chanson

I've loved the TEDTalks podcasts for quite a while and I've been catching up on the videos on my Apple TV and iPhone.

It turns out that Pop!Tech has Pop!Casts which are very similar in scope and presentation. And in quality! If you like the one, you will enjoy the other.

Subscribe to the audio or the video — especially if you have an Apple TV, it's a great way to get some interesting and enlightening video content that will look decent (though not necessarily great due to bandwidth limitations) on your big flat screen — content that comes to you almost entirely outside the Big Media distribution system, no less! Check it out.

The next thing I can't wait to see is the Singularity Summit 2007 that was recently held by the Singularity Institute in San Francisco. I waited too long to sign up for it so I didn't get to reserve a space to attend, but I'm sure some interesting material will come out of it and they've said they'll be producing podcasts.

I'm not sure when it happened, but OpenCroquet.org is now a fancy MediaWiki for the Croquet Consortium.

In case you haven't seen it, Croquet is a bit like Second Life, but instead of being a client that connects to a server, it's a node that can talk to other nodes and that provides an immersive 3D environment for building Interesting Stuff. The difference is that, unlike Second Life, it's tools for building Interesting Stuff aren't stone knives and bearskins primitive. Why? Because it's built on top of Squeak Smalltalk!

Don't worry, though — it's plenty fast, too, though certainly rougher around the edges at the moment than Second Life. The Croquet environment leverages native platform technologies for things like 3D and audio, and Squeak Smalltalk is also getting some extensive performance work done lately — check out the Exupery dynamic optimizing compiler for an example of the kind of work Croquet will be able to leverage.

Really, Croquet seems likely to be the first step in bringing about some of the good parts of Snow Crash like the distributed, immersive Metaverse. After all, we're already well along in bringing about the bad parts of Snow Crash — see the classic essay Grim Meathook Future by Joshua Ellis for some details.

Reading through the current Croquet FAQ, one thing Croquet definitely needs soon is NAT traversal. Otherwise, how are people going to be able to collaborate on improving Croquet from their home wireless networks? I bet someone who knows their way around the common traversal protocols could put together some classes for handling it fairly easily...

But that doesn't mean he's not onto something.

Scott Adams, The End of Humanity (The Dilbert Blog):

They say that many technologies owe their existence to sex. Porn drove the cost of VCRs down, for example. And porn was the early fuel for the growth of the Internet. I see one more area where this phenomenon is likely to repeat: robots.

Have you heard about the company that’s making realistic life-sized sex dolls? They cost up to $10,000. I haven’t seen one in person (really, I haven’t) but they reportedly weigh as much as a real person and are eerily lifelike.

I've said since the late 1990s — ever since I first learned of them, really — that the first fully ambulatory, fully interactive androids would come from RealDoll or a company creating something similar. And though I had seen Cherry 2000 at the time, it was well before I'd even heard of Chobits. (Note for anyone who cares — very minor spoilers follow.)

Chobits depicts fairly well what a world where might wind up looking like — especially in the book-within-the-book A City With No People. The route it takes is a bit more circuitous than just sex robots, however; the robots in it are personal computers that are more personal assistants that eventually become the centers of their users' lives.

Not like that would ever happen. No way, no how...

Oh no! The Singularity Summit at Stanford is also on May 13 — the final day of DCamp! What to attend, what to attend...

Dennis Cheung shares with us a brief outline of the next century.

Is it just me, or has the accelerating growth in weblogs, the accelerating growth in computing power, and the accelerating exposure of normal programmers to highly dynamic languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby combined to bring about a resurgence of interest in Lisp?

In preparation of welcoming our new parenthetical overlords, I've been reading The Art of the Metaobject Protocol and over the weekend I installed OpenMCL:

% openmcl
Welcome to OpenMCL Version 1.0 (DarwinPPC32)!
? (require "cocoa")

For more Lisp fun, and a convenient Lisp blog aggregator, check out Planet Lisp.

I think languages that follow the lead of Common Lisp, Dylan, and modern Smalltalk have the most potential as Singularity enablers due to their abstraction and complexity-management features. At some point, I want to write a bit about why they haven't so far seen the kind of uptake that either the C-family languages or the (so-called) "scripting" languages have.

Yes, I know all about Richard Gabriel's Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big which gave us the Worse Is Better aphorism. I don't have quite the same take on it though I certainly think Gabriel's perspective is valuable.

Over my Thanksgiving break, I disconnected myself from the electronic part of my brain and did a couple things I've been meaning to do for a while: I watched all of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (including S.A.C. 2nd Gig), and I re-read A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.

Note: I shouldn't have to put a spoiler notice in for a 13-year-old book, but I will anyway. So don't read this if you haven't read A Fire Upon the Deep and you plan to, and you don't want plot details spoiled. Instead, buy it and read it.

( Now that that's out of the way... )

Wesner Moise, 50 Years From Now:

I was speaking to a woman in her 80’s, and it was remarkable hearing about a different age in which she lived through World War II as a young adult. Fifty years from now, I will be over 80 and living in a changed world that will be every bit as different 1950’s were from today.

Actually, it won't be every bit as different. It will be even more different than today is from the 1950s thanks to the persistent acceleration in the rate of change.

The 1900s were different than the 1850s, but the 1950s were even more different than the 1900s. The 2000s are even more different still, and it's hard — or, if you think the Singularity is approaching, impossible — to imagine just how different the 2050s will truly be.

I picked up 攻殻機動隊 Stand Alone Complex O.S.T.2 via YesAsia.com yesterday. It's just wonderful. Yoko Kanno. Origa. Jazz. Electronica. Rock. Mmm.

I wasn't really that into Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, but the soundtracks are excellent and the entire series has been growing on me as a result. Last weekend I rented the original Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and watched them back to back, and they've left much more of an impression this time around than they did when I rented the original many years back.

What I like about them is that they explore the run up to a Kurzweilian intelligence amplification Singularity.

I believe that we're headed for the Singularity within my lifetime, unless someone royally fucks our world up. But it will take a lot to fuck up the progress of science and technology — a lot more than making kids stupid by teaching Creationism instead of science, a lot more than trying to undermine the US technical job market, a lot more than trying to bankrupt Social Security and permanently trash our economy, and even a lot more than trying to hasten a psychotic religion's End Times prophecies.

Technological progress will not only continue but continue to accelerate, and sooner or later we'll pass the knee of the exponential curve. And that's when things will get really interesting.