From CNN: Device stops speeders from inside car The system being tested by Transport Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Department of Transportation, uses a global positioning satellite device installed in the car to monitor the car’s speed and position. If the car begins to significantly exceed the speed limit for the road on which it’s travelling the system responds by making it harder to depress the gas pedal, according to a story posted on the Toronto Globe and Mail’s Website. The pilot test, using 10 cars driven by volunteers, is believed to be the first in North America, although similar systems have been tested in several European countries, according to the newspaper.

Business Week published an article on Autonomic Computing: Computer, heal thyself. His idea was simple. Scientists needed to come up with a new generation of computers, networks, and storage devices that would look after themselves. The name for his manifesto came from a medical term, the autonomic nervous system. The ANS automatically fine-tunes how various organs of the body function, making your heart beat faster, for instance, when you’re exercising or stressed. In the tech realm, the concept was that computers should monitor themselves, diagnose problems, ward off viruses, even heal themselves. Computers needed to be smarter. But this wasn’t about machines thinking like people. It was about machines thinking for themselves. Apparently IBM has been pushing the autonomic idea for a few years now, and has detailed the 4 major aspects of an autonomic system, and the 8 obstacles such systems face. This is interesting to me, obviously, for several reasons. The drive towards self-regulating, autonomous systems is obviously a push for greater agency in these systems. But the interesting aspect is IBM’s focus on the biological metaphor in describing the nature of autonomic systems, and borrows heavily from the philosophical and cognitive science research on the nature of agency. That last link includes reference to Damasio, for instance. I will have to do more research on the idea before I can say anything substantive. Glancing over the manifesto makes me think this is deep into ‘industry buzzword’ territory, though I think the implications here are more theoretical and foundational than IBM lets on. I should stop to conisder some of the blogosphere phuzz on the article. From Rough Type: Not like breathing The real power of the idea is not that computers will run themselves, in the way that the autonomic nervous system runs itself. Rather, it’s that, […]

This plus this brings the metaverse that much closer. We are literally one technological convergence step away from a world entirely marked up by metadata. This basically means that we are one killer gadget away from a world where continuous, real-time access to that metadata is assumed as part of an individual’s basic equipment set, like having a phone number or the ability to see. Next semester I plan on teaching Bruce Sterling’s not-quite-sci-fi design manifesto Shaping Things (full text here), in which he refers to this kind of killer gadget as a Wand. A wand is nothing like the Xwand, because Microsoft’s trumped up Wiimote does not deal with metadata. A wand is handled like a cell phone, but without the already obsolete assumption that the gadget’s primary function is to make phone calls. The Wand’s primary purpose is to wrangle arphids, which are the keepers of metadata. A “monitor” should be cheap and easy to make, because it’s basically just an active arphid. It’s an arphid that happens to have a steady source of power, a longer communication range, and a more sophisticated chip. It’s been moved from passive to active; it’s now a boss arphid… The point of installing these monitors is that they can communicate information about the arphids to one another. Then they can filter that torrent of data and move the valuable information over long ranges. They become bosses, guards, co-ordinators. Add these monitors into the mix—active hubs of arphid data, repeaters, relayers, linked to a global network—and you have created an INTERNET OF THINGS. … Whenever I shop, I shop with a wand in my hand. It would never occur to me to shop without a filter and an interface. And someone built that for me, it was designed—as a Wrangler, I need […]

In a precedent-setting case, administrative trial judge Tynia Richard recommended the firing of John Halpin, a veteran supervisor of carpenters, for cutting out before the end of his shift on as many as 83 occasions between March 2 and Aug. 9, 2006. The evidence against Halpin, whose base pay is $300 a day, included time cards that suspiciously appeared stamped on the same machine, even though his duties placed him in different locations each day. But there was a clincher: data gathered through the GPS system on Halpin’s cellphone, which he accepted in 2005 without being told it might be used to trace his every move. |link| My first response to this article was that it is yet more proof of how our technology outpaces our ethics. Our technology is rigid; our ethics have some slack around the edges. It might be a minor failing to leave work 5 or 10 minutes early, but its the kind of thing that most people are willing to over look and let slide, especially when such behavior goes so easily under the radar. And people have been exploiting this minor loophole since we first had punch cards keeping track of our hours. The economy didn’t crumble, and businesses didn’t suffer. Unless it is a particularly egregious case (this particular case might count), most people don’t think that leaving work a bit early is a sign of laziness or any other ethical failing. No one wants to be at work, and everyone understands that. Our technology, on the other hand, only knows rigid deadlines. Technology is ruthless in its petty attention to detail and its utter lack of flexibility. Our machines have no sympathy for our minor human concerns, and pays no attention to the flexibility of our intuitive ethical code. It would be […]