Inspire

My View on the Future of Human Identity, Human Potential and Self Realization

In the last few years we have witnessed incredible progress in robotics, biotech, artificial life and intelligence and cognitive neuroscience including connectomics from Harvard. Robots are already socially and emotionally intelligent to a certain extent as can be seen in the the stunning work by Cynthia Breazeal from MIT. Robots, AI and A-Life will increasingly narrow down the specific features, benefits and skills of us humans. What are our competitive advantages relative to these technological developments? My guess at this point in time this will boil down to (among other things) creativity and innovation and other right brain skills.

As all these technological developments will increasingly democratize and empower us as individuals - like almost all key technologies in the past have democratized eventually - we'll in my view probably end up with the situation in which children and adolescents will increasingly be exposed to these powerful tools. Not only as prevention or correction but simply as an 'awareness right'. In practice, we'll see that fMRI scans (benefiting from the current research on connectomics from the neuron level upwards) and personal DNA profiling (like in 23andMe) will democratize. Children and adolescents will know quite early in life what their skills, talents and dispositions are or can be. This will probably drive a deeper sense of human identity, self awareness, human potential as well as self realization. And educational system (offline as well as online) will somehow integrate these insights in the long run.

In short, the psychological trend of the last 20 years in which magazines, TV programs, books and educational systems test their users/readers (and successfully as this spreads around and around while users love it) will broaden into the fields biotech and cognitive neuroscience. With a strong focus on what makes us uniquely human relative to the advances in robotics, AI and A-Life.

I am thrilled by this prospect as this will probably enhance a lot of lives in the future.

Daniel Suarez Presents DAEMON - Bot-Mediated Reality at the LongNow Foundation

There are many incredible, fascinating and inspiring videos and presentations available on the web and this seems to increase every year. Below one of the better ones in my view. The reason is an upcoming science fiction novel called DAEMON - Bot-Mediated Reality by Daniel Suarez. Recently, he gave a high-impact presentation at the LongNow Foundation, of which I am an active/paid member since the beginning of 2008.

DAEMON deals with bots (software based on narrow AI incorporating algorithms for specific search, retrieve and actionable goals) and the future of the (mobile) web. Daniel shows us that bots are on the rise and that they redefine what it means to be human. What strikes me about this presentation can be summed up as follows:

• The first time it impressed me, but by the time of the second viewing this video really inspired me to broaden my vision.
• Bots are within my field of interest since May 2005 when I worked with/for Yme Bosma and Bas Verhart within MediaRepublic for extending the opportunities of the Eccky bot. Artificial Intelligence (AI), both narrow and general, is key to the development of chatbots.
• Recently, I visited the The Singularity Summit 2008, a remarkable and highly recommended event with speakers like Esther Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Nova Spivack, Eric Baum, Neil Gerschenfeld, Cynthia Breazeal (fantastic!) and Ben Goertzel. Many talks in this one-day-event considered AI, bots and robots. 
• Daniel Suarez raises several important questions based on the rise of bots. They focus on a new Internet (DarkNet with limited bot-access), lifelogging, pattern recognition, copyright (User Owned Data?), security, terrorism, privacy, authentication, authenticity, identity, outsourcing, (hyper)efficiency, games and virtual worlds and new organizational structures.
• Amazing insights related to advanced reputational (human) systems, social networks and Mobile Augmented Reality as a gateway to a newer, more secured and better Internet (DarkNet) as to block unlimited powers of bots in the next decades in the current internet.
• Bots are also related to the current global financial crisis. Bots are in almost all cases linear, dualistic and digital in nature. The non-linearity of the real world (see the remarks by Nassim Taleb) in most cases might imply sub-optimal decision making by financial bots as can be seen by our current crisis.

Recommended viewing by Peter Schwartz, Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly! The book will be officially released on January 9th, 2009.

Chris Anderson on The End of Theory (Wired/Edge) and the Petabyte Age and Its Impact on Scientific Evolution

Chris Anderson recently wrote a thought-provoking piece in Wired and Edge called The End of Theory in which he focuses on the rise of massive datasets, computational algorithms and correlations (instead of causation) for the next step in scientific evolution. Highly recommended reading.

More importantly, different leading thinkers like Kevin Kelly, Bruce Sterling, Daniel Hillis, George Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Stewart Brand and John Horgan respond to the Anderson view in this post on Edge analyzing the pros and cons of The End of Theory article. Below some quotes by Anderson and his critics.

In my view, correlation might boost useful science in the sense of working or realistic correlations. Nonetheless, in most disciplines intuition, creativity, asking good questions (perspectives/frames !), understanding, models and theory still have a clear value add, albeit for social / sharing reasons on top of a deeper understanding of the why of natural or social phenomena. Additionally, the reasoning of Chris Anderson is relevant for the rise of the mobile internet and its ubiquitous computing role in the near future. All these real-time mobile sensors might boost correlations and predictive capabilities to a certain degree while still acknowledging the power of Black Swans. Furthermore, Andersons' view seems to resonate with the Internet Scenario and Digital Gaia Scenario within the Singularity according to Vernor Vinge in which the continuing profileration and advancement of the internet will give rise to posthuman sense of consciousness as its too complex to contemplate. Finally, the role of the Semantic Web/Web 3.0 is interesting in the light of Andersons' reasoning. He seems to disagree with the benefits of the meaning and top-down structures of the Semantic Web. It would be great to see the responses of Tim Berners Lee and Nova Spivack to the Anderson piece. 

"All models are wrong, but some are useful. So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

Chris Anderson seems to think computers will reduce science to pure induction, predicting the future based on the past. This method of course can't predict black swans, anomalous, truly novel events. Theory-laden human experts can't foresee black swans either, but for the foreseeable future, human experts will know how to handle black swans more adeptly when they appear.

Just because we remove the limits and biases of human narrativity from science, does not mean other biases don't rush in to fill the vacuum.

It is clear to me that while numerical simulation and computation are welcome tools, they are helpful only when they are used by good scientists to enhance their powers of creative reasoning. One rarely succeeds by “throwing a problem onto a computer”, instead it takes years and even decades of careful development and tuning of a simulation to get it to the point where it yields useful output, and in every case where it has done so it was because of sustained, creative theoretical work of the kind that has been traditionally at the heart of scientific progress."

Our Technological Future: Special on the Singularity by Vernor Vinge

IEEE Spectrum has a fantastic special edition on the Singularity just released in June 2008.
In this post on the many faces of the Singularity and our human and technological future are some remarkable quotes by Vernor Venge. For all readers who are into deep future, Metaverse, Multiverse and Augmented Reality. Highly recommended as this is in my view mind-expanding and blowing material !

"I expect the singularity will come as some combination of the following:   
1. The AI Scenario: We create superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) in computers.
2. The IA Scenario: We enhance human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces—that is, we  achieve intelligence amplification (IA).
3. The Biomedical Scenario: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological operation of our brains.
4. The Internet Scenario: Humanity, its networks, computers, and databases become sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.
5. The Digital Gaia Scenario: The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

Several of the essays discuss the plausibility of mind uploads and consequent immortality for “our digitized psyches,” ideas that have recently appeared in serious  nonfiction, most notably Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. As with nanotechnology, such developments aren't prerequisites for the singularity. On the other hand, the goal of enhancing human intelligence through human-computer interfaces (the IA Scenario) is both relevant and in view. Today a well-trained person with a suitably provisioned computer can look very smart indeed. Consider just a slightly more advanced setup, in which an Internet search capability plus math and modeling systems are integrated with a head‑up display. The resulting overlays could give the user a kind of synthetic intuition about his or her surroundings. At a more intimate but still noninvasive level, DARPA's Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System is based on the idea of monitoring the user's mental activities and feeding the resulting analysis back to the user as a supplement to his or her own attention. And of course there are the researchers working with direct neural connections to machines. Larger numbers of implanted connections may allow selection for effective subsets of connections. The human and the machine sides can train to accommodate each other.

Brooks suggests that the singularity might happen—and yet we might not notice. Of the scenarios I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I think a pure Internet Scenario—where humanity plus its networks and databases become a superhuman being—is the most likely to leave room to argue about whether the singularity has happened or not. In this future, there might be all-but-magical scientific breakthroughs. The will of the people might manifest itself as a seamless transformation of demand and imagination into products and policy, with environmental and geopolitical disasters routinely finessed. And yet there might be no explicit evidence of a superhuman player.

A singularity arising from networks of embedded microprocessors—the Digital Gaia Scenario—would probably be less deniable, if only because of the palpable strangeness of the everyday world: reality itself would wake up. Though physical objects need not be individually sapient, most would know what they are, where they are, and be able to communicate with their neighbors (and so potentially with the world). Depending on the mood of the network, the average person might notice a level of convenience that simply looks like marvelously good luck. The Digital Gaia would be something beyond human intelligence, but nothing like human. In general, I suspect that machine/network life-forms will be faster, more labile, and more varied than what we see in biology. Digital Gaia is a hint of how alien the possibilities are."

On Publicis and Other Classic Ad Agencies and Their Positioning Within The Digital Marketing Ecosystem

The New York Times has some news on Publicis (a.o. Digitas) and how they envision the evolution of digital marketing. In my former posts on this blog (see the eMarketing tag on the right side of this blog) I shared my view on how Marketing 2.0 might be look like on a tool level, the impact of the Google-Doubleclick merger and the evolution of digital marketing and the key underlying principles of Marketing 2.0 and the meltdown of old media and their outdated ad models. Below some quotes from the NYT post.

My 2 cents:

• I like the idea of personalizing ads with ad variants, this clearly is one of the ways digital marketing will move forward as this will boost online ad ROI. As I wrote on my analysis of the Google-Doubleclick merger, I believe we will soon witness automated integration of clickstream data of users in different digital marketing tools like banners and e-mails.
• I wonder how Publicis can integratie advertisers' consumer data in their solution
• If you have the pull (not push) data from consumers, you are in the driver seat in the evolving digital marketing space. Clickstream data on search engines - my take-away from the outstanding book The Search by John Battelle - (albeit PC-based, mobile, iTV, Augmented Reality apps, 3D Web or gaming) are key in this respect in my view. So the question looms how Publicis will compete on this level with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. In my view, Google clearly is in the lead on most fields at this point in time
  
• Publicis assumes there will be a separation between online media and online ad agencies. In my view Google, Yahoo and Microsoft see this differently. Search engines are a key connector of consumer purchase intentions and online media, connecting content and commerce.
• Unfortunately, the vision of Publicis doesn't seem to take the impact of social networks and social networking on the digital marketing space into account (this is pull advertising as well like buzz marketing and open source marketing). Same applies for user generated online ads (and its variants). Their vision doesn't resonate enough in my view with the Wikinomics principles: openness, peering and sharing. They do dig the Global Operations part though
• What is the impact of open source ad networks and what is the role of Publicis in this respect ?

Looking forward to seeing your views on this topic. Thanks.

"Digitas uses data from companies like Google and Yahoo and customer data from each advertiser to develop proprietary models about which ads should be shown the first time someone sees an ad, the second time, after a purchase is made, and so on. The ads vary, depending on a customer’s age, location and past exposure to the ads.

Digitas executives say that consumers end up with a better experience — even a service — if the ads they are shown are relevant and new. “We now know how many times they’ve seen this ad, so stop annoying them,” said Mark Beeching, executive vice president and worldwide chief creative officer of Digitas. “The more you can standardize and automate in terms of making different versions, hallelujah. That money should be spent creating more content.” Along with automation, low-cost workers abroad will help create more versions of ads."

On Questions and Answers, Answers and Questions and the Role of Search Engines, Transformation and Social Networks

Some musings on questions, answers and search engines. My passionate blog readers know that my core focus in my blog is on the intersection between technology and the mind. The theme below is haunting me for a while now.

With the rise of mobile devices and their search engines, the search for (standard) answers will be shortened and less important. Additionally, the increasing importance and impact of virtual agents (Web 3.0, semantic web) as well as Augmented Reality applications will raise the bar even more for hard answers. At least, for some matters. Why ? Communication has four different levels : weather, facts and figures, emotions and intimacy. I suspect in the future the most interesting (and hard) questions and answers will migrate slowly towards emotions and intimacy. And this is where the importance of Transformation (Joseph Pine II) and social networks comes to the fore. The weather and facts are non-personal, emotions and intimacy by default aren't. Furthermore, every answer gives rise to new questions, more deep questions that is. Combine this insight with the rising importance of multi-disciplinary studies, disciplines and professionals and we see the rise of more integrated questions and answers with much more depth. We can already witness this in the increasing saliency of scientific papers encompassing different disciplines.

In short, technology is changing the nature of questions we will ask ourselves and the world around us.  We will ask more personal questions using technology than ever before. More deep factual, scientific questions, more emotional questions as well as more questions on intimacy. Perhaps Ray Kurzweil was right: we might end up being spiritual machines after all ;-)

How do you see this unfold ?

Prometeus Media Revolution: Future Vision on Digital Media in 2050: A Critical Analysis

The video below called Prometeus Media Revolution is a thought-provoking vision on the future of digital media until 2050. There are some powerful ideas in here. Here are my comments and musings based on this 5 minute video:

• Be all you can be (Man = God); here I miss the strong interrelationships between digital media, biotech, nanotech and cognitive neuroscience. More importantly, I miss (the importance of) the notion of Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality/Google Earth in this video
• Multiple identities and avatars -> more empathy & more effective communication as well as more self awareness/identity awareness (intrinsic motivation and unique capabilities)
• Sharing of memories and processes -> more productivity and more empathy. We already see this happening right now with partial solutions like Clutzr
• The movie Abre Los Ojos / Vanilla Sky resonates strongly with the latter part in the video (virtual dreaming versus your real life)
• The vid is about the rise of the Gift Economy (Kevin Kelly) and rise of Creative Commons (Lessig)
• Advertisement becomes information (not propaganda), comparison and experience. Here I miss key concepts like attention, relevancy, intention(s), trust and permission based/opt-in. I do really like the idea of Content Creators producing their own advertising/commercials. Powerful but inside-out, not recipient driven !
• I like the idea of Personal Agents delivered by Google due to its link with Web 3.0/Semantic Web
• I also love the idea of reliving history episodes as a participant/active agent -> very high impact and emotional as well as educational value due to its immersiveness
• Furthermore, the Spirit theme resonates with me strongly as a result of my posts on Transformation, Spirituality, Identity and Authenticity (Identity, Authenticity and Creativity as reinforcing forces in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0). However, I wonder if it will be possible in any time to convey and transfer feelings based on lifelogging materials like in Spirit in this video. What I miss is the value and possibility of Dreaming as a source of new virtual worlds and experiences. I believe we don't have to travel outer space as they increase our Places repetoire in virtuality. We have our hands full living out our continuously evolving personal dreams in my view. That is endless
• I don't believe in 'Totems' on the street for printing purposes. This will be personal/mobile/integrated, if any ;-) Papers can get lost, digital stuff can't
• Digital terrestial won't be abandoned due to the implications for the mobile TV revolution (e.g., the impact of technologies like DVB-H and DMB)
• "The media arena will consolidate"; hmmm, yes and no. The Long Tail will always be active, especially since the user generated content craze will intensify and broaden to collective peer production results. With the advent of LIVE mobile webcasting (ComVu, Kyte, Mogulus) we will witness an increase social content consumption relative to the market content consumption. Additionally, I don't buy evil scenarios with 1 company dominating the whole internet (like Google). Why ? Companies with too much power have always been dethroned by the masses as they embrace more benign competitors or develop their own (open source peer produced) alternatives. However, the current huge investments by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon data centers point in the direction as shown in the video below.
• I totally agree with the idea of Knowledge Flow instead of statis output(s)

The Metaverse Roadmap : The Future of Web 3.0, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality, MMORPGs, Lifelogging, Google Earth and All Other Key Trends in Digital Media

Finally, the Metaverse Roadmap 2006-2016 has been published with over 72 pages of very valuable content related to all subjects/tags from my blog and even much more. The section on Predictions (9) is just stunning and breathtaking, so much highly interesting insights. The coming months I will pick some topics from this report to give you my perspective on them.

This is probably one of the most important reports on the future of digital media as a whole. It covers all aspects: economic, social, cultural, legal, political, technological and psychological. To me, this Metaverse Roadmap report is the absolute number 1 resource at this moment. It's just incredible. Thanks to all who contributed.

Very highly recommended to all my readers !

On Chatbots, AI, Cyber Doubles, MyCyberTwin, Semantic Web and Authenticity versus Productivity

Below some quotes from Jeremy Wagstaff from Wall Street Journal. More in here. This is an interesting dillemma: productivity (and info discernment; see Linda Stone) versus authenticity.

Using cyber doubles we can interact and scan more efficiently while at the same time we are losing control and our own authenticity, albeit marginally due to the almost perfect online copies of our real personalities. What does it to ones' reputation (both individually as well as corporate) when people or users find out that their conversation with you was fake (and this was not announced by the chatbot before the conversation started) ? In my view the reaction depends on the specific context. On a personal level this might be less acceptable compared to the corporate setting. In my view using chatbots to save time for your personal live is a lack of (emotional) commitment to others while corporate bots can be justified by being (rationally) relevant and efficient.

However, I do believe in Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web enabling personal advisors or agents acting on our behalf, but in my view that is different from the statements below. Those 3.0 agents focus on the individual and not on the conversations with other people. 

To me MyCyberTwin is particularly interesting due to the fact that it is a transformative tool (see Joseph Pine II and this link on different other examples of Transformation) to gain self awareness. What is your own communication style ? Which patterns do you use unconsciously ? This tool makes the invisble visible, thereby allowing for personal growth.

"Expect a future where we don't interact with other people. Instead, we'll send our "cyber double" out to interact with other people's "cyber doubles" until things get interesting. Then, and only then, will real people take over. This is the vision of Liesl Capper, whose Sydney-based RelevanceNow! last week launched an early version of MyCyberTwin (mycybertwin.com), a service that allows you to create and hone an online version of yourself. Your cyber twin will then chat on your behalf on instant messaging, your blog or your MySpace page. Eventually much of what you do online will be left to your cyber double, indistinguishable from the real thing (you). As Ms. Capper puts it: "You can be you, even when you're not you."

Ms. Capper, armed with a degree in psychology, has with her business partner John Zakos taken what she says is a different tack: looking at the human side by measuring personality traits with psychometric testing, in order to generate a person's likely responses to questions, so that person's cyber twin can mimic that person better. This, Ms. Capper says, not only makes the replies more lifelike, it allows people to quickly generate and personalize their own cyber twins. Which is pretty much where MyCyberTwin stands now. Answer 80 questions and the software does a pretty good job of describing your character. Once that's done, you can tweak your cyber twin's responses further by feeding it content from your own emails, records of instant-message chats or blog posts, and it will, Ms. Capper says, sound like you. Some of these features aren't available yet, but Ms. Capper says that in initial tests "we're finding that a fairly large population don't know if they're talking to a real person or a cyber twin." My own tests suggest she's onto something, but still has some way to go."

On Antropocentrism, Parallelism, Evolution and its Impact on Digital Media

Ok, this is highly speculative but here goes anyway.... looking forward to your comments ! It is about three key concepts (parallellism, evolution and antropocentrism) and its impact on digital media.

• Parallellism: existence of parallel universes, quantum mechanics (possibilities) and dreams. We seem to live multiple lives and in multiple environments.
• Evolution: evolution of evolution (even the speed of light constant itself changes over time), evolutionary/expanding universe, evolutionary timescale/geology/tectonic plates, evolution of species and Gods Delusion. Static solutions, explanations, values and theories give way to dynamic versions. All is in flux.
• Antropocentrism: Ptolemeus -> Copernicus (earth-centric became sun-centric view of solar system); evolution of species (we are similar to the apes); dark matter and energy unknown -> we consist of only 5% of the known matter of the universe and extra terrestial intelligence probably exists (Drake's equation). All this implies that increasingly humans are not (!) the center of the universe.

How does this all relate to ICT and digital media ?

Increasing parallelism

• Serious Gaming (parallel strategic gaming and thinking before implementing IRL)
• 3D Worlds like Second Life (parallel worlds and identities)
  
• Augmented and Mixed Reality (combining physical and digital experiences)

Increasing evolution

• Hardware, software, services, content and connectivity increasingly become hackable, remixable, reconfigurable, open, dynamic and evolutionary. E.g., Amazon with web scale computing
• Evolutionary blog posts, articles ; they become conversations, open ended, self correcting and organic documents

Decreasing antropocentrism

• Bots, AI and machine (besides human) learning within Semantic Web (Web 3.0)
• The internet of things (pervasive or ubiquitous computing)
• Robotics