Communion Of Dreams

One of the basic premises of Communion of Dreams is that over time we will introduce personal ‘experts’ - advanced Expert Systems or Artificial Intelligence - which will act as a buffer between the individual and a technological world. We will enter into a trade-off: allow our ‘expert’ to function as an old-fashioned butler, knowing all of our secrets but guarding them closely, in order to then interact with the rest of the world. So, your expert would know your preferences on entertainment and books, handle your communications and banking, maintain some minimal privacy for you by being a “black box” which negotiates with other people and machines on your behalf.

Why do I think that this will happen? Why will it be necessary?

Because increasingly, in the name of ‘convenience’, both government and industry are seeking to become more intrusive in our lives, all the way down to the level of what happens inside our homes. People want the convenience, but are starting to become increasingly aware of what the price of the trade-off will be. The latest example:

Comcast Cameras to Start Watching You?

If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes.

Here’s another source:

Comcast’s Creepy Experiment Puts Cams Inside DVRs to Watch You

In a scene straight out of 1984, Comcast said it will begin placing actual cameras in DVR units to track data for who is watching the digital television.This statement is so farfetched I almost don’t believe it, but it came out of the mouth of Gerard Kunkel, the senior vice president of user experience for Comcast. At the Digital Living Room conference he said that Comcast is already experimenting embedding cameras into DVR boxes that actually watch the television watchers. Big Brother, anyone?

Comcast is shilling this as a type of customization features. The camera would be capable of recognizing specific individuals and therefore loading a user’s favorite channels and on the other hand block certain content as well. Stop the schtick, Comcast. Nobody, and I mean nobody would ever voluntarily allow you to place a camera in a household, for any purpose. It’s a shame that I can already imagine the headlines when Comcast does this involuntarily.

Now, in the comments at both sites, there is disavowal by Comcast executives that the company is actually going to do this - they’re just “looking into it.” Sure.

More importantly, there are a lot of comments about how this is just yet another step into the world of total surveillance, another incremental loss of privacy. Sure, these comments come from tech-savvy people, who are well aware of how the technology may work - moreso than most people. And they are also aware that for many folks, this will be seen as ‘no big deal’, and a welcome convenience.

But the tech-savvy are the ones who will be developing the tools to counter this kind of intrusion. Sooner or later someone will figure out that there is a service to be met, creating a buffer of privacy between the individual and the corporate-government union. It may not be a huge market to begin with, but it will be the first start in the creation of the kind of expert systems I predict.

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi. A slightly shortened version of this has been cross-posted to UTI.)

Of all the many wonderful characters created by J. Michael Straczynski for his Babylon 5 universe, I have always been particularly fond of the Technomage Galen. Why? Well, actor Peter Woodward is just plain cool (he understand real weapons and fighting like few actors or fight directors do - his ‘Conquest‘ series for the History Channel a few years back was one of the best such documentary series I have ever seen). But more than that, the character Galen uses *exactly* the kind of technology that I envision is commonplace in the world of Communion of Dreams: the cyberwear which allows the user a functional augmented reality.

Recently, I wrote about how researchers have made a first important step in this direction, with the development of “a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.”

Well, now Wired is reporting that - surprise, surprise - DARPA is interested in the development of this technology. From the article:

Today, a handful of soldiers with advanced gear can see a few digital maps, through helmet-mounted monocles. Some pilots can get data about their world, on heads-up displays. But one day, troops could see an info-”augmented” reality all around them, with contact lenses that provide “first-person shooter-type video game” environments to those that wear them. At least, that’s the idea behind the latest project from DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky science and technology division.

The agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office announced Wednesday that it’s looking for information on “the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses.” And not in some far-off future. But in “three to five years.”

Three to five years. As I said in that post in January:

Woo-hoo! I love it when my predictions start to become reality!

Jim Downey

I mentioned the other day that as in any SF, I took a look at where technology was, where it was likely headed, and tried to make sense of how it would be applied by the time of Communion of Dreams. Well, another one of the basic technological gadgets in the book just became a lot closer to reality:

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.” The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.

Woo-hoo! I love it when my predictions start to become reality!  There’s still a long ways until the augmented reality I envision for the novel is possible, but this is an important development.  Personally, I hate wearing contact lenses, but I think I would make the adjustment if it meant that I could have all the cool benefits of augmented reality available to me that my characters have available to them.

Jim Downey

Via MeFi.

. . . the one I have in Communion of Dreams about a military EM jamming device which shuts down all communications in a given area is actually pretty lame. This sort of thing has been a staple of Science Fiction just about forever, and in fact real radio jamming equipment has been used since the early days of radio. I remember back in the ’70s reading about something called an ‘Odien Coil’ which could be used to blanket all radio and television broadcasts for up to about a half-mile. For Communion, I just set a few different parameters for the device, and gave it the ability to disrupt all the electro-magnetic spectrum used to carry the data of a ubiquitous computing/augmented reality society, then allowed it to play an important role in the plot.

So, while my prediction in this regard is, as I said, pretty lame, I still got a bit of amusement out of the recent NYT coverage of cell phone jamming devices. It was mentioned again this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, and that reminded me that I wanted to say something about it here, because while the tech is actually fairly old, how it is applied in a society becoming increasingly dependent on instantaneous cell phone communication is nonetheless newsworthy and insightful. From Matt Richtell’s NYT article:

The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.

The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

Bingo. We’re still in the early phase of this kind of communications tech. As I stipulate in Communion, one way such technology could evolve is to become even more personal, literally implanted into our bodies, making it completely unnecessary to speak above a whisper in order to conduct a call clearly. If this were to happen, it would solve the problem of idiots needing to chatter away loudly on their phones, and perhaps societal pressures would counteract the current situation. And if it wasn’t just a matter of politeness bringing about such a change, perhaps the application of jamming technology will push us in that direction.

One can hope, anyway.

Jim Downey

Several quick items this morning…

First off, last stats I saw (yesterday morning), over 5,400 people have downloaded the novel.   That’s like 1,200 this month alone.  Yay!

Hits to this blog have also continued to rise - over 5,000 so far.  So have submitted spam ‘comments’, of course, now over 2,000.  Glad that the filtering software catches the vast bulk of that stuff.

A friend sent me the current issue of the American Ceramic Society Bulletin.  Unfortunately, items he wanted to share with me are not available through their site, but with about 10 seconds of searching, I was able to pull up more complete information on the two things I wanted to mention.  Sheesh - when will people figure out that hiding basic information behind a subscription firewall is not only pointless, but aggravating to the average person?  Now, rather than linking to their content (and increasing their traffic/exposure/possibility for advertising), I’ll link to the other sources.

First of these is about the latest developments in transparent transistors.  This is the thin-film tech I stipulate for the best computers in Communion of Dreams which are not based on the superconducting Tholen gel.

Second is how scientists have discovered a way to embed silicon nanowires right into living cells without causing damage to the cells.  This is the basis of the mind-machine interfaces that I use for the computer and communications tech in Communion, though I don’t go into the details of it in the book.

In both cases the tech is further along than I had expected when I first wrote the novel, but it is good to see that my predictions about how things would likely develop were on track.

Lastly, there will be a newspaper feature about my wife and I caring for my MIL in the local paper this evening.  I’ll post about it with a link probably tomorrow.

Jim Downey

A friend sent me a link to a CNET news item from last week about how a new ‘color alphabet’ was going to revolutionize communications. From the article:

Lee Freedman has waited a long time, but he thinks the moment is finally right to spring on the world the color alphabet he invented as a 19-year-old at Mardi Gras in 1972.

For 35 years, between stints as a doctor, a real estate agent and a pizza maker at the Woodstock concert in 1994, Freedman has been working on Kromofons–an innovative alphabet in which the 26 English letters are represented solely by individual colors–waiting for technology to catch up with him.

And now, thanks to the Internet, the ubiquity of color monitors, Microsoft Word plug-ins and his being able to launch a Kromofons-based e-mail system, Freedman thinks he is finally ready.

Well, maybe.

Science fiction authors have used various tricks at evolving language and written communications, one of the most memorable for me being Heinlein’s Speedtalk from the novella Gulf. And working in other senses is a common tactic, up to and including extra-sensory perception (such as telepathy). This is part of the way I use synesthesia in Communion of Dreams: as a method by which the human brain can layer meaning and information in new ways, expanding the potential for understanding the world. It is noteworthy that many synesthetes will associate colors with a given word or even letter - it may be possible that Lee Freedman drew upon such an experience to create his color alphabet.

(An aside - I have experienced mild episodes of synesthesia upon several occasions. Sometimes these episodes have been induced by drugs, sometimes by intense concentration, sometimes of their own accord. I think that this is a latent ability everyone has, but not something which we usually access, because it is poorly understood by the general populace.)

Anyway, while Kromofons or something similar is certainly possible in the context of computer display (of almost any variety, including nano-tech paint) , there are some real limitations that I can see. First off, you wouldn’t want to have to have a full set of color pencils/markers and keep changing them in order to just write something down in the ‘real world’. Printed material of whatever variety would also be subject to degradation from light-fading: some pigments fade more quickly than others, some inks are more frail than others, some colors react to different lighting conditions in different ways. (Those are all problems I’ve experienced as a book & document conservator, as well as owning a gallery of art.) Even in the world of computer display, variations in lighting and equipment could render some colors ‘untrue’. Not to mention problems experienced by people as they age and color perception skews, or from the small but real percentage of the population which suffers from one type or another of color blindness. Sure, a good AI or expert system would be able to ‘translate’ for people who had such limitations, in the context of augmented reality, but that tech isn’t currently available except in its very infancy.

So, while I enjoy a slightly-nutty idea as much as the next person, and can see some ways that Kromofons could be used for fun, I don’t really see the idea going too far.

Jim Downey

Via MetaFilter and O’Reilly comes news of a new Google service: StreetView. This is the first step into a true ‘augmented reality’, such as I envision for Communion of Dreams. For right now you’ll need to be in one of the few locations offered, and have to have your laptop or some other suitable device running, but this is still a big advancement. With StreetView, you can move through real space, seeing clear images of your immediate environment overlaid with location and directional information. Go play with it - it’s a fun tool that you need to use to really appreciate.

It’s still a long way until there is a seamless overlay provided by your own expert system, projected onto contact lenses so you can just move through real space without hassle, but this is clearly where we’re headed. I do so love to see real tech coming online that supports my predictions of what the world will be like in 50 years…

Jim Downey

This is an old clip, from the TED2006 conference, with Jeff Han making a presentation about his multi-touch sensing interface. I got into a discussion with friends the other night, and had reason to look this up to share it with them, thought I would post it here:

This is pretty much the sort of interface I envisioned for Communion, though done entirely as a ‘virtual’ tech made possible by the AI entities I call ‘experts’, coupled with the integrated cyberware that the characters have. But of course, having it as a physical object first makes sense, and can be considered to be an antecedent to my predictions of how the technology will develop.

Anyway, it’s a long clip, but very intriguing.

Jim Downey

The tech of Communion of Dreams is based on a seamless connectivity of almost all electronic components - it is what enables the AI/expert systems such as Seth to move freely through the world on behalf of their clients, augmenting reality in such a way as to allow for much deeper insight and understanding of the world. I don’t say it explicitly in the book, but in part this level of connectivity is what allows for the actual development of true artificial intelligence (an homage to Heinlein’sThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress).

Via BoingBoing comes news that Tim Wu has an excellent piece up about the forthcoming auction of wireless spectrum, and how it presents the opportunity to encourage the kind of innovation necessary for the world of Communion to become possible. Wu, a leader in the promotion of net neutrality and broadband tech, understands that establishing common standards and then allowing inventors to attach their gadgets to wireless networks will be the critical infrastructure of the future. An excerpt:

The right to attach is a simple concept, and it has worked powerfully in other markets. For example, in the wired telephone world Carterfone rules are what made it possible to market answering machines, fax machines and the modems that sparked the Internet revolution.

Attachment rights can break open markets that might otherwise be controlled by dominant gatekeepers. Longshot companies like Ebay or YouTube might never have been born had they first needed the approval of a risk-averse company like AT&T. If you’ve invented a new toaster, you don’t have to get approval from the electric company. Consumers decide how good your product is, not some gatekeeper.

It’s an excellent position paper, all the better for being brief and to the point. Read it, share it.

Jim Downey

A story this morning on Weekend Edition - Saturday about the military’s efforts to recover lost or captured soldiers in Iraq brought up the topic of “tagging” our people with some kind of tracking device. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Gary Anderson was somewhat critical of the current Pentagon leadership that such an application of technology hadn’t been put into more widespread use yet.

His reaction is understandable. The idea of tracking devices of one sort or another has been extremely popular in fiction (everything from spy novels to SF) for decades, and we now have a widespread tech which could be fairly easily adapted for such use: Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID for short. Combine this with the already extant use of battlefield electronics, it should be possible to increase the range of such passive devices without sacrificing size and concealability, allowing for hiding such tags in clothing or even within the body of the soldier. Certainly, this would seem to fit with the current mindset of the military, and would fill the gap until current military tech evolves to have an ‘information-integrated force’ such as I stipulate for Communion.

[Mild spoiler alert.]

In Communion, I apply the tech of the period to have the soldiers ‘wired’ with an array of information-sharing devices, analogous to the type of integrated ‘cyberware’ used by the general population. For military applications, though, the tech is more robust, a little more cutting edge, a bit further advanced in application, to the point of even having “smart guns” which would only function for those using the correct encryption key. This does play a minor part in the plot development at several junctures, and assumes that at all times anyone can be tracked fairly easily.

Anyway, the idea of tagging our people in that kind of war environement seems to be a no-brainer to me.  Yeah, there are privacy issues to be concerned with for the use of such tagging in civilian life, but that is much less an issue for someone in the military.  I expect we’ll see it implemented across the board in the near future…the first step into my predictions about in-body cyberware.

Jim Downey