GENOMICON

One of my favourite concepts: “in the end, everything comes true… but not usually in the way you expect”

(from physorg : via botjunkie)

Looks like the droids off the end of Silent Running have finally come to life, as it were… along with one of my other favourite concepts “In the future, every tree will have its own gardener“… though to be honest, from the look of it, the plants might be better off just being put outside somewhere and left alone.

As far as pollination goes… don’t scoff, when I was a kid, one of the chore-type things we used to have to do was to manually pollinate passionfruit vines… we’d get a little paintbrush and transfer pollen from on flower to another. Mai god, what a tedious job that was. Small price to pay for passionfruit though I suppose. If you can get your kids to do it.

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Looking at this again I feel kindof overwhelmed about what an incredible long way we’ve got to go… until I realise how incredibly fast this is moving.

By the way, are these things basically just Roombas with laptops stuck on the back of them?

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And the other thing of course is, I know damn well that somewhere down the line someone will discover that looking after plants works better than prozac… so long as you keep away from the back-breaking industrial scale stuff.

You know what I’m sick of?

I’m sick of hearing people go on about this clip from Minority Report

being the future of Advertising, because it’s not.

Don’t you get it? You people are finished.

What this clip is, is an example of more and more and more and more advertising money being thrown at a more and more media-savvy, cynical and indifferent audience… we’re not going to be narrow-casted to like this because the only people we listen to are our friends. Our spending decisions are based upon feedback we get from our networks… our 2 degrees of separation.

Billboards with embedded retina-scanners that ID passers-by and hit a database for likely buying choices, which they then shout out loud to whoever happens to be near by ARE going to be made… because they were on Minority Report… and sooner or later, everything in a Sci Fi movie gets made. It’s part of the culture… there’s something in human nature that is hell-bent on fulfilling prophecy.

So these billboards will be made, but they’re not going to be used for advertising because they whole floor is going to be swept by crowd-sourced recommendations… and that is a party that “The Industry” is specifically and systemically not invited to.

Here’s an example of a DIY advert that someone has made for the little felt camera covers that she makes on Etsy.

Now that is effective advertising… why? Because it will get cited. It will get linked to. That is what it’s all about now.

Think of it as a giant Artificial-Intelligence experiment (because that is exactly what it is). If you don’t get linked to… (get this RIAA) if you can’t inspire people to evangelise about you by copying your memetic content… then you don’t get seen.

A nice list of digital ink devices (that never were) from Dvice… which is one of my favourite sites for… well, products that never were (or will be). Speculative design and all that. Pushing the envelope all the time.

A symptom of the approaching sci-fi singularity, that the predicted future can become quaint and old-fashioned in such a short period of time… almost zero in fact – in fact there’s a whole genre of design devoted to making things that look like failed sci-fi predictions – Sci-fi movies based on steam-punk Victoriana, are outstripping by far “proper” predictive ones. When was the last one? Minority Report? I can think of at least 5 steampunk sci-fi movies that have been made in the same period.

This is happening partly because steam-punk Victoriana is an incredibly rich seam visually… but mainly because the future has become impossible to predict without being rendered embarrassing within a very short period of time.

Things have become incredibly volatile.