The next big thing?

I read about the next "big" thing, namely 3D TV: The future 3D TV – we look at some of the best angles
Yes it is cool, really coo but is it the next "big" thing?
Sorry but it will not change anything, I mean it will not change our behavior patterns not even slightly.
It is similar to when the color TV came. Color, yes! The same TV programs, the same people producing and the same people watching. The TV shops got something new to earn money on. That's all.
Did I say that I want black and white TV back? No not at all, I just said that color-TV didn't introduce any changes to our society. New cool feature and some new business, nothing more.

3D TV is a new cool feature and I will be the first (almost) to buy. However, it will not make any changes to our society.
That is why I regard, ePaper and eReader as a more "big" thing than 3D TV. The introduction of good quality ePaper and eReaders will definitely change our behaviour and definitely have an impact on our society.
Look in my article Will e-Readers save the world? why I think so.

Why doesn't smartphones have a voice interface?

I mean the command interface. What devices are the most natural to start having a voice interface? Mobiles of course!

We talk in them already. A voice interface to the PC isn't at all as natural. I can imaging people sitting at the office talking to the computer. Annoying, to say the least!

I have mainly used Sony-Ericsson and Nokia mobiles and in my old Sony-Ericsson P900 I could say the name of someone in the contact list. It work sometimes and if I said "Donald Duck" or something that P900 didn't understand I called someone randomly. Nokia never made any big effort to have the same voice input but my Nokia N95 and now Nokia E71 read up the callers name with a voice from an old robot-movie from the 70:s...

C'mon Nokia and Sony-Ericsson you can better than this! Can't you?

The Nokia E71 can even read up my e-mails and other stuff. Well not that bad but I have no use for it really.

So what am I talking about here?

I would like to have a voice input for every command you can do, such as "open calender", "book meeting", "start music player", "start radio" etc etc

It can be made more or less sophisticated but a basic level would be great. I wouldn't even need to put on my reading glasses! I have done many stupid things while driving my car, that I will not tell you about ;-) but a voice interface would spare me some tricky situations.

Can this be so hard? I know that the software for voice input is out there that can do these things so why not in the mobile?

Nokia, why didn't you go for this instead of 5800, the so called "iPhone killer". I tested it for one day. Really, I have to say this, it is pathetic Nokia! Your 5800 is like a modern version of my old Ericsson P900 when it comes to user interface. Yes you have many nifty funtions but an "iPhone killer"? You can't be serious! I haven't seen Sony-Ericsson's new "iPhone-killer" but something tells me that iPhone will remain the king of user interface for a while. So, Sony-Ericsson why didn't you go for something new? A real voice interface?

What do you say, wouldn't a real voice interface be a neat function to have in your mobile?

Maybe it is out already, did I miss something?

Delicious or Twine? The answer is Diigo!

I have for about a year now used delicious for two reasons:

1. The same bookmarks everywhere. I have the same bookmarks in every PC. At home, at work and anywhere else. When I go somewhere, I can walk right in to an Internet café and my bookmarks are there. Even when surfing with my mobile I have the same bookmarks.


2. Sharing bookmarks. I share bookmarks with my colleagues and friends. We never send url's in emails any more. We use delicious to send bookmarks to each other and we can also look into each others bookmarks. BTW, anyone can see my bookmarks unless I tick "Unshare!

This is great and some of my friends and colleagues do the same so we can share bookmarks. If you use the Firefox Delicious plug-in it is as easy as saving bookmarks locally. A bonus is the tagging. To set tags is soooo much better than save in folders.

There is another newer bookmark service called Twine. You save and tag bookmarks similar to Delicious but Twine offers much more functionality. Things like automatic tags and search for people with certain interests. Sharing Twines (subjects) with both friends and people I don't know is another function and in a Twine can we save bookmarks and documents. Fine, but I don't want to administrate bookmarks in two different systems. No one wants that... Actually I did use both! For a couple of months I have used both systems until a week ago. Twine offer a better way to arrange and maintain knowledge and not just bookmarks. Delicious is easier and faster and I have my network to share bookmarks with there.

A week ago I found Diigo, a beta that so far looks very nice. Diigo have a rich functionality not the same but at the same level as Twine. When I save bookmarks to Diigo I also save to Delicious and gets the same tags! Now I can use Delicious together with my friends and also use the more advanced Diigo by using the one and same save-button. Diigo has another really unique feature. You can mark an area on the web page and make a comment to that area. You can also put floating sticky notes on the page. If you use the Firefox plug-in and you open a web page that someone have bookmarked, you can see all the notes that they have put there. Really awesome! You can configure which notes you want to see. I will mainly work with Diigo as my bookmark service but as long as my network and sharing is still in Delicious I must go in there now and then. Hmm, how can I convince my colleagues and friends to move to Diigo? I need to set up a plan here...

www.Delicious.com
www.Twine.com
www.Diigo.com

Cyborg - human or machine?

When Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the term "cyborg" 50 years ago they were talking about people living in the outer space. Today we can define a cyborg as a human (or other organism) that get increased capabilities with the help of technology. With a passive definition like this most of us are cyborgs already. I think that the term is not interesting until it is technology that substantially improves our abilities. We have many examples, such as pacemakers, prostheses and even wheel chairs. They make things much better for the individual in question but maybe not with much better functionality than a healthy body. Transhumanism is a term that is very related to cyborgs. Transhumanism is a philosophy (or maybe philosophies) that not only believe in a very bright posthuman future but also strive for it. The typical transhumanist have great hopes on the The Singularity.

New technology, new materials and new knowledge about how our body works will give us human spare parts with even better performance than the original. We will see this in sports where the current problems with steroids, blood doping and other kind of doping is just the beginning. In the Olympics in Beijing 2008, we had examples of contestants who ran with a prosthesis. The Olympic Committee approved it. Next time, 2012, the prosthesis are so good that they will win if they still are approved to attend.

Will the disabled be the first superhumans?

This may sound strange but it is probably close to the truth. Let's make a little test:

The man who run 100 meter in the shortest time is regarded as the fastest man on earth. Today, the fastest human ever is Usain Bolt from Jamaica. He run 100 meter in 9.69 seconds at the Olympic games in Beijing, August 2008. This is an amzing speed.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

If I offered you legs that would make you run faster than Usain Bolt, would you receive them? You must of course cut off your own legs and replace them with the new legs. My guess is that you would say no! Well, maybe not. If you are one of the disabled people who have no legs, I guess that you would say yes!

So when these legs are here, we will see disabled people with supernatural powers. Jumping and running like no one ever done before.

Of course this can be true for any human organ. We will probably be reluctant to replace fully functioning organs with mechanical stuff but if the organ is missing or dysfunctional we will say yes.

In the future we will also see mechanical components that can be mixed with our organs and implanted in our bodies. Not replacing organs is a little more easy to accept, I think.

The limits will then still be our bones, flesh and nerves and not the mechanical parts. The one who can get a complete mechanical set will probably have even better features.

I am not a medical expert but I think that the future for many kinds of disabilities looks rather bright!

Some ethical and hard questions

If you know that you will live x years extra if you replace your functioning liver with a mechanical one, will you do it? How about your heart? Your brain?

Before we answer we must also think about how it will be done. We are talking about a future where the surgical methods are different from today. Maybe nanorobots injected in our system, can do all or part of the job, maybe micro surgery done more or less by robots or maybe some other method not yet invented. Mistakes are very rare and repairable. Painless and shorter period of recovery compared with current methods. It is maybe easier to say yes under these conditions?

The ethical questions are numerous however. What kind of ethics and culture will be present at that time? I think that we will gradually get used to the idea. Just take a look at how the perception of plastic surgery has changed over the years.

So far we have been talking about replacing one or another organ with artificial artifacts. Let us go one step further. Imaging a situation where most or all of our organs can be replaced by artificial compononents that performs far better than the original. How much can we replace before we are more machines than humans? Maybe it is the brain that makes us human? Some day even the brain will be possible to replace but I don't want to fantasize about its implications. Replacing the brain is so far ahead and science fiction that I will stop here.

I think that we are in a period where the combination of IT, nanotech, genetics and other technologies are improving with an exponential pace. If not ourselves so will our children certainly face these challenges and questions. The 2 TED talks in the links below show us that in some sence it is already here.

Links:

TED Video: Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs

TED VIdeo: Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling new science

Blogs about cyborgs

Blogs about Transhumanism

10 Future Shocks for the Next 10 Years - Business Center - PC World.

Will e-Readers save the world?

I am the type of nerd that can't handle papers. If I get papers I don't know where to put it and finally I will forget that I ever had it or can't find it when I need it. Sometimes however I print large volumes of paper for use in my work. Large volumes are not very convenient to read from the pc-monitor. Paper is much more relaxing for the eyes.

The world consumption of paper has increased 400% in the last 40 years. Close to 4 billion trees or 35% of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries globally.

An e-Reader is a device that is used to display documents. There are a bunch of e-Readers available such as Amazon Kindle, Sony's e-Reader and Fujitsu's FLEPia. Currently they all suffers from either being too small or too expensive and of course the black-and-white displays, except for FLEPia which has color, are limiting as well. Another problem that some e-Readers have is a very low refresh rate of the display. You have to wait several seconds for the screen to turn a page.

Kindle2

In general, Kindle of today is just not good enough to replace paper. I know that many are using Kindle but they are in the first wave of users. The forgiving type: Wow! Look I can load documents and read it! Cool! Kindle displays documents in black and white and the format is too small. The price, however, is almost OK: ~$350.

FLEPia from Fuijitsu

The latest FLEPia has a color display, still a little bit too small and way too expensive! Most new e-Readers, including Amazon's Kindle and Sony's e-Reader, use electronic-paper technology that is easier to read than conventional displays. But e-paper still suffers in comparison to conventional liquid crystal displays in terms of refresh speed and vividness of color. FLEPia is LCD-based and first in the industry with color display. FLEPia may still have a way to go. 1000€ is just too much. I think that people will hesitate to buy when the price is on the same level as a good laptop.

Plastic Logic

I expect new types of e-Readers to come soon with A4-format and really thin. One candidate is Plastic Logic that announced an e-Reader to be launched in the beginning of 2010. It is a black and white device. If the price is right, such as 200€, this will be a success and I am sure that it will be easy to get back the invested money, fairly quickly. I mean paper cost, ink cost, printer maintenance and other. E-Ink, the company behind Kindle, has announced development of a new e-Reader. The preliminary plan is late 2010 and then it is a color display but the price tag is unknown.

The cost per printed paper is something between 20 cents to 1€ depending on how you calculate it. If the cost for an e-Reader is less than 200€ it is easy to get back the investment fairly quick. That should mean much less paper used worldwide. Even if it takes a while to change peoples mind there are some really good business cases not only in office environments. For instance within manufacturing of complicated products and products with many variants, all over the world loads of paper is used during the assembly. The assembly instructions are following the product along the assembly line. The feeling of a real book have its own merits especially an old one. I regard this as an art form but for how long will that be the standard book? How long will we have newspapers on paper every morning? Will we have newspapers at all? BTW, I stopped reading morning papers a long time ago. A lot of forests to save and of all trees used by man, it is the process of making paper that is the most environmentally unfriendly technology. Eventually the e-Readers will give a reading experience as comfortable as paper with non-scattered displays and easy to use interfaces. Maybe e-Readers will not save the world but they sure will be a good help.

monitoring, legislative changes and control

This blog-post is the last one in a series of 4 postings. It is about 4 mega-trends that each can take two paths. Heaven or hell. Everything depends on ourselves and our own decisions. The 5th post will be a summing up and conclusions.

There is so much to say about this topic but I'll try to keep it short. The very purpose of this blog post is to combine it with the other previous posts.

Never before has it been so easy and cheap to monitor and track people, as it is now.

It is relatively easy to use the interception of networks, email scanning, pattern recognition, AI, etc..
We leave traces of ourselves in social networks including "Location awareness", transactions such as ATM withdrawals, credit cards, the entry and exit of buildings, logging on and out, phone calls, instant messaging etc, etc.

Matching all this information is a piece of cake if you have access to it. Our government agencies and institutions have access to the most but also companies and individuals can access a lot of information with both legal and illegal means. In most of the western world we have laws to protect us against such but the laws are outdated and are constantly exposed to "attacks". Different interests lobbying for relaxing or removing those laws. Only few politicians are working to strengthen citizen protection. It is clear that powerful forces working to bring total transparency and control over us citizens.

George Orwell's 1984 just sniffed at what was really going to come.

To what already exists, we will also soon have new opportunities for visual and audio analysis. A View can now recognize a face. A technology which will become increasingly more sophisticated and cheap. Soon every man's property! What is said in a video or audio recording will soon be translated into text, evaluated, cataloged, sorted and matched. This technology is in its infancy but will also be developed.

I have a very positive overall personality and I am convinced that we (humanity) will break up this knot! However, I am afraid that it will take time and that our awakening can be very painful.

When it is so easy and cheap to get large volumes of information that can be matched and used in different ways, is there anyone who believes that even strong laws are sufficient to prevent power-mad politicians, institutions and companies from doing this? Just look back in our history to get an idea. The technology is new but the man does not change as fast!

Counter forces will arise from the same origin, namely, social networks and communities. Countermeasures in the form of software and hardware that will do anything to hinder surveillance. Will it work? Maybe not. We will vote for politicians who dare to take away from this trend and establish laws and technology that can stop a total control of individuals. But only after we have burned ourselves!
Sure monitoring is necessary and useful to society and this is precisely the problem. We all want fight the criminals and terrorists, but at what price?

In Sweden, the debate has raged against a new law (FRA Act) for signals intelligence. The law has nevertheless come about. It is that Swedish intelligence service will collect and analyze all Internet traffic in Sweden. Especially, people are worried for their email ... but this is not about reading the individual emails. It is about getting an additional source of mass information to add to the ones mentioned above. Moreover, the debate is quite naive. Sweden is just a small speck on the map. Who believes that other intelligence agencies do not do the same thing already? Some have been going on for years. Echelon is a famous example. How many secret and unknown examples are there? C'mon we are talking about secret intelligence! I think that we all agree that it is needed to some degree but it is almost impossible to set the limits. How can we take control of the control?

Heaven or hell?

To get a broader picture, please read my 3 previous blog-posts: "singularity - are we doomed?", "nanotechnology"and "humanoids - the next generation"

Some links of interest:

• Wikipedia about surveillance
  


• Antisurveillance, by Brian Martin ("Surveillance, essentially is a problem of unequal power")


• Video Analytics the new magic solution?


• Wikipedia about FRA


• Blog posts about the SwedishFRA act

humanoids - the next generation

This blog-post is the third in a series of 4 postings about 4 mega-trends that each can take two paths. Heaven or hell. Everything depends on ourselves and our own decisions. The 5th post will be a summing up and conclusions.

Asimo via Wikipedia

I suppose that most of you have heard about the amazing Asimo from Honda. Partner from Toyota is another one and there are many more. Asia is far ahead of Europe and the U.S. when it comes to humanoids. Of course a robot must not resemble a human being. It can be adapted to different tasks with different size and design but here we will talk about humanoids. One interesting fact is that it is the automotive industry in Japan, China and South Korea that invests most resources in humanoids. How come?

What does automotive have to do with humanoids?

There are projections that indicate that the sales volume of humanoids will exceed the sales volume of passenger cars in less than 10 years. These volumes require production, distribution, after market with support. In order to design and develop these things, considerable knowledge is needed. In all produce and sell humanoids and other advanced robots is at a level that is comparable to cars. How many industries, of today, have the required capacity? This is what Asian automotive realised many years ago. One have to start now in order to get market shares in this emerging segment. Even the price might be the same as a small car.

Why would people spend so much money on a humanoid?

Right now they can not do much, but Asimo is working on a number of receptions with simple tasks. Eg to show the guests to the right place and offering coffee. They remember the guest's name and face and can make simple greetings. At first, they may well just be for entertainment and very simple tasks at home. Eventually, he (yes I will say he!) can act as a personal valet to cook and clean up after us. He can serve as a popular babysitter. He can carry your bags. He will remember everything that you need to know, navigate and even be our interface to Internet.

"Partner" from Toyota

Another path of development, opposite from entertainment, is humanoids for embarking dangerous environments, heavy lifts, hospital care tasks and so on. Pretty nice prospects or what?

Is everything just fine?

There is one obvious catch. What happens when Asimo can do work as good as we people? Many jobs are not more complicated than that it will be possible quite soon if not right now. Outsourcing may not be as interesting when we reach that point but mass unemployment can wait around the corner. We will in the same time get closer and closer to the singularity point (se Singularity - are we doomed?). We do not need to reach that point before they will be able to take over all kinds of jobs including office jobs and eventually leadership job. The whole picture is of course a little more complicated than this. I will come back to that later in the post about "summing-up and conclusions". As you can see in the link above, the singularity point will by itself raise some other questions.

Heaven or hell?

Some links of interest:

Robot Park in South Korea an example of Asian spirit within this field
Asimo from Honda
Partner from Toyota
Singularity - are we doomed? My previous post about heaven or hell
"futuramb unfiltered" have a link to h+ Magazine about future scenarios

nanotechnology

This blog-post is the second in a series of 4 postings. It is about 4 mega-trends that each can take two paths. Heaven or hell. Everything depends on ourselves and our own decisions. The 5th post will be a summing up and conclusions.

Nanotechnology is an area that really fascinates! As usual when talking about really powerful technique, the possibilities are enormous but so are also the threats. There are excellent articles in Wikipedia on Nanotechnology so I will not and can not go particularly deep in this area. 

Instead, we dive straight into the analysis and a brief classification:

1. Material: with nano-engineering, one can obtain materials with properties that we never before seen. Eg super thin and super strong material, material that adapts to temperature, light or other external factors, "intelligent" materials that change depending on some circumstances etc.


2. Medicin: We will see drugs that are tailored for a particular purpose and has no side effects. Nano-robots that can get into the body and locate the right area and perform micro-surgery or other local tasks.


3. Other: We will have nano-machines that can not be perceived by our ordinary senses. These nano-machines can be spread in food, water or air. They can, for example, be our rescue in an environmental disaster but also a terrorists wet dream or a warring nation's invisible weapon.

There are many ethical questions we must ask ourselves. Think about this for a nano second. What will happen when our environment is full of these for us new particles? Are they biodegradable? What happens when different nano machines interact with each other? Will they get new features then? We are talking about Nano garbage, leaking nanotoxicity into our macro world.

Heaven or hell?

To get a broader picture, please read my previous blog post and the two blog-posts soon to follow.

Some links of interest:

• futuramb unfiltered about (h+ Magazine Spring 2009 Issue)
• American scientists have no idea what they're doing re: nanotechnology (crunchgear.com)
• Phone sniffs your breath to detect diseases (makezine.com)
• Artificial trees could function as solar-wind harvester (engadget.com)
• Nanotechnology on Wikipedia (link in the text above)

singularity - are we doomed?

This blog-post is the first in a series of 4 postings. It is about 4 mega-trends that each can take two paths. Heaven or hell. Everything depends on ourselves and our own decisions. The 5th post will be a summing up and conclusions.

Computers are just faster and faster. They calculate everything faster and can sort, cluster and find the connection between data in a dizzying speed. They are also getting smarter. Today's chess programs are as good as and even better than the best human chess players. A small niche, but an indication of what is to come! Most people now agree that one day computers will be smarter than us humans. This point is sometimes called the singularity (Check also Ray Kurzweil's pages). I know that smarter is a hard-defined word, but let us ignore the hair-splitting for a while! If we know that they take better decisions than us, can we avoid to follow the decisions? How can a company leaders or politicians justify a different decision when it is proved that the computers are a step ahead? Sooner or later, this impacts on society, the labor market, in the political system and economic systems. Major changes are imminent. I am not so afraid that computers will take take control, much like HAL in the movie 2001. Quite so simple, will it not be to swindle the humanity! The big challenge is how we tackle the major structural changes that must take place. What would you work with and how? Why work? What will you do? How will you earn your living?

Start thinking now and don't wait until the panic is here!

I anticipate that we will have many desperate political and other measures when this becomes apparent. Absurd laws and proposals will shower down. Threatened structures and systems are doing anything possible to survive. Hopefully it will not go astray during this time.

When will all this happen? It will take between 30-50 years according to computer experts. Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner predicts that the singularity will be here before 2050.

Heaven or hell?

Read also about the other 3 mega trends, in future blog postings, to get a broader picture.

Some links of interest:

The Singularity is near - and it has a university 
Q&A: Kurzweil on tech as a double-edged sword (news.cnet.com)
Singularity in Wikipedia (From the text above)
Ray Kurzweil's pages (From the text above)