Deeply engaged into the CINUM seminar, I just have time for few facts I ran across this morning on the ACM Tech News:

Designers will be able to convert a sketch of a Web page into a functional Web page using a new software tool that is being developed by researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The software tool, InkKit, which works with a tablet computer that has a stylus, also makes use of some sophisticated rules that will allow it to transform code drawn by hand into a real program.
(…)
Intel researchers looking to develop a shape-shifting fabric are confident that such an intelligent fabric can be created, but add that the software needed to control millions of tiny robots would be more of a challenge
(…)
A Greenpeace analysis of just a handful of laptop computers revealed harmful chemicals, indicating the enormous scope of the problem facing regulators in enforcing new rules, such as the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, to rein in the use of toxic materials in electronic products.
(…)
The US Department of Homeland Security is funding the development of “sentiment analysis” software by a consortium of major universities that uses natural language processing technology to scan foreign publications for negative views on America and its government.

Why do I blog this? since we’re working today on foresight scenario, I brought up some facts (randomly, just a vague selection here) to be discussed.

Today, I am heading to Margaux (small french town close to Bordeaux) to attend the CiNum seminar (i.e “Civilisations Numériques” = “Digital Civilizations”) to meet up with nice brainiacs:

Ci’Num is a 3-year collective and open strategic foresight process which focuses on “Digital civilizations”. Its goal is to create a worldwide community of thinkers and stakeholders, working together in order to identify opportunities and challenges for the future of civilizations confronted with (at least) to main transformations: globalization and digitization.

The underlying issue at stake here is that:

“Digital civilizations” describe the sets of values, social bonds, cultural creations, institutions, economic forces, spaces, artefacts… that emerge from the gradual blending of the physical and digital worlds. The implications of this concept are broader and deeper than those of the “Knowledge society”, as it incorporate intent, collective action, as well as cultural and social diversity.

Digital civilizations are not just shaped by technological and economic trends – rather, they shape technology and the economy as much as they are shaped by it.

Digital civilizations are shaped by people – individuals and communities – as much as by institutions and corporations.

Digital civilizations are shaped by well-known megatrends (such as ageing populations, urbanisation, energy shortage, global warming…) as well as a constant flow of disruptive innovations and social changes.

I have luckily been invited there to give a talk there about the Internets and how it creates new experience for Things, People and Places.

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ITWales interview of Ian Pearson (BT’s “futurologist”) raises some interesting issues. Some excerpts about the methods:

How do you and your colleagues make your predictions?

I track future technologies that are coming over the horizon, so as soon as we learn that somebody is doing some research in a particular field, we start putting that together with all the other bits of research that everyone else is doing, and try to figure out what people might try to use that for once it becomes real technology in a decade or so.
If one person is doing research on this, and another is doing research on that then companies A, B and C may be able to make products using that kind of basic technology, and if we can anticipate what they might look like then we might figure out how people will use those in society and in business to change their lifestyle.

It’s a question of second guessing what people will do, which requires sitting around and talking about it an awful lot really. What we end up with is a whole stack of possibilities of how people could realistically use technology to improve their lives, or get market advantage, or whatever, and if there are good enough reasons for doing that then we can be fairly certain that people will actually do it. If, on the other hand, it’s just a whacky idea, like networking every single thing in your home so that you can close the curtains from the comfort of the office, then not many people are going to want to do it, so it would probably be a flop in the marketplace. So we use common sense to throw away the things that people probably won’t want to do, and filter out those things that are quite realistic, and will succeed in the market.
(…)
In terms of keeping up, I wouldn’t say that I do. I stopped keeping up round about 1993 or 1994! Since then things have been moving so fast you can’t really keep up, all you can do is hope to not fall too far behind. I don’t pretend to keep track of 100% of new technologies now. I keep track of some of the key ones, and there are still some surprises
(…)
In terms of filtering them, the only tools that you can really use are ordinary everyday common sense and some business intuition.

Why do I blog this? apart from methodological content that struck me, Pearson discusses lots of issues (ranging from androids to computers writing their own software, as well as security and ‘biology IT’), some of his thoughts are quite relevant. The most down-to-earth ideas he describes are related to “social computing”.

Excerpts from “Final Enclosure“: spoken words (on dub music) of Hakim Bey and french dub band Brain Damage (extract from the Spoken Dub Manifesto album):

There’s nowhere to go! This is the final enclosure!

You know science fiction novels about societies of the future which are completely contentless in some way, in which the social has really, really been abolished. All the science fictional images of transcendence are all bullshit as far as we can see. You know, the aliens have been a big disappointment, time travel doesn’t seem to work, there’s nobody leaving on other planets, it’s not even anything useful to steal there. I mean it’s just a big … you know … it’s the end!

A quick overview (transcribed from the slides) of Bruce Sterling’s “Spime Meme Map” he presented yesterday at Ubicomp 2006 (I just copied his slides):

It’s basically a map of the characteristics of a spime, with different examples of bricks available today (web2.0 but also others) that would enable to design such a thing.

In the last issue of IEEE Spectrum, there are results from and IFTF/IEEE survey about what developments IEEE Fellows expect in science and technology in the next 10 to 50 years. It’s called “Bursting Tech Bubbles Before They Balloon” and was written by Marina Gorbis and David Pescovitz & IEEE Fellows Survey.

Some excerpts I found pertinent below. First they start bursting tech bubbles:

As our population ages and needs more care, there will be fewer young people to provide it. But don’t expect to fill the personnel gap with humanoid robotic nurses (…) Forget about being chauffeured to work by your car; the Fellows doubt that autonomous, self-driving cars will be in full commercial production anytime soon. And though they say Moore’s Law will someday finally yield to the laws of physics, slowing the increase in computer performance, the IEEE Fellows don’t expect to get around the problem by using quantum weirdness to perform calculations at fabulous speeds. Seventy-eight percent of respondents doubt that a commercial quantum computer will reach the market in the next 50 years. (…) no space elevators in most of their forecasts

Then they give some more theoretical issues about foresight:

“We tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run,” observed former IFTF president Roy Amara
(…)
A few were uncomfortable making forecasts, arguing that science and technology are unpredictable. At IFTF, we wholeheartedly agree. Trying to predict specific events and timing is best left to astrologers. Instead, our researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., look for signals—events, developments, projects, investments, and expert opinions, like those provided by this survey—that, taken together, give indications of key trends. Observed as a complex ecology, these signals reveal where these developments may be taking us.
(…)
“While technology may permit many of the forecasted accomplishments to occur, human beings may well resist their implementation,” writes electrical and computer engineering professor Andrew Szeto of San Diego State University in his survey comments.

As Yogi Berra reportedly said, “The hardest thing to predict is the future.” And as we’ve said, our survey does not try to predict the sci-tech future but merely to uncover key directions. So although we may not be able to say that in 2015 a space elevator will be shuttling goods and people into orbit or that in 2020 we’ll all have robot servants, we can foresee that in the next several decades we will be building our infrastructure in a new way: we will have unlimited computing resources, live in a sensory-rich computing environment, and reengineer ourselves and the biological world around us. Understanding these larger trends helps organizations think about adapting to the future, and thus shaping it.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of bursting bubbles and there are some good insights to gain from it. Besides, the article gives interesting ideas and signs about possible avenues.

I finally ran across a relevant paper that clearly explain the methods of scenario-building in foresight. It’s called “How to Build Scenarios” by Lawrence Wilkinson. Some excerpts of the methodology:

scenarios are created in plural (…) specially constructed stories about the future, each one modeling a distinct, plausible world in which we might someday have to live and work.
(…)
the purpose of scenario planning is not to pinpoint future events but to highlight large-scale forces that push the future in different directions. It’s about making these forces visible, so that if they do happen, the planner will at least recognize them.
(…)
Note that the scenarios don’t fall neatly into “good” and “bad” worlds, desirable and undesirable futures.
(…)
Once we’ve identified those implications that work in all of the scenarios, we get on with them in the confidence that we’re making better, more robust plans. (…) For these we want to know the “early warning signs” that tell us those scenarios are beginning to unfold.

The method is pretty straight-forward:

1. Scenario planning begins by identifying the focal issue or decision (…) So we begin the process by agreeing on the issue that we want to address
2. we next attempt to identify the primary “driving forces” at work in the present. These fall roughly into four categories: Social dynamics , Economic issues, Political issues, Technological issues
3. After we identify the predetermined elements from the list of driving forces, we should be left with a number of uncertainties. We then sort these to make sure they are critical uncertainties. (…) If we can simplify our entire list of related uncertainties into two orthogonal axes, then we can define a matrix (two axes crossing) that allows us to define four very different, but plausible, quadrants of uncertainty. Each of these far corners is, in essence, a logical future that we can explore.
4. We return to the list of driving forces that we generated earlier; these dynamics become “characters” in the stories that we develop. (…) we recognize that the “real” future will not be any of the four scenarios, but that it will contain elements of all of our scenarios.

Michael Rogers a MSNBC columnist yesterday described his thoughts after the World Future Society’s annual meeting in Toronto dealing with foresights and futurology. Here are some excerpts I found interesting:

Some presentations were quite speculative: one fellow describes neural implants that would rewire our brains to let us perceive things like a fourth primary color. (“Why would we want to do that?” one audience member wanted to know. The speaker explained: “Because it would be interesting.”)

Other presentations were serious looks at corporate future-gazing by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Philips and BASF. It’s clear that European firms tend to be more interested in futurism — which they often call foresight analysis — than are Americans.
(…)
There was, however, relatively little focus on more negative aspects of human behavior, beyond a few sessions on the future of law enforcement and terror prevention. On balance, the futurists seemed to be an optimistic bunch, which may be self-selecting. If you’re going to spend your career thinking about the future, you might as well feel good about it.
(…)
in the end, making lots of accurate predictions isn’t necessarily the job of the futurist. It’s more the act of stimulating creative thought about the future that, in turn, influences how we act today. At the Toronto conference, veteran futurist Joseph Coates put it this way: “Being right or wrong isn’t so much the point as being useful. The ultimate purpose is to change people’s minds.”

In a recent blogpost, Charlie Stross - the american sci-fi writer - described the main thread of his next novel. Supposed to be set in 12 years ahead, the story will deal with how “existing technological trends (pervasive wireless networking, ubiquitous location services, and the uptake of virtual reality technologies derived from today’s gaming scene) coalesce into a new medium“.

Even though the whole post and the comments are worthwile (the underlying process of finding the story thread, a quick and personal summary of the Internet as seen by the author…), what I found more curious was the part about how Role Playing Games (and one of its very well known proponent) shape today’s virtual reality:

Sad to say, the political landscape of the early to mid 21st century has already been designed — by Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.

Gary didn’t realize it (D&D predates personal computing) but his somewhat addictive game transferred onto computers quite early (see also: Nethack). And then gamers demanded — and got, as graphics horsepower arrived — graphical versions of same. And then multi-user graphical versions of same. And then the likes of World of Warcraft, with over a million users, auction houses, the whole spectrum of social interaction, and so on.

Which leads me to the key insight that: our first commercially viable multi-user virtual reality environments have been designed (and implicitly legislated) to emulate pencil-and-paper high fantasy role playing games.

The gamers have given rise to a monster that is ultimately going to embrace and extend the web, to the same extent that TV subsumed and replaced motion pictures. (The web will still be there — some things are intrinsically easier to do using a two dimensional user interface and a page-based metaphor — but the VR/AR systems will be more visible.)

And given the fact that Stross envisions VR as being the new metaphor for Web evolution, he thinks that paper based RPG prefigured the future of the coming technosphere.

There has been a good buzz around the virtual edition of Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Even though I am not into nanotech stuff, the book is worth to read for other concerns. An excerpt from chapter 3:

AS WE LOOK FORWARD to see where the technology race leads, we should ask three questions. What is possible, what is achievable, and what is desirable?
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These three questions - of the possible, the achievable, and the desirable - frame an approach to foresight. First, scientific and engineering knowledge form a map of the limits of the possible. Though still blurred and incomplete, this map outlines the permanent limits within which the future must move. Second, evolutionary principles determine what paths lie open, and set limits to achievement - including lower limits, because advances that promise to improve life or to further military power will be virtually unstoppable. This allows a limited prediction: If the eons-old evolutionary race does not somehow screech to a halt, then competitive pressures will mold our technological future to the contours of the limits of the possible. Finally, within the broad confines of the possible and the achievable, we can try to reach a future we find desirable.

In 1912, Alphonse Norgeu did a wonderful postcard serie for the “Chocolat Lombart” company (printed on chromolithography); it’s called “Comment vivront nos arrière-neveux en l’an 2012″ (How will our grand-nephew live in 2012?)

(Source : Trésors des Postes et Télégraphes, PTT Cartophilie, 1989.)

1) Bonjour mon enfant… Nous t’envoyons ton Chocolat Lombart
par l’aéronef des vides ! / Hello my son… We send you the Lombart Chocolate by the Indian Aeronef

2) Back from the Moon: in 8 hours, we’ll have our Lombart Chocolate in Paris!

Cyril has an interesting post about the “death of video-games”. IMO video games creativity is not dead. What is dead is the video game development model which suck and is so publisher-driven that it kills innovation. Garage studios are no longer viable, in-house studios are following the headquarters order and cut innovation; and even when it comes to outsourcing, there is nothing good out of it. Of course there are still some good and innovative studios (blizzard) but they’re less and less. I think Water Cooler also addresses that issue.

To me, what is interesting is that the most important innovation with regards to video games are

• not games but rather platforms, environment to do something together: I am thinking about WoW (even though has of course a RPG component) or Habbo Hotel (or even Flickr which started as a game platform).
• not classical platforms such as consoles but rather on the Web, which is the most open innovation platform for developing things.
• not game content but DYI game platforms (DYI MMORPG or at least 3D environment tools), artifacts (like game controllers as for the Nintendo Wii or the Sony augmented reality card game), machinimas or tools like Xfire (a very relevant tool to when your friends are online, what game they’re playing, and what server they’re on, join in on their games with one click and see what the friends of your friends are playing).

And this is interesting because video/computer games are now starting not only a tiny platforms but they’re is now an ecology of artifacts connected to them which eventually are targeted at engaging people in playful activities such as developing DYI games, creating or watching machinimas, playing games with tangible interactions…

Why do I blog this? I am interested in foresight issues related to this sort of activities and how games is evolving from a very precise activity to a culture with fuzzier boundaries.

There is now a language shift from the previsouly so-called “Artifical Intelligence” to “Cognitive Computing” as attested by the news in Red Herring (an interview of Dharmendra Modha, chair of the Almaden Institute at IBM’s San Jose and IBM’s leader for cognitive computing).

Q: Why use the term “cognitive computing” rather than the better-known “artificial intelligence”?

A: The rough idea is to use the brain as a metaphor for the computer. The mind is a collection of cognitive processes—perception, language, memory, and eventually intelligence and consciousness. The mind arises from the brain. The brain is a machine—it’s biological hardware.

Cognitive computing is less about engineering the mind than it is the reverse engineering of the brain. We’d like to get close to the algorithm that the human brain [itself has]. If a program is not biologically feasible, it’s not consistent with the brain.

The emphasis is then less in the “artifical” but in the information treatment processes (cognitive) that should be re-designed through reverse engineering. What is also very intriguing is this:

Q: Can even the simplest artificial “mind” have practical applications?

A: That’s my goal, to take the simplest form and put it into a system so a customer can use it. We hope to appeal to what business can do with it.

OK, it’s IBM, it’s a company research lab, and even though there are still very high-level, there is this mention to “the customer can use it”, which is very curious in terms of what (of course I have ideas about it but it’s not explicated in this interview) and with regards to the “consuming process” (let’s consume this cognitive computing device).

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to see language shift in the domain of technology, it’s always meaningful.

Last month, there was a futuristic piece about the Internet on Red Herring, which had interesting points with regards to the relationships between virtual world/objects and the physicality of those.

the barriers between our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world and virtual reality.

Automakers, for instance, might conceivably post their parts catalogs in the virtual world of Second Life, a pixilated 3D online blend of MySpace, eBay, and renaissance fair crossed with a Star Trek convention. Second Life participants—who own the rights to whatever intellectual property they create online—will make money both by using the catalog to design their own cars in cyberspace and by selling their online designs back to the manufacturers, says Danish economist and tech entrepreneur Nikolaj Nyholm.
(…)
“Devices will no longer be spokes on the Internet—they will be the nodes themselves,” says Ray Kurzweil.

I am wondering how this would work with networked seams, perplexed users facing the non-interoperability of networks; how would this prediction work: “People will be able to talk to the Internet when searching for information or interacting with various devices—and it will respond”. As a user experience researcher, I am wondering whether everybody has in mind how people are currently using the Internet, how one look for information with search engine. I know this is long-term research but there is a huge gap between this and how people use current networks. Of course today’s kids will be able to handle that but what about the aging population?

The machine-to-machine communication is also expected to increase:

As so-called sensor networks evolve, there will be vastly more machines than people online. As it is, there are almost 10 billion embedded micro-controllers shipped every year. “This is the next networking
frontier—following inexorably down from desktops, laptops, and palmtops, including cell phones,” says Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. This is what will make up much of the machine-to-machine
traffic, he says.

The article also addresses other concerns like the telco competition, the internet infrastructure and mostly innovation in emerging technologies.

Today at the Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival, there was a very interesting panel about “infrastructure”. It started with 3 great video presentations available here (by wally baer, francois bar, shahram ghandeharizadeh, fernando ordonez, aram sinnreich and todd richmond). Each of them describes three possible network futures.

Why do I blog this? each video offers a pertinent foresight of how network evolved over time and what can be new path that are expected.