Here’s a thought for future parents: your kids may cuddle artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence may cuddle them back.

A new San Francisco startup, ToyTalk, has put out an intriguing video about its core product in development, apparently an AI-enabled Teddy Bear that interfaces with children through an iPad.

Here’s the video, though it’s just a teaser:

According to reports, ToyTalk has already raised $16 million in funding, based on its concept and a team that includes people with impressive tech resumes, such as Oran Jacob, former CTO at Pixar, and Martin Reddy, who worked on the project that became Apple’s Siri digital assistant.

Fascinating stuff, and most likely the next evolution in toys. There’s been a long mechanical tradition in toy making, of course, from wind-ups to remote controls, but ToyTalk appears to be taking it to another level. A child’s anthropomorphic toys evolve from having life-like motion to having subjectivity-like interaction. The myth of Pinocchio—a toy achieving consciousness—moves a small step toward reality.

I can’t wait to see the product and the depth of the “AI” here. I suspect also that this bear is only the beginning.

One of the socio-technological themes that I follow and have written about is the interrelationship of automation and the future of human work. In a previous post, I discussed the South African mining strikes, which in some cases are winding down. In other cases, labor unrest has spread to other mines and other mining companies. At issue here, of course, are the various trade-offs between safety, economics, livelihood, and social equity that plague all dangerous, low-wage human labor.

Workers want more safety and compensation, i.e. better life outcomes, and corporate entities want more predictable and profitable operations, i.e., better economic outcomes.

To be clear and direct here: the global economy will settle the dispute eventually. As much as I sympathize with the workers, and I do sympathize with them, they are being crushed between a rock and a hard place. Global economic trends are working against them, but so too are global technology trends.

We are already seeing technology gearing up to fill the labor gap.

Check out this video from Rail-Veyor Technologies:

It won’t be long before the global supply chain in raw material extraction and transportation will be fully automated and computer controlled. This means mining, farming, and more. Even in developing economies.

Automation will have enormous impact on human beings who earn their livelihoods through labor, and these displaced human beings will have an impact on our world, positively or negatively.

I’ve written before that as automation progresses, human beings will be challenged to do new things, develop new skills, and add unique, human-driven value to the economy. In the first world, most of us can likely meet this challenge ourselves, individually. There are support systems for us.

In the developing world, it will be tougher for individuals to adapt. And because our global economic fortunes are increasingly intertwined, the best thing would be for governments and industry to take an active global interest in assisting displaced workers. Teach them skills, educate them, find ways to help them focus and leverage their bodies and minds in ways that provide them with livelihoods.

This needs to happen in conjunction with automation. It can’t wait. In fact, I’d like to see companies like Rail-Veyor develop assistance and educational programs for potentially displaced workers.

This is yet another big challenge for our global society. There are so many, it’s true, but doing nothing isn’t viable. Pragmatically, strikes and protests by displaced workers are economically disruptive, but ethically, a future of exclusion, of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, can’t be anyone’s vision of an ideal global society.

We can do a better future than that.

The 2012 US Presidential election is over, and congratulations to Barack Obama. The internet is filled with infinite analyses on what the election means, both in the short term and the long term, so I won’t go on too long about my impressions.

But a couple of things are clear and worth noting.

First, the game of politics in the United States has changed, empowered now by technologies ranging from social media to big data forecasting. Secondly, the make-up of the American voting population has changed, as more Hispanic Americans, young people and women assert themselves electorally.

These two facts work against the traditional Republican establishment that was so successful in electing George W. Bush in 2000. And it seemed to catch them by surprise. Perhaps the most poignant and telling moment for me (and many others) was Republican strategist Karl Rove’s election night meltdown on Fox News.

Here’s the video, in case you missed it.

The point here isn’t Ohio, of course, and I have little interest in heaping ridicule on Rove or the arrogance of Fox News (well, maybe a little). But really, Rove’s meltdown is a telling moment in the sense that here is an aging white male establishment political strategist protesting stubbornly against the behavior of a nation that no longer seems to operate the way he expects it to.

The beautiful subsequent sequence when the Fox crew consult their own data geeks sharpens the poignancy of Rove’s meltdown.

Rove looked like a dinosaur. Karlasaurus Rove.

The fact is that Karl Rove’s generation and assumptions are rapidly aging, no matter how much he might wish to deny it. It’s there, demographically. American voters are young, multi-ethic, tech-savvy, and female. It’s there, culturally too. There is support for gay marriage. There is support for the legalization of marijuana.

It’s tough to know exactly how demographic, cultural and technological trends will impact the US political process in the future, but they will continue to impact it. That much is certain.

It’s also possible that we’ll see more statisticians than strategists next time around.

Here’s a science fiction story I just wrote and made into an eBook. It’s in .pdf format, and I’m making it available free for download and sharing.

Node 137A is a longish short story (or shortish novella) set about 20-30 years in the future. It tells the story of an engineer who works with automated security grids, future police systems that monitor and control entire cities. In the process of upgrading an old security grid in Johannesburg, South Africa, he inadvertently triggers the emergence of The Singularity, i.e., artificial intelligence.

Click on the image below to view or download.

If you read it, I hope you enjoy. And if you enjoy, I hope you’ll share and maybe leave me a comment saying you liked it.

WARNING: This story contains profanity, plus some rather speculative computer science, either of which might offend some sensibilities.

Enjoy!

The US national news at present is dominated by the imminent arrival of “superstorm” Sandy to the Northeastern coast. Like most of us in the US now, my thoughts are with my family members, friends and work colleagues in that region.

Please prepare and be safe, everyone. (Especially my sister, who, according to a Facebook update, was “kicked out” of Atlantic City today. This time, it’s for your safety, too, sis.)

That said, you’d have to be living in a cave to be unaware of how extreme our weather has become. In the US this year, summer temperatures hit new highs in many places. Globally, we have had massive hurricanes, snowstorms, tsunamis (remember Japan last year), earthquakes, tornadoes, you name it. And with the extreme weather have come human casualties. It’s a convergence of two global trends: climate change and overpopulation. We have over 7 billion people spread across the planet now, so any storm is likely to encounter a populated area.

It seems no longer useful to deny the effects of climate change. As partially explained here a few days back, the fearsome potential of Sandy comes from the convergence of multiple climate effects, including a tropical storm, a nor’easter, the jet stream, “blocking” effects, and the full moon. A perfect storm, if you will, that owes some of its historic force to climate change. The rapid decline of polar sea ice, for one thing, has warmed the seas, and warm seas add energy to tropical storms. So we’re likely to see these storms hit harder further north in the future. It’s just one result of global warming.

Reading about the coming storm also reminds me of Bruce Sterling’s 1995 cyberpunk novel Heavy Weather, which I re-read earlier this year. The novel tells the story of a band of tornado chasers called “The Troupe,” in a near-future version of West Texas-Oklahoma. Climate change in the story has advanced to the point that tornado alley becomes virtually unlivable for all but the most renegade or weather-obsessed.

The story follows The Troupe as they chase after an F6 tornado, a huge, never-seen-before superstorm. The fictional F6 tornado, like the real hurricane Sandy, is something of a climate change-driven convergence of forces that don’t normally converge, full of fearsome power that threatens to destroy the book’s protagonists.

Lots of good action and adventure, of course, but it’s not the plot that makes Sterling’s 17-year-old novel so fascinating to me today. It’s his very prescient description of a possible future socio-economic-ecological environment. The near-future world of Heavy Weather has economic collapse, social collapse, and environmental collapse all rolled into a world that’s beginning to look a lot like ours. It’s even got out-of-control Mexican gangs, food shortages, and driverless cars to boot.

A brilliant work of futurism, really.

So it’s safe to say some folks saw superstorms like Sandy coming. Like global warming, the data trends have been there for years. If we take climate change seriously, it may be possible to mitigate our impacts on the environment, and thus potentially on weather patterns. Sure, a lot of people would have to do a lot of things differently, but our only alternative might be to learn to love heavy weather.

I wrote in my last post here that we needed some ways to make explicit and visual the impacts our actions and behaviors have on the ecological health of our planet. If we are to truly embrace sustainability on a mass scale, in other words, we need to begin to see the damage we’re doing.

The Hestia Project is an interesting step in that direction.

According to the project site:

“The Hestia system combines diverse data about the flow and metabolism of the energy-emissions-climate nexus. Hestia can provide stakeholders an unprecedented opportunity to design and implement carbon management strategies, verify emissions reduction, strengthen and support basic research in climate prediction and carbon cycle science, and allow the public, decisionmakers, scientists and industry access to detailed space-time information on fossil/industrial energy consumption and CO2 emissions. All this will be done via an intuitive, interactive, photorealistic, three-dimensional visualization of the Earth.”

Here’s also a Fast Company article on the project.

And check out their video:

Great stuff. All of which says, to me anyway, that there are great opportunities to better understand and mitigate our ecological impacts, again, when we can see them, graphically, in real-time. Of course, I think they’re approaching this a little institutionally, and they may never be able to influence the behavior of the average consumer on the street, given their current scope. But it’s a model, and hey, it’s a start.

I hope the general concept matures, as this kind of invisible insight needs to be a public, everyday thing.

Just imagine — if you took an augmented reality concept like Google’s Project Glass and overlaid emissions data optics on the visual field of the wearer, so that wherever they went they could see the impact intensity, in real-time, right there, right then, that would be pretty interesting, wouldn’t it? If adopted widely, how would such a tool change our behavior and/or our environmental expectations?

Here’s my favorite part of The Examined Life, a very watchable documentary from 2008 — philosopher Slavoj Zizek discusses ideology and ecology in the trash heap:

Many interesting (and contentious) points for both present and future here: the relationship between ideology and ecology, nature as a series of catastrophes, ecology as a new opium of the masses, the myth that humans are alienated from the natural world, and more.

My favorite part is when he talks about “disavowal,” the idea that although we may know a fact, we sometimes act as if we don’t know. You might know certain foods lead to unhealthy outcomes, for instance, but you still eat them anyway. Zizek’s point here is that we consciously or unconsciously disavow, and disguise, the ecological impact of human activity on the earth by engineering our environment to separate human activity and behaviors from their ecological impacts. The trash heap in the clip here is an example: we produce all this waste, but it disappears from our lives. When we walk out of our homes and go to work, all we see is clean streets and groomed parks.

In other terms, Zizek is pointing to a material example of the psychogeographical engineering* that we (or the powers that be) do as a society and culture in order to support discourses of consumption and materialism. We have engineered our world to support mass consumption of disposable goods, and the inconvenient externalities have to be hidden so as not to disrupt that discourse.

If you were interested in a sustainable future, creating more awareness of ecological impacts would be useful, and to do that, you likely need to break the cycle of disavowal. We might have to make visual all the hidden waste and destruction happening as a result of our daily lives.

Technology could help us out here. Could some system be developed, integrating video, GPS, and RFID to make humans visually and quantitatively aware of their environmental impacts? If we saw everywhere the scale of our waste and destruction, would that change our behavior? It seems possible such a solution might work, and I think it would be more impactful than those online carbon footprint calculators.

Something to think about.

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* Incidentally, I am thinking more and more about this psychogeography concept, which I mentioned in a previous post. I think it’s a good potential framework for cultural analysis of material-architectural-environmental discourse. If principles of psychogeography are part of the methodology through which the built environment reinforces the present, then it’s a critical space for contesting that present and for creating the future. More in a future post.

If you’re like me, you succeed at times, and you screw up here and there too. Some projects turn out wonderful. Others, not so much. It feels great when we succeed, and not so great when we fail. Moreover, it’s generally pretty clear whether we’ve succeeded or failed, isn’t it, because in most of the contexts in which we act, expectations are defined and outcomes subsequently rewarded or punished.

Since we’ve also been conditioned since birth to seek pleasure and avoid pain, the success vs. failure dichotomy goes deep and is hard to confront. Culturally, we reinforce that dichotomy over and over as well:

“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” football coach Red Sanders told us.

Yoda was just as humorless in the Star Wars saga: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

In order to be a good futurist, innovator, or I would even say human being, these days, we need to remember that the success-failure dichotomy is socially and contextually constructed. That is, it’s defined by the rules of the particular game that’s in play. Put yet another way, it’s defined mostly by others.

More than that, the ways in which success and failure are often defined support a specific status quo, and therefore look backward, by virtue of their intrinsic participation in a legacy context or construct. A familiar example might be the success the oil industry has had in developing technologies to profitably extract oil from previously marginal locations. It’s a success in today’s game in that it maintains our global fossil fuel economy and keeps gas prices affordable for consumers, but the oil industry’s present success seems a collective failure of the future in that it may delay serious efforts to move us beyond fossil fuels.

Well, someone always wins and someone always loses, we might say, but intelligent consideration of such an example needs to go beyond winners and losers to consider the construct or game in which these actions play out. To shift from the present into a sustainable future is to shift the construct, and where future thinkers add value has to be in analyzing, modeling and prototyping possibilites for the where and how of such shifts.

I think this perspective also applies to our individual personal and professional lives. Maybe if we stop thinking in terms of success and failure, and start thinking in open possibilities, defining and shifting our own context, it might change the way we see our work and ourselves. The next time you do or try something, maybe try to resist letting the status quo construct define the outcome. Instead, try to define the outcome within your own context and see if you feel differently about it.

Finally, I’d like to suggest a modification of Yoda’s famous “there is no try” phrase, for futurists and, well, all of us: There is do, do not, and also try. Our great challenge is to figure out which one, in which context, works the best.

Quick, random thoughts tonight on Google (and a between-the-lines love letter to Guy Debord):

Reflecting a bit on “Don’t Be Evil,” Google’s famous old “informal corporate motto”— one is tempted at first to laud it as a pithy, hip-phrased commitment to integrity, transparency and corporate citizenship.

Yet, anyone that has given the thing an ounce of thought is also tempted to wonder why the lady doth protest so much. In other words, why go on about evil unless you’re doing it? Well, there are plenty who think Google knows too much about us, and they probably do. But I don’t think they were ever necessarily evil or interested in becoming evil.

Instead, I think they’re extremely smart and generally know what they’re doing. For one, they know they’re always on the edge of any number of minor Faustian bargains. More than that, I believe Brin and Page saw the psycho-cultural-epistemological magnitude of their search engine project pretty early on. I think the “Don’t Be Evil” thing was a rather genuine ethical response. For dramatic purposes, I imagine a moment when they saw the raw corrupting power of their creation, looked up at each other, had an oh-shit moment, then nervously scrawled the motto on a conference room whiteboard, where none dared erase it.

I know it probably didn’t happen that way, but hey, why not imagine it?

Anyway, reverse-engineering that “Don’t Be Evil” scrawl, here’s what I think Brin and Page saw:

1) The web is nothing more than the first iteration of a future world that is pure datasphere. We will all live in that world. It will shape us. It will teach us. It will define what is possible and what is not. It’s already happening, but it’s just begun.

2) Page Rank and algorithms like it will be primary forces of nature that will do nothing less than shape and define the world we live in. And who we are, what we can be. It’s already happening, but it’s just begun.

3) Specifically, the search engine scuplts the psychogeography of the datasphere in which we all live. By favoring some data, and starving off others, Google and things like Google passively and actively delimit what data exists in the world, according to their own logic and judgment, and thereby (I repeat) define the world we live in, shape what we can think and who we can be.

4) And thus, Google is nothing less than a kind of demiurge cartographer of a living world of data: they are mapping (and through mapping, creating) our digital world for us. They are creating/mapping our intellectual, social and cultural possibilities, no less, and it’s no surprise that they long ago set about to map (or re-map) the physical world too. It’s all the same project of psychogeographic engineering.

So that’s the beautiful terror in the algorithm: world-creator power of many magnitudes.

Any distrust we might have of Google, then, comes from our intuitive sense of that power. The Chinese government exercises a similar power over its citizens, perhaps. That’s the closest analogy I can think of. But I think in Google’s case, to this point, it amounts more to a tremendous ability to be evil than actually being evil. Either way, that’s how big the thing is that Google holds in its hands. If you don’t believe me, consider alone the sway Google has over internet marketers. There is something akin to deep moral import in every tweak of Page Rank, and the faithful tremble. Just read the SEO blogs each time PR changes—those folks rattle about like ancient oracles attempting to extract an omen from an animal carcass.

So there it is. Maybe it’s all obvious to you. Or maybe I’m wrong.

Regardless, I always liked the ideas of the Situationist Movement, particularly the idea of the derivé, that aimless wandering through the city in a way that subverts its intended psychogeographical discourse, that allows you to think and be in ways that aren’t programmed by the structures around you.

And I wonder what a datasphere equivalent of the derivé would look like.

There has been a lot of press on “intelligent transport” lately: technology-enhanced automobiles, cargo vehicles and personal transports. The poster child for the movement has to be Google’s driverless car. If you haven’t been following the latest Google adventure in innovation, check out this Ted Talk with Sebastian Thrun:

But beyond this high-profile Google project, now legal in California, there are countless devices and vehicle prototypes designed to post-modernize the 100-year-old technology of hitting the road. But it’s not just vehicles, it’s also roads, signs, and overall geographic systems that are being innovated.

Here’s a Discovery video overview from the World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems:

The ostensible benefits of intelligent transport are safety, efficiency and sustainability, all of which are desirable. But this tech is also a sign of the increased networking and automation of our lives, and thus a potential loss of adventure and personal autonomy. On a certain level, in other words, it feels too damn safe. And tech-tethered.

While I’m no fan of gas-guzzling old technology, I do have to admit there is something satisfying about ripping along an open freeway in a convertible, with no set itinerary. So I wonder how quickly broad adoption of intelligent transport will happen, if intelligent transport means safe and tethered. The very real future forecasting issue here is the interplay between technology and culture: are we really ready to embrace so much automation in an area of our lives that provides us such a sense of psychological control as driving our cars? Maybe many of us are, but is everyone? Will there be a blended period of time where intelligent and dumb cars share the road? And will we eventually lose the ability to choose, as the new paradigm sweeps the old technology aside like leaded gasoline?

However it turns out, it’s clear that as these technologies advance, the road trip is unlikely to be the same.

Which begs the classic futurist question: when do I get my frickin’ jet pack?