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Did you read Water by any chance?

It's the summer of 2019. You're you, but you're a decade older. Where are you having dinner, what are you eating, what are you thinking or talking about?

(and check out other players' dinner stories in the comments of our Superstruct announcement! http://www.iftf.org/node/2098)

Soooo... they want us to write essays on the future. Sure I'm eating all my food in pill form and discussing how screwed up the world is. Collate this into your forecast idiots!

Jonah HEX

Yeah, http://www.iftf.org/they sound like a real bunch of nutjobs. A silicon vally organization that tries to predict future trends my analyzing technical change. What will we crazy Californians think of next.

Entirely coincidentally, IFTF's Future Now had a post not but an hour ago on Gershenfeld's FAB, a book about personal fabrication technologies and how computers are enabling their new revolution. This is the exact revolution I'm talking about; the power to build what you dream of.

Future Now post
FAB

As the submission noted, this work will be building on what Hawkins wrote about in his recent book, On Intelligence. The companion web site for the book is here:

There are also a some reviews of the book:
http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000605.html
http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0105/ran dom/index.htm
(By Bob Colwell, who was Intel's chief IA32 architect)
http://www.techcentralstation.com/112204B.html
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/026649. html

A quote from his book:

The agenda for this book is ambitious. It describes a comprehensive theory of how the brain works. It describes what intelligence is and how your brain creates it. The theory I present is not a completely new one. Many of the individual ideas you are about to read have existed in some form or another before, but not together in a coherent fashion. This should be expected. It is said that "new ideas" are often old ideas repackaged and reinterpreted. That certainly applies to the theory proposed here, but packaging and interpretation can make a world of difference, the difference between a mass of details and a satisfying theory. I hope it strikes you the way it does many people. A typical reaction I hear is, "It makes sense. I wouldn't have thought of intelligence this way, but now that you describe it to me I can see how it all fits together." With this knowledge most people start to see themselves a little differently. You start to observe your own behavior saying, "I understand what just happened in my head." Hopefully when you have finished this book, you will have new insight into why you think what you think and why you behave the way you behave. I also hope that some readers will be inspired to focus their careers on building intelligent machines based on the principles outlined in these pages. ...

Weren't neural networks supposed to lead to intelligent machines?
Of course the brain is made from a network of neurons, but without first understanding what the brain does, simple neural networks will be no more successful at creating intelligent machines than computer programs have been.

Why has it been so hard to figure out how the brain works?
Most scientists say that because the brain is so complicated, it will take a very long time for us to understand it. I disagree. Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not a cause. Instead, I argue we have a few intuitive but incorrect assumptions that mislead us. The biggest mistake is the belief that intelligence is defined by intelligent behavior.

What is intelligence if it isn't defined by behavior?
The brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events. It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. I will describe the brain's predictive ability in depth; it is the core idea in the book.

How does the brain work?
The seat of intelligence is the neocortex. Even though it has a great number of abilities and powerful flexibility, the neocortex is surprisingly regular in its structural details. The different parts of the neocortex, whether they are responsible for vision, hearing, touch, or language, all work on the same principles. The key to understanding the neocortex is understanding these common principles and, in particular, its hierarchical structure. We will examine the neocortex in sufficient detail to show how its structure captures the structure of the world. This will b

Folksonomies (the first meme of 2005?) is attributed by Wikipedia to Thomas Vander Wa.

Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies which examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services - Del.icio.us and Flickr - designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification.

IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Are these features or bugs? Consensuss says 'feature'. Andrew Ducker has a suggestion for synonyms and a modest proposal

Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?,
John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging".

I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging' ,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears.

New: In Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag, JC Francois wonders if "2005 will be the year of tagging".

Will Folksonomies lead to the nirvana of the Semantic Web, or at least Semantic web light? (see : ftrain.com August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web)

Tag, you're still it!"

I acknowledged that this might be deceptivly stated. But if it is indeed as it sounds, it would not be the first time.

See this article.

See this article.

See this article.

See this article.

There are countless other articles on similar incidents and concerns as well. I wasn't blindly criticizing the entire system. Knob.