Stainless Steel Printing

Self-replicating desktop manufacturing systems are on the near future horizon.

From this CrunchGear entry: 'The future of fabrication is here: Shapeways announces stainless steel printing'

Much if not most of 3d printing uses modified inkjet printers. Ink is substituted with other mediums.

The incredible accuracy of the printer heads deposit nano-scale droplets exactly where they need to be. The end result is a useful or interesting object.

Where is this Technology Headed?

1. Desktop Manufacturing
In the same way huge computers shrunk to the desktop while becoming vastly cheaper and more powerful, desktop manufacturing is following the same trajectory.

2. Self Replication
Desktop fabricators capable of manufacturing all of it's own parts, to be assembled into another unit, will by nature quickly spread and improve in a self reinforcing loop.

3. Open Source Network Power
These systems will allow the grass-roots production of new continually evolving computers. The compounded power of countless networked enthusiasts around the world will pour ingenuity and creativity into new systems you can manufacture at home. Gadgets, cell phones, ... you name it... will spill from home hobyists and Universities into the marketplace in the same inexpensive way as iphone apps and the Linux free operating system.

4. Robots
As the hardware, circuitry and software continue to evolve, they will be capable of manufacturing and becoming robots which can self replicate.

5. Fabricating at the Molecular Level
Imagine a molecular printer. Cartridges filled with each element of the periodic table, the raw materials to create literally everything in the universe.

More here:

How Close Are We To Cyberspace?

There are only a few links left between us and full immersive sensual cyberspace.

William Gibson coined the term Cyberspace as a near-future digital world we would mentally navigate.

Clearly, the mouse and keyboard are about to be assimilated by touch screens. Sky diving costs and increasing value dictate it.

Monitors, the last membrane between us and cyberspace dissolve as we navigate digital experience in the same way we do physical experience.
Thought recognition, (computing that translates thoughts into a real or virtual world action) is here and advancing fashionably below the radar.

The distinction between the virtual and the physical is only a matter of resolution. As we merge our minds directly with Cyberspace, a global mind will emerge from the network. (The power of a network increases exponentially according to the number of communication nodes). Coming soon: an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly intelligent, global nervous system.

Ever-fresh Google searches on thought controlled technology here:

Google Search

What to Expect From Google in The Next 10 Years?

This article from eWeek raised the question in the title. At this writing, Google has passed her 10th birthday. From Google Web to Maps to a newly invented browser about to rule the Web, to a Google phone, to a completely new computer operating system ... Everything she produces seems like a paradigm shift. So, what will she make happen during her next 10 years? I think it's quite possible the shift will be from information to Intelligence.

Intelligence and communication networks can't exist without each other. And in some cases (as in the Web), they symbiotically reinforce each other in a self accelerating feedback loop.

The Internet is a scaffold for Intelligent systems which compounds the power of Intelligence within the network. This combined networked Intelligence repays the favor by further diversifying, increasing the efficiency of, and enhancing the network.

I think that's why we started calling the Web "Web 2.0". It started behaving meaningfully smarter.

Lastly, as increasingly intelligent systems exchange the sum of their Intelligences at near the speed of light, a new global Intelligence will emerge with the power to focus on a single global project as one mind and switch to trillions of projects individually. Again in a self reinforcing loop.

The next really big Google sized opportunity will be the shift from organizing the world's information to organizing the world's Intelligence. If not Google then who? I mean ... besides the Intelligence itself :)

The Internet / A.I. to Become One of Our Senses.

Visionary article by John Burch.

Ted's paraphrased summary:

The Internet (read "The OneMachine") exists because everybody wants it, and that will drive brain augmentation because it helps us get the Internet. The Internet will soon turn into one of our core senses.

Audio has arrived through a bluetooth headset. Next the earphone disappears into the ear canal and cuddles up to the ear drum. Eyeglasses morph into contact lenses that derive their energy from light, and overlay graphics onto what we see. The graphics are like an aircraft display, delivering visual data. Contact lenses start to look at the world from its own camera. It provides face recognition. You know everyone’s name. The artificial camera gets better with telephoto, infrared, high resolution vision and overlaid Internet.

Next we embed this system into our skull where it directly connects to our brain.

More juicy visionary goodness here.

The End of Commercial Mass Media Television

By 2015, cheap bandwidth and computer processing power, combined with powerful video compression will end commercial television. From The Inflection Point by Cringely

By extension, the end of Mass Media T.V.

Web 3.0 The Internet as Artificial Intelligence

Kevin Kelley, one of the foremost thinkers about the 'net and it's evolution gave a profoundly lucid presentation on where it's headed. I've summarized some of it below, and added a few notes of my own.

[Summary]

The Web was about 5000 days old early in 2008. In those 5000 days the Web has brought email, auctions, Youtube, Blogs, phone service, Google, real time stock prices, sports scores, weather, news, real estate prices, every street map, encyclopedias, library books, IRS forms, every song, movie and television program, dictionaries, phone books, show and game tickets, family trees, all patent records, catalogs, banking...

5000 days ago we never saw this coming. There was no economic model on how all this new wealth could be generated and then given away for free. So, the Web taught us that we have to get better at believing the impossible. That's the major lesson. What impossibilities will the next 5000 days bring?

The Internet is the largest and most reliable machine in human history, consuming 5% of the world's electricity (2008 figure). 5000 days ever growing, never stopping. 100 billion clicks a day, 55 trillion links, a billion connected PC chips. Every second 2 million emails, 1 million IM messages and 8 terrabytes of traffic move throughout this organism. 65 billion phone calls per year, 255 exabytes of hard drive storage. It behaves like a brain with neurons, automatically connecting ideas to each other. Roughly equivalent to the processing power of the human brain, it doubles in power every 2 years. By 2040, it will match or exceed the processing power of humanity.

[End of Summary]

[Ted's Notes]
Meanwhile, it is behaving ever more intelligently using automated decision making, analysis, testing, learning, creativity, invention, design and autonomous self-improvement simulations.

Simultaneously it is developing sophisticated sense organs. Vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste.
[End of Ted's Notes]

What will the next 5000 days bring? From Kevin Kelley: "Expect the Impossible." From Larry Page Google Co-founder: "What we really want to do at Google is create an AI."

Definitely worth the watch. The Q&A is just as juicy.

Amazing "BigDog" Military Pack Mule Robot

The latest "BigDog" 4-legged military robot "pack mule", moves with an astonishing animal fluidity. Creepy, spooky, amazing... what word best suits? It's real. But turn your sound way down. There is no commentary anyway, and BigDog sounds like a chainsaw.



Follow story here.

Exoskeletons and Thought Recognition

Thought-controlled Exoskeletons are on the way. The technology already exists.

Rapidly evolving, sophisticated exoskeletons have arrived. My favorite is Sarcos exoskeleton. No need for a joystick or hand controls. You just wear it, and it mirrors your actions.

You can pump a couple hundred pounds, run, box, dance and carry heavy loads up stairs. It doubles as an autonomous robot. If it can't do so already, it would be a simple step to program it. While in the robotic suit, carry out a series of actions, save, then step out. Switch to autonomous mode and the robot will repeat what you have taught it.

Like all computer tech, these suits will continually drop in price and become ever more sophisticated. Soon they'll park in the garage next to the car or maybe take up a corner in the living room waiting for intruders.

But here's the obvious next step: This technology is also primed to make the link between thought and superhuman abilities.

Thought Recognition

Thought recognition systems directly translate brain signals into action. Eric Ramsay, a man completely paralyzed except for his eyes is translating his thoughts into speech, a monkey's leg movement brain signals control a robot across the planet, and another monkey mentally controls a robotic arm to feed itself.

As exoskeletons fluidly respond to thought, paralysed, speechless people will walk, talk and navigate. Exoskeletons will spill from military applications to industry and then to consumers to become superhuman extensions of our bodies.

Follow news on thought controlled exoskeletons here.

More on thought controlled technology here:

Google Search

Google Video

Google News (not much as of March 2009, but worth checking over time)

As Speech Recognition Software Morphs Into Thought Recognition

Since 1999, Eric Ramsay has been paralyzed and only able to move his eyes. Otherwise he's completely conscious. But a new computer/ brain interface reads his brain signals as he thinks about vocal sounds, translating them in real time. The goal is conversation, by making it possible for him to literally think out loud. This pioneering development has interesting implications for texting, search engines and much more.

Some Blue Sky Thinking...

Computer technology that translates thoughts into spoken words would also be able to turn them directly into text. That's what speech recognition software already does. So Eric Ramsay may soon be searching Google and surfing the web. It means he may soon be texting his friends and family. Making new friends and maybe show up on Twitter.

[April 22 2009 Update: Adam Wilson made history, posting to Twitter just by thinking about it.]

As electrodes give way to a skull cap, things like wireless searching, texting, messaging, Twitter, Facebook etc., could become a thumbless, mental exchange. I can hardly wait for the 'Blue-Toothers' to discover this. I mean it's freaky to watch someone striding down a street, or sitting alone at a table having a conversation with the ether. (Chuckle at this short video.)

Reverse the process and imagine computer text translated directly into your unique brain signals and show up as your own thoughts. 'These opinions are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise...'

Is there an ethicist in the house? Who said that?

More on thought controlled technology here:

Google Search

Google Video

Google News (not much as of March 2009, but worth checking over time)

Amazing Rough Terrain Robot

The six legged RHex Robot, from the makers of BigDog is designed for extreme terrain. It can seemingly go anywhere. Stairs, over rocks, through mud, swim through water, run through fields... If it gets stuck it just goes crazy until it's moving again. Kinda cute too. At least until hoards of them begin marching from our desktop fabricators only to be turned into zombies by the latest botnet.
See the video links.

The Automation of Intelligence

Automated intelligence (also known as "computational intelligence"), doesn't need to be conscious in order to realize the promise, peril and potential of Artificial Intelligence. Meanwhile, computers run human cognitive skills such as decision making, analysis, testing, learning, creativity, invention, design, self-improvement... at hyper speed... and accelerating.

Early computers leaped from the assembly lines of the industrial revolution. These accelerated typewriters, doped with shreds of human cognition; memory, logic and calculating power, plowed the paper blizzard triggered by the men and machines of the factories. And as the next page of history turned, it dissolved into electronic pulses.

Today, the heart of our world beats with increasingly powerful cognition engines. Hyper speed simulated human mental functions run non-stop throughout our global computer systems, many way beyond human capabilities. And ALL of them promise the sort of returns that attract big investment.

It's Not About Consciousness

I'm not referring to some sort of conscious system that would spend 99% of it's time making itself brighter than it's builders while delightfully distracting us with the remainder. But all the promise, peril and potential of artificial intelligence will be realized through automated intelligence. In fact, while these emerging systems process human mental functions billions of times faster than a human, most fruitful thought about its implications has been bottlenecked by the A.I. consciousness debate. So whether artificial cognition systems can or cannot become conscious, they are getting exponentially better at behaving intelligently.

Things like automated decision making, analysis, testing, learning, creativity, invention, design and self-improvement, simulations, even perception such as vision hearing smell touch taste.

Emerging Cognitive Systems

Many singular functions are networked into systems from artificial sensory systems to new armed military robots.

What's Next?

As cheaper, more powerful coordinated automated intelligence continues to accelerate, learn, network and influence our global systems, what will be the impact? What will be the hallmarks of automated cognition systems at work inside businesses, nations, the markets and our personal lives?

Stay with me to explore the implications and impact of these hyper speed self-improving cognitive systems networking with each other and the world at large. I've got some ideas and I invite yours.

(Smart Mass) Times (Acceleration) = Smartforce

Swarming behavior is an accelerating social force.

Emerging from the global connectedness of cell phones, the Web, Email distribution lists etc., technological swarming is a novel development in Guerrilla warfare, protest, politics, journalism, and every social sphere. Experiment for yourself with some searches.

This one snagged me though: From China to Colorado, consumers are connecting online in coordinated "mob buying" sprees. A Smartforce of hundreds of people ready to purchase big ticket items, swarm temporarily into a collective that sellers are willing to compete for.

Here's a classic shot of a journalistic flash scoop collectively aiming their phonecams at the New York steam pipe explosion.

Tiny Liveable Houses

These houses have a tiny "footprint" but are beautiful and use space very efficiently. Energy use and maintenance is correspondingly tiny. Some people put them in their back yard as a retreat. Some use them as guest houses. Others actually live in them full time. Cool idea. You could probably put a dome over them and create an artificial environment. It only takes 5 minutes to heat the whole house up, and energy costs are between $20 and $50 per month. I can imagine installing solar panels and going completely off grid.

Pictures here.

Emotional Reactions to Robots

At first I thought it was just me. Watching a recent video of a new 'pack-mule' robot (nicknamed BigDog) being tested by the US military, I suddenly began feeling pity.

I know it's just a machine. But during testing inside a small room, when a researcher kicked it to demonstrate how it recovers with an animal-like fluidity, I was secretly wishing it would kick back. But it also moves like 2 torso-less people trying to move a couch. That made me laugh.

Both of those responses came directly from the animal-like motion. And this highly complex movement is a sign of how advanced robotics is becoming.

This discussion on Digg has several posts describing emotional reactions to the vid.

Update: Mar 17 2008 Check out BigDog on ice, snow, climbing over cinder blocks, jumping and more.

Want to see more creepy robot motion? See the tree climbing robot that moves and looks like a cockroach that recently crawled out of university research labs. Others move like spiders and snakes.

Robots Are Evolving In Chunks

High quality reusable intelligent robot functions are hitting the market. Both the legwork of BigDog and the stability of the 2 wheeled Segway base have been adopted by the US military.

Also consider face recognition. Indeed, all of the senses, abilities and aptitudes found in nature are being reproduced and implanted into machines.

Robots of all kinds will very soon be everywhere while getting smarter very fast.

Marshall Brain's excellent read on the approaching impact of robots can be found here.

Downloading the Web in an Afternoon

That's the equivalent of what Caltech recently accomplished.

Bandwidth is a measure of how much data can be sent across a network in a set amount of time. It's what you experience online when waiting for a web page to load.

But recently, Caltech reached a stunning milestone in how fast data can be sent, transferring 475 terabytes of data in 24 hours. That's fast enough to download the entire Web as indexed by Google in an afternoon. (Cool idea too. Can you imagine having your own personal cache of the web, updated every couple of hours in the background while you surf with no page load waits?)

OK, for math heads, here's the figures I used rounded to the nearest sanest numbers:

475 terabytes (the amount of data transferred in 1 day by Caltech), divided by 156 terabytes (the size of Google's web) = (roughly) 3.

More math? OK here is how I determined Google's size:

I did a Google search with my preferences set to return 100 pages. I searched for everything using *.* (Note: This search query doesn't work anymore. Use a creative seach of your own with common words like "home" or "welcome").
From those 100 hits, I added up the size of each page for a total of:
1721 k
and then divided that by 100 to get the average size of each page.
That gave me an average of 17 K per page
Multiply that by the number of pages on Google (9,180,000,000)
and that gives 156,060,000,000,000 Bytes or 156 terabytes.

How to Visualize Data

Did you know that 1 CD can hold the entire Human genome? That a Gigabyte of text printed out would fill the bed of a pickup truck with paper? That it takes 20,000 trees to print out 400 Gigabytes on paper? That 100 Terabytes is a high-side guess of Human brain storage space, slightly less than one days Web Page views from Google in 2009.

I've been collecting these data bits for a couple of years now, finding gems and doing my best math to see if they fall in line with everything else. It's pretty close. Close enough to give you some useful comparisons.

Bits

2 bits: any 2 choice decision. Yes/No Run/Stop...
3 bits: A color pixel. Only 3 bits are needed to represent any colour. Red, Blue and Green, from which all other colors are derived.
8 bits: 1 byte

Bytes

1 byte: Any character on your computer keyboard (not including your cat).
5 bytes: The average English word

Kilobyte

1,024 bytes often rounded to 1,000 bytes
1 Kilobyte: A joke or a couple of paragraphs
2 Kilobytes: Typewritten page
3.2 Kilobytes: The amount of data in the H1N1 Swine Flu virus
3.5 Kilobytes: The size of the first web page
5 Kilobytes: A Desktop Icon
10 Kilobytes: A page out of an encyclopedia
17 Kilobytes: The size of an average Web Page
50 Kilobytes: A (roughly) 4 by 6 inch image
100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph
750 kilobytes: The file size necessary to categorize the entire range of human experience and interest. (11 categories and about 450 unique sub-categories) as indicated by the Yahoo! directory on November 3rd 2007. (I wrote a small program to fetch all the headings and categories, save it to a text file, then view the text file size.)

Megabyte

1,048,576 bytes,
1 Megabyte: Small novel, 3-1/2 inch diskette
2 Megabytes: 12 Megapixel Digital Photo, high resolution
3 Megabytes: The average mp3 song. (Rough rule of thumb: an mp3 plays about 1 megabyte per minute.)
4 Megabytes: A Non illustrated King James Bible. I downloaded a text version from Project Gutenberg and viewed the file size).
5 Megabytes: 1 minute of a YouTube High Quality video.
10 Megabytes: (Roughly) 1 minute MPEG movie.
20 Megabytes: Typical hard drive in the first desktop PCs
100 Megabytes: Roughly the text info contained in 1 meter (3 feet) of bookshelf
750 Megabytes: 1 CD. The Human genome (props to Max for his comment below)

Gigabyte

1,073,741,824 bytes,
1 Gigabyte: The bed of a pickup truck filled with paper.
7 Gigabytes: 1 DVD
10 Gigabytes: A 1 inch stack of CD's
28 Gigabytes: Tweets Per Day on Twitter as of Jan 1, 2011
30 Gigabytes: From My Life In A Terabyte - Roughly the entire collection of Gordon Bell's Gordon Bell's articles, books, correspondence (letters and email), CD's, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings by 2003.
400 Gigabytes: 20,000 trees made into paper and printed.
500 Gigabytes: 100 DVD Movies

Terabyte

1 Terabyte: 1000 gigabytes
An 8 foot stack of CD's or about 150 DVD's. It would hold all 350 episodes of The Simpsons or all 238 episodes of Friends. About 2 years non stop MP3s. About 50,000 trees made into paper would be needed to print out a Terabyte of data. 250 million pages printed both sides, over 10 miles high. Roughly 250,000 MP3s (2 years non-stop listening). About 2 weeks of non-stop DVD movies. 500,000 digital camera pictures.
4 Terabytes: The YouTube record of U.S. user names and IP addresses including every record of every video watched by them as of 2008.
10 Terabytes: Enough to store everything you look at for a year, and could include a heart monitor, personal GPS, everything you type and every move of your mouse. From Charlie's Diary Shaping the Future.
45 Terabytes: All the videos on YouTube as of Aug 2006
100 Terabytes: High guess of Human brain storage space. The monthly growth of The Internet Archive in 2009. From this Google search
122 Terabytes: The size of one days Web Page views from Google in 2009 (7.2 Billion daily page views) X 17 Kilobytes (the size of the average web page).
150 Terabytes: Estimated size of all Web pages indexed by Google on Dec 8th 2005 (not including databases or video). (See this article for the figures I used)

Petabyte

1 Petabyte: 1 thousand Terabytes. Storage at this level signals the dawn of a new era with powerful implications to the sciences and Artificial Intelligence.
About 100 years of television. The amount of data storage space the Internet Archive had in 2004.
Roughly the amount of new video added to youTube every day in 2007
A stack of CD's 3 kilometers high
2 Petabytes: The amount of data Google processed every day in 2008
3.5 Petabytes: 2007 Estimated capacity of Google's Data centers in a box.
4 Petabytes: Estimated amount of Internet data stored in RAM by Google in 2006.
4.5 Petabytes: The capacity of The Internet Archive as of 2009. From this Google search
15 Petabytes: The amount of data the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates per year as of 2008.
20 Petabytes: Google daily total workload in January 2008. The storage capacity of all hard drives produced in 1995.
60 Petabytes: Estimated total size of Flickr photos by December 2011
200 Petabytes: The estimated amount of data contained within the Googleplex in 2006.

Exabyte

1000 Petabytes.
2.2 Exabytes: According to Charles Stross, all data recorded by our species in 2003
246 Exabytes: Total storage of the Internet in 2006.

Zettabyte

1000 Exabytes
1.8 Zettabytes: Estimated amount of total electronic data in existence by 2011

Yottabyte

1000 Zetabytes.

Technology, Computers and Innovation: Why Everything is Speeding Up

Our grandparents incredulously shook their heads at the moon landing, microwave ovens, nuclear bombs and computers. Theirs was the first generation to actually feel technology speed up. Today, crude replicators, new forms of Intelligence, immortality and the very reigns of evolution are within our grasp. Why IS everything speeding up?

Innovation MEANS Acceleration

Ideas trigger ideas. Step into any research lab, and you'd probably interrupt someone methodically confirming or disproving some theory. Boiling enormous amounts of information down to one bit of data. Either yes or no.

But once that tiny single grain of new truth is harvested, new knowledge, questions and ideas automatically spring forth. There’s suddenly a whole other set of things you can do. This is the classic feedback loop of discovery.

Time saving innovations create another self reinforcing loop. Think of all the things we use to save time. Our dishwashers, cars and computers free us from one set of demands but give birth to new urgencies. Our cars make it possible to live further from work. So we commute for an hour. Dishwashers make it possible to catch up on the Email we receive from all of those people around the world we could never have met any other way. So time saving solutions also incrementally speed up the pace of life. More events get crammed into shorter periods of time. Including world changing events.

As we shall see, these simple feedback loops have been speeding up for thousands of years. And we have arrived upon the scene in time to witness leisurely progress become super accelerated.

It's Been A Long Time Coming

"We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning." Billy Joel

The world seemed as still as stone for thousands of years and technology moved as slow as amber. Take a 100,000 year walk back with me. Notice ancient hands transform logs into levers, wheels and axles. Watch these three simple innovations morph into a wheelbarrow.

Flash forward as wheelbarrows transform into wagons going 2 miles per hour, chariots at 20 mph, cars at 100 mph, trains at 300 mph, planes at 2000 mph, rockets at 4000 mph, spacecraft at 18000 mph... Innovations beget ever more and powerful innovations because each advancement illuminates a new set of still greater possibilities.

Why Our World Is Noticeably Speeding Up

It was only last century that our grandparents incredulously shook their heads at the moon landing, microwave ovens that heated only the food and not the container, nuclear bombs and computers. Theirs was the first generation to actually feel technology speed up. A mere half generation later, crude replicators, new forms of Intelligence, immortality and the very reigns of evolution are suddenly within our grasp.

Computers Changed Everything

The BIG invention was computers because they are embedded with memory, logic and calculating power. Shreds of human intelligence. Things sped up dramatically since the computer (including computers) because each generation of computer chip could be harnessed to propagate the next. Now all of our world is speeding up in lockstep with the acceleration of computing.

Centuries ago the pool of innovations we sipped from was small and local. But on the Internet, our global ocean of knowledge and a worldwide pool of innovators are brought together.

Today's automobiles spring both from inventions, knowledge and processes as far back as fire and the wheel as they do from networked minds blanketing the globe.

Is There An End In Sight?

Most of tomorrow's inventions, from new drugs, to enhancing our abilities with embedded computing, to the progress we make with Artificial Intelligence, will be about coping with the acceleration. As a species, we CAN do more than survive. We could thrive and discover ourselves in ways we now believe impossible. But, as far as I can see, the acceleration will eventually go far beyond us. Soon AI will be as good at the same intelligence feedback loop we've been using since the evolution of our opposable thumbs - and accelerating.

Why You Should Know About The Digital Revolution

The computer revolution, the information revolution. You hear talk within the media about some revolution that is supposed to change everything.

Yes, there is a revolution so profound in it's implication, so sweeping in it's scope, and eventually so pervasive in it's effects, that it will change everything, but it is neither of these.

The two big revolutions we have seen so far are the Agricultural revolution which began about 3000 years ago, and the Industrial revolution which began about 300 years ago. I am convinced that we are simply in the heyday of the Industrial revolution, the final strokes of a mighty brush, which because of the Industrial revolution's drive to automate, simply paints faster and faster.

The acceleration of change we are witnessing is the logical outcome of the drive to automate causing history to unfold faster and faster.

Computers are simply machines which automate the processing of information. Because the most important underpinnings of our present world rely so heavily on information, (Economy, Government, Commerce, Business, Education Military, Media etc.), and because computers do that so quickly, all of these systems are speeding up, with change being the only constant. Therefore, these things do not represent something new, so much as the same unfolding process accelerating.

But the true revolution, the one that will change everything, the one with all of the wild cards, is just beginning. It is the digital revolution. At it's very core it IS new. It's about translating atoms into bits of data. Let's talk about that, and why you should know about it.

Shakespeare once spoke of a "tide in the affairs of men" and how valuable it is to recognize it early.

When you consider all of the things that you do which are repetitive, someone, somewhere is working on automating that process.

However, the digital revolution (the translation of real world experiences into bits or data) represents a still deeper shift in the "tide". That is because everything that can be digitized is being digitized. And everything can potentially be digitized. Sounds, images, movement, thought processes, information, knowledge, intelligence... In other words, everything that can be translated to data will eventually be data. Boring you say?

Well consider that the meaning of data has barely begun to dawn on us. Everything we sense is converted to data by our brain. It's called "sensory data". What we now call virtual reality is a vague shadow of what is to come. By then, our world will have completely shifted from the focus on atoms to bits of data.

Once things become digitized, their cost goes into free fall while rapidly accelerating in power and reach. Digital Cell phones loaded with digital cameras communicating across digital networks are leaching the mass from media spawning a new viable grass roots media. Notice how quickly digital devices; computers, phones and iPods spread and evolve. Or how the digitization of entertainment through MP3s or video on DVD have so quickly outstripped the recording and movie industries ability to stop it.

Meanwhile, look around at what physical things become vaporized due to the thrust of digitization: Paper, tape cassettes, photo development processes may quickly spring to mind.

Some cars have no physical link between the accelerator pedal and the engine. When you depress the accelerator, you are actually sending a digital signal to a computer. The pedal might as well be a mouse.

What about farm equipment and the land upon which it tills? Bio-engineering has already produced oranges that grow in vats. An entire "orange grove" sits inside a room, without trees, branches, leaves or dirt. What the digital revolution will do with Real Estate, it can do with practically anything else.

Look at all of the tasks that are repetitive where you work. These are the most fruitful to begin considering in a new light. The sheer amount of opportunities can be blinding at first glance, so start with customer service tasks. Specifically communication needs. Are there repetitive information requests that would better serve these people if they were automated? What about information that WOULD be very valuable, but because of distribution or production costs (printing etc.) it has never been fully implemented?

Now ask yourself how technology could make obsolete some of your equipment, products and or services. If it is conceivable to you, it is achievable. Pay attention to news releases about these areas. The best way I know of doing that right now is by using RSS. Have a robot scan hundreds of your favorite Websites and automatically deliver new information rather than surf for it.

(This is an excellent example of innovative people re-engineering the Web using these principles.)

So, if I have offered you any perspective at all, it is the direction in which to begin casting your flashlight.

For the best description of this emerging digital world, read "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte. Lucid, easy to read and understand, it is at the top of my recommended list.

Warm regards,

Ted

The Dangerous Convergence of Technology and Warfare

Technology decentralizes power; military, political, economic, media, energy... all of it. Because once a medium becomes digitized, it must move with the laws of networked information. Distributed, connected, decentralized, democratized, Peer-to-peer ... Eventually grass roots. From the hands of the few to the masses.

The Internet is possible because of the computerized digitization of text, audio and video. The fight over music copyrights emerges from the digitization of audio. Pirated Hollywood movies can arrive online within hours of release because of the digitization of video.

The same pattern is also occurring within manufacturing which will soon give birth to desktop fabrication and crude (at first) replicators. A. I. will emerge as we get far enough down the road in digitizing intelligence. And this ongoing digitization of everything allows ever smaller groups to wage increasingly potent warfare.

This nexus of technology and warfare are probably the biggest challenge we face as a species. But the increasing acceleration and magnitude of political violence is also driving technological solutions to it. Ultimately the solution to global violence will be distributed as well, meaning we, the masses will somehow become the solution.

The Acceleration of Global Violence

There is an ugly economy to violence. It's cheaper to destroy than build, and to take by force than negotiate. And within every segment of the political spectrum there are those who would employ violence to achieve their ends.

Todays coordinated attacks from stateless groups around the globe cost orders of magnitude less than the burdens of rebuilding and forever heightened security.

Present political stability depends on managing wholesale violence with the threat or exercise of still greater violence. Otherwise the political structure dissolves.

The Decentralization of Global Violence

Technology makes increasingly powerful weapons cheaper and gives rise to new ways and means of destruction. And so small innovative groups become capable of increasingly cheap, massive, raw violence. In Madrid, cheap cellphones became sophisticated detonators. They could have been triggered by Email, remotely and anonymously, from anywhere in the world.

Where Is This Taking Us?

Technology democratizes power of every kind; military, political, economic, media, energy production; all of it. Centralized power becomes distributed from the hands of the few to the masses.

I do see the day when politics reflects the conscience of mothers, the security of children and all the things communities really want in order to thrive and grow functionally. There isn't much time though. Weapons of mass destruction are becoming open source, distributed and cheap.