The future of X-People

There is an abundance of choice for X in my ‘future of’ series, but most options are sealed off. I can’t do naughty stuff because I don’t want my blog to get blocked so that’s one huge category gone. X-rays are boring, even though x-ray glasses using augmented reality… nope, that’s back to the naughty category again. I won’t stoop to cover X-Factor so that only leaves X-Men, as in the films, which I admit to enjoying however silly they are.

My first observation is how strange X-Men sounds. Half of them are female. So I will use X-People. I hate political correctness, but I hate illogical nomenclature even more.

My second one is that some readers may not be familiar with the X-Men so I guess I’d better introduce the idea. Basically they are a large set of mutants or transhumans with very varied superhuman or supernatural capabilities, most of which defy physics, chemistry or biology or all of them. Essentially low-grade superheroes whose main purpose is to show off special effects. OK, fun-time!

There are several obvious options for achieving X-People capabilities:

Genetic modification, including using synthetic biology or other biotech. This would allow people to be stronger, faster, fitter, prettier, more intelligent or able to eat unlimited chocolate without getting fat. The last one will be the most popular upgrade. However, now that we have started converging biotech with IT, it won’t be very long before it will be possible to add telepathy to the list. Thought recognition and nerve stimulation are two sides of the same technology. Starting with thought control of appliances or interfaces, the world’s networked knowledge would soon be available to you just by thinking about something. You could easily send messages using thought control and someone else could hear them synthesized into an earpiece, but later it could be direct thought stimulation. Eventually, you’d have totally shared consciousness. None of that defies biology or physics, and it will happen mid-century. Storing your own thoughts and effectively extending your mind into the cloud would allow people to make their minds part of the network resources. Telepathy will be an everyday ability for many people but only with others who are suitably equipped. It won’t become easy to read other people’s minds without them having suitable technology equipped too. It will be interesting to see whether only a few people go that route or most people. Either way, 2050 X-People can easily have telepathy, control objects around them just by thinking, share minds with others and maybe even control other people, hopefully consensually.

Nanotechnology, using nanobots etc to achieve possibly major alterations to your form, or to affect others or objects. Nanotechnology is another word for magic as far as many sci-fi writers go. Being able to rearrange things on an individual atom basis is certainly fuel for fun stories, but it doesn’t allow you to do things like changing objects into gold or people into stone statues. There are plenty of shape-shifters in sci-fi but in reality, chemical bonds absorb or release energy when they are changed and that limits how much change can be made in a few seconds without superheating an object. You’d also need a LOT of nanobots to change a whole person in a few seconds. Major changes in a body would need interim states to work too, since dying during the process probably isn’t desirable. If you aren’t worried about time constraints and can afford to make changes at a more gentle speed, and all you’re doing is changing your face, skin colour, changing age or gender or adding a couple of cosmetic wings, then it might be feasible one day. Maybe you could even change your skin to a plastic coating one day, since plastics can use atomic ingredients from skin, or you could add a cream to provide what’s missing. Also, passing some nanobots to someone else via a touch might become feasible, so maybe you could cause them to change involuntarily just by touching them, again subject to scope and time limits. So nanotech can go some way to achieving some X-People capabilities related to shape changing.

Moving objects using telekinesis is rather less likely. Thought controlling a machine to move a rock is easy, moving an unmodified rock or a dumb piece of metal just by concentrating on it is beyond any technology yet on the horizon. I can’t think of any mechanism by which it could be done. Nor can I think of ways of causing things to just burst into flames without using some sort of laser or heat ray. I can’t see either how megawatt lasers can be comfortably implanted in ordinary eyes. These deficiencies might be just my lack of imagination but I suspect they are actually not feasible. Quite a few of the X-Men have these sorts of powers but they might have to stay in sci-fi.

Virtual reality, where you possess the power in a virtual world, which may be shared with others. Well, many computer games give players supernatural powers, or take on various forms, and it’s obvious that many will do so in VR too. If you can imagine it, then someone can get the graphics chips to make it happen in front of your eyes. There are no hard physics or biology barriers in VR. You can do what you like. Shared gaming or socializing environments can be very attractive and it is not uncommon for people to spend almost every waking hour in them. Role playing lets people do things or be things they can’t in the real world. They may want to be a superhero, or they might just want to feel younger or look different or try being another gender. When they look in a mirror in the VR world, they would see the person they want to be, and that could make it very compelling compared to harsh reality. I suspect that some people will spend most of their free time in VR, living a parallel fantasy life that is as important to them as their ‘real’ one. In their fantasy world, they can be anyone and have any powers they like. When they share the world with other people or AI characters, then rules start to appear because different people have different tastes and desires. That means that there will be various shared virtual worlds with different cultures, freedoms and restrictions.

Augmented reality, where you possess the power in a virtual world but in ways that it interacts with the physical world is a variation on VR, where it blends more with reality. You might have a magic wand that changes people into frogs. The wand could be just a stick, but the victim could be a real person, and the change would happen only in the augmented reality. The scope of the change could be one-sided – they might not even know that you now see them as a frog, or it could again be part of a large shared culture where other people in the community now see and treat them as a frog. The scope of such cultures is very large and arbitrary cultural rules could apply. They could include a lot of everyday life – shopping, banking, socializing, entertainment, sports… That means effects could be wide-ranging with varying degrees of reality overlap or permanence. Depending on how much of their lives people live within those cultures, virtual effects could have quite real consequences. I do think that augmented reality will eventually have much more profound long-term effects on our lives than the web.

Controlled dreaming, where you can do pretty much anything you want and be in full control of the direction your dream takes. This is effectively computer-enhanced lucid dreaming with literally all the things you could ever dream of. But other people can dream of extra things that you may never have dreamt of and it allows you to explore those areas too.  In shared or connected dreams, your dreams could interact with those of others or multiple people could share the same dream. There is a huge overlap here with virtual reality, but in dreams, things don’t get the same level of filtration and reality is heavily distorted, so I suspect that controlled dreams will offer even more potential than VR. You can dream about being in VR, but you can’t make a dream in VR.

X-People will be very abundant in the future. We might all be X-People most of the time, routinely doing things that are pure sci-fi today. Some will be real, some will be virtual, some will be in dreams, but mostly, thanks to high quality immersion and the social power of shared culture, we probably won’t really care which is which.

 

 

The future of water

 

When I started in futurology, one of the common beliefs was that future wars would be fought mainly over water supply. There are certainly some areas of the world where water-based wars could occur, but the main conflicts today are nothing to do with water at all.

Desalination used to be very expensive but new technology will reduce costs to not much more than standard fresh water sources. The discovery of graphene is a particularly important breakthrough because it allows water to go through easily but holds back impurities, even salt. Since graphene offers so many other benefits, research is proceeding enthusiastically to learn how to manufacture it in large quantities. Hot off the press today, http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl502399y shows that it is easily strong enough for high pressure reverse osmosis desalination. That will allow not just faster and cheaper desalination, but also cheaper and safer recycling, taking load off the system, allowing less water to go further and making it easier to get that water in the first place. Together, desalination and recycling will reduce load and improve supply sufficiently to remove the stress and potential conflicts – desalination and water purification plants will be a lot cheaper than wars. There will certainly be squabbles and political pressures applied sometimes, but I don’t see full-scale water wars as a significant threat. Technology has effectively solved this problem.

In humanitarian disasters, lack of availability of clean water is often a major problem, and many people die from diseases picked up by drinking very polluted water. http://nvireuk.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/graphene-drinking-straw/ was my own water purification idea a few years ago. (nvireuk doesn’t exist any more but the article is still visible). It isn’t designed to be an everyday replacement for a proper supply, but should work well in emergency situations.

The absorbent material provides a smooth surface onto which to apply the graphene coating. The graphene coating filters out everything except the clean drinking water. The sponge then provides a reservoir from which to suck safe drinking water. When we get to the point that graphene can be produced cheaply and easily, this could save many lives in developing countries, in disaster zones, and even be useful to save carried weight for hikers, sailors and the military.

In the UK, we have lots of green types trying to make everyone use less water. Wasting is never a good idea, but really, we have no shortage of water here and the pressure to reduce usage is misdirected, there are plenty of real problems that need solved. We get abundant rainfall in the UK, and the only issue is cost of capture and storage against water-saving measures. It is a simple commercial trade-off, not a shortage of fresh water, most of which is allowed to go out to sea unused. There is no evidence that water companies make less profit as we save water, though they need less reservoir capacity and have lower treatment costs than otherwise, and in any case, leaks in their own system account for up to a third of the use of drinking water. The evidence is that they simply increase charges to maintain profits.

Water use for food production is likely to increase, but production will still tend to concentrate where resources are more readily available, such as prime agricultural land. Some hydroponics and vertical farms in cities will provide a small proportion of food. Meanwhile, whether there are fundamental shortages or not, better engineering will still mean lower requirements for resources than before right across industry. Where local shortages do exist, industry can simply recycle more. It is therefore hard to see any cause for concern for future water supply. There will always be local problems arising, but they can generally be solved.

In summary, there is too much panic about water in the future. We will face a lot of big problems, but water isn’t one of them.

The future of virtual reality

I first covered this topic in 1991 or 1992, can’t recall, when we were playing with the Virtuality machines. I got a bit carried away, did the calculations on processing power requirements for decent images, and announced that VR would replace TV as our main entertainment by about 2000. I still use that as my best example of things I didn’t get right.

I have often considered why it didn’t take off as we expected. There are two very plausible explanations and both might apply somewhat to the new launches we’re seeing now.

1: It did happen, just differently. People are using excellent pseudo-3D environments in computer games, and that is perfectly acceptable, they simply don’t need full-blown VR. Just as 3DTV hasn’t turned out to be very popular compared to regular TV, so wandering around a virtual world doesn’t necessarily require VR. TV or  PC monitors are perfectly adequate in conjunction with the cooperative human brain to convey the important bits of the virtual world illusion.

2. Early 1990s VR headsets reportedly gave some people eye strain or psychological distortions that persisted long enough after sessions to present potential dangers. This meant corporate lawyers would have been warning about potentially vast class action suits with every kid that develops a squint blaming the headset manufacturers, or when someone walked under a bus because they were still mentally in a virtual world. If anything, people are far more likely to sue for alleged negative psychological effects now than back then.

My enthusiasm for VR hasn’t gone away. I still think it has great potential. I just hope the manufacturers are fully aware of these issues and have dealt with or are dealing with them. It would be a great shame indeed if a successful launch is followed by rapid market collapse or class action suits. I hope they can avoid both problems.

The porn industry is already gearing up to capitalise on VR, and the more innocent computer games markets too. I spend a fair bit of my spare time in the virtual worlds of computer games. I find games far more fun than TV, and adding more convincing immersion and better graphics would be a big plus. In the further future, active skin will allow our nervous systems to be connected into the IT too, recording and replaying sensations so VR could become full sensory. When you fight an enemy in a game today, the controller might vibrate if you get hit or shot. If you could feel the pain, you might try a little harder to hide. You may be less willing to walk casually through flames if they hurt rather than just making a small drop in a health indicator or you might put a little more effort into kindling romances if you could actually enjoy the cuddles. But that’s for the next generation, not mine.

VR offers a whole new depth of experience, but it did in 1991. It failed first time, let’s hope this time the technology brings the benefits without the drawbacks and can succeed.

The future of ukuleles

Well, actually stringed instruments generally, but I needed a U and I didn’t want to do universities or the UN again and certainly not unicorns, so I cheated slightly. I realize that other topics starting with U may exist, but I didn’t do much research and I needed an excuse to write up this new idea.

If I was any good at making electronics, I’d have built a demo of this, but I have only soldered 6 contacts in my life, and 4 of those were dry joints, and I know when to quit.

My idea is very simple indeed: put accelerometers on the strings. Some quick googling suggests the idea is novel.

There are numerous electric guitar, violins, probably ukuleles. They use a variety of pickups. Many are directly underneath the strings, some use accelerometers on the other side of the bridge or elsewhere on the body. In most instruments, the body is heavily involved in the overall sound production, so I wouldn’t want to replace the pickups on the body. However, adding accelerometers to the strings would give another data source with quite different characteristics. There could be just one, or several, placed at specific locations along each string. If they are too heavy, they would change the sound too much, but some now are far smaller than the eye of a needle. If they are fixed onto the string, it would need a little re-tuning, but shouldn’t destroy the sound quality. The benefit is that accelerometers on the strings would provide data not available via other pickups. They would more directly represent the string activity than a pickup on the body. This could be used as valuable input to the overall signal mix used in the electronic sound output. Having more data available is generally a good thing.

What would the new sound be like? I don’t know. If it is very different from the sound using conventional pickups, it might even open up potential for new kinds of electric instrument.

If you do experiment with this, please do report back on the results.

The future of terminators

The Terminator films were important in making people understand that AI and machine consciousness will not necessarily be a good thing. The terminator scenario has stuck in our terminology ever since.

There is absolutely no reason to assume that a super-smart machine will be hostile to us. There are even some reasons to believe it would probably want to be friends. Smarter-than-man machines could catapult us into a semi-utopian era of singularity level development to conquer disease and poverty and help us live comfortably alongside a healthier environment. Could.

But just because it doesn’t have to be bad, that doesn’t mean it can’t be. You don’t have to be bad but sometimes you are.

It is also the case that even if it means us no harm, we could just happen to be in the way when it wants to do something, and it might not care enough to protect us.

Asimov’s laws of robotics are irrelevant. Any machine smart enough to be a terminator-style threat would presumably take little notice of rules it has been given by what it may consider a highly inferior species. The ants in your back garden have rules to govern their colony and soldier ants trained to deal with invader threats to enforce territorial rules. How much do you consider them when you mow the lawn or rearrange the borders or build an extension?

These arguments are put in debates every day now.

There are however a few points that are less often discussed

Humans are not always good, indeed quite a lot of people seem to want to destroy everything most of us want to protect. Given access to super-smart machines, they could design more effective means to do so. The machines might be very benign, wanting nothing more than to help mankind as far as they possibly can, but misled into working for them, believing in architected isolation that such projects are for the benefit of humanity. (The machines might be extremely  smart, but may have existed since their inception in a rigorously constructed knowledge environment. To them, that might be the entire world, and we might be introduced as a new threat that needs to be dealt with.) So even benign AI could be an existential threat when it works for the wrong people. The smartest people can sometimes be very naive. Perhaps some smart machines could be deliberately designed to be so.

I speculated ages ago what mad scientists or mad AIs could do in terms of future WMDs:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/wmds-for-mad-ais/

Smart machines might be deliberately built for benign purposes and turn rogue later, or they may be built with potential for harm designed in, for military purposes. These might destroy only enemies, but you might be that enemy. Others might do that and enjoy the fun and turn on their friends when enemies run short. Emotions might be important in smart machines just as they are in us, but we shouldn’t assume they will be the same emotions or be wired the same way.

Smart machines may want to reproduce. I used this as the core storyline in my sci-fi book. They may have offspring and with the best intentions of their parent AIs, the new generation might decide not to do as they’re told. Again, in human terms, a highly familiar story that goes back thousands of years.

In the Terminator film, it is a military network that becomes self aware and goes rogue that is the problem. I don’t believe digital IT can become conscious, but I do believe reconfigurable analog adaptive neural networks could. The cloud is digital today, but it won’t stay that way. A lot of analog devices will become part of it. In

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/ground-up-data-is-the-next-big-data/

I argued how new self-organising approaches to data gathering might well supersede big data as the foundations of networked intelligence gathering. Much of this could be in a the analog domain and much could be neural. Neural chips are already being built.

It doesn’t have to be a military network that becomes the troublemaker. I suggested a long time ago that ‘innocent’ student pranks from somewhere like MIT could be the source. Some smart students from various departments could collaborate to see if they can hijack lots of networked kit to see if they can make a conscious machine. Their algorithms or techniques don’t have to be very efficient if they can hijack enough. There is a possibility that such an effort could succeed if the right bits are connected into the cloud and accessible via sloppy security, and the ground up data industry might well satisfy that prerequisite soon.

Self-organisation technology will make possible extremely effective combat drones.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/free-floating-ai-battle-drone-orbs-or-making-glyph-from-mass-effect/

Terminators also don’t have to be machines. They could be organic, products of synthetic biology. My own contribution here is smart yogurt: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/the-future-of-bacteria/

With IT and biology rapidly converging via nanotech, there will be many ways hybrids could be designed, some of which could adapt and evolve to fill different niches or to evade efforts to find or harm them. Various grey goo scenarios can be constructed that don’t have any miniature metal robots dismantling things. Obviously natural viruses or bacteria could also be genetically modified to make weapons that could kill many people – they already have been. Some could result from seemingly innocent R&D by smart machines.

I dealt a while back with the potential to make zombies too, remotely controlling people – alive or dead. Zombies are feasible this century too:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/zombies-are-coming/ &

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/vampires-are-yesterday-zombies-will-peak-soon-then-clouds-are-coming/

A different kind of terminator threat arises if groups of people are linked at consciousness level to produce super-intelligences. We will have direct brain links mid-century so much of the second half may be spent in a mental arms race. As I wrote in my blog about the Great Western War, some of the groups will be large and won’t like each other. The rest of us could be wiped out in the crossfire as they battle for dominance. Some people could be linked deeply into powerful machines or networks, and there are no real limits on extent or scope. Such groups could have a truly global presence in networks while remaining superficially human.

Transhumans could be a threat to normal un-enhanced humans too. While some transhumanists are very nice people, some are not, and would consider elimination of ordinary humans a price worth paying to achieve transhumanism. Transhuman doesn’t mean better human, it just means humans with greater capability. A transhuman Hitler could do a lot of harm, but then again so could ordinary everyday transhumanists that are just arrogant or selfish, which is sadly a much bigger subset.

I collated these various varieties of potential future cohabitants of our planet in: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/future-human-evolution/

So there are numerous ways that smart machines could end up as a threat and quite a lot of terminators that don’t need smart machines.

Outcomes from a terminator scenario range from local problems with a few casualties all the way to total extinction, but I think we are still too focused on the death aspect. There are worse fates. I’d rather be killed than converted while still conscious into one of 7 billion zombies and that is one of the potential outcomes too, as is enslavement by some mad scientist.

 

Fusions needs jet engine architecture, not JET

Warning: some or all of what you will read here might be nonsense, but hey, faint heart ne’er won fair maid.

Lockheed Martin are in the news with yet another claim of a fusion breakthrough. It looks exciting, but some physicists are already claiming that it won’t work. I haven’t done the sums so I don’t have a sensible opinion on it. I am filing it mentally with all the other frequently claimed breakthroughs and will wait and see, not holding my breath. I really hope they succeed though. If they don’t, then their claim is just hot air, and if they can do that, then why can’t I? So here is how I would do the easy bits of the top level design, leaving the hard sums to others.

Joint European Torus = JET, and the new Lockheed Martin approach is meant to be about the same size as a jet engine. I couldn’t help making the obvious mental leap. Long ago, plane engines used internal combustion engines and propellers. The along came 40-year-old Frank Whittle and changed the world with his jet engine invention:

Picture copyright Popperfoto

Smart bunny!

Standing on his (and Rutherford’s) shoulders, I had to ask whether we can’t use a jet engine arrangement to harness fusion. We don’t need the propulsion, just the ejected products to extract heat from, fairly conventionally. As lazy as researchers can be these days, I typed ‘jet engine fusion’ into google images. Way down the page was one that I thought had already used the idea, as a spaceship propulsion system, but bringing up the page, it doesn’t, it just uses a pretty conventional reaction chamber and ejects the fusion products out through a nozzle to provide propulsion force.

So either the idea is so obviously flawed that nobody has even bothered to investigate it far enough to bother making graphics, or a major case of group-think has affected the entire physicist community. Bit of a gamble proceeding then, but, if you have a few billion to gamble, here’s how to do fusion:

Jet style nuclear fusion process

Intake a continuous stream of deuterium and tritium. Note for those people who want to believe everyone except them is a moron: I am not actually a moron, I have a Physics degree and specialised in the nuclear options. I do know you only need a tiny quantity of material. The pic shows a jet engine but it is the compression stage idea I want, not the scale, so the compressor would obviously look nothing like this, the diagram is just to get the point across that the jet engine principle is a good one. 

Compress it (using some of the energy from the fusion process)  and optionally heat  or compress it conventionally to reduce energy deficit in final stage.

Feed it into the narrow reaction pathway, which is a strongly confined tunnel surrounded by an Archimedes screw of high intensity lasers.

Generate continuous heating via lasers as the plasma passes along the reaction pathway (using some of the energy from the process) until fusion finally occurs in the short fusion zone.

Allow hot fused products to expand in an expansion chamber

Pass through suitable heat exchanger to make steam/molted sodium or whatever takes your fancy.

Feed some of the energy harvested to drive compressors, heaters, and obviously the lasers. Very possibly some of the products might be useful feedstock for production of lasing medium.

Bob’s your uncle.

OK, the intake and compression bits are quite jet enginy, and using some of the energy produced to power the earlier stages is very jet enginy. We don’t have any burning of gases so it isn’t quite the same. But in the interests of extracting as much from Whittle as possible, I kept it nice and circular with as few components as possible in the way, arranging the lasers in a continuous spiral (inspired by the Archimedes screw), so that the plasma heats up as it passes through them until it starts to fuse. There is no actual screw, its just that if all the lasers are mounted and directed towards the plasma jet as it heats, the external arrangement would look very similar, and the effect would be that the temperature and proximity to fusing would rise as the plasma passes through it.  You still need serious magnetic confinement to prevent the plasma touching the walls, but there is nothing physical in the path to touch, just magnetic fields and lots of laser beam.

I can’t see any immediate reasons why it couldn’t work, and it offers some definite advantages over a torus approach or exploding pellets. It takes ideas from all the other approaches so it isn’t really new, just a rearrangement.

Doesn’t Lockheed Martin make jet engines too?

The future of sky

The S installment of this ‘future of’ series. I have done streets, shopping, superstores, sticks, surveillance, skyscrapers, security, space, sports, space travel and sex before, some several times. I haven’t done sky before, so here we go.

Today when you look up during the day you typically see various weather features, the sun, maybe the moon, a few birds, insects or bats, maybe some dandelion or thistle seeds. As night falls, stars, planets, seasonal shooting stars and occasional comets may appear. To those we can add human contributions such as planes, microlights, gliders and helicopters, drones, occasional hot air balloons and blimps, helium party balloons, kites and at night-time, satellites, sometimes the space station, maybe fireworks. If you’re in some places, missiles and rockets may be unfortunate extras too, as might be the occasional parachutist or someone wearing a wing-suit or on a hang-glider. I guess we should add occasional space launches and returns too. I can’t think of any more but I might have missed some.

Drones are the most recent addition and their numbers will increase quickly, mostly for surveillance purposes. When I sit out in the garden, since we live in a quiet area, the noise from occasional  microlights and small planes is especially irritating because they fly low. I am concerned that most of the discussions on drones don’t tend to mention the potential noise nuisance they might bring. With nothing between them and the ground, sound will travel well, and although some are reasonably quiet, other might not be and the noise might add up. Surveillance, spying and prying will become the biggest nuisances though, especially as miniaturization continues to bring us many insect-sized drones that aren’t noisy and may visually be almost undetectable. Privacy in your back garden or in the bedroom with unclosed curtains could disappear. They will make effective distributed weapons too:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/drones-it-isnt-the-reapers-and-predators-you-should-worry-about/

Adverts don’t tend to appear except on blimps, and they tend to be rare visitors. A drone was this week used to drag a national flag over a football game. In the Batman films, Batman is occasionally summoned by shining a spotlight with a bat symbol onto the clouds. I forgot which film used the moon to show an advert. It is possible via a range of technologies that adverts could soon be a feature of the sky, day and night, just like in Bladerunner. In the UK, we are now getting used to roadside ads, however unwelcome they were when they first arrived, though they haven’t yet reached US proportions. It will be very sad if the sky is hijacked as an advertising platform too.

I think we’ll see some high altitude balloons being used for communications. A few companies are exploring that now. Solar powered planes are a competing solution to the same market.

As well as tiny drones, we might have bubbles. Kids make bubbles all the time but they burst quickly. With graphene, a bubble could prevent helium escaping or even be filled with graphene foam, then it would float and stay there. We might have billions of tiny bubbles floating around with tiny cameras or microphones or other sensors. The cloud could be an actual cloud.

And then there’s fairies. I wrote about fairies as the future of space travel.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/fairies-will-dominate-space-travel/

They might have a useful role here too, and even if they don’t, they might still want to be here, useful or not.

As children, we used to call thistle seeds fairies, our mums thought it was cute to call them that. Biomimetics could use that same travel technique for yet another form of drone.

With all the quadcopter, micro-plane, bubble, balloon and thistle seed drones, the sky might soon be rather fuller than today. So maybe there is a guaranteed useful role for fairies, as drone police.

 

 

 

The future of rubbish quality art

Exhibit A: Tracey Emin – anything at all from her portfolio will do.

Exhibit B: What I just knocked up in 5 minutes:

Exploration of the real-time gravitational interaction of some copper atoms

A recent work, I can Cu Now

As my obvious  artistic genius quickly became apparent to me, I had a huge flash of inspiration and produced this:

Investigating the fundamental essence of futurology and whether the process of looking into the future can be fully contained within a finite cultural bottle.

Trying to bottle the future

I have to confess that I didn’t make the beautiful bottle, but even Emin only has a little personal  input into some of the works she produces and it is surely obvious that my talent in arranging this so beautifully is vastly greater than that of the mere sculptor who produced the vase, or bottle, or whatever. Then, I produced my magnum opus, well so far, towards the end of my five minutes of exploration of the art world. I think you’ll agree I ought immediately to be assigned Professor of Unified Arts in the Royal Academy. Here it is, if I can see well enough to upload it through my tears of joy at having produced such insight.

Can we measure the artistic potential of a rose?

This work needs no further explanation. I rest my case.

The future of cyberspace

I promised in my last blog to do one on the dimensions of cyberspace. I made this chart 15 years ago, in two parts for easy reading, but the ones it lists are still valid and I can’t think of any new ones to add right now, but I might think of some more and make an update with a third part. I changed the name to virtuality instead because it actually only talks about human-accessed cyberspace, but I’m not entirely sure that was a good thing to do. Needs work.

The chart  has 14 dimensions (control has two independent parts), and I identified some of the possible points on each dimension. As dimensions are meant to be, they are all orthogonal, i.e. they are independent of each other, so you can pick any one on any dimension and use it with any from each other. Standard augmented reality and pure virtual reality are two of the potential combinations, out of the 2.5 x 10^11 possibilities above. At that rate, if every person in the world tried a different one every minute, it would take a whole day to visit them all even briefly. There are many more possible, this was never meant to be exhaustive, and even two more columns makes it 10 trillion combos. Already I can see that one more column could be ownership, another could be network implementation, another could be quality of illusion. What others have I missed?

The Future of IoT – virtual sensors for virtual worlds

I recently acquired a point-and-click thermometer for Futurizon, which gives an instant reading when you point it at something. I will soon know more about the world around me, but any personal discoveries I make are quite likely to be well known to science already. I don’t expect to win a Nobel prize by discovering breeches of the second law of thermodynamics, but that isn’t the point. The thermometer just measures the transmission from a particular point in a particular frequency band, which indicates what temperature it is. It cost about £20, a pretty cheap stimulation tool to help me think about the future by understanding new things about the present. I already discovered that my computer screen doubles as a heater, but I suspected that already. Soon, I’ll know how much my head warms when if think hard, and for the futurology bit, where the best locations are to put thermal IoT stuff.

Now that I am discovering the joys or remote sensing, I want to know so much more though. Sure, you can buy satellites for a billion pounds that will monitor anything anywhere, and for a few tens of thousands you can buy quite sophisticated lab equipment. For a few tens, not so much is available and I doubt the tax man will agree that Futurizon needs a high end oscilloscope or mass spectrometer so I have to set my sights low. The results of this blog justify the R&D tax offset for the thermometer. But the future will see drops in costs for most high technologies so I also expect to get far more interesting kit cheaply soon.

Even starting with the frequent assumption that in the future you can do anything, you still have to think what you want to do. I can get instant temperature readings now. In the future, I may also want a full absorption spectrum, color readings, texture and friction readings, hardness, flexibility, sound absorption characteristics, magnetic field strength, chemical composition, and a full range of biological measurements, just for fun. If Spock can have one, I want one too.

But that only covers reality, and reality will only account for a small proportion of our everyday life in the future. I may also want to check on virtual stuff, and that needs a different kind of sensor. I want to be able to point at things that only exist in virtual worlds. It needs to be able to see virtual worlds that are (at least partly) mapped onto real physical locations, and those that are totally independent and separate from the real world. I guess that is augmented reality ones and virtual reality ones. Then it starts getting tricky because augmented reality and virtual reality are just two members of a cyberspace variants set that runs to more than ten trillion members. I might do another blog soon on what they are, too big a topic to detail here.

People will be most interested in sensors to pick up geographically linked cyberspace. Much of the imaginary stuff is virtual worlds in computer games or similar, and many of those have built-in sensors designed for their spaces. So, my character can detect caves or forts or shrines from about 500m away in the virtual world of Oblivion (yes, it is from ages ago but it is still enjoyable). Most games have some sort of sensors built-in to show you what is nearby and some of its properties.

Geographically linked cyberspace won’t all be augmented reality because some will be there for machines, not people, but you might want to make sensors for it all the same, for many reasons, most likely for navigating it, debugging, or for tracking and identifying digital trespass. The last one is interesting. A rival company might well construct an augmented reality presence that allows you to see their products alongside ones in a physical shop. It doesn’t have to be in a properly virtual environment, a web page is still a location in cyberspace and when loaded, that instance takes on a geographic mapping via that display so it is part of that same trespass. That is legal today, and it started many years ago when people started using Amazon to check for better prices while in a book shop. Today it is pretty ubiquitous. We need sensors that can detect that. It may be accepted today as fair competition, but it might one day be judged as unfair competition by regulators for various reasons, and if so, they’ll need some mechanism to police it. They’ll need to be able to detect it. Not easy if it is just a web page that only exists at that location for a few seconds. Rather easier if it is a fixed augmented reality and you can download a map.

If for some reason a court does rule that digital trespass is illegal, one way of easy(though expensive) way of solving it would be to demand that all packets carry a geographic location, which of course the site would know when the person clicks on that link. To police that, turning off location would need to be blocked, or if it is turned off, sites would not be permitted to send you certain material that might not be permitted at that location. I feel certain there would be better and cheaper and more effective solutions.

I don’t intend to spend any longer exploring details here, but it is abundantly clear from just inspecting a few trees that making detectors for virtual worlds will be a very large and diverse forest full of dangers. Who should be able to get hold of the sensors? Will they only work in certain ‘dimensions’ of cyberspace? How should the watchers be watched?

The most interesting thing I can find though is that being able to detect cyberspace would allow new kinds of adventures and apps. You could walk through a doorway and it also happens to double as a portal between many virtual universes. And you might not be able to make that jump in any other physical location. You might see future high street outlets that are nothing more than teleport chambers for cyberspace worlds. They might be stuffed with virtual internet of things things and not one one of them physical. Now that’s fun.