Slashdot Mirror
The Shape of the Future
Last week, Sci-Fi writer Charlie Stross was invited to speak at a technology open day at engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. He's posted a transcript of his discussion on his website, which features a fascinating analysis of where technology is going in the next 10-25 years. Instead of envisioning outlandish future developments, he looks at what the impact might be on society from very reasonable iterations of today's SOTA. "10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year -- there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream -- compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution -- of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry -- a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send -- onto that chip, while I'm awake ... Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. 'What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?' Think of it as google for real life. "
"You're talking about memories."
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
"What was the title of the book I looked at and..."
Hate to break it to someone, but some of us can do that already - it is a burden sometimes, to be sure, but we can do it, without so much as a grunt and thank you mama...
The Final Cut, staring Robin Williams. Sort of unexpectedly badass.
With the proper ironclad legal protections, Life Recorders will be a massive boon. Accused of a crime? No problem, just open up the datafile, fastforward to the time of the event, and see that we were actually sitting in the basement surfing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.midgets.
And for those times when we want to actually bring a midget home, we might want to stop recording. After all, the purpose of privacy is to protect ourselves from the erratic rationality of our fellow humans' moral judgment (as well as the wholesale absence of rationality behind some of our laws). We've still got evolutionary wiring left over that causes us to feel physical pain when others disapprove, and so privacy is a rational demand.
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
If we all get to used to a machine recalling stuff for us, we'll soon get too lazy to do it ourselves. I've already found my handwriting sucks because I type 99% of the time and my memory for certain things is worse because I never really have to use it - stuff I want to know is either on my hard drive or a Google searech away.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Uh... those are layman's terms.
Ok, so maybe he didn't quite define "singularity" like Kurzweil, but close enough, what's a decade or two?
Imagine watching 10 porn movies at once... whilst looking at that cute receptionist. "Uh... have a tissue?"
bomb the us up set someone
Unselfish actions pay back better
..when we get to 4. PROFIT!!! we can rewind a step and see what the hell 3. ???? was that people keep banging on about.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I think he is coming at this from the wrong angle, as we develop more awareness into what makes us human and as we understand consciousness we are not going to need to use thought as much. Present moment awareness, understanding how our body reactions to emergency situations, the expansion of consciousness will allow us to bypass thought, and will allow us use other senses in our bodies to take action or create a reaction to situations in an instant with out much thought process.
The solution isn't more processing power in our brains, its being able to turn it off thought so other more powerful forces within us can take over and do the calculations needed to live our lives.
Here's some books if you want to get in the know about whats possible once we have reached a point where our minds distortion of the present moment has ceased to be an issue. Once that happens thought plays a very small part in the equation of creativity, and functioning in the world.
"The power of now"
Eckhart Tolle
The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles
Bruce Lipton, Phd.
"The Divine Matrix"
Gregg Braden
I don't think they will let you in with a camera mounted on your head.
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
Instead of envisioning outlandish future developments, he looks at what the impact might be on society from very reasonable iterations of today's SOTA. [....] What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?' Think of it as google for real life.
Record your life to remember a book's title, will you? Not outlandish at all.
For those who can't take a simple note on a paper or computer, the future bright is not.
It'll all be stored in a device called a "brain" using an operating system called "life".
I don't get why this is considered interesting when the general idea's been floating around since the days of Vannevar Bush. Even Sergey Brin's joke about it is 4 years old now. Dozens, if not hundreds of article writers speculating on the uses of IPv6 have conjured this idea. I don't see why a struggling author's name should be splashed all over Slashdot for recycling an old idea.
I might add, the not-too-subtle dismissal of extropian/transhumanist ideas as outlandish and absurd is a bit disappointing.
I'm not related to the author at all, but this book about ambient findability well suits the discussion. From wikipedia: "Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."
Animoog.org
667 - one step ahead of the beast.
This puts the burden of proof onto the defendant: they have to explain why they turned off the life recorder.
Read up as to why we have "Innocent until proven Guilty": there are a lot of circumstances that are not illegal, but frowned on
by society. (e.g. being Gay and in the US Military, etc.) : especially where you have politically-motivated prosecutors
such as in the US (less so in Britain and Ireland where there is a higher degree of independence for the Director of Public Prosecutions)
the law can become a tool of persection. You can be in deep trouble when doing something perfectly legal but frowned on
my a majority (or vocal/powerful minority) of your community.
Other issues of the panopticon society: imagine setting up a business (in your spare time,or whatever). Your employer / competitor
could bring a frivolous lawsuit just to see what you were doing on day X.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
There is a current experiment by a guy from Microsoft Labs. He wears a camera around his neck which automatically takes pictures every minute so that he can label and save them later in a database I saw that in Spectrum (IEEE magazine) but here is a link from a quick google search : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,167 4359,00.html
Here is another prediction. We are going to reach a point (and this is going to be scary to allot of people) where we are no longer going to need privacy. once we reach a certain level of evolution in consciousness, Human beings are going to be directly connected to each other, we will be able to read the thoughts, feelings and sensations of every human being on the planet in ways we never thought possible. I believe that this is going to be nessesary if we are going to survive. We will all be connected to whats called a collective consciousness, which is a intelligence that will coexist with our current perceptions of how we perceive our selfs individually. But this intelligence will allow us to interface with the world and people on a global scale. We will be able to focus on specific people and bring their thoughts and ideas into our awareness. As this happens we will all be co-creating our lives in real time building on the thoughts and ideas of everyone connection with the help of each other. Also I think this intelligence will be self corrective to people that are living self destructive lives. The people that have evolved past that point will be able to help the ones that need help install new programs that will allow them to no longer need to live in that fashion any more. Its not like it will be a choice its more like everyone will have separate goals that function towards one main outcome for humanity, with this in mind I don't think it will be natural for people to live destructive lives anymore and we will all know our purpose towards bettering humanity.
Remember that Pi seconds is a nanocentury.
I'm sorry, sir. You have no life.
Fuck Slashdot
.... and carbon 12 are not equally abundant. 13C accounts for about 1% of carbon - 99% is carbon 12.
No, it translates to being able to store all the porn you could ever watch in your lifetime in the palm of your hand.
Err... Wait.
Your other hand, I mean.
To gain an insight... to speed this 'assentian' just like the ancients.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
One thing that allways bothers me about these kinds of predictions, even when I agree with alot of the insights, is they neglect to note scaling problems. Recall that "smart environments" ubiquitous computing, micro-kernels, 64bit architecture, etc....have all been around for a long time, the technology that is. What has been problematic is costly implementation and lack of scalability. Take smart houses, realistically most of the technology is about 20 years old or more, and was implementable 20 years ago...at a significantly higher cost of course, but even though the comparative technology is cheap today, the implementation is not.
What this specifically means is that the average contractor would not know how to set it up, and the average consumer would not know how to manage it, so it doesn't get used. The time horizons for implementing many of these technologies at a ubiquitous level, even if they're invented now, or invented 20 years ago, is fairly large for many things. Most code is still 32bit and single threaded, despite the rather large inroads made by multi-core 64 bit processors, despite parts standardization being introduced to autos and other products and production methods shortly after the turn of the 20th century,...our houses are still built more or less like they were 200 years or more ago, just faster and with less workmanship.
With reference to his lifelogs, they will come of course, but he should definitely extend his time horizon, cellphones and small computers aren't even universally ubiquitous for most of the world yet. Hell, the *internet* isn't either for that matter. And there's a large body of deadweight that will also have to go, people who will never adopt technologies, even if their children or grandchildren do, and large masses of geographic terrain which will not be integrated with any sort of computerized ubiquitous technology for at least a century or more.
I thought it was a good talk. I'll just say that 20 years ago I was watching characters appear on my TV via a 300 baud modem that plugged into my Commodore. Even with software curve flattening, the next 20 years should be cool.
Grrr... I am being blocked behind a firewall, can someone post it in here or give a mirror?
There is already such a "hive mind" going on for centuries now (and no it's not the Borg), it's Catholics, members of the Catholic Church. All united to form a visible body of Christ on Earth, single minded in their faith and outlook, self correcting and correcting other members, with unique mind and consciousness emerging much like what you are talking about.
Sure this would have some limited utilitarian use. But you know what I do to things I think I'll need later? I record them and put it in a sorted order so I can get it quickly under what circumstances I need it. I summarize what's truly important. I prioritize important things when I write them down, and I put miscellaneous information (instruction books, meeting notes, etc.) in places I know if/when I'll later need them. What good is a big indiscriminate pile of information of years of your life that in paper form would look like a wall of filing cabinets 20 feet high and 100 feet long? 90% of that information would be fairly useless. In searching archives of some always-on recorder, I would likely waste a lot of time trying to find what I need, and probably often think I found what I needed when I didn't really.
Intelligent memory is about organizing, sorting, remembering what's important. What good are computer search algorithms going to do you for always-on recordation? If you aren't intelligent enough to make sense of a jumble of information by identifying meaning, and then sorting and tagging it up as it occurs, a computer can't do that for you. At least not for a long time until AI is maybe as common-sense and intelligent as we are. If that day ever comes, would this look to augment existing memory, or replace it with crutches? Sounds like a de-evolution to me. At best you would end up reliving large swaths of recorded experiences (conversations, books, sights, sounds) of your life with tweezers trying to search for and grasp what was important.
Rather than being a productivity tool, I can see many people using technology like this as an emotional escape. Given the detail level, it would have a life of it's own. Look back in vivid detail on the big game that your won in high school, the hot date you had, getting married, when your kids were young and playful, when you were thin and in shape, your vacations, parties, past friends, and youth. We're meant to have memories fade in order to seek to make new ones.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is. -Berra
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/
Actually a fairly enjoyable little movie. I really don't think anyone wants this kind of "google search for life" stuff if this is where it would (and it would..) go. While it would be useful DURING your life (albeit with the conscious knowledge that everything you do is recorded), what do you think people would do with it after your death?
But using a life recorder IS a crime already according to the MPAA/RIAA. At the movie theater, listening to the radio, watching a baseball game, reading a book, at a live concert (except for the Grateful Dead), etc. etc.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
My old astronomy prof told us that a year was approximately pi * 10^7.. It's really 3.16* 10^7.
This would make for 316kbps video. I would guarantee you this is nowhere near DVD quality.
The original 10 million seconds is more like 4 months, and yes, this would be close to DVD quality.
Why am I posting this? Because I built myself a 0.9TB array just last year for my MythTV backend. And after 6 months it isn't enough space, even with aggressive deleting and transcoding.
1TB will feel like a very small number even 5 years from now.
I think the issues you raise could be addressed if life recordings were considered testimony and therefore eligible for fifth amendment protection. You wouldn't need to turn your recorder off, ever, but you also could not be compelled by any court to show any part of your life recording if you thought that part might incriminate you. Of course, just like a refusal to testify, a jury might wonder what it is that you're hiding but they'd be instructed not to allow that to influence their decision.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I love the geeky narcissist population here on slashdot (like you). It amuses me so much how you always so "subtley" try to sneak in some self-agrandizing bits into your posts to brag on yourselves.
i rkpd5.jpg
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/4839/inspcaptk
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...is a triangle!!
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
The index size itself can grow pretty large, especially with so many different data collections to index. Using an example with a simple inverted file and a plain text collection, it can quickly grow twice as big as the text collection itself if you index everything not including punctuation, even with stemming. And that's not even considering collocations and latent semantic indexing.
Everyone knows Charlie got replaced by an AI about two years back. Last I heard he is collecting royalty checks in the south of France, he emails the AI a plot summary twice a year, the rest of the time it's nothing but wine and cheese.
...DivX in 50 years, I quit.
Digital Sailor
heheh, sweeeeeet, I can finally become a Gargoyle from Snow Crash. now I just need access to the CIC database...
This might be a nightmare or a boon for arguments. With a certain person, half our arguments at some point wind up being "Them: You said 'blah blah blah'. Me: No, that's not what I said. Them:Well, that's what I remember."
I'm not sure if it would be good or bad to be able to do an instant replay.
as the guy who wrote the initial AC post about narcissism...awesome...I'm glad someone read my stuff.
Where can I get a degree as a futurist?
Oh, I can't? Then why in the hell should I give any creedence to one? Especially since I'm old enough to remember the population bomb, global cooling, flying cars, and the complete and utter lack of any mention by any futurist whatever of cell phones, the internet, CDs or DVDs?
Unless you have balls of crystal, shut the fuck up about the future; you're as ignorant about the future as me or anyone else.
Seriously. Be silent and be thought a fool, or speak and remove all doubt. Call yourself a futurist or claim to know what's coming and you have removed all doubt. The future ain't what it used to be!
-mcgrew
For example, imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff. There are a number of alternative futures: you could take a pace forward and plunge to your death; the cliff could crumble under your feet - with the same result; a gust of wind could carry you over; but the probability is that you would turn around and walk away again. That's a prediction based on the known facts. But a prediction is not immutable fact: if you hadn't gone near the cliff in the first place, you wouldn't have had to face any of the inherent dangers.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You're completely right BTW. Geeks have poor self esteem or something and often make up for it by bragging. It's very noticable and annoying in hyper geek companies. Whereas I've literally never heard my non geek drinking buddies do it except ironically or sarcastically. Now I'm sure there are non geek braggarts, but I just never seem to run into them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
People can have their own opinions about this, but not their own facts. all of the ramping up of capacity, speed, and ability of the past 100 years is directly attributable to high density transportable energy, in the form of petroleum. The remaining energy in that petroleum reserve would bet be served developing the technologies to prevent the starvation and privation of the 9 some odd billion people we're expecting to share the planet with in 50 years. Self driving cars? Perhaps, but not interesting, especially when people (mostly the poor, hungry, and dispossessed) are tearing up suburban McMansions for timber to keep warm during the ever milder winters, and the cities are gradually abandoned from the rising oceans.
And all of THAT will require enormous amounts of energy. The kind of cybernetic totalism that TFA exhibits is one that is(sadly) all too pervasive in forums such as slashdot, ars technica, etc. And this is a tragedy, as we need the best and brightest to solve the problems of the future before they get here, not jerry-rig some bandaid solution on a disaster when it happens.
To have even the VAGUEST glimmer of hope for an industrial civilisation, we need to get electricity in massive amounts, and figure out how to NOT use it in massive amounts. Suburbia will be abandoned - self driving cars won't save it. We will need to remove the burbs so we can reclaim it as farm land....
I'm not being alarmist - I'm not a "doomer" by any stretch, but I am extremely skeptical of any predictions that do not directly address energy and resource consumption as central to any technology.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Right, and I'm the Queen of England. One thing I hope life logging does is force people to be more honest with themselves and stop this rampant self-delusion.
captcha: extended
See As We May Think: the Memex.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
This is what drives me nuts about all this "singularity" talk. Charlie brings it out in his talk, but doesn't seem to understand the implications. From the fine article:
Yes, Moore's law is an exponential growth function - the transistor count doubles every 18 months or so. So where's the "singularity"? Exponential functions are defined everywhere along the curve. They NEVER go to infinity for any defined input. And no one thinks that even Moore's law is going on for too terribly much longer. In fact, no real exponentially growing process can go on forever - you'll eventually run into some kind of natural limit.
I think this singularity stuff is a bunch of hogwash.
Given that C-12 constitutes 99% of naturally occurring carbon, getting enough C-13 to make all these diamond memories is likely to require some rather expensive equipment to concentrate/extract the C-13. Say you needed one carat worth of memory, which was 50-50 1's and 0's - then you'd need to mine like 50+ carats worth of coal (accounting for impurities, etc) to get your half-carat of C-13. Then you'd have to use some sort of centrifuge to separate out the C-13. My guess is that this is likely to make the process expensive enough to be impractical.
How about a hum-to-music search for songs with similar melodies. I'm often wishing I could search for a catchy tune by the music I can remember, rather than they lyrics I can't.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If we are assuming the ability to assemble diamond memory atom by atom, it is difficult to imagine we do not also possess a similar capability to DISassemble something atom by atom. Take anything containing C13 and disassemble it atom by atom, and save the C13 atoms.
Nah, I assure you, my "fighting prowess" is pretty damn low, despite two decades of trying. Which is why when a rare moment like what I mentioned occurs, my conscious reaction (once "I" catch up) is "hey, cool". But do something long enough, and you'll have a few cool moments now and then.
Martial arts examples crop up a lot when talking Zen. Partly for historical reasons related to its adoption by the samurai, partly for practical ones (it was the practical ones that made for its adoption by the samurai in the first place). And partly because they're just more vivid than "so we were jamming and the piano player started modulating back and forth between minor and major keys in the melody line, but without thinking I just went into a progession of suspended chords, and it stayed tight." (I don't even know if that example makes sense, some jazz guy feel free to correct with something meaningful.)
It happens that I have significant first hand experience with the martial arts; should I then draw on somebody else's secondhand reports, rather than my own experience, so that you don't think I'm a "geeky narcissist"? Would it be better if I said, "when a boxer slips a punch and yadda yadda yadda"?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
One very important issue in TFA that hasn't been discussed here is legal reforms. Even without a life recorder, we are closing in on those issues.
A great many actions are not prohibited (especially government actions) simply because there WAS no way to actually do those things. Another class of actions is not explicitly permitted (to citizens) or conversely government is not forbidden to prohibit them simply because until recently, there ws no practical way to prohibit them.
The most glaring example is privacy. Whens the Constitution was framed, there was no protection at all for private conversations (for example). That's not because it's not a right worth protecting, but because in an era before cameras and shotgun mikes, nobody could imagine a situation where people wanting to converse privatly couldn't manage to do it. Most of the country was quite rural and nobody could have any idea where anyone actually was. The closest you could get would be if the person told you where to find them and then actually went there. Even the most urban setting more closely resembled what we would call a small town.
There were no bugging devices or infrared cameras.
Much of that is more or less intact based on the legal expectation of privacy, but another large portion of it is entirely gone now.
At one time you were whoever you said you were. There were no photos, no databases, and no credit reports. You might well have a reputation (for better or worse) where you live, but you could go a days ride away and be a stranger. Go to another state and you were surely an unknown. There was no legal right to a fresh start simply because there was little way to deny you one if it was worth moving away for.
That's not to say that nobody knew anything about you, just that you knew about as much about them as they knew about you.
Equally important are a lot of laws that are only vaguely acceptable because they're not (yet) fully enforcable. In general, we haven't set a legal prohibition against prohibiting thoughts only because we have little or no way to detect thoughtcrimes in the absense of actions based on those thoughts. Even lass overt actions used to go unnoticed. The latter is where we are seeing the beginnings of a problem. There have been several controversies surrounding keeping tabs on what people choose to read. Thus far it's been restricted to a few cases of monitoring library checkouts and purchaces from large book sellers, but the problem is growing.
Specifically, we don't have a legal right to read whatever we care to read without being profiled or creating probable cause simply because until now there was no practical way to KNOW if someone somewhere bought or checked out a particular book, much less to know what someone read online. Since then, it has become possible to check up on particular people, and now with TIA and carnivore like operations, it is becoming possible to watch everyone.
The real question is do we have the wisdom, restraint, and political will to recognize that privacy IS a right and that attempting to deny it will slowly destroy our society. So far the answer seems to be a resounding NO!