The Shape of the Future

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. "

Memories!

"You're talking about memories."

Re:Memories!

"You're talking about memories."

What I see, what I remember, what is happening in front of me, those are three different things, although they might have a resemblence in normal life. It would be quite interesting to see what you didn't see.

Interesting but...

From TFA

As projections of a near future go, the one I've presented in this talk is pretty poor. In my defense, I'd like to say that the only thing I can be sure of is that I'm probably wrong, or at least missing something as big as the internet, or antibiotics.

Indeed, in fifty years of reading future preditions the one thing they all have in common is that they're all wrong. The next big thing always comes out of left field and is poo-pooed by the 'experts'. It's good to see that Charlie Stross understands that.

Re:Interesting but...

I'm a huge fan of serious science fiction and have been a fan of Stross (and contemporary "posthuman" writer Greg Egan) for some time. But he is not alone in this realization. No serious science fiction writer in the last 30 years has, to my knowledge, been so arrogant as to think he can accurately predict the future. Only a damn fool thinks that he can predict even the *near* future.

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.

In other news...

"What was the title of the book I looked at and..."

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...

The Movie you're looking for is called

The Final Cut [imdb.com], staring Robin Williams. Sort of unexpectedly badass.

Re:The Movie you're looking for is called

who would want to record every single waking --and sleeping!-- moment?

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.

Well, yes, all that indexing and searching possibilities are cool and all, but you would still have to spend some time looking it up

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.

memories get embellished by our minds. Just go back and read your high school angst-ridden writings and if you're matured just a bit

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.

And there's the waste in recording again what you already saw (because you would be recording yourself watching those records... bleh).

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.

Re:The Movie you're looking for is called

Your entire life as such, is worthless if for no other reason than that it'd take literally a lifetime to watch it.

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.

Life Recorders

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

This puts the burden of proof onto the defendant: they have to explain why they turned off the life recorder.

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.

Uh oh

If we all get to used to a machine recalling stuff for us, we'll soon get too lazy to do it ourselves. I've already found my handwriting sucks because I type 99% of the time and my memory for certain things is worse because I never really have to use it - stuff I want to know is either on my hard drive or a Google searech away.

Re:Uh oh

Just as most of us can't survive without AC and a supermarket round the corner. Don't labour under the misconception that we're somehow self-sufficient at the moment and have lost none of our previous skills - it's called progress. We, as a species, will always be losing some skills and gaining new ones. Imagine the skills we can learn when we don't have to rely on flaky memories. Dropping standards in handwriting is a good example - it drops because we simply don't need it any more. It's a good thing :)

The Singularity Is Near!

Ok, so maybe he didn't quite define "singularity" like Kurzweil, but close enough, what's a decade or two?

Very roughly!

there are roughly 10 million seconds per year

Hm..., a mean tropical year has 365.24219878 days of each 86400 seconds, or 31,556,926 seconds. Ten billion seconds is slightly less than 317 years.

Re:Very roughly!

I think that's called an engineering approximation.

Re:Very roughly!

s/roughly/of the same order of magnitude/g

Finally...

..when we get to 4. PROFIT!!! we can rewind a step and see what the hell 3. ???? was that people keep banging on about.

Thought

Of course, aside from making it possible to write very interesting science fiction stories, the Singularity is a very controversial idea. For one thing, there's the whole question of whether a machine can think -- although as the late, eminent professor Edsger Djikstra said, "the question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim". A secondary pathway to the Singularity is the idea of augmented intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence: we may not need machines that think, if we can come up with tools that help us think faster and more efficiently. The world wide web seems to be one example. The memory prostheses I've been muttering about are another.

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

In the cinema?

I don't think they will let you in with a camera mounted on your head.

The future

Instead of envisioning outlandish future developments, he looks at what the impact might be on society from very reasonable iterations of today's SOTA. [....] 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.

Record your life to remember a book's title, will you? Not outlandish at all.

For those who can't take a simple note on a paper or computer, the future bright is not.

Ambient Findability

I'm not related to the author at all, but this book [findability.org] about ambient findability [wikipedia.org] well suits the discussion. From wikipedia: "Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."

This has already been done

There is a current experiment by a guy from Microsoft Labs. He wears a camera around his neck which automatically takes pictures every minute so that he can label and save them later in a database I saw that in Spectrum (IEEE magazine) but here is a link from a quick google search : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,167 4359,00.html [guardian.co.uk]

Other Crazy Ideas

Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.

Here is another prediction. We are going to reach a point (and this is going to be scary to allot of people) where we are no longer going to need privacy. once we reach a certain level of evolution in consciousness, Human beings are going to be directly connected to each other, we will be able to read the thoughts, feelings and sensations of every human being on the planet in ways we never thought possible. I believe that this is going to be nessesary if we are going to survive. We will all be connected to whats called a collective consciousness, which is a intelligence that will coexist with our current perceptions of how we perceive our selfs individually. But this intelligence will allow us to interface with the world and people on a global scale. We will be able to focus on specific people and bring their thoughts and ideas into our awareness. As this happens we will all be co-creating our lives in real time building on the thoughts and ideas of everyone connection with the help of each other. Also I think this intelligence will be self corrective to people that are living self destructive lives. The people that have evolved past that point will be able to help the ones that need help install new programs that will allow them to no longer need to live in that fashion any more. Its not like it will be a choice its more like everyone will have separate goals that function towards one main outcome for humanity, with this in mind I don't think it will be natural for people to live destructive lives anymore and we will all know our purpose towards bettering humanity.

Wow

"Think of it as google for real life."

I'm sorry, sir. You have no life.

Carbon 13?

.... and carbon 12 are not equally abundant. 13C accounts for about 1% of carbon - 99% is carbon 12.

A small objection...

One thing that allways bothers me about these kinds of predictions, even when I agree with alot of the insights, is they neglect to note scaling problems. Recall that "smart environments" ubiquitous computing, micro-kernels, 64bit architecture, etc....have all been around for a long time, the technology that is. What has been problematic is costly implementation and lack of scalability. Take smart houses, realistically most of the technology is about 20 years old or more, and was implementable 20 years ago...at a significantly higher cost of course, but even though the comparative technology is cheap today, the implementation is not.

What this specifically means is that the average contractor would not know how to set it up, and the average consumer would not know how to manage it, so it doesn't get used. The time horizons for implementing many of these technologies at a ubiquitous level, even if they're invented now, or invented 20 years ago, is fairly large for many things. Most code is still 32bit and single threaded, despite the rather large inroads made by multi-core 64 bit processors, despite parts standardization being introduced to autos and other products and production methods shortly after the turn of the 20th century,...our houses are still built more or less like they were 200 years or more ago, just faster and with less workmanship.

With reference to his lifelogs, they will come of course, but he should definitely extend his time horizon, cellphones and small computers aren't even universally ubiquitous for most of the world yet. Hell, the *internet* isn't either for that matter. And there's a large body of deadweight that will also have to go, people who will never adopt technologies, even if their children or grandchildren do, and large masses of geographic terrain which will not be integrated with any sort of computerized ubiquitous technology for at least a century or more.

Lot of negativity in the comments

I thought it was a good talk. I'll just say that 20 years ago I was watching characters appear on my TV via a 300 baud modem that plugged into my Commodore. Even with software curve flattening, the next 20 years should be cool.

Friewalled

Grrr... I am being blocked behind a firewall, can someone post it in here or give a mirror?

Why canned memories?

Sure this would have some limited utilitarian use. But you know what I do to things I think I'll need later? I record them and put it in a sorted order so I can get it quickly under what circumstances I need it. I summarize what's truly important. I prioritize important things when I write them down, and I put miscellaneous information (instruction books, meeting notes, etc.) in places I know if/when I'll later need them. What good is a big indiscriminate pile of information of years of your life that in paper form would look like a wall of filing cabinets 20 feet high and 100 feet long? 90% of that information would be fairly useless. In searching archives of some always-on recorder, I would likely waste a lot of time trying to find what I need, and probably often think I found what I needed when I didn't really.

Intelligent memory is about organizing, sorting, remembering what's important. What good are computer search algorithms going to do you for always-on recordation? If you aren't intelligent enough to make sense of a jumble of information by identifying meaning, and then sorting and tagging it up as it occurs, a computer can't do that for you. At least not for a long time until AI is maybe as common-sense and intelligent as we are. If that day ever comes, would this look to augment existing memory, or replace it with crutches? Sounds like a de-evolution to me. At best you would end up reliving large swaths of recorded experiences (conversations, books, sights, sounds) of your life with tweezers trying to search for and grasp what was important.

Rather than being a productivity tool, I can see many people using technology like this as an emotional escape. Given the detail level, it would have a life of it's own. Look back in vivid detail on the big game that your won in high school, the hot date you had, getting married, when your kids were young and playful, when you were thin and in shape, your vacations, parties, past friends, and youth. We're meant to have memories fade in order to seek to make new ones.

Robin Williams already did it..

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/ [imdb.com]

Actually a fairly enjoyable little movie. I really don't think anyone wants this kind of "google search for life" stuff if this is where it would (and it would..) go. While it would be useful DURING your life (albeit with the conscious knowledge that everything you do is recorded), what do you think people would do with it after your death?

10 million seconds ~= 4 months.

My old astronomy prof told us that a year was approximately pi * 10^7.. It's really 3.16* 10^7.

This would make for 316kbps video. I would guarantee you this is nowhere near DVD quality.

The original 10 million seconds is more like 4 months, and yes, this would be close to DVD quality.

Why am I posting this? Because I built myself a 0.9TB array just last year for my MythTV backend. And after 6 months it isn't enough space, even with aggressive deleting and transcoding.

1TB will feel like a very small number even 5 years from now.

The shape of the future...

...is a triangle!!

What about the index size?

The index size itself can grow pretty large, especially with so many different data collections to index. Using an example with a simple inverted file and a plain text collection, it can quickly grow twice as big as the text collection itself if you index everything not including punctuation, even with stemming. And that's not even considering collocations and latent semantic indexing.

If we're still using...

...DivX in 50 years, I quit.

Let's check the tape

This might be a nightmare or a boon for arguments. With a certain person, half our arguments at some point wind up being "Them: You said 'blah blah blah'. Me: No, that's not what I said. Them:Well, that's what I remember."

I'm not sure if it would be good or bad to be able to do an instant replay.

TFA presumes huge per capita energy resources...

...which in reality are shrinking. Per capita energy use peaked in the early 1980s. Building self-driving cars and the infrastructure to support such, building lifelogs and the infrastructure to support it, etc. and so on, is going to require HUGE amounts of energy, for EVERYBODY, and frankly, it just isn't there.

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

Vannevar Bush made this prediction in 1945

See As We May Think [theatlantic.com]: the Memex.

More indexing options:

How about a hum-to-music search for songs with similar melodies. I'm often wishing I could search for a catchy tune by the music I can remember, rather than they lyrics I can't.

Legal reform

One very important issue in TFA that hasn't been discussed here is legal reforms. Even without a life recorder, we are closing in on those issues.

A great many actions are not prohibited (especially government actions) simply because there WAS no way to actually do those things. Another class of actions is not explicitly permitted (to citizens) or conversely government is not forbidden to prohibit them simply because until recently, there ws no practical way to prohibit them.

The most glaring example is privacy. Whens the Constitution was framed, there was no protection at all for private conversations (for example). That's not because it's not a right worth protecting, but because in an era before cameras and shotgun mikes, nobody could imagine a situation where people wanting to converse privatly couldn't manage to do it. Most of the country was quite rural and nobody could have any idea where anyone actually was. The closest you could get would be if the person told you where to find them and then actually went there. Even the most urban setting more closely resembled what we would call a small town.

There were no bugging devices or infrared cameras.

Much of that is more or less intact based on the legal expectation of privacy, but another large portion of it is entirely gone now.

At one time you were whoever you said you were. There were no photos, no databases, and no credit reports. You might well have a reputation (for better or worse) where you live, but you could go a days ride away and be a stranger. Go to another state and you were surely an unknown. There was no legal right to a fresh start simply because there was little way to deny you one if it was worth moving away for.

That's not to say that nobody knew anything about you, just that you knew about as much about them as they knew about you.

Equally important are a lot of laws that are only vaguely acceptable because they're not (yet) fully enforcable. In general, we haven't set a legal prohibition against prohibiting thoughts only because we have little or no way to detect thoughtcrimes in the absense of actions based on those thoughts. Even lass overt actions used to go unnoticed. The latter is where we are seeing the beginnings of a problem. There have been several controversies surrounding keeping tabs on what people choose to read. Thus far it's been restricted to a few cases of monitoring library checkouts and purchaces from large book sellers, but the problem is growing.

Specifically, we don't have a legal right to read whatever we care to read without being profiled or creating probable cause simply because until now there was no practical way to KNOW if someone somewhere bought or checked out a particular book, much less to know what someone read online. Since then, it has become possible to check up on particular people, and now with TIA and carnivore like operations, it is becoming possible to watch everyone.

The real question is do we have the wisdom, restraint, and political will to recognize that privacy IS a right and that attempting to deny it will slowly destroy our society. So far the answer seems to be a resounding NO!

Re:Layman's terms please....

No, it translates to being able to store all the porn you could ever watch in your lifetime in the palm of your hand.

Err... Wait.

Your other hand, I mean.