This development is... interesting.
That Apple's next update to the OSX line of operating systems is to incorporate a geolocation facility is both compelling and worrying.
Obviously having fully networked, location-aware computers is a Good Thing, but the potential is also there for additional harmful tracking and monitoring of individual computers.
Where Apple leads Microsoft and everyone else is sure to follow. Yet another component for realisable spimes is imminent.
Interesting times.
Showing posts with label spime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spime. Show all posts
Monday, February 09, 2009
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
The Perfect Phone
Note: I actually wrote this on the 7th of January, before Apple announced the iPhone. From what I've seen and read about the iPhone it seems like a step towards what I'm talking about.
I’ve been thinking about the problem surrounding PDAs. Every so often I experience something that leads me to think that maybe my enthusiastically techno-optimist outlook is, if not flawed, then at least misappropriated. There are several disadvantages of using a normal A7 paper notebook over a PDA:
I’ve been thinking about the problem surrounding PDAs. Every so often I experience something that leads me to think that maybe my enthusiastically techno-optimist outlook is, if not flawed, then at least misappropriated. There are several disadvantages of using a normal A7 paper notebook over a PDA:
- You can drop a notebook in the sink and any information stored on it will still be accessible (after leaving it in the sun to dry – this can still apply to PDAs, but PDAs would generally be less likely to function after a good dunking).
- Notebooks generally weigh less than PDAs.
- Notebooks do not need recharging.
- You can drop a notebook on the floor and not worry about it breaking.
- Notebooks cost around £2. PDAs cost around £200.
Convergence is, I understand, the current big industry buzzword surrounding consumer electronics. It can, however, be argued that too much convergence leads to a giant Swiss Army Knife problem. Like most individuals with both chromasomes I enjoy the idea of owning a brick containing every possible tool I could ever possibly need, but I’m also aware that I wouldn’t want to carry it around with me.
Sure, it’s nice having a phone that can take pictures, send email, play movies, play music, access the web, send texts and make and receive phonecalls. But a Hack of all Trades can (at least for early adopters) prove to be annoyingly deficient in a way you really don’t want an object you just shelled out £200+ for to be. Things like the autofocus-lag on the 2 MP camera in my
Of course, I have the economics of consumer electronics to blame for these annoyances [anyone remember when 3G was going to be TNBT? Anyone remember minidisk players? Anyone remember bluray vs. HDDVD… Oh wait, that one hasn’t happened yet], companies are not going to invest in a piece of hardware that will last say, ten years, because they know that in ten years they will have a whole new range of phones to sell to people, and they don’t want people using the phone they bought ten years previously.
Just as the Israelites tired in the desert, so I’m tiring of pursuing the here-today, gone-tomorrow dreams of some white collar corporate sweatshop worker.
What I’m basically saying is that I’m annoyed that I have to swim through what could well be decades of projected-lifespan-six-months, NBTs that screw early adopters, screw everyone else, and become unfashionable just as the technology is perfected, before we get to the good stuff.
Here is a description of the things I want from the electronics industry (after reading it you’ll realise that by the time all of these things are available the electronics industry will either be non-existent or will have evolved into something completely different):
The screen will have a definition such that the resolution of my own eyes will be insufficient to isolate a discrete pixel. The screen will be at least 40 mm by 60 mm in size, and the phone will be able to communicate with the surroundings as well (so screen size shouldn’t have to be an issue). The screen will be unscratchable, like the rest of the phone.
The phone will have two cameras that are fully detachable, and intelligent enough to combine to form a large baseline telescope. The cameras will be approximately the size of chart-pins, and will be stored in an isolated compartment within the main phone. There will also be a more standard camera built into the camera itself. This will have a fairly wide-angle camera capturing images at around 60 fps (for recording events to harvest for photographic still-shots later).
The phone will have a voice-activated (set to respond only to my voice-pattern, of course), thoroughly indexed, and wholly searchable encyclopedia, including the entire contents of the British library, the library of Congress, all available stored audiovisual output (i.e. everything ever written, recorded, filmed, or photographed).
In case I get bored with the phone’s fascia (I don’t know materials – some sort of carbon composite…?) the phone will be supplied with an autofabricator that can completely redesign the phone if I wish it to.
As well as maps and an on-board inertial-compass it will of course be able to consult any GPS systems that are available.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
It's All Just Meat
When faced with the breadth and majesty of books like The Singularity is Near, Engines of Creation and Hacking Matter it is difficult not to feel inspired and optimistic about the future. There is a particular brand of techno-progressive idealogue who can weave images in the mind as effectively as any of the technologies they predict.
There is a problem. Ray Kurzweil calls it "the argument from incredulity". The picture of a plentiful future peopled by synthetic superhumans is so compelling it registers on our internal TGTBTM (Too Good To Be True Meter) as a being unreasonably optimistic.
Most rational people who don't live within the bleeding edge of pattern-recognition technologies simply refuse to accept that the clanking, smoking, bad-for-the-environment hulks of machined metal that are what most people still associate with the word "machine" could ever turn into anything as sublimely effective and versatile as a human being.
It is interesting to look back at how technological changes have been predicted to occur and how they actually did occur. Take the widely-predicted advent of powered flight in the late Victorian era. We see those wonderfully fanciful drawings of individuals flitting around in one-man ornithopters. The artist that comes to mind is Heath Robinson, although his were probably actually drawn in the early twentieth century.
One of the great fears of the Victorians, as exemplified by the writing of H.G. Wells, was the concept of "war in the air" (the other great fear being that of the advent of powered cavalry). That WITA became a terrible reality through the Blitz of London within the lifetimes of many of those already adults during the Victorian era suggests that our current fears of GM viruses, dangerous artificial intelligences and rampant nanotechnology scenarios may not be as far-fetched as we could imagine.
I disagree with Kurzweil's sweeping "law of accelerating returns". The most compelling point he makes in support of this is that over the lifetime of the universe, complexity has tended to increase in a manner which strongly resembles an exponential graph.
However when we get down to the nitty-gritty level of technological development over the years and decades of a human lifetime "progress" (an amorphous term in this debate) seems to happen in fits and starts, and is strongly influenced by political and economic factors.
That a young (perhaps 20 year-old) Victorian in 1900 growing up in a world without heavier than air flight could live to see the Apollo and the Moon landings (Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) springs to mind) is an extraordinary thing.
Another point to consider before dismissing Kurzweil entirely is the nature of technological change. The counterpart of the technology of aircraft in the early twentieth century is the development of computers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Computers tend to affect things in ways that were difficult to comprehend beforehand. Highly efficient information management and versatile and decentralised communication generate a lot of side-effects that would not be immediately obvious to someone who was not aware of computers.
Spime and conversion and the gradual move from centralised manufacturing towards decentralised CAD/CAM machines will allow the effects of abundant, effective computing to move from the world of pure information to the real world the rest of us inhabit.
At the moment our world is still very much run by meat. Humans are required for their versatility and imagination, if for little else. I think that of all Ray Kurzweil's predictions, the most likely to turn out to be correct is his belief that there will be a strong convergence between human and machine intelligence with the result of an (even more) profound change in the way the world works.
There is a problem. Ray Kurzweil calls it "the argument from incredulity". The picture of a plentiful future peopled by synthetic superhumans is so compelling it registers on our internal TGTBTM (Too Good To Be True Meter) as a being unreasonably optimistic.
Most rational people who don't live within the bleeding edge of pattern-recognition technologies simply refuse to accept that the clanking, smoking, bad-for-the-environment hulks of machined metal that are what most people still associate with the word "machine" could ever turn into anything as sublimely effective and versatile as a human being.
It is interesting to look back at how technological changes have been predicted to occur and how they actually did occur. Take the widely-predicted advent of powered flight in the late Victorian era. We see those wonderfully fanciful drawings of individuals flitting around in one-man ornithopters. The artist that comes to mind is Heath Robinson, although his were probably actually drawn in the early twentieth century.
One of the great fears of the Victorians, as exemplified by the writing of H.G. Wells, was the concept of "war in the air" (the other great fear being that of the advent of powered cavalry). That WITA became a terrible reality through the Blitz of London within the lifetimes of many of those already adults during the Victorian era suggests that our current fears of GM viruses, dangerous artificial intelligences and rampant nanotechnology scenarios may not be as far-fetched as we could imagine.
I disagree with Kurzweil's sweeping "law of accelerating returns". The most compelling point he makes in support of this is that over the lifetime of the universe, complexity has tended to increase in a manner which strongly resembles an exponential graph.
However when we get down to the nitty-gritty level of technological development over the years and decades of a human lifetime "progress" (an amorphous term in this debate) seems to happen in fits and starts, and is strongly influenced by political and economic factors.
That a young (perhaps 20 year-old) Victorian in 1900 growing up in a world without heavier than air flight could live to see the Apollo and the Moon landings (Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) springs to mind) is an extraordinary thing.
Another point to consider before dismissing Kurzweil entirely is the nature of technological change. The counterpart of the technology of aircraft in the early twentieth century is the development of computers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Computers tend to affect things in ways that were difficult to comprehend beforehand. Highly efficient information management and versatile and decentralised communication generate a lot of side-effects that would not be immediately obvious to someone who was not aware of computers.
Spime and conversion and the gradual move from centralised manufacturing towards decentralised CAD/CAM machines will allow the effects of abundant, effective computing to move from the world of pure information to the real world the rest of us inhabit.
At the moment our world is still very much run by meat. Humans are required for their versatility and imagination, if for little else. I think that of all Ray Kurzweil's predictions, the most likely to turn out to be correct is his belief that there will be a strong convergence between human and machine intelligence with the result of an (even more) profound change in the way the world works.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Science and Technology #1
Bruce Sterling is a very fine science-fiction writer. He is also a very distinguished individual in the field of design, particularly pertaining to environmental design and "green" technologies, being the central figure of the Viridian Design Movement.
Another area in which Sterling has been an active commentator is that of "spime". This is one of those ideas that, when you first hear it, you dismiss as being so blindingly obvious that no-one should deserve recognition for it's "invention".
However after reading about it a little, then going away and reading about it some more, I gradually came to realise that spime as a concept is not a vague neologism but a very relevent modern-day topic, and an inevitable product of the convergence of information technology and the material world.
Consider the fact that today, most products (like toys, electrical goods, cars, computer-components, peripherals, buildings, pharaceutical plants...) are designed in software on a computer. They will then probably be instantiated by machines.
Once they have been completed, transported from the factory and sold to the consumer, and used by the consumer they may well be recycled. And hopefully one day all items will be recycled.
However this raises an interesting question: exactly where does the "object" (whatever it may be) come into existence? Is it when it is put together on the assembly line? Is it when it is first created in the virtual environment of the CAD software?
The fact is that the "object", as an abstraction, can be said to have existed from the moment it is concieved in VR. As technology advances, it will become cheaper and cheaper to manufacture computer chips (or their technological descendants) and cheaper to build them into objects as a matter of course.
These chips will have memory, processing capability, sensory capability and an awareness of where they are in space and time, and what they are. The blueprint for these chips will exist along with the object they are embedded within in the virtual CAD environment.
When it is time for the object to be recycled the chips will guide the object to its final destination (imagine a sandwich-wrapper lying on a pavement saying "please deposit me in the jive-coded waste receptacle...").
Once the object is recycled there will remain a complete record of the objects life. Where and when it was designed, who by, where it was manufactured, where it was taken, where it was used, who by, what for, and finally where it has been recycled.
This sounds very Orwellian, especially when you consider that factories in the future may be very compact and verstatile, and capable of manufacturing objects from the atoms upward. This will mean that potentially the food we eat, and even our bodies can be tagged, recorded and monitored at an incredible level of detail.
Who controls spimes, and who has access to the information, will be a key topic of political debate in the future, and the near future. Of Sterling's six facets of spime several already have representative technologies. The six are:
1) Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely indentifying something over a distance (e.g. radio frequency identification).
2) A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth (e.g. a global positioning system).
3) A way to effectively mine the large quantities of data produced by these systems (e.g. modern web search engines).
4) Tools to virtually construct any object in a virtual environment (e.g. AutoCAD, and various molecular-modelling programs).
5) Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into physical objects (there are various "3D printers", but we're not yet very near the garage-level universal assembler)
6) Cheap and effective recycling.
The potential good for this kind of convergence is huge. However there are numerous potential pitfalls and problems. I look forward to exploring these in thought, and maybe later in the real world.
Another area in which Sterling has been an active commentator is that of "spime". This is one of those ideas that, when you first hear it, you dismiss as being so blindingly obvious that no-one should deserve recognition for it's "invention".
However after reading about it a little, then going away and reading about it some more, I gradually came to realise that spime as a concept is not a vague neologism but a very relevent modern-day topic, and an inevitable product of the convergence of information technology and the material world.
Consider the fact that today, most products (like toys, electrical goods, cars, computer-components, peripherals, buildings, pharaceutical plants...) are designed in software on a computer. They will then probably be instantiated by machines.
Once they have been completed, transported from the factory and sold to the consumer, and used by the consumer they may well be recycled. And hopefully one day all items will be recycled.
However this raises an interesting question: exactly where does the "object" (whatever it may be) come into existence? Is it when it is put together on the assembly line? Is it when it is first created in the virtual environment of the CAD software?
The fact is that the "object", as an abstraction, can be said to have existed from the moment it is concieved in VR. As technology advances, it will become cheaper and cheaper to manufacture computer chips (or their technological descendants) and cheaper to build them into objects as a matter of course.
These chips will have memory, processing capability, sensory capability and an awareness of where they are in space and time, and what they are. The blueprint for these chips will exist along with the object they are embedded within in the virtual CAD environment.
When it is time for the object to be recycled the chips will guide the object to its final destination (imagine a sandwich-wrapper lying on a pavement saying "please deposit me in the jive-coded waste receptacle...").
Once the object is recycled there will remain a complete record of the objects life. Where and when it was designed, who by, where it was manufactured, where it was taken, where it was used, who by, what for, and finally where it has been recycled.
This sounds very Orwellian, especially when you consider that factories in the future may be very compact and verstatile, and capable of manufacturing objects from the atoms upward. This will mean that potentially the food we eat, and even our bodies can be tagged, recorded and monitored at an incredible level of detail.
Who controls spimes, and who has access to the information, will be a key topic of political debate in the future, and the near future. Of Sterling's six facets of spime several already have representative technologies. The six are:
1) Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely indentifying something over a distance (e.g. radio frequency identification).
2) A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth (e.g. a global positioning system).
3) A way to effectively mine the large quantities of data produced by these systems (e.g. modern web search engines).
4) Tools to virtually construct any object in a virtual environment (e.g. AutoCAD, and various molecular-modelling programs).
5) Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into physical objects (there are various "3D printers", but we're not yet very near the garage-level universal assembler)
6) Cheap and effective recycling.
The potential good for this kind of convergence is huge. However there are numerous potential pitfalls and problems. I look forward to exploring these in thought, and maybe later in the real world.
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