Last fall, I told you about my family’s big move from New York to Pasadena so I could join a cutting-edge startup. Well, this spring, I experienced Job Search 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It’s not easy to do two potentially life-changing job searches in any given year. And it isn’t exactly what I’d planned when I started out. But, as always, things seem to work out well in the end. So here’s the even bigger announcement…
IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity
I’ll post more when I get a second, but it’ll take some time to digest.
For what it’s worth, my present take on the Singularity is a cross of Vinge’s and something Stoss said at a WorldCon party (or elsewhere), and Kurzweil, despite some inherent contradictions:
1. The future beyond a singularity is fundamentally unknowable. That’s the whole point. If we can accurately describe what’s past a so-called singularity, then it’s just your basic run-of-the-mill evolution, revolution or "disruptive" sea-change, which happen all the time.
2. People are good at extrapolating linearly, not exponentially. We can predict a few years out, but after that, reality diverges wildly from our naturally limited mental models.
3. We’ve already gone through multiple "singularities" throughout history, though perhaps increasing in frequency. Singularities are never the end of anything, but a new platform on which to complain about our current ways of life and ponder the color of the pasture on the far side of the next singularity.
Before their introduction, could people have predicted how the world would change with Writing? Or Computers? Or Corporations? Could they have even predicted the invention itself? If not, then these may also be singularities, points in history that we can only understand by looking back, not forward, like the approaching event horizon of a black hole.
That is not to say that some visionaries don’t imagine a world past that event horizon or see the event coming. But it’s all speculation, cautionary or wishful fiction at best.
Even the inventor of the mechanical computer, beyond genius for his day, could not have predicted word processors, virtual reality, AI, or even the CAD software that would have unquestionably helped design his mechanical computer.
One could argue that the One True Singularity will occur only when we (our heirs or errs) become smart enough to see through to the future beyond, i.e., the real Singularity is the last Singularity we will ever know.
So my friend Cory Ondrejka (co-creator of Second Life) started an interesting thread last week that I didn’t see covered as widely as it should. Here are his slides — alas I didn’t get to hear the narration that went with it, but I can guess.
What he seems to be describing is apparently not too far from what I’ve been writing about for a while. The part I’m still skeptical about is the life-logging, and probably because of my own preference for privacy. You’ll notice I don’t twitter. I have a hard time believing anyone would even care to follow what I do from moment to moment. And I think careful editing is the secret to any compelling narrative. I just don’t want to put gigabytes of sub-standard, often mundane, prose out there into the digital firmament.
But putting that aside, the germ (and/or gem) of what he’s saying, and the part I totally agree with, is this notion of a pervasive synthesis of augmented, mirror, and alternate realities — no need to distinguish between those arbitrary categories. Turns out, there’s an old word for this which I think we can now safely revive to summarize the intent:
magic
Sometimes, when I work on a project, there’s nothing we can publicly show until the product launches. And sometimes, by the time the product gets attention, I’m off working on the next big thing and can’t enjoy the show, except by proxy.
In this case, Big Stage has partnered with SonyBMG & YouTube to bring you a free sneak preview of our technology. Needless to say, we’re all very excited to see how it goes.
The process is pretty simple from your point of view: you take and upload three slightly different digital photos of your face to MichaelJackson.com (account registration required), wait an hour or so while our big iron servers do some really heavy math, and then you receive an email telling you the YouTube URL of your finished personalized Thriller video, which you can share as you wish.
That’s it.
The result will be something like this — though imagine your own face in place of my 7 month old son’s — and note: it’s not really designed for kids’ faces:
Well, those of you who keep checking back for this have been very patient indeed. The delay in making the announcement was that I was waiting for the official company press release so as not to jump the gun. But that won’t come for a few months, and so I got the green light to disclose this now.
The company is called Big Stage, or sometimes Big Stage Entertainment. Never mind those acronyms. My colleagues have developed some of the best 3D facial reconstruction and animation I’ve ever seen. They recently demonstrated it at CES during Intel’s keynote, and more public demonstrations are on the way. It tends to blow people away. And the first application is way more fun than most uses of 3D on the web that I’ve seen.
My new title is "Principal Architect, User Created Content," which I’ll leave to your imaginations. As part of the deal, I sold IP from my R&D company to Big Stage in an all-stock deal. I could therefore say that I’ve successfully sold my first company (on my own anyway — I was long gone from Keyhole by the time it was sold to Google). But I don’t want to overstate things — my decision was less about the potential profit and more about whether to join this company or several other interesting options to occupy my time and bring my grander ideas to market better than I could do alone. And note, it will absolutely take additional time and resources* before you get to see those ideas come to life. For now, I’m spending a big chunk of my time helping the company launch the first product, while building a team* to take it to the next level, so to speak.
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(*) if you’re a top-notch coder and into the kinds of things I like to discuss on this blog, drop me a line. I do have a budget, and I will be holding interviews for a handful of key positions at GDC.
Researchers at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory claim a novel approach to accessing patient medical records — using the human body as the 3D framework in the same way that Google Earth uses the Earth as a framework to fuse and navigate geospatial information. Spin the body, click on a body part, and zoom in closer to get more information.
In guessing what Google and the marketplace have in store for us, I’m taking into account both what’s technologically feasible, now and on the horizon, and what I think people will demand.
I blogged a while back about virtualization and privacy issues for both Street View and Maps/Earth, which, for starters, implies to a [predicted] future version of Street View that erases people and even cars from the imagery you see. So let’s start there.
I’ve been having a continuing conversation with a local / vocal advocate of censoring Google Earth: Michael Gianaris, State Assemblyman from Queens, NY. We disagree on some fundamental points, though I am sensitive to his concerns. I just don’t think he’s properly weighing the harm of censorship against a realistic appraisal of its value.
His argument at first seemed to be that terrorists could use Google Earth to plot attacks. And that was obviously bad. So we should obviously censor sensitive sites in Google Earth to prevent that outcome, despite the 99.999999% of non-terror-plotting uses (or in mathematical terms, 200 million download vs. 1 alleged use of Google Earth to help blow up JFK.)
After talking to him, I find his position to be a bit more nuanced — he readily admits that any image one can get for free via Google Earth can be obtained elsewhere for slightly more time and/or expense. After all, Google doesn’t own its own satellites (yet) — they buy the stuff on the open market like anyone else.
But, he says, if Google voluntarily censors, maybe everyone else will follow their lead. But more importantly, what Mr. Gianaris asserts is that making terrorists go that "extra step" to get good intel will help us catch them — using Google Earth is way too anonymous, he says, whereas they’d have to at least use a credit card to buy the same or better imagery elsewhere.
So I decided to put his theory to the test, which btw, is the same theory of "credit card validation" that ostensibly prevents kids from viewing porn on the internet… Still, I wanted to give it a fair test. I decided to think like a terrorist, at least to see how they might act given a Google-censored Earth.
After reading an article called "How Google Earth Works" on the great site HowStuffWorks.com, it became apparent that the article was more of a "how cool it is" and "here’s how to use it" than a "how Google Earth [really] works."
So I thought there might be some interest, and despite some valid intellectual property concerns, here we are, explaining how at least part of Google Earth works.
People who think a lot about the future follow trends like anyone else. In fact, that’s their job, at least in the better sense of “follow.” But both senses are true. They tend to over-predict over-predicted outcomes like “The Metaverse” — a set of new virtual world experiences cited, curiously enough, in an older form of virtual worlds (i.e., the novel). There’s always the standing prediction of A.I. “coming soon,” to lure us with a potential liberation from the drudgery of thought. And then there are the all-too-common buzzwords floating around, like “convergence,” just begging some genius to build that one device to rule them all. [Read more →]
