RAY OZZIE: I think the answer is yes, it’s important and there are a lot of very interesting things. I think we don’t really know yet which ones are going to be sustainable killer app type usages versus not. It’s really hard to scale things that are at that real time level, and I frankly don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what real time means.

When you’re Tweeting only once every, I don’t know, how often do you think the speediest people who Twitter are doing it over the course of their waking hours, if you averaged it out, once every —

STEVE GILLMOR: Well, noisy — Scoble is 100 a day.

RAY OZZIE: Is it 100? Okay. But that’s still not much in the grand scheme of things if you think of how many seconds he’s awake per day. It’s still only once every N seconds.

What if your devices were Tweeting on your behalf to serve you? What if your phone, your car, your — I don’t know your glasses, but different things in your life were posting informational updates that went to services that were acting on your behalf? It’s a perfectly reasonable, realistic thing that could happen if you had an infrastructure that was a message switching infrastructure in real time. It’s a logical direction that things would go.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been talking about auto-Twitter for months now.

STEVE GILLMOR: So, your concern about the overwhelming fire hose aspect of this that is just difficult to scale up to that kind of —

RAY OZZIE: Well, there’s a technological aspect and a human aspect. From a technological aspect it’s just a hard computer science problem like some of the Azure things that we’re doing or some of the things that Google has had to cope with in high scale systems. Anybody who has built a really high scale system — Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger — whenever you’re dealing with half a billion users, there are some interesting scale issues. And that’s simple point to point. If you take it end to end, it’s just even more.

But beyond the technological scale issues, the reason I was getting at the unified notifier concept is because I think as humans we have these issues. And certain of the events, certain classes of the events we want to treat, as Dave says, like a river where you don’t really care if you miss something, you know. It’s where you’re not trying to keep up every little thing. It’s maybe it’s an amusement, maybe it’s just a background activity.

Some types of events you just want to see them. You just don’t want to miss even a single one in this big flood of notifications. And so we just need better tools.

Our tools will become more and more responsible for maintaining our social networks, and trading between background and foreground attention. Our machines are using us.

He envisions that people will turn to robots for the illusion of a living presence to satisfy their emotional needs.
…

One of those future products is the so called “Funktionide“. It is an amorph object whose intention is to provide the owner with an atmosphere of presence thus counteracting the feeling of loneliness. In the visions future people are lonely and with all the new dimensions products offer, humans will eventually turn to “robots” for emotional satisfaction.

Link via Boing Boing

Here we come closest to McLuhan’s core idea — “Here it is” is a function of Twitter; “Here I Am” may be its core “message” in so far as McLuhan saw the message as something that might not be articulated on any kind of conscious level but emerges from the ways that the medium impacts our experience of time and space.

“Here it is” became “Here I am” and more importantly “Here we are.”

“Here we are” is not only more important, it is also closer to the truth, since it hides whatever implicit subjectivity is present in “Here I am”.

But where? Twitter is nonspatial; the internet is everywhere and nowhere. Twitter is nontemporal, or at least asynchronous; ‘we’ do not share time.

Twitter is location without coordinates. “Being here” is the final reversal of the implicit subject-object distinction in dasein itself, setting context without any reference to the other.

we are no longer dasein.

So instead of letting these articles live and die on my computer, I’ll just post link dumps every once in a while. I’d like to save these articles for posterity and give credit where credit is due, but I don’t really have the time to do proper commentary. I hope you don’t mind.

If an autonomous machine kills someone, who is responsible? (Guardian)

Yet another official-sounding body, this time The Royal Academy of Engineering, puts together a report on the ethical implications of machine autonomy.

“If you take an autonomous system and one day it does something wrong and it kills somebody, who is responsible? Is it the guy who designed it? What’s actually out in the field isn’t what he designed because it has learned throughout its life. Is it the person who trained it?

“If we can’t resolve all these things about who’s responsible, who’s charged if there’s an accident and also who should have stopped it, we deny ourselves the benefit of using this stuff.”

As if these issues are any easier in the case of humans…

(thx Jon!)

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. (Slate)

Great article on the relation between seeking behavior and dopamine, and how the translates into high tech ‘addictions’.

Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, “where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy”… “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It’s why… experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

This article made me think about the very idea of drugs as ’substances’, and how hard it is to fit seeking behavior as a reward in itself into a hedonist paradigm.

(thx Kirk!)

Would You Gamble With Your Twitter Followers?

The very idea of social networking is grounded in the assumption that individuals seek out and individually cultivate their own network. Using these networks as a commodity to trade around arbitrarily (and through the use of a giant Gorilla) is quite disruptive and I find it very interesting.

(thx @bruces followers!)

The Rise of Network Fog

Network everything! Clouds are neither thick nor thin; they have shape but no container. Taking steps away from the Data Center model is one way to ensure a genuinely neutral net.

(thx @darthjulian)

Delicate Boundaries from csugrue on Vimeo.

As referenced in Bruce Sterling’s lecture At The Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry

Technology part 1: 80’s action movies are lame.
Technology part 2: Terminator, Time-Travel, and Technology
Technology in film part 3: Robotics and Fear
Technology in film part 4: Judgement Calls

From Abstruse Goose (Thx Cameron!)