The first one being that robots can now be trusted (pretty much) to operate on people without being supervised, although as far as I’m aware it’s only been tested on Turkey so far, not the country, the big chickenny things – which is ok because chickens are basically just walking plants aren’t they.
Which is apparently successful 93% of thhe time, which is good – but what about the other 7% where it accidentally slips and cuts your todger off eh? What about that? I suppose it could quickly sew it back on again and pretend nothing had happened… that’s what I would do. It would get away with it 73% of the time.
The other one is a sort of television that you can see from every angle.
Which as far as I can see is only useful for one thing, and that’s putting your own disembodied head into, forever. You could get thousands of them – line an entire room with them… you could sit in the middle on a simple wooden chair while the thousands of replicas of your own head told you how great you were for hours on end in somnambulant, monotonal voices.
It’s not a sex thing. It would be character-building.
To what end indeed. No good will come of this. These people are mad. Quite quite mad. You can hear them going mad (just before they’re cut off) right at the very end of this
Once upon a time, a spaceship (or the earthling in it) took this photie… and apparently global consciousness evolved as a result.
I don’t know if that’s true. Could be. Could be bollocks – I would have though that with the internet now more or less available more or less everywhere, that some similar sort of thing would happen – that one to one links between people so rich and fat they can hardly move and people who’s lives are gratuitously harsh are made… because there comes a point (there must surely?) where charity goes from being a $30 punt on Karma to an utterly un-resistable human imperative. If you look someone in the eyes… if you see a picture of their mum and dad or their cat… you don’t have a choice but to… help.
Or not. People have lived alongside slaves forever, and there’s more slavery going on today than there ever has been in the past – and a million shades of grey between. In the end, all struggles are class struggles.
Anyway, back to the earth… these links kindof rotate around the earth. Kindof not.
“If the human species should be destroyed on Earth, our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilization, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war. Or people just becoming stupider and stupider until they can no longer tie their own shoelaces or feed themselves any more”
Android in this case being his cellphone rather than his Ken Doll… which is cool because it’s (already) funded via Kickstarter – which in turn is crap because it’s American-only… an in turn cool because the shots are not called by paranoid suits. He’s going to send it up using weather balloons I think, and it will take photographs of things when it’s up there – which is exactly what I would do, if I was up there, only I wouldn’t use a cellphone – unless that’s all I had.
Which is k-for cool because I’m not that interested in eye-candy for western fan-boy jackdaws. Anything really revolutionary is probably going to arise as a response to “market forces” in places where the market doesn’t revolve around people who can afford $20,000 for a car.
Seedcamp is an EU incubator. What would be really cool would be a non-US version of Kickstarter – although it would be interesting to see if The Crowd could filter out the inevitable fraud. My guess is that it could.
Something that turned up over the Kiva Furore – they said they set the thing up and fraud set in almost immediately – so they reorganised around already-on-the-ground micro-banks… in the process deceiving the donors into thinking that their donations made the difference between a project happening or not. Actually all the “stories” in Kiva are all already funded.
And build stronger communities – although how this differs from file-sharing I don’t know. Every time you share something a kitten dies.
The basic gist of this is a list of stuff that’s kindof surplus to requirements – it reminds me a bit of that… um… um… Deviceknit in which people list stuff that they have lying about and other people list ways of cobbling it all together to do useful stuff.
This in turn reminds me of the geek-box where people send boxes of junk to each other through the post.
“IKNOgrid è un Sistema “SMART GRID” che permette di poter monitorare a distanza e istante per istante il corretto funzionamento e la reale produzione di un qualsiasi impianto ad energia rinnovabile, segnalando in tempo reale eventuali anomalie, difficilmente rilevabili anche manualmente.”
The Man’s a God. Every time I read something by or about him, he impresses me more. I always wanted (right from when I was a small, delinquent child) to be the next Martin Luther. It’s not going to be me – or even one person… it’s going to be a whole load of people – and one of them is Julian Assange.
Fascism is already here – it’s just diluted… this is what we’re up against… creeping, privatised authoritarianism. All Authority is inherently illegitimate, and bears the burden of proof – it must prove it’s legitimacy, to those that it would govern. If it can’t do this, then it must be dismantled.
We need to fight back, and we need to fight back hard. We’re all Spartaci now – and exposure is the one of the best weapons we have.
He’s been flirting with this sort of thing for a while I think – there was that blade-runnery thing. Purefold – which could be a cynical corporate attempt to mine public ideas, or something else. I wish him luck – he’s done some excellent stuff.
Tempting though it is, I’m not sure if I’ll submit any of my own day… It’ll get ignored. It always does. Maybe I’ll make an alternative version which takes the piss. I mean the official version is going to be all “worthy” and TED-like isn’t it?
This is exactly the sort of thing I like the most.
It’s a tiny 3d printed helicopter, the design for which was arrived at using genetic algorithms.
Absolutely brilliant – machines that can design themselves using inner-simulations. Almost. There’s nothing to say that a “machine” shouldn’t have appendages that aren’t actually attached to the brain… we’re just used to creatures being “one-piece”. I think it’s a whole lot more likely that robotic creatures are actually thin-client.
Like we are… now that we can no longer cope without having 24/7 access to the web.
It’s this guy who appears to have single-handedly created about 1400 educational videos – university level. Check out the list on that page… that’s utterly incredible. He’s quite good at teaching as well by the look of it – they’re understandable. If I had ten divisions of such men our troubles here would be over very quickly.
I’ve been thinking about sky libraries quite a lot recently – because that (among other things) is what the web is. It’s a Giant Library In The Sky.
And you know what the thing about libraries is? They’re a basic human right. They’re a cornerstone of civilisation… all information available to all people all of the time, is a basic human right. If you are a publisher, you don’t get to choose what goes into a library. Please… fuck off. That is not your decision – the ethos/sanctity of libraries is more important than the business/$$$ of publishers. Sorry, you’ll just have to find some other way to make money – like the rest of us have had to.
Which leaves us with some fairly tangly questions to answer – to do with where privacy starts, and libararyhood… takes over. Every human on earth has a god-given right to be able to access all information as soon as it is published. Just like they would if it was a bricks-and-mortar library. Once information is in the wild, it no longer belongs to anyone… not logically or morally. The law is retarded, and retarding – and held in utter contempt by everyone under the age of 25, and a fair few over. You (Douglas Rushkoff) may think you have a right to “own” what you publish… rather than (as you say) just “giving” it to the hive-mind… nice try, but that is not the environment you live in. Those are not the environmental conditions – and you can’t fight it without pouring a ton of money and energy into the guard-economy. You can’t fight it without making the web equivalent of the fascism that we saw at the G20 in Toronto this last few weeks
Information is inherently unownable – if you don’t like it, don’t create it… there are a couple of billion people more than happy to take your place. We are witnessing the biggest explosion in expressive-capability in human history, and legacy industries are a hindrance, rather than the sine qua non of creativity. We are here.
So… I think the library frame is a more useful starting point for the morality of information… than that of “theft” – because that clearly doesn’t work.
And when you see what Salman Khan has done – what he’s gifted to the world… how much this information / teaching would mean to someone… who doesn’t have access to education. It goes beyond (the symptom of a chronically broken system that is) philanthropy and is looking a whole lot more… Gandhi-like is too strong… I mean all he has done has given everything he knows to the rest of humanity. He hasn’t broken the British Empire… but still… …If I had ten divisions of such men our troubles here would be over very quickly.
Which can apparently understand 1000 words, all nouns.
Well that’s not going to fucking work is it? I only think in adjectives…. but like, what we really need is verbs. Verbs like “wake up”, “attack”, “kill”, “run away” etc. I’m including this here, because mind-controlled flying things is one of my fav concepts. So there it is.
Anyway – this turned up the other day…
Another flying camera thing – this looks pretty cool, because it uses a proper dslr camera, which are now movie capable… and because in the video the shutter speed makes it looks as though the propellers are laconically flipping about rather than doing the usual screaming whine etc. Looks like quite a small critter as well.
Then there’s this one that that can cling to trees etc, which is probably useful for search and rescue or something.
Alternatively you could fly it over the house of a <insert name of major banking institution CEO> and fire a curare tipped dart into his brain as he walks past… especially as the “clinging” mechanism is actually more like “biting”. With a pair of curare-tipped mandibles. Mind you, the Russians were apparently into that sort of thing (except with poisoned umbrellas) for years, and it didn’t stop them from going into Afghanistan and bankrupting their not-insubstantial empire, so maybe there are better things to do with little planes that can cling to walls and trees and such. Emergency wifi-webs maybe. Self-organising wifi webs. Self-organising zigby webs.
And finally – some people who have made a solar-powered plane, which is cool… and a video that makes them look like a bunch of advertising-arseholes “expressing themselves” on their day off, by showing how clever they are by making another fucking advert that looks like a blockbuster movie advert… which isn’t:
Christ, that video is like “Essence of Tosser”. A perfectly crafted distillate of everything I fucking hate about what passes for “cinema” or branding or whatever it is these days.
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Is it illegal to embed a youtube video then mercilessly slag it off? I mean it’s not really in the spirit of things is it?
But you know – I’m really interested in stuff that annoys the shit out of me… so there it is.
Everyone wants one, but as soon as they turn up with any level of affordability, someone will crash one and then some existing industry (air? road?) will fund some “won’t someone think of the children” lobby-group to get a law passed making them illegal, so only rich people or people in Brazil will be able to use them, and only mega-corporations will be able to make them.
This happens every time.
The killer-app, the intel-inside of the 21st century is shaping up to be the ability to ignore stupid laws designed to protect legacy industries… for our “safety”.
Whatever.
Why do I like this? You already know why I like this… I like this because it looks like an Aptera, and Aptera’s rock.
Apeteras are the future of transport methinks – but they need to be open-sourced, and made out of bamboo. If I had a million dollars I’d spend it all on doing just this. I know people who could make such a creature. You could use your iPad or iPhone or whatever with all it’s built-in geo / tilt-sensing smarts as the dashboard… bingo. The controls themselves should be mechanical, but the smarts can be… well, smart. The average iPhone has more computing power than it took to put a man on the moon and… well, driving a car isn’t rocket-science is it?
It’s got to be dead-cheap, makeable and repairable out of local materials anywhere on the planet, and affordable to… everyone. It’s the global Volkswagon for the 21st Century. If it can fly, then that’s an added bonus. If it can fly, and it only does 100km/h and it’s made out of bamboo and has airbags, then you can probably crash it without killing yourself.
I think you could probably set up the entire project for less than it would cost to buy a Lamborghini.
The Robotic Invasion continueth, from small beginnings… it comes. From multiple angles it comes.
Do we know what it’s for yet? Do you know what it is yet? Nope. Not really. A weird revolution that seems to be driven not by necessity, but fantasy – and other people’s fantasies at that.
Dancebots – a little bit cute, a little bit spooky. Who said white guys can’t dance? Well… me basically. Still.
A video of a star-wars walker thing, that’s been made to do all the things that make dogs so annoying.
DIY Drones have a new quadracopter, that looks to me like they’ve gone a bit mainstream – into the zone where the price nose-dives, and they turn up duty-free at Hong Kong Airport, costing next to nothing. Although right now, this one is $400.
I haven’t gone on about the relationship between toys and weapons for a while – there is a connection though, and it’s becoming more and more entangled. Fantasies of violence, the distancing of the warrior from his victim, the distancing of the public from the wars they fight. Toys, people, people, toys. Nothing is real.
Bet I’m the only person in the world who knows where the quote “Blown by unseen winds” comes from.
Anyway, this is not dissimilar to the wind thing from ages ago… which obviously I’m not going to be able to find, because “wind” isn’t a googlable word. It was like the 3rd or 4th thing I posted… which also doesn’t help, because there isn’t a crono… oh… hang on… there is. This.
Still. Ungooglability on account of being a straw in a haystack rather than a needle. Nick Taylor is ungooglable. There are loads of us. We grown on trees…. only I now appear to have two entries on the first page – a previous incarnation has become famous, which is a bit of a worry tbh, because I was taking the piss and have moved on a bit etc.
A snip at $24,000 – I get this vague feeling that the future of reprappery is something like this… but which can “see”. This one can’t see, so the engineering has to be really really tight.
It’s got those weird little “go in any direction” wheels, which seem like a massive piece of over-engineering to me. They were invented by the segway guy who invented a really expensive solution to “walking”, and now there’s a really expensive solution to “the wheel” – though it looks like someone’s using it. Bet you could take a couple of k off the price of this thing by using… well… wheels.
Like a cross between The Abyss and a generic Sci-fi Waving-Arms-Around-Interface. One of those things that is photogenic, so put into movies about the future, so people want one in real life.
Like product-design copying sci-fi, only the actual thing got invented before the sci-fi, and it isn’t actually a product, just a thing someone’s made. Maybe dolphins could use it?
Which is a P2P file-synching/sharing app. I wonder if it can be encrypted. I wonder if it works via blue-tooth or some non-centralised thing. Dvice seem to think it will be another blow to the copyright-cartels… I guess it could… but only in terms of swapping stuff within one-degree-of-separation – which is a little different from dialing up whatever you want – anywhere, anytime.
An aspect of one-degree-of-separation stuff though is it kindof comes with recommendation built in.
Whatever – the Copyright Cartels have become such a threat to the democracy now, that I think we need to do whatever it takes to put them out of business.
Someone’s used an app called Evernote to scan all their local menus, which they can then search. Simple enough… hang on… “search?”.
I’d never really looked at evernote before. Might have to give it a go – because from the sounds of it, it automatically OCRs anything you upload – and that could be well useful, because people keep sending me shite through the post, and this would be a really good way of indexing it. If it works. I’ll have to give it a look
Which as far as I can tell is a bit of software… and a really fast camera – but I’m not entirely sure that the one I just bought isn’t one of those. Well… it goes up to 60 shots a second, with a really fast shutter-speed. Might be able to do it. Dunno. Maybe you could flip slower.
There’s a video on the site, but I can’t get it to embed. Looks like alien-egg-petals opening.
Alien had the best/worst movie monster ever invented – a composite of about 8 different human phobias, including a bunch of hightly freudian ones. A perfect example of my theory about what art is – exaggerated human resonances – dancing a two-step down the line between the impossible and the-girl-next-door. There’s nothing that the Aliens monster does that doesn’t happen in the… animal kingdom, including paralysing prey so it can be later eaten by hatchlings. Crrrreeeeepppyyyyy.
The fact that this has kindof created a secondary set of phobias… egg-petals opening, is something else I think. Maybe it’s just me.
6) Musical instruments made out of paper
Can’t remember where that one came from *(yes I can) – for what it’s worth, I know I’m not really the cutting-edge any more, but I’m pretty sure that a guy wearing a jumper like that doesn’t get to decide what’s cool.
Or maybe he does. What do I know? I’m still wearing my girlfriend’s shirt from 23 years ago. This one.
Anyway, there’s another thing over here that claims to be a paper piano
although to me it looks more like a box. The interesting thing about these though is the escape of the interface into… the mundane I suppose. I have a feeling that the long-term future of this isn’t ubiquitous sensors but ultra-perceptive behaviour-recognition software connected to CCTV cameras – a bit like that new Wii-esque game from Microsoft.. All of us living in our own personal panopticons. A bubble of outsourced self-awareness.
