Architect Eugene Tsui is walking the line between the two with his two-mile-high Ultima Tower concept.

Blogger Mahesh Basantani comments:

We’ve seen a whole slew of gigantic, volcano shaped, city-in-a-building towers, each promising to be the largest building in the world. First it was the wacky X-Seed design for Tokyo, and then even Norman Foster got into the game with his proposal for the massive ‘Crystal Island’ development in Moscow. Well now, architect Eugene Tsui is taking the gigantic volcano tower concept to a whole new eco level, by taking design inspiration from the natural world. His new design for the Ultima Tower – a 2-mile high Mt Doom-esque structure - borrows design principles from trees and other living ystem to reduce its energy footprint. We are always intrigued by architecture that uses biomimicry – the borrowing of principles from nature’s designs - and Tsui’s concept for this towering, ultra-dense urban development has certainly captured our attention with its thought-provoking design.

The base of the tower is 7000 feet in diameter. Solar panels on the outside would provide a good deal of the the required energy for operation. Additional power would come from wind turbines. Plus, Tsui describes a method of generating energy based on temperature differential between the bottom and the top of the tower. (I'me familiar with the idea of generating power using the temperature differentialin water; I suppose air would work the same. But if there's that much difference in temperature between the top and the bottom of this thing, either the top or the bottom -- I'm guessing the top -- would be pretty uncomfortable.) The 144 elevators would be powered by compressed air.

In addition to trees, one of the inspirations from the natural world for this design was an African termite mound:

Tsui's design calls for the tower to be surrounded by lakes on all side, which got me wondering -- why not ocean? Could something like this be constructed out at sea, attached to a huge platform bolted to the sea floor? It would be like the ultimate oil rig. If so, I think a design like this would be a good endgame for the Seastedders -- folks who want to, in their own words, "create permanent dwellings on the ocean - homesteading the high seas."

Their concept photo looks a lot less ambitious than the Ultima Tower:

On the other hand, it looks like it's designed for -- among other things -- agriculture. That would probably be an important consideration when building a self-contained habitat out at sea. Ultima Tower would be a huge undertaking even on land. But I love the idea of having it sit out somewhere in the middle of the Pacific -- an independent city-state. There's something very appealing about that.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michio Kaku says there are three:

Type 1 impossibilities

Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes

Type 2 impossibilities

Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realised millenia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes

Type 3 impossibilties

Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition

Kaku has some interesting speculations on when we'll be seeing things like teleportation and time travel.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Some interesting comments from reader Nato Welch in the discussion thread of the most recent FastForward Radio:

Take by way of example California's recent law prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to take RFID implants. If jobs are scarce, and competition among workers necessitates taking on modifications in order to compete effectively, then a form of distributed //duress// (Dale's term) accomplishes an effective circumvention of self-determination even where direct coercion may not.

So our commitment to morphological liberty, if it is to be practical, demands a bit more than simply enjoining direct forms of coercion, but also the creation and maintenance of societies where relinquishment of technological interventions is not only permitted, but actually practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated.

Excellent point. What Nato is describing as "morphological liberty" begins with non-coercion; it can't end there. But where does market pressure end and out-and-out coercion begin? This is a tricky question.

Let's step back from human augmentation and look at some more mundane forms of technological adoption. On a recent Frontier Airlines flight, I was surprised to hear the flight attendant announce that Frontier Airlines "no longer accepts cash." Anyone wanting to use the DirecTV service or purchase a cocktail now has to use a credit card. Okay, granted, credit card "technology" is so ingrained in modern commerce -- especially travel-related commerce -- that the expectation that passengers on a commercial flight would have access to it seems pretty reasonable. The number of passengers who purchase their tickets via cash or check (is that even possible any more?) is no doubt vanishingly rare.

Continue reading "Plateaus of Completeness" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In response to the video I made last year asking attendees at a library conference how much change they will see if they live to be 100, a filmmaker, visionary, and old high-school buddy of mine offers this compelling scenario:

So take that, grandma!

For your reference, here's the original video:

Something that caught my attention on a recent viewing of this video was Bob Treadway's (second) answer to the question: "maybe what's more interesting is what won't change." Being a Speculist and all, that struck me as a kind of contrarian answer. So it's interesting to note that in starting to read John Naisbitt's Mind Set!, his first and establishing mindset is as follows:

While many things change, most things remain constant.

What's great about this idea is that it is infinitely arguable. Of course, bear in mind that if you take the "more things change than don't" position, you aren't just arguing with Bob Treadway; you're arguing with the Megatrends guy.

So let's hear it, folks. Do more things change or do more things stay the same?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Lets pay a little game. Below you will find several headlines from the now-defunct Weekly World News. For those who never had the privilege of standing in a US grocery store checkout line during the 80's or 90's, let me explain that the WWN was a schlocky tabloid publication that eschewed the normal celebrity gossip in favor of the most randomly bizarre, outrageous, and absolutely preposterous "news stories" you can imagine. Tucked in the middle of all that nonsense is a real headline from an actual current news story.

Your mission is to see if you can identify the real news story:

Seeing Eye Squirrels For Blind Dogs

Blind Man Regains Sight After Doctors Implant Son's Tooth in His Eye

Groom Freezes at Nudist Wedding

Severed Leg Hops 75 Feet!

Scientist Invents 'Reverse Lightbulb' that Makes Room Darker

Doctors Reattach Siamese Twins

Think you've got it figured out? Well, click here to see which one is actually news.

How did you do? If presented with that list, I believe I would have gone for the freezing nudist groom or the hopping severed leg. But, no.

The procedure is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. It is described thusly:

McNichol’s son Robert, 23, donated a tooth, its root and part of his jaw for his father’s surgery. McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, and a lens was inserted into a hole drilled in Robert’s tooth. The procedure required two surgeries lasting a total of 15 hours.

How wonderful that a man's eyesight has been restored. But what is more striking to me about this is -- even if you guessed correctly -- how well that headline fits in with the others. We live in an age of such robust possibilities that it is getting difficult to make a claim that is so outrageous that it is rejected at face value. Maybe this is why the WWN went out of business; they just couldn't compete with the real news any more.

A world in which real news is as outrageous as faux news becomes risky if we allow our sense of credulity to grow at the same pace that possibilities are increasing. I think the key is to continue to be startled by, and to push back against, claims that sound outrageous.

With that in mind, is anyone prepared to tell me that the headline linked above is, in fact, a hoax? If it is, I am hardly the first to fall for it.

As Paul Simon put it:

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
Thats dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Dont cry

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's a future scenario for you. Imagine this trend catching on and staying with us:

While the headlines concentrate on peace breaking out in Iraq, that's but part of a worldwide trend for the last few years. Violence has also diminished, or disappeared completely, in places like Nepal, Chechnya. Congo, Indonesia and Burundi. This continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere.

Via InstaPundit.

Merry Christmas!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When the SpecuWife and I first started going out, I was something less than the very model of emotional stability and maturity that you've all come to know so well from reading these pages. I had this rather quaint idea that she and I could keep things casual and avoid getting into a a full-blown relationship. In fact, I wouldn't even allow the word "relationship" into our conversations. I insisted on using a euphemism, "the R word."

Well, in the words of John Cleese explaining that the woman should, in fact be burned as a witch because she turned him into a newt -- I got better.

These days, I just couldn't be more comfortable with the word relationship, so I now use the same euphemism to refer to a different word, a word that I think is all too frequently offered up as a pretext for being a total lame-out, buzzkill, or any other variety of foot-dragging techno-progress-a-phobe.

That word, of course, is "realistic."

So it isn't too surprising that when I used the R Word in a recent comment thread, reader and frequent acerbic commenter Mdarling called me on it:

Realistic? really?

How about these for some realistic guys:

- “640k ought to be enough for anybody.” – Bill Gates 1981

- “So we went to Atari and said, “Hey we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.” And they said, “No”. So then we went to Hewlett Packard and they said, “Hey, we don’t need you; you haven’t even got through college yet.” – Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s pc.

You know this area of tech blindness at least as well most, better I would think

I'm not asking for my own personal orbital vehicle nor even my flying car (though I think a flying Segway would be wicked cool and not that hard technologically). I just want enough electric storage to move 1500-2000 pounds for 80-100 miles, that can recharge overnight. The technology exists now- though I admit there is no market and Toyota was right to hide the plug in outlet on the early Priuses. ("Priusi" ?)

So the realism you are urging is on the market- not the technology. And this may be one of those Catch-22's where no one will build it commercially because there is no market and there is no market because the thing is not commercially available.

Well, he's got me there. When I use the word "realistic," I'm talking strictly in terms of what the current political/social/economic infrastructure will allow, certainly not what is technologically possible. Personal orbital vehicles and flying Segways, much less the modest electric car that MD is looking for definitely could be developed in a reasonable time frame. I mean, we've already had electric cars, so all we're talking about doing is tweaking the specs of something that already exists.The Apollo program showed us how fast an idea can become technological reality, and it only scratched the surface. The greater the level of motivation, the longer the list of things that we will allow might be "realistic."

It's kind of like When World's Collide. I think if we had a couple years warning of Earth's certain demise, we could have a substantial population living in space -- maybe in space stations, maybe on Mars -- within that time. But failing that level of motivation, changes are bound to move more slowly. So in spite of warnings from serious people who are looking at issues much more realistically than most of us would ever care to, there is still no space ark under development.

But there would be if there was general agreement that we needed one. Just as there will be flying Segways when the technology is there, and the technology will be there sometime before the world at large is good and ready for it, but long after the good-and-ready point for people like MD (and me, for that matter.) Meanwhile, we can at least take solace in the fact that we do have some early prototype drawings of this technology in old Dick Tracy comic strips. I wanted to reproduce one here, but I cannot find any online. There is a reference to the technology here, however, with some very cool images of a more -- you guessed it -- realistic prototype:

So, what do you want to see in the next five years -- fully electric cars dominating our highways? Personal flying platforms? Personal orbital spacecraft? Personal Star-Trek style replicators? Or better yet, transporters?

Here's a thought to ponder:

Putting all social, political, and (most) economic considerations aside for a moment, what is the most outrageous, unrealistic technological development that we could see in place one year from today. Five years? Ten years?

I think several of the ones I listed above could happen in that period. What do you think?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Via GeekPress, here's a profile of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, whose game-theory methodology for predictiong the future we discussed in a recent FastForward Radio. It's an interesting methodology:

The elements of the model are players standing in for the real-life people who influence a negotiation or decision. At each round of the game, players make proposals to one or more of the other players and reject or accept proposals made to them. Through this process, the players learn about one another and adapt their future proposals accordingly. Each player incurs a small cost for making a proposal. Once the accepted proposals are good enough that no player is willing to go to the trouble to make another proposal, the game ends. The accepted proposals are the predicted outcome.

To accommodate the vagaries of human nature, the players are cursed with divided souls. Although all the players want to get their own preferred policies adopted, they also want personal glory. Some players are policy-wonks who care only a little about glory, while others resemble egomaniacs for whom policies are secondary. Only the players themselves know how much they care about each of those goals. An important aspect of the negotiation process is that by seeing which proposals are accepted or rejected, players are able to figure out more about how much other players care about getting their preferred policy or getting the glory.

Bueno de Mesquita has achieved an impressive list of correct predictions using this approach, although as Karl Hallowell recently reminded us, people in this line of work tend to play up their successes. For example, how impressive is it that he predicted that the UK would leave Hong Kong 12 years before it happened? Wasn't their lease about to expire, anyway? On the other hand, two independent evaluations of his work (one by the CIA and one by fellow academics) have shown him to be about 90% accurate.

The earlier article that I read about de Mesquita in Good magazaine mentioned that he is scrupulous in not making information such as the outcome of the 2008 Presdiential elections availabe. This is interesting, in that he doesn't mind making sweeping statements about what policies will and will not work regarding Iran:

The details of his study of negotiation options with Iran are classified, but Bueno de Mesquita says that the broad outline is that there is nothing the United States can do to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear energy for civilian power generation. The more aggressively the U.S. responds to Iran, he says, the more likely it is that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. The upshot of the study, Bueno de Mesquita argues, is that the international community needs to find out if there is a way to monitor civilian nuclear energy projects in Iran thoroughly enough to ensure that Iran is not developing weapons.

If real, the ability to make accurate predictions about the future represents a unique form of power. How interesting that he leaves this particular matter open-ended. As described above, wouldn't Beuno de Mesquita's methodology have provided an outcome to the situation with Iran? It's notable that here he talks about how things will work out if... Of course, it's possible that he's just being evasive becuase he's not allowed to talk about the results. But I can't help but wonder whether he has seen the future, he doesn't like what he sees there, and now he's trying to do something to stop it.

Would such an act represent an abuse of Bueno de Mesquita's (hypothetical) power? The fact that he won't give away presidential election results indicates that he doesn't want his information to be used to change how things would have otherwise worked out. But then that's absurd. Somebody is paying his company to make predictions (the State Department is mentioned as one of his clients) and you can be sure that they are acting on the information.

So it's possible that Bueno de Mesquita sees a very bad end coming to the Iran situation, and he is giving the above warning as a means of trying to prevent it. And that is just a little scary.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Eve Matelan provided us a link to this intriguing article delving into whether the Soviets ever actually built a version of the Doomsday Machine discussed in the movie Doctor Strangelove:

In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.

An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.

Well, um, yikes.

Okay, everybody -- have a great weekend!

BTW, Eve has some thoughts of her own on the Doomsday Machine and other less terrifying future-related topics. You can catch her in one of my (still-being-edited) video montages from the Singularity Summit.

Linkathon

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

...comes around.

Over on the right-hand side, the diagram is a little sketchy on what happened between the U S WEST and QWEST eras. Also, it reads as though there was an entity called "U S WEST" which then acquired Mountain Bell and the two Northwestern Bells, rather than the reality which was that USW was a merger of those three spun off as a separate company after AT&T's divestiture.

Years ago, I remember being at educational sessions at USW where we would talk about the company's strategy in the face of the many changes going on in the telecom business. Those geniuses had it all figured out that we would be one of the last few standing. And darned if they weren't right, in a sense.

(But maybe not so much on the "genius" thing, really.)

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I wasn't paying attention, the team working on the Metaverse Roadmap wrapped their project and published the results. By way of background:

Over the past year the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) and its supporting foresight partners have explored the virtual and 3D future of the World Wide Web in a first-of-its-kind cross-industry public foresight project, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR). We use the term Metaverse in a way that includes and builds upon Neal Stephenson’s coinage in the cyberpunk science fiction novel, Snow Crash, which envisioned a future broadly reshaped by virtual and 3D technologies.

The MVR has “near-term” anticipation horizon of ten years (to 2017), a “longer-term” speculation horizon of twenty years (to 2025), and a charter to discover early indicators of significant developments ahead. Seeking diverse points of view, our process included an invitational Metaverse Roadmap Summit, public and expert surveys, a few workshops and roundtables at major U.S. conferences, social meetups, and a public wiki. Many helpful people from the IT, virtual worlds, professional, academic, futurist, and lay communities contributed ideas to the MVR.

The Metaverse comprises four components near and dear to the hearts of all Speculi:

Virtual Worlds
Mirror Worlds
Augmented Reality
Lifelogging

You might begin with the excellent summary found here. If you think the web of today is a distinctly different beast from the web of 1997, you are correct. But we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's the nicest thing anybody has said about me for some time. Now, we're not just talking about handyman skills. Who cares about that? Let's address a serious scenario -- say you got sent back in time 2000 years and you wanted to push civilization along like that guy did in Lest Darkness Fall? Could you do it, or would you be like the business man in that Twilight Zone episode who thought he would make a fortune by traveling into the past and inventing all the technology that the world would need -- only to realize that he didn't have the technological chops to pull it off.

Well, you don't have to wonder about how well you would fare in that scenario. There's a quiz that can help you evaluate how you would do, so -- should the opportunity present itself -- you'll know whether it would be worth the trip.

My results were as follows:

Hey, 19th century. Not bad!

Via GeekPress, where Paul scored an impressive 10 out of 10.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

Well, I didn't get 10 out of 10, but I'm happy to report that I'm also useful!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Charles Stross writing for BBC News:

We've had agriculture for about 12,000 years, towns for eight to 10,000 years, and writing for about 5,000 years. But we're still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history.

Don't we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don't. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us.

Indeed, we've acquired bad behvioural habits - because we're used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we're on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

Stross describes a world -- not too far off, where every moment of every individual's life is recorded and where 100 kilograms (or less) of diamond-based storage can store an entire century's worth of experience for the population of the planet. One of the commenters on this thread over at Dean's World suggested that people living in the present age are not experiencing the same level of dramatic change as people who were born in the 1870's. The fact that the developments Stross is talking about strike us as even a little plausible confirms for me that all eras of change that humanity has faced to date are just a blip compared to what's coming.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There are a lot of reasons why trying to predict the future is no easy task: the complexity of the variables involved; the sheer number of those variables; the tendency of human fears, hopes, ambitions, and expectations to branch out in new and unexpected directions.

All of this adds up to give us the Law of Unintended Consequences, or maybe what I'm getting at here is a corollary to that law -- the Law of Completely Unexpected Results.

For example: how is that Sushi has become a huge culinary favorite all over the world? There are complex answers to that question, and one could draw several lines through time from the non-Sushi past to the very Sushi-centric present. But how did it all start? Where did it come from? Would you believe empty cargo holds on trans-pacific passenger flights?

In the early 1970s, executives at Japan Airlines fretted that the cargo holds on their Vancouver-to-Tokyo flights were often empty. So the airline asked its Canadian freight coordinator, a man named Wayne MacAlpine, to look into whether these planes could be crammed with bluefin tuna from Prince Edward Island. McAlpine was somewhat baffled by the request, since fishermen on the island, some 2,800 miles to the east of Vancouver, didn’t much care for the bluefin’s taste—as he Teletyped back to his bosses in Japan, “What [the fishermen] did after they caught them is they had their picture taken with the fish and dug a hole with a small bulldozer and buried them.”

The airline executives were stunned: each buried bluefin could garner hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in Japan, a country already suffering the ravages of overfishing. The company took the unprecedented step of importing five Canadian bluefins for a 1972 auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The giant tunas proved a hit, selling for the then-steep price of $4 per kilogram. The race to satiate the world’s toro jones was on. “Sushi was nearly two millennia old,” writes Issenberg, “but it was that morning at Tsukiji that the current experience of eating it was born.”

So, some thrifty executives need to cash in on unused cargo space, and poof! Three and a half decades later there is a sushi bar in virtually every shopping mall in the US. That's not the only reason, but it's a huge one. And one has to wonder whether most of us would have ever even heard of sushi had those JAL execs decided to put something else in those cargo holds.

So, what's the life going to be like three and a half decades from now? Who knows? But one thing's for sure -- dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of future-shaping decisions such as the one that those airline executives made way back then are being made every day.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Serious scientific research is being done in some pretty far-out areas, such as

Invisibility

and

Time Travel

to name only two.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's the opening from Stephen's recent entry on a bad shopping experience with Target:

As the amount of data and intelligence available to merchants increases, so should our expectations as customers. Some stores seem to get this, others don't.

Now here's the "same"phrase translated from English to Japanese, then back to English, to Chinese, back to English, to French, back to English, to German, back to English, to Italian, back to English, to Portuguese, back to English, to Spanish, and then finally once more back to English:

Whereas they probably use it, our switches of the emergency of the hope of the commerce of the commerce therefore magnify the data of the client and the intelligent amount. Together if the memory, that one he to take with this, other subjects if memorizzato like.

One Carl Tashian wrote a program to abuse phrases by passing them iteratively through computer translation programs. Of course, even if translation programs were 99.9% accurate and reliable not just for vocabulary but for idiomatic phrases, it would still be an abuse of them to use them this way. If you make a photocopy of a photograph, then photocopy the copy, then copy that copy and on and on, you will see a lot of degradation of the picture even with a really good copier.

Still, the results are interesting to say the least. Even tiny, simple phrases such as "I love you" get pretty mangled. In fact, the odd title of this entry is really just the intended title, "Communication Is Challenging" sent through the wringer. At least that one is in the ballpark, I guess.

Important to note: this is state-of-the-art as of 2003. Maybe the technology has improved since then?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Here's the first of three videos that I am putting together from the Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference which I attended last week. This one has responses to one of the Seven Questions About the Future:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via InstaPundit, author Charles Stross has some interesting things to say about the future:

This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn't happened yet — we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.

And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.

And just imagine all the alternative versions of that story that they'll be able to model!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts on the conference, I was particularly intrigued by what Chip Nilges of the Online Computer Library Center had to say. His talk was very interesting on a couple of levels. On the one hand, libraries are more networked and web-enabled than I realized (and apparently becoming more so all the time.) My question to Chip had to do with how individual libraries can drive web traffic to their sites based not on individual pieces of content -- everybody has a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls -- but on types of content, content that makes a particular library particularly interesting. (This isn't as big a problem for academic libraries as public libraries. Tools that Chip described such as Google Scholar will drive readers to a particular academic library based on content type.)

My example: I suggested that the Atlantic City Public Library probably has more resources on the Monopoly board game than most -- maybe more than any other. If a web browser is looking not for a particular book or article about Monopoly, but rather general information, that library should be one of the top resources that comes up in a Google search. But if you do a Google search on Monopoly, you won't find that library -- at least not anywhere near the top. And Chip admitted that the tools he described don't allow for that kind of granularity. I think if libraries are going to continue as individual entities -- both online and in their bricks-and-mortar edifices -- this is going to have to change.

Librarians see themselves as being competitive with services like Google and other search engines because they both claim the same primary value proposition -- they both want to be the Gateway to All Knowledge. I think Librarians get to keep that role with the patrons who walk into the library. As Joan Williams pointed out in the conference's concluding session, librarians can add value to a search by helping to filter through the noise and irrelevance that typically comes up in a web search. That's great. But Libraries can't compete on the web as the Gateway to All Knowledge. There are too many of them, and there's way too much overlap. Individual libraries need to draw traffic based on their individual characteristics. Right now, the only individual characteristic that leads a web search to a particular library is location.

As far as web presence is concerned, these libraries need to grow a personality.

But that's just the beginning. Working together, I think libraries in general should start working on being the source of information on particular topics. (I realize this cuts against the grain. How can we talk about being the source for a particular topic when we're the Gateway to All Knowledge?) By running web campaigns on particular topics, libraries can work together to raise their overall profiles on the web. Plus, once those links are there, they tend to persist.

Do a Google Search on Death Sucks and see who comes up. But I don't think that guy has published anything new on that subject for some time. Still, that blog entry continues to drive traffic to this site.

So maybe libraries should work together this year to promote themselves on the web as particularly good resources for, say, nutritional information; then those links will still be in place and will still be driving people to their websites next year when they promote themselves as sources of information on alternative energy sources.

Another good topic for this kind of promotion -- the future. After the conference, I'm starting to think that libraries have a particular role to play in helping to create awareness about the future. Maybe the Gateway to All Knowledge can evolve into the Gateway to the Future.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference, Day 1 Re-Cap

Here’s a run-down on the sessions I attended at the first day of the conference:

You Are Becoming Me and I Am Becoming You! Setting the Record Straight on Latinos Being the Majority Population in the US

Salvadaore Avila, Las Vegas – Clark County Library District

Salvadore Avila quickly brushed past his provocative title, pointing out that Latinos will not be in the majority in the US for some time, and that the increased incidence of intermarriage between Latinos and Anglos will ultimately render the transition less dramatic than we tend to picture it today. Based on the rest of his talk, I take the title to be an attention-getting device, offered up tongue-in-cheek.

Continue reading "Conference Day 1" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've been to two sessions so far at the Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference so far. Kurzweil killed with his keynote -- got a standing ovation. At lunch, I was talking to a couple of the librarians who mentioned that they were surprised at how optimistic he is.

I'll have lots more to say later, but my initial observation is that accelerating change thinking -- including the Singularity, although Ray did not explicitly go there -- continues to move into the mainstream. A librarian conference isn't exactly a dentist or Realtor get-together, but neither is it a Foresight Nanotech Vision Weekend.

These folks may be surprised by what they're hearing, but not shocked or scandalized. They are pleasantly surprised.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Just got directed to this site. What to recommend? Start with Neil Gershenfeld on fab labs. Don't miss Martin Rees and Robert Wright. Keep going and you'll hit Ray Kurzweil. Lots of amazing, eye-opening stuff.

It's all good.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One day the lion will lie down with the lamb. In the meantime, we've got this:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the past couple of weeks I've been introduced to two websites (there are probably others) that provide glimpses into the futures via a "news" format. That is, the scenarios are written in news story form, so we read about the future as the present (or to be very technical, the recent past, which is what news actually is.)

Pontus Edenberg gives us a kind of MSM view into the world that's coming with his News of Future site. This is an attarctive and well-researched site. I especially like the tabs that let you pick which future year you want to visit. Commiserate with the MSM look and feel, these are mostly pretty conventional futures we're looking at, here. No alien invasions. No global thermonuclear wars. No singularity. Here's a fairly representative news bite from the year 2050:

At a press conference today it was announced that the first tourist heading for Mars will be the 38-year-old US businessman Patrick Clifford. He will leave the earth in the launching window of June 2052 and set his foot on the surface of Mars in November, together with the other 6 astronauts assigned for the mission to further explore the planet.

Contrast that with Future Fragments, a blog written in the year 2030. These fragments of the future are bit more personal than Edenberg's news, a little more obscure, and kind of raw the way blog posts sometimes tend to be. Typical snippet:

Random inaccessible memory they call it. Eventually you were numb from the uncertainty, knowing less and less about your past, about yourself. All we knew then, though, was that something didn’t feel right. Something you couldn’t quite keep in your sights, like trying to keep a bead on a target moving just too quickly. People started to be … different, strange. Jones used to sit on his bunk, staring blankly at the same sepia-toned digiframe, the images of a pretty blonde cycling one by one in perpetual cycle. He’d done it every day since we started the programme together, staring intently before the transfers began. A look of confusion spread and grew deeper like some cancerous root as the weeks withered past. Eventually, he looked up at me, a thin needle-like tear cutting down his haunted face, and he asked, “Is this my wife?”

I'm enjoying both of these sites quite a bit. Would be interested to know what others think. Would also appreciate being directed to other future news sites.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you think about the space program - getting to the moon - the lunar space program was literally achieved using slide rules. It's a technical achievement which shouldn't have happened. It is incredible that they were able to do it... They did it 50-60 years ahead of when they should have been able to do it... The orbital tracking system that was up on the wall... it was updated with motors and gears - someone was back there checking to make sure it was in the right spot. That's gearpunk. That isn't a space program in a modern sense. That's gears and slide rules and people doing the math... It was a political race, so it's not that surprising that we had a lull after [achieving the Moon]. The goal and function of the program had been achieved. The political point was made."

Sci-Fi author Tobias Buckell (March 20, 2006 Fast Forward Radio interview)

The science fiction subgenres of steampunk and gearpunk are set in alternate histories in which modern technological paradigms happen earlier, but are accomplished by way of the science available in that time period.

In "real life" inspiration often leads what should be possible. The transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866. The U.S. Civil War had just finished and it would be another three years before the first U.S. transcontinental railroad would be completed, but from that year forward there has always been instantaneous communication between America and Europe. That was 50 years before the more obvious solution to transatlantic communication – radio - was able to broadcast across the ocean.

Other times it seems that we miss opportunities. Charles Babbage came close to delivering a Turing-complete computer in the mid-19th century – almost a century ahead of the 1943 arrival of the first working Turing-complete computer, ENIAC. It's little wonder that steampunk is commonly set in an alternate history where Babbage was successful. Imagine where we'd be today if computer development were 100 years further along.

It seems likely that most breakthroughs arrive "right on time." The Wright brother's flight is a good example. Of course their achievement was remarkable. Internal combustion engines might have been developing nicely at the turn of the century, but there still wasn't an engine with a sufficient power to weight ratio when they got started. So the Wright brothers took the best engines they could find and rebuilt and tinkered with them until they could coax just enough power out of the engine to make that first flight possible.

Meanwhile, there were other inventors working to be the first in the air. It's even possible that there were other heavier-than-air flights before the Wright's. With all this activity flying was destined to happen by 1903 – give or take a few years.

Phil once suggested that expectation has a lot to do with our advancement. If there is an expectation that something worthwhile is possible, we tend to work hard to make it happen. I agree. And if we're moving slow, the problem could be a failure of imagination.

The idea that history has momentum but inspired individuals can make a difference also came up in our recent conversation with Dr. Aubrey de Grey. De Grey agreed that if life extension is possible it would come about eventually, even if he or any other single individual pursuing the goal stopped working. But, he quickly added, if his work helped advance the life extension timetable by even a little, then millions of lives that would otherwise be lost would be saved. That, he said, "strikes me as a worthy goal." Indeed it is.

By the way, I think Tobias is exactly right about the 1969 Moon landing. It was accomplished about 50-60 years ahead of time. That would put us returning to the Moon, to stay, sometime between 2020 and 2030. That sounds about right.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Randall Parker comments on whether sequencing the Neanderthal genome means that we'll eventually meet some of our old homeboys face to face, and if so what issues that will raise:

Neanderthals might not make nice semi-people. Would they be smart enough and capable of being civilized enough to qualify for human rights? One of the biggest debates of the 21st century (at least until the robots take over) is going to be on the question of which attributes must an intelligence possess to be eligible for rights and even to be eligible for not immediately getting destroyed or at least imprisoned. But that debate hasn't started in earnest yet because all the politically correct liberals are still denying that genetics plays a big role in creating cognitive characteristics that determine why human societies take the forms we see.

What if we found that the Neanderthals were not only much more intelligent than us, but much nicer, too? Not likely, I realize. But maybe they just weren't brutal enough to survive in the face of competition with their homo sapien cousins. What if we're Cain to their Abel?

Or maybe they're still around, are of roughly the same intelligence as us, have impeccable taste, and are just a little bristly when the whole subject of their "extinction" comes up. This idea has been explored recently...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephen and I have been trying to work out the difficulties of recording an episode of FastForward radio with four people on the line. Now the Skype folks are giving us this:

Skype Technologies SA is piloting a new community conference call service, which can support as many as 100 callers, and is also offering a beta version of its new Internet calling software designed for easier use, the company said Wednesday.

The Skypecasts conference service allows online communities to schedule calls that anyone around the world can join.The service is currently being tested by select Skype partners but a beta version for the general public will be launched soon, Skype said.

Hey, maybe we could have some kind of audio get-together for Speculist readers. A mini-convention. Who's in?

Nope, I'm not allowing comments here. If you'd like to participate in the Speculist audio conference, give us a call:

(318) 775-0127

Normal long distance charges apply. You can reach the same number (and avoid long distance charges) by using Skype:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Well, maybe it won't be the rats that take over. It looks as though the pigs are starting to get a hoof up in the race:

AMES, Iowa - Max Rothschild has been trying to "build" a better pig for almost 30 years, since he took a job cleaning up after the hogs at his alma mater, the University of California, Davis.

The idea is to find and exploit the genetic variations of the best pigs, which Rothschild and like-minded agricultural researchers say will radically change the industry.

Of course, this kind of research takes us more in the direction of plumper hams and crispier bacon than it does an eventual porcine coup d'etat. But still. It's interesting that pigs can be improved upon, but humans must not.

One thing we don't have to worry about is super-intelligent killer corn taking over the planet. At least not if Poland has anything to say about it:

WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's parliament has passed a law which removes genetically modified seeds from a national register, effectively banning their sale.

"This should be interpreted as a ban on the sale in Poland of genetically modified seeds," Wojciech Mojzesowicz, head of parliament's agriculture commission, told AFP.

Naturally, we do need to be concerned about horrendous damage that irresponsible genetic research might eventually lead to, especially seeing as the cost of sequencing and synthesizing genes is plummeting, and we are drawing ever nearer to the age of widespread gene-hacking capability available on the desktop.

But I think we also need to be worried about the harm that the kind of superstitious dread that surrounds genetic research might cause. Genetic alteration of the food we eat and of our own bodies will take place in time. If the Western powers remain skittish about involving themselves in these developments, they merely assign the work to other hands. It won't go away.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In the case of an interspecies smack-down between human beings and lab-rats, who do you think would win? You might say the answer is obvious, but let's look at this for a moment.

What have we got going for us? Opposable thumbs, big brains, civilization/technology/control firmly in place. The lab rats are ours to toy with (poor things.) They don't stand a chance.

Or do they?

The one thing they would appear to have going for them is a lack of regulatory prohibitions concerning their advancement. For a lot of pretty sound reasons (along with a lot of Luddite/buzzkill reasons), you can't just go out and build Human Being 2.0. But there's little if anything stopping somebody from building Lab Rat 2.0, 3.0, 9i, Lab Rat 2009 Mega-upgrade, etc. The lab rats might go blasting right past us. Then it's their show.

Could it happen? Well, it seems unlikely. But people are talking about it nonetheless. Maybe as a precaution, we ought to give a thought as to how we can make treatment of lab animals as humane as possible. We should probably be doing that, anyway. But, you know, if the shoe might one day be on the other foot...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via GeekPress, author Dan Simmons provides about as bleak an outline of the future as can be imagined, in short-story form.

I don't think this future will happen, primarily because I believe that there are other forces at work in the world besides political forces. But could it happen? As scenarios go, this one certainly passes any initial sniff-tests that one might wish to apply.

It could happen.

The answer to a scenario is another scenario. Simmons wants to warn us about dangers he sees as imminent. On this site, we have dedicated a good deal of time and verbiage to spinning out scenarios that speak to a very different kind of future, mapped against what we see as a relentless spiral of improvement. However, we have to concede that there are risks and choices to be made even if these scenarios turn out to be correct.

Ultimately, the future comes down to what choices lay before us, all of us -- the items that occupy our possibility space -- and the actions that we take to bring them about. Simmons' nightmare future is out there. A series of bad choices might just land us there. (Simmons asserts that most of the choices have already been made.) But that future is one of many, and I don't believe -- as the time-traveler from Simmons' story asserts -- that time is a river whose course can't be changed.

We are the river; the choices that we make and don't make. I'm pretty sure Dan Simmons must believe that, too, or why bother writing about any future?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Here's a fun site where you can write and rate quick descriptions of what will happen in the future. If you have an opinion about the future of anything, you're qualified.

But be warned, it's kind of addictive!

Oh, and keep it clean, kids.

As for what L2si stands for...those who know, know. Those who don't? Welcome to the Speculist!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sure, it sounds like a cheesy skin flick from the 70's, but they're serious:

The colony aims to be self-sustaining in its requirements for sustenance, but it will nevertheless function in symbiosis with Earth. As a result, trade between the lunar colony and Earth will flourish, with the lunar colony contributing towards the development of research and scientific activities, such as, for example, the supply of alternative energy based on advancements in Helium3 fusion power, and provision of structural materials for spacecraft and satellites in earth orbit as well as deep space. At this time of potential fossil fuel shortages, threats of global warming, cultural clashes, and population explosion, this concept might well be what stops man's over-exploitation of Mother Earth by uniting governments and nations, scientists and laymen in mutual cooperation and understanding.

From reading the article, it sounds like they're stuck in a permanent planning stage. But maybe not.

This could make for some interesting discussion. In fact, let's make a poll out of it.

(via Rand Simberg)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Michael Strong opines that the solution to some of these dangerous, intoxicating delusions that we've been talking about -- at least to the extent that they show up in academia -- might be predicition markets:

Prediction markets may provide a powerful antidote to academic abuses of power. Just as critical experiments have enforced a reality-based ethos of scientific integrity in the hard sciences, so, too, prediction markets may be used to enforce a reality-based ethos of scientific integrity among those who make claims about society, politics, and economics. When theoretical speculations in the hard sciences repeatedly produce false predictions they are marginalized. We need to create just such a system for the social sciences.

For those of us who believe that excessive respect for academic opinion has led to avoidable poverty, waste, and human misery due to adherence to the misguided policies proposed by academics in the past century, then the need to create a more reliable system for discovering the empirical truth about the political and social realm is urgent. Moreover, prediction markets have the added benefit of allowing ordinary people to make money, possibly fortunes, by exposing those unfounded academic beliefs that are most widely accepted at present. Society wins, ordinary people win, and we create an incentive for people to focus their energy and attention on discovering important facts about the future.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

In addition to assessing the probabalilities of various outcomes, I think predicition markets may eventually incorporate more elaborate descriptions of the future. Compare a potential future as described by the Foresight Exchange with a different future as described by Long Bets. Foresight -- along with most other currently operating predicition markets -- is currently interested primarily in the ouctomes. Long Bets, on the other hand, is as interested in the arguments supporting the outcome as it is in the outcome itself. However, even the Long Bets approach is binary. The thing either will happen or it won't, so an argument is provided for each side.

In fact, there are many different sets of circumstances and events that can lead to the same outcome. I'd like to see a prediction market that rewards both correct answers and the best analyses as to why an outcome will occur.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 27, 2016

You finally made it. Wimbledon, Centre Court. An audience of thousands looks on cheering. The Chair Umpire calls out, "Quiet Please....Quiet." The crowd hushes as you bounce the ball twice, throw it high in the air, and serve. This is match point. This is for the championship.

A godlike voice drowns out the crowd, "Honey, could you put that game on pause and come help your son with his Algebra?"

You sigh. "Okay." The real world intrudes. You take off your sports goggles and ear pieces. Center court disappears. You are back home in the large VR gym you put in behind the garage.

The gym is 18 meters square with a vaulted ceiling - the size roughly of half a tennis court plus the out-of-bounds. You spent extra for the high ceiling so you could play basketball. A lower ceiling would have be sufficient for many sports including tennis and golf, but you love playing half-court with your son. You like to play hoops in the Hawaiian setting, overlooking the Pacific. He prefers the inner-city midnight hard court with boom boxes blaring. You both get your wish... at the same time.

Basketball is a game that doesn't translate well in full VR mode. You can't bump into virtual players, or pass the ball to, steal from, or be fouled convincingly by players who aren't there, at least not with this technology. You'd need a brain hack for that, and you're not quite ready to take that step. With this form of VR, contact sports require actual players. So you and your son play one-on-one basketball in AR - augmented reality. You see each other, the basketball you are actually playing with, and the goal - all virtually unchanged. But the surroundings change.

It's different with tennis. Only half the court is real. No jumping the net to shake hands after playing here. The "net" is located half a meter in front of the back wall. Of course it's a virtual net. A real net catches tennis balls as they are served. Usually the ball is simulated too... only on serves is the ball real. The racquet you hold is real enough - real with force feedback built in. It convincingly simulates the feel of hitting the ball. Sometimes you play simulated players. Other times you play other human players via the Internet - most from their own VR gyms.

You've golfed the most exclusive courses in the world from this room. But your ground prosthetic isn't perfect. It's a 2 meter square synthetic grass platform that can be inclined in all directions to about 30 degrees. The false grass can "grow" to simulate the green, the fairway, or the rough. You're a bit dissatisfied with this model lately. Your buddy bought the recommended upgrade last month and it's much more realistic - variable grade simulation with realistic sand trap emulation. But you've read the feature set of the next upgrade that's coming out in six months. You've decided to wait. No need to keep up with the Jones's when you can leap ahead.

You love bowling in here, especially with the 1979 package. Somehow bowling with the Steve Miller Band on the jukebox and smoke in the air just seems right. You don't play many other sports. Your friend with the better golf ground likes to play racquetball. But racquetball screws up your tennis game. "One racquet sport at a time" you say.

Many people hunt in VR. You've even heard that one VR vender will ship you meat - cow meat of course - equal to whatever kills you make in their environment.

You've found that the VR gym is limited only by the prosthetics you can afford. You've purchased three major packages: golf, bowling, and theater seating. Tennis just requires the racquet and a ball catching net. The 6-person-row of theater seating rolls in robotically from the side closet when called for - just like the golf ground, and the bowling apparatus. Most movies are available pay-per-view the same day they open in the cinemas. When you put on your goggles the IMAX screen is larger than the room it replaced.

As the lights turn out while you leave, you remember you were worried that you wouldn't use the gym enough to justify the expense. Instead, you've found that other rooms in your house go unused.