Suspended Judgement

Google Glass and the problem of delineation...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:23:00 +0100

Last week Google unveiled Project Glass, their augmented reality eyeglasses designed to help you “explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” Here’s the demo video:

Now, there’s lots of things to say about this - for starters that it’s amazing technology; probably distracting; potentially dangerous; and that it’s likely to have the opposite effect than putting you ‘in the moment’.

However, I noticed something else in the video that I think might be a bigger issue for Google.

At about 1:30 ‘Mr Google’ checks in to the Mud Truck on Google+, and he shares it with his ‘circles’. But note that it’s not his ‘foodie’ circle, or his ‘friends’ circle or his ‘people I’m trying to impress with my hipsterishness’ circle, it’s simply all his circles…

A few months ago I wrote a piece on the Technophobia blog about underlying trends for 2012, and number 3 was the issue of ‘delineation’ - how do we conceive of the thresholds between things: features, capabilities, networks etc. Or put another way, the issues that information architects wrestle with are now our issues.

And this G+ check in is the sort of thing I was talking about - it’s hard to manage groups *inside* a network, not because good tools don’t exist to organise people into groups, but because it’s a pain to explicitly share things with them (quite aside from the fact that it’s still far harder to share things to G+ than to Twitter and Facebook as it is).

And so the video demonstrates that someone in Google’s marketing department has realised this and made the decision to ignore one of G+’s foundational features in the interest of expediency, and I don’t think the need to simplify and expedite an imagined interaction on a promotional video is really any different to the need to do the same in a real actual user interaction…

If I were on the G+ team, I’d be a tad worried about that.

On SXSW and culture as therapy...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:43:00 +0100

“Who could be against more communication and conversation, participation and collaboration, transparency and free speech? To question the spread of the web would be like being against dolphins, green space and trees and things that are self-evidently good. Yet many sensible and thoughtful people, not just Luddites and cultural conservatives, have grave reservations about the impact and implications of the web.” - Charles Leadbeater

In his 2008 book “We Think”, Charles Leadbeater wrote a chapter called For Better or for Worse in which he weighed the potential of the web to strengthen democracy, freedom and equality against the possibility that negative effects will overwhelm the gains leaving us worse off, less free, more controlled, more confused.

Much of my experience of the South by South West conference this year seemed like a safari through the jungles of those negative effects and the fears they generate. I didn’t specifically plan it to be such, although given the thousands of sessions on offer I’m sure I could have chosen to spend my time among people of a more utopian bent. Perhaps it’s retrospective apophenia - just my brain seeing meaningful patterns in essentially random data…

Whatever it is, many of the sessions I went to involved speakers who wanted to share concerns about the direction the web is heading. Here are the most significant ones in a nutshell:

Alec J Ross (senior Advisor for Innovation to Hilary Clinton): How 21st Century Tools Are Disrupting Global Power
Governments, of all denominations, are terrified of social networks and are rapidly developing enormous surveillance and control capabilities.

Andrew Keen (author and cultural critic): Digital Vertigo
Social media sharing places individuals in a virtual ‘panopticon’ which limits choice, expression and ultimately our freedom.

Danah Boyd (ethnographer and academic): The Power of Fear in Networked Publics
We live in a culture of fear, which is further fueled by social media and the resulting attention economy.

Jaron Lanier (computer scientist, author and musician): Is Technology Making Our Lives Richer or Poorer?
The open web is being consumed by giant proprietory networks that extract value from our activity but don’t return any of it, which is an unsustainable economic dynamic.

Brian Solis (social media analyst and author) and Billy Corgan (musician): The End of Business as Usual
The internet is hollowing out the creativity and substance of music, leaving only “corporate robots and jerks in basements”.

George Friedman (CEO of foreign policy analysis consultancy Stratfor): Surviving Technology
The internet is a breeding ground for conspiracy, because in “an absense of information one imputes the worst, the most dangerous, of motivations in others”.

Bruce Stirling (science fiction author): The Ultimate Bruce Stirling Talk
The world is dominated by five ‘stacks’ - Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft who don’t treat us as customers but as livestock. The ‘stacks’ will ultimately fall, but in the meantime our future is summed up as “old people and big dirty cities, afraid of the sky”.

Now those summaries don’t do proper justice to any of the talks, all of which were excellently argued and nuanced (and I highly recommend you check them out - much of the audio from the sessions has already been published at the above links). However, I do think there are some clear themes running through them all - of fear, dehumanisation and of economics. And furthermore I think in the aggregate they express something important about where we are in the progression of the new form of communication and it’s socio-political impact.

I left the conference with my mind churning with thoughts of how these effects will be mitigated and what kinds of institution will be involved in mitigating them. After chewing it over for a few days, I came to the conclusion that one of the other (much more optimistic!) sessions I went to might hold the key.

On Saturday afternoon, Baratunde Thurston gave a keynote speech entitled: How to Read the World. Thurston is a comedian, author and digital director of the satirical website The Onion. In his talk he argued that the future will be defined at the intersection of politics, technology and comedy:

“The internet of crap is emerging for all of us, it’s a magical time. This casts a lot of noise. It creates some tension in opportunity for clarity and trust because with all this noise and confusion, we look to institutions for trust. They often come up short. Government is trying to shut it down. Religion missing in action. Your parents are awkwardly texting you. And the media is busy talking about the state of the media.
So, who’s left? You’ve got comics, willing to speak truth to the youth and beyond.”

And I think he’s right. Actually, I think it’s about culture in a wider sense than just comedy - there’s a huge demand for culture that both engages people and that gets to the heart of these issues, that changes the way people feel about what’s happening as well as highlighting the absurdities and calling out the failures.

Furthermore I think this is true at all scales and in all contexts. Fear, confusion and alienation exist locally and within organisations as well, and there too culture can change attitudes and enable behaviours that promote the best of what the Internet can be.

I’m not talking about something abstract here, I’m not using the world ‘culture’ in the way it is often used to signify ‘just the way things are here’. I don’t mean ‘team-building’, I mean creating culture by actually making things - drawing, painting, sculpting, doing comedy sketches, videos, acting out plays, that kind of thing. Engaging in a shared creative experience around a theme or challenge. Just as in the wider world negative effects can’t be overcome simply through legislation, so too within communities and companies they can’t be overcome with mere policy. There has to be something deeper, something that increases understanding, trust and confidence, and that creates norms of behaviour that people adhere to because it’s right to do so.

This is quite anathemic to a lot of people. Very few organisations recognise its importance to the point of incorporating it deeply into their practice, despite the problems associated with a lack of culture being well identified. Many people prefer looking to technical solutions to address these problems instead of dealing with the complexity of people. And of course technical (‘architectural’) solutions play an important role, but just like policy, they often fall short in use. Without addressing culture in a way that transcends mere ‘training’, technical solutions will not fulfil their promise - at least not unless they are so cleverly and beautifully designed that they engage with deeply evolved traits in the individual, that require little understanding and learning.

In a nutshell: if companies, communities and societies want to take proper advantage of the opportunity presented by the new communications realities, they have to figure out ways of encouraging positive norms of behaviour and attitude. And instead of doing this from above by diktat or shipping it in from outside, I think it needs to emerge - small groups, bottom-up, in a creative and inclusive process, sharing with others.

Where there is challenge, there is opportunity. And I think this is an area that is crying out for more innovation.

SXSW 2012, redux...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:36:00 +0100

Well, it’s two weeks now since Saul and I were at South by South West Interactive (how can that possibly be?!!) and it’s about time I took stock…

I’m going to break this initial post down into a few sections: what the basic experience was like; whether my plans for the conference panned out or not; and what sessions I actually went to. Then I’ll follow up with some more about what I actually learned while I was in Austin in another post…

The Basics

Weather: Abysmal for the first few days - torrential downpours made the conference a) miserable and b) hugely over-crowded. It also forced some of the outside events to either cancel or shift indoors which meant I was late for a few things. By Monday it had brightened up a lot though and it was glorious from then on.

Hotel: Days Inn South, about 20 minutes by taxi from downtown Austin. Cheap & basic, but servicable - especially once I’d moved to a room closer to the wifi router!

Getting around: Taxis were a pain in general - waited up to an hour some mornings. Some taxis refused to take us out of downtown late at night (what’s that all about?!), forcing us to sneak in to the taxi queue at the Four Seasons one night. On the plus side, Chevy had a fleet of free cars cruising around the city during the day that you could just hop in to; the pedicabs were abundant and handy for short jaunts; and there were unlicensed cabs roaming around after dark, driven by working guys on the lookout for some extra cash during South-by season.

Food: Big variation in quality. Took a few days to get used to the trace corn-syrup sweetness of everything. The food-trucks were fantastic though - really tasty & the portion sizes allowed you to carry on walking once finished too!

Connectivity: I was relying on wifi except for emergencies, and that worked ok, although I did spend a lot of my time faffing for a connection. The event wifi extended beyond the conference centre to other nearby venues on the same SSID, which was useful, and, although it was congested for much of the time, you could usually find somewhere quiet where the signal was usable, which given that there were around 40,000 delegates wasn’t too bad. Of course, you never had a signal when you really *needed* one, but that’s just the universe for you… Most venues in town also had free wifi of varying degrees of quality. (And I never even saw a ‘human hotspot’ let alone used one).

The Plan

In my pre-sxsw post I mentioned a few things I wanted to pay attention to, so this section is about whether I think I succeeded or not…

I will look out for sessions that look interesting and/or align with my interests, but I won’t be disappointed if I miss them…

With over 5000 sessions available the shortlisting process was a pretty time-consuming affair. However, I discovered something interesting on about my 3rd round of trimming the shortlist. Actually, in the final analysis, almost all of the sessions I’d marked melted away leaving just a handful that I felt I really couldn’t miss. Here’s the thing: why bother going half way round the world to listen to someone talk about something you already know? Most of the things I’d put down were on topics I understood - sure I want to keep abreast of things in those areas, but when it clashes with something that sounds fascinating, but I don’t already know about, the new knowledge definitely wins. And so I ended up with just 3 or 4 things I had to see each day, and a bunch of other stuff I would be happy to check out if I got the chance, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if I missed.

The only thing I really was disappointed I missed was the Sunday morning “sketch-camp” visual thinking workshop. But with a hangover compounded by the clocks going forward overnight, it wouldn’t have been medically advisable to go…

As much as possible, I will try to involve myself in interactive sessions and workshop…

That was a good plan, but there really weren’t very many interactive workshop sessions and the ones there were tended to be a little way from the conference centre. I also missed the ‘sketch-camp’ as I mentioned. I did though go to a comedy improv workshop and an open discussion about Formula One which was a lot of fun. Verdict: B-

I will also try to spend a fair bit of time at or near the ‘book reading’ sessions…

I did manage to catch a book reading almost every day, and the format was good, but my intention of hanging out in there for extended periods didn’t work out, as there was good wifi and comfier seats just round the corner, and most of the books being read from were pretty uninteresting as it turned out…

Instead of constantly checking the back channels during sessions, I’ll check in on foursquare at the outset and then take notes in mindmap format on paper…

This approach I did stick to and it worked really well. I’ve used my foursquare history several times since to remind myself what I saw and when. Not checking the backchannel meant a lot less faffing with the wifi connection, and I got more useful notes from the mindmaps I made. Furthermore, SXSW published an official hashtag for each session, so it was easy to pick up and contribute to twitter conversations straight afterwards.

I will define a handful of specific conversations I want to have, and specific people I want to have them with…and will deliberately seek them out.

In the end, I only came up with four specific conversations I wanted to have in advance, which were: a conversation about human augmentation with Amber Case (I never got anywhere near her, but did chat to others about it); a conversation about ‘lean start-ups’ (Saul managed to wangle us invitations to a do at Adaptive Path were we had several conversations about it); a conversation about innovation in Formula 1 broadcasting (managed to have quite a long chat with F1 broadcaster & journalist Jonathan Green); and a conversation about innovation within an agency (spoke briefly to Marty Boyer from agency Possible who was talking on the subject, and will pick that up when we both have more time).

So all in all quite successful, and although there was no shortage of interesting topics I’m quite glad I got some identified beforehand. It made it easier to keep focused, easier to know that I got some value out of the whole exercise and it made sure that I got to talk about things that weren’t just about ‘work’ as well.

Each day I will look for opportunities between the conference and the after-hours parties to sit down, put my earphones in and write the day up in a blog post.

Yup, that just didn’t happen. And I’m quite glad it didn’t - it must be a bind to be a journalist and have to file copy at the end of the day instead of having fun and meeting interesting people…

And so, finally, was I able to ‘wander the wilderness’ as I’d intended to?

Yes. I think so. Amongst all the hubbub and excitement, and the squirming crowds of people, there were many occasions when I stopped to reflect, put my earphones in and stepped away from it all without going anywhere. And those were some of the best moments of all…

The Schedule:

Below is a list of the main things I went to - if you want to know what I thought, or want to see my notes, please just ask. Also, the audio from some of these sessions has already been published at the sxsw site - just follow the links.

Monday:

BBQ Crash Course

Alec Ross: How 21st Century Tools Are Disrupting Global Power

David Eagleman: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Brian David Johnson: Where Do Science Fiction and Science Fact Meet?

Saturday:

Andrew Keen: Digital Vertigo

Danah Boyd: The Power of Fear in Networked Publics

Eliza Skinner: Basics of Comedy Improv Workshop

Baratunde Thurston: How to Read the World

Sunday:

Ravi Iyer: The Moral Psychology and Big Data Singularity

Chinwag’s Global G & Tea Party

Monday:

Dov Seidman: HOW - Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything

Jaron Lanier: Is Technology Making Our Lives Richer or Poorer?

Ray Kurzweil: Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit

Brian Solis & Billy Corgan: The End of Business As Usual

F1 Meet Up

Marty Boyer: Agency Innovation in 15-Minutes or Less

Tuesday:

Anne Richards & Carla Fisher: What Left 4 Dead Can Teach Us About Kids Games

Lane Becker & Thor Muller: Get Lucky - Putting Planned Serendipity to Work

George Friedman: Surviving Technology

Bruce Stirling: The Ultimate Bruce Sterling Talk

…and that was it!

It seems like a lot, but to be honest what I’ve written down here isn’t really the half of it, as there were so many people, conversations and other events. I also haven’t said anything about the difficulty of being away from home for over a week, leaving my wife and two little boys at home - big thanks to Rosie for looking after them by herself! - or the rather dreadful family news we received while I was there, which affected the experience quite a bit. Still, those things aside, it was a terrific thing to be at and, at times, it really did feel like being at the epicentre of a world-changing force…

See Through 3D Desktop, (by Jinha Lee)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:36:20 +0100

See Through 3D Desktop, (by Jinha Lee)

Preparing myself for SXSW...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:16:00 +0000

So, I’m off to South By South West Interactive, the biggest geek festival in the world. Seven days in Austin, Texas, by all accounts the hippest corner of the lone star state - I suspect Rick Santorum supporters will be thin on the ground at the ACC…

I’m currently sitting towards the rear of a Boeing 777 somewhere over West Virginia, roughly eight hours into a ten hour flight, and thinking about how i’m going to approach this week - not so much what sessions i’m going to go to, but what I want to get out of it all, and, as Amsterdam’s Picnic festival reminds visitors each year, what am I going to bring to it?

Of course, I haven’t only just started thinking about this, but now is a good opportunity to write down my thoughts so far. Also, I’ve spent some of the idle time on this flight, catching up with some recent TED talks and one of them in particular has caught my attention:

It’s by Susan Cain and it’s called The Power of Introverts. In it she argues that people with a natural bent towards introversion are all to frequently made to feel at odds with dominant culture (I can imagine this being especially true in the boisterous, confident U,S of A. Although perhaps less so these days - the last time I was in the States, Osama Bin Laden was merely that crazy nutter who’d tried to blow up the World Trade Centre back in the early nineties…)

It’s an especially impressive talk coming from someone who goes to some lengths to lay out her own introversion credentials. She ends her talk with three ideas that she wants the audience to take away with them:

Firstly, the idea that this trend towards group-work -which she goes as far as to describe as a “madness” - must be stopped. Not that working in teams is bad, but that it neglects the insight that comes from quiet solitary contemplation. (I can’t help feeling that TED is itself partly to blame for that trend - I can think of several very popular videos that promote a shift away from broadcast mentality and rigid work roles towards more flexible, more group-oriented forms of engagement, but anyway..)

Secondly, she encourages us to ‘visit the wilderness’ occasionally; to disconnect from the network and the noise, and connect with our own thoughts for a while; to gain insight and to return to the world of people with revelation.

Thirdly, she asks everyone to occasionally expose what is, figuratively, in their mental ‘suitcases’ - in other words unpack and share with others what makes you tick, what inspiration you take, what knowledge you’ve learned, what ideas you have… especially introverts, because, as she says, “the world needs you, and it needs the things you carry”.

So, am I going to go around telling everyone what makes me tick? No. I tend to talk too much as it is! It’s Cain’s second invocation that has got me thinking. I *do* want to visit the wilderness. I am thousands of miles away from work and family, and, while of course I will miss them hugely, I should also be taking advantage of the rare opportunity that distance, lack of responsibility and lack of distractions provides. These should be the right ingredients to gain some perspective.

The problem of course is: how in the biggest, most hectic technology conference on earth do you find solitude and time for reflection..? And if I ignored the conference and spent my time here in contemplation, well it’s a long way to go and a lot of money to spent for the privilege. To say nothing of the wasted opportunity to talk to and learn from so many thinkers and doers.

No, balance must be the order of the day. “Pacing” as all the guides for conference newbies advise. So, this is what I intend to do:

I will look out for sessions that look interesting and/or align with my interests, but I won’t be disappointed if I miss them - most of the sessions will be available on video later anyway.
As much as possible, I will try to involve myself in interactive sessions and workshops where real debate is going on, or skills are being practiced.
I will also try to spend a fair bit of time at or near the ‘book reading’ sessions, as the 20 minute format looks good and there are many topics on the schedule I’d like to know more about.
Instead of constantly checking the back channels during sessions, I’ll check in on foursquare at the outset and then take notes in mindmap format on paper, so I can concentrate on the session itself.
I will define a handful of specific conversations I want to have, and specific people I want to have them with, (this should probably be the subject of another post), and will deliberately seek them out.
Each day I will look for opportunities between the conference and the after-hours parties to sit down, put my earphones in and write the day up in a blog post.

Most of all though, I will try to remind myself that I am, in fact, wandering in the wilderness. And that means being present in the moment, knowing what I’m thinking and letting time flow towards me.

Let’s see whether this works out anything like I imagine it now… ;-)

A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision. (by...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:58:43 +0000

A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision. (by CorningIncorporated)

Easy to forget how much of our present and future is being shaped by an advanced glass manufacturer…

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors (by TheDmel)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:51:55 +0000

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors (by TheDmel)

DragonBot: A platform for cloud-based social robotics (by Adam...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:16:36 +0000

DragonBot: A platform for cloud-based social robotics (by Adam Setapen)

DragonBot is a new robot platform from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. Specifically designed to support long-term learning interactions between children and robots…(more)

To understand is to perceive patterns (by notthisbody) I thought...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:35:24 +0000

To understand is to perceive patterns (by notthisbody)

I thought this was a nice attempt to get at something fundamental about perspectives and possibilities - I’ve often thought that human history has this oddly paradoxical feature whereby our view of our significance in the universe steadily diminishes, just as our power to manipulate it increases. This video made me think of that…

What are going to be the big debates for 2012?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:58:46 +0000

I just wrote a piece on the Technophobia blog about what I think some of the big themes of debate in digital business and innovation are going to be this year. Or perhaps better: what underlying issues will be driving them.

I’ve highlighted just five concepts, which are by no means intended to be comprehensive. They are:

Human augmentation and the capability gap.
Context and distraction.
Scope and ‘delineation’.
Monopolies and closed platforms.
New business models going mainstream.

If you’re interested in any of these things, please read the post and comment if you disagree or have any questions.. :)

Flying robots, the builders of tomorrow (by ReutersVideo)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:09:27 +0000

Flying robots, the builders of tomorrow (by ReutersVideo)

Most Human Like Robot Ever (by Kennykpz1979)

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:01:25 +0000

Most Human Like Robot Ever (by Kennykpz1979)

A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021 by The...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:57:16 +0000

A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021 by The Institute for the Future

Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED (by...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:50:37 +0000

Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED (by Akiredsil)

Reveal Project - Personal Data Mirror (by NYT R&D)

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:53:08 +0000

Reveal Project - Personal Data Mirror (by NYT R&D)

The Top 10 Predictions from The World Future Society’s...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:48:00 +0000

The Top 10 Predictions from The World Future Society’s latest Outlook report.

(Incidentally, I made this in a new content creation platform called Jux, which I’ve been experimenting with recently. Jux seems to be something of a competitor to Tumblr, but I’m hoping that they will play nice together, with Jux providing a way of creating beautiful content for certain kinds of information and Tumblr providing the blog ‘wrapper’ with info pages and tags, etc. We’ll see…)

On AI's tipping point...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:14:02 +0000

Last night I watched my wife have a conversation with a computer. Not a particularly sophisticated conversation, as conversations go, but it felt like a conversation to her and that’s perhaps more important.

She has just received a new phone upgrade - an iPhone4S, and, while she was playing around with it on the sofa next to me, I casually asked her whether she realised the phone was intelligent?

“What do you mean?” she said.

“It has some new software in it called Siri that will listen to you and understand what you’re saying. You can use it to do things for you, you know - phone-related things like looking something up or adding things to your calendar and stuff.”

She looked at me a bit dubiously.

“Just hold it to your ear and talk to it as if you were on the phone to someone”, I said.

“What shall I ask it to do?”

“Um, why not tell it you’re going to meet me for lunch tomorrow?”

She lifted the handset to the side of her head, and a soft chime sounded to indicate that Siri was listening.

“What can I help you with?” it said.

She paused for a second or two and then said in her best ‘talking to a machine’ voice: “Meet Chris for lunch at one o’clock tomorrow.”

The voice in her ear started saying something unintelligible to me, and then she shot me a cheeky smile and said “Hmm..” as if she was giving it serious thought, “I meant Chris Dymond”.

The voice then said a few more things and her eyes widened. “Er, no, um.. push the meeting to 2 o’clock instead”.

The voice carried for a few seconds, then she said “Yes please”, and took the phone away from her ear, rapidly unlocked it and flicked to her calendar. There it was. Lunch with me at two o’clock. Just as she’d asked for.

She looked at me in amazement, trying to fathom what had just happened, then said “It didn’t sound like Stephen Hawking… at one point it said ‘okaay..’ slowly, as if it was thinking about something…”

(True story, by the way, if shortened slightly.)

***

Artificial intelligence has been with us for a while without us really noticing, of course: figuring out what’s relevant to us in Google search results, LoveFilm recommendations, personalised radio stations and the like. It’s used in smart recognition systems like Shazam and Google Goggles, and in content surfacing systems like Hunch and more recently Trapit, which uses technology from the same DARPA-funded research as that used by Siri.

But I think Siri represents something new - a difference in how visible the intelligence is and in how people perceive it and interact with it.

At the beginning of this year, geeks around the world were amazed by IBM’s ‘Watson’ computer, as it played a televised game of Jeopardy against human champions and beat them handsomely. It was an eye-opening demonstration that machines can now do things cognitively that were formerly the preserve only of humans. I think Siri will open the eyes of non-geeks to the new reality in a similar way.

And so, as I wonder what impact this will have, three things stand out for me initially:

Firstly, people will very soon realise that low-end ‘knowledge work’ is under significant threat. IBM didn’t build Watson to win lots of money at Jeopardy, they built it to provide a cheaper alternative to hiring and training thousands of call-centre staff (amongst a zillion other potential uses, of course, but that one seems the most obvious). Automated online assistants have been around for ages, of course, but just like Sir Lancelot storming Swamp Castle, you see it coming for ages, then suddenly it arrives…

Secondly, I think the importance of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs will become more obvious to people. Siri works out what you’re trying to do by processing enormous amounts of data from hundreds of services across the Internet, which it accesses via such APIs, and if you want your information to be part of Siri’s answers you need to be able to plug your service in to it.

Thirdly, Siri’s user interface is highly refined. From detecting when you move the phone to your ear, to the tone of voice, talking speed, pauses and word choice. Soon it may well dynamically modify these things based on the action it’s performing, the urgency it detects in the voice of the user and the need to keep the user engaged. It may not be perfect now, but it’s already impressively good. As such voice interfaces become more ubiquitous, and more nuanced, this new field of interaction design will gain in importance, with new skills, considerations, constraints and practices.

***

The great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - we may still be some way from having machines that cope well with high levels of ambiguity, but, when we look back in a few years time, we may well identify 2011 as the year in which artificial intelligence first started to really feel like intelligence to us.

One Plus One Equals Three...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I spent a wonderfully stimulating evening at the Royal Institution in London, listening to the well-known broadcaster, teacher and journalist James Burke give a lecture entitled 1+1=3. His was the second in a series of three events on innovation that have been guest-curated for the Institute by Aleks Krotoski around the theme of ’Connections’, and Burke is perhaps most famous for his three similarly titled and seminal documentary TV series from 1978, 1994 and 1997. In those programmes, he charted the causal chains of ideas and influences, people and inventions, across the breadth of human history.

(Incidentally, all of the Connections series are available for free on Burke’s YouTube channel - which is, frankly, one of the most brilliant things I know of on the web :)

His lecture was very much in the same vain - clever exposition of some profound concepts (of cognition, prediction and complexity) combined with elegant, frolicking skips through history and excellent story-telling. It culminated in an extended consideration of the possible impact of nanotechnology and the notion that we might be less than fifty years away from gaining the ability, as individuals, to make anything we need - from energy to food to any object we can imagine - from cheap abundant raw materials and for very little cost. The implications of such a capability and the impact of such abundance on society, culture, politics and the very meaning of value are truly profound and deserve a separate post (it’s the kind of speculative socio-technical scenario I love, so I may well try to write up my thoughts on it sometime soon).

However he also presented something else I’d like to talk about here, something more of the tangible now:

About half way through his lecture, Burke announced that he’s been spending some of his spare time working on a piece of software in collaboration with some volunteer programmers from mindmapping company The Brain. He then demonstrated a system that looked like essentially an indexed database of his life’s work researching connections between people, ideas and technologies - some 28,000 of them I think he said - with a visualisation that allows the user to traverse the links, switching the focus from node to node and uncovering new connections in the process (somewhat like the ‘MatchMe’ feature of the Technology Strategy Board’s innovation network ’_connect’, which is a project I’ve been involved with for the last couple of years).

It was quite impressive, and would be even more so if the system had an API that would allow others to create experiences and interfaces using the data (I asked him whether it had one during the Q&A, but his answer was a bit vague and I’m not sure he understood the implications of my question (my bad!). But perhaps the guys at The Brain have got it covered - I’d be interested to know…

Anyway, there were two things he said about the system which I thought were particularly noteworthy: the first was his inspiration for creating it, and the second was a hope for its potential.

His intention is to create an experience that allows students, of all disciplines, to better understand the serendipity involved in the process of innovation itself - the unpredictability of the paths it takes and the strange, unforeseen downstream impacts that new things have. He hopes it will generate in students an understanding that multi-disciplinarity is important. That the no-man’s-land between specialisms is the true birthplace of new ideas.

I think he’s on to something here. Just traversing the connections, as he did for much of his talk tonight - from loading camels to the development of the English language; from improving naval navigation to the invention of toilet paper - filled me with the sense that we are the product of just the potentials that we have managed to discover so far. And that given the right awareness of the endlessly churning exchange of ideas and knowledge going on in the world, nothing is certain yet anything might be possible.

His hopes for the system’s predictive power, however, I found more problematic. He made the argument that it might be possible to use the tool to map current connections, and to determine which connections are likely to yield important breakthroughs. By way of illustrating this concept he showed some examples of people who were mostly connected to others in the same general field, but who had interesting connections to someone in a very different area of expertise that had resulted in some major transformational technology. His argument was, (and sincere apologies if I misunderstood this), that identifying those ‘surprising’ cross-disciplinary connections might provide us with indicators for potentially important breakthroughs. Now, I can’t help thinking that there is an element of hindsight-bias in this. Those extraordinary connections may well not look so unusual were we to map a person’s connections right now, without the filter of history working to isolate the connections that proved important in the long run. Furthermore, with levels of research collaboration at the point where some academic papers have hundreds of cited co-authors, and with inter-disciplinary research becoming more or less the norm, a map of 28,000 connections might only encompass a few hundred people.
However, thinking about it further, maybe there is still such a thing as ‘surprising’ cross-disciplinary connections. Maybe such connections are created through serendipitous means, through personal relationships or chance meetings, and maybe they could be isolated from other kinds of connection. Perhaps, if people using a system like _connect were to indicate their social relationships to other members of the network, as well as their professional relationships, we could filter for that and identify connections that were worth paying closer attention to. Or maybe we could help convert such connections into collaborations by supporting such efforts in some way.

That might be very interesting indeed…

How to Touch-Enable Arbitrary Objects using TDR (by baudisch)

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:18:56 +0000

How to Touch-Enable Arbitrary Objects using TDR (by baudisch)

“Origo: 3D Printing @ Home” by Artur Tchoukanov (by...

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:32:48 +0100

“Origo: 3D Printing @ Home” by Artur Tchoukanov (by Umeå Institute of Design).

At Innovate 2011 on Tuesday, Will Hutten gave a very compelling speech about ‘General Purpose Technologies’ and the importance of being first to develop them. I think this was what he was talking about…