GENOMICON

Dogcam. It’s supposed to be a petcam, but I can’t imagine it not turning a cat into a struggling furry ball of hooks and spitting-fire. Dogs are more malleable. Ductile etc. Maybe it would work for ducks as well. They’re ductile.

Neat idea though – especially when cameras get small enough to mount on insects etc – bringing one of my favourite subjects: Spider-Safaris one step closer. First-Personism again

These things have also been made for humans apparently – years ago,

There’s a great article about Sousveillance here – the universal panopticon, and The Blue-Spaghetti Monster that I was on about earlier. Little brother looking back up the hierarchy… which is one of the things that is starting defining so many conflicts – Iran, The London Riots etc. At one point, if you went into any shopping mall in the UK and tried to take photographs, the security people would jump on you (especially, I suspect, if you were taking photos of their CCTV cameras). These days it’s kindof moot though because everyone has a cellphone and everyone seems to be taking photos with them all the time.

It’s a simple leap from this, to having some sort of peripheral which allows you to have a lens mounted on glasses or a button, ready to go (or even going) all the time.

Which kindof leads into this…

Which is a Fiber Fabric that Could Create Whole-Body Camera – which contains the C-word “could”, which is one of my least favourite… but it’s an interesting concept to me, because not only…

“Scientists say the optoelectronic fiber could lead to bizarre new imaging products like a wall-sized, all-seeing camera or a soldier’s uniform that captures 360-degree views.”

… but it kindof represents a missing link. A sensory mesh.

Prosthetics have come a long way (and are progressing rapidly) – this video turned up recently:

Something that’s missing from these prosthetics – or robots generally from a bio-mimicry point of view is that real organisms are covered by a layer of nerve-cells – not a single censor, but a whole mesh of them, reporting back an entire “touch-picture”.

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So there you go. Starts off on one thing, winds up on another… tenuously connected, but I can imagine this scenario of immersive-sensors. Where everything everywhere is being watched or recorded all of the time… which seems like a terrible or scary idea, but I have this feeling that the universal mind gets what the universal mind wants – and maximum sensory input is one of them. It wants omnipotence.

I think.

So much will have been written about this in the time that it takes to write this sentence it’s hardly worth bothering – to dog-paddle amid the tsunamis of hype…

… but in case you hadn’t heard, and because the purpose of this here web-address is to keep track of things, Google started talking about Wave today.

(complete guide here)

It’s one of those things that deals with such basic interactions, that the full effects of it aren’t that predictable – the real-time collaboration on the same page for example.

In a nutshell though, it makes any conversation (be it via email, blog comments, etc) into an embeddable object. The ramifications of that are huge. Conversation on the web at the moment is a mess. Everything’s everywhere – if this takes off – and I suspect it will, because the viral aspects of it are Skype-like, then it will not only create and destroy whole rafts of businesses overnight, it could well wind up changing the way we interact with each other.

If it does link your email identity to your comments-on-blogs identity… then every comment you leave on every participating service will be traceable back to you – all your comments will become a single body of work. It may well lessen the anonymous arsehole factor – which is a shame, because I rather enjoy being an arsehole sometimes, still, there you go.

Google (and in fact the entire internet) is, as far as I can gather, not a million miles-away from being a giant artificial intelligence machine. Possibly the greatest ramifications of this are in this area – if so, what does it mean? Far, far smarter linking between conversations I think. The Universal Mind may be about to have an IQ leap.

If it catches on, and I think it will. I think this will be a bit of a game-changer.

My reptile brain holds the following pieces of information about google

• Good search innit? You can find anything
• Didn’t they buy a wifi station or something?
• Their server farms use 5% of the earth’s electricity

I know they’re useful, big… and over there somewhere —->

Actually they’re everywhere. They’re the face of the internet . That old maxim “anything too big to fail is too big to exist” certainly holds true with Google. This is what the end of the world looks like:

Google have integrated themselves far more tightly with the fabric/structure of the internet than Microsoft have done with desktop PCs – it’s become a part of our brain-architecture. The same way that cellphones mean we don’t need to remember phone numbers any more, we’ve gotten kindof used to the idea that we can find a pretty good shot at the answer to any question, pretty much all the time.

But anyway, the reptile part of my brain still thinks of Google as a text box in the middle of a page… so every once in a while I come across something that makes me go “Holy crap, they can do that?” – and there have been a couple recently

1) Similar Image Search.

(clocks)

Can this do facial recognition (which has serious social/privacy ramifications)? Maybe not, but it’s step on the way. Maybe. I’m not sure how they’re doing this… it isn’t purely image-similarity… if you look at rep-rap similar images you tend to get a lot of pictures of Charles Darwin (the name of the orginal Reprap being Darwin) so there’s something other than pattern recognition going on there. Still… it’s fairly impressive

(Jennifer Connollys)

I mean this one isn’t just returning images of Conifer Jennily – it’s getting those, but also focusing on the mood of the picture (only movies) – so there’s also Blade-Runner, Train-Spotting, Star-Wars, Phenomena (which has Jennifer Connolly, but she’s not in the photo) and Alien vs Predator (the page title being Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem: ‘Predator Arrival’)… and the first JC photo is from Reqium for a Dream (hence the Trainspotting link: Heroin)… so in addition to image-recognition smarts, there’s also word-linking smarts. And they’re smart smarts.

–

2) And the other thing is this O3D:

A 3D rendering plugin for browsers… which would be even more impressive if I could get the fucking thing to work, but my graphics card (on a 1 year old Toshiba Laptop) isn’t supported, so that’s that. What this is, is a memosphere. And Every Single Web 2.0 App That Ever Succeeded Was A Memosphere.

So anyway – looking at these caused me to look into what else google are doing in the app-space – there’s a hell of a lot… they seem to be able to do all this stuff by stealth. I mean the video above is on Youtube that they own – which in its 4 years of existence has become the second biggest search engine on the web… and I think it is (semi) single-handedly changing the way people watch television. That’s ~ 200,000,000,000 (us: pop~ 300,000,000) brain-hours a year, that’s now doing something slightly/profoundly different.

Google. Privately owned. Can you imagine it working if it was publicly owned? Nope. Can you imagine it working if it’s decisions came under the democratic control of its stake-holders? Nope. Is it a law unto itself, and can do whatever it wants without fear of some sort of embarrassing backlash? Nope. Not yet anyway.

Still, I can remember when Yahoo was “the only” search engine, and now they seem to be constantly under threat of being bought by Microsoft.

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky, man.

“‘Eureka machine’ puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

The machine, which took only two hours to come up with Newton’s laws of motion, marks a turning point in the way science is done”

So we may have come a long way from when I was at school and we used slide-rules then.

[edit] It also seems that a genetic robo-scientist in Wales has performed the entire loop of the scientific methodology on its own… and made a discovery.

” As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, Adam autonomously hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae code for enzymes that catalyze some of the microorganism’s biochemical reactions. The yeast is noteworthy, as scientists use it to model more complex life systems.

Adam then devised experiments to test its prediction, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and used those findings to revise its original hypothesis and test it out further. The researchers used their own separate experiments to confirm that Adam’s hypotheses were both novel and correct–all the while probably wondering how soon they’d become obsolete. ”

The singularity approacheth.

T’would be cool to link something like these to the WorldChanging.com’s thing about the universal panopticon

If you take a bit of a spin through the Square Mile in London, you will be filmed every centimetre of the way, and it’s not even that interesting.

The whole place is packed with CCTV cameras. They’re everywhere… not as concentrated as the British Railway Stations, (where dozens of them cling to the poles like birds of prey) but The City is CCTV central.

The implication… “we can see you but you can’t see us”. It’s an unblinking black eye… or a million black eyes with wires spaghettiing back into… if not a police-state, then the police-part of the state. It’s things going on behind closed doors. It’s fear. It’s Big Brother… the sensory omnipresence of opaque hierarchy. This is the symbol of modern hierarchical power – it’s the lens of a CCTV camera.

Well I’ve got bad news for you Sunshine.

Check this out:

Especially about 2 minutes in.

Notice something?

Fucking EVERYONE has a camera.

The implication : Every single lens is a direct line to the web. It’s the sensory omnipresence of the universal mind… and isn’t hidden, it’s wide open to the world and it’s watching.

The lens of a CCTV camera is an opaque threat – there’s no way of knowing what’s at the other end. The lens of a human-held camera is fundamentally, qualatatively different – we all know exactly what’s on the receiving end… It’s the web. It’s youtube. It’s millions, billions of people – creating what Robert Axlerod describes as “The Shadow of the Future”… it’s what Mike Wesch likens to Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”. It’s the world. It’s us.

So there it is. It’s hierarchy vs network again – the defining conflict of the era… and although The Black Spaghetti Monster has violence and secrecy on it’s side… man, it is so much smaller than The Blue Spaghetti Monster.

We are big.

So you behave yourself because we’re watching.

There have been a proliferation of these recently:

Though I can’t really believe that that woman actually sits there reading a magazine, waiting for her plants to need watering. She should get a hobby. Like building one of these:

Which is the by now, semi legendary arduino thing that sends a twitter message when your plant needs watering, a smallified, off-the-shelf version being here:

Which seems to be an emerging pattern with open-source hardware… all information for free, but sell kits on the side – though I can’t help but noting that neither Etsy nor Lady Ada are currently stocking this item.

The reason I mention it though is because of this:

which is a variant that not only measures soil-moisture but also light strength, humidity, temperature… and logs the data, which you can then upload to their site to compare to a database that they have of plants… and what conditions they prefer.

Quite a nice idea – and dead simple to do… although I couldn’t help but noticing that they say “Plant Sensor uses patent-protected sensors” as though that’s a good thing, rather than an insult to humanity… especially right after they say “We brought NASA Mars Rover Technology down to Earth” – sorry? Don’t taxpayers pay for NASA Technology? Well they can go fuck themselves up the chuffers. The only reason I’d buy one is to reverse-engineer it and put the designs up on the web.

Still… that aside. I really like the idea of this when applied to various larger scales… it kindof ties in with the WorldChanging.com idea of using cellphones to monitor environmental conditions globally – so we can be far more responsive to changes in local conditions etc.

I think it might also help people with backyard-farming – which is a fairly crucial component of “buying out at the bottom“, which is a fairly crucial component of humanity surviving the 21st century, in my most humble of opinions.

I’ve got this vague vision of rfid enabled censors for pretty much everything being scattered like confetti all over the place… they can network together and in a dead-simple mycelium type way, cover the entire planet. Whether we like it or not, The Universal Mind is becoming omnipotent. Firstly it was the CCTV cameras and webcams, now it’s about a billion people with cellphones and web connections. Sooner or later it’s going to become botnetified (mp3).

Well here it is, the dawn of a new day, a new era and Barclays (god bless them) still haven’t managed to figure out that THE best way of getting publicity for something is to ban it.

So… Some leaked documents that fell into the hands of The Guardian hinting at some impropriety on behalf of Barclays in respect to Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue were promptly barred from publication… but don’t worry, because they’re freely available on the internet… someone linked to them on Twitter… so I re-tweeted…

… and wouldn’t you know it, my tweet has been deleted (by someone other than me). To be fair, 2 other somewhat innocuous tweets have also been deleted – I know this because I keep an RSS feed of my own tweets. Never mind… you can get hold of the offending documents over at Wikileaks, who’s kudos has risen sharply on the news that the Australian Government is trying to ban them.

Barclays must be panicking for some reason… my guess would be that they’re engaged in fraud… and that it’s a fair bet that all the other big banks have also engaged in fraud, and that to do so, they’d have needed the complicity of the Big Four Accountancy firms, who are also responsible for auditing against such behaviour.

So. I’ve had a look at these documents and I can’t make head or tail of them. Fortunately The Guardian appears not to be barred from publishing interpretations.

Listen thou would-be censors: We are the internet, and we most vigorously disapprove of censorship on specifically and explicitly moral grounds.

Moralities are sets of behaviours designed to protect the social group from individual self-interest. Blocking the flow of information is against the interests, the morality and the innocence of The Universal Mind.

The reason why so many religious morals are now so ugly and mean is that they were designed to protect the types of social groupings that were common back in the Bronze Age… This is why small town America tends to vote Red while the cities tend to vote Blue – it’s why the Red camp in the last election attempted to make out that “small town America” was (morally) the “real” America.

Well, censors, we now have a brand new social structure… and it’s bigger and it’s stronger than you are.

We are here.

So when I wrote the last post, I went looking for the clip where Jeremy Clarkson reviews a Tesla… I embedded it from Youtube… and…

… it had been deleted for “terms of use”

Fuck you people, you can fucking fuck off and go fucking fuck yourselves up the chuffers.

So… I think we need a P2P backup mechanism for saving videos (especially youtube videos) into the universal mind so fuckwits from “the past” can’t delete them.

I shall go exploring.

I’m interested in Emergent Morality… of this thing that we’re building – The Internet: A billion nodes each terminating with a soon-to-be-obsolete computer and a vast morass of complaining humanity, at least 50% of which has below average IQ.

LOL Retards.

But I won’t go into that today, I’ll put it off again…

So today this hit the wires/waves :

(from) (the music is too spooky. Mute it.)

What it is, is a little app for an open-sourced mobile-phone platform which is currently under the nurturance of Google, of whom you may have heard.

So another site offers a new scheme where people can offer to pay for apps to be developed (bounties) and developers can go ahead and “win” the bounties. Crowd-sourced innovation and funding then. Not that google doesn’t have the resources to do this itself, but the crowd-sourcing is the thing. This is where the genius lies on a number of different levels.

So the first… the very first app to win a bounty, is Torrent Droid, and the social news sites light up like Christmas on Fire, because what it is, is a barcode reader for DVDs that searches the bittorrents for the DVD content, and allows you to send it to your home PC, so rather than buying it from the shop, a pirate version is there waiting for you when you get home.

And the reaction from the Internet?

“I don’t bother going to DVD stores anyway? Why not just do a search on IMDB?”

It’s not going to change anything… but it’s a raised finger to the RIAA/MPAA. You people are so fucked. Nobody cares. You’re finished. You’re like a bully that starts out beating up little kids… and finds that when the little kids all get together and he starts losing and tries to be nice, no one wants to know.

Flickr.com has turned into an amazingly good search engine… I noticed it the other day when I was looking for photos of Pomanders (and who ever does that?). There’s a group dedicated to them… or photos of them.

I read recently that Youtube is the second biggest search engine on the web (in a blog that I’ve now misplaced) by one of the funders of Twitter, who was saying that Twitter was a threat to google because it delivers more up to the minute information… a notion roundly bollocked by the hoards of commenters etc.

Twitter is a pretty good search engine for what people are talking about on any given subject right now though. Want to know what people think of IE6? Search for it on Twitter. Hating IE6 is an international language.

Facebook is an excellent search engine for people. I’ve found people that I thought I’d lost forever.

Digg/Reddit and co have fucked it up. They’re not good search engines for news.

Instructibles.com is rappidly turning into a really good site for searching for “how to build things”… and that is its destiny methinks… but it’s not quite there yet.

There are probably good sites for searching for music… MySpace? Lastfm? I imagine that the backward facing copyright analists have/will interfere with that one… I use youtube for music searches and they interfere with that all the time.

So there you go. Web 2.0 is turning into Search 2.0. Who’d a thunk it?

And in a way it makes sense, because although google is utter genius, it’s also a bit crap because (like digg, reddit etc) it’s an exercise in Rewarding Beaten-Paths. Sure the long tails are there… but if you want to find an honest review of a camera say, you have to wade through about a million pages of people trying to sell them. If you want authenticity, you need to go to Amazon (a search engine for not just things to buy, but reviews) or some other site that specialises in reviews (and there are a fair few of those, but I’ve not found them to be terribly convincing) … where the focus is small enough that the interests of long-tails are genuinely served.

It’s classic AI – and quite possibly/probably how wetware brains work… every time you click a link, you increase the likelihood that it will be clicked again. Beaten-Paths are rewarded, but beaten paths are not always right, and can be (and are) gamed.

It doesn’t always work. It’s not always fair… in fact the bigger it gets, the less likely it is to be fair. Oligarchies of Influence are formed. It’s almost like (and this is an advantage of twitter/facebook) that classic AI isn’t that good for delivering authenticity… for that you need small networks of small-degrees-of-separation of white-listed people. “People you know”, or “who know people you know” or “who no people who know people you know”, but not much beyond that. You’re not guaranteed an answer though.

Another problem – a concern I have with the way these things are shaping up, is that this system encourages monopoly. The major filtering systems of the internet are specifically, systemically architected to encourage monopoly. It’s not democratic… it’s sold as democratic, but it’s not democratic.

I’d be a lot happier (for example) with some sort of P2P version of Flickr… so once something is uploaded into the Universal mind, it doesn’t get lost… but it doesn’t have the lack of resilience inherent in monopolistic systems. We’ve already seen the drawbacks of monopoly with Youtube… embedded a video recently? Chances are it will have been pulled by WMG – and your site will now have a dead link.

I think any P2P system will need to run in parallel… a bit like the distributed SETI system… where chunks of the Universal Mind that live in precarious silos like Youtube or Flickr are automatically backed up onto individual PCs… I think there are already sites that try to backup every single youtube video onto their own servers… but this is kindof replacing one problem with… well, the same problem.

This is probably already being done, but I don’t know about it.

Here’s a picture of a penguin

Apropos of nothing.

I’m also increasingly seeing the web as (you guessed it) The Universal Mind. It’s becoming a creature in its own right, with its own patterns and behaviours, and its own emergent moralities… but more of that later.