Iain posts, he just doesn’t know it yet…

In an effort to get Iain writing for me I have just gone ahead and posted something for him. Thats what friends are for.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6968591.stm

Saw this recently about how technology will eventually mean it is feasible to record a human life from start to end and what moral questions this raises, imagine Facebook taken to the extreme, when it requires no user input because all the gaps are filled in by sensors in everything we come into contact with (Iain is… about to get hit by a bus but he doesn’t know it yet, though he will in about 400ms, I could warn him but I’m just a mobile phone and far too busy working out my next chess move).

It reminded me of something I read recently on the same thing about how in 500 years historians of the time would have an amazing resource to call upon. The amount we can glean from pollen grains in stomachs of frozen icemen currently is pretty amazing, but if ice man had been recording his life we would have a wealth of information about him beyond what type of tree pollen blew into his food. Also had a thought recently along the Phil K Dick line of pre-cognition, but instead of weird woman hooked up to a machine it would be amazingly constructed algorithms for predicting human behaviour, based upon whatever inputs were available, maybe visual and heart rate for example, the ‘system’, such a barbed word, detects that a guy is showing behaviour consistent with someone about to rob a bank and raises the alarm to whatever effect (maybe lock the airlock style door just as he enters, would look great on an American cctv comedy clips show “Little did he know that ‘the system’ had been tracking him since he left his house this morning and now he is trapped in an airlock, watch how he explodes as we evacuate the air, ho ho ho, and now a hilarious clip of a puppy falling into a meat grinder”).

To be continued.

(Chris: On a similar note, I got around to watching Aaron Russo’s America: From Freedom to Fascism recently on google videos, and there is an interesting interview about this kind of technology near the end of the video. The documentary is pretty well made and quite startling, so if you have time its definitley worth watching – if only as a great example of the mistrust of government that sits in the heart of so many Americans).

Fun cartoon

I stumbled upon this great little cartoon from 1948 warning against the evils of communism.