We are living in the future.

Woman receives windpipe built from her stem cells.

Stem cells harvested from the woman's bone marrow were used to populate a stripped-down section of windpipe received from a donor, which was then transplanted into her body in June.

This needs to be automated and built into and automatic medi-doc®.

Flying Cars, Jetpacks and Rocket Racers, Oh My!

The Experimental Aircraft Association Annual AirVenture Show in Oshkosh Wisconsin.  Which includes exactly what the title of the Popular Science video says it does.  Flying cars  (although we don't see it fly), jetpacks (although its actually a prop-pack not jet and it only "flies" 15 feet and under control of two guys on the ground)

The Rocket Racer section sounds pretty cool and they had one up in the air screaming along on it's rocket.  And the PR guy looked a little like another PR guy I know, talking about the business plan and the consumer.

As a very interesting side note:  The Experimental Aircraft Association's site has been partially pwned!  At there very same time as one of your peaks of popularity.  An article in Pop-Sci, linked via Instapundit.  They just need to remove the index.html file from their server, it's not the default document so this is a rookie pwn.

...in retrospect after a bit of researching, this is in fact a fail!  The hacker thought he knew what he was doing but his weak skillz are exposed.  He didn't replace the default document.  Only index.html (not even default.html)

Screenshot.

Rookie.

I thought I would enumerate the electronic devices that I am traveling with and juxtapose that with what a business traveler may have gone with in eras past.

1. I have my laptop of course.  This is the primary weapon of the modern business traveler. 

2. But lucky me I get to carry a second laptop built with the correct environment for testing and displaying our application in China.

3. Camera.  My families steady and true Cannon SD110.  Nicked scratched and battered but clicking along just fine thank you very much.

4. My 30gig Zen Music player.  Crucial for drowning out the airline noise.

5.Noise canceling headphones.

6. My Blackjack 2.

7....and bringing up the rear a couple of thumb drives.

Impressive and confusing.

Now. Let's go back as far in the past as  1990.  What of those devices would a traveler have had along with them...

1. Camera (film based)

2. Walkman (maybe)

and a newspaper.

Remember what I always say - In the future what is simple will be complicated...and today is yesterday's future.

At first you may think Clay Shirky is stretching the analogy between the industrial revolution and the interactive computer experience of the 21st century, commonly called Web 2.0.  But as he continues and fleshes out his argument in the second half of the video, and especially the example of the 4 year old, I flipped my interpretation and thought the industrial revolution example may still be the wrong analogy, but because it is not STRONG enough.

if the video doesn't show, right click and click on play in the context menu.

A couple of key quotes:

On comparing WOW and Gilligan's Island:
"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter."

Television is the "heat-sink" of cognitive surplus:
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation."

Another quote:
"I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into."

You can read the whole text at his website: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

ht: Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus

Charlie Martin makes some fairly straightforward "in-the-box" predictions about the power of computing coming in the next ten years.  Even so there are some remarkable facts buried in the article.

What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do?

We haven’t talked about networks much yet, but the same kind of rule applies to them as we’ve applied to computers: the total speed of the network at the house should go up by between 16 and 32 times in ten years. My cable modem: 8 gigabits a second, at least in theory. My home network in 2018: 128 gigabits a second, or call it 12 gigabytes a second. That’s a whole HD movie in around 5 seconds.

Excita bytes!  Xtreeeeem Bytes!

An exabyte is one-quintillion byte unit of information.  That is equivalent to 50,000 times the size of the Library of Congress.

The amount of data that is flying around the Internet right now is measured in that scale.  This opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out a bunch of fascinating statistics, this one caught my eye.

Cisco's newest video-conferencing system requires 15 megabits per second in each direction. A one-hour conference call could thus produce 13.5 gigabytes, which is more than a high-definition movie. Just 75 of these Cisco conference calls would equal the entire Internet traffic of the year 1990.

...75 video conference calls == the entire Internet traffic of 1990.  Admittedly there weren't a whole lotta people on the Internet for that time, but still..75 calls.  My previous company did that many video conference calls by themselves in a month, maybe in as short a time frame as a week...and that was a company of about 200. 

It's not stopping here folks, you realize that don't you?  There are 1 Billion people connected...there are 5 Billion people not connected....even a simple arithmetic operation is staggering let alone an exponential one.

We have not idea what we will be using computers for and how integrated they will be in our lives in 10 years...heck 5 years may be too long.

Are you ready for the ride?

Wetware and you. How I learned to not fear silicon.

In a world where all our expectations are routinely exceeded I have the expectation that we will one day have comprehensive, multi-faceted, robust wetware. What I mean by wetware is portable, ubiquitous, virtually invisible brain computer interface [BCI].

Some of you out in the audience may scoff at this prediction on several grounds: it's only science fiction, it's too complex, the brain will never be understood to that degree, it's icky, who would be stupid enough to stick electronics in their brain.

My goal of this post is not to refute those arguments but to describe a potential outcome. I will only say that many things written about in science fiction years ago have come to pass, this could be another.

Capabilities. Google as my outer brain.

Among the many capabilities that I believe we will have at the tip of our mind will be the near instant access to all the information on the Internet. Think of it, we will be able to channel any and all the information, from any source in the world.

We will be able to view the world though enhanced sensations, what is called augmented reality. Visually directions might be placed over our world, a mobile heads up display as it were. We will have information provided to us about everyday objects, what they contain, how we might use them, are they helpful? Are they perhaps harmful?

Visual augmentation is already under research: eyetap.

And there is no reason why it only has to be visually enhanced. What you hear and feel and SMELL, could all be enhanced.

Will we still think in the same way if any and all information we want is at the wish of our brain? The power of memory will at least decrease as it will be unnecessary to remember anything. Already we see this occurring with handsets controlling peoples phone books. How many phone numbers do you know? How many phone numbers did your parents know?

The result will be far reaching and certainly a mixed bag of good and bad.

Personas. Part of you for everyone to see.

We will expose a part of our thinking and wishing to the outside world. This will be in some form of a persona or perhaps a simplistic statistic sheet. It will probably take many forms and there will likely need to be some sort of consortium that will establish industry standards...and Microsoft will probably create a competing standard that will in many ways be better but in some ways crippled.

This exposed persona or avatar or datasheet or "comic-bubble" will be a form of interface with other people. It will let them see who we are, what we are looking for, maybe what we are feeling, what we think about them.

And we will be able to see the avatar of others.

For all intents and purposes...Telepathy.

If we can see thoughts and feelings of others and they can see the same from us...isn't that the definition of telepathy?

[Definition: Telepathy...is a term used to describe the transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the five classical senses. Wikipedia]

I guess it isn't quite the historical fantasy of reading someone's mind, but in a way the reverse. Our mind (or a small portion of it) is exposed externally for the viewing.

What sort of interface will there be? Will our software mind automatically attach with another persona and exchange information? Or will it be a passive listening/watching interface? Will we be able to attach to more than one person? What sort of new crimes will be created from this technology? How do you define your personal space in this new world?

I of course have no answers to those questions? Merely more questions?

Will we end up hating EVERYBODY?

With regards to human interaction, we could see a greater polarization within the public much like we've seen in media consumption as the Internet has matured. With our viewpoints and emotions harder to hide and more on our sleeves as it were, people might tend to automatically gravitate towards only people of similar thinking as themselves.

This could hurt friendships as people have a more difficult time accepting people when some of their disparate thoughts and feelings are on display for the world to see.

How do you hide your politics, your religious feelings, your bigotry, your distaste? Because we all do right now. The bottling up inside our heads of all our unorganized and contradictory thoughts and feelings allows us to deal with everyone around us in a civilized manner. What if you can no longer edit your thoughts and feelings from the outside world?

There of course will need to be a way to prevent the display of all your inner most thoughts. I assume there will be differing levels of display. In public you show the bare minimum: first name [or handle], occupation, public contact info...and nada mucho.

With friends and family you would show more. Perhaps much more. It would bring a whole new meaning to the word homepage.

There would grow up around the exposed persona a whole range and breadth of supporting applications. This is a brand new market for software development that has no entrants in it yet.

Software that you can create and make billions off of

Filter programs: An easy means of controlling what is exposed to whom. This software package will probably be included with the original installation, but after market suites will probably have a niche to fill as well.

Spoofers: Do you want someone to think you like them but your true feelings get in the way? An emotion spoofer is perfect for this. Politicians will absolutely require this mind-mod.

Detectors: Do you want to know if someone is spoofing you? With the emotion spoofer detection application, you may not be able to find out what they truly think, but you will know if they are lying about it.

Environment overlay: Does your city look dull and gray? Get this package and make all the buildings rosy and pink. Hide the garbage, dull the stink. Change the settings to suit your tastes

Adware: Ah yes there will be money in them thar hills. Every new medium is followed by advertising. Why should this be any different. As you walk through the world targeted visitor ads will be displayed at any opportunity, trying to entice you to spend your hard earned money.

Ad-blocking software: With adware comes ad blocking software. They are two peas in a pod.

Who will build it?

Who will write the software?

What will the OS look like?

Will it be Linux or Windows?

Of course if its inside my brain I will probably want a Mac.

At the same height and Length of a Mini Cooper (but classified as a motorcycle), the VentureOne is a fully enclosed vehicle that is surrounded by a steel “safety cell” and other safety features typically found only in cars—things like side impact beams, driver airbag, rear bumper and engine shield.

The passenger compartment and the front wheel tilt when cornering; however, the forces are aligned with the vertical axis of the driver’s body, resulting in the driver being pressed into the seat rather than pushed across it.

So everyone talks about the increasing computer speed and power, Moore's Law as it were.  But there are many technologies that are following a similar path.  One that may not have the same visibility in the press is telescope power.

There has been a rapid increase in telescopic abilities lately.  We have seen the number of extra-solar planets discovered go from 1 (which was huge news) to tens to many more than that in just a few short years.

Now comes word that NASA researchers have demostrated that they have the technological capabilities to detect an EARTH SIZE planet.  This is a remarkable development. [linky]

Even the vaunted "Futurist" looks like he has underestimated accelerating change when he stated last October: [linky]

I believe that increasingly more powerful telescopes will ensure that we discover the first genuinely Earth-like planet in another star system by 2011, and that by 2025, we will have discovered thousands of such planets.

Well, we haven't found one yet, but I feel confident to say that we should smash that 2011 estimation he made.  Accelerating change indeed.

I gotta soft spot for this guy.

July 6 - 8, 2007
Hyatt Regency Crown Center & Westin Crown Center
Kansis City
[Heinlein Centennial web site]

Is there a cooler conference to attend than TED?  I gotta get there one of these days.

Semantic connections between pictures.  All the pictures online interconnected.  Your picture that you upload could immediately get enriched with all the data, images, information, perspective, beauty...everything of all the other pictures of the same place.

Truly incredible.

Go here to try it FOR YOURSELF! [photosynth]

This technology along with the recently released surface from Microsoft sure makes me wonder if the king is truly dead.  It sure doesn't look like it to me.

Basically the cliff notes on his singularity books and accelerating change.  

PEOPLE ARE SOYLENT GREEN!

At least I think that's what he was saying. A very interesting article today by Chris Anderson where he equates spare cycles to online content.  What's the next content channel to be tapped?

People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they'd rather not be.

Sometimes he really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on...

Cool accelerating change video. It has some interesting comparison statistics at the start, but then gets into some very interesing prediction stats.

None of this is new to me but the presentation is pretty gripping.

I have read science fiction since before I could grok and one of the most common "future" technologies used in the stories has been wetware: brain implants. William Gibson pushed the concept far into the mainstream with his cyberpunk novels such as Neuromancer and Count Zero. The Matrix movies took it to an extreme. But that is all fiction, what is reality?

2002

I read an article in wired way back in 2002 [linky - Vision Quest] that talked about curing blindness through wetware.  It described a brain implant technology being developed at UCLA and other locations that put a diode under the patient's skull adjacent to their visual center of the brain and cured (partially, and with side effects) their blindness.

True wetware.

The side effects of seizures not-withstanding, this was an incredible breakthrough.

But where are we today?

BCI - circa 2007

Brain Computer Interfaces [BCI] is the official name given to this discipline and there is a lot of progress.

Check out this video from Berlin:

Now that isn't wetware, but it is BCI.

Brain implants are going to help quadriplegics

And if you have any doubt as to the applicability of such technology check out this video:

Now THAT is wetware, but it is only a first step.

Here is an article about the volunteer in the above video. Wired 2005 [linky - Mind Control]

Nagle, 25, is the first patient in a controversial clinical trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease.

Convergence

We have convergence happening here as well. DARPA has initiated an effort to create breakthrough prosthetic limbs [linky]. Limbs that are radically better, have actual touch and feel and human reflexes. The example I've heard it explained like is Luke Skywalker's replacement hand at the end of Empire Strikes Back.

We are on the verge of true Cyborg technologies here. And at the speed at which the discoveries are being made, how fast scientists and engineers were able to improve year over year in the last DARPA challenge [linky - driverless cars], we could be in for quite a rollercoaster.

So we have breakthroughs coming in BCI, breakthroughs in prosthetics and breakthroughs coming in vision and hearing sensors. All of this is converging rapidly. You don't hear much about it, but we are going to wake up in just 5 or 10 years with capabilities far exceeding what we have today.

The Future

In the future will we all be hooked together into a World Wide Mind? In the video below some of the leading futurists talk about what might be in store of us. I don't hear much cautionary discussion coming from them. They speak of the benefits of the World Wide Mind, what about the drawbacks?

• the obliteration of privacy
• the potential for predators to abuse the technology
• the threat of a computer virus to physically harm people
• electrocution
• dependence on external power and support for your survival
• weather (lightning)
• more...

Yet one more example of accelerating change.

We think things are not changing because we are unable to see them in the context of time. Humans live in the present. If we were to back up to 1990 and view the current state of this field of research it would look incredible. And yet here, with us being so close to it all, we don't see it, we don't talk about it, we accept it as the norm.

It is not the norm. It is revolutionary.

The crippled will walk and the blind will see.

References:

Wikipedia:
Brain Implants - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_implant

Seeing what a cat sees:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/20/111815/063

bionic eye
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6368089.stm
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2007/01/second_sight_me.html

Retina implant
http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=bionic-eye.htm&url=http://www.optobionics.com/home.asp

Department of Biomedical Engineering at USC is working on a variety of different projects including retina implants, not quite true wetware  but related.[linky]

Picture of the day.

just cool.