GENOMICON

The week cometh; the week goeth.

Crossing the radar… ripples spreading then receding…

1) Blown by unseen winds

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.

2) Little Expensoid Arm-bot

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.

3) Water-Based Touch-Screen

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?

4) A bunch of software.

a) Libox.

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.

b) Menu Search Engine Mashup

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

c) apropos of that, another really fast book scanner.

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.

5) Creepy Alien Wall Thing

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.

7) A Hell of a lot of CDs

8 ) USB Typewriter

Similar sort of thing really.

On Disruptive technology. Someone else made a load of predictions, and I made all sorts of comments and said I would too… later. So now I have.

I’m totally winging it here. I’m making it up as I go… so to make that a bit easier – a brief recap of the most disruptive of disruptive technologies in the 20th century?

Cripes – that’s a big one. Maybe too big. There was TV, Aeroplanes, mechanised warfare, TV again, telephones, computers, the internet, the anti-baby-pill, the atomic bomb. Not all of these were disruptive in the classical sense, but had a huge impact. Ok. 20th century too big. Try the last 20 years.

Cellphones. And the Internet. Obviously. I mean we did have these things earlier than 20 years ago, but the effects didn’t really kick in until the 90s/00s.

And to be honest, I’m struggling a bit to think of anything outside of that – but they are (to be fair) kindof big. I think they’re probably bigger than the anti-baby pill… and that was a really big one, that no one saw coming. It basically allowed women to go out an work – to a much greater degree. And this (coupled with capitalism’s inexorable drive to make people worth less) means that once a husband could support a whole family, now it takes two… and often even that is pushing it. This has put all sorts of strains on that entirely artificial construct “the family”… on people’s expectations, and now about 1/5th of the planet is suffering from clinical depression.

Obviously there are other reasons for the depression… but… whatever it is that we’re doing now, it ain’t making us happy. See that picture above. That’s prozac. In a bit I’ll get up, make a coffee and swallow that pill.

The point? “there’s no such thing as fate, just demographics” as a Russian somewhere said. If you’re looking at disruptive technologies, then I think that focusing on things that make Western consumers go “hey, Neato!” is… dust in the wind, dude.

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So. Disruptive technologies. Big ones. Tectonic ones.

1) The anti-death pill.

I’ve got a feeling that this one might be a bit like nuke fusion – always 20 years away… because the complexities of separating out what each gene actually does, is very problematic, because no gene is “for” just one thing.

Off the back of this – the search for it, satellite technologies like limb-replacement etc… the drive towards life extension is probably going to create all sorts of discoveries (like alchemy did back in the day) and will create fairly profound questions around what it actually means to be human. I mean where would the absence of death leave the monotheist religions? (which as far as I can see, are basically death-cults – particularly Christianity). And the anti-death pill is the most compellingly viral of technologies because virtually everyone on this planet has someone who they would die for. There is absolutely no question of containing this technology once it’s invented. People will kill for it.

2) The end of scarce energy.

Biotech again. Home-made fuel-stills running off genetically engineered algae. Once the bits are in place (ie: someone’s made the algae) then it should (theoretically) be no harder to set up than making your own beer.

Biotech is a bit of a mad one because once the R&D hump is passed, the costs of replication fall precipitously. You do need wizards to get over the hump though.

In addition to this, the price of solar, and the pressures to install are falling (and rising respectively) all the time. I can remember when every calculator needed a bunch of batteries. Then Every calculator was solar. This was due to nega-watts in action… not through improvements to solar-tech, but improvements in efficiency of the calculators.

So – I think energy acquisition (you know, that thing we’ve fought all these wars over in the last 100 years) is going to be completely deflated. And it will probably be replaced by mineral acquisition… because we’re running out of stuff… there are whole swathes of minerals where the remaining stocks/sources can be counted in 1 or 2 decades. Gallium for example – we’ve got about 6 years of that one left. It’s the stuff that flat TV screens are made out of.

This is another driver for bio-tech solutions I think. The Chinese currently own about 90% of the rare-earth magnet sources. You need these for generators etc… you know, wind-farms and so on. Solar? Wouldn’t be at all surprised if there weren’t a few key-ingredients here that are running a little low either. Biotech doesn’t have a problem with this sort of thing. Well, not as much.

3) CNC

Computer-controlled micro-manufacturing in other words… the ability to download a design from the web, to a printer/cutter thing of some sort, that then makes it.

The proliferation of this tech, combined with open-source… solutions for things created by people who are actually embedded in the problem, rather than trying to make “solutions” to sell to consumers – this is also potentially a big one. I think it’s a long way out though – decades. We actually already have machines that could (reprap-like) make themselves – modern cnc/lathing machines could do it… but these are very big and expensive. There needs to be a couple of innovations (probably to do with micro-sensing feedback loops so the engineering can be sloppier) happening before this stuff proliferates to the extent where it really starts sidelining mass-production.

I always use clothes (sewing machines etc) as the example why DIY manufacturing won’t necessarily take off. That said, the robotics of sewing machines is so well established and advanced, that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was where it started.

4) Non debt-based currencies.

Don’t know how this will happen, but there is a need for it to happen. A bad need – and if it does, it will change everything.

I mean really, there needs to be a serious re-invention of what “wealth” actually means, because our current understanding is not working. It’s not making us happy – even the people who have all the money aren’t happy… and it means we’re pouring trillions of dollars – lives, energy etc etc into “protecting ourselves from each other”.

From a design point of view it’s fucked.

Now we know a bit about design now – we experimented on various things in the 20th century, none of which worked terribly well – but something’s that was fairly clear – monolithic design is a recipe for genocide. Whatever we do needs to be made up of small, networked cells.

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That’ll do for now.

Another thing from Julius Von Bismark, who is a god. Or at least he looks like a god. Or a Druid. A Germanic one.

He’s the one that invented the thing for projecting images into other people’s flash photographs, and made a giant average-emoticon in the sky over Berlin. Brilliant.

Anyway, he’s invented this scrolling doodlebot

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which is pretty cool – because it can make pictures bigger than it is. Really really long ones in other words. The sky is the limit. We have nothing to lose but our imaginations.

The only way you could improve on that is have something that could draw and move about… a bit like a more nimble version of these:

Which would obviously escape from the lab and cover the entire world with graffiti, and you’d wake up with doodles all over your face, a bit like the way you wake up covered in snail-trails when you get drunk and go to sleep outside.

I’m not entirely sure what this is, but I think it looks pretty cool

The wheels look a bit silly on a body that wide, but still… excellent. A few (major) tweaks here and there, and you’ve got a winner I think.

Oh deary me yes, check this out.

Now that, my little furry friends, is the future.

It’s like one of these on steroids

On acid.

There’s this mega proliferation of flat-bed, cartesian type robots.. this is the way all the reprap energy seems to be going. There are loads of them. Everything from gardening robots

To open-source laser-cutters, to egg-painters.

The advantage of the cartesian-approach is that you can get fairly good precision for fairly simple maths. This brings the cost of the engineering down. The advantage of arm-type machines is that they can make things bigger than themselves. And that you can have more than one of them working together. And that they take up less space. And you can get them to give you (fairly bad) hand-jobs, and stir your tea, and play ping-pong with you and so on and so on.

I think the key to this is sending feedback to the arm-motors… so the machine can recalibrate its position 1000 times a second. There have been a whole rash of balancing robots recently… segway progeny (in fact I think someone has actually made one out of lego) so I think it’s doable. I also think that the sensors could (should?) probably exist outside the robot itself – a bit like the recent bunch of precision quadracopters

So the maths is harder… but maths is a software problem, and we can do software.

Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (2006) – Garnet Hertz – High Resolution Video Overview from Garnet Hertz on Vimeo.

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Is that good? I don’t know… is it? I think it might be the opposite of good? But who knows? It’s 4 years ago. Nothing bad happened did it?

It reminds me of those things off Dune – giant megalomaniacal warbots with human brains – essentially immortal, but not entirely mechanical.

This cockroach thing is basically taking a genius piece of engineering, that we’re probably not going to manage in our life-times – aka: a cocroach, and using it to power a clunky naff-bot. It’s like using an iPhone as a paperweight… but a much bigger paperweight.

Or maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it – maybe the robot is an extension of the bug’s exoskeleton… I have sortof said it before I think… I think this is the way robotics is going to wind up – not with bug controlled machines, but machine controlled bugs. We can easily (for our intents and purposes) replicate the basic functioning of a cockroach’s software…. the hardware on the other hand… yer dreaming.

Augmented Shadow_document from Joon Y Moon on Vimeo.

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Ok, so that Tim Boucher, from timboucher.com was going on about disruptive technologies that are likely to turn up and I thought I’d make a few of my own. Or just sortof heckle. Or whatever.

Firstly, Tim’s were:

1) AUGMENTED REALITY

(probably not – could be good for shopping. Good for meta-tagging reality. Could raise monster privacy issues if face-recognition is linked to late-night facebook page rantings etc. Ok… maybe it will be then. Most of the apps I’ve seen so far have been “concepts” though, and a bit crap. Apart from that google one maybe – with that weird bloke with the savagely repressed hair. That’s disruptive. You could go into a shop to try something out, then buy it off ebay on the spot)

2) UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

(absolutely – it will get into our electricity and heartbeat-rate. Like all of these things, a two-edged sword from a privacy POV)

3) FREE-FLOATING HOLOGRAMS

(probably not, but if you can use them for porn, then they might be quite popular)

4) GESTURAL & KINESTHETIC INTERFACES

(Waving Arms Around Interfaces – utter bollocks. Useful for games maybe. The main reason people like these though is like transparent screens, they turn up in sci-fi movies all the time – but they don’t do that because they’re useful but because they’re photogenic. Eyeball tracking is an interesting one though)

5) MIND-TO-COMPUTER INTERFACE

(what would this allow us to do that we don’t already do? There was that thing where people controlled revolving cubes on a screen recently… so you could theoretically control a mouse pointer or a RC plane… but… Dragon Dictate hasn’t really taken off because you can’t talk and think at the same time – when you type you can think ahead about what you’re going to say next. Being able to suck information off the web “internally” could make it a hell of a lot easier to cheat in exams though.

And a major factor in a computer’s physical size right now is the fact that human fingers are the size they are. Get rid of a keyboard and a screen and you could conceivably get away with networked smart-dust)

6) FULLY-CARTOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE

(an extrapolation of a current tendency… but who would want it? Us I suppose. We would want it. Total recall)

7) INTER-LINKED SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS

(Already happening – there was that Australian port-surveillance system recently. I think this one is quite interesting because it allows us all to become ghosts in the machine)

8) SUPER-PROFILE

(also already happening… but I think this creates a niche that facebook used to provide but now fail to, which Diaspora aim to fill… but chances are won’t – unless they have the magic-bullet of being able to seamlessly leach off facebook’s info… it offers a niche for shared private spaces. Sorry… teenagers need them. Adults need them. We’re too complicated to have only one persona for all people. We just are)

9) PERSONALITY CLONING & SIMULATION

(really? Hadn’t thought of that one. It would be interesting to meet your clone, but… the psychological/psychiatric ramifications of saving the personalities of dead people are possibly a little too severe – prolonging the agony of loss etc. Could be useful for extending the lives of actors though. Maybe)

10) DISPOSABLE IDENTITIES

(already happening – you can get email addresses that only last a couple of hours)

11) COLLECTIVE IDENTITY SYSTEMS

(I’m not sure that this isn’t already happening to the extent that it will)

12) REMOTE PRESENCE

(yup – absolutely. Holidays from hell. Backyard spider-hunting safaris)

13) KILLER ROBOTS

(yup – already happening. Drone attacks are the only game in town when it comes to killing forn terrsts)

14) AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCES

(I think these are miss-imagined. People think of something like Orac of Blakes 7 – but it’s more likely to be things like smart-thermostats escaping from the hot-water-cupboard – roombas etc. I guess the dividing-line is something that uses genetic algorithms so it can deal with entirely new situations based upon experience, or trial-and-error. This raises the spectre of computer virii escaping from the network and learning how to control a roomba. Or a car. Or a killer robot)

15) UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

(nah, everyone will learn to speak English – as well as their own languages – it’ll take a generation or so, but it will happen. To a large extent this is already the case… and it hasn’t really disrupted that much I don’t think. Not compared to the technology that’s made it happen. But… you know, we can talk to each other, but I’m not sure we’re really listening to each other yet – not really)

16) MINIFACTURING

(Oh yes. If this does what I think it’s going to do, then disruptive is too small a word)

Ok – that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would, so I’ll do a follow up post on the morrow, which will be my version of the same thing.

Ok, another weekly round-up. Slipping further and further behind. I’ve been busy. I probably need to regroup. I need a holiday. I need more work. I need to hide under the bed surrounded by lots of little animals that I’ve made out of matchboxes, with matchstick legs. I’m a maker me. The Creator. Alpha and Omega, permanently in Beta.

1) Pick and Place Machine for making drone brains.

I didn’t know what a pick and place machine was until I saw this, and now I’m still not entirely sure. A machine for picking and placing things? I would have supposed so.

This one is special though because it comes from the the ardu-drone folk – the DIY cruise-missile-waiting-to-happen people, although personally I think the future is probably more like those hunter-seaker things of Dune… where a little quadracopter operated over the web that sits in a tree outside your house and when you come out it fires a curare dart into your neck.

I’m sortof surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more regularly in fact – I mean there’s this guy up in Auckland, NZ who’s just built himself a 50 million dollar house – after his company went down taking with it the life-savings (and therefore old-age-pensionhood) of thousands and thousands of people. And he got away with it. The Bhopal people got away with it. Cheney got away with it. Justice is not being done – and although I’m absolutely not in favour of the death penalty, I’m Scottish – so do believe in the sanctity of personal blood-vendeta. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.

And maybe it won’t – I mean if you look at revolutions in the past – The French, The Russian – the people had to be pushed to incredible lengths before they started killing the rich – just for the sake of moral principle. Maybe we humans are a lot more docile than we imagine ourselves to be.

Violence is first and formost an act of communication though – and one that almost always backfires – you can’t perpetrate violence without legitimising and strengthening the hawk constituency on the other side.. Especially now that information is so much harder to control.

Still – watch this space. The age of assasination – an inevitable flipside to the guard-economy, and possibly one so useful that if it didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it.

2) Industrial Scale Freecycle

This is pretty cool – it’s a way for industries to offer their (massive amounts of) waste to the ether, and have it turned into something useful… probably avoiding their own disposal costs. Industrial scale-freebies offer business opportunities… and make the whole system a whole lot more efficient.

I mean with these massive cotton-reels you could make massive cotton reel tanks and invade… who’d be easy to beat? Easier than Iraq or Afghanistan? Andorra? No… to mountainy. The Vatican? Yea – it’s a soveriegn state isn’t it. Invade the vatican with massive recycled cotton-reel tanks. You’d still lose, but that seems to happen every time anyway, and this way it wouldn’t cost you a trillion dollars.

3) What If The News Was Written By Scientists?

I know journalists like to go on about how important and worthy they are, and maybe they’re right. That said, I feel an almost physical sense of relief reading the article above.

Why? Because I haven’t got some fucker trying to sell me something – I can relax and take it at face value – which you can’t with news-reporting today. News today is all about trying to grab your attention. It’s a sales job.

It would be really good to have some rationality-filter set up to de-bullshitify the news.

4) Bitcoin

This is interesting – an alternative currency, yes… one that you can’t actually buy anything with yet, granted… but the architecture sounds interesting.

Which is to say, it’s entirely decentralised P2P – and they pay you (in bitcoins) for being a host. You can buy one thing with them – VOIP phone credits… so in some ways, it’s a high-tech rendering of the African thing where they send money about the place by reading cellphone top-up codes over the phone.

That’s the thing with currency – it really helps if it’s based on some “thing” that everyone uses. Corn in the old days for example. Today it’s debt, but that isn’t sustainable because the interest keeps multiplying.

Various funding mechanisms have been creating waves etc of late as well – the obvious one is kickstarter.com… with the quite probably doomed-before-it-starts Disaspora. Another one was an open-sourced laser-cutter (more on that later). There’s one that’s turned up in the EU recently as well – private (rather than crowd-sourced) funding… from people who think they can second-guess the crowd’s earthly desires better than the crowd can. Nice diagram anyway

Because if there’s one thing geeks love, it’s flow-charts.

IBM are offering an alternative currency as well – for buying cloud services, which they claim everyone needs.

5) Back to the Axis of Evil

Another rash of surveillance innovations from the Plucky Brits…

So they can spy on themselves even more than they already do, and… should they feel the need to co-invade and occupy some wog country with the Plucky Americans, they can spy on “insurgents”, or locals. Depending on who you talk to.

In addition to that is a thing in The Telegraph, a depressing tory rag, where it is suggested that brain scanners could (might, may) be used to “read people’s minds” – which is almost certainly an example of the sciencificaly challenged reporting that I was on about before – if you read between the lines it seems that it could be used as some sort of lie-detector, and I’m not sure that that is any great surprise.

In fact so irked was I by the number of “could”s in this article, that I made a word-cloud out of it to prove my point.

Effectively disproving my point. Ok. I was wrong. Whatever.

6) Open Source Laser Cutter

Because everyone needs a laser-cutter.

Scoff thee not… $14,500 worth of people have decided they need a laser-cutter, and have punted it at kickstarter – this includes (as far as I can gather) the possibility of punting $512 and getting a laser-kit. Is that the same thing as a $512 laser cutter*? Hard to say. $15000 is (apparently) about 1/2 what a commercial laser-cutter costs… but 50% more than what they were after.

* oh – apparently not. Extremely misleading wording there. They say further down the comments that they expect the thing to cost $2-$5k.

Even further down the comments is a link to someone who is already doing the same thing, cheaper.

This one being specifically designed to replicate itself.

It’s not always the simplest/best/most-open that win though. There’s The Skype Effect – where although there are better alternatives, one offering leaps ahead on polish, marketing and then self-propelling viral hype. It helps if your website is lime-green.

Still… there seems to be a movement underway here. Would I buy a laser-cutter for $3k. Not immediately – but at some point. Probably. I’ve probably spent that much on laser-cutting in the last 12 months or so. Freedom to experiment. That’s what it’s about.

7) Lego Printer

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Makerfaire was on recently – there was also this one that could draw on lightbulbs and eggs and so on.

For all your egg-drawing needs.

8 ) Briefcase trainset

round and round they go. From Trendy clothes shop, Paul Smith, via Notcot.org

9) Telepresence Robots

10) more quadracopters

Note robot-handling glove.

and

Which are (like the wizzy thing from a few days ago) controlled by the room, rather than being autonomous.

Controlled by the cloud. Although it seems like a cop-out, I’m not sure that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. It kindof makes the robot a detached limb of a larger entity than being an autonomous object in its own right.

So there you go. The week that was.

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20 Cameras? I think the room is telling it what to do. Still. Quite impressive.