Leis on Life

Technology Trends in 2014 (from 2012)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:45:15 -0700

(While these trends are United States-centric, most of them also apply to other developed countries, and will soon apply to developing countries as well.)

Internet

A significant fraction of households now have 100-200 mbps broadband connections, with pockets of 400 mpbs connections spreading to some cities, and more, but still rare, 1 gbps connections. The arrival of 4K video online and the rapid refashioning of the web into an interactive multi-medium will increase the consumer and business demand for 1 gbps.

The rollout of LTE-Advanced, with average speeds in excess of 100 mbps will begin. There will be few devices that support this speed.

The Internet of Things and Sensor Web are much more commonly discussed. There are truly more sensors and tracking of objects using the internet, but these are just the early days of a revolution in what the internet is capable of becoming. Our environment will be more aware due to a push by marketers, but AR, lifelogging and ads will be the only beneficiaries at this stage.

Digital Media

In 2014, the Cloud is the primary platform for all digital media, with 1080p, 5.1 surround sound being the standard. 4K video will arrive, with affordable TVs and other displays providing QFHD (3840 x 2160 pixels) or 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) resolution. Television stations and cable companies will have been testing 4K and the first 4K channels will likely be offered by the end of the year. The first 4K digital downloads will arrive to begin filling up the resolution real estate of 4KTVs and other displays. Consumer electronics companies will be talking about their new 4K physical disk formats, but it is likely these will never catch on as streaming and downloads will become overwhelmingly more popular.

Metaverse

Intelligent Agents will pass Social Networks as the most commented upon, reported, hyped, and business-oriented and consumer-facing trend. When merged with Augmented Reality, we will begin to see the spread of cartoon critters that leap around our devices and displays to serve as assistants and entertainment.

Lifelogging continues to improve with the arrival of the Internet of Things and Sensor Web. Activities like waking and falling asleep, health metrics, and activities are commonly collected by consumer electronics and these data have become the foundation for the transformation of Social Networks into Lifelogging Platforms.

Hardware

In 2014, the 4K Video Era will arrive, with affordable TVs and other displays providing QFHD (3840 x 2160 pixels) or 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) resolution. A 42-inch 4KTV will have similar resolutions to desktop computer monitors several years earlier: 105+ pixels per inch. Tablets will be at over 300 ppi (iPhone 4 and 4S are at 326 ppi today) for near-magazine-level crispness in text, and smartphones will be over 600 ppi. Displays will integrate multitouch and haptics for virtual textures and buttons you can “touch”, leading to tablets that can truly compete at the level of productivity currently offered by computers with keyboards. In fact, the tablet could replace the keyboard for our TVs and desktop computers.

Semiconductor manufacturing processes reaches the 14 nanometer node, helping consumer electronics to reach incredibly thinness and flexibility. This will allow for the beginning of a proliferation of form factors for computers, including those that can bend, roll up, and fold. Desktops and laptops come standard with 4 to 6 TB of storage capacity, but SSDs in the TB range are even more popular and quickly become the standard. Smartphones and tablets reach 256 GB of flash RAM, which allows for storage of several HD movies or a tens of television shows.

Memristors and ReRAM arrive in consumer electronics, helping to shrink these devices even further, while using less energy than their ancestor devices of 2012. 3D transistors are all the rage, and strontium germanide MISFET transistors arrive.

USB 3.0 and Light Peak are common in devices. Tablets are the new laptop and outsell them now that they are haptic-enabled. TVs are the new desktop and all-in-one.

Sunglasses-style heads-up displays arrive with 1080p resolution and 3D support. They are not widely popular at first as the details are worked out, but their eventual thinness and power will soon make them the new smartphone (probably by 2016).

Robotics

Torsobots are working side-by-side with humans and other robots for consumers are rapidly improving in capabilities, including doing things like washing dishes and windows, folding clothing, and holding and using tools. These are still mostly be in the lab, but some consumer-directed offerings arrive. While robots are primarily still single duty, there is a trend already beginning toward general-purpose robots.

Robots begin to migrate out to take care of tedious tasks like maintaining and inspecting high voltage transmission lines, water mains, and sewers. There is a revolution in “hidden” robotics, but we are just a few years away from them taking a more active and public role in labor.

Medicine

Genome sequencing now costs well under $1000 for the individual and can be purchased in doctor’s offices. Many new companies arrive offering this service to individuals, and many more are offering lifelogging platform-oriented analysis of individual genomes.

Very expensive 3-D printing of complex organs arrives. Stem-cell research after languishing for a few years is back in the news with new successes, new methods for obtaining and generating them, and more widespread use despite the lack of FDA approval. In fact, plastic surgeons will begin to make use of these cells more often, including breast reconstruction that avoids the need for implants.

Advanced prostheses that are mind-controlled are in human trials by the end of 2014. The results of suspended animation experiments are published and FDA approval is likely.

Technology Trends in 2012 (From 2012)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:29:30 -0700

(While these trends are United States-centric, most of them also apply to other developed countries, and will soon apply to developing countries as well.)

In 2012, nearly everyone will benefit from faster internet speeds, 1080p video will be everywhere, vast and flexible LCD displays will cover more marketing space, hardware will arrive to support the next step up in resolution and graphics (4K), and a new generation of robots will work side-by-side with human laborers.

Internet

Wider rollout of 50 to 100 mbps broadband, 200 mbps in some locations, 1 gbps in rare locations.

LTE 4G rollout accelerates, providing an average of 10 mpbs via smartphones and other cellular-connected devices.

Digital Media

Massive 1080p (8 to 12 mbps bit rates) digital downloads and streaming video rollout, with 720p downloads and streams being upgraded to 1080p. The first 3D digital download attempts. “HD” music formats as online music retailers seek to differentiate themselves. New gaming consoles will try to stave off the competition from smartphone platforms. The web is shaping up to become the primary TV, movie, music, games, and news platform. Cloud storage capacities (amount of room given to consumers to store their digital media) will increase rapidly.

Metaverse

Licensing of content for augmented reality applications (Disney, etc.) OTOY and OnLive branch out into virtual world hosting. Virtual worlds return to the news with new offerings from competitors to Second Life. Lifelogging popularized and mainstreamed by Facebook. Apple joins the mirror world fray with the first major competitor to Google Earth via iOS.

Hardware

Finally we will see the first 4 TB hard drives widely available for sale to consumers, but SSD prices have been falling quickly and by the end of the year a 1 TB SSD should be around $800. Laptop SSDs will increasingly be 512 GB in size, with very expensive 1 TB options late in the year.

Intel’s Ivy Bridge arrives at the 22 nanometer node with tri-gate 3D transistors, lower power needs, and graphics support for 4K (4096 by 4096 pixels) display resolution. The first 4K computer and TV monitors for consumers will arrive, with a resolutions between 3840 x 2160 pixels and 4096 x 2304 and 105 and higher pixels per inch for displays up to 42-inches.

Dedicated graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD will also support 4K resolution as they switch to the 28 nanometer node.

Super computers will reach 20 Petaflops as the race to exoflop-class super computers heats up.

Apple’s iPad will continue to sell well, especially with a much higher-resolution display on the way in the spring. Amazon will see success with Kindle Fire and an in-house designed successor. Andoid tablet sales should also tick up, though Apple (at near 70%) and Amazon (most of the rest) will remain successful.

Laptops are getting much thinner and should see improved sales with the introduction of Apple Macbook Air competitors. These ultrabooks will define the industry going forward. All-in-ones like the Apple iMac will continue to be popular but the desktop is slowly dying out, replaced by tablets and ultrabooks on one end, and smart TVs at the other end. In fact, Apple’s anticipated iTV could very well be a 4KTV with Siri, gesture, and multi-touch interfaces.

Digital cameras have been in need of a shakeup and with Lytro and QuantumFilm, 2012 could finally be the year that this happens. Cameras in smartphones will benefit the most as they encroach on the 8 to 12 MegaPixel dedicated cameras.

Quad-core smartphones and tablets will be all the rage. Screen resolutions will rapidly transition to native support of 720p and 1080p video and pixels per inch exceeding 300.

Glasses will be in the news more often, but we are still a few years away from sunglasses-style heads up displays. The components are rapidly evolving though, and demonstrations of what is coming will become more frequent. The heavier form factors that exist today will gain support for 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels) input resolution this year.

As for interfaces, multitouch remains in the lead, but voice, gesture, and Intelligent Agents are all rapidly improving and coming together in multimodal packages. An Apple iTV will likely demonstrate how these come together, while Microsoft will continue to improve Kinect, and bring the technology to desktops and laptops. The web itself is overdue for a face lift: watch as it becomes more dynamic and animated, especially as the ways we interact with it - multitouch, gestures, voice, and IA - improve and merge. Google will likely introduce a true Siri-competitor this year. If they don’t, then it will be clear that they completely missed this rather obvious trend, and will be hard at work on getting caught up.

Retail and marketers will rapidly deploy vast LCD screens in stores, on buildings, and as billboards during this year. Many of these will be multiple feet in reach, flexible and wrapping around various shapes and structures.

Robotics

The first “torsobots” should arrive: robots that work side-by-side with humans in factories. The form factor is a platform for arms that can do many of the same tasks as humans, yet do so safely, without putting their human co-workers in physical danger. Robots are still very slowly making their way into homes and businesses, and we are still several years away from a mass consumer-level general robotics platform. Robots will continue to be single function.

Medicine

The first $1000 genome sequencing machines will arrive, but the price will apply only when bought in bulk. Sequencing for individual genomes will still be around $5000 and not very popular with consumers, who will increasingly use SNP sequencing services like 23andMe. Next generation technologies to radically reduce the price will be in the works, but it is unlikely we will see much from them in 2012 as they finish up their development and testing.

Medical breakthroughs will continue, but so far the impact on individuals remains minimal. The media (and the mainstream consumer) will become more aware of the deficiency of our current processes as these breakthroughs languish while waiting for funding and government regulatory approvals.

Suspended animation technology is in human trials.

Fundraising for Emerging Technologies Organizations in 2012

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:12:00 -0700

[Reposting from Frontier Channel.]

The following emerging technology organizations are raising money for 2012. Over the past few years the amount of money being donated to these types of causes has grown exponentially, but that was starting from about zero. Now that ideas like healthy life extension, accelerating technology, Friendly AGI and the Technological Singularity have gone mainstream, there is no better time to get involved, donate, learn about, and influence the technologies set to change you and your family forever.

The SENS Foundation website | donation page
The Methuselah Foundation website
- New Organ Mprize website | donation page- goal: to raise $200,000 by February 28, 2012; matching grant: $25,000 from Keith Murphy
The Singularity Institute website | donation page - goal: to raise $100,000 for 2012
Foresight Institute website | donation page - goal: to raise $30,000 by January 15, 2012 (challenge page)
The Seasteading Institute website | donation page - goal: to raise $1,000,000 for 2012; matching grant: $500,000 from the Thiel Foundation (website)
The Singularity University website | scholarships donation page
humanity+ website | donation page
The Long Now Foundation website | membership page
Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) website | donation page
Alcor Life Extension Foundation website | donation page
Longecity website | membership and donation page
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies website | donation page

Kickstarter also hosts any number of interesting fundraisers for emerging technology projects like the successfully-funded BioCurious hackerspace and “The Human Project” app, hardware like the wildly successful (and still a few days left to donate!) Twine, and documentaries like the successfully-funded “The Methuselah Generation: The Science of Living Forever” and “The Synthetic Bio Documentary“.

(via Kickstarter - Playa Time-Lapse 2.0) Go gigabig or go home.

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:20:57 -0700

(via Kickstarter - Playa Time-Lapse 2.0)

Go gigabig or go home.

Trailer for a documentary - filmed in 3D - about longevity. The...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:22:00 -0700

Trailer for a documentary - filmed in 3D - about longevity. The filmmakers are raising money to finish the film via Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/structurefilms/the-methuselah-generation-the-science-of-living-fo

"Robotics" YouTube Playlist

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:02:55 -0700

"Robotics" YouTube Playlist

"Visions of the Future" YouTube Playlist

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:02:22 -0700

"Visions of the Future" YouTube Playlist

Digital Media is Just a Battle That Will Soon Be Long Forgotten

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:54:00 -0700

Google took Google Music, previously a cloud storage solution for music files, out of beta today and added Google+ integration and music purchases from three of the four major labels as well as many independent labels. The result? An iTunes competitor and most of the pieces for a digital media platform to rival the platforms developed by Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Almost all of these platforms now offer apps, games, ebooks, music, TV shows and movies (rental and/or purchase) on the web, in the cloud, and on a variety of consumer electronics. So what comes next for these platforms? The filling out of these offerings and general improvements in quality. Just to name a few, here are some of the announcements I expect to hear over the next year or two:

Higher bit rate 1080p HD TV shows and movies
Higher bit rate music
3D video content
Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free video

With DRM-free music standardizing at a bit rate of 320 kbps in MP3 format (or similar quality AAC), look for the platforms to attempt to differentiate themselves by offering more expensive and higher bit rate “high definition” music soon.

Amazon and Apple offer some video content in 720p HD; expect the dam to break for 1080p HD early in 2012. 3D video will arrive somewhat later and will probable arrive around the same time Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft begin to offer 3D-capable screens on their consumer electronics. As for DRM, the first DRM-free video announcements probably won’t occur until the end of 2013, and only if the movie studios become convinced that removing this draconian measure will benefit them, like the music studios did a few years ago. Look for it soon after UltraViolet fails.

Over the next few years, 1080p will quickly become the standard video format across devices, the web, and the Cloud, enabled by fast broadband pipelines to the home and office, and the transition of pseudo 4G LTE cellular to true 4G LTE-Advanced cellular.

By 2014, with DRM-free media easily transmitted between platforms or accessible via apps available across platforms, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft will be poised to make the leap to 4K video, while also increasing their battle for the living room, via integrated services in 4K televisions, and the automobile. Unfortunately, these companies will be hard-pressed to distinguish themselves from one another using digital media at the pace they are competing with each other.

The increase in bit rate and addition of 3D or removal of DRM are just minor improvements in a battle that has been hard fought in the Platform Wars. That battle, however, is for the most part over, and it appears four or five platforms can co-exist successfully. To separate themselves from the crowd, the platform will need to do more than provide easy access to high-quality digital media. Thus, the platforms will soon have to compete based on interface and the addition of technologies heralded by developers of the Metaverse.

Siri thus becomes an important distinguishing capability of Apple’s platform. This AI provides a context-sensitive conversational interface. For Microsoft, gesture and voice recognition via its Kinect technology has helped it differentiate itself from Sony and Nintendo in gaming, and will likely help it do so against other consumer electronics companies. For its part, Amazon integrates well with a complete - digital and real items - ecommerce platform.

What then does Google have to distinguish itself from the pack? So far, nothing. However, it is likely that they are also working on an AI platform that can compete with Siri. They are also attacking the problem by integrating with their social networking platform, Google+.

I have not yet mentioned Facebook. Based on recent remarks by CEO, President and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook hopes to become a partner platform to all the other platforms. Yet they too have integrated apps, games, music, video and other digital media into their platform, and could easily launch competitive digital media offerings. Furthermore, they could eventually transform into a consumer electronics company with their social network platform more deeply integrated into their own devices than competitor devices.

Is a social network enough to compete in the Platform Wars, though? Is a social network an interface like an Intelligent Agent (Siri) or sensory array (Kinect)? Facebook is about to launch their new profiles platform: Timeline. This is a partially-automated framing of a person’s events and activities into a lifelog, one of the four major technologies that make up the Metaverse. As data is gathered about a person through their own reporting and increasingly sophisticated sensors, and then presented in a variety of useful ways via Timeline, a digital reflection of the person becomes apparent. A person can begin to interact with their own Timeline, perhaps eventually in a similar manner to how they interact with Siri.

Meanwhile, Apple and Google are laying the groundwork for their own individual take on another component of the Metaverse: Mirror Worlds. Google Earth is a 3D representation of the Earth, with layers adding additional data to the lay of the land. Already Google Earth has become an important component of the Maps app on iPhones and in Android smartphones. Apple is rumored to be building their own competitive mirror world, which would allow them to strip out Google Maps from iPhone. In time, these mirror worlds will serve as the basis for rich GPS-enabled devices with real-time traffic updates, offered for free as just one feature of smartphones and tablets.

Dreamworks, the movie studio well known for several 3D animated features, is working with Intel to add a layer of animation and interactivity to the web next year to make the web less text-centric and much more dynamic. Microsoft would seem to be especially well equipped to interface with this third component of the Metaverse: Virtual Worlds. Through voice and gesture recognition via Kinect, users could begin to move well beyond the typing and mouse gestures that are still the primary way for interacting with the web, and offer the means to leap frog over the intuitive multi-touch interface popularized by Apple iOS and Google Android. Even more than they are now, consumer electronics will become windows into other worlds, where information is presented in much more dynamic, colorful, and potentially extremely useful ways. Instead of scrolling through status updates like we do today in Facebook, Google+, Ping, LinkedIn, and Twitter, each post will become an object that can be manipulated alone or in mass in a variety of ways through the flourish of motion and voice prompting.

Finally, third-party developers of augmented reality - the fourth major component of the Metaverse - have begun to demonstrate how useful metadata added on top of a video stream of reality can be in mobile devices. The Android and iOS platforms lead the charge here, but Microsoft’s Kinect and Windows Phone 7 platform will likely serve as an ideal platform for augmented reality. Each of these platforms will spread to windshields, glasses, contact lenses and other devices where it makes even more sense to augment the reality we see.

For the time being, each of the major consumer-facing digital media platforms from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves, and all of them are seeking new capabilities based on their individual company’s strengths. The best way to sell their platforms to consumers and developers appears to do be by adopting components of the Metaverse. Apple, Google, and Microsoft appear to have the lead here, though Facebook through lifelogging may be a surprise entrant to the list very soon. Amazon appears to be the least equipped to compete, despite their foray into consumer electronics like the Kindle Fire tablet and their deep digital media offerings. What they do not appear to have, even in rumor, are any components that would lead to lifelogging, mirror worlds, virtual worlds, or augmented reality.

It remains unclear if any of these major platform companies even understand that the Platform Wars have already moved beyond digital media and into the very technological components that will lead eventually to the Metaverse. Furthermore, the combination of lifelogging, mirror worlds, virtual worlds, and augmented reality does not by itself result in the Metaverse. The Metaverse will be a Web of webs, a mass medium built on a next-generation internet that will adapt in real time to your needs, creating the right medium at the right moment.

The company that understands this will have the advantage and will likely win the Platform War. Once the Metaverse arrives (perhaps in the 2020s?), the digital media battles through now will be long forgotten, replaced by a medium that will dwarf in extend and capability all the services that were built on top of the Internet before it arrived. And digital media, today exemplified by individual consumables like ebook, music, and video files, will give way to information and entertainment provided in game- and life-like, “You are there!” sensory overloads of unimaginable complexity.

Kickstarter - Hypothes.is - Taking peer review to the Internet.

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:16:00 -0700

Kickstarter - Hypothes.is - Taking peer review to the Internet.

Google+ Zero

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:23:00 -0700

When Google Wave was announced, I immediately took to a platform that seemed to combine all of the productivity tools I used. It was an exciting time and my brain was full of ideas about how Wave would fit into work and the other projects I was interested in starting. When Wave was cancelled, I was disappointed, but I had not been using it much. The reason? No one else was using it either.

In the past few weeks Google has been steadily releasing components of the Google+ Project, a ground-up reimagining of everything they do infused with an individual’s social and interest graphs.

Image credit: 06/29/2011 screenshot of Google+ overview page.

The overview videos depict your exciting life with friends, whether you are categorizing them into groups, making arrangements for lunch, or getting together for a shared video chat. With Google+, the world’s knowledge, the people you know, and your interests all come together into an uncertain whole. Google stated that the project will continue to expand over the coming months, with new tools and relationships being added over time, until Google+ becomes a true competitor to Facebook that takes advantage of Google’s strengths in search and advertising.

This is the latest in a long line of developments in the social networking revolution. Proponents argue that as social animals humans, online or off, are looking for new ways to interact. For some of us, however, this focus on human-to-human interactions, while often useful, was never the point of the Information Age. While Web 2.0 and social networking has taken the web by storm, the promise of human-to-machine interactions has taken a backseat. These interactions are there, but they are not the source of excitement, not the center of hype. The animal masses decided that this technology would be an extension of their social lives, rather than the addition of a new relationship between humanity and its technological creations.

I am not criticizing this direction. In retrospect, it now appears obvious that social networking would be the logical outcome of a public web. People are indeed social animals, and the most introverted of people have found a measure of social interaction online. For some introverts, the net has allowed them to take on extraverted personas, with ramifications for their offline personas.

For me personally, the result was complex. Textual updates (say through Twitter, Facebook, or blogging) became one of my most frequent activities. This was probably to be expected; pre-Internet, I was always writing and was active in the school paper. With the arrival of the web, I almost immediately began keeping a public online diary and jumped into blogging soon after its arrival.

When it comes to real-time chatting, VoIP, and video conferencing, however, I am as reticent as I am offline. I feel exactly the same social anxiety when talking to people in real time as I do when meeting with (new) people face-to-face. A call on Skype from an acquaintance is nerve-wracking. An unexpected Google or Facebook chat fills me with dread. Even a friend request can give me the jitters. As a carefully planned, business transaction, none of these phase me. As tools for engaging other people and making friends, I’m at a loss.

That is why Google+ suggests to me a godsend to extraverts and a horror to introverts. Introverts are not people who lack social interactions; they are just people who find solitude comforting and productive. They interact, but require some alone time to recover. Introverts embrace the web, but the social networking aspects are often sources of dismay.

Is being introverted a disease? There are drugs on the market that ease social anxiety, therapies to help overcome these fears. However, being introverted is the result of a complex biology modulated by experience. And so is being extraverted. Rather than thinking of personalities as diseases, I prefer to think of them as aspects of the self that can be ignored or changed, depending on the desires of the individual. We have the technology (and are rapidly gaining even better technologies) to allow us to modulate ourselves.

When thinking about Google+ and the online social interactions that are the focus of development, I wonder if we are actually seeing the beginning of the end for this focus. The easiest thing to do to improve the web was to hook humans into the Machine, generating, collating, analyzing data and finding relationships because the Machine was not intelligent enough to do so itself. As machine technology improved, however, some of this could be automated. Google+ represents the coming together of algorithms and human activity to churn through information and create something much more complex and nuanced, something that is, potentially, useful.

A turn of events will occur, however, when the Machine begins to take on more and more capabilities currently handled by humans. IBM’s Watson in supercomputer size already rivals humans in determining the question to trivia answers, and it is quickly making a name for itself in the medical community by making diagnoses based on information from multiple sources, at a speed to rival the best doctors. We do not need truly thinking machines of human-level intelligence to replace humans in online social activity. We just need machines of particular capabilities, working at a speed well beyond that of humans, to begin creating new knowledge from the vast store of data on the Web.

In Google+, Google has retained its algorithmic roots while embracing the social graph of Faceback and the interest graph of Twitter. Social networking will continue to shape the web, but it will soon be dwarfed by human-to-machine interactions (both of which will remain dwarfed by machine-to-machine interactions.) For those of us who were less than happy by the 2.0 turn of the web toward social earlier this century, the mid-2010s will be a return to form after a long detour. The interactions with machines we have longed for will finally arrive in the form of increasingly sophisticated intelligent agents, beginning with the integration of Siri into Apple’s consumer electronics that began this year. Google will also embrace intelligent agents, and will push it out, through Google+ and through mobile. The human-to-human interactions will remain, but our conversations with machines will soon become the center of development, fundraising, news, and hype.

The Rise of Human-to-Machine Communication

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:11:34 -0700

From the perspective of you and me, Web 2.0 has been all about human-to-human communication. Sure, this communication is mediated by increasingly sophisticated machine-to-machine interactions, but from blogs to social networks to new media, best practices to graphic design to standards, we consider human-to-human communication to be central to the web as we know it today.

This will not be the case for much longer. The direct communication between humans and machines will soon dominate our social activity. Siri, Qwiki, and IBM’s Watson are just the beginning of a transformation that will radically transform the web and our relationship to it and each other over the next decade. Soon the focus of funding, development, and news coverage will shift away from human socialization to this new and intimate relationship between humans and our machines. Meanwhile, specific human-to-human interactions will begin to vanish, replaced by a chain of mostly automated interactions with the following pattern:

human <-> [machine <-> machine]_n <-> human

where n is a variable number of automated machine-to-machine interactions.

For example, consider the predominately human-to-human interactions involved in making a reservation for dinner with a friend. We typically begin with a conversation between friends about dates, times, and locations, and we continue communicating as necessary until all the arrangements are made. This may include a conversation between one of us and someone at the restaurant to make the reservation, or the same conversation but use of a website or app to make the reservation.

The latter is something we have been doing more frequently in recent years. We often use our web browsers or apps to find places to dine, read reviews, and even make the actual reservation. What is coming is a refinement of this, pushing machine-to-machine interactions further out on either side of the arrangement until even the human-to-human interactions are optional. This is not going to happen because we are becoming less sociable. Instead, we will have the tools in place to make these arrangements so convenient and immediate that a barely thought-out passing mention in the vicinity of our machines will be translated into a specific arrangement.

Consider instead this near-future scenario: I decide I want to have dinner with a friend. This might be an independent whim or the outcome of a conversation between me and my friend. What is important is that our intent - to go eat dinner together - will be picked up at any stage by the technology around us. In a series of human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions, my digital devices and services will consult with my friend’s digital devices and services, and these technologies will consult back with us individually as necessary. A preliminary plan arranged, these services reach out to other services to finalize the arrangements. In minutes, or even seconds, all the arrangements have been made, whether or not my friend and I decided to communicate with each other directly, and without either of us having to talk to any other person, such as a human taking reservations at the restaurant.

As in the past, the end result is an enjoyable dining with a friend, but the majority of the communications required to make these arrangements will shift away from human-to-human interactions to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine.

Consider another current-day scenario: I am injured at work and end up on short term disability. I have not received any money from the insurance company and begin to worry about paying my bills. I call and wait on hold to talk to a representative. When they answer they are not very friendly. They insist that my employer has not faxed in the required information. I hang up and call a representative in my company’s Human Resources department, but they insist that they have already sent all the paperwork. After more phone calls I get more and more impatient. When the insurance company finally lets me know they have found the paperwork - it was filed in the wrong place! - my stress level has gone through the roof.

In the near future, there will be no telephone calls to HR or the insurance company. I will instigate an investigation with intention; perhaps a verbal expression of frustration with no one listening but my digital tools. These technologies, such as intelligent agents (IA), will work with IA in HR and IA at the insurance company to resolve the issue. There may still be misfiled paperwork, inefficient systems, and other issues, but the conversations taking place will generally require little if any participation by me or other humans.

Humans are inefficient and often unsuccessful when it comes to diving into the depths of data and bureaucracy to recover what is necessary and useful and to complete tasks in a timely and mutually agreeable fashion. IA will not necessarily eliminate system inefficiencies and bureaucracy, but IA will have the speed, tenaciousness and non-human detachment that will make it seem as if there were no inefficiencies! As these interactions increase and the focus of technological progress shifts further toward human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications, the frustrations of today will quickly dissolve, replaced, probably, by new frustrations, but vanquished nonetheless.

Voice user interfaces (VUI) have been around for years, but they have not been widely distributed except in particular verticals like word processing and customer service. In word processing, the automated conversion of dictation to formatted text is all that is required for the successful completion of a task. In customer services, interactive voice response (IVR) has been moderately successful primarily because of the narrow range of questions asked and possible responses. The reason why VUI and IVR are not more widespread is because they are just one of a host of technologies that need to come together to be useful. Voice recognition, VUI, IVR, and natural language processing are some of the technologies coming together with a background intelligence - IA - to enable these new interactions. The combination of these technologies as demonstrated recently by both Watson and Siri provides much more capability and highlights the very human-to-machine interactions - conversations - that will soon become the focus of our online activities.

Although we still appreciate search engines today, they have begun to show their age. Search is not an easy conversation. Search requires the use of keyboards, mice, and buttons. Search can result in spam, wrong answers at the top of results, and otherwise unsatisfactory results. With intelligent agents evolving from technologies like Watson and Siri, the distance and required effort between my request and an answer or action will narrow greatly. Questions will be asked and requests will be made naturally, with our voices, body language, and emotions, to the devices in our environment. These devices will divine actionable intention from our expressed hopes and frustrations. The result will be specific answers and actions, tailored to specific situations and environments, all of it in a conversational manner, the very same manner with which we interact with other people.

Search verticals like Google, supported primarily by advertising, are on notice now that IA, combined with other technologies, have arrived. In fact, Google has already begun to explore and develop the kinds of technologies that will sweep search engines away and replace them with conversational IA. They have demonstrated technologies that interpret the world around them as viewed through a mobile device’s camera or heard through its microphone. Google’s deep roots in textual search, however, could slow their transition to IA. Apple has bet on a conversational IA future with their deep integration of Siri into iOS 5.0 and iPhone 4S. Unhampered by a legacy of textual search and gaining a voice and an attitude, Siri has already captured the imagination of several million consumers now using it regularly.

What follows Siri and Watson are increasingly sophisticated technologies that understand humans without requiring humans to narrow and tailor their communications. These are not technologies to augment search engines; they are technologies to replace them completely. The ease at which I can speak (sign, emote, or otherwise indicate) a question or request will dwarf the limited subset of questions that can be asked of search engines today.

IA will also speed up, or even replace, certain human activities. Siri can already make a dinner reservation or call for a cab more quickly than I can alone. It can also answer trivia questions more quickly than I can search for them in a search engine. Which is faster: (1) holding down a button and vocally asking to be reminded of a task you need to complete or (2) launching an app and typing in the reminder yourself? You might be a fast typer, but in the time it took you to launch your app, type your reminder, and set the time and date, Siri will have already entered it for you, waiting for just the right time or location to remind you. As Siri learns more about you, it will be able to do so more efficiently, and eventually it will learn how to prioritize and even complete some of these tasks for you.

Primitive IA were already being marketed at the end of the 20th century, but they flopped because the rest of infrastructure was not in place to truly support it, including natural interfaces like voice and gesture. These early IA - in the guise of parrots, paper clips, and an operating system named “Bob” - were slow on the hardware that existed at the time. There were no web services to query and no cloud data centers to which to outsource processing. Perhaps most importantly, interaction with these IA was limited to what we could do with a mouse and keyboard.

Some may argue that there is still much development to be completed in IA, and that this technology is many years or decades away. The truth is, much of the foundation for IA has already been created and demonstrated. Watson is in some ways even more sophisticated than Siri but its hardware takes up an entire room. Like all room-sized technologies, however, its infrastructure requirements will rapidly shrink until Watson can fit into consumer electronics. At the same time it shrinks, Watson will also gain new capabilities. IBM already has an aggressive roadmap to bring Watson technology to hospitals and health workers in the next 18 to 24 months.

Meanwhile, mobile platforms have reached a multi-touch plateau. Everything that was initial cool and cutting-edge about multi-touch now seems routine and widely distributed. There are limitations to multi-touch, some of which will be eliminated by updated hardware, but others that are inherent to the technology. The next revolution in mobile platforms, then, will be multi-modal interfaces. This is the integration of voice, gesture, and haptics, among others, into a seamless, adaptive interface.

This infrastructure is falling into place, capable of supporting rapid, efficient, and conversational interactions between humans and machines. Behind the scenes, the machines are getting smarter and improving their interactions with each other to complete increasingly sophisticated tasks. IA are now conversational. They adapt to us, rather than we to them. They beg to become a part of our conversations. Soon, we will be let them, and those interactions will become some of the most valuable we will ever know.

Creativity is “Everything”.

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:56:18 -0700

Creativity is “Everything”.

Kurzweil AI News: "Discovery may lead to cure for drug addiction"

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:09:34 -0700

Kurzweil AI News: "Discovery may lead to cure for drug addiction":

The debate over whether or not it is possible to cure addiction, adultery, obesity, mental illness, and even criminal behavior is over. While the interactions between genetics and environment are complex, the tools to manipulate ourselves at the molecular level are emerging, nature versus nurture be damned.

This could not be more personal.

I am dying to see this documentary made and they are so close to...

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 01:19:30 -0700

I am dying to see this documentary made and they are so close to being fulling funded! Just five more days to donate on Kickstarter.

Awesome! Stop motion? Christopher Lee? A tribute to Tim Burton?...

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 01:18:08 -0700

Awesome! Stop motion? Christopher Lee? A tribute to Tim Burton? Yes, please. Donate on Kickstarter to make this a reality!

One of the documentaries I would like to see made. Donate on...

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 01:16:00 -0700

One of the documentaries I would like to see made. Donate on Kickstarter.

Yeah, I’m a sometimes football fan. If there is a next season and if Apple TV ever offered NFL Sunday Ticket, that is how I would spend my Sundays.

Important Progress in Equal Rights for LGBT

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:58:00 -0700

Today brings great news regarding the slow but steady march toward equal rights for all LGBT citizens. In expected but still wonderful news, Hawaii has become the seventh state to authorize civil unions (three states that previously enacted civil union laws now allow gay marriages). There are now 13 states and one district that allow same-sex marriages or offer partnerships with comparable rights and responsibilities to opposite-sex marriages.

In more surprising news, the White House has declared the “Defense of Marriage Act” unconstitutional and the Department of Justice will no longer defend Section 3 of the law. This progress comes on top of the recent expansion of hospital visitation rights to same sex couples and repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and it bodes well for the various legal battles that will eventually bring the issue to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The following states (and district) have taken the appropriate steps forward to put this insane era of discrimination behind us:

Gay Marriages (5 + 1 district):

Connecticut
Iowa
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Vermont
Washington, D.C.

Civil Unions (4):

Hawaii
Illinois
New Jersey
Vermont

Domestic Partnerships with similar rights to marriage (4):

California
Nevada
Oregon
Washington

Domestic Partnerships with some of the rights of marriage (4):

Colorado
Maine
Maryland
Wisconsin

Recognize Gay Marriages (3):

Maryland
New York
Rhode Island

Image source: AppleInsider - “Inside subscription content:...

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:04:28 -0700

Image source: AppleInsider - “Inside subscription content: Apple iPad vs Google One vs Amazon Kindle” page 3 table.

This fanstastic graphic from AppleInsider summarizes the various subscription plans now offered for Apple’s iOS App Store, Google’s Android store, and and Amazon’s Kindle store. The Apple plan looks downright generous in this comparison! This begs the question: why are developers and digital media companies in an uproar?

Apple's Subscription Gamble

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:44:00 -0700

Apple announced their digital media subscription service for the iOS App Store today and reaction has been all over the place, though for certain classes of people it has been overwhelmingly negative. Developers and publishers especially are not happy with the service requirements.

For digital media like streaming video from Netflix, Hulu Plus; streaming music from Pandora; and ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle Store, customers currently purchase subscriptions and digital media on the providers’ websites. Then they are able to view the digital media using the providers’ free iOS apps. With this announcement, digital media providers can continue to offer media in this manner, but in addition they are now required to add an in-app subscription feature to their apps, one that will make use of iTunes own payment service. The customer has a choice: pay for the digital media inside the app or pay for it on the provider’s website. The digital media provider has a choice: pay Apple 30% if the customer pays for the digital media inside the app, or pay Apple 0% if the customer pays for it on the provider’s website.

Apple positioned their take as payment for bringing new customers to the digital media provider. “We have the platform,” Apple seems to be saying, “and we have the customers. How about 30% for bringing you a new paying customer?” It would have been strange if Apple had not wanted a cut of in-app subscriptions, because they have always taken a cut of in-app purchases. What Apple is really saying, a bit deviously perhaps, is go ahead and set your platform against our platform. Let’s see who brings in new paying customers.

Apple has taking a calculated risk, one which they cannot lose. If their assumptions about platforms, digital media, and customers are wrong, then a quick policy change will put the entire ugly affair behind them. If their assumptions are correct then Apple stands to gain both a financial windfall and a new level of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

"Back to the Future" Photography

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:55:12 -0700

"Back to the Future" Photography:

Very cool idea from a photographer with amazing (and sometimes a little NSFW and surprising) results.