Category Archives: Science & Technology

A new kind of presence

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David Weinberger imagines an exciting technology future:

At the FlyEye site you scan a huge video wall that shows you a feed from every person out in the streets who is sporting a meshed GoPro or Google Glass wearable video camera. Thousands of them. […] Off on the left there’s a protestor holding a sign you can’t quite make out. So, you click on one of the people in the crowd who has a blue dot over her that means she too is wearing a meshed video camera. Now you see through that camera. The protestor’s sign isn’t as interesting as you thought. So you video surf through the crowd, hopping from camera to camera.

FlyEye provides a “Twitch Plays Pokemon” sort of interface that lets the remote crowd ask participating meshed camera-wearers to turn this way or that. You click furiously asking the person with the camera you’re “riding” to look backwards. No luck. So you hop to someone further back. […] The software enables a user to choose which camera to ride, as well as the sorts of services that would make it easier to choose which cameras to surf to. Plus some chat capabilities of some sort.

 

Is Earth a seeded planet?

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“One possibility is that we will build 3D printers and create organic humans based on our software personalities just to experience reality through five senses. An organic creature can keep learning its entire life. So our future software selves might find a need to bring some of our minds back into organic form just to keep up the challenge and the learning. And you know where this is going. If the scenario I described might happen in the future, how can we know it didn’t already happen and we are the second-generation organic humans?”

Scott Adams thinks it is and makes his case here.

Scott Adams: The user interface to reality

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“The so-called ‘truth’ of the universe is irrelevant because our tiny brains aren’t equipped to understand it anyway. […] Our human understanding of reality is like describing an elephant to a space alien by saying an elephant is grey. That is not nearly enough detail. And you have no way to know if the alien perceives color the same way you do. After enduring your inadequate explanation of the elephant, the alien would understand as much about elephants as humans understand about reality. […] Today when I hear people debate the existence of God, it feels exactly like debating whether the software they are using is hosted on Amazon’s servers or Rackspace.”

Scott Adams: The Age of Magic

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“Imagine walking to a crosswalk and doing the “halt” hand motion in the direction of traffic. Your ring and your watch can tell by their orientation to each other that you have formed that gesture and so they send a “pedestrian waiting” message to the street light. The lights change for you and you cross. It will feel like magic. Or point at something in a vending machine and your watch and ring can detect which item you selected, charge your credit card, and send a code to release the item. To an observer it will seem that you pointed at an item and magic released it.”

Dark Universe

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“With astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as your guide, go beyond the night sky and into deep space to find out how discoveries over the past 100 years have led us to two great cosmic mysteries: dark matter and dark energy. You’ll hurtle through Jupiter’s atmosphere, peer at the web of dark matter holding galaxies together, and watch the colorful remains of the universe’s beginnings unfold.”

I was fortunate to experience this at the Hayden Planetarium (part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York). The most amazing and wonderful thing I have every seen.

Location-aware Wi-Fi lets fans be part of show

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Company I used to work for is big in collegiate sports marketing so this story probably more interesting to me than many of you. But this tech will almost certainly show up in lots of places. A few excerpts from full post:

The system, developed by UK start-up Mobbra, will let organisers *send football replays, backstage interviews with pop stars, or area-specific food deals direct to fans’ phones*. It will also encourage the audience to become part of the show.

With Mobbra’s system, dubbed Massivity, organisers can *take control of fans’ phones to create spectacular effects*. For instance, the camera flashlight on each phone could be activated remotely, turning the crowd into a glittering star field. Or a team’s colours could sweep around the phone and tablet screens in the venue like a Mexican wave.

These kinds of applications are possible because Mobbra has found a way to deliver Wi-Fi to every user in a large crowd. A typical wireless access point can supply just 50 connections – so unless a venue can afford to run an access point for every 50 or so people, Wi-Fi is not guaranteed. Even then, simple radio interference can destroy any chance of stadium-wide access.

The phone side of the equation is choreographed by an app called Fangage, which tweaks the phone’s Wi-Fi settings. It will launch on the Apple and Android app stores later this month. *During a game, all phones could vibrate to tell the crowd of a betting opportunity, or a special food and drink offer*, says Walton. “You can have four streams of video, which could be replays or goals from other matches that are on at the same time. At gigs you’ll get behind-the-scenes news and backstage interviews with the stars.”

When we’re not the smartest ones in the room

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Views on Artificial Intelligence (AI or, more common these days, AGI) seem to fall into one of three camps:

  • Never happen. Machines will never be smarter than we are, in any way that really matters
  • It will happen and it’ll be game over for humans. This is is the SkyNet scenario. When our machines no longer need us, they’ll destroy us.
  • The next evolutionary leap. A merging of human and artificial intelligence that will — for the most part — benefit man. Think Bishop (Artificial Person) from Aliens, not Ash from Alien.

There’s countless other takes on this but let’s stop with three.

I think one of the reasons many people tremble at the thought of  really smart machines (although I doubt we, or they, will think of themselves that way) is a subconscious fear of Big Time Payback.

What if these superior entities treat us no better than we have dolphins, mountain gorillas or other non-human intelligent creatures? One might argue they have less reason to do so, not being mammals and all.

But let’s talk about why I’m looking forward to a world controlled (managed?) by AGI’s. And note that I’m assuming they’ll keep humans around for as long as a) they need us for something or b) they find us amusing/lovable/interesting/etc.

If they’re really smart, they’re gonna shit-can a few institutions that threaten the entire planet. Religion, politics, Monsanto, Fox News, carbon emissions, suicide vests, Congress, Power Ball and gun shows. (you can make your own list)

We just won’t be able to do some of the stupid shit our species now insists on doing. Like good parents, they won’t let us. Yes, I see a massive Free Will movement spring up, demanding the right to make our own choices, even if they’re harmful to us. The AGI’s will be too smart to bother explaining that free will is an illusion but will, instead, let natural selection take its course. (Stupid will be a virus for which they quickly create a vaccine)

Cro-Magnon eventually became Homo Sapiens (did I get that right?) but it took a long time. This next evolutionary leap will be like that Red Bull guy that jumped back to earth from the edge of space. Much bigger deal. And it will happen — relatively — so much faster that we’ll sort of see it happening and that will be really scary. The future us will arrive while we’re still here.

For my money (except we probably won’t have money) artificial intelligence will be better than no intelligence at all.

The Devil’s Code

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The Devil’s Code by John Sanford was published in 2000. Fourteen years ago.

Clipper II was an Orwellian nightmare come true, a practical impossibility, or a huge joke at the taxpayers’ expense—take your pick. It was designed in response to a fear of the U.S. government that unbreakable codes would make intercept-intelligence impractical. And really, they had a point, but their solution was so draconian that it was doomed to failure from the start.

The Clipper II chip—like the original Clipper chip before it was a chip designed to handle strong encryption. If it was made mandatory (which the government wanted), everyone would have to use it. And the encryption was guaranteed secure. Absolutely unbreakable.

Except that the chip contained a set of keys just for the government, just in case. If they needed to, they could look up the key for a particular chip, get a wiretap permit, and decrypt any messages that were sent using the chip. They would thereby bring to justice (they said) all kinds of Mafiosos, drug dealers, money launderers, and other lowlifes.

For those too young to remember, the Clipper chip was a real thing. The NSA was a real thing as well.

Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tse-tung’s private words on the president’s desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.

No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codes—any good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.

The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn’t know what to do about it. They’d become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out ot the Washington intelligence center.

And if the NSA was becoming obsolete, might their solution look something like what we have today?