In Which I Repeat Buzzwords to Attract Readers

Being as how I don't want to scare off any potential viewers with too much dense phenomenology, I'm going to tone down my ranting in this post and just do some idle speculation on current technological trends. Specifically, I want to look at a potential future for media as we begin to merge with our technology.

One of the questions often asked of technologists and futurists is what we're going to do with ourselves in the future, especially when so much information can be gathered and presently instantly and freely. Many believe that our technological companions, which are increasingly powerful and convenient, will soon replace print media. There will be no need for paper books, newspapers, or magazines if all the content we want is readable on a lightweight, long lasting computer tablet.

I believe this future is still a while off due to the lack of color e-ink, the premium you pay for your portable devices, the hassle of navigating a truncated computer interface just to read, and the irreproducible feel of an actual book. While the last one is most important to me and other passionate book readers, future generations will have never known this and won't miss it. I admit that in a few decades, when books are no more, I will seem quite old-fashioned still lugging around my library.

But what will we find to replace the immersing comfort of books? To answer that, I must turn to buzzwords. The burgeoning internet is rife with dreams of augmented reality, crowdsourcing, and the semantic web, with each meme just waiting for the chance to supplant whatever dying paradigm came before it. Implementing these wild ideas is easier said than done, and there has been plenty of criticism on that front. But as I said in an earlier post, the real problem may be that we lack a sophisticated enough means to interpret the preponderance of information available to us. When videos, comments, and advertisements annotate nearly everything around us from novels to people to buildings, will we be able to handle that information, to synthesize it properly, to rely on it?

Jamais Cascio suggests that we may find ourselves in a sort of participatory panopticon where voluntary transparency will breed trust. But, as can be seen from the scandals of Facebooking teachers, traditionally private information made public tends to be greatly exaggerated and taken out of context. Think of how much nastier and more pervasive political muckraking would become if politicians' lives were open to such scrutiny. Rather than a collective stream of consciousness thrust onto the web without review, what we need is a more intelligent way of aggregating fiction and nonfiction that can be presented to us in a unified, articulated manner.

And I believe the best place to look for such a concept is the simple web crawler. Web crawlers, automated news services, and feed readers are the precursors to intelligent agents that will, in the future, organize the world for us. While the current breed of intelligent agents are in their infancy and possess no recognizable creativity, artificially intelligent software will eventually be able to read and understand natural knowledge and build original pieces of work. We have long had software that can generate music and art, and we are now beginning to create programs that can construct complete narratives of real events.

The next step for a new immersing content medium is software that can create linear movies constructed from photos, uploaded cell phone videos, and archived footage. This can be combined with generated music that matches the theme or mood of the story being told as well as your preferences. And each element in a constructed video can have contextual information connected to objects and people with original descriptions culled from twitter updates, blog posts, or Wikipedia entries.

Rather than subscribing to a dozen different blogs and news sites that are chock full of misinformation and bias and then attempting to sift through that data to find the gem of information you were actually looking for, an artificial system such as this would have the ability to instantaneously compare information from hundreds of different sources in order to identify and collect verifiable facts that it could present in a novel format best suited to your learning style.

A thorough piece of software would be capable of tracking down a fact's original source to prevent you from following link after link until eventually ending up back at the first link. By identifying where data comes from, software could focus on finding data related to the original source that added to the story it was trying to build. Intelligent fact-finding, if it became the norm, would stop the spread of rumors before they gained too much truthiness. By not allowing non-primary sources to add information to a story, these agents would be arbiters of objective information.

If sufficiently advanced, these programs might very well revolutionize news media, but that's hardly all there is to creative expression. In order to to create the next generation of thoroughly fulfilling fiction, software would have to be all-encompassing and interactive. Programs could be designed to create role-playing mysteries, geographically-aware chases and hunts, or passive narratives in which the user observes an artificial story integrated into the user's environment.

Imagine a future MMORPG in which, through a heads-up display, your environment was transformed into a fantasy wilderness replete with digitally created monsters. Other players in the area would appear before you in the guise of their character. Games that rely very heavily on imagination and internet support already exist, but with fully integrated displays that overlaid the real world, such games would be immersing and real in a way that no others before have been.

In the other direction, an artificially intelligent software agent with the template for a detective story could build up a realistic plot using geotagged data and objects. It would direct you to travel from one point to the next in the city you live in, and then advance the plot by enhancing real world structures and activities with digitally inserted characters or scenarios. All the while mood-appropriate music, pulled from online libraries or composed on the spot, would play in the background.

These programs, lacking the insight human authors can impart, would not be able to replace the novels and essays we have today until AIs reach human-level intelligence. But the stories they fabricate would be original and entertaining, and the freedom to literally move into and out of the setting and characters of a story you're experiencing would be unlike anything that exists today. If these programs are rich enough and complex enough, the chaos of a real world environment and real world users will create emergent themes and ideas that might not ever come to fruition if directed solely by human minds. To me, the prospect of discovering a new world hidden within our own world is very intriguing indeed.

The Freedom of Information Post

As much as I used to love The Simpsons, Sunday's episode - in which they gave social media a send up several years too late - may have been the clearest signal yet that they are woefully behind the times (and no longer funny). Nevertheless, they briefly touched upon the very topic I planned to discuss this time around. When the technophile teacher that replaced Edna ridicules Martin's rote memorization in favor of looking the answer up online, the show managed to highlight a cogent question: is it more important to know something or to be able to know something?

Ubiquitous computing is quickly becoming a reality, and accessing new information - an encyclopedia entry, a news article, a restaurant menu - is becoming easier, faster, and more reliable. We will reach a point when there will not be a clear distinction between what information you have stored in your head and what information you have stored in a readily accessible database. When this moment arrives, what will the value of knowledge be?

Some argue that the widely scattered bits of information we gather through our various electronic mediums are inferior to the more deeply textured knowledge we can acquire from books and other more conventional sources. If we don't actually know the details of a thing, but only know an excerpt or a summary of it, then perhaps we don't know it at all. But I would argue that the way we're storing information in our brains now is not much different than the way we've always been doing it.

When we cram for a test the night before we take it, we're storing information for easy access and retrieval in our short term, fleshy memory, but we're not retaining it over the long run. The only effective difference between Martin's rote memorization and the teacher's search engine is where we access the information. But whether we pull it out of our brain or we pull it out of a cell phone, the knowledge will be gone the next day.

This happens in areas outside of education as well, beyond "teaching to the test" and cramming the night before. Most of what we commit to memory is in the form of snippets of information that lack any real depth. The route we take to drive to work, our impressions of a politician, what our favorite food is - all of this knowledge is based on incomplete observations thrown together and regurgitated when necessary.

And this has been true since well before the internet age. While most of us know that the Earth has gravity and holds us to the ground, most of us understand nothing about how gravity actually functions. We know nothing about how Einstein's general relativity upended Newton's classical view, or how gravity's unusual interaction with the universe is at odds with quantum mechanics, or the fact that the gravity around the Sun alters the light of distant stars behind it. Most people's understanding of a fundamental force that rules our lives could be summed up in a newspaper or blog headline: "New Study Indicates Big Things Attract Small Things."

Then there are those that believe the technological revolution we're experiencing will lead to a new enlightenment brought about by the profusion of information available to us. Proponents of this belief point to rising IQs throughout the world, or the unstoppable democratization that social media can give us, or the complexity of today's technological culture. The freedom with which information can cross national, personal, and physical boundaries gives every internet user the power to learn about, discuss, and influence the world at large, from restaurant reviews to global diplomacy.

But what our cell phones, twitter accounts, and cloud computing don't give us is a better way to synthesize and assimilate the data we're reading. And we're no longer just pulling all nighters for our Calc test tomorrow. Now we're keeping track of the updates and activities of all our friends, companies, and favorite celebrities; reading opinions and reviews for every item we can spend our money on; and scanning through statistics, blogs, and reports to win comment and forum wars. But are we closer to our friends, or more frugal with our money, or more reasoned in our debates? Or are we overwhelmed by the deluge of free information?

So far, very little scientific and technological development has been geared toward giving us the ability to critically think, learn, and teach any better. Without an increased capacity for synthesis and assimilation, the knowledge available to us, whether in the form of memorized math formulas or wikipedia entries, is not any more useful to us. The issue is not how we acquire the information but what we're able to do with it once we have it.

Consequently, as the information age engulfs us, just as important as inventing new ways to spread knowledge is inventing new ways to understand knowledge. Technology that rejuvenates our neurons or restores our memories must keep pace with our information technology. We must become smarter before we can become even smarter still.

Tune in next time when I discuss the Singularity Summit, because what kind of futurism blog would this be if I didn't?

Lamenting Science Fiction's Failures

My genre of choice, science fiction, has given a lot to the world. It is the red-headed stepchild of literature, but it is responsible for important cautionary tales, cultural and political allegories, and discussions of the human condition. Aside from these social services, science fiction has also contributed a long list of now ubiquitous words to our technological lexicon.

From Karel Čapek’s robots in 1921, to Heinlein’s grok, Gibson’s cyberspace, Vinge’s singularity, and even including less well attributed terms such as hyperspace and meatspace, or phasers and warp drive from Star Trek, science fiction has a record of introducing terms - and sometimes ideas - to the world before the rest of us have found suitable syllables. And this is an important function. Without science fiction's anticipatory naming, novel ideas thrust upon us by confused science reporters acquire clumsy monikers that sometimes have the misfortune of standing the test of time.

But science fiction is not perfect, and there is one particular domain that crept up on us so quickly and changed us so profoundly that all but a few of the most prophetic science fiction writers failed to see it coming: this here internet. The revolution of personal computing and the interconnectedness that followed blindsided many a science fiction writer, leading to Asimov's room-sized computers in a future galactic empire or Back to the Future Part II's preponderance of fax machines.

Because of this collective failure of the science fiction genre to foresee the internet, the neologisms that arose to describe it are some of the worst created by the human imagination. The earliest incarnation of these terrible descriptors is probably "the information superhighway," for whom we have the internet's inventor, Al Gore, to thank. Fortunately, humanity's decreasing attention span discarded this bloated appellation; unfortunately, the trend swung too far in other direction, giving rise to a series of awkward portmanteaus that persist to this day: netizen, webisode, infornography, etc. There are a few good ones, such as podcasting and emoticon, but the vast majority are tacky and superficial.

The worst one of all, of course, which I'm sure anyone reading this meandering monologue has already guessed, is blog. An amalgam of web and log, this term is used to describe the publishing of anyone's inane inner thoughts onto the internet. In the mid to late 90s when this medium of expression was just beginning, there were plenty of common synonyms for blog - journal, post, diary, site, page - but none of them managed to catch on. Perhaps they were too mundane to be ascribed to what many considered to be a new and important form of communication.

Nevertheless, blog stuck and it has spawned further linguistic monstrosities from its loins: blogger, blogging, blogosphere, blogrolls, moblog, etc.; the list goes on. This term is serviceable when used as a truncated word to ease internet communication, but it has broken free of that role in a way that lol and n00b never have. Now newscasters and journalists spew this ugly creation with every report, clinging desperately to any semblance of modernity and relevance in an environment in which breaking news is so last week before the talking heads have time to reapply their makeup.

Alas, this being the internet - where everyone is given a chance to voice their unique worldview - I'm a little late to the scene. A quick googling of I hate the word blog reveals that many others have embarked on this rant before me, and some have even done it better than I. Nonetheless, this futile rebellion against our memetic culture and an acknowledgment of the limitations of a genre I hold dear to my heart shall serve as an introduction to protoPosthuman. I'm an avid science fiction fan, a writer, a gamer, a philosopher, and a futurist, and I've decided that it's time to unleash my particular brand of cynicism on the internet.

This is my blog.

Tune in next time for a radical proposition regarding the impending technological singularity!