What Future?

Posted by Carol at January 6th, 2008

You can soup up and reengineer your video recorder with the full consent and encouragement of the manufacturer. It does neat things.  Is this an industry changed or just distractioneering?

Posted by Carol at December 28th, 2007

In November, 2007, the University of of Delaware announced that two its professors “outfitted kid-size robots to provide mobility to children who are unable to fully explore the world on their own”.

Infants with Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism and other disorders can have mobility limitations that disconnect them from the ongoing exploration that their peers enjoy. The tiny robot is ringed with sensors that can determine the obstacle-free roaming space, and will either allow infants to bump obstacles or will take control from the infant and drive around the obstacle itself. The next prototype, UD2, will build on the current technology to provide additional control to a parent, teacher or other supervising adult.

“In this way, we can bind technology and human need together to remove barriers for movement in the environment,” [co-investigator] Agrawal said. They believe the training, robot design and new technology derived from the project will provide the foundation for the first generation of safe, smart vehicles for infants born with mobility impairments.”

At first glance, this project seems to fall lock step in line with the walking chairs and sensor bots that have made assistive robotics a headline-maker throughout 2007.

What differs, however, is that unlike Toyota’s walking chair, the Delaware research was conducted at the University’s Early Learning Center - a daycare that conducted the in-house research for these prototypes.

The larger set of concerns this prototype raises is an old one: commercialization and ubiquity are key to mass adoption of assistive robots, but are hampered by current models of innovation dissemination and the limited set of choices for robotics development - corporate or academic research.

That the Delaware researchers were able to meet proof of concept is no small feat, but a working model does not a viable tool make. Incubation arms and technology transfer units within universities sometimes speed the deployment of store-shelve ready models, but often this comes at the cost of retained IP rights.  By contrast, corporate incubation units focus on fiddling with expensive showpieces designed not for commercialization but instead to grab media attention, demonstrate thought leadership and, of course, secure valuable patents.

Posted by Greg at December 10th, 2006

Holiday cheer got you down? Consider this: Earth is a scary place and there are a lot of things that could kill us.

We know a lot about the current threats, and yet we’re only marginally well-equipped to deal with them. We’ve had fusion weapons for fifty years without wiping ourselves out, but such weapons are making their way into the hands of less stable dictatorships. We’ve had both Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis save us from being smashed by Hollywood space rocks, but we don’t have a real plan for detecting and destroying real ones. The flu could kill millions of us, but at least we’re talking about ways to mitigate an outbreak. The 20th century may have been the bloodiest ever, but considering the risks we faced, we didn’t do too badly.

Enter the 21st century. It seems that the transhumanist community has been addressing the possible threats of emerging technology with more seriousness. This is a good thing. There are serious risks posed by nanotech, biotech, and advanced artificial intelligence. But how to enumerate and prepare for them?
Accelerating Future is attempting to list and categorize the threats that accidents, military leaders, mad scientists, supervillians and disgruntled grad students will throw at us in the 21st century:

The important ones:

1. superintelligence - not just AI - but superhumans too
2. deliberate misuse of nanotech (arms race, nanoweapons)
3. accidental misuse of nanotech
4. killer artificial virus
5. antimatter holocaust?
6. particle accelerator disaster

Fortunately, they have some potential solutions too. Go contribute your own.

Posted by Greg at October 26th, 2006

As found on O’Reilly Radar, Flickr user Arenamontanus comes definitive proof that the future is scary. He’s posted a Flickr set featuring a bunch of signs that could be used to warn us about the dangers of future technologies.

My favorite of the bunch is almost certainly Memetic Hazard. Though not the most appealing of the bunch from a design perspective, it’s perhaps the most thought-provoking. I can imagine this logo popping up before accessing particularly dangerous data, or printed on the cover of potentially damaging e-Books. One Flickr commenter even suggested mandatory labeling for holy texts. Antimatter, Active Nanodevices, and Nanoparticle Hazard seemed to be other likely candidates for warning labels of the near and distant future.

Although the design and phrasing left something to be desired, perhaps the most immediately important was the sign for an area without Internet access. I’m looking forward to both wireless and wireless devices becoming ubiquitous enough that this kind of notification is necessary.

Posted by Greg at October 10th, 2006

It has been a long time coming, but I’ve finally found time to post my MA thesis, Dying to Live Forever: Challenging representations of radical life extension.

From the abstract:

The idea that bio- and nanotechnologies could drastically extend human lifespans is gaining currency, both among supporters and opponents of the potential technologies. Loosely organized immortalist groups are under political fire from all sides, faced with opposition from well-organized conservative, religious and environmentalist groups. If they do not find political allies soon, immortalists may find that the technologies they have such high hopes for are banned before their potential can be realized.

This thesis explores the culture of those who believe that human lifespans should be open-ended and propose technological interventions to keep us youthful and prevent “involuntary death.” A study of mythological and fictional tales of immortality lays the groundwork for an examination of immortalist discourse. Through Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations and Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the beliefs and attitudes of immortalists are explored and suggestions are made for improving engagement with potential political allies.

A special thanks to BJ Klien at the Immortality Institute, the participants on the ImmInst forum, and to Dr. Aubrey de Grey for your participation in the project. I sincerely hope that my work proves useful to the immortalist community, or at least provides interesting fuel for discussion.

If you have any feedback, comments, or want to give me a book deal, please leave comments here or email me at gmcmullen at gmail dot com.

Posted by Greg at September 27th, 2006

ITWales.com has posted perhaps the best transhumanist-themed material I’ve read in a long time. Ian Pearson is a futurologist with BT, which is of note itself– big business is taking note of the weirdness that is the near future. While the interview doesn’t really cover new ground, it take a pragmatic approach that addresses the concerns as well as the benefits and looks how the emerging technology will be adopted and used by the non-transhumanist set.

Best of all, Pearson is able to explain his ideas in a way that anyone can understand. He doesn’t rely on fuzzy concepts like “the singularity” or “molecular manufacturing”, rather drawing on pop culture and concrete examples to illustrate a future that is at once exciting and frightening.

Highlights include:

• “in the next 15 years - what we can reasonably expect in that timeframe is still probably largely metal and plastic robots, and something not very far away from what we saw in the film I, Robot, you know, slightly more humanoid.”
• “in around 20-25 years time where we can do the full 3D video straight into your active contact lenses, and full 3D audio, and also a sensory experience in terms of touch… Many would do it for relationship purposes - if you’re in New York and your partner’s in London you might want to make love across the network.”
• Discussion of a world where we give up on any pretenses of security, because the sophistication of threats so greatly exceed our ability to effectively manage them.

Read it now.