October 8, 2009
From a great interview with Ray Ozzie from Microsoft waxing philosophical about the Google Wave era technologies. RAY OZZIE: I think the answer is yes, it’s important and there are a lot of very interesting things. I think we don’t really know yet which ones are going to be sustainable killer app type usages versus not. It’s really hard to scale things that are at that real time level, and I frankly don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what real time means. When you’re Tweeting only once every, I don’t know, how often do you think the speediest people who Twitter are doing it over the course of their waking hours, if you averaged it out, once every — STEVE GILLMOR: Well, noisy — Scoble is 100 a day. RAY OZZIE: Is it 100? Okay. But that’s still not much in the grand scheme of things if you think of how many seconds he’s awake per day. It’s still only once every N seconds. What if your devices were Tweeting on your behalf to serve you? What if your phone, your car, your — I don’t know your glasses, but different things in your life were posting informational updates that went to services that were acting on your behalf? It’s a perfectly reasonable, realistic thing that could happen if you had an infrastructure that was a message switching infrastructure in real time. It’s a logical direction that things would go. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been talking about auto-Twitter for months now. STEVE GILLMOR: So, your concern about the overwhelming fire hose aspect of this that is just difficult to scale up to that kind of — RAY OZZIE: Well, there’s a technological aspect and a human aspect. From a technological aspect it’s just a hard […]
October 6, 2009
He envisions that people will turn to robots for the illusion of a living presence to satisfy their emotional needs. … One of those future products is the so called “Funktionide“. It is an amorph object whose intention is to provide the owner with an atmosphere of presence thus counteracting the feeling of loneliness. In the visions future people are lonely and with all the new dimensions products offer, humans will eventually turn to “robots” for emotional satisfaction. Link via Boing Boing
August 24, 2009
From Henry Jenkins Here we come closest to McLuhan’s core idea — “Here it is” is a function of Twitter; “Here I Am” may be its core “message” in so far as McLuhan saw the message as something that might not be articulated on any kind of conscious level but emerges from the ways that the medium impacts our experience of time and space. “Here it is” became “Here I am” and more importantly “Here we are.” “Here we are” is not only more important, it is also closer to the truth, since it hides whatever implicit subjectivity is present in “Here I am”. But where? Twitter is nonspatial; the internet is everywhere and nowhere. Twitter is nontemporal, or at least asynchronous; ‘we’ do not share time. Twitter is location without coordinates. “Being here” is the final reversal of the implicit subject-object distinction in dasein itself, setting context without any reference to the other. we are no longer dasein.
August 21, 2009
So people send me articles, videos, and other interesting stuff all the time, and I enjoy and appreciate it but I rarely find the time to do a proper write up. Usually, the articles sit as open tabs in my browser, waiting for me to post them here with some analysis, and are lost after a restart or a browser crash. So instead of letting these articles live and die on my computer, I’ll just post link dumps every once in a while. I’d like to save these articles for posterity and give credit where credit is due, but I don’t really have the time to do proper commentary. I hope you don’t mind. If an autonomous machine kills someone, who is responsible? (Guardian) Yet another official-sounding body, this time The Royal Academy of Engineering, puts together a report on the ethical implications of machine autonomy. “If you take an autonomous system and one day it does something wrong and it kills somebody, who is responsible? Is it the guy who designed it? What’s actually out in the field isn’t what he designed because it has learned throughout its life. Is it the person who trained it? “If we can’t resolve all these things about who’s responsible, who’s charged if there’s an accident and also who should have stopped it, we deny ourselves the benefit of using this stuff.” As if these issues are any easier in the case of humans… (thx Jon!) Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. (Slate) Great article on the relation between seeking behavior and dopamine, and how the translates into high tech ‘addictions’. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, “where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy”… […]
August 21, 2009
Delicate Boundaries from csugrue on Vimeo. As referenced in Bruce Sterling’s lecture At The Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry
August 19, 2009
Head over to The Futile Podcast to check out some chats I had with my buddy Ian about robots and technology in film. He has put a lot of effort into this podcast (which is starting its third year!), and he did a great job editing down my inane ramblings into their most pedantic and narcissistic form, framed by classic GnR. I had a blast trying out the podcast medium, and I’ll probably try to do more in the future. Technology part 1: 80’s action movies are lame. Technology part 2: Terminator, Time-Travel, and Technology Technology in film part 3: Robotics and Fear Technology in film part 4: Judgement Calls
August 4, 2009