Category: The Future

Posts about the Future

Rescued from the Archives: My Wonderwall

Here’s a post I wrote a few years back, but it’s more relevant now that people can see the prices of large flat screen displays dropping. We really aren’t that far from a day when they are inexpensive enough to replace a section or two of 4′ X 8′ gypsum wall board in a room or three. Along with that we’ve achieved more miniaturization of computers and reductions in power consumption. So picture a world where you wear your computer, and you display on the nearest wall.

Wonderwall is a sappy, smarmy love tune by Oasis, a representative sample of the inane lyrics below:

And all the roads that lead to you were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you
I don’t know how

I said maybe
You’re gonna be the one who saves me ?
And after all
You’re my wonderwall

The song was pretty popular a while back because the lyrics were reasonably well-sung, but what is a “Wonderwall” in reality?

My wonder-wall would embody things to come. Shortly deposition techniques and the new sciences advances will be perfected as companies race to create the cheapest, largest, flat panel HD screen.

A few years beyond that there will be “pixelized fabric” and the computer technology to use it. It will change billboards and movie screens, but after that it will be cheap enough to coat the walls of your home with. Maybe just one wonderful wall to start.

So what will you put on your wonder-wall? Mine will be a real-time stream from the Niagara falls internet channel (trust me someone will create this,) with a full-time close-up of the Falls along with booming bass falls-thunder-sound to match the wall.
Continue reading “Rescued from the Archives: My Wonderwall”

When your machines talk together, What will they say about you?

As the rest of the century unfolds you will see machines and artificial Artificial Intelligence units talking among themselves more and more until that chatter becomes a persistent tapestry in the background of our lives that we only rarely hear or notice. When the machine chatter becomes nearly ubiquitous, what will our machines be saying about us?

We can speculate on some of the near horizon M2M apps, but what Machine to Machine chatter will be like mid century and beyond is really impossible to predict. There’s already a lot of M2M out there but now it usually takes human request through push of button, click of app, or other trigger to initiate the conversation.

In the future it will most likely happen seamlessly and automatically. Sensors will detect our presence, temperature, vital signs, position, and everything else measurable. Timers will know when to trigger events, and meters will measure our personal context for events that unfold around us almost completely without our direction. Context will be things like: Are you standing, sitting, laying, moving, or still? What time is it? When did you last eat? What thing did you last do, choose, look at, move toward? What did you last say and what motions did your hand make?

As making machines smart and then smarter becomes a matter of pennies, and as having them talk together wirelessly and automatically also becomes cheap, most companies will open their devices and they will tart them up with artificial artificial intelligence (AAI.*) This will escalate and accelerate for the rest of century until most devices are talking incessantly to most other devices, sensors, and network devices like Chatty Cathy dolls on a loop. Initially companies will do this to leapfrog the competition but later it will be absolutely necessary if they want to stay in business.

Let’s start with a few simplex assumptions and build upon them to get to an example that’s simple, easy, and really doable tomorrow. Machines do not have artificial intelligence yet,  so what starts the conservation between them? It will likely take artificial artificial intelligence (AAI,*) or programs with contextual triggers, thresholds, or control zones that are also able to search and query databases both at home and online.

What will the conversation be about? That will be dependent on the devices talking, the context, and the amount of artificial artificial intelligence (AAI*) built in. Context might consist of time of day, location, position, weather, and data about you — like when you last ate, whether you are standing, sitting, or laying down, who else is present, what songs you like, which artists you like, who your family and friends are, what they like, etc. etc. etc.

So here’s an easy example, all the parts exist but none talk together yet. You drive up to your house – your garage is opened by you pressing a button, and you manually switch off the radio. In a fully developed M2M environment things could be different. Your car could signal ahead that you were coming once it recognized that you were near your house with it’s GPS. The Garage door opener could periodically query the camera out front and your car’s until it got short distance confirmed recognition of both your car and your face. It could then open the door, and turn on the speakers in the garage. As you exit the car after pulling into the garage the speakers in the garage play the song, station, or stream that you were listening to in the car. The Garage door opener signals the TV in your living room to turn on and tune in the news channel you usually watch this time of day, and etc. etc. etc. Everything in this example could be kludged together today with existing tech, but since M2M is definitely our future it really does behoove us to create some open standards around it.

Perhaps the FCC should investigate M2M only spectrum, and Universities should look at standards for security and protection (E.G. if our machines are going to know everything about us then they damned well better be secured with biometrics and much more.)

 

* Artificial Artificial intelligence is when masses of data regarding human or individual preferences or masses of actual crowd sourced human input is sifted to get to best choice or a range of best choices – it’s crowd sourcing, history sourcing, or both to find a few best choices: examples are Google and other search engines with their history of other people’s preferences when searching your search term. Others are the “you might also like” recommendation engines at Netflix and Itunes where they use the history of your preferences and look for like, and another is Mechanical Turk at Amazon.com where they put the question to hordes of people on the net to get best answer. This is a term I first heard from Jonathan Zittrain in a Berkman center lecture and I am stealing the term because it’s so appropriate. Bottom line it looks like the machine is thinking and possibly prescient, but it’s really neither — it’s all done through brute force or lots of human responses sifted through context.

A Letter from Christopher Hitchens to American Atheists

Christopher Hitchens is ill, and cannot make an address he was scheduled for instead he sent this letter.

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit…) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson’s wall of separation. And don’t keep the faith.

Sincerely

Christopher Hitchens

I place this here on my blog so I might have easy access to it for few better words were ever writ to those who don’t believe.

Dawn of the Omnisensor

I’ve been talking about cheap sensors and how all things electric are getting smaller and wireless, so let’s get a little crazy and look down the road at things that will probably come.

At some point lens, camera logic and memory will become one solid state chip. At some point thermometer, barometer, GPS, altimeter, camera, humidity, RF,  motion, fire detector, and all other possible sensors will become miniaturized and then placed in various combinations on a variety of solid state chips and devices.

The potential to fit all of the above on a single chip is likely sometime within the next 20 years – what happens then? What happens when they become mass produced and dirt cheap?

Do drones carpet battlefields ahead of the fight with a carpet of smart networked omnisensors? Does all privacy everywhere in the public space become thoroughly eradicated as it will be easy to place miniature sensors anywhere?Will your house or room know when you have a temperature, will it recognize you and your friends faces and voices for security purposes? Will omnisensors be embedded in everything from your coffee maker to your lightswitch to your mailbox?

The possibilities are endless, and predicting the most important aspects of how Omni sensors will affect our lives is really impossible.

 

The Age of the Cheap Sensor and Machine to Machine Chatter

Last post we talked about home medical sensors, and how they could easily become available for use with apps tied to a PC, IPOD, or other computing device in your home. I mentioned disposable pulse oximetry leads, thermometers, and BP cuffs, but those are not the only sensors that have become inexpensive.

Sensors are becoming easier to embed on a single chip through nanotechnology and the outcome is smaller and cheaper sensors everywhere. My camera uses an imaging sensor that’s more capable than the first one that went up in Hubble — it costs less than a thousand dollars for the sensor, camera body and application and two lenses. You can now get webcams for your PC that are cheaper than fifty dollars yet they are much more capable than studio television cameras costing tens of thousands of dollars from a few decades ago.

Bundle the ability to package an application and a sensor on small chip with the ability to wirelessly network it and you can see where this is going for home networks and the potential to have your devices constantly talking to each other. One example of this is the “Eyefi” SDHC chip for cameras. Right now these cost under $50.00 and you can expect that price to drop further over the next five years.

Now, what about a refrigerator that can talk to your computer or your phone wirelessly? What if it could also read every RFID strip on every container in your kitchen to give you an inventory while you are looking up that recipe? Why doesn’t your thermostat, water heater, furnace, and oven talk to your home computer? What could you do if they did? How about a rooftop wireless weather station? Why shouldn’t your home computer be able to interrogate your car’s computer for tire pressure or stream tunes, maps, or directions into it’s memory?

Wouldn’t you like an infrared and motion sensor array around your home that could stop motion record what’s going on through inexpensive cameras when things are detected, further shouldn’t your home security array recognize your face, and voice, and retina? Shouldn’t your outdoor camera recognize you and your car and open your garage door when you drive up? Shouldn’t there be a Kinect type sensor array in every room so you can issue gestural commands anywhere?

The possibilities are nearly endless, and we are soon crossing the horizon where much of this becomes cheap and easy to do. It’s a matter now of setting some standards and making your personal computer into a home server (since your phone by now is becoming your personal computer) and turning your wireless router into a plug and play wireless communications hub. Yes, I know that home wireless routers are supposed to be that now, but they are too difficult and insecure for the average user. When my 70 year old dad can easily connect any wireless device, from phone, to IPOD, to camera then we will be there, machines will recognize you, your gestures, and will be able to chatter with each other about you.

Primal Nerd Rage: Why I’m an Optimist

Predicting a technology’s future is problematic due to competing technologies, converging technologies, trailing standards bodies, and occasionally poor legislation — and those are just the minor factors. The major factors are the multitude of gaps between new technologies, some unseen as of yet. Predicting how humans will creatively bridge these gaps and which methods will then become predominant can’t be done with reliability.

These holes and valleys in our technology are where many will profit in coming years since people are going demand they be bridged one way or another, sooner or later in this coming decade. If we talk about them a bit it could be sooner. If we talk about them a lot, then the economy could turn around very quickly for each of these verges or gaps is a goldmine for willing entrepreneurs. Nerds rage against these gaps — nerds get frustrated when they think things like “Why can’t I stream my latest Itunes songlist direct to my Car and phone for my next trip? Why must I either get an Ipod adapter, or burn a CD to get them to my car? Why can’t my phone play my Itunes songs period?” After stewing the past decade lots of little things like this have been bubbling around and stirring rage in nerd town, and I can tell you right now that they’ve had it with limits…

Jonathan Zittrain worries that the future will close down a bit, moving from the generative fabric of the open PC and the “Wild West” Web to the closed proprietary devices and walled garden appliances such as Ipods and wireless phones. I think there is weight to what Jonathan says, since at minimum there’s desire from “Big Content” to keep things captive in their walled gardens. It’s important to look at potential futures across all of these gaps – and how open or closed things will be. Will they be a blend of closed and open? Which are most likely to succeed very long term? Those are subjects for the coming year here, and I’ll be examining all in  future posts here since I’m changing this to a pure tech/science blog after having moved my political blogging over to Little Green Footballs pages.

Below are some of the questions leading to potentially bright or dim futures I’ll be covering this coming year just because it’s past time for new things in all of these areas:

Wireless in the home – there are all sorts of wireless gadgets and tech out there, but none of them really intermix and play well together. I can get proprietary devices that work over wireless G, N, or bluetooth, and I can get wireless home phones in the DECT 6.0 spectrum, I can get infra-red remotes for TV’s, Ipod docks, and picture frames, and I can get bluetooth keyboards, mice and headsets. There are wireless chips for my camera, and my printer does wireless networking. There isn’t an aggregated control interface or API manager for these devices however on home PC’s and wireless routers. Should there be a standard that braids all of these multiple modes into a single home wireless space that’s transparent to consumers? Should wireless hubs be plug and play, if so what’s best strategy to secure them?

The verge here is between devices and I/O — each device is creating their own I/O button pad, keyboard, display, etc. atm, but with wireless networking and the concept of flexible pixel, printer, game, and audio space wouldn’t it be better if that weather station or remote camera could interface wirelessly with your flat panel in any room? Why can’t your keyboard and mouse downstairs direct your doorway cam upstairs, or your laptop, or your bedroom TV?

What about video cams? Sensor chips for them have dramatically dropped in price while increasing in capability – you can get  video cams, panels, projectors, and software enough to outdo any television studio from ten years ago for under 20K — what changes will that drive? Telepresence, video conferencing? Will there be a green room booth with a changeable backdrop for phone calls in some offices or homes, or will most walls be fully dedicated to pixelspace in 20 years? Will custom designers create your perfect avatar based on your enhanced body and face so you can answer the video phone while you are unshaven or having a bad hair day with a near perfect appearance and mimicry of your actual features while you talk?

Streaming media vs Proprietary channels vs on Demand – is it past time to tear down cable tiers and broadcast times for shows?

Physical media: How much longer will the DVD in whatever form live? Will it be SDRAM chips that replace them, or will it be purely streams?

Sensors: when will there be universal API and xHTML style outputs for all of them – from weather devices to cameras to motion sensors to thermostats?

What’s the future of I/O channels and human computer command systems? The obvious thing driving the question is Kinect, but what other verges need better crossing for command and control systems within your office, home, car, town, or city? Will there be facial recognition systems that replace the need for password security? Will voice recognition and gestures replace mouse and keyboard? Will every room have it’s own gesture and facial recognition sensors, wifi I/O and infra red command blaster? Where are our WALDOs?

Home PC / Home Server / Home OS — with all of this happening, shouldn’t your “personal computer” or “PC” really be an HC? Should it be a personal computer, or should it be a home computer/server/controller? Further, will HC’s or Home Computers need some pseudo AI like that featured in the Ray Bradbury story “There Will Come Soft Rains”? Are you nerd enough that you cried when that house died?

One last thing while we are speculating wildly : where the heck is my flying car?

Let’s face it — us nerds are getting frustrated with the gaps, and there’s nothing better for making new things happen in the second decade of this new millennium than primal nerd rage against the machine.

*Primal Nerd Rage graphic copyright Bethesda Software

Invitation to Google Voice

Woohoo! I’ve gotten my invite to Google voice, which means I can try out / beta their new voice service and let you know how it goes. I will apply by asking for a new phone number that will ring or not ring all of my other numbers, depending on how I set it up.

It looks pretty good, with the service essentially being a cloud based network queue and voicemail point for all of my phones that also does voicemail and other services. I’m going to experiment as I go and let you know what things are good, and what could use improvement.

I thought I better start taking the first step towards cutting free entirely from location based telephony, since at some point in the future many of us will have several IPV6 addresses that substitute for phone numbers, and eventually all “phone” calls will convert to video calls anyway.

Why I’m an Optimist: Large Scale Macro Trends

So it is that I am a confident optimist based on the past example of our long history. Whatever pratfalls, missteps, and tumbles that humanity has taken we have always managed to dust off and carry on with the journey after. As we witness one of those pratfalls that will become the biggest environmental disaster since we started recording them in the Gulf of Mexico I am also confident that over time the problem can be overcome

A symbol to me of the power of our future, and our technology. I traveled thousands of miles in mere hours to snap this digital photo and capture it on a chip the size of a postage stamp.

While we move forward in technology at a furious pace there certainly are some huge gaps, and as those gaps and verges close we will see many new things that nobody predicted nor could have predicted; and we will see old things fade away. The largest scale macro trends will continue regardless of gaps and pitfalls; if one path to the future closes a thousand others will open. It’s been that way for most of our history and that’s a large scale macro trend I don’t expect to falter.

In future articles I’m going to outline some gaps I’ve seen, and potential means to close them. Please keep in mind however that nobody can predict the future – that you can only predict trends. Even when predicting trends you are likely to get the future wrong if you look at micro or macro trends — you cannot predict which trends will continue, and which will end, you can only look at the large confluences of trends and attempt guesses at which are most likely to continue. In other words you know that it’s likely that the Mississippi will make it to the Gulf of Mexico regardless of the oxbows and loops it makes.

Think of the sharp trend lines and market charts once there of VHS and Beta Max tape manufacturing and sales to get an idea of what I mean. At the dawn of the tape age, none could predict with certainty the micro trend of the war between the formats, or whether the macro trend of tape sales in general would continue, but it was easy to step back and see the larger scale macro trend of generic technology – data storage media would continue to change, but storage would continue to become less expensive, smaller in form and format, and more widely available.

Whether that tape machine was capturing and streaming back data in your Betamax, VHS, or computer room backup tape carousel it was all same-same when you consider the larger macro function of the technology: Capturing data for preservation and/or later playback. That was global.

The generic larger purpose of tapes and the various tape formats was to record and preserve data. The real trend wasn’t between the formats or the physical shape or the protocols: it was really towards more data in less physical space and for less cost. That large scale macro trend was occurring in all formats, from silicon to tape to hard drives to optical and it continues through this day. It’s also quite possible that some other technology will replace both Blue Ray and HD-DVD before that format battle ever finishes.

A few years back it would have been a massive project in capital and expense to perform a one time physical transfer of 650 gigabytes of data between two companies or vendors – however right now a single person could pop into SAM’s or Best Buy and pick up at 1 Terabyte or 2 Terabyte USB drive and get that transfer done in under two hours if you eliminate the travel time. Even better than that you can see storage devices becoming something a bit more than just storage devices. One example is the “Eye-Fi” chip – it’s specialized storage for Digital cameras, but it’s also a GPS and a Wifi network adapter for your camera. It’s the size of a postage stamp, and the width of a couple of quarters.

There are cards with larger memory space, and you could put an entire K-12 education in the space of one of these postage stamp cards if you worked at it.

So when looking at the longer term future to get to accurate predictions of trends you must take them to higher functional large scale levels, or look at them as very large scale macro trends. Worldwide soybean production going up is not a large scale macro trend. The large scale macro trend behind that simplex market trend is that food supplies and therefor diets are diversifying globally.

This large scale macro trend is the confluence of several technologies crossing verges, and no particular macro trend (in the marketing, woo-woo “we are trying to sell you something” definition of macro trends) is responsible.

Instead all are somewhat needed, including better packaging, preservation, transport, free trade, the internet and television proliferation of diverse cultural methods of cooking,  etc . etc.  Don’t worry however foodies: if any of these smaller macro trends falters, something else will take its place. The large scale macro trend of more diverse diets and food supplies is not going to end anytime soon because large scale macro trends are measured in centuries and millenniums, not years and decades. They are determined only in part by demographics and desires as marketers would tell you, but also by technology.  There might be momentary fluctuations – some that last a decade or two, or even some like the Dark Ages that last centuries, but the large macro trends will continue. Other examples of large scale macro trends:

  • Worldwide capital increases
  • Our sources of energy multiply
  • Our ability to store and transfer knowledge increases
  • Life spans increase

Technology becomes more complex, and more capable, while becoming more accessible as individual powers and capabilities increase. In my garage sits a car with more horsepower than most medieval kings could muster in a few moments, in my computer is a powerful media studio that can broadcast to the world over the internet, on tap at the nearest electrical outlet is more energy than that held by all of the tyrants in history who ever held human slaves.

The particular spots or time where these large scale macro trends fail are the exceptions not the rule. Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa are two places where these overall trends break right now,  but they are the exceptions not the rule, and over time even those places will improve.

So it is that I am a confident optimist based on the past example of our long history. Whatever pratfalls, missteps, and tumbles that humanity has taken we have always managed to dust off and carry on with the journey after. As we witness one of those pratfalls that will become the biggest environmental disaster since we started recording them in the Gulf of Mexico I am also confident that over time the problem can be overcome.

Higher Dimensions- Speculation and Ideas from Brian Greene

This will make you think; and we all certainly need to do more of that.

More :

To learn more about String Theory, watch Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” on NOVA:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

Also see Brian Greene’s book on String Theory “The Elegant Universe”:
http://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Univers…

Or Brian Greene’s book on General Physics “The Fabric of the Cosmos”:
http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-S…

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