there is a discussion whether the USPS (US postal services) should be disbanded (300k jobs). of course it should. all the sectors of the industry that resist efficiency improvements by going digital are dragging the economy into recession. most mail these days is advertising and bills. an all-electronic bill payment system has been waiting in the wings for years, ready to be deployed. industries need to improve efficiency, or die.
Month: October 2001
Accelerating change
The world is getting more complex at a rate we can’t cope with, it seems. The fabric of society needs to be updated. Collaboration needs to happen at deeper and broader levels, entire layers of abstraction need to be designed to fight complexity. Can massively parallel collaboration technologies help? I hope so, and David Gelernter thinks so as well.
His livestreams concept sounds like an advanced form of weblogs to me.
2003-08-03: Accelerating Change
I’m considering attending I will attend the Accelerating Change conference.
In both universal and human history, there is a special subset of events that have continually increased their speed and efficiency of change. Accelerating systems are regularly able to accomplish more with fewer resources; as a result, they avoid normal limitations to growth. Over the 20th century, several domains of technological development have accelerated, even during deep recession, driven primarily by the powerful new physical and economic efficiencies that they introduce into the human economy. Perhaps even more interestingly, looking ahead we can see no natural limit to specific accelerating physical and technological efficiencies.
2003-09-13: The mixer at Accelerating Change was mind blowing. A very diverse group of people at my table, from Todd who is a researcher with the Alcor life extension foundation to Michael Anissimov to Alex Jacobson who was at reorient too.
2003-09-14: The Accelerating Change conference is still going on. There is so much good material being presented, and not having wifi forces me to just write down the major points.
things to look up
Caloric Reduction
eintelligence.com
innovationwatch.com
openEEG.org
IPTQ.org
notions
3D computing makes slow circuits (brain) fast
exponential computing power applied to exponential problems leads to linear increases (speech processing etc). This is valuable
Is substrate-independent computation possible?
There are 1000 basic protein shapes. Think of it as the atomic table of proteins. All these are assembled with 1 protein
As computing power increases, the simulation becomes the reality
GP (genetic programming) is able to find patentable new solutions with 30 day runs on a 1000 node cluster.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as a singularity trigger
One human life has ~1021 bytes of information
The universe has performed 10120 computations since the big bang
People to follow up with
Paul Boutin
Michael E. Muston
Steve Jurvetson
2003-09-15: Accelerating Change was without doubt one of the most inspiring conferences I attended the last couple years. It will take me weeks to digest the torrent of mind boggling, challenging notions I gathered in these 2 short days. The crowd was most excellent, to the point that I felt like a toddler among adults. The schmoozing was most excellent too. I conclude with some random notes (again, no time to write them up properly, alas)
cool stuff
tribe.net social networking
iawiki.net information architecture
danah boyd has a “net nanny” blog with netiquette rules
keith devlin writes awesome math books
stumbleupon.com social bookmarking
quantumtheology.com intersection of technological change and consciousness
notions to think about
there are more molecules in a drop of water than transistors ever built
brain circuitry is 10k times more efficient than CMOS
solid state lighting will reduce energy consumption for lighting by 50% worldwide
how much do you have to vertically integrate nanotech to have a product? can’t sell a speck of sand can you 🙂
Imago has a 3D atom imaging device
it should be possible to bootstrap new organisms starting from a minimal genome of 300 genes
technology enables more and more non 0-sum games
0-sum games do not communicate, while non 0-sum games rely on communication
there is a recognition stack for voice recognition that goes like this: phonetics – phonology – morphology – syntax – semantics – pragmatics
the nuance vocalizer 3.0 has achieved almost human levels of speech synthesis
computers outperform humans in certain voice recognition tasks (noisy environments)
tim o’reilly claims that NCSA was inspired to write mosaic by o’reilly pitches
the read / write ratio for wikis is approx. 20 / 1
stay in touch
terry frazier
ross mayfield
mila golynski
ramez naam
2003-10-23:
“Crackpots, too SciFi,” were the comments he kept getting from other nanotech entrepreneurs. “I still find it absolutely amazing that one early-adoption population considers another early adoption population a bit too ‘out there.’ “
Hm, I guess that makes me a double crackpot (or a kool aid drinker) for attending Accelerating Change. I’m ok with that though.
2004-09-18: I will be attending Accelerating Change 2004. This will be without doubt the best conference of the year again.
2004-11-06: Accelerating Change 2004 has begun. Last night was simply awesome (writeup over at terry frazier’s). It is not every day that you get to casually hang out with Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Doug Engelbart at the same time. Doug and Larry had a lot of fun playing with Roomba, and we had a discussion with Helen Greiner from iRobot about upcoming APIs for these autonomous robots. Pictures coming 🙂
This morning I am sitting in a presentation by Helen. She is talking about how her field, robotics, benefits from accelerating change. Roomba, their cleaning robot, sold 1M units already, with prime time advertising. Their vision is “Eliminate dangerous and repetitive tasks.”
She is showing movies from Afghanistan, with special ops soldiers sending robots into caves for reconnaissance, and Iraq, where robots defeat bombs remotely. One of these robots is about a 100k worth of equipment. She estimates the size of the autonomous robotics industry to be about $500M today, with their company increasing business 4x in the past year.
Now she is showing a movie with 10s of robots swarming in a room, only communicating with their closest neighbors. It looks surprisingly like an ant nest.
How can robotics tap into accelerating change? Moore’s law of course (Helen mentions CCD sensors as an example: what used to require extremely heavy computation for object recognition is now helped by advances in sensor quality). Getting OEM involved to grow the market, strategic relationships (iRobot developed $200 toy robots, brought it down to $18 by learning from their toy industry partners) She is showing a video of a velociraptor toy, complete with roars. Think Aibo, dinosaur style. Another strategic partnership: John Deere. Think robotic tractors.
Helen predicts that the aging population will drive demands for robotic elder care applications. “building on the beerbot idea, the robot that brings you a beer during the super bowl, build a robot to make sure people are sufficiently hydrated at all times.”
Entertainment: 33% of furby sales went to adults without kids.
Interesting sightings
- Buddy Buzz, combining mobile speed reading with posse-style recommendations. It’s principal BJ Fogg has some scary ideas about persuasive technologies that he calls captology.
- Alicebot is the leading bot technology, with an open source community behind it’s aiml, the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, which is the markup language for the alice bot. Seems obvious to try to apply wikipedia lessons to the nurturing of its body of knowledge.
- Digital space, a commons in cyberspace which tries to bootstrap old and new organizational models using the tools cyberspace offers.
2006-10-03: A pretty decent futurist blog by Michael.
2007-03-01: Nice accelerating change type video.
2007-08-15: A warning
Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity’s collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible
2014-09-29: Factors of accelerating change
From Moore’s Law to property development, drones, and space exploration, Steve Jurvetson discusses factors affecting accelerating technological change.
Steve is the rarest of creatures: a VC who gets it at a MUCH deeper level than all the “social media / disrupt” clowns. You might not agree with everything, but he’s consistently interesting.
Experiment in knowledge scaling
we did it. our rainbow weblogs project is taking shape, and it seems bound to succeed. what will really determine our success, however, will be our ability to foster a community. i plan to attack this problem with these measures:
- Integrate Instant Messaging
Shared experiences, instant support, quick tossing out of ideas are just some of the more obvious uses for instant messaging. to avoid the creation of yet another “ghetto”, its important to integrate IM tightly with the web by having web clients, and archiving discussions on the web. - Integrate Mailing Lists
Because email is such a handy tool, many valuable discussions are taking place via email. it is therefore important to bring these discussions on the web, to make them searchable, archive them, and accessible to a wider audience. - Communicate transparently
Be it support, be it ongoing development, be it fresh ideas, most things gain value when they are unlocked from some private audience. the rule is to make it public in general, and private exceptionally. - Leverage RSS Content Flows
Because activities and content are distributed,
it is important to aggregate that content so that other can learn about it. - Increase Network effects
By really pouring valuable content into the community, we hope to lower the threshold for others to participate. as more and more people participate, it becomes increasingly lucrative to do so.
Photoshop Tennis
some guys over at coudal are battling it out with photoshop. the rule: you add a layer, go wild, pass the file to your opponent, his turn, until either of you gives in.. later on, the winner is found by popular vote. sure beats ice hockey as a spectator sport 🙂
the interface is the message
Al-Jazeera
For the first time, there is a tv station (al-Jazeera) that is not giving in to pressure from governments around the arabic world to censor its content. for the first time, arabic people can get real news, without the usual all-distorting propaganda. this will change the region for good, its things like that that are crucial in the fight against stupid fundamentalists. let the people have their own opinion, and foster economic growth.
marrying email & weblogs
a lot of productivity stems from the use of email. likewise, a lot of productivity is lost by having to deal with massive email archives. plus, email tends to be unmanageable for most people once it leaves their inbox and disappears into some email folder (or more likely, is deleted)
as john udell discusses in NNTP, IMAP, And The Semantic Web, email needs to be better integrated with other technologies. i have a few ideas how this might be done with weblogs.
- mail-to-weblog gateway: converts mails to weblog posts, and replies to comments by analyzing the message id of the email
- map email addresses of a mailing list with user accounts of a weblog
- add a X-Topic header to email to facilitate integration into a weblog
- assign categories to imap folders -> match with weblog
- attach discussion on imap folder / imap messages
the goal should be to make most email traffic google searchable. google has become so important that if your content is not in google, it could as well not exist. this is exaggerated, but has a point.
Russia Bookkeeping
and now for some good economic news. recent changes to russian laws concerning declaration of company profits encourage companies to show real profits for the first time. companies are paying dividends for the first time. the russian stock market is up 45%.
Let a 1000 weblogs bloom
I have started to read the Lexus and the olive tree, a book about globalization. It has many inspiring thoughts in it. It got me thinking what i could do to unlock some value that is hidden within the brains of my surroundings. Raising literacy and the level of discourse is an obvious candidate. Therefore, my aim is to make it easier for folks to communicate their thoughts and share it with others. This comes down to setting up a lot of new weblogs, making it easy to connect them to each other, and so on. I’d like to do these things:
- Provide an out-of-the-box weblog system for rainbow customers
- Promote weblog usage and research into their significance through cooperation with the literature department at University of Zurich.
- Promote weblog usage among friends and family by assisting them & teaching them
- Move more of my communication to weblogs, ie think of ways to attach email flows to my weblog
- Research more on the topic of management by weblog.
company weblogs expose non-performing resources
over at john robb, there is a discussion about whether having a company weblog can work.
- Problem #1: most people are not passionate about their work.
- Problem #2: most companies don’t see the value of having people document anything, much less their daily thoughts.
- Problem #3: most people are not good writers.
- Problem #4: people only have so much writing in them every day.
- Problem #5: most people, if they write well enough and often enough to be useful, will eventually write something that the company disagrees with.
Linux on the desktop
Some Open Source advocates are serious when they suggest that Gnumeric is a valid Excel contender, or that the Gnome Desktop “is just as easy to use as the Windows Desktop”. These people suffer from their very own reality distortion field, as Larry Augustin, founder of VA Linux, points out:
I recall a discussion (not on this list) some time ago where a group of people were arguing that Gnumeric was a replacement for Excel. I was appalled. They were arguing about Excel vs. Gnumeric features. They were arguing about reading and writing Excel file formats. They didn’t understand why Excel users complained when they tried to use Gnumeric. The prevailing opinions were that users were just not willing to learn to use something different.
I finally asked the question, “Can Gnumeric do pivot tables?” I go the response, “What’s a pivot table?” My point was proven. The Gnumeric advocates didn’t even understand the technology they were trying to replace. I can hand an Office power user an Excel spreadsheet with 1000s of names and addresses, and with a few point and click operations, out come pages of stick-on mailing labels. How do you do that with Gnumeric? I’m willing to bet that few or none of us on this mailing list have that level of proficiency with MS Office or Excel. If we don’t know what it can do, and we don’t know what people do with it, how can we replace it?
2002-12-12: Arrgh. I now remember why I made the conscious decision in 2000 to no longer run Linux on the Desktop. It’s just a waste of time to get all the silly library dependencies to work. Decided to give it a try at the office over VNC, such as to not have to screw up my machine. Turns out I have to spend a day resolving install problems and other shit, not exactly what I consider relevant activities. I will gladly leave that field to slackers that want to feel leet. I will likely export my sources over samba so that I can work on them from Windows 2000 using Eclipse.
2008-01-03: Hopefully, 2008 is the year of online apps, instead. having spent a day to decrapify a XP machine this holiday, it was refreshing to see how much non-savvy users like some online apps.
I think that was it, though. Everything else “just worked,” including opening all their Microsoft Office documents — word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations — in OpenOffice.org, connecting to their wireless network (served by an Apple Airport Express, natch), and of course playing Mahjongg (part of gnome-games). I know the wireless thing isn’t a fair test, since I’d already thoroughly tested their hardware for Linux compatibility and had been running Debian on it for 18 months. Still — different Distro, clean install, no driver problems. Thanks, Canonical (and Debian, and all the upstream driver hackers). And thanks to Sun and others for reverse-engineering Microsoft’s proprietary formats and building a free office suite that even my mother could love. Kudos all around. 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop. My parents’ desktop.
2008-01-30: Best troll of recent memory
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me. It’s just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of Windows. Not possible. I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
