Something wonderful.
Just when you thought markets were “back to normal.”
Just when you thought it was safe to stop thinking again and go back to hiding in meaningless routine.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse.
Just when you knew life couldn’t be better.
Just when you thought you hit your life’s pinnacle. Just when you thought you hit rock bottom. Just when you thought you had it all figured out. Just when you realized that you know nothing at all.
That’s when.
Details at http://www.vta.org/xbus
Gilroy to Lockheed Light Rail in just over an hour, with wifi http://www.vta.org/schedules/SC_121.html
There is zero reason to not have self-driving, 100% solar-powered, electric-engine buses running in synchronized pods well before 2030. Only reason forecast is not for 2020 is widespread institutional mailaise and incumbent energy interests working to slow progress. This too is evidence for how industrial era capitalism continues to hobble Accelerating Sustainability.
The most ancient of readers will recall when “Ma Bell” tried to charge us for connecting a second rotary-dial phone to the same line, in the same home. So obviously full of #FAIL on a thousand metrics.
Grown ups in general will remember when incumbent DSL internet providers in the 1990′s tried to charge us for using a home hub or router to share our land line internet connection with more than one computer. Absurd, right?
When we access telecom services, we’re paying for a signal, a service, which has nothing to do with the devices connected to that service. Just like electricity or water. Today’s oligarchs want to charge us extra to use water from the tap when filling different shaped glasses, pitchers, carafes; or charge more if the water you get from the spigot is intended for cooking, drinking, or cleaning.
This oligarchic, bit-measured (they don’t even really exist, except as energy, humans!), device-centric contrivance is and always was nothing short of an abomination to common sense; the equivalent of having to pay extra for plugging in a toaster or blender to household electricity. Electricity has peak use and hence a kind of “congestion” too, yet nobody would ever dream of paying extra every time they plug in another desk lamp. Here’s the latest example from VerizonWireless, foisting precisely that model onto a captive, closed market:
“Data packages may not be used to tether your smartphone or basic phone to a computer or tablet, or as a Wi-Fi hotspot, unless you subscribe to Mobile Hotspot/Mobile Broadband Connect.”
Telecom oligarchs are the slum lords of bandwidth. They only build the bare minimum and then do everything they can to raise rents at the fastest possible pace while putting off improvements until someone takes them to court. The biggest #WIN for oligarchs, like slum lords, is that the vast majority of their tennants are in absolutely no position to be able to hold them accountable.
The answer to carrier complaints of “bandwidth hogs” (i.e., Smartest Innovators on The Network) is the same as it ever was: open networks, open markets up to more competition to keep building more capacity, faster, so that more innovation can continue to improve the entire interdependent system.
Cisco’s John Chambers answered “the congestion question” in the 1990′s and it’s still true today, there’s no scenario in which installing sufficient capacity doesn’t successfully and effectively kick the congestion can down the road. Unlike politics, in technology, kicking the can down the road isn’t a bad solution at all; in fact, it’s almost always been the way we grow into where we’re going, from where we are, with what we have on hand.
The answer for consumers is to Just Say No and/or practice Peaceful Conscientious Resistance through superior understanding and knowledge of their own, including opening more unlicensed spectrum and building our own nationwide mesh networks.
If we don’t realize that energy companies are watching carefully, and will try to pull the same stunt with ephemeral photon from the sun that oligarch telecoms are attempting — in pretending data packet of photons consist of mass and cost — then we have only ourselves to blame. Once the optical fibers and microwave towers are in place, the marginal costs of moving bits are as close to zero as one can get without literally vanishing into oblivion.
The bit-measured, device-centric telecom pricing phantasm is so ipso facto absurd that I can’t believe so many of us have spent 30 years explaining this in such excruciating detail, still to be met with a deer-in-the-headlights responses, more often than not. It’s just not that hard to grok; really it isn’t. I am definitely not that much smarter than the average bear; I know some really damned smart bears who remind me of this on a daily basis.
If supply and demand had anything to do with the way the world really works, then WATER should be priced like bandwidth and bandwidth like water. This is just one of the thousands of ways that we continue to see that the old capitalism has already passed, and the next capitalism, continues it’s evolutionary emergence. The olden ways were fine for the olden days and those days are long gone. It’s as fundamental as the Rights of Mankind to restate the aphormism that nobody can own the sun, the stars, the wind, or the sky. They are here for all, and apart from the initial cost of building the physical collectors and connectors, it’s all virtual FREE LUNCH. That’s what we mean by Apprehending Postscarcity. The world has changed.
To remix the late great Walt Kelly, “We have met the future, and it is us.”
The Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) arrived in lunar orbit today. It’ll enable us to learn more about the moon’s lumpy gravitational field and internal structure of the moon. This year, school kids will begin controlling the lunar platform and snapping pictures of the moon using the UCSD Moonkam.
Pause to consider. This will be the only boring, drab, normal world that today’s 12 y.o.’s have ever known. Their world view: “Yes, of course I can personally control and perceive the universe through sophisticated robotic platforms orbiting other bodies in space; who can’t? Duh.”
It’s always boggled my mind that these are the kinds of everyday experiential and perceptual deltas that so-called normals utterly fail to incorporate into their puckered expectational world model. Yet millions of everyday futurists like us immediately, instinctively echo, “Duh? No Duh!” I’ve always wondered how and why is it that so many humans can immediately and vividly comprehend just how rapidly the perspectives of today’s 12 y.o. will come to shape the entire world, while so many others believe that 12 y.o.’s (or children of any age, 12 to 62) are powerless snot-faced punks to be “put in their place.”
May 2012 also be the year of the 12 y.o. Let’s listen and learn where the future is going from the people who are right now best positioned to decide and execute such visions. It ain’t you and it ain’t me. We’ll be long gone, six feet under, while they may be setting foot on moons orbiting the sixth planet from the sun, without the slightest reservations about whether or not robotic embodied cyborg reality is reality.
It’s all RL.
The ability to buy oatmeal for breakfast. Vegetables for lunch. Rice and beans for dinner. Without coming up short for rent.
via Matt Riddley, WSJ:
“The most memorable metaphor was offered by David Miller of University College, London. Since Mr. Waldegrave had been a colleague of Margaret Thatcher, Mr. Miller chose to portray the Higgs field thus: “Imagine a cocktail party of political-party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbors. The ex-prime minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighborhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves, she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing.”
The party-goers are the Higgs field, which gives mass to particles like electrons (Lady Thatcher) by viscously impeding their progress. “Once moving, she is harder to stop, and once stopped, she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.” The Higgs boson itself he compared to a rumor spreading through the party, causing a wave of local clustering in the Higgs field.”
Given the pace of development and disruptive implications of the accelerating changes I’ve variously vamped on in recent years, and considering the Cyborg Anthropology field is now well represented, a couple particular facets of curiousity keep glinting in the future light, beckoning to find the right team to invent a PhD in some field like Cyborg Psychology or Transhuman Psychiatry.
While the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) has long been the thought leader in expounding the ethical dimensions of the changes underway, Google still doesn’t seem to associate too much with terms like Cyborg Psychology or Transhuman Psychiatry although Cyborg Psychiatry provides some interesting reading. Maybe it’s time we begin formalizing some of these. Will there inevitably be a Cyborg Medicine, Cyborg Law, and other Cyborg Holistics that branch distinctly from their earlier counterparts?
How well are hominids adapting to the merger of human and machine minds in an age of cochlear implants, BCI-controlled robotic prosthetics, Adderall overachievers and Nuvigilantes? How can we do better? What does it even mean to do better and to stay healthy, thriving, as our bodies and minds get tweaked and upgraded in ways that have never before been possible? Even if we won’t know these answers until later, now is one of the richest times in human history to attempt to quantify and document the impending metamorphosis.
Where are we failing, or missing opportunities? Are some humans simply unfit for these new prosthetic, extended capabilities? What is our collective cyborg obligation to them? Should we be thankful that certain minds can’t or won’t grasp the significance, much less master the means of even today’s rudimentary mind amplification tools and techniques? How do we then address opposition from those who fear being “left behind?” Who are we to say, anyway? How do we help to foster adaptive, resilient, flourishing cyborg lives?
As we reach even further toward extending the duration of healthful biological life and repairing disease through intracellular engineering technologies, should people who exhibit histories of manifestly anti-social or violent, lynch-mob like behaviors be permitted access to such technologies? Should fighters win these spoils, or the meek inherit the earth? Who gets preferential access to the most consequential human enhancements, and why? Is wealth or any other caste system a valid rationing program for the kind of positive transhuman capabilities we’d hope to lead us into the next era of human technological evolution? If not, what is?
Today’s 2012 candidate buzzword: “Kinesthetic UX.”
It’s an election year, so it can’t hurt to don the 2012 trending, branding, and positioning hat and declare 2012 the year to (among many equally important things):
1. Break the Screen Trance
Across tablets, smart phones, and game pads, our current perpetual face-glued-to-palm (facepalm) catatonic state deserves one huge collective flash-crowdsourced palmface.
We, the utterly spoiled top 60% or so, all possess these super nifty handhelds; wearable, accessorizing, super skinny cute cyber work-n-play-mate devices that are supposedly doing all this uber neighborly, lifestyle integrating, big data inclusive, cloud synergizing, socialish stuff. And they do, sort of. Except for a few minor side-effects.
2. Narcissistic Mono-Screen Attention Disorder
Kinesthetic UX means please give us reasons to look up and re-connect with one another, across and through our growing constellation of displays and devices! It’s a theme inspired by this presentation by Marco Tempest.
Until we can get to the full-on fruition of Steve Mann’s lifelong work, forever dreaming the impossible stream while going about our daily post-singularity grind; please, device manufacturers and designers, at least give us reasons for our devices to actually want to cooperate, collaborate, and interact, kinesthetically. At the very least, we want the experience of our mobile devices to feel more like Marco’s marvelous artistry.
3. Prying Open My Third Eye
Maynard James Keenan loyalists may not require any further explanation at this point of departure. For the sake of legacy 44 & 2 humanity, we’ll add that features like augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, collaborative social cognition, social tv, the cloud and the crowd, won’t be discarded or lost, they’ll simply become recombinated and incremented into new species that exhibit all the earlier behaviors plus vastly simpler and more accurate geo-fencing and tagging capabilities; improved contextual salience (what matter most to me in this particular place and this unique circumstance); increasingly effective ad-hoc intentional communities for travel, learning, political action, business; more intimate bodily kinesthetic awareness (external and internal); real-time understanding of the gravitational pull of time constraints and scheduling; shockingly higher resolution direct neuro-discernment (yep, respectable degrees of thought and mood reading are not far away, now) and associated mind amplification tools and processes; all assisting us in selecting, affecting, and optimizing both material and immaterial aspects of our environment to better fit the architecture of our intentions; individual, group, regional, global; recreational, educational, aspirational, and occupational.
For devices, there’s got to be more to this particular technium evolutionary branch than endlessly fidgeting with 4” or 7” or 10” or 11” experimentation. Yeah, yeah, size matters; to a degree. So does fit and function; usually more so. The point is, especially with NFC on the scene, we’ve finally got all the pieces to go wild with the multi-device, multi-screen, multi-surface, multi-sensor, multi-player, multi-ulti-everything experiences; not just for mobile, but incorporating public kiosks, displays, entertainment, transportation and transit, work group round tables. We want Microsoft Surface like capabilities on every display surface, in every size, shape, and setting.
Each of those contexts, and many more, are teaming with potential for new mutations of open, semi-shared, specific-use, general purpose swarm cams, swarm sensors, swarm screens, human-machine synthesized compound-mind’s-eye perspectives; in addition to vastly accelerated and extended social cognition tools that are right now delivering incomprehensively complex, yet elegant and easy to interact with, limitation-shredding, human-machine-mind-melding, problem solving capacities.
Given the pace of development and disruptive implications of these and other accelerating changes, and considering that the Cyborg Anthropologist field is already well represented, I’m leaning more and more in the direction of finding the right people to help me invent a PhD in Cyborg Psychology. If there isn’t such a field, maybe it’s time we create it. How well are hominids adapting to the merger of human and machine minds? How can we do better? What does it mean to do better and to stay healthy, thriving?
Where are we failing, or missing opportunities? Are some people simply not fit for these new prosthetic, extended capabilities? What is our cyborg obligation to them? Should we be thankful that certain minds can’t grasp the significance, much less master the means of various mind amplification techniques? How do we help to foster adaptive, resilient, flourishing cyborg lives?
As we reach even further toward extending biological life and repairing disease through technological means, should people who exhibit histories of manifestly anti-social or violent, lynch-mob like behavior be permitted access such technologies? Who gets access and why? Is money or any other caste a valid rationing program for the kind of positive transhuman capabilities we’d hope to lead us into the next era of human technological evolution?
At least if you measure startup like FAKEGRIMLOCK measures startup.
Yep, I have to insert an AdSense waypoint click here, instead of directly linking you to the post above, because G+, like Facebook, and others, still not enabling us to somehow capture our own Content Creation value. It remains to be seen whether Chime.In succeeds in moving the needle in this regard.
Actually, there are two inserted waypoint clicks in this funnel. One here to encourage a microscopic chance of AdSense revenue and a second on G+ to keep building the curation network. In the current social media model, I am not in any way incented to actually direct readers directly to content. I am incented to divert and capture and redirect, to hopefully sink attention into my properties. Is this model encouraging and fostering the most productive use of such powerful extended cognition tools? Clearly not.
I think Microsoft and I join Steve Mann and EyeTap in respectfully disagreeing with Will Wright. Many people will vastly prefer the convenience of AMS-HUD (Attention Management System – Heads Up Display) over having to constantly dig into pockets and purses, look down and away from the the people and activities we’re engaged in. It’s just another organic form factor that will improve the integration and usefulness of information and physical layers of our world.
If we can’t convince Jony Ive or @ideo to build our iGlasses, maybe it would be a fun Kickstarter project; as dreamed by the true pioneers of this technology, we can finally build this functionality into a product that is stylish enough to credibly accessorize.
April 2012 Update: Hahaha. Looks like Google-X Project Glass agrees. Nice work!
Observing the pace of product evolution in the past decade, it’s almost as if when enough of us express any given intention with some semblance of coherence and clarity, the global cognition grid makes it happen. “Yet, we’re not amazed.” – Kevin Kelly
Go ahead. Try to tell us WE CAN’T. We dare you. Yeah, I’m mashing up the best of Microsoft, Apple, and Ideo to make the point. Let’s get started now.