“future”
85 posts under this tag.
Jaron Lanier’s answer to the 2007 Edge question, What are you optimistic about?, is, predictably enough, post-symbolic communication. But the more I hear about it, the more I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur and sheer magic of the vision. As beautiful a dream as I’ve ever seen.
One extravagant idea is that the nature of communication itself might transform in the future as much as it did when language appeared. This is not easy to imagine, but here’s one approach to thinking about it: I’ve been fascinated by the potential for “Post-symbolic Communication” for many years. This new style of interpersonal connection could become possible once large numbers of people become virtuosos at improvising what goes on in Virtual Reality.
We are virtuosos at spoken language. Adults speak with what seems like no effort at all, even though everyday chats might be the most complicated phenomena ever observed. I see no reason why new virtuosities in communication could not appear in the future, though it’s hard to specify a timeframe.
Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and
interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.
Why bother? It’s a reasonable hunch. Words have done so much for people—so alternatives to them with overlapping but distinct functions ought to lead to new ways of thinking and connecting.
An alternative to abstraction might arise—the possibility of expression through a fluid and capable concreteness. Instead of the word “house” you could conjure up a particular house. How do you even know it’s a house without using the word? Instead of falling back on whatever the word “house” means, you might toss around a virtual bucket that turns out to be very large on the inside- and contains a multitude of house prototypes. In one sense this “fuzzy” collection is more precise than the word, in another, less so. It is different.
If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here’s another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love?
The most valuable optimisms are Infinite Games, and imagining that new innovations as profound as language will come about in the future of human interaction is an example of one.
I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform—meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture—tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari—it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has—to use a commenter’s phrase—the faint whiff of horse manure.)
So that’s that. I now want to remark a little on that iPhone review I just mentioned. Bruce Tognazzi is no Joe Blogger, he was Apple employee #66 and is a famous interaction designer. His website, AskTog, is a classic resource on interface design. But it’s not his interaction insights I want to point out now—though there are plenty of good ones. What impressed me most was his language. Three quotes in particular strike me as true language-forging moments.
What strikes me about the iPhone interface in general is that it gives ordinary people access to features that have been the private purview of the young and the geeky. For example, cell phones have long had contact lists, but they were typically difficult to build, maintain, and sync.
The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.
The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.
High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase—electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.”E
Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.
There’s an image! It reminds me a lot, both alluding to pseudo-scientific science WP, WP, of that classic Spanish insult, ” No tener ni dos dedos de frente!” (“Not have even two fingers of forehead!”)—trying to find an appropriate translation, btw, I stumbled upon an instant new classic, ” Tiraron al niño y se quedaron con la placentaF” (“They threw the child and kept the placenta!”).
 Is an essay posted by Steve Jobs two days ago [link] proposing to do away with DRM protection in digital songs. It’s a brilliant, persuasive pamphlet and easily one of the most surprising recent turns in Intellectual Property’s (IP) unfolding evolution—and with IP soon becoming the only property that matters, we are talking about a civilization-defining process here.
Now of course Jobs’s letter is self-serving, as The Economist clearly explains, but is he right? Is a DRM-free world better? With thousands of pirated songs in my library I could hardly make for a devil’s advocate now but I still wonder. If we renounce technological solutions, how will we reward creators? Will policing and empathy be enough? (Don’t be so quick to answer, we will all be creators soon.)
A technological arms-race between pirates and anti-pirates was bound to end in senseless wastage, but that doesn’t mean new structures are not hardly needed—economical structures (based on trade) not political ones (based on force)—if IP will prove ultimately viable.
Let’s see what we can think of—the problem just got a whole more interesting.
But a finding in 2005 appears to have swung the argument decisively in favour of an ageing programme. A study at the Russian Academy of Sciences found that salmon can live much longer and continue reproducing when infected by pearl mussel larvae. In some cases, infection by this parasite extends life fourfold, to 13 years. It seems that the parasite has evolved a mechanism to avert the salmon’s abrupt death so it can continue providing shelter and food for the parasite’s development and reproduction. For a parasite dependent on the survival of its host, this is a sensible strategy. While the mechanism for this effect is not yet fully understood, it seems that the larvae produce a small protein that helps to mop up free radicals.
I need a father who’s a role model, not some horny geek boy who’s gonna spray his shorts whenever I bring a girlfriend home from school.
Alan Ball, American BeautyIMDB
They say that as you grow old you should stop idealizing your parents. Grow out of seeing them as mighty heroes and realize they’re flawed human beings like everyone. And it’s true. And it’s good advice. But it’s a pretty big world out there. And it has its heroes. And there must be at least some of them who have kids. There are.
If I have always within me this silly joy that cares little for justifications. If welded to me is this naive faith in people, in reason, in conversation, in love, in truth—in human possibilities. If I’ve never lacked wonder. If I’m so unfettered I’ve always lived in the future. If I believe in me. If I never look back. If I dare.
It’s because of my parents. I’m thankful. Tonight. Tomorrow.
Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.
So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.
Here some usage examples:
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Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.WP
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By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.ELZR
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Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.ELZR
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At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.ELZR
I tried to cram myself with Stephen Wolfram trivia (there’s all you might want at his website) before seeing him live at the 2006 Summer Startup School but I wish I had read this brief correspondence he had with Feynman. I would have been in still more awe (which might had been counterproductive, I might no have had the courage to approach him and make a fool of myself).
Humanized, of which I’ve blogged before, has released a trailer of the product (or product line, it’s confusing) they’ve been hard at work for the last 18 months: Enso. The video is interesting though it dwells too much (the first 2/3s) on features (spell-checking, dictionary, and thesaurus) that are not that compelling. It looks a whole lot like Mac’s Quicksilver (of which I’ve become a zealot since I got my Macbook) and on reflection that’s just as it should be. I remember finishing Jef Raskin’sWP The Humane InterfaceAM (Jef Raskin is the late father of Humanized’s Aza Raskin) excited of the revolution he was prophesizing and sure that Quicksilver, the glimpses of it I’d been able to steal, was exactly what he was talking about. That became half the reason I bought the aforementioned Macbook (the other half is DevonThink).
So as far as I can tell it’s a Quicksilver for Windows. I can’t wait to try it. (And wish to hereby make a prophecy: The time and software ecosystem are right for a Cambrian explosionWP of this kind of parasitic metaprograms.)
This was originally appended to the original lonelygirl article some weeks ago. I’m moving it to the blog stripELZR itself because I doubt anyone noticed it.
It’s frighteningly fast how the avant-garde becomes the status quo. Not long ago Google was an underdog. It is now unarguably a behemoth. (“Google is the weather.”EEM) Two months ago it payed 1.65 billion for YouTube, the new media underdog. Now lonelygirl15, YouTube’s first star, has made the cover of this month’s Wired. And her article, The Secret World of Lonelygirl, is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how it all started. From Jessica Rose’s misgivings about the shady project, to her browseresque beauty, to lonelygirl’s origin as the alter ego of a commune-raised, bullied boy.
Jessica Rose was suspicious and frankly a little pissed off. She had come to this organic-tea shop to discuss what she thought was a feature film called Children of Anchor Cove. Now Beckett and Flinders had made her sign a nondisclosure agreement and, clearly pleased with themselves, told her that they wanted her to play the lead in what they billed as the future of entertainment. For free. It was an Internet-something-or-other –- she wasn’t listening. They were also going to “hire” another actor to play a character named Daniel. It sounded a lot like porn.
It was exactly what her acting coaches at Universal Studios’ film program had warned her against: unkempt producer-types hawking shady deals.
When he got to college, Flinders [cocreator of lonelygirl] dreamed up an alter ego—an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl. As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences. He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.
There’s something about Jessica Rose that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window. That’s not to say she isn’t pretty off camera—she is—but every step she takes closer to the cam multiplies and enhances her looks. It’s a face made for the browser screen.
[Miles] Beckett was at home trying to decompress. He had been working as an urgent care doctor to pay the rent and was exhausted. Between filming and editing the Lonelygirl15 series and dealing with severed fingers and dog bites at the hospital, he wasn’t sleeping much. It didn’t help that Goodfried called at 2 am.
”Miles, it’s time you quit being a doctor,” he said. “We just passed 200,000 views.”
Within 48 hours, the video had half a million views. Goodfried knew that to be considered a success, a cable television show needs to get between 300,000 and 500,000 viewers. “My Parents Suck …” had vaulted into that territory.
Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. ”You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.”
This Web series not only looks different, it’s made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree’s universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can’t write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show.
Rose leaps onto the bed and jumps up and down. She makes faces at the camera and waves her hands, knocking askew the picture of the rose hanging on the wall. Beckett got it at a 99-cent store because it was cheap and looked like something a teenage girl would buy. Nobody seems to have noticed the faint pink quotation printed beneath the flower: ”It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.”
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