Saturday December 5, 2009 20:39
CompInfoFuture Homework 11: Class Applicability to Research
- Discuss briefly the applicability or inapplicability of the discussion from Monday 10/26 (Prediction vs. Intervention; Weather vs. Climate) to your project.
- In any discussion about the future, there will always be a bit of “wiggle room” as our current understanding of anything (technology, in this case), can—at worst—prove to be totally irrelevant to the technology of tomorrow.
- It seems that our best methods for prediction can only give us a short glimpse into the possibilities of short-term events; iterative technologies can be taken axiomatically to keep on iterating, but true innovation is forever obscured. If innovation could be predicted, then the predicted technology would have already been created!
- Peter Drucker, self-described “social ecologist,” noted that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” This gets to the crux of the prediction vs intervention debate; namely, that since we are interacting with the system we are predicting (that being the technology of the world), and prediction we make about the system will necessarily affect the future of the system. There are numerous examples of this happening; my favorite is the Star Trek original series’ communicator, which was consciously adopted by Motorola in the design of the most popular phone ever, the flip-phone RAZR.
- Discuss briefly the applicability or inapplicability of the discussion from Wednesday 10/28 (Robots!) to your project.
- In the Samara/Monocopter (Maple Seed) video, one thing that struck me was the use of the fabricator machine; where the developer of the device said that he didn’t need to know how to machine metal or anything, he could “print out” his device.
- In a larger sense, the Petman video demonstrates the growing understanding of natural gait in walking, which will be important in an augmented human. Some of the other projects showcased demonstrated the use of non-hominid walking systems, which, also, would be useful as “post-human” prostheses, as Aimee Mullins (and her 12 pairs of legs) attest.
- Such prosthetic systems could be automatically controlled by software, freeing the user to dedicate brain power to other, more fruitful goals.
- Advance your project. What’s new?
- Continuing to dump raw project materials into my off-brain storage mechanism.
- Category: Computing, Information, and the Future
- Comments Off