk)

Here Sanjay's abstract:

Anxiety. Stress. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. These moods and conditions may represent the predominant emotional and mental qualities in our fast-changing world. As anxiety dominates how people think - and as the speed of business and social change overwhelms people's abilities to cope healthily - innovation and creativity will be affected. Sanjay Khanna, a writer, researcher and consultant for technology companies in consumer and enterprise markets, will discuss key implications of our age of anxiety for individuals, societies, cultures and innovative industries. He will also offer an antidote, which he calls "Realistic Sanctuary."

We have an Age of Anxiety Wiki page where you can already get some background information, post your own thoughts and links to interesting sites covering the theme. (By the way that wiki page is on the first page of Google results already if you search for "Age of Anxiety".

Details: Future Salon Age of Anxiety Friday October 21st 2005

Future Salon has the following structure: 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP . From 7-9+pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map] As always free and open to the public. Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities. Free and open to the public. Please RSVP, so we can get enough food and drinks.

The event will be Webcasted check the Age of Anxiety Wiki for the details and we will have an IRC chat too: Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #futuresalon 

More on Long-Term Thinking, from the Dyson Clan

Stewart Brand just sent out a heads-up on the next Long Now Seminar:

The next Seminar About Long-term Thinking, on Oct. 5, will be unusual in important ways. The main difference is that making a phone or email reservation is the best way to ensure getting a seat. The problem is a very attractive event in a very restricted venue. The Fort Mason Conference Center only seats 310, but many more than that may want to see Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, and George Dyson together for the first time on a public stage, discussing "The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead." So:

To ensure a seat for the Wednesday Oct. 5 talk at Fort Mason Conference Center, you'll need to call or email Simone Davalos at Long Now--- 415-561-6582; simone@longnow.org--- and leave your name. At the event we'll try to find seats for standbys, and there's a not-too-bad option of standing room outside the windows.

I've added a sub-section to the Salon ride-sharing board for SALT as well, so please check it if you plan to attend and would be interested in carpooling.

Katrina: A Failure of Timeframes

Back in 2001 or so, I had some interesting conversations with John Smart about "what is a life form"? He said a life form is anything that dissipates energy to maintain its internal structure, for example how our bodies burn energy from food to maintain the structure of the cells and DNA and so on. By this definition, a hurricane is a life form. Maybe it is fitting, then, that we give them names?

Here are some photos of our short-lived, swirling, well, I can't call them "friends" -- maybe "enemies" would be a better word -- that have been making headlines recently: Katrina and Rita.

You can see that Rita is a smaller storm, although it is still quite big. Both photos were taken by the same satellite (NASA's Terra satellite) at the same resolution.

At the Long Now Foundation, Danny Hillis started a project to build a clock that would last 10,000 Years, to encourage long-term thinking. The disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is mostly due to failure of long-term thinking. The lack of preparedness is simply a matter that the last time a hurricane of this magnitude hit New Orleans (hurricanes Camille and Betsy) was 30 years ago. That's too long for human memory. The scientists who studied the numbers knew of the risk all along, as demonstrated by, for example, the Scientific American article, Drowning New Orleans, published before the storm.

You have to have a subscription to read the article. There is a similar article in the Houston Chronicle, originally published on Dec. 1, 2001, The foretelling of a deadly disaster in New Orleans.

At any rate, it suffices to make the point that the disaster was foreseen by scientists, even if the politicians, our society's emotional decision-making system, didn't listen. They didn't listen because these kinds of hurricanes aren't part of their day-to-day experience, so it's hard for them to take the scientific warnings seriously.

Ray Kurzweil likes to talk about the difference between "linear" and "exponential" thinking. He is getting at a similar idea: humans are bad at long-term thinking.

For another example, look at California's earthquake preparedness compared with Missouri's. San Francisco, besides the devastating 1906 quake, has had more recent quakes, like the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989. Missouri got hit by a huge quake in 1812, the New Madrid quake -- but absolutely nothing since. I've heard that today, there is virtually no earthquake preparedness in Missouri compared with California.

Fundamentally, we learn from day-to-day experience. Things that happen only once in 30 or 40 years lie solidly outside our day-to-day experience. Things like the 1929 stock market crash -- we got the dot-com bubble and crash because nobody remembered 1929.

And things that lie in the future, like robotics and AI, are also outside our day-to-day experience. In our day-to-day experience change seems linear. Kurzweil's point is very much on-target. But I would go beyond what he says and say it's not just linear vs exponential, it's what we learn from daily experience vs what we can't learn that way. It's things we can learn from experience and feedback -- as our bodies and brains are evolved to do -- vs things that we can only learn by abstract scientific deduction looking at unfamiliar timeframes.

If you want to predict the future correctly, you have to learn to think in unfamiliar timeframes. We learn to think about time gradually over the course of our lifetimes. As children, seconds and minutes seem huge. A week is forever. We have little concept of anything that happened in the past -- something happening in 1800 in indistinguishable from something that happened it 500 BC. To little kids, it was all "the olden days". As we grow older, we can see how our lives fit into history, and get a more long-term perspective. This is why as kids, history is "boring" but becomes more interesting and meaningful as we grow older. That knowledge goes to predicting the future, since taking trends from the deep past and extrapolating into the future is the first step to predicting the future. The problem is that most trends fail to keep going, so you have to think about why the trends happen, and why they will or will not keep going.

And as Katrina demonstrates, failure to develop long-term thinking can result in huge surprises when the future actually arrives. Future-predicting not a purely academic exercise. It's something we all need to learn to do. Survival depends on correct prediction on all timeframes, from how the boss will react to the next thing you say, to the technology that will exist in 30 years -- not just the technology, (which we tend to focus on) but things like energy supplies, population trends, and yes, even the weather.

Why Gamers Will Save the World

Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab (Creators of Second Life), Why Gamers Will Save the World

Synopsis: "Games will save the world by teaching the majority of people how to critically filter the increasing information they are exposed to." Gamers are critical-thinking goal-oriented people. Games are learning environments. The Yahoo Senior Director of Engineering Operations is founder of the World of Warcraft guild The Azure Blades (this was actually on their resume). Being a guild leader requires coordinating 100's of people all around the world, working toward common goals, balancing player needs and politics all while trying to win the game. Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project at USC is looking at MMOG games as a method for acquiring public diplomacy skills.

Joi did perfect lead in to [the virtues of a] user created world...but I'm not talking about that tonight.

[Between typing intently for over 13 hours and a silly technical problem with my laptop  at start of Cory's talk, this session's notes are sparse relative the density of content Cory presented. His slides were awesome and I'll see about securing a copy. BTW, I recommend Cory's talk from AC2004; it was my personal favorite at last year's AC2004. Scroll down in AC2004 Day 1 notes to "Living the Dream: Business, Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds".]

"Games will save the world by teaching the majority of people how to critically filter the increasing information they are exposed to."

Games are a learning environment. Laziness is punished in games.

Education example: ThottBot, http://www.thottbot.com/?f=q, and Apolyton is collection of fans who've built a "university" to teach other gamers about the game, Civ.

The flying spaghetti monster is proposed to be as valid as the notion of a Creator of universe (versus Kansas Board of Education).

Intellectual laziness can bite you: "We didn't know the levees would breach..."

Don't like the game? Then modify it, skinning, make your own (taking engine but turn it into something completely different).

Cory Doctorow had a book signing at Second Life; those at the signing could upload a digital file of a page so they'd have his "signature" on their Second Life book.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) guilds require coordinating 100's of people all around the world, working toward common goals, balancing player needs and politics all WHILE trying to win the game.

The Yahoo Senior Director of Engineering Operations is also founder of the World of Warcraft guild The Azure Blades - this was actually on the resume. 

Gamers are critical thinking, goal-oriented people.

Joshua Fouts and Douglas Thomas at USC Annenberg School have done some research. [See Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project at USC; and speech abstracts [1] [2]]

Use of gaming approaches for education in general.

Why isn't this topic bigger [and known]? Other topics getting attention like violence: "games make kids evil", pesky science stuff (few peer review studies on game and violence - exception: "Study: Games Do Not Unequivocally Cause Violence", was later picked up by The Economist), the idea that game industry is doomed because we have to make all this stuff (content costs time & expensive programming resources).

ac2005 education second life virtual worlds mmorpg

Brave New Virtual Worlds

Jerry Paffendorf, Community Director at Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) spoke on his research interests in the session, "Introduction to Explorations: Brave New Virtual Worlds".

Synopsis: Jerry covers a lot of ground in a short time. He discusses the protypical user-constructed universe of Second Life.  For instance, industrial designer, Caven Concord, trys his ideas out in his virtual workshop in Second Life. He can then choose to 3D print his prototypes into "real life" manufacture later. Jerry also touches upon the annotating the real-world planet as well in the second half. What he calls Earth 2.0, the taggable, searchable, skinnable planet via GPS-aware phones, Google Earth, Google Maps and more.

Jerry Pallendorf, Community Director, ASF, "Introduction to Explorations: Brave New Virtual Worlds".

Jerry recommends the book, Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox: How It Will Happn and What it Will Mean.

Last year Jerry spoke about making things in Second Life. [Last year's talk was entitled Rise of the Virtual-to-Real Labor Force: 5 Free Ideas—from Underwear to Architecture. Notes available at end of Day 1 AC2004 notes here.] Second Lifeis a prototypical universe; it now has 50,000 accounts; most games peak out in user growth within a few months but Second Life just keeps growing.

[In the hallway, an attendee that went to Friday's Tech Night reception tells me that accounts are free at SL now; they realize user attention is a valuable currency itself. And they make more money on real estate anyway.]

If you Google image search on his name, "Jerry Paffendorf" you get his Second Life avatar first in the results. There's even presentations and future salons (blog) within SL. Second Life Relay for Life raised $5,369 for American Cancer Society, Volunteers build donation camps and self-organize their own activities.

Prototype, Rip, Mix, and 3D Burn - design on the edge. An industrial designer, Caven Concord, trys ideas out in his workshop in Second Life. He can then 3D print them into "real" manufacture.

The 3D virtual world is subsuming the browser (i.e. you browse Internet in Second Life) and Firefox is being rolled out in SL.

"I'm not building a game, I'm building a new country." - Philip Rosedale, CEO, Second Life

Real-world Second Life convention October 8-9: www.slconvention.org - colocated with the State of Play conference at NY Law School.

What will a Google Earth search for "Jerry Pallendorf" show you? Mentions the collaborative tracing of GPS-connected folks in Amsterdam. "In the very near future there are going to be billions of people walking around the planet with GPS-aware phones. I used to wonder what kinds of things we'd be able to do with them. Now it's clear: we are going to use them to collectively annotate the planet." - Jon Udell

The taggable, searchable world: Google chipped in to get latest satellite images after Katrina; people could post updates on news, and the situation.

The Skinnable World: Example of 3D model of coffee shop in Great Bear Coffee, Los Gatos. An avatar walks through space - see also Amazon's A9 blockview, Adobe Atmosphere, Google Maps.

Mapping and Sculpting the Possibility Space (possibility space is term that Willl Wright uses in Sims). Players can create player paths in The Sims.

Jerry ends that the ultimate platform is Earth 2.0, a system of the world.

ac2005 gmaps second life virtual worlds mmorpg tagging web2.0

Progress in Search: A Conversational User Interface (CUI) by 2015?

Ron Kaplan, Director of Natural Language Research, Palo Alto Research Center  and Marti Hearst, Professor, SIMS, UC Berkeley; Science Advisor for Search, Yahoo! spoke on the state of natural language interfaces for search.

Synopsis: Kaplan says we're at the level where where it's like talking to a one-year-old today. What's desired is something more akin to conversing with "an  intelligent research assistant." He adds, "It's not just about search. How do we interact with the world of ubiquitous computing [talking to remotes, your fridge, your car, sensors of all kinds, etc]? They'll be useful to extent we can have natural conversations." His prediction: "We'll be at 8-year-old level in 2010. In the [classic] hockeystick curve, I'm going to claim we're at the inflection point."

Marti Hearst claims that a well thought out user interface itself can help guide people and speaks about the role of inference: "What will people want to do next based on other people who had same question?" She's even more optimistic: "Shouldn't online travel agencies be more like a travel agent? Maybe we'll be there in about 4 years. And a pretty good desktop assistant? I'd say 5 years because there is a lot of government research in this area."

Progress in Search: A Conversational User Interface (CUI) by 2015?
From program: Our debate at AC2005 will consider differing estimates of the difficulty and strategies necessary to achieving a first-generation conversational user interface (CUI, pronounced "cooey") within the coming decade. Achieving a functional CUI would be perhaps the single most important and empowering artificial intelligence/intelligence amplification breakthrough we may witness in our lifetimes. It would give us the ability to talk to, be productive with, and be continually educated by our computers, cellphones, internet, and other complex technologies using simple but natural human conversation.

Sibley Verbeck, StreamSage (Moderator): More of an [intelligence] amplification than a technology itself. It's language understanding, it's inference. For instance, control applications - at lunchtime, chatted about getting rid of remotes and talk to devices in our living room. Being at Comcast, I have to think about television. If you are watching the news and something comes on. Any two minute new story generates more questions than it answers. What if we augmented and queued up more in-depth version of story, provide other information.

What is under hood? How close are we?

Ron Kaplan, Director of Natural Language Research, Palo Alto Research Center

Slides titled: Converging on Conversation: Search and Everything Else

It's not just about search. How do we interact with the world of ubiquitous computing? They'll be useful to extent we can have natural conversations.

Where are we now? It's like talking to a 1-year-old. Can't say what you want, nor get what you need. Adding more words yields no hits (usually).

Issue today is precision.

Work arounds: order by popularity (based on incoming links, clickthroughs for these hits - assuming you are generic person: "if it's good for everyone else, it's good for you") - it's not individualized. You order cookbook for your mother and now you get cookbook recommendations on Amazon for life.

What's desired: A better model is not a 1-year-old, but an  intelligent research assistant.

Let's say I want to know... What prevented the Northwest strike? Then you have a conversation for clarifation. Next question: By mechanics or flight attendents? Mimics having a back-and-forth conversation with your assistant to refine the search rather than keywords and documents [model].

Typing is a problem sometimes. IM is anything but Instant. Language is efficient; unsaid but understood in context and based on expectations ("The fish seemed ready to eat"). The speaker and hearer must model each other. Problem is that it's an intricate interactiton of intricate operations.

Component technologies: Accurate speech, robust grammatical analysis, ontologies and inference, personalization (how does it figure out "me", context, expectations), dialog models (primitive but useful)

Personalization is not very good right now. Needs discussion along with observed behavior ("I'm buying this for my grandmother"). The personal context (speech, interests) can be on client side.

Also needed coherent architecture that enables modularity.

We need another 2 cycles of Moore's Law. GB + GIPS.

We'll be at 8-year-old level in 2010. In the [classic] hockeystick curve, I'm going to claim we're at the inflection point.

Marti Hearst, Professor, SIMS, UC Berkeley; Science Advisor for Search, Yahoo!

SIMS is interdisciplinary - within School of Information - includes economics, law, IT

In short-term a lot of focused, domain specific interfaces. Such as "shortcuts" on search engines like "SFO flights" - but, of course, people don't like memorizing command languages.

User interface design itself can often make up for a lack of natural language processing technology itself by limiting choices, suggesting next choices, etc.

Compute statistics on data. For instance, factoid questions: "Who is president of Uganda?" (For straight-forward questions with single answers.)

Automating dialogue is not that far ahead today. Only a little bit of work in that area [thus far].

Large-scale huge behavior collections, such as spelling corrections. Making inferences: What will people want to do next based on other people who had same question?

Spelling example: Dictionaries not enough because many words aren't in standard dictionaries. Use other people's mistakes to map to other misspellings. If horrible misspelling then map to the closet (better) mispelling until you [iteratively] hit on correct spelling. First maps to other misspellings. Number of correct spellings obviously must outnumber the misspellings.  This algorithm wouldn't work other than there are so many queries [to map against].

Shouldn't online travel agencies be more like a travel agent? Maybe we'll be there in about 4 years.

And a pretty good desktop assistant? I'd say 5 years because there is a lot of government research in this area.

ac2005 search search engine user interface natural language processing

H2N-Gen Hydrogen Generating Module

Joe Williams Sr. seems to have found the solution for a couple of our problems:

His product, he said, produces a more complete burn, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing fuel consumption by 10 to 40 per cent - and pollutants by up to 100 per cent. ...

The H2N-Gen increases burn efficiency to at least 97 per cent, Williams said. This saves fuel and greatly reduces emissions. ...

"We're marketing a 20-pound unit for $7,500," Williams predicted. "That's the maximum price that it will be. The average truck out there today will get their money back in eight months at the latest. CN (Canadian National) spends $11 billion a year on fuel and we can save them minimum a guarantee of 10 per cent, $1.1 billion a year."

Please hurry up, we all can use less emissions and better efficiency.

The Open Network, Joi Ito

Joi Ito, venture capitalist, talks on The Open Network.

Synopsis: Joi evangelizes for the power inherent in an open network - open as in not closed to participation and competition. He sees a divide between an old guard and his twist on the "Creative Class". The creative class scrambles to find business models and opportunities in behavioral shifts, trends, technologies rather than fighting change and preserving the status quo. He cites examples of Chinese and Japanese artists making a living by giving some of their product away. And he ends with the rise of the amateur revolution (amateur is a French meaning one that is motivated to do by passion): "Good amateurs are better than crappy professionals."

Joi Ito, The Open Network

Earlier someone mentioned ICANN - ICANN is fixable; and at least it is an open system. [Reference to other large body organization that he's not sure is fixable; btw, Joi is on the board of ICANN.]

Internet was the first open network; open networks are a pillar of democracy.

Before the 'Net, the telephone companies decided amongst themselves the rules of play. Open means it's competitive - anyone can participate and compete; not about who has the most votes [in a committee].

I would call ourselves The Creative Class - I've been kicked around by Richard Florida by my interpretation.

There is more similarity between the creative class across countries - like with Brazil - than within the same country [to non-creative class]. There is a huge gap between the old school guys and new school guys. File sharing is a new behavior. Old school: Instead of trying to make a business out of it, they [instinctly] want to kill it. You don't try to force a behavior change -- you watch for behavior changes and then create a product for it. [[At this point, Joi plays the Pepsi Super Bowl commercial where kids that are "criminals" for filesharing speak.]

MP3 is metadata. The artists make their money in concerts, in endorsements. I've talked to Chinese artists. They said: "What's worse than being ripped off? Not being ripped off." Contrast to in Japan the music is crap because [the industry] it is a big machine.

Don't need to argue for Wikipedia in this audience - take a look at Wikipedia history flow. Average mean time to correct any vandalism is five minutes.

New anime  products by same business folks that sold Pokemon for $2. Now finding people will pay $2000 for DVD boxed set [of anime videos that are freely distributed online]. These are the devotees. Trying to get $2000 from 100 fans instead of $2 across 100,000 people. This is a new model.

It's now more about relationships between artists and fans.

Plays Narutrix video.

ccmixter.org - you can put music here under Creative Commons license [from site: "remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want"]; says people have been picked up by labels and "discovered" here.

Last.fm - now people can tag their music 'gothic lolita' if that's what users actually refer to it; tags are a new way that microcontent is attaching itself to other microcontent

Amateur is French, for people who do things for passion; "Good amateurs are better than crappy professionals."

Folks that won't like amateurs are monopolies: telephone companies, Microsoft, and Hollywood.

Q: on future of blogging [supposed to have been the published title of Joi's talk]

A: Future of blogging is all about the amateur revolution. Ohmynews - you pay $100 to train as citizen journalist; if you attend all classes you get your money back. People get paid via tipjar - one article alone got $20,000 in tips. Part of reason that blogging hasn't taken off in Korea as much is so many are participating in this citizen journalism.

ac2005 web2.0 tagging social software creative class business model

The Accountable Net, Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson, CNET, The Accountable Net

Synopsis: Informal Q&A style on the implications of reputation, privacy, anonymity, and governance of the Internet. Dyson also adds her international perspective several times. Talking about her recent trip to Africa: "If you don't eat then all this [technical] stuff is irrelevant. Eroding power of authority is secondary - after you are surviving. I think Internet as an economic tool is more important in those countries. She ends the talk with this food-for-thought:

"I don't want a [master] list from government of credible people. Give people power to do things, not to power over other people."

The Accountable Net, Esther Dyson

I want this talk to be a model of what I'm going to talk about. If you don't like what I'm going to talk about, you can get up and go hear Terry Winograd [speaker in concurrent session]. Or you can go out to lobby and protest. Or go out and start your own conference. That's the kind of governance and freedom that is part of the Internet.

Accountable peer-to-peer rather than some elected authority that can be corrupted, etc.

One version is you just leave it alone. [Runs itself.] However, the rule sets you create do make a difference [and determine nature of the environment]. Gives example of 'rules' for use: Vizu for polls as Flickr is for photos. Letting users create the rules is one possibility; but you may start out with wrong set of users. Market-placed mechanisms.

One place it doesn't work is internet security. How do you protect clueless grandmother (or clueless white male not to be stereotypical). Focus on designing for 80% people. A staggered hierachy of rules and protection for spectrum of "I need help" to "I'm a hacker, I know what I'm doing."

Q: What about the nonaccountable Net? For instance, people into kinky sex or political dissenters or just wanting anonymity.

A: Stay private. And the gray line should be moved a little bit in case of China. In general, I think transparency is best. You can say "I won't tell you my name." Fine. But you should be accountable to who you say you are. There are rules that apply when you are physically in China even if they are different when you are virtually on the Internet using anonymizer. I'd like to change the world, but I can't.

Large group of anti-spyware companies making judgments - some [folks] think  they'ree too vigilante, some just fine. It's a messy process, but I think it'll turn out well in the end.

I don't think Soviet Union fell apart because of Internet. CNN did it. People saw how the other half lived. SMS played a large part in Phillipines. And Ukraine. More about  organizing protest. Blogging is now big in China. I just came back from Africa - if you don't eat then all this [technical] stuff is irrelevant. Eroding power of authority is secondary - after you are surviving. I think Internet as an economic tool is more important in those countries.

Q: I'm thinking about the Darknet - the part of Internet we can't see into.

A: You can protect yourself from everything. The problem isn't search. It's filtering through all of it - getting the information you need. If you really knew all the things that could be happening to you, you'd stay in bed. Some of Darknet is also the freedom lovers [i.e. political dissenters] - not all bad.

I'm a big fan of clean well-lighted places. And I believe in privacy. I don't want a [master] list from government of credible people. Give people power to do things, not to power over other people.

ac2005 accountable net reputation privacy

Annotating the Planet and Google Maps

Jon Udell, lead analyst at Infoworld, spoke on Annotating the Planet. He tells stories as he speaks so it was hard to capture all the nuances of his talk because I found myself listening more than typing notes!

Synopsis: With services such as Google Maps, the physical world becomes a canvas. He gives varied examples of Gmaps applications and muses about the location-aware future and how memory is tied intimately to place. He contrasts Amazon's A9 use of professional photographers to provide images of city and town block views with where the future is going: the do-it-yourself creation, annotating, tagging collective. "We're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself."

Jon Udell, Annotating the Planet

Intro: Lead analyst at InfoWorld. Wrote Internet groupware book for O'Reilly in 1999. ("Groupware" is basically forerunner to social software now.) Even was at Lotus back when.

Jon starts by telling us a story by referring to a Google Map of Keene, NH (his hometown). He tells us that at Greenlawn Cemetary, there is a nest that a squirrel made out of flags. He's told friends about this this nest before but never been able to adequately describe it to people or where it is at. When you've lived in a place all your life, a lamp post has all sorts of memories - for you - but necessary for a newcomer. [I envision that locals' annotations can help make newcomers or visitors feel welcome and part of the history and memories.]

The physical world becomes a canvas.

He refers to chicagocrime.org [also referenced by Scott Rafer in his talk.] [Bonus link: Jon describes why Google Maps along with other Web technologies are powerful in terms of leverage.]

Some runners took the Google Maps API and built this Gmaps Pedometer (at sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer).  It measures the distance of a route and saves the route. Jon started using it to track his bike routes. And he tags his rides at del.icio.us/judell/bicycleroute. [All del.icio.us users bicycleroutes here.]

He maps his bike rides and notes how memory is tied to place - at mile 23 he was listening to podcast and thinking of Jim Gray's research. Now the two are intimately linked. [I think Jon was also implying it reinforces the learning and absorption. When he passes that mile 23 again, he recalls.]

In rural New Hampshire there aren't many surveillance cameras. When he was lightly grazed by car, would it be possible to find the driver [someday with use of cameras tied to maps]?

Reference to www.cellreception.com/towers

How will we follow trillions of objects RFID tagged? Location is often an attribute of digital identity: for instance, dodgeball, plazes. Even when we're not tagging or advertising our location, someone else at this conference may make mention of it, or consider that our credit card audit trial leaves traces of where we are.

We like transparency when applied to other people. But not when applied to us. The Transparent Society, by David Brin. Anyone can stand on street corner and watch. So we reason we should be able to access this government surveillance camera feed on TV.

Daniel Greer says access control lists don't scale. Because humans [can't deal with them?] and they are always in flux.

I just read this book Red-Tails in Love. Hawks were on a high ledge of a building on Fifth Avenue. It's really about the bird watchers in Central Park. They keep a [bird register - it's like a wiki [offline] - with maps and annotations. Asks what if the bird register was missing. In general, in this case, a collaborative effort like this doesn't require technology.

evdb, upcoming.org - coordinate with people that plan to attend events. Right now you can't say "tell me everything about Unitarian Church events" across all these, including individual blogs.

Amazon's mapping service (maps.a9.com) has photos of blockview images (done by [pro] photographers). But we're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself.

Ward Cunningham found that Coastal Data Information Program feeds information on buoys into Internet.

Can help us engage more deeply with the natural world. DavidRumsey.com has made his antique 18th and 19th map collection available online. David Ramsey ended his talk at Where 2.0: In the future, there will be no unknown spaces. The new geography is we'll know more about those places and our connections there.

I expect to upload my consciousness in the future, but in the meantime I want to know more about this world and connect more intimately to it.

ac2005 gmaps tagging social software web2.0

The Fundamental Mechanism of Cognition

Robert Hecht-Nielsen, Computational Neurobiologist (via videoconference) spoke on
The Fundamental Mechanism of Cognition.

Synopsis: Each cortical module in the celebral cortex is responsible for describing one attribute that an object in the mental world can have. These attributes are persistent terms of reference. For instance we can have the attribute of apple for a mental object. Hecht-Neilsen goes on to describe how pair-wise "knowledge links" are formed - for instance, apple can be unidirectionally linked to another neuron-collection of red. Hecht-Nielsen goes on to explain how we think (take inputs and respond with action) with this knowledge link model. He ends by discussing conversational interface research funded by the FairIsaac that employs 10B links to mimic a human conversationalist.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen titled the powerpoint, "Engines of Cognition: Cortical Modules"

Cerebral cortex is divided into modules - macroscopic, not like cortical module which is microscopic - large tissue. For a while people thought these didn't exist; does that mean don't exist? It means people didn't know what they were looking for, but now they do.

Each cortical module is responsible for describing one attribute that an object in the mental world can have. It describes it in terms of symbols.  These symbols are formed in early childhood and they never are removed. You can't delete the symbol "David" - you can't do that. They're persistent. Symbols are durable, persistent terms of reference that must exist if knowledge is to be accumulated over long periods of time.

This is all the machinery of cognition that's needed.

A mental object can have an attribute of name, for instance: apple. Another symbol representing color red. Unidirectional neuron collection-to-neuron collection knowledge link between apple and red.  Always pair-wise. Pairs of symbols.

How can these components think?

Each cortical module receives a thought control command input, which can cause the module to implement confabulation.

Some of these are receiving simulataneous knowledge links - very fast, highly parallel operation to determine which symbol is receiving the most activation. This "winner takes all" contest is called confabulation. Lightly excited symbols drop out - everything over in 100 milliseconds or less.

All of cognition is built on this operation called confabulation. [This has no relation to the better known definition of confabulation.] Not a digital control signal - it's analog like a muscle. The tension on the muscle must be precise.

Every time a confabulation yields a conclusion, then a set of action commands output. This happens immediately. These action commands are the behaviors we implement. Most of them are micro-behaviors, very small - but also include the macro.

The Alien Nature of Animal Intelligence: Vast quantities of knowledge are keys and billions of knowledge links are required. Thinking is exactly like moving (he uses the muscle analogy again). Learning is expensive (takes 1/3 of our life).

Language is the essential core of intelligence - that's why monkeys are stupid and we're not.

Fill-in-word example, sentence-continuation examples given.

FairIsaac has funded research on conversational machine called Vacations! mimics a human conversationalist, employs 10 billion knowledge links, exhibits powerful generalization to novel arrangements of familiar elements.

Sees a future called the "Confabulation Age". Sci Fi has already sold the vision. Envisions govt and academia playing minor role because not sufficiently nimble. Not within scope of resources for students or start-ups. Will be large IT-based companies ('elephants') as dominating.

tags ac2005 AI artificial intelligence cognition

Announcement: Grand Challenge Road Trip

Whether you're sad to be saying goodbye to all your ASF friends already after such a jam-packed ACC weekend, or you weren't able to attend at all, a perfect opportunity for some more socializing, over a more leisurely weekend, is just around the corner: you're invited to join fellow Future Saloners to attend the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicles race on October 8. As was done for last year's Challenge, we will be self-organizing into carpools at a Salon the Friday night before, but this year the race is on the San Diego Future Salon weekend, so we'll be congregating there rather than in L.A. (The precise course of the race will not be revealed until the morning of the race, and even the locations of the start and finish lines will not be announced until the week before, but they will be somewhere out in the southern CA/NV desert.)

Last year, as you may recall, none of the contestants completed the course, and the $1 million prize went unclaimed. Since DARPA had suspected such an outcome was likely (they named it the DARPA Grand Challenge for a reason), the idea was to double the prize amount each race until somebody wins. As planned, therefore, this year's prize is $2 million. Vying for it this year are 43 teams, from 15 states, including two teams ("Red Team" and "Red Team Too") from last year's best contender, Carnegie Mellon. For more on last year's race, check out the DARPA Grand Challenge website, the coverage on IT Conversations, and my own small trip album.

And the October 7 San Diego Future Salon will feature David Lemberg, the Executive Producer and Host of the "Science and
Society" Internet radio and podcast program focusing on nanotechnology, life sciences, space exploration, K-12 science education, and the intersection between science and art. He will be presenting "Nanotechnology: The Near Future of Medicine, Space Exploration, and the Environment."

Feel free to just show up at the SD Salon, or at the race itself if your Friday evening is already booked. But those planning to attend the race are encouraged to let it be known to us all in order to encourage others to join us for the trek as well.

Update: I've now added a coordination page to the ASF wiki.

Shrinking the Planet Session

Two speakers in this session including Peter Barrett, Microsoft TV on IPTV; and Scott Rafer, chairman of Wireless Ink, previously founder of Feedster. From the program: "Each can greatly personalize the information we receive, "shrinking” the planet by making all the world’s knowledge more accessible than ever before."

Peter Barrett is talking about video services over high-speed broadband. Mobile operators in particular are interested in integrating voice, data, video. He sees much of the uses being in the 'long tail' of personal media, sharing of user-created photographs and video.

Scott Rafer makes the point that aggregated, collaborative intelligence is here and now. The Q&A at the end really underscore his point that other humans in aggregate are his "artificial intelligence" agents:

Q: How is this A.I.?
A: My talk is there is none. I grew up on Route 128 and I've been promised AI since I was 12.

Q: Your talk seems to be about collaboratiive intelligence.
A: Yes, I think to average person the end-result will appear same.

Download Scott's Rafer's Slides.pdf

IPTV, Peter Barrett, Microsoft TV
IPTV better for content providers; better for consumers. Broadcast TV is partly a function of way we monetize content; that's changing. The video lives in the service.

SBC Project Lightspeed - new IP-based fiber-rich network - up to 50 mbps to 18M customer households  (today broadband in U.S. is at 1.5-6 Mbps). Doesn't stop at home - other devices on home would be connected within home.

IPTV is connected TV. Operators will start combining the voice services with the data services. Photos aren't just on my phone - they're on TV. They're part of the service, not part of device.  Also sharing personal media.

If you look at those deploying IPTV - they are folks like SBC, Verizon - carriers with mobile services.

Live8 is poster child. Two inane VJs started to talk over Pink Floyd. People went online to watch.

If you want to catch Gilligan's Island, Episode 71, you can do that.

The Long Tail - there is some content EVERYONE wants to watch; then there's content that only a certain demographic wants to watch. Over time, the total audience under the 'long tail' is much larger. Broadcast TV is horrible at this.

I think Long Tail as all is about our pictures. To my parents, pictures of grand babies are at least as interesting as Six Feet Under. Personal media is much more immediate today.

Video service platform including billing, etc. Not very interesting to look at. Don't have a demo of it. From user point to view. (Shows some clips.) Tuning is in the network, not in the box. You can blend in media and data from other sources simultaneously - which is very difficult to do in broadcast or satellite. You can see what your friends and family are watching. You can also see what other people are watching.

People watch catastrophic events live. Or Super Bowl- which is sort of catastrophic. And that's it. The future is definitely PVR. People would rather lose color than PVR.

Ads can be targetted and connected to other forms of media. PVR isn't killing advertising. It's continuing fragmentation of media. There will be a new form of advertising.

Q: On your comment when you said video was in the service...

A: The end-to-end principle of IP is still there. But we need a way to develop premium channels. Looking at pictures - you're going over the core. What I described was a private network by SBC.

The user sees a service-specific view of the service.

Built on public standards for security.

The system does support IPv6 infrastructure. This is a service platform for operators. SBC is launching with Yahoo and partnering with application developers. It's a platform for ecosystem, not a service in and of itself. 

Scott Rafer, newly chairman of Wireless Ink (wherever you are in world, find realtime chats), just previously founder Feedster

"AI is 10 to 9th broadband humans"

Smart agents are other human beings. The Web 2.0 systems are all going to be passing Turing test. The book I think that is useful to understand this is Emergence, by Steven Johnson. Five rules outlined in that book.

Humans are useful.

Humans are consistent. (Shows triangle of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - ending with self-actualization. Note from blogger: Actually Maslow added Transcendance as last layer.) Scott's version of Maslow:

1. Water, Food, Booze
2. Bars, Restaurants
3. Potential mates?
4. How do I look?
5. Is this really all there is?

Is this semantic?

• How do I find an apartment near (or far away from) where my friends drink heavily?
• Which TV segments are being viewed by people who influence opinion most?

(The only TV shows that Scott watches are ones recommended by a few bloggers he reads.  "I trust them.")

Humans will be my AI.

See also: del.icio.us/popular, Chicago crime map (at chicagocrime.org), cheap gas (this may be what Scott refers to), onegoodmove.org TV excerpts - all the good parts are right there (MORE: "Already sites like onegoodmove post long clips from commercial programming like Jon Stewart’s "The Daily Show," and thus far most content owners haven’t complained." - MSNBC's The Practical Futurist article)

Q: How is this AI?
A: My talk is there is none. I grew up on Route 128 and I've been promised AI since I was 12.

Q: Your talk seems to be about collaboratiive intelligence.
A: Yes, I think to average person the end-result will appear same.

Q: You're saying that population of humans is better than AI.
A: It exists.

tags ac2005 AI artificial intelligence social software broadband

Q&A With Ray Kurzweil

With moderator: Moira Gunn, of public radio's Tech Nation

KEY M: Moira Gunn | A: Ray Kurzweil's response | Q: Audience question

A snippet from this afternoon's Q&A:

[An AI entity...] Is that a machine like a character in a video game? Is it conscious? Consciousness is at the core of our moral and legal systems. But there is not human agreement on consciousness, for instance, are animals conscious?

KEY M: Moira Gunn | A: Ray Kurzweil's response | Q: Audience question

[I just stepped in from break and we're talking about sex...]

A: Will need virtual reality to affect sexual relations. Would need tactile communication, VR in the nervous system.

VR will also enable new art forms.

Safe as far as STD, pregnancy, a violent outcome; you can change who you are (you can change who you are); you can project yourself as the other person; accountability matters - wouldn't want people to masquerade as a teenager that is a pedophile

Really explore interpersonal relationships

M: Is there anything about intimacy?
A: Everything I've talked about is communication. Emotional intelligence is the cutting edge of human intelligence - that's the last frontier in AI. Spindle cells - special type of neurons - involved in emotions. We have about 80,000. Chimps have 3-4,000. Humans don't have any spindle cells when they are born. But still, that's only behavior. Is that a machine like a character in a video game? Is it conscious? Consciousness is at the core of our moral and legal systems. But there is not human agreement on consciousness, for instance, are animals conscious?

This will be ongoing debate. I think we'll see them as conscious. They'll be mad if we don't believe them, so they'll be influential.

M: We build these systems. At that point as technology creators what should we program into those systems?

A: That's a good questions. Look at viruses - they're unleashed with unpredictable consequences. We can disallow self-replication but could be easily adverted. Need an immune system. The answer is we have a lot of responsibility. We can create more complexity than we started with - we see that with evolutionary genetic programming.

M: The rate of change is skyrocketing. All technology is a product of science and engineering. Peter Schwartz at Global Business Network says 92% of all scientists are alive today; 95% of all engineers are alive today. Doesn't say what kinds of technology will the new technologies create?

A: I don't see it as a distinction. We merge the two. Librarians use the tools - integrated into human civilization. All of our jobs routinely use technology.  There must be a wall, people say, because humans can't handle all this.

M: Most of us don't know how the car works. But we adapt to use it. My question is idea that technology begets other technology. Will there also be humans [in the loop].

A: I believe technology is part of human civilization. This future civilization is emerging from our civilization. To me the purpose of life is creating knowledge - includes all the expressions including art and music and literature. We create knowledge and pass that from generation to generation - that is distinctly human.

M: Paradigm shifts - how we view the world. Humans love to timeshift, for instance when we first got email. TiVo interferes with broadcast TV [business model]. Books on tape worry book publishers.

A: These new paradigms don't eclipse others. We still have magazines. We still have plows. These become new business models in and of themselves - bigger pie, and profoundly democratizing.

Esther [Dyson in previous session] was right that Internet was there yet. Had fax machines. Now everyone knew what was going on. Information wasn't hidden anymore. That's what undid Soviet Union.

We will be able to harness a specific interest - if you are a musician, you can jam with a specific, complex ensemble.

M: Religious fundamentalists and even uninformed people are anti-technology. Can you paint dark & light scenarios?
A: It isn't just religious fundamentalists. It's also humanist movement: take the anti-GMO movement. Golden rice can save a lot of people; kids from going blind. Stem cells have moved ahead. Biotech is moving ahead quite obstentively. These tend to be stones in the stream and ultimately don't really change exponential trends.

M: Will politicians listen better to AI [simulated] models [reference to models and experts that described issues around levees in NOLA]?

A: Probably not. There's tremendous power in private hands. In 2020s, we'll have nanobots to clean up industrial revolution's waste.

Have/have not divide is huge issue. It's tragic what's been done in AIDS. If only the wealthy can use it, then it's not as useful. The law of accelerating returns [means that these come down in price in accelerated fashion].  In movie The Matrix the cellphone that was whipped out was only available to elite then - not that long ago.

Q: on education

A: At MIT, 60% of courses are online now. A school in Pakistan is taking its curriculum from MIT; watch the webcasts  (isn't exactly like being there yet; maybe another eight years). That's the case in Africa, China. There are ambitious plans so don't need to have a teacher to teach in every subject in every village. Just about free in many languages.

Overcomes time-lapse, geography, etc.

Q: See from your slides earlier that our lives are being extended.

A: The law supports now that if they're healthy and in good shape, that's just fine. I often get question regarding population problems and issues around resources. Nanotechnology will help us create the material goods we need - so resources won't be issue. I'm asked: Won't boredom set in? But also an expansion in knowledge.

Q: Nuclear was supposed to solve all our energy problems. What will prevent nanotechnology going the way of nuclear power?
A: Nanotech is very distributed; nuclear power centralized.
Q: Semiconductor fabs cost millions of dollars.
A: A lot won't require multimillion dollar technology at all.

Q: Who will be accountable in this new type of intelligence?
A: We're going to have to redefine accountability.

M: We started off on the topic of sex. I really like a man with a sense of humor...until you get the humor part down, I'm going to wait out.

A: That's going to be last thing we can master.

tags ac2005 singularity AI artificial intelligence

Kurweil Keynote: When Humans Transcend Biology

Ray Kurzweil, Kurzweil Technologies and author, The Singularity is Near When Humans Transcend Biology keynotes for third year in a row (if memory serves right).

Check out slides at: www.kurzweilAI.net/pps/ACC2005

Synopsis: We have programs in our body we haven't changed in 30,000 years.  The main difference in perspective from people in this conference and much more common view is the historical exponential perspective and a linear perspective. Most people intuitively extrapolate today into the future linearly.

As Kurweil maintains, the maxim 'Know thyself' is really the goal of reverse-engineering of the brain. Kurzweil's latest book, makes case the reverse-engineering will happen by 2029. That's when computers pass the Turing test.  And our fixed biological intelligence will merge with nonbiological intelligence.

People ask me all the time about existential risk. To biological warfare risks, to pathological nanotechnology, and to pathological AI. The answer: Strong AI. And when that becomes pathological - stronger AI. Sort of like it's turtles all the way down.

We plan for it...sort of like we planned for Katrina. [Audience laughs.]

We have programs in our body we haven't changed in 30,000 years.  The main difference in perspective from people in this conference and much more common view is this difference in historical exponential versus a linear perspective. People intuitively extrapolate today into the future linearly.

What can we say about the future? People say it's unpredictable. Some things hards to predict. Will Google stock be higher in 3 years? The price of MEMS track to simulated models pretty well. A feature of any evolutionary process. Each stage in biological evolution used its creation to build upon. Latest generation of technology used to build next.

The paradigm shift rate itself is changing - doubly every decade.  Telephones took decades to be adopted - and look at cell phone subscribers.

Shows a logarithmic plot of events from emergence of life, to human ancestors walk upright, spoken language, early cities, printing, industrial evolution, telephone, computer, personal computer...

We go through different epochs: (1) atomic structures, (2) biology (DNA), (3) brains, (4) technology - hardware and software, (5) merger of technology and human intelligence, (6) universe wakes up (patterns of matter and energy in the universe become saturated with  intelligent processes and knowledge)

Brain uses a very slow chemical-switching process now. In Age of Spiritual Machines, I talked about 3D molecular computing would be the next thing (coming about in nanotubes).

Goes beyond Moore's Law - IT of all kinds double their power (price performance, capacity, bandwith) every year. Even his notebook laptop today is more powerful than a $11 million IBM mainframe he used at MIT in 1967. (24 doublings of price-performance in 36 years.)

More charts of Moore's Law itself (supercomputer power, power/cost, transistors, MIPS, dynamic RAM in bits/dollar, magnetic data storage, etc.). That's just hardware side of equation. 

Similar rates for price/performance for AIDS drugs.

We are reverse engineering human biology. Costs of DNA sequencing is halving too (halving time is 1.9 years). RNA interference used to shut down a gene for genetic medicine.  Every speaker at the Future of Life - except myself and Bill Joy - used a model of  progress in the last 50 years for the next 50 years.

Every form of communications technology is doubling price-performance, bandwidth,  capacity every 12 months.  Another exponential trend is miniturization. We've been shrinking devices at exponential rate.

Animation of a respirocyte releasing oxygen in a capillary - we could run for X minutes without needing to take a breath.

Eventually, we can put the intelligence of a cellphone into a nanobot (assumption is nanobot could be within our body).

Reverse engineering the brain - the ultimate source of the templates of intelligence. Noninvasive brain scanning - ok, so we get this data but can we make sense of it? There was thought that nature of complexity that we couldn't understand - but that turns out not to be so.  If you compress the data in the genome, it's smaller than Microsoft Word. You'll hear more about evolutionary programs later in conference. Where you can take something compact and expand it in self-organizing way (i.e. cellular automata) to create something more complex. Each repetition adds some randomness in interacting with the world (i.e. a child throwing the ball).

Slide showing IT's share of economy. It's still smooth regardless of the 'bust'. On overall trends, we can make predictions. 

Computers will "disappear" - they will be so tiny that they'll be in our clothing, environment; images written directly to our retinas.

I make the case in book that we will have reverse-engineered the brain by 2029. And computers pass the Turing test.  These devices get very small they can be introduced into our bloodstream. To expand our biological intelligence by this 'merger' of nonbiological and our biological intelligence. Effectively biological intelligence is fixed.

In answering a question, Kurzweil says: Software viruses are getting more sophiscated. But it hasn't taken down the Internet.

Audience member pipes up: You're talking about going from opposable thumb to opposable mind.

The maxim 'Know thyself' is really the goal of reverse-engineering of the brain.

tags ac2005 singularity

Can We Avoid a Hard Takeoff: Speculations on Issues in AI and IA

Vernor Vinge, Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Author, True Names; The Coming Technological Singularity

Synopsis: Math professor for thirty years, and also science fiction writer, Vernor Vinge talks about the possible scenarios for a technological singularity, including whether we will get there without even knowing it.

"We might think, 'Gee, I don't remember that mountain range west of San Francisco'. Or that sand talking back to me. Humans are operating under illusison that they are self-aware. Adam Smith's invisible hand would really be manifest!"

He peppers his talk with frequent - too frequent for this live-blogger to capture - references to sci-fi novels and short stories that vividly illustrate the possibilities.

'Exponential' as in 'exponential growth' used in conversation all the time.  The exponential growth of a baby last 17 years. Often exponential growth doesn't last. Sometimes comes with catastrophic collapse, or just saturation.

In 1968, there was plenty of electrical engineers that could have given you an estimate of power of computers in 2005. Very few of them would have been correct as to what they would have been used for. What is the killer app if growth continues?

A robotist at CMU has done some thinking on this. If you look at Moore's Law and you look at the raw hardware power of the human brain, there is a crossover point. What happens one Moore's Law generation after that? In physics, singularity also means there are unknowable things that are beyond us. We, as humans, are no longer the drivers of progress.

We could explain Mark Twain if he came back to this time we could catch him up with the modern world in an afternoon. We cannot do the same with the goldfish. [Uh, we're the goldfish guys, if you're trying to follow along.]

Profoundly important events like the printing press, architecture, fire are singularity points - but don't compare to the technological singularity - they lack the quality of unexplainability.

There is an analogy. Like the rise of humankind within the animal kingdom. Another author says, "Life is just the prologue to intelligence." I'm not sure if I agree with this. Another close analogy is the beginning of all life on Earth.

This sort of transcendence ...

Although there is something comforting in knowing that things get better and better and intelligence increases, what makes us nervous is thinking this will happen in our lifetime. 

What if singularity doesn't happen? Raw hardware power not enough - perhaps we don't get software working. Perhaps there will be catastrophic violence - sometimes we are our own worst enemy. We might be in a Russian roulette type of situation: ah, that didn't hurt - click - ah, that didn't hurt too much - click.

Sir Martin Rees, "Our Final Hour." Right now we might be the most important time in history. The singularity itself could be catastrophic.

His own view is that while the technological singularly is not a sure thing, it is the most likely non-catastrophic scenario on the horizon.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet Self waking up an being conscious (see Bruce Sterling's Maneki Neko for painting a picture of this world). More immediate: Intelligence amplification is happening now. And fine-grained distributed systems (embedded microprocessors are networked and even more ubiquitous) are bit further behind than Moore's Law (see Karl Schroeder, Ventus).

Don't see mention in this conference of the dangerous realms in intelligence amplification, such as direct neural hookups. Without worrying about sci-fi aspects of IA, important here-and-now promise of IA is in network mediated interactions of humans.

Before singularity, you don't have superhuman intelligence.

Soft takeoffs. The complete transition takes years and doesn't appear exponential. As you get late into the transition, the rate and what's happening is unintelligible to normal humans. Takes about twenty years, see Accelerando.

Hard takeoffs. There are no precursors. People still debating whether it is going to happen or not, and it comes about in less than 100 years. See Greg Bear, "Blood Music" (sandwich starts talking to him one morning). Hard takeoff is plausible: resembles an earthquake or snow avalanche. Even paleolithic humans can adapt to cold weather faster than buffalos.

My intuition is that hard takeoff would be a very bad thing. Trying for a soft takeoff would be a good thing. Intelligence amplification is a good way to go for that. If it really worked, there would be people around that would be keeping up with what's going on.

Q: (by Brad Templeton, EFF) They wouldn't have perception that hard takeoff is a bad thing. They're in charge.

A: Yes. History always ends happily.

Q: Would we even know. Possibility that we would not aware of this intelligence but things would be radically different.

A: We might think, gee, I don't remember that mountain range west of San Francisco. Or the sand talking to me. Humans are operating under illusison that they are self-aware. Adam Smith's invisible hand would really be manifest!

Brad: I'll sell you hard takeoff insurance!

Q: What if this happens in biology rather?

A: That would be transitory. Long run it's the other substrates [where singularity happens].

tags ac2005 singularity

John Smart Opens AC2005

John Smart, Acceleration Studies Foundation founder and president as well as conferencec co-producer, kicks off the third year of the Accelerating Change conference:

We're often surprised by the future.

There was that guy in 1992 waving his hands saying that this World Wide Web was going to be a big thing in ten years. We have a lot of those kinds of people here.

Accelerating Change Conference is like PopTech at a fifth of cost with a multi-disciplinary view around accelerating change.

Rather than future-shock, future-shaping.

Four components to Acceleration Studies Foundation include awareness, education, research and advocacy. You should have to think about the future as an undergraduate. If we take courses in history, current affairs, it'd follow.  ASF is teaching a curriculum in Foresight Development at the University of Advancing Technology [a very innovative private university in Tempe, AZ educating the IT-enabled generation].

How do people make bets on the future? Some things are unreasonably predictable that have to do with small-scale techologies, information technologies, and communications technologies.

If we take a broad picture view, we'll often see things that are sea changes.

There's a report by another organization on philantropy around the world (it's in our knowledgebase) and what struck me was how much the world is much more of a network today rather than a hierarchy.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is one of those spaces that is broad and encompasses all that is increasingly autonomous in computing.

There are ambassadors to Paraguay. We're ambassadors to the future. Sometimes humans don't change [rapidly], but our houses are changing. What happens when your bed is smarter than you are?

tags ac2005

Intelligence Amplification Introduction Wiki

We are trying out something new with our next Future Salon (21st of October): Age of Anxiety. We created an Age of Anxiety Event Wiki page, where if you are interested you can already check background information and even better your own links and views. Please do so.

Although a bit late, am doing the same for my small Intelligence Amplification Introduction on the second day of the Accelerating Change Conference AC2005 this weekend.

Abstract: Growing up I always wished that I had a grandfather around that I could ask anything and everything. Now we have Google and Wikipedia. It takes intelligence to create a software virus, even more a biological virus. But that's not the kind of intelligence we want to amplify. The better question is how to amplify wisdom and maybe we should also shoot for Artificial Wisdom instead of AI.

Here is the wiki page with my current collection of interesting links and thoughts. I only have 25 minutes to introduce the theme, the schedule of the day, give some SAP as well as my own perspective. Not sure yet how to accomplish all that :-)

Very thankful for every insight, link, dialog, ...

Jaron Blogs ...

If you check the Internet Archive where many of our Future Salon videos are stored, the one with the best Batting Average as in how many people have viewed it in comparison to just look at the page with over 20% it is Jaron Lanier's talk. Here some more details about that interesting evening.

Turns out he just started to blog at the Huffington Post with some really good insights for example about Science and Intelligent Design. 

I didn't know that Deepak Chopra is supporting intelligent design:

Somehow I doubt Deepak Chopra is a big Republican supporter, for instance, but by promoting Intelligent Design he discourages reality-based thinking and therefore encourages our current sorry crop of reality-challenged leaders ...

I like the perspective that religion should focus on profound empathy:

Isn't the truest sign of divinity composed of such things as compassion, empathy, service, forgiveness, and so on? The divinity described in the traditional religions encompasses both magical events, like walking on water, and profound empathy, so why not emphasize the empathy, and demote the question of the authenticity of the magical events until it's practically a moot point? After all, a clever alien could have performed the magic, and that by itself wouldn't mean a thing.

Here some more, but read the whole post it's great:

The goal should be better informed kids who think it's cool to work towards honestly understanding the world (which is a quick populist shorthand for doing science.) ...

I don't see why religious feeling can't be a motivator of honest scientific activity. As it happens, the most profound aspects of religion are the ones that can work best to motivate scientists. A quest for moral improvement does no harm to science, so long as it doesn't fall into the manipulative orthodoxies of a church power structure. A call to service, a sense of compassion and empathy; these fit perfectly with the current opportunities to further medical science. A profound sense of awe at existence is just right for science. Metaphysics need do no harm to physics and is more profound and beautiful than supernatural claims, which turn God into nothing but a nerd superhero in the sky.

P.S. Oh and History will forget Schwarzenegger he is going to veto. Also don't use Lingo as your VOIP service provider . http://tinyurl.com/8f3ln

Wifi on Caltrain?

Jeff Nolan is so right. Would love to have Wifi on my Caltrain ride to work.

Seattle buses get wifi

By jeff

Why is it that Seattle gets all this cool stuff and I can't even get a decent cell signal in the heart of Silicon Valley? Link: Wi-Fi Networking News Archives. The King County Metro Transit tries out Wi-Fi on a few routes: Using the locally made Junxion Box, which relays data between a Wi-Fi gateway and a 2.5G or 3G cellular network, Metro Transit will equip all buses along two long routes with Internet access—29 buses in all by mid-October.

There are actually some rumors that Caltrain folks are at least thinking about it, but nothing at the moment if you search for "Wifi" on their site.

On second thoughts, that would bring more people to ride the train and I have been refused to board one because the bike limit was reached. Was a close call this morning again. They are getting a lot of complains about it, so that they even have a Bike FAQ on their home page.

There are ways to improve the situation: Allow more than 4 bikes to a rack, allow people to use the handicapped space as long as there is no whealchair passanger on board. That would free up spaces.

Chess Computer History

Bummer that I am so under water and have no time, otherwise I would check out the follwoing this Thursday:

The History of Computer Chess: An AI Perspective

Computer History Museum Presents

After all I am always following the competitions with great interest.

AC2005 with Doug Engelbart

I am working on not one, not two, but three conferences right now. I feel a bit bad, that I haven't written more about the first one to come up AC2005. The Accelerating Change Circus will pitch up its tent again for 3 days at Stanford from the 16th until the 18th of September.

One of the best things last year was the Tech Night at SAP on Friday evening. You would go from station to station and be wowed by the things they showed and you would bump into interesting people doing interesting stuff on the way.

I am especially happy that my personal hero Doug Engelbart will be giving an update on the Collective IQ which was one of the best presentations at last year's Accelerating Change Conference. (He presented at the Future Salon too last year and the video is available on the Internet Archive)

This alone is worth the entry fee to AC2005 and as a Future Salon subscriber use the discount code: AC2005-BAFUTURE for $75 off the current sign up price. We are close to selling out, so don't delay. See you there.