New Human Societies in Cyberspace

Howard Rheingold - If Kurzweil uses mathematical models, Rheingold is more like the gum-shoe.  He tries to predict and learn what's coming from what he observes on the street.  Spent the last 2 years chasing down clues about changes that cause virtual and real worlds to merge.  He was in Tokyo recently and started observing people using their phones to do SMS (we don't see this in the US much).  Then he was in Helsinki.  What's going on?  A lot of really interesting things.

Look at cooperation and collective action in the wake of the advent of the Internet.  How have humans gotten to the point of working together?  Traditionally,they have required direct knowing of the person that they are dealing with.  Napster and eBay show us large groups of people sharing and trusting each other (even though they have no face-to-face knowledge of the person that they are "trusting").  Napster is more than about "stealing music."  Large numbers of people were "sharing their hard-drives."

If you think of the phone as always-on connection to the Internet then you start to glimpse a vast change.  Stationary computing doesn't invade our life the way that a pervasive computer communication does.  Cost of access is one barrier to the always-on connection.  But the barrier is dropping.  Even people in Botswana ride their bikes in the street and talk on cell-phones now.  If you plug the PC into the telephone you get something more than you would ordinarily imagine.  People are doing things that they find interesting.  Posting pictures of their dogs, whatever.

Protests in Seattle (The "battle of Seattle").  The protesters used computers, cell-phones and E-mail to organize their protest.  Same sort of thing occurred in Manila with people using text-messages.  Around the world we observe people "flocking" and quickly organizing meetings, and they do so using technology.

Technology is often developed for one thing, but used for another.  The Internet was originally driven by E-mail, which was the predominate form of collective communication.  We are now seeing new forms of communication.  What forms?  Well, even Google is an example.  It evaluates relationships and categorizes them.   His new book Smart Mobs is out soon and covers all of this in more detail. 

Amy Bruckman - Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech.  Bruckman is interested in children, and learning, and how people connect.  Big things are happening generally. 

We see many-to-many eCommerce, online suppport groups, hobby sites, blogs. But how does the Internet affect education and kids? She works with kids and there is a project called Moose Crossing, which teaches kids as young as seven object-oriented programming.  They "get it" right away.  Adults are so slow.

She created the Palaver Tree Online project where kids interview elders and learn history.  They do it online, and it works better.  Why?  Well, in the original model people have to meet face-to-face and coordinate their schedules.  Meeting face-to-face is hard, and somewhat daunting for the elder.  The online model is asynchronous and is not as daunting. 

What was learned from the project?  Apparently, more than just the online model is easier on the schedule.  Like what?  Kids had a greater role in shaping their own information gathering and liked history more.  We haven't seen all the expressions of online communication.  There are new interaction models being created, and we have to understand them.  She is wary of predicting the future.  It isn't set and it's up to us to create it.

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Ray Kurzweil sings In the Year 2525 - Ray Kurzweil is known for his work with speech recognition, which he says took 15 years to do.  Now he studies tech trends and tries to predict evolution of technology.  Uses mathematical models,  which are surprisingly predictive.  What has he learned?  That that the paradigm shift rate is doubling every decade.  It is an exponential growth rate and we are just now at the knee of the growth curve.  So 100 years of progress will actually only take 25 years (self-replicating nano-technology won't take 100 years.  It will take 25 years).

The end-point of Moore's law is not the end of the growth rate of computing.  Three dimensional molecular computing will be the paradigm that will take over for the the integrated circuit.  Computers are just one thing.  Gene sequencing experienced expontial growth.  ISP cost performance.  All of these technologies have S-curves reflecting exponential growth.

Next up for exponential growth rates?  Resolution of non-invasive brain scanning.  The growth rate of E-Commerce, the Internet, and telecommunications is following the predicatable path.  Wall St. doesn't see this, but it is true.

Predictions:  2010 Computers disappear.  We have always on wireless access to the Internet at all times.  Images written directly into our retinas.  Electronics so tiny it's embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eye-glasses.

2029: An intimate merger of computers and our brains -  $1,000 of computation = 1,000 times the power of the human brain.  Reverse engineering of the human brain completed.  Computers pass the Turing test.  Nanobots let you auto-switch between real and virtual reality.  A computer stimulation test with one woman caused her to laugh and find humor when a certain spot was stimulated. Human brain is 12 million bytes of compressed information (less than Microsoft Word, but more complicated...well, maybe not).  Computers have the ability to quickly transmit information.  Software is easily copied, but human knowledge is currently hard to transmit.  That won't be the case in the near future.

The Challenge from Malthus "Exponential trends eventually run out of resources"  This is not necessarily true because new catalysts for exponential growth arise.  Human Life Expectancy is going to experience exponential growth.  So if you can just hang in there...Radical life extension will be available to our kids.  Soon on the market: Human body 2.0.

9:37:43 AM    comment []