Watching the Social Impact of Technology.

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Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse

Blogs are abuzz right now over the question of which could wipe us out first: peak oil or global warming? Peak oil is the concept that the Earth's petroleum resources are on the decline, so oil production rates will follow leaving the ever- more oil-hungry world in dire straits. Yikes for sure. Meanwhile, because we're burning all kinds of oil and coal and filling our atmosphere with carbon dioxide, we have climate change to contend with. The question that inquiring minds submit now is whether the two diasters will reach a stalemate, with the decline of oil production reducing the impending potential of irreversible climate change. Is it wishful thinking?
-> Read on here.

It's All About the Sun

Speaking at the Aspen Environment Forum, Daniel G. Nocera, a professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, “All scientists ultimately believe solar has to be the answer... If you take sunlight plus water, that equals oil plus coal plus methane.” He believes that with the correct action taken by individuals and government utilization of solar energy could be developed to be a legitimate energy source and replace the fossil fuels we depend upon currently. Without a radical solar initiative, our energy needs in the next decades drawing upon petroleum and coal will exacerbate the climate change problem significantly. But how to accomplish it? Fundamentally, Nocera suggests that rather than having a central power source that many individuals draw from, individuals should supply their own power using a variety of active and passive solar technologies.
->You can read more about Nocera's ideas here.

Large *Havoc* Collider?

The builders of the world's largest particle collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, have had a lawsuit brought against them in federal court on behalf of scientists who fear that activating it could possibly create "globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet." The purpose of the the large hadron collider is to recreate an environment similar to that of the theoretical Big Bang in order to answer some of the large remaining questions of Physics and Cosmology, such as, "Do particles have supersymmetric partners?" or "Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?" or "Are there extra dimensions indicated by theoretical gravitons, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?" and "What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?" But some scientists are asking more practically-oriented theoretical questions as they wonder if activating the collider could create mini black holes or magnetic monopoles that could mess with atomic nuclei on Earth. Others question if the anticipated total cost of the project (between $5 and $10 billion) is really worthwhile given the unknowns, risks, and other applications worth funding.
-> Read more about the LHC suit here.

Media and Panic

Listen to this fantastic episode of WNYC's RadioLab, which examines "the power of mass media to create panic." They specifically look at the infamous War of the Worlds radio play created by Orson Welles and a similar situation that occurred in Chile. (It's also the first episode to be recorded live.)

Is Earth Enough For Us?

If any author has examined through fiction the consistent dissatisfaction humanity feels for its capabilities, it's been Isaac Asimov. One of his older collections of stories, called Earth is Room Enough, examines these themes so well. One particular story, " The Dead Past," portrays a future in which science is so heavily regulated by the government that the scientist has no freedom to look in to areas outside of his official area of expertise. When a historian becomes interested in chronoscopy (or time viewing), a conspiracy to suppress knowledge is unveiled. What is fascinating is that while the story leads the reader to react against what appears to be a totalitarian government, it becomes apparent later that the government's motivation was to protect the people, not to withhold knowledge or suppress progress. A strange parallel to this is found in another book, Father Ernetti's Chronovisor: The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine, which tells the true story of a Vatican priest who claimed to have been involved in the creation of a real-life time-viewer, a chronovisor. Not sure about the veracity of this, but it sure makes a great story!
-> you can buy Earth is Room Enough here.
-> you can buy Father Ernetti's Chronovisor here.

Do You Need Your Home to Be Smarter Than It Already Is?

Reconfigurable House 2.0 from haque d+r on Vimeo.

People are gaga over the idea of smarthomes right now. Don't believe me? Just try Googling 'smarthome' for starters. One explanation for this is that most people just assume that their immediate surroundings will change in accordance with increasing technological capabilites. In other words, we assume that our homes and communities should reflect the current state of technology. However, this is really not the case. What is more likely is that consumer technology represents the last decade of technological achievements- sort of a "trickle-down" effect. Anyhow, that shouldn't stop us from expecting, should it? Take a look at how the city of 2057 will be after the next half-century of technological progress. Also, take a look at this video that demos a more do-it-yourself approach to the smarthome.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

This is definitely required reading for anyone thinking about the impact of technology on society and a good primer for anyone interested in better understanding the thinking of the philosopher, scientist, visionary, architect, inventor, etc., Buckminster Fuller. This is Bucky's sincerely optimistic essay about how humanity can survive by utilizing industrialization and wealth balanced by better education. Without this balance, he believes that man's tendency is toward "oblivion" without realizing the universal impact of our daily decisions and larger policies, but that considering Earth a "spaceship," that is always on the move, mankind can better act as a passenger and steward.
-> Learn more about the book here.
-> Buy it used here.

Life in the Cloud

The cloud is already on its way to becoming the predominant computing platform for most people. The cloud is used to refer to the concept of utilizing a centralized hosted application or operating system which allows its resources to be accessed by users accross the internet, as opposed to the typical scenario of individual users running applications installed on their local computers. If you're suprised that this could so quickly become the norm, consider the applications you use today, and which are actually located on your machine. -> This article wonders what your "cloud profile" is.

Social Media and the Collective Visual Memory

At a recent TED talk, architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrated a Seadragon zoomable UI -enabled interface called Photosynth. Photosynth creates incredibly detailed and spatial representations of places and objects by assembling the data from multiple images from social sources, like Flickr. As you'll see in the demo video (see below for the embedded YouTube player), the result is extraordinary! Below are Blaise's concluding remarks, which explain the significance of the Seadragon technology. What I find compelling about his comments relates to this article, which distinguishes between social media tools that either utilize existing communities and social momentum for the purpose of gathering and organizing information, or attempt to create communities using online technology and connectivity. I think Photosynth is of the former category. Read and watch below...

"What the point here really is, is that we can do things with the social environment. This is now taking data from everybody- from the entire collective memory visually of what the earth looks like- and linking all of that together. All of those photos become linked together and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. You have a model that emerges of the entire earth- think of this as the long tail of Steve Lawler's Virtual Earth work (see below for YouTube video of Steve Lawler's presentation)- and this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and who's benefits become greater to the users as they use it. Their own photos are getting tagged with meta data that somebody else entered. If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space since that metaverse is using everybody else's photos using a kind of cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. And of course, a bi-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the earth collected not just from overhead flights and satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory."
-> Watch Steve Lawler at TED.
-> Watch Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED.

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