There are 15,000 different sets of the AIBO AI being taught how to interact with a human environment. One of the neatest things I've come across reading about how people using their AIBOs was from aibosite.com's FAQ. Apparently some AIBO users have found their AIBOs have developed rudimentary face-recognition, even though Sony claims that no such software was installed in untrained AIBOs.
This might light up some people's Big Brother radars, but what if those 15,000 trained AIBOs downloaded the product of their training into a central database at which someone(probably Sony, but what are the possibilities of GPLing the training you've given your AIBO?) can sort through the best of the acquired programs and redistribute them to new AIBO purchasers? With so many individuals constantly training(ie, improving the software of) their AIBOs, wouldn't the software increase dramatically?
Barring for a moment the logistical problems of attempting to implement a widespread distribution of portable computers(not necessarily Palms) and the current dearth of "educational" software for Palms, the usefulness of universal portable computing is significant, at all age levels. Morning announcements could be transmitted by IR, instead of loudspeaker. High School students at a Model Congress competition could trade AIM and ICQ accounts in seconds, fostering contact between like-minded students across school district lines. Students could keep their schedules organized, viewing their own scheduled activities as well as a schedule of all school extracurriculars.
There are wider uses for universal portable computing in education than just collecting science lab data. With some improvement in handwriting recognition, penmanship could be taught at an individual's speed, with comments and corrections flowing from computer to student constantly. If reasonable security could be enforced, a variety of tests could be taken directly on the portable computer, and graded by software, with persistent problems flagged so that the teacher can help the student personally. Any electronic implements to diminish the teacher's workload increases the quality of education as the teacher can subsequently allot more time to individual and small group teaching, which is much more efficient than the lowest common denominator that permeates most classrooms.
The technology just isn't here yet. The computers powerful enough to have decent security and advanced enough software to be useful are much too expensive to be universally distributable, even when manufactured in the huge quantities that universal distribution would entail. But prices are always coming down and hardware is always improving, and I don't doubt there won't be a day when fourth graders are just as wired as business execs are now. It will happen slowly, first in colleges(bundled with tuition), then private schools, but eventually universal portable computing, with it's myriad and unpredicable applications, will trickle down to every student.
Actually, student rights are severely limited. There were a series of Supreme Court cases in the early 80s that, when put together, effectively say that first amendment rights don't apply to speech in schools. The argument went that schools are in loco parentis and thus have the right to "protect" their student bodies from dangers, including dangerous speech.
My own high school's newspaper in 1983 published a scathing review of a particular teacher, but that issue was kept from distribution by the administration. In reaction, the students held a rally, garnering a mention in USA Today, but the issue never was released.
Re:Destruction through stupidity rather than malic
on
Rise of the Nanobots
·
· Score: 1
This has already been predicted in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi. If I recall, Earth was destroyed accidentally by a lab in Indonesia. He call it mataglap, rampantly destructive nanotech.
The problem with the possibility of such a thing existing is it assumes that a type of nanite will exist that can use any type of atoms to self-replicate. And if life hasn't been able to move beyond using carbon, and then usually only in a limited number of forms, in 3 billion years, it's unlikely the less rigorous system of created nanotech, even when it's directed by intelligent minds and not just evolution, has the capacity of leapfrogging the destructive power of viruses. Lichen takes a long, long time to break down rocks.
Jon Katz extracts a number of observations and theories from Jane's involvement with Slashdot over the last two weeks, but misses a few key points.
First of all, authors using reader response in anticipation of publication is nothing new. From biographers soliciting interviews in the New York Times Book Review to focus group based editing to the basic research that every article or book begins with, information flows into an article from multiple, often public sources. The case of Jane's Intelligence Review soliciting analysis from/. members can be seen as an opening of the editing process of journalism to the general public, but it can also be seen as the action of an editor searching for expert opinions, as editors and authors have always done. Jane's didn't ask AOL teen chat rooms what they thought of the article(though the responses would be worthy of an article unto themselves): they came to a recognizable and engagable concentration of computer experts. This bears little difference from an author preparing to write about international relations to send her manuscript to experts in the field, hoping for intelligent and constructive comments.
And yet posting an article to Slashdot is a different sort of type of solicitation for information than making distinct, personal contact with experts in the field. Thousands read the solicitation; hundreds respond. Of the hundreds of comments, a few dozen are useful, from the "general public"(ie, are not individually solicited) and in the public domain(if I understand the rules governing Slashdot properly). The fact that expert people give their expert advice gratis I believe occurs only because those experts are by and large firm believers in open source, be it open source code or open source journalism. Few other fields have such a widespread belief in open standards and free flow of information, particularly the business and political spheres. In fact, the farther you move from pure science towards pure politics, the more valuable each actor believes his opinion to be.
While the community on Slashdot may be enthusiastic to help improve Jane's article on computer security for the mere value of having a more accurate article than a less accurate article, mainstream publications will have difficulty transfering such enthusiasm to other fields. Journalists in politics or business will still have access to deep throats and other individually solicited expert opinions, but the Slashdot mentality does not fly as high inside the Beltway or on Wall Street, where carefully guarded information is power or money, than in the Valley or in Austin where the spirit of competition is supplanted by the spirit of excellence.
This article, while seeming pretty well put together on numbers, fails to deliver on causes. The best they have to offer:
Observers suggest several explanations for why Washingtonians, whether at home or at work, are the most wired. One is the close to 3,000 technology companies, whose approximately 250,000 workers not only are online but, consciously or not, proselytize their friends and families to get online, too.
seems weak at best. Other areas in the US have huge concentrations of IT workers, chief among them San Francisco. If they talk to all their friends and their friends' friends and get everybody onto the net, why doesn't the Bay area have the lead for most wired? A better reason could be money: Metropolitan DC has the highest average income in the nation. So money correlates more closely to net connectivity than frequency of IT workers. Which means the best way to get your region better connected is to bring in more dollars, not necessarily bring in more tech companies.
What matters is that if the technology exists, it will be used. Pure science has never asked why. I can't think of a single technology that has ever been developed but didn't come into use for ethical reasons.
There are whole classes of weapons that have never been used for ethical(and realist) reasons, from hydrogen bombs to uranium in the water supply, but chief among them are the biologicals. Never has a modern biological weapon, such as smallpox, been used against a military or civilian target. Not by a nation, not by a terrorist group, not by an insane but brilliant individual. There are arguments that this is purely out of realist principles, the case being made that once a widespreading biological weapon is employed(and Anthrax, with it's limited infectious capacity, doens't quite count), there's no effective way of preventing your own forces from being infected. But liberal norms apply as well: a basic sanctity of innocents and revilement of weapons without discrimination of their victims has kept biologicals out of warfare in the past, and hopefully will continue to do so.
The phenomenon of small nimble companies growing under the radar of a large corporation market leader is not exclusive to IT industries.
FedEx grew in the late 70s despite UPS's dominance of the package delivery market because it's hub and spoke system could get more packages to the right places faster and cheaper. It was ignored for a long time by UPS as a small time, regional carrier. Eventually UPS got screwed(though they still have the lead in overall number of packages delivered annually) by its willful ignorance of potential competition.
On a larger scale, Japanese manufacturers were able to slip under the radar of their American counterparts, manufacturers of everything from TVs to steamshovels, by coming out with a cheaper product, being ignored by the market leader, and improving until their quality met or bested that of the former market leaders. (BTW: It is a process currently underway with Korean manufacturers, of everything from TVs to steamshovels, who are undercutting both their American and Japanese counterparts).
This even happens with countries. France, the market leader in wool production in the early 18th century, ignored Britain's increasing productivity due to early industrialization and lost its lead, which contributed in part to the economic stagnation that predicated the French Revolution. Western Europe has consistently underestimated Russia, and was caught by surprise when, under Leninism, it exploded economically and fully became a world power. The Arab world ignored Zionism when it was a small and powerless movement and did not realize what was happening until control(or market dominance of the political sphere, if you want to think of it like that) had shifted, at least for part of Palestine.
Now these last two examples bring up an important point: sometimes the overturning of the market leader by a previously ignored underdog is a good thing and sometimes it is not. As applied to the current situation, I would hazard that an overwhelming majority of/. readers think that a potential for Linux to overturn the current market of OSes would be a good thing, but, looking at other examples of similar phenomena, we ought to hold judgement on the benificence of all such overturns until the facts are in.
While a beeper isn't clothes to the same extent that a tee shirt is, it is definitely an accessory designed to be placed on the body(not unlike a belt) with computational characteristics. The fact that it can't run Linux doesn't mean it's not a computer.
Not to mention the latest few years of techno-watches with IR links and onboard RAM or the proliferation of cell phones with screens and net access(particularly in Scandanavia and Japan).
Wearable computing is in the evolution stage; the revolution was made 20 years ago with the first digital beepers.
Washington is simply under public pressure to do something about exporting national secrets (as if any open source code could be considered a national secret) considering recent debacles related to Chinese espionage and the subsequent attempted coverup.
They're just flailing out at a segment of the software industry that can't defend itself, collecting the brownie points back home, and forgetting about it by morning.
One of the hardest parts of a creationist theory to give up is the distinction of man. Under the mainstream Judeo-Christian creation story, Man is separate from all the other animals, from monkey to bacteria, placed on a higher level of existence, halfway between God and animal. Evolution denies such a privleging of Man: Man is merely an offshoot of a branch of zoology who happens to have developed intelligence to an extent previously unseen in billions of years of species proliferation.
This is difficult to give up. If you've grown up believing Man to be special on a certain merit(created separately by God), trying to deny that merit in the face of a differing theory is an ego blow. I'm not saying this is the only reason supporters of Creationist theories sometimes vehemently deny evolution, but it is certainly a reason supporters of any theory can understand.
But even within a purely evolutionist view of the world, it is possible to retain Man's distinction from the rest of the animal kingdom: intelligence. Never in the course of evolution has such intelligence been so focused, so complex, so beautiful. It it our ability to reason that distinguishes us from the animals, not some unprovable "and on the sixth day God created Man".
One of the points brought up in Person's article, that cyberpunk marked a shift in scifi mentality away from the "change one thing and see what happens" towards a world-building model, is not born out by the history. Just looking at a few classics, from Ender's Game to Stranger in a Strange Land to even the Foundation series, writers had been creating entire universes just as complex and varied as the world of Neuromancer or Snow Crash.
What separates these earlier worlds from early cyberpunk(with it's high water mark of Neuromancer), is their generally cheery view of the world. This is not the case to the same extent with Ender's Game, but the case very well could be made that, at least under Person's definitions, Ender's Game is a sort of proto-cyberpunk.
One of the main distinctions Person makes between cyberpunk and postcyberpunk is the corresponding world-views of the two subgenres. Postcyberpunk, just like the post-Cold War era into which it is written, has a rosier view of humanity, and of humanity's eventual perfectability(even if that eventual perfectability doesn't look precisely human(this is scifi, after all)), contrasting to the late Cold War mentality that the world is on it's way down; while technology gets increasingly spiffy, it's not making the world a better place.
Postcyberpunk is a return to an earlier, and much larger theme in science fiction: the future is going to be better than the past. Earlier Cyberpunk is the anomaly.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 15,000 different sets of the AIBO AI being taught how to interact with a human environment. One of the neatest things I've come across reading about how people using their AIBOs was from aibosite.com's FAQ. Apparently some AIBO users have found their AIBOs have developed rudimentary face-recognition, even though Sony claims that no such software was installed in untrained AIBOs.
This might light up some people's Big Brother radars, but what if those 15,000 trained AIBOs downloaded the product of their training into a central database at which someone(probably Sony, but what are the possibilities of GPLing the training you've given your AIBO?) can sort through the best of the acquired programs and redistribute them to new AIBO purchasers? With so many individuals constantly training(ie, improving the software of) their AIBOs, wouldn't the software increase dramatically?
Barring for a moment the logistical problems of attempting to implement a widespread distribution of portable computers(not necessarily Palms) and the current dearth of "educational" software for Palms, the usefulness of universal portable computing is significant, at all age levels. Morning announcements could be transmitted by IR, instead of loudspeaker. High School students at a Model Congress competition could trade AIM and ICQ accounts in seconds, fostering contact between like-minded students across school district lines. Students could keep their schedules organized, viewing their own scheduled activities as well as a schedule of all school extracurriculars.
There are wider uses for universal portable computing in education than just collecting science lab data. With some improvement in handwriting recognition, penmanship could be taught at an individual's speed, with comments and corrections flowing from computer to student constantly. If reasonable security could be enforced, a variety of tests could be taken directly on the portable computer, and graded by software, with persistent problems flagged so that the teacher can help the student personally. Any electronic implements to diminish the teacher's workload increases the quality of education as the teacher can subsequently allot more time to individual and small group teaching, which is much more efficient than the lowest common denominator that permeates most classrooms.
The technology just isn't here yet. The computers powerful enough to have decent security and advanced enough software to be useful are much too expensive to be universally distributable, even when manufactured in the huge quantities that universal distribution would entail. But prices are always coming down and hardware is always improving, and I don't doubt there won't be a day when fourth graders are just as wired as business execs are now. It will happen slowly, first in colleges(bundled with tuition), then private schools, but eventually universal portable computing, with it's myriad and unpredicable applications, will trickle down to every student.
Actually, student rights are severely limited. There were a series of Supreme Court cases in the early 80s that, when put together, effectively say that first amendment rights don't apply to speech in schools. The argument went that schools are in loco parentis and thus have the right to "protect" their student bodies from dangers, including dangerous speech.
My own high school's newspaper in 1983 published a scathing review of a particular teacher, but that issue was kept from distribution by the administration. In reaction, the students held a rally, garnering a mention in USA Today, but the issue never was released.
This has already been predicted in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi. If I recall, Earth was destroyed accidentally by a lab in Indonesia. He call it mataglap, rampantly destructive nanotech.
The problem with the possibility of such a thing existing is it assumes that a type of nanite will exist that can use any type of atoms to self-replicate. And if life hasn't been able to move beyond using carbon, and then usually only in a limited number of forms, in 3 billion years, it's unlikely the less rigorous system of created nanotech, even when it's directed by intelligent minds and not just evolution, has the capacity of leapfrogging the destructive power of viruses. Lichen takes a long, long time to break down rocks.
Jon Katz extracts a number of observations and theories from Jane's involvement with Slashdot over the last two weeks, but misses a few key points.
First of all, authors using reader response in anticipation of publication is nothing new. From biographers soliciting interviews in the New York Times Book Review to focus group based editing to the basic research that every article or book begins with, information flows into an article from multiple, often public sources. The case of Jane's Intelligence Review soliciting analysis from /. members can be seen as an opening of the editing process of journalism to the general public, but it can also be seen as the action of an editor searching for expert opinions, as editors and authors have always done. Jane's didn't ask AOL teen chat rooms what they thought of the article(though the responses would be worthy of an article unto themselves): they came to a recognizable and engagable concentration of computer experts. This bears little difference from an author preparing to write about international relations to send her manuscript to experts in the field, hoping for intelligent and constructive comments.
And yet posting an article to Slashdot is a different sort of type of solicitation for information than making distinct, personal contact with experts in the field. Thousands read the solicitation; hundreds respond. Of the hundreds of comments, a few dozen are useful, from the "general public"(ie, are not individually solicited) and in the public domain(if I understand the rules governing Slashdot properly). The fact that expert people give their expert advice gratis I believe occurs only because those experts are by and large firm believers in open source, be it open source code or open source journalism. Few other fields have such a widespread belief in open standards and free flow of information, particularly the business and political spheres. In fact, the farther you move from pure science towards pure politics, the more valuable each actor believes his opinion to be.
While the community on Slashdot may be enthusiastic to help improve Jane's article on computer security for the mere value of having a more accurate article than a less accurate article, mainstream publications will have difficulty transfering such enthusiasm to other fields. Journalists in politics or business will still have access to deep throats and other individually solicited expert opinions, but the Slashdot mentality does not fly as high inside the Beltway or on Wall Street, where carefully guarded information is power or money, than in the Valley or in Austin where the spirit of competition is supplanted by the spirit of excellence.
This article, while seeming pretty well put together on numbers, fails to deliver on causes. The best they have to offer:
Observers suggest several explanations for why Washingtonians, whether at home or at work, are the most wired. One is the close to 3,000 technology companies, whose approximately 250,000 workers not only are online but, consciously or not, proselytize their friends and families to get online, too.
seems weak at best. Other areas in the US have huge concentrations of IT workers, chief among them San Francisco. If they talk to all their friends and their friends' friends and get everybody onto the net, why doesn't the Bay area have the lead for most wired? A better reason could be money: Metropolitan DC has the highest average income in the nation. So money correlates more closely to net connectivity than frequency of IT workers. Which means the best way to get your region better connected is to bring in more dollars, not necessarily bring in more tech companies.
What matters is that if the technology exists, it will be used. Pure science has never asked why. I can't think of a single technology that has ever been developed but didn't come into use for ethical reasons.
There are whole classes of weapons that have never been used for ethical(and realist) reasons, from hydrogen bombs to uranium in the water supply, but chief among them are the biologicals. Never has a modern biological weapon, such as smallpox, been used against a military or civilian target. Not by a nation, not by a terrorist group, not by an insane but brilliant individual. There are arguments that this is purely out of realist principles, the case being made that once a widespreading biological weapon is employed(and Anthrax, with it's limited infectious capacity, doens't quite count), there's no effective way of preventing your own forces from being infected. But liberal norms apply as well: a basic sanctity of innocents and revilement of weapons without discrimination of their victims has kept biologicals out of warfare in the past, and hopefully will continue to do so.
The phenomenon of small nimble companies growing under the radar of a large corporation market leader is not exclusive to IT industries.
FedEx grew in the late 70s despite UPS's dominance of the package delivery market because it's hub and spoke system could get more packages to the right places faster and cheaper. It was ignored for a long time by UPS as a small time, regional carrier. Eventually UPS got screwed(though they still have the lead in overall number of packages delivered annually) by its willful ignorance of potential competition.
On a larger scale, Japanese manufacturers were able to slip under the radar of their American counterparts, manufacturers of everything from TVs to steamshovels, by coming out with a cheaper product, being ignored by the market leader, and improving until their quality met or bested that of the former market leaders. (BTW: It is a process currently underway with Korean manufacturers, of everything from TVs to steamshovels, who are undercutting both their American and Japanese counterparts).
This even happens with countries. France, the market leader in wool production in the early 18th century, ignored Britain's increasing productivity due to early industrialization and lost its lead, which contributed in part to the economic stagnation that predicated the French Revolution. Western Europe has consistently underestimated Russia, and was caught by surprise when, under Leninism, it exploded economically and fully became a world power. The Arab world ignored Zionism when it was a small and powerless movement and did not realize what was happening until control(or market dominance of the political sphere, if you want to think of it like that) had shifted, at least for part of Palestine.
Now these last two examples bring up an important point: sometimes the overturning of the market leader by a previously ignored underdog is a good thing and sometimes it is not. As applied to the current situation, I would hazard that an overwhelming majority of /. readers think that a potential for Linux to overturn the current market of OSes would be a good thing, but, looking at other examples of similar phenomena, we ought to hold judgement on the benificence of all such overturns until the facts are in.
Wearable computing is a reality today.
While a beeper isn't clothes to the same extent that a tee shirt is, it is definitely an accessory designed to be placed on the body(not unlike a belt) with computational characteristics. The fact that it can't run Linux doesn't mean it's not a computer.
Not to mention the latest few years of techno-watches with IR links and onboard RAM or the proliferation of cell phones with screens and net access(particularly in Scandanavia and Japan).
Wearable computing is in the evolution stage; the revolution was made 20 years ago with the first digital beepers.
Washington is simply under public pressure to do something about exporting national secrets (as if any open source code could be considered a national secret) considering recent debacles related to Chinese espionage and the subsequent attempted coverup.
They're just flailing out at a segment of the software industry that can't defend itself, collecting the brownie points back home, and forgetting about it by morning.
One of the hardest parts of a creationist theory to give up is the distinction of man. Under the mainstream Judeo-Christian creation story, Man is separate from all the other animals, from monkey to bacteria, placed on a higher level of existence, halfway between God and animal. Evolution denies such a privleging of Man: Man is merely an offshoot of a branch of zoology who happens to have developed intelligence to an extent previously unseen in billions of years of species proliferation.
This is difficult to give up. If you've grown up believing Man to be special on a certain merit(created separately by God), trying to deny that merit in the face of a differing theory is an ego blow. I'm not saying this is the only reason supporters of Creationist theories sometimes vehemently deny evolution, but it is certainly a reason supporters of any theory can understand.
But even within a purely evolutionist view of the world, it is possible to retain Man's distinction from the rest of the animal kingdom: intelligence. Never in the course of evolution has such intelligence been so focused, so complex, so beautiful. It it our ability to reason that distinguishes us from the animals, not some unprovable "and on the sixth day God created Man".
One of the points brought up in Person's article, that cyberpunk marked a shift in scifi mentality away from the "change one thing and see what happens" towards a world-building model, is not born out by the history. Just looking at a few classics, from Ender's Game to Stranger in a Strange Land to even the Foundation series, writers had been creating entire universes just as complex and varied as the world of Neuromancer or Snow Crash.
What separates these earlier worlds from early cyberpunk(with it's high water mark of Neuromancer), is their generally cheery view of the world. This is not the case to the same extent with Ender's Game, but the case very well could be made that, at least under Person's definitions, Ender's Game is a sort of proto-cyberpunk.
One of the main distinctions Person makes between cyberpunk and postcyberpunk is the corresponding world-views of the two subgenres. Postcyberpunk, just like the post-Cold War era into which it is written, has a rosier view of humanity, and of humanity's eventual perfectability(even if that eventual perfectability doesn't look precisely human(this is scifi, after all)), contrasting to the late Cold War mentality that the world is on it's way down; while technology gets increasingly spiffy, it's not making the world a better place.
Postcyberpunk is a return to an earlier, and much larger theme in science fiction: the future is going to be better than the past. Earlier Cyberpunk is the anomaly.