The Existential Whisk

Singularity Institute Blog

2007-06-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

I'm currently a guest blogger for the Singularity Institute's new blog. I consider it quite an honor to contribute to such a fine talent pool.

My first two posts can be found here and here.

Singularity Summit 05-13-06: Big Names, Big Ideas

2006-05-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

Have you registered to attend the Singularity Summit yet? Why not? It's free!

Every time I hear about this thing I get more excited. The speaker list is already packed with some of the most important thinkers on the planet where our future as a species is concerned, and the list of VIPs expected to attend (which, alas, I'm not entitled to share) is equally impressive. Trust me on this one: If your geek factor comes anywhere near mine, you're going to meet more than one personal hero at this conference.

This is our Woodstock.

And if you're not a geek, but want to know and have a say about the upcoming end of the world as we know it (and who wouldn't), then you should still definitely go.

And if you just can't make it to Stanford at the appointed hour, take heart: It will be extensively covered by the more future-savvy media, and you will probably be able to find a full podcast or two. Check out the "Coverage of the Summit" section at the bottom right of the Summit website.

Mobile Text Entry Showdown

2006-03-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

I've gotten in the habit of carrying around a Pocket PC.

My biggest complaint about Pocket PCs and their PDA ancestors has always been the text entry problem, so over the last few weeks I set about looking for ways to overcome it. Voice recording and free-hand writing both have their uses, but at the end of the day I need honest digital text.

The standard on-screen options for this are stylus-pecking on a QWERTY-style keyboard, handwriting recognition, and "block recognition" -- a special handwriting style that brings warm fuzzies to long-time Palm users.

My views on these are as follows:

Too slow.
Too slow and inaccurate.
Too slow.

Enter the new contenders:

In one corner, I had a foldable keyboard for the device. Undeployed, it's not much bigger than the Pocket PC itself, but it's still a little too large to *comfortably* carry in a pocket or on a belt.

In another corner, I had heard good things about the FrogPad one-handed keyboard. At the advice of Outlawpoet, I thought I'd try the Lefty USB version. It was out of stock everywhere, so I patiently waited for one to appear on eBay and plucked it.

In a third corner, I stumbled upon MessagEase, an alternative on-screen keyboard from Exideas. This uses large keys for the most common letters, and directional swipes away from said keys for everything else.

The Folding Keyboard

There's not much to be said about this one. They come in many different sizes and configurations, and a decent one will feel pretty much like a laptop keyboard under your fingers. The only question is whether you will bother to carry it and have a place to put use it. They often don't work very well on laps.

The FrogPad

Outlawpoet's review pretty much sums up my impressions. At the risk of repeating it, I will say that the FrogPad's killer ap is on the desktop rather than with mobile devices. If you spend a lot of time in programs where you must heavily use both the mouse and the keyboard, the FrogPad is for you.

Within a week, however, I realized that I was not, in fact, a heavy user of such programs -- at least not enough to turn a blind eye to some of the FrogPad's tragic design quirks: 'm' and ',' are both much harder to hit than 'z', for instance. Dvorak typists like myself just can't tolerate that kind of oversight. More alarming, some very common typos on the Frogpad put you in ALT or CTRL modes where you can swiftly cause all manner of chaos to whatever it is you were working on. It makes you wonder whether today's Froggers are really just the beta testers for what could, and should, be an improved layout.

MessagEase

The MessagEase, in contrast, begs no such questions. It takes a while before you can find everything without a hunt, but it never, at the end of your search, leaves you screaming, "Why!? Why!? Why!?" Being an onscreen keyboard, it's also easier to learn -- your fingers don't block your view of the keys when you're not typing. And unlike standard on-screen keyboards, you can get to every key and character from a single screen. With not-too-much practice I already find it eerily fast. I'm not easily impressed, but I hereby award MessagEase a "damn clever" ranking, and declare it to be worth every penny of the $19.50 registration price (varies with platform).

Analysis

The FrogPad would surely prove faster than MessagEase in the long run, but as a keyboard for a Pocket PC it is actually less practical than the foldable keyboards it hopes to replace. One of its selling points is supposed to be that it can be used in tight quarters where table space -- or even lap space -- are in short supply. You can hold it in one hand while typing with the other.

In my tests this proved terribly awkward. The FrogPad is too big to comfortably palm (in my admittedly smallish hands), but, with any other grip, impossible to hold steady while typing. Worst of all, in this situation I have no remaining hands with which to hold the Pocket PC itself. That leaves... my lap? I'm back where I started, and actually worse off than I would've been with a keyboard in my lap, since the LCD screen of the Pocket PC has so many suboptimal viewing angles. And Google help me should I ever need to use my stylus!

So, short of sewing the FrogPad to the side of my leg, I don't see it working as a keyboard for mobile data entry. If I'm packing a bag for a day away from home, a foldable keyboard just makes more sense. It props the Pocket PC up at a useful angle and allows me to bring my full Dvorak speed to the table. (Stowed, both keyboards are about the same size.)

And for anything other than quality time at a quiet table or desk, MessagEase reigns supreme. For one thing, it's discreet. To the untrained eye, I'm just making notes in my "planner," not writing the initial draft of, say, this post. FrogPads and folding keyboards are hard to ignore, and "Conversation Starter" is not a feature I personally enjoy in my gadgetry.

The loser is thus the FrogPad, which saddens me a little. It's pretty nifty, despite the flaws. But in my case the niche it fills is just too small. It's back to the great virtual auction house for this plucky amphibian.

----

As a sidebar to this little adventure, learning two new keyboarding styles had me looking around for tools to get me up to speed. For the FrogPad, you can get a free trial for their dedicated tutor. It's right-hand only for the trial, but that shouldn't make much difference. Really, any incremental lesson scheme for any keyboard will work for you if you make sure you use the correct fingering; this is equally true for MessagEase or any other keyboarding style. I just ended up using the the page I had used to learn Dvorak back in the day.

There's an awkward competency gap, however, between the time one has a new keyboard memorized and the time one is fast enough to use it in one's daily typing activities. A logical bootstrapping approach is to find a list of the most common words and letter combinations in your language and drill with them intensively. This doesn't get you practicing every key, but it gets your overall speed up to a useful level quickly.

For completely unrelated reasons, I happened to be learning a little JavaScript while I was learning the new keyboards. So, for my first attempt at a useful JavaScript program, I created a "daily speed drills" page. It incrementally drills you on a random selection of letter combinations drawn from a bank of those most common in the English language. Every time the page is refreshed, new selections are made. It's nothing fancy, but I have found it very effective.

Want a Manhattan Project? Take a Number

2006-02-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

It seems that everyone these days is calling for new Manhattan Project.

I'll bet you've heard these cries from people looking for a 'new energy economy' or something related -- maybe fuel cell development, or a serious dent in global warming.

If you live in the United States you have almost certainly caught some other politically-charged calls for Manhattan Projects in recent years: to construct defenses against bioterror, bird flu, or SARS; to improve the quality of our nation's schools; to protect against cyberwarfare; to increase broadband internet penetration.

If you Google around for a little bit, you'll find plenty more Manhattan manifestos: to conquer the diseases of the poor; to clean up the waste from the original Manhattan Project; to build the first space elevator; to create the first nanoassembler; to cure aging; to create strong artificial intelligence; to create "global peace and prosperity"; to develop something called "intimate surveillance"; and, perhaps most esoterically of all, to "do away with the conventional divisions between the natural and social sciences and humanities."

But if you're waiting in line for your own Genuine Manhattan Project, be warned: A Manhattan Project ain't what it used to be, if it ever was.

The Numbers

The total cost of the Manhattan Project is usually estimated at 2 billion war-time dollars. Depending on how you draw the lines, this total was run up over four to six years, starting as early as 1940 and continuing to the first bombs dropped in 1945. 2 billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But to put it in perspective, this was only about 6 hundredths of a percent of the 3.3 trillion spent by the US on the war.

Adjusted for inflation, that 2 billion would be about 22.5 billion in today's dollars, which also sounds like a lot, but is only about the size of our annual Department of Energy budget. That's only 4.5 billion a year for five years, about what we currently spend on the combined pleasures of bagged salads and used books. It's about $4.50 for every VISA card in circulation.

This doesn't seem like such a huge deal to me. I'm certainly not seeing visions of a nation with radically redirected priorities at such a low price -- to the dismay of many pundits, I'm sure.

Perhaps it's better, then, to look at the price of the Manhattan Project as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product of the time. This would be a more realistic measure of national sacrifice. The US GDP skyrocketed during the war years, but so did Project expenditures. My calculations suggest that we can average out the Manhattan Project as costing a quarter of one percent of the national GDP for five years.

A New Unit

So, let me now propose a new functional unit, the MP, that will do for 'cost to the nation' what the LOC* (Library of Congress) does for 'quantity of data'*.

Let one MP equal one quarter of one percent of the US GDP for five years.

*One LOC is said to equal 20 terabytes (but not without debate).

One MP is far more than our earlier 25 billion dollar figure in today's much larger economy. A quarter of a percent of our 12 trillion dollar GDP comes out to 30 billion dollars; projecting for rises in GDP this would total 175 billion for the next five year period.

But still, we need perspective.

30 billion a year is less than a tenth of what we spend servicing the national debt. It's less than six percent of our defense budget. It is about one 75th of the total US budget.

The five-year total for one MP today would likely be about 600 dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country-- a figure which finally brings the number home enough to feel. But, in practice, when the government goes looking to fund a new program, Manhattan or otherwise, politics necessitates hiding the cost in some combination of sources that includes corporate taxes, royalty assessments, re jiggering of existing budgets, and new treasury bonds (more debt). So even though you pay it, you don't quite feel it.

So, is an MP a lot of money or not?

Well, it is, and it isn't.

The MP, applied

Many talk about the Manhattan Project as a research project, but it was really more of a massive industrial engineering project that happened to depended on new research. At its peak in 1945, the Manhattan Project employed some 130,000 people, but only a small fraction of these were researchers. Most were employed in the many stages of the nuclear fuel processing and enrichment chain, an entirely new industry that had to be built from scratch in total secrecy -- with all the extra expenses one would expect from this.

Not only would it have been overkill, it would have been impossible to spend an MP on just nuclear research during the war . There were only so many scientists to go around, and too many other areas needed their attention.

It would be similarly impossible, or at least foolhardy, to spend an entire MP on research for any specific project today. Let's try a scenario.

An MP for Research

Consider what would happen if, as some have suggested, we spent an MP to develop a fuel cell that was both efficient and affordable enough for widespread use in automobiles and other products.

If the government chose to start or grow an in-house program, the first thing they would do would be to hire the most qualified people they could, by offering them more money than they are currently making. Those most qualified would be those already working on fuel cell technology. All we will have done at this point is increase the average salary of fuel cell scientists and changed the bank account numbers on the checks.

Next, the project would begin hiring researchers from related fields and bringing them up to speed on the fuel cell problem. This increases the total number of fuel cell researchers, but at the expense of other projects that must now, incidentally, pay more for their researchers. The expanding fuel cell project inflates the cost of research everywhere.

(This might just encourage more people to become scientists instead of, say, lawyers or executives. This might be a good thing. But since the fuel-cell quest is billed as a Manhattan Project -- a five-year crash program -- it's unclear as to whether students would see rosy long-term prospects in science.)

Our in-house project is now swollen with huge numbers of scientists working as closely as they can. On the one-hand, they are sharing much more information than they were while working in the R&D labs of competing corporations. On the other hand, they are losing productivity to ego battles, too-many-cooks syndrome, and an intellectual monoculture. Risky alternative approaches to fuel cells are discouraged in favor of the organization's orthodox angle.

By the end of the five years, the team would probably succeed in their mission. But at what cost? The inefficiencies of cramming combined with the opportunity cost of research deferred. Who knows how many lives might have been saved by projects left waiting by researchers who had been sucked into the 175 billion dollar cash cow that was the Fuel Cell Manhattan Project? Sure, you might save more lives in the long run by getting fuel cells out there sooner, but it's awfully hard to say. And it will be impossible to say that a different but equally viable cell -- or even some non fuel-cell alternative --would not have been developed in the same time period, in the absence of the Project.

The closest thing to a research MP that I can think of right now is ITER, the international project to test the feasibility of a commercial-scale power generation via tokamak-style fusion reactor. Despite having a large physical engineering requirement on top of the heavy research budget, ITER is currently projected to cost a total of only 10 billion dollars. Even if overruns take it to 20 billion (a not unlikely scenario), that will only total about .11 MP.

The lesson? Unless your pet research project is very broad in scope, and can be distributed among many different fields -- something like SENS, the project to defeat physical aging -- an MP is way too much money, and would ultimately carry too many hidden costs. Asking for such an absurd sum is surely counterproductive to your cause.

But what if yours is also a massive civil engineering project? Is an MP still too much?

An MP for Civil Engineering

Let's suppose we've decided to spend an MP to create a 'hydrogen economy'. Advanced fuel cells are an obvious starting place, and we've already concluded that an MP is way too much to spend on just this, so we'll have plenty of money left over. We're also going to need fuel tanks for dense, safe hydrogen storage. That's another big research project, but probably no larger than the fuel cell one, so we still have plenty of our MP left to spend -- let's say 80 percent.

So we'll move on to the hydrogen infrastructure. I'm guessing that .8 MP will be more than enough to retrofit our nation's approximately 170000 fueling stations to safely pump hydrogen. It might even be enough to start on the network of tanks and pipelines needed to handle the new fuel. But I doubt it would be enough to finish it.

And we haven't even started on the hydrogen production infrastructure. We have to figure out what combination of facilities to make, then build them, whether these be be next-generation high-temperature nuclear plants, genetically-tweaked algae, solar 'cracking' of water molecules, the reprocessing of fossil fuels, something we've not yet thought of, or simply industrial-scale water electrolysis using our existing power grid. This production infrastructure could easily cost a few MP all by itself.

(We won't, but at this point we are in a position to consider just how many tens or hundreds of MP it would cost to make a real dent in global warming by spreading this new energy infrastructure around the world...)

The moral here is that for your project with a large civil engineering component, you are likely to need much more than an MP to get the job done. You might, instead, ask for one or more PAs (A Project Apollo is equal to three tenths of one percent of GDP for ten years). More realistically, consider breaking your cause down into the smallest sub-projects that can be seen as independently valuable, and seek funding for some of those instead.

(I should note that there are some "smaller" civil engineering projects that may, in fact, fit easily within the bounds of a single MP. These include the Space Elevator, estimated to cost 0.23 MP for the first useful 91,000 km tether, with subsequent cables costing closer to 0.08 MP. )

The Bottom Line

The original Manhattan Project was expensive, but not nearly as expensive as our gut reaction today would suggest. Pundits use "Manhattan Project" as a clarion call for new national priorities and collective sacrifice, but a single MP may not actually qualify as such.

Nevertheless, it would not take too many simultaneous MPs to knock the wind out of our economy. With so many different calls for Manhattan Projects, we must be judicious in the asking and granting of funds. It helps to know that research projects probably overstate their needs when they cry for an MP, while projects with civil engineering objectives may tend to understate -- even wildly so.

As a unit of cost, the MP may prove useful for helping people wrap their heads around really large expenditures, letting them more intuitively tell the difference between a merely very expensive project and an astronomically pricey one.

In any case, if people are going to keep asking for Manhattan Projects, it makes sense to quantify the term.

Timmy and the Dragon

2006-02-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

Februrary 11, 2006. Mexico. The services were in Spanish, a language I spoke for two years in Spain as a missionary in a time that now seemed as impossibly distant as my religious past. The trembling convictions spoken by Timmy's siblings, my wife among them, were thus understood, but foreign. Familiar, but empty. The contradictions of a heavy dream.

I was seated near the front center, my eyes left to idly study the casket, a handsome cloud-gray vessel in tasteful, fully rectangular proportions. Sturdy shafts ran along the sides. The pallbearers, a group including myself, would use these to heft the too-light assemblage away to a place where it would never be seen again.

The mounting brackets for these shafts were decoratively embellished. Each seemed, to me, to resemble the mask of a ravenous reptile. I recognized this for what it was: The mark of the Dragon-Tyrant.

For Timmy, it was no mere cliche to say his life was over before it had begun. Born severely disabled, he was never able to whisper a single word, never able to give his parents a hug. Had he not been adopted from birth, he would almost certainly have been left to die, either tacitly or explicitly, in the cage of extreme poverty into which his was born.

Every day of his seventeen-year life, his very existence was thus a living reflection of his parents' indefatigable charity. Theirs was a love so powerful and pure that the entire community basked in it. (That so many people were now crowding the church for the funeral of a drooling, twisted mute was final evidence that I do not exaggerate.)

It was not enough. Under the rules in which humanity came into existence, the house always wins. The Dragon-Tyrant of physical aging and death has a particularly loathsome modus operandi, typically tearing first into your grandparents and parents before moving on to your friends and perhaps some of your children. As he then spirals in to finish you off, you may well feel that life is no longer worth living. The kill of the Dragon is thus total, both in body and spirit.

I am probably luckier than most. I did not lose so much as a grandparent until my early twenties. Then I lost my Grandpa. After a pause of several years, the Dragon has returned to assert his dominion. In the span of about a year, he has consumed my Grandad, my Grandma and now, my brother-in-law, Timmy.

The Dragon's orbit draws tighter and faster.

In such times, a natural instinct is to reach for a belief in a better life after this one. To accept death as the will of god. There is comfort in these ideas that I will not begrudge on anyone. Submitting served humanity well for many thousands of years, when revolt against the Dragon-Tyrant was clearly impossible. But in the end, when we submit, we still collaborate with the enemy -- especially now, when the possibility of defeating him is real.

Yes, he is the enemy. And I will not submit.

This makes me a cornered animal. An ice floe drifting in the sun. A sack of thermite left next to a furnace at the onset of winter. For inevitably, the Dragon must devour someone I have loved very closely, and my fury may well incinerate me from within. For even in the exquisite, faithless pain of total mourning, I will not submit.

It is customary in many circles to make charitable donations in memory of loved ones at the time of their passing. This is a good tradition. Timmy's parents, for example, run a school for disabled children in an impoverished corner of Mexico. I admire and respect anyone who contributes to this or any other worthy cause.

I definitely participate in this giving tradition, but have nothing left to donate on the occasion of Timmy's passing, because I have not been postponing my charity for such occasions. It would be wrong of me to wait until my loved ones are gone, for my charity of choice intends to save them.

So it is that I share my tears with Timmy's many loved ones who, because of their beliefs, cannot fully endorse my cause. But I will not submit.

In the name of Timmy, I will fight the Dragon.

Join me. The Singularity Institute seeks to create benevolent artificial intelligence as a stepping stone to ending involuntary death and suffering in our time.

Why Google Wants Your Data

2006-01-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

I was configuring my Gmail account for POP access today when the thought occurred to me: "Why does Google let me do this? Gmail makes the company money only when users click on ads. When I access my email via POP, I never even visit the site."

Perhaps they think POP access will draw enough new users to make up for the lost revenue. After all, even the POP people will probably use the web client at times when they are away from their desks.

Personally, I think Google is just looking ahead -- to the era of personally-tailored search results.

You can't get there by merely indexing every web page and every book ever written, as useful as these habits are. No, to make the next leap in search, Google must get to know you personally. Google therefore hopes to learn your tastes and your tendencies, or at least have the tools in place to do so later. What better way to do this than with products useful in their own right, like Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, and Gmail?

If you ask a good friend whether you should see "Disappointing Sequel III" this weekend, she'll give you an intelligent answer. She won't just tell you if she liked it, but will use her knowledge of your tastes to venture whether you would like it. "I didn't care for it," she'll say, "but you will probably love it."

Now, imagine your friend is a search engine. If you type 'fedora', your friend would know you are, in fact, one of those few twisted souls more interested in hats than operating systems.

Google, on the other hand, will talk about Linux until about the 20th link. That's because, right now, it just plays the percentages by looking at the links between pages. If you mean what most web page makers do when you search for 'fedora', you are probably satisfied with the results.

As you may know, Google already records every search query you enter and links it to your IP address. They don't yet use your search history to improve your search success. There are privacy concerns, after all. Imagine your horror if your geeky friend came over to your desk, and, googling 'fedora' on your computer, saw a bunch of links about early twentieth-century head coverings come up.

Google could certainly do more to get to know you. Suppose, for a moment, that you're ok with this.

If you let the search engine monitor your surfing habits, it would know which sites you visit and for how long. This would not only give it a better picture of your overall habits, but would let it know what you're working on right now. If you're uncharacteristically looking at pages about Linux, it might correctly assume that a search for 'fedora' should ignore hats, just this once.

The engine gets similar benefits by reading your mail, your instant messenger transcripts and your half-forgotten, half-baked novel.

Now, give it a little more access. Let it measure how fast your computer is and how big your hard drives are. Let it watch which applications you use, and how you use them. Let it hear what music you listen to. Let it tally up how fast you type, and which words you misspell most often. Let it see your digital photos.

How is it supposed to make use of this information, you might ask? By finding patterns among users.

Some of these patterns might make a kind of sleuthy sense to us: Perhaps it guesses you like hats -- not because of your previous searches, but because it has discovered that users who, like you, listen to country music and take pictures of horses, tend to spend more time on hat pages than on Linux pages.

Some patterns it uncovers might seem bizarre: Maybe it finds that people who listen to country music and like hats express the most love online to Mac users who read the Onion and take photos with greater-than-average red eye. Google Date, here we come.

Pattern-seeking software has another name: expert system.

Medical expert systems help doctors diagnose illnesses that fit complicated patterns of symptoms and test results. Outside their area of expertise, expert systems are useless. But, within it, they are savants. Sifting through mountains of data, they look for, and find, patterns that humans never would. Sometimes these are statistical artifacts that don't hold up against future data. Sometimes the conclusions hold up surprisingly well, for reasons we simply haven't figured out yet.

People like me refer to expert systems as a type of narrow AI. Google, or any aspiring rival, must see their products as examples of narrow AI in the very wide domain of answering questions. If a search engine or any other expert system can widen itself sufficiently, it ceases to be narrow and becomes a general AI. Better hope it knows how to 'not be evil'.

With this longer view in mind, we should not be surprised by observations that Google is collecting or retaining more data than would seem necessary -- or even profitable. Likewise, we can expect Google to continue churning out products that give users immediate benefits while giving their clusters more data to crunch. We can even know when Google is about ready to serve us the Next Big Thing: when it provides, behind a personal log-in screen, a beta search tool that asks if it can access your other Google tools to give you better results.

Whether you use the improved search will be up to you. Technically, Google should be able to do all this without violating your privacy. But if you're the kind of person who doesn't even want a program looking at your honeymoon photos, you will probably pass.

What were you two doing with that fedora, anyway?

Conversation with an Atheist

2006-01-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

So you're religious.

You've probably read hundreds of pages of scripture and commentary regarding a single faith -- not because you shopped around, but because you were born into it. Why shouldn't you cuddle up for a bit with some friendly rebuttal?

I've even done my best to make it fun.

Conversation with an Atheist

Seriously, though... I'm not out to attack anyone. If you're totally content with your religion, move along. There's nothing for you here.

And if you're not religious? I had thought of subtitling this piece "an introduction to rational thought." It may still make you smile.

New Home

2006-01-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

I had been itching to buy a new domain and switch web space providers for some time. I also had a number of longer written pieces near the end of the production pipeline without any great place to put them.

A new site seemed like the best way to pull everything together.

As mentioned there, I'm not getting rid of this blog. But when I have longer pieces I will host them on my site and link to them from here.

X-Mas List Item #6: An Open, Fully-Supported E-book Reader

2005-12-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

Pull up a chair and grab an eggnog, and I shall tell you the the haunting tale of the First E-book Migration.

Somewhat ironically for the technology sector, the failure had little to do with over-hyped and underperforming equipment. Text requires minimal bandwidth to transmit, and minimal memory to store. The LCD displays of the day, though drab by today's standards, were perfectly adequate.

But being first type of media capable of making the jump to digital distribution turned out to be a disadvantage. Consumers were still new to the internet, and leery of using it to make purchases. No successful online media marketplace existed that the would-be e-book titans could emulate. Publishers feared a backlash of the brick-and-mortar stores upon which they were dependent for shelf space. And, perhaps most importantly, the venerable scaffolding of contracts between authors and publishers had no accommodations for digital release. Nothing fosters inaction like the prospect of a legal quagmire.

Still. It was morning in dot-com America. E-books were possible, so they had to be done.

Ships under many flags disappeared over the horizon. They had names like Franklin and RCA.

Those who early-adopted their way into the First Migration found themselves in a wilderness both sparse and cruel.

Only a handful of publishers released titles digitally. Most of those who did handpicked a seemingly random fraction of their titles for e-release – probably for arcane contractual reasons or because they were afraid to extend themselves more deeply than their competitors.

Manufacturers and publishers sported a ridiculous array of incompatible formats. They also shared different visions of how the e-book universe should operate. Some opted for a direct-download model in which readers would dial-up content directly. Others thought reading on the computer should be sufficient, and spurned dedicated devices entirely.

The differences went on and on. Should Ebooks be just like regular books, page numbers and all? Or should they act more like the web, with hyperlinks and interactivity? Should they cost more than regular books, because they are more flexible? Or less, because they are intangible?

While the early adopters tried to colonize this wild frontier, the rest of us cuddled up with our dead trees and waited for news of a bounteous harvest.

It never came.

Later explorers tell of the lost colony. It was there, they say, exposed to the elements on a rocky coast marked by the wreckage of the Gemstar. Buy them a drink, and they will show you charcoal rubbings of mysterious inscriptions like “.rb” and “.fub”. They will speak in whispered tones of ghostly modem chirps in the wind.

The numerous sightings of readers gone feral and still living in this devil's land are, of course, the fevered ramblings of codec-sickness, and not to be taken seriously.

Superstition aside, the promise of Ebookland remains. Contrary to popular belief, plain paper is not just plain better. It goes without saying that many books can be stored simultaneously on a digital device. But my favorite features are these: A well designed E-book reader can be held and operated continuously with a single hand because a page-turning happens instantly at the touch of a button. And, because they usually provide their own illumination, e-readers work well in cozy places with poor lighting. You can read in a dark car, a dimmed airplane cabin, or next to your sleeping spouse with the bedroom lights turned off. I find the e-book experience to be smoother and less distracting than the one I get with bound paper.

If consumers are willing to pay a little more, they will undoubtedly see combination gadgets that combine the purposeful design of an e-book with wireless internet browsing capability. Telephony and music playback could be thrown in, too, but with each extra purpose battery life will drop, weight will rise, and the distraction-free charm of e-reading will fade.

But wait! I haven't mentioned the killer ap for e-readers yet. It's surprisingly mundane, and was found in many of the earlier models.

I predict that e-books will become a hit not because of tech-savvy generation Xers, but because of their parents. Baby boomers are realizing their eyes aren't what they used to be. E-books are preferable to paperbacks because they can provide strong backlight and adjustable font sizes.

For this reason I am still agnostic about electrophoretic displays (E-ink is a tradename, but I'll use it anyway). E-ink looks a lot like regular ink on regular paper, and only drains power while “turning the page” or otherwise refreshing the display. This makes e-ink superior for reading in direct sunlight. Less power also means smaller batteries and lighter weight. But e-ink cannot be effectively backlit. You would need some sort of lamp attachment to read in the dark or ease aging eyes, which could mean keeping the bigger batteries around anyway.

An promising hybrid may exist in a type of LCD from ZBD that, like e-ink, only uses power to change content. (It is mentioned in this recent ElectronicsWeekly article.) It won't be quite as easy to see in direct sunlight as e-ink, but it can be backlit.

Clearly, technology is giving us even more options than we had during the First Migration. This may just mean more crippling confusion, but it might spark a new wave of interest in e-reading.

The Second Migration recently got off to a slow start with the first commercially available e-ink based reader, the Sony Librié. The Librie has frustrated many consumers – not because of the technology, but because of the draconian copy protection scheme used. I suppose Sony did this to allay the fears of Napsterphobic publishers. After all, you can't have a viable e-book reader if you don't have any publishers on board. But Sony has resorted to making the Librié useless for viewing files you already own in other formats, like .html and .pdf. Early adopters are very turned off by this; support for common file types should be a no-brainer in a product that as yet provides little content of its own.

In fact, people like me enjoy “open” e-readers without any e-books at all, because we can take long digital documents away to more comfortable reading locations.

So, for X-mas, Quantum Future Santa, bring me a future where publishers and manufacturers have at least agreed to support each others' formats if they can't settle on a single standard. Bring me a future where every title ever written is conveniently available as an inexpensive e-book. I'll be overjoyed if you can also bring me a backlit ZBD reader, but I'll settle for e-ink (with a built-in lamp of some kind) or even a standard LCD or OLED display. If worse comes to worse, I can make due with the old REB1100 I use now.

*

This concludes my QFS X-Mas Wish List for 2005. (What, you thought I had to go up to ten?)

As a token of my gratitude, Santa, I have left you a sealed box. It contains cookies or milk, depending on the unobserved outcome of a random single-bit operation. I thought you would appreciate it.

X-Mas List Item #5: Any Katamari PC Component

2005-12-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

In order to get me this gift, Quantum Future Santa, I'm sending you to a somewhat less probable future. I will probably never find myself there.

But I might. Let me explain so you know what the heck I'm talking about.

Speedbumps on the road laid by Moore's Law – especially excessive heat – have pushed manufacturers to push chips outward rather than inward. We are seeing many new dual-core chips. Computers with two dual-core processors are in the works.

Nowhere is the new multicore mentality more pronounced than in the new generation of gaming consoles. The Xbox360 has three cores that can each act as two, handling up to six “threads” of code simultaneously. The Cell processor under the hood of the upcoming Play Station3 has eight separate cores connected to a general purpose CPU that can act as two, for a total of 10 simultaneous “threads.”

I'm emphasizing the threads, because from the progarmmer's standpoint, this multithreading means much more than the details of the hardware itself. Historically, most programs could be written with the assumption that a single very fast processor would handle each piece of the program in order. (In actuality, smart processors rearrange small groups of instructions for greater speed, but they send the results back in the original order, maintaining the illusion.)

The new multicore systems can run simple programs just fine. But to harness the power of extra cores programmers must write their software in such a way that it can split tasks up into different threads. Some coders have been doing this for a long time. Many more have not.

The ones that have not tend to be the ones writing software for personal computers like yours.

But we can hope that, before long, nearly all software will take advantage of as few or as many cores as it can find. At this point, the Katamari PC becomes an interesting possibility.

The Katamari PC is the promiscuous country cousin of the corporate 'blade server'. Your current PC is basically a single motherboard with slots for a single CPU, a few strips of memory, and a few other addons. A 'blade rack', on the other hand, acts lie a giant grandmother board that can hold a large number of compatible motherboard 'blades' while coordinating power, communication, and cooling. When a corporation with a blade server needs more power, memory, or storage capacity, they don't go out and buy a whole new system. They just plug in some more blades. Thanks in part to multi-threaded programming, the results are immediately felt.

What if we could do this at home, with smaller components and an even more flexible arrangement? What if instead of a bunch of chips in a single metal box, we had packets of PC functionality that could be linked together ad infinitum?

Each packet would be built around a universal pipeline through which power, data, and ventilation would be received and transmitted to adjacent bricks. Some packets would be specialized: more cores, memory, cooling, etc.. Some might have a little of everything.

I call this the Katamari PC after the video game 'Katamari Damacy', in which the player must grow a gigantic ball of debris by snowballing anything and everything in its path. A Katamari PC would allow people to upgrade by endlessly adding to their existing components instead of replacing them.

I thought about calling this a 'Lego PC', a term I've heard on other occasions. But 'Lego' implies a single proprietary format for every brick. Your Apple bricks might only connect with other Apple bricks in a lego PC. Acer to Acer, Dell to Dell. Amen.

The Katamari PC is more flexible. It specifies the architecture of the pipeline and nothing else. If you want to connect ugly Dell bricks to stylish Apple ones, you can. If you want to keep your 300GB doorstop running alongside your holographic petabyte crystal, you can.

Is this an efficient way to operate? Not really. Not every type of program benefits from multiple cores. Some types of old gear tend to hog space and electricity compared to new gear. And every now and then the pipeline design itself would need an upgrade.

But the Katamari PC would be fun! You could build your own home supercomputing clusters with ease! You could arrange your computer into fun shapes that fit in unlikely places! Upgrades could be sold in the checkout line as impulse purchases! (They would sell like hot cakes, too, to hapless users compensating for their growing burdens of viruses and adware.)

Is Katamari likely? Sadly, I don't think so. Manufacturers would have difficulty agreeing on a common standard. And while they would love selling more upgrades, the major brands would miss selling you a complete machine every few years whether you need it or not. (They could probably keep doing this in the portable market, though, where beauty and compactness command a premium.)

Still, if you could bring me back just one piece of Katamari, Santa, it would make a stupendous souvenir from a geeky future that might have been.

X-Mas List Item #4: Nifty New Input Device

2005-12-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

We use our computers today for much more than work. We chat with our friends and family. We shop. We bank. We read articles, essays and blogs.

But limits of earlier technology have given us this idea that such things must be done while sitting upright in front of a flat service.

It's high time we took computing off the desk.

Laptops don't really count; their design pretty much requires users to be sitting upright. I find using a laptop on a couch less comfortable than sitting at a desk; from a comfort standpoint, the laptop is a step backwards.

So, for X-Mas, Quantum Future Santa, I want a new way to point, click, and type that is efficient enough to use at my desk, yet portable enough to use anywhere.

One promising early alternative is the AlphaGrip: essentially a keyboard wrapped around a video-game controller with a trackball built in. The AlphaGrip appears thoughtfully designed, but, alas, at the time of this writing remains vaporware.

And anyway, I don't think a one-piece device for two hands will prove the best way to go. I would prefer to see a pair of wireless one-handed devices. Apart from greater freedom of movement, I want the option of mousing and clicking with one hand, like I do now. I need that free hand for snacks of a salty or greasy nature.

There are ways to eliminate the need for a second hand altogether. Take a look at the Twiddler2, a pricey little gadget that combines some kind of mouse-nub with a chorded keyboard. I wouldn't mind learning chord-keyboarding. It's supposedly not that hard. But the top speeds one can reach are relatively limited. And anything that's not immediately obvious to a beginner will always be underdeveloped thanks to its inherent disadvantage in the marketplace.

Voice recognition could become a major player in input. This would eliminate the need for both hands. But I'm really a quiet, hands-on kind of guy, and I think a lot of other people are, too. Besides, who wants to be sitting in a train car or cubicle next to three other guys enunciating, in their computer-friendliest voices, "Window Maximize. File Open. Budget. Column D, Row 11...?"

So here's my proposal: Start with an AlphaGrip. Split it in half. Make it wireless. And instead of a trackball, allow one or both hands to point by aiming the handpiece itself. (See my image, above right.)

(Yes, this is the kind of pointing we will be able to do with the upcoming Nintendo Revolution controller. It would be intuitive to aim the controller at the screen as though it were a laser beam. But, if you've ever played with a laser pointer you know that human hands are surprisingly shaky when magnified over distance. I suspect that the Revolution controller pretends the screen in front of you is far bigger than it really is. The feel will still be very intuitive, and you won't have any trouble keeping the pointer trained on small targets.)

This pointing feature would require motion detectors inside or detachable reference-point doodads. People would always be losing the latter, so the first option makes more sense, even if it adds a bit to the price tag.

In the longer run, we'll get rid of the handpieces entirely and replace them with a system of finger cots or clip-on nails. But I think that would push you out beyond my chosen ten-year horizon, Santa.

P.S. In case you're wondering, I do indeed plan to combine this with the keychain PC and the VR display on my list. It's a good thing I have you, Santa, because otherwise I think this wearable getup could be a long time coming.

For despite my high confidence that each of these items will appear within the next ten years, the early forms they take could make integration difficult. Manufacturers may use proprietary formats or fail to agree on standards. And probability kind of demands that I have less confidence in a complete wearable setup than I do in any one of the parts.

X-Mas List Item #3: Keychain PC

2005-12-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

This won't take up much room in your sleigh, Quantum Future Santa. But I'm sending you a bit farther out for this one.

Computers are getting smaller. Nothing new about that. But we've gotten to the point where a capable computer can actually be much smaller than the screen or the keyboard we use to interact with it.

This raises tough questions for designers of portable devices, who can, and sometimes do, make cell phones and PDAs that are too tiny for average fingers.

Fortunately, those who manufacture desktop machines can simply have fun with the shrinkage. Take the Mac Mini, for example. It's not portable in the sense that a laptop is portable, because it has no display or keyboard. But, as a result of these omissions, it is actually much smaller than most laptops. It's useless on an airplane, but great in a carry-on bag.

Mobile computing now has two flavors; devices that you use on the way to Grandma's house, and devices that you bring to grandma's house.

If you're the one driving, like I usually am, the first kind of portability doesn't do you much good anyway. So I'm looking at the second. Fast forward five or seven years and watch as the Mac Mini or its inspired rivals shrink even farther. Watch as a robust PC comes to fit on a keychain.

The keychain PC will be a beatiful thing. Its only interface will be a wireless communications chip with ethernet and bluetooth capabilities. The only blemish on its sleek surface will be a recharging oriface. Being mostly battery, it will also be a cold dense lump in your pocket when you're not using it, and a hot dense lump when you are. You can't win 'em all. (I won't ask you for mini fuel cells this year, Santa. You're busy enough already.)

What kind of person will use this? The kind of person who travels between two or more locations where displays and input devices can be borrowed. The kind of person who doesn't trust or understand the local network well enough to want to try and access his computer remotely over the internet.

I know, Santa! You're saying, “Ho, Ho, Ho. This is silly. What kinds of places have keyboards and screens lying around for people with keychain PCs to link into?”

Few, if any right now. But I'm looking ahead.

When the time comes, I'll use my keychain PC on any modern television – which is to say, any High Definition set. Unlike classical color sets of yore, HD displays have enough pixels to show text without wooly, mammoth fonts.

Many sets by this time will have builtin-wireless receiving features. Those that don't will probably be connected to something that does.

The same will be especially true for keyboards and mice. I'll just grab what I need from a desk that's not using it at the moment.

But I don't consider keyboards and mice to be the optimal solution to my keychain drive, which is why you'll need to get me the next item on my list. (Stay tuned!)

It goes without saying that I'll need operating systems and devices to become a little smarter. For example, it would be nice – and kind of kinky – if I could slave a device to my keychain simply by touching them together in a special place.

I also understand, Santa, that my keychain PC may never become more than a geeky novelty, because I know as well as you do that remote computing is the wave of the future. Within a couple years, Microsoft and Google will be locked in an epic struggle to win users over to web-based office suites. Before long, the browser will be the only piece of software most machines will need to run.

And when that happens, we may just see browsing capability built in to anything and everything that uses a screen. Like the digital clocks of an earlier era, PC functionality is destined to become a cheap, ubiquitous commodity.

Which is why it should go on my keychain. At least it won't have a blinking “twelve-o-clock.com”

X-Mas List Item #2: Flash Hard Drive

2005-12-13T19:02:00.000-07:00

Here's another easy one for you, Quantum Future Santa. Hard drives made of flash memory are at most a few years out. Let me tell you why.

From an engineering standpoint, they can be built now. I have no doubt that some hacking power users are doing this as I write (the kind of people that would buy this fun little drive based on ordinary PC ram). 2GB flash chips are the hot sellers today. If you stick five of those together you can make a 10GB drive.

10 GB is tiny by today's standards (200-300GB is typical for new drives now). But 10GB is enough room to store an operating system and the applications you use most. Your documents will also fit very comfortably.

So, a 10GB flash-based hard drive you can probably handle 70 to 100 percent of your computer related activity. If you store massive amounts of music or photographs, or any number of videos, you'll probably need a traditional hard disk standing by. But there's no reason you can't have both. In fact, Flash-n'-Platter will be an ideal marriage for a number of years ahead.

What's the appeal? Flash drives have no moving parts. They are faster, quieter, and more rugged than the spinning platters we use now. They also consume less power. All of the above make flash attractive for desktops and a slam-dunk for laptops. (Interesting side-note: You're not crazy if you think hard drives are getting noisier. A lot of that has to do with the software we run today. This little article explains how something as simple as an instant messenger buddy logging out can cause four or five different programs to thrash about on your drive, all for good reasons.)

So, I will accept this x-mas gift in either of two forms: a standalone flash drive that I can mount alongside my platter drive, or a hybrid drive that contains both types of storage. (Hybrids are already said to be under development.) As one who is comfortable pulling stuff in and out of my machine, I would prefer the pure flash option. But the hybrid has its charms, too.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The problem is the price.

If you shop around you can probably get 2GB of flash today for just under a hundred bucks. Assuming manufacturers can get steep discounts, let's say they can build a 10GB hard drive for $400.00. (Remember there's a little more to making a drive than sticking the 5 chips together). That's 40 dollars per gigabyte.

A discounted traditional 250GB drive goes for about 110 bucks today. That's about 40 cents per gigabyte.

So, gigabyte for gigabyte, flash is a hundred times more expensive! Ouch.

But one good reality check deserves another. How many people can actually put 250GB to good use? The runaway technological arms race among storage manufacturers has left us with these cheap, cavernous drives that home users have to work to fill. Video is about the only thing that can do it.

So give us a 10 or 20GB flash drive, and we can save spinning up our platters for when we're playing with video.

Oh. Right. $400.00 for 10GB is still much too expensive.

Fine. Let's look at the state of the flash memory industry.

Nearly all flash chips today go into portable gadgets. These include cell phones, digital cameras, and, especially, music players. In fact, Apple, maker of the dominant iPod brand, is expected to suck up 25% of the entire global output of flash memory in 2006 all by itself!

But Apple is running out of room to grow here. The portable player market will soon be saturated. How do I know?

The video iPod.

Let me explain.

The iPod has sold phenomenally well, and inspired a huge variety of offerings from Apple's competitors – not all of them garbage. But when everyone who wants a music player has one, the only thing left to do is sell them a better one. Apple has done this. It has moved beyond its classic iPod – which has a tiny spinning platter drive inside – and into sleeker flash-based models. Each new generation has been smaller and had more capacity.

The problem for Apple shows up when capacity outstrips the size of the buyer's music collection. Admittedly, I'm not a conossieur, but my complete collection barely fills 2GB in mp3 form. Why would I buy anything bigger?

Maybe because there was other stuff I wanted to put on. Or to satisfy a techno-macho urge. Apple is trying very hard to give me both.

The iTunes Music Store doesn't make a huge profit; that was never the point. The idea behind ITMS was that there should be a way to buy music for an iPod that was as slick and stylish as the 'pod itself. Apple then makes the real money selling more – and bigger – iPods as people increase the size of their collections.

But the capacity of flash chips is growing much faster than the length of peoples' play lists. Filling the largest iPods takes more than music.

Steve Jobs always used to say he disliked the idea of a video iPod. I agree. It really is silly. But it is sexy, and Apple is all about the sexy. Macho geeks need to show off. And Apple needs to create a need for higher capacity iPods. The video iPod was born.

What does all of this have to do with the price of flash?

Well, Apple has so successfully stoked demand for flash that production capacity is going through the ceiling and prices are plunging towards the floor.

And while there is much to be said about Apple pushing video content providers into the internet age, I expect the cachet of watching video on the tiny screen of an iPod will be short-lived. It won't die tomorrow. Maybe not even next year. But it will die.

And when it dies, the earth will flood.

The market will be awash in 2GB, 4GB, even 16GB flash chips. They will show up in frivolous and unexpected places. Cell phones that record hours worth of video? Check. Whimsical children's toys with more memory than common sense? Check. Hybrid and fully flash-based hard drives?

Check. And check.

I'm not being especially clever in this prognostication. The CEO of Samsung, a giant in flash manufacturing (among other things), has said he expects upcoming flash chips to make hard-disk drives “obsolete”.

Even Microsoft seems to see the handwriting on the wall. Their upcoming Vista operating system is supposed to able to use the memory in a standard USB 'keychain' flash drive to store core system files. That means that even a 'small' 2GB drive can speed things up if you have it plugged in. Cool!

It's not quite the gift I'm looking for, Santa, but it's a start.

Quantum Future Santa X-Mas List Item # 1: A Viable VR Helmet

2005-12-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

(From my Quantum Future Santa X-Mas List of 2005)

I don't think I'm being at all unreasonable here. In fact, I think the pieces are in place for a viable virtual reality display as early as next year.

Why? The new generation of game consoles packs plenty of punch. But most notably, Nintendo’s upcoming Revolution console has a motion-tracking controller. Since motion tracking is one of the essential components of a head-mounted display, mass production of these controllers can be expected to drive down the price of this technology. Given that the Revolution will also come with the stationary reference point devices that the controller uses to determine its orientation, this console would make a logical first home for VR.

The more difficult challenge is the display itself. The obvious choice is LCD or OLED, which are not known for combining high refresh rates and tiny pixels on inexpensive screens. Low refresh rates would mean blurriness anytime the head is moved, since the entire frame must be redrawn to reflect the change in perspective. Large pixels would mean a large screen, with a correspondingly bulky helmet.

There are more exotic options: A scanning beam can be aimed directly into the retina of the viewer. It's not as dangerous as it sounds; the power levels involved are so low that being out in direct sunlight is probably far more taxing on the eye. Direct-scanning devices are currently used in a small number of applications – mostly military and medical – but provide only low-resolution text and diagrams of a single color. So it will be a while yet before these displays capable enough and cheap enough for consumer VR. But the technology is essentially the same as that behind DLP, one of the popular new flavors of large-screen TV. This may help bring down prices, and your second-generation VR display may well be a lightweight pair of direct-scan glasses.

In any case, we clearly can’t expect first generation VR to match the resolution of high-definition television sets – resolutions the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation3 are designed to make use of. This may be yet another reason the Revolution, lacking HD support, would make a logical first home for VR.

Videogame developers have been in a creative funk for a while. Gamers are hungry for titles that don’t just look or sound better. They want something truly new. The Revolution’s controller will tap into this desire. A VR display could do the same. It might have to be bulky the first time around, but Nintendo can make that a feature; all they need to do is roll it out with a special Metroid title and it can look, from the outside and in, like the battle helmet worn by hero Samus Aran.

The Virtual Boy was a long time ago. It's time to get over it and stop chickening out.

Dear Quantum Future Santa,

2005-12-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

What do I want for X-Mas? It's a tough question. One problem is money. Neither I nor the people who might buy me gifts are made of money. The bigger problem is my farsighted technolust. If only a Santa Claus from an Everett Branch between 1 and 10 years in a fortunate future were getting my mail. Surely he could find a way to push Rudolph superluminal and through whatever quantum wormholes necessary to bring me my toys.

But lest I drown myself in a quantum foam of near-infinite possibility, I've decided to pare down my options. Each item on my list will meet the following criteria:

It could actually fit under my tree.
It wouldn’t be so expensive that nobody would ever buy it for me as a gift.
It could actually be found under my tree in the next 1-10 years because the technology is either here already or just around the corner.
It wouldn’t require earth shattering breakthroughs like strong nanotechnology or a technological singularity. (But modest changes in the socioeconomic status quo are fair game.)

I will build up my list over the next few posts.

Thanks in advance, Quantum Future Santa!

P.S. Somewhere, in some universe, I'm sure I conformed to locally accepted morals this year. Wink wink.

The Golden Age of Biosecurity

2005-10-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

There's been a good deal of talk among SL4 readers about this opinion piece by Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil that appeared in the New York Times the other day regarding the recent publication of the 1918 influenza genome.

The piece is significant in part because Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil don't generally see eye to eye on the subject of technological containment. Joy has been outspoken in the opinion that we should relinquish entire areas of research that could enable widespread or even existential calamities. Kurzweil has strongly dismissed this approach as not just ineffective, but counterproductive -- it would mean denying ourselves the benefits of the research even as those who operate outside the law continue to explore their more sinister uses.

So when Joy and Kurzweil agree that the blueprints for known biological WMDs shouldn't just be posted up on the internet for anyone to download, I'm inclined to pay attention. The knee-jerk reaction from the transhumanist crowd tends to be that information should be free, and that any restrictions push us towards a stagnant totalitarian future, and are therefore bad by definition. I sympathize with this position, and often agree. But there is a place for common sense.

Yes, researchers need free access in order to help us understand and defend against the threat of deadly diseases like the 1918 flu. And I agree that any security arrangements effective enough to actually thwart a determined terrorist would mean the end of such access.

But most of us aren't biological researchers, and determined terrorists aren't the only threat.

So let me make a case not for high security or no security, but for low security.

It is said by those who understand physical security that most locks serve only to keep honest people honest. People who would never think of breaking and entering can be tempted by valuable goods left out in the open.

Low-security locks and their kin also serve as buffers against rash decision-making, and to keep hazards away from those untrained to handle them.

We have a constitutional right to own firearms, but we don't leave them within reach of children, and we usually have a waiting period associated with purchasing a handgun.

Anyone is allowed to pull a fire alarm, but we often cover the alarm with a thin pane of glass to remind us that, while it is easy to sound the alarm, it should not be done lightly.

Joy and Kurzweil compared the 1918 influenza genome to the blueprints to an atomic bomb. This is not the best comparison because "rogue" nations and organizations have little difficulty obtaining this information. The limiter to nuclear proliferation has been the fortunate reality that manufacturing weapons-grade fissile material requires a combination of technical prowess and industrial capacity that is difficult to conceal and crushing to small economies.

Biological weapons are simply not in the same league of difficulty, and while today the number of entities that could reconstruct the 1918 influenza from the genome is small, the number is fast becoming non-trivial. The same technology that now allows genes to be sequenced hundreds of times faster than they could just two decades ago will undoubtedly allow them to be manufactured with equally accelerating speed.

In the earlier days of the compact disc, anyone could play them but few could afford a burner and fewer still owned one. MP3 was not a household word, and the internet was just an academic curiosity. It was a golden age for the recording industry. This is where we are at with gene manipulation. How long can we really expect it to last?

I can already hear the Slashdot crowd: 'Fool! CD and DVD copy protection schemes have proven a nuisance for the masses and and trivial for the pirates to crack.'

But genegineers are not 'the masses', and while I'm worried about terrorists, they don't have a monopoly on my fear. I'm worried about 2013. I'm worried about the grad student left alone with the department's GeneJet 6P one Friday night and looking for something fun to print up. I'm worried about the disgruntled employee of a big pharmaceutical corporation who decides to go postal with the tools he knows best.

Would it be too onerous to perform legitimate research if you had to, say, order your deadlier genomes by mail? If you had to have an operator's license to use a geneprinter?

It may sound silly now, but it's not going to seem silly to the thousands or even millions who will be affected by the release of a deadly organism built in a moment of rashness or stupidity. And in the draconian security climate that will follow, researchers will look back fondly on our golden age and wish that all they had to put up with was snail mail.

Just a little security. That's all I ask, and I won't take more.

Interactive Storytelling and the Gamer, Part II: Nuts and Bolts

2005-08-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

In part I, we left off with a Social Simulation-Enhanced Role Playing Game (SSERPG) that had spawned the following situation:

A player had gone to Merlock the Magnificient looking for a 'Magma Mallet' spell; Merlock offered the spell in exchange for the killing of his enemy, Splitwick the Sage. Merlock didn't know 'Magma Mallet', though. He lied because he wanted the player to think more favorably of him, because he knew he had the trust of the weaponssmith, who's daughter Merlock hopes to marry. Splitwick knows Merlock is a liar, and has been using this to blackmail him to the sum of 100 gold monthly.

Now, let's take a look at how a social simulation would create this situation. I'm loosely basing this on my limited understanding of Chris Crawford's Erasmatron engine as I've read about it on his site. It's complicated, but not as nearly as complicated as it looks because we humans immediately draw all sorts of conclusions when we hear a string of gossipy facts like the previous paragraph. The reality is pretty shallow. It's certainly no Turing test.

Merlock, like all the actors in this social simulation, is nothing but a few lists and tables: values he's trying to maximize, and values he holds for other actors. These values are suggestively labeled 'trust', 'obligation', 'esteem', etc., but have specific mathematical relationships to those of other actors. The simulation provides various methods by which actors can end up expressing these relationships, and these include textual representations that make sense to the player but are irrelevant to the simulation.

By luck of the draw, Merlock has a want called 'love', and in semi-random fashion he drew a 'marry suitable woman' method from the simulation's dictionary for methods on gaining love. His indicators of socio-economic status matched a number of other actors classified as “women”, and in semi-random fashion he was assigned the weaponsmith's daughter as his ’suitable marry' target.

'Marry' is simply a word that, to the game, denotes a comitment that will not be accepted without some combination of high values of esteem towards the one asking, or obligation, or payment, etc. With different weights on the values, it could be 'share family recipe' or 'give footrub' or anything else. The name is actually unimportant, except where it helps the player understand the mechanics of it.

Because the weaponssmith's daughter did not have enough esteem/trust/obligation towards Merlock, she refused his ‘marry’ request. But by default, most actors give a 'what could I do to increase trust/obligation/esteem with you enough for X' query when they are refused something on such grounds. The dice rolled again, and the simulation selected the reply ‘gain the trust of my father', in part because her trust value towards her father is currently quite high, and in part because trust-increase replies to a man’s ‘marry’ request are inherently skewed towards a trusted father. So Merlock went to her father, the weaponssmith, and gave the 'what can I do to increase trust/obligation/esteem with you' query. The weaponsmith said ‘money‘ (you and I might call this ‘dowry’) or 'gain esteem of my friends', and gave a list of friends for whom his own trust value was high. This list included the player.

Since Merlock was low on cash, he could not immediately satisfy either of these requirements. His want for money increased, as did his want for the esteem of everyone on the weaponsmith’s list.

Enter, finally, the player. When the player came knocking, Merlock recieved an “I want Magma Mallet’ request. According to the rules of the simulation, actors will sometimes make false claims, or promises they can’t deliver, when they wish to increase their esteem with someone else right away. In other words, they lie, especially when their 'integrity' and 'intelligence' attributes are low relative to their degree of want. And when an actor in this situation has an 'i want this' request from another actor, he will not only claim he can provide it, but offer the same kind of trade he would if he were not lying. Otherwise, the lie would be pretty transparent -- and immediate -- making it useless for a temporary esteem boost.

This is not the first time Merlock has lied. It is a character defect for him, because his 'integrity' attribute is low. He had previously told a lie to another actor, because he wanted 'money', something the actor had and was willing to exchange for ‘Fireball Level 2', something Merlock did not have.

You may not be surprised to learn that this other actor was none other than Splitwick the Sage, who's wants included 'magical power' – that’s how he became a wizard in the first place. ‘Fireball Level 2’ was one of the items in the list of things that would satisfy Splitwick’s 'magical power' want. So Splitwick was asking other characters if they had ‘Fireball Level 2’. Merlock said he did. Splitwick asked for the spell. Merlock refused, because he did not have enough trust/esteem/obligation towards Splitwick. A “what can I do to increase trust/esteem/obligation with you enough to get [‘Fireball Level 2']” query was made, and Merlock responded with '100 gold', because, as mentioned, Merlock wanted money.

Splitwick gave Merlock the money, but Merlock did not give Splitwick the spell because he did not have it. Splitwick's trust and esteem of plunged, weighted by the worth of the unmet agreement, which was '100 gold'. But the relevant part for our story is that the simulation also computed that Splitwick had caught Merlock in a lie worth 100 gold, because Splitwick was privy to all the information neccessary to know this -- Merlock had said he had the spell, took 100 gold based directly on that claim, and then denied he had the spell, all in Splitwick's presence. Now, the simulation allows actors to respond to lies in a number of ways beyond the automatic drop in trust. One of the responses that can be chosen, especially for actors with low 'integrity' values, is 'blackmail'. It turns out that Splitwick isn't the embodiment of integrity himself, and this is what happened.

'Blackmail' is really just a name for a kind of threat transaction, which is when an actor tells another that unless he is given some want, he will perform an action guaranteed to lower the attainment score of what he believes is one of the others' wants. When the ‘blackmail' threat is drawn as a 'caught someone in a lie' response, the threat is to reveal the lie to a list of other actors -- an event which is sure to lower their trust towards that actor. Splitwick wants money. How much? The lie was worth 100 gold, and the simulation says that's worth 100 gold a month for 10 months. Ouch!

The simulation computes whether the lost trust will be worth more than the blackmail amount to the actor. In this case, it was determined that Merlock valued the collective trust of the people on the blackmail list more than 1000 gold, so he agreed to the blackmail. But as is the consequence of accepting a 'blackmail' threat, Merlock's esteem for Splitwick dropped to an abysmal low. Given Merlock’s lack of integrity, this score is low enough that he might, given the opportunity, contract an assassin.

Such an opportunity arose, of course, when our player arrived asking Merlock if he had the ‘Magma Mallet’ spell. Once again, Merlock lied. He lied because, as was shown, he had low 'integrity' and wanted to increase his esteem with 'player' in order to increase his trust with the weaponssmith in order to gain the trust of the weaponssmith's daughter, in order to obtain from her the 'marry' commitment, in order to satisfy his 'love' want. And the simulation required that he 'hide' the lie by behaving just as he would have if he were not lying, by naming a want that the player could satisfy that would be equal or greater to Merlock's theoretical value of the ‘Magma Mallet' spell. The simulation determined that 'kill Splitwick' was a suitable match, for reasons which we now know all too well.

So when the player made his 'what can I do to increase trust/obligation enough for 'Magma Mallet'' query, he was asked to kill Splitwick the Sage.

Whew.

See? There's nothing magical about it. In fact, Merlock had no clever plan for dealing with you once you had taken care of Splitwick. You would've caught him in a lie worth whatever you decided it was worth, because you're the player. He may have responded in one of the ways people caught in a lie can sometimes respond when they know they've been caught, like trying to kill the person who caught them. It may have looked to you like a clever plan, but it was really a simple causal reaction.

Or, if he had no such reaction, you might have tried a blackmail threat on Merlock yourself. And if you picked a low enough amount, and gave a good enough actor-tell list, he might have agreed. You came in looking for ‘Magma Mallet’, expecting a run-of-the-mill 'fetch me this' request. Instead, you assasinated another wizard and are now getting blackmail money every month – it’s unexpected, but logical, interesting, and helping you kick butt. In a word, fun!

Perhaps this all sounded needlessly convoluted to you.

In fact, it wasn’t complicated enough, as I gave only a peek at how a social simulation can give rise to such encounters. I omitted many details – most of which I probably haven’t even thought of.

But the point I hope I have made is that the social simulations behind interactive storytelling can solve the general case of creating interesting situations in a fictional universe.

Gamers may be inherently repelled to textual content because of how it is traditionally used, but in a SSERPG, the social simulation adds valuable depth and longevity to a tried-and-true game stye. I believe this is a recipe both for comercial success and for reaching out to non-gamers; The same mechanics that push you into the assassination business today could turn you into a collector of decorative swords, a marriage counselor, or who-knows-what-else tomorrow. And it could all still be in the name of helping you kick butt – if that’s what you want.

Interactive Storytelling and the Gamer, Part I: Hearts and Minds

2005-08-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

Even if you're only a casual gamer, you may have played Myst, back when CD-ROMs were new and gullible PC shoppers thought the word "multimedia" meant something.

If you're "old school", you might have played Zork, back when floppies were starting to overcome cassette tapes as the removable media of choice.

And even if you're a non-gamer, you might have read "Choose-your-own-Adventure" books.

None of these have anything to do with interactive storytelling. A modern interactive story is not really a story at all, but a social simulation in which stories arise naturally.

So get it out of your system and repeat the "simulation" mantra until it sinks in. Repeat it until you see interactive storytelling as something that is, in fact, unheard of in every game you've ever played, because none of the games you've played have ever simulated much of anything in a way that could create or change the plot.

This state of affairs will change. Soon, hopefully. But the fact that I felt compelled to address these likely misconceptions about interactive storytelling (IS) should give a sense of the difficulty IS products will have gaining initial market share among gamers.

It is true that non-gamers represent a huge untapped market potentially receptive to IS products. But IS isn't going to sell itself. Even if a huge swath of non-gaming adult women were born to play a new IS title, they're not going to go stumble into a game store and pick it up. They're not going to pay attention to advertisements for video games. Gaming is antithetical to their current sense of self. How will they ever get to the point of sale?

I see two major avenues. The first route is by way of entertainment they're already consuming. "Can't get enough of [novel, tvshow]? Enter the intrigue at [web address]." Web-based game play is something this audience could handle long before they could bring themselves to visit a game store, and probably more appropriate to the serialized media crossover model anyway. Web-based interactive stories, while benefitting from authorial and graphical styles, need not – and probably should not – be as flashy as their pc/console counterparts.

The second major avenue into the hearts of non-gamers is through their gaming friends and family. Consider a female college student, home for the summer. "I bet YOU would even like this game," says her obnoxious 15-year old brother. "I don't think so," says the young woman, just like she always does. But she steals glances at it. She becomes intrigued, then hooked, and eventually finds a way to get more.

The challenge for the developers in this case is creating products that will appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. While graphics and explosive settings aren't the selling points of interactive storytelling (IS), an IS product that is not web-based had better capitalize on the technical advantages and create a very rich client that gamers will accept and non-gamers will be able to grasp just by watching someone. I would strongly argue that The Sims, a crude-but-addicting social simulation, owes its amazing success with women to pulling off this procedure. (And coming out of the established Sim franchise certainly didn't hurt with the get-in-with-the-gamers-first part, either. There's probably a lesson there, too.)

But rich interactive storytelling is going to be even harder to sell to gamers without the extensive camouflage of a graphically-rich client. It’s a problem of past conditioning. The text/dialogue portions of most games are typically the parts we gamers try to skip. Chatty cut scene? Pass. Domestic side-quest? Nein. Expositionary lump? C'mon, let me kill something!

This is not because there is anything inherently wrong with dialogue or text in general, but because it has a cosmetic or janitorial role in most games -- generally to give the impression of a greater scope than actually exists, or to impart information that the interface was unable to communicate on its own. It's a facade. It's duct tape. It's filler. We gamers see right through it to the underlying mechanics, where words are scarcely to be found.

So how do you bring textual content back into a game in a meaningful way without triggering the gamer’s reflex? You camouflage it.

One way to make essential game text more palatable is to use an ‘iconized’ mini-language, something pioneered almost fifteen years ago in Chris Crawford’s inventive flop, Trust and Betrayal. The player builds statements by assembling icons that represent “words” understood by the game. The Sims could be said to use a drastically-simplified version of the same scheme: much too limited for a meaty interactive story, but easily understood by neophytes.

But iconized mini-languages of any complexity are difficult for the non-gamer to understand just by watching; indeed, Trust and Betrayal is said by some to have failed on account of its “confusing” interface. Today’s best compromise between plain-text and iconization is probably Deikto, the “tinker toy” language Crawford has devised for Erasmatron 4, his latest interactive storytelling engine. It’s not as visual as icons, but it’s still sleek, precludes the need for an ambiguous text-parsing prompt, and is a system a non-gaming observer can latch on to because it still uses actual words.

Wrapping up the language with a sleek GUI will not be enough, however, to turn today’s gamers into IS consumers. I think the best way here will be to retain elements that gamers know and enjoy. This idea is probably perverse to some IS purists, but I think that IS can, and should, be used from the start to add a much-desired level of depth to classical role-playing games – like the kind where monsters are slain, spells learned, and treasure discovered. Though I see nothing wrong with such hybrids in their own right, gamers who appreciate the IS dimension will have a good chance of being won over to “purer” IS titles. This will be especially true if the game includes non-violent means of achieving objectives that are at least as fun as the violent ones. Plenty of games have claimed to be revolutionary for including non-violent alternatives, but the non-violent paths have sucked to play.

So let's suppose we've got an IS-enhanced game that the gamer can now at least recognize as kin. How will the IS portions be used? Can diplomacy be as interesting as spellcasting? Can conversation compete with armed combat? When the words -– iconized, Deiktoized, or something else -- start scrolling up, what will keep the gamer from taking this opportunity to use the bathroom and check his email?

First, the words will be integral to the that which the gamer cares most about -- increasing his ability to kick butt.

In most games, Merlock the Magnificent doesn't feel like teaching you the ‘Magma Mallet’ spell. He sends you out into the swamp to find some rare reagent before he’ll help you.

But today, in the IS-enhanced version, he's going to try and talk you into killing his enemy, Splitwick the Sage, instead. The problem is, Splitwick knows other spells you also want to learn. And in this particular game, there is no "charisma" stat. If you want to reach a favorable agreement with Merlock, you're going to have to do it yourself.

Being clever, you may discover that Merlock does still, in fact, want that Screaming Rotweed. And you might convince him to teach you in exchange for the weed, which you will then seek in the Swamp of Slimy Horrors, with adventurous results.

Or maybe not. Maybe you'll agree to kill the Sage, but just prior to the killing make a false promise to spare his life if he gives you his spells. Or maybe you'll offer to dispatch a different rival who means less to you. It all depends on the scope and flexibility of the game engine, but these kinds of options are exactly what an IS engine is designed to provide.

As we know, a modern interactive story is not really a story at all, but a social simulation in which stories arise naturally as players choose their own paths.

[In fact, I believe the term “interactive storytelling” should be reserved for games in which the social simulation is enhanced by a “Virtual DM” (Dungeon Master, Drama Manager – take your pick) who follows and adjusts a player’s journey in order to promote the dramatic structure and suspense-arcs we instinctively associate with storytelling.]

With a robust enough social simulation, you can have an economy where the participants can exchange not just gold for spells, but commitments for trust, trust for quests, quests for gratitude, and gratitude for gold. You'll still get your spell, if that's what you want, but the path will be more interesting, because you found it and chose it yourself.

Now, some of you will say that you have had these kinds of options before. Yes, I did play Morrowind, and there were indeed occasions where you could take a diplomatic tack, or a stealth tack, or a brute-force tack to increase the trust NPCs had in you. And this trust did indeed translate to new spells, items, or abilities. And they did indeed allow me to kick butt.

And in my growling gamer voice, I shout, "Yes! And it was good!"

But I also say that it was good because the world builders put in so many thousands of hours scripting up these specific situations. It was obvious that there was no underlying social simulation that could've spawned these options dynamically. The hand-sculpted approach has the advantage of allowing every situation to be rich in intelligent, creative details, if someone is able and willing to add those details. But the social simulation approach offers other advantages. The first is obvious: vastly greater numbers of situations. More interesting are the possibilities of tragic, humorous, or convoluted situations that make perfect sense within the simulation but would never have been anticipated by the designers or the players.

In our SSERPG (Social Simulation-Enhanced Role-Playing Game), It turns out that Merlock didn't even know the ‘Magma Mallet’ spell. He lied because he wanted you to think more favorably of him, because he knew you had the trust of the weaponssmith, who's daughter's hand in marriage he is seeking. Merlock the Magnificent is a con. He asked you to kill Splitwick, because the Sage knows he is a con, and has been using this to blackmail Merlock to the sum of 100 gold monthly.

It all makes sense now, doesn't it?

But maybe it sounds too good to be true. Perhaps you are thinking, like many game developers past and present, that no social simulation could never create this situation without the management of a human-level AI.

If so, stay tuned: In Part II, I show you how its done. Mostly.

My Summer of Code

2005-07-30T01:45:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not talking about a Google-sponsored open-source Summer of Code. I should be so lucky!

But thanks to my wonderful wife, I've had the next best thing: 6 weeks of low-interruption, low-obligation crunch time. She took Jason down to Mexico while I cuddled up with my text editor.

As you may know, I'm trying hard to train myself for a career as a software architect, professional writer, or some combination of the two. As the primary caregiver of a now two-year-old, it has been a bit of a struggle. Last spring, I learned the high school math I never learned in high school. I had retained almost none of it, and from what I recall, the understanding I had back then wasn't worth retaining. I also learned some basic Python, an oh-so-nifty programming language I wish never to be parted from.

Summer, autumn and winter were difficult times of heavy parenting, in which, for the sake of my sanity, I had to content myself with daytime reading and late-night writing. Jason made it tough even for these, but at least I continued to learn and develop in areas important to me.

[At this point, I must ask forgiveness of my non-programming readers while I give a concise accounting of my summer exploits.]

I started to heat things back up this spring, as more time became available. I learned Linux well enough for it to become my primary OS. Getting MythTV running had a lot to do with this switch, although I haven't watched TV at all this summer. (It's mostly for the wife and kid, since I'm currently suffering from Simpsons fatigue.)

I actually said “free as in beer” the other day, too. My indoctrination is complete.

As spring moved into summer, I dusted off my Python and went on to become pretty fluent. Why Python? I doubt there's any faster way to gain exposure to the terms and metaphors of programming-in-general. This really helps me understand what the writers of programming books are saying. I'm drinking from a firehose, and need all the help I can get.

But I didn't become fluent by simply reading books and doing exercises – although I've done plenty of that.

I gained my fluency by plunging into what, to a beginner like me, is an ambitious project: A suite of dynamic mod-making utilities for Freelancer, the game of space combat and privateering my brother and I had been playing together on Saturdays.

We had first played Freelancer when it came out in 2003. It's a great game that leaves you wanting more content. So in a bit of hopeful nostalgia, we were trying the impressive FLRebalance mod for Freelancer.

FLRebalance combined new star systems, ships, and weapons from many different modders. Excellent! But among other things, this meant that there were now many hundreds of different items for sale, each apparently priced by their creators, who seemed to have very different ideas on what things should cost. Another side-effect of massive inclusion was inconsistent use of the new items, leaving many of them in relative obscurity. As a result, I felt that FLRebalance lacked, well, balance.

Apart from a couple of very minor and lucky bug fixes in years long past, I've never done any modding. (Well, I did play with the Unlimited Adventures build-your-own-gold-box-D&D-game kit back in the day, but I'm not sure that counts.)

Frankly, the kind of modding I wanted to see in Freelancer never held much appeal to me. Not only are there a gazillion little decisions to make, it's tedious, repetetive, and error-prone... the kind of activity computers were meant to do.

Aha!

After spending quality time with Google and Lancer's Reactor (the premier Freelancer modding site), I was satisfied that the tools I wanted did not exist. I had found my summer project. (Update: As of yesterday, someone else has made a basic version of one of my tools -- a ship shuffler. Guess I'd better hurry!)

My toolkit, FLModMonkey, makes the kinds of global alterations to large game variants like Rebalance that only the foolish or masochistic modder would want to try and do by hand. It currently does the following:

--Uses a complex and finely tuned scoring algorithm to set and integrate a fair price for every ship in the game variant being examined.
--Uses another complex and finely tuned scoring algorithm to set a fair price for every weapon.
--Uses yet another algorithm to determine the “level” of star systems based on the difficulty of the missions offered within them, and redistributes the ships being sold based on these scores, with some controlled noise thrown in to ensure a fresh shuffle every time.
--Generates as many as several thousand unique random weapons by applying clever Diablo-style modifiers to existing weapons (with excellent flavor text, I might add).

Before I'm finished with this version, it will also do this:

--Shuffle the weapons being sold similar to the redistribution of ships described above, except for weapons that will only drop from NPCs (see below.).
--Generate hundreds of variations on existing ships (i.e. 'used' or 'modded'), similar to the weapon generator.
--Generate thousands of new loadouts for NPC pilots, making use of all of the above.
--Combine all of the above into a simple super-utility that determines logical boundary prices and shuffling restrictions based on the data found in the game variant being modified.

Apart from all the programming essentials I've learned just in the course of learning Python, FLModMonkey has brought me excuses to play with unicode strings, XML, hexadecimal arithmetic, and more. But at it's heart, writing FLModMonkey is all about creating, weighting, curving and tweaking scoring algorithms, an area I find particularly interesting.

But now that I'm about midway through the project, with most of the research behind me, it's become more about code management. I'm taking pleasure in becoming more object oriented as I go along and grow more comfortable with this methodology.

But FLModMonkey does not own me, as hard as it tries. I've also done the following this summer:

Progressed from Vim newbie to actually feeling at home in the editor. A few stategic keymappings have allowed me to more than compensate for the inherent disadvantage I have with the defaults as a Dvorak typist.

Learned the basics of C with help from K&R, and wrote some very fast little utilities for converting things like Project Gutenberg .txt files and multiple decompressed .chm pages into a basic single-page HTML format that RBMAKE can easily use to make perfect .rb files to send to my REB1100 via REBCOMM. You catch all that?

Became a confident regular expressionist, with help from Mastering Regular Expressions and the Python Regex Howto. Which is good, because FLModMonkey is, by nature of its mission, heavy on the .ini file text parsing.

Lost my Windows API virginity by using Mark Hammond's WinAPI extensions for Python – initially to open the .dll files Freelancer stores some of its text in and pull out the creamy goo inside. Yes, I put it back. And then some.

Began keeping a programming schedule (at the advice of Joel on Software), so as to learn the valuable art of estimating how long it will take me to code something.

Encountered Getting Things Done, as seen in Wired Magazine. Like many geeks, I was already pretty organized. I had the stereotypical todo.txt files lying around. GTD was just what I needed to close the remaining leaks in my personal management loops.

Wrote my own little keyboard-centric, cross-platform (GTD-flavored) organizer program (in Python) to bring unity to my to-do lists. Every hacker has done this at some point, right?

Discovered the work done by veteran game programmer Chris Crawford in the embryonic genre of Interactive Storytelling. You may be hearing a lot about interactive storytelling from me, because it's a topic I happen to be fascinated in.

My wife gets back in a couple days, and my parenting duties will return. I intend to see FLModMonkey through to completion, however, even if it takes me until Christmas. Hopefully it won't come to that: we've got more financial stability and babysitting options this year.

And Jason has finally started talking!

Flickr of Interest

2005-02-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

A recent entry in Aaron’s Blog piqued my curiosity about Flickr, a rapidly growing online photo hosting service that emphasizes community-oriented features. By making it easy for subscribers to locate, organize, and markup their own – and each others’—photos, Flickr becomes one humongous photo album/personal directory with the combined industriousness and intelligence of all its users.

Experiencing the smooth interface and hearing of the free accounts, one might be tempted to place Flickr in the same league as, say, Gmail: internet manna. But alas, Flickr, though a very interesting service, is no land of milk and honey for the poorest of poor wayfaring photographers. The bounty comes with a price.

The problem is that the free account, despite hosting the obligatory ads via Google, is really just a tease for anyone who wants to do more than, say, show off a new grandchild. The most serious restriction is the upload limit of just ten megabytes per month. On the free account I opened, I uploaded twelve images of a trip my wife and I made a few years back to Idaho and the adjacent Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. I had more, but after just these twelve images, which I had already scaled down to the size of a quality desktop background image, I was benched for the next 29 days. So, while Flickr technically offers free account users unlimited storage, it would take one of them more than eight years to upload even a gigabyte of data – an amount which, by 2013, would seem positively Lilliputian; Heck, Gmail users had that much free space back in 2004!

The non-paying subscriber, just like a non-subscriber, faces what are effectively download limitations as well, since Flickr processes each uploaded image into several standard sizes which are henceforth the only ones available to anyone who does not hold a “Pro” account; these can access and download the original uploaded files, regardless of their size. Fortunately, Flickr’s generic “large” size (for original images at least that size) is 1024 x 768 pixels – adequate for most desktop backgrounds, though first-time users may not immediately notice the links to these versions of each picture.

That “Pro Account” currently costs $41.77 a year, boosts the monthly upload limit to a gigabyte, and pretty much removes all other limitations on the account. I suppose 42 bucks isn’t all that much, but it’s more than I am willing to pay for offsite disk storage since photography is, for me, an infrequent hobby at best. If I needed a clever photo organizer, or wanted to get to know other people through their photographs, I would consider joining the club. But, like paid subscription “meet markets” for singles, I think there’s just something slightly unseemly about paying for a service where feature content is provided by other paying members.

At any rate, Flickr is fun just to browse around in, and I’ve begun to use it alongside Google Images when I’m searching for an image of something I’m reading or thinking about. It’s well organized, and the average posted photograph is better than you might think. I guess that makes sense; if you’re a freeloader like me, you’ve got to make those 10 megabytes count.

'Singularity Sky': Wishes and Warships

2005-02-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

“Fertile imagination” would not be the right phrase with which to describe that portion of Charles Stross’s mind with which his readers are most familiar. I am more inclined to use “radioactive mutagenic spawning pit of amusement,” and suspect he would wear this description with pride.

I’ve read, and enjoyed, a number of his stories. But Stross always seems to want to move on to the next story premise in the middle of the one he was writing, so I worried whether his simultaneously heavy, zany, and sometimes macabre style could hold up over the course of an entire novel. It was thus with nervous glee that I picked up ‘Singularity Sky’, his first full-length feature, from my local library.

The novel opens, aptly enough, with high technology raining from the skies on an economically and politically backwater planet, Rochard’s World. It is a dispassionate yet dire threat to the repressive powers that be. Would the long-time would-be revolutionaries obtain fearsome weaponry? Would the big wigs of the old regime even try to maintain the impoverished status quo in light of the inherently prosperous new reality?

The interesting stories that could be told about such a population abound. In fact, stories and other entertainment are the only currency of interest to the interstellar interlopers granting the high-tech wishes, a mysterious entity known as the Festival.

But, perhaps because we have no nanoassemblers which to tempt the author, we never get more than a few outlandish vignettes about those on Rochard’s World. Instead, the novel’s dramatic center of gravity quickly and permanently shifts to somewhere within the Lord Vanek, flagship of a military task force en route to the embroiled planet. Depending on your taste in science fiction, the precise center is either Martin: a civilian contractor who comes aboard with hidden prerogatives, or the miniature black hole that is the ship’s drive kernel.

This is somewhat disappointing, because both planet and starship contain several named characters with whom I was probably expected to take an interest. But most of Stross’s characters lack emotional appeal and become a chore to keep straight. The revolutionaries and their adversaries on Rochard’s World are stereotypical voices in a predictable debate. The Vanek’s crew: empty uniforms wadded up into sweaty ball of intrigue.

There is one important female character, Rachel, who ultimately manages to radiate some warmth and charm, sharing the limelight with Martin and providing some romantic tension.

But before this can happen, she and Martin must burn through a couple layers of identity shielding. They have to have several in order to stand out, since everyone else in the book also seems to have at least one Secret Identity or Great Big Secret. The combined weight of these surprises ultimately becomes rather silly, to the point that the novel’s final revelations made me want to stand up and throw someone a Scooby Snack.

I shouldn’t be so hard on Stross. This was a new format for him, and there were a lot of fun ideas in ‘Singularity Sky’. But this was a book I could, and did, put down. Often. It just seemed like more fun for Stross than for me. Like a three-ring circus, there was more showmanship than I had the attention to be amused by. I found his parallel plot-lines too independent and too lacking in harmony to keep most cliffhangers from turning into offramps. Too much thread, not enough yarn.

And then there’s the fake-out chapter, which I might have been ok with back when I liked Star Trek and its holodeck ‘never happened’ episodes, but truly angered me on this occasion. I won’t reveal the scene here, but after realizing my trust had been betrayed for the sake of a flashy action sequence that could not actually take place within Stross’s chosen plot, I was tempted to put the book down permanently.

Stross also seems determined to make a political statement, but on this occasion lacks the subtlety to work it into the tale in more than the most amateur way. To completely implausible foil characters, Martin and Rachel lecture on the failings of traditional government. Like interstellar hipsters, they teach the squares about the grooviness of techno anarchy and how central control is, like, so 20th century. It’s all so obvious: Rochard’s World is upstate New York. The Festival is Woodstock.

‘Singularity Sky’ is not without its charms, but does not pull itself together into a working whole. Hopefully, Stross will learn to evoke more depth and unity as he continues to stretch his frenetic creativity into novel-length stories. His sequel to this book, ‘Iron Sunrise’, is already out. I’ll look around for it the next time I’m in a Stross mood.

Oh, a few words about the title: Singularity Sky does have something to do with the technological Singularity, but mostly in the sense of sudden abundance changing all the rules, rather than the creation of greater than human intelligence. And the polarized situation on Rochard’s World doesn’t lend itself to drawing intelligent parallels to the consequences of such a Singularity here on earth. But if your favorite kind of singularity is astronomical, you’re in luck: the Lord Vanek's engine room gets plenty of page space.

Technology and the Psychology of Physical Fitness

2005-02-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

Some day, hopefully not too far distant, simple drugs or procedures will provide the health and cosmetic benefits of physical fitness without the dieting and exercise. And some day, perhaps not long after that, these primate bodies will become obsolete entirely.

Until that time, we must cope. Unfortunately, modern civilization enjoys the dubious—even ludicrous—distinction of excelling in medicine while neglecting bodily maintenance. It’s like a world where the auto mechanics are practically godlike, but nobody can seem to keep their oil changed regularly.

The problem is not that scientifically researched diets and workout regimens are ineffective, but that so few of us are able to stick with them.

Our overweight society is, fortunately-if-slowly, moving past the fallacious view of obesity as a moral failing. Losing weight is just plain hard on many levels, and the psychological one is the hardest of all.

A miracle pill that causes immediate weight loss might be very efficient, but it would be no more effective than a miracle pill that grants people the willpower to eat right and exercise. Frankly, I would prefer the latter, despite the extra time required, since presumably that extra willpower could be applied to other ambitions.

The gold standard of weight-loss programs, as with drugs, ought to be careful studies that compare the end results of a study group with a control group. How much weight did group A lose and keep off, compared to group B? The pragmatic, fair researcher will not exclude those who quit early from group A from the data, though for publicity reasons weight-loss programs brave enough to do studies at all will often do just that.

In these cases, the baby has been thrown out in lieu of the bathwater. Pretty much any program where calories are significantly reduced and physical activity is significantly increased will result in weight loss. The proportion of subscribers who stick with the program is, in fact, the variable most worth tracking.

The question I am most interested in addressing right now is this: How might we use today’s technology to help people overcome the psychological obstacles to maintaining their bodies? While there is probably much to be said about food, today I’m going to focus solely on exercise.

I think it can be helpful to start by considering if there are any groups of people who, despite living in modern, western comfort, remain physically fit for years or decades at a time. There are. They are called athletes.

An athlete is different from someone who is merely physically fit. In an athlete, the fitness is merely a means to a competitive end. I won’t deny that there are some tough individuals out there able to make themselves run lap after lap, week after week, year after year, with no carrot in front of them except their own good health. But I’ll bet there are fewer of them than people think. Most solitary exercisers are competing for something, and they know it. They are chasing the carrots of wooing potential mates, thwarting rivals for those mates, or the challenge of beating their own best performance.

But these closet athletes are probably outnumbered easily by those who play competitive sports. “Competitive” need not mean league play, either, but rather any situation where a participant can be said to win or lose. Competitive sports dangle so many carrots and flashing trinkets in front of the players that they have an impressive power to overcome the psychological resistance to physical exertion.

Perhaps most importantly, the player is distracted from the discomfort of exercise by the mental and emotional demands of the game. Similarly, the player wants the closure of completing each quarter, inning, lap, etc., and is unlikely to stop in the middle just because he or she is getting a little winded. Players may also be interacting heavily with other team members, an additional distraction bringing the added impulse to not let the team down by stopping short. The desire to impress one’s teammates or trounce one’s opponents even leaks out between the games, helping drive players to train independently during their free time. The player-athlete doesn’t give a hoot about physical fitness. The player-athlete just wants to excel, and win.

So if sports make physical fitness a non-issue, why don’t more people participate? There are plenty of logistical reasons: scheduling issues, equipment costs, facility costs, climate incompatibility. But once again, the chief impediments are psychological. People want to excel, and if they feel they will never be competitive with their peers in a sport they like, they will probably never get into it. Likewise, if they think they could be competitive only after years of training, they are unlikely to bother. And there are many who have simply been bored to tears by every sport they’ve ever been exposed to.

How can technology transform those who are disinclined to sports into athletes? By creating exercise environments filled with distractive engagement and situations demanding closure; environments where any player, novice or expert, can feel competitive; environments that provide, measure and show each player their performance improvements from one day to the next.

The first example I ever recall seeing of this was an arcade game where a player seated at a stationary bike made a virtual flying machine travel from point to point on screen by pedaling. The game seem kind of slow, and I don’t think it ever caught on. But, today we have a nearly ubiquitous workout game to look at: Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), where players step, twist, and jump to the beat on a set pressure pads, as indicated by instructional symbols scrolling in time to the music. (I myself have recently become a DDR convert, but that’s a post for another day.)

DDR, especially in its home console versions, has a lot going for it as a workout device. It’s cheap, storable, and playable (indoors) regardless of the weather. It can be used solo, or with others – even online. But DDR’s biggest advantages are psychological. Mentally taxed by following the stepping instructions, the beat of the music, and the feel of the dance pad, a player is thoroughly distracted into completing whatever outrageously exhausting routine they may have signed up for in selecting a song at a given difficulty level. The game scores and cheerfully comments on each performance in real-time, pushing players on to ever higher scoring combos. After songs, players are scored and graded in ways that let them compare themselves to others or their own prior performances.

But DDR is by no means a total workout solution, and has plenty of disadvantages. Most obviously, the upper body is little-used. And, like any song or video game played solo long enough, it must ultimately become boring. More games are needed, as are more ways for these games to trick their players into gladly working themselves into a fitness frenzy. More competitive games are needed that can accommodate small or large teams of evenly matched player-athletes; more cooperative games are needed that let players work and workout together to pound zombies, terrorists, or tetrads.

I eagerly await a game that affordably and creatively brings full-body aerobic and resistance training into my living room. I suspect I will be waiting a long time. But imagine the possibilities! I want a game where dueling battlemechs charge shields with aerobic exertion while wielding heavy weapons through brute strength. I want a fantasy game where random encounters make me sweat and defeating the boss leaves me sore the next day.

I want the carrots dangling before this sweaty flesh-bag of mine to be rendered in anti-aliased high resolution, with lightning fast frame rates and no less than 64-bit color depth. Is that too much to ask?

Necessary though it may be, I, like most humans, don’t like to exercise. But I do like to play. And I love to win.

Show me a gamer, and I’ll show you an athlete.

We can build him. We have the technology.

'Transcension': Boy Meets Girl Meets Singularity

2005-01-03T01:24:00.000-07:00

It is a testament to good storytelling that in a novel suffused with high technology of the pre- and post singularity ages, a thread revolving around a young man in an Amish-like community can be the most compelling. Such is the nature of Damien Broderick’s ‘Transcension’, a clever blend of nostalgia and discovery that satisfies despite a couple of important flaws.

The inevitable clash of cultural and romantic tension between the agrarian young man and a brusquely modern teenage girl from beyond the valley occurs early and enjoyably, beginning a down-to-earth adventure occurring within a broader tale of Singularity and human destiny. I could reveal more about the plot without spoiling the ending, but this is a book in which much of the page-turning suspense comes from the desire to learn more about how this fictional universe is structured, and why its characters live the way they do.

Most every character is likable, even the ones standing obstinately in the way of progress in general and our protagonists in particular. Broderick imbues them all with a measure of his wry humor appropriate to their station. He also gives endearing streaks of sensitivity and innocence, even to those whose roles would seem to imply an informed detachment.

The technology pulling this plot together is more remarkable for the wit and style with which it is deployed than for the mechanics of it all, which are left largely to the imagination. It is a controversial convention of Singularity-aware science fiction shared by authors such as Vernor Vinge—and Broderick’s Australian contemporary, Greg Egan—to present the higher technology of tomorrow as being devised by minds so much smarter than ours that we might not understand the explanations even if we had them, fulfilling Arthur C. Clarke’s law that sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

So is this book “hard” sci-fi, or soft? Or is it pure fantasy? These kinds of questions show why so many publications, bookstores, and libraries no longer bother making such distinctions, if they ever did. ‘Transcension’ definitely comes across as science fiction, even if some of the higher technology has little, if any, foundation in known science.

And this is certainly no space opera, (like Star Wars) where the technology is a merely a stylistic background on which an archetypal melodrama is played. Transcension’s characters could not exist in a fictional universe with any other combination of technologies.

In fact, Broderick seems to respect his technology enough that he felt it necessary to include a number of real-world quotations relevant to possibility of artificial intelligence; I suspect that this novel exists, in part, to address AI naysayers.

Taken in its entirety, Transcension makes a good read, and I happily recommend it to anyone looking for some unusual and enjoyable fiction. But Trancension is not without its failings.

Most glaringly, Broderick commits what, in modern fiction, is the nearly unpardonable sin of direct dialect: scenes told from the point of view of the female lead are written in the same cropped style as her dialogue, which eschews articles and pronouns. I subscribe to the mainstream notion that dialects should be implied with a relatively small number of words, phrases, figures of speech, or other patterns woven into that character’s scenes. These are more than enough to give the reader a sense of the character’s way of speaking. Once you get carried away and start explicitly stylizing with the swagger of Mark Twain, you will almost certainly violate the modern commandment: “Thou shalt not get in the way of thy reader.”

I was also somewhat annoyed when, near the novel’s climax, Broderick chose to present a few scenes from the viewpoints of minor characters with whom we had not made any strong emotional connection—for we had not previously spent much, if any, time inside their heads. This is a borderline violation of the modern guideline stating that new characters should not be introduced near the end of a story; sure, we knew them, but not well enough for them to take center stage near the peak of suspense.

Authors, of course, are allowed to break any rules they wish, but they are advised to have good reasons for accepting the inevitable tradeoffs. I, the reader, didn’t feel these particular departures were warranted. And this brings up the Prime Principle of writing: the reader is always right.

Kurzweil, Bostrom, Peterson on SIAI Advisory Board

2004-12-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

I was delighted to see this news in the latest installment of the newsletter put out every few months by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I think Nick Bostrom and Christine Peterson have been cheering SIAI on from the beginning, but Ray Kurzweil had seemed to think SIAI’s cause was as hopeless and unnecessary as it was admirably idealistic.

Kurzweil’s is probably the best known voice in American futurism, and he has done much to educate people about the reality and potential consequences of accelerating technological progress—myself included. By accepting a position on the new Advisory Board of SIAI, Kurzweil has gained an additional measure of my esteem and gratitude.

(Anyone interested in receiving a copy of Kurzweil’s new book before it is released should check the beginning of the bulletin.)

Congratulations to Kurzweil and SIAI. May the Board advise well and increase public awareness of the Singularity Institute as a force for good in this universe.

The Technology Squeeze: Teachers

2004-12-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

I initially had teachers on my list under “professions that should probably be partially automated, but won’t be”, but after reading Richard Worzel’s ‘The Next Twenty Years of Your Life’, I feel inclined to move them into the “can expect to be partially displaced by automation” category.

The reason he sold me on was demographic: The elderly have historically proven themselves opposed to increased education spending—after all, their kids have long since graduated—and Baby Boomers are about to swell the ranks of the senior citizenry. This will mean a massively increased burden on government entitlement programs alongside shrinking tax revenues. Pushing through new funding for education in this fiscal climate may be next to impossible.

And yet, the attitude that “something is wrong” with our educational system does not seem to be disappearing, so we can expect the usual vague, contradictory pleas for education reform to continue. Pie-in-the sky plans that promise to both improve schools and cut costs will be more attractive than ever.

Worzel and I agree that technology does indeed allow better, cheaper education. Studies suggest that interactive educational software can be more effective than a traditional classroom environment when the products are well-crafted by talented teams of instructors and programmers. What is true in corporate training programs would be even more true in public schools: The high cost of production is more than made up for in volume, as the program gets used in thousands of classrooms and reduces staffing requirements. Woila. Improved educations and reduced budgets.

However, when educational software is implemented on the cheap, the cure is much worse than the disease. A developer who merely adds little quizzes and a few flashy bits of multimedia to a digital version of a textbook will always have the cheapest offering. Getting what they pay for, disappointment, ill-feelings, and much finger pointing ultimately ensue among the buyers.

The moral for today is that no matter the quality of the software, teachers in districts that spend heavily on these programs can expect pressure or outright reassignment to remove them from the traditional classroom setting. They may find themselves shunted into less-attractive duties that are not-so-subtle attempts to encourage tenured professionals to take an early retirement.

The trend will be spotty. The American public school system is a patchwork of local districts that usually have a great deal of autonomy. As the price of hardware continues to drop, the largest and most volatile districts—generally those of metropolitan areas—will set the trend. Chronically understaffed and underfunded, but with an unrivalled ability to pool large sums of capital, they will be eager to invest in software that promises to bring top talent to every classroom in the city. Barring flaming wreckage in pilot programs, the quality of the digital alternatives will be irrelevant from the standpoint of teachers whose subjects will shortly invite replacement.

Less deliberative subjects at junior high or high school levels will be obvious targets: Algebra, Earth Science, geography, and driver education, for example. Math and science teachers are usually in short supply, adding another reason to make heavy use of software in these subjects. Because of said shortage, however, these teachers will probably find ready employment in the more advanced subjects—or in other districts.

Elementary school teachers will be the least vulnerable, followed by teachers of writing, calculus, art or anything else difficult for software to helpfully evaluate. I’m not sure about physical education teachers—not because they’re easily replaceable but because P.E. programs make easy targets when funds are scarce.

Now, few will think it a good idea to leave students at terminals without adult supervision. So where, they will rightly ask, would the cost savings come from?

Larger class sizes. Not necessarily in the form of bigger or more crowded rooms—although this will be possible in some buildings. No, the nature of the media will mean that teachers can remain in the loop without being tied to a given room in a given building. Loose online arrangements can replace the typical class structure entirely, allowing students to complete courses at their own pace and still have professional teachers on call for one-on-one help or small group sessions at all hours. Teachers would be making better use of their time, increasing productivity and reducing payrolls. Those who take their teaching online may enjoy their jobs more, too, freed from the responsibilities of classroom management. The adult body in a classroom (or generic computer lab) will not be a low-paid teacher, but lower-paid aide—a glorified warden at the minimum security day-care institution that is a public secondary school.

But if we’re moving courses and teachers online, why come to school at all?

Why, indeed? It’s not inconceivable that schools would cope with decreased per-pupil funds by shortening the school day or year and requiring some specific courses to be completed from home. But I don’t expect things to reach their logical conclusion—the wholesale closing of school buildings. There is immense social inertia locked up in public education; too many roles to fill: day care, social interaction, moral and civil indoctrination, and the not-to-be-underestimated parental instinct to see that our children learn the same (often pointless) things that we did in the same (often ineffective) ways.

Expecting these same institutions to educate almost seems unreasonable, doesn’t it? Smart use of technology would help to compartmentalize these functions, which is probably a good thing. Too many students today graduate with an ingrained understanding that learning is something done at the behest of others in a building set aside for the purpose. In the typical public school, education can easily become an emotionally repellant activity—one students will avoid for life and never undertake without the whip of external discipline cracking overhead.

This is partly why, at the beginning of this post, I suggested that replacing many teachers with software would probably be a good thing, whether or not it was likely. It’s not a perfect solution to the problems inherent to public education, and probably not even a great one. But it’s one that we could actually see happen.

In any event, teachers—in some grades, in some subjects, in some districts—face what looks like a technology squeeze. They would be wise to take stock of their situation and plan accordingly. The teaching profession is not going to die anytime soon, but portions of it appear destined to become less hospitable.

'The Next Twenty Years of Your Life': Your Future as a Canadian

2004-12-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

The late 1990’s were clearly a writer’s market for future studies. Among the works commissioned for the impending turn of the millennium, Richard Worzel’s ‘The Next 20 Years of Your Life: A Personal Guide into the Year 2017’ stands out for its combination of competence, politeness, and unpretentiousness. It is, to put it simply, very Canadian.

This is not to say that ‘The Next 20 Years of Your Life’ cannot apply to Americans or others, but unlike more generically focused works, this one is clearly written for Canadian consumption. The economic trends focus on Canadian corporations and Canadian institutions. But Americans have not been entirely incorrect in their simpleminded assumption that the provinces north of the border are basically U.S. states; most bureaucratic agencies mentioned in this book have close parallels in both nations, and we can expect them to react—or fail to react, in similar ways.

Worzel adds colorful projection to his restrained discussion with occasional present-tense vignettes of individuals in future scenarios. Some of these characters use wearable computers and semi-intelligent digital ‘genies’ to make their daily arrangements and monitor their health. Others create their own television programming, delivered via the internet. Loose, federated business arrangements provide freedom and profit for the well-connected, and new technology enables forward-looking schools to provide better education at lower cost. Medical patients benefit from sophisticated suites of non-invasive diagnostics combined with custom genetic or nanotechnological treatments. All are reasonably credible scenarios, though some seem to entail a great deal of expense.

Worzel does not miss a beat, however. One of the chief questions addressed by this book is “Who will pay for all of this?” Worzel’s economic discussions suggest a globalized future where those with incomes enjoy tremendous prosperity, but where incomes are harder to come by, even for those who are well off: a kind of punctuated poverty that provides both freedom and prosperity for the flexible and disciplined, but a lack of security for those unable or unwilling to do what it takes to stay in the game. Adding to the instability, the bulge of aging North American baby boomers threatens to overdraw the resources of the working population without drastic cuts in entitlements. Worzel makes such points with candor and compassion, in a kind of personal plea to prepare for a more rough-and-tumble era of capitalism than many of us have known.

There are a few dry spots in ‘The Next Twenty Years of Your Life’. The chapter on the evolving telecommunications industry occasionally reads like a biblical lineage about which Canadian telco begat which thanks to some regulation or other. And the chapters on learning and education sometimes feel redundant, with overlong vignettes.

But on the whole, Worzel is both reasonable and interesting, a sometimes difficult combination for a futurist to achieve. He keeps to his chosen focus, and only takes readers to the relatively pedestrian year 2017, rather than through a technological Singularity (which can’t be ruled out by then, but will probably come later) and on to the end of the universe. In ‘The Next Twenty Years of Your Life’, the promise of personal guidance for the years just ahead is kept by an author well worth reading.

The Sick Truth About Virtual Reality?

2004-12-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

In Mark Pesce’s ‘The Playful World’( a book I’ve previously mentioned but not reviewed), he relates an interesting insider’s tale of the early days of Virtual Reality. Actually, it’s the premature days of VR – the era of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and other misguided, mislabeled implements of eye pain that gave VR the bad reputation it enjoys to this day. The system Pesce was working on at the time was for the Sega Genesis, and by his account would’ve been far better than anything else within reach of the general public: it had the essential head-tracking feature separating VR from mere 3D glasses (which is all that the Virtual Boy and an earlier Sega accessory were).

But the product was terminated at the cusp of completion.

It seemed that test subjects trying out the prototype would often take several minutes or more to recover from their experience. Pesce says that today’s VR equipment tricks the brain into adopting a new spatial awareness, but does so only with a limited number of the orientation cues used in the real world – and VR doesn’t manipulate these exactly the same way real life does. As a result, people can come out of the experience disoriented, with trouble focusing--even dizzy or nauseous. Concerns about immediate injury aside, there was the question of what effects long-term use might have on the developing brains of the target demographic.

With no medical evidence or background whatsoever, I’m going to suggest that any effects would probably be negligible, and could even be beneficial.

You see, we modern humans already adjust to different patterns of perceptual awareness with some regularity. Some of the first humans to get a real taste of this were probably sailors. The untrained mind revolts to the discrepancies of motion and vision on a body of water, often with chunky, acidic effect. Getting one’s “sea legs” takes some getting used to, but it does reliably happen. When sailors disembark, the firmness of solid earth can be disorienting, too. But again, the effects are temporary.

Nowadays, automobiles are a more common alternative perceptual experience. We don’t often notice it because we ride in cars from the earliest days of our youth, but to someone who has never traveled at speeds not reachable by animal legs, the smooth, cocooned accelerations of a car can be as nauseating as a sea voyage. I suspect most of us have felt car sick at some point or other, despite our usual acclimation.

Trains, planes, submarines, rollercoaster rides… all opportunities for disorientation, sometimes intentionally, but we seldom worry about long-term effects on our brains.

But none of these fully replace our visual awareness the way VR does. Is this a fundamental difference?

I doubt it. Consider getting a pair of glasses for the first time, or an updated prescription. You can experience a kind of fishbowl dizziness, but you adjust over a period of days, if not hours or minutes. And with some conditioning, can switch between wearing glasses or contacts or nothing with little discomfort

I’ve noticed the same thing when playing “first-person shooter” games on my computer, which are close cousins of VR. I’m a pretty talented player who quickly assimilates the spatial dimensions and physics of a game, and as such, I’m shifting my movement and visual directions very rapidly when I play, both to avoid being killed and to stay abreast of my three-dimensional surroundings. But I often go months at a time without playing a FPS. And if I haven’t played one in a while, I can get pretty green around the gills if I bust out of the spawn at full tilt without warming up. (Watching other hard-core players can be similarly disturbing, since my brain can’t anticipate their jinking and jumping.)

I don’t think that VR will be all that different. The technology is improving as well, which should make a comforting difference; instead of abstract Euclidian shapes, we’ll be getting the same level of detail we see in games today. In fact, today’s high-end game engines can accommodate multiple, shifting viewpoints so easily that hooking up VR hardware at home will be pretty trivial. I suspect I will be one of the first to jump on board when affordable VR helmets are introduced with display quality rivaling that of my monitor. I’ve always felt that certain games, particularly those with aerial dogfighting, need the smooth look-around capability in order to capture the essence of three dimensional combat. But most any game with a 3D environment could benefit.

First-timers will find the experience exhilarating, and probably a little disorienting when they disconnect. But in short order they will adjust to switching in and out of VR, and it will seem as natural as slipping reading glasses on and off.

There are people who use VR regularly today; most of them are scientific or engineering specialists who use it to help them model complex structures. I haven’t heard about any long-term disorientation problems.

I will even go so far as to say that young people will potentially be at a disadvantage if they are kept from using VR devices out of fear for their safety. I foresee a large number of commercial applications once the price point is reached, and many will come to depend on VR to earn a living. Those who have trouble making the adjustment will be in a tough spot; imagine a business person today unable to travel in any closed vehicle without getting sick.

Bring on the VR, I say. The corporation who doesn’t, out of fear, will miss out while a competitor scoops up tremendous profits. Their gear will be profusely labeled with warnings and disclaimers, just as it is now. (Epileptics beware!) And the fears will prove to be overblown.

‘Trends 2000’: Angry Diatribe from the Age of Aquarius

2004-12-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the one about the astrologer, the medicine man, and the alchemist who walked into a bar? Apparently, they had too much to drink and decided to write a book called ‘Trends 2000: How to Prepare for and Profit from the Changes of the 21st Century’

Perhaps I am too harsh. I am, after all, critiquing this book some seven years after the publishing date. There could be any number of innocent explanations for why I am so very embarassed for author Gerald Celente.

Perhaps this book fell into my hands through a wormhole from an alternate reality where the rules I know simply don’t apply; where the understanding of the ancients fully equals that of modern scientists. After all, the book is told in the past tense—events from the mid 1990s indistinguishable from those coming in 2000 or 2050, except where indicated by citing the headline of a newspaper article.

Or maybe I’m just not in the right frame of mind. Maybe if I were among the “unbufalloed”—a word much loved by Celente—I would recognize in this narrative the very world in which I live: a world where the establishment has conspired to keep me from recognizing the transcendent virtue of alternative medicine, the fading glow of my own inner energy, and the relentless assault of radiation poisoning.

It could even be that Celente does not share the neo-hippie consciousness espoused by his book at all perhaps he is merely predicting the mindset of mainstream America in the 21st Century by writing in the voice he expects them to have. After all, I don’t have any hard evidence that Celente wrote this book in a vacuum while under the influence of herbs of dubious salutary value. The jacket states that he is “founder of the Trends Research Institute”, an organization that supposedly had, as of 1997, an impressive track record in trend spotting.

But if this is the case, I fail to see why Chapter 2 was necessary, explaining how the celestial precession of the equinoxes places the new millennium in the Age of Aquarius.

In any event, this book is not entirely bad. It is truly multidisciplinary (not that I consider alchemy a discipline), living up to an introductory promise to not be blinded by technological advancement in a civilization with so many other dynamics. This is a rare and commendable trait in future studies today. But ‘Trends 2000’ cyclically flushes any accumulated credibility with an undercurrent of acerbic demagoguery and bad science, leaving little more than an awful song in the reader’s head. “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius, ooooh…”

In an early chapter, Celente fails to recognize the remarkable achievements in health and sanitation implied when a nation finds that cancer has become a leading cause of death. Worse, he seems to think that nuclear power is responsible for the terror. “Zooming radiation levels have made it a statistical certainty that the cancer death rate will go up still more dramatically within decades,” he claims, in a typical passage where the reader is left to guess whether the argument is an interpretation or a prediction. He doesn’t seem to think there should be any reason for Americans to put up with fossil fuels, either… at this point, early in the book, he’s begun offering hints of cheap, limitlessly energy just over the horizon. I couldn’t wait to find out what he had in mind.

Somewhere in the long middle of ‘Trends 2000’, when the ‘unbuffaloed’ have started acting on their realization that everything is giving them cancer and killing their souls, he makes his most memorably accurate prediction: “Home improvement and remodeling, from the architect/designer level to do-it-yourself, will be a strong growth sector.” (His pseudo-history is punctuated with bold-faced, future tense “Trendposts” like this one.) Of course, his psychological reasoning here is somewhat suspect. I would argue that the craze has had more to do with mortgage refinancing than with people trying to restore their souls through Feng Shui and hands-on labor. But still, he wins a couple of points.

He also foresees, with some accuracy, a growing fascination with vitamins and herbal remedies, whether they be “scientifically” proven or not. Celente obviously seems to think that the future will show them to be extremely worthwhile; I am much more skeptical.

In the final chapters of the book, we learn how new forms of education will restore balance and sustainability to an impoverished, toxic, crime-ridden, nation:

“On the colloge level, an Interactive U. diploma included courses in lost civilizations, sacred geometry, alchemy, reincarnation, psychic phenomena, ancient prophecies, extraterrestrial life-forms, alternative medicine and healing, esoteric philosophy and metaphysics, and other subjects formerly taboo at the university level.” p.256

It is here that one of Celente’s few technology-centered predictions come into play (though it’s lost in the New Age nonsense). By 2005, he explains, the videophone will have become an indispensable fixture in every home and office. I guess there’s still time.

But his grasp of technology doesn’t really become apparent until he finally unveils the cheap abundant source of power that will soon reveal today’s energy providers as the innovation-suppressing, money-grubbing monopolists they are. Yes. You guessed it: Cold fusion.

It could be that ‘Trends 2000’ is a book far ahead of its time—that much of what I’m laughing at now will indeed be the history of our past, albeit with a different set of dates attached. But if you believe that, I need to tell you the one about the shaman, the vitamin consultant, and the alien abductee who all died and wanted to get into heaven. The shaman goes up to St. Peter and says…

The Toxins, My Friend, Are Blowin' In the Wind...

2004-12-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

As a special treat for my readers today, I’ve cooked up a shred of polemical science fiction on the subject of electricity generation. I think you’ll see what I’m getting at.

Secretly recorded conversation in an upstairs office at the Summer Daisy (Coal-Fired) Power Plant:

“So, what was so important that you had to come down here personally?”

“My team has discovered a way to sequester all of the byproducts of fossil fuel use for power consumption. We wouldn’t have to send it all up the smokestacks anymore. We could start with this plant.”

“That’s amazing! What’s the catch?”

“The catch is that we’ll be sequestering all of the byproducts, instead of sending them up into the air.”

“Hmm. So we’d be moving into the waste storage business. How hard will this stuff be for us to keep?”

“All things considered, it won’t be hard at all. We send millions of tons of toxic waste up the smokestacks every year. My team has figured out how concentrate that into a single cylinder that would fit on a railroad car.”

“Wow. But what would we do with it?”

“That was beyond the scope of our research. But if I were in charge I would suggest we stick it under a mountain somewhere. That’s a lot of concentrated deadliness. It’s so potent we could turn most of that back into fuel if we felt like handling it a second time.”

“Well, nobody is going to want that stuff buried anywhere near them.”

“It would beat breathing it.”

“The locals won’t see it that way. We’d probably end up bogged down in court for years while the gunk piled up here at the plant.”

“Hmm. Well, we could easily store it here for decades. Like I said, it doesn’t take up that much room. It’s just really, really toxic. We’d have to keep an eye on to make sure it doesn’t leak or anything. And we wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Wouldn’t the ‘wrong hands’ be crazy for wanting anything to do with it?”

“Sure. But if they were both crazy and clever, some suicidal terrorists could turn it into a terrifying weapon just by smearing it over a few city blocks. They could also sell it to Iran or someone else who could probably turn it into a full-blown WMD. That’s how bad our garbage is.”

“Damn. All the more reason to bury it under a mountain. Easier to guard that way. How long would we have to look after it?”

“A few thousand years.”

“Jesus! I knew it was too good to be true.”

“We pump some seriously deadly shit into the air! My team has done nothing short of a miracle in figuring out how to turn it into something we can bury. As it stands right now, everyone on the planet is breathing it, not just the poor saps downwind of us. Who knows how many thousands of people we sicken or kill with just this—“

“Watch it, son. If we go down like Big Tobacco, we’re taking you eggheads with us.”

“My point is, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But this comes pretty close to fat-free ice cream that actually tastes good. It’s a hell of an opportunity that I suggest we take.”

“Ok. I’ll take it up with the board of directors. But the public will be seriously wierded out by this. I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

“Oh, I already do. Every time I come down here.”

Think the comparison is unfair? Just the radioactive component of coal plant waste released into the air greatly exceeds that realeased by a nuclear plant, which is pretty close to zero. And those radioactives are nothing compared to the heavy metals, sulfur dioxides, and other carcinogens coming out of a coal plant. If we did have a way to sequester these, it would take up far more room than in the story, and be nearly as dangerous. The only real difference would be the inability to turn this variety of waste into nuclear weapons. (There are ways under development to keep nuclear waste from being useful in a weapons program, too.)

I’m not trying to be a doomsayer or a tree-hugger here. Our power has to come from somewhere. But I would like to see some rational decision making when it comes time to decide between new coal plants and new nuclear plants. The relatively clean natural gas plants we've been relying on to pick up the slack in recent years are expensive to fuel, and becoming more so as supply fails to keep up with demand, so the decision-making time is already upon us. Nuclear waste is bad stuff, but I think it’s more useful to see it as an opportunity than as a liability. Unlike smoke stack emissions, it’s manageable bad stuff.

'Our Molecular Future': Two Books In One

2004-12-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

"What happens to land prices when owners can construct palatial homes at low cost? And . . . what happens to real estate if the coastline ends up under a wall of water from a tsunami?” --page 251 (ellipses his)

Douglas Mulhall’s ‘Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World’ brings to my mind an author writing two books at once, when a bolt of lightning fused them into an abominable, though functional, servant of chaos. On the cover, as suggested by the title, this is a broad futurist technology survey ripped almost entirely from the headlines, with all the scrappy, shallow, contradictory urgency that you would expect from such an approach. But inside, it is also an alarmist warning about natural catastrophes—a theme hogging 10 of the book’s 23 chapters, stitched onto the technology debate with a discussion of global connectivity and a few glitzy visions of nanotech defenses.

Where technology trends are concerned, Mulhall gives a lay of the land that is as expansive as it is uninspiring—and not for lack of intriguing concepts. On the contrary, fatigue is induced by an unrelenting barrage of unelaborated proclamations that sound like the sensationalist headlines of popular tech magazines—which they probably were. It’s true that scientists can slow light to a stop and speed it up again. It’s also true that satellites now orbit the earth with the ability to repair themselves. But as one who has probably read the articles that followed these claims, I can almost guarantee you that the circumstances omitted by Mulhall render them far less impressive than the images they first bring to mind. To make matters worse, he often jumps ahead to discussions of the future described in present tense; if you weren’t paying enough attention when the switch was made, you won’t know what time-period he’s talking about—that’s how hyped his discussion of the present is.

This weakness is perhaps inevitable given Mulhall’s chosen approach. He cites his conspicuously short sentences with endnotes that read like an unpurged cache of the Google News Sci/Tech section. He introduces these notes by telling us that he purposely worked mostly from sources that are “one step removed from the highly technical realm of scientific journals,” the better to give lay readers access to the background material.

Not that there aren’t some plusses to Our Molecular Future’s journalistic parentage. The illustrations are numerous and eye-catching. Chapters are numerous and subdivided, increasing the accessibility of what could be an intimidating, 392-page tome (after appendices, notes, and index).

But, how did this natural disaster book get here? Mulhall’s background on the bookjacket begins: “sustainable development specialist and technology journalist.” I guess that’s as good an explanation as we need.

He introduces “Part 2: Nature’s Time Bombs” by citing the Nick Bostrom’s hierarchy of human-species-killing existential risks, seemingly failing to notice that natural calamities are at the very bottom. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis don’t make the list at all, but consume much of the next 90 pages, while the top-ranking “misuse of nanotechnology” gets hardly any space at all.

This is especially worrisome when Mulhall tells the story of a future where a mega-eruption in California, with its accompanying earthquakes, tsunamis, and stifling dust plume, is turned into a “dud” through the mitigating use of self-replicating nanobots. These nanomachines reproduce by the trillions all throughout the crust, oceans, and atmosphere by feeding on the molecules found naturally therein. It’s not that I don’t think it’s impossible to render such a scenario safe from mutating into runaway gray goo; and if any situation would warrant the use of such devices, it is this one. But, in a human society where the self-replication approach to nanotechnology is commonplace, there will be far too many individuals with the opportunity to insert a careless or malicious vulnerability into a replicator design that turns it into a fatal cancer of the biosphere.

The small-but-real risk of tomorrow bringing a natural existential calamity is increasing at an imperceptibly slow rate when compared to the increasing and accelerating risk of a disaster brought about through high technology. Mulhall’s discussion thus seems of relevance only in the context of weathering life on earth, over the very long haul, as classic Homo sapiens in a recognizably human civilization. It could happen, I suppose, but the deeper, more Singularity-conscious studies of futurists like Broderick, Moravec, and even Kurzweil, suggest that any such existence will be an Amish side-show compared to what will really be going on in our galaxy by then.

So, if you’re looking for a rational analysis of risk management for the coming decades, look elsewhere. But if you’re turned on by gargantuan tidal waves scrubbing the eastern seaboard of the United States, or are simply curious to see what interesting technology headlines you might have missed over the last decade, ‘Our Molecular Future’ is right for you. Just remember to Google for the fine print.

The Technology Squeeze: Truck Drivers

2004-11-29T23:54:00.000-07:00

DARPA’s Grand Challenge gets more press than it deserves. It’s an entertaining competition, and there really is some great engineering work being done, but like most of DARPA’s projects, the Grand Challenge is about planting thousands of seeds in the hopes that something will turn out to be a useful technology in the long term. A short-term incubator it is not, but the competition was designed to meet Congress’s goal of making 1/3 of its operational combat vehicles unmanned by 2015. Now, 2015 may not sound short-term to some readers, but given the historically slow procurement cycles in the U.S. military, I think this is going to be a very difficult target to reach. 1/3 is a LOT of vehicles.

I think the Grand Challenge is an unrealistic approach to meeting that goal because it is spurring development in systems that allow for completely autonomous driving. The level of artificial intelligence required for this is huge, because it is so difficult for a system of cameras, radars, sonars, laser rangefinders, and their digital processors to distinguish between a bush, a boulder, and a brown paper bag. At least one team in the previous round of competition resorted to instructing the vehicle to not to drive over any bushes at all. Imagine a combat vehicle unwilling to risk driving over a shrubbery!

Not only is complete autonomy for ground vehicles unrealistic for large-scale deployment in the near term, but pushing for unmanned combat vehicles may not be the best way of meeting Congress’s ultimate purpose behind the goal, which was presumably to save lives. Recent counterinsurgency experience in Iraq–the kind of warfare our military expects to be the norm in coming decades—suggests that non-combat vehicles are the more dangerous place to be. Every guerilla knows that the supply chain is the soft underbelly of any large military. Why go after M1 tanks when unarmed, unarmored, and often unescorted semi-trucks provide ample opportunity to increase the body count on the evening news and reduce the ability of the U.S. Army to extend its reach into insurgent strongholds? Now that the Army is scrambling to better armor and escort its truckers, perhaps it’s time to consider alternatives to having a human driver in every cab; alternatives workable in the short term. Semi-autonomous alternatives.

Way back in 1995, a robotic driving system called RALPH drove a vehicle from Washington D.C. to San Diego, CA in control 98.2 percent of the time at an average speed of over 62 mph. Efficiency dictates that just about anywhere robots could work successfully 98% of the time, they should be allowed to do 98% of the work. As I've pointed out in my previous posts on robotics in the workplace, this is made possible by keeping a human in the loop. In RALPH’s case, the human in the loop was the system's designer, a doctoral candidate in the driver’s seat by the name of Todd Jochem (he subsequently earned his Ph.D.)

Obviously it wouldn’t do much good to give Army truckers autopilots that needed the human in the loop to be sitting just inches away. But what if truck convoys were actually chains of semi-random X’s and O’s, like XOOXOOOXOXOOXXOOO, where every ‘X’ is a human-driven vehicle and every ‘O’ is a robot-driven vehicle that mostly just shadows the vehicle in front of it as though following a short trail of breadcrumbs? This would get around the bush/boulder/bag problem because the robot trucks would only drive over the tracks of the human trucks. It would retain the intelligence of human drivers while easily eliminating a third of them. Just tint the windows of all the trucks, and stick dummies in all of the unmanned ones so that the guerillas can’t easily tell which trucks have fleshy wetware on board.

But what about that lead vehicle? It might as well have a bulls-eye painted on it. It’s not the place the human would want to be, yet it’s also clearly the place a human needs to be. Would it be so hard to equip it with the kinds of high resolution cameras and all-weather imaging systems used by the better-funded Grand Challenge teams? The remote driver could remain somewhere in the convoy, where he would be close enough to react to any environmental concerns unrelated to the road ahead. This would also make it unnecessary to clog communications satellites with high-bandwidth imagery the way remotely piloted surveillance aircraft do.

But driving the convoys from the comfort of a base in Tennessee would definitely have some advantages. Besides getting humans out of harms way, it reduces the logistical needs abroad, eliminating the need for some of those trucks entirely. Remote truckers don’t need their food, water, and shelter transported to the other side of the globe.

When semi-autonomous driving and remote driving catch on with the military, you can bet that civilian freight lines won’t be far behind. There will be some political hurdles, of course, which should not be understated; people won’t like the idea of potentially buggy computers driving a tractor trailer next to them at 75 mph. But the vision I have in mind doesn’t seem too far fetched.

In the near term, semi-autonomous trucks would be confined to the highways along major long-haul routes—the kinds of places where it’s not unusual even today to see two or three trucks from the same freight line keeping an inline formation. Local drivers would move long haul freight to and from waystations just off the highway where the long-haul drivers would pick up two or three trucks at a time that were going his way. These would be dropped off at the waystation nearest their destination, or at a waystation acting as a hub to other waystations. Distribution centers for major retailers like Wal-Mart are already located just off highways, often with dedicated off-ramps outside of city limits, so the biggest waystation hubs are already in place.

The robotic trucks in a convoy would be designated as such with a standard pattern of lights, reflectors, and symbol placards to help other drivers realize that these vehicles may not be as forgiving in some situations. They would also be equipped with a 360 degree array of the kinds of radar or laser rangefinders found in today's “smart” cruise control systems, providing the human convoy pilots with a clear picture of the traffic around them. At the human’s direction, or on their own, if need be, convoy trucks could be temporarily routed to different lanes, or allow non-convoy vehicles to come between them.

In the longer term, the humans in the loop would become more like ground-traffic controllers, remotely overseeing many autonomous trucks in many areas simultaneously. These operators would spend most of their time helping trucks through stretches of high traffic or ambiguous road conditions, and many would probably specialize in a few tricky locales. As a truck enters a difficult area or legally mandated safe corridor, command is routed to the available operator best equipped for it.

Ultimately, semi-autonomous and fully autonomous drivers will be safer than a fleet of human drivers, both in peace and in war. Trucks without drivers may become less tempting targets for guerillas looking for media attention, saving the lives of both drivers and bystanders. Long haul truckers will be less likely to be hypnotized by the road or fall asleep on monotonous, uneventful stretches because it is here that they will be coordinating multiple vehicles at once--and remote drivers acting collectively would never have any incentive to drive when sleepy; there would always be someone else close by who could do it. And, finally, the logical conclusion of DARPA-style projects will be artificial driver-savants that, while subhuman by many measures of intelligence, are better drivers than humans could ever hope to be.

I just don’t see them making it to mass production in time to meet that 2015 goal.

Immortality Institute Chat

2004-11-29T01:29:00.000-07:00

I was the featured guest speaker tonight for the Immortality Institute's Sunday Chat. You can find the transcript here.

In an unmoderated chat format like this, it's hard to decide which questions and comments to respond to. I hope I didn't offend anyone as a result of my on-the-spot decisions.

In particular, I regret being unable to respond to a question about other types of fallacies and failures I think futurists can fall into. I actually have a list of twelve in my notes. In truth, all futurists who make useful predictions are ultimately wrong, so one or more of these failures gets everyone in the end. But it can be instructive to ask which failures are most likely for today's futurists.

Look for an upcoming essay summarizing the conclusions I've reached while preparing for this chat. It, or a link to it, will appear on this blog.

The Reading Cure

2004-11-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

(Note: Since I don’t have a professional-level education in psychology, I’m probably about to overstep my bounds here. Oh well. I’m claiming blogger’s license. But I did take a little Psych in college, and have read a few books and articles on the subject, so I don’t think I’m completely uninformed.)

Psychology is in the midst of a fragmented, long overdue civil war. Battle lines have been drawn in efforts to define the very nature of the field.

In one camp, there are established professionals versed in the traditional talking cures descended from Freud, the behavioral therapies inspired by Skinner, and the innumerable variations espoused by others who continue to create esoteric models to explain how the mind works.

In another camp, a mostly younger breed of scientifically minded therapists are trying to incorporate standards of scientific evidence in an effort to implement whatever actually works; Credible studies have suggested that receiving traditional talk therapy from a professional psychologist is no more effective than talking with a sympathetic listener.

A related and overlapping camp of secessionists questions the very relevance of talk therapy in the age of antidepressants and other provably effective drugs that work directly on the brain, and in light of advanced brain scanning increasingly offering the chance of actually spotting and surgically correcting the physical abnormalities behind some of the rarer but more serious psychiatric problems.

Ultmately, in the coming age of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, I think the human brain will be so well understood that there will be little need for “black box” hypotheses that only occasionally result in effective treatments—treatments for which the causal mechanism is often unknown. But until that time, I submit that an alternative, memetic approach lending itself to scientific comparison may be the sanest way to treat many of the softer issues addressed by counseling and therapy.

I define “soft” issues as those that don’t justify or lend themselves to today’s drugs, and only warrant therapy because the patient believes that they do. A person who considers himself to be intolerably shy, for example, may seek counseling, even if those around him think he’s just a little withdrawn. Someone deeply disaffected with a marriage, yet equally determined to fix it, may seek counseling as well, even if divorce would be a socially acceptable solution. In such cases, the patient is considered successfully treated when the patient declares that it is so. There is really no alternative to this subjective victory condition in soft therapy, except in cases where close associates of the patient deserve to be polled as well (A family with an abusive parent is not served by a patient who considers himself cured because the therapist has convinced him that abuse is an appropriate expression of frustration.)

I think it’s fair to say that no two therapeutic conversations are exactly alike. The therapist, patient, and context will always vary from one occasion to the next. This makes it hard to scientifically study the effectiveness of a counseling approach. About the best we can hope for is a rough comparison between obviously different counseling philosophies and loose “control groups” that are “treated” by any sympathetic listener. Any increase in uniformity among therapy sessions allowing for cleaner studies would therefore be potentially be worth the loss of customization; effective session content would quickly reveal itself as such, creating opportunity for developing still more effective, testable techniques.

It turns out that we already have a ready supply of uniform therapy sessions. They are called books. Not necessarily non-fiction self help books, either. I think every reader of fiction has encountered a story that noticeably changed their outlook or behavior. Soft psychology problems—the ones we’re not yet trying to identify and treat physically—are memetic in nature (composed of ideas and concepts); at least, we are only concerning ourselves with the memetic component if we’re calling it a soft problem. As dense memetic delivery systems, books can alter or overthrow patterns of ideas and values in the mind of a reading patient, literally changing their lives.

The pharmaceutical industry provides a ready model for the techniques of identifying and marketing effective treatments. Drug companies typically spend only a slice of their efforts creating new compounds; The low-hanging fruit is in testing existing compounds found in nature or in drugs used for other purposes, to see if they provide a net benefit in the treatment of a particular condition. Similarly, a memetic drug company would have ample low-hanging fruit in the form of existing literature; there would be little need to develop stories or self-help books from scratch. If anecdotal evidence suggested that “Gone With the Wind” was effective for people who feel hopelessly codependent, the memetic drug company would sponsor studies and trials in an effort to compare it to other potential alternatives. When proven safe and effective (perhaps by the inevitable memetic arm of the FDA), the book could be marketed as a memetic drug.

We will probably never see scientifically minded, federally regulated meme-drug companies like this, however, because of the easily reproducible nature of media. It would be tough for a company to make enough profit to cover the cost of the studies when anyone can check the cure out of a library or download a copy off the internet. But perhaps the combinations of copyright, buzz, and medical authority would offer enough profit potential, in the form of boosted sales for forgotten or declining titles. If not, government money and philanthropy already headed into scientific psychology (I don’t know how much of this there might be) could be directed to such an effort.

But perhaps the only way we’ll ever see anything like this will be if people take it upon themselves to create it, in the form of internet communities where people can rank books they’ve read according to their value in treating their various psychological discontents.

The reading cure would not be for everyone. Not everyone can read at the level necessary to receive the impact of a given book. (Movies and recordings might be effective substitutes.) And some people will always feel most comfortable when talking to someone professionally trained to listen. But, many seek traditional therapy only because they know of no alternative, and needlessly waste their money on whatever marginal treatment their therapist happens to use. The reading cure could be an inexpensive and effective alternative to traditional psychology.

'Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind' (the title says it all)

2004-11-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

No future study is complete without graphs of exponential curves, but in Hans Moravec’s ‘Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind’ the accelerating curve from mundane to profound is an emergent form identifiable in the structure of the book itself. The book opened on page one is not the same one closed on page 211; readers looking for the hard stuff they associate with Moravec might be confused or turned off if they lack the trust to wait patiently—or the impulsiveness to skip ahead.

Moravec uses the first two chapters (50 pages) to relate the history of today’s semi-autonomous robots—a tale he is uniquely positioned to tell largely in the first person. In direct, semi-technical prose, he talks in big blocky paragraphs about maps, and MIPS, and the general trade-offs designers make today when creating robots suited to particular tasks, whether they be high-speed driving, low-speed roving, or anything in between. Most of this information will be easily forgotten, but by the end of the discussion the reader has at least a chance of relating to the scale of the numbers tossed around in succeeding chapters.

Chapter three is a very different take, looking past the misleading veneer of robot limbs and sensory organs and into the mind of the machine. This is a chapter about the possibility of true artificial intelligence, and the nine most common objections to it – attacks Moravec parries with the serene precision of a judo instructor. I have no doubt that he has had many, many opportunities to hone these arguments in discussions with people in and out of academia.

The midpoint of the book details Moravec’s categorization of robot abilities by “generation”. As computing power climbs the range of applications to which new generations of robots can be applied increases accordingly. Physical dexterity grows as well, as do the frequency of opportunities for disaster—robots making mistakes that injure themselves or others. Robot minds may feel analogues to pain and pleasure as part of their designs, learning from traumatic mistakes and great successes. By the fourth generation, robots are roughly as smart as human beings.

Here, I part company with some of Moravec’s conclusions. His world of tomorrow, filled with human-equivalent robots shaped by superintelligent AI, is neither inexplicable nor unstable. Robots, as agents of corporations in a capitalist environment, seek only to profit within the bounds of laws created by and for humans; the machines evolve to become ever more proficient in this domain. Not all robots will play along, he argues, but cooperation is such a beneficial long-term strategy that an overwhelming majority of minds will block the ill intents of the few bad eggs, who in any case wouldn’t survive into the next round of corporate mergers and breakups. Moravec does not seem to share my concerns about runaway seed AI—a mind miles above all others and becoming more intelligent every second, unstoppably bending the universe to a will that may or may not include our own.

But, perhaps to any true humans remaining in such an era, the expansion of the new minds will indeed look like a fiery nova of cooperative capitalism blossoming out from the inner solar system at the speed of thought. Moravec does suggest that traditional human minds will be hopelessly uncompetitive pensioners in the new economy, confined to heavily metaphorical interpretations of activity increasingly beyond their ken.

The final quarter of ‘Robot’ is definitely not your father’s futurism. Moravec shows a solid understanding of cutting-edge physics, and their implications for the future of thought: compact customized matter; the pros and cons of existing on the surface of a neutron star; the “Bekenstein bound” on computation in a single atom. This last one suggests that a single human body’s worth of atoms “could contain the efficiently encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxies—or a quadrillion individuals each with a quadrillion times the capacity of a human mind.” The future is in simulation.

Or is simulation the very cause of the future? Moravec patiently discusses the physics behind time travel with several thought experiments for sending messages or beings back in time. He also explains the closely related curiosities of quantum computation, where even the non-paradoxes can seem, well, paradoxical. Our universe is already saturated with particles that seem to have no regard for time’s arrow.

‘Robot’s’ final ten pages seem almost as dense as the sum of all that came before. Cosmological, philosophical questions on the nature of reality and consciousness boil over as Moravec uses Everett’s “many worlds interpretation” of quantum wave functions to argue the uselessness of differentiating between simulation and reality. Perhaps, he speculates, the universe only appears to have order because our minds make it so, and that our minds will never ceases to be even after everyone else sees us as long dead. We may simply find ourselves in branches of reality where our continued existence is likeliest.

So ends ‘Robot’, at a place very different from the seemingly inconsequential dawn of robotics described in the beginning. Like the strange future we approach, Moravec’s ‘Robot’ is an accelerating trip into the unexpected.

I Want My Smart Receipts

2004-11-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

I’m going to make you a small fortune. Incorporate yourself and take this idea to your nearest venture capitalist.

I want all of my receipts to be smart receipts. In other words, I want them all to be machine readable without a scanner and supercomputer running the latest optical character recognition software. There shouldn’t be anything especially difficult about this. Many major chains already print bar codes on the receipts that employees can scan when working at the returns desk. The scanning register queries the corporate database to reopen the sale identified by the code on the receipt, and it is done.

Make it so that I can do the same thing using a low-end webcam or cell phone camera. Such cameras can already read traditional bar codes, so all I need on the receipt is some kind of code for a URL like: http://www.mostromart.com/receipt788849920?pin=76r8987. Make sure the address is printed below the bar code, just as with UPC codes, for times when the code is damaged or I am temporarily without a working reader. Finally, provide a small, free plugin for my favorite spreadsheet or money management program that will seamlessly use this address to enter the data from my receipt directly into my software.

What’s the big deal, you ask?

As it stands now, most receipts just clutter up my desk until it’s obvious I won’t be returning anything with them. Then they are thrown away. When you allow my computer to read my receipts, I will begin to truly take advantage of them. I will rack up the individually small but collectively large tax deductions an attentive filer can claim. I will conscientiously track my spending and spot worrisome trends at the category or product level. (I spend how much a month on Chip Blaster Deluxe Cookies??) I will scan all of those damned bits of crumpled paper as soon as I dredge them, lint-draped, out of my pocket--getting them off my desk, out of my sight, and into manila envelopes with witty inscriptions like “2004: In case of audit, break seal”.

Or maybe I won’t. But if good intentions are enough to keep fitness centers and weight-loss programs in business, they’re good enough for me to make demands of you, the entrepreneur who will sell affordable coding and hosting services to business unable or unwilling to meet my needs on their own.

Not that I expect to be the primary end-user target of smart receipts. I think hotels, copy centers, restaurants, and office supply chains will be the first introduce smart receipt services as another way to entice the well-heeled business person—a customer much too important to fill out expense reports by hand. Next down on their target list will be the increasingly common self-employed soul with every reason to show the IRS just how expensive it is to run a business. And after that? Everyday people looking for the all-important moral high ground, in the form of numbers that can be waved in the face of a spouse about to throw another six-pack or pair of shoes onto the checkout counter.

Yes, there’s going to be some money changing hands, but I’m so generous I won’t even ask for a tiny slice of your profits. I’ll just sell my accumulated receipt codes to the highest bidder. Market research firms will love to get their hands on my receipts once they can get them online, without waiting for scraps of paper with data that must be entered manually. Sometimes I will carelessly drop my receipts in the street, or in public trash cans, where a homeless person will retrieve them for their codes while collecting aluminum cans. Market researchers will need the continuous threat of people like us to leverage reductions in the exorbitant prices retail giants usually charge for this data—when they sell it at all.

You should now understand that smart receipts will be a win-win for everyone; and the biggest winner will be you.

Go now. I will watch for word of your success in the pages of Wired and Slashdot.

The Technology Squeeze: Housekeeping/Cleaning Personnel

2004-11-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

The other day I discussed trends in technology that are eliminating jobs in the low-wage retail sector—jobs that people and policy makers probably never thought were really at risk. We have been conditioned since the industrial revolution to expect manufacturing workers to be replaced by automation, but low-end service personnel?

In this post I will discuss another occupation, in the next of many expected posts about professionals who haven’t expected to be culled by technology, but should probably start to worry. I use the word ‘culled’ deliberately, as humans can expect to be in the loop in these professions for quite some time, rather than eliminated wholesale; robots are still too dumb. Human-supervised clusters of self-checkout stations are an excellent example of a template we can apply, with some creativity, to many other areas.

Today’s target is housekeeping/cleaning. Hotel chains, airports, and hospitals all have large numbers of similar bedrooms and/or bathrooms that are periodically cleaned by crews of roving service personnel. A cleaning person or team of persons go through one room after another, vacuuming, dusting, swapping out the sheets, and scrubbing the bathtubs, sinks and toilets. I expect these institutions to begin employing smaller teams using robotic assistants. (If I google hard enough, I’ll probably find that this has already begun.)

Vacuuming is a chore that has already proven tractable to robotic servants, as in the case of the Roomba. Roomba operates in a semi-random pattern to accommodate endless room configurations; As a result, it misses spots, and doesn’t work very quickly. But since one hotel room is pretty much like another and must be vacuumed frequently, it would be easy and worthwhile to configure commercial-grade vacuum robots with layout programs—or the rooms they service, with discreet boundary wires or paints—to make coverage quick and thorough. A worker arriving in the room to clean it would check the floor over for situations that might cause the vacuum trouble, then unleash it while changing the sheets and cleaning the bathroom. The vacuum would be finished by the time the worker is ready to move on to the next room.

And what about bathrooms? Cleaning a bathroom is probably the least enjoyed and most difficult task in housekeeping. As a result, it is often not done as often or as well as it could be. This is considered acceptable in our homes, but not in public facilities, and especially not in hospitals. So I look to healthcare to lead the deployment of bathroom-cleaning robots, even before they can pay their own way from a labor standpoint. A toilet-cleaning robot might look like a non-descript box just a little larger than the toilet it cleans. After removing any excessive debris from the target, a worker wheels the machine over the toilet and plugs it into water and power supplies (a hose socket might be built into a specially designed toilet made by the maker of the cleaning machine). The machine sinks down and forms a gentle water-tight seal with the floor, and proceeds to scour the toilet from all sides with scalding hot water jets and/or disinfectants, like a high-powered dishwasher. It blow-dries the toilet when finished, and signals completion to the worker, who was free to perform other tasks during the cleaning. The machine is unplugged and wheeled to the next target.

As for sinks and bathtubs, robotics might be forthcoming here, but would initially work best with fixtures designed for automated cleaning—combination sockets for mounting, power, and water used by service people who always make sure the target is sufficiently prepped for scrubbing before plugging a very utilitarian-looking machine in.

Robo-moppers for the floors? Why not? The key to each of my above scenarios has been force-multiplication of human labor rather than dependence on the intelligence of robots. If eighty percent of the time a robot won’t have any problems, it makes sense to let a robot do eighty percent of the work. If a human will identify and correct the remaining twenty percent, the robots can do it all. The end result: lower costs, cleaner facilities, and workforce reduction among institutional cleaning personnel.

(To repeat an earlier disclaimer: I’m not passing judgment on the employees or decision-makers who will be involved in the transition. I wish only to explain an economic reality I hope we will be prepared for.)

'Profiles of the Future': A Blast From the Past

2004-11-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

I’m scheduled to be the Immortality Institute’s guest chat person this coming Sunday, on the topic of futurism in the past and present. This is why my reading list has been so heavy on the future these last few weeks; I’d like to be at my most intelligible best. Finding futurism from the present has been no problem thus far, but futurism from the past has been tough. Even forty or fifty years back would be nice, although I intend to go back much farther before drawing my conclusions, into the depths of that history stuff I'm supposed to know so much about.

With this in mind, I was hoping to get my hands on a copy of the 1962 version of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 'Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible', but the best my library could do was his 1984 revision. Some chapters are revised extensively, and others not at all, but Clarke doesn’t always tell you which ones, so I don’t know how close to the original I got. Most of it doesn’t seem to have changed too much, and holds up well even now, because this book does not try to defend any particular scenario of the future so much as describe the possibilities that exist within our understanding of the laws of physics; the changes in understanding between 1962 and 1984 didn’t close off much, if any, of that territory.

Older writers in a non-fiction format that amounts to a soap box can sometimes be tedious, but I found Clarke to be surprisingly readable and even playful; for example, his recognition that advances in communications and telepresence might greatly diminish the need for passenger vehicles does not keep him from explaining how hovercraft, conveyer systems, sky hooks—even antigravity and extra dimensions—might get us from place to place. (Yes, he admits that those last two methods seem pretty unlikely, but he can’t rule them out, and the point of this book is to cover the interesting things he can’t rule out.) Similarly, he accepts the possibility of superintelligence and uploads, but still talks about human-equivalent machines assisting humans in their daily affairs. I daresay that Profiles of the Future is the most entertaining non-fictional future study I’ve read in years—a blend of rational insight and old-school Sci-Fi fun.

But I wasn’t reading for the entertainment value. I was trying to be more critical. But between winning me over and playing it safe, Clarke didn’t leave me much chance to fault him. As if anticipating my needs, however, he appended his text with a rough, extensively disclaimered timeline – pay dirt. I quickly surmised that his general error class was the one Kurzweil most likes to brings up: short term expectations (20 years or so) are a little too optimistic, while long-term predictions are much too conservative. He correctly expected cloning and super-heavy elements between 2000 and 2010, but he also expected manned planetary landings and non-cryogenic superconductors around this time. Well, I suppose the decade isn’t over yet. As for space elevators and the creation of greater-than-human intelligence: he didn’t see these until 2090-2100, which seems much too distant given the discovery of carbon nanotubes and the contemporary consensus of 2030 or so for greater intelligence.

I may just have to see what interesting things he’s said lately. He’s pushing 90 now, but his name still appears on collections and collaborations from time to time, so maybe he’s not completely out of the game.

The Technological Double-Squeeze on American Wage Labor

2004-11-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

Visiting my local Super Wal-Mart recently, I was treated to an unusual, but not unexpected, sight. A long line of shopping carts was being pushed into the store not by the usual two-man team, but by a single worker with a remote-controlled pushing device that propelled the carts from behind while he guided them from up front. I have worked in positions that entailed cart-pushing myself, and had wondered how the process might be automated. But I didn’t expect to see it so soon, because I knew what I was earning pushing carts. Any robotic replacement would have to be really cheap. Or so I thought.

In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious that there were other cost pressures at play besides my twice-monthly pittance. I had already used self-checkout stations at grocery stores, where one cashier mans (or often doesn’t man) a station of four terminals. Since these aren’t as fast as manned registers I figured that each cluster of four was maybe eliminating one job. It should’ve occurred to me then that a pusher robot for shopping carts would probably cost considerably less than a couple of self-checkout stations. But how on earth do these stores recover the costs of these clever machines when the people they replace get paid so little?

It didn’t take me long to realize I had not been taking into account the hidden expenses added by even the cheapest human employees to an American employer, particularly one not operating under the table. There is the employer portion of the payroll tax, the cost of goods stolen or damaged by employees, worker’s compensation claims and lost wage benefits for injuries on the job, legal fees and settlements when employees sue their employers, hiring and training costs, retention efforts, paycheck distribution, and all of the associated bureaucratic overhead resulting from the above.

But even as technology shrinks some of those expenses, it swells others. The first and probably largest category is medical. As we are so often reminded in this country, the costs of health care are soaring, thanks in large part to an extremely healthy market for corporations that develop costly new diagnostic tools and drugs. The benefits of any one procedure or pill are often very limited, but the spoiled patient will usually get them all. And since practically all American medical care is given by professionals who either have a profit motivation for pulling out all the stops, or who are completely isolated from the costs of technology, we are all spoiled patients (except for the growing number of uninsured, who don’t count in a discussion of workers compensation expenses). I’m not sure that we would even want a saner third alternative that helps reign in costs, because the American attitude towards healthcare is that everyone should get the best care possible no matter what. It’s noble and good, but, it drives up the cost worker’s compensation insurance as much as ten percent a year for many employers.

The second major way in which technology is making even cheap employees more expensive is litigation. Thanks to modern media and the internet, everyone knows about the million dollar settlement claims made by corporations and the diverse ways in which their employers might be screwing them over. And, with just a few short clicks, you can find entire legal firms dedicated to pressuring employers into making settlement claims for your mutual enrichment.

So we find ourselves in a situation where retaining human employees is increasingly costly even though the paychecks of the bottom-feeders remain low. Let’s face it: From the standpoint of an American retailer, human employees are lazy, flighty, shifty, clumsy, and litigious. Combined with the inexorable tendency of high technology to become cheaper over time, we have a technological double-squeeze leading American shoppers to bag their own purchases after checking themselves out at a store where they probably had to compete for the attention of a handful of service personnel running around in response to chimes and lights scattered around the building.

It’s not that we don’t like personal service along with our modern comforts--just ask any Westerner who’s had the pleasure of visiting developed areas in China lately. No, we live in a self-service society because we don’t like paying the surprisingly high cost of American low-wage workers in the form of more expensive goods at checkout time.

(Note: I’m not passing judgment on anyone here, I’m just trying to explain one of the many economic realities shaping our future that we must learn to cope with. More on this topic later.)

'BLUR': When the Oracles Have Stock Options

2004-11-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

At first glance, ‘BLUR: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy’ looked like an exercise in buzzword branding—a 7 Habits of Highly Effective Dot Coms, as it were. Perhaps it could not be helped, published as it was in 1998, during the gilded age of ‘irrational exuberance’ (the authors actually discuss why this very phrase is misguided) and creative accounting that made WorldCom (also extolled) seem like the perfect role model for aspiring entrepreneurs.

The first half of the book didn’t do much to improve my impression, since authors Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer seemed to think it would be very out-of-the-box to stud every paragraph with the word BLUR (always in all-caps) used as verb, noun, and super-duper mission statement. I hung on because there were some interesting tidbits mixed in, and it was enjoying to read what is essentially a futurism text written in the language of business and economics. Buyers are becoming sellers. Sellers are becoming buyers. Small businesses are gaining big-business reach. Services are becoming productized, and products are increasingly tied to services. I doubt much of this would be new to anyone who works in business management or investment today, but it was just fresh enough to keep me going.

By about midway through, Davis and Meyer finally hit their stride. The BLUR count drops, as do the number of proactive ‘Does your business do this?’ questions. In the most interesting section, the authors apply their earlier conclusions regarding the changing relationships between buyers, sellers, competitors, and investors to individuals. They take the philosophy of a person-as-enterprise, not worker-as-employee. In the new economy, they argue, an individual must see every job and relationship in terms of its future value; the position you have today may be at least as valuable to you for experience and cachet gained as for wages and benefits earned; the friends and contacts you made at your previous jobs may me more valuable to your current employer than your job skills. Intangibles like these have value, and markets will increasingly find ways to price them and trade them.

In fact, BLUR describes a future where individuals routinely sell stock options in themselves, sharing slices of their future earnings in exchange for cash up front. As this would be a relatively high risk loan, they argue, it won’t take long before personal investment mutual funds spring up, investing in groups of workers, spreading out the risk and opportunity to create reliable performance. Just make sure you retain control of your destiny by keeping at least 51% of your stock. There’s a bit of advice your parents probably never gave you…

It’s all pretty stimulating, but since we now walk through the graveyard of bubbles long burst, I couldn’t help have serious doubts about how far I could trust these economic oracles. Was the New Economy just a dream? I knew just the way to phrase this question to my browser.

The answer arrived in a dialogue box a few seconds later: The book’s vaunted companion website—interactive, innovative, in a word: BLUR—is no more.

Signs of the Times

2004-11-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

How will you know when the Singularity has arrived, or is about to arrive? How would you recognize that technological progress has become too fast for you to comprehend?

When you can no longer tell who, if anyone, is joking in a conversation like the following.

This is a snippet of actual dialogue from the SL4 chat room today; I have changed the names of the parties to protect the innocent (as a rule, logs of this room are not to be posted).

Horace: BCI is making big progress lately
Louis: what is that, enlighten me please :)
Louis: *?
Horace: Brain-computer interface. Who needs keyboards anymore?
Louis: ahh
Pringle: What progress is that?
Horace: Google something about sending emails with your thought
Louis: I've been waiting for those, can I buy such from the local market? (I rarely visit those)
Horace: Not yet, I'm afraid
Louis: aww :(

'The Spike' Wins a 'Mitchy'

2004-11-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while a book comes along that causes me as a reader to feel a profound sense of gratitude to the author: a book of concentrated insight representing the apex of a massive aggregation of scientific and scholarly study—the layman’s payoff for the esoteric labors of thousands. Two examples of in this category would be 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond, and 'The Moral Animal' by Robert Wright, explaining the more interesting and useful conclusions of anthropology and evolutionary psychology, respectively, along with a host of related subjects.

'The Spike', by Damien Broderick, is the latest tome crossing my desk to earn the prestigious Mitchell Howe Gratitude Award for Explanatory Excellence in Service to Humanity. This book is perhaps best described as an arena in which the top competing concepts in futurism are carefully introduced and pitted against each other in brief vivisectional combat. The most consistent champion is Broderick’s scarcely disputable thesis: for better or worse, our world as we know it will disappear during the first half of this century—the inevitable result of accelerating technological advancement. We find ourselves at the elbow of a slope that ‘spikes’ ahead of us with staggering steepness, whether we are graphing the trends in biotechnology, automated manufacturing, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, or some combination of the above.

Unlike the better known (at least in America) future studies of Ray Kurzweil ('The Age of Spiritual Machines', 'The Singularity is Near'), 'The Spike' never comes across as sensational, dumbed-down, or one-sided, and should therefore find a much more receptive audience among the highly educated and highly skeptical. As an unavoidable consequence, however, 'The Spike' may make difficult reading for those who do not meet a moderate threshold of general and scientific literacy. I recommend 'The Spike' to anyone who has graduated from Kurzweil, or who could expect to test out of it, given the chance.

Broderick is nothing if not thorough. He confidently marches the reader through canonical transhuman topics like uploading, immortality, and the Fermi Paradox, and continues straight into Shock Level Four territory, with discussion that includes Jupiter Brains and Matrioshka Brains, until he’s reached the intersection of the singularity and cosmology with Tipler’s Omega Point concept. Given the patent unpredictability of anything past the creation of greater-than-human intelligence, we might call this last stretch of Broderick’s journey a well-grounded study of wild-speculations, if such a thing is possible. Whatever it is, it’s fascinating.

But he’s not finished there. He concludes with no fewer than twelve scenarios in which the Singularity/Spike is reached, or not reached, as a result of roadblocks and opportunities along the way. The reader is then free to wade through the plentiful endnotes backing up various points of the text.

Authors like Broderick are the reason I’m so happy to live near a decent library again. In fact, this reminds me: I have another two year old wish to fulfill. Let’s see…

Yes. 'Transcension' is checked in…So, if you’ll excuse me…

On Colds and Fluids

2004-11-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

The baby has been sick this week with a nasty cold. After a few days, I started coming down with symptoms myself. Determined to do what I could to get over it, I decided to make sure I took my daily multivitamin and drank plenty of fluids. But wait, I thought, ‘drink plenty of fluids’ sounds like it might be one of those tenets of medicine that’s just been passed down through the years without any scientific basis. It’s obvious that drinking is very important if you have, say, repeated episodes of diarrhea that make you a dehydration risk. But on the other, people with run-of-the-mill colds don’t usually have diarrhea, and often have the opposite problem. Is there any scientific justification for not following your body’s internal cues of thirst in this matter?

I asked Google for wisdom.

The only thing I could really find was a commonly cited study early this year (as in this article) offering some evidence that drinking extra fluids may actually do more harm than good, because respiratory illnesses tend to trigger a water-retaining reflex; increasing consumption on top of this may upset the body’s salt balance. The study was very far from conclusive. Doctors generally say they dispense this advice in the belief that it reduces congestion by thinning mucus secretions. This would make the patient more comfortable, and also reduce the chance of a secondary sinus infection. Coming from a family where secondary sinus infections are the norm, I decided, on this occasion, to go with the fluids. I didn’t drink like a fish, but I made a conscious drinking effort that definitely upped my hydration level, taking care to not drink too much in any given sitting, and to eat small snacks to keep from excessively diluting my salts. I don’t think I’ve made this kind of effort on any previous cold.

I’m not really surprised that this common wisdom has never been carefully studied. There’s no direct commercial interest in doing so. But one would think this would be the kind of study a government agency or non-profit could commission. After all, the common cold supposedly costs the U.S. economy $40 billion annually. Anything to reduce the number of sick days, doctor visits and ineffectual antibiotic prescriptions would seem like a good idea.

And I’m curious as to how or why the water-retention response to respiratory sickness might have evolved, but this not a question I expect can be easily answered. There was probably nothing ‘common’ about colds prior to the development of agriculture, and I don’t know enough to say whether the water-retention reflex is triggered directly by the ailment or by an evolutionarily advantageous immune response. If it was an evolved response, what was the advantage?

Oh, the result of my ‘experiment’? Inconclusive. I’m just one person, after all, and who’s to say whether I had an actual cold robust enough to cause the usual grief?. But I seem to have gotten over this cold with ease, breathing easily during most hours of the day and skipping the gummy green horror of a sinus infection.

Now you know. I’m truly a blogger now.

'The Elements of Fiction Writing': Better Writing Through Chemistry

2004-11-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

At some time or other, I’ll bet you’ve seen a chemistry teacher hold a class spellbound as he or she made simple adjustments causing solution A to suddenly turn clear, solution B to froth and boil, solution C to solidify, and solution D to explode. But have you ever seen a writing teacher get the same reaction, causing paragraph A to suddenly turn clear, paragraph B to froth and boil, paragraph C to solidify, and paragraph D to explode? The authors of the books I’ve read in the 'Elements of Fiction Writing' series make a habit of such educational showmanship.

Despite my long running interest in the craft, I had not independently sought books on the subject until recently. My experience with English and writing classes in high school and college had given me the erroneous impression that such texts were merely vague motivational tools; that a mastery of the storytelling craft could only come from within after absorbing the highly anthologized works of others. In retrospect, it’s obvious that books of distilled technique do not fit easily in the curriculums of a large multi-purpose language class, and that it’s much easier for a teacher in that position to fill a syllabus with an annotated anthology than with a concentrated guide to technique.

The 'Elements' authors have felt my pain. Like most every writer whose advice I have sought on the web, they all seem introduce themselves by telling about how they were pulling heartfelt-but-troubled manuscripts out of the depths of their soul until some kind veteran took them under their wing and schooled them in the tricks of the trade. What? You mean good writing can actually be learned by something other than failure?

In Plot, Ansen Dibell, masterfully addresses what had been my biggest pre-writing concern: building a coherent plot skeleton on which you can hang the manageable building blocks of scenes. This is the skill of crystallization, of creating a basis for choosing which ideas to pull out of the intimidatingly infinite possibilities of your own imagination.

In Jack M. Bickham’s Scene & Structure, plot is analyzed in finer grain. Everyone knows that a story has rising action and falling action, but what do you build this roller coaster out of? Scenes! And Bickham shows you exactly how to build them. I don’t think anyone could have done it more cleary, either, since his is the high-octane, no-nonsense style that brought us brisk novels like Twister.

Orson Scott Card shows you how to get personal with Characters & Viewpoint. Card was my reason for checking out this particular series in the first place, for I know of no other more skilled at making me care about his characters. By learning his techniques you will be able to put the experiences of yourself and your closest friends into stories in ways so twisted nobody will ever be able to tell; you will have created new and believable people to populate your universe. Card also succinctly demonstrates the tradeoffs you will make when you pick a particular viewpoint in which to tell your story.

Bickham gets a second chance to impress with Setting, and he succeeds again. Setting is often disparaged in writing courses as something most amateurs already overdo on their own. Bickham does not flinch from the peril, and successfully teaches how to use setting to enhance, rather than bog down, a story.

In a similar vein, Monica Wood’s contribution, Description, elucidates the factors that you should use to determine how much description to use on a given occasion. This volume also deals very competently with what most others would probably lump under style. But in any case, Wood knows her craft and her examples are great.

Beginnings, Middles & Ends, by Nancy Kress, explores the same topical space as Plot, but from a different enough perspective to make it worth reading anyway. Different writers have different styles and ways of approaching a problem, and something can be learned from each.

Conflict, Action, and Suspense could hold its own as a stand-alone book, but I don't think William Noble’s volume adds much to this series. I feel that most of his points are made more clearly by the other authors.

Lewis Turco’s Dialogue is a another soft spot. (I already felt pretty competent in this area, so he had a tougher job to begin with.) Turco covers the territory, but by writing his entire book as a dialogue about dialogue, he trades clarity for cleverness. Every part of every page becomes example, but without the focused precision of the example snippets used in the rest of the series.

(There are 2 other books in the series; one, Manuscript Submission, won’t help me yet, and the other, Voice & Style, is not carried by my library.)

Each volume in this series weighs in at a lean 160 pages or so, a good length for reading in a day, though some of the authors strongly recommend reading over days or weeks between writing sessions.

A great thing about how-to books on writing (versus how-to books in general) is that they are written by people who know how to write. Each author here is an excellent explainer, and each keeps their book interesting with personal anecdotes about finding the solutions to story problems. But it’s their examples that reveal these writers as masters of the ‘Elements’. With just a pair of sentences or paragraphs, they dazzle and amaze, surprise and teach. They’ll earn your ‘ooh’s and ‘ah’s.

The Polygon Fallacy and Repellent Realism

2004-11-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

Alvy Ray Smith, one of Pixar’s founders, is often quoted as stating that a computer would have to process 80 million polygons a second before it would be indistinguishable from reality. While I have no idea how he settled his figure, I don’t doubt have any reason to doubt it. It’s easy to use this figure improperly however, in a type of “necessary but not sufficient” mistake we might call the “polygon fallacy.”

As a glaring example of what I mean, virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, in his book The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, tells the story of Sony’s PlayStation 2 as a quest to come closer to the 80 million figure. The end product fell a good 60 million polygons per second short of this holy grail, despite being 50 times faster than the original PlayStation. (There are many ways to measure such things. I’m just using Pesce’s numbers because I have them in front of me.) But the PlayStation 3 is supposed to be 1,000 times faster than the PS2, he says, going on to conclude that, if this is so, then “the images it generates will be completely indistinguishable from the real world, as complex and as rich as anything you might encounter in real life.”

Whoah, partner! Where is this complexity and richness supposed to come from? Someone or something has to create that level of complexity before it can enlist a machine to render it. It’s just not practical to do this today, and there are in fact good reasons to not jump at every opportunity to increase realism. The better game design firms, such as Blizzard, don’t load their gameplay or cut-scenes with the motion-captured images of Hollywood actors, although it would be cheaper and easier for them to do so. In the context of most game universes, which are necessarily—even intentionally—much less realistic, such tricks draw too much attention to themselves. They make the necessary and voluntary suspension of disbelief more difficult for the gamer to maintain.

This is a lesson the creators of the new movie The Polar Express might have wanted to take into account, as they captured an unprecedented amount of data from actors’ faces (mostly Tom Hanks) to actuate various characters in the film. This technique produces the most realistic animations of people ever, but at what cost? I haven’t seen the movie yet, but if the reviews are to be believed, then the effects wizards have managed to hit that known sweet spot of creepiness where the mind is simultaneously drawn inward by realism and repulsed by subtle imperfections. Pixar and others have deliberately kept their characters more cartoony for this reason. Is it not better to harness reality only inasmuch as it draws the audience into the story? Is it not wiser to avoid state-of-the-art gimmicks that merely draw attention to the medium?

That said, I do expect the richness and complexity of game environments to increase over time. As textures, shading, and physics improve, motion captured actors will not seem so out of place. Better tools for digitizing the properties of actual materials and the contours of actual locations will also help bridge the already narrowing gap between production techniques effective on film and in games. But for the foreseeable future, gaming environments are just not going to be mistaken for television programs, no matter how many billion polygons come screaming at you.

'Tomorrow Now': A History of the 20th Century

2004-11-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

I've read some of Bruce Sterling's better short fiction, and heard a recording of him speaking on the subject of the Singularity. (He seemed to understand what it was all about, even if I found his cavalier attitude towards it rather disconcerting.) These were the colorfol, if narrow, visions of one who had obviously done his homework, and I was curious to see what kinds of images of our future he might project on the wider screen of a non-fiction book. So I recently checked out Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years from my local library.

It's a bold title, and his first chapter, on biotechnology, lives up to it. Sterling provides a detailed montage of a new lifestyle: a generation that embraces and guides the diverse micro-ecologies around us and within us, instead of indiscriminately assaulting every microbe with broad-spectrum antibiotics, toothpastes, deoderants, etc.

Had he maintained this assertiveness in his other six chapters, on education, love, politics, war, business, and aging, Tommorow Now would probably be the premier futurist survey on the market. Instead, by chapter two he has seemingly cast off the shackles of editorial oversight, coasting along on timid, wandering note-dumping and ruminations on the character of modern life.

He discusses love in terms of relationships he's had with technology itself over the years. A history of the German Reichstag building becomes an extended metaphor for the evolution of political systems in the last half century. He personifies modern war through biographical study of a few celebrity rebels ("martyrs", "terrorists", "freedom fighters", depending on who's side you're on)--the kind of warriors that give today's traditional armies so much trouble.

I don't want to imply that there's anything wrong with his analysis of 20th century history; it's as insightful as anything I've read, and makes good reading in its own right. Unlike many futurists, Sterling obviously understands the importance of taking more than just technology into account when building projections. It's less glitsy, more complicated, and horribly difficult, but ultimately produces the most reasonable results. All futurists are wrong, but some are more obviously wrong sooner.

But while playing it safe is understandable, Sterling fails to deliver on a stated promise. Tomorrow Now does not envision the next fifty years for more than fifty of its 320 pages. By failing to assemble his insights into a working futurism projector, Sterling misses out on the big payoff he might be capable of. He pours a bag of intriguing gears, springs and optics into the reader's lap, pausing only to give Andy Rooney-ish commentary before disappearing into the night.

Sesame Street Report Card

2004-11-13T02:13:00.000-07:00

When you're the parent of a toddler, you get to know your Sesame Street. It's fun to see what's changed and what hasn't since you were it's target audience. I was watching back when Snuffy was still imaginary (and silent?), and "Beets Beets Sugar Beets" was among the more memorable tunes.

It's impossible to tell whether my more sophisticated observations could've applied to the Sesame of a quarter century ago. Have the old-timers in the cast acquired new undertones, or was I merely incapable of seeing them as a child? Grover has a subtle edginess; he sometimes--not often, but sometimes--comes across as a Krusty the Clown in blue fur, tired of children and ready for more adult pursuits. Our old friend Bob somehow manages to look self-conscious in some of those embarrassing sketches he perpetually finds himself in, earning chuckles from my wife and I as he dances, clucking and pecking, in a chicken suit, or stars as the insidious Trianglebob Trianglepants. Bert and Ernie continue to bother me as they glorify Ernie's playfulness at the expense of intellectualism. And Big Bird seems to be immune to the passage of time, remaining 100% in character despite 30 some-odd years housing the same actor.

I'm even less qualified to remark on the newer cast additions, but I'm going to do it anyway. Rosita, the fluorescent blue monster from south of the border, immediately won me over when she played the blues on her Spanish guitar. Gabby, the human teenager, couldn't have a bigger smile if she had a run-in with the Joker; she uses this warmth to good effect in the classic style of a children's entertainer. She's cloyingly sweet, but definitely seems to enjoy what she's doing, and she does it well. Miles, the other teen, would've gotten along just fine on either the Cosby Show or a preliminary round of American Idol, but lacks conviction in his faddish pop star voice.

But what's this? I saw something that looked like sexual tension between Gabby and Miles... We'll have to keep an eye on those two. They probably shouldn't be allowed in Oscar's trash can alone together. Take it to another street!

The celebrity sketches don't seem to have room for mediocrity. Nora Jones gave an ingenious acting performance alongside her musical one in "Don't Know Why 'Y' Didn't Come," while Natalie Portman ran Hooper's store for a day with a sickening demeanor suggesting an underage prostitute at church. Was she coming on to Big Bird? Maybe size does matter.

Here's my quick, totally subjective, and highly selective report card for the Sesame Street I've seen this past month. I trust my fellow viewers will understand.

Thumbs Up: Rosita, Prarie Dawn, Bob, the number 16, the dancing vegetables, Nora Jones, Natasha, Aaron Neville, Beijing acrobats, tie dye, 'Hace Calor', Suzie Kabloozie, Seth Green, Dr. Feel.
Thumbs Down: Elmo, Baby Bear, Dr. Phil, Natalie Portman, Trash Gordon, the Noodle family, Grunchetta, Madlenka, 'Do De Rubber Duck', Global Thingy.

This entry has been brought to you today by the typographical symbol '#'.

The Diamond Age

2004-11-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

It's almost embarrassing that it took me this long to get my hands on a copy of The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson. It's practically a pillar of that temple of nerdiness revered by my dominant brain hemisphere. Libraries, so otherwise sympathetic to my needs, kept thoughtlessly lending this book out to others. But my days of having to nod politely at the conversations of Slashdot types are now over, and I can stop plotting up ways to shift the subject away from Neal Stephenson and onto, say, their preferred Linux distro.

Last weekend I toured a 'compiled' future where nanotech moguls and Confucian judges commune in exotic locals ranging from floating neo-Victorian manors to the House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel (aka KFC). I plunged into a customized fairytale conjured up on the fly by a charismatic educational tool: a Primer powered by a combination of exotic nanotech and sympathetic voice talent. I cheered the exploits of an underpriviledged girl whose improbable relationship with the book steers the plot towards a unique, sophisticated climax.

Stephenson's multithreaded treatment hearkens back to the days of Dickens. Given the aesthetic tastes of the neo-Victorians pulling many of our protagonists' strings, it is surely no accident that a few minor but lovable characters seem to enjoy forbidden extra-helpings of page-space pudding. Setting descriptions occasionally wax past the point of polish into thick veneers that threaten, but fail, to dull the shining stories within them. And some people ride horseys!

For a jaded reader like me, 'The Diamond Age' was a real gem. It sparked real emotional involvement in a fully-rendered future. And unlike so much science fiction I read these days, the obligatory orgy scene had a point.

I've never felt closer to my poindextrous brethren. Time to explore the strange new world of 'interlibrary loan'.

My Other Blog

2004-11-10T23:20:00.000-07:00

My other blog, Evolution by Choice fell into disuse when my life took a turn for the stressful. I was also beginning to feel bogged down by upcoming questions for the Singularity Q&A I was building there -- questions in areas I had hoped to be more technically grounded in before answering for a lay reader.

Two moves, two jobs, and a baby later, I'm getting back into the blogging scene. I loved the layout I made for EBC, but I wanted convenience and comment capability this time around.

As my profile currently states, I'm in the process of trying to migrate into a career quite unlike the one my degree as a history teacher qualifies me for. Software architecture is the general area I have in mind, and I've started using the ADU curriculum to ground me in the fundamentals. I spent the first part of the year learning the basic math I had forgotten or never learned in high school. I also gained a functional understanding of the Python programming language. Now I'm slogging through calculus.

At least, that's the idea.

I'm currently the primary caregiver for my son, in an interesting twist that also has my wife working at the same kinds of jobs I was doing just a few months ago. (The moccasins are truly shared in this family.) Jason doesn't take kindly to me mentally spinning up to technical subjects like calculus, so there's a lot of screeching and squealing and not a lot of traction when I hit the books.

But I'm determined to be productive in any way I can. I've largely given up computer gaming this year, as much as it pains me. Though difficult, I find I can still read and write in the short, unpredictable bursts of time full-time parenting affords. On good days I can read one or two hundred pages and write one or two thousand words. On bad days... well, I'd rather not talk about those. Isn't that right, Jason? wvssssn (<--- The more attentive among you may notice that Jason uses Dvorak, just like his old man.)

What am I reading and writing, you ask?

Well, the writing bug bites and tugs at my flesh from time to time in a manner not unlike Jason, and this is one of those times. I've wanted to write sci-fi since my teenage years, and though I keep dismissing the urge as utterly impractical, it always comes back. So during this bout, I've read a series of books and websites on the subject of writing. I've also sampled the state of sci-fi over the past year by reading a couple of hundred short stories and various novels. At the keyboard, I've been banging out notes for my current novel concept, as well as short scenes and dialogues intended soley as practice fodder. You'll hear more about what I'm reading and writing in later posts, I'm sure.

Whatever I'm working on, I plan to talk a lot about problems that readers can help me answer if they're feeling charitable, so I thank you in advance for putting up with my ignorance.

Too bad you can't help me find Jason's sippy cup.