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. "

Comments

Thought

[Intrinsic]

Of course, aside from making it possible to write very interesting science fiction stories, the Singularity is a very controversial idea. For one thing, there's the whole question of whether a machine can think -- although as the late, eminent professor Edsger Djikstra said, "the question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim". A secondary pathway to the Singularity is the idea of augmented intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence: we may not need machines that think, if we can come up with tools that help us think faster and more efficiently. The world wide web seems to be one example. The memory prostheses I've been muttering about are another.

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

Ambient Findability

[Lord Satri]

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."

Other Crazy Ideas

[Intrinsic]

Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.

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.

Re:The Movie you're looking for is called

[joto]

who would want to record every single waking --and sleeping!-- moment?

People who have amnesia. People who would like to record every waking moment but not have to deal with turning the recording on and off. People in law-enforcement. People who need to document fraud and/or abuse by other people, but can't necessarily predict when the interesting bits happen. Students who like to review one of their classes. Perverts who like to sell their sex-experiences on the Internet. Journalists who don't like taking notes. Anyone who have trouble remembering names, or directions, or whatever. In short, just about anyone, I guess.

Well, yes, all that indexing and searching possibilities are cool and all, but you would still have to spend some time looking it up

Sure. The idea is that if it's no hassle to record stuff, why not just record it all. The device could be embedded in your wrist-watch and/or cellphone, which most people carry around anyway. Or it could be an implant. If you don't need to access it, you won't waste any time accessing it, and the additional weight you have to carry is less than the extra weight you already carry because you forgot to cut your toenails.

memories get embellished by our minds. Just go back and read your high school angst-ridden writings and if you're matured just a bit

I know I feel that way, but I'm not sure everyone feels that way. But even if you do feel that way (like I do), that doesn't remove the usefulness of such a device. Nobody is forcing you to review your angst-ridden teenage depression all the time. But if you need to remember something, you could.

And there's the waste in recording again what you already saw (because you would be recording yourself watching those records... bleh).

Why is that wasteful? Storage is cheap. Micro-managing it is wasteful, because it costs more money and time than not managing it at all. Besides, you may end up some day wanting to see how much time you waste inspecting older memories. In short, you could just as well argue that everyone should use letters of maximum 2mm height, and no paragraph breaks or whitespace, when handwriting, since otherwise you would waste ink and paper. The world just doesn't work that way.

Re:Life Recorders

[illegalcortex]

As will, perhaps, refusing to turn over your life recorder. Sure, the 5th amendment should protect against that, but it probably won't, at least not well enough.

Actually, I think you're in a bit of a gray area. How is refusing to turn over your recorder (if it's known you have one) any different than refusing to turn over documents and emails?

What could possibly be protected is having your recorder encrypted and refusing to turn over the password. From what I've been reading, the fifth will probably protect you from turning over passwords right now. So I think the same would apply.