In which roteno.com creates the idea of Imperceptible Computing, in which all the smarts of a system are hidden within it – including circuits, interface etc etc.
Taking this a step (quite a big step) further… to an inevitable conclusion… an entire environment which is a meshed network of RFIDs (and/or Zigbys etc) and sensors that is aware of your presence and every movement etc, 24/7. A Guardian Angel of sorts – but best make sure it’s YOUR guardian angel.
In the meantime (and straying into areas untroubled by the angelic footfall) is a variant on one of my favourite concepts – iPhone as interface to everything:
In which shouty blowhards pretending (or is it real) to be in a 90s Jackass type tv program for Fire-Nerds, provide simple, straightforward instructions for how to make a remote controlled car-bomb of the kind that would normally have required someone (probably quite young and gullible) with a beard to commit suicide. Think of the lives it would save. Kindof.
Still, what do I know. The video’s been there for 5 days and has been viewed about 170,000 times. It has, as the saying goes, gone viral. They also provide a video for sound-triggered fireworks. What could possibly go wrong?
Leaving aside the general principle, “If a headline ends with a question-mark, the answer is always ‘No’”, it’s kindof an irrelevant question anyway. It’s about as relevant as asking “Is the Model-T the Brewster of Cars”.
No… because the (demographic) market for carriages was rendered irrelevant by the market for cars… and the same thing will apply (I suspect) in turn, for the horseless-carriages we now know and love.
It isn’t about Western consumers. Western consumers are irrelevant… it’s about the massively growing middle class of countries like India, China and possibly various parts of South America. If you’re still designing vehicles for people who can afford $40,000 then you belong to the past.
As an aside, when I was looking for names of famous carriage-makers, I came across this:
Studebaker, who started out making carriages, actually made an electric car slightly over 100 years ago… and while it is a bit teapotty, it isn’t that much more teapotty than the timid offerings that are turning up today.
So. Main-stream car-designers have lost it. Do any of them even drive?
Here are a couple of fundamental truths that they all seem to miss with a studious vengeance:
1) Cars don’t (just) solve a transport problem, they solve a privacy problem.
2) Cars also solve an identity problem – generally where sex meets territoriality.
A car is a piece of territory… and (similarly to the way single people in the west all now sleep in double beds) it is a piece of territory that says “I am big and strong enough to share with a mate”. To sleep in a single bed is infantalising… to drive in a one-seater car? People aren’t going to do it… and that is why the new offering from VW probably isn’t going to catch on:
Not just because it looks like a death-trap which has considerately been designed to double as a coffin, but because your imaginary girlfriend will have to sit behind you (carrying a pot on her head). They hate that. I know.
Go stand at the side of a motorway… preferably one of those ones where there’s a special lane for people who have more than one person in the car… how many of those cars look like teapots? How many cars aren’t using the fast lane because there is only one person in the car?
Think that’s an accident?
It’s not… it’s a deliberate behaviour. Being in the car is the only time an awful lot of people get to be themselves… get to be on their own. They can sing, they can talk to themselves… and so on. Go sit on a London tube in the commute-time (assuming you can sit, which you can’t). What’s the worst thing about being there? It’s being too close to too many other people… and it’s etched into the lines of every single face you see.
So anyway… this is how I see this going. This:
Crossed with this:
ie: favela-chic meets 21st Century design, with echos of the 1920s… but with a radically different business-model because Americans are no longer the market.
Something that says “Sex”. Something that says “21st Century”.
It needs to be
1) Car as Platform. It’s not a finished product, it’s a set of techniques, materials, designs, philosophies that people can adapt to local conditions, using local materials. For this to happen…
2) The individual subsystems need to be de-coupled. It needs to be electric-capable. Pedal-capable. “burning stuff” capable. Increased efficiency means the ability to eliminate entire subsystems… and the ability to do so without rebuilding every single part of the machine is crucial
3) Detachable brain. ie: Your iPhone is the dashboard.
Or your netbook, or whatever. The point is to create a possibility for turning as many problems as possible into software problems… because we’re pretty good at software, and the barriers to entry are very low.
4) It will probably need to be a 3 wheeler to get around laws that favour big corporations.
5) Easily sourceable, swappable parts. I’m talking bicycle wheels. Crap is better. The line of fastest propagation… a bit like the reprap approach – minimum vitamin parts.
There have been some tantalizingly close passes at this… nearly. Almost. We’re gradually inching towards it, but no one that I’m aware of has approached this with anything like direct-intent. Here are a bunch of random examples etc.
Pros: Complete elimination of various subsystems, eg: gears, brakes, axels
Cons: looks like a teapot. Also bigger than the doors of the building that it was built inside. Engineering students as well. Bless. I imagine they’ll probably teach that in the second year.
Dutch Recumbent bicycle with electric assist variant.
Pros: Looks pretty cool. Made of bike parts. Electric capable, pedalable
Cons: Single-seater so there’s no room for your imaginary girlfriend, Big invisible sign saying “EAT ME” to trucks etc.
Closer though. The company website has all the hallmarks of a company that’s like, died though. Notices saying “coming soon” from last year don’t bode well.
So there you go. I’ve got to cut this short now because someone’s shouting at me… there are various other examples in varying states of repair. I’m going on about Bamboo Apteras again though, because it’s getting quite close to Lottery Winning Day etc… so I think I’ll take the proceeds of that, and put it into this.. Someone’s got to.
Spherical Robots have definately got a future I think – not because they’re actually useful for anything, but because people can’t seem to stop making them.
The thing above isn’t dissimilar to Sony’s thing from 2007 – which I ranted on about re: hackability. I’m not sure the thing above is any better to be honest… unless the phone is open-sourced. Then you can program it yourself – and as an iphone (I mean that generically) is (as I keep saying) basically a detachable head, you’ll be able to use it for detachable head stuff… like… errr… hassling the cat via remote-control, from the other side of the world, or checking if you’ve left the gas on… from the other side of the world. That sort of thing.
So amazingly advanced and dismayingly primitive at the same time.
There’s an overview/article of the various protocols here – which is worth a look. Seriously – it may look a bit clunky at the mo, but a combination of this and smart-power monitoring is going to be massive. There’s gold in them that hills, I tell ee.
For $56, farmers in India can control the pumps that irrigate their fields… which saves them walking for miles, sometimes for nothing, because the pump-driving-electricity is a bit erratic. It’s called Nano Ganesh.
I can see this as a general principle becoming very widespread – cellphones as controllers for everything. This is looking something like physical telecommuting – where instead of working (in your underpants) on information-processes that are anywhere on the planet, you’re working on physical activities… farming for example.
There’s a movie that I haven’t seen yet that seems to have a fair bit of this – in an entirely unpleasant and exploitative sort of way:
Which you can watch in Spanish etc, because the one with that gravelly hollywood-ese American voice-over is simply too stupid to live.
It’s a nightmare vision this though… it’s not labour-saving in the sense that a farmer saves herself walking for miles just to turn a pump on and off, it’s labour-saving in the sense that the cost (and therefore value) of human labour has been pushed down to the point that people have become inhabitants of matrix-like virtual-sweatshops.
And this is an inevitable artifact of the fact (and I’ll say it again) that our money system is not based on abundance of production, but is lent into existence (at interest) as a scarce resource. Our monetary system has poverty built into it.
This isn’t quite the same thing – because the head is in the hands of the human, rather than being attached to the robot (in this case a UAV. Is that a robot?)… but in a way, although it’s in the hands of the human, it’s acting as a dislocated head for the UAV. Neat interface as well. Really intuitive. Basically you’re holding a little microcosm of the thing you’re controlling.
From the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory, University of Tokyo.
I heard this podcast from Paul Saffo last night in which he said we’ve been through these various “ages” which are caused by technological innovations – so in the
- 80s we had computers, courtesy of cheap microprocessors
- cheap lasers allowed us to create the communications boom
- and now we’ve got a revolution in cheap sensors going on, and that’s going to cause a robotics revolution.
The computers of the 80s that learned to talk to each other in the 90s are in the process of learning to negotiate physical environments. They’re breaking free. It’s like Lawnmower Man all over again, but with real lawnmowers.
Which brings me back to the iPhone – being used as a sensor-bank, rather than a cellphone. It’s cephalic. It’s a detachable, pocket-head.
“Instantly transform your iPhone or iPod touch into an air mouse, trackpad, and wireless remote for your computer! Sit back and surf the web, browse your photo library or control your music player from the comfort of your couch. Our air mouse uses the built in accelerometer to translate your hand motions into mouse movements on your screen. It can also operate as a trackpad, allowing you to control your computer with a single finger. Suddenly your iPhone has become an essential part of any home theater PC and a presenter’s best friend. Using an innovative application notification system, the iPhone will always know what applications are running at any time and show the appropriate keys for that program, providing you with a single screen for controlling ALL your media and web applications.” – http://mobileairmouse.com
So there you go. Parallel Evolution, Machine Generation and yet another shining example of why patents are bad, and the whole lot should be scrapped. Innovation grows out of the Primordial-Meme-Soup. People have the same ideas at the same time – it’s not Morphic Resonance, it’s common memetic ancestry. Vicarious Lamarkianism.
IPhone is ideal as a separate, swappable brain for previously dumb devices… it’s actually a fairly big computer, and it has so much in the way of sensory and communication gear built in. It’s potential as something other than a cellphone, or even a computer as we currently understand them is huge.
Trouble is though, iPhone is closed-source, and therefore a bit crap.
Mark Rolston (on A vision of our evolving mobile world), suggested that Facebook was the AOL of social networking… a control system rather than a set of standards.
I think he’s right – and I think that iPhone is the AOL of cellphones… or more accurately, hand-held computers. It’s the Ooh! Shiny thing that gets people through the door in large numbers, and holds their hand so nothing can go too scary can happen. IPhone is a mobile platform for grandmothers. It fails to understand where the true potential lies – and that is out there in the wild wild web – a set of standards rather than a control-system.
Something that’s turned up a couple of times recently, is using an iPhone as a brain for some sort of other, slightly bigger thing, that’s got absolutely nothing to do with telephones.
eg: this electric superbike… which uses one as a dashboard.
I can see this happening more and more – rather than having a computer with lots of “plug and play” devices, you have a lot of devices and one computer/smart-stick etc that plugs into them.
iPhones are a bit different though – because they have eyes, ears, a sense of balance, a sense of location… a screen, an input device, web-enabled, sms-capable etc etc etc. It’s not just an extension of a brain, it’s an extension of a load of different human senses as well… though not as good as the real ones. Yet.
I can see this coming from the other end, and being a competitor for arduino actually. The potential of it is massive. Seriously… but iPhones are tethered, and they’re not open-source… and the future is open-sourced. So um… Android it is.
