Slashdot Log In
The Shape of the Future
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon May 14, 2007 05:31 AM
from the just-a-little-bit-connected dept.
from the just-a-little-bit-connected dept.
Last week, Sci-Fi writer Charlie Stross was invited to speak at a technology open day at engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. He's posted a transcript of his discussion on his website, which features a fascinating analysis of where technology is going in the next 10-25 years. Instead of envisioning outlandish future developments, he looks at what the impact might be on society from very reasonable iterations of today's SOTA. "10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year -- there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream -- compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution -- of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry -- a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send -- onto that chip, while I'm awake ... Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. 'What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?' Think of it as google for real life. "
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Memories! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Memories! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Very nice.
Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
He was wrong. I'm quite sure he didn't predict the Russian revolution in 1917, or the first and second world war, which led to the cold war. His prediction was mostly based on Russia being a big country, USA rising to become a big country, and therefore, eventually, rivals. In the mean time, just about anything could have happened. That events eventually played out to make this particular prediction true fo
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good science fiction writers know that science fiction really isn't about the future at all. Serious science fiction is more a commentary on our present, and on the human condition.
Parent
In other news... (Score:2)
Hate to break it to someone, but some of us can do that already - it is a burden sometimes, to be sure, but we can do it, without so much as a grunt and thank you mama...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Life Recorders (Score:5, Insightful)
With the proper ironclad legal protections, Life Recorders will be a massive boon. Accused of a crime? No problem, just open up the datafile, fastforward to the time of the event, and see that we were actually sitting in the basement surfing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.midgets.
And for those times when we want to actually bring a midget home, we might want to stop recording. After all, the purpose of privacy is to protect ourselves from the erratic rationality of our fellow humans' moral judgment (as well as the wholesale absence of rationality behind some of our laws). We've still got evolutionary wiring left over that causes us to feel physical pain when others disapprove, and so privacy is a rational demand.
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
Innocent until proven Guilty (Score:4, Informative)
Read up as to why we have "Innocent until proven Guilty": there are a lot of circumstances that are not illegal, but frowned on
by society. (e.g. being Gay and in the US Military, etc.) : especially where you have politically-motivated prosecutors
such as in the US (less so in Britain and Ireland where there is a higher degree of independence for the Director of Public Prosecutions)
the law can become a tool of persection. You can be in deep trouble when doing something perfectly legal but frowned on
my a majority (or vocal/powerful minority) of your community.
Other issues of the panopticon society: imagine setting up a business (in your spare time,or whatever). Your employer / competitor
could bring a frivolous lawsuit just to see what you were doing on day X.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Well in some countries, it could be a crime: if memory serves in some country it is illegal to have porn pictures with what look like a children, even if these are really adults or even if these pictures are drawings or generated by computer..
Does a midget look like a child enough that porn with them is illegal?
I don't know, when laws reach this level of stupidity, it's hard to rely on common sense to distinguish what i
Re: (Score:2)
* or whatever the politically correct term is.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
With the proper ironclad legal protections, Life Recorders will be a massive boon. Accused of a crime? No problem, just open up the datafile, fastforward to the time of the event, and see that we were actually sitting in the basement surfing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.midgets.
Re: (Score:2)
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
As will, perhaps, refusing to turn over your life recorder. Sure, the 5th amendment should protect against that, but it probably won't, at least not well enough.
Also, I'm just not sure the idea is useful enough. Are you going to want to carry all the recording hardware around all the time? Are you going to have methods of searching audio and images sufficient that you'll be able to find wha
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think you're in a bit of a gray area. How is refusing to turn over your recorder (if it's known you have one) any different than refusing to turn over documents and emails?
What could possibly be protected is having your recorder encrypted and refusing to turn over the password. From what I've been reading, the fifth will probably prote
Watch out for MPAA/RIAA (Score:3, Insightful)
But using a life recorder IS a crime already according to the MPAA/RIAA. At the movie theater, listening to the radio, watching a baseball game, reading a book, at a live concert (except for the Grateful Dead), etc. etc.
Uh oh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Very roughly! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very roughly! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Think of the future children!
Re:Very roughly! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Pi seconds (Score:2)
Finally... (Score:3, Funny)
Thought (Score:4, Interesting)
I think he is coming at this from the wrong angle, as we develop more awareness into what makes us human and as we understand consciousness we are not going to need to use thought as much. Present moment awareness, understanding how our body reactions to emergency situations, the expansion of consciousness will allow us to bypass thought, and will allow us use other senses in our bodies to take action or create a reaction to situations in an instant with out much thought process.
The solution isn't more processing power in our brains, its being able to turn it off thought so other more powerful forces within us can take over and do the calculations needed to live our lives.
Here's some books if you want to get in the know about whats possible once we have reached a point where our minds distortion of the present moment has ceased to be an issue. Once that happens thought plays a very small part in the equation of creativity, and functioning in the world.
"The power of now"
Eckhart Tolle
The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles
Bruce Lipton, Phd.
"The Divine Matrix"
Gregg Braden
Re: (Score:2)
Thats why Jobs did LSD..... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean like God? If so, I hope I'm not surprising you by mentioning that this idea is something most humans have thought about for many millennia, at least as long as we have written records, and probably as long as there have been humans.
Our position in history right now (or since the scientific revolution) is unique, exactly because it allows
In the cinema? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ambient Findability (Score:3, Interesting)
This has already been done (Score:2)
Other Crazy Ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Lot of negativity in the comments (Score:2)
TFA presumes huge per capita energy resources... (Score:3, Informative)
People can have their own opinions about this, but not their own facts. all of the ramping up of capacity, speed, and ability of the past 100 years is directly attributable to high density transportable energy, in the form of petroleum. The remaining energy in that petroleum reserve would bet be served developing the technologies to prevent the starvation and privation of the 9 some odd billion people we're expecting to share the planet with in 50 years. Self driving cars? Perhaps, but not interesting, especially when people (mostly the poor, hungry, and dispossessed) are tearing up suburban McMansions for timber to keep warm during the ever milder winters, and the cities are gradually abandoned from the rising oceans.
And all of THAT will require enormous amounts of energy. The kind of cybernetic totalism that TFA exhibits is one that is(sadly) all too pervasive in forums such as slashdot, ars technica, etc. And this is a tragedy, as we need the best and brightest to solve the problems of the future before they get here, not jerry-rig some bandaid solution on a disaster when it happens.
To have even the VAGUEST glimmer of hope for an industrial civilisation, we need to get electricity in massive amounts, and figure out how to NOT use it in massive amounts. Suburbia will be abandoned - self driving cars won't save it. We will need to remove the burbs so we can reclaim it as farm land....
I'm not being alarmist - I'm not a "doomer" by any stretch, but I am extremely skeptical of any predictions that do not directly address energy and resource consumption as central to any technology.
RS
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The Movie you're looking for is called (Score:4, Interesting)
People who have amnesia. People who would like to record every waking moment but not have to deal with turning the recording on and off. People in law-enforcement. People who need to document fraud and/or abuse by other people, but can't necessarily predict when the interesting bits happen. Students who like to review one of their classes. Perverts who like to sell their sex-experiences on the Internet. Journalists who don't like taking notes. Anyone who have trouble remembering names, or directions, or whatever. In short, just about anyone, I guess.
Sure. The idea is that if it's no hassle to record stuff, why not just record it all. The device could be embedded in your wrist-watch and/or cellphone, which most people carry around anyway. Or it could be an implant. If you don't need to access it, you won't waste any time accessing it, and the additional weight you have to carry is less than the extra weight you already carry because you forgot to cut your toenails.
I know I feel that way, but I'm not sure everyone feels that way. But even if you do feel that way (like I do), that doesn't remove the usefulness of such a device. Nobody is forcing you to review your angst-ridden teenage depression all the time. But if you need to remember something, you could.
Why is that wasteful? Storage is cheap. Micro-managing it is wasteful, because it costs more money and time than not managing it at all. Besides, you may end up some day wanting to see how much time you waste inspecting older memories. In short, you could just as well argue that everyone should use letters of maximum 2mm height, and no paragraph breaks or whitespace, when handwriting, since otherwise you would waste ink and paper. The world just doesn't work that way.
Parent
Re:The Movie you're looking for is called (Score:5, Insightful)
There's some bits of it though, that would be nice to keep. And here's the thing, you don't know beforehand which bits that is. Sometimes you discover it later, on occasion *MUCH* later.
That girl sitting next to you on the bus today ? It don't matter, unless she ends up eventually becoming your wife, in which case you migth very well find it amusing to have a recorded video of your very first meeting. (or not, but -some- people would, which is the entire point)
The only way of being able to get at the interesting bits though, is recording a lot of stuff, on the hunch that *some* of it will be interesting and/or useful. For the same reason, basically, that many people keep *all* receipts for expensive stuff they buy -- because inevitably -some- of the stuff will break down, and then you may need the receipt in order to get a guarantee-repair or a refund.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Err... Wait.
Your other hand, I mean.
Re: (Score:2)