Half of Test Subjects Never Suspected They Were Talking To A Computer

A clever twist on the Turing Test using a popular chatbot and some creativity. Roughly half of the test subjects never suspected they were actually talking to a computer.

Insights Into The New "Tech Bloom"

Michael Meiser has incredibly lucid insights into the new "Tech Bloom". The rise of tagging and open source editing such as Wikis, Flickr point to the democratization of media. I've summarized some of his ideas below.

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Social is the word.

Welcome to the latest tech bloom, the next evolution, Web 2.0.x. We're soon to see what happens when democratization goes beyond Email and Blogs and Wikis to the rest of the media. The hallmark of this next evolution will be democratized media and Web 2.x starts with audio and video.

It's time to break mass communications out of the box and see what next happens when all the world has equal access. What happens when all the world has access to a project manager? How about an enterprise development manager? The best encyclopedias? The coolest, latest greatest tools? What happens when "amateurs" have access? ...they build even cooler shit.

The future of web based tools is in ubiquitous social collaboration and communication. The value is in their ubiquity. There is no purpose in having a word processor online or for that matter a to do list... unless.... unless it can go anywhere and do anything and collaborate with anyone. That is to say, unless it can go social.
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This is big.

Computers Will Become Vastly Simpler To Use

Marshall Brain is an ongoing source of great, well articulated ideas.

I really like his "as simple as possible but no simpler" writing style. His way of removing the complexity and jargon while retaining the essence is why I always look forward to articles like this in which he points to a near future scenario in which our increasingly powerful computers become vastly simpler to use.

It's also great to see some fresh light on this subject.

I recall Eric Schmidt talked about the hollowing out of the computer in a similar manner quite a while back. Bob Metcalfe expanded on the concept in his article "The Coming Software Shift".

As our applications inevitably migrate from our computers to the network, the network literally becomes the computer.

This new supercomputer gets faster as bandwidth increases. A completely optical network means bandwidth would approach the speed of light. My computer could use your hardware as seamlessly as mine.

Meanwhile Ray Kurzweils predictions of $1000 of hardware with the processing power of a human brain arising within our lifetimes is also quite conceivable.

These factors, combined with Metcalfe's Law (The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it) all point to an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly "intelligent" global nervous system.

And we've got front row seats :)

Stay well,

Ted

When Politics Is Driven From The Bottom Up

As information technology evolves, new ways of spreading information spontaneously emerge.

Inevitably, "mass media" becomes decentralized meaning our news about things we are interested in increasingly comes from the people we are connected to. Centralized media, in order to survive, will need to serve that end.

Email, web, texting, messaging, phone, fax, autoresponders, phone cams ... Evolving according to their utility (how useful they are) and how they reduce transaction costs (how much simpler, cheaper, more effective they are), existing technologies become the technology base from which new technologies emerge, in an ever widening spiral of growth.

Overheard On A Streetcorner: "Something Me" by Cameron Marlow

"While walking home from work the other day I passed a group of guys emerging from a pizza joint. After a few handshakes and goodbyes they parted ways and made arrangements for their next meeting. And then one of them yelled across the street, "something me on Thursday." His friend looked a little confused, but I knew exactly what he was talking about. He added, "IM, call, email... I don't care."

So as new adopted communications technologies become as saturated as Email, we can expect grass roots political force to grow.

What interests me is the potential untapped power of the connected masses. The computational power of all connected home desktops in North America is far greater than the most powerful supercomputer. Even Google, which has an estimated computational capacity surpassing the most powerful supercomputer and approaching that of the human brain.

Estimates are that
the Human brain computes somewhere between 100 TERAflops and 1000 Teraflops,
and Google performs somwhere between 100 and 300 teraflops.

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 :)

Another example:
I don't know how current the Seti@home FAQ is, but they claim 15 TeraFLOPs at a cost of $500K and they are comparing it with IBM's ASCI White, rated at 12 TeraFLOPS with a cost of $110 million.

This potential computational power foreshadows the coming networked intelligence of the masses.

The economics of distributed communications technologies increase exponentially as more nodes are added to the network. As smart mobs become smart masses, political weight tilts faster and faster towards an irrevocable tipping point at which politics will be driven from the bottom up.

I see the day when the politics of local communities reflect the conscience of local mothers, the needs of children and all the things a community really wants in order to thrive and grow functionally.

Our Emerging Global Nervous System

We're accelerating towards a global computing grid which will tap unimaginable power from hundreds of thousands of computers, as powerful as a brain. The collective intelligence which emerges will rival our present fantasies of Artificial Intelligence

As we modelled the eye to build cameras, the brain to build computers, the ear to build speakers, we're modeling our autonomic nervous system to build the next evolutionary step in computing. Networks that independently and reflexively self -regulate, configure, repair, optimize, and protect in the same sense as an immune system or an automatic pilot.

This would allow the network to automatically manage server load balancing, process allocation, monitor the power supply, automatic update software and fend off threats without having to consult the administrator.

For example, if an application starts performing badly, it automatically receives increased resources. If software or hardware fails, it doesn't even ripple the end users coffee. An autonomous computing system would roll out new patches, monitor and adjust the resources singular end users need, set up servers... all the mundane stuff.

The complexity of integrating and managing the latest hardware and software into existing systems is destroying the advantages of economies of scale. Autonomic computing is one way of insulating the IT administrator from the mundane complexities and freeing them to do other more interesting things like understanding the needs of the business more, or modelling and automating existing business processes.

On a larger scale, it spells an evolutionary move towards a decentralized global self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting nervous system. Since Autonomic Computing can look for patterns in data and extrapolate to predict future events, deployed on a global scale, the spin-offs will be very interesting.

Blogs Are Here To Stay And The Impact Will Deepen

From a discussion on Slashdot here entitled: "The Rise and Fall of Blogs". The main question wondered: "Have Blogs reached a saturation point?"

Web Page 2.0

Blogs are simply the evolution of the personal Web page. They made publishing online easier for everyone because you don't need to know HTML. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically. No Webmaster bottleneck. Blogs have become such a phenomena because they dramatically reduce the "friction" to publishing online.

The Millions of HTMLess can now have their say. And the sheer number of Bloggers means the brilliant, funny and fabulous poke through the slime.

They're here to stay like anything else that works better. I just hope we pitch the name soon. Can't stand saying it.

Is "Big Brother" Dying or Just Being Born?

A post on Smart Mobs entitled Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation raises one of the central questions about the future and technology. Is "Big Brother" dying or just being born? Will technology enslave us or empower us? Here's the quote:

How we resolve this culture war will have far-reaching consequences for all of us. Five or ten years from now, who will be able to create and share media—individuals, or only powerful interests? When hundreds of millions of people walk down the street carrying connected, always-on devices hundreds of times more powerful than today’s computers, what will they be allowed to do?

I think the end of the drama is written upon the wall. The digitally connected masses will soon remove the mass from media. Here's why:

1. The balance of power has already shifted to the masses in a sort of first mover advantage. The backlash coming from the entertainment industry is reflexive. It happens *after* networked mobs creatively, unexpectedly, disruptively take technology into their own hands. The tension between the entertainment industry and the online world simply represents that shift of power and control away from mass media.

2. What will the entertainment industry be when consumers en masse, produce their own "as good or better than" diversions? Blogs spontaneously exploded news into millions of niches, leaching the mass from news media. Cheap high tech multimedia production tools wielded by thousands of grass roots reporters are absolutely capable of producing high quality fare.

The mass entertainment and news industry will soon compete with high quality virtually free grass roots alternatives from the digitally connected masses, and take its rightful place as another niche. What "mass" will be left to market to?

3. Litigation takes a lot of time. Since technological advances also accelerate events, inflexible, knee jerk systems will eventually be overwhelmed with the speed of disruption. There will soon not be enough time to react before the next volley. Future shock paralyses the most inflexible systems first. So, ultimately, in a digitally networked world, control is distributed to the masses. But the question keeps returning:

Is Big Brother a Possible Future?

Will some central organization, representing narrow interests be able to control what citizens share electronically? I don't think so. The imminent emergence of open source personal self-replicating fabricators will spit out an ever growing complexity of items, all of which will be embedded with personalized computational intelligence. So, no consistent control over hardware standards will be possible. Chips will not answer to a centralized institution.

As self-replicating fabricators rapidly spread to thousands and then millions of people, they will mutate and evolve; enlisted to upgrade and propagate their own next generation. Mobjects from the collective creative energy of Smart Mobs. This spells the end of the consumer/ producer divide. What will mass marketing be without a mass market?

P. S. The rise of personal replicating desktop fabricators is one of the trends I've followed closely since October 2004. I was pleased to see CNN cover the emergence of desktop fabricators only a few days ago. The blogosphere scooped CNN by many months :)

Ted