Next generation gaming is not for the faint of heart

Life is a game. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of the game, involving the work we do, the people we hang out with, and the social structures that surround us.

But who exactly created this game? Each day we live our lives as animated playing pieces, playing by rules that others created. Conformity is a constant force, imposing a lifestyle that most of us were born into, saddled with goals that often go cross-grain with our personal strengths. All of this, however, is about to change.

In the future, the very near future, nothing we hold dear today will remain sacred. Not even the rules for our own game of life. 

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Next Generation Thinking Machines 

Artificial intelligence in the past has been a top-down exercise of simulating the actions and behaviors of people. Given the wide range of decision-making processes that the average person uses in their day to day activities, the problem-sets that needed to be solved in order to replicate all of the possibilities became staggeringly impossible.

However, the online world has given us insight into some new approaches for developing artificial thought, and these new approaches center around the concept of capturing real pieces of human intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

Will the convergence of search technology and RFID chips improve our lives or forever put us in a fishbowl for all to see?

Findability Vs Spyability

Has this ever happened to you?
 
Over the years, my eyes have grown progressively myopic. I don’t mind my fuzzy view of things distant. My short range vision is still nearly perfect. Just need the specs for driving. Wouldn’t you know it? I step away from my computer and a moment later discover my glasses magically vanished. (For me, the glasses disappearing act, similar to losing socks in a dryer, is a recurring annoyance.)
 
Now, several days later, I’m still looking and my imagination has shifted into full gear, conjuring up thoughts of a sinister KGB plot to mess with my head.
 
I wish I were looking for something online. I could simply turn to a search engine, type in a few words, and on a good day find my subject.  But we have no search engines for the physical world.  Not yet.

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Thinking beyond the limits of our current systems

Creativity is coming from unusual places these days. I snipped this from David Levinson’s blog post dated Feb 13, 2008, one of the earliest mentions of this topic (http://bit.ly/ma1Ur): …

“I’m proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years. This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs … we’ll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead.”

The National Infrastructure Bank is making a lot of noise inside the Beltway. Not difficult to imagine why. Here is another big-ticket item that is bound to keep lobbyists and politicians in hyperbole mode for months.

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