Changing the game with Technology

So I read Cory Doctorow's book, "The Makers".  There were some points where I think it could have benefited with some editing, but overall I think it was a good book.

Makers is a story about the effect of disruptive, game changing technology.  In the case of Makers the primary example is the three dimensional printer that is able to download a pattern and print it out.  Want a new bicycle?  Print out the parts and assemble it.  Need a new fender for your car?  Print it out. 

3D printers are not fantasy - they do exist.  The RepRap 3D printer is a device that can almost print a copy of itself.  That's the goal.  No one would purchase one of these printers, they would just have a friend run one off for them.  RepRap is working on making a printer that could even print electronic circuits.

My friend Madhu linked to a TechCrunch article from his Facebook page about the beginnings of another disruptive technology.  I think this technology is not getting the attention it deserves.

This Techcrunch article by Paul Carr is about the Fort Hood massacre, and it talks about how Army soldier Tearah Moore was inside the hospital where soldiers were being taken for treatment.  Mr. Carr rips into Moore for being a "citizen journalist" for her reporting of events via the Twitter social network.  He points out that she got much of her information wrong, and then calls her a problem for being part of the "look at me" society.

Mr. Carr seems to be lamenting the loss of professional journalism, and berates those amateurs behind the camera who won't get out of the way, or put down the camera and help.  I think that is a discussion worth having, but is not the intent of my post.

I mentioned in response to Madhu that the difference between citizen journalists and professional journalists is the difference between data and information.  A person on the spot with a camera and a twitter feed is providing data.  This data, like all data, should be considered to be suspect until confirmed.  A good news person would know this.  A quick twit of "multiple shooters" would be turned into a cautious announcement of, "We have an unconfirmed report that there may be more than one shooter."

There aren't many good news reporters left. 

But data is going to increase.  The game changing technology is the convergence of micro digital video recorders, cell phones and live Internet streams.  These cameras are shrinking to the point where a police officer can confiscate your 35mm camera while completely overlooking your personal digital video recorder.  What good is it to force a photographer to delete his photos when they are already online the moment he or she takes them?

CCTV is already pervasive, there are few public urban places where people can go without being recorded by some sort of camera system.  These systems are usually owned by businesses or by local governments, and they rarely link together.  CCTV is sold to businesses and the public as a means of "security".  As one executive in the security industry told me, "We don't build 'alarms' because they don't alarm the bad guys.  We build 'security systems' because they make our customers feel more secure".

How much more secure would it make an average person feel than to wear a real-time video transmitter all the time?

At some point the technology is going to be so pervasive, and so discreet, that it will be unthinkable to prevent citizens from using it in public areas.  It will become difficult, if not impossible to prevent the use of this technology even in a secure area.  Places that don't allow cell phones often allow personal music players.  What if your discreet iPod had a camera built into it?  What if your camera system was smaller, and designed to blend in? 

What will we do when all this video becomes available through live feeds on the Internet?  The problem will cease to be shoddy citizen journalism.  The problem will be in sifting through all this data and turning it into information.  Those people and companies that learn how to do this well will become our news media.  Those people who can turn mountains of raw video and audio into brief, informative text and video reports will become the "Walter Cronkites" of this next age of information.

And this pervasive technology will definitely change the game.  Police got the message from Rodney King and routinely harass those people who video or photograph their actions.  How will they act if they are unable to tell if someone is recording them?  Most stores, like Walmart, don't bother to stuff cameras behind each camera bubble in the ceiling because the bubble itself is a deterrent.  In the same vein, every bystander will become a deterrent to poor police procedure because it will be impossible to know if someone is carrying one of these cameras without performing a thorough search.

The new technology of video analytics is a way of analyzing video to determine behavior or attitude.  If we applied this to a personal video stream, it could be possible for the system to sound an alarm when something goes wrong.  Being held up at gunpoint, having an airbag deploy, or even varying your routine in a drastic manner may make your own personal "OnStar" system perk up and ask you if everything is okay.  If you've ever been mugged before, this could be a very attractive technology.  It would certainly change the game for criminals.

What does this all mean?  What will come of it?  I dunno.  No one did a good job of predicting the consequences of personal computers or of the Internet.  Some industries and governments have tried, and failed to predict the consequences of technology, with often humorous results.  (For example, the Movie and Music industry successfully lobbied to cripple Digital Audio Tape recorders in America, and completely missed the importance of CD-ROM.  They've been trying to catch up since then.)

Cory Doctorow's other book, "Little Brother" talks about pervasive information gathering of government and private businesses, and how the citizen can fight back using technology.  It's a good book, but I don't think he took it far enough.  When web-connected personal video cameras become ubiquitous the change will be massive.

Fresno Atheists interviewed on ABC 30 over the movie "The Golden Compass"

First of all, welcome to those who have made it here from ABC 30 News. Yes, I'm one of the Atheists you saw in the interview that is supposed to air today.

It was a busy morning for me today. I had taken the day off of work in order to see the first showing of “The Golden Compass” here in Fresno. Ordinarily I would never do something like that – I'm quite content to wait until it is convenient for me to see a movie.

But I received an email from Liz Harrison of ABC 30, asking if any local Atheists would like to see the Golden Compass and then be interviewed together along with a couple of representatives of the local Christian community. I agreed to be there, and I put out a group wide email to members of the Central Valley Alliance of Atheists and Skeptics asking if any other Atheists would like to attend. Happily, Will and Ben were both able to make some time this morning. No one else was able to take the day off of work on such short notice.


So, what did I think of the movie? Atheists everywhere have been hoping that the movie doesn't suck. It's odd, Atheists are so used to having people think of us as being immoral, or arrogant, or evil that it no longer really bothers us so much. However the general Atheist opinion seems to be that they would hate to be represented by a poorly made Hollywood movie.

So here's my take. The movie didn't suck, but it also wasn't nearly as good as I hoped it would be.

I'll try to keep the spoilers down to a minimum, but if you don't want any at all I suggest you stop reading now. Click on the interview after the show to skip the spoiler parts.

Don't get me wrong, Lyra's universe was portrayed exactly as it was in the book in all of it's Steampunk glory and more! And the portrayal of Daemons was exactly how I see it in my head. The casting was excellent – Dakota Blue Richards made a perfect Lyra, who fit very neatly the person I pictured in my head. Sam Elliott played a perfect Lee Scoresby, and using Kathy Bates as the voice of Hester was icing on Scoresby's cake.

And Nicole Kidman as Marissa Coulter was very close to perfect – even though she played a blond instead of having Marissa's “sleek black hair”.

Other casting wasn't so well done. Daniel Craig played Lord Asriel in a manner that seemed like he was just phoning it in instead of making Asriel leap off of the screen. In the books Asriel is an electrifying personality that dominates everyone and who almost effortlessly commands attention and respect. Daniel Craig didn't come close.

And oddly, Christopher Lee as the First High Councilor – well, Mr. Lee is good in whatever he does, but he seemed so overqualified for this role that it actually made the character seem a bit lopsided. I would have been much happier with Lee as Lord Asrial and with Craig as the High Councilor.


You would think that with all the attention paid to special effects and to casting that Director Chris Weitz would be able to make the complex intrigue from the book flow effortlessly onto the big screen – but it just didn't happen.

I kept thinking of how Director Peter Jackson was able to reproduce the complex saga of the Lord of the Rings in cinematic form. “The Fellowship of the Ring” was more than an hour longer than “The Golden Compass” and even at that length Jackson wasn't able to show all of the intrigue, he had to leave details out.

But that length did allow Jackson to make a movie that felt huge, unhurried, open. Even though “The Golden Compass” was just under two hours in length, it felt ... rushed. It was like Director Chris Weitz had an urgent appointment elsewhere so he hurried this movie so he wouldn't be late.

Major plot points were revised in order to save time and explanation. One of those points changed the basic character of Iorek Byrnison, and downplayed the role of the other Panserbjørn. In the books, Iorek was tricked by Iofur Raknison into killing an innocent Panserbjørn during a dominance contest over a female. The innocent bear was given drugs by Iofur in order to prevent him from backing down when it became clear he was the loser of the contest.

This shows that Iorek was fearless, capable, and without fault in his actions, even though he blamed himself for the other bear's death.

In the movie, Iorek was simply banished after losing a fight in single combat with Iofur over the throne. Iofur used drugs to kill the previous king, Iorek's father, and then won in combat with Iorek. Iorek's banishment from the Panserbjørn wasn't due to shame for breaking the code of the bears, but merely on Iorek's whim.

It changes much of Iorek's motives.

And things like this were done throughout the movie, motives were ruthlessly changed in favor of making them simpler, easier to present on film.

The result is a movie that contains major plot points around memorable events in the book, with a weak, hurrid progression between these events. Cinematic whiplash where the viewer is rushed from event to event with no real explanation of why or how they got there.

Because of this rush between events, it was very hard for me to become emotionally invested in the characters. I found it hard to care about them until the movie was nearly half-way done, at the point where Lyra is apologizing to Iorek for getting him involved in a duel to the death with Iofur.

The movie ends before the final chapters of the book. At this rate it will take 4 or 5 movies to present the whole trilogy. And by the end of this movie I felt disappointed. So much of it was so different from the books that I kept wondering if I would have enjoyed the movie if I had never read the books. I'll be interested to see the opinions of those who see the movie first.


The interview after the show

Afterwards our group retired to the nearest coffee shop (located in Borders bookstore) to spend some time discussing the film over a welcome cup of hot chocolate. As I said, myself, Will and Ben represented the Central Valley Alliance of Atheists and Skeptics, while the religious side was represented by a school teacher named Teresa Barber and by Steve Williams who told me he worked in insurance. No, seriously, that's all I know of them. I suspect that Steve might be active in the church, and Theresa is probably active in faith-based politics, but I wasn't told more. I guess I'll have to find out by watching the interview on television.

Theresa, Steve, if either of you read this, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and I hope you'll let me know if I get the details wrong.

[Update: from the ABC 30 site, I've discovered that Steve Williams is an Evangelical Christian leader in Fresno, and that Teresa Barber is a children's pastor at Valley Christian Center. - M]

I have no idea how much of Liz Harrison's interest was genuine or professional, but she led us into discussion with each other in a way that indicated she was fascinated with our take on the movie, and that she was interested in the Atheist viewpoint. I'm afraid that the Atheists sort of dominated the interview, although I'm sure that may be adjusted slightly in the editing room.

We talked for nearly an hour. We were pleasant, and there were no major disagreements or drama of any sort. Anyone watching us would have thought we were a group of good friends, if they ignored the cameraman.

Honestly, it would be a pleasure to be friends with these people, and I hope they could say the same of us.

In general, I'm the only one who read the books, and Ben was the only one who seemed to think the movie was good. Ben was the youngest of us all, and he may have been the demographic that Weitz was aiming for.

Few of us agreed that this would be a movie for young children, although Will pointed out that violence on Saturday morning cartoons equals or exceeds that in “The Golden Compass”. The books were written for the same sort of audience as “Harry Potter”, or perhaps a bit older, with enough intrigue to keep adults interested, so I suggested that teenagers would be better prepared for this movie.

I tried very hard to point out that The Catholic League was urging a form of censorship by advocating a complete boycott of the movie so that it failed and therefore would be prevented from dragging children over to the Atheistic 'dark side'. Worse, they pressured Scholastic Children's books to prevent them from publishing any further books by Pullman.

Censorship of any book or movie in order to prevent others from ever seeing it is something that I consider an especially vicious form of evil. Instead, I advocated that parents should be the ones who decide if their children should see this movie or not. I really hope that came across.

Personally, I believe that if a parent does decide to allow a younger child see this show, that he or she do so together with the child. The movie, even in its simplified form, is complex and should be discussed afterwards.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a child would be happy enough to merely see Lyra riding Iorek through the snow.

Ms. Harrison promised that we would be able to see the interview online. When it becomes available, I'll link to it from here.

=========================
Updated at 7PM. As promised, here's the link to the story.

As a disclaimer, I never said I headed CVAAS, I did say I was a co-founder, along with my friend Richard.

On another note, out of all that talking I knew I would only have a brief speaking part. I just didn't realize it was THAT brief!

Dr. Bob Park on the DSCOVR mission and global climate change

Great minds think alike. Well, in this case, Dr. Bob Park and I have the same idea on the subject of global climate change. Whether or not Dr. Park shares my predilection for HP Lovecraft and geeky gadgets remains to be seen.

But on climate change, we both agree. I wrote about the denial of climate change in October, and in that blog entry I wrote about the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) which was built at Vice President Gore’s suggestion, and then mothballed by the Republican controlled Congress. It is kept in mothballs and studiously ignored by climate change deniers and by the current Presidential administration.

As Dr. Park said in his latest “What’s New?” column:

4. CLIMATE: UH, MAYBE WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT THE PROBLEM IS.
Warming is caused by atmospheric contaminants that change the energy balance with the sun. Last week an "elite" group talked about sending up vast amounts of other contaminants to make it go the other way. Yes, they really did. Before we do that, maybe we should launch DSCOVR to measure the energy balance. Built and paid for, the Bush administration is hiding it in a Greenbelt, MD warehouse.

Much more succinct than what I have written on this subject, Dr. Park acknowledges that climate change is real, and that the cause is still subject to dispute. Measuring the Earth’s energy balance would be a huge step toward figuring out just how much of climate change can be blamed on humans. Personally, I think that the current evidence points directly at human causes. The DSCOVR mission can offer much better evidence to support or deny this hypothesis.

So once again, I call on those people who deny climate change or deny that it is caused by humans. The DSCOVR mission would cost mere hundreds of millions to take out of mothballs and to launch. The most expensive portion of the mission, designing and building the vehicle, is already bought and paid for. For what we spend in half a day in Iraq, we could have definite answers to the question of climate change.

What are we waiting for?

The denial of climate change

Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today for his work on climate change. His film, “An Inconvenient Truth” won an academy award. Good for Al.

There is some disagreement among the scientifically knowledgeable that Mr. Gore should have received the Nobel. It is thought to be a political statement by the Nobel committee, and the film is known to have a few errors in it, even though the science it is based upon is valid.

But according to the second annual “America’s Report Card on the Environment” survey, most Americans accept the fact of global climate change, and want Bush to do something about it. This survey (PDF link), conducted by the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University in collaboration with the Associated Press, states that:

A striking 84% want a great deal or a lot to be done to help the environment during the next year, by President Bush, the U.S. Congress, American businesses, and/or the American public.

This report says that Americans blame American businesses and Bush’s policies for the declining environment, and that a large majority of Americans are sure that global warming has been, and is currently happening, and that the consequences are likely to be serious.


But there are a few very loud deniers of climate change. I know a couple of religious deniers personally, and if my small sampling of deniers is any indication of the majority, they deny climate change due to religious and/or dogmatic reasons instead of scientific reasons.

The dogmatic, instead of reviewing the science and coming to a conclusion instead start with the conclusion and poke holes in the ongoing climate change science. But even these dogmatic types of skeptic are being overwhelmed with evidence, and are starting to come around.

Christians are having a harder time with climate change, and even though some religious leaders have come around to accepting the evidence, many have not.

The religious group Answers in Genesis advises caution over Global Warming. They lay the majority of the blame on natural events, such as a natural cycle of fluctuating solar output. The belief that nothing happens outside of God’s plan is strong in AIG, and so any talk of climate change that hints at a future global disaster is immediately downplayed, and the blame put on those who are against the “Christian Worldview.” From their article in Answers Magazine, “Human-Caused Global Warming is Slight so far”:

Christians especially need to be cautious when it comes to the issue of global warming and other environmental issues. One of the reasons is that these issues have been hijacked by individuals who desire to change our way of life, and in particular, the Christian worldview that has guided the Western Hemisphere.

I can understand why AIG is wary about this - if they admit the scientific validity of climate change, then how close do they come to admitting the scientific validity of other disciplines - such as evolution?

The problem with overcoming arguments with deniers is that there is not one single “killer” piece of evidence for climate change that will knock their socks off, demonstrate simply and clearly that climate change is happening, and that it is an Earth-based, rather than Sun initiated phenomenon. Deniers point to past warming, to solar radiation changes, to the Maunder Minimum and the Modern Maximum number of sunspots, and claim that even “if” climate change is happening we can’t prove that it is humankind’s fault. And if it isn’t our fault, then there is nothing we can, or should, do about it.

There would be an easy way to find out if climate change is caused by the sun, or by humans. It is a simple experiment that most freshmen who took physics or chemistry would find familiar. To discover the temperature trends of a substance without actually placing a thermometer in the substance, you instead measure the amount of energy being radiated by that substance. That’s the basic principle behind infrared thermometers.

It is easy to measure the amount of energy that is received by our Earth. We know what the solar energy density is when it reaches the Earth so it is simple to calculate how much of it strikes our planet.

It is also possible to measure how much energy is radiated from the Earth. It would require a satellite aimed at our planet to take a measurement of that radiation, but the tools and science to do so are amazingly simple.

So in a simple experiment, using a satellite, it would be easy to calculate how much energy is radiated, as opposed to how much energy is absorbed by our planet. We could prove, or exclude our Sun as a source of climate change during the first week of this satellite’s operation.

If only we had that satellite.

But we do have that satellite! The Deep Space Climate Observatory, (which was originally named Triana), was proposed in 1988 by Vice President Al Gore. How about that?

The DSCVR was designed to sit at that neutral point between the Earth and the Sun called the L1 Lagrange Point. It contains a radiometer that would take measurements of the sunlight absorbed and reflected by the Earth, and would confirm or deny the Sun’s influence on climate change. It would also be able to measure Earth’s temperature, and show its change.

Here is a wonderful tool that could potentially shut up climate change deniers – or shut up those scientists who are offering proof of climate change. In this game of conflicting talking heads, Triana is the referee and judge who could take a big step toward determining the rightful winner. And it is a tool we might never use. Although NASA built this satellite, it was never launched.

Even though he has a somewhat stilted public persona, I think that Al Gore is at heart a romantic. Although Triana could do real and valuable science, Gore instead emphasized that it would be able to provide real-time video of the Earth to everyone, in the hopes it would draw us Earthlings together in a similar fashion to Apollo 17’s “Blue Marble” photograph. This was derided by Republicans who tried to kill the project and called the satellite a “75 million dollar screen saver”. Scientists and Democrats fought against the satellite’s death, and instead of being killed, the satellite was mothballed.

It is still in storage, at a cost of a million dollars a year. The original team that put it together was disbanded and directed to other projects. It would cost a couple of hundred million dollars to put together a new team, to possibly upgrade the satellite, and to launch it. And that money is a mere pittance when compared to the billions we spend each month in Iraq. Yet we don’t spend that money, and now there are those who deride the satellite and deny its usefulness. A rational person would question this sort of resistance.


When denial becomes this blatant – you have to question motive.

The many flavors of Christianity

There are Christians out there that are concerned about saving my soul. Some of them are friends of mine, some of you have just read my words on the 'net. Most of you are very kind, a few are not. Besides the salvation of my soul most of you have one thing in common.

You don't agree with each other.

Is there a hell, or are we just 'separated' from God? There is disagreement. Is Divorce (and remarriage) allowed, or is it not? There is disagreement. Is the universe 14 billion years old (give or take several billions) or is it closer to thousands of years old, and made in mere days. There is disagreement.

What is the path to salvation, and what keeps you off of that path? Sadly, for this most important of questions, you disagree.

I point out in my blog the extreme interpretations of Christian text and myth held by a portion of Christians to show that I'm bombarded with advertising from different Christian groups selling their particular Christian flavor.

The original Gospels, vitally important to today's Christians, are lost. They were translated into Greek, copied, and the copies sent out to other cities to be copied. As they were copied, city by city, each new copy gained, or lost, text. Christian scholars think that they've compensated for this, but other Christian scholars don't believe that the original text is knowable.

This is a problem for those Christian sects who believe that the Bible is inerrant. It is even a problem for liberal denominations – how can you give instructions for salvation if you can't vouch for the validity of those instructions? It's like one of those ridiculously translated instruction books for a Chinese product bought off of Ebay, only worse since the text was copied during a game of “Telephone”.

Christians disagree about what different passages mean. Others disagree about the validity of different passages. When non-Christians point out the conflict between Christian interpretations, they are attacked by believers on all sides.

When you guys get your stories straight, get back to me, okay?

Uploading your brain - Transhuman / Post Human technology

I guess it was inevitable; after watching both Pixar’s “Cars” and 20th Century Fox’s “Robots” I started thinking about the coming technological singularity and humanity’s upgrade to ‘post human’.

Transhumanism is one of those concepts that are almost pseudoscience – what Michael Shermer might call ‘borderland science’. It is based upon the idea of using technology to augment a human, an idea that is as old as Mary Shelley’s writings – and just as scary as Frankenstein’s monster.

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge wrote about an, “intelligence explosion” which would happen when artificial intelligence technology got to the point where the AI could start designing its own upgrades. At that point AIs would become more intelligent in a sort of uncontrolled feedback loop explosion. Vinge called this point “the Singularity.”

MIT educated engineer and inventor Raymond Kurzweil wrote an essay in 2001 called, “The Law of Accelerating Returns” in which he projects a timeline based somewhat on Moore’s Law and looks at its implications. Moore’s Law is not really a law, more of an observation that about once every 18 months (give or take 6 months) computing power doubles. Scientists wonder if this rate is sustainable – especially after we get to the point where circuits are so small that the effects of Quantum Physics render current electronics theories useless. Kurzweil hypothesizes that new technology will be invented to take over when current technology reaches a fundamental limit – and perhaps he has something with this. Quantum computing may possibly take the place of electronics-based computing.

The major implication of advancing toward a technological singularity, according to Kurzweil, is that it may be possible to become immortal. Kurzweil thinks of immortality as maintaining an augmented human body with nanobots, sort of like a Star Trek ‘Borg’, (but without the look of a robotic Dominatrix.)

Author and ‘futurologist’ Ian Pearson also talks about the upcoming technological advances in Artificial Intelligence, and has gone so far as to suggest that our minds might be uploaded into a piece of hardware. He also talks about intelligent yogurt, but I’m not sure if it was of the strawberry and banana kind, or the plain vanilla type.


I’ve got a couple of problems with transitioning all of Humanity into better hardware. Some parts of a future upgrade are attractive, like the not ceasing to exist part, but other parts I worry about. Like the fact that many of our emotions have glandular components. Will we still shed tears when we grieve? And is it really love if you can’t feel your heart skip a beat? Samantha Bee asked Kurzweil if we will be able to have sex with robots; that question has already been answered affirmatively by the porn industry (batteries not included) – the real question is if we, as future robots, will have sex with each other? Perhaps the question will become moot upon the passing of biological urges.

I don’t believe that emotion will disappear – I just think that it could become divorced from its biological components – and in so doing it would become ‘alien’ to our current way of thinking.

I have a problem with ‘uploading your mind’ into a computer. The problem is that you are not uploading yourself, you are instead copying yourself. If I upload a floppy disk onto my hard drive, the software may run faster, but the original floppy disk doesn’t disappear. The floppy disk is then put away into a drawer, discarded, erased and re-used, or more likely these days it is seen as archaic and thrown away. As soon as you upload yourself into a computer, the flesh and blood ‘you’ becomes superfluous, ready for discard. This would be disconcerting, to say the least, to the ‘you’ that still inhabited the flesh and blood body about to be discarded!

This is where Kurzweil’s idea of nanorobotics becomes more attractive – instead of copying our intelligence into a computer; we could instead over a period of time upgrade our human bodies until they become a computer. This follows nature’s current method of replacing cells in a human body. Human bodies replace all of their cells several times over a lifetime, and the mind continues unbroken during these cell changes.

Perhaps there will come a time when the software of the Mind becomes complex enough to view its physical body at a different level, and instead see it as a sort of housing. If we reach this point we will then be able to transfer our intelligence to a new housing without the same qualms as uploading from our brains. Instead of ‘copied’ intelligences, we’ll become capable of ‘cut and paste’. (We can then store our previous body, or perhaps sell it on Ebay.)


I have a major problem with all of these predictions. The people talking about Transhumanism or ‘post humans’ are well educated, they are also Science Fiction authors, or work at predicting the future of technological trends. The singularity is forecast to happen between 2020 and 2075 – so it is possible that I may see it in my lifetime. Your kids, and certainly your grandkids will see it happen.

If it happens.

Predictions of the future are notoriously unreliable. I’m the first to admit that current technology is pretty amazing – but I also have to lament that past predictions have not come true. Where are our hover cars? Why aren’t we living on the Moon or on Mars? “2001, A Space Odyssey” is already 5 years past-due, and we still haven’t achieved the technology that was installed in the spaceship Discovery One. During the Golden Age of Science Fiction stories were placed in the magical year of 2000, where we all owned our own space suits, and we vacationed on Venus.

These predictions are merely this, predictions. Some predictions, like flying cars and personal space craft, are as yet still unworkable. Other predictions such as giant college-campus-sized computers didn’t turn out as we thought they would, miniaturization and quantities of scale have put supercomputers on everyone’s desktop. Other advances are so far out that they were not even written about in the Golden Age of Science Fiction – the Internet was a surprise.

Predicting the future is a hobby burdened with disappointments. Long-range forecasts are about as accurate as long-range weather forecasts, we can say with certainty that it WILL rain next year, but we can’t say for sure if the rain will ruin our 4th of July Barbeque. We can say for certain that there WILL be major advances in technology, but we can’t say for sure what this will imply for humans.

Perhaps technological immortality will become available for humans – and perhaps not. I think that it’s too early to say for sure. Perhaps we will become post-humans, and perhaps we will instead become slaves to, or extinct because of our cybernetic overlords. Right now it is all just a ‘borderland science’ and as such I won’t worry about it much.

Hmm… I think I’ll watch Bicentennial Man again, and I really wanted to catch up with what’s going on with brain-machine interfaces.

The future is already here

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."
- William Gibson

One of the things I love about my job is the exposure I get to new, emerging technologies. It's always exciting trying to predict what will be the next big technological hit. Will the next new technology become the equivalent of the microwave oven, the cell phone, or the Internet? Or will a promising technology fall by the wayside like consumer digital audiotape, or Betamax?

New technology has already drastically changed lives around the world. Consider the cell phone. In America, the cell phone was a luxury item at first. People questioned its usefulness because the American phone system infrastructure was so ubiquitous that anyone who wanted a phone in their home could get one installed much cheaper than buying a cell phone.

But in China, Korea, and Thailand, a cell phone is a necessity. Phone companies there did not have the ability to install the same sort of wired phone system that existed in America. When I was stationed in Korea, I vividly recall that phone lines were draped over rooftops in crowded neighborhoods because there was no place to install a telephone pole. Apartment buildings were just too close together. In many cases, power poles had to be installed right in the street, causing a minor traffic hazard in older neighborhoods.

The cell phone for these countries allowed people to get a good, reliable connection without the hassle and cost of a wired phone.

The Internet is another example. Here in America, it has drastically changed the way that we shop, communicate, learn, and entertain ourselves. Billions of dollars a year flow through the Internet. It is no wonder that major corporations are now fighting to gain control of this media.

Another technological breakthrough is the microwave oven. It has changed the way that the whole world cooks.


I like to think about possible technologies that will have the greatest impact on humanity. There have been many simple technologies in history that have changed the world dramatically. For example, the stirrup revolutionized warfare, bringing about the era of the armored knight, which was brought finally to an end by the English longbow, the crossbow, and finally the gun.

What new technology could again change the world dramatically? What does the world need?

First, the world needs clean water, for our crops and for us. Farmers and people who get their water from wells are concerned about water, but most Americans take clean water for granted. In other countries, such as Africa, clean water is difficult to acquire. A technological breakthrough here would be an inexpensive method of generating a lot of clean water quickly. Current methods are either cheap and slow, or extremely expensive and fast.

Next, the world needs a better battery. Generating energy is easy - but storing that energy is difficult. The problems for any energy storage system include charge and discharge rates, along with energy density.

Chemical batteries are inefficient, slow, and they really don't like to be recharged. Capacitors are efficient and fast, and don't mind charging and discharging, but their energy density is very small. Flywheels are inefficient and can't be made small. Fuels, such as gasoline or hydrogen, have excellent energy density, but must be converted to electricity through processes that leave dangerous waste products; not to mention that they cannot be 'recharged'.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the input / output methods for computers. I still use a full-sized keyboard and 21-inch monitor to access a computer that could be squeezed into a brick the size of a cell phone. As our computers shrink further, there will come a time when they will be the size of a button or smaller. We need a better way to access these computers, or we will stay tied to bulky systems.

I would also love to see a better way to leave the Earth and start exploring space. Currently the price to get into space is in the thousands of dollars per pound. It isn't worth sending people into space as yet. Economically, it makes more sense to only send robots. If there was a method of launching vehicles into space at a cost of dollars, or even cents per pound, I believe there would be a great rush to the 'new frontier' of space. Yes, I do realize that there are problems of bone loss and radiation in space, but I believe these problems are solvable - and that cheap exploration would be key to solving them.

These problems sound unsolvable don't they? The interesting thing is that they are not. The invention of the carbon nanotube has lead to experiments with super capacitors that are showing promise of replacing batteries. Carbon nanotubes are also the proposed material for use in a space elevator.

Experiments are being preformed with brain-machine interfaces that may solve the computer input problem (and make quadriplegics walk again too!) The Army already uses a video system that beams images directly into the eye with no need for a computer monitor.

The hardest problem to solve, the one with the least headway, is the problem of cheap, clean water. But there are ideas and experiments here too.

We hear about new technology all the time, and then it seems to fade away. That doesn't mean that it is gone. If it's a good idea, it will return after a time, better developed, more compact, and cheaper. This is what engineers do; improve things through progressively better designs.

New technology isn't evenly distributed, as William Gibson said. Who knows when you'll be able to write in your blog and surf the Internet without need of a keyboard or monitor? Perhaps never for you, perhaps your kids or grandkids may be the ones to benefit from new technology. It takes a long time for new things to seep into common use.

After all, the first Microwave oven was built in 1947 and cost thousands of dollars. What a difference from the $38.95 Wal-Mart model that is evenly distributed (in America at least) today.