Tech IT Easy » science

Maybe it’s just a bad dream?

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:32:35 +0000

There is a really disturbing trend about environmental issues, outright self-deception that it might not actually exist. People do have this strange tendency, once things go complex, to make up stories that explain why things are how they are. This, in a way, explains why, in this age of reason and science, people choose to believe in things like make-believe medications, which they, in an effort to legitimize them, call “alternative” medicine.

An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in the unfashionable part of the galaxy

This morning at the gym, I overheard people talking about the recent e-mail leak from UK’s Climatic Research Unit. Paraphrasing, the discussion went something like this. “…I read from the news that they have exaggerated the numbers.” “Yeah, I never could believe that the sea levels could rise by so many meters.” And off they went talking about heatwaves in the Middle Ages and other stuff, probably trying to assure each other that everything is just fine.

Ars Technica does a good job, as always, explaining how the e-mail leak means probably nothing. And anyway, the scientific community has ways routing around fraud – which, you have to keep in mind, is not the case here.

At another occasion, before the e-mail leak, in a bus an older woman wondered “how can they measure that the sea-levels have risen by a fraction of a millimeter. It’s so tiny.” I almost wanted to tell her about the DNA, carbon nanotubes, integrated circuits and other wonders of science in an effort to explain that, yes, “they” can measure things even if they are really small.

I’m seriously worried that these people secretly wish that the whole climate change is just a bad dream, and that they have a confirmation bias to believe all evidence that disproves that our planet is in peril – that status quo will prevail.

Yes, I’d also like if the whole climate issue was just a bad dream. But no e-mail leak or even a group of fraudulent scientist (which, once again, isn’t the case here) does not disprove the massive amount of evidence that we have for an accelerating climate change. What’s going on is a good example of our cognitive dissonance at work. Maybe it’s easier to justify why you’re not doing anything to counter the problem, if the problem doesn’t exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, the newspapers and TV news aren’t really helping, going for flashy headlines instead. True, the scientific community has a bad track record trying to explain things to laypeople, but sometimes things are a bit difficult – especially when they are as complex as the climate of a planet.

In fact, it seems that television can make things worse, as this video from a Sarah Palin’s book-signing shows (see 7:00 for the kicker). People, instead of trying to even rationalize their arguments themselves, just throw catchphrases to explain their position. My favourite? How polar bears must be removed from endangered species list so it would be easier to drill for oil in Alaska.

I’m really, really worried.

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A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook's (or equivalent) future

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:40:07 +0000

OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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Technology, business, and the need for a religion

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:48:17 +0000

Before you label me a religious nut, let me explain that religion to me has little to do with god, rather it is about finding meaning in what we do. In that sense, it may be more appropriate to call me a type of Buddhist than the Catholic that I was raised as. I think that business and technology (to the latter of which, I include science in general) are particular areas missing a type of meaning, and there is actually a continuous battle being fought against it.

This is perhaps more apparent in science, where prominent celebrity-scientists like Richard Dawkins are waging a war against creationism, and with that all that it stands for. I have little defence for the bible-based pseudo science being propagated by people with very little in credentials to their name. I don’t particular think that science should’ve ever entered this area of people lives; it comes from an outdated belief that the church should control everything that we stand for. ‘Control’ is the wrong word; there should be ‘meaning’ to all things we do, but the validity of science is established and the validity of religion is being undermined more everyday by pretending to be a pseudo-science.

In business too, a battle is being waged between maximising measurable shareholder returns vs. the more intangible qualities that make ideas great. Religion, meaning, has lost it’s place to the Dollar bill a long time ago…

I thought this subject appropriate as one of my favourite science fiction shows has ended last weekend, Battlestar Galactica, in which the presence of a god or gods plays a strong role in determining the fate of man and machine. It is one of a trilogy of shows that have played a strong part in my thinking since I was a teenager; the other two being “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Terminator,” the movies and the show [I also love "Babylon 5," though that more for the solid quality of screenwriting, on par with shows like "The Wire," a story for another day and blog].

There is little doubt in my mind that some version of the future predicted in those three shows will come true. The robots will come anyway, but what does that mean for us? Will they be equals like Data in Star Trek; dangerous allies like the friendly terminator on John Conner’s side; or simply “the enemy?”

I guess that this is for us to decide and I think that some kind of religious element, similar to Asimov’s three laws of robotics perhaps, will have to come into place for there to be a meaning that transcends the relationship between man and machine. Our very nature is determined by the state of nature as we perceive it: a planet with resources too few to maintain all of us, feeding our competitive spirit; humans that are a kind of machine, with a limited life-span, and the ability to procreate, feeding our compassionate spirit and need for understanding. By creating beings that defy that logic, it is hard to fathom what effect that will have on us. Will we see them as competition, as slaves, as children, as equals? How will they see us?

I think that religion, as it is now, needs to accept that science is an established area that explains, in part, our place in the universe—science will not, as yet, make us immortal. I also think that religion is a strong candidate for the building of communities, something that science and technology plays a role in also. I think that the imperfection that is religion, should perhaps also be built into technology in some way, remembering that by religion, I mean “the bringing of meaning,” which is different to “the bringing of purpose.”

That meaning, whatever it is, “god,” is by nature imperfect, fuzzy, and unclear, because worshipping perfection, a perfect god, a “techno-god,” will more than likely mean the end of us. I have a hard time imagining that such a god will tolerate flawed creatures like us.

This is my brain-dump after spending a few days in limbo, and currently on just a few hours of sleep. It is, admittedly a little light on criticising the business side of things, which, in my opinion, has more than proven it’s ability to take meaning away from action. Take it as the start of a conversation perhaps.

Vincent
P.S. speaking of sci-fi and the future, did you know that “Demolition Man” is considered the Nostradamus of sci-fi movies?

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