Future Salon

Future Salon: 10th Trimtab with Dino Karabeg July 16 @ SAP Palo Alto

In a May 2010 Future Salon, Dino Karabeg, Associate Professor Institute of Informatics University of Oslo, brought us his approach to making global changes (see Future Salon video).  He has returned from Norway for a  brief visit to the Bay Area and we have him for an update with the 10th Trimtab.  Join us July 16 at SAP Labs North America, Building 1: Please follow signs to our room. SAP is located at 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304. Free and open to the public. Please RSVP. 6pm Networking 7pm talk/game. 

Here is Dino's description:

"It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course," wrote Aurelio Peccei, the first president of The Club of Rome, based on a decade of research and this think tank's view of the global condition in 1980. The Game-Changing Game (a real-life, collaborative game-like strategy), which we will begin playing together at this event, is offered as a prototype solution—a practical way to change course—which is already being implemented in practice.

Two years ago I orchestrated a dialogue at the Future Salon about `trimtabs for systemic change,' where I introduced nine ongoing projects with course-changing potential. I am now coming back with the tenth systemic trimtab; but this final trimtab is generic—The Game-Changing Game is a practical `machinery' for systemic change in any domain, or for systemic innovation, as I prefer to call it.

The Game begins by offering a choice of eight career or life goals. Each choice is followed by a reflection, inviting the player to aim high. A hint is offered why uncommonly high achievements are reachable within The Game. The rest—the substance—of The Game consists of a Vision Quest, where the players find a strategy to be followed along which such high achievements can be reached; and of an Action Quest, where a collection of already active projects, ready to be joined, is discussed and offered.

A salient characteristic of The Game-Changing Game is that information technology is being used in its projects as an enabler. The Game offers a vision of a mature Information Age, where `making the world work for all' is a business niche for information technology; and where a way to get there is offered by creating a synergy between business and humanistic interests.

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.