From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
The image of Seth disappeared, to be replaced by what seemed to be a miniature landscape of hills, a road, a small river, and a bridge. On one of the hills appeared a small person, looking around as though trying to find something. Ling commenced to play with the controls on the side of the projector. Jon didn’t recognize the game, looked to Klee.
The German smiled. In English he said, “No, it’s probably not a game you’ve ever played. It’s a little something Seth and I came up with to help her learn the fundamentals of game theory. In this first level, she has to learn how to communicate with the figure, and agree on a meeting place. The obvious choice is dictated by the terrain features: where the road crosses the river, there is a bridge. That is a unique point in the landscape, and hence a good starting point to establish a reference. The game goes on to introduce other concepts,using a variety of terrain features, multiple players, tacit and explicit communication, cooperation, and competition. She’s quite good at it, and no matter which variables the machine uses, Ling sees the essential key to each scenario quickly. Soon she’ll have mastered the principles of a zero-sum game, and we’ll move on to other lessons.”
* * * * * * *
Via BoingBoing:
‘Sleepy market town’ surrounded by ring of car cameras
Despite low levels of crime, police are installing a network of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras around historic Royston, Herts.
Police claim the devices will help catch criminals as Royston lies close to the borders of three counties and is the juncture of several main roads.
However, opponents claim the scheme is “grossly disproportionate”, an invasion of residents’ privacy and an unlawful expansion of Britain’s Big Brother state.
The system records the number plates of all vehicles passing through the cameras, logging their details in national database for up to five years.
* * * * * * *
It’s not the first time it’s been done, of course, though this is a somewhat larger scale. And after all, why should we worry? The use of surveillance cameras and other scanners is popular. It makes people feel safer. And if you aren’t doing anything wrong, why should you care?
Control the rules, and you control the game. See you at the crossroads.
Jim Downey
As noted, I’ve been more than a bit preoccupied with something else of late. But I do want to take a moment and pass along this delightful tribute, via Phil Plait:
I was never a hard-core Shuttle fan. The whole project was a series of compromises, both political and technological, and it never lived up to the original promise. And yet . . .
. . . and yet even with all that being true, the Shuttle, and the people who made it work, undeniably accomplished remarkable things. It would be churlish to say otherwise, just because it didn’t meet my youthful expectations.
We all compromise in the face of reality. But those who still manage to create the future even with that limitation deserve our honor, and our praise. Life is short, and the stars are far away.
Jim Downey
Via The Last Shuttle, an amazing Virtual Reality Panorama of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s flight deck at the time of decommissioning.
*sigh*
More on all of this, once I’m not entirely preoccupied with getting Her Final Year launched.
Jim Downey
From the first chapter of Communion Of Dreams, describing a terraforming operation:
It was going to take generations to finish, even using mass microbots and fabricating the construction materials from the Martian sands. Tens of thousands of the specially programmed microbots, a few centimeters long and a couple wide, would swarm an area, a carpet of shifting, building insects.
In my novel, the ‘bots are a basic technology, and are a factor in the plot at several points.
And here’s a first step at making them real:
Kilobots Are Cheap Enough to Swarm in the Thousands
These are Kilobots. They’re fairly simple little robots about the size of a quarter that can move around on vibrating legs, blink their lights, and communicate with each other. On an individual basis, this isn’t particularly impressive, but Kilobots aren’t designed to be used on an individual basis. Costing a mere $14 each and buildable in about five minutes, you don’t just get yourself one single Kilobot. Or ten. Or a hundred. They’re designed to swarm in the thousands, although the Harvard group that’s working on them is starting out with a modest 25:
It’s a cool little article, and there are plenty of links to related efforts. But what was particularly fun was this video from the Harvard scientists behind the Kilobots:
That’s one small step for 29 robots, one giant leap for robotkind.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Failure, Health, Privacy, PZ Myers, Science, tech, Travel
I just took my blood pressure. Because of past problems with hypertension, I keep a pretty close eye on it. Here are three readings, using a very good automatic digital monitor:
- 123/85
- 121/88
- 115/81
This is how they usually recommend doing it – taking several readings over the course of a few minutes, to help get a good sense of where your bp actually is since there are natural variations and just one reading can be misleading. And those numbers are pretty good – showing that my blood pressure is under control thanks to a combination of diet, exercise, and drugs.
Happily, my doctor trusts me to keep an eye on my bp, because whenever I go in to the clinic, my numbers jump. The readings above would probably be a good 20/10 points higher, if not a lot more. See, I have a mild case of “white coat syndrome”. I just dislike almost any kind of testing by strangers like that (one of the reasons I am happy to work on my own, in my own business, and on my own time).
I also hate traveling. Well, more accurately, I hate having to put up with the hassles and intrusion on my privacy that goes along with dealing with airport security. Flying is fine. So is driving around in a new place, seeing the sights, experiencing a new culture. But dealing with the TSA or any similar entity? Gah – I hate it with a passion.
And if the latest debacle of an idea to provide ‘security’ comes to pass, I’m probably going to hate it even more:
Terrorist ‘pre-crime’ detector field tested in United States
Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly ‘sense’ whether you are planning to commit a crime.
Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.
Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person’s gaze, to judge a subject’s state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.
Charming.
Of course, scientists are skeptical:
Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, a think-tank based in Washington DC that promotes the use of science in policy-making, is pessimistic about the FAST tests. He thinks that they will produce a large proportion of false positives, frequently tagging innocent people as potential terrorists and making the system unworkable in a busy airport. “I believe that the premise of this approach — that there is an identifiable physiological signature uniquely associated with malicious intent — is mistaken. To my knowledge, it has not been demonstrated,” he says. “Without it, the whole thing seems like a charade.”
As well they should be. Even the DHS spokesperson says that the FAST system was only “70% accurate” in lab tests. As PZ Myers notes:
Feeling anxious about the job interview you’re flying to? You will be strip-searched. Angry because the incompetent boob at the ticket counter bumped you from your flight? Your body cavities must be inspected. Steely in your resolve, forthright in your determination to strike the infidel? Welcome aboard!
More security theatre. Wonderful.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Brave New World, DARPA, Firefox, movies, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube
So, the massive ballistics testing is done. Most everything has been cleaned up and put away. My head has stopped throbbing from the repeated low-level concussion of firing over 7,000 rounds of ammo, much of it very powerful and from very short barrels. Now it’s time to see if I can get my attention shifted over to all the other stuff I’ve ignored for the last couple of weeks.
Like this wonderful glimpse of the future here now:
I think it says something – a lot, actually – about the state of the world today that some of the first applications of functional brainwave-controlled mechanisms would show up in this kind of consumer product rather than a military application. It’s not the first such toy, either. Which isn’t to say that DARPA or some similar organization hasn’t been experimenting with such tech, but still.
Again and again, I am surprised at how quickly some of the predictions from fiction (including my own) are coming to be actuality. But that’s just the nature of the beast – what you think is going to happen later happens sooner, what you think is going to happen sooner sometimes doesn’t happen at all.
Related, I’ve just about given up on ever getting a straight answer from Trapdoor about if/when Communion of Dreams is actually going to be published. I’ll worry about it after I see to getting Her Final Year out. Some things I can control with brainwaves (indirectly), some things I cannot.
Jim Downey
Interesting:
From the FRIDA project page:
Today, the development is at a stage where several prototypes have left the research lab and are being tested in pilot applications, with more work required to reach a fully agile assembly scenario.
This is more of an economic development than it is the advent of our New Robotic Overlords. Having such a robot on a human scale which is fairly modular means that it can be plugged into existing factories and systems with minimal additional investment. Depending on the cost of these things once they’re ready for sale, they could wind up supplanting human labor – likely first in environments where it is too dangerous/costly for humans to work, then increasingly in general repetitive labor.
The Utopian science fiction writers foresaw a society where robotic workers freed humans for a life of ease – allow people to do creative work at their leisure. Cynical bastard that I am, I always figured that such a life of ease would mostly be reserved for the people who *owned* the robotic workers, with everyone else struggling to get by in a society which no longer really needed human labor. Current economic trends have tended to bear this out.
But I suppose we’ll see what the future actually holds.
Jim Downey
I’ve heard of engineering projects described as “graceful.” My uncle Ted was one of the people primarily responsible for building such a project – the Clark Bridge.
But this . . . this goes beyond graceful, and straight to beautiful, like something out of a dream:
Via a delightful blog post by Robert Krulwich, science reporter for NPR. He’s got more videos and complete explanation there.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Babylon 5, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Wall Street Journal
A good friend sent me a review in the WSJ about Physics of the Future. Here’s a good excerpt from the review:
That is the core message of Michio Kaku’s “Physics of the Future.” Despite its title, the book is not so much about physics as it is about gadgets and technology, described by Mr. Kaku—professor, blogger and television host—on a wide-ranging tour of what to expect from technological progress over the next century or so.
Much of the terrain Mr. Kaku surveys will be familiar to futurists, but less technically oriented readers are likely to find it fascinating—and related with commendable clarity. The changes that Mr. Kaku expects range from the readily foreseeable to the considerably more esoteric.
Augmented reality—in which useful data overlay what we see with our eyes—already exists in rudimentary form on smartphones, but Mr. Kaku predicts a time, only a decade or two away, when a much denser information stream will be fed directly to our retinas by contact lenses or optical implants. Want to fix a car, perform emergency surgery, or prepare a gourmet meal? The app will tell you what to do—and guide your work. Have trouble learning a foreign language? Expect a useful universal translator to do the work for you. And the ability to connect computers directly to human nervous systems will drastically improve the lives of those who are paralyzed, blind or deaf—as it is already beginning to do. Eventually, we may know the sort of virtual worlds illustrated in science-fiction novels like Greg Egan’s “Permutation City.”
Hmm . . . sound familiar? This is exactly the sort of tech I stipulate as being pretty mature (completely developed and integrated into everyday use) in Communion of Dreams.
Fun. I may have to get a copy of that book.
Jim Downey
(Thanks to ML for the link!)
This is *very* clever, and really quite wonderful:
More info about the whole project here: Immaterials: Light painting WiFi
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 