This is a Mitsubishi 4G32 engine that's been all taken apart and repainted. It looks so naked and vulnerable. And it has that amazing, long exhaust manifold . . . that just needs to be connected to something. dave_7 took this picture, and I'm certain he never thought a horny robot of the future would be drooling over the size of his exhaust manifold.

Jeff Kubina took this shot that looks deep inside the Saturn 5 rocket — you can see just a hint of the engine that lurks inside. It's sort of the close-up gonzo view of an engine. Seriously hot, if you get what I mean.

If you just can't wait for a world packed with artificial intelligences, you'd better be prepared for their porn. Luckily, the internet is already full of it — which means some things in the future may stay pretty much the same.

During the conference, Brady says two companies will be testing out their reality mining fu: Path Intelligence will be tracking people in sponsor sessions with their phones, and BlueBall will be tracking people with bluetooth. (OK how cool is it that there's something called BlueBall?) There will also be sessions on crowd simulation, virtual worlds, Eye-Fi (gadgets that know where you are), Earthscape's augmented reality display (with helicopter demo!), plus cool new world-mapping announcements from Google, Microsoft, Earthmine and Everyscape.

Can't make it down today? Stop by the Where Fair tonight. Lots of demos and friendly fun.

Where 2.0 [conference schedule]

According to the Washington Post, other clinics eschew the nanometer waves for tougher tactics:

The clinic in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, the capital, is the oldest and largest, with 60 patients on a normal day and as many as 280 during peak periods. Few of the patients, who range in age from 12 to 24, are here willingly. Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month — about 10 times the average salary in China — for the treatment.

Led by Tao Ran, a military researcher who built his career by treating heroin addicts, the clinic uses a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks.

Budd says:

The PIMs act a bit like a sponge when hydrogen is around. It's made up of long molecules that can trap hydrogen between them, providing a way of supplying hydrogen on demand.

Imagine a plate of spaghetti - when it's all coiled together there's not much space between the strands. Now imagine a plate of crispy noodles - their rigid twisted shape means there are lots of holes. The polymer is designed to have a rigid backbone, and it has twists and bends built into it. Because of this, lots of gaps and holes are created between molecules - perfect for tucking the hydrogen into.

The holes between the molecules give the polymer a very high surface area - each gram has a surface area equivalent to around three tennis courts. The molecules in the polymer act like sieves, catching smaller molecules like hydrogen in the gaps between them. The holes created in the polymer between molecules are a good fit for hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules stick in these holes and are kept there by weak forces - this means they can be released when they are needed.

Hydrogen is most sticky when it is cooled down to low temperatures. When the hydrogen is needed to power the car, the system would just raise the temperature to free up the hydrogen molecules.

Baton Rouge, which you can see here, glows in the particulate matter of its pollution. Dentalben took this photo. It's the tenth most ozone-ridden city in the U.S.

And it should be no surprise to anyone that Los Angeles is the most polluted with ozone. Here is a beautiful view of LA, showing off the dreamy, weird layer of gunk that hovers in a brown band over the city. Steven Buss took this photo.

Most Polluted Cities [American Lung Association]

I love the tee with the laser-eyed robot (below).

And who could resist this bizarre tee (bottom), which says "wonderful future life" and is topped with inexplicable pictures of mouse heads and explodey stars.

Be sure to check out the Terratag gundam gallery.

Terratag via Hide Your Arms.

Glenn writes:

I just blogged about the generation of Americans (born 1904-13) who I call the Partisans. Not only did they give us the editors of the great intellectual-literary journal Partisan Review, not to mention the inventors of the atom bomb, LSD, Scientology, and Bugs Bunny, as well as most of the actors who played villains on the 1960s "Batman" show. Their cohort also includes Golden Age and pre-Golden Age SF and sword & sorcery pioneers like Robert E. Howard, Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Fredric Brown, Jack Finney, Nelson S. Bond, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, and Alfred Bester. Plus C.L. Moore, one of the first women science fiction authors, and comic strip artist Alex Raymond, who created Flash Gordon. Plus the influential science fiction journal editor John W. Campbell; Donald A. Wollheim falls just outside this group, though he was no doubt Partisan-oriented. We might also include those authors born in other countries, or whom we don't usually associate with SF: A.E. van Vogt, A. Bertram Chandler, Eric Frank Russell, Ayn Rand ("Atlas Shrugged"), Samuel Beckett ("Endgame"), Hergé ("The Shooting Star"), Pierre Boulle ("Planet of the Apes"), Louis L'Amour ("The Haunted Mesa"), Mervyn Peake ("Gormenghast") and B.F. Skinner ("Walden Two"). Also, I consider Orwell (b. 1903) an honorary Partisan, not only because of his partisan attitude and collaboration with American radical intellectuals born in the 1904-13 generation, but because of "1984." Finally there's Joseph Campbell, without whom no "Star Wars."

The Partisans [Brainiac]

Wired blogger Jenna Wortham quotes opening keynote speaker David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, describing how web fame has transformed fame as a whole:

"We made him, made them, famous," Weinberger said while showing photographs of the Star Wars Kid, Obama Girl, the home page of Turkish net fad Mahir and clips of YouTube's ubiquitous laughing babies. Weinberger went on to describe the current state of the fame game, saying that the traditional model of Hollywood megacelebrity is "based on alienation" — a model, Weinberger says, that opens the door for us to reinterpret our notions of fame.

"[Hollywood celebrities] cease to be famous when we see them as they are," a concept he demonstrated by showing several gossip magazine pictures of celebrities without their makeup. "Blogging, however, is all about taking off the 'makeup.' They're exposing themselves as fallible human beings."

The same holds true for the rest of the web celebs. "What's famous on the web looks like it was done by a human hand," said Weinberger, while showing a Homestar Runner graphic. "They still feel like ours."

"It's not just the homespun quality of what's famous on the web. It's how fame works — it's becoming much more DIY," said Weinberger. "Fame is now living in a long tail, or a long continuum of ways to be famous."

While it sounded like a seriously fun party at ROFLCon, packed with people whose online creations I've been enjoying for years, it's hard to take seriously the idea that web celebrities are truly challenging the sartorial-celebrity industrial complex. Many of the "celebrities" in attendance didn't know who the other celebrities were, and a lot of the attendees were fans of the obscure rather than the popular.

Ultimately ROFLCon was a gathering of people who are subculturally famous, the way many weirdo artists and creators have been for at least the past 200 years. I'd love it if Tron Guy's fame really were challenging Tom Hanks' fame, making all of us into potential celebrities. And making Tom Hanks into less of a big deal, which he really should be. But if anything, ROFLCon proved that challenge isn't happening. Web celebrities, if you can call them that, have hundreds of cool, devoted fans. But they're going to need millions before I'm convinced that, as Weinberger asserts, we're "reinterpreting our notions of fame."

I guess what I'm saying is that millions of downloads aren't the same as millions of fans. Until they are, Gem Sweater lady will never vanquish Paris Hilton. I'm not sure if that's a tragedy or a joke.

Tron Guy photographed by Scott Beale.

According to the authors of the study, diabetes and lung disease were the biggest life-shorteners. In an introductory note to their study, PLoS editors write:

The researchers looked at differences in death rates between all counties in US states plus the District of Columbia over four decades, from 1961 to 1999. They obtained the data on number of deaths from the National Center for Health Statistics, and they obtained data on the number of people living in each county from the US Census. The NCHS did not provide death data after 2001. They broke the death rates down by sex and by disease to assess trends over time for women and men, and for different causes of death.

Over these four decades, the researchers found that the overall US life expectancy increased from 67 to 74 years of age for men and from 74 to 80 years for women. Between 1961 and 1983 the death rate fell in both men and women, largely due to reductions in deaths from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke). During this same period, 1961-1983, the differences in death rates among/across different counties fell. However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call "the reversal of fortunes." This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers' key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.

Electro-Encephalogram (EEG) "Mind Reading"
As EEG devices flood the consumer market, quacks will write software that promises to "read your mind" based on the electrical signals the EEG can pick up through your skull as you think. Some of this pseudo-science will be based in today's most speculative real science, such as the work on happiness which suggests lots of electricity in your right frontal cortex means you are joyful. Expect programs that will promise to help you find out what your spouse is "really thinking," and ones that promise to diagnose whether you are having too many negative thoughts.

Network Divining
Having trouble with your network connections? Does your cell phone signal drop out at random in certain parts of your house? The best way to solve your problem, according to quack science, will be with a special "network divining rod," an LED device that will start blinking if it finds a "break" in your network signals. Unhappy Google-AOL-BT-NewsCorp customers can use it to locate where exactly the problems are in the global phone-computer-media network, and then buy another device, full of network enhancing crystals, to repair the break. Expect the usual promises: "Guaranteed to work! We've got testimonials from many happy customers!"

Green Exhaust Filters
With global warming having melted away the ice that used to cover those massive oil fields in the arctic, we're more dependent on oil than ever. But governments are still insisting that carbon emissions must go down, and your carbon footprint is being measured carefully. The more emissions, the higher your carbon tax. That's where the hucksters selling "green exhaust filters" come in. These filters, which they will claim are made with "patent-pending nanotechnology," fit right into your exhaust pipes or chimney-top to scrub up to 70 percent of the carbon out of your emissions. That's a huge tax savings! You can buy now, and pay in seven easy monthly installments. What you save on your carbon taxes will make this investment the smartest ever. Until you find out that it's just a fiberglass filter with some carbon nanotubes sprinkled in.

EMF Focusers
Every mobile device emits a small amount of microwave radiation. While we used to believe that was dangerous, it turned out that in fact it was neutral. Based on that idea, future quacks will claim that there is actually a benefit to mobile phone radiation. After all, when people put their cell phones next to the heads, it turns out they have more to say and their vocabularies get bigger. So these quacks will start selling mobile apps that promise to "focus" cell phone radiation to certain regions of your brain that you want to develop more quickly. Want to learn another language really quickly? Get the language stimulation package. Want to inspire yourself to exercise more? Get the goal-attainment package. You don't even have to hold the mobile in a different position! The software does it all for you.

Top image via Psi-Tronics.

Achenbach's point is smart, if unsurprising. His thoughts on why American politicians tend to avoid the subject of the future are especially clear-headed:

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially "hard science fiction" that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. "If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong," she says. "But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong."

That's exciting — and a little scary. We want the blessings of science (say, cheaper energy sources) but not the terrors (monsters spawned by atomic radiation that destroy entire cities with their fiery breath).

Eric Horvitz, one of the sharpest minds at Microsoft, spends a lot of time thinking about the Next Big Thing. Among his other duties, he's president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He thinks that, sometime in the decades ahead, artificial systems will be modeled on living things. In the Horvitz view, life is marked by robustness, flexibility, adaptability. That's where computers need to go. Life, he says, shows scientists "what we can do as engineers — better, potentially."

Our ability to monkey around with life itself is a reminder that ethics, religion and old-fashioned common sense will be needed in abundance in decades to come (see the essay on page B1 by Ronald M. Green). How smart and flexible and rambunctious do we want our computers to be? Let's not mess around with that Matrix business.

Every forward-thinking person almost ritually brings up the mortality issue. What'll happen to society if one day people can stop the aging process? Or if only rich people can stop getting old?

It's interesting that politicians rarely address such matters. The future in general is something of a suspect topic . . . a little goofy. Right now we're all focused on the next primary, the summer conventions, the Olympics and their political implications, the fall election. The political cycle enforces an emphasis on the immediate rather than the important.

Photo: IMDB

io9: So you're talking about these social tools, and how communities can use them, but of course you're also talking about "user generated content," which is one way of saying "get people to work for you for free."

CS: Depends on your frame of reference.

io9: Are we looking at a future where getting a job means working for free for many years before you get to be a developer or producer for cash?

CS: If we think of Flickr as being like a newspaper, then yes, the content that was previously paid for is now free. But if you think of flickr as being like a bar, then what you get instead is that the user conversation now creates value for people out of earshott. No one complains that the bar marks up its booze prices because it's a place for people to get together.

io9: So the bar gets paid for your conversations?

CS: I think the whole 'you work, we collect the money' model has been over-emphasized by the fact that professional media covering these new tools will of course be biased to take the current media model as the 'correct' one. Merchants, a bar in Manhattan, charges $17 for a martini. Know what goes into a $17 martini?

io9: What?

CS: $3 of gin and $14 of "I'm in a bar where people pay $17 for a martini!"

io9: But that makes Flickr sound like an elite place where you pay to be around beautiful rich people.

CS: So the change in the price of drinking gin at home alone, or in a bar with others, is mainly a metric of social value, and we're quite used to paying the platform operator, which in this case would be the bar owner, for making a site where that value can accrue. Of course the whole 'is it a newspaper or a bar' thing is even one level too shallow. The thing Flickr is most like is Flickr. It has all kinds of novel characteristics which are exactly the things that get obscured by metaphor. So when media people look at Flickr (or Digg or YouTube) as new competitors in an existing media ecosystem, instead of a new ecosystem, they create bias towards old metrics.

Oh, and to your earlier comment, I don't mean to suggest that Flickr always equals merchants, just that we are more than used to business models where almost all of the value in the establishment comes from value the patrons create for themselves. It's just that the press doest see (or sees and doesn't like) that comparison, because its hard to argue that some injustice is being doen when viewed in the light of social life rather than media production.

io9: The problem I guess with the bar analogy is that the most "valuable" bars to be in are often valuable because they are full of elite people — which is sort of the opposite of what I think you're hoping for in this book.

CS: Well, even a $2 well drinks dive has the same economics. Consider happy hour. There is a discount on the nominal product precisely to create the necessary bit of social value.

io9: So to get back to the question of getting paid. Sounds like you're saying that we're tending toward a model where the people who make content (or art or writing) don't get paid,
but the people who make the tools that let them express themselves do.

CS: That is one part of the effect. Another part is that, on average people won't get paid, because the pool of creators has gotten too large. But significant talent will still be rewarded. Wedding photographers and stock photo people are going to get creamed. But Herb Ritts' fees may go up. When the bottleneck is not longer worth paying for (because it mostly doesn't exist) talent becomes the only differentiating metric.

io9: So the elite content producers may get more?

CS: I think so.

io9: Obviously a lot of people are decrying this idea, particularly in the media — "oh no we're losing taste makers!"

CS: We're not losing taste makers! I hate that argument — we're gaining taste makers, at an unbelivable rate. We're losing scarcity.

io9: So do you think in the end we'll get a world where more people will be compensated to do creative work? Or that creative work will become more lilke cooking, where everybody does it?

CS: More people overall, maybe, but many fewer on average. And most of the ones who do get compensated don't have it as their main source of income.

io9: Which other industries do you see this change affecting?

CS: Anything where there is a production bottleneck. So the obvious ones are non-litigation lawyering, librarians, anyone in the media distribution business, but also the info managing pieces of things like industrial design, medical decision making, etc.

io9: Are you worried at all that people might use your book to exploit users?

CS: Most of the uses of this sort of group-forming are hard to fake over any length of time (imagine a fake open source project — the coders would bail in a matter of weeks), but the uses of social tools for groups from Al Qaeda to the pro-anorexia kids seems to me to be the biggest social threat that will come from the medium.

Check out the book — although Shirky isn't a futurist, Here Comes Everybody is the best work of futurism I've read in quite a while.

Here Comes Everybody [ISBN.nu]

The folks at Andrew Maynard Architects explain their project, with tongues planted mostly in cheek:

The age of the outer-suburb is soon to come to an end. Many analysts believe that Peak-Oil will be reached soon after 2011. When we hit Peak-Oil we will not only have no petrol to run cars, furthermore we will no longer have many of the goods we need and there will be huge food shortages as food production and distribution relies heavily on oil based fertilisers which drastically increase yields.

With no cars people will no longer be able to reach the suburbs and hence metropolitan populations will swell as suburban refugees are forced to wander into the cities . . . The suburbs will decay . . . At Andrew Maynard Architects, we have decided to give mother-nature a hand. We have begun designing the first suburb eating robot and we hope to go into production in early 2019. We have called our robot the CV08. In short, CV08 consumes the abandoned suburbs through its front 2 legs. It processes the materials and fires off compacted recycling missiles to awaiting recycling plants. CV08's middle legs and one rear leg follow the front legs to terra-form the newly revealed earth with native Flora and Fauna. Vast stocks of the Flora and Fauna are stored within CV08 in carbonite sleep until they are required to colonise what was previously suburban wasteland.

Over 50% of Australians are currently over-weight due to complete car dependence, a sedentary lifestyle and over eating. With this in mind the 6th leg has been designed to pick up, and apply liposuction to over-weight Australians that have been to slow and unfit to migrate into the denser areas with the rest of the population. As there is no longer a steady stream of oil, CV08 fuels itself with the vast quantities of excess human fat that it finds on its journey through the suburbs.

Pepe's work follows on the heels of MoodViews, which tallies of mood tags used on LiveJournal, and We Feel Fine , which scours a vast swath of the interweb for statments of "feeling."

Admittedly, Pepe's work is a little odd, but it's still a good first stab at trying to discern how people think about the years to come. So what sort of moods did people display when talking to their future selves from different eras?

From the present day (circa 2007) until 2012, depression trends downward, but there's a marked up-tick from 2012 to 2018. From there on it's smooth sailing, with depression going steadily downward from 2018 through the end of study period in 2035. the 'vigor' graph follows a roughly inverse trend.

The other four mood categories (Anger, Confusion, Tension, and Fatigue — again, odd choices) didn't show much in the way of statistical trends.

The peak in depression from 4-10 years into the future is tough to explain, and Pepe didn't offer at it during his talk at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Spring Symposium at Stanford University last week. But the overall decrease in depression towards 2030 makes sense: the distant future isn't very clear, so it's easy to picture all of our hopes and dreams coming true. That and, you know, it's going to take about that long for the Singularity to arrive.

Shaping a Collective Emotional Perception of the Future [research paper]

It's worth quoting rather extensively from a release about this study, which makes a somewhat subtle point. First, the researchers explored three different types of mental illness, ranging from mild to severe. They also point out that people in Lebanon on average don't have a higher rate of mental illness than people in other countries. When Lebanese civilians have been directly exposed to war, however, the likelihood that they will develop mental illness increases 3- to 13-fold. (Also, note that the researchers carefully define what "exposure to war" means.)

From a release about the study:

Elie Karam and colleagues . . . used a World Health Organization (WHO) interview tool to diagnose mental health disorders in a sample of 3,000 adults in Lebanon representative of the population. They investigated the question of lifetime prevalence (the proportion of Lebanese who have a mental disorder at some point in their lives) and the age of onset of mental disorders, as well as the delay they experienced in receiving treatment . . . They also asked each participant in the study about their experience of traumatic events relating to war, including whether they had been a refugee (38 % of people in the study), a civilian in a war zone (55%), or witnessed death or injury (18%). Although the relationship between war and the mental health of people serving in the military has been described before, this is the first time that a nationally representative study has assessed the effect of war on the first onset of mental disorders in a civilian population.

The authors describe that one in four Lebanese in this study had a mental health disorder during their lifetime, according to the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria that the WHO tool uses, with major depression being the most common disorder. This is similar to prevalence of mental illness in the United Kingdom and lies within the range observed in the WHO's World Mental Health Surveys in other countries. The researchers also estimated that one in three Lebanese would have one or more mental disorders by the age of 75, which is also similar to survey results in other countries. Only half the surveyed people with a mental disorder had ever received professional help; of those who did have a mental disorder, the delay in treatment ranged from 6 years for mood disorders to 28 years for anxiety disorders. Finally, exposure to war-related events increased the risk of developing an anxiety, mood, or impulse -control disorder by 6-fold, 3-fold and 13-fold respectively.

Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in Lebanon [PLoS Medicine]

To-Do Lists for Futurists:

1. Five ways to build an ecotopia, an urban space that exists in harmony with nature
Sure, recycling helps, but so does repurposing an old machine.

2. Five ways to contribute to the creation of artificial intelligence
You can help bring about machines with the ability to reason just by surfing the web.

3. Five ways to start planning for a future moon colony in your bedroom
From growing plants with LEDs to participating in a space elevator contest, there are a lot of things you can do to make that moon vacation in 2030 a reality.

4. Five ways to become posthuman by this time next year
A software download that makes your computer search for proteins that cure cancer while you sleep, and a tiny device that will make your body machine-readable tomorrow.

To-Do List for Futurists: Become Posthuman

1. Today: Download the Rosetta@home program, and let your computer crunch data on protein shapes while you're not using it. Like the SETI@home program, Rosetta@home is designed to harness the power of thousands of PCs to take the data that scientists have gathered about how proteins in our bodies are shaped, and churn quickly through that data to figure out how we could design new proteins that might fight disease or turn us into posthuman, flying, megabrainiacs who don't need to sleep.

2. This week: Read all about what posthumans and transhumans want in James Hughes' fantastic book Citizen Cyborg.

3. This month: Volunteer to participate in neurological experiments at your local university. No, we don't want you to get the zapper, we just want you to volunteer to sit inside an MRI brain imaging machine and do various tasks so that neuroscientists can learn more about which parts of your brain are responsible for which activities. The more we understand the neurology of the brain, the better we'll be at preventing its degeneration through age or disease. And maybe we can get closer to those awesome Google brain implants. Most labs and universities have helpful websites that explain who can volunteer and how.

4. This month: Get a high-tech implant. Want to feel electro-magnetic waves? Get a magnet implanted in your finger. Want to be machine-readable? Get an RFID implanted under your skin. You can save all kinds of useful data on that RFID, but just be sure you keep it encrypted!

5. This year: Get your genome sequenced and donate the data to a public research institution. Companies like Knome and 23andMe will do it for some cash, and then you can take the data they get and give it to the International HapMap, an open database of genomic information used by researchers all over the world. The more data they amass about human genetic diversity, the sooner you can get a drug tailored specifically for you to cure your cancer, or make your legs move at super-speed.

Obama's rhetoric calls to mind the tradition of Afrofuturism, in which writers, artists, and creators mingle traditional African culture with futuristic imagery and ideas. We've written about Afrofuturism at io9 before, in our interview with Junie from P-Funk. And Octavia Butler, whose book Kindred we recommended as one of twenty that could change your life, has written a series of books that deal with Afrofuturist themes (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, and Patternmaster).

io9 reader Dolly Hayde recently wrote in to ask us whether we could bring up the topic of Afro-Futurism on the blog. She's taking a class at the University of Arkansas on folk and pop music, and writes:

My project centers around African-American musicians who claim space traveler and/or extraterrestrial personas. This work has been primarily informed by music biographies, a whole lot of bizarre rap and jazz tracks, and anthropological texts on science fiction and racial identity. I'm also currently reading Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and researching Afrofuturism online wherever I can find it . . . I'm curious as to what [io9] commenters have to say about this specific phenomenon within the greater context of science fiction and pop culture in general.

Image via Time.

The release reads, in part:

"Security" is the word on everyone's lips these days, but there is more to this dramatic market growth than that. Video surveillance finds uses in a variety of vertical markets such as retail, education, banking, transportation and corporate business. And it's not always about security: new facial recognition software can analyze shoppers' behavior within stores, for example, tracking eyeball movements as shoppers view product displays.

European video surveillance markets are more mature than those in North America (some say the UK, with its 4.1 million surveillance cameras, is the most monitored society on earth), but massive deployments are also now taking place in North America and, in connection with the upcoming Olympics, in China . . .

But while digital technology offers advantages - higher resolution, easier searching and retrieval, and more efficient storage - many of the traditional security resellers of analog equipment are not yet comfortable with digital, and a massive retraining effort is going to be required.

"This is a modern version of the California gold rush," [ABI vice president Scott] Schatt concludes, "except that people are bringing cameras instead of pickaxes and shovels."

Ah, the future looks so bright. I'd better make sure I'm filming everything that happens in it with hidden cameras. Image via NYC Indymedia.

Video Surveillance: Explosive Market [ABI Research]

To-Do List for Futurists: Creating A.I.

1. Today: Tag everything you can on the Web. Many A.I. theorists believe that the first steps to creating a sentient computer involve teaching it to recognize information in the same way humans recognize it. So, for example, if you tag images on photo-sharing site Flickr, you are building up a database for a future A.I. who can look at a picture of a car and say to itself, "90 percent of people called this a car, so it's most likely a car."

2. Today: Along the lines of the "tag everthing" task, you can also teach future A.I.s how to evaluate what they're seeing in a subjective way too. For instance, you can start generating data that will teach A.I.s to recognize the difference between science fiction and science by using services like StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us, where you have a chance to categorize and rate any Web page. Find an excerpt from a novel about computers by Neal Stephenson? Categorize it as "science fiction." Find a book about computers by journalist Steven Levy? Categorize it as "science." The richer our metadata is, the closer we come to creating machines that can evaluate images, text, and objects in a human-like way — simply because the machine will have so much data about how humans have already evaluated them.

3. This month: Tutor a kid in math or computer science. You may not be the next big genius who is going to invent the nice A.I. who does an anti-Skynet and stops all war through rationality. But the kid who lives in your neighborhood who doesn't have the cash to buy her own laptop? She might be. So help out by tutoring — you can often find opportunities via services like VolunteerMatch.

4. This month: Help make statistical machine translation of human languages as natural as possible. A few hours' worth of work with MIT's open source MOSES software project, and you can help A.I.s of the future gain a nuanced understanding of how to do idiomatic translations from one language to another. This will, of course, also help A.I.s to gain a feel for speaking in natural languages themselves. Basically, you upload "training data" to MOSES — usually two texts, one an original and one a translation — and then you give MOSES feedback on whether the translated phrases it has now learned work in all situations.

5. This year: Many experts now believe that A.I.s will only evolve if we can place them inside robotic bodies, because sentience is so bound up with being able to move around in the world. (So say goodbye to the idea of an A.I. that just sits in a giant box.) Get educated about robotic intelligence by visiting a robot show (Robogames is a good one, and you can look for others like it in your local area). If you can't make it out to a robot show, try reading up on the future of robotics in a great book by MIT AI lab researcher Rodney Brooks called Flesh and Machines. It was written a couple of years ago, but it's still up-to-date in terms of what the most cutting-edge research is.

Yesterday's to-do list: How to Build an Ecotopian Society
Tomorrow's to-do list: How to Colonize the Moon

Here you can see the car after the flames have been put out, and the injured and dead have been taken away. This particular bomb was set off in a hotel parking lot by Muslim insurgents, and claimed at least two lives.

Forensics experts gather three kinds of evidence: chemical, to see if the "signature" of the bomb's materials matches those of known terrorist groups; mechanical, which is to say how the bomb was set off (is it an IED or something made by professional military?); and finally, they look for DNA evidence to see whether they can identify the bombers by bits of skin or hair they may have left behind. The BBC has an interesting article on car bomb forensics. Car bomb forensics may not be a futuristic science, but car bomb forensics expert is a job that is (unfortunately) only going to become more common. Images by MUHAMMAD SABRI/AFP/Getty.

Terdiman writes:

My take was that the film—which focuses mainly on three distinct stories, a gamer who is so deeply addicted to World of Warcraft that he loses almost everything in his life; a household of gamers who spend almost every waking, non-working hour playing; and a couple in the early stages of a relationship that bloomed in EverQuest II—depicts these people as largely dysfunctional, out of touch with the world around them and not very capable of dealing with that world . . .

We're introduced to the film's main redemption figure, Dan, when he is vastly overweight and tells us his WoW addiction cost him his relationship, his business and his home. Now, he's living as what amounts to a patient in the home of a woman who runs a video game addiction support group . . . Another major story line is that of a group of grown-up adolescents who live together in a house in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and who play WoW almost every minute they're not at work or asleep . . .

That leaves us with our lovers, Heather and Kevin. After meeting in EverQuest II, the two began to fall in love, even though Heather admits that she knows Kevin was also flirting with several other women in-game at the same time . . . Over time, they meet in person, consummate their love and eventually move in together. And while it's never fully spelled out, my take on their relationship was that both of them were passive aggressive, immature and that if they somehow managed to make it past a year living together, they would begin to hate each other.

My problem, I guess, is that the stories presented in this film did not present anyone living a life enhanced by their experiences with MMOs.

Imagine a movie about people who watch movies which introduced us to movie-watchers with broken relationships, addiction problems, and difficulty with socializing. Would these problems be traced back to their movie-watching, or to something else? Probably something else, because we think of movies as such a natural part of our lives that we hardly blame them for neurosis (except in extreme cases). And yet entering virtual worlds is still demonized, still held up as something terrifying, despite the fact that its as ubiquitous as movie-watching.

Second Skin is a kind of antifuture movie, which characterizes people who enjoy pop culture that is currently ascending as pathological. So what do we fear more? Virtual worlds or the future? Or is it really the same fear in the end?

Second Skin documentary bleak [C|Net]

According to Freedom Ship International, the city will have:

* 18,000 living units, with prices in the range of $180,000 to $2.5 million, including a small number of premium suites currently priced up to $44 million.
* 3,000 commercial units in a similar price range
* 2,400 time-share units
* 10,000 hotel units
* A World Class Casino
* A ferryboat transportation system that provides departures every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, to 3 or more local cities giving ship residents access to the local neighborhood and up to 30,000 land-based residents a chance to spend a day on the ship.
* A World-Class Medical Facility practicing Western and Eastern medicine as well as preventive and anti-aging medicine.
* A School System that gives the students a chance to take a field trip into a different Country each week for academic purposes or to compete with local schools in numerous sporting events. For example; The Freedom Ship High School Soccer team plays a Paris High School team this week at home and an Italian team next week in Italy, while the Freedom Ship High School Band presents a New Orleans Jazz musical at a concert hall in London.
* An International Trade Center that gives on-board companies and shops the opportunity to show and sell their products in a different Country each week.
* More than 100 acres of outdoor Park, Recreation, Exercise and Community space for the enjoyment of residents and visitors.

Freedom Ship International

Rucker, a retired mathematics professor, says, "We tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality." He then goes on to scold the starry-eyed futurists who predict smashing up the real world to make way for a virtual world as varied and granular as the one we live in now:

I might ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There's something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It's a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old "work now, get rewarded in heaven" routine.

We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that computer science provides strong evidence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts . . . Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that's smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments . . .

Come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

Those tubes are escalators connecting different living areas to each other.

Koolhaas says he's using this 6.5-mile square mini-city to launch a critique of generic cities filled with acres of sameness. He wants this city to look like a cross between the supergeneric urban spaces of New York and the superfantastical, weirdly-shaped buildings for which Koohaas is known. According to the New York Times:

The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.

The monotony is broken by mixed-use structures whose immense scale and formal energy draw on mythic examples from architectural history. A spiraling 82-story tower might have been inspired by the minaret of the ninth-century Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq; a gargantuan 44-story sphere brings to mind the symbolic forms of the 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée.

City on the Gulf [NYT]

In Merci's words:

PMOG is an asynchronous, peripheral game that transforms the Firefox browser into an MMO head up display and invites the player to engage in warfare, socializing, and annotation on the world wide web through html.

Is PMOG the future? Is the Internet going to become a vast multiplayer game?

The internet is already a vast multiplayer game, PMOG just makes that obvious and tangible. There are player types (Wikipedia nannies versus forum griefers), there's social cuing based on a the presentation of self online (avatars, profiles on social networking sites), When I designed PMOG I approached the problem of making an MMO in a browser by first realizing that the internet is already a place. It's an environment with its own architecture, languages, and customs. The gameplay and story flowed from that decision.

What kind of story did you devise to overlay/explain/narratize the internet in PMOG? It looks pretty steampunk - is that the genre? Any plans to evolve the story over time?

When I began designing PMOG, I started with the environment of the internet. It struck me that the internet is this kind of awful urban sprawl. Buildings (websites) go up in a matter of days with no building codes or aesthetic oversight. There's no organizing principle apart from the most basic rules of the world - html operates like gravity. If it loads, I guess it's okay. There is no government building roads and schools, keeping the streets lit at night, putting on parades, or punishing criminals. But despite this lawlessness there are some highly functioning and beautiful structures, there's magic and technology living side-by-side. That concert of magic and tech speaks well through steampunk. Additionally, I took a lot of Victorian literature in college. And aesthetically, I'm tired of everything being fantasy or flat anime-esque children. Over the course of the time that PMOG runs I'll continue to develop the story and the world, eventually adding non-player characters and more advanced interactions.

You can sign up for the PMOG beta. If you were PMOGing, you would already have earned experience for reading this post.

A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that's attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn't be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.

A more far-future implant might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see google results on your retina. No matter how the instant, subtle, brain-controlled access to google works, the same benefits and problems are likely to exist.

PRO:

Ability to "remember" many details about a person or issue in the middle of a conversation, so that you can marshal facts quickly and check the accuracy of what other people are saying.

CON:

The person you're talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise.

PRO:

You will never get lost because you've got maps at your synapse tips, and you'll always know what's playing at your local theaters. You'll also get the latest news headlines and stock quotes at the twitch of an eyelid.

CON:

You'll spend so much time in your head reading google news and watching YouTube that you'll zone out during conversations and forget to pay attention to what your best friends are telling you (unless they're telling you in the form of a google news alert).

PRO:

Instant access to infinite data storage allows you to quickly store your every interesting thought, and search through them instantly. More innovative ideas result.

CON:

Over reliance on "offloaded" memory means people make less of an effort to remember important things and therefore brain flexibility actually erodes. Ideas become boring repetitions of what you've thought up before, or what other people have thought up and posted on the Web.

PRO:

You can cheat on tests.

CON:

You can cheat on tests.

PRO: Need something desperately and can't get to the computer to order it? Just buy it through Froogle.

CON: Google ads are constantly running in your head, perhaps designed to respond to thought patterns.

PRO: Every time Google ads a cool new service, like Gmail or Picasa, you've got instant access to it in your brain.

CON: Google is famous for its "silent update" system, which occasionally results in pretty buggy services. Imagine what it will be like when Google silently updates your brain.

Crayon Physics Deluxe won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival, which is like Sundance for video games, except that entrenched video game medium needs the DIY creativity of a Sundance even more than the film industry.

The Playstation Eye Tank War Demo seems to spring from the same purple crayon - you draw something, freehand, and drop it into a video game where it rolls around shooting at other things. If you claim that you did not draw things shooting at other things in the margins of your school notebooks, then you, sir, are a liar.

Arthur Radebaugh was a futurist and illustrator who came up with many of the "world of tomorrow!" style of ads that you'd see gracing the inside pages of magazines like Motor, Esquire, Fortune and Advertising Agency throughout the 1930s. He even coined the term "imagineering" back in 1947, and Disney tried to gank it in 1962. Sadly, they were partially successful, since most people automatically think of the Mouse House when they hear that word.

There's an amazing online exhibit of Radebaugh's art at the Palace of Culture called "The Future We Were Promised," which is just a short mouse click away.

Artist David Levy has been working as a concept artist and visual director in the gaming industry for several years, and he's currently working with Spacetime Studios, most notably on their upcoming Blackstar science/fantasy MMO. He's also worked on Turok, Red Star, and others, where he brings his love of outer space and Japanese animation together. Although he wanted to become a naval architect, his love of science and fantasy took in a different direction, mostly inspired by his grandfather.

"My grandfather used to draw a lot, and I saw him as a hero," David recalls. "He built roads in the desert, ski-jumped and was a flower geneticist, while staying very humble. He was a real inspiration for me, and drawing was part of it."

Levy was also inspired by Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, and movies like 2001 and Blade Runner. When he's not working with his brushes and Wacom tablet, he also teaches classes on art. Check out more of his work on his website.

Those of us lucky enough to see Kyle "qDot" Machulis give his presentation last year at Arse Elektronika know that he and his irrepressible sex tech pals are working on brain interfaces for cybersex. Some of the ideas he's proposing will make it into his talk at this year's Etech conference.

How would a brain interface sex toy work? You could meet up for cybering in SecondLife, control your sexy avatar with your BCI device, and keep your hands free for . . . you know, stuff. Or you could do some cross-network biofeedback action. As you get more excited, your brain would direct a cursor to a special spot on the screen, or move your avatar in a certain way. Then your cybering partner, who is of course controlling your special vibrating space egg, could send a command from her computer to rev that vibration up higher. Pretty soon, your brain is hitting the special spot, the space egg is zooming, and you've got the perfect BCI sex toy.

Please, Mr. Machulis, invent this as soon as possible. I need one like five minutes ago.

It turned out that men and women use exactly the same parts of their brains to engage in the imaginative exercise required to imagine, a future scenario. Even more intriguing was that both genders relied heavily on the Hippocampus, a part of the brain that's usually associated with memory. Write the authors in a study published earlier this year in the journal Hippocampus:

Behavioral, lesion and neuroimaging evidence show striking commonalities between remembering past events and imagining future events. In a recent event-related fMRI study, we instructed participants to construct a past or future event in response to a cue. Once an event was in mind, participants made a button press, then generated details (elaboration) and rated them. The elaboration of past and future events recruited a common neural network.

If you're like most people (and if you like the original Star Wars and Joss Whedon's writing), you probably thought you wouldn't enjoy this blog post all that much. You've fallen prey to what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls a "common affective forecasting mistake" by overestimating how much pain you'll receive from this post. Normally, however, this type of mistake is measured in potato chips.

Gilbert did a series of studies on undergraduates at Harvard that involved two potato chip scenarios. Subjects in group A were presented with a bag of potato chips and a chocolate bar, both of which they were going to eat. Subjects in group B were presented with a bag of potato chips and a tin of sardines. Asked to rate how yummy the potato chips would be, subjects in group A said "so so." Subjects in group B said, "wow totally yummy." (I'm paraphrasing.)

But when they ate the chips, all the subjects reported enjoying them as much as they always enjoy chips. These Harvard students had made an affective forecasting mistake. They'd overestimated how yummy the chips would be when in the presence of sardines and underestimated how yummy they would be when in the presence of chocolate. Neither prediction accurately described how they felt when ultimately eating the chips.

Gilbert suggests that this kind of mistake happens because humans imagining a future experience have more attention energy to burn. They cast their attention around, compare their future experience (chips) to other potential future experiences (chocolate), and then decide that because chocolate is so awesome that chips can't possibly be that great.

But if you're actually experiencing something (like eating a chip), your attention energy is focused on the crispy, oily, salty experience itself. Your mind doesn't wander as much into elaborate comparisons with other potential experiences. And therefore the experience of the chip isn't diminished by