Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, General Musings, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
So, it seems that we’re taking another step into the development of the types of “experts” (expert systems) that I envision for Communion: today Reuters news service is launching an automated stock-trading algorythm which will scan news articles and make stock purchasing decisions for clients. From Yahoo! Finance:
Reuters Group PLC plans to launch a computer program today aimed at hedge fund and bank trading desk clients that are already Reuters subscribers. The program is unique in that it scans news articles, originally just from Reuters’s own news service but eventually from other news services too, and measures whether companies are getting positive or negative news coverage. The program will then trigger stock trades based on the algorithmic computations it makes. In addition to tracking individual company names, the program can track entire industries or exchanges, ideal for ETF plays.
Is this Seth’s great-great-whatever- grandpappy?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
I’m a big fan of the blog Paleo-Future. The appeal is probably obvious, because it focuses on “A future that never was.” As I say on the Communion of Dreams site:
Welcome to Communion of Dreams, set about 50 years from now in an “alternative future history.” The world I have envisioned in this book is recognizable, in the same way that the 1950’s are recognizable, but with a comparable amount of unpredictable change as between that era and the present. Most authors will avoid writing about the near-term future, because it is easy for a work to become dated. I’m not that smart. Or perhaps I’m just more willing to jump in and explore what could be just over the horizon, if things work out a certain way. Nah, scratch that – let’s just go with ‘I’m not that smart.’
I’m sure that my predictions about artificial intelligence, psychic abilities, tech development, our future in space, et cetera, will all someday be profiled on some future version of Paleo-Future. You just can’t get all this stuff right.
Which is OK. The job of the science fiction author isn’t to predict the future, let alone create it. It is to posit a possible future, and within that context explore some aspects of humankind – or at least tell a good story. I like to think that I accomplish those things…and that I might even hit the jackpot and make a few predictions which will come true.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, General Musings, Marketing, movies, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
Via BoingBoing, an interesting (though dated – written in 2003) paper by Michael Schmitz titled Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies. This paper deals just with movies, but naturally all authors want to see their books translated into that medium, so…
The paper is an interesting survey of how human-computer interactions have been depicted. Perhaps the most interesting section deals with the movie Minority Report
from 2002 (which I just saw last year), and talks about how in the time period of the movie (2048 – about the same time period as I set for Communion) retina-recognition will allow for ubiquitous ID of individuals, and how this will not only be used by the government, but also by advertisers and marketing departments.
[Mild spoiler warning.]
This was actually part of the reason that I designed the ‘evolution’ of the tech I posit for the expert systems in my book – as part of a new manifestation of the battle between privacy and business. Because I too think that companies will employ increasingly intrusive technologies to identify and track consumer spending habits – we can see this already in on-line shopping at places like Amazon.com, or in ‘Rewards’ systems at grocery stores and other retailers where you get a discount for allowing them to track your purchasing habits. I think that sooner or later our basic ‘ad/spam blocker’ type of software will become more sophisticated in thwarting the attempts to invade our privacy, and that eventually primative artificial intelligence expert systems such as we have now will be used in this manner. In the classic battle between armour and firepower, the whole thing will tend to escalate, until we reach the point where we have the technology behind Seth (the S-series gel-based computing systems). Of course, along the way many other functions will be bundled into such an expert system, the aggregation leading to something akin to true artificial intelligence.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 