Future Salon

Jaron the Musician & Co

As I read to you at the AC2004 Jaron's Wikipedia entry starts with Jaron Lanier is an artist, musician, ...

Last Sunday you got a glimps of his brilliant mind. Come out this Sunday 14th 6pm to the Wheeler Auditorium in Berkely for an earfull of his muscianship. He will be playing with a couple of other excellent musicians.

The evening is called:
The bird of fairy tale.
Classical Persian Composition Meets Innovative Avant-garde Soundscapes Music

It is worth going for alone to hear the different instruments that I have never known existed.

I love music and musical instruments yet besides of indian drums and soprano sax I have never heared (of) any of the intruments he is listing further down. It will be a treat just to hear these.

Future Salon with Doug Engelbart: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

Doug Engelbart was the most inspiriring speaker at the AC2004 conference. He is a true visionary and a real role model.

When he was young he set the principle for his life:

Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Weeks later his lifetime goal emerged:

As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

50 years later this goal is still driving him. Makes me think: Ahm, what was that again that is driving my life? 

He compares us (the world) to a bus with little compartments (different countries). The bus is traveling over a bumpy road it is dark and the headlights are not working very good so the collective visibility into the future is not very good. From the compartments people are trying to steer the little bus. The problem is, that the bus is going at an ever faster pace (Accelerating Change). How he is asking can we collectively bring this bus back under control. (By the way he is looking for a cartoonist to illustrate that vision. Get in contact with the Bootstrap Institute if you want to do such a project.)

AC2004: Day 2 Notes

Here are my Day 2 notes below for the Accelerating Change Conference 2004. My brain is totally overwhelmed by late morning (and sleep deprivation plays into it) and undoubtedly I probably don't do justice to the quality of the presentations.

Day 1 notes are here.

AC2004: Day 1 Notes

Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research told us this weekend at his session on the My Life Bits project that categorizing and tagging all the data in his life would  take another lifetime, so that's why he's hired an assistant.

I decided I didn't have another lifetime (or even an assistant) to clean up all the notes from this weekend's intense Accelerating Change Conference 2004. And I'm guessing you'll value immediacy over quality editing.

Realizing most of us can quickly skim even long passages, I decided to share my notes "as is" (I've clearly delinated each new speaker) with you in their entirety. Divided into Day 1 and Day 2 as that is how I took the notes.

This will allow me to also blog on what I thought the highlights and key takeaways were in my view while I still have some energy.

If you find something that strikes your interest as you peruse the notes, then go to IT Conversations to hear the session in its entirety or consider buying a DVD (all the DVDs were available at the show, so it's just a short matter of time for the order form to go online).

And there's never any replacement for being there in person (virtually doesn't cut it), so jot down next year's dates, October 28-30, 2005 at Stanford University (more info) and I'll see you there.

Day 1 notes follow. (Day 2 coming after I grab some lunch.)

David Brin on Evaluating Horizons

David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, is joking about how a   astronomer/physicist transforms to a sci-fi author to being a pundit for openness. His talk is about What Limits Our Ability To Cope WIth Accelerating Change.

There are two ways to look at the future and the past. And in almost every civilization, "the golden age" of the past is often romanticized - everything was great until we fell from a state of grace. Perhaps from hubris and trying to appropriate the gods' power.

The difference between these two worldviews - the past was the golden age or the future is the golden age - is profound and to a large extent mutually incompatible. [Reference made to Election 2004 here.]

SAP's Agassi on Enterprise Agility and the Future of Software

Shai Agassi, executive board member at SAP - one of the largest software companies in the world - was the second keynote at Accelerating Change Conference 2004. He's responsible for SAP's overall technology strategy. [Agassi was much more engaging and humorous than my notes indicate.]

I am considered the futurist in our company. Our company is very sales-driven so we're making futurist predictions when they talk about the next quarter - but I myself look out five years.

Nicholas Carr asks in his book, Does I.T. Matter? He equates computer industry to the train industry after all the train tracks have been laid. But the computer industry is different. Most of I.T. investment happened in the last 20 years reduces process execution time. We're at 200 millisecond transactions. So the question is valid: Why would you invest to go from 200 millisecond to 20 millisecond transactions?

The next challenge is "time to change." Product lifecycles haven't moved as fast. And change management - pushing beyond the corporate inertia -  events such as a merger takes 18 months in a corporation. A corporate venture can take 18 months to reflect an effect in the business.

AC2004: Peter Norwick Google. Web Search as a Force for Good

I came into the room and read on Peter Norwick's: Web Search as a Force for God

Scale of time saved through Google search: 5 minute * 200 million searches ~ 9.000 lifetimes per year saved.

Keyhole: You put in your current address and they zoom into it.

Japan Lovegety dating gadgets.

Will Wright Kicks Off Day 2

[It's time to lower my standards for these posts. I have a backlog of draft posts from yesterday - coming soon. Reminder that these are  notes, and any pithy observations, etc. come later.]

First, Mark Finnern, the organizer of Bay Area Future Salon and co-producer of conference, is saying that he has seen the future and it is Second Life. One day Second Life will allow you to 3D print what you created in Second Life; even something as large as a house.

Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims, founder of Maxis. Topic: Sculpting Possibility Space is the first keynote.

A lot of people consider games related to story. You can put story on one end and game-play on other end of spectrum. Story games like Myst use a branching structure topology. In a story format, the topology is linear and the game developer creates narrative. In interactive format, the topology is dense and the player creates the narrative. Thus the appeal is empathy in story, and agency in games.

You could look at a game as a possibility space, a landscape. You want to have a wide set of options. Now showing a 3D terrain graph and there are peaks and cliffs and the goal-oriented players want to move "uphill" (success) and overcome challenges. With Sims there are material, social 2D terrain axis and success is height axis. 

There is also issue of language - it's a different language than designers are using. If you come across a dog, even in real world you might parse out the following in your mind: Noun- dog - me, Verb - bite - run or (more complex) Purpose - Companionship - Safety. And advectives. Big or small tank.

Most games have primary metaphor or primary verb. And it's KILL.

They've used a shopping catalog to give choices of nouns and verbs in the game. Shopping catalog metaphor provides for description and gives impression of limited resources and trade offs.

Models. Communication is a process of constructing models. Science is a process to build models. Science is moving away from analytic models like calculus and more into simulation. This parallels game play trend. These possibility spaces become scaffolding for the imagination of the player.

Dynamics. I think about the raw material we use to build these virtual worlds... How do these things interact over time (the behaviors)? What are the paradigms (network theory, cellular automata, system dynamics (Jay Forrester), cybernetics, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, adaptive landscape )?

Wright is showing a complex 3-D model of this "raw material" or game elements. The three dimensions are: Agents/Networks/Layers; Paradigms; Dynamics. Dynamics could include: Propagation, grouping, allocation (gambling, shopping), mapping (matching), specialization

Interesting thing about games is the nested feedback loops. There are short cycles like 10 sec - each level has success and failure. In SimCity (or Sims?), there is nested success/failure levels progressing from Basic Control -> Needs -> Job/Skills Economy -> Social-Friends -> (missed this last one). The game designers spend a lot of time on the failure scenarios because they found that players spend more time here and that they don't mind failing if they know why they failed and it's fleshed out in details and it's interesting.

The future is usually highly extrapolated. When skyscrapers just came out everyone envisioned Metropolis.

Cybernetics is about feedback structures - and by chaining these together you can have elaborate structures. Cellular automata is the first that allowed for emergence. SimCity is combination of paradigms of system dynamics and cellular automata. CAS have internal rules systems (neural networks, genetic algorithms fall into this area). An offshot of AI. Actually what biologist calls fitness landscape influenced the idea of having 3D terrain maps to represent "possibility space." Especially interested in scale-free social networks. People could define friends and enemies in Sims.

All of these are not reality - they are just trying to explain - they are models. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics - but neither can explain the reality of a duck. Other elements in the game toolkit: Disordered<-> Ordered, Local<-> Global, Cooperate <-> Compete.

Just finished The Sims 2. In 1984, one person created SimCity and in 2004, took 130 people on the Sim2 project. If you extrapolate we'll need 2.5M designers not too far in future. Content teams within the project team are the group growing faster. So how can we get players involved with creating content? Maxis created 500 characters, 800 objects. And the fans created 16,530 characters and 10,600 objects.

In The Sims 2, players can also cast their characters into movies and shows and film them. This is something they call "derivative content."

A whole online community around games formed. Comprised of: Collectors, storytellers, webmasters, content artists, casual players, browsers.

Metrics. We can formally measure everything you do. We can build profiles on what the player tends to do and compare to other players. We can see what they buy. We can look at relationships they develop. We can even see how they are traversing through the possibility space of the game. We can do things with that data - perhaps introduce them to other players, what content they might want to use or interact with. You see this happening in TiVo (at a much slower feedback loop). The computer can see where player is going in the possibility space and dynamically alter the possibility space (for instance, if you just met a new girl, your ex could show back up in the picture).

Question on comparing to Second Life. Second Life players are more advanced than our audience. Sims audience is 55% female and most of them have never played another computer game. Both are very open-ended. (Also Sims mostly offline game.)

If you have more women on your developer team it's like falling off a log - you don't have to do focus groups on how to reach women's market.

We found for our players biggest barrier to online game is business model - many (and I don't) want to pay $15/month. I like the computer understand what I'm trying to play and it starts evolving around me. It knows I'm doing a scary movie or if it's a sit-com suggests appropriate music. Your version of game and mine end up different after a month.

We see our players as co-developers. We spend a lot of time with the people who run the websites, etc. We ask them at Sim University (a gathering/conference) about what they think of microtransactions. Experimenting with microtransactions for allowing users to sell their content. We don't have digital rights management (yet); so you could change a few pixels.

Question on if you could have avatars move between two worlds - i.e. Sims and Second Life. Not now but it's theoretically/technically possible with Sims 2 characters.

Flickr Tag AC2004

Update: Direct link to AC2004 pictures on Flickr

If you take pictures at the Accelerating Change 2004 conference, please load them to Flickr with the tag ac2004.

Without even talking to each other Ross and I used exactly that tag. Unfortunately my camera battery flatlined right after that shot. When was that again that battery life accelerates? Currently it seems I am still on the accelerating draining.

Business Mechanisms to Accelerate Change

Keynote speaker: Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of the board of iRobot. You may have heard of their most popular product, Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner. They've sold a million units. [Congrats ACC, it's rare to see a woman as the opening keynote at a technology conference.]

I'm going to talk about business mechanisms to accelerate change. First ten years we didn't even talk to venture capitalists - we were busy inventing the technology.

Robotics is not like a lot of other industries in terms of capital available and technical drivers. Our uber-mission at iRobot is "freedom from tedious and dangerous jobs."

We are creating a new industry in commercial robotics. We believe it's a technology trend for the next ten years - not just for vacuums. From tractors to construction equipment to automobiles. Our vision in domestic arena is to make household chores history. Dusting, window washing, bathroom cleaning. We've been building robots as a company since 1990 with mixed results - it takes a lot of experimentation and innovation - including business models. We need to take advantage of other innovations also - not just those within our own company.

Mechanisms to Accelerate Change that iRobot has employed include:

Capital. Although robotics is a difficult area to raise venture capital in. 

Government sponsored research. So we also looked at other ways to raise money. We worked with DARPA to build robots to help Marines avoid going into dangerous situations. For instance, PackBots are used in cave clearing. They don't know what's in there - perhaps a land mine or weapon caches. They are using robots to see what's there first and then go in.

Tech transfer from university research. We partner with universities on research. We doing work on swarm intelligence - for instance, a swarm of 120 robots all working together and autonomously cooperating. In one case, the robots as a group are told to find specific orange items and eventually through biologically-inspired - i.e. ant colony pheromones - algorithms when one finds the orange object they all do. Now imagine instead of a benign orange object that they are told to locate a chemical spill or a land mine.

Tech transfer from research labs.  A naval lab has used their robots in research on simultaneous localization and mapping.

Taking advantage of exploding exponentials. How can the robot be more intelligent and efficient through advances in other technology?

Intel, AMD, Freescale computer chips are innovating quickly. A lot of changes in: personal storage, price of gene manipulation, wireless bandwidth and range, to the home "wired" bandwidth, backbone bandwidth, cameras in the environment, speech vocabulary recognition, power supplies, etc.

OEMs in the field.

Strategic relationships. An example is in 1998 we started working in the toy industry. We were proud to have prototypes in the $200 range. That is until we started to talk to toy industry folks and they thought we were insane. We learned from our toy industry partners to achieve a price point closer to $20.

We also partnered with John Deere for applications in industrial equipment and vehicles. You can learn a lot from folks in different industries with different core competencies. [The book, The Medici Effect states that innovation comes at the "Intersection" - i.e. where two or more different fields meet - so this sounds like a great strategy.]

New applications. We didn't start out as a vacuum cleaner company or a defense company, but as a robotic company. For instance, there are shifts in demographics toward an older population but there are not enough care-giving to go around. Can robots help people be more independent? Also telemedicine.

Accelerating Change Conference 2004 Kicks Off

Life is too short not to pursue our passion, are the very first words from John Smart, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change whom is kicking off the conference. He quotes Buckminster Fuller: You can't get an unbiased education, so the next best thing is a multi-biased education. [Great quote!] Let's look at issues from several angles to sift the truth. [I really enjoy the 'debate' format of several sessions.]

The goal of the Accelerating Change conference is to be the foremost futurist conference. And ACC sees technology as a lever, as Archimedes would say, for positive change.

John is encouraging us not to spend all our time (if you're not a blogger that is ;-)) in sessions alone. Just like in a university, half of your education comes not from the program itself but from your peers. All the amazing people in the audience have self-selected to be here - meet them.

How can change be positive? There's a lot of talk about offshoring especially to India and China. (Actually the institute itself, a non-profit, outsources their own I.T. needs to India.) But the Chinese themselves have lost 10 million jobs to factory automation. Innovation is always disruptive - but is there a way to keep it creative as Joseph Schumpeter would say instead of destructive.

There is only so much this conference can cover in 2 1/2 days. There are many areas of innovation. For example...

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and now of the Omidyar Network, wants to innovate around the concept of microfinancing initiated by the Grameen Bank and develop microcredit securities (via mortgage-backed securities) to spur local community economic development.

New Balance, the shoe company, does all their manufacturing in U.S. employing a lot of innovative automation and processes. Their market share went from 2% to 10% within last year.

[Note: I'm blogging my notes of the conference in near real-time. The operative word here is notes. I intend to synthesize the conference highlights with the perspective of distance later in the week both here and cross-posted at my blog, Crossroads Dispatches.]

AC2004 Tonight: Virtual Human Interaction Lab Tour

Ups, Thursday already that means AC2004 starts tonight: Jeremy Bailenson will open the doors to his Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. More details on the AC2004 site.

Directions: The VHI Lab is located in Building 120, McClatchy Hall , Room 453. (450 Serra Mall, facing the Oval at the top of Palm Drive). Outside doors will locked, but an undergraduate volunteer will be available at the front (East) door. See you their.

If you can't make it today there is another chance on Sunday evening too.

 

Open Standards for Virtual World Exchanges

Last Thursday I attended the Technoraty Party in their swank new location close to the ballpark. Swank only in comparison to their old funky office that was warm in the summer cold in the night and loud during the day because of the construction going on at third street. I met Tantek Celik their and told him about the Accelerating Change 2004 and that Will Wright will talk about how he approached the design of landscapes in The Sims 2.

By the way Will is nominated for the Visionary of the Year prize by the Billboard Magazine for his work on the game. Rightly so, they have chartered new ground in integrating Artificial Intelligence in the design of the game. The Not so simple Life article in the Mercury News the other day wrote:

What's remarkable about this computer game, being released worldwide Tuesday , is that the domestic drama is not scripted. The characters act the way they do because that is what naturally unfolds. It's a quality dubbed ``emergence,'' based on the history of the characters' relationships and their own artificial, or preprogrammed, intelligence.

Electronic Arts, which is publishing the sequel to the bestselling ``The Sims,'' believes this leap forward in artificial intelligence is what will keep gamers by the millions entranced with their virtual Sims. ...

``It brings the game into a more dramatic space,'' says Will Wright

Tantek remarked something interesting. At the moment all this MMOG are living on their own little islands. Tools are needed to build your own Online World. API and standards should be defined for interoperability, so I can visit yours and you mine.. The one who figures that out will eat the other's lunches and Technorati tools would help with the finding and connecting of these do it yourself online worlds. If you look at evolution regarding finding and creating connections we are only at the stage of may be amoebas soon there will be multi-cell organisms and off we go. For sure these standards and interoperability are no trivial problems and currently not in the interest of the game designers.

I am curious what the experts will say to that suggestion at AC2004. For example Cory Ondrejka VP of product development from Linden Labs the creators of Second Life. The great thing with that game is that it gives the player the tools to create their own world. Don't know how sophisticated these tools are, but in principle the limit of Second Life's growth is only the imagination of their players and the size of their servers.

Congratulations Dan Gillmor

Congratulations to Dan Gillmor another speaker at Accelerting Change 2004 for winning the

2004 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism prize. I am reading and have quoted his Weblog for a long while. I also own his book and will give it to my boss as soon as I have finished it.

He spoke briefly when introducing Larry Lessig at the SD Forum: As expected the book didn't get any mentioning in the main street press, but a lot of buzz in the web world. Can't wait to get an update to it at the conference.

[via Doc]

We will rock you!

I was part of both SAP TechEd teams this year in San Diego as well as Munich. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

At both events Shai Agassi was one of the keynote presenters. He was great, but don't take my word for it. Dagfinn Parnas also mentions in his SAP TechEd summary : Interesting key notes from technically adapt SAP leaders (especially Shai Agassi's keynote was excellent)

With 5000 other SAP TechEd participants in attendance standing in the back it had a bit the feeling of a Rolling Stones or Queens stadium concert. I took the picture to the left in Munich.

At the Accelerating Change Conference happening next weekend at Stanford there will be around 300 people which means you will be a lot closer to the action.

Shai's keynote will be about Achieving Enterprise Agility:
Abstract: SAP customers process roughly 50% of the world's GDP through its systems annually. Flexibility, interconnectivity, analytics and usability are key capabilities that companies need to succeed in today's competitive marketplace. Mr. Agassi will illustrate SAP's strategy for enabling the "in-time enterprise" which can rapidly adapt to market demands and increase the velocity of events throughout business networks.

It boggles my mind that 50% of the world's GDP is running through SAP systems. I had no idea. Makes sense to check out what is in store for the next years in this area.

Wired Doug Engelbart Article

Via AlwaysOn's Pip Coburn I stumbled over a link to an excellent article about Doug Engelbart one of the Keynote speakers of AC2004.

The key quote is this one:

I came to realize that we needed new levels of group understanding and abilities to work collectively to solve complex problems.

When I talked to Doug about speaking at AC2004 he told me, that he is still driven by this goal. There is great untapped potential and the need for new levels of understanding is even more urgent now.

We weren't interested in "automation" but in "augmentation." We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge. Automation means if you're milking a cow, you get a tool that will milk it for you. But to augment the milking of a cow, you invent the telephone. The telephone not only changes how you milk, but the rest of the way you work as well. It touches the entire process. It was a paradigm shift.

Not long before the San Francisco demo, Arthur C. Clarke came by our lab. We showed him what you could do with the NLS. As he was leaving he said, "I write all kinds of things about the science fiction future, but I never thought of anything like this!"

Now you understand why I am so excited to get an update of his vision, that may be even Science Fiction authors haven't thought of yet.

New Tech Tidbits Highlights "Real Money in Virtual Economies" Debate and Welcomes Nanotech Pioneer Christine Peterson to AC2004

This week's Tech Tidbits highlights the upcoming AC2004 debate between Steve Salyer, President of IGE, and Jack Emmert, lead designer of the massively multi-player game City of Heroes, on "Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content".

Forbes.com has a new article (Ordinary Hero) discussing the success of City of Heroes (released at the end of April by the small, first-time developer Cryptic Studios, it has already clocked 200,000 paying subscribers). Meanwhile, just a few days ago at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, Bill Gurley gave a great talk (mp3 file) about the emerging massively multi-player market.

The massively multi-player gears are turning on both the business and play ends, something's in the air, and AC2004 will provide a great stage for thinking about the next act in addition to all the other great dialogues on technology, business and social systems.

This week's Tech Tidbits also announces the addition of Christine Peterson to the AC2004 speaker line-up. Christine is Vice President and Founder of Foresight Institute, and co-author of Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (full text online). She'll give a talk entitled "Championing Nanotech Innovation: Lessons Learned".

Blogger Discount Competition

You too can offer a $50 discount to Accelerating Change 2004 on your Weblog. Not only do you point your readers to a very interesting event, but you also enable them to come for less money.

If your Blog post leads to the most registrants you get a free ticket to the conference to use for yourself or to enable a student to take part in the AC2004 excitement.

For this to work you need your own discount code. Please contact Iveta Brigis and she will give you one right away.

If you don't care about your own code use: AC2004-FS. This one is not taking part in the competition.

AC2004 Early Bird Extended Until Next Sunday

Good news, we extended the early bird special for AC2004 until next Sunday the 10th of October.

Until then you can register for $350 after that it will be $450.
If you use the Future Salon discount code: AC2004-FS you can bring down the prize by another $50. Go for it.

A weekend of expanding your mind and perspective beneath 300 of the smartest most active positive thinkers is a weekend well spent.

Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

Accelerating Change 2004 Abstracts are being posted as they come in.

This one I didn't know and it blows my mind: " SAP customers process roughly 50% of the world's GDP through its systems annually ..." Talking about influence.

I am really looking forward to the big picture outlook for example Doug Engelbart's:

Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

David Brin Vs. Brad Templeton; Broadband Activist Dewayne Hendricks Wires the Developing World, & More in the Newest Tech Tidbits

The Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change puts out a weekly newsletter called Tech Tidbits. You can check out this week's edition here. It includes a description of an upcoming debate between physicist-author David Brin and EFF chairman Brad Templeton at Accelerating Change 2004: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface. The topic of that debate is "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?" and Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson technology venture capital firm, will moderate. This week's edition also spotlights broadband activist (yes indeed) Dewayne Hendricks, President of the Dandin Group, who's working to bring state-of-the-art networks to underdeveloped areas like the Country of Tonga and American Indian reservations. Exciting, hopeful stuff. Dewayne will also be speaking at Accelerating Change.

Sign up to receive Tech Tidbits (weekly) and/or Accelerating Times (ISAC's lengthier, quarterly newsletter)

View this week's Tech Tidbits

View recent archive

ISAC is also looking for story submissions. If you'd like to submit an article or write-up for Tech Tidbits or Accelerating Times please email me at jerrypaffendorf(at)accelerating(dot)org.

The Cryptic Prophecies of Jeff Goldblum Applied to Massively Multiplayer Video Games...In a Good Way, of Course

Massively multiplayer online games (MOGs) come in many shapes and sizes, from EverQuest to City of Heroes to Second Life to The Sims Online. But no matter how self-contained a MOG is designed to be (it's a sliding scale), these virtual worlds consistently end up coloring outside the lines of simple fun and games.

Like Jurassic Park with avatars instead of dinosaurs, players routinely pour over the designers' intended boundaries and take over the park, at least partially (hat tip to Jeff Goldblum). This really miffs some of the hardcore gamers whose immersion is disturbed by glimpses of the workaday world outside, not to mention those gaming companies that want to put a smackdown on secondary markets for virtual goods.

The whole thing is rather complicated, what with its who's who of legal, creative and ethical issues. What does seem clear is that as the degree of freedom and quality of simulation within digital environments rises, the pressures of real life suggest new capabilities in areas ranging from education to business to rapid prototyping to military training to dating.

The Virtual Space theme of this year's Accelerating Change conference explores the future of reality gaming and massively multiplayer environments by bringing together some of the most savvy and visionary thinkers on the topic of digital worlds which embrace the real world. Will Wright, creator of The Sims, and Cory Ondrejka, Second Life developer, will provide keynote presentations that should not be missed--"Games as Prosthetics for the Imagination" (Will), and "Living the Dream: Business, Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds" (Cory).

Following Will's talk there will be a debate entitled "Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content" between Jack Emmert (lead designer of City of Heroes) and Steve Salyer (new President of Internet Gaming Entertainment--the world's largest secondary market for virtual goods and currencies), and including Cory Ondrejka.

Similarly focused speakers include Nova Barlow (online community consultant and forecaster), Robert Gehorsam (There and the Earth military simulation), Keith Halper (Kuma Reality Games), Robin Harper (University participation and learning in Second Life--Wired News article), and Clark Aldrich (Simulation and the Future of Learning).

For more conference information and a full list of speakers go to http://www.accelerating.org/ac2004. Early registration ends on September 30th.

Doug Engelbart will Keynote AC2004

Update: When in doubt shout. The AC2004 dicount code only works with all caps: "AC2004-BLOGGER". Register now.

People following the Future Salon for a while know that I am a big fan of Doug Engelbart best known for inventing the computer mouse as well as being a pioneer of human-computer interaction, including GUIs, hypertext, and networked computers.[More: Wikipedia] Doug and his team were so far ahead of everyone in 1968. [Check out the videos of their demo.]

At the Planetwork Conference this year I met Eugene who is cofounder of the Blue Oxen Associates think tank. It turns out that Doug Engelbart is on the advisory board of Blue Oxen. That peaked my interest and Eugen told me the following story about how he got to know him. He went to interview Doug for a magazine and he asked him whether it doesn't fill him with pride, to see his invention on every desk of the offices he is working in. I am paraphrasing here, but Doug's reply was: "No, I am frustrated if I think of where we could be."

I think it is high time to get an update from him on where we could be and what we can do to make his vision come true ASAP. This is why I am so happy that Doug will keynote at the Accelerating Change 2004 conference at Stanford 5-7th of November. More details soon.

Attention: As a Future Salon reader you can get a blogger discount when registering use the "AC2004-BLOGGER" code and $50 will be reduced from your fees. If you sign up before September the 30th you also get the early bird special and will only pay $300.

If I were you I would sign up soon, where else can you get this line up of diverse speakers in an intimate setting of 300 people for such a prize?

Good Surveillance :: AO

Rafe Needleman writes about Good Surveillance :: AO and a company that can spot a shot with great precision:

ShotSpotter works by triangulating the sound of gunshots using a network of fixed microphones. This audio information is fed to a computer system that is able to differentiate between gunshots, firecrackers, car backfires, and other sounds with excellent accuracy, CEO James Beldock told me. For a single-gunshot incident, ShotSpotter's location accuracy is about twenty feet. But when more than one gunshot is fired, the system is able to cancel out the effects of wind and weather (which can't be determined in a single-shot scenario). In these instances, the system can determine the location of the gunshots to a precision measured in inches.

Law enforcement not always convinced:

I read that some police districts are wary of the technology because it is both accurate and prolific; it sends the cops out to investigate more gunshots than the current citizen-based reporting system does. And, of course, by the time police arrive on scene, the shooters are almost always gone.

The Evolution Will Be Mechanized

Got my Wired Magazine today and surprise, page 102 Bruce Sterling is opening up his column with the AC2004:

The Evolution Will BE Mechanized The rate of technological change is dizzying, and it's only getting faster. In September [It's moved to November 5-7th, I guess he didn't get the memo :-) ] at Stanford, the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change is acknowledging the trend with its second annual Accelerating Change conference.

Update: Eric Nehrlich found the link to the column. Thanks.

AC2004 gets noticed

First couple of time the Accelerating Change conference gets mentioned in the Blogosphere:

Loic Le Meur: Many friends amongst the speakers and a content that looks interesting, too bad I am not sure I will be able to join Accelerating Change, a Conference that talks about Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface on November 5-7 this year.

Overmorgen: ... Two weeks later we have Accelerating Change, packed full of "change agents" such as Jaron Lanier, John "Singularity" Smart, Ross Mayfield, Will "SimCity" Wright and Helen "Master of our robot overlords" Greiner. Could be good... the topics certainly get a full house in Buzzword Bingo.

Sandhill Trek - Accelerating Change! Intense opportunity at Stanford November 5, 6, 7... the Accelerating Change conference is featuring all the people Dave Winer would like to be! Check out this paper co-authored by Lada Adamic to get my drift. Unfortunately, Dave scheduled his Blogger...

Yes, Dave Winer has scheduled his BloggerCon on the same weekend also at Stanford. Make the best out of it and sign up for both and get some exercise while walking from one session to the other :-)

Transparent Society Update

In July 2002 one of the earliest books we covert at a Future Salon was David Brin's Transparent Society He has just written the cover story for Salon Magazine [free day-pass] in August of this year: Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!

He makes the case that the surveillance technologies are so plentiful, that it is no use fighting it. It is a tide, that you may slow down, but not stop. What we should focus on is to make sure it goes both ways:

Each time the lesson is the same one: that professionals should attend to their professionalism, or else the citizens and consumers who pay their wages will find out and -- eventually -- hold them accountable.

I am not so sure about this. Take for example Prison Rape. It is a long known fact that these horrors are going on in the prisons on a daily basis. So we have found out about it, but we are not really holding anyone accountable do we?

AC2004 is shaping up to be really exciting

The Accelerating Change 2004 conference is happening this November at Stanford. This year's theme Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface, analyzes the intersection of three monumental trends:

Accelerating interconnectivity of the physical world
Increasing accuracy of the simulated world
Growing importance of the physical-virtual, human-machine interface. 

Each of these alone is powerfully impacting society today. Together, they paint a truly transformative picture of the future.

Check out the the list of speakers and you will recognize some well known faces, especially for the ones who have been following the Future Salon for a while: There is Professor BJ Fogg from Stanford, Ross Mayfield CEO of Socialtext and Jaron Lanier who doesn't need an introduction. All of them have done excellent presentations at the Future Salon and I can't wait to hear their updates. When experts in their respective fields come together over a weekend like this, sparks fly, new connections are formed in the minds of the people as well as between the participants. It is always enlightening.

I have activated the categories on this Future Salon Blog and we will post more information about our speakers and the theme under the category: AC2004. Stay tuned and may be I even figure out where the category RSS/Atom feed is located that you can subscribe to.