This link has been bookmarked by 112 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 May 2007, by Paul Swartz.
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29 Jan 13
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We can plot this increase in travel speed on a graph — better still, plot the increase in maximum possible speed — and it looks quite pretty; it's a classic sigmoid curve, initially rising slowly, then with the rate of change peaking between 1920 and 1950, before tapering off again after 1970.
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We probably don't spend significantly more hours per year aboard aircraft that our 1900-period ancestors spent aboard steam trains, but at twenty times the velocity — or more — we travel much further and consume energy faster while we're doing so.
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It's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines.
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computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.
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It's like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h and are used by millions of people every month. There will be social consequences, and you can't easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.
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can think of several reasons. Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis.
Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. "What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?"
Think of it as google for real life.
We may even end up being required to do this, by our employers or insurers — in many towns in the UK, it is impossible for shops to get insurance, a condition of doing business, without demonstrating that they have CCTV cameras in place. Having such a lifelog would certainly make things easier for teachers and social workers at risk of being maliciously accused by a student or client.
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The capacity of memory diamond storage is of the order of Avogadro's number of bits per two molar weights. For diamond, that works out at 6.022 x 1023 bits per 25 grams. So going back to my earlier figure for the combined lifelog data streams of everyone in Germany — twenty five grams of memory diamond would store six years' worth of data.
Six hundred grams of this material would be enough to store lifelogs for everyone on the planet (at an average population of, say, eight billion people) for a year. Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.
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Sooner or later there won't be a new model to upgrade to every year, the fab lines will have paid for themselves, and the bottom will fall out of the consumer electronics industry, just as it did for the steam locomotive workshops before them.
Before that happens, we're going to get used to some very disorienting social changes.
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Keeping track of those quaint old laws about personal privacy is going to be really important.
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And yet, these trends are emergent from the current direction of the telecommunications industry, and are likely to become visible as major cultural changes within the next ten to thirty years. None of them require anything but a linear progression from where we are now, in a direction we're already going in. None of them take into account external technological synergies, stuff that's not obviously predictable like brain/computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, or magic wands. I've purposefully ignored discussion of nanotechnology, tissue engineering, stem cells, genomics, proteomics, the future of nuclear power, the future of environmentalism and religion, demographics, our environment, peak oil and our future energy economy, space exploration, and a host of other topics.
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the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain.
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shanucoreA wonderful slice of futurism from Charles Stross, excerpted from a 2007 technology open day speech.
charlesstross futurism communication community computing culture design fun ideas innovation internet media politics privacy sciencefiction singularity society surveillance technology
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Peter CruickshankExtrapolating the consequence of Moores Law - total history, no privacy (Crarles Stross)
2007 blog culture privacy society opinion history technology
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And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.
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18 May 07
Susi MopsVortrag zur Zukunft durch Veränderung von Datenspeicherkapazitäten
Lifelogging zukunft science fiction speicher daten veränderung theorie
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(That, incidentally, is what makes the world wide web possible; it's not the technology but the fact that millions of people are throwing random stuff into their computers and publishing on it. You can't do that without ubiquitous cheap bandwidth and cheap terminals to let people publish stuff. And there seems to be a critical threshold for it to work; any BBS or network system seems to require a certain size of user base before it begins to acquire a culture of its own.)
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16 May 07
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Adam Crowe"capturing the data, indexing and searching the storage, and identifying relevance — that's going to be one that imprint the shape of our current century on those ahead, much as the great 19th century infrastructure projects define that era for us."
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edtechtalkCharlie's Diary: Shaping the future: So I'm going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia...
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Jennifer MaddrellCharlie's Diary: Shaping the future: So I'm going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia...
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15 May 07
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Maggie LeberWorth reading. Might be called "The future of history". Also relevant to library science.
future technology culture singularity privacy history english for:ardrhi for:dreamerstar87 for:rarcke
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14 May 07
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Jon TannerInteresting analysis of past developments, extrapolated to the future.
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Owen MathewsInteresting article about the future as affected by technology, focusing on ubiquitous storage
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13 May 07
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