Suspended Judgement

A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision. (by...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:58:43 +0000

A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision. (by CorningIncorporated)

Easy to forget how much of our present and future is being shaped by an advanced glass manufacturer…

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors (by TheDmel)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:51:55 +0000

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors (by TheDmel)

DragonBot: A platform for cloud-based social robotics (by Adam...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:16:36 +0000

DragonBot: A platform for cloud-based social robotics (by Adam Setapen)

DragonBot is a new robot platform from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. Specifically designed to support long-term learning interactions between children and robots…(more)

To understand is to perceive patterns (by notthisbody) I thought...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:35:24 +0000

To understand is to perceive patterns (by notthisbody)

I thought this was a nice attempt to get at something fundamental about perspectives and possibilities - I’ve often thought that human history has this oddly paradoxical feature whereby our view of our significance in the universe steadily diminishes, just as our power to manipulate it increases. This video made me think of that…

What are going to be the big debates for 2012?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:58:46 +0000

I just wrote a piece on the Technophobia blog about what I think some of the big themes of debate in digital business and innovation are going to be this year. Or perhaps better: what underlying issues will be driving them.

I’ve highlighted just five concepts, which are by no means intended to be comprehensive. They are:

Human augmentation and the capability gap.
Context and distraction.
Scope and ‘delineation’.
Monopolies and closed platforms.
New business models going mainstream.

If you’re interested in any of these things, please read the post and comment if you disagree or have any questions.. :)

Flying robots, the builders of tomorrow (by ReutersVideo)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:09:27 +0000

Flying robots, the builders of tomorrow (by ReutersVideo)

Most Human Like Robot Ever (by Kennykpz1979)

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:01:25 +0000

Most Human Like Robot Ever (by Kennykpz1979)

A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021 by The...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:57:16 +0000

A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021 by The Institute for the Future

Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED (by...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:50:37 +0000

Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED (by Akiredsil)

Reveal Project - Personal Data Mirror (by NYT R&D)

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:53:08 +0000

Reveal Project - Personal Data Mirror (by NYT R&D)

The Top 10 Predictions from The World Future Society’s...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:48:00 +0000

The Top 10 Predictions from The World Future Society’s latest Outlook report.

(Incidentally, I made this in a new content creation platform called Jux, which I’ve been experimenting with recently. Jux seems to be something of a competitor to Tumblr, but I’m hoping that they will play nice together, with Jux providing a way of creating beautiful content for certain kinds of information and Tumblr providing the blog ‘wrapper’ with info pages and tags, etc. We’ll see…)

On AI's tipping point...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:14:02 +0000

Last night I watched my wife have a conversation with a computer. Not a particularly sophisticated conversation, as conversations go, but it felt like a conversation to her and that’s perhaps more important.

She has just received a new phone upgrade - an iPhone4S, and, while she was playing around with it on the sofa next to me, I casually asked her whether she realised the phone was intelligent?

“What do you mean?” she said.

“It has some new software in it called Siri that will listen to you and understand what you’re saying. You can use it to do things for you, you know - phone-related things like looking something up or adding things to your calendar and stuff.”

She looked at me a bit dubiously.

“Just hold it to your ear and talk to it as if you were on the phone to someone”, I said.

“What shall I ask it to do?”

“Um, why not tell it you’re going to meet me for lunch tomorrow?”

She lifted the handset to the side of her head, and a soft chime sounded to indicate that Siri was listening.

“What can I help you with?” it said.

She paused for a second or two and then said in her best ‘talking to a machine’ voice: “Meet Chris for lunch at one o’clock tomorrow.”

The voice in her ear started saying something unintelligible to me, and then she shot me a cheeky smile and said “Hmm..” as if she was giving it serious thought, “I meant Chris Dymond”.

The voice then said a few more things and her eyes widened. “Er, no, um.. push the meeting to 2 o’clock instead”.

The voice carried for a few seconds, then she said “Yes please”, and took the phone away from her ear, rapidly unlocked it and flicked to her calendar. There it was. Lunch with me at two o’clock. Just as she’d asked for.

She looked at me in amazement, trying to fathom what had just happened, then said “It didn’t sound like Stephen Hawking… at one point it said ‘okaay..’ slowly, as if it was thinking about something…”

(True story, by the way, if shortened slightly.)

***

Artificial intelligence has been with us for a while without us really noticing, of course: figuring out what’s relevant to us in Google search results, LoveFilm recommendations, personalised radio stations and the like. It’s used in smart recognition systems like Shazam and Google Goggles, and in content surfacing systems like Hunch and more recently Trapit, which uses technology from the same DARPA-funded research as that used by Siri.

But I think Siri represents something new - a difference in how visible the intelligence is and in how people perceive it and interact with it.

At the beginning of this year, geeks around the world were amazed by IBM’s ‘Watson’ computer, as it played a televised game of Jeopardy against human champions and beat them handsomely. It was an eye-opening demonstration that machines can now do things cognitively that were formerly the preserve only of humans. I think Siri will open the eyes of non-geeks to the new reality in a similar way.

And so, as I wonder what impact this will have, three things stand out for me initially:

Firstly, people will very soon realise that low-end ‘knowledge work’ is under significant threat. IBM didn’t build Watson to win lots of money at Jeopardy, they built it to provide a cheaper alternative to hiring and training thousands of call-centre staff (amongst a zillion other potential uses, of course, but that one seems the most obvious). Automated online assistants have been around for ages, of course, but just like Sir Lancelot storming Swamp Castle, you see it coming for ages, then suddenly it arrives…

Secondly, I think the importance of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs will become more obvious to people. Siri works out what you’re trying to do by processing enormous amounts of data from hundreds of services across the Internet, which it accesses via such APIs, and if you want your information to be part of Siri’s answers you need to be able to plug your service in to it.

Thirdly, Siri’s user interface is highly refined. From detecting when you move the phone to your ear, to the tone of voice, talking speed, pauses and word choice. Soon it may well dynamically modify these things based on the action it’s performing, the urgency it detects in the voice of the user and the need to keep the user engaged. It may not be perfect now, but it’s already impressively good. As such voice interfaces become more ubiquitous, and more nuanced, this new field of interaction design will gain in importance, with new skills, considerations, constraints and practices.

***

The great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - we may still be some way from having machines that cope well with high levels of ambiguity, but, when we look back in a few years time, we may well identify 2011 as the year in which artificial intelligence first started to really feel like intelligence to us.

One Plus One Equals Three...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I spent a wonderfully stimulating evening at the Royal Institution in London, listening to the well-known broadcaster, teacher and journalist James Burke give a lecture entitled 1+1=3. His was the second in a series of three events on innovation that have been guest-curated for the Institute by Aleks Krotoski around the theme of ’Connections’, and Burke is perhaps most famous for his three similarly titled and seminal documentary TV series from 1978, 1994 and 1997. In those programmes, he charted the causal chains of ideas and influences, people and inventions, across the breadth of human history.

(Incidentally, all of the Connections series are available for free on Burke’s YouTube channel - which is, frankly, one of the most brilliant things I know of on the web :)

His lecture was very much in the same vain - clever exposition of some profound concepts (of cognition, prediction and complexity) combined with elegant, frolicking skips through history and excellent story-telling. It culminated in an extended consideration of the possible impact of nanotechnology and the notion that we might be less than fifty years away from gaining the ability, as individuals, to make anything we need - from energy to food to any object we can imagine - from cheap abundant raw materials and for very little cost. The implications of such a capability and the impact of such abundance on society, culture, politics and the very meaning of value are truly profound and deserve a separate post (it’s the kind of speculative socio-technical scenario I love, so I may well try to write up my thoughts on it sometime soon).

However he also presented something else I’d like to talk about here, something more of the tangible now:

About half way through his lecture, Burke announced that he’s been spending some of his spare time working on a piece of software in collaboration with some volunteer programmers from mindmapping company The Brain. He then demonstrated a system that looked like essentially an indexed database of his life’s work researching connections between people, ideas and technologies - some 28,000 of them I think he said - with a visualisation that allows the user to traverse the links, switching the focus from node to node and uncovering new connections in the process (somewhat like the ‘MatchMe’ feature of the Technology Strategy Board’s innovation network ’_connect’, which is a project I’ve been involved with for the last couple of years).

It was quite impressive, and would be even more so if the system had an API that would allow others to create experiences and interfaces using the data (I asked him whether it had one during the Q&A, but his answer was a bit vague and I’m not sure he understood the implications of my question (my bad!). But perhaps the guys at The Brain have got it covered - I’d be interested to know…

Anyway, there were two things he said about the system which I thought were particularly noteworthy: the first was his inspiration for creating it, and the second was a hope for its potential.

His intention is to create an experience that allows students, of all disciplines, to better understand the serendipity involved in the process of innovation itself - the unpredictability of the paths it takes and the strange, unforeseen downstream impacts that new things have. He hopes it will generate in students an understanding that multi-disciplinarity is important. That the no-man’s-land between specialisms is the true birthplace of new ideas.

I think he’s on to something here. Just traversing the connections, as he did for much of his talk tonight - from loading camels to the development of the English language; from improving naval navigation to the invention of toilet paper - filled me with the sense that we are the product of just the potentials that we have managed to discover so far. And that given the right awareness of the endlessly churning exchange of ideas and knowledge going on in the world, nothing is certain yet anything might be possible.

His hopes for the system’s predictive power, however, I found more problematic. He made the argument that it might be possible to use the tool to map current connections, and to determine which connections are likely to yield important breakthroughs. By way of illustrating this concept he showed some examples of people who were mostly connected to others in the same general field, but who had interesting connections to someone in a very different area of expertise that had resulted in some major transformational technology. His argument was, (and sincere apologies if I misunderstood this), that identifying those ‘surprising’ cross-disciplinary connections might provide us with indicators for potentially important breakthroughs. Now, I can’t help thinking that there is an element of hindsight-bias in this. Those extraordinary connections may well not look so unusual were we to map a person’s connections right now, without the filter of history working to isolate the connections that proved important in the long run. Furthermore, with levels of research collaboration at the point where some academic papers have hundreds of cited co-authors, and with inter-disciplinary research becoming more or less the norm, a map of 28,000 connections might only encompass a few hundred people.
However, thinking about it further, maybe there is still such a thing as ‘surprising’ cross-disciplinary connections. Maybe such connections are created through serendipitous means, through personal relationships or chance meetings, and maybe they could be isolated from other kinds of connection. Perhaps, if people using a system like _connect were to indicate their social relationships to other members of the network, as well as their professional relationships, we could filter for that and identify connections that were worth paying closer attention to. Or maybe we could help convert such connections into collaborations by supporting such efforts in some way.

That might be very interesting indeed…

How to Touch-Enable Arbitrary Objects using TDR (by baudisch)

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:18:56 +0000

How to Touch-Enable Arbitrary Objects using TDR (by baudisch)

“Origo: 3D Printing @ Home” by Artur Tchoukanov (by...

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:32:48 +0100

“Origo: 3D Printing @ Home” by Artur Tchoukanov (by Umeå Institute of Design).

At Innovate 2011 on Tuesday, Will Hutten gave a very compelling speech about ‘General Purpose Technologies’ and the importance of being first to develop them. I think this was what he was talking about…

World Policy Journal: Fall 2011 | World Policy Institute

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:27:00 +0100

World Policy Journal: Fall 2011 | World Policy Institute:

This autumn’s issue of the World Policy Journal is dedicated to the subject of Innovation and is full of very interesting articles from writers in various fields.

(The WPJ is the quarterly organ of the World Policy Institute which is a New York-based non-partizan think tank that “develops and champions innovative policies that require a progressive and global point of view.”)

Three articles are, I think, of particular note:

“The Big Question” is a series of short essays by prominent innovators and scientists working in fields such as biomedical research, artificial intelligence, cyber-sociology and sustainable technologies and economic development.

“Innovation Starvation” is an essay by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in which he describes (and bemoans) the barriers our global society now faces when trying to do large-scale innovation.

As a potential (sort of) solution to Stephenson’s dilemma, Stephen Ezell’s “A Bretton Woods for Innovation” suggests bringing state-driven innovation under a global governance framework.

There’s lots of food for thought there and in the rest of the issue, and I enjoyed reading it :-)

3LiveShop - innovation på kundens villkor (Innovation for the...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:53:12 +0100

3LiveShop - innovation på kundens villkor (Innovation for the customer’s sake) by 3Sverige

Holographic Interface - round interface - Ringo (by Ivan...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:39:00 +0100

Holographic Interface - round interface - Ringo (by Ivan Tihienko)

Not new, but interesting…

Obvious to you. Amazing to others. - by Derek Sivers (by...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:51:08 +0100

Obvious to you. Amazing to others. - by Derek Sivers (by dereksivers)

On pizza cutters and Tim Harford's 'Adapt'...

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:33:00 +0100

Pizza cutters fill me with dread.

Not because they are sharp enough to slice through crispy thin-crust pizza even though they are usually just made of plastic, which, admittedly, I do find a bit weird. No, I’m fearful of them because it struck me a few years ago that they only have a single failure mode, and that failure mode is catastrophic.

The weakest point of a pizza cutter is the hub of the wheel. It’s not particularly strong and will weaken with repeated pressure under normal use. When the hub breaks, it will almost certainly do so because the person using it is applying downward pressure in the course of dividing a freshly cooked pizza into slices. The blade will go one of two ways depending on how the hub breaks. Either the blade will leap away from the person’s knuckles, which are now plunging towards the pizza, or it will twist towards them. In the former case the person’s hand will most likely punch the white-hot molten surface of the pizza, causing severe burns. In the latter case the person’s hand may be briefly deflected from its natural course by a sharp plastic blade, causing lacerations followed immediately by severe burns.

In other words, when a pizza cutter fails, it is highly likely that it will do so in the worst possible way for the person using it.

(And therefore is a bloody liability in my book!)

Of course, the pizza cutter is not alone in this regard, there are many things that are similarly fault intolerant although usually those things are too complex for that fault intolerance to be easily visible in advance of catastrophe. Nonetheless, the metaphor of the pizza cutter has served me pretty well over the years when I’ve wanted to express my concerns about something that, were it to fail, is likely to fail so catastrophically that people tend not to contemplate it failing at all.

Anyway, I was reminded of this having spent much of the last few days reading about failure in the form of Tim Harford’s excellent new book “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure”. Harford’s core arguments revolve around how evolutionary processes of variation and selection, in constant feedback with each other, produce superior outcomes to human-devised processes that are characterised by the desire to prevent failure and minimise risk. He goes to great lengths to show how failure-friendly policies might be fruitfully applied to areas such as economic development, corporate governance, financial regulation, and several others.

It’s a good read, full of interesting stories, characters and ideas. And it furthermore contains some insights that have a direct bearing on my fear of pizza cutters:

Firstly, drawing on the research of accident-analyst James Reason, he identifies the pizza cutter’s apparent catastrophilia as the result of a so-called ‘latent error’ - an error that is already inherent in the system but that is lurking “unnoticed until the worst possible moment”.

Ultimately, however, the advice he offers for dealing with latent errors when they are uncovered is bittersweet…:

“The instinctive answer is to eliminate the errors. This is an impossible dream. The alternative is to try to simplify and to decouple these high-risk systems as much as is feasible, to encourage whistle-blowers to identify latent errors waiting to strike, and - sadly - to stand prepared for the worst.”

Well, this is me blowing the whistle on pizza cutters. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Prepare for the worst…

Alternatively, can someone please design a pizza cutter with a proper knuckle guard..?!