Some pretty remarkable technology:
Because of the ability to slice time fine enough, and the ability to send an accurate enough laser pulse, this demonstrates how it is possible to see the reflected image of something hidden behind a wall.
It’s still fairly crude, but is incredibly impressive. It feels somewhat like what early photography or radio was like: the slightest taste of what is to come.
Something to . . . reflect on.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Music, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired, Writing stuff
Hmm. Quoting a lot of music lately. Wonder why that is.
It’s not explicit in the book, but there is an implication that the Experts of the government have access to pretty much *all* private conversations and communications in 2052. Having true Artificial Intelligences makes it fairly easy to break most routine security, and that’s why you have things like ‘privacy screens’ and military-grade isolation fields – it’s an attempt to maintain some level of privacy. There are also some explicit passages like this one from the beginning of Chapter Nine:
“After he experienced several instances of unusual dream activity, Jon asked my thin-film counterpart back on Earth to collect data on the subject. Reports in discussion groups, news sources, and public postings on any significant change in the
frequency of dreams or their content. My dup went back through the last year’s datafiles to establish a baseline for the study, then I compared that to activity for the last few weeks. There is a significant deviation from the norm.”
Think about that – Seth, Jon’s ‘Expert’, can casually go back through all the material of the previous year looking for a specific pattern to conversations. That is an immense amount of data, and a similarly immense amount of computing power.
And that’s the world we live in today. If you have any illusions that you have some modicum of privacy from our government, read this:
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
* * *
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
* * *
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
* * *
In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”
The article is long, but informative. And frightening. That is, if you have any illusions that you have some modicum of privacy. As they also say in the article: “Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. ‘We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,’ he says.”
But are we even that far?
Again, I almost regret that “I . . . see . . . things.”
Jim Downey
*Don’t say words you’re gonna regret
Don’t let the fire rush to your head
I’ve heard the accusation before
And I ain’t gonna take any more
Believe me
The sun in your Eyes
Made some of the lies worth believing
From late in Chapter Two:
“All right. Let’s get her inside and get Seth working with her. By the way, what’s her name?”
“Chu Ling.”
Jon nodded his head, touched the wafer under his ear. “Seth, download the record of the last few minutes from my pc. Then make the necessary arrangements for us to get inside with the girl. I’ll meet you in the conference room; since she isn’t wired, you’ll have to conduct the tests from the holo projector there. And tell Magurshak I’m on my way to lunch.”
“Understood.”
“Let’s go.” Jon looked to Gish and the young girl.
“Oh, and Seth . . . ”
“Yes?”
“Prepare a Mandarin language program for me, OK?”
“It’s waiting for you.”
From this past Monday:
Microsoft unveils universal translator that converts your voice into another language
Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice.
In a demo of the prototype software (starts around the 12 minute mark), Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, says a long sentence in English, and then has it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can definitely hear an edge of digitized “Microsoft Sam,” but overall it’s remarkable how the three translations still sound just like Rashid.
In order for the translation system to do its work it needs about an hour of training, which allows it to create a model of your voice. This model is then mushed into Microsoft’s standard text-to-speech model for the target translation language. For example, Microsoft’s standard model of Spanish will have a default “S” (ess) sound, but the training process replaces it with your “S” sound. This is done for every individual sound (phoneme) in Microsoft’s text-to-speech model for Spanish. The creator of the software, Frank Soong, says that this approach can be used to translate between all 26 languages supported by the Microsoft Speech Platform, which covers most of the world’s major languages.
OK, first thing: this is *NOT* the universal translator from Star Trek.
But it is *exactly* what I had envisioned as the tech that Jon asks Seth to use in the excerpt from Communion of Dreams quoted above. The idea is that Seth would have such a wide selection of Jon’s phonemes in his knowledge base that it would be simple for him to use that for translation. In this case, all he would have to do is install the necessary program files into Jon’s embedded personal pc – so that Jon could use it to communicate with the girl whether or not Seth was ‘present’.
So, yeah, another prediction nailed.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Pandemic, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
Unsurprisingly, I have been thinking a lot about St. Cybi’s Well, the prequel to Communion of Dreams I have had simmering for some years. I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because more than a few folks have been asking what the next book will be and when it will be available. Some quotes from the Amazon reviews to illustrate this point:
“I’m looking forward to his next book.”
“The worst thing about buying this book is now I’m waiting for a sequel!”
“I hope Downey will return to this alternate future history and tell us more about the deeds and dreams of the people who live there.”
* * * * * * *
He got down to the main street, turned left and continued. On his side of the street were some small office buildings, then the large city park he’d noticed on the drive in. Then he came to the long, tall wall. Pausing for a moment, he pulled the uniPod out of his satchel, removed the wireless earpiece and pushed it into his left ear. Then he fiddled with the uni, tapping a series of commands on the screen, until the machine found the local hotspot and downloaded the audio tour.
“The park wall, just in front of you, was part of the effort of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, to rehabilitate the old castle grounds in the late 19th century. As you move along the wall, you will see it is adorned with totems of various animals in a realistic depiction, climbing over the wall as though to escape. This was The Lord Bute’s response to being denied the creation of a zoo in this park by the city fathers at the time. As you move along the wall you’ll soon see the looming Clock Tower, a favorite of the Lord Bute. Working with his architect, the renown yet whimsical William Burges, the two men sought to bring to life a bit of what they thought the middle ages should have been.
“This is the casual tour guide. More detailed descriptions and an in-depth discussion of any and all topics related to this site are available. Just select the level of information you require.”
That’s an excerpt from Chapter 1 of St. Cybi’s Well. The book is set in 2012, the protagonist is Darnell Sidwell (the “he” in the above excerpt), and concerns the onset of the fire-flu. Obviously, all of this is part of the ‘backstory’ for Communion of Dreams.
Seems pretty straight-forward, right? Tech feels good for the present day. Why did I choose the term “uniPod” though? Just to get around Apple’s trademark or something?
Nope. It’s because I wrote that on November 29, 2005. I know that because of the “date modified” info in the WordPerfect file.
The iPad was introduced in April, 2010.
* * * * * * *
A friend posted this comment to his Facebook wall yesterday:
I’ve been thinking about So-and-so’s post and subsequent thread the other day regarding the inarguable expansion of militias. Living here in Paradise Lost, it’s sometimes easy to lose sense of the prevailing winds of sentiment sweeping across the American landscape elsewhere. But it’s apparent that there are a lot of pissed-off people on both sides of the ideological fence and that each faction is seemingly preparing itself for more – and ever escalating – confrontations. And so I have to ask: Do you think we’re heading for a civil war? (And yes, I am being serious)
I sent him a link to this blog post from two years ago: Playing with fire.
And from page one of Communion of Dreams:
The Commons had been borne of the fire-flu, with so few people left out in the great northern plains after it was finally all over that it was a relatively simple matter to just turn things back over to nature. Effectively, that happened a few short years after the flu swept around the globe. According to law, it was codified almost a decade later in the late Twenties, after the Restoration was complete and the country was once again whole — expanded, actually, to include what had been Canada, minus independent Quebec. Hard to believe that was more than twenty years ago.
* * * * * * *
This is from the end of Chapter 9 in Communion of Dreams:
Jon thought he should clarify. “Jackie’s got the gist of it, but let me try and explain a little more completely. Sometime during the chaos of the post-flu, there were two marginal groups that got together. One was the heir of something called The Order, a reactionary offshoot of the old Aryan Nation.”
“Ah, neo-Nazis. Yes, I know them.”
“Thought so. The other group was a splinter of the radical environmental organization Earthfirst!, sort of like the far-left fringe of the Greens. They managed to create a hybrid belief system: that true adherence to God’s natural law would bring man back to a state of grace, suitable to be readmitted to the Garden of Eden. To promote this belief, they want to see a complete restoration of the Earth’s biosphere to a natural state, with humans having almost no environmental impact.”
Via a MetaFilter thread I came across this morning, a link to this movie: END:CIV
In a quote promoting the film on that website:
“In END:CIV, Franklin López does a refreshingly thorough and well packaged job of laying out the inherently self-destructive nature of westernized civilization and the ineptitude of peaceful reform. Using Derrick Jensen’s Endgame as a lose framework, López not only identifies root causes of systemic oppression and exploitation, but also exposes the deceptive nature of reformism and green-washing, instead spotlighting examples of indigenous resistance and the Earth Liberation Front. By the end of the film, passionate viewers will no longer just be questioning not whether western civilization is justified, but what they themselves can do to help bring it down.”
-Leslie James Pickering
Former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front
* * * * * * *
I write about this not to tout my prophetic abilities. No, just to illustrate that for anyone who is paying close attention to both technological and sociological trends, certain things seem to be pretty obvious. As I told the Tribune:
“I’ve tried to anchor the world of 2052 firmly in what our world today is really like, but extending trends we have seen operate in the last 40 years,” he said. “Toss in a few wildcard events, some unexpected discoveries, and then cross your fingers.
“And to a certain extent, this is why I don’t really think of ‘Communion of Dreams’ as a typical ‘science fiction’ book — it is solidly grounded in known science and built from the reality around us,” he added. “The people in it are all real people, not unlike folks you know or would find in any mainstream novel. In this sense, it is just another work of fiction, though one which is a bit more speculative.”
Oh, and to say that pretty much everything I had written six or seven years ago as background material for St. Cybi’s Well has to be thrown out. The fictional world I came up with for 2012 has, largely, come into being. Or seems to be pretty damned close to happening just as I foresaw. Granted, there hasn’t been a theocratic regime come to power in the US – but can you honestly look at the current Republican rhetoric and not say that we’re close to that?
Gods, I just hope I’m not right about the onset of the pandemic flu . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, DARPA, Government, Humor, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, YouTube
Ah, looking around, seeing the different components of the rise of the machines. Here’s a nice bit from BoingBoing:
And then this news item: Police Drone Crashes into Police
Make that “tired and embarrassed.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Feedback, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Press, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Anticipation is a good thing. I think that, particularly when you get a little older, get a little jaded, it is easy to lose a sense of excitement about something that is coming. Or perhaps not lose it, but no longer trust it. Because so very few things ever turn out like we want, or plan.
Life’s experiences, life’s disappointments, teach us this. It is hard not to be cynical, just out of simple self-preservation.
And yet . . .
And yet, I find myself looking forward with anticipation for the first bit of press attention to Communion of Dreams. Even though I already know what it says. Even though I know *exactly* how it was put together, having myself written many such columns/articles about the arts for the very same small-town paper. Even though I have had countless other articles in the press about me and the things I have done or been part of.
Why? I’m not sure.
I “believe” in the value of the book, and the story I tell. But then, I also “believed” in the value of Her Final Year, and look how completely flat that book fell on its face.
But still, I am looking forward to tomorrow’s article. To the Kindle promotion. I’ve even created a Facebook “event” for it. I guess you might say that I have “hope.”
And that reminds me of an appropriate quote:
“There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.”
See you tomorrow.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Press, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Some good news items to share this morning.
One, the piece in the Tribune this Sunday about Communion of Dreams is going to be quite substantial. I’ve seen the preliminary copy, and I think that people are going to enjoy it. A lot.
Two, some numbers from last month/since we launched the book.
In terms of visits to the site, there were over a thousand in February. That’s pretty decent, and I would like to thank everyone.
In terms of how many copies of the book are now out there (the Amazon editions, not the PDF version), I am happy to report that it is now about 850. That includes both the paperback and Kindle editions. And again I would like to thank everyone who has helped to make this a reality. And in particular I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to let me know they’ve enjoyed the book, or have gone and written a review on Amazon. That is both rewarding and very helpful.
Of course, I would love to double that number this weekend with the free Kindle download. Or even sales! So please, share the news with friends and people who love to read.
Thanks again!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Expert systems, Google, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech
This news item is making the rounds:
What’s next? Perhaps throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.
That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.
Well, they aren’t contact lenses, but they are very much exactly the sort of ‘cyberwear’ tech that I stipulate as standard for the world of Communion of Dreams. And as I mentioned four years ago.
The future’s so bright, you gotta have goggles. Complete with a primitive A-series expert called “Android.”
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 