"Webs of trust." People will make pages telling what pages they believe have a good reputation, and generally tells the truth. If someone fills the web with a ton of random statements, they will have a low reputation.
Computers will have "beliefs" reflecting their owner's own. You will tell the computer, "I believe this is true," and the computer will absorb the package of information. You can say, "I believe this is false," and the computer will absorb the package of information, and put it into the "bogus" bin.
A message has "meaning" if you can make special use of it.
Normal web pages have meaning for browsers, it's just that that meaning is limited to "how to draw words for the user."
What we're doing, is making it so that your computer can make special use of messages on the web, to do smarter things.
It would be scary if the Semantic Web were about "my meaning is THE meaning." But it is explicitely not like that. In fact, one of the main things about it is that anyone can make up their own languages, their own way of modelling the world.
There are tools that make it so you can say, "My word X is sort of like their word Y," but it's acknowledged that such translations will be imperfect. Likely, fuzzy logic, and systems that are able to ask for clarification (and remember responses), will be used to mediate that sort of things.
You may also be interested in my favorite page on AI by Open Mind. The Semantic Web isn't explicitely about AI, but it opens the door for a lot of AI work.
I remember hearing wave after wave after wave of "evidence." And then I remember wave after wave of counter-evidence.
The aluminum tools weren't for enriching uranium. The "unmanned aerial drone" was a weather baloon, or a kite, or something. None of the biological agents were biological agents.
(I mean, c'mon: Saddam Hussein, with state of the art unmanned aerial attack drones?!)
Everyone I knew who was for the war thought that it was like- 90% of the evidence was real, and 10% of it was just mistakes.
But: 100% of the evidence was "mistakes." But you could never convince the pro-war people of that.
They'd just rattle off some other piece of evidence, and if you didn't have a counter within 10 seconds, about how the evidence was bogus, they'd just look at you like you were an idiot.
In the present Iraq war, I believe the number is somewhere in 1,000-20,000 people, I'm not really sure. Certainly not a million.
I have heard that the US military has worked very hard, and very successfully, to cut down numbers. I didn't hear this from pro-war people- I heard this from active pacifists who are dedicated to reducing deaths and suffering. They are very much against the war. But they have told me: The US military has done a lot of research in how to conduct a war with small loss of life, and they have been doing a good job of it.
This difference in loss in life- this could be considered a point for "things are getting much better."
I have been opposed to this war from the beginning. I have never been in favor of it. But to compare it to the Vietnam war seems to be a bit much, based on the very different numbers of deaths.
It's started with commited group efforts like Free Software. As communications technology develops, we start seeing things like Wikipedia.
As it develops further, we will see things like the project-space network, and local economies and sharing networks. As it develops still further, local governments will be mediated over by well organized electronic communities online.
Really, if this all seems strange to you, you have no idea the power of communications technologies.
Before "wiki," a piece of software, there could be no wikipedia. After that piece of software, it's almost impossible for there not to be a wikipedia. Details could be different, but the basic idea is almost an inevitabilitiy.
We are not done. There's still a hoard of communications software in the pipes. We're just now getting our event systems online. We'll start seeing things like "OverHear," allowing you to hear your friends' public conversations, with voice even. As we get the ability to index the world's voice conversations (with voice-to-text software), we'll be able to ask, "Who in the last 5 minutes said this world," we'll see that the online world will become one gigantic OpenSpace conference. We'll see the conferences, we'll see the group affiliations, we'll see the projects, we'll see it all.
I predict that between 2015 and 2020, the Hive Mind (by some other name) will be a recognized and powerful force. It will also recognize itself and it's own power. We could call this the day that the Hive Mind achieves "self-awareness."
It may even have a military force- I don't know what else to call a gigantic networked mess of sympathetic hackers, chemists, biologists, and lawyers. It is not unthinkable that "the Internet" may become it's own "sovereign nation," of sorts, lack of an independent land be damned.
So, connecting the idea of the UN and the Internet is not all that strange. I mean, what else? What else could it possibly be?
Our next generation "communications software" isn't so much about making it so that messages can be sent from person to person in different ways, but about organizing the existing communications, and about organizing ourselves. We're putting in individual-to-group affiliations, and affiliations amongst groups with each other.
There's no reason to believe that our communications will stop networking and developing.
People do not have their attention on our trajectory. They see half the people downtown walking around with cell phones stuck to their ears, but they don't think that anything can "come next." But it will. There's much much more on the way.
The "Hive Mind" will look less rediculous, I think.
In 5 years, VoIP will be mature, and have basically taken over. Online group VoIP conferences may be primitive, but some ordinary people will be using them. Semantic web technologies like RDF will be in mainstream understanding and use (like XML right now), and our computers will be noticably "smarter" than the information desplay we have today. Tablet's will be cheap and accessible, and we'll tighten up the "I drew something"-to-"There it is on the web" loop. In short, our conversations will be full of napkin diagrams, Visual Language will take off beyond web comics. Our user interfaces will have transcended (finally) the box-ish interfaces, because graph data-structures have taken on new-found importance, and with the new interfaces, we'll see component lan
With voice software, you can already speak in real-time, conference style. I think Skype supports 5 people.
With speech-to-text, you could log all conversation to IRC.
Then you could have search engines that search *all conversation within the last 5 minutes, world-wide.*
Well, at least all conversation that was okay with being public.
So you could say, "Show me all conversations that are going right now about Python, and immediately find the people talking about Python, wherever they were.
You may be interested in LocalNames, which allows people or groups to keep their own keyword lists.
You can default LocalNames lists to other LocalNames lists- so, if people make a particularly good or useful set of names, other people can choose to use them as well.
You (and others) can maintain a list of corporate names, and bind them to URLs. Then you publish the list.
People can then default their own names lists to the list of corporate names.
If they look up a name (in their browser address bar,) and it's not on their own list, it will automatically default to the corporate names list.
If the name was defined in both their own list and in the corporate list, then resolution goes to their own name. If they specificly want to go to the corporate list, then they can type "corp/Coke", instead of just "Coke," and get to the corporate names list.
http://localnames.taoriver.net/corp/ is now bound to the names description, so you can just go to a URL like http://localnames.taoriver.net/corp/Coca-Cola and you'll be taken straight to the Coca-Cola website.
Using FireFox foo, you can make it so that just typing "corp Coca-Cola" will take you straight to the Coca-Cola corporation's website.
But it's not just for web browsing; You can use this in any wiki that supports InterLinks, and you can use your names in WordPress blogs as well...
In the future, we'll write mail client plugins, mailing list plugins, instant messenger plugins, all sorts of beautiful things, so that, combined with good link organizers, you Never Ever Ever have to look at a URL ever ever again.
The LocalNames spec doesn't describe what linking syntax should look like, but it'd generally be something like this: [[short name of URL][long text to link.]] So for example, you might write:
"So, I was on [[Slashdot]] the other day, and I saw [[invisibility cloak][an incredible invisibility cloak!]]"
The names lists support defaulting, so that you don't have to name every URL you like. If someone makes a names list you like, (for example, the contents of a wiki,) you can just default to it.
Bloggers may be interested in MooKitty's plug-in for WordPress that lets you use LocalNames in blog posts.
Really, I get a little upset now when I have to look up URL's mid-post. I think, "Geeze, I've got the LocalName for this right on the tip of my tongue; Why do I have to actually resolve it to a URL myself, and then stick a href tags around it?"
Once you start using short names for stuff, you never want to go back.
(And I think: Hell yes. It's done great, and will do even better. The Internet is primitive right now, and it's growing stronger. Wikipedia will follow suit.)
Marshall Brain wrote a blog post where he joked about the way we pick any explanation that feels scientific.
Explaining why smokers have more sex: "Here's a theory. Perhaps, way way back in the evolutionary chain, humans have a long-extinct ancestor that had long, thin, tusk-like incisors jutting out of its mouth. And perhaps, residually, our brains are programmed to recognize that "long incisors" means "good mate". So when a person puts a cigarette up to his or her mouth, it triggers the "long incisors" circuit in our brains, and cigarettes get associated with sex in that way. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? That's because it is ridiculous -- there must be a better theory."
I think I am going to patent a method for inflicting virtual pain / beatings / torture / death on these future embedded personalities, because it will be the only way to keep the bastards in line.
Every 10 years, the ownership of available spectrum is divided up in shares across all citizens. 1 citizen, 1 share.
Then they go to town with it- there's a gigantic market for spectrum.
At the end of 10 years, do it all over again.
End result: Everyone gets access to spectrum. People can choose to give spectrum to causes they believe in, or they can sell it to the higher bidder, or hell- just use it themselves or their own causes.
This creates a price signaled market, and also puts cash into everybody's hands, which is good for the economy.
I loved the M0 story, (thought it was hilareous,) though I didn't necessarily buy their dopamine explanation. But hey- with research like this going on, who knows?
If you haven't noticed, Machines are Power, and that power is intensifying daily.
If you want the ability to program to be strictly managed by the very few powerful patent holders, based on an illigitimate ownership of ideas, be my guest.
If you care a FUCK about the world, and you don't think our interactions and capabilities and powers should be under the strict ownership of a very few, then you should be vigorously against software patents.
It's about POWER.
The patenting of software in the age of machines is the biggest power grab we've ever seen. Fight the patents as intensely as you can.
I'm in the middle of working v5 of it, which has a more consistent API, security and privacy features, and more "exhibition" as well- you can look at the server, and see who's subscribed, get a whole lot of other data as well. It also has an ULI port, so it's easy to query from Jabber, IRC, the command line, wherever you can communicate a line.
Today, to write into a wikipedia article, you find a page, make a few changes in wiki syntax, and talk about the changes in the talk page. You also send notes in your personal user page.
I'm wondering: Is that process going to remain the same?
What process do you see people using in the year 2015 to collaboratively build articles in the future?
What about organizing groups of related pages- what kind of process do you think will develop there?
It felt authentic, in a way that everything after ST:TNG does not.
It's true, it's rusty. But they seem really comitted, and I think they're going to master this system that they've created.
I just have one major wish:
I really wish the audio were redubbed. Do the shots just using the microphones on the set, and then perform a seperate dubbing session, so that the sounds are clear.
Regardless of whether the audio is improved or not, I'm a dedicated fan now.
I haven't watched a Sci-Fi TV show in about 7 years. But I'm excited about these shows!:)
RDF is a way to make webs of information. Think "web" as in "world wide web"- one thing points to another thing points to another thing, and it can all point back to the original thing. (In Computer Science, this is a "graph.")
OWL is a way to help computers reason over these graphs. You can give hints like, "If you hear people talking about POBOX's over in this one system, that's the same thing as people talking about PO-BOX's over in this other system. Note that OWL isn't AI technology; It's just an assistant to programmers working on making smarter programs.
As for all the jargon coming out of the W3C: Yes; It is a problem. I don't know if they are working on it or not, but I hope they are..!
Slashdot Mirror
News flash: Americans are fat because they eat fat foods.
Canadians aren't starving, Socialist Europe isn't starving. They just eat (and drink!) responsibly.
A message has "meaning" if you can make special use of it.
Normal web pages have meaning for browsers, it's just that that meaning is limited to "how to draw words for the user."
What we're doing, is making it so that your computer can make special use of messages on the web, to do smarter things.
It would be scary if the Semantic Web were about "my meaning is THE meaning." But it is explicitely not like that. In fact, one of the main things about it is that anyone can make up their own languages, their own way of modelling the world.
There are tools that make it so you can say, "My word X is sort of like their word Y," but it's acknowledged that such translations will be imperfect. Likely, fuzzy logic, and systems that are able to ask for clarification (and remember responses), will be used to mediate that sort of things.
You may also be interested in my favorite page on AI by Open Mind. The Semantic Web isn't explicitely about AI, but it opens the door for a lot of AI work.
I remember hearing wave after wave after wave of "evidence." And then I remember wave after wave of counter-evidence.
The aluminum tools weren't for enriching uranium. The "unmanned aerial drone" was a weather baloon, or a kite, or something. None of the biological agents were biological agents.
(I mean, c'mon: Saddam Hussein, with state of the art unmanned aerial attack drones?!)
Everyone I knew who was for the war thought that it was like- 90% of the evidence was real, and 10% of it was just mistakes.
But: 100% of the evidence was "mistakes." But you could never convince the pro-war people of that.
They'd just rattle off some other piece of evidence, and if you didn't have a counter within 10 seconds, about how the evidence was bogus, they'd just look at you like you were an idiot.
I don't know how these figures work, but it looks like about 3,500,000 people died in the Vietnam war.
In the present Iraq war, I believe the number is somewhere in 1,000-20,000 people, I'm not really sure. Certainly not a million.
I have heard that the US military has worked very hard, and very successfully, to cut down numbers. I didn't hear this from pro-war people- I heard this from active pacifists who are dedicated to reducing deaths and suffering. They are very much against the war. But they have told me: The US military has done a lot of research in how to conduct a war with small loss of life, and they have been doing a good job of it.
This difference in loss in life- this could be considered a point for "things are getting much better."
I have been opposed to this war from the beginning. I have never been in favor of it. But to compare it to the Vietnam war seems to be a bit much, based on the very different numbers of deaths.
It makes sense to me.
We're making an Internet Hive Mind.
It's started with commited group efforts like Free Software. As communications technology develops, we start seeing things like Wikipedia.
As it develops further, we will see things like the project-space network, and local economies and sharing networks. As it develops still further, local governments will be mediated over by well organized electronic communities online.
Really, if this all seems strange to you, you have no idea the power of communications technologies.
Before "wiki," a piece of software, there could be no wikipedia. After that piece of software, it's almost impossible for there not to be a wikipedia. Details could be different, but the basic idea is almost an inevitabilitiy.
We are not done. There's still a hoard of communications software in the pipes. We're just now getting our event systems online. We'll start seeing things like "OverHear," allowing you to hear your friends' public conversations, with voice even. As we get the ability to index the world's voice conversations (with voice-to-text software), we'll be able to ask, "Who in the last 5 minutes said this world," we'll see that the online world will become one gigantic OpenSpace conference. We'll see the conferences, we'll see the group affiliations, we'll see the projects, we'll see it all.
I predict that between 2015 and 2020, the Hive Mind (by some other name) will be a recognized and powerful force. It will also recognize itself and it's own power. We could call this the day that the Hive Mind achieves "self-awareness."
It may even have a military force- I don't know what else to call a gigantic networked mess of sympathetic hackers, chemists, biologists, and lawyers. It is not unthinkable that "the Internet" may become it's own "sovereign nation," of sorts, lack of an independent land be damned.
So, connecting the idea of the UN and the Internet is not all that strange. I mean, what else? What else could it possibly be?
Our next generation "communications software" isn't so much about making it so that messages can be sent from person to person in different ways, but about organizing the existing communications, and about organizing ourselves. We're putting in individual-to-group affiliations, and affiliations amongst groups with each other.
There's no reason to believe that our communications will stop networking and developing.
People do not have their attention on our trajectory. They see half the people downtown walking around with cell phones stuck to their ears, but they don't think that anything can "come next." But it will. There's much much more on the way.
The "Hive Mind" will look less rediculous, I think.
In 5 years, VoIP will be mature, and have basically taken over. Online group VoIP conferences may be primitive, but some ordinary people will be using them. Semantic web technologies like RDF will be in mainstream understanding and use (like XML right now), and our computers will be noticably "smarter" than the information desplay we have today. Tablet's will be cheap and accessible, and we'll tighten up the "I drew something"-to-"There it is on the web" loop. In short, our conversations will be full of napkin diagrams, Visual Language will take off beyond web comics. Our user interfaces will have transcended (finally) the box-ish interfaces, because graph data-structures have taken on new-found importance, and with the new interfaces, we'll see component lan
With voice software, you can already speak in real-time, conference style. I think Skype supports 5 people.
With speech-to-text, you could log all conversation to IRC.
Then you could have search engines that search *all conversation within the last 5 minutes, world-wide.*
Well, at least all conversation that was okay with being public.
So you could say, "Show me all conversations that are going right now about Python, and immediately find the people talking about Python, wherever they were.
One step towards the HiveMind.
You may be interested in LocalNames, which allows people or groups to keep their own keyword lists.
You can default LocalNames lists to other LocalNames lists- so, if people make a particularly good or useful set of names, other people can choose to use them as well.
You can do just this with Local Names.
You (and others) can maintain a list of corporate names, and bind them to URLs. Then you publish the list.
People can then default their own names lists to the list of corporate names.
If they look up a name (in their browser address bar,) and it's not on their own list, it will automatically default to the corporate names list.
If the name was defined in both their own list and in the corporate list, then resolution goes to their own name. If they specificly want to go to the corporate list, then they can type "corp/Coke", instead of just "Coke," and get to the corporate names list.
The technology exists now, to do it. Here, I tell it to make a new space... There. I've just made a working namespaces.
Now to set up URL forwarding... There.
http://localnames.taoriver.net/corp/ is now bound to the names description, so you can just go to a URL like http://localnames.taoriver.net/corp/Coca-Cola and you'll be taken straight to the Coca-Cola website.
Using FireFox foo, you can make it so that just typing "corp Coca-Cola" will take you straight to the Coca-Cola corporation's website.
And if you make your own LocalNames list, you can just add the Corporation list as a defaulting target, and the names will all pass through.
Ta daaa!
But it's not just for web browsing; You can use this in any wiki that supports InterLinks, and you can use your names in WordPress blogs as well...
In the future, we'll write mail client plugins, mailing list plugins, instant messenger plugins, all sorts of beautiful things, so that, combined with good link organizers, you Never Ever Ever have to look at a URL ever ever again.
It's called "Local Names," and it allows you to use short names for URLs.
The idea is that you should be able to use short names in:
We can presently use LocalNames in most wiki (any wiki that supports InterLinks,) in WordPress blogs, and in Firefox browsers.
The LocalNames spec doesn't describe what linking syntax should look like, but it'd generally be something like this: [[short name of URL][long text to link.]] So for example, you might write:
Which would render out as:
The names lists support defaulting, so that you don't have to name every URL you like. If someone makes a names list you like, (for example, the contents of a wiki,) you can just default to it.
There is already: a site for keeping your own names list, a web-browser redirection site, and a site for adapting a Wiki's title index into a Local Names list.
Python programmers may be interested in the Python library reference names, which you can use with FireFox to jump straight to any Python module's documentation.
Bloggers may be interested in MooKitty's plug-in for WordPress that lets you use LocalNames in blog posts.
Really, I get a little upset now when I have to look up URL's mid-post. I think, "Geeze, I've got the LocalName for this right on the tip of my tongue; Why do I have to actually resolve it to a URL myself, and then stick a href tags around it?"
Once you start using short names for stuff, you never want to go back.
That's why we're having this discussion. If it weren't authoritative, we wouldn't be sitting here arguing about it.
The question is: should it be authoritative?
(And I think: Hell yes. It's done great, and will do even better. The Internet is primitive right now, and it's growing stronger. Wikipedia will follow suit.)
Will this new light cause us to rethink our ideas about "nature" v. "nurture"?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Marshall Brain wrote a blog post where he joked about the way we pick any explanation that feels scientific.
Explaining why smokers have more sex: "Here's a theory. Perhaps, way way back in the evolutionary chain, humans have a long-extinct ancestor that had long, thin, tusk-like incisors jutting out of its mouth. And perhaps, residually, our brains are programmed to recognize that "long incisors" means "good mate". So when a person puts a cigarette up to his or her mouth, it triggers the "long incisors" circuit in our brains, and cigarettes get associated with sex in that way. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? That's because it is ridiculous -- there must be a better theory."
Right now, people seem to buy up anything that sounds like Evolutionary Psychology. The attitude is: "It is scientific. Therefore, it must be true. Anything else would be religion or emotion."
I think I am going to patent a method for inflicting virtual pain / beatings / torture / death on these future embedded personalities, because it will be the only way to keep the bastards in line.
Maybe not a good idea.
This isn't like land.
It's easy to remap spectrum.
It's impossible to remap land.
Here's what we should do:
Every 10 years, the ownership of available spectrum is divided up in shares across all citizens. 1 citizen, 1 share.
Then they go to town with it- there's a gigantic market for spectrum.
At the end of 10 years, do it all over again.
End result: Everyone gets access to spectrum. People can choose to give spectrum to causes they believe in, or they can sell it to the higher bidder, or hell- just use it themselves or their own causes.
This creates a price signaled market, and also puts cash into everybody's hands, which is good for the economy.
Chalk some points up for Reciprocality, and their theory of "The Anatomy, Life Cycle and Effects of the Phenomenologically Distributed Human Parasite M0." (google cache- their server seems to be down atm)
I loved the M0 story, (thought it was hilareous,) though I didn't necessarily buy their dopamine explanation. But hey- with research like this going on, who knows?
Actually, this is about Democracy.
If you haven't noticed, Machines are Power, and that power is intensifying daily.
If you want the ability to program to be strictly managed by the very few powerful patent holders, based on an illigitimate ownership of ideas, be my guest.
If you care a FUCK about the world, and you don't think our interactions and capabilities and powers should be under the strict ownership of a very few, then you should be vigorously against software patents.
It's about POWER.
The patenting of software in the age of machines is the biggest power grab we've ever seen. Fight the patents as intensely as you can.
You might want to investigate DingDing, an Event System.
It supports XML-RPC, Query -based Subscription, and Transparent Messaging.
I'm in the middle of working v5 of it, which has a more consistent API, security and privacy features, and more "exhibition" as well- you can look at the server, and see who's subscribed, get a whole lot of other data as well. It also has an ULI port, so it's easy to query from Jabber, IRC, the command line, wherever you can communicate a line.
Today, to write into a wikipedia article, you find a page, make a few changes in wiki syntax, and talk about the changes in the talk page. You also send notes in your personal user page.
I'm wondering: Is that process going to remain the same?
What process do you see people using in the year 2015 to collaboratively build articles in the future?
What about organizing groups of related pages- what kind of process do you think will develop there?
The web browser is basically becoming a virtual computer.
I watched it, I thought it was great!
:)
It felt authentic, in a way that everything after ST:TNG does not.
It's true, it's rusty. But they seem really comitted, and I think they're going to master this system that they've created.
I just have one major wish:
I really wish the audio were redubbed. Do the shots just using the microphones on the set, and then perform a seperate dubbing session, so that the sounds are clear.
Regardless of whether the audio is improved or not, I'm a dedicated fan now.
I haven't watched a Sci-Fi TV show in about 7 years. But I'm excited about these shows!
Heh.
None of my High School English teachers ever taught me to write like that.
I learned to write like that from posting on the Internet!
Where's the "computer reading your mind" bit?
..?
I don't think anyone's claimed that the Semantic Web will read your mind.
I feel for you.
RDF is a way to make webs of information. Think "web" as in "world wide web"- one thing points to another thing points to another thing, and it can all point back to the original thing. (In Computer Science, this is a "graph.")
OWL is a way to help computers reason over these graphs. You can give hints like, "If you hear people talking about POBOX's over in this one system, that's the same thing as people talking about PO-BOX's over in this other system. Note that OWL isn't AI technology; It's just an assistant to programmers working on making smarter programs.
As for all the jargon coming out of the W3C: Yes; It is a problem. I don't know if they are working on it or not, but I hope they are..!