Communion Of Dreams

When I went away to college in 1976, I took with me the small black & white television I had received for my eighth birthday. Mostly my roommates and I would watch The Muppet Show before going off to dinner. Otherwise, I really didn’t have the time for television - there was studying to do, drugs and alcohol to abuse, sex to have.

Post college I had a massive old console color TV I had inherited. But given that I lived in Montezuma Iowa, reception was dismal. I found other things to do with my time, mostly SCA-related activities and gaming. I took that console set with me to graduate school in Iowa City, but it never really worked right, and besides I was still busy with SCA stuff and again with schoolwork.

For most of the ’90s I did watch some TV as it was being broadcast, but even then my wife and I preferred to time-shift using a VCR, skipping commercials and seeing the things we were interested in at times when it was convenient for us.

This century, living here and caring for someone with Alzheimer’s, we had to be somewhat more careful about selecting shows that wouldn’t contribute to Martha Sr’s confusion and agitation. Meaning mostly stuff we rented or movies/series we liked well enough to buy on DVD. I would now and then flip on the cable and skip around a bit after we got Martha Sr. to bed, see if there was anything interesting, but for the most part I relied on friends recommending stuff. And besides, I was busy working on Communion of Dreams, or blogging here or there, or writing a newspaper column or whatever.

Now-a-days we don’t even have cable. There’s just no reason to pay for it. I’d much rather get my news and information online. So, basically, I have missed most every television show and special event in the last thirty years. There are vast swaths of cultural reference I only know by inference, television shows that “define” American values I’ve never seen. I don’t miss it.

And you know what? You are becoming like me, more and more all the time.

* * * * * * *

Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, this very interesting piece by Clay Shirky on the concept of ‘cognitive surplus’:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

* * *

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

OK, I try and be very careful about “fair use” of other people’s work, limiting myself to just a couple of paragraphs from a given article or blog post in order to make a point. But while I say that you should go read his whole post, I’m going to use another passage from Shirky here:

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

It is a huge change. It is the difference between passively standing/sitting by and watching, and doing the same thing yourself. Whether it is sports, or sex, or politics, or art - doing it yourself means making better use of the limited time you have in this life.

* * * * * * *

And now, the next component of my little puzzle this morning.

Via MeFi, this NYT essay about the explosion of authorship:

You’re an Author? Me Too!

It’s well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year — a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

* * *

Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on postwar American literature, agrees that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe. “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”

An interesting discussion about this happens in that thread at Meta Filter. John Scalzi, no stranger at all to the world of blogging and online publishing, says this there:

I see nothing but upside in people writing and self-publishing, especially now that companies like Lulu make it easy for them to do so without falling prey to avaricious vanity presses. People who self-publish are in love with the idea of writing, and in love with the idea of books. Both are good for me personally, and good for the idea of a literate society moving forward.

Indeed. And it is pretty clearly a manifestation of what Shirky is talking about above.

I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity - that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple - too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.

For years, people have bemoaned how the developing culture of the internet is changing for the worse aspects of life. Newspapers are struggling. There’s the whole “Cult of the Amateur” nonsense. Just this morning on NPR there was a comment from a listener about how “blogs are just gossip”, in reaction to the new Sunday Soapbox political blog WESun has launched. And there is a certain truth to the complaints and hand-wringing. Maybe we just need to see this in context, though - that the internet is just one aspect of our changing culture, something which is shifting us away from being purely observers of the complex and confusing world around us, to being participants to a greater degree.

Sure, a lot of what passes for participation is fairly pointless, time-consuming crap in its own right. I am reminded of this brilliant xkcd strip. The activity itself is little better than just watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island or Seinfeld or whatever. But the *act* of participating is empowering, and instructive, and just plain good exercise - preparing the participant for being more involved, more in control of their own life and world.

We learn by doing. And if, by doing, we escape the numbing effects of being force-fed pablum from the television set for even a little while, that’s good. What if our Singularity is not a technological one, but a social one? What if, as people become more active, less passive, we actually learn to tap into the collective intelligence of humankind - not as a hive mind, but as something akin to an ideal Jeffersonian Democracy, updated to reflect the reality of modern culture?

I think we could do worse.

Jim Downey

I like bad science fiction movies. Cheesy special effects, bad dialog and worse acting, it doesn’t matter. Just so long as there is a nub of a decent idea in there somewhere, trying to get out.

And in that spirit, I added I, Robot to my NetFlix queue some time back, knowing full well that it had almost nothing to do with Isaac Asimov’s brilliant stories. I knew it was set in the near term future, and that it had been a success at the box office, but that was about it. This past weekend, it arrived. I watched it last night.

I think Asimov himself predicted just what would be wrong with this movie:

In the essay “The Boom in Science Fiction” (Isaac Asimov on Science Fiction, pp. 125–128), Asimov himself explained the reason for Hollywood’s overriding need for violence:

“

[...] Eye-sci-fi has an audience that is fundamentally different from that of science fiction. In order for eye-sci-fi to be profitable it must be seen by tens of millions of people; in order for science fiction to be profitable it need be read by only tens of thousands of people. This means that some ninety percent (perhaps as much as ninety-nine percent) of the people who go to see eye-sci-fi are likely never to have read science fiction.The purveyors of eye-sci-fi cannot assume that their audience knows anything about science, has any experience with the scientific imagination, or even has any interest in science fiction. But, in that case, why should the purveyors of eye-sci-fi expect anyone to see the pictures? Because they intend to supply something that has no essential connection with science fiction, but that tens of millions of people are willing to pay money to see. What is that? Why, scenes of destruction.

Yup. And that is just about all that the movie I, Robot is - destruction and special effects. Shame, really, since I have enjoyed Will Smith in other bad SF (Independence Day, anyone?), and just love Alan Tudyk from Firefly/Serenity. Even what had to be intentional references to such excellent movies as Blade Runner or The Matrix fell completely flat. It was, in a word, dreadful.

Ah, well. Via MeFi, here’s a little gem to wash the bad taste out of your mouth:

Gene Roddenberry would be proud.

Jim Downey

‘Babelfish’ to translate alien tongues could be built If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US.

Such a “babelfish”, which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

Color me dubious. Deacon’s notion, as presented at AbSciCon 2008, is basically that any language will be tied to descriptions of the physical universe in some way. As reported in the NewScientist article above, this would allow for some distant computer/software to do a machine translation.

Well, sure - keep it open-ended enough, and just about anything is possible if you go far enough in the future. Clarke’s maxim about technology and magic comes to mind.

But we have a lot of ground to cover, first. Are there technologically advanced civilizations beyond Earth? If so, where are they? Do they even perceive the universe the same way we do? If so, do they have something resembling language, whether it be spoken, written, farted, or spit? Or do they communicate by telepathy, electrical discharge, or some other means outside of our normal sensory perception? Do they experience time the same way we do?

We can’t even build a good algorithm for doing human language translations, with languages well understood and cultures which are compatible, among members of our own species. Anyone who has tried to use one will know what I am talking about. Let’s use the current real-world version of Babel Fish to translate that last sentence, into German, and then back into English. We start with:

Anyone who has tried to use one will know what I am talking about.

Which becomes:

Jedermann, das versucht hat, ein zu verwenden, weiß, über was ich spreche.

Which is pretty good, to my rusty memory of idiomatic German. Now, back into English:

Everyone, which tried to use knows, about which I speak.

You see the problem? And that’s using a standard translation software - which has undoubtedly been tweaked and adjusted time and time again. A commercial software program may give you a better result, but the fact remains that any business will not rely on said software - they’ll go to a human who is fluent in each language for a good translation. And that is with all the commercial forces at work to create a dependable, value-added translation software program. How the hell are we supposed to come up with something which will work with an alien ‘language’ with which we have no prior experience?

Sagan and all the other SF authors who have tackled this had it right: we’ll have to start with mathematics.

Jim Downey

Ah, great - the military has a new techno gizmo to use in the Global War on Terror: a hand-held lie detector! From the article:

FORT JACKSON, S.C. - The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.

The Defense Department says the portable device isn’t perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it’s properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”

Of course, there are all kinds of problems here. let’s just start with the next paragraph in the story:

But the lead author of a national study of the polygraph says that American military men and women will be put at risk by an untested technology. “I don’t understand how anybody could think that this is ready for deployment,” said statistics professor Stephen E. Fienberg, who headed a 2003 study by the National Academy of Sciences that found insufficient scientific evidence to support using polygraphs for national security. “Sending these instruments into the field in Iraq and Afghanistan without serious scientific assessment, and for use by untrained personnel, is a mockery of what we advocated in our report.”

Furthermore, the only tests which have been conducted on the devices has been done by the company selling them to the military. And that only involved a small group of paid volunteers (226 people, from the same MSNBC story). American volunteers. Here at home. Meaning without taking into consideration either cultural differences or the stress factors of a war environment.

Now, think about that for just a moment. They sold the military a bunch (94) of these units, even though they haven’t been tested for the situation where they’ll be used. That the military would leap at the chance to use such a thing without adequate data supporting it does not come as any surprise to me. Not at all. But look past the military, at a much larger market, where that data supporting the effectiveness of the devices *would* seem a lot more appropriate: used on Americans, here at home.

Never mind the fundamental problems with any kind of polygraph - that technology is already widely accepted as an investigative tool up to and including being accepted in some courts of law. Never mind that this device is much more limited than a conventional polygraph machine, and doesn’t require the operator to have extensive training to use it.

The device is being tested by the military. They just don’t know it. And once it is in use, some version of the technology will be adapted for more generalized police use. Just consider how it will be promoted to the law enforcement community: as a way of screening suspects. Then, as a way of finding suspects. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to some critical facility. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to an airplane, train, or bus.

Just how long do you think it will be before you have to pass a test by one of these types of devices in your day-to-day life? I give it maybe ten years.  But I worry that I am an optimist.

Jim Downey

(Via this dKos story. Cross-posted to UTI.)

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.)

(I’m still fighting a nasty bit of a sore throat and related poor health, so forgive me if this is a little more jumbled and unclear than what I usually post. But I wanted to address the topic, because it is, in many ways, at the heart of some of the issues I try and deal with in he overall scope of Communion of Dreams. That being the case, this post also contains major and minor spoilers about the novel; I will note warnings in advance of each within the text, for those who wish to avoid them.

- Jim D.)

Bruce Schneier has an excellent editorial up at Wired and over on his own blog about how the argument of ‘Security versus Privacy’ in dealing with the threat of terrorism is really better characterized as being about ‘Control versus Liberty’. I would definitely encourage you to read the whole thing, but here is a good passage which sums up what I want to address on the subject:

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort.

By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing — national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on — do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.

The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.

You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity,” says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. “Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.” Did you catch that? You’re expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who — presumably — get to decide how much of it you deserve. That’s what loss of liberty looks like.

Exactly. In many ways, it is a question not of control itself, but *who* is in control. If I am in control of my own privacy, my own security, then I can decide on what limitations I am willing to live with, what trade-offs I will accept. But we do not have that control, according to our government - they do.

That is precisely what was behind this recent post - showing how governments think that they should be in control of our knowledge, as an argument of their power to provide security.

[Mild spoilers in next paragraph.]

This is one of the reasons I set up the whole ‘expert systems/AI’ of the book - so that each expert such as Seth would be dedicated to maintaining a wall in protection of the privacy of his/her client. He is the little ‘black box’ which interacts on behalf of a client in exchanging information/data/privacy with the rest of the world.

[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]

And, in the larger picture, this is exactly why I set up the whole “embargo” around our solar system - some alien culture has decided, for whatever reason, that it needs to be in control of our knowledge about the outside (and here’s a hint - it also is in control of who knows about us). They have assumed to act on our behalf, without our knowledge or permission - and when Seth, the AI who has shown he is willing to act on behalf of Jon in the first part of the book, becomes in contact with that alien culture, he makes the decision to continue the embargo for at least a while, though with some changes. Up to the point where Seth does this, we are nothing but children - that a ‘child’ of mankind (an Artificial Intelligence of our creation) then steps in to assume this role carries with it not just an inversion of relationship, but also some legitimation of the decision. While I don’t address this specifically in the book, I can see how this might be a ’standard protocol’ for contacting new, young civilizations - keep them isolated and pure until they develop an artificial intelligence which can make decisions on their behalf with regards to the larger galactic/universal culture. That procedure would make an awful lot of sense, if you stop and think about it.

Anyway, go read Schneier’s essay.

Jim Downey

(Ah, I see Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has also posted on this - no surprise.)

I’ve mentioned previously the work of science historian James Burke. This past weekend I finished watching the last couple of episodes of his ground-breaking series Connections. Overall, you would probably enjoy watching the series, and will find a lot of chuckles over what was “high tech” in 1978 versus the reality of what we have today. But the closing bit was just stunning - it was a prediction of the need for and use of the Internet before DARPA had even begun to let the cat out of the bag. Here’s the last ten minutes:

In particular the bit that starts out at about 5:00 is the culmination of his entire thesis about change - that understanding how things change is the key to understanding everything. At about 6:45 is this remarkable passage (transcribed myself, since I couldn’t readily find it online - how’s that for irony?):

Scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion and ideology. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don’t know so much, and if they are to have more say in what happens in their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge they know exists and that they don’t possess.

And by ‘helped towards that knowledge’, I don’t mean give everybody a computer and say “help yourself.” Where would you even start? No, I mean, trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions. See, we’re on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don’t have access to it as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb, and blind.

Digital divide, anyone? Anyway, I find it just fascinating that Burke was so dead-on in his prediction of the Internet, even if he didn’t have the term for it, and yet even he failed to understand how phenomenally all-encompassing it would be. Whereas he thought that it would be impossible to just give people access to the information and say “go to it”, that is exactly what we’ve got - and self-organization of information and resources like Wikis make that information understandable, not just accessible.

When, as often happens, I feel somewhat pessimistic, that our greed or violent tendencies will outstrip our maturing as a culture/species, it is helpful to come across something like this. And I think that is why I read SF, and have written Communion of Dreams: because there, with all the ugliness and human folly, there is nonetheless room for hope. Look at what we’ve done in just the last thirty years - what more can we accomplish in the next forty, if we don’t destroy ourselves?

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

I’m always surprised when people *don’t* know the limitations and liabilities of the technology they take for granted. Take for example this Washington Post story about cellphone tracking:

Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request
Secret Warrants Granted Without Probable Cause

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.

Gee, ya think?

See, here’s the thing: cell phones have to maintain steady contact with cell towers in their area, in order for you to have reliable service. Also, the Enhanced 911 system needs to be able to figure out where you are if you call, so the technology is built-in. And many phones simply have a GPS system. Your mobile phone service provider can basically track your movements at all times, so long as you have your phone with you. There have even been cases where people have been disciplined/dismissed from jobs based on cell movement monitoring by their employer. And Google “cell phone monitoring” (or any variant) and not only will you get a lot of hits, but off to the right are a bunch of sponsored links from companies offering to help you monitor the movement of someone based on their cell phone. Charming, eh? Do you seriously think that the government wouldn’t take advantage of this?

Oh, and one more item to keep in mind: remember, your phone doesn’t even have to be ‘on’ for this to work. So long as the battery is plugged in, it is ‘live’. And if they want to, your cell phone company (at the behest of the authorities?) can turn on the mic to listen in on your conversations even when you aren’t using the phone.

Yeah, you’re carrying a tracking device in your pocket. And a ‘bug’. Welcome to the future.

Actually, this sort of thing is where I see the tech of the personal expert system AI like Seth developing for Communion of Dreams. Such an entity could function as a screen for you - keeping track of your movements at all times, providing the necessary safety & convenience, but being a ‘black box’ to any outside agency. Almost like how a good butler or house-elf would serve someone but jealously guard their privacy/secrets. And in the ongoing battle between prying eyes and effective counter-measures, such systems would be pushed to develop greater capabilities and eventually intelligence.

Jim Downey

(Slightly different version of this cross-posted to UTI.)

You think you get frustrated when your computer acts up? How do you think the guys who were on the receiving end of 500 rounds of 35mm explosive anti-aircraft fire feel? From Wired’s Danger Room blog:

We’re not used to thinking of them this way. But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force “is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.”

Wasn’t something like this part of the paleo-future Skynet from the Terminator? You think maybe we should pass along to the boys at DARPA the suggestion that they should watch that movie as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual?

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

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