IFTF's Future Now

Holographic Second Temple

The latest issue of Wired Magazine has one of the more remarkable examples of an idea that plays on our belief that cyberspace is a place: a proposal to create a massive multiplayer games whose members would "build" a virtual Second Temple of Jerusalem-- which would be projected as a hologram on the site of the Dome of the Rock. The developer, Yitzhaq Hayutman,

wants to set up an array of high-powered, water-cooled lasers and fire them into a transparent cube suspended beneath a blimp. The ephemeral, flickering image, he says, would fulfill an ancient, widely revered Jewish prophecy that the temple will descend from the heavens as a manifestation of light....

The rest of that money would be poured into Hayutman's second idea for jump-starting the end-times: a virtual temple within a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The goal is for thousands of people to join in its construction on the Web. Hayutman even wants to display progress reports in the floating hologram as a kind of apocalyptic scoreboard....

It's possible, according to Hayutman, that the game itself may be the realization of prophecy. "The Book of Revelations describes a New Jerusalem which will encompass the entire Earth," he says, citing Revelation 21. "The online, worldwide virtual reality version of Jerusalem is the only thing that could fulfill that requirement. The digital version of the city would exist in Germany or Indonesia at the same time it exists in Jerusalem itself."...

Whether it's a hologram or a cyberstructure, Hayutman believes that a techno temple does away with the need for a physical building.

I'm not even remotely qualified to speak to the theological or political dimensions of such a proposal, but the notion that "a techno temple does away with the need for a physical building" is a great example of how far we've taken the idea that the digital world really is a world.

New Republic on the politics of the Internet

The New Republic Online has a long article asking why the Internet hasn't been a force for democrative reform and political openness in most of the world. The examples of MoveOn.org, the anti-WTO demonstrations, and the campaign to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada are all exceptions to the rule: Singapore isn't more democratic despite Internet access, China's cybercafes haven't become hothouses of political agitation, and the human rights records of a number of African and Middle Eastern countries have gotten worse in the last few years.

So what's happening? The article sees two kinds of problems. The first are "the Internet's inherent flaws as a political medium:"

• "[T]he [political] impact of the Web depends to a certain degree on local resources--specifically, the existence of opposition networks able to provide evidence of government wrongdoing." If there aren't local watchdog groups, there's little information to disseminate, and less of a role for the Web to play in political reform. The Internet can be useful in expanding the reach of dissident organizations, but laying down broadband doesn't lead to an opposition movement or viable civil society.

• "Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities.... The Web is less well-suited to fostering political discussion and debate because, unlike radio or even television, it does not generally bring people together in one house or one room.... [T]he Internet also fosters a kind of anarchy inimical to an effective opposition movement. Singaporean dissident Gomez says the Web empowers individual members of a political movement, rather than the movement as a whole."

• To access the Internet in most of the developing world, you need a decent income, and to be literate-- two requirements that hundreds of millions of people can't fill.

Then there are top-down limitations: "the ease with which authoritarian regimes have controlled and, in some cases, subverted it."

• The most straightforward way governments have responded to opposition websites has been simply to shut them down.
  
• Western computer and networking companies have cooperated with China and other governments, by providing "the latest censorship technology."
  
• Local Internet entrepreneurs are often relatively easy to coopt or coerce.

But "even beyond its failure to live up to democratizers' dreams, the Web may actually be helping to keep some dictatorships in power." It's easier to find dissidents online than in the real world, and the Web is a great medium for disseminating state propaganda.

The article makes two interesting points. First, arguments that the Internet has some inherent political quality-- decentralizing, libertarian, etc.-- don't hold up in the developing world and authoritarian states. China has shown that it can pretty effectively monitor the Internet. Second, the details of our interactions with computers-- and by "interaction" I don't just mean the kind that has been of interest to ACM or CHI working groups, but also the broader social context in which we use computers, and the unconscious demands we make of users (like being literate)-- has consequences for our ability to integrate the Internet into political life.

Wal-Mart delays RFID rollout

The New York Times reports that Wal-Mart's plans to have RFID tags on drug deliveries has hit a snag, and the rollout has been moved from April to June. "The drifting deadline is the latest in a string of accommodations Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has been forced to make as it pushes to deploy radio frequency identification in its supply tracking process. "

IDC on future technology

John Gantz, chief research officer at International Data Corp., has an interview in Investors.com on the past 40 years of technology. "Gantz sees a world where technology is everywhere. The proliferation of handheld devices will also lead to a redesign of global communications networks. In short, the best is yet to come."

Interview with William McDonough

The New Scientist Web site has an interview with architect William McDonough, a leader in architectural biomimicry. The interview isn't very long, but it's a decent introduction to his ideas. This quote gives a sense of his ambitions:

From my designer's perspective, I ask: why can't I design a building like a tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon, distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates. This is using nature as a model and a mentor, not an inconvenience. It's a delightful prospect.

McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle (coauthored with Michael Braungart) is very much worth reading.

Dissertation blogs

Writing a dissertation is a difficult, isolating experience; at least it was when I was doing it, in the technological stone age of ca. 1990. By the time you get to the stage of cranking out chapters, you're so deeply-focused (in both a mental and emotional sense) on your work, and often so tightly focused on a specific, narrow subject, that it's easy to assume that no one else is interested in your work.

Thus I find the growth of the genre of the dissertation blog particularly interesting. Not surprisingly, the majority of dissertation bloggers seem to be people working in new media. Sam Kinsley, a new media student at Plymouth University (I don't know where it is, but gather from the number of ".uk" sites listed as colleagues that it's across the pond) has one that I find interesting. This recent entry on "Augmented Space" caught my eye:

it seems many theorists and practitioners are identifying a coming convergence of several seemingly unrelated technologies into a critical mass that will spawn a widespread revolution in our experience of space.

The blog has a dissertation outline (tentative title: "Smart Mobs and Cybrid Spaces"-- not a bad title), entries-- thought-pieces, really-- on hybrid spaces, the growth of "cellspace," and a bibliography.

My suspicion is that these will become more popular over time, but also more carefully-crafted a form of public performance: a way to fashion your professional identity, to give a sense of your research and passion, without giving away TOO much or looking too scattered. (I don't think I've found a single entry in which someone talks about how they've got writers' block, or are emotionally exhausted; maybe there's more self-consciousness behind these blogs than I realized.) Still, I think they could emerge as a useful resource for people interested in the future: dissertation students can be great data-points on where a field is going, and what's going to be important to a discipline in the coming years.

RFID in smaller companies

Information Week reports that " While billion-dollar businesses make up the majority of companies with RFID implementations under way, many smaller companies are starting to jump in, realizing that mandates from Albertsons, the Department of Defense, Target, and Wal-Mart will affect them sooner or later."

RFID readers

Nokia recently announced that it would release an RFID reader that can be attached to its cell phones. Currently it's envisioned as a tool for service technicians and other mobile workers. As MobileMag reports (or just picks up from the Nokia press release-- much the same language appears in articles in vnunet and edubourse),

The Nokia Mobile RFID Kit extends the mobility of field force personnel by integrating RFID reader technology to a familiar portable device. Simply by touching a smart object, the user can initiate tasks in their Nokia phone - call and send text messages or access databases and record new data entries.

"There are numerous ways to utilize the Nokia Mobile RFID Kit in a business", said Gerhard Romen, Head of Market Development, Nokia Ventures Organization. "The user can easily launch services and conveniently access phone functions like dial or send messages, just by touching smart objects, in this case RFID tags. The phone reader will read the content of the smart object, and translate it to an action. For example, a field service engineer can intuitively start browsing the latest service instructions to repair a machine on site. It is also possible to collect meter reading data to the phone by keying the reading into the phone, replacing the paper and pen method still widely in use today. The Kit can also replace the pen and paper method in recording time and attendance, for example."...

The Nokia Mobile RFID Kit is an enabler of Nokia's "Life Goes Mobile" vision in making mobile phones more intuitive for users. Touching a smart object with a mobile phone is an easy way to connect to mobile services and content. It will not only improve the experience of using current services, but also create entirely new applications and value.

As Peter Winer notes, there's an interesting potential consumer use of this kind of technology: "Conceptually, empowering consumers with their own handheld readers counterbalance some privacy concerns related to RFID. Presumably consumers could use the reader to detect tags present and act accordingly." This particular version has a very limited range-- which makes sense for applications in which you know where the chip is, and want to retrieve information from it (as in the repairman example), rather than determine whether or not you're tagged-- but the principle is intriguing.

(My own sense from talking to people working with RFID-- and granted, I've only spoken to people who are in large, publicity-conscious companies, not edgier (or more morally suspect) ones-- is that the secret tag scenario is not one we need to worry too much about. In order to use tags to monitor someone's movements, you also need to set up detectors in lots of different places. In constrained spaces-- like shopping malls, for example-- this might be feasible, but in larger, more open spaces, you're not likely to get better results than if you used videocameras; and for now at least, RFID would not be the technology of choice for tracking someone as they go about their day. For both technical reasons, and because of vigilance on the part of consumers and privacy advocates, Mark Roberti is probably right that it's "highly unlikely... that companies will be able to get away with using RFID data to track individuals without their consent.")

But if you wanted to give people the ability to guard against RFID-enabled intrusive uses or monitoring, detecting secret tags would be half of the equation; the other half would be detecting unexpected attempts to interrogate tags-- not to secretly plant tags, but to secretly read them. This would require little more than a sensor-- essentially an RFID tag with a bigger-than-normal antenna and a little extra electronics-- that could alert users when they're in the presence of a reader. Today, they might be the size of a postcard; eventually it could probably be pendant- or coin-sized. If it went off near a checkout stand, no big surprise; but if it went off in an unexpected place, you might ask questions.

More generally, I think one thing we're going to see in the next couple years are the developement of relatively cheap technologies that give consumers the ability to tell when RFID tags are being read, and whether they're embedded in a product. These won't have to be expensive, and as the Nokia case shows, they could even be integrated into devices we already carry around. One doesn't want to rely exclusively on technological fixes for privacy issues, but it is worth recognizing that such tools could be developed, and could be used by consumers to monitor whether someone is trying to do something illicit or unexpected.

[via RFID Privacy Happenings; RFID Radio Frequency Blog]

Black Star

Discussions of the cultural and economic impact of the Internet, wireless, and mobile phones tend to focus pretty exclusively on the developed world-- the U.S., western Europe, and East Asia (or even more specifically, Silicon Valley and a few other high-tech American enclaves; Scandanavian cities; Japan and to a lesser degree Korea).

At one level, this is perfectly logical: these are the places with the densest communications networks, the best access to high tech, and the longest traditions of hacking and playing with computers. Plus, they're rich markets. Studying them makes sense.

But there are also built-in limits to such an approach. For one thing, technology and culture are inseparable: you can't understand why technologies evolve without reference to the environments in which they evolve, and always focusing on the same set of countries-- which themselves share many similiarities-- limits your ability to understand how that relationship works. Further, if you're interested in technical and social creativity and innovation, you want as diverse a range of cultures in your sample set as possible. Easy access doesn't necessarily lead to creativity: some of the most innovative experimentation is driven by scarcity, not abundance. Put another way, profligacy can lead to certain kinds of creativity, while scarcity leads to others. Both are worth studying.

A third reason for looking beyond the normal iron triangle of North America, Europe, and East Asia is that there's a chance that major technical and product innovations will come from companies working outside those markets. Clatyon Christensen and Stuart Hall argue that companies serving the "base of the pyramid"-- those 4 billion people who make less than $2,000 a year-- can experiment with new technologies and products in ways that companies in richer markets cannot. Poor markets don't have giant installed technology bases that hinder adoption of newer technologies, as many wireless companies have found. Companies that serve these markets also learn to be lean, mean, and resourceful: Japanese electronics and auto companies grew up serving what was essentially a Third World economy, and this made them tough competitors when they went global.

So when a detailed study of high technology adoption and re-invention in an unfamiliar part of the world appears, it's worth knowing about. Such a study came out in the latest issue of First Monday: "Black star: Ghana, information technology and development in Africa," a study by Gregg Zachary (full disclosure: Gregg is a friend of mine) of computer use in Accra. Here's the abstract:

Accra, the capital of the West African country of Ghana, is technologically marginalized by any measure. But over the past ten years, the introduction of the Internet, wireless technology and freer radio broadcasts have vastly expanded communications and information. The Internet is widely available. E–mail usage is soaring. Wireless telephony is growing rapidly. Radio stations are proliferating. Once mired in information poverty, the people of Accra, Ghana now face the challenge of using information and connectivity to their best advantage. In examining how Accra adapts to technological change, we gain a better understanding of how people in poor African cities use technology and what they want from it. Debates over the so–called "digital divide" can be enriched by close studies of lived experience in parts of the world where the revolution in information technology remains more prospect than reality.

This follows up an earlier report sponsored by Columbia University's Center for Science Policy and Outcomes.

Innovation is not chaotic

One of the articles from the BW special issue on American r&d repeated the oft-repeated belief that the American system of research thrives because it is "disorganized and "chaotic". While the article goes on to cite these as positive traits for the development of new ideas, and therefore innovation, the use of these words needs to be corrected.

Empirical research into the time of pre-ideas that comprise the earliest stage of innovation – the stage before the “idea” or the “team” exists – is still in its infancy. Existing research views the stage as an ad hoc period of indeterminate time, driven by intuition, and filled with ambiguity and uncertainty... primarily so that the researchers can then begin studying the later stages, wherein an idea, a team, an office, funding, and such formal matters are all existent. Studying this early period is clearly hard, so how about everyone just agree it is "chaotic" and move to the easier stuff?

We are now smart enough to move beyond the thinking inherent in viewing early innovation as chaotic. disorganized, ad hoc. Each of these terms brings with it issues of the unknown, or more precisely, unknowability. But this is far from the truth.

Research is a process of ideas and interactions co-evolving toward a possible innovation. It is a social process that begins with the introduction of a half-formed thought, leading to interactions around this thought, and ending with the possible self-organization of a team. And it is this recurring process (with lots of possible non-organization) that leads to the formalization of the innovation idea and team and the beginning of more traditional processes of innovation.

The process of early innovation - the time of idea and team formation - is emergent. It is a socio-ideational process rooted in complexity. And while emergent processes may look chaotic, they are anything buy.