the.Inevitable.Org/anism

Carver Mead is an amazing speaker … I always love to hear him
speak. Here at Telecosm he is the after dinner speaker, and the
title of his talk is Science and Society: timing the crests and troughs of opportunity in life and science.

His talk started with a conversation about the vacuum tube, and how
Edison created the foundation. He elaborated and explained the
next series of experiments with vacuum tubes, and how they progressed,
and eventually how this research led to the creation of the
transistor. From there he progressed into a discussion about the
discovery of the first superconductor. What makes his story
telling so amazing is his presentation of the subject, his in-depth
knowledge of the subject, and his ability to communicate so clearly.

It’s funny to hear his mild disdain for Bohr and others who, in his
words, discouraged alternative views of quantum physics. He jokes
about how students today are not taught collective quantum systems, but instead a strange model of photons. He refers to his “little green book” as the source of learning about collective quantum effects. His little green book is titled: Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of
Electromagnetism … I’m going to have a buy a copy.

He closed his presentation by referring to the few people, from his
perspective, that are truly thinking again about physics at a different
level … from a different perspective … instead of just blindly
following the directions that were laid out decades ago.

I haven’t been blogging … since it was just too much of a pain. 
The wireless network here at Telecosm - of all places - was a
complete joke this year!  I’ve taken lots of notes, and will post
when I get someplace that there is decent bandwidth … like back in my
room.

The guys from Tropos Networks were supposed
to be providing wireless, however what they provided was crap.  I
had to argue with them on Tuesday to get them to even get it working
… and then it has been up and down for the last two days.  When
it was working, the bandwidth sucked.

It’s amazing in this day and age, to be at a high-end conference that
is talking about the Internet, and not be able to get high-speed
wireless Internet access.

If I come next year, I’ll be bringing all of my own equipment to provide wireless for the attendees!

Chris Anderson was up next … I saw him speak at eTech a while
back.  I actually sat next to him at eTech before he spoke …
although I didn’t know it until he got up to speak.

He gave his Long Tail presentation, and there were some updated
details.  It’s a insightful presentation that talks about one way
that the Internet is allowing more companies to exploit the “long tail”
… the vast market that exists outside of the high-volume markets.

As he progressed through his thoughts, he brought up his Set of Three Forces … something that I had forgotten:

• Force 1: Democratize the production
• Force 2: Lower the cost of consumption
• Force 3: Connect consumers

As he talked about the first force, I got sidetracked as I explored the companies that he brought up - Flickr, Typepad, GarageBand, Movie Maker, Lulu.  I had heard of the first three, couldn’t find the fourth, and started to read about the last one - Lulu.

I like to think about this in the context of Agilix Labs and what we can
offfer to students.  Force 1 and Force 3 seem to be the easiest to
pursue.

I haven’t been to Telecosm in years … the last year that I
registered was 2001 when 9/11 occurred and caused a lot of 
conferences to change their schedules.  I’m here this year to
catch up on the capitalist view of the world … Forbes conferences are
always impressive to me.

George Gilder did a brief introduction and kicked things off. 
He immediately went into a short story of how he met Ray Kurzweil …
and then invited him to the stage.

Ray told the story of his Telecosm introduction of The Age of Spiritual Machines. 
For anyone who has not read this book, I highly recommend it.  Ray
went on to explain how this led to his indepth research and study of
the trends that he outlined, and how he is now using this as a
foundation to forecast future trends … 3, 5, and even 10 years out.

He spoke about how his research is getting very good at predicting
longer range trends with surprising accuracy … even being very
conservative.  His new book - being released today - is called The Singularity is Near.  I got my copy here at the conference, and even had it signed by Ray after the evening session at the fireside chat.  He indicated that information is becoming the most important aspect of computing.

It’s funny seeing Ray just weeks after Accelerating Change 2005
… he’s giving (of
course) almost the exact same presentation.  It’s always cool to
hear though … the constant reminder of exponential growth.  His
graphs including showing the Mass Use of Inventions - the World Wide Web being adopted far faster than the cell phone.  

He had a great chart that showed the growth in supercomputing -
measured by calculations per second (CPS) - and said that the estimates
of the power of the human brain range from 10^14 to 10^16 CPS. 
His estimates on when we would reach that point were confirmed as being
sooner when a group in Japan just annouced last week that they will
attain 10^16 Calculations per second by 2010!

He next went to The Biotechnology revolution:  the intersection of biology with information technology.  He talked about the research into biology and what is now possible with new technolgies.  RNA interference
is a newer technique to turn-on and turn-off individual genes, and is
now being widely tested and moving towards human trials. United
Theraputics (Nasdaq: UTHR) is one company that Ray is involved with doing research in this area.

As Ray wrapped up, George and Ray went into a brief chat on
stage.  It was interesting to hear the difference in questions
here at Telecosm.  They were more economic based, and global
society based - Where are the profits going to be made?  Will
America keep up?  Will this solve global war issues?  How
will people deal with this radical growth?  How will this be
regulated?  A great opening night!

I had to do it.  Garage Blogging.

I was waiting for lunch to finish cooking, and so I was playing with my
son, Sam, in the garage.  While we were playing I was loading my
truck with my tools for my after-lunch project … I’m heading into
Salt Lake City to work on installing a wireless set-up at an Internet
Cafe.  I had some stuff I had to check on-line, but Sam was having
too much fun playing with his Spiderman Car.  Wireless rules!

I grabbed my laptop from inside, and sat down out in the garage and got
to work . .. what a nice day.  I headed out to the front porch and
thought about the amazing progress … I’m no longer stuck to a desk to
get some quick “global” work done … I can work from my garage. 
Even though I live with technology ever day, some times it still hits
me as truly amazing.  Wild to think where we will be in the next
10 years.

I’ll be at George Gilder’s Telecosm
conference this week … I’ll be blogging there.  I haven’t been
to one of his conferences since 2000.  In 2001 the events of 9/11
caused the conference to be cancelled.  Since then, I’ve been too
busy working on things.  I’m really looking forward to this years
conference.

Flash is one of those amazing animation tools that sometimes ends up
being used to create something very amusing … I have to say that
Pekka rocks.  This Falling Ragdoll is too much!  If she gets stuck, you can grab her with your mouse and pull her down through the balls …

Ok … I’m easily amused …

Sorry about the barrage of blogging this weekend … I know that some
of the posts might not have been completely applicable to the topic of
this blog, however in my mind it all relates.  I got some feedback
from some folks that wanted to know what the heck I was thinking …
and others that really liked the diverse set of posts that I wrote.

I’ll do my best to see if I can sort better in the future.

Ok … I have a new thing to explore and experiment with.  After
this weekend, I downloaded Croquet and it is pretty amazing.  A
very cool starting point for 3D synthetic worlds.  I also started a new blog to post about my Croquet Experiences … I’ll be posting more as I learn more.

I’m going to go home and get this working on my projector … I think
it would be fun to explore with my kids … see what we can do!

The final panel discussion here at Accelerating Change 2005
had quite a line-up of people:

• George Gilder, Gilder Technology Report
• Joichi
  Ito, Neoteny
• Steve Jurvetson, DFJ
• Beth
  Noveck, NY Law School
• Rudy Rucker,Computer Scientist, Author
• Cecily Sommers, PUSH

Steve Jurvetson is a local VC who has a lot of foresight and great analysis skills.

Cecily Sommers talked breifly about the two constants that they watch - change and human nature
- which seem to forever dictate how things occur in the future.
She mentioned that collaboration is one way that we can escape our
fixed beliefs of the world, and maybe see new possibilities emerge from
these collaborative conversations.

Joi impressed me with his thoughts yesterday, and he mentioned that he
is very involved in non-profits. He really believes that the next
phase of the growth of the internet is more and more growth from the edges
… not central authorities. He commented on the evolution away
from the larger commercial players - from Microsoft, to the telcos, and
even Hollywood - to continue to open things up. He commented on
BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and how they are starting to do
their own thing when it comes to the Internet.

Beth had three core points (as “the lawyer”) that she realized from the
conference - the brain (understanding the individual brain, and also
the collective brain - the mind of the group), inviting more people
from the arts, and lastlyhow to better use technology to serve social justice.

I’m a long fan of George Gilder and his ability to synthesize such a
wide range of high-level topics. What he saw in the conference is
that the growth curves that we are seeing - including Moore’s Law - are
actually learning curves. These are reflecting human progress,
and learning is a core aspect of that learning. It’s all about
information.

Rudy was the final panalist to comment. He commented on his new book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul … and how everything breaks down to computation. I like the subtitle: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About
Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life,
and How To Be Happy … pretty good.

There was a breif discussion about Intelligent Design … and I feel
that George had some good comments on this. As Rudy had suggested
that the entire universe is one huge computation, George suggested that
a computer is
intelligence … which would make the universe a form of natural
intelligence. It was interesting to hear this discussed … I know that
I have not heard enough of the debate to truly understand the theories
in depth.

Of course Intellectual Property came up in the discussion, and I liked
what Joi had to say which was that he is not against IP, but he knows
that it has become very skewed from what the founding fathers had
intended.  He added that places like Brazil and China might be
screwing up now, but they have the opportunity to look at things fresh
… to think about new models, or resetting them back to where they
make sense.

There was a final discussion that explored the potential threats to all
of humankind … or a big portion of it … by all of the technology
that we are creating.  How do we ensure that it is not used for
“bad” purposes.  Even the financial aspects of capitalism were
debated … even though it has brought huge gains to the countries that
have embraced it.  That was a close.  I’m off to the airport!

Philip Rosedale CEO of Linden Labs (the makers of  Second Life)
is now presenting his company and virtual world.  He immediately
went into a demonstration of Second Life … walking around the virtual
world, interacting with objects.  He pulled a kiosk out of his
pocket, and had it play a life streaming video, and then wandered
around until he found other users.  He quickly created some
objects, took pictures, put the pictures on objects as a texture, and
even showed some of the physics by linking objects and swinging them
around.

I have heard there are weapons in Second Life, and he showed his pistol
and shot at some things.  The core server farm is 1200 machines,
and they are using ~200Mbps of bandwidth.  He indicated that the
average is 70-80kbps per client machine.  There are currently over
50,000 users, with ~10,00 unique users per day … about ~3,000 at any
one time.

The top in world avatar in making ~$150,000/year in Second Life, with
many people making ~$100+ per month.  I have to admit that I am
very interested in these virtual worlds and the many potential revenue
sourrces that might exist.  Hmmmm ….

I am intrigued by the growth of 3D virtual worlds, and this session is
one that I have been looking forward to. David Smith of the Croquet Project started off in his demonstration of Croquet. Alan Kay and his Squeak project are both contributors to this work.

Croquet is a peer to peer collaborative 3D world. Avatars within
the Croquet world can interact with objects, and the lower level
messages are replicated within the peer group. He demonstrated
this by manipulating some windows in the world, along with more complex
objects. He also demonstrated stepping through a window … a
portal … into a moon/mars scape. Moving through these portals
allows the avatars to enter into alternative worlds. They both
went through a portal into a “water world” and immediately transformed
into fish. As they swam around they came across a “text editor”
white board thing … and edited the text on it.

Ok … he just opened a paint panel and drew a fish, colored it, and
then inflated the 2D fish as he dropped it into the world. Now
both of them were able to manipulate and move the new fish
around. He entered another portal and showed a interactive
spreadsheet, with the inherent ability to graph the values contained in
the chart. He also demonstrated using windows as filters to show
a filtered view of anything behind it. He was able to move it
around showing the wire-frame models beneath the textures mapped onto
objects.

All of this is written in Smalltalk, and uses Squeak … completely
cross-platform to Windows, Mac, and Linux. He indicated that they
will have a Python, Ruby, and other language support soon.

Expanding on his filter demo, he showed how he can open a new window
and use it as a portal to create new objects in the virtual world
through the new window. So the window become a palette through
which you are able to create even more content. Of course, as a
development environment, he is also able to add code that will add
behaviors to the objects.  I’m downloading it!

Just prior to lunch I’m in a session on diet and nutrition … good
timing.  What I really like about this conference is the
multi-disciplinary sessions … the accelerating future of 
everything!

This session is titled T. Colin Campbell, Cornell University.  Changing the World one
Bite at a Time: The China Study
and he is immediately jumping into the “common sense” knowledge. 
I’m sure that he is about to throw out some curves.  He feels that
good nutrition is being forgotten … we just don’t think abou tit, or
the implications, on a daily basis.  Like every time that we
eat.  Oh … and he said that supplements are NOT nutrition in his
view.

One powerful statement was that he believes that nutrition can bring
the responsibility of health back to the individual!  In our age
of exploding health costs, this makes complete sense.  We know
that good nutrition can prevent and cure disease, controls disease
producing genes, and reduces toxicities and facilitates
metabolism.  He expressed his frustration where in specialized
groups - sports as an example - the value of nutrition is so well known
… but not communicated to the average person.

He reviewed his research into high-protein diets … 20%+ … and the
high-incident of cancer that they found.  Up to 10% … no effect
… but above that they saw an increased rate of cancer in
animals.  In addition, they have gathered a lot of data showing
the effects of animal proteins vs. plant proteins … and the impacts
on a long list or diseases.  At the end of his presentation he
pointed to Biosignia as a web site to check out.  Ok … time for lunch! 

This panel discussion really demonstrated the forward thinking schools
… from around the globe.  There are many new types of programs that are being introduced into traditional education.

Right now, the speaker from Tamkang
University in Taiwan, Dr. Shun-Jie Ji,
is describing
their requirements in Future Studies and STEEP - Society, Technology,
Economics, Environment, Politics.  It’s very cool to see the
multi-disciplinary aspects of what they are teaching … from sciences
to health and medicine … all forward looking and exploring the
future.  He is committed to creating stronger leaders who have the
ability to accomplish more in the future world.

The next speaker, Sr. Denise Lawrence, Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual
Organization, talked about The Role of Meditation in Intelligent Learning
… yet another new twist in education.  Their experience is that
meditation alters the quality and process of thought.  These
thought processes become influenced by inner stillness, intuitive
clarity, creative insight, and innate moral wisdom.  Intelligent
learning is then enhanced and able to emerge from this experience.

The final speaker (I missed the first one!) was Robin Raskin, Digital Mom, Author, Raising Digital
Kids,
and her comments are around not forgetting many of the core values of
life.  As technology continues to accelerate, we seem to be moving
away from “responsible computing”.  To her, it appears that
children are learning from adults that things are more permissible in
the virtual world that are not “ok” in the real world.  She gave
examples of where it is no longer about children being exposed to
“naked people”, but instead people who - in one case - encouraged a
teen age girl to commit suicide by providing not only the chat room
encouragement, but the detailed instructions on how to do it!  She
feels that in the current overly scheduled, overly competitive world
… children actually see cyberspace as the last place to escape their
“helicoptor parents” and hectic lives.

Most of the “guides to parenting” have fallen far behind in
communicating about cyberspace.  Children have started to lose the
distinction of what a “friend” is … they claim a friend, but often
don’t really know who that “friend” is in the real world.  Robin
feels that as corporate dollars are now flowing into Friendster,
MySpace, and other social networking sites they are becoming the same
as on-line bars.  The Pew Institute just released a study that
showed that only 38% of people - old or young - can distinguish paid
vs. unpaid content!

Robin really had to rush to fit her presentation into the time
allotted, however she had some very good points and statistics … the
impacts on children, and then blurring of lines in cyberspace … have
got to be causing long-term effects in society that we have yet to see.

Daniel started off with a very interesting story about what they have
learned by brain scans. He talked about a patient where they did
a brain scan - exploring some severe martial issues - and found what
appeared to be a brain with bad “toxicity”. He indicated this was
equivilent to heavy drug abuse or alcohol abuse. The man, and his
wife, indicated there was no way he did either of these. What he
found after numerous conversations is that

He has imaged numerous criminals including murderers, and to him there
are obvious patterns. He is amazed at the ignorance demonstrated
when brain imaging in not used to diagnose mental health.

All of his clinics work is based on 9 very simple principals:

• The brain is involved in everything you do.
• When your brain works right, you work right. When your brain doesn’t work right, you have trouble.
• Brain is the most complex organ - 100b neurons, trillion supporting cells
• Brain is very soft, housed in a hard skull - brain injuries matter!
• One size does not fit everyone - most problems are not single or simple disorders
• Brain imaging can be very helpful - how do you know unless you look?
• The brain can change - right interventions help, wrong interventions hurt!
• Myth of the perfect brain - we all need a little help …
• Brain is not completely developed until age 25 - myelinization occurs to optimize operation

SPECT - single photon
emission computed tomography - is how they do their brain
imaging.  What he has found is that once people get an image of
their brain they begin to explore other ways to continue to improve
their brain.  Many of these methods are alternative medicine and
supplements.  He showed a series of amazing images of healthy brains, stroke victims, alzheimers, and various head injuries.

He indicated the core value is the ability to specifically target
treatments, explain behavior, and predict future issues.  It also
removes the stigma of “mental illness” … as it is now a physical
medical condition that can be treated through known science.

Psychiatrists are the only medical specialists who rarely look at the organ
they treat. The odds are that if a patient is having serious problems with
feelings (eg, depression), thoughts (eg, schizophrenia), or behavior (eg,
violence), the psychiatrist will never order a brain scan. He or she will
prescribe medication, psychotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, or a host of
other treatments that will change brain function—but will not know which areas
of the patient’s brain work well, which areas work too hard, and which do not
work hard enough. In my opinion, the lack of brain imaging has kept psychiatry
behind medicine’s other specialties, reducing our effectiveness with patients
and hindering our efforts to reduce stigma and improve compliance.

He indicated that a brain scan costs ~$1000, with a full check up
costing ~$3200.  He said there are other things that are also
coming into this same space … one example is Journey to Wild Devine … another set are outlined on his web site - Seven Ways to Optimize your Brain.

Dileep is now starting his talk on Understanding the Neocortex to Accelerate our Understanding of Intelligence. He is one of the founders of Numenta with Jeff Hawkins. He immediately started to explore the traditional
thoughts behind AI. Ignoring biology was common place, even with
neural network research. In the 1990’s things began to change.

Now there is a groundswell of reasearch into biologically accurate
systems. Hierarchical Temporal Memory is one of these research
areas. This is a focus on the neo-cortex. He explained that:

if I opened the top of your skull, I would see your
neo-cortex. If I pulled it out, it would really be a crumpled
sheet, about 1mm thick, and you could spread it on the table. It
would look like a big thin tortilla. All of your memories from childhood on would be stored in that tortilla.

Ok … so I have a tortilla in my head!

Supporting the talk from yesterday, there is a main stream belief that
the entire sheet of the neo-cortex is based on the same replicated base
pattern. A basic neural module. So what does it do?

• the neocortex is a memory system (hierarchical, stores sequences)
• through exposure, it creates a model of the world (discovers causes of sensory data and how they behave)
• recognizes inputs and predicts the future (by analogy to past events)
• behavior is a by product of prediction (behavior and prediction are the same)

Reptilian brains do not have a neocortex. It was mammalian brains
that gained the neocortex. Initially only on the sensory side …
in humans it went even further and took control of the motor
skills. In addition it is hierarchically organized. The
hierarchy implements a series of feedback loops … each level stores
sequences of patterns. It passes a recognized pattern “up” by
name, and also predicts the next element. This prediction is then
passed “down” towards the senses to provide a reinforcing feedback loop.

Numenta is well along the way of creating artificial systems that
provide the same sort of trainable memory systems … amazing.
His demonstration showed a series of trained images - very low
resolution for now - and then he would draw on another screen and allow
the software to predict/select which image he had drawn. He
showed how the recognition was very resistent to noise, and able to
easily distinguish between similar images. It was crude … but
very impressive. He expects to see commercial solutions within 3 to 4 years.

Tom is from MIT and is speaking on The Future of Work … and I believe that I am really going to like this talk. He is really interested in organizations
… and how Intelligence Amplification could come from organizations of
intelligent humans. I thoroughly believe this, and that he is on
the right track.

One of his first examples is the Wikipedia, and that the organization
of so many people - however loose - was an amazing feat. His
bottom line prediction is that technology is changing the whole world
of organizations in a way similar to the revolution of democracy.
He feels that the costs of communications are the core element,
allowing the individual to have access to vast amounts of information
which allows for individual choice … over top down management.

His next example was eBay.  Amazing stats:

$3.3 Billion revenue in 2004
~430,000 people make their living from selling on ebay
If these were employees, they would be one fo the 5 largest employers

What eBay has attained is to reinvent the right kind of infrastructure
and community to invent a whole new kind of retailing.  He feels
this is the next logical stage of a pattern that has been repeated
throughout history.  These stages have been:

• Bands - decentralized, unconnected
• Kingdoms - centralized
• Democracies - decentralized, connected

He feels that transitions between stages are based on the declining
costs of communications.  The more that decision making
information can be decentralized to the edges, the more efficient and
valuable the organization becomes.

He had some interesting examples of how democratic principals are slowly entering into leading companies:

• W.L. Gore - managers become managers by finding people who want to work for them
• Visa International - independent banks vote on policy questions
• Mondragon Cooperative Corp - employees elect the board of directors and vote on key issues

Markets are another way that this revolution is taking place. 
Outsourcing is one type of market … creating the e-lance
economy.  Funny that Elance
is a web site that actually implements this idea.  I have friends
who have used Elance teams to do software development … from Sri
Lanka and India.  Intel has apparently been exploring the use of futures markets within their manufacturing to manage manufacturing capacity.

MIT developed a Process Handbook
with over 5000 processes and activities that can be used for planning
purposes within organizations.  They are looking to create an Open
Source version.

He showed the classic self-organizing humans demonstration … the interactive media solution by Cinematrix. 
It demonstrates - with the flight simulator example that he showed -
that there is a real power in collective human organizations that have
simultaneous access to the same data.

Mark works for SAP and runs their developer program … he’s been there
a long time, and is a long time futurist.  His Introduction to
Intelligence Amplification started with a number of slides covering
thoughts by John Taylor Gatto.  Gatto posits that there is a Fourth Purpose
behind institutional education.  He feels that the current design
of the system is flawed, and more interested in teaching consumerism
than anything else.  All of this proposes that there is a better
way to educate, and maybe different things that we ought to be
educating about.

John wrapped up the evening (beginning his talk at 11:21pm!) on How to Be a Tech Futurist …

His talk reviewed how “futurism” is slowly becoming a real science …
a real area of study.  With the current states of Future Studies
(2 US Graduate Programs), Science and Technology Studies (30+ US
programs), and Technology Roadmapping (5 US programs + 1 PhD) there is
a growing movement in the right direction.

There were a couple of very interesting references that I hadn’t seen
yet.  One of them was the Shell report on energy consuption called
Energy Needs, Choices, and Possibilities:  Scenarios to 2050
… a very interesting analysis showing the relationship between per
capita income and energy consumption.  When combined with the
flattening of population on earth (estimated by the UN in their 2002 revision) is seems that many of the fears of past decades ar not going occur.

John is always amazing to hear … too many facts and references … I’ll be reading for weeks!

I have to admit that I am geting tired, and really just wanted to
listen to this presentation and not think about blogging.  The Participatory Panopticon
was the theme … and it was a great talk … well presented … on the
future world of always on cameras.  Jamais is a very good
presenter …

Wow … Cory is one of the most important figures behind Second Life is here with his presentation Why Games Will Save the World. 
It is always interesting to see the slides that attempt to communicate
important ideas by bashing certain people and conversations … I was a
little disappointed by that.  But he did get into the core of
using gaming for education.  It was a good talk with a lot of interesting sounds bites and examples of the values of game playing.

Joi was supposed to be presenting on the Future of Blogging, but immediately said that he wasn’t going to only talk about blogging. 

He had some good stuff to say about a wide range of subjects …
Wikipedia, Firefox, File Sharing … and more on Wikipedia.  He
brought up fansubs
- which I hadn’t heard of, but makes perfect sense.  People take
various video content, and then add their own subtitles in their own
language.  Joi also showed a very cool remix of The Matrix
Reloaded done by someone who put together a bunch of anime clips to the
same sound track.

I had not heard of ccMixter … it’s a Creative Commons music site.  Of course he promoted the concepts of tags and technorati … Plazes … last.fm
and how quickly tagging has taken off … a new free-form way for
organizing/categorizing information, and more importantly information
flows.

Too much good stuff to blog … what a great spew of information!

The evening sessions tonight started off with some interesting “open
mic” Q&A … some of the highschool students from the audience
spoke about their perspectives … it was interesting to hear.

Jerry got up to start talking about Brave New Virtual Worlds … and
jumped right into some of the interesting things going on in Second Life. 
He talked about how there are now all sorts of real-world to
virtual-world interactions.  One example was a Cancer Society fund
raiser where Second Life characters walked in Second Life to raise
money in the real world.  In addition, Jerry even holds regular
Future Salon meetings within Second Life where other Second Life
avatars come to participate and listen to virtual presenters.

He briefly talked about the Croquet Project … something that will be
in a talk tomorrow.  Another virtual world project.  I
downloaded the Second Life client software and will sign up for a free
account … I want to see what this is about.  Hmmmm … my first
virtual identity in a 3D virtual world.

This interview was really a chance for Ray to answer questions that
were submitted by people here at the conference.  The interview
started off with a question about sex in the future.  It was great
to get things rolling, and there were numerous laughs on some of the
comments.

Of course Ray quickly progressed into commenting on uploading, brain
scanning, alternate substrates, etc.  Overall … a usual great
Q&A by Ray.

To start things off, when I walked into the session Esther was pointing people to Vizu
… very cool polling site. I’m now signed up and playing around
with it. I pretty much missed a lot of the rest … it was
basically an open Q&A session … there were a lot of good questions about ICANN, privacy, and the accountable Internet.

I have always liked reading John Udell … I think this might be the first time to see him present. His talk is on Annotating the Planet
and started with a very cool mash-up demo using Google Maps. He
reviewed the various Google maps mash-ups, and then went into some
details on his various bike rides that he is mapping with the Gmaps Pedometer.

He touched on the areas of privacy and geotagging of all sorts of information. Referring to David Brins book The Transparent Society
he had some commentary on how to potentially protect ourselves from the
abuse of this information, and how to control who can get at this
information.

He pointed to David Rumsey’s web site,
and quoted from his talk at a recent conference. David has an
amazing collection of maps … and is doing some very cool synthesizing
of old and new maps.

The next breakout was supposed to be a video conference with Robert
Hecht-Nielsen, but something didn’t work out … so they chose to play
a DVD of his presentation. Still interesting. The best part
was the term “Confabulation Theory”! Yeah … confabulation is a word that is in the dictionary.

His presentation explained how four key concepts form the foundation of cognition.

He started by proposing that cortical modules exist in the brain, and each of these is responsible for describing one attribute of Objects in the Mental Universe. These cortical modules are made up of groupings of neurons in the form of symbols that we learn at an early age. Each symbol is made up of ~60 neurons. Symbols could be names, colors,
or any other attribute of an object. As numerous cortical modules
are receiving sensory input, confabulation occurs … triggering
behavior.

Again, he emphasized that it is the quantity of knowledge that allows
for confabulation to occur. Billions of knowledge links.
One third of our life or more is spent learning the foundations.
Language is the essential core
of cognition.  As we grow up we develop a rich set of symbols, and
interconnections between symbols - between cortical modules - by
hearing words combined with other sensory experiences.

There is more information about his theories in this article about his new theory of cognition.

After lunch at Accelerating Change 2005
we progressed into a series of breakout
sessions. The first of of my choices was tough, but I went to a
session titled Shrinking the Planet given by:

Peter Barrett, Microsoft IPTV
Scott Rafer,
Feedster

Peter started off commenting on the growth of bandwidth to the home,
and also the improvements in codec technologies. Both of these
are combining to create an environment for on-demand IP delivered video
content. This environment is quickly becoming the foundation for
supporting the long tail
concepts for video. He showed some demos of IPTV, and talked
about the metadata that will be exposed in the TV guide - like how many
people are watching a particular show, or even specific people you know
like your family and friends. He said that the project is based
on the DVR concepts, and that one of the initial partners is SBC with
their Project Lightspeed.

Scott began his talk with some thoughts that are similar to mine …
that AI might just come from millions of interconnected humans.
He referenced Dodgeball, and expanded on this theme with various potential mash-ups of various datasources. His slide titled Humans Will Be My AI
gave a number of examples where large amounts of data - aggregated by
humans - become the valuable source of metaperspectives. It was
almost funny how many people were uncomfortable during the Q&A with
his perspective of AI not necessarily being something that is
created on a computer from some lab. Maybe one day … but sooner
then that I believe that humans are quickly becoming the “sensors and
actuators” at the edges of a growing AI …

The first panel discussion here at Accelerating Change 2005
was on the Prospects of AI. The panel includes an impressive line-up of people:

Neil Jacobstein, Chair, Innovative Applications of AI 2005;
CEO, Teknowledge
Patrick Lincoln, Director, Computer Science
Lab, SRI International
Peter Norvig, Director of Search
Quality, Google; Author, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
(the world’s leading texbook in AI)
Bruno Olshausen,
Director, Redwood Ctr for Theoretical Neuroscience

The introduction by Neil gave an overview of the many Task Areas being explored in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
The key aspects of development are in Knowledge Engineering, Systems
Engineering, and Business & Cultural. In his bullets about
Ontologies and the Semantic Web, he referenced examples of early work -
Cyc (OpenCyc), SUMO, and OWL.

The second speaker, Patrick, talked to the value of AI - Intelligence
Amplification - and why this is necessary. The increasing gap
between the complexities of technology, and human capabilities is
causing more and more failures. AI can augment our ability to
design complex systems, debug complex systems, and even operate complex
systems. He talked about AI providing powerful abstracations - at
the right levels - for both designers and operators. His examples included the progress and predictions in the uses of UAVs.

Third was Peter, from Google, who started with a slide titled AI in the Middle. His comments were about AI existing between authors and readers. His first point was about Machine Learning
… and joked about the fact that we don’t know how to do it. His
comments on AI in the Middle included how authors can write trillions
of words, systems can detect certain patterns, and intelligent readers
can then actually sort through this and find information. He went
on to give examples of where apparent intelligence can emerge from
larger amounts of data . .. giving examples of the accuracy of Arabic
translation based on larger and larger data sets of example translation.

Bruno was the final panel speaker, and his area of research -
Theoretical Neuroscience - is looking to the brain to gain insights
into AI. The
view of his team is to understand intelligence by understanding the
brain. Not only the human brain … but also other animal
brains. One example is Jumping Spiders. He reviewed the knowledge that they have gained, and some interesting
points that they are exploring. One area they have
learned about involves vision, and where for each neural connection of retinal data (vision) coming in
from the outside world, there are 10 times as many feedback connections
coming from the cortex of the brain. So there is more information coming from the model in our own brain of what we are seeing, then the actual
information being sensed! The model that we have in our mind
contributes more feedback that what we are actually seeing! He
explained that this is only one rich feedback loop that they are
working to better understand.

It seems that all of the speakers look at advanced AI arising out of
the shear number of patterns and complexities of their foundation
work. I have to agree with them … what we
perceive as AI just might end up being an emergent property of
the systems that we are creating … not the explicit result of the
planning and construction of the system.

I always enjoy listening to Ray Kurzweil speak on his vision of the
future. He is spectacular thinker who notices and tracks many of
the subtle trends in sciences that are the precursors to future events.

It is interesting to hear Ray start off by talking about the possible
“bad” scenarios that could emerge in the future. He ventured into
the conversation about how it will take new advanced techologies to
protect us from current advanced technologies. This led to a good
thread fof conversation on foresight and prediction … how to analyze
trends to see if the timing was right for the delivery of a new
technology.

He always has a lot of supporting measures for his predictions … and
he immediately jumped into these. He used a new graphic that
reviewed his 6 Epochs of Evolution
that map to a set of substrate transitions that we are in the midst
of. What is impressive about his research is that he is open to
include different sources of detailed information and add it to his
analysis … and still demonstrate that his theories are on
track. He is very good at showing that Moore’s Law applies to far
more than just computing power … but to almost anything around us.

He talked about some of the great new genetic and biological research
where we are becoming more and more capable of controlling our
genes. He commented on some interesting work where gene interference
research is allowing us to more easily turn on and turn off individual
genes by attaching to the RNA within a cell. Some of the first
outcomes will be drugs that will stop cells from hanging on to extra
calories … something that is not as important (obviously!) in a world
where food is more plentiful.

Miniaturization is another exponential trend that Ray explored … talking about Respirocytes - nanomechanical replacements for red blood cells - and Microbivores
II - nanomechanical replacements for white blood cells. Both of
these are being simulated, and many of the underlying technologies are
in research today.

He jumped to some examples of economic growth by a wide variety of
measurements … again demonstrating Moore’s Law all around us.

He wrapped up with a couple of great slides … his thoughts of the future:

2010:  Computers Disappear

• Images written directly to our retinas
• Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times
• Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
• Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
• Augmented real reality
• Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface
• Effective language technologies

2029:  An intimate merger

• $1,000 of computation = 1,000 times the human brain
• Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
• Computers pass the Turing test
• Nonbiological intelligence combines
• the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence, with
• the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence
• Nonbiological intelligence will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed

Imagine if only half of these things occur … or if even more occurs!  The accelerating future!

John Smart
founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation
kicked things off by talking about
the future, and future studies. This entire conference is
presenting a multidisciplinary view of the future, and the effects of
acceleration caused by the technological revolution. John primed
the pump with some interesting comments, and a quick review of the
speakers.

He then introduced the first speaker … someone who I have wanted to
hear speak for quite some time … Vernor Vinge. Vernor is given
credit for first using the term the “technological singularity”.
He immediately jumped into his presentation … the slides are here: Vernor Vinge @ AC2005

It was fun to hear his line of thinking about the Singularity, and
various types of growth curves. His slides contain a good set of
quotes and thoughts about possibility. What is so great is to
hear a speaker like this talking about the future, and some of the
inevitable future events … the development of creativity and intellect that surpasses present-day humans,
this *is* the Singularity … and the future of being human will evolve
into whole new dimensions. He talks about direct neural hook ups
of computers as inevitable in a way that makes you realize this is not
a question of if … but when.

He spent some time talking about the soft takeoff vs. hard takeoff scenarios. As he discussed soft takeoffs he highly recommended Accelerando as a great book exploring “soft takeoffs” as one possible scenario.   Amazing stuff.  He is a big thinker.

Last night was the AC2005 Tech Night reception up at SAP Labs in Palo
Alto, CA.  It was a great gathering with an amazing set of
demonstrations.  A lot of fun.  Some of the things that I
really enjoyed were:

• Digital Identity - I got to meet Kaliya Hamlin - Identity Woman - in person.  She was at an Identity Commons booth, and I also spent time talking with Ajay Madhok - founder and CEO of AmSoft Systems - and saw his demonstration of using iNames with cell phones … some cool stuff.
• New Space Technologies - I met Michael Mealing of Masten Space Systems. 
  They are working on re-useable low-cost launch vehicles for taking
  smaller payloads (one cubic meter) into space.  They are looking
  to do a first launch in 2007 … so not too far away.  It was fun
  to see that this type of thinking - and work towards making it a
  reality! - is becoming so commonplace today.
• OpenCroquet - there was a great demo of the OpenCroquet system … something that I am going to go and check out more.
• IMSmarter - these guys have a very cool couple of products with their IMSmarter and pbwiki
  products … both are consumer extensions of existing technologies with
  cool spins.  The IMSmarter application is unique is that they are
  leveraging the power of Internet “proxies” to insert themselves in the
  stream of communications to add enhanced services.
• TroyWorks - Troy Gardner was there showing off some of his TroyWorks
  visual interfaces that were very cool.  I have some ideas that I
  am discussing with him … I really like what he is doing.
• Tactical Iraqi - this was an amazing example of how learning tools are evolving.  Tactical Iraqi is a combination of traditional learning and gaming to rapidly teach Arabic to people.

The conference is starting … I’m looking forward to being blown away …

I have to admit that I really like to hear about all of the medical
advances using new technologies.  Of course it is only going to
accelerate and get better.  This is some interesting work using carbon nanotubes to assist in bone healing.

Carbon nanotubes help heal broken bones.
Carbon nanotubes make an ideal scaffold for the growth of bone tissue,
chemist Robert Haddon of the University of California, Riverside, has
found.

The new technique could change the way doctors treat broken bones, allowing them to simply inject … [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

This is a very interesting article about some possible future foods …
grown in a lab.  Oh … and it is not plants that are being grown
… it is meat!Will this end up being the future of farming?

Burgers from a lab? US study says it’s possible.
Laboratories using new tissue engineering technology might be able to
produce meat that is healthier for consumers and cut down on pollution
produced by factory farming, University of Maryland researchers said.

Scientists could grow cells from the… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Wow … I just recevied an e-mail from the bugzilla system for OpenDarwin … one of the OpenDarwin bugs
that I reported has been assigned!  This particular bug is related
to a real-time clock issue when running OpenDarwin within Virtual PC.

I’m actually happy to hear this since I have stopped experimenting with
OpenDarwin for a bit while some things like this get sorted out. 
If they get this one fixed, it will make many things work much
better.  On my installation right now, every second of computer
time is somehow being stretched to be ~45 seconds of real time … so
things run REAL slow on my OpenDarwin installation.

I’m looking forward to seeing what is done … I’d love to see this resolved!

I have to admit that I am surprised that I am not reading more from the
extreme environmentalists about the pumping out of New Orleans. 
All I have heard is what a polluted “soup” that is there … and these
huge pumps are now moving all of that pollution into the adjoining
lakes, canals, and the ocean!

What?  Save people and destroy the environment?  How dare
they even think it!  I can’t even imagine the massive amounts of
environmental damage being caused by the horrible people pumping this
toxic soup!

Oh … I guess in this case maybe they will suggest that since the
hurricane already caused enough damage, a little more won’t hurt? 
Or maybe this time, since the impact on humanity is so blatantly
obvious, they’ll let things slide.  Who knows …

I have to admit that I love living up in the mountains … I really
like the wildlife and the wilderness.  We’ve had all sorts of
animals in our back yard - deer, elk, fox, and even a bear! - and
hiking around the valley you get to see racoons, skunk, and even
moose.  And the moose are frequently seen all over the valley.

While driving though, I often worry at night about the number of deer
and elk around . .. since you can often see them lying dead on the side
of the road.  Day or night, you have to keep your eyes open and
your guard up.  The closest that I have ever come was one winter
evening when I was driving home from Park City,
Utah.  Cruising on highway US-40 from Park City to Heber City, Utah
it
was snowing pretty hard and I was in my truck going pretty fast …
it’s a 4WD truck and I grew up driving in snow …when I saw a large
elk walk out onto the highway in front of me.  I started to brake
and immediately began to slide, so I used some knowledge that I learned
from someone out here.  I continued to head towards the elk in the
direction that he was walking, and at the last second I swerved just
behind him.  It was wild to see him flash by my drivers window
just a foot or so away.  Of course then I had to manage the slide
that I had started … but I was able to recover and could only imagine
the damage that would have been caused by hitting him.  Being in a
truck is obviously much safer.

What made me post this is that on that same trip home last night, my
family and I were coming down the grade next to Jordanelle Reservoir
and we could see a LOT of police cars and flashing lights … obviously
a major accident.  When we came under the Mayflower exit we came across a pretty gruesome looking site … a small car that had hit a very large moose.

As we slowly went by in traffic, we could see police and paramedics
attending to the driver of the vehicle, still trapped in the car. 
The front bumper of the car did not appear damaged, however the top of
the hood was crushed, the windshield was gone, the roof completely
peeled back, and everything else flattened.  I can image that the
moose - with a full rack - had to be over 1500 pounds … it was
immense.  The driver of the car had little chance if they didn’t
notice the moose … I’m not sure that the car was as tall as the belly
of the massive animal.  When hit, the car probably cruised right
under the moose.  Ouch.

I’ll be watching the news, hoping that the passenger(s) of the car
survived the incident … the moose did not.  And seeing accident
last night is why I am always a little more cautious and attentive when
I drive around here.

I was again impressed today by Dell.  I bought a new laptop a week
or so ago, due to problems with my old one.  I order a Latitude,
however when it arrived I could not believe they even put the Latitude
name on it!  This thing was HUGE … and it weighed a TON.  I
know … I could have read the dimensions and weight when I ordered,
however I have been buying Dell Latitiude laptops for a long time.

I really didn’t like the new machine, and so I called to see what the
return process would be … no big deal … they first offered me $300
to keep the laptop!  When I declined, they quickly gave me the RMA
number and an address to ship the unit to.  No big deal … 
return it and just pay for the shipping.

I like working with Dell …

When I first saw Meetup come on-line, I
thought it was really going to be an interesting medium for social get
togethers.  I started to use the free service, and felt that they
could really start some good momentum going, and leverage the various
locations for their revenue.  Well … they quickly were