You awoke out of necessity and now cannot
return to sleep – too much tossing and turning. – Amorella
0246
hours. I am sitting in the bedroom black lounger. It is at times pleasantly
confining and I drift to sleep; certainly not while typing away however. This
can be a thinking time but I have nothing on mind. It would be quiet if not for
a secondary pole fan whirring from the northwest corner. The ceiling fan is
quiet enough. Someone is stirring downstairs. Why necessity sometimes calls in
the middle of the night is understood while still being inconveniently older in
age. I am not hungry and rarely so in the night. I seem, at times, to live in a
sort of bubbly stream of quilted consciousness lying as an inner layer of bedding
just beneath the skin – a bubble-like wrapping full of nooks and crannies –
flat and thus unround; quite odd considering the body is full of bony curves. I
would have thought consciousness to be perpendicular but it does not show
itself as such in this instance. Thus it is to be within a flattened though
fortunate fold of the night. A flat sense of consciousness is not the same as
being flat-lined and may be nothing more than being turned over or inside out;
nothing that a young Alice would not have considered in some sense of bedded wonderment;
reason covered in wintery permafrost with sleep needed for a thawing of air
without bubbles. If it were not for the words the reality might be considered
profound. (0315)
Post before you lose your nerve, dear boy. –
Amorella
Linda and Mary Lou left mid-morning. You
helped Carol with her exercises and picked up lunch at Piada Street Italian.
Her request is for a Graeter’s along with mid-afternoon errands. Earlier you
were reading the Edge article on humans and robots. – Amorella
1453
hours. In the old days I would take this to be an article in The World Future
Society magazine.
** **
The World
Future Society (WFS) is the largest membership organization in the
futures field. The society is a nonprofit educational and scientific
organization in Bethesda, Maryland, US, founded in 1966. It investigates how social, economic and technological developments
are shaping the future. It seeks to help individuals, organizations, and
communities observe, understand and respond to social change appropriately and
investigates the effects of applying anticipatory thinking to society.
Through
its magazine, The Futurist, media, meetings, and dialogue among its
members, it endeavors to raise awareness of change and encourage development of
creative solutions. The society takes no official position on what the future
may or should be like. Instead it seeks to provide a neutral forum for
exploring possible, probable, and preferable futures.
The
Society has members in more than 80 countries, and has active chapters in
cities around the world. The Society holds an annual conference during July,
which usually features keynote speakers and one-or two-day courses dealing with
the future. Membership is open to anyone who wishes to join and can afford it.
The society claims that its membership includes sociologists, scientists,
corporate planners, educators, students and retirees.
Annually, the Society reviews the
past year in order to make predictions about the future. Many members are not
professional futurists. Membership includes CEOs, ambassadors, teachers,
marketers and fashion designer.
Selected and edited from
Wikipedia
** **
1500
hours. I joined back in 1972 I believe, upon returning from Brazil. My focus
was on developing a futures studies/science fiction course for high school,
which I did do and taught at Indian Hill High School. The ‘Edge’ article
reminds me of those heady and fun days being on the forefront of new ideas and
concepts. The futurist view has never really left me I suppose.
** **
Edge:
To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and
sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other
the questions they are asking themselves
CONVERSATION : TECHNOLOGY
The
Next Wave
A Conversation With John Markoff [7.16.15]
It's
quite remarkable. It's moved people off of personal computers. Microsoft's
business, while it's a huge monopoly, has stopped growing. There was this
platform change. I'm fascinated to see what the next platform is going to be.
It's totally up in the air, and I think that some form of augmented reality is
possible and real. Is it going to be a science-fiction utopia or a
science-fiction nightmare? It's going to be a little bit of both.
JOHN MARKOFF is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist who covers science and technology for The
New York Times. His most recent book is the forthcoming Machines of
Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. John Markoff's Edge Bio Page
THE
NEXT WAVE
I'm
in an interesting place in my career, and it's an interesting time in Silicon
Valley. I grew up in Silicon Valley, but it's something I've been reporting
about since 1977, which is this Moore's Law acceleration. Over the last five
years, another layer has been added to the Moore's Law discussion, with
Kurzweil and people like him arguing that we're on the brink of self-aware
machines. Just recently, Gates and Musk and Hawking have all been saying
that this is an existential threat to humankind. I simply don't see it. If you
begin to pick it apart, their argument and the fundamental argument of Silicon
Valley, it's all about this exponential acceleration that comes out of the
semiconductor industry. I suddenly discovered it was over.
Now, it may not be over forever,
but it's clearly paused. All the things that have been driving everything that
I do, the kinds of technology that have emerged out of here that have changed
the world, have ridden on the fact that the cost of computing doesn't just
fall, it falls at an accelerating rate. And guess what? In the last two years,
the price of each transistor has stopped falling. That's a profound moment.
Kurzweil
argues that you have interlocked curves, so even after silicon tops out
there's going to be something else. Maybe he's right, but right now that's not
what's going on, so it unwinds a lot of the arguments about the future of computing
and the impact of computing on society. If we are at a plateau, a lot of these
things that we expect, and what's become the ideology of Silicon Valley,
doesn't happen. It doesn't happen the way we think it does. I see evidence of
that slowdown everywhere. The belief system of Silicon Valley doesn't take that
into account.
There
was a wonderful moment when I went down to cover the DARPA robotics challenge
in Southern California. There was a preliminary event in Florida about eighteen
months ago where they had the finals. They had twenty-five teams. It was quite
an event. It was a spectacle. They built these by and large Terminator-style
machines, and the idea was that they would be able to work in a Fukushima-like
environment. Only three of the machines, after these teams worked on them for
eighteen months, were able to even complete the tasks. The winning team
completed the tasks in about forty-five minutes. They had an hour to do eight
tasks that you and I could do in about five minutes. They had to drive the
vehicle, they had to go through a door, they had to turn a crank, they had to
throw a switch, they had to walk over a rubble pile, and then they had to climb
stairs.
I'd
have been able to do it a lot quicker than five minutes. It took the robot
about forty-five minutes. Most of the robots failed at the second task, which
was opening the door. Rod Brooks, who's this pioneering roboticist, came down
to watch and comment on it afterwards because he'd seen all these robots
struggling to get the door open and said, "If you're worried about the
Terminator, just keep your door closed." We're at that stage, where our
expectations have outrun the reality of the technology.
I've
been thinking a lot about the current physical location of Silicon Valley. The
Valley has moved. About a year ago, Richard Florida did a fascinating piece
of analysis where he geo-located all the current venture capital investments.
Once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara. Now it's
moved fifty miles north, and the current center of Silicon Valley by current
investment is at the foot of Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Living in San
Francisco, you see that. Manufacturing, which is what Silicon Valley once was,
has largely moved to Asia. Now it's this marketing and design center. It's a
very different beast than it was.
I've
been thinking about Silicon Valley at a plateau, and maybe the end of the line.
I just spent about three or four years reporting about robotics. I've been
writing about it since 2004, even longer, when the first autonomous vehicle
grand challenge happened. I watched the rapid acceleration in robotics.
We're at this point where over the last three or four years there's been a
growing debate in our society about the role of automation, largely forced by
the falling cost of computing and sensors and the fact that there's a new round
of automation in society, particularly in American society. We're now not only
displacing blue-collar tasks, which has happened forever, but we're replacing
lawyers and doctors. We're starting to nibble at the top of the pyramid.
I
played a role in creating this new debate. The automation debate comes around
in America at regular intervals. The last time it happened in America was
during the 1960s and it ended prematurely because of the Vietnam War. There was
this discussion and then the war swept away any discussion. Now it's come back
with a vengeance. I began writing articles about white-collar automation in
2010, 2011.
There's
been a deluge of books such as The Rise of the Robots, The Second
Machine Age, The Lights in the Tunnel, all saying that there will be
no more jobs, that the automation is going to accelerate and by 2045 machines
will be able to do everything that humans can do. I was at dinner with you a
couple years ago and I was ranting about this to Danny Kahneman, the
psychologist, particularly with respect to China, and making the argument that
this new wave of manufacturing automation is coming to China. Kahneman said to
me, "You just don't get it." And I said, "What?" And he
said, "In China, the robots are going to come just in time."
What's
largely left out of this discussion about robots, manufacturing automation, and
white-collar automation is that all over the advanced world we're seeing a
dramatically aging population. What's called the dependency ratio is moving in
a direction where he's right, the robots may show up just in time because there
may not be enough workers. It's a very different way of looking at the problem
than the way in which most people looking at automation see it.
China
has a one-child policy. In Japan, the aging situation is even worse. Europe is
aging dramatically. The Europeans are now spending $1 billion on robotics to
try to build a generation of machines that can take care of human beings who
are elders. By 2020, we're going to cross over, and for the first time in
history there are going to be more people who are over sixty-five years alive
in the world than there are people under five.
My
sense, after spending two or three years working on this, is that it's a much
more nuanced situation than the alarmists seem to believe. Brynjolfsson and
McAfee, and Martin Ford, and Jaron Lanier have all written about the rapid pace
of automation. There are two things to consider: One, the pace is not that
fast. Deploying these technologies will take more time than people think. Two,
the structure of the workforce may change in ways that means we need more
robots than we think we do, and that the robots will have a role to play. The
other thing is that the development of the technologies to make these things
work is uneven.
Right
now, we're undergoing a rapid acceleration in pattern recognition technologies.
Machines, for the first time are learning how to recognize objects; they're
learning how to understand scenes, how to recognize the human voice, how to
understand human language. That's all happening, no question that the advances
have been dramatic and it's largely happened due to this technique called deep
learning, which is a modern iteration of the artificial neural nets, which of
course have been around since the 1950s and even before.
What
hasn't happened is the other part of the AI problem, which is called cognition.
We haven't made any breakthroughs in planning and thinking, so it's not clear
that you'll be able to turn these machines loose in the environment to be
waiters or flip hamburgers or do all the things that human beings do as quickly
as we think. Also, in the United States the manufacturing economy has already
left, by and large. Only 9 percent of the workers in the United States are
involved in manufacturing.
There's
this wonderful counter situation to the popular belief that there will be no
jobs. The last time someone wrote about this was in 1995 when a book
titled The End of Work predicted this. The decade after that,
the US economy grew faster than the population for the next decade. It's not
clear to me at all that things are going to work out the way they felt.
The
classic example is that almost everybody cites this apparent juxtaposition of
Instagram—thirteen programmers taking out a giant corporation, Kodak, with
140,000 workers. In fact, that's not what happened at all. For one thing, Kodak
wasn't killed by Instagram. Kodak was a company that put a gun to its head and
pulled the trigger multiple times until it was dead. It just made all kinds of
strategic blunders. The simplest evidence of that is its competitor, Fuji,
which did very well across this chasm of the Internet. The deeper thought is
that Instagram, as a new‑age
photo sharing system, couldn't exist until the modern Internet was built, and
that probably created somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million jobs, and made them
good jobs. The notion that Instagram killed both Kodak and the jobs is just
fundamentally wrong.
The
other thing I'm starting to think about is to ask what's interesting to write
about beyond robotics, computing, and artificial intelligence, areas in which
I've been immersed for the last half decade. I began very early to write about
the Internet. I began writing about computer networking in the 1970s, and the
broader world didn't catch on to it until '93 to '95. Twenty years of writing
about computer networks and arguing that they would transform the way we live
and work, and finally the world caught on to it. I was pretty early to
understanding that robots and robotics, automation technology, and artificial
intelligence were going to have a Renaissance. Now, all of a sudden, it's the
white-hot center and I've started to look around for other things that are
interesting, that are on the edge, if you will.
What's
new and interesting is material science. This is Neil Gershenfeld's world, it's
Nathan Myhrvold's world now. Myhrvold is one of the first people to invest in a
class of materials—metamaterials—that are important and are going to remake
lots of technology and lots of parts of the economy. I've dabbled in
metamaterials, I've dabbled in these things called metal organic frameworks.
Gershenfeld, at the Center for Bits and Atoms, is building these new kinds of
digital materials that will make ordinary things not static, but very dynamic.
That's intriguing, but it's half a decade to a decade away. That's where I've
been putting my time.
I'm
doing it against the background of watching The New York Times go
through a fundamental transformation. It took a long time, but you can see a
digital culture emerging inside The New York Times right now.
It is the case that not only have we become digital, but our website is now not
the place where most people read The New York Times. Most people
read The New York Times on their smart phones. That is driving
a lot of the thinking of The Times. I'm firmly a part of the old
guard. I was the first person to write about digital technology and digital
culture at The Times. I wasn't born digital in that sense, and so
I've watched two cultures—one culture going out the door at The New
York Times, and the other culture taking over. I think The Times has
a reasonable chance of crossing the chasm. It's not across the chasm yet, but
of any of the old line media cultures, The Times has been
working hard and seems to be on the edge of making it across. That's what I've
been doing.
Stanford
is an example of the transformation of the academy, I guess. We talked once
upon a time about these things called ivory towers, and at Stanford that ivory
tower idea has gone away completely. An electrical engineer is president of the
university. He is someone who has invested in and has started many companies. I
knew John Hennessy, the President of Stanford, when he was a professor and then
when he was Dean. We talked maybe two decades ago about his challenges in
keeping his professors, who were starting to cycle in and out of the university
as they started these companies. Now it's this incredibly well-oiled machine,
which is essentially serving as a farm team for startup culture.
You
go to Stanford to get your ticket punched, and then you go off and you start
your company. Or maybe you leave Stanford after a year or two if you're an
undergraduate, just long enough to find your startup. I don't know if they'll
persist, but right now the whole notion, anywhere in society, of doing long-term
research is really under assault.
The
NSF budget and the NIH budget are relatively frozen; they're not growing.
Venture capitalists are increasingly making short-term bets rather than
long-term bets. Google was supposed to be the latest corporate entity that was
going to try to fix that. They created Google X that was supposed to do these
moon shots. Maybe there's a little bit of it, but you don't see it
very much of the notion of basic research, of doing science. You see applied
research everywhere. Even the national labs, you see projects that are intended
to find ways to commercialize technology. The notion of science for science's
sake is under assault.
This
is against the background of a technological culture in America during the
middle of the last century, which was based on industry monopolies that
could afford to create giant research laboratories—places like IBM, the Bell
Labs—and fund researchers to do things that would take place over years. That's
gone away. In Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC was started as an effort to get Xerox—the
copier company—into the computer industry. They failed to make Xerox a computer
company, but it had this wonderful spinoff effect. That is possible, that some
of these efforts may still have serendipitous consequences, but nobody is
willing to place the long bet anymore. That period of America, that type of
technological economy in America is just gone. I don't know if it's any place
else in the world either.
There's
been a dramatic shift in corporate America, and the time horizons have
shortened. Even DARPA, which was created in the 1950s to prevent America from
suffering from technological surprise, in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war
DARPA shifted its focus and has become focused on much shorter term results.
Clearly something has been lost. In Silicon Valley, we're in the midst of a
bubble right now, and it'll be interesting to see what the culture is like
after it resets. For the moment, we're focused on things that will return. The term
of art is now a unicorn, $1 billion startup in the space of just a short time.
There have been some, but there are also lots and lots of failures.
The
question is, how does this current bubble end? Not when, but how? What
constitutes a bubble? For me, I can clearly see we're in a bubble economy when
relatively more money is chasing relatively few good ideas. When the
conversation turns to Uber for "x," you can tell there we're out of
ideas, that people are basically just trying to iterate and get lucky. I
suppose some of them will be lucky. There was lots of good timing before the
collapse of the last bubble, and so this bubble is and will continue to create
billionaires. But something will cause a reset, and, for example, you can see
this now with regard to new organizations such as The Battery Club.
There
was a period when San Francisco first created these exclusive social clubs.
There was the Bohemian Club and the Pacific Union Club, and they came into
being at the turn of the last century, maybe a little bit before, but a time
when there was a generation of great wealth. Now along comes the Battery Club.
You can see on a Friday night at the Battery Club the Uber black cars lined up
around the block. You can see it in the absurd real estate valuations that are
transforming San Francisco. I believe the median cost of a one‑bedroom apartment is over $3000 right now, the median rental cost in the
city is over $4000. Real estate prices have gone up pretty continuously since
the mid-1990s. They've plateaued occasionally, but now it's amongst the most
expensive places in the world to live.
Looking
out the windows from my office over south of Market, I can see nine
construction cranes. What's being built are banks. This is this kind of wealth
that emerges in the developed world now. It's happening in New York, it's
happening in London, it's happening in San Francisco, where money that needs to
flee from regions of the world that are financially insecure will come and
basically invest in a condominium. There are these stacks of condominiums, and
you drive past these buildings at night, and there are no lights on. The owners
don't need to rent them through VRBO or AirBnB, they just leave them empty. It
deforms the city. The capital flows in, in many ways. I can't tell you how many
times I've said signs of a bubble top, because you see something that's
obviously irrational.
The
transportation situation in Silicon Valley is quite amazing right now. You have
this crumbling public infrastructure, and now the Internet has made it possible
to essentially skim the cream. That's what we're seeing right now. It's now
clear to me that the Internet enabled private transportation services that are
springing up, ranging from Uber and Lift and SideCar to these premium bus
services like LEAP in San Francisco, which will take you in a small bus with
Wi-Fi and a fancy seat from the marina to downtown.
There
are other systems that are appearing around the country, in places like Boston
and Washington. There's a company called Bridj, which has basically a small
bus-style transportation system that routes itself based on people calling in.
So it's not Uber getting just you, it's a bus that changes its route based on
who's calling in. It's kind of an efficient transportation system.
I
worry that we'll have two classes of transportation: We'll have the elites,
who'll drive in Uber blacks, and we'll have the poor, who wait longer and
longer for the public buses that never come because the public system has
basically become even more underfunded than it already was. That's still
working itself out.
There's
another wave of virtual networks emerging in Silicon Valley that are
interesting. Not just Silicon Valley, but it's possible now to stitch all the
different competing transportation systems together, just with your phone.
There are companies like Urban Engines, City Mapper, these are developing apps
that allow you to efficiently use multiple transportation systems. The reason
why it matters is that there's a prediction that Route 101, which is the artery
that goes down the backbone of Silicon Valley, comes to a dead stop in 2020.
Basically, the traffic jam is so bad that you need to just park your car and
just walk away; it's over.
The
question is, will we be able to do something with a combination of these new
private ride systems, the virtual networks that are emerging, Google cars, if
they come into reality in time to save the creaky transportation
infrastructure? BART is falling apart in front of our eyes. It's scary because
the rails get fixed while the BART trains are not running across them. The
rails are aging and it's a race to the bottom.
At
the same time, the state is talking about building a high-speed rail system
that will go down to LA, except it goes through the Central Valley for
political reasons, which is kind of crazy. It's remarkable and sad at the same
time to see all these new technologies. At the same time, we're on the cusp of
having a Third World transportation system in the highest tech part of America,
which is richly ironic.
There
is this perspective that people like Neil Gershenfeld, who runs the Center
for Bits and Atoms at MIT hold, that there's a value to getting a first-class
education—first‑class technical or
scientific education—because you can apply that expertise in these high-tech
jobs that require technical management. Gershenfeld in particular has an
amazing group of students who are all doing remarkable things at a fairly high
level in Silicon Valley. He's the anti-Peter Thiel in the sense that Thiel is
arguing that if you're bright you should just go out and do it. A couple of
examples are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who took off at certain points
because they had a vision. The problem with the Thiel idea is that the vision
is not some deep understanding of the particular situation with respect to
technology that both Jobs and Gates had. They went because they saw an
opportunity and they had a broader vision. Together, they were able to
create a new economy.
Thiel
is basically asking people to be wannabees. I don't have a vision, but I want
to be an entrepreneur and the vision will come second. The vision has to come
first. I haven't followed Thiel closely, but I haven't seen any fundamental
world-changing ideas in the way that Gates or Jobs change the world, in terms
of creating new industries, come out of any of that yet.
The
argument that some people make is that it's two sides of a coin. Silicon Valley
isn't just hacker culture. That was represented by Wozniak. It's that
particular combination of an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, and a technical guy,
Steve Wozniak, who just wanted to build a personal computer so he could show it
off to his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club.
It
was Jobs who said, "Hey, there's a market for this." Rarely do you
see that combination in one person. You frequently see it in two people—a guy
who's passionate technically and a guy who has the business sense to realize
there's a market, and they come together. Earlier, you had a Hewlett and a
Packard, where there were two technical guys who became business guys. More
frequently now in Silicon Valley you see this interesting combination of a
passionate technical person or small group of people and someone who has
business expertise. That's what makes a successful company.
That's
what's going on. I don't know enough about Uber to know whether there's actual
magic technology. There was technological insight into that idea. The notion of
the sharing economy was pioneered by an earlier group of people, before the
Uber folks came along. The ideas were there and they jumped on them, and they
became the dominant force for whatever reason.
What
worries me about the future of Silicon Valley, is that one-dimensionality, that
it's not a Renaissance culture, it's an engineering culture. It's an
engineering culture that believes that it's revolutionary, but it's actually
not that revolutionary. The Valley has, for a long time, mined a couple of big
ideas.
There
was Engelbart. Doug Engelbart set in motion the ideas that became personal
computing. A decade later, there was Mark Weiser, the second generation. Alan
Kay riffed on Engelbart's ideas and he created the idea of the Dynabook, which
became the modern personal computer. But it started with Engelbart. Then came
Mark Weiser. Mark Weiser had this profound idea that computing would disappear
into everyday objects, and everyday objects would become magic. That was the
second big idea. The first guy to understand that and take advantage of it was
Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs first turned the record player into an iPod, and then he
turned the telephone into a computer. Those were two really big ideas.
One
of things I've wondered about for the last decade now is at what point does the
first new platform happen first outside of Silicon Valley? The last major
platform in the world that defined the picture of commuting was the smartphone.
That was 2007. The year before the smart phone, I thought innovation was moving
to Europe. All of the interesting mobile applications were happening first at
that time in Europe, not in the US. And then the iPhone happened and it all
came back to Silicon Valley.
At
some point, another major platform is going to come first outside of Silicon
Valley. I thought that the Internet made that more possible. Friedman talks
about the world being flat, and the Internet did flatten the world, so why
shouldn't a global computing platform that's the future come first outside of
Silicon Valley? That's entirely a possibility. What is that going to be? What
comes after the smart phone? My bet now is it's augmented reality, or some form
of augmented reality.
There
are a number of small and large companies who are basely arguing and or trying
to develop this technology that causes the mouse to disappear, the keyboard to
disappear, the smart phone disappear. You will interact with the computing
resources that are all around you in the Cloud and wherever else by just
speaking and looking through your glasses. I thought that was entirely
science-fiction, and more recently I've seen HoloLens from Microsoft. HoloLens
was neat, but it's also disappointing because it's clear that Microsoft is
still locked in the PC paradigm. They're still trying to reinvent and save the
personal computer.
I
saw the same technology riffed on by a startup called Magic Leap that Google
and Qualcomm and Kleiner Perkins put a half-billion dollars in, and they're
trying to raise even more. Magic Leap technology was the first point that I
thought there might be something that would be a new computing platform that
would be post computer displays and keyboards and mice and the smart phone. The
notion that if you want a high-resolution screen, you can simply go like this,
and the screen would hang in the air and you would be able to enter text by
speaking. I thought that was science fiction, and now I don't believe that it's
science fiction, I believe that it's real. It might not show up in the next
five years, it might be a decade away, like the mouse was once, but that's my
best bet for the next wave of computing. The question becomes does it come from
Silicon Valley, or does it come from someplace else in the world?
These
new platforms, they're increments, and they only come along every half-decade
or decade. The smart phone happened in 2007 and a huge ecosystem was created in
its wake. The entire population of the world walks around looking at their
phones. This can't be the end of human evolution. We have to go someplace else.
It's
quite remarkable. It's moved people off of personal computers. Microsoft's
business, while it's a huge monopoly, has stopped growing. There was a platform
change. I'll be fascinated to see what the next platform is going to be. It's
totally up in the air, and I think that some form of augmented reality is
possible and real. Is it going to be a science-fiction utopia or a
science-fiction nightmare? It's going to be a little bit of both.
In
2004, maybe 2005, I remember seeing Sergey and Larry, and they both had little
Sidekicks on their belts and that was with the modern feature. They had just
graduated from the pager world. 2007 comes along, we have the iPhone, then
comes Android. They'd hired the inventor of the Sidekick, Andy Rubin, and he
went to work for them and built the Android business. Ironically, Android was
supposed to be a defensive move against Microsoft, and it just got a little out
of hand. It ate the world. It was too good of an idea. I spent a lot of time
thinking about what comes next. What comes after smartphones? Smartphones can't
be the end of computing. My own bet is that it will be some flavor of augmented
reality. Somebody will come out of left field and surprise us and do something
really interesting. The question is, is it going to be in five years or is it
going to be in ten years or fifteen years?
Ubiquitous computing, or the
Internet of things, is all supposed to disappear. The problem is, is it
going to disappear into us? What could possibly go wrong? There is an argument
that these machines are going to replace us, but I only think that's relevant
to you or me in the sense that it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen in
our lifetime. The Kurzweil crowd argues this is happening faster and
faster, and things are just running amok. In fact, things are slowing down. In
2045, it's going to look more like it looks today than you think.
Selected and edited from edgeDOTorg
** **
Time for errands, orndorff. Post. - Amorella
No comments:
Post a Comment