IFTF's Future Now

Bonding with robots

New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with Roomba:

"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.

Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.

Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."

So as they move from environments that we don't like into places that are more familiar, and from doing work we hate to work we just dislike, two things happen to our perception of robots: their social status goes up, and they become more familiar. But this doesn't just happen with robots who are doing "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs: humans who are doing those jobs can develop bonds with those robots, too.

US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.

Enhancement isn't just for athletes any more

For years there's been anecdotal evidence, and a couple surveys, suggesting growing use of drugs like Ritalin and Provigil by undergraduates looking to get an edge over the competition. Now, some faculty are starting to claim that professors have started doing it, too:

While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists.

In a commentary published in the journal Nature last month, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir revealed the results of their informal survey of a handful of colleagues who study drugs that help people perform better mentally....

But brain boosting raises hackles in some parts of academe. "It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess," said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. After recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between athletes and assistant professors. "You're expected to publish and teach, and the stakes are high. So young professors have to work their tails off to get that golden nugget of tenure."

The poll was not meant to be a comprehensive study, said Ms. Morein-Zamir, a research associate at Cambridge. Rather, the essay, "Professor's Little Helper," was intended to provoke a public discussion of whether society in general, and universities in particular, should regulate the use of available compounds and medications that might be developed in the future. "If a drug helps you be more alert but also make better decisions, how does society feel about that?" she asked.

The essay, published in Nature, is a rewardingly geeky piece that includes a long discussion of how these drugs work, and what dangers exist in their use.

Technorati Tags: brain, drugs, university

David Brooks, cyborg

David Brooks is now augmenting. The piece is over the top, but is one of those "if he's doing it, it's either really big or is really over" data-points.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S....

I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves....

Memory? I’ve externalized it.... [I]f I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins....

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, end of cyberspace, geoweb, memory, mobility

Humanity Gets an Upgrade at the MIT Media Lab

Two years ago, IFTF’s Technology Horizons program explored the implications of what we called “the extended self”. The core hypothesis was that the body is becoming a platform for a whole range of technological augmentations. These deliberate enhancements run the gamut from mobile phones and social network software, to cochlear implants to restore lost hearing.

One of the really interesting implications of that research was the insight that we are increasingly seeing people leveraging therapeutic technologies to create super-human abilities. This is clearly the case in athletics, but you can also this at work with college students abusing drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to maintain focus during long study sessions. Michael Chorost, who wrote so eloquently about his relationship with his cochlear implant, forecasts that people will almost certainly exploit the potential of that technology to provide super-human hearing for healthy people. Even though only six people have had therapeutic retinal implants to date, it probably won’t be long before someone develops a retinal implant that gives its symbiant the ability to see X-rays or infrared.... if they haven't already.

It was with this in mind that I set out this Wednesday on the 7am shuttle to Boston to attend the Humans 2.0 symposium at the MIT Media Lab. Bearing in mind that Media Lab events are often a big, over-produced show designed to impress sponsors into coughing up another year's worth of funding, I had low expectations. As you can see form the archived video of the day, it was actually a pretty good event all things said.

John Hockenberry, the former NPR/NBC correspondent who is now in residence at the lab, emcee-ed the day and kept everyone awake with wise-cracks, innuendo and jokes. Since Hockenberry has been paralyzed from the waist down since a car accident in 1977 at age 19, it provided a great context for thinking about upgrades to the body.

Most of the presentations by Media Lab researchers were incremental updates on ongoing research, some of which has questionable relevance to the idea of human augmentation. (And nary a Q&A session was offered). If there was an over-riding or under-lying theme to the days presentations, I didn’t get it. But then, that’s what happens at a place like MIT - so many bright people with money inevitably pursue their own desires. The Media Lab especially is notorious for having as many “Centers” as it does professors.

Here are some thoughts about the various presentations.

The Highlight: Progress Towards Neural Interfaces

The highlight of the day, in terms of scientific interest, were two excellent presentations by non-MIT people. These presentations described current research on and the future potential of neural interfaces - technical devices that would allow the human nervous system to connect to electronic devices. Essentially, a network bridge between the human nervous system and digital electronic networks.

Douglas Smith of the University of Pennsylvania shared some results of his work, which focuses on quickly growing long strands of nerve cells in culture using a mechanical stretching device that mimics the tension that stimulates nerve growth in large, rapidly growing animals like whales. In his lab, researchers have been able to grow nerve strands as long as 10 cm at a rate of 1 cm per day. The cells in the strands self-organize into cohesive linear structures, and they have had success taking these strands, wrapping them in collagen and inserting them into rats that have had existing nerve segments removed. While they are not yet sure if the grafted segments will allow normal nervous system functioning to be restored (i.e. to undo the surgically created paralysis), they have proven that electrical current is passing along the nerve-graft boundary, indicating that new connections are being formed.

John Donoghue, who teaches at Brown but is also foudner of a company called Cyberkinetics, contined the discussion on neural interfaces. He began by likening the current state of research to where electronic Pacemakers were in the 1950s, and showed a slide of the first Pacemaker - a device about the size of a large dishwasher. He went on to describe the small, pill-sized sensor that his company has developed for implantation in the cerebral cortex in a region that controls movement of the arm - the BrainGate neural interface system. It has 100 tiny micro electrodes that sense action potential in motor nerves. It is being implanted in people paralyzed through various injuries and disorders. It allows people to "think" about moving their missing or paralyzed arm, and use that output to control a cursor on the screen. The next step will be to couple BrainGate with functional electrical stimulation systems that are already widely used (though with external siwtches) to bridge damage in nerves and the spinal cord (5 years or so).

The Show-Stopper: Biomechatronic Prosthetics

From a showmanship point of view, first prize goes to Hugh Herr, director of the newly formed MIT Biomechatronics Group, who demonstrated an active ankle prosthesis that is essentially a robot itself, actively powering his walk like a real human ankle does. In a dramatic unveiling, Prof. Herr lifted his own pants leg to reveal that he himself (a double amputee) was wearing his own invention, as well as conventional leg prosthesis. While the device does not use a neural interface - it achieves its great functionality largely by sensing orientation and acceleration and driving actuators to stabilize itself and deliver thrust - seeing this device makes you realize just how close we are to robotic prosthetic devices as an everyday medical technology.

Off-topic: Recording an Entire Life

Another highlight was a presentation by Deb Roy, the soft-spoken director of the Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines Group, who described the “ultra-dense observational analysis” he is performing to record every waking moment of his infant son’s development through a network of video cameras installed in their home. This work was recently the subject of a feature-length article in Wired but Prof. Roy showed several fascinating extracts of the massive data set (250 terabytes or 200,000 hours of video by the end of the 3-year collection phase). The best was a time-lapse audio clip of about 150 instances of his son saying the word ball, from first identifiable use to final mastery. And so while Roy is primarily interested in using the data to develop computers that are better at learning by modelling how children develop language skills, this technology has many applications - the most obvious being for memory augmentation. But while fascinating, it was hard to link Roy’s work directly to the human augmentation theme of the symposium. He explicitly is clear that while this technology could be used for memory augmentation, that’s not his goal - he’s trying to mine the data to build software that learns more like children do.

We were cyborgs then

Nicholas Carr, in an appropriate follow-up to his post about energy consumption by Second Life avatars, looks at the Sigma and Delta scans and notes, "One of the recurring themes is the blurring of the line between people and machines, between the human mind and the computer. "

Technorati Tags: cyborg, Delta Scan, future, science, technology, UK

Future Shock

Extremely funny, if superficial, Daily Show piece on the future of robots. (Here's part two.) Features Ray Kurzweil in one of his most humorous performances.

Moodblurbs and social hardware

One of my colleagues, who knows how much time I spend working in coffeehouses (and probably could see from my Plaze that I'm working at one this morning), pointed this out this morning: Moodblurbs.

Moodblurbs are, on a very basic level, a fun way to communicate. Think of them as three dimensional status messages; or as a silent conversation starter, even as a dating tool.

[The] Moodblurb holder... connects to your laptop (cubicle, bicycle, review mirror, baby stroller - anywhere you want to clip it - but we really had laptops in mind at first), and holds one Moodblurb at a time.

The Moodblurbs are designed to help you express your mood, intentions or humor at the moment. Some of the expansion packs give you the tools to have actual conversations with the blurbs without getting up from that comfy couch seat in the corner of the coffee shop.

They're designed as a way to counter the cafe zombie effect.

In the summer of 2005, we were sitting at Spyhouse Coffee (a favorite of ours in Minneapolis), reading an online article that talked about how with the increasing availability of WiFi (wireless internet), more people were coming out to places like the Spyhouse with their laptops. Cool, right? Yeah, but the downside was that this was having an adverse affect on the coffee shop community - people were staying online, and no longer getting to know the people sharing their public space. In simple terms, strangers weren’t talking to each other.

We began brainstorming about how to get people with their laptops talking again. At first, we were thinking purely in online terms. Then, it came to us (we will argue till the end of time who came up with the actual idea first), that what we needed to do was come up with a way to get the online community to communicate offline in a manner similar to the one they used online.

Moodblurbs is the answer to the question of how to make online messengers and blogs and such three dimensional. The Moodblurb is similar to a short post or a status message, and encourages others to communicate with you - which is why we come up with clever messages online in the first place - to initiate a response.

Of course, the object itself is likely to become an attractor of social interchange, until they stop being novelties.

One thing Moodblurbs and the cafe zombie phenomenon highlights is how laptops and PCs cut people off from their social surroundings, even as we increasingly use them as a tool for communications. My Powerbook lets me keep up with my brother in New York, my father in Kuala Lampur, and my colleagues spread between Santa Cruz and London; but it acts as a barrier to talking to the person at the table next to me.

Some of this has to do with the fact that I'm generally working when I've got my laptop open; but computers do a good job of sucking your attention away from the real world (ironically, even as they can enable a kind of information-charge ADD). They require you to look at them, occupy your hands, and are just complicated enough to require constant monitoring when you're using them.

This leads to a question: when are we going to see a social hardware movement that's the equivalent of the social software movement? Obviously anything that's easier to use is, by definition, going to make you more social just by freeing up some neurons and bandwidth. When will we start seeing devices that make it a little clearer to other people what we're doing, without necessarily showing them what we're reading, working on, etc.?

Technorati Tags: cafe, social software

myPod in the Mercury News

I've got an essay in the San Jose Mercury News on the present and future of the iPod. It's on the Web site now, and is scheduled for publication in the Sunday paper:

From iPod to ourpod: Will it become a more social machine?

By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

About a week before my last birthday, my 6-year-old daughter started thinking about what kind of cake I should have. In her world, birthday parties have themes, and birthday cakes are serious business: She once talked my wife into making a dome-shape cake, decorating it like a ball gown, and putting a Barbie in the middle. (The effect was a bit like Evita Perón at the prom.) After a few days, she figured it out. "You should have an iPod cake," she announced.

I should have known. This is a girl whose drawings of me always show me plugged into my iPod. She leaves off the cell phone and the portable flash drive I wear around my neck -- both of which I also carry all the time. Like all good artists, she abstracts to catch a deeper truth: Other technologies are conveniences, but with my entire personal musical history -- 22 gigabytes of music organized into 100 playlists -- my iPod is no longer just a product. It's an extension of myself. It's myPod.

Technorati Tags: Apple, culture, cyborg, ipod, music

Robot Snake

SnakeRobots.com shows the work of an inventor who is studying snake locomotion. One of the potential applications of this technology is search and rescue, and given recent events it is easy to see the value of this technology.

The site also has a picture of the inventor with the robot. Based on this picture the inventor either has a great sense of humor or is too involved with his work.  I saw this on Dave Barry's blog.

Michael Chorost on Cochlear Implants and Transhumanism

On August 31st, Michael Chorost, author of Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, spoke at the Institute. Below are my notes from the talk (which haven't been vetted by the author, so all caveats apply--- quotes are approximate, and you should assume that the overall shape of these notes reflects my attention and interpretation, not what Mike actually said or meant).

(from the IFTF flickr photoset)

Technorati Tags: communication, cyborg, digital/physical, IFTF, paloalto, Silicon Valley, work

It's out!

My review of Michael Chorost's Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human is available on the L.A. Times Web site. I think it's also the lead review, but I haven't seen hard copy yet; I've got a couple copies reserved at my local bookstore.

Unlike my review of Ramez Naam's excellent More Than Human : Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, I actually found this one myself.

I'm finding the transhumanist argument-- or at least the more humanist incarnation represented by Naam and Chorost, and a few others-- more and more compelling. Or to put it another way, they're trying to deal with questions that we're all going to be struggling with in the future.

Technorati Tags: books, cyborg, Rebuilt

Rebuilt

I'm reading Michael Chorost's new book Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, which in a moment of weakness I agreed to review for a newspaper. It's a quick read, but a very stimulating one.

Chorost is a Bay Area technical writer who, in 2001, lost his hearing. The book is about his experience with a cochlear implant, and learning to hear again.

Though the book is just "about" those things in the same way that Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents is about programming: it's really a set of essays on the relationships between technology, humanity, and identity. And it deals with a set of experiences-- implants, endless tests, learning how to hear (or read, speak, walk, etc.)-- that will become increasingly common in the future. Two major demographic trends-- growing life expectancy, often involving recovery from a major illness or crisis that would have killed you in the past; and the increasing ability of doctors to save children with disabilities that in an earlier age would have kept them from living through childhood-- suggest that more and more of us are going to go through this kind of experience.

More on the book later.

Technorati Tags: cyborg, Rebuilt

Better brains

Want an upgrade? New Scientist lists "11 steps to a better brain."

[via Dan Pink]

Yet more Andy Clark

At the risk of boring regular readers to tears, but catching some poor unexpecting soul who's gotten here via Google, I'll point to this Financial Times piece on rethinking cyborgs. Not surprisingly, a significant portion of the piece deals with Andy Clark's work. (We interviewed Clark for our Ten Year Forecast last year; you can read the transcript here.)

Cyborgs are all around us. They’re larking around in the schoolyard, working in hospitals, running the country, indistinguishable from you and me. In fact, say some leading figures in the world of cognitive science, we are all cyborgs now - although perhaps not in the way you might think....

I started thinking about these issues a few weeks ago while at the pub, as often seems to be the case. It was a friend’s birthday party and I was trying to convince a very nice historian about how the internet and Google and so on might be thought of as a kind of extension to our minds. “You’re looking at it so unhistorically,” she said. “The internet’s no different really to a library. It’s a place where information is stored and retrieved.”...

I put to [Clark] my historian adversary’s point - that the internet is nothing more than a fancy library. “Not at all,” he replied to my e-mail. “Portable access and great search engines transform a mere library into a cognitive prosthetic.

”We have always been cyborgs, at least since language got a grip on the species,” he continued. “But new interfaces and robust, portable, soon-to-be implantable, technology makes it all the more dramatic.”

Clark argues that there is little significant conceptual difference between a highly accessible computer outside our body, and one implanted into our body.

I reviewed the book when it first came out, and find myself going to back to its core ideas constantly. When I first picked it up, my initial thought was, "Oh great, another over-reaching book by a computer scientist;" that opinion lasted about ten minutes. I now suspect it's going to be remembered as one of the more important books of the decade.

More Than Human

A bit of self-promotion: my review of Ramez Naam's More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement was just published in the L.A. Times Book Review. You can read it online; I don't think registration is required.

The review in a nutshell:

More Than Human is a terrific survey of current work and future possibilities in gene therapy, neurotechnology and other fields. Naam doesn't shy away from technical detail, but his enthusiasm keeps the science from becoming intimidating. But he's less successful in making the case for "embracing the promise of biological enhancement." Yes, people are greedy, regulations are often ineffective and the war on drugs has not gone well. But none of these facts is likely to change the minds of people who oppose gene therapy on moral or theological grounds.

Interview with Andy Clark

Several months ago, I conducted an interview with Indiana University professor Andy Clark. Clark is author of several books, most recently Natural-Born Cyborgs, a book that I found to be extremely stimulating.

I interviewed Dr. Clark in the course of writing the annual report for our Ten Year Forecast program, and a highly edited and compressed version of the interview appeared a couple months ago in the 2004 Ten Year Forecast. It pained me that we couldn't publish the whole thing; but space constraints prevented us from doing so.

However, there are no such constraints here; and so the interview can appear in its entirety. Here it is.

Daniel Dennett

The Guardian has a really terrific profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Brain implants

The New York Times has a piece on the latest efforts to develop brain implants that will let people control devices:

Cyberkinetics Inc., plans to implant a tiny chip in the brains of five paralyzed people in an effort to enable them to operate a computer by thought alone.

The Food and Drug Administration has given approval for a clinical trial of the implants, according to the company.

The implants, part of what Cyberkinetics calls its BrainGate system, could eventually help people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, Lou Gehrig's disease or other ailments to communicate better or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control.

Burning Man for Robots

If you're driving between Barstow and Las Vegas this Saturday, be careful: you may be in the path of the Grand Challenge, a DARPA-sponsored robot race. In the Grand Challenge, robots-- some the size of motorcycles, others built from Humvees-- try to complete a 180-mile course in the desert. The robots are entirely self-guiding: two hours before the race begins, programmers will see the route and have a chance to make last-minute adjustments to their vehicles, but otherwise, it's Robot vs. Nature.

One friend describes it as a cross between Hans Moravec and Hunter Thompson: part serious research project), part bottom-up, spontaneous high-tech happening. This is somewhat by design. As John Markoff explains in today's New York Times, the event is supposed to be different from the typical DARPA project:

The Pentagon, under a mandate from Congress to save lives by turning to unmanned combat vehicles to meet a third of its needs by 2015, has become impatient with its usual crowd of big-name military contractors, like the Lockheed Martin Corporation and the General Dynamics Corporation, to come up with a solution. It turned instead to the spur of free market capitalism, inspiring a motley band of computer scientists, artificial intelligence experts and robot lovers to take on the challenge.

This may sound like no way to foster serious engineering, but a century ago, races and international contents were a significant spur to innovation in aeronautics and automotive engineering. The Orteig Prize, for example, was offered for the first New York-Paris flight (after eight others failed, Charles Lindbergh won it). (These could also backfire: after ten people died in the San Francisco-Honolulu Dole Derby, a ban was put on uncertified transoceanic flying.) And even in an age of Big Science, they haven't disappeared completely: think of the Kremer Prize for human-powered aviation, won by Paul MacCready in 1977, or the still-unclaimed X Prize, offered to promote private development of space travel.

The terrain in the California desert is so difficult, some experts say that no robot can complete the course. However, if one does succeed, it will be interesting to see if the Grand Challenge becomes a model for future DARPA-- or other military-- research projects.

Whale culture?

Futurists always try to think of events that are highly unlikely, but which if they happened would change everything. One favorite example is contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life-- the Star Trek "first contact" scenario.

But this ScienCentral report that whales have cultures makes me wonder if the discovery of intelligence and culture comparable in some ways to that of humans among animals might have a similar impact:

Humans may not be the only mammals who have different cultures....

"Whales are pretty hard to study, but evidence is coming up from quite a number of species that in a whole range of ways, they're learning things from each other and they're passing it on to other whales, and that's culture," says Hal Whitehead, biology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.... Whitehead says whale culture isn't exactly like ours; for instance, whales don't have opposable thumbs, so they can't make objects to pass on through the generations. "[Whale] cultures are in their minds and not in the things that they make," says Whitehead.

To some degree we all recognize that animals possess their own forms of intelligence and emotions; yet we still easily maintain a divide between humans and animals. The posession of culture is supposed to be one of the things that makes us distinctive; if we aren't alone in having it, what would that mean?

Personal server gets closer

New Scientist reports that

A full-featured PC that is small enough to slip into a shirt pocket is being hailed by its makers as the world's first modular computer. The machine can perform as both a PC and a handheld computer, but it remains to be seen if consumers are willing to pay for such a hybrid device.

The Modular Computing Core is being launched on 7 November by Antelope Technologies, a Colorado-based start-up. The device is a single portable unit into which all the essential computing components are crammed. At 76 by 127 by 19 millimetres (5 x 3 x 3/4 inches), the MCC is not much bigger than a deck of cards.

This core unit can then either be slotted into a docking station to be used with a screen and keyboard as a desktop computer, or into small portable "shell" with a touch-sensitive screen, turning it into a handheld computer. "Modular computers will change the way people use their computer," claims Kenneth Geyer, president of Antelope Technologies.

Inside the MCC is a 1GHz microprocessor, 256 MB of RAM and a 10 or 15 GB hard drive. It will also run a full version of Microsoft's XP operating system, instead of the stripped-down operating systems used by handheld computers.

This is a small, albeit somewhat costly ($4000) step towards the "personal server" concept, discussed here earlier.

Are friends electric?*

(*With apologies to Gary Numan.)

NTT researchers recently presented their ElectAura-Net technology, which uses humans' natural electrical fields (those things that mystics and New Agers think of as auras) to move information. They explain how it works in a SIGGRAPH publication:

ElectAura-Net is a novel indoor broadband networking and positioning system. A wireless(-like) communication is enabled by electric-fields (electric aura) emanated from the human body and the floor. The result: the world's first broadband (10Mbps) intrabody communication. ElectAura-Net also provides indoor positioning, which is urgently needed for "ubiquitous" communication.

ElectAura-Net provides both broadband wireless(-like) networks and a meter-accuracy positioning system for indoor use. It is a kind of "intrabody communication" system that uses electric fields as transmission media, and the human body and floor as an Ethernet cable. In this system, a "communication-cell" (carpet size) can be shrunk down to one meter or less, and simultaneous access by many users can be realized. Ordinary intrabody communication systems cannot achieve long-distance communication between components such as body-worn devices and the floor. ElectAura-Net provides extra-high-sensitivity and high-speed capability.

This is an extension of the Personal Area Network (PAN) research done at MIT in the 1990s by Tom Zimmerman (the subject of his 1995 MA thesis), and later picked up at IBM. That technology exploited the fact that the

natural salinity of the human body makes it an excellent conductor of electrical current. PAN technology takes advantage of this conductivity by creating an external electric field that passes an incredibly tiny current through the body, over which data is carried.

The current used is one-billionth of an amp (one nanoamp), which is lower than the natural currents already in the body. In fact, the electrical field created by running a comb through hair is more than 1,000 times greater than that being used by PAN technology.

The difference here is that this new technology isn't aimed at linking people together, but at connecting people (and all their devices) to a network, and using that same technology to sense people's locations.

The NTT technology sounds like it's a long way from hitting the streets, but the notion of using our bodies-- and touch-- as a way to share information is one that I find kind of breathtaking: wonderful in its simplicity, deep in its conceptual potential.

We already have a pretty good protocol for sharing information via PDAs: I can beam something to another person with a PDA, but they have to accept it before it gets stored on their device. Sharing a picture, or a message, or a piece of music with someone by holding their hand-- or touching their shoulder, or tapping them on the arm-- is at once both high-tech and intimate. If it adopted some features of the PDA method-- that a file has to be actively accepted by the recipient, or it's discarded-- this method would also provide a means of sharing information that was as transparent as handing someone a Polaroid or business card: you'd know who it was coming from, you'd have to choose to accept it, and the transaction would take place within the context of a social exchange.

Imagine, for example, that you're at a wedding. At the reception, you take a lot of pictures, as does everyone else. The bride and groom have a great time, the guests have a great time; and at the end of the evening, one of the things you do for the happy couple-- the course of shaking hands with him or hugging her-- is share those pictures with them. Or, you and your teenage friends are at an amusement park, and you have a passerby take a group picture with your camera. After getting the camera back, you'd cue up the picture, then hand a copy of the picture to each one of your friends. Information-sharing turns into a genuinely social activity. Pushing bits becomes an exercise in gift-giving. Data becomes a social artifact.

It would be the ultimate example of social navigation, of an information technology that drew upon existing methods and media for digital communication. This interpretation runs completely opposite to an IBM article from a few years ago that declared that described Zimmerman's work as showing "how a touch can also be used to communicate unemotional digital information." Today, what seems interesting is how the PAN could place the communication of digital information in an emotional and social context.

Finally, it would be an exemplar of a trend we're actively exploring at the Institute: how the growth of ubiquitous or pervasive technologies promises to remove computers and communications technologies as obstacles to social interaction.

Other sources:

• Eric Smalley, "Body network gains speed," Technology Research News (October 2003).
  
• "A Truly Organic Network," Wired News (December 15, 1997).
  
• "Personal Area Network enables intrabody communication," Design News (1998).
  
• Bruce Schechter, "The Body Electric," Think Research (1997).
  

[via Smart Mobs]

Personal servers and personal memory

Every futurist does a lot of scanning. I have to (or try to) read a tremendous amount of stuff, in a variety of formats-- things published on the Web, articles in PDF or Word, PowerPoint presentations, old-fashioned words on paper, and articles on the radio. (This blog is essentially an attempt to leverage that work, to turn it from a public resource into a public good.) One of the biggest problems I have comes when I want to track down something I read or heard in passing two or three weeks ago, and which now is relevant to a project I'm working on. We have lots of good tools for managing information that we know is important; the big challenge comes in retrieving something that you thought was irrelevant, but turns out to be an indicator of some emerging trend.

I've often wondered why there isn't a tool to help with this kind of problem-- a kind of Google that would just index everything you've read, rather than everything on the Web. The closest I've come has been a product called iRemember; unfortunately, it only works on the Macintosh, and hasn't been updated for OS X. So I soldier on.

If someone asked me, "Would you want to be able to store and remember everything you've ever read, written, or even seen and said?" I'd say "Yes!" without hesitating. Or I would have. I'm now having second thoughts... just at a point when we can confidently say that such a technology will be available in the next decade.