Singularity Trends
How does technology relate to the world around us? Consumer devices, instant messaging, web search, world politics, space travel, and the nature of our existence as humans: Technology is driving our evolution in all of these areas at breakneck speeds. The emergent need to extend our awareness into our tools and the environment around us is driving a revolution in smart objects that threatens to leave dumb materials exponentially farther behind. How much longer before our bodies are just another relic of the past?
No longer a radical idea, some claim. Opinions differ, but expect an ideological war over such ideas to break out in the mainstream over the next several years. The convergence of human communication and media and networks and systems is massively disrupting the social structures of past human history, and in doing so, changing the nature of human thought and our awareness of what it means to be human. What does the future hold? One World? One People? One Mind? Selected events that may be driving such trends, directly or tangentially, will be covered here as time allows.
Design
Emergence: Why Fight Nature? Biomimicry as Design
Jeremy Faludi takes a stab at describing a biomemetic approach to technological design. Design in nature often addresses both short and long term issues, unlike many industrial processes. If we drop the industrial age blinders and look clearly at the surrounding world, perhaps we will find that the most efficient solutions to our design problems already exist, everywhere around us. The Nature of Order series by Christopher Alexander makes for a good companion to this article.
Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things ala Spimes
Following up on his introduction of Spimes in 2004, Bruce Sterling has finally produced his design manifesto, Shaping Things. What is a Spime? Cory Doctorow reviews Shaping Things and states: "A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe, and it is the use of this information that informs the most exciting part of Sterling's argument." Sterling is on a roll again, following Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years, which should be required background reading.
Smart Objects: Custom Printing the Ultimate Shrinkwrap House
What is solar-powered, heat managing, and embedded with OLEDs? Meet SmartWrap, a mind-bending step beyond digital wallpaper. Metropolis Magazine has a great summary of this advanced composite replacement for conventional wall materials. Numerous proof-of-concepts have demonstrated that this is no blue sky pipedream, but instead a paradigm shifting development of truly geeky proportions. Cory Doctorow pinged SmartWrap on BoingBoing.
Gadgets
The iPhone is a game changer, a platform paradigm shift, finally enabling dedicated web site application interfaces, in lieu of a web browser. This never happened on the desktop, despite browser application frameworks developed by Mozilla, Yahoo, and Google. Lesson learned: Massive constraints = Massive innovation.
The much anticipated video iPod forshadowed the coming of the iPhone. The form factor is nicely suited for portable viewing of TV shows. Anyone remember the handheld TV craze that never reached critical mass in the U.S. due to poor reception? Steve Jobs has tapped into the ever simmering demand for portable sitcom content.
The Apple iMac continues to push the boundaries of computers without extraneous footprints. With OLED displays and printable circuit boards on the horizon, who knows when setting up your new computer will consist of unrolling a sheet of plastic and slapping it on the wall? Near term, there will be a need for a power cable, and perhaps a remote CPU box, but in time, these too shall fade away.
Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil has made the rounds of numerous talk shows, including an appearance on the NPR program, On Point. To allay your fears, Bruce Sterling made a common-sense argument against a cataclysmic singularity event, during his Long Now seminar presentation in 2004.
The long awaited. publication of Ray Kurzweil's vision of the Technological Singularity finds itself unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Some critics argue that Wolfram's New Kind of Science may predict the infeasibility of Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.
My opinion on the matter? Consciousness has an architecture that can be replicated and optimized across platforms. I find it to be highly implausible that consciousness is tied directly to a quasi-infinite regressive scaling of matter. The concept of self-awareness is not that impressive or particularly special, as the quality of our behavior on this planet attests and animal research continues to demonstrate.
Too many people shy away from the scientific study of self-awareness, somehow entangling it with religion and the idea of "soul". One discussion is scientific, the other is based upon faith. There is no conflict between religion and science here, except that imposed by those with an agenda.