Future Trends in Computing
TRENDS 2016
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics prediction, 1949
"Power electrons are the mother's milk of the information age and power distribution is a lot more fragile than we imagine," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Carry spare batteries."
2014 Government-built malware running out of control, F-Secure claims "Governments writing viruses: today we sort of take that for granted but 10 years ago that would have been science fiction," he told the public conference. "If someone had come to me ten years ago and told me that by 2014 it will be commonplace for democratic Western governments to write viruses and actively deploy them against other governments, even friendly governments, I would have thought it was a movie plot. But that's exactly where we are today."
The Unstoppable Exponential Growth In The State Of Surveillance For the people who don't care and mistakenly think since they've got nothing to hide they have nothing to be afraid of.
2013 Welcome to the cyberwar arms race
, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century.
Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued last October and released
by Edward Snowden, outlines US cyberwar policy. Most of it isn't
very interesting, but there are two paragraphs about "Offensive
Cyber Effect Operations," or OCEO, that are intriguing:
OECO can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance
US national objectives around the world with little or no warning
to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from
subtle to severely damaging. The development and sustainment of
OCEO capabilities, however, may require considerable time and
effort if access and tools for a specific target do not already
exist.
The United States Government shall identify potential targets of
national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of
effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of
national power, establish and maintain OCEO capabilities
integrated as appropriate with other US offensive capabilities,
and execute those capabilities in a manner consistent with the
provisions of this directive.
These two paragraphs, and another paragraph about OCEO, are the
only parts of the document classified "top secret." And that's
because what they're saying is very dangerous.Cyberattacks have
the potential to be both immediate and devastating.
First of all, calling it "war"
as people have been doing is a misnomer. "War" is a large scale,
national effort to force another nation to bend to the political
will of the first. The things that have been alleged do not rise
to that level. Furthermore, a real "war" would involve kinetic as
well as cyber.
It skews the perception and public discourse to continue to call
these actions "war" -- similar to using that word to refer to the
"war" on drugs or the "war" on Christmas.
Surveillance
: White House petition to pardon Snowden: 110,000 signatures
The Obama Administration has established
a policy
that it doesn't respond to petitions relating to "specific law
enforcement matters." See first articulation, in the case of
Sholom Rubashkin; the White House repeated the same language in
response to petitions relating to Casey Anthony and the Church of
Scientology.
SKYbox Data From Above
What can you really learn from 500 miles above Earth? Quite a lot,
it turns out. Already, our limited commercial services for
satellite imaging are providing crucial data to companies,
scientists, and governments. Their up-
to-the-minute snapshots of the planet will give us data
that could upend industries, transform economies—even
help predict the future.
1985 Welcome to the Information Age
A journey through Mankinds History. Post Industrial Age and by
1956 the information age begins.
By spring 2013, everyone on Earth will be able to watch the planet from the most unique vantage point ever built, the International Space Station.
2012
Predicting what topics will trend on Twitter
A new algorithm predicts which Twitter topics will trend hours in
advance and offers a new technique for analyzing data that
fluctuate over time.
2012 Google Presidential campaign Prediction
2012 3D printers -- In much the same way as the PC trashed the
traditional world of computing Industrial 3D printers can now be
had for $15,000, and home versions for little more than $1,000 (or
half that in kit form). “In many ways, today's 3D printing
community resembles the personal computing community of the early
1990s,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge,
an advocacy group in Washington, DC. Because of a 3D printer's
ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand
it a piracy machine. The next generation of Makerbot's 3D printer
is out. $2,200. Review here:
http://blog.makezine.com
Video:
http://blog.makezine.com/
2012 BIG DATA When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers' privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud. "we'll see a small group of scientists with access to private data repositories enjoy an unfair amount of attention in the community at the expense of equally talented researchers whose only flaw is the lack of right 'connections' to private data.”
2011 The Personal Computer Is Dead Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.
Digital Delivery and moving to the cloud, the concept of ownership will evaporate.
By 2010 the Time Teens Spend With Digital Will Be 80% [
1
]
Google, CIA Invest in Future of Web Monitoring Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents both present and still-to-come. Its not the very first time Google has done business with Americas spy agencies. Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Futures board.
Non Profit Internet Exchange Points
like
365 Main
Originally, the companies that owned the backbone of the Internet
shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has
increased to the point where some researchers who study
public peering points - peering
the way global networks are put together believe that peering is
changing the fundamental shape of the Internet, with serious
consequences for its stability and security. “The Internet as we
know it is pretty
much vanishing, in the sense that much of the traffic is being
routed through lots of new layers and applications, much of it
wireless. One petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes. A
zettabyte is a million petabytes. And a yottabyte is a thousand
zettabytes. The company estimates that video will account for 90
percent of all Internet traffic by 2013. Arbor's Internet
Observatory Report concluded that today the majority of Internet
traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers
like Google and consumer networks like Comcast. It also described
what it referred to as the rise of so-called hyper giants —
monstrous portals that have become the focal point for much of the
network's traffic: “Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the
Internet, 30 large companies — 'hyper giants' like Limelight,
Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube — now generate and consume
a disproportionate 30 percent of all Internet traffic,” the
researchers noted.
Joseph Weizenbaum
, computer pioneer and critic, dies 2008
"Perhaps the computer, as well as many other of our machines and
techniques, can yet be transformed, following our own
authentically revolutionary transformation, into instruments to
enable us to live harmoniously with nature and with one another.
But one prerequisite will first have to be met: there must be
another transformation of man. And it must be one that restores a
balance between human knowledge, human aspirations, and an
appreciation of human dignity such that man may become worthy of
living in nature."
Trend: Computers remember everything forever.
We should shift the default when storing personal information back
to where it has been for millennia, from remembering forever to
forgetting over time. We have become a global society through
mass, creative collaboration when participation will be the key
organising idea. People are now players not just spectators, part
of the action, not on the sidelines.
Ten Reasons You Will Not Recognize America in Ten Years
2016 - The Computer Age Arrives, civilization as we've known it is over. Now over 90% of the US population is online. Internet access crosses the 90 percent mark that is only achieved by truly ubiquitous technology, such as television and the home telephone.
Originally introduced in a 2002 paper called " The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution ," in which the authors imply that the emergence of darknets is inevitable as long as content can be copied and there is sufficient interest in distribution. 'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.' Use VPN
2004 In all, 1,286 internet experts looked at the future impact
of the internet and assessed predictions about how technology
and society will unfold.
The report about the survey results, including a great many
predictions and comments from participants:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/145/report_display.asp
The survey results themselves can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Experts_future_survey_results.pdf
In addition, many of the predictions have been entered in an
online database that we have created with Elon University. They
will join the more than 4,000 predictions from the 1990-1995 era
that are already entered in the database.
http://www.elon.edu/predictions/.
Computer Grid Merger 2006
The Global Grid Forum (GG
F)
and the Enterprise GridAlliance (EGA) Merger "common interest in
accelerating the pervasive adoption of grids worldwide."
The GGF founded in 1989, develops standards for grid technologies.
Members include many academic institutions as well as commercial
interests. The EGA, created in 2004, is an organization of vendors
working to facilitate the deployment of commercial applications in
computing grids. The EGA includes such companies as EMC, Fujitsu
Siemens Computers, HP, Intel,NEC, Network Appliance, Oracle, and
Sun Microsystems.
- Advanced Encryption Standard - Wireless Policy http://csrc.nist.gov/wireless/S04_DOD%20Wireless%20Requirements-th.pdf
- A Flash Mob supercomputer is hundreds or even thousands of computers connected together via a LAN working together as a single supercomputer. A Flash Mob computer, unlike an ordinary cluster, is temporary and organized on-the-fly for the purpose of working on a single problem.
- The future of email is to get your good ole' phone directory up to date again.
- Brain Scanning - the neuroscientists' use of fMRI, wrote in
the
March 2003 Nature Neuroscience
:
“Our analysis shows a steady expansion of studies with evident
social and policy implications, including studies of human
cooperation and competition, brain differences in violent people
and genetic influences on brain structure and function.” Complex
behaviors and emotions—such as fear, lying, decision making,
self-monitoring, moral dilemmas, and assessments of rewards and
punishment—are all in play. So far, she suggests, society has
given little thought to how these technologies and their volatile
payloads will be used. - a lie detector small enough to fit in the
eyeglasses of law enforcement officers, developed by mathematician
Amir Lieberman at Nemesysco in Zuran, Israel, for military,
insurance claim and law enforcement use say it can tell whether a
passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple
question in real-time. The heart of Nemesysco's security-oriented
technology is a signal-processing engine that is said to use more
than 8,000 algorithms each time it analyzes an incoming voice
waveform.
Also see -
The Truth Detector
and
Thoughts read' via brain scans
- Eliminate the use of student, staff and faculty SSNs wherever possible, because of identity theft which can lead to a egregious violation of student privacy."Many institutions are beginning to use institution-created unique ID numbers, but they are often only an alternative to using the SSN for many systems and forms.
- Can next-generation phone systems take the shape of decentralized, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that run over the Net and eliminate phone-company middlemen? Skype is free and simple software that will enable you to make free calls anywhere in the world in minutes
- Anonymity could be replaced by Pseudonymity To preserve freedom Mr Lessig suggests it might become legal, for instance, to have credit cards for online transactions under different names , as long as these could still be traced to the individual owner. The challenge is to set the legal hurdles for online search warrants high enough so that governments cannot abuse their power. But at the same time to keep them low enough so that criminals can be found and stopped. In this respect, the online world should be no different from the real one.
-
NSF Cyber Trust Program
Carl Landwehr, Program Director, (703) 292-8950, clandweh@nsf.gov
CyberTrust Program
Deadlines for proposals
are available for fundamental research, multi-disciplinary
research and education and workforce development.
NSF Science Experts: Eugene Spafford, NSF Senior Advisor,
(703) 292-8900, espaffor@nsf.gov
- Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe, aims to build the largest international grid infrastructure to date, operating in more than 70 institutions throughout Europe, providing 24-hour grid service and a computing capacity comparable to 20,000 of today's most powerful personal computers. The other is a distributed supercomputing project, led by France's National Center for Scientific Research, that will connect seven supercomputers in Europe at optical network speeds, getting a leg up on the TeraGrid project in the United States, which aims to connect the nation's major supercomputer sites. The goal is to establish Europe as one of the most dynamic and creative environment in the world to deploy grid-enabled infrastructures. source 10/11/03 COSM
- By 2003 anyone still clinging to the idea that the Internet is a public enterprise should forget it. That was a romantic notion in the good old days before 1996, when everything seemed possible. With nothing but a computer, a modem and a phone line, the smallest fry could compete with the biggest corporate dragons by reaching millions of people at little cost. Information and entertainment could flow freely. Closed and oppressive societies would be opened. The order of the day also was to avoid turning the Net into a public utility, subject to the kinds of rules and regulations that govern telephones and electricity. The Internet's global reach was one major reason; who would have jurisdiction? Government involvement also would squelch innovation and growth, people feared.
- TERAPROT project by CEA, Gene-It SA & INFOBIOGEN Contains the results of the all-by-all comparison of 67 proteome sets.
- Human Resources (HR) department plays in enterprise security. Securing a business is not just a technological matter--choosing the right firewall and other measures. Technology must be backed by sound policies to govern usage and maintenance. HR is responsible for the implementation of those policies, and creating a security culture backed by employee awareness. HR is responsible for the management and control of staff, and acts as a conduit of communication between departments. HR must also ensure the company complies with the latest legislation. Make "security best practices" part of employee contracts and staff training. Establishing firm security policies with a cycle of self-assessment to enable businesses to adapt to changing security demands.
- Sandia team develops cognitive Machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences and allow users to call upon simulated experts. A new type of "smart" machine that could fundamentally change how people interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories. Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions. Article and contact
- Robotic Replacement of Human Workers
-
Open Government Information Awareness <
http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
>
The Open Government Information Awareness program is an effort to
increase transparency in the United States government. As the US
government increases its supervision of civilian lives, it is
crucial to ensure accountability. Since democracy requires an
informed public, every effort must be made to give citizens access
to government information. The Open Government Information
Awareness program builds a framework for US citizens to construct
and analyze the world's most comprehensive database on our
government. Citizens will explore data, track events, find
patterns, and build risk profiles, all in an effort to encourage
action. To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive,
easy-to-use repository of information on individuals,
organizations, and corporations related to the government of the
United States of America. To allow citizens to submit intelligence
about government-related issues, while maintaining their
anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to
participate in the process.
- Cyber War, Cyber Terrorism
Terrorists, individual hackers and foreign governments exploit
computer network vulnerabilities to disrupt the infrastructure of
a country, known as weapons of mass disruption. No country can
match the US in terms of conventional weapons so cyber-terrorism
is the best way to do it. It's so cheap, don't need soldiers and
tanks, and it is so stealthy. They use information technology to
control critical government and private sector systems. Our enemy
will attack the electric, water, and other critical infrastructure
grids stopping service for at least 6 months and cause billions in
damages by breaking through the weak and or non existent security
on the software being used by those responsible for these public
companies. They do not spend the money on the needed security and
as a consequence knowing leave the country infrastructure
defenseless. Congress has refused to vote to make this a
regulation forcing them to do what they should, basically because
they don't use computers don't "get" technology only "get" the old
fashioned idea of war and leave it to the "war guys" to deal with.
Companies like Microsoft who have billions in cash won't guarantee
secure products - there are no lemon laws around for sloppy
programs so . . . we are doomed to see the catastrophe occur
followed by the congress dog and pony shown with their feigned
surprise followed by the inevitably vote that finally regulates
industry.
MORE
-
Computer Crime Research Center - Statistics
Cyberattacks with Offline Damage
This interstitial area where cyberspace meets the real world is a
ripe area of attack. This problem is the real-world equivalent of
a distributed "denial of service" attack, in which the attacker
gets computers around the world to inundate a target machine with
data, messages and other electronic detritus that make it
impossible for legitimate users to get through to it. Anyone can
get a computer and bury someone in junk. Google shows hundreds of
thousands of Web pages from which anyone could request a catalog,
but instead could have a program tell it to send someone a million
catalogs. This attack could be enormously disruptive to the
target, and could paralyze the local post office that has to deal
with the onslaught. As the report notes, the exploit could be used
as a diversion to accompany a deadly terrorist act, like mailing
an envelope containing anthrax spores. Some experts have talked
about hypothetical, cyberattacks on real-world facilities that are
connected to the Internet, like the power grid and dams. Other
automated include automated orders for hundreds of maintenance
requests, package pick-ups and service calls. -
-
DRM technology and policy
There appear to be two extremes: the pro-copyright extremists
and the anti-copyright extremists.
What will happen with DRM protected data in 100 years from now? Is
this what the
Computer Grid Merger
is actually for? Do they intend to control all data?
Don't you want future generations to be able to access
then-historic documents? Otherwise all DRM protected documents,
movies and films will be lost forever when the DRM technology is
replaced by something " better". Librarians can still read and
copy centuries old books today. Material which is copyrighted must
enter the public domain when copyright expires. Material which is
private must not. Right now DRM systems are not distinguishing
these cases in any meaningful way.
Happy Birthday
is copyrighted.
- Usage Log Data Management Working Group
The usage logs generated by web servers contain much data that is
useful for site owners, but the current default configurations can
pose a threat to the privacy of individuals, and may also present
a legal risk to corporations. Specifically, the IP addresses
collected by web servers are becoming increasingly easy to
associate with the identity of particular individuals. For
corporations, this means that they may violate their own privacy
policies by retaining portions of these logs. Left unmanaged,
these logs can expose web site owners to potential lawsuits and
discovery requests, and erode what privacy is left to individuals.
But today, no standard policy exists to manage the retention and
eventual destruction of usage log data, and no tools exist to
enforce such policies. The goal of this all-day working group
meeting is to
develop a policy that organizations can use to govern their
retention of usage log data, and a specification for a utility
that will delete, hash, or aggregate usage log data according to
this policy
. This meeting is intended for legal, technical, policy, and
business practitioners who are involved with the management of web
usage log data, or web usage log tools. For further information,
please contact Jeff Ubois (jeff@ubois.com) .
-
Edsger Dijkstra quote on Computer Science
[From asilomar-news, noted by Robert G. Kennedy III in Hackers
newsgroup,sent to RISKS by Ken Knowlton. PGN] Edsger W. Dijkstra,
*Communications of the ACM*, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3
In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a
widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but
completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a
theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the
engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs. [...]
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central
challenge, "How not to make a mess of it," has not been met. On
the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than
can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be
used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the
computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his
system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide
distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply
ashamed.
For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of
education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the
managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state
of affairs, but that won't do. You see, while we all know that
unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know
what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the
intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the
interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of
disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy
can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be
talking about, ... The moral is that whether computing science is
finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.
- Move interaction with the computer from the hands to the
mouth.
The screen responds to the human voice in every way. Voice
commands are responsible for every operation, no hand movements
are necessary.
- Cyber security liability will involve insurance firms
to help manage business risk. Insurers will demand better
security, perhaps spawning minimal security standards.
- Using Neural Networks To Beat Hackers : By combining the behavioral and computer sciences, D.C.-based startup Psynapse promises to lock out hackers before they can do any damage. Psynapse's Checkmate intrusion protection system conducts a real-time assessment of each visitor to a network, and if it sees behavior that indicates an attempted security breach, automatically terminates the intruder's access.
- TRACKING PEOPLE - the tech-art group 0100101110101101.org, started something like that with their VOBOS project. A combo of mobile phone/GPS sends the coordinates to a server. And the movement of the "kit" is traced on a map that can actually be very detailed (at a city/street level). http://0100101110101101.org/home/vopos/index.html
-"The human population does not double every 18 months, but its ability to use computers to keep track of us does. You can't encrypt your face." -- Phil Zimmermann; http://news.com.com/2100-1009-998728.html
- SMART MOBS
- the nature of cooperation for good and not all smart mobs are
going to be benevolent. How is it that humans come together to do
things collectively, and how do those enterprises succeed and
fail? That is an important aspect of how smart mobs can change the
world, because people with these devices linked together
instantaneously worldwide will be able to act collectively or not
act collectively in new ways. the mobile communication device, and
the Internet. Tens of millions of individuals will have computing
power in their pockets, they will be linked together so that the
aggregation of that computing power and the communications
capabilities of the individuals will be multiplied similar to the
way the Internet multiplies the capabilities of individuals who
were sitting in front of PCs. Peer-to-peer sharing, for example,
or peer-to-peer sharing of computing power as is done with
SETI@home or Distributed.net.
Examples:
-- groups of individuals voluntarily creating something
collectively that's much more powerful than what they could do
individually
-- a crowd that mobilized and succeeds in toppling a government,
organized with the endless forwarding of millions of text
messages.
-- WTO protestors in Seattle, who used cell phones, PDAs, laptops,
and the Internet to protest the meeting of the WTO in 1999. Using
these, they were able to outsmart the police. Source
http://www.thefeature.com/article.jsp?pageid=19666
-- Open Souce - great for collaboration between people who don't
trust eash other
-- SWARMING example: Amber Alert system automatically post images of the child or suspect direct to the desktop. In addition, the application provides the capability of instantly printing out a poster featuring all the information about the missing child. You can download an actual application from the link below. Amber Alert Ticker The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), the Digital Information Network will now provide instant and automatic Amber Alerts issued anywhere in the country. These Amber Alerts can be automatically or manually issued by our clients to hundreds of thousands of desktops within seconds of the alerts being issued. Be instantly notified of an Amber Alert on their desktops - but also receive vital information about the missing child, pictures of the child or suspect and a detailed written description of the individual law enforcement agencies are looking for http://dltw.tv/r.asp?i=303DA210-7968-471b-A4AB-C2ECF8BEEECF&b=Mark_Toney
- NANOTECHNOLOGY
Nanotechnology Portal with basics news & information. Covering
the Nanospace and reporting on nanoscale & future sciences
such as Molecular Machine Systems, Nanomedicine, & BioMEMS.
- THE FUTURE IS 802.11 WIRELESS NETWORKS
WIRELESS PARK
-
sponsored by Intel Wireless computing available anytime the park
is open Bryant Park now is a WiFi "Hot Spot", bringing the
internet FREE to users of laptops and handheld devices with
802.11b Ethernet cards. NYC Wireless, a volunteer community group
of computer wizards, provided the expertise to make Bryant Park
the first park in the world to offer 802.11b wireless computing to
its patrons for free. Go wireless and do work while enjoying the
park. How-to guides to get started are available at the park
entrances.
COMMON-SENSE COMPUTING (AP/CNN.com 9 Jun 2002) http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/06/09/common.sense.computer.ap/index.html Computer scientists have been working with linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers since 1984 in a project they hope will transform human existence -- teaching a computer common sense. The group has spent the last 18 years building the Cyc database, feeding it 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life that they hope eventually will give computers supercharged reasoning abilities -- which could enable humans to work more efficiently, understand one another better, and even help predict the previously unforeseeable. This spring, Cyc's developer -- Cycorp Inc. -- created a Web link to enable the public to download Cyc's knowledge base and teach it a few things, too. Cycorp founder and president Doug Lenat says that if enough people log in to share their wisdom, Cyc could quickly become vastly more useful -- doing duty as an instant language translator, annotating e-mails to put them in better context for their recipients, or even offering humans advice from varying points of view. Inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks Lenat is taking the right approach toward educating Cyc, combining pattern recognition with a rule-based foundation. "We're not going to spoon-feed all of our knowledge one rule at a time. I do think we could take Cyc as the seed for a self-organizing system that would then learn on its own."
Photonic Networks
The idea of assembling a large number of smaller computers
connected via a network (an idea which dates at least back to 1970
with the DCS project at UC Irvine (I was PI) may in the long run
be a much more powerful way to get large scale computing. The
advent of all photonic networks and the increasing power of
micro-computers may make such dinosaurs out of conventional
superccomputers.-- Dave Farber April 20, 2002
- Interplanetary Internet (IPN)
The future of this next-generation Net revolves quite literally
around Mars: Vint Cerf 56, recently joined a small team of
engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to begin sketching
out a wireless communications network that would let all those
space-based machines and - eventually - astronauts talk to one
another. He is using public and private missions aimed at Mars and
other planets, the moon, asteroids, and deep space.
- Bell Labs Says It Shatters Data Delivery Record
2002
Bell Labs, the research arm of Lucent Technologies Inc. said on
Friday that it has doubled the distance and the speed at which
data can be sent over long-haul telecommunications networks. The
development will eventually make it cheaper for telecommunications
service providers to send more data on fiber optic networks over
longer distances. Bell Labs said that, in a demonstration, it sent
a massive 2.56 terabits of data per second over a distance of
2,500 miles, the equivalent of sending the contents of 2,560,000
novels every second across the United States. One terabit is a
little over 1 trillion bits of data. The previous record was 1.6
terabits per second over 1,250 miles, or half the distance. Bell
Labs achieved the 2.56 terabit-per-second speed by sending 40
gigabits-per-second of data over each of 64 separate channels in
fiber optic cable, which uses light waves to carry data. It used
dense wave division multiplexing, a technology that allows service
providers to push bigger chunks of data onto a single strand of
optical fiber. The capacity and distance improvement was made
possible by use of a coding scheme called differential phase shift
keying, which Bell Labs has developed for high-capacity
communications. Lucent's current long distance networking product,
the LambdaExtreme, cannot support the higher data speeds but a
spokesperson said the Murray Hill, New Jersey based networking
company will incorporate the improvements into future products.
Trends in Language
Bandwidth and data storage increases again and again, from
kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes. Language to describe these
increasing metrics are as follows:
A kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes.
1 Gigabyte is over one billion bytes (1,000,000,000)
1 Terabyte is over one trillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000).
1 Petabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
1 Exabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
1 Zettabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
1 Yottabyte: over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
In perspective:
From Roy William's website at CalTech's Center for Advanced
Computing Research
|
1 Megabyte: One small novel OR one 3.5 inch floppy disk |
| 5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare OR 30 seconds of TV-quality video |
|
1 Gigabyte:
A pickup truck filled with paper OR A symphony in high-fidelity sound OR A movie at TV quality |
| 2 Gigabytes: 20 meters of shelved books OR A stack of 9-track tapes |
|
20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven |
|
1 Terabyte: All the X-ray films in a large technological
hospital OR 50,000
trees made into paper and printed |
| 2 Terabytes: An academic research library |
| 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress |
| 1 Petabyte: 3 years of Earth Observing System satellite data (2001) |
| 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries |
| 200 Petabytes: All printed material |
| 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings. |
- The Computer Museum History Center Website
Established in 1996, Preserves and presents the artifacts and
stories of the Information Age. It is home to one of the largest
collections of computing artifacts in the world, a collection
comprising over 3,000 artifacts, 2,000 films and videotapes, 5,000
historical photographs, 2,000 linear feet of books and other
cataloged documentation, and gigabytes of software.
The Distributed Knowledge Systems (DKS)
project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico Johan
Bollen, Heylighen's former student built a Web server called the
Principia Cybernetica Web that can continually rebuild the links
between its pages to adapt them to users' needs. On the Principia
Cybernetica Web, algorithms will reinforce popular links by
displaying them prominently on the page, while rarely used links
will diminish and die. It's the first step on the road to the
global brain. The
Principia Cybernetica Web
will request feedback on whether a particular Web page is
interesting or relevant to its users, and asking advice on the
relative merits of different pages.
Smart cookies identifies users and keeps records of each user's routes through the site. "transivity" When a user moves from A to B and then to C, it will infer that C is probably of some relevance to A, and create a direct link between them.
The Turing Test, Researchers ask human testers to guess if they
are communicating with a machine or a person.
If the tester can't tell the difference, the machine is deemed
intelligent. Norman Johnson who leads the Symbiotic Intelligence
Project at Los Alamos says we already rely on the vast and
incomprehensible mechanism that is society. Ask an ant how it
finds food, and it won't be able to tell you. Ask most people how
their television works and they are unlikely to give you more than
the basics. We trust most organisations to deliver the things we
want without understanding exactly how they do it, and we will be
able to trust an intelligent Web in exactly the same way.
Johnson says: "We are finding successful Turing tests within a
certain situation," "Take it out of that situation and it fails
miserably, but within the right context you can't tell the
difference." "Humans can act intelligently within many contexts,"
"But if you put all those abilities into one person they probably
wouldn't be able to function." "That's why we have society: to
mesh those intelligences together, creating a powerful sum." "Our
premise is that systems can be much more intelligent than
individuals" "You can have a very diverse group solving problems
much better than an expert: that's why we have society and social
insects."
On average, uninformed individuals take 34 steps to escape the
maze; the second, informed, generation takes an average of only
12. As the number of individuals in the collective increases, the
solution gets better and better. A worldwide network of people
using interconnected computers should open up a kind of
"collective memory" to add on to our individual brain power.
Eventually there will be little distinction between people,
computers and wires--everything combines to create one vast
symbiotic intelligence.