Future

[Prospective] How do they envision the future?

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In Metropolis Mag different designers, urbanists, and city-dwellers describe how they envision the future (worst and best case scenario). Some are quite classical but other are interesting.

The future--from my limited perspective 21 ft. below sea level--is an artificial space protected from the encroaching seas, both literal and cultural. It threatens to flood the specifity of place by a system of design that defines the empty potential of human territory and the uses of historic forms to provide the building blocks for an unknowable future.(Aaron Betsky)

Besides, I like this story... hacking's the future (I mean 'hacking' as it was defined back in the days, when I was not even born).

An inventor in a little Brooklyn workshop hacks into a Blackberry handheld and discovers that, with a modification to the firmware, it can be redesigned to work for free within a short range. Working with a small upstate electronics manufacturer, this inventor makes a thousand of these mutant pagers and sells them through newsstands and bodegas in his neighborhood, and a free wireless community network is born. As the device becomes more popular, people in other neighborhoods and then other cities adopt them. A graduate student in Chicago gets one and sees an opportunity to add a couple of chips to the circuit, and she invents a new kind of free local voice message system.

[Tech] Haptic phones?

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This Vibetonz system seems to provides cell phones with a new feature: haptics. More explanation here (.pdf)

VibeTonz is intended to enable users to download different vibrations the same way they download ringtones now. The vibrations could be used to add sensory depth to emoticons sent by instant messaging, or to provide sensory feedback when navigating by a global positioning system

Here is the interface to compose the vibrations from MIDI files:

[Prospective] Voicemail extinction?

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The Feature has a post about the decrease in the voicemail feature of mobile phones.

 Although society is now becoming accustomed to time shifting entertainment, it is becoming less tolerant of doing the same with communication.

Voice is still the killer application on mobile phones but, especially with younger generations, it may not be the sound of voice that is driving its success. A new study sponsored by Mobeon, a company which delivers messaging servers, has found that there is a growing generation gap between voicemail users and those who opt to send a text instead. When younger generations are faced with a an outgoing message, they often hang up and send a text, or they skip the call altogether and send a text message to begin with. Older generations, especially those who grew up with answering machines and other asynchronous communication, don't mind leaving a message. (...) The clarity of a text message is superior to that of a voice message in most cases. However it seems that more of the arguments in favor of text messages these two companies have found all exploit the fact that an SMS comes directly to the recipient's handset.

At work, in two years, I used 2 times my answering machines and the two times I had to ask the administrator for my passsword.

[Prospective] Closer to Johnny Mnemonic Jones' than ever

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In Johnny Mnemonic (William Gibson's short story, shot in a movie by Robert Longo, with a pre-matrix Keanu Reeves) there was this nice dolphin called Jones:

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.

We are close to that, with this amazing news:

A University of Florida scientist has created a living "brain" of cultured rat cells that now controls an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator.

Scientists say the research could lead to tiny, brain-controlled prosthetic devices and unmanned airplanes flown by living computers.

And if scientists can decipher the ground rules of how such neural networks function, the research also may result in novel computing systems that could tackle dangerous search-and-rescue jobs and perform bomb damage assessment without endangering humans.

[Propsective] Is Europe the Future?

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There seems to be a pattern here. Yesterday, I was reading Richard Florida's Creative Class War in Washington Monthly. His point is that the current USA policy (restricting VISA for immigrants, the war on terror...) makes other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talents (the so-called creative class). That means: less creativity in the US, less entrepreneurship and down the road, less leadership. The reason might be Georges Bush but also a change in the country's political-economic demographics:

As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue" areas going ever more Democratic.

So people do not ove to the US, they go elsewhere... Europe for instance:

But the bigger problem isn't that Americans are going elsewhere. It's that for the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come here. (...) Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin.(...) The world's leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle

And today, there is a paper in the Financial Times about "Europe as a new role model for world".

Just when Europe is being dismissed as a power in terminal decline, Jeremy Rifkin advances a compelling case for its ascendancy, writes Andrew Moravcsik

Of course every country always feel to be in decline at a cerain point and the neighbor always appear to do better. But there seems to be a trend. Now sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling is not the only one to believe in Europe in angry wired columns. The reasons why Europe could be a model, as described in the FT are not on the same level as the one described in Florida's paper. It's more about the EU policy that tries to take into account a multi-lateral world and not a single direction.

Of course Europe is not doing so well, but there are certainly some interesting options, like the new emerging and multi-lateral governance in the EU. Would that be a model for the UN?

[Prospective] Which model to create and support innovation?

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Interesting new debate in France: a think tank-like mission lead by J.L. Beffa (CEO of Saint Gobain) was asked by the French government to think about different way to create and support innovation. They published a report in which they promote the japanese and scandinavian models rather than the american one. Using private/public mixed funding they want to accelerate 'transfer' between universities and private companies... going back to the 60s with big projects like Ariane, Airbus, the TGV and so on... Well nothing new under the sun, but it's always nice to have this kind of debate.

[Prospective] Freegan: a step toward bruce sterling's distraction proles

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Accoridng to newsday (via), a freegan is:

"Freegan" comes from the term vegan - a person who does not eat meat or animal products for health or ethical reasons. Freegans take it one step further by eating food thrown away by stores and restaurants, to avoid waste and limit their impact on the environment. They say that by not buying food, they're boycotting a capitalist consumer society that needlessly slaughters animals and harms the environment by mass-producing nonessential food, much of which ends up in landfills.

That reminds me the proles in Bruce Stlering's novel Distraction who create/recycle their own food...

[Prospective] Optimizing Individual and Public Interests in Information Technology

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RAND reports are always worth to have a glance (and more). I recently read Project Libra: Optimizing Individual and Public Interests in Information Technology (.pdf) by Edward Balkovich, Tora Bikson, David Farber, Robert Kraut, James Morris, Peter Shane, Joel Smith, CP-477, 2004.

This document describes the vision for a program of research to investigate policy implications of emerging information technologies. The research would explore capabilities of future systems of wireless technologies and sensors that implement appropriate protections of privacy and civil liberties; experiment with decisionmaking processes that optimize the balance between privacy concerns and the public and personal benefits of these information technologies; and examine the mutual adaptation of attitudes, behaviors, policy, and technology that come about with experience. Project Libra was conceived as a joint research activity of the RAND Corporation and Carnegie Mellon University

[Prospective] 10 principles of technology

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Howard Rheingold, in the feature, posted some responses to Neil Postman's 10 Principles of Technology.

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige and a "worldview".

Again, I will take advantage of my position as first commenter by making the obvious observation that untethering communications from the desktop means spending more time on the move, in the park or at Starbucks, and less time at home or the office. Communication addiction no longer dictates agoraphobic behavior patterns.

[Prospective] Bruce Sterling's quote

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Interesting Bruce Sterling quotes taken from this interview

NG: There seems to be a division between your work up to the mid-Eighties--usually set off Earth or in the past--and your output since then, which concentrates on the near future and the socio-cultural realities engendered by the information revolution. Was this a deliberate change in direction? What motivated it?

BS: Mostly I had a lot more information, and rather less imagination. Thanks to the Web and my work in journalism, I have tremendously good research material now. I can't go to the moons of Jupiter, but if I hear of something odd going on in Turkish Cyprus, I can easily pull some strings and go to Turkish Cyprus. Compared to Ganymede, it's a remarkably engaging place: trees, buildings, food, heroin smugglers, genocidal war crimes, it's more fantastic than one might give it credit for. And you've got to keep in mind: I'm 46 years old. Rocketing flights of world-shattering fancy tend to be a young guy's game.

[Prospective] Wireless area in cities, who's gonna pay?

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It is indeed a nice question, who is going to pay for wireless cities? Technology Review provides a good discussion of this issue.

One reason cities and towns appear eager to leap into the wireless fray is the inclination—and pressure—to serve their constituents. "Local governments very much want to be more citizen-friendly," says Joe Pisciot. (...) The wrinkle in the public-service spin on Wi-Fi is who will bear the cost for the service. The answer splits proponents into two camps, and both are problematic. On one side are those who see wireless broadband as a public amenity—a basic service that cities and towns should provide free to residents as they do, say, trash pickup. (...) In the other camp are those who eye Wi-Fi as a potential revenue generator. Proponents of this model say cities and towns could negotiate affordable residential Wi-Fi rates as part of the bundle of wireless broadband services they purchase for local government departments, such as fire, police, and schools. (...) "A town can make any argument it wants," says Frezza. "It has as much money as it can pull out of its taxpayers."

[Prospective] Supply and demands negotiated by autonomous agents

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Agents of change by P. Thibodeau discusses a capitalist future in which supply and demand is negotiated on a minute-by-minute basis by autonomous agents.

Negotiation was one of the key agent capabilities tested at the conference's Trading Agent Competition. In one contest, computers ran simulations of agents assembling PCs. The agents were operating factories, managing inventories, negotiating with suppliers and buyers, and making decisions based on a range of variables, such as the risk of taking on a big order even if all the parts weren't available. If an agent made an error in judgment, the company could face financial penalties and order cancellations.

[Prospective] SciFi and the future of social organization

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I have always been amazed by the different social/economic/political forms or organizations in science fiction novel, especially in:- Greenhouse Summer by Norman Spinrad: multinationals are replace by kibboutz-like syndicate. - Distraction by Bruce Sterling: not a true economy, ruled by ex blue-collar workers who were entirely marginalized because they had no skills of any value. Operatives who operate for the sake of nothing. - Neuromancer by William Gibson: big multinational companies with their own privatozed army (the nations are dead). - Snowcrash by Neal Steaphenson: franchise franchise franchise - ...

It seems that in lots of those novel, the authors draw their inspiration from collective structures like kibboutz (or kampong), this is an intersting track I would like to follow.

[Prospective] Sterling and Rheingold connections

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Two interesting take: Howard Rheingold's latest connection by Rheingold (in Business WeeK) and When Blobjects Rule the Earth by Sterling.Howard Rheingold:

Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," [they say they're] just selling something. But it adds up. (...) Google is based on the emergent choices of people who link. Nobody is really thinking, "I'm now contributing to Google's page rank." What they're thinking is, "This link is something my readers would really be interested in." They're making an individual judgment that, in the aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of what's the best source.

Then there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those free riders suddenly become an asset.

Bruce Sterling:

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. (...) The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.(...) The people who make Spimes want you to do as much of the work for them as possible. They can data-mine your uses of the spime, and use that to improve their Spime and gain market share. This would have been called "customer relations management," in an earlier era, but in a Spime world, it's more intimate. It's collaborative, and better understood as something like open-source manufacturing. It's all about excellence. Passion. Integrity. Cross-disciplinary action. And volunteerism.

When you shop for Amazon, you're already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don't get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions. Whenever you use a spime, you're rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second.

I thought there was a connection between the two: a new conception of how users cooperate to add value to a service.

[Prospective] Near-Future Ubiquitous Networking Devices

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Geek stuff for the future: Resonantware: Near-Future Ubiquitous Networking Devices Visualized by Designers. The design is really nice.

NEC designers have created design possibilities with near future paradigms in mind: the world where humans and machines resonate with one another. We propose devices that judge situations to meet user’s needs, and interfaces that let users access unlimited information as naturally as breathing. - Soft-shell mobile phone "tag" is a new, malleable, casual communicator. - flacon: Virtual storage bottle. - gumi: Ubiquitous media chip. - wacca: visual Memory in a Bracelet. - P-ISM : A Pen-style Personal Networking Gadget Package - nave:360-Degree Visual Communication Device.