Franklin vs. Einstein: FIGHT!

So, the basic concept here is that, back when Ben Franklin was around, and, more importantly, I suppose, the time of the American Revolution, the US (such as it was) had a total population of about 2.5 million (which, the more I think of it, the bigger a number that is, given that there just wasn't that much land in the "US" at the time, but anyway). That's 2 orders of magnitude less than there is now, some 200+ years on. At this time, the largest city in the US was Philadelphia with 20,000 people in it (NYC, by comparison, had about 5,000).

Now if you're anything like me, this strikes you as a really small number. So, if you're a Benjamin Franklin - man (person?) of ideas - and you have some means (which, honestly, I don't recall if he did or not, so hopefully you'll look kindly upon the spirit of my argument here if he was not), then you don't have much competition for ideas. Most people, bless them, just aren't ideas folks. They're busy tending the necessary things that need tending, or they are pushing the boundaries of what it means to have a human body. Half of the remaining are going to be caught up chasing their mystical tails (tales?) to over worry about what we might call "invention". So, right off the bat, you're in a good place.

Now, also consider that the "Western World" was in the knee of the intersection between scientific-like rationalism, and the beginning of the industrial age (I know, the actual industrial age isn't for more than 100 years, but its roots are certainly visible here). People were thinking of things in the right way, such thinking was at least tolerable, if not downright fashionable, and the materials for playing with these new thoughts were more available than ever.

So Ben had his printing press for poking fun where it needed to be poked, and the like because they were there (or so very nearly there) for him to have access to. Which means that an ideas man like himself found himself in a veritable cornucopia of things to think about and pursue. He could be exploring science in the morning (as gentlemen were wont to do), explore politics in the afternoon, and write satire in the evening. So many fronts were unexplored, so few doing the exploring, and all the tools nearly at ones fingertips with which to do it.

None of this is to say that Mr. Franklin was a slouch in any way. Quite the contrary! Surely he was a genius as well as a man of charms.

What it IS to say is that he was a person in a moment that were perfectly fit for each other to make an impact on the world and on history.

Physics was a fairly narrow field of study at the time, and electricity a small spark of it (exciting and illuminating thought it was). A man of proper attentiveness and wile could endeavor to understand it substantially during his lifetime, while giving equal measures to Greek classics, the whole extent of botany, and the intricacies of foreign affairs. Did I mention that there was no TV? If you don't have to spend your life toiling, and aren't interested in spending your life exploring the wilderness, what is one to do, really? There weren't even the weekly tabloids. Which reminds me: for the fields that you were interested in, you could readily keep up with the advancements in the monthly "magazines" of the times.

Again, no small effort this, and no small mind to keep it in, just a small world of people to compete with.

Fast forward to the time of Einstein's youth. I have no way of comparing the minds of these two men, but humor me enough to suggest that they may have had minds of equal power at least at the outset here.

Much has changed since the time of Mr. Franklin. The bodies of knowledge in physics, botany, politics, or what have you have increase exponentially. You could perhaps devote your lifetime to one of these - MAYBE two - but you weren't going to scratch deeply into the font of human knowledge like you could in Ben's time. So Einstein specialized. He took some quirky aspects of the relative edge of physics and blew them out in a previously unexpected direction (unexpected by most; there were some thinking his General direction already). At least as powerful a mind as Ben's, but concentrated in a much narrower field.

Yes, he still had interests and abilities outside of the physics he worked on, but nowhere near that of Mr. Franklin's time. Was he a more hardwired specialist to Franklin's generalist? I could be convinced, but that only goes to show that the state of knowledge had advanced to the degree that a deeply insightful specialist like Albert could flourish. If you were a deep specialist a hundred years earlier, you invariably hit the end of the road half a career down it.

Jump ahead to modern times. The US now has about 300 million people in it. If you assume that the same proportion of people in Franklin's time are of Franklin's intellect or better, then we're looking at hundreds, if not thousands of Franklins kicking back in front of Jeopardy daily at 7 (maybe thousands). And if you take Einstein to be a rarer breed of bird, then you're still looking at tens if not hundreds of him wearing Vulcan ears in front of a Star Trek TOS marathon on SyFy.

And what does it take to master a field? Pretty much any field that Einstein would have been aware of, even at the end of his life, would have exploded into a complex ecosystem with tiny sub-sections that might take years to really understand. Even by people in the field. And those minuscule areas of understanding would have exploded into their own complex ecosystem with even finer-grained specializations that take nearly a career to master. And it's probably possible to argue that those specialties have also exploded and have nano-specialties of their own.

And that's just in physics. All of human understanding has been doing this specialization-explosion-specialization over and over again throughout time. It was fairly slow (probably "punctuated equilibrium" would be more accurate) for most of time, but has been going faster and faster as newer discoveries travel through faster connections to increasing numbers of Einsteins, which fuel new ideas, which repeat the cycle again. And we haven't even talked about the rest of the world yet. Countries like India and China (and, to a different degree, Russia and Brazil) are boostering their immense populations into the interconnected, learn-all-you-want-about-anything, data system that is the Internet.

More later. 'Cause this ain't it quite yet.

The Innovation Balloon

[THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I WROTE IN MY 750WORDS.ORG ACCOUNT. AS SUCH, IT'S MORE NOTES THAT A FORMAL ARTICLE. I APOLOGIZE FOR THAT.]

This is the idea that there is a surface of "innovation" that is continually expanding. Each point on the surface represents some specific area of innovation. This surface is like a balloon in that is constantly growing. Innovations that were once small specs on the surface become large areas as people understand the innovation, dig deeper into it, and create new micro-innovations based on it. The "pressure" inside comes from the increase in innovation. As new things are conceived of/discovered, that adds pressure to other points on the surface (a rising tide raising all boats). Not all innovations increase every other innovation, but, on average, the increase in innovation generally adds pressure to other innovations. This pressure is a positive influence, and represents the ability to move innovations forward. There are two broad areas of interest on an innovation surface.

The first are areas where extra effort has been put into a "technology" (using this word as generically as possible) to move it forward ahead of the rate of expansion of the balloon. A prime example of this is the US space program starting from around the time that Sputnik was launched. At the natural rate of expansion of technology, the US would not have been able to go to the moon by 1970, but the US poured huge amounts of financial and personnel resources into the project, moving technology in the "space" area of the balloon (and related technologies) forward. These areas are "pushed out" from the surface as they have expanded faster than the general rate of innovation.

The second area of interest are surface areas where innovation has not moved along as expected. An example of this might be in foosball tables. There are many ways that the classic game of foosball could be advanced (e.g. score detectors), but it hasn't moved ahead as that area has not been deemed worthy of exploration (there are many MUCH better examples, I'm sure, but this is all that comes to me at the moment). These areas appear as depressions on the surface of the balloon as they have not kept pace with the general rate of innovation. These areas of depression are of interested because they represent places that could leap forward rapidly from their "current" state of innovation. Foosball, for example, could benefit from detectors in the rods, interactive screens as the playing field, and the like (again, a horrible example). (Worth nothing that the reason that Foosball is a horrible example is that increasing innovation does NOT need to imply added complexity. In fact, it may typically mean reduced complexity. The examples of improving foosball generally add more points of failure and expense than they may add fun to the game. Therefore these aren't necessarily radical leaps forward for the game, but could actually hinder interest, but hopefully you get the point of where I'm trying to go here.)

So why are these areas depressed to begin with? There could be any number of reason. Innovation of any sort requires the confluence of many factors, and the lack of any one of them can retard progress. Generally it probably comes down to things like: people actually paying attention to a space (many things get under-attended because they are out of fashion, or just not in the public consciousness much), people thinking that there is no room for innovation in that field or that innovations would be too hard to apply (this might be the case with foosball, for example), or that there are countervailing forces attempting to maintain the status quo. The latter case is illuminating to why a lot of areas of innovation move forward rapidly, and then stop moving at all (to the point of falling behind the innovation rate).

Take again the US space program. Moving it forward was a herculean effort. And it worked! But to keep the program going, we had to solidify ways of thinking about going to space because the innovation surface hadn't caught up to the point that other options were viable. If, for example, we would not have gotten into space for 20 more years had no "race" been in effect, then you could say that effort had to go in to maintaining this advance for 20 years. Again, this solidified thinking around going to space, and, importantly, resulted in huge bureaucracies being put into place to help maintain both the effort of making the parts to go into space, and the effort to keep up our ability to go into space. Once the innovation surface caught up, there was already a vested interest in a particular way of thinking about the problem, and a lot of "we have to get our money's worth" kinds of thinking that went along with the huge budgets that the space program had been given.

Now we see the emergence of commercial space travel, and non-governmental entities gearing up to go into space. But this commercialization may have happened many years earlier if we hadn't pushed very hard to move the technology ahead of the surface.

In a way, you can think of the surface as an indicator of when it is efficient to push a technology ahead. Of course, there is no actual visible surface, and its interactions are extremely more complex than I've outlined here, but hopefully this provides a useful framework for how to think about innovation when considering problems like why it still costs $10,000 to put 1kg into space.

The Myth of the Myth of Technological Progress

I was reading an article by Russel Davies where he was considering the lack of visions of the future today, and linked to an article by Scott Locklin on the Myth of Technological Progress. The gist of Locklin's article is that technology progressed rapidly up until the second half of the 20th century, and then dropped off. I found this interesting and started writing out a response. As I read his other responses, it became clear that he's more crotchety than curious, so I thought I'd just dump what I'd written here rather than on his blog.

Take a look at his article and then read on.

A primary issue here is mismatch of the eras under consideration and their product domains. If we take a look at, for example, the Industrial Age, the output of it was things that industry produced: physical products. The understanding of electricity and the ability to work with it, brought forth tremendous improvements in areas where electricity could make a huge difference. The same can be said of materials science, chemistry, and the like.

What differentiates us fundamentally right now is that we live in the Information Era where the output is in the information domain. You have chosen to create what seems like an aesthetic line of demarcation between things that are the products of prior ages and those of the last few decades, but I think it can be hard to argue that modern computers (compared with those in existence in 1959, which is akin to comparing a bicycle with a motorcycle), mobile communications, computer networking, and, resultingly, the public Internet have all had huge impacts on how we live. From there, I’m guessing that things like email, search engines, global auctions, instant messaging (not to mention text messaging), truly portable computing (not to mention the invention of the GUI), and any number of other advances that have taken place in the information domain will hold little appeal to you despite the impact that they are having on how people all over the entire world live.

I think another thing worth noting is that progress is happening so fast on such a huge variety of fronts that things that, had they come out on their own, would have been great wonders in their own right are lost among all of the other things that are happening simultaneously. We’re just used to the progress that we make now, and the fact that it will all be outdated in a couple of years is an indication of just how fast we’re making change, not how irrelevant each change is.

And this says nothing about revolutions in manufacturing in terms of equipment (robotics, for one) and process that are underrepresented in histories of innovation as much as they are now, despite being core aspects of the enabling platform that allows for the emergence of wonders in any era.

Finally, it seems that there’s a fundamental error going on here. You point out fantastic things that have happened in the past, and then ask where is the progress on that same front now. It seems fallacious to point to an existing technology and ask where the major leaps forward are. It’s not clear at all that innovation works that way. A technology emerges, it’s developed, and it’s improvement levels off as it matures. New innovation comes from new places.

That said, it’s difficult to conceive of saying that a car today is not fantastically better than a car in the 1950s. Sure, they have a lot in common, but you can buy a car today with antilock brakes, air bags everywhere, built in GPS navigation, autonomous cruise control, and the ability to detect the specific type of impending crash that’s about to happen and make the appropriate adjustments to your environment to maximize the probability of your survival. It may not be faster or more fuel efficient, but that’s not the current metric of success.

Ultimately it seems that we’ll need to determine some metrics that you would see as representing the impact of a technology for things like the nuclear bomb, and only from there will we be able to compare like for like for technologies from the last few decades.

[TV Show] 2057 - The World

Some thoughts on the Science Channel show 2057. This time on the installment entitled “The World”.

Quick Shave
In the setup for the show, we’re introduced to a space station tethered to the Earth with two men (one American, one Chinese) manning it in its final days before it is shut down. American Guy wakes up and orders a laser shave. Dutifully a laser runs down his face and he’s smooth as a baby’s bottom in about 3 seconds. Interestingly he doesn’t have to turn his head to get at all the hard-to-reach areas that a laser issuing from a single point might not be able to reach from a head-on view, but that’s just a nit.

More interesting, I think, is whether he would need to shave at all. I expect (as I’ve written about elsewhere) that by about this time we can expect nano-machinery of some sort to maintain our body hair. You design what you want your hair to look like and little nanites would crawl up and down it, trimming it the moment it got longer than needed. At the same time, they could be manipulating molecular bonds to curl or straighten your hair, and likely apply whatever coloring is in vogue. No fuss, no muss.

More interesting yet is the question about whether we will have hair at all. I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find the bulk of people opting for permanent hair removal on the head. And those that didn’t might have chains of nanobots for hair (a sort of nano-medusa look) that could rearrange themselves dynamically. A middle ground would probably be some sort of synthetic hair with whatever properties (energy generation for your onboard computing anyone?) are in style at the moment.

Shaving? That was so 2037!

A Laptop?
As Chinese Guy quizzes American Guy on Chinese sayings, we see that Chinese Guy is sitting at a laptop working. Didn’t they deride this in The City? Anyway, see my article on that episode with respect to augmented reality to refresh yourself on why all of the visible computers are unlikely to exists.

You might be thinking that visible interfaces might still be necessary in collaborative environments, but there is no reason to believe that collaborative environments wouldn’t happen in an augmented sense as well. Even better, your version of an interface that we need to share may be customized for your needs and preferences, looking very different from mine. Physical shared interfaces are just SO inflexible ;)

Where’s the Gravity?
On the tethered space station, there appears to be Earth-like gravity. The people don’t float, nor does any of the equipment. Perhaps the tethering is supposed to provide a centrifugal force-type gravity, but you can clearly see in the windows behind them that the “gravity” that they are experiencing is pulling them towards the Earth. If the tethering was providing a gravity-like force, wouldn’t they be “pulled” away from the Earth?

Caller ID?
Interestingly, none of the “phone calls” I’ve seen so far have told the person receiving the call who is calling. Are we taking steps backwards here?

Body Armor
There’s an interesting piece about work that is being done for the military on active body armor. The idea is that the uniform a soldier wears will transform its properties as needed (being soft and compliant until hit by a bullet whose shock causes it to become stiff), and have active components that, as given in the example, can give a soldier CPR by contracting as needed.

It’s interesting to think of this latter property in terms of muscle augmentation, making soldiers stronger and faster. What’s more interesting, is that if we assume that this technology is, say, 20 years out, it will probably only be 10 years before the average citizen has access to it. If we think about the applications of assisting the elderly, or otherwise weak, and the applications in terms of enhancing a healthy person’s performance, I’d guess that it would be available much faster…should it be available at all.

Going the Distance
Overall, I think that these shows are suffering from the same problem as many future lookers: They aren’t thinking big enough.

From some of the screens shown on the show, it appears to have been made in 2006. Since that time, much progress has already been made on things they’ve shown, meaning that it’s much closer than they are projecting.

Just think of where we were 50 years prior to 2007, in 1957. We’ve made monumental leaps in so many fields, the list would be extremely long if you tried to write it down. And think of all of the things that are new since then. Heck, for a more enlightening experience, think of where things were in 1997. Think of the state of the art in computers, cell phones, the Internet. Think of how you watched TV then, and how you get your entertainment today. Think of hybrid cars and green technology. Really big screen television, video games and the like.

Every day our understanding of the universe gets better, allowing us to make better educated guesses than we could the previous day. Every day our tools get better allowing us to do more work far more efficiently and accurately than we did the day before. The walls to collaboration drop, the number of people working to improve any given area of life increases, the ability to learn whatever you need to know increases as well. Every day we take a bigger step forward based on the previous record step of the day before. It’s an amazing time to be alive. And tomorrow will be more amazing yet. 50 years from now? I’m guessing it’s practically unimaginable.

[TV Show] 2057 - The City

Ok, issues with the Discovery Channel’s 2057.

Let’s start with “The City”.

Giant Holograms
This installment opens with a scene of a city with giant holograms around buildings. There are a few reasons I don’t think it’s likely that there will be such things, one of which I'll talk about later. One reason I’ll focus on now is actually relatively minor and that’s that I think Americans, by and large, will find that distasteful (with certain exceptions). If you travel in many other countries, and especially in Japan, you’ll see large-scale outdoor advertising on buildings, but for some reason that really hasn’t caught on here (with New York City being a notable exception). I’d be a bit surprised if that aesthetic had reversed itself by 2057 (though not a LOT surprised, frankly).

Flying Cars
In the same opening sequence we see flying cars traveling what appears to be a virtual highway. While I don’t think this is entirely out of the question, some serious obstacles (as I’ve touched on before) will need to be overcome for this to be a reality. And the importance of these obstacles are not strictly technical in nature.

First either the flying car needs to produce relatively little sound, or people have to not care about it. Current powered air craft make quite a bit of noise in order to sustain themselves.

Second, people need to be accepting of cars as part of their view of the sky. Sky-car highways may prove to be too much of an eyesore to…uh…get off the ground.

Third, there is the issue of falling debris. Technical problems must not cause collisions, people cannot be able to jettison material from the vehicle, and the vehicle will have to not drop anything of significance for its entire life. A few falling cars or even bits of debris could mean a serious restriction on how such vehicles are used. Perhaps they might even be restricted to traveling only over existing land-based roads to minimize such issues. That’d be nicely ironic.

An issue that has raised its head more recently is the cost of fuel. Unless engines become a lot more efficient, or the cost of fuel drops dramatically, the cost of the energy required to keep a car off of the ground may be the biggest barrier to its success.

Giant Kinetic Art
Also in the intro sequence we see what looks like a giant (as tall as a building) spinning helix that appears to be part of a building. Again, I wonder if our aesthetics will prevent us from having such fixtures as part of our skylines. A massive moving piece like this would continually attract the eye, and that may be its demise.

Segways? Really!?!
We move to a street scene that’s either under an overpass, or underground. The Audi that’s featured in the movie AI makes an appearance (good to see Audi getting as much mileage out of that concept car as I appear to be getting out of travel-related puns).

And then there’s a man riding a Segway. Unless the Segway company does something really remarkable, I think it’s opportunity to be a futuristic travel mode has now passed. If they DID do something remarkable, I would expect that it would look much different than the slightly modified version we see in this scene.

Futuristic Clothes
It’s tough to guess at what fashion will look like in 50 years, so I guess I’m not surprised to see the classic “futuristic” clothing style being marched out here. My feeling is that we’ve only gotten more casual over the last 50 years, so it would seem unlikely that we’d go the more formal route that this kind of clothing always seems to convey, but then again, fashion is fickle. If you showed someone from the 50’s an outfit from the 80’s they might consider that “futuristic”. In any case, I expect to see a lot of heterogeneity in the way people dress, regardless of the style.

Holographic Dolphin
We are shown a boy walking through the street scene with a holographic dolphin at his side. There are a number of reasons I think that this is unlikely, and much like with the flying car, some of the important ones are non-technical. I think anyone who has a dolphin as a holographic pet is likely to get beaten until they choose something a bit more peer-appropriate. And things that are peer-appropriate may not be appropriate elsewhere, so it may be difficult for this trend to get started.

More importantly, however, and this is a theme that I expect to come up over and over again (I’m pausing the program as I watch to write this, so I don’t exactly know where things are going from one scene to the next), I expect that we’ll be living in a world where our view of it is through some sort of personal information layer. Near term this is likely to be special goggles or glasses through which digital reality is overlaid on physical reality. More long-term it may well take another form (contacts that put the information more directly into our line of site, retinal implants, attachments to the optic nerve, or even direct brain stimulation) – especially if goggles never make it into the realm of socially acceptable (though I think they probably will, much like headphones are today).

The point being that much of what we see will be an overlay on the physical world that’s made for our personal viewing and not available for the unaided eye of those around us. This is the same argument I’d offer for large holograms on buildings: they just won’t be needed. People will customize the world in ways that they want to, so providing holographic augmentation will be, by and large, superfluous. This could be true of holograms in general. By the time they are ready for mass adoption, we might have already moved into augmented reality by heads-up displays, making the technology moot.

Large Video Displays
As part of the street scene we see outdoor walls covered with large displays showing video. Again, I think that video just attracts too much attention to be a common fixture on the urban landscape. Much like the intrusive advertising we saw in Minority Report, I think people will find it distasteful and it will be a non-starter as a mass-medium device.

Couple that with my point above about augmented reality (which will be pretty advanced 50 years from now) and I think we won’t be seeing outdoor video like this in our future.

Holographic Companion as GPS Device
The narrator indicates that the dolphin (and holographic companions of its ilk) will help us navigate to where ever we want to go. This seems like a far too intrusive way to navigate as a general rule, and a far too specific application to be pointed out in this show. By 2057 we are likely to have myriad ways of navigating which can change depending on our current context and whim. It seems very unlikely that this functionality would coalesce in a single mode like a holographic companion. This isn’t to say that you won’t have a virtual companion (although it’s probably more likely to live in the augmented space of a heads up display (or equivalent) than in the physical space of a hologram), it’s just that such companions aren’t likely to have a primary purpose like guiding you home, and such a function (GPS with navigation) is likely to be mashed up in all sorts of ways.

In-House, Bi-Pedal Robots
Well, everyone is happily predicting the onslaught of domestic robots that are imminently upon us to support aging Baby Boomers. As we’ve followed the kid with the holo-pet home, we’re introduced to his grandfather and then pan around to see a robot that looks very much like the kinds of robots Honda likes to parade about. I myself think we’re still a fair ways from a universal robot that does whatever we need, but even so, I think that this robot looks like something that would be a throwback in 2057. Perhaps that’s what the announcer is about to say, after all, CRT monitors with deep tubes that are practically outmoded today are shown in the background along with a clutter of things that are no-doubt intended to reflect “old” and “quaint”. Perhaps the grandfather is a historian or collector and this robot is part of it.

(Yep, it’s portrayed as a decaying relic – the Asimo -…well there you go.)

3D Screens
So now Physicist Michio Kaku (who I seem to recall really enjoying on Big Thinkers) gives us some words about interacting with 3D characters. He states that our current monitors will seem as outdated to future generations as the horse and buggy are to us. I totally agree with this. However then next segment is about one of the several different 3D computer monitors that have been in the works for the last few years. These certainly could be impactful for us in the next decade, but by 2057 we’ll be 40 years beyond them. I expect we’ll never see anyone sit down in front of something like a computer or screen (as the kid we’ve been following just did) that far in the future. You have to remember that whatever you can point to that’s in the labs today (that may reasonably become part of our lives anytime soon) will be ancient history by 2057. That’s what makes shows like this very difficult to do accurately (though I’m guessing the producers won’t claim that this is anything more than entertaining guesswork). Of course if you believe in an approaching Singularity, well then things will get REALLY interesting by 2057.

Mouse Obsolescence
As part of the segment on 3D displays, Klaus Schenka (sp?) indicates that the computer mouse may be in trouble and demonstrates a peripheral that uses infrared light to track hand movements. I think the days of the mouse are definitely numbered and it will be interesting to see what replaces it. I personally fell that it’s likely to be something with a satisfyingly tactile sense to it. So I’m not enthusiastic about Schenka’s device where you appear to make gestures in empty air. There are interesting things happening with displays that you manipulate by using your hands directly on the display. This seems like it may be the near-term contender to replace the mouse. What lies ahead I’m not entirely sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find infrared tracking going on there somewhere.

Portable Computing
The kid is show interacting with a PDA-sized computer using a stylus. I think we can expect that we’ll not be interacting with computers in this way by 2057. Our computers are definitely going to be small, but our displays are probably not going to be fixed to them, or, at least not in the handheld fashion of modern PDAs. I expect that the stylus will have been long since replaced by a combination of sensors that detect where your attention is focused, and AI routines that recognize your intent.

Likely we will still have the need to type or otherwise directly interact with a computer in order to organize our thoughts in ways that we’ve been using clay tablets, papyrus, paper, pencils, pens, typewriters, and computers for for a couple of millennia, but probably a great deal of our interaction will take place outside of the context of us poking at a small interface with a stylus and will rather take place in some sort of heads up display (as mentioned above) or holographic projections (though I have my doubts on this).

The Pace of Change
I should point out that any vision that I have as an alternate to what is presented by this program is what I expect to happen by 2017, not 2057. While I’m not a Singulatarian in what you might call the “strict” sense, it is definitely plain that the rate of change of technology and the speed that we integrate this into our lives, is continually increasing. The producers of this program have likely chosen a distance quite a ways out in some part because saying that these things will happen in the next 10 years would make many viewers doubt the credibility of the program (more than they might already).

Computer Graphics
A quick note as the holographic shark that the boy is playing with disappears into a wall display of fish. The graphics that people have interacted with so far are very crude. In most cases they don’t even represent the state of the art now. This isn’t terribly surprising given that it would be difficult to create the graphics of tomorrow when the technology hasn’t been built yet today. Perhaps, however, the program would have been better served by picking real video of animals (where possible) and claiming that it was computer generated as that’s likely what the graphics of 2017 will look like. By 2057, we’ll likely be so far beyond what they’re showing that it is difficult to imagine.

Life Extension
I expect we’ll get farther into this later, but after the shark swims away, we’re treated to a brief holographic ad passing by the boy’s window that says “celebrate your 100th birthday on the moon”. Good to see that they’re embracing the idea of radical life extension. It will be interesting to see how radically they think a person’s 100th birthday would be.

Going to the Moon
As for traveling to the moon, it’s not clear to me whether that will be an option or not (if the current energy being poured into privatized space travel is any indication, we’ll likely be able to do that well in advance of 2057 as well), but by 2057 virtual reality should be so convincing feeling (and I mean this for all of our senses) that it will be interesting to see if we spend much time going to actual places at all (human nature seems to indicate that we’ll be going there physically whether we need to or not).

A Laptop?
Not sure yet if this is supposed to be a throwback as with other things, but the kid starts typing into a laptop that looks like any Dell you’d pick up today. Again, we’ll probably have something akin to typing in 2057 (unless we’re totally plugged in by then, which is certainly likely), but even if we do it’s not going to be into anything that looks like a laptop.

Locating Us
A police officer is contacted in her self-driving car and asked her arrival time to work by a co-worker. It may be that this level of ask-and-answer will be required for this kind of interaction, but it will be feasible by 2017 (indeed, is feasible now) that we will have pre-established rules that indicate under what circumstances what groups of people will have access to specific information about us, and, once established, this kind of communication will happen without the need to bother us.

In this case, we can expect that co-workers will have access to our current position and arrival time (assuming that we grant it to them) without ever having to ask us directly.

“Billions of Chips Embedded in the Road”
Michio Kaku makes another appearance to discuss how great it would be to jump into your car, tell it where to go, and not have to touch the steering wheel. (It would be great!) He mentions briefly the idea of having “…billions of chips embedded in the road…”. I know that embedding sensors of various types in the road has been explored as a way of automating driving, but it seems that by 2017 we are unlikely to need this. In an always-connected world with very precise positioning capabilities (both from GPS and dead reckoning), it seems unlikely that we’ll need anything special embedded in the road to tell us where we are, what conditions are like, where obstacles are, etc. Pretty much all of this (and much more) will be done at least as well external to the road itself.

Intelligent Braking Systems
What follows is a section discussing how computers will sense obstacles and brake accordingly, and how they will determine when we are too drowsy to drive. This all seems like things that are already either in the market, or very near being in the market. It is certainly a decent reflection of the state of the art in consumer cars (this section of the program is one of several that show programs going on now that seem futuristic), but barely informs anything interesting of 2017, much less 2057.

The City of the Future Controlled from a Single Point
The narrator discusses how the city of 2057 will be massively interconnected, with all objects transmitting data and everything being controlled by a central point. I certainly agree with the first part of this, but I’m doubtful that everything will be controlled from a single point. (I’m assuming that “everything” means things that would normally fall under responsibilities of a municipal government, and not literally “everything” as a great deal of this “everything” is likely to be under private direction.)

I think it’s reasonably likely that we’ll continue to see a certain amount of centralization in the near term where it makes sense, but longer term (and not MUCH longer) I expect that we’ll start seeing local objects in a city negotiating as required with other objects in their area without the need for central control. This does not mean that they won’t have access to the information from the rest of the city, only that the data won’t go to a central place, and that some sort of central decision maker (computer or human) will be involved in the decision.

Coming Home to the Wired House
The narrator indicates that as soon as you come home lights and temperature (among other things, one assumes) will be adjusted to your preferences. This is a bit of a nit, but at least some of these activities (e.g. temperature) will begin preparing for your arrival well before you get there so that everything is correct by the time you arrive (so you don’t have to come home to a cold house during the winter). In some senses a programmable thermostat can already prepare the temperature in advance of your arrival, but clearly we’re talking about something more flexible than turning on the heat at a certain point of time each day.

This is probably a good time to mention that many things won’t be set to our individual preferences, per se, but will be set to the preferences of all individuals presently in the environment. So the heat may not be as hot as you’d prefer it, but it may be warmer than your spouse prefers. Our environments (and I mean not just our physical environments) will continually adjust themselves in any number of ways to accommodate the ebb and flow of individuals with differing needs.

Cameras and Microphones in the Walls
The narrator describes how devices and structures like walls will have their own microphones and cameras. I think this is unlikely actually, and the pervasive nature of monitoring devices of all sorts will mean that individual devices would not need ones specific to themselves. Of course there are some serious privacy issues to navigate before we get there, so it’s possible (though unlikely) that we’ll see device-specific monitoring equipment instead.

TV Screens
While we hear this description on the program, we see a woman sitting down on a red couch (because what says “the future” better than a red couch?) watching a TV that’s all of 50 inches across (and it appears to be one of those Philips TVs with the “mood lighting” behind it). My TV screen of today is already bigger than this. By 2057 I’d guess that we’d be so far into the realm of virtual reality as media that we’d puzzle a bit about what it must have been like to watch “TV” on a “screen” (but hey, we could always simulate it).

“On Demand” Programming
The narrator goes on to describe how we will be able to call up our favorite TV programs whenever we want. This suddenly sounds like the future world of 2005.

Ordering Items from the Supermarket
Next we’re told that the refrigerator will check to see if it has all of the ingredients for the food we will want to prepare. There are a number of interesting things to think about relating to this.

First, we will probably also get recipes for things that are already in the fridge (again, in the 2017 scenario, although even this is a bit of a time stretch).

More interestingly, however, will be whether or not we are ordering anything physical from a store by 2057. It seems very likely that much of what we will need will be built on the spot using nanotech assemblers of some sort or even less sophisticated technology for less sophisticated products.

Perhaps our relationship to food will change altogether. Indeed by 2057 there is no guarantee that we’ll need food at all if we can change out our body parts for mechanical bits.

Grocery Shopping from your Couch
Uh…HomeGrocer? Peapod? Certainly there have already been attempts at it, and my regional Safeway still does it. Not much of a revelation here.

Your Clothes Will Call an Ambulance
Probably not strictly correct (in that your clothes will provide the feedback and some agent on your behalf will call the ambulance), but definitely a strong possibility by 2017. By 2057 you are likely to be repaired on the spot if you suffer an accident (illness being largely handled proactively at that point).

GPS Locating Free Parking Spots
Minor nit, but it seems a pervasive meme that GPS does work on your behalf aside from providing your location. Your GPS will provide your location. This can be used to locate a you relative to an available parking spot, but it won’t be GPS that does it, it will be an inventory control system at the parking lot, and your computer’s communication with that system that negotiates for it on your behalf.

Now I leave open the possibility that Michio is using this term more loosely to refer to a piece of electronics like today’s GPS Navigation Units, but even that is unlikely to exist as a separate piece of equipment by 2057.

Obsolete Virus Terrorizes City
Our young hero is now turned accidental villain as some hacking tomfoolery on his behalf begins to create pandemonium in the City’s various systems. While trying to hack his pet shark into the City’s ad network using his grandfather’s “obsolete’ laptop, he accidentally lets loose a virus that was lurking on the outdated machine.

Here are a few reasons that I am skeptical of this scenario:
If “obsolete” means what it should, then a virus on that laptop should be incompatible with the City’s systems and just wouldn’t take. That’s kind of like what would happen if a virus existed in an old calculator; their systems are just too different for the virus to get transmitted.
As mischievous as he might be, he’s unlikely to be the first person to try to hack that particular system. Given the number of people who will plunk idly away at hacking whatever system comes their way, and the importance of the City’s system to the large number of people that interact with it, this kind of hacking is very unlikely to succeed. I suspect that they are trying to imply that the old technology is part of the reason that he’s able to slip by the system defenses, but hackers today are already darned crafty, so I’d guess that even this approach would have been tried before or protected against. (Yep, now that I’ve unpaused, the narrator says that the City is not able to defend against this “ancient enemy”.)

Biometric Security
A police officer is shown stating her name and getting a retinal scan in order to get past a secure door. I think biometric identification will have its place in the future, but this kind of security seems like it could be far more easily accomplished with an embedded chip under the skin, or by using your own personal portable computing power to validate your identity (continually, perhaps) and negotiate with the door on the fly using live hashing of some biological identifier or other. No need to stop to talk to the door; just walk right in.

“Intent to Enter” Doors
The police officer and a co-worker walk through a nearby door that senses that they intend to pass through it, and opens automatically. This is the kind of thing that we take for granted in futuristic scenarios (thank you Star Trek), but it’s worth noticing. I actually think that if, for some reason, we tire of opening and closing doors on our own, this scenario is entirely plausible. I expect that either some sensor in the door would have tracked your velocity, and coupled that with statistical models for intent and opened the door for you when a certain probability threshold has been reached.

Perhaps more likely, your own computer (slash-network-slash-whatever) will probably have very accurate models of your historical actions and results, and thus a finer tuned model of your intent (perhaps with additional information, like your schedule, that the door alone won’t have), and will inform the door that you are about to pass through so it had better get its act together and open up.

Making Phone Calls
“I would have called but all of our lines are crashing.” That pesky virus! It’s got us using phone lines again when they’ve been obsolete for almost 30 years! Do bad we aren’t using a loosely coupled network of nodes able to route around problem areas to avoid cascading failures like they’re likely to use in the…uh…future….say, what’s up with that?!?

WHEW! Only 20 minutes into the hour-long program. Perhaps I can manage to keep my comments to a minimum from here on out…

“C’mon Asimo!”
I like how grandpa never came up with anything more clever to call his Asimo than “Asimo”. Reminds me of my daughter who calls her stuffed puppy “puppy”. Perhaps gramps has the one and only original Asimo, but didn’t they make many of them…or rather, aren’t we to presume that in this future’s past many were eventually made?

Fish on the Wall
Just another note on the graphics, with the fish on the wall again. Their behavior and level of detail is inferior to what you can find on a screensaver even now. I wonder if they were supposed to look ancient in this future.

Finger Holographic Communicator
The police officer has been put in charge of determining who set the virus loose on the City. It turns out that – get ready for this – she’s our lad’s MOTHER! She calls home with her fancy finger holographic communicator projector thingy looking for gramps, but getting her boy instead.

It will be interesting to see if we make “calls” to places for much longer. Already a large number of people don’t have home phones, and it seems the trend is only continuing. I’ve already gotten into the habit of calling the number that I know will get me to a person’s personal communication line, rather than to some house where I may get someone else entirely (though that’s certainly not all bad). I expect that officer mom would have called grandpa directly, bypassing the boy altogether. Then again, perhaps gramps is some sort of weird luddite and doesn’t have any fancy new gear despite his penchant for old gear.

To the communications device itself (which is packaged as a stylish half-glove), see the earlier discussion about augmented reality. There’s no sense in everyone seeing your conversation out in the wild. Better yet, have your onboard computing power recognize that you’re looking for gramps and have it start doing so on your behalf.

Magic Pen
Not getting a hold of gramps, and the communications conveniently cutting out when junior tries to confess, officer mom walks over to a computerized table, puts her pen on it, and out comes the bio of grandpa. Apparently something was analyzing her intent and doing work on her behalf. Too bad that doesn’t show up elsewhere.

Sad Segways
Amusingly, as an indicator that the City is being devastated by the virus that junior unwittingly let loose, we see people dragging their Segways about. Interesting that they don’t run on their own like they do now.

Happy Ending
After bringing down an entire city, and nearly getting gramps killed, and mom fired, the only punishment junior gets is a “you rascal” style hair tousling and a hug. I guess we have come a long way after all.

FutureGrinder: Participatory Panopticon with Jamais Cascio

Conversation with Jamais (35MB, 49mins)

Jamais Cascio, co-founder and Senior Contributing Editor of WorldChanging.com gave a presentation at the Accelerating Change 2005 converence where he described his idea of a "Participatory Panopticon" - a society where everyone is constantly recording their experiences because so doing helps make their life easier.

As I've been interested in that idea myself for quite some time (and was, in fact, recording constantly at the conference), I was immediately intrigued. I was not disappointed. I found myself nodding heavily in agreement with his thoughts.

After his presentation, I asked him if he'd be willing to talk a bit more about the world of always on recording, and this conversation was the result.

Superlongevity Article

I ran across an article by Mark Walker on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which got me thinking about things related issues surrounding life extension. Specifically I'm now background processing (in my brain, lest you think I'm smart enough to have a computer model built) the economic impacts of at least some percentage of the population having radically longer life spans.

Go read the article if you haven't. This post is largely to capture the comments I posted there.

Here were my comments (which are likely to make sense only if you've read Mark's article):

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the thought-stimulating article! Some comments:

In the population model presented, it seems as though the replacement rate would be applied to EVERYONE, not just the mortal. There is no assumption given that long-lived individuals won't breed at the replacement rate. So if reproduction continued only at the replacement rate, there would be an increase in population as long-lived individuals had replacement
offspring but did not die.

There is at least some reason to speculate that very long-lived individuals may actually reproduce above the replacement rate. Assuming that such individuals retained the capabilities of the relatively "young", I would not be surprised to see second or third relationships yielding children as a way of further strengthening a relationship, or even out of a desire to see how a different pairing results in differences in children. After all, if one might live for a thousand years, the 20 or so years that it takes to raise a child may seem pretty trivial, to be undertaken whenever it seemed interesting.

If one then chooses to hold the population constant (that is, no growth; which seems like a relatively arbitrary decision given no other information) then we get in to a situation where whatever factors are conspiring to keep the population steady force increased pressure on members of the population, potentially leading to revolts on one side or another (or the creation or exacerbation of factions not strictly aligned on the long-/short-lived spectrum) resulting in people being selected to die in some way (lottery, war, etc) to relieve the pressure. Worth keeping in mind is that pressure is likely to be applied across all individuals living at the time, not just the mortals.

One thing one might consider to help relieve this pressure would be to offer individuals large cash payments to maintain a "short-lived" life. This, on the face of it, solves very little in that as long as the long-lived continue to breed they will continue to put pressure on whatever is acting to stabilize the population (resources, for example). Since it seems likely that individuals would not be considered old enough to actively decide to live a short life until after the age where a short-lived individual would be able to conceive and care for children, it is therefore unlikely that rules that a free society are likely to adopt would be abe to successfully curb the expanding population.

Speaking of resources, things get complicated when one talks about resources too far into the future assuming that individuals are undertaking bio-modification of some sort or another. Given the present rate of technological progress, and the fact that life extension body modifications are likely to be developed concurrently, or at least only slightly ahead
of modifications for less dire reasons (such as improving the capabilities/efficiencies of the body system). It is therefore likely that whatever modifications humans undertake to themselves is likely to significantly alter the resources required to sustain an individual body. This may come from such abilities as to reconfigure ones body to suit a situation, which may allow an individual to adopt a much less resource heavy physical construction until need for a more resource-heavy body is required. This could alternately be accomplished by separating one's "consiousness" entirely from any physical presence,
again, except when needed. Inded, if consciousness is able to be separated from a physical body and Moore's law keeps moving along for several more generations, then an "individual" may take up very few resources at all (and any further efficiencies discovered would likely be easily propigated to all other "individuals" existing at the time).

Interestingly, if superlongevity does come about, it seems very likely that views on suicide will need to change at least somewhat. If it is theoretically possible for someone to live forever, we are likely to have to respect the will of some percentage of this long-lived population to be done with their living experience and either opt out of further life-supporting care or, equally likely, actively terminate their mortal existance. I wouldn't be surprised to find, hundreds of years hence, age of consent laws that treat suicide as akin to drinking: you must be old enough (say, 50 or 75) to be considered to have enough experience to make an informed choice.



It would be interesting if the backlash over the ability to live for a very long time was an increase in individuals not opting for life-saving procedures of any kind. The dissonance that is likely to arise between people who have chosen to become very long lived versus those who see it as antithetical to their religious/moral beliefs seems likely to cause at least some fracturing along these lines; it will be interesting to see what causes people to take sides. Even if the whole process of becoming long-lived unfolds over a long period of time so that individuals don't have to confront the idea of suddenly having a super-old population, I wouldn't be surprised to find a group of "young" people who become outraged by the idea (perhaps with a return to fundamentalism such as we are seeing now among some groups of people here and abroad) and gain traction on the idea as part of some larger dogma attractive to those who have not yet had to face the decision of living just a little bit longer.