Accent français

The idea of the singularity starts with numbers. Numbers that get bigger and bigger over time, exponentially. As Ray Kurzweil showed it in his presentation, big numbers getting bigger are all over the technological world:

• Moore’s law
• Total bits shipped
• Magnetic data storage bits per dollar
• Internet data traffic
• Internet backbone bandwidth
• US nanotechnology-related patents

But also in biology, for instance the cost of sequencing DNA that is dropping exponentially.

Conjecturing what happens next when those numbers get really big is what this summit and the groups involved in the singularity are about. Something is bound to happen. Something special, something unforeseen, something beyond any of our wildest prediction. Will it be good (techno-optimist), bad (techno-pessimist), the same (techno-neutral) or good or bad depending on how we get there (techno-volatile)? What is going to happen, to people, to human intelligence, to artificial intelligence, to the biological world? When will the singularity point be past?

So, the singularity is where we’re going, but the work still needs to be done. And that’s what computer scientists, biologists, neuroscientists, writers, futurists, psychologists, historians and many other experts come together to discuss.

One main theme is understanding the human body and the brain better. Not just to cure diseases, repair the body, make us immortal, and more intelligent, but also to find principles that guide scientists to make smarter, more powerful technology, such as nano machines that writes and reads DNA, or computer systems that are generally intelligent.

With that many different angles and approaches to the singularity, there is no unified view of it and it is hard to even get a more precise idea about what it could be or mean. You get bits and pieces here and there, a glimpse over here. And as they say, one thing that is certain about the future is that you cannot predict it.

Besides the big ideas, was the conference good? Yes, it was nice to attend, listen to some of the guys whose blogs and articles I read from time to time. The distribution was as usual, 4-5 talks I really enjoyed and were thought-provoking to me, a few I could have slept through and the rest in the middle. I enjoyed it overall but I’m not sure experts would learn that much per se from their own field from the talks, unless you come to network.

The videos should get on the website sometime.
Read the day one and day two report articles from the h+ magazine.

Si vous venez visiter la Bay Area et San Francisco et que vous voulez gouter à l’esprit high-tech et entrepreneur de la Valley, c’est facile, il n’y a qu’à chercher un peu. Presque tous les jours, vous trouverez des meetings et meetups organisés par les nombreux groupes et associations de la région.
Quelques bonnes adresses pour commencer:

• Startup Digest: inscrivez-vous à la mailing list ou lisez leurs archives (cherchez SF Bay Area HackersDigest).
• Eventbrite: recherchez tech dans la Bay Area
• Women2.0 propose ses propres événements et tient  à jour son propre listing

La plupart des événements organisés sont soit gratuits soit peu cher ($10-$20).

This article is relatively old (from 2007) but nonetheless interesting. It basically says that a condition for higher productivity is access to intangible wealth. Whereas natural and built capital describe natural resources, pasture land, and machinery, equipment, infrastructure; intangible wealth include such things as trust in society, property rights, education, etc.  And the amount of intangible wealth is decisive for how productive and creative you will be.

Sounds intuitive enough.

Concretely, what does it mean for you? Well, if you were pondering whether you really need a new computer, a bigger screen, a lighter bike, the newest camera, you can help convince yourself that you’ll be definitely more productive, says the World Bank. Self-deception is a powerful mind trick.

• Just joined the young scandinavian club of San Francisco http://www.ysc.org/ #fb #
• Je lis http://www.rue89.com/node/147010 #
• There are 7 secular / laic countries in the world: http://www.secularnations.org/index.php?page=Laiccountries #
• @lucafracassi France has had terrible religious wars and invented secularism to avoid more blood baths… keeping it has a price I suppose in reply to lucafracassi #
• @frech c'etait plutot un cauchemard alors! :) in reply to frech #

The paper and the recent posts about how Twitter data can be used to predict the first-weekend box office revenues of movies are quite interesting.
Basically, provided sufficient data about a topic and clever ways to process the data, the analysis of Twitter data could potentially indicate if people are going to buy a product, watch a show, vote for someone, go somewhere or think in a given way, etc.

Now I’m wondering if the simple corollary to this is not that Twitter is making the future. After all, Twitter can also be seen as a massive network of influences, and its real-time property makes it much more dynamic than blogs, Facebook, newspapers, or TV. Twitter sphere’s of influence goes also beyond Twitter.com as Twitter feeds are embedded in many other websites and applications.

Compared to other types of data, twitter’s data is easily accessible, is better structured for text analysis (short, you don’t need to parse and find the interesting piece of text in a page long text), as well as for other data or time-based analysis (all tweets are real time, all stamped with the same time/clock system which is a big deal, they cannot be edited, they can all be tracked to their original authors and those who retweeted), and finally there is a lot of it.

Wouldn’t there be a causality link here too? Twitter chatter would not just reflect what people are thinking or doing, it also influences them, like any other viral media channel.
Instead of just investing into methods to know what the chatter says about a product or someone, companies and people are going to invest to increase the amount of chatter related to that product or someone. Like they did with forums, and blogs.

Twitter is ultimately an excellent platform to experiment with prediction and real-time making of the future. Build a system that adds to the Twitter chatter in the direction you want (to promote something for instance) and watch real-time if it is going to influence and affect the outcome.