Tag Archives: futurism

Art, Idea Soup, Technica

Back to the Future

France_in_XXI_Century_Latest_fashionJust over a hundred years ago, at the turn of the 19th century, Jean-Marc Côté and some of his fellow French artists were commissioned to imagine what the world would look like in 2000. Their colorful sketches and paintings portrayed some interesting inventions, though all seem to be grounded in familiar principles and incremental innovations — mechanical helpers, ubiquitous propellers and wings. Interestingly, none of these artist-futurists imagined a world beyond Victorian dress, gender inequality and wars. But these are gems nonetheless.

France_in_XXI_Century._Air_cabSome of their works found their way into cigar boxes and cigarette cases, others were exhibited at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. My three favorites: a Tailor of the Latest Fashion, the Aero-cab Station and the Whale Bus. See the full complement of these remarkable futuristic visions at the Public Domain Review, and check out the House Rolling Through the Countryside and At School.

I suspect our contemporary futurists — born in the late 20th or early 21st-century — will fall prey to the same narrow visions when asked to sketch our planet in 3000. But despite the undoubted wealth of new gadgets and gizmos a thousand years from now the challenge would be to see if their imagined worlds might be at peace and with equality for all.
France_in_XXI_Century_Whale_busImages courtesy of the Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Public Domain.

 

Environs

Hotels of the Future

Fantastic — in the original sense of the word — designs for some futuristic hotels, some of which have arrived in the present.

See more designs here.

Image: The Heart hotel, designed by Arina Agieieva and Dmitry Zhuikov, is a proposed design for a New York hotel. The project aims to draw local residents and hotel visitors closer together by embedding the hotel into city life; bedrooms are found in the converted offices that flank the core of the structure – its heart – and leisure facilities are available for the use of everyone. Courtesy of Telegraph.

Technica

A Post-PC, Post-Laptop World

Not too long ago the founders and shapers of much of our IT world were dreaming up new information technologies, tools and processes that we didn’t know we needed. These tinkerers became the establishment luminaries that we still ove or hate — Microsoft, Dell, HP, Apple, Motorola and IBM. And, of course, they are still around.

But the world that they constructed is imploding and nobody really knows where it is heading. Will the leaders of the next IT revolution come from the likes of Google or Facebook? Or as is more likely, is this just a prelude to a more radical shift, with seeds being sown in anonymous garages and labs across the U.S. and other tech hubs. Regardless, we are in for some unpredictable and exciting times.

From ars technica:

Change happens in IT whether you want it to or not. But even with all the talk of the “post-PC” era and the rise of the horrifically named “bring your own device” hype, change has happened in a patchwork. Despite the disruptive technologies documented on Ars and elsewhere, the fundamentals of enterprise IT have evolved slowly over the past decade.

But this, naturally, is about to change. The model that we’ve built IT on for the past 10 years is in the midst of collapsing on itself, and the companies that sold us the twigs and straw it was built with—Microsoft, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard to name a few—are facing the same sort of inflection points in their corporate life cycles that have ripped past IT giants to shreds. These corporate giants are faced with moments of truth despite making big bets on acquisitions to try to position themselves for what they saw as the future.

Predicting the future is hard, especially when you have an installed base to consider. But it’s not hard to identify the economic, technological, and cultural forces that are converging right now to shape the future of enterprise IT in the short term. We’re not entering a “post-PC” era in IT—we’re entering an era where the device we use to access applications and information is almost irrelevant. Nearly everything we do as employees or customers will be instrumented, analyzed, and aggregated.

“We’re not on a 10-year reinvention path anymore for enterprise IT,” said David Nichols, Americas IT Transformation Leader at Ernst & Young. “It’s more like [a] five-year or four-year path. And it’s getting faster. It’s going to happen at a pace we haven’t seen before.”

While the impact may be revolutionary, the cause is more evolutionary. A host of technologies that have been the “next big thing” for much of the last decade—smart mobile devices, the “Internet of Things,” deep analytics, social networking, and cloud computing—have finally reached a tipping point. The demand for mobile applications has turned what were once called “Web services” into a new class of managed application programming interfaces. These are changing not just how users interact with data, but the way enterprises collect and share data, write applications, and secure them.

Add the technologies pushed forward by government and defense in the last decade (such as facial recognition) and an abundance of cheap sensors, and you have the perfect “big data” storm. This sea of structured and unstructured data could change the nature of the enterprise or drown IT departments in the process. It will create social challenges as employees and customers start to understand the level to which they are being tracked by enterprises. And it will give companies more ammunition to continue to squeeze more productivity out of a shrinking workforce, as jobs once done by people are turned over to software robots.

There has been a lot of talk about how smartphones and tablets have supplanted the PC. In many ways, that talk is true. In fact, we’re still largely using smartphones and tablets as if they were PCs.

But aside from mobile Web browsing and the use of tablets as a replacement for notebook PCs in presentations, most enterprises still use mobile devices the same way they used the BlackBerry in 1999—for e-mail. Mobile apps are the new webpage: everybody knows they need one to engage customers, but few are really sure what to do with them beyond what customers use their websites for. And while companies are trying to engage customers using social media on mobile, they’re largely not using the communications tools available on smart mobile devices to engage their own employees.

“I think right now, mobile adoption has been greatly overstated in terms of what people say they do with mobile versus mobile’s potential,” said Nichols. “Every CIO out there says, ‘Oh, we have mobile-enabled our workforce using tablets and smartphones.’ They’ve done mobile enablement but not mobile integration. Mobility at this point has not fundamentally changed the way the majority of the workforce works, at least not in the last five to six years.”

Smartphones make very poor PCs. But they have something no desktop PC has—a set of sensors that can provide a constant flow of data about where their user is. There’s visual information pulled in through a camera, motion and acceleration data, and even proximity. When combined with backend analytics, they can create opportunities to change how people work, collaborate, and interact with their environment.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is a big part of that shift, according to Nichols. “Allowing devices with sensors to interact in a meaningful way is the next step,” he said. That step spans from the shop floor to the data center to the boardroom, as the devices we carry track our movements and our activities and interact with the systems around us.

Retailers are beginning to catch on to that, using mobile devices’ sensors to help close sales. “Everybody gets the concept that a mobile app is a necessity for a business-to-consumer retailer,” said Brian Kirschner, the director of Apigee Institute, a research organization created by the application infrastructure vendor Apigee in collaboration with executives of large enterprises and academic researchers. “But they don’t always get the transformative force on business that apps can have. Some can be small. For example, Home Depot has an app to help you search the store you’re in for what you’re looking for. We know that failure to find something in the store is a cause of lost sales and that Web search is useful and signs over aisles are ineffective. So the mobile app has a real impact on sales.”

But if you’ve already got stock information, location data for a customer, and e-commerce capabilities, why stop at making the app useful only during business hours? “If you think of the full potential of a mobile app, why can’t you buy something at the store when it’s closed if you’re near the store?” Kirschner said. “Instead of dropping you to a traditional Web process and offering you free shipping, they could have you pick it up at the store where you are tomorrow.”

That’s a change that’s being forced on many retailers, as noted in an article from the most recent MIT Sloan Management Review by a trio of experts: Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business; Yu Jeffrey Hu of the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Mohammed Rahman of the University of Calgary. If retailers don’t offer a way to meet mobile-equipped customers, they’ll buy it online elsewhere—often while standing in their store. Offering customers a way to extend their experience beyond the store’s walls is the kind of mobile use that’s going to create competitive advantage from information technology. And it’s the sort of competitive advantage that has long been milked out of the old IT model.

Nichols sees the same sort of technology transforming not just relationships with customers but the workplace itself. Say, for example, you’re in New York, and you want to discuss something with two colleagues. You request an appointment using your mobile device, and based on your location data, the location data of your colleagues, and the timing of the meeting, backend systems automatically book you a conference room and set up a video link to a co-worker out of town.

Based on analytics and the title of the meeting, relevant documents are dropped into a collaboration space. Your device records the meeting to an archive and notes who has attended in person. And this conversation is automatically transcribed, tagged, and forwarded to team members for review.

“Having location data to reserve conference rooms and calls and having all other logistics be handled in background changes the size of the organization I need to support that,” Nichols said.

The same applies to manufacturing, logistics, and other areas where applications can be tied into sensors and computing power. “If I have a factory where a machine has a belt that needs to be reordered every five years and it auto re-orders and it gets shipped without the need for human interaction, that changes the whole dynamics of how you operate,” Nichols said. “If you can take that and plug it into a proper workflow, you’re going to see an entirely new sort of workforce. That’s not that far away.”

Wearable devices like Google’s Glass will also feed into the new workplace. Wearable tech has been in use in some industries for decades, and in some cases it’s just an evolution from communication systems already used in many retail and manufacturing environments. But the ability to add augmented reality—a data overlay on top of a real world location—and to collect information without reaching for a device will quickly get traction in many enterprises.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) 2001 Series, circa 1977. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

BigBang, Technica

Ray Kurzweil and Living a Googol Years

By all accounts serial entrepreneur, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is Google’s most famous employee, eclipsing even co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin. As an inventor he can lay claim to some impressive firsts, such as the flatbed scanner, optical character recognition and the music synthesizer. As a futurist, for which he is now more recognized in the public consciousness, he ponders longevity, immortality and the human brain.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Ray Kurzweil must encounter his share of interviewers whose first question is: What do you hope your obituary will say?

This is a trick question. Mr. Kurzweil famously hopes an obituary won’t be necessary. And in the event of his unexpected demise, he is widely reported to have signed a deal to have himself frozen so his intelligence can be revived when technology is equipped for the job.

Mr. Kurzweil is the closest thing to a Thomas Edison of our time, an inventor known for inventing. He first came to public attention in 1965, at age 17, appearing on Steve Allen’s TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” to demonstrate a homemade computer he built to compose original music in the style of the great masters.

In the five decades since, he has invented technologies that permeate our world. To give one example, the Web would hardly be the store of human intelligence it has become without the flatbed scanner and optical character recognition, allowing printed materials from the pre-digital age to be scanned and made searchable.

If you are a musician, Mr. Kurzweil’s fame is synonymous with his line of music synthesizers (now owned by Hyundai). As in: “We’re late for the gig. Don’t forget the Kurzweil.”

If you are blind, his Kurzweil Reader relieved one of your major disabilities—the inability to read printed information, especially sensitive private information, without having to rely on somebody else.

In January, he became an employee at Google. “It’s my first job,” he deadpans, adding after a pause, “for a company I didn’t start myself.”

There is another Kurzweil, though—the one who makes seemingly unbelievable, implausible predictions about a human transformation just around the corner. This is the Kurzweil who tells me, as we’re sitting in the unostentatious offices of Kurzweil Technologies in Wellesley Hills, Mass., that he thinks his chances are pretty good of living long enough to enjoy immortality. This is the Kurzweil who, with a bit of DNA and personal papers and photos, has made clear he intends to bring back in some fashion his dead father.

Mr. Kurzweil’s frank efforts to outwit death have earned him an exaggerated reputation for solemnity, even caused some to portray him as a humorless obsessive. This is wrong. Like the best comedians, especially the best Jewish comedians, he doesn’t tell you when to laugh. Of the pushback he receives from certain theologians who insist death is necessary and ennobling, he snarks, “Oh, death, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.”

“People say, ‘Oh, only the rich are going to have these technologies you speak of.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, like cellphones.’ “

To listen to Mr. Kurzweil or read his several books (the latest: “How to Create a Mind”) is to be flummoxed by a series of forecasts that hardly seem realizable in the next 40 years. But this is merely a flaw in my brain, he assures me. Humans are wired to expect “linear” change from their world. They have a hard time grasping the “accelerating, exponential” change that is the nature of information technology.

“A kid in Africa with a smartphone is walking around with a trillion dollars of computation circa 1970,” he says. Project that rate forward, and everything will change dramatically in the next few decades.

“I’m right on the cusp,” he adds. “I think some of us will make it through”—he means baby boomers, who can hope to experience practical immortality if they hang on for another 15 years.

By then, Mr. Kurzweil expects medical technology to be adding a year of life expectancy every year. We will start to outrun our own deaths. And then the wonders really begin. The little computers in our hands that now give us access to all the world’s information via the Web will become little computers in our brains giving us access to all the world’s information. Our world will become a world of near-infinite, virtual possibilities.

How will this work? Right now, says Mr. Kurzweil, our human brains consist of 300 million “pattern recognition” modules. “That’s a large number from one perspective, large enough for humans to invent language and art and science and technology. But it’s also very limiting. Maybe I’d like a billion for three seconds, or 10 billion, just the way I might need a million computers in the cloud for two seconds and can access them through Google.”

We will have vast new brainpower at our disposal; we’ll also have a vast new field in which to operate—virtual reality. “As you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud. The biological portion of our brain didn’t go away but the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically the way we back up everything now that’s digital.”

“When the hardware crashes,” he says of humanity’s current condition, “the software dies with it. We take that for granted as human beings.” But when most of our intelligence, experience and identity live in cyberspace, in some sense (vital words when thinking about Kurzweil predictions) we will become software and the hardware will be replaceable.

Read the entire article after the jump.

Idea Soup

A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years

[div class=attrib]The Globe and Mail:[end-div]

The iconic writer reveals the shape of things to come, with 45 tips for survival and a matching glossary of the new words you’ll need to talk about your messed-up future.

1) It’s going to get worse

No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now

The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.

4)Move to Vancouver, San Diego, Shannon or Liverpool

There’ll be just as much freaky extreme weather in these west-coast cities, but at least the west coasts won’t be broiling hot and cryogenically cold.

5) You’ll spend a lot of your time feeling like a dog leashed to a pole outside the grocery store – separation anxiety will become your permanent state

6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?

That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!

7) Retail will start to resemble Mexican drugstores

In Mexico, if one wishes to buy a toothbrush, one goes to a drugstore where one of every item for sale is on display inside a glass display case that circles the store. One selects the toothbrush and one of an obvious surplus of staff runs to the back to fetch the toothbrush. It’s not very efficient, but it does offer otherwise unemployed people something to do during the day.

8) Try to live near a subway entrance

In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it’s the only real estate that will hold its value, if not increase.

9) The suburbs are doomed, especially thoseE.T. , California-style suburbs

This is a no-brainer, but the former homes will make amazing hangouts for gangs, weirdoes and people performing illegal activities. The pretend gates at the entranceways to gated communities will become real, and the charred stubs of previous white-collar homes will serve only to make the still-standing structures creepier and more exotic.

10) In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness

11) Old people won’t be quite so clueless

No more “the Google,” because they’ll be just that little bit younger.

12) Expect less

Not zero, just less.

13) Enjoy lettuce while you still can

And anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it is they served in railway hotels in the 1890s. Jams. Preserves. Pickled everything.

14) Something smarter than us is going to emerge

Thank you, algorithms and cloud computing.

15) Make sure you’ve got someone to change your diaper

Sponsor a Class of 2112 med student. Adopt up a storm around the age of 50.

16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze

While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.

17) You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual

You’ve become a notch in the Internet’s belt. Don’t try to delude yourself that you’re a romantic lone individual. To the new order, you’re just a node. There is no escape

18) Untombed landfills will glut the market with 20th-century artifacts

19) The Arctic will become like Antarctica – an everyone/no one space

Who owns Antarctica? Everyone and no one. It’s pie-sliced into unenforceable wedges. And before getting huffy, ask yourself, if you’re a Canadian: Could you draw an even remotely convincing map of all those islands in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories? Quick, draw Ellesmere Island.

20)

North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989

Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.

21) We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be able to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette’s, has no medical ability not to pun

22) Your sense of time will continue to shred. Years will feel like hours

23) Everyone will be feeling the same way as you

There’s some comfort to be found there.

24) It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are

Much of what we now consider “personality” will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

25) Dreams will get better

26)

Being alone will become easier

27)Hooking up will become ever more mechanical and binary

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

The way we define our sense of self will continue to morph via new ways of socializing. The notion of your life needing to be a story will seem slightly corny and dated. Your life becomes however many friends you have online.

29) You will have more say in how long or short you wish your life to feel

Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.

30) Some existing medical conditions will be seen as sequencing malfunctions

The ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows have been shown to sequence). Dogs, while highly intelligent, still cannot form sequences; it’s the reason why well-trained dogs at shows are still led from station to station by handlers instead of completing the course themselves.

Dysfunctional mental states stem from malfunctions in the brain’s sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “not good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.

31) The built world will continue looking more and more like Microsoft packaging

“We were flying over Phoenix, and it looked like the crumpled-up packaging from a 2006 MS Digital Image Suite.”

32) Musical appreciation will shed all age barriers

33) People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s

1980: “We can’t go to that restaurant. Karen’s vegetarian and it doesn’t have anything for her.”

2010: “What restaurant are we going to? I don’t know. Karen was supposed to tell me, but she doesn’t have a cell, so I can’t ask her. I’m sick of her crazy control-freak behaviour. Let’s go someplace else and not tell her where.”

34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

35) Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people. You will live in a world without kings, only princes in whom our faith is shattered

36) Metaphor drift will become pandemic

Words adopted by technology will increasingly drift into new realms to the point where they observe different grammatical laws, e.g., “one mouse”/“three mouses;” “memory hog”/“delete the spam.”

37) People will stop caring how they appear to others

The number of tribal categories one can belong to will become infinite. To use a high-school analogy, 40 years ago you had jocks and nerds. Nowadays, there are Goths, emos, punks, metal-heads, geeks and so forth.

38)Knowing everything will become dull

It all started out so graciously: At a dinner for six, a question arises about, say, that Japanese movie you saw in 1997 (Tampopo), or whether or not Joey Bishop is still alive (no). And before long, you know the answer to everything.

39) IKEA will become an ever-more-spiritual sanctuary

40) We will become more matter-of-fact, in general, about our bodies

41) The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed

42) You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell

Over-criminalization of the populace, paired with the triumph of shopping as a dominant cultural activity, will create a world where the two poles of society are shopping and jail.

43) Getting to work will provide vibrant and fun new challenges

Gravel roads, potholes, outhouses, overcrowded buses, short-term hired bodyguards, highwaymen, kidnapping, overnight camping in fields, snaggle-toothed crazy ladies casting spells on you, frightened villagers, organ thieves, exhibitionists and lots of healthy fresh air.

44) Your dream life will increasingly look like Google Street View

45) We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves

Douglas Coupland is a writer and artist based in Vancouver, where he will deliver the first of five CBC Massey Lectures – a ‘novel in five hours’ about the future – on Tuesday.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Google’s Earth

[div class=attrib]From The New York Times:[end-div]

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]