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After listening to this cued up exchange, go back to the beginning and watch the whole presentation. #MustWatchETV
Um, wait. Ultimate irony, hypocrisy, or just some technical dumb-assery on my part? Very strange that the embed doesn’t appear to be working; even though the YouTube tools to create embed work as normal. WTF? Cannot Display Embed Above?

Steve: “I want to be someone powerful. A towering historic figure.” Lucifer: “Here’s the deal, Steve, you get to create the world’s most valuable company, but upon attainment your soul is mine.” Steve: “Tell you what, I’ll make our logo the bite of the forbidden fruit, just to seal the deal.”

“For testing special clothing.” Right. Got it.

“PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot developed by Boston Dynamics for testing special clothing used by US military personnel. PETMAN balances itself as it walks, squats and does calisthenics. PETMAN simulates human physiology by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating inside the clothing to provide realistic test conditions. PETMAN development is lead by Boston Dynamics, working in partnership with Measurement Technologies Northwest, Oak Ridge National Lab and MRIGlobal. The work is being done for the DoD CBDP. For more information about PETMAN visit http://www.BostonDynamics.com.”

From the video, in 2011: Whopping increase in app creation and downloads: – ONE BILLION apps downloaded worldwide each month – $3 BILLION paid by Apple alone to independent apps developers Surge in use of social media mobile platforms: – 166 PERCENT increase in Facebook Mobile users in the first half of 2011 alone – 103 MILLION wireless tweets were posted each day – ONE BILLION Foursquare check-ins – 26 PHOTOS were made “hipstery” on Instagram every second Ongoing explosion in data traffic: – EIGHT TRILLION texts were sent – up 1.1 trillion from last year – 1800 PERCENT increase in traffic on U.S. networks predicted in just four years Unprecedented competition and choice: – MORE SMARTPHONES purchased than PCs in the United States – MORE WIRELESS SUBSCRIPTIONS than people – TWO BILLION networked mobile devices by 2015 – 4G SERVICES being rolled out by at least six carriers in 2011 alone Massive potential for job creation and economic growth: – 2.4 MILLION American jobs supported by wireless – $27.5 BILLION investment in U.S. mobile networks by wireless carriers – 500,000 JOBS & $400 BILLION to U.S. GDP with additional 500 MHz of additional spectrum

“These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be. Where we can contact our friends, anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali, just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it prove worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day, we may have brain surgeons in Edinborough operation on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point, and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute, they will communicate.”

Via @askpang by way of @wa8dzp.

Prosthetic eyes, limbs, hearts, organs, and wings.

NASA successfully completed the final flight in a series of tests of a new robotic lander prototype at the Redstone Test Center’s propulsion test facility on the U.S. Army Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. The team steadily increased the lander’s flight profile, starting by hovering the lander — dubbed Mighty Eagle — at 3 feet, then 30 feet and finally a record 100-foot flight test.

Totally embarrassed by the depiction of exhuberant gleaming youth in this clip, with whom I clearly identified too strongly at far too impressionable an age, some 40 years ago. Wonder how I got "this way?" By believing what Toffler explained and yet still being subjected to the very vestigial technium / techonomy that he describes, herein, a lifetime ago. It was like, "Here's everything that's most broken about the world, go do something to try and help fix it."   Consider this as Exhibit A for the argument that The Singularity Already Happened and Is In The Process of Happening; marking the year 2029 more like the time at which a critical mass of 8 billion humans will look back, defining that new default reality.  

  Toffler: "All of us think about the future, but the futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long term future, not just what’s going to happen next."   "We go around the world talking to people who are, in fact, MAKING the future. So this is not some mystical exercise in Nostradamus style prediction, but an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing, or will be changing our lives in the years and decades ahead."   "It occured to us that when you go to a foriegn culture, you’re bombarded by strange cues, by visual, sound and other inputs that may be different from the ones in your own culture and that are hard to understand and some people get truly disoriented, and upset,  and sociologist and anthropologists call it culture shock."   "What happens, if a new environment comes to you, where you are, and comes to you rapidly? So that you don’t understand IT’S inputs, and it’s CUES? And the answer to use was, if you can have culture shock by relocating to another location in space; you could have Future Shock by, in effect, relocating in time. A future comes toward you, that you don’t understand."   "You also hear people than ever complaining about being time harrassed, time squeezed, time over-worked, too many hours, and I think everybody feels this pressure. You’re under pressure usually to make more and more decisions in shorter and shorter intervals of time."   "And guess what? There’s a limit beyond which we don’t make good decisions. If we push ourselves to decide quickly about things that are terribly complex, the chance are, we’ll make some serious mistakes; and we do. The hope was, computers will solve this problem."   "The computer does simplify decision making, but it complexifies everything else, so you have to make more complex decisions, anyway. The computer as a source of complexity, as well as a machine for dealing with complexity has not yet been fully understood."   "Technology and Social Change are all interrelated. The industrial revolution changed, not just the technologies of production, it meant that people stopped being peasants, they became urban industrial people. Totally different value systems, totally different forms of social organization, new institutions. They invented department stores. They invented post offices. Social inventions, not just technological inventions."   Ed. Note: don’t miss "the miracle of HIGH SPEED wire communication is commonplace today, lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your fingertips." at 5:48. LOL!   "It’s the civilization that gave rise to the world that most of us watching this were born into. The world of mass production, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment, mass recreation, and in some countries, Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Hipster Hints: he’s not talking about Iran or Iraq, homies.)   "In that kind of a world, conformity is idealized; you are supposed to be like everyone else; and that is because it is economically advantageous for that system to produce people who are prepared to spend their lives doing work on the predicate; basically unthinking work, on assembly lines; or in offices built to operate like assembly lines. That product of the industrial revolution is not just an economy, it’s a way of life." Oh, we’re sooo much smarter now, right? :-)   LOLCATSROTFLXPALADOCIOUS!

Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy.

Photographic SwarmBots. Swarming Cambots. Tomato, Tomahto. Potato, Potahto. Break out the #tinfoil hat or welcome the Transparent Society? Exhibit A US accused of making insect spy robots Tom Leonard in New York Oct 10, 2007.

Exhibit B Robotic Aerial Vehicle Captures Dramatic Footage of Fukushima Reactors April 20, 2011. Erico Guizzo.

“Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, is using a T-Hawk, a remote operated flying machine created by U.S. firm Honeywell, to get a closer view of the severely damaged reactors. The T-Hawk, known as a micro air vehicle, or MAV, uses a ducted-fan propulsion system that allows it to hover in place like a helicopter and fly into tight spaces where other aircraft can’t go.” Exhibit C X Prize Team to Send Swarm of Spiders to the Moon May 13, 2009.

Exhibit D Tiny flying machines inspired by nature will revolutionize surveillance work July 28, 2011.

“Incorporating micro-cameras, these revolutionary insect-size vehicles will be suitable for many different purposes ranging from helping in emergency situations considered too dangerous for people to enter, to covert military surveillance missions.” Exhibit E Spherical Flying Machine Developed by Japan Ministry Of Defense #DigInfo Oct 23, 2011. DigInfo TV

Of course, endless beneficial commercial applications could include services like Alta Shot‘s High Altitude Real Estate Photography, Land Surveys, disaster response and rescue, etc.

Full chart on TechOfTheHub: