Real Story

This entry at the Arts and Computing blog caught my attention through its similarity Ray Kurzweil's technological developments forecast in his book "The Singularity is Near". A short history of the point we are at today is presented and then technological prophecies follow: Google expands to be more than just a media company - or we might say, "media" has its meaning changed by Google through augmented reality technologies, nanochips and then one massive computer network, shaped only by human brains. [No need for external devices? Come on, WE will become the "external" devices!]

Unrestricted imagination, when taken with a grain of scepticism, has the power to reveal. It's not only a fantasy that humans will be much more integrated (in the physical sense) with the computers, it's an extremely plausible reality for the future. Why ignorantly dismiss these ideas and artificially slow the progress down?

Well, there might be an answer. Discover it through your feelings when you see the end of the video.

submusic

The Arts and Computing blog has some very interesting stuff posted, including this amazing plucked string "player". While the "music" played is rarely ever pleasant, it is nevertheless an impressive attempt at making something different. I tend to love things that have no connection to music being presented in such a way that makes me think that they could be actual instruments.

This particular example has one property that makes it feel much "real worldly": There is a certain schedule that the trains follow and the trains that are launched are randomly selected for every day. Oh and that: there's a day-night cycle, the background turns from white to black at night and all the trains slow down. If only it affected the sounds as well (maybe change the base chord into something else)!

Victorian Literature

A stream of graphs on the contextual analysis of some 1.7 million book titles gets me thinking on how statistical analysis might be essential in the training of an AI. The greatest step in front of the AI developments of our day is the transition from combinational, direct-mapping decision maps to algorithms that examine the trends and stochastically determine the outcome from more than just a few sensor readings or any simple set of data.

Last week, I watched a video from the Google Tech Talks, about a relatively new neural network model that was able to separate entire documents into classes by their topics. Where we give the ability to manipulate, rather than just analyze and understand data to AI, we create "life" in a world we have created by ourselves and for ourselves and we establish strong links from this new world's entities to the physical reality.

On the image: funny how the title word "universal" has been in a sharply declining trend for so long. Probably replaced by "global" though.

Sitting Chairs

This exhibit of chairs sitting on each other at the Design and the Elastic Mind caught my attention through its use of recursion in the design. The "levels" that the chairs stand at are representatives of layers of software in a digital world, from the point of view of a person whose world lies very much beyond the border from physical to digital.

Say, the largest chairs might have been virtual machines on an operating system (the white background), the next largest the window environments running on these VMs, and then the applications/utilities come, and there are also the utilities that don't need the window environment to run, etc.

Makes me think about imagining the computer as a social environment, having electrons interact and cause great turmoil in the apparently stable operation mechanisms (and doing this actually around two billion times in a second)... But let us not make things so cyclic that in the end, going deeper and deeper in computer science we won't arrive at social psychology or something similar.

One final note about the chairs: Notice the blockiness? I bet the legs and the body on each individual chair here can be divided into equally sized cubes with no volume left out...