transmit nowhere

I just watched Surrogates this past weekend. Not bad. I’m either rusty or the plot twists were genuinely difficult to predict.

But I have to say the ending left me just a little unsatisfied. Part of it may just be that I’m a technologist at heart. Slap some powered silicon onto something, and you can bet I’ll think it’s interesting. (Maker Faire last weekend felt a little like that, but that’s for another day). Apparently I like Fitbits because I’m interested in tech (but if you don’t know them, try one. I’m on my second after a bit of water damage on the first). But it’s a clever bit of technology. It just tracks every step you take, a pedestrian game in life. And you can monitor your sleep at night (even more fascinating).

iPads aside, the spread of sensing technology will definitely lead to Surragotes or I, Robot style exo-skeletons for human use.

What really bugs me is it seems like most of these techno-thrillers about the future seem to portray the hyper-advancement of the field as an inherently bad thing, often preaching a kind of Luddite philosophy. Now mind you, I don’t think there should be a movie where everything is better because of the tech (I don’t think a story that’s happy through and through can be a very good story, there has to be strife…)

…strife.

So why not a movie looking at problems in the world we currently think of as intractable, with the story about the development of said solution. The R&D I’m sure would be boring, but you could really emphasize a grand conspiracy of anti-solution sentiment coupled with the docile inactivity of the mass population. It’s like a non-dead zombie apocalyptic scenario where the average person is effectively a mediated zombie, ODing on pizza and television. There’s a big problem (well, several are hinted, but we focus on one) looming ahead that a subset of the population can see, and nobody else seems to give a damn.

Oh, wait.

And then the rest of the film can be about the struggle to bring solutions to fruition. With a plot twist and international intrigue thrown in for spice.

What are you doing right now?

What is your arch-nemesis doing right now?

And if you don’t have an arch-nemesis, you’re really missing out. I hope I meet mine one day. So far all I know is that she’s formidable.

I’ve been interested in pen based computing since high school. I remember in elementary school I was lusting after a laptop being advertised with the financial paper on weekends. And a family friend joked with me that I should wait for the smaller laptops of the future, “palmtops”. And he held out his hand like it would sit on his palm and be typed on with his other hand. At the time I didn’t appreciate it, I wanted a laptop after all.

Me of little faith. When the PalmPilot came out a few years later and I read about the Apple Newton, my savings were reallocated.

I believed Gates when he would talk about tablets being the future. Especially learning about little slate tablets in school houses before mass paper or cuniform tablets of lore.

Even the Windows XP Tablet computer I procured after college felt different. Like holding it in my lap wherever I went actually changed the thoughts and emotions I would have.

So, standing in line today I have some mixed perspectives about the device.

The XO-3 concept design unveiled late last year, and at the time I wondered I it made sense.

http://i.engadget.com/2009/12/22/olpc-shows-off-absurdly-thin-xo-3-concept-tablet-for-2012/

I trust in Yves Behar, but coming from an older school of thought, it can be hard to let go of the past ideas of the future. But if anything, the iPad releasing today is perhaps setting the model for kids inthe future. Indistinguishable from magic, we grew up with the idea of a natural tablet and touch interfaces from Star Trek if nothing else. I’m sure others can point further back. But a child today will look at the iPad and the captain’s log and wonder why space ships have antiquated technology.

On the edge of reality. We live on the edge of reality and it’s hard to look over it. For our generation, as we try to think of what we could do with the toys and infrastructure we build, it’s going to be increasingly difficult, burdened with the memories of the old way.

Remember when Apple was about to wither away? And Microsoft invested, saving competition?

The OLPC project seems to be on the edge of reality. It’s unfortunate that even technologist like myself cannot fond the time to pour energy into a thing like Sugar and the XO.

But now I’m excited. Because if the XO goes the direction of the XO-3, and my hope is that mass demand for this class of consumer products will drive the cost down. And if everyone starts to have a tablet, we won’t care as much about the form factor.

Our world will become software. Thas why today is especially exciting.

William Gibson shares some wisdom on writing, answering some forum questions:

Q: Which novels did you enjoy writing most?

A: Writing novels is a painful and anxiety-ridden process, for me. There are *moments* of enjoyment. I very much enjoy the state of having written.

Q: Least?

A: They’re all equally if differently painful, and each one seems, at some point, to me, to be not only a very bad novel, but the worst novel ever written. That crisis, I’ve learned, indicates that I’ll be finished soon, and that the worst is over. But knowing that doesn’t seem to decrease that devastating and absolute conviction of utter failure.

from http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2010_03_01_archive.asp#6800925744412544840

I have rarely met anyone who has enjoyed or appreciated bureaucracy. Maybe the people who are entrenched in it or contribute to it. There are problems of efficiency (a whole other post) that are nearly universally recognized but we cannot seem to improve. Looking at the rich history of our people (everyone) it seems like many systems today are perpetuated out of a misplaced sense of respect for the past. An unbroken stagnation that has come to life. A sentience of paperworks, forms, processes, rules, regulations.

Are there science-fiction stories that postulate a world in which a single global government takes on a Vogon-like bureaucratic mess, developing and growing a system for management riddled with forms, cross-checking, and delayed process? Perhaps this system would come to life and become our benevolent overlord, drowning us all in a kind of ISO 9000 process.

Like many things in life, taking a step back, asking questions I’m forced to wonder the purpose of the system. It took a friend a quick check on Wikipedia on automotive registration for us to determine the reasons to necessitate the annual registration. The answer, of course, was unsatisfying. Justified, maybe. But only barely.

It makes me wonder if the proponents of “small government” are thinking too small. And makes me ask more questions about the world I live in that instill seeds of depression.

The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

via Post-Medium Publishing.

As more of our conversations parse through personally, carried devices and the services they connect to our ability to transform, filter and analyse what is being spoken evolves. Simple examples exist today – mobile phones designed for the elderly in Japan include features that can slow down conversations by up to ~30% to make them easier to follow – the conversation length stays the same compensated by shorter pauses. The iPod shuffle supports podcasts on speed.

via Silence is Subjective – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect.

synchronicity |ˌsi ng krəˈnisitē|

noun

1 the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection : such synchronicity is quite staggering.
2 another term for synchrony (sense 1).
ORIGIN 1950s: coined (in sense 1) by C. G. Jung.

Things are duplicated everywhere. Tweets in Tweetie, across computers and the iPhone. Google Reader and Buzz. Missed calls from Google Voice. Status indicators, badges, alerts, alarms. Duplications everywhere. It’s not enough that there’s too much – we duplicate things even when it’s not needed.

It’s more than that, and worse. Trawl github and you’ll find that people have implemented and re-implemented the same stuff over and over and over again. How can we do anything new, anything meaningful if we keep doing the same things over and over again?

“Where should I meet you?”

“Here, I’ll just share my location with you on Latitude, just navigate to me”

“Ok.”

“See you in a bit.”

A little weird, and a little awesome.

Posted via web from Ryan’s posterous