Future Salon

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.

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

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

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?

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.