Future Salon

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.

Fab Future on the Internet Archive

Finally the fabulous April Future Salon video with Neil Gershenfeld is available on the Internet Archive. More details at the Personal Fabrication Future Salon post.

At the beginning of his presentation, he is covering so many things so fast, that he left a lot of people scratching their heads. It is really great now to be able to watch it again and again and again :-)

Things that they are working on in the lab. Covered in the first couple of minutes:

• Internet Zero
• Internet Protocol survived 7 orders of magnitude of growth. Let's bring the lesions learned from the Internet to physical goods.
• Computers as building materials, you spread it out like paint.
• Fault tolerant digital fabrication
• ... Much more you should really check it out.

This is also a mayor shift in your personal power the more things you can create on your desk, the less you are depending on the current corporate powers. One reason I can't wait to get my own little Nanofactory.

This trend is one of the reasons why the rights to the blueprints, the intellectual property is heating up.

It is so funny, the Internet Archive is giving you thumbnail pictures, one shot per minute unfortunately only for the first 30 minutes. Because Neil had to rush to the airport, we didn't do the round of introductions, this is why we only have pictures of Neil and me this time.

Mark your calendar: Next Future Salon Friday 22nd about the Future of Radio.
Future of Radio? Isn't that an old technology? Yes, but what happens when you put the intelligence into the software and give the radio flexibility that wasn't there before? Matt Ettus will give us an introduction. More soon.

Addiction: The Future of Home Entertainment

Imagine a world where you can have whatever experience turns you on, anytime, all the time. Is that a recipe for addiction or what?

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms
The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates.

Ok, but supposing female monkey bottoms aren't your thing. With advances in the internet, movie, and gaming/virtual reality environments, you could more and more have any experience you want. Travel virtually to any corner of the globe, exchange ideas on anything with anyone, solve clever puzzles. We all have some experiences we enjoy and some we don't. Imagine that you could have whatever sights, whatever sounds, whatever music, whatever interactions with the world or with other people you want anytime all the time.

Quantum networking, quantum registers, and quantum computing chips

Quantum computing, which will allow Moore's Law to continue beyond the barriers imposed by semiconductor physics, continues to advance in research labs. Major developments include quantum "networking" -- a way to entangle a photon using a laser, quantum registers -- a way of storing qubits for later use, and quantum computing chips -- a technique using "qutons" (quantum photons) on a semiconductor chip. The invention stores qubits in a Cooper box that has more than a billion superconducting aluminum atoms acting together which provides the ability to read a qubit's state without disturbing it.

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.

Jeff Thompson reviews Ghost in the Shell 2

ISAC board member Jeff Thompson wrote the following movie review of Ghost in the Shell 2 in contrast to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The review will appear in this week's Tech Tidbits, and is interesting enough to post here by itself. Jeff highlights the different motivations behind the scenarios (social commentary, future prediction), and reminds us that our baseline visions of the future can be woefully far from the direction in store for us--no matter how futuristically on the ball we try to be ;-).

Jeff's review:

Last week's Tech Tidbits linked an article by James Pinkerton comparing two current movies, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, set in the 1930's, and Ghost in the Shell 2, set in the 2030's. Sky Captain is not really an attempt to visualize the future, but rather to nostalgically present how people viewed the future in the 1930's. There are airplanes that turn into submarines, wrist radios and giant mechanical robots. The movie does reveal one fascinating thing: for all their imagination, no one in the 1930's imagined the most important development which the future would bring only a decade later: the electronic computer. At the core of robots in the movie are gears, not digital processors. Power is about having bigger metal feet that can crush cars, not about being able to manipulate information faster. (It wasn't until 1937 that Alan Turing showed that a general purpose computer, like the one you're reading this article on, was mathematically possible.)

Contrast this with Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, which gets it. There are many reviews, like this one which will confirm that the mix of hand-drawn animation and 3D computer graphics is gorgeous. At the end of the first Ghost in the Shell movie, the main character's police partner is basically uploaded, becoming pure information on the world's data networks. In the second movie, he wanders through the sensory overloaded urban landscape, vaguely missing his partner and trying to solve a case. He mostly does this by interviewing one person after another who questions what it means to feel like an individual when the world has so clearly been shown to be a just sea of information created by ubiquitous computing and instant communications which link everything. Among the philosophizing and eye-popping scenery, there is indeed a plot involving the case (remember the movie title) which is a literary device to ask the question: In a world where information devices can turn the whims of anyone, even a little girl, into a reality that reaches out across the world, who can truly be innocent? Both the main character and his uploaded partner (and hopefully the audience if they were paying attention) are left wondering how to proceed when physical space has been turned into mind space, and like it or not your fate can be determined by the naive - but not innocent - impulses of a random child. Maybe even the ever-resourceful Sky Captain would realize that the threat in the future is not an army of giant robots, but the precipice of confusion and cognitive dissonance.

end review

Jeff's website (thefirst.org) has a new paper outlining his perception of how minds percieve perception. It's titled, fittingly, The Orders of Perception and I'm sure feedback would be appreciated from those so inclined.

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?

Not-So-Abrupt Climate Change?

I once wrote about the Climate Flip Flop but according to latest research in New Scientist posted at WorldChanging: Not-So-Abrupt Climate Change? does not support that scenario.

Spimodo: Gizmos, Blobjects, Spimes

If you are looking for a visionary talk, Bruce Sterling' Seagraph keynote certainly hits the mark.

It's a call for the designers to conquer not only the digital world, but also the world of atoms. With barcode reader on your cell phone you can already find out the background to a product line and company right in the store. Soon to come so his vision, you will get with every purchase of a product the life history and all other needed information transfered to you too. From the design blueprint to the oh so important way to safely dispose it.

In the whole process you play a part in the feedback loop to the producer, as you do already with your purchases at Amazon: Improving the offerings and the processes of Amazon.com. You become a Wrangler.

He calls these things that go beyond Gizmos: Spimes as in merging the words Space and Time. I agree with Alex from Worldchanging Spime is not a good word, way to close to spine and therefore to spineless. Who wants that?

But it is quite possible, that Spimodo is coming to an RSS reader of your choice soon.

Voting via Floating

I almost overlooked our friends in San Diego had an interesting session this month about Seasteading.

Land is taken, let's create land on the sea. In modular structures, that can be linked together to form a community. Advantage: If you don't like the politics or gasp the taxes of your current society, you pull up your seastead and float it over to where the sea is greener.

Intel's 486 CPU turns 15

This article talks about the 15 year period from April 1989 to April 2004. In April 1989, the 33MHz Intel 486 was introduced. I checked Intel's website and their current high-end offering is a 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4.

So, what's the "rate of acceleration" from 33 MHz to 3.4 GHz in 15 years? I'll do the math for you. That's a factor of 103 increase. That comes out to a factor of 1.36 per year, or 36% increase per year. That's a doubling time of 2.24 years. (Close enough to 2.25 to round, I'd say.)

Now, this calculation looks only at clock speed, and neglects the fact that the new chips are "hyperthreading", and all the other cpu pipeline improvements that have been made. So the actual difference in performance between the 33 Mhz 486 and today's Pentium 4 is much more that 103x. Exactly how much, I don't know.

Where Are We Now?

I wanted to tell you all about this article: From the ashes: The next stage of EDA". I know it's a bit technical for some of you, but I think it's worth reading carefully anyway, because it gives a good overview of "Where we are now" -- where we are in the ongoing Moore's Law saga, the current problems facing the semiconductor industry, and the surprising ways people are changing what they are doing in response. (The figures are in annoying PDF files, but still worth checking out.)

Forgotten Technology

Wow, I guess Wallace T. Wallington rediscovered an old technology with which he is not only able to move, but also raise a 19,200 lbs block of concrete by himself. Forgotten Technology (Click on the pictures to see little demonstrations, absolutely amazing.)

He estimates:

I could build The Great Pyramid of Giza, using my techniques and primitive tools. On a twenty-five year construction schedule, (working forty hours per week at fifty weeks per year, using the input of myself to calculate) I would need a crew of 520 people to move blocks from the main quarry to the site and another 100 to move the blocks on site. For hoisting I need a crew of 120 (40 working and 80 rotating). My crew can raise 7000 lb. 100 ft. per minute. I have found the design of the pyramid is functional in it’s own construction. No external ramp is needed.

Spread the word, how much productivity will we gain, especially in third world countries? And sell your Caterpillar stocks :-) [Via Quote-a-Day]

r vs K strategy

For those of you who were following our conversation at the last Future Salon on r vs K strategy, I got the r and K backwards. r strategists are the ones with the high reproductive and mortality rate, K strategists are the ones with the low reproductive and mortality rate. For an explanation, see Checks on Population Growth.

Basically, the context of the conversation goes like this: Michael was discussing terrorism, and saying that eventually a terrorist group will get their hands on nuclear weapons. I asked if he thought this was a situation of r-strategy vs K-strategy. The link here is that terrorists depend on a continuous supply of 'expendable' people for suicide attacks. Large supply of 'expendable' people suggests tendency towards r-strategy (to use the correct term this time.)

Was George Gilder Wrong?

I was reading a paper by Jim Gray (the same dude I was talking about in my Information Overload posting) called Distributed Computing Economics. He said, "Over the last 40 years, telecom prices have fallen much more slowly than any other information technology. If this situation changed, it could completely alter the arguments here. But there is no obvious sign [as of March 2003] of that occuring." This is a direct contradiction with Gilder's Law, which, as you'll recall from reading my handy-dandy List of Laws, claims that network bandwidth doubles every 9 months.

Information Overload

In this interview, Jim Gray talks about how storage capacity has exceeded Moore's Law and asserts that "programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device". Believe it or not.

A Conversation with Jim Gray

What on earth is all this storage being used for?

Long Now Seminar: Long Term Policy Planning

Notes from the James Dewar lecture yesterday at the The Long Now Foundation seminar series.

The success rate of long term predictions have been sketchy. That shouldn't discourage us from learning from our past mistakes and fine tune our approach. James Dewar yesterday introduced such a new approach to Long Term Policy Analysis (LTPA). The premise is, that the future is uncertain. Therefore let's search for what we can do today that best keep us on track no matter what the future brings.

Hacking Matter using Quantum Dots

After Wil McCarthy's talk: Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter I overheard the following conversation: "Sounds like Snake Oil to me." "Well, if it is true, then one can make excellent snake oil out of it."

The "it" that Wil McCarthy was talking about in his presentation are microscopic small devices called "Quantum Dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and these properties can be changed at will. Properties like color, transparency, thermochromicity, fluorescence, many others still undiscovered.

The Long Now

A couple of years ago I heard a wonderful lecture and slideshow about The Long Now Foundation's 10,000 Year Clock, a high-tech mechanical clock that is designed to not wear out for over 10,000 years, to be installed in Long Mountain near Ely, Nevada. Quoting computer scientist Daniel Hills:

I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

The Long Now Foundation's goal is to change how we think about time:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries.

It was a fascinating lecture, and made me think deeply.

I just got a note tonight that The Long Now Foundation is sponsoring a series of free seminars on the topic of "Long Term Thinking". The next one is Friday, February 13 and the speaker is James Dewar of RAND, and the topic is "Long Term Policy Analysis", to answer the question "how to improve our ability to think about the longer-range future--from 35 to as far as 200 years ahead."

The free seminar will be held at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco at 8pm (7pm coffe bar). Thankfully, this isn't a Future Salon Friday, so I hope to attend.

There is also information on future seminars which include Rusty Schweickart on "The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years", Daniel Jazen on "It's ALL Gardening" and David Rumsey on "Mapping Time".