Singularity Sunrise

Can Twitter Save Your Life?

This AP wire report picked up by MSNBC notes that the flu beleaguered residents of Mexico are interacting more and more on a virtual level in order to maintain a healthy physical distance from each other:

Churchgoers celebrate Mass via television. Congressional candidates campaign with real-time speeches on the Web. A magazine promises Internet tours through the real Mexico — the one with open museums and pyramids. And rock bands plan online concerts. Swine flu is creating a virtual Mexico. With school canceled nationwide and many parents forbidding their kids to party, teenagers are logging a lot more time chatting on Facebook, Twittering and downloading music and movies from the Internet. So are many adults, especially after most business and government offices in Mexico City shut down Friday for five days.

Is Mexico on the right track? Should governments everywhere encourage citizens to engage in virtual interaction, distance learning, and telecommuting to avoid the flu? Can Twitter save your life? Viva la Revolución!

Microsoft Prepares Desktop AI

Microsoft is hoping that their Windows operating system may yet be the shape of things to come as they prepare for an AI powered version of the personal assistant. According to this report from The New York Times, they envision an artificially-intelligent avatar as your interface to a powerful personal assistant program that can interpret your mood and expressions while making your appointments, sorting your e-mail and taking care of other routine tasks:

Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one. Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks like booking appointments for meetings or scheduling a flight. More compelling, however, is Laura’s ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments. Instead of being a relatively dumb terminal, Laura represents a nuanced attempt to recreate the finer aspects of a relationship that can develop between an executive and an assistant over the course of many years.

I think this is a worthy effort, but if Google ever creates a cloud based avatar interface for standard search, they may leapfrog Microsoft as consumers will probably prefer quick efficiency over a digital relationship. And with Google, they would probably figure out the relationship part (sustained by a steady diet of cookies and datamining) eventually. Of course, Google has no comparable project in the works that I know of, so perhaps this is one innovation in which Microsoft will take the early lead.

Here is more on the project:

Calling All Mad Scientists

Here is a report about a conference last summer in which the U.S. military invited, recruited and encouraged scientists to build a bigger, badder future:

Last August, the U.S. Army held a three-day conference in Portsmouth, Virginia, to look at new developments in military science and hardware. The confab was called the "2008 Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar." Really. It was. "The objective of the seminar was to investigate proliferating technologies with the potential to empower individuals and groups in the next 10-25 years," according to an unclassified summary of the Mad Scientist gathering, obtained by Danger Room. As you'd expect from such a colorfully-titled gathering, the collected brains predicted a world in which individuals would have easy access to everything from ray guns to nano-bots to bioengineered weapons to arms for creating international chaos online.

I'm still waiting for my nanobots but I certainly appreciate that they are making an effort.

Olympian Technology

Check out this Wired News Gallery on how high technology is helping athletes in the Olympics. Carbon nanotubes and VR goggles lend a hand.

Google Goes Virtual

Google is venturing into the world of virtual reality with a new service aimed at challenging Second Life (Wired News - Google ventures into virtual reality with 'Lively'):

The Mountain View-based company unveiled a free service Tuesday in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called "Lively," represents Google's answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality. Google thinks Lively will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities because it isn't tethered to one Web site like Second Life, and it doesn't cost anything to use. After installing a small packet of software, a user can enter Lively from other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs.

I think this is an interesting development but I'm concerned that the publicity around this new effort is overselling the service. Unless I'm missing something, this is nothing more than a 3-D chat room, which is a service others have offered for some time. Perhaps the novelty here is that it's from Google, a trusted and ubiquitous name on the internet. I wonder why they didn't call it Google Life?

AI in SL

I mentioned before the possibility that virtual environments like Second Life may provide the perfect testing ground for human-AI interaction, and it looks like there has been some progress in this area (AP - Researchers teach 'Second Life' avatar to think):

Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier. [...] "Second Life" is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don't have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills. And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems - like, say, creating a virtual human - right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

So, will the Turing Test finally be passed in Second Life? Stay tuned.

Thought Control

Imagine a time in the distant future we will have the ability to control machines with our thoughts. Ok, now imagine being able to do that this year (Telegraph.co.uk - The computer headset controlled by thought):

The first wireless headset that can read electrical activity in the brain and translate it into commands in video games will go on sale later this year. [...] Tan Le, president of Emotiv, said: "We’ve created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically. [...] Emotiv is also working on using the technology for other uses, including interactive television, market research, health and security.

I bet this will become a new consumer tech field - brain computer interfaces - and it will generate many more applications. This is an amazing breakthrough and I'm glad it's being done in the context of gaming, simply because that won't scare anyone  (investors) away from a technology, which if presented in another application, could be potentially troublesome for a lot of people. After all, if people think that nanotech is morally suspicious, then what would they think about people using the power of their minds to control the internet, robots, warbots, and pretty much any application that accepts direct commands.

Real Brains, Virtual Movement

Here is an effort to allow disabled people to use their brain waves to navigate in virtual worlds like Second Life (AFP - Scientists use brain waves to stroll through virtual world):

Under the technology, a person wearing head gear embedded with electrodes, which analyse brain waves in the cerebral motor cortex, would be able to move a Second Life character forward by thinking he or she is walking. Imagining movement with the right or left hand would make the character turn accordingly in the same direction.

I wonder if such technology could also be used to help people with brain trauma, or perhaps even coma patients, interact in ways that would have been impossible before?

Virtual Google Earth?

I was just blogging about the need to create a virtual world environment to complement the growth of different national and international virtual environments and it looks like Google Earth is on the way to doing that (CNET News.com - The future is here: Google Earth meets virtual worlds): A new technology from Multiverse Network allows developers who use its virtual world platform to incorporate terrain from Google Earth.

Virtual Japan

Here is a report (AP - Subdued Virtual World for Japan) that suggests an interesting idea, that different countries will create virtual worlds that mirror their own national personality and distinctive cultures:

Japanese are so well-behaved and conformist, he says, they would prefer a more predictable and secure virtual environment over the free-spirited anything-goes of "Second Life," created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab.

Perhaps we should anticipate the creation of a virtual world-city where the various national virtual worlds will converge, a virtual Rome, where all the avatars of the world can meet and greet each other. Avatars of the world unite!