Quite some time ago, I challeged readers to come up with a better word than The Singularity to describe the phenomenon, famously named and described by Vernor Vinge, of a technological gulf so wide that it is impossible to understand and predict beyond it.
While it's stupid that the biggest story to come out of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive was the gossip over the interview of Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy, the one "hook" that has kept the story going is the suggestion that it was the use of twitter, in particular snide comments on twitter, which turned the audience against Lacy, the interviewer from Business Week.
There have even been comments (from those who weren't even there) suggesting witch hunts and misogyny. Other bloggers used hyperbolic terms like "train-wreck" and "career-ending" which are serious exaggerations.
Short summary. In a "keynote" interview, Lacy, who has just finished a book about Facebook, was on stage to interview Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg was, as usual, a difficult interview subject, but for a variety of reasons the character of the interview changed as the audience turned against Lacy, cheering criticism of her. Most agreed they had not seen somebody lose an audience like this in some time.
Earlier I wrote an essay on the paradox of identity management describing some counter-intuitive perils that arise from modern efforts at federated identity. Now it's time to expand these ideas to efforts for portable personal data, especially portable social networks.
Partly as a reaction to Facebook's popular applications platform, other social networking players are seeking a way to work together to stop Facebook from taking the entire pie. The Google-lead open social effort is the leading contender, but there are a variety of related technologies, including OpenID, hcard and other microformats. The primary goal is to make it easy, as users move from one system to another, or run sub-abblications on one platform, to make it easy to provide all sorts of data, including the map of their social network, to the other systems.
Some are also working on a better version of this goal, which is to allow platforms to interoperate. As I wrote a year ago interoperation seems the right long term goal, but a giant privacy challenge emerges. We may not get very many chances to get this right. We may only get one.
The paradox I identified goes against how most developers think. When it comes to greasing the skids of data flow, "features" such as portability, ease of use and user control, may not be entirely positive, and may in fact be on the whole negative. The easier it is for data to flow around, the more it will flow around, and the more that sites will ask, and then demand that it flow. There is a big difference between portability between applications -- such as OpenOffice and MS Word reading and writing the same files -- and portability between sites. Many are very worried about the risks of our handing so much personal data to single 3rd party sites like Facebook. And then Facebook made it super easy -- in fact mandatory with the "install" of any application -- to hand over all that data to hundreds of thousands of independent application developers. Now work is underway to make it super easy to hand over this data to every site that dares to ask or demand it.
Fancier conferences put up two projectors to let the audience see the slides. But the presenters still look at their slides on a notebook on the podium, or in some cases on a monitor on the floor below their stage.
How about adding a projector that projects on the back wall, just above the heads of the audience, for the speaker to see their own slides? Then they can roam the stage and see the slides without losing eye contact with the audience. They may not be able to see clear detail on the slides but they shouldn't need it.
Today I am at eComm, a reborn conference. Tim O'Reilly, who does the eTech conference (which just took place last week) used to run an emerging telecom conference called eTel. They decided not to run it again, so some of the participants who wanted a little more edgy telecom conference pushed to start a different one. I had hoped it would be an ad-hoc conference in the barcamp/unconference style, but instead it's become a more traditional $1K conference like eTel was.
Earlier on, I identified robot delivery vehicles as one of the steps on the roadmap to robot cars. In fact, these are officially what the DARPA grand challenges really seek, since the military wants robots that can move things through danger zones without putting soldiers at risk.
Over the weekend I was at the [BIL conference]http://www.bilconference.com, a barcamp/unconference style justaposition on the very expensive TED conference. I gave a few talks, including one on self driving cars, privacy and AI issues.
The conference, being free, was at a small community center. This location did not have internet. Various methods were possible to provide internet. The easiest are routers which can take cellular network EVDO cards and offer an 802.11 access point. That works most places, but is not able to handle many people, and may or may not violate some terms of service. However, in just about all these locations there are locations very nearby with broadband internet which can be used, including hotels, businesses and even some private homes. But how to get the access in quickly?
What would be useful would be an "instant internet kit" with all you need to take an internet connection (or two) a modest distance over wireless. This kit would be packed up and available via courier to events that want internet access on just a couple of days notice.
What would you put in the kit?
As our devices get more and more complex, configuring them gets harder and harder. And for members of the non-tech-savvy public, close to impossible.
Here's an answer: Develop a simple browser plug-in for all platforms that can connect a USB peripheral to a TCP socket back to the server where the plugin page came from. (This is how flash and Java applets work, in fact this could be added to flash or Java.)
Yesterday I wrote about predictive suspension, to look ahead for bumps on the road and ready the suspension to compensate. There should be more we can learn by looking at the surface of the road ahead, or perhaps touching it, or perhaps getting telemetry from other cars.
I'm not the first to think of this idea, but in my series of essays on self driving cars I thought it would be worth discussing some ideas on suspension.
Driven cars need to have a modestly tight suspension. The driver needs to feel the road. An AI driven car doesn't need that, so the suspension can be tuned for the maximum comfort of the passengers. You can start bu just making it much softer than a driver would like, but you can go further.
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