Haptics past and future: Gloves and the Octopus Butler Robot

    My interlocutor for this month:  The Wii

Phenotropics; web mashups, brains, bacteria, and how to escape the curse of neo-Von Neumannism

    My interlocutor for this month:  Suffering programmers everywhere

A good place to start is  here. ...and here's Salon's story on it. Ray Kurzweil has written a counter-manifesto here. Here's an essay about it in American Prospect.  Here's Upside's article on it, and here's a lot of ranting about Upside's version of what I said on Slashdot. 

Here are links related to specific topics explored in the Half-manifesto"

The "Singularity"

In effort to make utopianism respectable once again, I gave talk on a 1000 year optimistic scenario.  These are some of the powerpoint slides from that talk, though alas some browsers won't read them. 

The Association for Computing Machinery asked various people to write essays on the subject of "hope" in the next fifty years of computing. These were published in the fiftieth anniversary special issue of the ACM's Communications magazine. Here's my contribution, titled "The Frontier Between Us".  I stand by everything I said in the above piece, even the bit about the pernicious longevity of MS DOS influence, which, far from becoming truly extinct, now haunts us in stealth.

Here's a vintage interview which captures some of the delirious, infectious way I used to talk about VR in my twenties.

Finally added some images of vintage VPL VR equipment from the 1980s in answer to many requests- will add more and better photos and documentation soon.

Here's an interview about Phenotropics, from the main Java website.  And here is the inevitable slashdot riot.  Most of the cranky complaints are about one particular issue, and in this case I have to say the critics are absolutely correct.  I goofed by not catching an incorrect number when I checked the interview for accuracy.  The number was stated as 10,000,000.  It should clearly have been higher.  But that value isn't important to the idea.  If you want to know what this is all about, read the interview!  Many thanks to all the people who have written extended comments on the ideas in the interview and sent them to me directly.  I will read and respond- might take me a while! Here's the second part of the interview on the java website.  This portion covers some of my earlier activities, like VR.

If you missed this seminar on Phenotropics, here are my characteristically sloppy slides.

Title:  Should Computer Science Get Rid of Protocols Altogether?

Abstract:   Computers are finally beginning to connect to the physical world with a little of the facility displayed by living organisms, which are generally able to interact reliably with an environment even though unplanned elements are often present.  Medical instrumentation, robotics, and advanced user interfaces have all been improved recently by using techniques such as pattern recognition and predictive filtering.  But operating systems and programming languages are still conceived of in the terms of mid-twentieth century engineering, in which sending signals on wires between slow machines was the central metaphor, and the protocol was the only solution.  Perhaps it is time to take some of the advances from recent systems that interface to the real world and apply them to the world that remains strictly inside the computer. Components in such systems would connect together through pattern recognition of each other instead of adherence to protocols.  This approach might be called “phenotropic”.  While the phenotropic idea is still not fully formed, there are reasons to hope that phenotropic systems would display more useful failure modes, facilitating adaptive systems and avoiding crashes, and might also grow to larger sizes than traditional protocol-adherence-based systems. 

My Blog on HuffingtonPost is (or was- I lost interest after a while) stimulated by politics and headlines, but enduring ideas are addressed, and I think you will find that the entries are still worth reading.  The names and places can always be changed to keep up with the headlines of the future.  

Go back to Jaron's home page.