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When I was working on the idea of the pocket-device model of augmented reality versus the lanyard model, I realized something about conference badges that didn’t really fit into the piece.

photo credit: jdlasica

Conference badges are little ancient proto-augments.

They are a way for people to carry around and display metadata about themselves. The basic bit of data is “I am allowed to be here”. Most conference passes add to that details such as who you are and who you work for. Some conference badges add in slots for customization such as press-clippings, your business card or whatever else you feel like tossing in there.

Everywhere you go, there’s the badge, broadcasting who you are and whether you are authorized. Anyone around can take a look and grab your data (such as it is). They are – as in all the lanyard augments – public, passive, and always-on.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

I’d like to talk about augmented reality. Specifically, I’d like to talk about augmented reality, the things you carry in your pockets, and the things you wear around your neck.

Primer

AR basics: It’s an extension of the mobile Internet (that’s the one where people are walking around with computers disguised as phones in their pockets). The mobile Internet is what happens when devices become untethered from power, ethernet, and phone cords.

photo credit: tranchis

Let’s talk about finding a restaurant.( Read more... )

1.

In 2008, Australian show A Current Affair broadcast an episode that included a brief hypnotherapy session. The segment was called Think Slim and the idea was that it would help viewers lose weight. This was found to be in breach of the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice which specifically forbids broadcasting shows “designed to induce a hypnotic state in viewers”.

photo credit: rheanvent( Read more... )

There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An invocation said while waiting for copies of the meeting’s agenda to be printed so that if could be distributed, doodled upon, and then thrown away.

photo credit: Corey Holms

The computer was meant to herald an end to paper documentation but paper multiplied instead. Easy editing + cheap and fast laser printing changed the relationship we had to paper. Real world filing disappeared, as it became easier to just print a new copy if the document had gone missing. Perfection trumped conservation and every discovered typo meant a complete reprinting of all 7 copies of the 50 page report or proposal.

Think about what’s happening here. Documents are undergoing an transition from object to data. The paper copies become physical instantiations of the data but they’ve stopped being the data itself. There’s this sort of adolescent transition in progress, while we – the users of the data – aren’t sure how to treat it, so we end up with these bizarre hybrid entities that slide back and forth between digital and physical, all the while leaving behind recycling bins overflowing with the dead husks of stale snapshots.

A decade later, we’re slowly starting to come to grips with this. Very few of my friends own printers anymore – they feel like a costly burden. We prefer to avoid printing at all if we can, resorting to a trip to the copyshop only when absolutely necessary. The fact that we have to do this at all shows how much of the rest of the world that we’re interfacing with still fetishises paper. So we resort to hacks, using scanned signatures and fax-to-email services to generate much documentation, essentially resorting to forgery to navigate our way through the paper bureaucracy. Adolescence is still in progress.

If all these visionaries are right about the path that manufacturing is going to take, we are in for an even worse transition with objects. Just like with paper, the promise of 3d printers is a blurring between data and objects. Bruce Sterling calls these hybrid things Spimes. Data that gets instantiated in the physical world for a time, before being reclaimed, recycled and sustainably mined for future use.

Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.

Bruce Sterling – Viridian Note 00422: The Spime

Will Wiles of Icon Magazine spent some time talking about augmented reality, Tron, and the fictional source of many design and technological innovations on his blog. I couldn’t stop thinking about the last two paragraphs.

photo credit: rbatina

Returning to augmented reality, there is of course a great risk that it will flop, just as the first wave of virtual reality did in the 1990s. I remember being taken to the Trocadero Centre to try out the “Virtuality” machines installed there – the first in the UK. I remember it clearly because it was such a huge disappointment. AR strikes me as massively more practical, but no matter how sophisticated the technology, it still comes up against a fixed limitation – the human arm. Are people going to walk around holding up their mobile phones to navigate the world?

Rationally, I’d say no, but then I wouldn’t have guessed that people would experience real-life events through the tiny screen on their digital cameras or even their mobile phones – and they do, preferring to see an event through a technological surrogate. I wouldn’t have guessed that people would trust the information on their Sat Nav screen over the evidence of their own eyes and instincts, but they do. There’s no guessing what people might prefer to delegate to gadgetry.

Will Wiles – The Unreal Deal

The technological surrogates idea so interesting. I keep thinking about the image of the Obama’s first dance and all the people recording it, themselves being recorded. Ditto for all those people who have been on vacation, seeing the whole thing through the frame of a Polaroid/Camcorder/Flip/iPod Nano. Extra points for the parents ruining their kids’ fidgety fun by yelling at them to pose and smile when all the kids want to do is LOOK at the thing they are posing in front of.

Then I sheepishly think of the GBs of photos on my drive. It’s not that difficult to imagine myself getting distracted enough to make the mistake of Wiles’ Sat Nav driver. It’s not that I don’t trust my senses so much as I don’t trust my memory of directions. Not that I try to remember them much anymore.

A mobile phone with a good notes and maps application makes remembering seem obsolete. I can just look it up. I’ll Google it. I’m pretty sure I wrote it down, somewhere…

I feel like camera phones and GPS navigators are two sides of the same coin: the fear of forgetting. Cameras say, “We will capture this event and keep care of it.” Garmin says, “I will tell you where the path is, you don’t need to write down the directions.” This one thing is so important that it outweighs the many ways in which these devices are terrible.

New technology doesn’t win because it’s so much better than what came before. It wins because some subset of what it does is SO COMPELLING that we put up with the many ways in which using it is worse than the older alternatives. A real map is much, much better than Google maps in presentation, ease of note-taking, ability to quickly scan around, and layers of data available. But they are expensive, it’s hard to carry a comprehensive set, they don’t show you where you are, and they can’t be searched.

I agree with Wiles that the seeds of the future are planted in the stories that people grow up with. The second half of the notion has to be our powerful ability to rewrite expectations. We say that Stephenson, Gibson and Sterling et al. invented cyberspace which led to the Internet. But this thing both fulfils and falls terribly short of the consensual hallucinations that drove the imagination of the people doing the work that led to the Internet that we ended up with.

Where augmented reality apps are likely to get over the hump into ubiquity is when they figure out what it is that they can do that we didn’t realize we wanted them to do, and ruthlessly implement that.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

A little while ago, I was sitting on a bus, considering the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs (like you do). Meaning, all of the things that needs to be happening behind the scenes or have happened in the past to allow the independence of the self-sufficient super-being.

photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

While this was happening, we got stuck in traffic behind a delivery truck. We were surrounded by them, in fact, and it occurred to me that I was on one (Greyhound offers a courier service). I started thinking about the insane infrastructure required to have something like FedEx. The need to rapidly get something from one place to another. The network of planes, warehouses, barcodes, computers, scanners, trucks, garages, boxes, and people all bent to the service of moving things around on our behalf.

FedEx’s business is in serious jeopardy. I wonder if they realize this.

It begins with letters, of course. FedEx is in essence a finely tuned premium mail carrier. That email put a huge dent in regular mail is old news. It’s faster and freer. When it comes to the transmission of information – one of the main uses of mail carriers – the Internet wins in almost every situation.

This doesn’t really matter to FedEx. They were never in the regular mail business. They ARE in the authenticity business and the object business, however. Both of these are under threat.

The Authenticity Business

This is how contracts between far flung business partners get negotiated:
You have a few calls to outline the deal and then someone draws up a draft contract in Word. This gets emailed out with track-changes turned on and then it goes back and forth electronically until a final version is agreed upon. This is promptly printed off, signed and faxed with the originals to follow by Fed Ex.

I have no idea why we still have to send the “originals” by physical mail. A nod to tradition I suppose. There is nothing about a laser-printed 30 page document with signatures on the last page that’s particularly more safe from tampering than an properly secured electronic copy of the same. If eBay, Amazon, Paypal and my bank can solve the authentication problem, it can be solved for contracts. For whatever reason, the business/legal world insists that it needs a copy of a sheet of paper with ink from a pen that I actually touched.

So it gets sent by FedEx and the guy shows up at your door with the package and to prove it was received, you sign for it. On a touch pad. Electronically. I don’t think that the signed documents portion of FedEx’s business is long for this world.

The Object Business

Once the Authenticated Document portion of FedEx’s business fades away, they’ll have to retreat into the molecule moving business. Here’s a need that, at least for the immediate future, doesn’t get demolished by the Internet.

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?

It’s not everything. Objects with acute sentimental value, hand crafted trinkets, mementoes, these will all be things you want to keep. But even this category is smaller than you might think. It’s not that long ago that photos were on the “must ship” list. Now they’re digital and easily reprintable, if they’re ever printed at all.

With mature 3d printing we’ve ended up with a kind of teleportation. This is the kind of thing that gives philosophers of art nightmares.

Teleportation

Need a computer at your destination? We’ll fab you one and format it from your encrypted cloud-image. It’ll be ready at the airport with your rental car and a change of clothes, which we also printed to your specifications.

Need your bike shipped? Drop it off at a reclamation facility, we’ll scan it and credit you the materials, then for less than the price of flying it across the country, we’ll rebuild it over there. For a small fee, you can fiddle with the specs.

You want to ship books? Really? Who ships books?

Because of mass-production, we’ve been living among essentially interchangeable copies for quite some time. The next step is making them utterly interchangeable. Here’s my prediction: We are less than 50 years away from the shipping of objects being as quaint and specialized a practice as shipping sheets of paper with good-wishes written them.

Whoever rises to replace FedEx? Their slogan can be: “It’s already waiting for you.”

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

A little while ago, I got a new iPhone. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. It’s not an upgrade or anything, just a repair job turned replacement. It looks and behaves the same as my old iPhone except that whatever was wrong with the screen on the old one isn’t on this one. The process was painless – I went in, they looked at the phone, handed me a new one and then I went home and re-loaded all the data.

photo credit: .m for matthijs

A good back-up/restore scheme changes your relationship with your gear. It changes a computer from heirloom to container. The loss, theft or destruction of hardware is transmuted from a crisis to an expensive inconvenience.

This isn’t new. We’re used to disposable containers and windows. Glasses are only useful insofar as they hold water, TVs only insofar as they display shows. No one has ever cried because an Ikea tumbler got smashed. Dropping a plasma screen down the stairs is an costly stumble, but not a crippling one.

The new part is how much stuff and what kind of stuff is being turned into data. (Not to mention what kind of data is being turned into stuff.) I’m surrounded by people for whom the loss of a hard drive would be as burning down their house.

There’s the obvious list: music, movies, books, newspapers. The digitization of these things has provoked a crisis in every industry that’s been touched and it’s coming for more. Think music piracy was a sea change? Wait ’til you see the casual piracy of clothing, cars, plants, and animals.

Beyond the well-worn questions of intellectual property, authenticity, and how to keep creators fed, there’s a lot going on. Consider “personal data” for a second. Not insurance records and banking info, but all of the things that used to be family possessions, which have become files. Consider the twin marketing features of durable and disposable, mirror virtues that we keep cramming into single objects. Think about cloud computing, 3d printing, and nomadic restaurants.

I’d like to spend some time on these. Stay tuned.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

1991 was, for me, the year that the future crossed over into the present. That’s the year that the Robotech storyline was meant to start, and I was big into Robotech. 1991 was the year that a world war would begin, a war that would nearly consume the planet, until an ultra-advanced alien ship fell out of the sky.

photo credit: Andreas_MB

You can imagine my fuzzy trepidatious fear/excitement when my Junior-High self woke up one morning to hear that the U.S.’d invaded Iraq. I didn’t mention the feeling to anyone, because, clearly that’s insane, but I harboured a secret thrill. Could this be it? Could Jack McKinney be a documentarian? (No.)

Dan Meth created a chart of Futuristic Movie Timelines and the result is instructive. It’s fun to watch these movies, knowing what we now know about the progression of technology. Not so much for the plot – the plots were never predictions – but for the set dressing. There’s two halves to the fun: stuff what’s there that we are missing and stuff that’s missing that we already have.

Both provide object lessons in how hard it is to calibrate visions for the future and serve to remind us that all science fiction is really about the present.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Full text of “Drone Army descends on New Orleans” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

Drone Army descends on New Orleans

Contact with drones lost during drug wars, swarm slowly migrating north.

photo credit: l@mie

MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade.

Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday.

Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units.

This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release.

“Although the full extent of the so-called Lost Army’s presence isn’t known, we have to assume that at least a portion is established in the area and people should be careful when travelling outside, hunting recreationally, or otherwise behaving in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner,” Arceneaux said.

Since the Michoacán incident, the Louisiana Department of Civil Defence has been upgrading surveillance stations along a north-south line through the state and at several key navigational choke-points to monitor for signs of the drones. Critics charge that the process has taken too long and that warnings are coming too late.

“This is just part of a larger failure on the part of the powers-that-be to properly fund national sanctity,” said Corporal J. F. Ruck, Minutemen spokesman, “They’re telling us to just sit back and let the drones fly on by, more of the extensive record of do-nothing politics by the government. We don’t even know where they are.”

More security news
Louisiana Ambassador calls for funding assistance to deal with drone menace
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“Pitbull” defence breeds approved for public purchase in Chicago

Built and deployed to police the Columbian jungle during the height of anti-drug paranoia, contact with the nearly completely autonomous collective was lost 9 years ago. The incident and subsequent massacre of a small unit of Panamanian security forces led to the immediate banning of high-autonomy drone units. The ban has ironically made the errant drones nearly impossible to contain.

“The problem is that our guys just aren’t as fast as these things,” said General Hussein, speaking from the Pentagon, “They do one thing really well and that is high speed 720 degree combat. You can’t expect a human operator to match that capability.”

After two disastrous attempts to retrieve or destroy the drones in South America, a containment policy was declared. However, jurisdictional issues have plagued the joint task force and as much as 50% of the army carrying up to 70% of the remaining ordinance remains unaccounted for. Despite efforts, they have been steadily migrating northward.

According to Lockheed Martin analysts, the drones appear to be in a patrol mode. Since the massacre at the alleged cartel fields in Michoacán, few violent incidents have been reported.

The drones carry a mixture of bio-explosive and conventional ordinance. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with drones disarm and seek cover immediately. People with weapons, home-based laboratories or certain kinds of farms are advised to take special caution. More information is available on the DoCD website.

Don’t miss these top stories on the network:
Opinion: Is it rude to sequence on the first date?
Hurricane Zeke makes landfall in Maine
Plan your vacation: 10 must-see “sunken city” diving tours

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Listen, Jerry can you get Louisa on the line? I’ve got an idea here you kids don’t want to miss. This’ll be a use of your VC dollars that’s way better than that ridiculous gene therapy tech that Kurzweil sold you on.

Here’s the deal: It seems like all of the buzz for augmented reality is around layering images in real time over the world or a video feed of the world. That seems cool, but it’s all very new and pre-alpha and I feel like there has to be more to the AR stuff than just jittery lines and awkward French maids. In fact, I think that there is the tech for an app, RIGHT NOW that could provide a polished user experience using current-gen consumer devices. I’d like to pitch that product to you today. Now.

photo credit: babel`µx

Here’s the background: On day 10 of Dustin Curtis’ 30 Day Flight he sits next to a retired Disney audio Imagineer. Calls him Mr Q. They have a conversation. In 1968 this Q guy designed the ambient audio system for Disney World. It was the first theme park that had music playing on the pathways between the rides. Over time it’s gotten more and more sophisticated.

Listen to this:

He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

That’s Dustin Curtis explaining How Mr Q Manufactured Emotion

It’s a cool solution but it’s very 20th Century. Very infrastructural. It’s location dependent and expensive to reproduce. It asks everyone to hear the same thing. It doesn’t scale to the whole world.

Enter smart phones.

Jer, you know smart phones. Smart phones are your own private amusement park. They have headphone jacks, they let us load apps, they let us play sounds, they are location aware. We don’t need to install speakers throughout the city, people carry the speakers in their pockets. They’re listening to playlists and podcasts and these really ancient “we-don’t-know-from-new-tech-so-we’re-just-filming-plays” primitive stuff. Pre-modern stuff. Audio walking tours? Please, that’s Walkman stuff. Press play when you reach this sign post, whatever. We can reproduce Mr Q’s tech and we don’t need to lay a single inch of cable, don’t need to bolt in a single sub-woofer. We just need to paint in the sounds.

Pick an launch market. Somewhere filled to the gills with creative types who have iPhones, Palms Pre, and Android handsets. New York? Toronto? London? San Francisco? Call up some big names or some up and comings soundscape artists. Is Brian Eno available? What about DJ Someone-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of? Someone the kids are in to.

There’s two parts to this thing. The client sits on the phone, downloads a soundtrack – custom for the city – pulls from the location API, and mixes sounds according to the instructions. There’s cleverness sure, some audio gee-whizery secret sauce, all very patentable and proprietary that seamlessly pulls it together. As you make your way from uptown to downtown, the tone shifts gradually, like in Mr Q’s park but moreso. Mr Q is strictly last century, he’s amateur hour hacker hobbyist. It’s laying copper when we could be putting up cell towers in Africa. Disney doesn’t know from happiest place on earth.

On the server – wait’ll to see what we’ve got going there – it’s all very user-friendly, very drag-n-drop. We show you a map of the city and your uploaded audio files. You can paint-in areas, just like Photoshop, in fact we’re using one of those 2.0 cloud-based painting apps as a base tool. Colour your regions and associate sounds accordingly. We crowdsourced the names of neighbourhoods from Flickr to give you suggested outlines, if you just wanna throw something together, but the real artist can paint down to the nearest half-meter.

Oh yeah, of course it’s all socially networked. We’ve got Facebook integration and a Twitter feed and you can rate soundtracks and see what your friends are listening to and we’ll make a recommendation engine or just leverage someone else’s.

Financial model? We’ve got a financial model like you wouldn’t believe. Licensing opportunities for bands, official city soundtracks for the burgs that care about that kind of thing, pay-per listen, downloadable in-app micro transactions, the whole thing. Disney needs to talk to US. Why are they wasting time on a single soundtrack for the happiest place on earth? Why aren’t they selling Little Mermaid downloads for the girls and Pirates of the Caribbean for the boys? You know what I’m getting at: everyone’s happiest place custom-selected for the needs of the individual.

And that’s all 1.0 stuff. Pre-launch Beta. Let me tell you about what’s in the pipeline.

For one thing, imagine interactive soundtracks. We’ll throw up some time-of-day code in the 1.2 release, that’s easy stuff. Then we start pulling down weather data and incorporating that into the premium soundtracks. Maybe event-based too. Festival in progress? Why not throw in a caribbean undertone?

In the long run, as user adoption upticks, we see a sub-genre of tracks that react to what other users are up to. Who is nearby? Is a crowd forming? The app knows and revises the soundscape accordingly. We’re also looking at a game element – can you follow audio clues and visit all the right locations? Secret soundtracks, unlockable content, all the stuff that makes people crazy with desire.

That’s not it, there’s 3.0 plans too, stuff that’ll change your relationship with sound; military applications, fitness regimens all kinds of things. But before I get to that, you’re gonna need to sign the NDA.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Ingredients

1. 15 Lombard Street is a meticulously researched manual for breaking into a London bank. Read about it on BLDGBLOG.
2. Augmented Reality. Hip and sexy new tech. Lots of active development and gee-whizzery. The whole industry is still essentially pre-alpha.
3. The construction method in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. Tagged tools, materials, and smart gloves tell unskilled workers what to do. The building more or less assembles itself.
4. WikiHow and Instructables.
5. The Anarchist Cookbook.

photo credit: Curious Expeditions

Recipe

What’s missing from AR is good, cheap, goggles. No one wants to go around with a flashlight on a lanyard Everyone knows this. The solution is under active development. It’s a matter of time before goggles let us overlay images on the world in real time, leaving our hands free to, you know, work.

The promise of AR (aside from sexy maids everywhere you look) is highly contextual just-in-time information. Could be automated, could be an operator looking over your shoulder telling you what to do.

“OK, pull the lever I just highlighted in red, then the one that I highlighted green.”

The idea of puppet-master is so centralized. So 19th-Century Crime. The real future is in the automated stuff. What happens when someone makes a Heist Layar? What happens when the getaway portion of the Heist Layar is build on top of someone else’s Traffic Avoider routines?

Distributed, crowd-sourced manuals for a break-in and escape. Researched by shadowy groups with Cayman Island bank accounts, released to the street. Hey mister meth-addict who just pulled off the greatest heist of the century, despite having no plan whatsoever: Need somewhere to launder your money? The manual has some ideas about what accounts you could use (for a fee).

It’s all very user-friendly. You pop on the goggles, plug in the earphones and go to work. There is a bright pathway lighting your way along with a little countdown telling you how long you have to get to the next node. The manual assures you that the patrol times have been precisely plotted. It ducks you into and out of shadows with alarming precision. Red areas outline the vision cones of every known security camera. You can see the gaps and thread your way between them effortlessly. You are wearing the clothes that the manual had you put on and a working counterfeit ID tag (the gear guided you through making that too). There are countermeasures in place, of course, but you’re running a 0-day version, updated overnight with data from an inside source.

You accomplices don’t even need to be witting. Inject the right instructions into other people’s rigs, have them hold open doors or block traffic to ease the getaway. You can recruit accomplices on Craigslist. Spread a crime across a wide enough range of people and the notion of accessory begins to look strangely outmoded.

“What? I’m just a courier. I got handed a package and I handed it off at the appropriate time. Of course my papers are all in order.”

“Surveillance of the bank? What are you talking about?! I was hired by a company to ensure that their security guards were all making their rounds at the appointed time and to note any deviations.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about officer, I just answered an ad and did what the rig told me. I thought it was a cleaning job.”

Now, take this tech and give it to suicide bombers.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Here are 6 videos spanning 50 years of predictions about our glorious technological future at home. What I love about all of these are the incidental predictions that need to happen when the videos are put together. They want to make promises about future technology and materials but they can’t help but imply various thing about how society will evolve. For instance, the 1997 Microsoft video which features a kid researching for a project doesn’t see Wikipedia coming at all (neither did Microsoft).

1. 1957: Monsanto Plastics

   Oh visions of the future from the 1950s, why must you have so much back-handed sexism?

2. 1980: Xanadu

   I really want to know what was going through the minds of the committee that decided that the first robot you should meet should be the murderous HAL from 2001.

3. 1988: Ameritech

   There are a lot of predictions that seem accurate if you sort of squint a little. One that wasn’t was that Ameritech would still exist. (Via the excellent paleofuture.)

   
   The Electronic Home

4. 1997: Microsoft

   In the future, you will still be watching Oprah.

5. 2008: Samsung

   I am pleased that in the future, the lead-in feature of RFID involves organizing your recipes.

6. 2008: Adaptive Path and Mozilla Labs

   Adaptive Path decides to hitch their future horse to the New York Times, Yahoo, MapQuest, Amazon, and Google brands. I wonder how many of those will make it.

   Aurora (complete video without commentary) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Fun activity: Predict what predictions in the last two videos will seem hopelessly naive 10 years from now.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

((Below emphasis is mine))

2007: Developer ensures islands will be safe from rising sea levels

Nakheel, which is the developer of The Palm islands and The World, says it followed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) estimation of a rise of 30cm to 50cm by 2100 when it prepared its plans for the islands. “It goes without saying that both short and long-term [sea level] rises are always considered in the design of Nakheel coastal projects,” said Dr Louay A Mohammad, a scientist with Nakheel.

“The upper end of the range is adopted by Nakheel, which is in line with International Marine and Coastal Structures Design Practices. We are therefore confident that the sustainability of our waterfront projects is ensured in the long term.” The developer, however, did not comment on the recent report from international ocean expert Stefan Rahmstorf, published in the journal Science, which said the increase was more likely to be 1.4 metres by 2100 – nearly triple the IPCC estimation.

2009: Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say

Ocean levels have been rising by 3.1 millimeters a year since 2000, a rate that’s predicted to grow, according to the study. The projections of sea levels rising by a meter this century compare with the 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) forecast by the IPCC.

((Oops))

photo credit: saharsh

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works. As you’re reading it, bear in mind that due to laws similar to the DMCA all over the world, it is often illegal to bypass DRM encryption, even if copyright law allows you to make a copy.

Why is this important?

In a storage locker in Halifax, there is a small box which theoretically contains copies of every essay I wrote in high school. These essays are stored on a stack of floppy disks. I’ll probably never read them again. For this to be otherwise, a lot of things would need to come true.

1. I figure out which Mac OS I was running (System 6?).
2. I find a copy of the OS and get it running either on old hardware (which I also find) or virtualized.
3. I find a compatible floppy drive.
4. I find a compatible copy of the word processor (WriteNow).
5. The disks have dramatically exceeded their estimated 2-year lifespan.

In contrast, consider my University essays, all of which I can still open and read. This is possible because I have been transferring the files from computer to computer over the past 12 years. There is an unbroken chain of digital pack-ratting from the MacBook I’m using now to the Pentium 166 I built in 1997.

The loss of my essays (grades 10-12) are not a big loss to society. But it serves to illustrate a problem that plagues archivists. Digital content is very easy to copy in the short term but degrades very quickly in the medium and long term. To keep digital content alive, you have to keep it moving. Kevin Kelly calls this Movage.

Anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward.

In order to preserve content against the decay of laughably short-lived media and compatibilty, archivists need to make copies - early and often. We’re not used to thinking of it that way. We’re used to thinking of preservation as a kind of stasis. We think of climate controlled rooms and white gloves and sealed vaults.

In digital, stasis is death. Stasis is the BBC’s endangered Domesday Project, trapped on laserdiscs, needing hardware that had nearly disappeared in 2002 (interestingly, they knew this was coming but the archivists failed to keep the data alive).

It is bad enough for librarians, what with the fires, earthquakes, moisture, theft, time, and other disasters eating away at the content they seek to preserve. Copyright holders have made it all the worse, by preventing the one thing going for digital - easy, short-term, perfect copies - from happening in a legal setting.

DRM schemes make it illegal for archivists to do their jobs.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

“The future”’s glamor, its sexiness. It’s never just one day. We don’t imagine May 20, 2050. The present is almost always the one given day.
Unless something starkly Ubertrending happens, and usually something bad. And that’s when the present feels like “the future”.
–William Gibson on twitter.

I feel like I live in the future ALL THE TIME.

My camera is a sleek flat rectangle just like in Transmetropolitan. Except that my camera is also a phone and a networked computer which contains a map of the world that knows where I am along with a growing portion all of the knowledge.

I have the Internet. Everyone has the Internet. We’re giving out laptops to children, except that this might not matter, because everyone wants a cellphone instead. What’s a cellphone? It’s the word we use to prevent our brains freaking from the fact that we all carry around personal radios, (with way more function than Star Trek communicators) that link us to a global satellite network. Like talking about wireless cable.

I just got back from 2 weeks in Thailand on business. I didn’t have working water every morning, but everyone had working miracle gizmos that we barely noticed. I got frustrated when network difficulties made it kind of choppy to talk to a teleconference of people all around the globe. For free!

The nation state is under pressure from without and within. Corruption is rampant and crushing. More and more corporations and individuals are becoming truly transnational.

Every day, people upload free video of new marvels and wonders. They’re commercializing Electric Cars!

Flying robots (ROBOTS!) are used to fight wars with shadowy terrorist organizations on the edge of law-bound civilization.

Need I mention that the world might be facing either an economic or environmental apocalypse (or both!).

We have a space station now, though it doesn’t really work very well. The Chinese have a space program. And possibly an army of hackers.

Did I mention, there were PIRATES? Not, like, fun swashbuckling pirates, but high tech, globally networked pirates.

This is not the bright gleaming future of certain kinds of science fiction, but it is the messy, complicated future of the science fiction I grew up with. It may be wrong on the details, but in tone, this is sometimes terrifyingly close to the 1980s worlds of Gibson and Sterling and that whole crowd. I think it’s telling that the crew I grew up reading are writing closer to the present these days (or even the past).

P.S. Nuclear Lighthouses.

photo credit: Midnight-digital

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.