Emerging Technologies

Intriguing points from 10 Emerging technologies that will affect the Internet, Computing, medicine, energy, air travel, nanotechnology and more. Carbon Nanotubes are emerging superheroes. Powerful Exoskeletons represent the near future emergence of Robots and Human technological evolution.

• NANOELECTRONICS Carbon Nanotubes make possible ultradense data storage. Within 20 years, you may be able to fit the content of all the DVDs ever made on your laptop computer or store a digital file containing every conversation you have ever had on a handheld device.


• Quantum Wires spun from carbon nanotubes to transform the electrical power grid. They are much lighter and stronger with a capacity ten times that of the current steel-reinforced aluminum cables used in today’s aging power grid. And they perform as well as existing superconductors.


• Biomechatronics is producing robotic prostheses that can communicate with users’ nervous systems. By 2012, spinal-cord injury patients will move their limbs again by controlling robotic exoskeletons strapped onto them.


• Silicon Photonics will allow everything from supercomputers to the tiniest transistors talk to each other from around the world at the speed of light. That means your personal computer could access the hardware and software resources of other computers as quickly as it's own. It also means the entire world's computers could combine and operate as one computer. Supercomputing and Artificial Intelligence will belong to everyone.


• Airborne Networks will automate flight control using GPS. Each plane would be networked with other air borne planes, continually transmitting identity, precise location, speed, etc. to other planes in the sky. Software would coordinate them.


• Metabolomics will make it possible to distinguish between an individual who is healthy and someone who has, or might develop, a disease. Very early detection.


• Magnetic-Resonance Force Microscopy will soon provide a 3-D view of the nanoworld. Designing molecular machines will be much easier when we are able to see the arrangement of the atoms in the individual molecules we are working with. The impact on chemistry, biology and molecular nanotechnology will be huge.


• Bacterial Factories would reduce the cost of a malaria cure to less than 25 cents.


• Cell-Phone Viruses mean viruses can infect cell phones and then be passed on to supposedly secure networks.

GeoBloggers: Ground Level Photos Fill in the Last Mile of Google Maps

From above the trees and rooftops of your favorite Google Map, tap into ground level photos of that very spot as thousands of people fill in the last mile. Try it now

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.