Listics

http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2005/08/10_steps_to_a_h.html

A Roomba to be exact… for my suggestion regarding creating a robot to play with the pets.  It was deemed one of the five best suggestions at the 2005 Accelerating Change conference on Artificial Intelligence.  Thus, when combined with the autographed hard cover copy of Ray Kurzweil’s "The Singularity is Near," this Roomba sends ac2005 to the top of my list for best conference schwag.  There are lots of things to think about here….

No pioneer, I’ve been hearing the SIP talk for only a few years now.  Here Henry Sinnreich describes where he was at a year and a half ago (thanks to David Isenberg for the link):

…here in the office, I use only SIP devices for communications: The Pingtel SIP phone and the Windows Messenger and several other soft phones on the  laptop.  My home network is SIP-enabled by an Intertex IX66 SOHO 802.11b enhanced gateway that rings all my upstairs and downstairs SIP phones at the same time using SIP forking and can also act as a home  PBX, though I have not gone quite that far as yet. Besides the Pingtel, MITEL 5055 and snom200 phones–they all have a web page with directory
        and support dialing a SIP URL from the PC–also priceless is the 802.11b BCM WiFi600 Mobile IP Phone in my home. And, last but not least,  the powerful XTEN soft phone that runs on laptops and Windows PDAs such  as my hp5400 iPAQ.

The latest issue of JOHO wriggled through the spam filters into my in-box today.  Here’s a little bit of what Dr. Weinberger has to say:

What I’m
playing

I played much of Brothers in Arms and maybe even all of it; I can’t
tell if it crashed or ended. I was a little disappointed. I had
less control over my squad than in Ghost Recon, which BiA probably
counts as a strength of the squad AI. But I liked the ability in GR to play as
this squad member and then to switch to that.

So, now I’m playing Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, an add-on that
captures much of the imagination and humor of the first one. Some of the fights
are too hard for the likes of me, but that’s why we have cheat codes.

Alex Lightman, Cecily Sommers, Steve Jurvetson, Joi Ito, Beth Noveck, George Gilder, Rudy Rucker… John Smart moderating…  Joi points out that an international conference would have more than half the people NOT form the US…. Jurvetson looks like some kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald charcter… Lightman is a coherent forward looking businessman, Sommers broadens the context beyond technology, Noveck speaks to group issues - something very difficult for a USian lawyer - she speaks also for social justice… Gilder points out that all the exponential curves are learning curves, experience curves…  Rucker goes deep into Wolfram and all that math…  he uses my favorite phrase:  "Millenial fervor of the singulatarians."

Good…. Gilder gets into it a little with Rucker… "computer scientists see the universe as a Turing machine.  My plumber sees the universe as a Kohler machine."  Rucker falls back on "Accelerando" and surfing words like "gnarly," and the turtles all the way down thing.  Glib, in other words.

Gilder:  Moore’s law is a coarse instrument.  Life is in formation.  Order and complexity are not complements, rather polar opposites.  Low entropy carrier required to bear high entropy modulated information.

Alex Lightman mixes metaphors.  He also complains about BRIC for stealing all our good stuff.  He’s an Intellectual Property proponent.

Cecily Sommers points out the duality problem… we either think it’s all going south or it’s headed for Utopia.  The important question is, she says, "What must YOU do?"

Joi disagrees with Alex about intellectual property… patent portfolios are beyond the range of start-ups… Ronald Coase… Benkler’s "Coase’s Penguin"… building new assets in the commons…

Gilder:  the patent systme has broken down…. Beth Noveck has an idea for reforming it…

Jurvetson:  club of rome projection that 8 billion people will reduce to 1 billion is drastically understated if we don’t get a handle on genetically modified pathogens...  hmmm, kinda dark…

Read the rest of this entry »

Moira Gunn is interviewing Ray Kurzweil here at ac2005.   She starts with a hard one… will artificial intelligence improve our sex lives?  Ray goes on at embarrassing length, telling me more than I really wanted to know about his views regarding phone sex, Virtual Reality, something I’d call the Tiresias factor… god knows what Ray would call it…. he was breathing heavy by this time and he was speaking in shorter sentences using smaller words.

I called RB last night to gloat over my signed copy of the new Kurzweil fantasy, "The Singularity is Near."  I knew RB had a few things to say regarding the numinous lunacy of such a declaration.  During our conversation I somehow slipped into aggrieved iPod user mode.  Chris suggested that I fix my scratched plexiglass case by doing an orange crate mod… replace the sleek Apple plexi design with something more organic, something that will put slivers in your butt if you sit on it.

Then, as if he’d been wired into the conversation, Norm offered this today.  What I like about the wooden case (besides the butt sliver factor) is the fact that if you’re ver called upon to hurl yourself on a funeral pyre, you’re actually providing some of the fuel.

Kurzweil has moved onto the topic of GMO, golden rice, preventing blindness, cell transdifferentiation, and stuff like that.  This is all part of a pretty coherent rap oposing fundametalisms including humanist fundies (like me) who put roadblocks up in the GMO area.  Reflexive antitechnologists is how he labels us.  Not sure that’s a fair statement.

Ray’s concerned about global warming but figures there will be nanotech available to clean up our messes in the 2024’s.

It’s like RageBoy said:

Manifest
destiny. Brands. The Second Great Awakening. The beautiful women would
have to wait. I was onto something. Big wheel keep on turnin. My room
35 floors high, boats on the river, bridges collapsing in perspective
to the horizon, neon twinkling in the water. Beautiful. And I’m landing
the gig with Highbeam.
All you killers / turn your lights on / ’cause there’s a monster /
under my bed… Ah, you must have been sleeping with Daniel Boorstin,
then. Trotskyites in the Dewey Decimal System. Dit-dit-dit-dot-dit-dit.
Yet another Enigma. Alan bites into the cyanide-laced apple. Fails the
ultimate Turing test. Queer Studies not having yet been instituted at
Oxford and Cambridge. Why were you so over-invested? Finite automata. A
workaround for the Gödel bug. Singularity as manifest destiny. Also
sprach Ray Kurzweil. Diodes, capacitors, printed circuits. Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea. Also sprach D. Dennett. Pandemonium, connection
machines, societies of mind. Also sprach Warren McCulloch, Danny
Hillis, Marvin Minksy. Winken, Blinken and Nod. If they wink and blink
at you, it’s hasta la vista, baby.

Old slave field holler I used to sing:

go down Hannah don’t you rise no more
hey, hey, hey…
if you rise up in the mornin bring the judgment day
hey, hey, hey…

On the 11th I noted that the borg have made inroads on my consciousness and I now own an iPod.  Norm Jenson linked to that post and sent hundreds of his readers over here to see if I’d written anything funny.  Not.  Same boring crap.  Boring but consistent.  It happens here most every day whether or not I say anything important. 

Whenever I get a link from Norm I’m reminded that blogging is something that can be done well.  Norm does it well.  He has a perspective on politics and religion that he voices in tones ranging from the wryly humorous to total outrage.  He has a blog format that’s consistent, presenting video clips from comedians like Boxcar to serious journalists like Jon Stewart.  His links are usually worth following which is why so many of his readers turn up the blind alley into these parts when he is kind enough to link here.

Norm was ready to upgrade his toolset, and he bought into the current high-end of Apple tech.  His new iMac G5 will process those media clips twice as fast, take up very little space on or around his desk, and with a 400GB hard drive, it makes guys like me breathe a little faster.  That said, Apple combines three of the several elements that comprise the core of Norm’s blog, namely politics, religion, and technology, so when Norm pointed to my conversion to iPodistry there emerged a brief but intense discussion in the comment thread beneath the post.  (Incidentally, it should be noted that comparing the iPod to the iMac is a little like comparing a Tonka toy truck to a new Mercedes).

Anyway, I thought it was time for the iPod update… a moment when anyone interested can check in on my status as a convert to the religion of Jobs.  I stuffed it in my pocket yesterday and enjoyed it on a
long plane ride. Great battery life, all the user interface convenience
you expect from Apple gear. And since I had a Sony noise canceling head-set I didn’t need to suffer four hours of ear bud rapine discomfort.  I was loving it until I discovered that some pocket change had scratched the heck out
of the faceplate. Clarity of the display is important on this particular unit because reading notes in tiny type and displaying
images were a couple of the added features that convinced me to buy it.  I was a little peeved at myself for being so careless. Still,
I thought, what could a new faceplate cost?

Luckily, I’m in Palo Alto and the atmosphere of Apple enthusiasm here is probably a match for the feelings around total immersion baptism in Oklahoma.  Not everybody is into it, but if you are, you have a lot of positivge reinforcement.  I stopped in the Stanford Shopping Center retail Apple store.  We’re talking about a store that is very near the Apple mother ship here in
Silicon Valley, a store with heavy upscale pretensions, a store where the staff are as much priests and acolytes as retail service personnel.  This store is in a shopping center where Nordstrom’s is the low end anchor store, serving the budget minded who can’t afford Bloomies or Neiman Marcus at the other end of the mall.  It was there, in the Apple store, that I learned that the repair isn’t possible, that the cost
would be the same as the cost of a new unit since they would actually just swap out the unit for a new one.  It was there that I learned that my 30GB hard drive multimedia appliance with the cute white earbuds is a "consumable." 

Naturally my mistreatment of the unit isn’t covered by the warranty.

I’ll be there today.  Anybody else?