Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

This weekend I spoke at BIL, a conference that was created to play off of the famous and expensive TED conference. BIL began as an un-conference, which is to say an ad-hoc conference created on short notice where the attendees are the speakers. Such conferences tend to be free or near-free. The movement begain with Tim O'Reilly's FOO Camp. FOO camp is for Tim's friends, and he has far more friend that can come. One year, he was explaining how he rotated among people and so some of those who were not invited that particular year (including myself) had a "BAR" camp which was a tremendous success, and created a trend.

The first two BILs were a lot of fun and worked pretty well. They had a variety of sub-par speakers, as these "anybody who wants to can talk" conferences often have, but there was always tons of hall conversation or sessions in other rooms to make up for that. And a modest number of TED speakers came over and gave their TED talks for free at BIL, and various regular TED attendees came as well.

This year's BIL did not live up to the earlier standard, and the hard-working and generous organizers are fully aware of that, so this is not an attempt to criticise them, but rather to look at the problem. Many things went wrong, including a last minute need to move the conference from a Saturday and Sunday(with only Saturday morning overlap with TED) to Friday and Saturday morning, which had total overlap with TED and minimal weekend time. This change was forced because no venue could be found (cheaply enough, at least) which would offer Saturday afternoon and Sunday. However, it was a ruinous change -- attendance on the workday Friday was way down, and even lower on Saturday, and no TED speakers came though a few attendees showed up, mostly near the end in the 2 hours after TED that BIL went on. The "outdoor" post-sessions were of limited success as a conference, but OK socially (I did not attend the planned Sunday events.)

Tomorrow, I will be speaking on pre-Robocar technology at BIL an unconference that parallels the famous and expensive TED conference. This is in Long Beach, CA. Unconferences are fun, cheap and often as good as expensive conferences. I will also be attending a reception at TED tonight for Singularity University, which I lecture at, so I may see you if you're at TED as well.

Last night's EFF bash was a great success. Thanks to Adam Savage and all the others who made it go so well.

In early 2000, after a tumultuous period in the EFF's history, and the staff down to just a handful, I was elected chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I had been on the board for just a few years, but had been close to the organization since it was founded, including participating with it as a plaintiff in the landmark supreme court case which struck down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

I'll have many more observations about my recent trip to DLD, Davos and the Alps soon, but one thing I've decided I do want to find (or train) is a travel agent/helper who can assist well with unscheduled travel (ie. a road or railpass trip.)

With unscheduled travel, you don't know in the morning where you will end up that night. You only figure it out later in the day. Sometimes you just drive until it starts getting late and then you pick where you will end the night. It's hard (or expensive) to do this in high season but in low season you can always find a room, and I and many others like that sort of freedom.

So when you do pick where you want to end up you have a few options:

1. You can have a guidebook or database (such as AAA in the USA) and phone around places until you get something you like
2. You can hunt around for web access (better if you have a data plan on your phone) and use sites like TripAdvisor and the various booking search engines (like Kayak/Sidestep) to find a decent hotel at a good price.
3. You can just drive into town and look for Vacancy/Zimmer Frei signs and go in and ask the price.
4. You can find somebody to do this for you.

There are problems with all these approaches. Method 3 (especially using tripadivsor) helps you avoid turkey hotels and find the better values. However, the databases cover only a fraction of the hotels, and the online reservations systems also cover only a small fraction of hotels in an area. There will be better values out there. On the other hand, many hotels offer a better price through the internet than if you call them, or will charge even more if you just walk in.

I'm at DLD in Munich, and going to Davos tomorrow. While at DLD I made a brief mention during a panel on identity and tracking of my concept of the privacy dangers of the AIs of the future, which are able to extract things from recorded data (like faces) that we can't do today.

I mentioned a new idea, however, which is a search engine which focuses on the negative, because though advanced algorithms it can tell the difference between positive and negative content.

These days it is getting very common to make videos of presentations, and even to do live streams of them. And most of these presentations have slides in Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever. But this always sucks, because the camera operator -- if there is one -- never moves between the speaker and the slide the way I want. You can't please everybody of course.

There's a phenomenon we're seeing more and more often. A company screws over a customer, but this customer now has a means to reach a large audience through the internet, and as a result it becomes a PR disaster for the company. The most famous case recently was United Breaks Guitars where Nova Scotia musician David Carroll had his luggage mistreated and didn't get good service, so he wrote a funny song and music video about it.

This weekend is the Foresight Institute conference on molecular nanotechnology and AI. I am on the board of Foresight Institute and will be speaking on the latest developments in robocars at the conference, along with a raft of great speakers. If you are interested in futurist issues around AI, nanotech and other accelerating technologies, this is the longest running conference in the field and the place to be.

The pharma industry is littered with cases of drugs that showed good promise, but proved to be too dangerous when they got into human trials. Dangerous side effects will cancel development for most drugs. In some cases, such as Vioxx and Fen-Phen the dangerous effects were discovered later, and the drugs pulled from the market.

I was contacted this week by the daughter of Don Watt, a well known Canadian graphic designer responsible for the branding and logos at many large companies including Loblaws and WalMart. Watt had just died at the end of December, and she was looking for more information from me about her father's account of how he had secretly been the designer of the modern Canadian Flag. She contacted me, because in his story, my father, Charles Templeton, had been the go-between for Watt and the government leaders who picked the flag.

Everybody has an Avatar review. Indeed, Avatar is a monument of moviemaking in terms of the quality of its animation and 3-D. Its most interesting message for Hollywood may be "soon actors will no longer need to look pretty." Once the generation of human forms passes through the famous uncanny valley there will be many movies made with human characters where you never see their real faces. That means the actors can be hired based strictly on their ability to act, and their bankability, not necessarily their looks, or more to the point their age. Old actors will be able to play their young selves before too long, and be romantic leading men and women again. Fat actors will play thin, supernaturally beautiful leads.

And our images of what a good looking person looks like will get even more bizarre. We'll probably get past the age thing, with software to make old star look like young star, before we break through the rest of the uncanny valley. If old star keeps him or herself in shape, the skin, hair and shapes of things like the nose and earlobes can be fixed, perhaps even today.

But this is not what I want to speak about. What I do want to speak about involves Avatar spoilers.

Who writes a gift guide in January?

This one is not about specific gifts but rather a philosophy of gift giving. Every year at Seasons I run into the problem that decently well off adults have with gift giving. They will often ask for a list of possible gifts, not knowing what to get. And it can be hard to come up with the list because, frankly in these days of online ordering, if there's something you really want that is not that expensive an item, you would have bought it already.

I have the photo archives of a theatre company I was involved with for 12 years. It is coming upon its 50th anniversary. I have a high speed automatic scanner, so I am going to generate scans of many of the photos -- that part is not too hard. Even easier for modern groups in the digital age, where the photos are already digital and date-tagged.

I just landed on a flight from Toronto to San Francisco. If you were inside the USA you may not have heard about the various crazy rules applied to travel to the USA, or at least not experienced them. While we were away the rules changed every day, and perhaps every hour.

I've been feeling we in the secular, atheist world should still have an official event at the end of the year, since with the Christians and the Jews making merry, it's a good time to do it. We have New Year's Eve of course, but so does everybody.

This new holiday, to mark the changing of the Seasons might be called "Seasons." Of course that is in part so that all the people saying "Seasons Greetings" (without the apostrophe, oddly enough) will now be making our greeting. Another name for it could be "Holidays" but that does have religious roots.

I'm waiting for the right price point on a good >24" monitor with a narrow bezel to drop low enough that I can buy 4 or 5 of them to make a panoramic display wall without the gaps being too large.

I think URL shorteners are are a curse, but thanks to Twitter they are growing vastly in use. If you don't know, URL shorteners are sites that will generate a compact encoded URL for you to turn a very long link into a short one that's easier to cut and paste, and in particular these days, one that fits in the 140 character constraint on Twitter.

It's now becoming common to kludge a conference "backchannel" onto Twitter. I am quite ambivalent about this. I don't think Twitter works nearly as well as an internal backchannel, even though there are some very nice and fancy twitter clients to help make this look nicer.

But the real problem comes from the public/private confusion. Tweets are (generally) public, and even if tagged by a hashtag to be seen by those tracking an event, they are also seen by your regular followers. This has the following consequences, good and bad.

• Some people tweet a lot while in a conference. They use it as a backchannel. That's overwhelming to their followers who are not at the conference, and it fills up the feed.
• When multiple people do it, it's almost like a spam. I believe that conferences like using Twitter as backchannel because it causes constant mentions of their conference to be broadcast out into the world.
• While you can filter out a hashtag in many twitter clients, it's work to do so, and the general flooding of the feed is annoying to many.
• People tweeting at a conference are never sure about who they are talking to. Some tweets will clearly be aimed at fellow conference attendees. But many are just repeats of salient lines said on stage, aimed only at the outsiders.
• While you can use multiple tags and filters to divide up different concurrent sessions of a conference, this doesn't work well.
• The interface on Twitter is kludged on, and poor.
• Twitter's 140 character limit is a burden on backchannel. Backchannel comments are inherently short, and no fixed limit is needed on them. Sure, sometimes you go longer but never much longer.
• The Twitter limit forces URLs to be put into URL shorteners, which obscure where they go and are generally a bane of the world.

Dedicated backchannels are better, I think. They don't reach the outside world unless the outsiders decide to subscribe to them, but I think that's a plus. I think the right answer is a dedicated, internal-only backchannel, combined with a minimal amount of tweeting to the public (not the meeting audience) for those who want to give their followers some snippets of the conferences their friends are going to. The public tweets may not use a hashtag at all, or a different one from the "official" backchannel as they are not meant for people at the conference.

The most common dedicated backchannel tool is IRC. While IRC has its flaws, it is much better at many things than any of the web applications I have seen for backchannel. It's faster and has a wide variety of clients available to use with it. While this is rarely done, it is also possible for conferences to put an IRC server on their own LAN so the backchannel is entirely local, and even keeps working when the connection to the outside world gets congested, as is common on conference LANs. I'm not saying IRC is ideal, but until something better comes along, it works. Due to the speed, IRC backchannels tend to be much more rapid fire, with dialog, jokes, questions and answers. Some might view this as a bug, and there are arguments that slowing things down is good, but Twitter is not the way to attain that.

However, we won't stop those who like to do it via Twitter. As noted, conferences like it because it spams the tweetsphere with mentions of their event.

I would love to see an IRC Bot designed to gateway with the Twitter world. Here are some of the features it might have.

There is some controversy, including a critique from our team at the EFF of Facebook's new privacy structure, and their new default and suggested policies that push people to expose more of their profile and data to "everyone."

I understand why Facebook finds this attractive. "Everyone" means search engines like Google, and also total 3rd party apps like those that sprung up around Twitter.

You may have seen it already but it's amusing to watch this encoding of a 1958 Disney show on the highway of the future: