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CEDIA and The Singularity
Friday, 11 May 2012 6:37:00 pm Australia/Melbourne
If there was one new word from the intellectual sources from the Sao Paulo heart land of innovation speaking at the Australian CEDIA, it was that we are approaching the "singularity".
This was repeatedly used in a context evoking both oneness of process and an end game of current trends in CE …
The Smart House is a soon-to-be dead end in the evo chain … it's replacement will be a multi spectrum distributed wireless network of sensored IP devices that is run by Artificial Intelligence off the cloud and is highly affordable and ubiquitous and will be able to thoughtfully monitor your needs and converse with you.
And it will happen quicker than we expect.
Part of this is driven by the need to look after Grandma. In the West and China we are soon to have an aged population explosion that will increasingly rely on these … thinking … homes for our care and entertainment. In Australia a 1000 people a week are diagnosed with dementia, sensors that aggregate data in their homes and and offer a Siri style intelligent discourse to acertain the health of the individual will graetly aid their quality of life. The first incarnation of this biometric revolution is needless to say happening in retirement condos in Florida, a state oft described as "Gods waiting room".
We can expect a Moore’s Law speed to the transition of these cloud run artificial intelligence devices into our lives.
How exciting ...
Not ...
To me the singularity has always meant the black hole at the heat death entropic end of the unverse when all time and space contracts back to a single point awaiting the next cosmic cycle. The speakers at this conference were, it turns out, actually referring to The Singularity as a a concept iterated by the futurist Ray Kurzweil wherin computers become smarter than humans and the pace of technological advancement enters an unstoppable feedback loop. Mr Kurzweil had originally suggested that this would be around 2029. It seems to me that at the current pace we will be approaching Turing level conversations with our home appliances and cars in more like five years.
I confess I see myself in five years waking up in my intuitive home in time to hear the birth cry of that non organic intelligence that perhaps will deem humanity to be an unescessary inconvenience ... this theme has been so flogged to death by various sci fi pundits that it is irrelevant for me to pursue it herewith other than to point out that most of this narrative style has an unfortunate way of becoming reality. The imantization of the eschateon comes uncomfortably to mind ... am I therefore an agent of evil by perpetrating cloud based intuitive home control systems?
Talking to an educational friend the next day after returning from CEDIA it was corroborative to my htoughts that he was bemoaning the new age onset of a phenomena that I can best describe as google based illiteracy. As Vinnie explained the secondary eductioned 21st century youth prepares their assignments by a quick cut and paste from googles servers rather than a careful research process of the literature. This new group of integrated consumers have been given government laptops since Year 7 and are apparently barely able to write their own name or spell a word with four letters or more... because they don't need to anymore ...
Expect Google and Apple to increase their role in our lives. Wheras once those engines of cultural accumalation were the sovereign nation states we can now look through our rose tinted Google specs at the new world order where these fabulously succesful corporations with more cash reserves than the USA increasingly become the countries where most of our influential time is spent.
This was repeatedly used in a context evoking both oneness of process and an end game of current trends in CE …
The Smart House is a soon-to-be dead end in the evo chain … it's replacement will be a multi spectrum distributed wireless network of sensored IP devices that is run by Artificial Intelligence off the cloud and is highly affordable and ubiquitous and will be able to thoughtfully monitor your needs and converse with you.
And it will happen quicker than we expect.
Part of this is driven by the need to look after Grandma. In the West and China we are soon to have an aged population explosion that will increasingly rely on these … thinking … homes for our care and entertainment. In Australia a 1000 people a week are diagnosed with dementia, sensors that aggregate data in their homes and and offer a Siri style intelligent discourse to acertain the health of the individual will graetly aid their quality of life. The first incarnation of this biometric revolution is needless to say happening in retirement condos in Florida, a state oft described as "Gods waiting room".
We can expect a Moore’s Law speed to the transition of these cloud run artificial intelligence devices into our lives.
How exciting ...
Not ...
To me the singularity has always meant the black hole at the heat death entropic end of the unverse when all time and space contracts back to a single point awaiting the next cosmic cycle. The speakers at this conference were, it turns out, actually referring to The Singularity as a a concept iterated by the futurist Ray Kurzweil wherin computers become smarter than humans and the pace of technological advancement enters an unstoppable feedback loop. Mr Kurzweil had originally suggested that this would be around 2029. It seems to me that at the current pace we will be approaching Turing level conversations with our home appliances and cars in more like five years.
I confess I see myself in five years waking up in my intuitive home in time to hear the birth cry of that non organic intelligence that perhaps will deem humanity to be an unescessary inconvenience ... this theme has been so flogged to death by various sci fi pundits that it is irrelevant for me to pursue it herewith other than to point out that most of this narrative style has an unfortunate way of becoming reality. The imantization of the eschateon comes uncomfortably to mind ... am I therefore an agent of evil by perpetrating cloud based intuitive home control systems?
Talking to an educational friend the next day after returning from CEDIA it was corroborative to my htoughts that he was bemoaning the new age onset of a phenomena that I can best describe as google based illiteracy. As Vinnie explained the secondary eductioned 21st century youth prepares their assignments by a quick cut and paste from googles servers rather than a careful research process of the literature. This new group of integrated consumers have been given government laptops since Year 7 and are apparently barely able to write their own name or spell a word with four letters or more... because they don't need to anymore ...
Expect Google and Apple to increase their role in our lives. Wheras once those engines of cultural accumalation were the sovereign nation states we can now look through our rose tinted Google specs at the new world order where these fabulously succesful corporations with more cash reserves than the USA increasingly become the countries where most of our influential time is spent.
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