ChittahChattah Quickies
- "Reading Ahead" Project Fuses Consumer Reading Habits With Opportunities to Enhance the E-Reader Experience – A press release about Reading Ahead and our design competition in partnership with Core77
It's a powerful idea and the movie's history from agit-prop to entertainment meshes nicely with some of the points I made about science fiction recently in interactions magazine, in We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World.
Under the Cybracero program American farm labor will be accomplished on American soil, but no Mexican workers will need to leave Mexico. Only the labor of Mexicans will cross the border, Mexican workers will no longer have to.
Using high speed internet connections, directly to Mexico, American farms and Mexican laborers will be directly connected. These workers will then be able to remotely control robotic farm workers, known as Cybraceros, from their village in Mexico.
Why isn’t it grand? Why isn’t it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn’t today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The present day is the only day we’re ever given.
(via BoingBoing)
* Level 1—Very poor literacy skills. An individual at this level may, for example, be unable to determine from a package label the correct amount of medicine to give a child.
* Level 2—A capacity to deal only with simple, clear material involving uncomplicated tasks. People at this level may develop everyday coping skills, but their poor literacy makes it hard to conquer challenges such as learning new job skills.
* Level 3—Adequate to cope with the demands of everyday life and work in an advanced society. It roughly denotes the skill level required for successful high-school completion and college entry.
* Levels 4 and 5—Strong skills. An individual at these levels can process information of a complex and demanding nature.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’
They have spent $10K to buy 18 Sony and Amazon electronic readers which they’re stocking with digital material for students looking to spend more time with literature. Those who don’t have access to the electronic readers will do their research and peruse assigned texts on their computers.
My latest interactions column, We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World has just been published.
Science fiction (also known as SF, which for many purists refers instead to speculative fiction) has taken on both of those pillars. But to the uninitiated, it’s presumed to consist only of the “stuff” -robots, aliens, gizmos, spaceships, and lasers that go pyew! pyew! (the noise that every boy can make from birth). To those of us who navigate interactions with people, a consideration of the future stuff is interesting, but exploring the future selves can be transformative
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Other articles
That is a shame, Mariko Ishikawa, a Tmsuk spokesman, says, because busy Japanese in the city could use the Roborior to keep an eye on aging parents in the countryside. “Roborior is just the kind of robot Japanese society needs in the future,” Ms. Ishikawa said.
Sales of a Secom product, My Spoon, a robot with a swiveling, spoon-fitted arm that helps older or disabled people eat, have similarly stalled as caregivers balk at its $4,000 price.
Artpiece made of clocks, Chicago MOMA
This list of 10 workplace skills of the future is going around the various ‘Scapes and ‘Spheres (it came to me on Twitter via Chris23). Without getting into whether the list is entirely correct or comprehensive, I think it’s incredibly thought-provoking.
For anyone involved in designing products–especially work environments and tools–it will be crucial to explore people’s daily lives and see what’s really happening: how these types of shifts are manifesting behaviorally and emotionally, and what new opportunities are being created as a result.
10 Workplace Skills of the Future
(From Bob Johansen’s book, Leaders Make the Future. Originally posted by Tessa Finlev in The Future Now blog.)
Ping Quotient
Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a networkLongbroading
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cyclesOpen Authorship
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributorsCooperation Radar
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or missionMulti-Capitalism
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtualMobbability
The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaborationProtovation
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failureInfluency
Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)Signal/Noise Management
Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice
Emergensight
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales
Once again, I was 10 years ahead of my time.
"Jon Brumit is an artist in Chicago…He and his wife just bought a house in Cope's neighborhood for $100. That's right: an entire house for the price of dinner at a nice restaurant for a family of four. Sure, the place needs a ton of work and it['s not that safe, but Brumit says it's worth it just to help bring back the neighborhood."
I’m sitting here at work and my wife Theresa and her friend Kiki are getting an early dinner.
Would I like something?–Kiki IMs me from her phone and sends me a pic of the menu. I text message them an order. Theresa calls me back–it’s too early for the dinner menu. So I click to the lunch menu on my computer.
This is all done without breaking my stride from the work I’m doing. After it happens, I can’t help but sit for a second and think about the awesome array of technology and communications firepower I’ve just used to procure my Caesar salad, and how utterly normal it felt to do this.
It’s the future, now. (But we still need to eat our leafy green vegetables.)
Related posts:
Technology strengthens families
Thinking about tomorrow makes my brain hurt
I’ve long been a fan of Bruce Sterling’s 1998 story Maneki Nekoi
Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman’s eye. Word of Tsuyosh’s skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.
At ten A.M., the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.
“Pickles!” his wife enthused. “People are so nice to you when you’re pregnant.”
“Any idea who sent us that?”
“Just someone on the network.”
“Great.”
So I was intrigued to learn about FriendlyFavor.
People seeking a babysitter, job referral or help moving a couch, to name just a few examples, can all use FriendlyFavor for free to ask for help online-sending their request only to the contacts they trust-as can people with favours to offer, such as extra tickets or leftover moving supplies. The platform was designed to eliminate the hassle, wasted time and confusion that can accompany traditional favour requests, providing instead a one-stop site for managing everything from the initial request to the thank-you once a favour has been granted.
Sure, it’s not yet mediated by an AI, but it is certain a predecessor to Sterling’s vision.
And see What Science Fiction Writers Have Learned About Predicting The Future of Technology (via Pasta and Vinegar)
Back in January, the Wall Street Journal ran a technology-oriented look at what our lives will be like in 10 years, around shopping, gaming, movies and TV, making and keeping friends, searching online, getting news info, and protecting privacy.
It’s filled with many speeds-and-feeds-driven predictions like
Moviegoers also can expect digital projection of their movies in super-high resolution, exceeding anything they could get at home, either online or through high-definition DVDs.
Somewhat better are the feature-driven predictions like
When you buy an airline ticket, you’ll have the option to send a text message to people in your network to let them know you’re taking a trip — in case any old friends will be in the area and want to meet up. Or you might let friends know you just bought a movie ticket, in case someone has a review to share or wants to join you.
And as GPS hardware becomes more widespread, that information will follow wherever you go — literally. You’ll be able to keep track of the physical whereabouts of your friends, so if you’re stuck on a layover in Dallas, your phone might tell you that you have a friend stuck in the same airport.
Mostly the piece just makes my skull throb (and not in a good way) with a barrage of mostly disconnected incremental changes in the amount of noise, communication, advertising, technology we’ll have to manage. That’s largely a function of the experience of reading through this laundry list of changes, not so much the specific predictions themselves. But I didn’t react the way I used to as a kid, waiting for the enticing possibilities of the future, which of course turned out to be way cooler than anything most people thought. This may simply be an artifact of aging (I’m likely more cynical than I was at 14), or may be an artifact of where we are at in terms of epochs of technological revolutions.
What do you think?
Children of Men is an intense and incredible movie, but also a tough one. There are very few typical futuristic elements in a movie set 20 years hence, basically since things have gone to shit in a big way. But here’s a couple:
A virtual keypad used by a wealthy young man who may have been autistic. He was not able to interact with other people and he was required to take pills. That’s all we know about him.
The buses are old and run-down, but they feature digital billboards with full-motion advertising.
The film played with time in an interesting way. Very little obvious sense of the future, fashions resembled today’s, London simply looked more like Mumbai (or Mexico, as the directed had suggested) than what we might think of today. And familiar songs (i.e., King Crimson) swing between the soundtrack and Muzak-like background that the characters hear in posh settings. And so the Battersea Power Station (where art is being preserved) is a location…with a pig floating in the background.
Yes, the pig from the Floyd album cover for Animals.
detail
Update: a reel of displays, interfaces, fake ads, and other visual artifacts is here [via DesignObserver]