Inspire

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.

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."

Kevin Kelly on Co-Creation, Filtering, Top-Down Control and Bottom-Up Self Organization (The Bottom Is Not Enough)

I used to read a lot of books on complexity science, ranging from Sante Fe professor Stuart Kauffman, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, Ralph Stacey and Mitchell Waldrop. Inspiring books ! One of the recurring topics that fascinated me (and it still does) is the right balance between top-down control/design and bottom-up self organization within all my online and offline experiences. When I read all these books (around 10-15 years ago), there was no buzz surrounding co-creation, open source, mass collaboration, wisdom of the crowds, collective intelligence and web 2.0. Funnily, these fields intersected around 2003 when I read Smart Mobs (Howard Rheingold) and when Yme Bosma showed me the importance of blogging as well as web 2.0 applications, technologies and tools (thanks again Yme !!).

My view on the future development of bottom-up structures is similar to the one conveyed in this great post by Kevin Kelly on bottom-up self organization. It will increasingly be the common modus operandi. The balance will slowly shift towards open source (see also the highly recommended books by Yochai Benkler and Don Tapscott) while still leaving room for top-down design, filtering and control.

I would like to add an additional point : we have physical, biological and social systems. In my view the whole thinking about self organization is most applicable within physical and biological systems. Social systems are behaving more biological than before (as Kelly wrote in Out of Control in 1994) BUT they are inherently more complex due to the nature of the mind. The mind (and its powers as well as limitations) makes purely bottom-up solutions and self organization less effective relative to physical and biological systems. The complexity of coordinating the individual and group minds is a daunting task. Even Wikipedia has some top-down controls built in. In my own experience right now within Mobile Monday Amsterdam we as a team are asking ourselves the same questions related to which degree open source and bottom-up structures can be applied to offline events. I believe Reboot and LIFT Conference are interesting bottom-up offline events in this respect. Our MoMo members/audience can create the whole event themselves in the near future (location, speakers, theme, etc. etc.), albeit as an experiment or not.

Below some highlighted quotes from the post by Kelly. Really looking forward to his newest release The Technium :-)

"What's new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
...ad infinitum.

The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare. The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.

Judged from where we start, harnessing the dumb power of the hive mind will always take us much further than we can dream. Judged from where we hope to end up, the hive mind is not enough; we need an additional top-down push. Since we are only at the start of the start, it's the hive mind all the way for now."

Event Update: Second Mobile Monday Amsterdam and PICNIC07 / Cross Media Week Amsterdam

Just finished my favorite week of this year encompassing two key events : Mobile Monday Amsterdam (MoMoAMS) and PICNIC / PICNIC07 (also known as Cross Media Week Amsterdam). In one word: inspiring ! Both were in the second edition. Below some recommendations and sharing from my side...

Mobile Monday Amsterdam : Mobile Communities
As one of the founders and organisers I found it very thrilling to see around 230 internet, mobile and marketing professionals in one room. Among them many of the leading twitterazi, thinkers and innovators in the Netherlands. The presentation by Tomi T Ahonen - author of Digital Korea and Communities Dominate Brands and leading mobile thinker (Mobile as the 7th Mass Medium) - was impressive. You can find in presentation and video format on our blog : presentation and video by Tomi T Ahonen on Mobile Communities. Some take-away case studies: Kart Writer, Flirtomatic, CyWorld, Any Question Answered (AQA), mobile idle screen tickers and OCR recognition/translation software for mobile phones. The presentation above contains more mobile community examples than the video. It also includes the best mobile internet sources around as recommended by leading thinker Tomi T Ahonen.

PICNIC / PICNIC07

• Presentation of Jyri Engestrom from Jaiku the next stage for social objects/networks/graphs and FaceRank instead of PageRank. FaceRank is based on social proximity (same connections), physical proximity (offline closeness), shared social objects and shared taste/values. Jyri was our first keynote spreaker at Mobile Monday Amsterdam. I was enthrilled by his deepening of his vision in just a few months. Definitely, one of the leading thinkers on social networks in my view.
• PhotoSynth with a incredible zoom-in and zoom-out function with breathtaking beauty and precision. Good to combine with Pixsta and Etsy.com
• Pablos Holman with a terrific and funny talk on different practical hacking stories and cases
• Stefan Sagmeister with an outstanding and highly creative overview of his work, just stunning !
• Alex Steffen with heartfelt stories on the environment and practical and positive case studies helping our world to be a better place. This video from TED by Steffen shows us the way
• Polar Rose for content analysis and searching photos
• Jack Meyers on branding and marketing in virtual worlds. En passant he gave a terrific overview of digital marketing trends worldwide, even on behavioral targeting !
• David Burden with a sublime presentation on the Metaverse Roadmap, Second Life, Augmented Reality, Mirror Worlds/Google Earth and Lifelogging. And how they interact and converge. One second favorite speech of this great week. Thrilling ! Soon you can download his presentation in this link from Platform Virtuele Werelden (PVW) and Jack Meyers prezzie is already here. Staggering to see a live presentation of real-time flight information fed into Second Life from Google Earth, opens up huge possibilities. Also, communicating with your 2L avatar using RSS. David will speak later this year on the Metaverse Summit where I can see him again :-)
• Portable Social Networks: a great workshop with Jyri Engestrom, Marc Canter, Dick Hardt, Biz Stone, Yme Bosma and many other leading thinkers. This was highly content driven (moving/synching/federating social networks, Identity 2.0, microformats, openID, lock-in, business models) and inspiring. I felt like witnessing the leading edge worldwide in social networking brainstorming for yet unknown solutions to complex, urgent and important problems and issues. No final answers as yet while I left the room but it was very special. I really hope these kind of sessions will become more commonplace going forward.
• Dennis Crowley on social networks, tagging the real world with cases like Sharkrunner and Plundr. His prezzie resonated strongly with the one from David Burden integrating real time, real data within games, virtual world and alternate reality games. 
• Nicolas Nova on augmented reality and twittering with your cat :-D  Here you can see his blog
• Adam Greenfield on Urban Landscapes, Gaming and Computing. Mobile Devices + Shared Visualisations+Tagging = Social Object = Jyri's presentation :) Extending the insights of Jyri Engestrom on social objects on location as a social object. More later in my blog and presentations
• eLens from MIT as an insightful example of city guides with personal and social overlays
• The Urban Garden: self organised bus stop with user generated content/tagging, craigslist data, narrowcasting and feeds from ubiquitous computing
• Emotion Maps and Biosensing
• Ben Cerveny on serious gaming, game culture, simulations, multidimensional and visual representations of pervasive and ubiquitous computing combined with augmented reality and GeoWeb. This was my ultimate highlight of this week. Shivers all over ! Complexity Science applied to games and real life. An extension of David Weinbergers' presentation on Everything is Miscallenous integrating different external data sources and categorizations on real life and serious gaming case studies. Here your can see his video from the LIFT Conference this year. His talk on PICNIC07 was different however, in my view even much better.

And of course all the dinners, talks and networking before, in-between en afterwards. Thanks to all who contributed, helped and organized ! See you soon at another inspiring web 2.0/3.0 or mobile event. I am planning to go to the next Mobile Monday Amsterdam (november), LeWeb3 (december) and Metaverse Summit 2007 (december; as a speaker, my first international speech on an inspiring event on lifelogging, augmented reality, web 3.0 and virtual worlds together with a.o. Jamais Cascio and David Burden).

Book Recommendation: Theory U from C. Otto Scharmer from MIT

I am reading a remarkable, high-impact, deep, original, inspiring and profound book from MIT called Theory U written by C. Otto Scharmer. It is difficult to summarize this outstanding book due to its enormous richness but in my view and experience it is in the league of the works from Jared Diamond, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. It is a spiritual, personal and business journey combined. Very special indeed. And it resonates with an incredible amount of my own experiences and observations, especially within my intensive Twitter community as a transformative, open ended journey since March this year.

I just can't stop reading it, every page is so full with ideas. Some hints on topics: blind spots, growth, spirituality, innovation, creativity, leadership, change management, web 2.0, globalization, communities, learning, smart mobs, evolution of organizations, democracy, capitalism, open source, emergence, complexity and many examples from private life, politics (Iraq) and business.

Referenced leading authors are among others (be prepared for a long shot): Brian Arthur, Argyris, Senge, Brand, Carr, Castells, Christensen, Coase, Collins and Porras, Dalai Lama, de Geus, Florida, Friedman, Fukuyama, Gladwell, Goethe, Habermas, Hagel, Hamel, Handy, Hawken, Heidegger, von Hippel, Maslow, Minsky, Mintzberg, Morgan, Nietzsche, Nonaka, Peters, Prahalad, Putman, Sen, Sheldrake, Soros, Steiner, Tolle,   Sun Tzu, Varela, Trompenaars, Weick, Wheatley and Wilber. And all combined in a structured and new way...amazing.

Highly recommended ! This clearly is my favorite book of 2007, no doubt about that :-D

The Impact of P2P and Peer Production on our Economy, Society and our Digital Media Future

Just discovered a new inspiring speaker via the blog Smart Mobs called Michel Bauwers. Below his presentation with a 50 minute timeframe on P2P, peer-to-peer networks, communities, co-creation, mass collaboration, open innovation, FabLabs, wikinomics and peer production.

Highly recommended as this is one broad overview of key trends in our economy, society and digital media infrastructure. It is all-encompassing and thought provoking in many many ways. And it is clear. It integrates the views from Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Don Tapscott, Henry Jenkins, Neil Gerschenfeld, Chris Anderson, David Weinberger and Alex Steffen in a new way. However, I do miss the impact of biotech and nanotech on his vision of peer production.

My 2 cents concerning this video:
- I do believe that open source, commons-based, non market peer production will grow the coming decades, both in the immaterial as well as material world (using Web/FabLabs).
- I like the distinction between hierarchical systems, decentralised systems and distributed systems and its impact on self organisation and fluidity (reminded me of David Weinbergers' latest book on categorisation). As the world clearly is moving at the speed of light towards to innovation, agility and flexibility, the distributed (web and P2P) model seems to become the dominant model, both organisationally as well as technically.
- I support the idea that the increasing autonomy and empowerment of individuals and their social networks/peers will reverse the power balance. Sources of trust are in peers, no longer in key institutions. Strong institutions with power are relevant and effective in situations where individuals are not empowered (enough), these are increasingly a thing of the past. Indeed, Eamonn Kelly - CEO of Global Business Network - wrote a piece on the impact of the emergence, self organisation, bottom-up culture on global issues. Additionally, Paul Hawken recently made the growing impact of NGOs explicit in this book Blessed Unrest.
- I dig the idea that peer production is about intrinsic motivation, authenticity, love and passion. And that's precisely why these initiatives thrive, both economically as well as ethically. If you self-select a project, YOU are in there with your whole mind and heart, including all your social and ecological values and norms. This means in my view that key improvements in our ecological and social agenda worldwide will be driven by these peer produced projects and not primarily by for-profit organisations (e.g. WiserEarth, WorldChanging etc.).

My Own Presentation on Trends, Digital Media, Marketing, Digital Marketing and Communication: Why Identity, Authenticity and Creativity Will Dominate Our Lives

Here is my presentation on different trends, digital media, web 2.0, web 3.0, marketing, digital marketing and communication/branding. Dutch only as yet, English one will follow soon. Focus is on different technological, environmental, economic and political views (macro perspective) as well as psychological, social and cultural views (micro perspective) and how they intersect, converge and reinforce in many different ways on different levels of analysis.

Key take away: Identity (knowing your intrinsic motivation, purpose and talents), Authenticity (being) and Creativity (doing) as reinforcing themes and values in the emerging and increasingly open space of the next web(s), biotech and ubiquitous computing where the all-encompassing and increasing availability of more granular and personal data of all sorts make the invisible visible and explicit to the benefit of ourselves, our social network, our peers and the market/global brain/humanity as a whole. The essential used to be invisible to the eye....until now and it will bring about massive transformations for the benefit of us all.

Hope you'll enjoy it.

Bruce Sterling on Spimes, the Internet of Things, GeoWeb, RFID, Cradle to Cradle and the Future of the Web

To me Bruce Sterling is one of the most inspiring speakers around. In September, 2007 his latest book will be released called Ascendancies - The Best of Bruce Sterling. I pre-ordered it. Here you can watch his presentation and powerful vision during the LIFT Conference on different important emergent trends like GeoWeb, RFID, Augmented Reality, mobile search, mobile social networks, Internet of Things and sustainability.

Highly recommended as this is in my view one of his best presentations I have seen so far.

Paul Hawken on The Great New Transformation, Environment, Community, Spirituality and Immune Systems

Below you can watch the presentation by Paul Hawken on Fora.tv in The Long Now Foundation section. His latest book - Blessed Unrest - is already a bestseller.

Without any doubt this has got to be one of the best presentations I have seen so far. Style, form, content, originality of video inserts, it's all there. Inspiring and recommended ! The Q&A part is also very interesting due to questions on singularity, communities, natural capitalism and growth limits.

Take-away: right now there are more than two million separate environmental-social justice organizations around the world with 100 million people dedicating their lives to humanity. WOW ! More on the website WiserEarth. Soon I will be actively involved in one of the key Dutch initiatives to boost sustainability. So expect me to post more on environmental issues coming months. 

On BANG Convergence and Three Other Key Value Drivers in the Coming Decades

Global Business Network is one of my favorite sources. To me Peter Schwartz, Stewart Brand and Eamonn Kelly are leading thinkers. In this short PDF document Eamonn Kelly - author of the highly acclaimed (futuristic) book Powerful Times - sheds some light on four key drivers of value creation in the coming decades.

The reasons for posting this one are the importance of the Gift Economy (see also the recent remarks by Kevin Kelly, Yochai Benkler and Don Tapscott), the revitalization of the Physical Infrastructure Economy (creative new insight) and most importantly the coming BANG convergence. BANG convergence is bigger than the current Digital Convergence and it relates to Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes. This is one of my favorite topics for a very long time as a result of reading the book Complexity. A life changer to me ! After reading this book in 1993, I was lured to the Santa Fe Institute as an inspiring knowledge platform for BANG convergence. It inspired me to read great books by Stuart Kauffman and Ilya Prigogine. And when we watch all those outstanding videos on TED we can see by our own senses why the BANG convergence is the biggest value creator of our times.