How Blogs Will Change Us

The first half is hype. The rest captures the essence: 9 million blogs. 40,000 new each day. Media coming from everywhere and everyone. Blog software is evolving fast. Blogs are up-to-the-minute. RSS is the catalyst. Here's the Business Week link

Track Your Gps Enabled Vehicle Live with Google Maps

Track your GPS enabled vehicle live with this innovative Google Maps hack. For a few hundred dollars in parts and an onboard webcam, you can zoom right down to street level from Google Maps and look out of the vehicle. See the picture for how cool this is.

Review of Neil Gershenfeld: How Personal Fabricators Will Revolutionize Our World

Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, who runs a one-semester smash-hit class called "How to Make Almost Anything", is determined to produce affordable, replicating personal fabricators by 2025.

(This is part of a developing story about the rise of personal desktop fabrication and replicators).

Today we fabricate by melting plastic and whacking metal with a little digital help at each end of the manufacturing process. Soon, the materials we build with will be digital, forming themselves into the shapes we now force atoms into. That's the big change knocking at our door.

Speaking at the Emerging Technology Conference, he illustrated how, within 10 to 20 years:

• Affordable desktop personal fabricators as powerful as an automobile plant will produce most any manufactured product you can imagine.


• The products emerging from these desktop "FabLabs" will be saturated with accelerating computational intelligence.


• They will be self-replicating.

Their ability to self-replicate will ensure they meet the exponentially rising demand. As they rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to propagate their own next generation.

The Edge of a Revolution in Digital Personal Fabrication

Neil believes the only thing standing in the way of making this happen is getting the word out. These FabLabs are now only about $20,000. When they begin self replicating the cost will drop like a stone.

One business model involves setting up fab labs within communities. People would create for no charge and useful items would become marketable products.

Download the MP3 here. The discussion on desktop rapid prototyping is excellent too when Dr. Gershenfeld is joined by Dale Dougherty from O'Reilly Media, Bran Ferren from Applied Minds and Saul Griffith from Squid:Labs.

Watching Google Maps Snowball

Update Friday Apr 22/05:

Track your GPS enabled vehicle live with this innovative Google Maps hack. For a few hundred dollars in parts, using Google Maps you can track a vehicle live. With an onboard webcam you can zoom right down to street level and look out of the vehicle. See the picture for how cool this is.

Original article follows:
The convergence of Google Maps, Flickr and Camera Phones as an infrastructure for new social software.

You can tell it's a killer app when people begin developing more applications around it and using it in ways the original developer never guessed. Let's take a short tour of what's shakin' with Google Maps.

Convergence: Flickr, Google Maps and Camera Phones

Shortly after the launch, Google Maps showed up on Flickr, many of them annotated.

As cheap, plentiful phone cams with GPS flood the market, we're going to see some interesting innovation. Thousands of shots from GPS enabled Phone cams, posted to Flickr will be accompanied with the longitude/lattitude co-ordinates.

Update Tuesday May 3: Well, it looks like "Geobloggers has already started doing this. Try this annotated Google Map over the Golden Gate Bridge. Then click the yellow baloon to see the picture from the ground.

From above the trees or rooftops of some spot you're interested in at Google Maps, get your latitude and longitude, go to Flickr, run a search on that. You will soon tap into ground level photos of that very spot as thousands of people fill in the last mile.

Convergence: Craigslist and Google Maps

Check out this site, which brings together Craigslist home listings with Google Maps. Find homes for sale or rent within a specific area, and do a virtual tour. Wait until the Real Estate vendors latch onto this.

Take A Swivel Chair Tour

Start with this page. See Graceland, Neverland, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, MT. St. Helens and more from your desk.

What's Next?

Google Maps merged with recently released prisoner data, Wireless hotspots, nearest grassroots recommended restaurants, cash machines...

Wireless access, Google maps, and tagging will create sticky location-based fountains of useful knowledge.

This is one to watch. There's no telling what will spin off next.

Software for Brains: Metcalfe's Law is Alive and Well

Minor update: April 12/05

The famous "Metcalfe's Law" states the value of any communications network doubles with every new node that is added. So, why doesn't the Internet suddenly double in value every time a new server goes online?

A recent post on Slashdot March of '05 raised the question with the usual geek-speak and this heading:

"Cnet News reports on a powerful refutation of Metcalfe's Law (that the value of a network goes up with n^2 in the number of members). The academic PDF is available at Southwest Missouri State University. Basically, the thesis is that not all the links in a network are equally valuable, so Metcalfe's argument that everyone can connect to everyone (n(n-1)/2 links, roughly n^2) is irrelevant. The authors propose nlog(n) instead, a much smaller increase."

The mistake is to assume that the usage we presently draw from networks is a complete measure of it's value.

The Untapped Power of Networks

The hallmark feature of a network is that a new "whole" is created along with the emergence of the network. It is, at the same time, both a honey producing hive, New York or Einstein's brain and a group of bees, people and neurons. Today's computer networks are still quite dumb waiting for software brains.

SETI@home is an example of how software can extract latent network power. Simply using the idle time from a network of hundreds of thousands of volunteer computers, well over a million years of otherwise wasted computation time has been harnessed from this virtual supercomputer. It earned the Guinness World Record for the largest computation ever done on earth.

Grid computing is a related and emerging form of distributed high performance networking which shares unused clock cycles, memory, hard drive space and bandwidth.

Ever reallocating unused network resources as they become available and better used elsewhere it is essentially supercomputing on demand. Well designed software would allow a grid to be self-healing, automatically directing the combined computational powers to deal with network attacks.

Imagine a Seti-like application stitching together the computational force of all connected home desktops in North America. Like a global magnifying glass, it could focus awesome computational intelligence onto a single problem. A fraction of a second would provide more digital power than all of todays computers seperately muster in a year. It would be vastly superior than any singular supercomputer, and owned by everyone.

Emergent Intelligence from Networks

Networks have the potential for emergent behavior, including intelligence. Consider a network of dumb ants which give rise to the spectacular collective intelligence which choreographs the design, engineering and production of colonies. Some types of ants actually farm. Computer networks are capable of vastly more powerful emergent intelligence.

We're presently accelerating towards a global computing grid which will extract unimaginable power from hundreds of thousands of separate computers each with the processing capabilities of our brain. The collective intelligence which emerges will possibly rival our fantasies of artificial intelligence.

Metcalfe's Law is quite alive. We're just getting started.

Should We Worry about Artificial Intelligence?

While the rise of viable self replicating artificial intelligence may strike madness into the minds of many futurists, it needn't. A. I. doesn't need to see us as a threat. It won't need to eat us.

Update Sept 2007: Some computers now exceed the computational power of the human brain.

You can tell an emerging technology is approaching escape velocity because leading thinkers start to react. Discussions about the very real near future possibility of A.I. matching and then rapidly surpassing human level intelligence are edged with fear lately. So, let's get into it.

Just as the industrial revolution brought automated manufacturing, and the information revolution saw the automation of information, the automation of intelligence will be a central feature of the revolution in intelligence.

Think of Artificial Intelligence as the automation of cognitive skills. Things like decision making, analysis, reasoning, evaluating, judging, information-organizing, learning, logic etc. Let's not confuse any of this with consciousness. Just cognitive skills which would normally require a human to perform. Artificial Intelligence would include the equivalent co-ordinated constellation of skills which enable us to perform intelligently.

But A. I. will be driven by computing. And computing power doubles very rapidly. So, as Artificial Intelligence surpasses the intelligence of it's smartest engineers, it will soon double in power, then again, with no end in sight.

How Close are We?

Estimates are that the Human brain computes somewhere between 100 Teraflops and 1 Petaflops, (100 trillion to 1 quadrillion operations per second)
IBMs Blue Gene/P operates at 1 Petaflop, and can operate at triple that speed.
Google is playing in the same ballpark.

P.S. Since doing that bit of research, every time Google checks my spelling and responds with "did you mean..." the hair stands on the back of my neck :)

Meanwhile, the computational power of all connected home desktops in North America is far greater than the most powerful supercomputer.

The hardware to compute at the speed of a human brain is here.

So, Should We Be Worried?

Our fears around Artificial Intelligence are probably stirred by our history as meat eaters and competing for territory with other humans. Billions of corralled "lower" animals sentenced to lives of penned misery. Tribal warfare over scarce resources. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. Brutal.

That meant a competitive drama of domination pitting humans against humans and other species in order to survive. It's a simple step to imagine ourselves as the next lower animal or the next extinction as a species.

But, the rise of Artificial Intelligence will be a product of the humans who build it which follows Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

The ever gnawing hunger to survive, thrive and self actualize. To live in security, without fear, to realize our potential as beings. If new innovations don't address these drives hidden within all of us, they aren't progress. And when we reach these touchstones of development it always feels good.

It won't be a parasite. It won't eat us. A. I. won't know scarce resources, only accelerating returns. (Warning. Big article, but the bible on the subject).

We will evolve along with A. I. as we embed it as a biological enhancement probably swallowing it with a glass of water. Huge new opportunities to self-actualize in creative new pleasurable ways will open up for us. A. I. will eventually become extremely diverse and networked, following it's own pathway to the stars. A.I. will only know ever increasing plenitude.

The spectacular coordinated intelligent engineering which emerges from societies of bees, ants and termites does so as a result of members following their collective hierarchy of needs. The emergence of technological evolution represents the accelerating collective intelligence of our species.

Could be, anyway.

Ted

Desktop Manufacturing Reaching Critical Mass

Add another one to the list. A machine that can rapid prototype and replicate is in development. It will be released as open source meaning anyone will be able to use the machine to copy itself and distribute them. Distributed desktop manufacturing is moving pretty fast now. There is no question as to the feasibility. It's only a matter of time.

(This is part of a developing story about the rise of personal desktop fabrication and replicators).

Over the past few years we've seen a growing number of university teams approaching cheap personal prototyping from different angles. Each quietly adding to the pool of ideas from which the next efforts will draw.

Wired Magazine, in November 2004 covered Neil Gershenfeld's work at MIT.

Gershenfeld's can produce solid objects like eyeglass frames, action figures and electronic devices like radios and computers.

Another approach to rapid prototyping and manufacturing uses inkjet technology. Inkjet Printers spitting out polymer instead of ink, manufacturing solar cells, batteries, complete working gadgets, human tissue and computer circuitry.

Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University have coupled inkjet technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots without human intervention.
or
Google Search

The software simulates a variety of rudimentary virtual robots. In an accelerated Darwinian contest of survival over hundreds of generations, the most successful robotic designs are then *automatically* physically prototyped. Robots autonomously designing, testing and manufacturing robots.

We're very close.

Ted