The End of Cyberspace

Working on other projects

This is just a note to confirm the obvious: for the next several months I'm working exclusively on my next book, Taming the Digital Monkey: From Perpetual Distraction to Contemplative Computing (forthcoming with the fabulous Little, Brown & Company), and so will not be posting about futures-related things.

I will, though, be writing about the book on my contemplative computing blog, which like this blog I use as a kind of open commonplace notebook.

Amazing: stealing SIM cards from smart traffic lights

This is going on in Johannesburg:

Hundreds of [traffic] lights have been damaged by thieves targeting the machines' sim cards, which are then used to make mobile phone calls worth millions of South African rand.

More than two-thirds of 600 hi-tech lights have been affected over the past two months, according to the Johannesburg Roads Agency, causing traffic jams, accidents and frustration for motorists.

The traffic lights use sim cards, modem and use GPRS to send and receive information, a system intended to save time and manpower by alerting the road agency's head office when any lights malfunction. According to Thulani Makhubela, a spokesman for the agency, the robberies have been "systematic and co-ordinated", possibly by a syndicate. An internal investigation has now been launched.

"They know which signals to target," Makhubela added. "They clearly have information."

Wow. Real world, meet ubicomp!

Andy Clark on cognitive prosthetics

Andy Clark argues:

[W]e seem to be entering an age in which cognitive prosthetics (which have always been around in one form or another) are displaying a kind of Cambrian explosion of new and potent forms. As the forms proliferate, and some become more entrenched, we might do well to pause and reflect on their nature and status. At the very least, minds like ours are the products not of neural processing alone but of the complex and iterated interplay between brains, bodies, and the many designer environments in which we increasingly live and work.

Ann Blair suggests, not so fast:

[We assume] that modern technology is creating a problem that our culture and even our brains are ill equipped to handle. We stand on the brink of a future that no one can ever have experienced before.

But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight.

Social bike sharing

Another example of bicycles becoming smarter and more social: Social Bikes.

For those who aren't familiar with how these resource-sharing services typically work, check out our story about the technology behind Zipcar. In a nutshell, there are little car lots (or in the case of B-Cycle, a company that will soon deploy shared bikes in Chicago, bike stations) located all over a city that are locked when not in use. A user can make a reservation online for a car or bike and then pick it up at the designated time.

There is no human interaction required: once the mode of transportation is reserved, the user identifies him or herself to the car or bike either by RFID (Zipcar) or PIN at the cycle station (B-Cycle), which then unlocks the car/bike. When the user is done, he or she returns the vehicle to the same lot so that others can make use of the car. For B-Cycle, users can return bikes to any B-Cycle station, not necessarily the one they rented from.

The SoBi system follows a similar path, but the technology is a bit more advanced than that of services like B-Cycle.... For one, there are no cycle stations: SoBi bikes are parked all over the city (starting in New York City) at regular old bike racks. This means that bikes could, in fact, be anywhere at any given time, and not just at a designated station that could be blocks away. You can pick up any bike that's not already reserved, and drop it off anywhere without having to hunt down a drop-off station....

Like a Zipcar, each SoBi bike is equipped with its own "lockbox" that communicates wirelessly with the SoBi servers via GPS and a cellular receiver (an H-24 module from Motorola, Rzepecki told Ars). When you make a reservation online or via smartphone, you see a map of all the bikes in the area based on their GPS data and are given the option to unlock a specific bike when you click on it....

Since the lockbox contains a GPS module, a cell chip, and a lock that works with a PIN pad, there has to be some way to power it. The SoBi team is still working out the kinks in power consumption, but plans to power the devices with a hub dynamo on the bike's rear wheel. The lockbox is essentially powered by your pedaling—no charging stations required.

[thanks, Heather]

The Copenhagen Wheel

For a long time, I've been interested in getting an electric bike, especially after I saw the Optibike at the California Academy of Sciences. Via the Daily Dish, I came across an MIT hybrid bicycle project that looks like just the thing: the Copenhagen Wheel. Check out the video:

Not completely clear from the video exactly how it works, but I like how elegantly it attaches to a bicycle (some bike motors look like real kludges), and that it also is a smart device:

Dyson Award-winning design:

Smart, responsive and elegant, it transforms existing bicycles quickly into hybrid electric-bikes with regeneration and real-time sensing capabilities. Its sleek red hub not only contains a motor, batteries and an internal gear system – helping cyclists overcome hilly terrains and long distances - but also includes environmental and location sensors that provide data for cycling-related mobile applications. Cyclists can use this data to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve their exercise goals or to create new connections with other cyclists. Through sharing their data with friends or their city, they are also contributing to a larger pool of information from which the whole community can benefit.

It's called the Copenhagen Wheel because the bike-friendly wants to increase the number of people who cycle, and worked wit the team to

to investigate how small amounts of technology could improve the cycling experience and how the four main obstacles to getting people on bikes - distance, topography, infrastructure and safety – could be overcome. What has resulted is the Copenhagen Wheel: a new type of electric smart-bike which utilizes a technical solution for overcoming distance and topography (a motor and batteries with regeneration capabilities that can provide riders with a boost when needed) and a real-time data network and series of applications to support infrastructure creation and foster a sense of safety.

Trading intelligence for resources; encouraging mergers of people and devices on human terms rather than device terms; bringing information to users in context-- all great examples of an end of cyberspace device.

Digital overlay on the physical world picture of the day

Outside the California Academy of Sciences:

via flickr

The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: "Let me think about that"

Tweetage Wasteland makes a good point:

The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are:

Let me think about that.

Shirley Sherrod, the former rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia found that out the hard way when she was fired by the Obama administration for her delivery of a supposedly racist speech. The speech was creatively excerpted, political bloggers and cable news commentators blew up the story, it entered the Twitterverse, and boom, Sherrod was asked to resign from her position.

Unfortunately, no one seemed to have time to listen to the whole speech. Once they did, Sherrod was showered with apologies and found herself taking calls from the President.

This story is less about politics and more about pace. It provides a clear example of how our Facebook and Twitter behaviors are bleeding over into the rest of our lives.... When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.

Turning off Del.icio.us reposting

I've decided to move the Del.icio.us posts to my main blog, as they're now less exclusively end of cyberspace-related.

links for 2010-07-19

• Op-Ed Contributors - Economics Behaving Badly - NYTimes.com
  George Loewenstein argues against over-reliance on behavioral economics in public policy-- and especially using it to evade difficult decision-making. "Behavioral economics should complement, not substitute for, more substantive economic interventions. If traditional economics suggests that we should have a larger price difference between sugar-free and sugared drinks, behavioral economics could suggest whether consumers would respond better to a subsidy on unsweetened drinks or a tax on sugary drinks. But that’s the most it can do. For all of its insights, behavioral economics alone is not a viable alternative to the kinds of far-reaching policies we need to tackle our nation’s challenges."
  (tags: psychology economics behavioral_economics)

links for 2010-07-18

• Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Afghan Advice
  On Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, and his interesting, complex relationship with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. "Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace."
  (tags: books)

links for 2010-07-16

• World Game
  Profile of the 1970 World Game and esp. SIU's group, "a company of future oriented, inter-disciplinary technological explorers who are participating in the World Game, a unique experiment to develop a computer coordinated model of planet earth—complete with resources, history, human attitudes and social trends—that can be used to "play the world" and develop ways of running the future for the benefit of all mankind. The experiment is being conducted in more than 20 universities and colleges in the United States, Canada and Europe but its center is housed in the basement and first floor of a monotonous two-story brick building surrounded by a dusty, graveled parking lot, about six blocks off-campus from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois."
  (tags: worldgame games buckminster_fuller paperspaces)
• postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies - Our cyborg past: Medieval artificial memory as mindware upgrade
  The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades... extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade.
  (tags: cyborg memory hci history cognition)
• In the Middle: When Did We Become Post/human? Table of Contents and Preview Essays
  New journal, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.
  (tags: culture history)
• MyForesight
  "Welcome to myForesight -- Malaysia’s first national-level initiative dedicated to the study and application of Foresight. Besides prospecting technology for business. it provides a common platform for shared experiences, insights and expertise on futures studies -- both at the local and global levels. At this initial stage, myForesight will focus on awareness and the participation of Malaysian stakeholders on Foresight current programmes. myForesight is a joint initiative by various parties who have a dedicated stake in Malaysia’s future.Click on the tabs below for a synopsis of myForesight."
  (tags: malaysia foresight web2.0)

Memory arts and mindware

Ruth Evans takes an historical perspective on Andy Clark's natural-born cyborgs argument, and that "human cognition is not just embodied but embedded: not mind in body, but both mind and body enmeshed in a wider environment of ever-growing complexity that we create and exploit to make ourselves smarter."

From the abstract:

The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades (I borrow the term ‘mindware’ from Clark, 2001) extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade. What cultural history adds to our understanding of embedded cognition is not only a recognition of our cyborg past but a historicized understanding of human reality.

This reminds me some of the work of the cognitive anthropology crowd, which I find necessarily speculative but extremely ambitious and interesting.

You could also re-work Paul Saenger's work on word spacing and intellectual history in light of Clark.

links for 2010-07-15

• How (Un)Certain Is the Future in Forestry? A Comparative Assessme...
  To gain more insight into the extent to which foresters experience uncertainty in their work field, a content analysis has been carried out to reveal how foresters from the United States and (Germanic) Central Europe (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) experience uncertainty. The outcomes were compared with the experiences of uncertainty in a more short-term oriented sector, namely the agricultural sector (also in the United States and in Central Europe). Although the findings must be interpreted carefully, the research reveals that, in contrast to what was expected, foresters experience the future as the most certain time period. Decisionmakers in forestry, as in other business sectors, seem to ignore the uncertainty and pretend that the future is certain. This strategy implies considerable risk and, therefore, for forest management to be effective, there is no other way than actively confronting the futurity dilemma.
  (tags: forestry time-horizon planning strategy psychology)
• The future orientation of foresters: An exploratory research among Dutch foresters into the prerequisite for strategic planning in forestry
  "The importance of strategic planning as an instrument to cope with the uncertain future has been long recognized, especially in forestry which is characterized by its relationship with the distant future. Surprisingly, the question to what extent the future is indeed considered in forestry decision-making has received only limited attention. It is therefore the objective of this paper to explore empirically foresters' relation with time (called time perspectives), and more specifically their future orientation, as a basic prerequisite for strategic planning in forestry."
  (tags: future forestry decision-making time-horizon strategy planning)
• Future orientation and planning in forestry
  Long range (or strategic) planning is an important tool for forest management to deal with the complex and unpredictable future. However, it is the ability to make meaningful predictions about the rapidly changing future that is questioned. What appears to be particularly neglected is the question of the length of time horizons and the limits (if any) to these horizons, despite being considered one of the most critical factors in strategic planning. As the future creation of values lies within individual responsibility, this research empirically explored the limits (if any) of individual foresters’ time horizons. To draw comparisons between countries with different traditions in forest management planning, data were collected through telephone surveys of forest managers in the state/national forest services of the Netherlands and Germany. In order to minimize other cultural differences, the research in Germany concentrated on the federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, which has consider
  (tags: forestry psychology decision-making future time-horizon)
• Coping with the Long Term: An Empirical Analysis of Time Perspectives, Time Orientations, and Temporal Uncertainty in Forestry
  More of this, please: studies of how communities view the future. This studies foresters in Europe. "The study takes a different approach than previous research: it takes an actor-oriented perspective and focuses on the question of how foresters actually cope with the uncertain future in their actions. This requires not only a shift in the understanding of time from a physical entity to that of a social realm but – even more importantly – a shift from interpreting uncertainty from some form of independent variable to viewing uncertainty as a cognitive and psychological state – a social construct about the availability and “makeability” of the future."
  (tags: future ethnography psychology behavior science time-horizon)
• They Own the Future
  " the increasing pace of change has made the future more interesting.

  The question "Who owns the future?" has become more urgent. At the same time, in the information society, there is an increasingly varied multitude of answers to this question. Hence, the key becomes asking well-targeted questions. If you ask who owns the future, a lot of answers crop up.... The moment you own the future, it has become the present. Eternally owned is only that which is lost."

  
  
  (tags: future)
  
  
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  Personal Futures
  
  
  Methods of foresight and future studies are no longer limited to business, government and other organizations. The study of personal futures is still in its infancy, but holds potential not only for you but also for your company. Learn how you can be your own futurist through personal research, and thereby achieve your preferred future.
  
  
  (tags: future scenarios)
  
  
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  FICTION PIMPS [greatest futures organization name EVER]
  
  
  The Performance Agency, Fiction Pimps, manifest ‘Cracks’ in everyday life – Sensory fictive parallel universes that aim at activating the aesthetic dimension of experience and reflection, to enrich any given situation and the persons involved in it. They fiction pimp and will Crack your World!
  …
  We are hybrids of performers, sirens, agents, poets, futurists, activists, visionaries, mystics and scientists.
  
  
  (tags: art denmark future performance)
  
  
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  House of Futures » Futurism
  
  
  
  (tags: future Denmark)
  
  
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  Futures confusions and the five futures glasses [pdf]
  
  
  This contribution deals with the problems in thinking and communicating about the future which are due to the variety and complexity of the types of futures, i.e. possible, potential, probable, desired, surprising, creatable future and the like. A set of resulting so called futures confusions is revealed, the goals confusion, the roles confusion and the methods confusion. The types of futures used in practice and discussed in the academic literature are presented comprehensively in order to identify the reasons for the difficulties leaders and managers experience when dealing with long term futures.
  
  
  (tags: future communication management)
  
  
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  Flemming Wisler, "The future belongs to those who can describe it"
  
  
  The struggle for the future is very much about communication. They who manage to set the agenda will also be those who dominate the decisions and behavior of many others. So we see more and more messages about the future that go hand in hand with media expertise. Even so, we have never been more shortsighted in our view of the future.
  
  
  (tags: future communication)
  
  
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  Normality of the future: Trend diagnosis for strategic foresight
  
  
  Foresight processes and activities are confronted with the task of making sense of the present, in particular by interpreting weak signals of change in the organizational environment. Although trends are considered to be important drivers of environmental discontinuities which may lead to strategic surprises, there is no operationalization from a strategic point of view. In this paper we are going to conceptualize trends as (socio-cultural) innovations. This leads to important implications. If the nature of innovation is taken seriously, then strategic trend diagnosis has to deal with two different aspects, invention and diffusion.
  
  
  (tags: forecasting weaksignals)