Predictions

We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.

This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.

Believe the hype. Please take a while and go play with it! Its help, as is Wolfram’s tradition, is excellent, the best introduction.

And with a mission “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”, it opens up as big and inspiring a project for this generation.

Ever since I’ve had a digital camera I’ve noticed a strange use of it: I’ll often snap stuff —whiteboards, signs, text, documents, maps, ads, book covers..— for practical, remember-or-consult-it-later purposes (as opposed to “leisure” snapping of people, events or cool stuff). Since I got my awesome new camera this use has only intensified, with two interesting new twists:

Second, since the screen is now unbelievably good and big (3”!), and since browsing has gotten so much faster and responsive (not there yet but close), most of my later reviewing now is done right at my camera. It’s a very different, much more personal and portable experience than being anchored to the desktop. Also, since memory is now so mindboggingly cheap I can just keep these reference photos on the camera (that is, with me) for as long as I need to.

It’s really starting to feel like a prostethic (photographic) memory module and my guess is that this use will become more and more prominent, to the point that some 5 years from now it could be cameras’ main use (mostly because we’ll be saturated by “leisure” photos of people, events or cool stuff). My camera actually reflects this and one of its 5 main modes is actually the cleverly titled “Clipboard” mode, designed only (!) to keep photos of “maps, timetables and other travel info” (reference photos!) at hand (a special mode shouldn’t be necessary once the interface gets there).

Interesting times for rarefied, elite education in America: in a move that paralleled and extended Harvard’s, Stanford announced a couple of weeks ago that students whose families earn < $100,000 a year won’t be charged tuition and those whose families earn < $60,000 will also be exempted from paying room & board—in other words, they’ll pay nada.

Which will be a fascinating and unprecedented landmark for the service industry.

I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.

Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,

how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?

I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.

OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”^SOURCE

And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ^ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.

Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.

Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.

Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.

The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.

Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast

Series Blenders

Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.

Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,

and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.

The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century, Ray Kurzweil

I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…

I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since: