Mark Finnern @ AC2005

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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 Smart @ AC2005

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

1. Introduction
2. Universal Assumptions
3. Two Processes of Change:  Evolution and Development
4. Introduction to Accelerating Change
5. Prediction:  Expecting the Future
6. Management: Thriving with Change
7. Creation:  Making the Future

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!

Jamais Cascio @ AC2005

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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 …

Cory Ondrejka @ AC2005

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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.

Joichi Ito @ AC2005

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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!

Jerry Paffendorf @ AC2005

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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.

Ray Kurzweil Interviewed by Moira Gunn @ AC2005

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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.

Esther Dyson @ AC2005

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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.

John Udell @ AC2005

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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.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen @ AC2005 (via DVD)

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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.