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.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
