Searching For The Question

There will be those who say that this is just rhetoric. But if it is—and I say this as a missionary atheist—then it is an “in the beginning was the Word” kind of rhetoric  which creates the worlds drawn from the words. Making real what for others is not even imaginable. We need not fear people whose inadequacy defines their narrow horizons. Their miserable influence will be washed away by history. There are these examples that allow us to look beyond, to look farther. Let them call us naive, let those who cynically reject the ideals that these words express discover for themselves the impossibility of creating a consistent set of values.

A fertile future , a desirable future: this must be our bet.

For Immediate Release October 9, 2009

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
ON WINNING THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Rose Garden
11:16 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning. After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” So it’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.
I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee. Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.
To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.
But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.
These challenges can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation. And that’s why my administration has worked to establish a new era of engagement in which all nations must take responsibility for the world we seek. We cannot tolerate a world in which nuclear weapons spread to more nations and in which the terror of a nuclear holocaust endangers more people. And that’s why we’ve begun to take concrete steps to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, because all nations have the right to pursue peaceful nuclear power, but all nations have the responsibility to demonstrate their peaceful intentions.
We cannot accept the growing threat posed by climate change, which could forever damage the world that we pass on to our children — sowing conflict and famine; destroying coastlines and emptying cities. And that’s why all nations must now accept their share of responsibility for transforming the way that we use energy.
We can’t allow the differences between peoples to define the way that we see one another, and that’s why we must pursue a new beginning among people of different faiths and races and religions; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.
And we must all do our part to resolve those conflicts that have caused so much pain and hardship over so many years, and that effort must include an unwavering commitment that finally realizes that the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security in nations of their own.
We can’t accept a world in which more people are denied opportunity and dignity that all people yearn for — the ability to get an education and make a decent living; the security that you won’t have to live in fear of disease or violence without hope for the future.
And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the Commander-in-Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people.
Some of the work confronting us will not be completed during my presidency. Some, like the elimination of nuclear weapons, may not be completed in my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it’s recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone. This award is not simply about the efforts of my administration — it’s about the courageous efforts of people around the world.
And that’s why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity — for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away; and for all those men and women across the world who sacrifice their safety and their freedom and sometime their lives for the cause of peace.
That has always been the cause of America. That’s why the world has always looked to America. And that’s why I believe America will continue to lead.
Thank you very much.

Here’s day two:

Stephen Wolfram, author of the book A New Kind Of Science, creator of the Mathematica symbolic calculation software suit, and of the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine is a recent addition to the roster of speakers at the Singularity Summit in New York.

In a recent webcast the audience in large numbers asked Stephen to comment on his views about the Technological Singularity and I captured it on video (sorry for the awful image quality due to multiple compression and cross-conversion):

You can also view the full webcast.

This conversation with science fiction author Gregory Benford is promising to be really interesting, and a great addition to the program.

If you haven’t registered yet to the Summmit, you can still do so until midnight EST Oct, with a 20% discount.

Whole Brain Emulation is going to create synthetic humans, if the functionalist point of view of neuroscience is right, by implementing their thought processes in forthcoming hardware, and software systems, which could arrive as early as the middle of this century. What are the rights of these uploads? How will their existence impact our economy, and the society as a whole? Anders Sandberg of the Future Of Humanity Institute of the University of Oxford talks about these issues, which are also going to be the subject of his talk at the Singularity Summit 09 in New York.

See the video “Anders Sandberg, and the Ethics of Uploading“:

You didn’t register for the summit in New York yet? Grab a Singularity Summit Registration with 20% off here!

Analyzing, and implementing specific brain functions, in order to complement, or substitute them when impaired has been possible for a long time. Hearing aids, or a simple pair of glasses are well accepted tools helping our senses, and our brain functions. There many leaps that researchers working in the field of neuroengineering want to be able to make from this. Applying prosthetic tools to cognitive functions. Emulating larger areas, or larger brains. Enhancing, and extending senses, and capabilities. The final goal being what Randal Koene eleven years ago termed the Whole Brain Emulation.

Here is a video chat with Randal about WBE, where he describes his project, the Tecnalia research institute, what is the current status of WBE, and its timeline. He also tells what he’d do if he woke up one day as an emulated brain, and describes the ethical considerations concerning WBE.

Randal will speak at the Singularity Summit 09 in New York.

Bela Nagy is working at the Santa Fe Institute on a project called the Performance Curve Data Base, which collects datasets concerning the evolution of technology, including performance metrics, production volumes, and other economic indicators. Bela calls his approach Quantitative Futurism, and applies techniques of hindcasting, starting from a point in the past, with the data available at that time, and checking if the forecast towards the present time matches what has actually been observed. The project is free, and open, and allows the downloading and uploading of datasets.

These Performance Curves look similar to some formulations of Moore’s Law, or to the curves found in Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity Is Near“; however, they also allow more flexible visualizations by utilizing more variables, and assigning uncertainty bounds to the forecasts is under development, similar to the Singularity Institute’s Uncertain Future project.

Here is a video where Bela explains the project:

Bela will speak at the Singularity Summit 09 in New York, presenting the Performance Curve Database project, and his findings.

On October 3-4, 2009, the Singularity Summit 09 is held in New York, and it promises to be a very stimulating event. Organized yearly by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Singinst), it is confronting for the first time an East Coast audience, after its past three editions in California.

Invited by Singinst’s President, Michael Vassar, I am setting up a series of conversations with the Summit speakers, and I hope these videos will give a good sense of the wide range of topics and the quality of the arguments being presented during the two-day program.

The first video about Artificial General Intelligence development is with Itamar Arel, of the University Of Tennessee.

Itamar talks about how AGI is going to be designed (spoiler alert: hierarchically), how is it going to be possible to manage its complexity (by taking inspiration from advanced chip design), what is the roadmap for its development (ten years), and what resources are going to be needed (millions, not billions).

Electronic text is not new, but the ebook has started to be seen as a new medium recently. The reason of this is the easy identification of ebooks through their unique reader devices. But is it right? When a new medium emerges, for a while it sits in a straddling position between carrying through the old content, and not exactly being sure what the shape of the new should be. We are now at the end of this period with ebooks, and it is possible to start seeing what the new content for the medium is going to be, and how it is going to be different from previous ones.

I am a book omnivore, with a personal library of several thousand volumes in each of three languages, Hungarian, my native tongue, Italian, and English, and a sprinkling of others, more or less exotic. The touch, sound, smell of books all conspire to create the experience of reading. My first instinct when I pick up a book is to open it slightly and smell it, recognizing instantly dozens of unnamed combinations, of paper, ink, and aging almost as if I were a book sommelier in some borgesian universe.

But I know that the age of the paper book is ending, just as that of the papyrus scroll has.

Yes, the paper book has a lot of advantages—I don’t see myself reading with an ebook reader soon in the tub soon—, just as the mainframe had many advantages over the personal computer. And just as that didn’t stop the mainframe slipping out of the central conversation and development of the computer world, the same books will become much more, and more varied than just their dead tree varieties.

More and more people are reading more and more text every day on screens of all types. Reading is not going to die with the paper book. Personally I have started reading full books on screens many years ago. When phones became computers, I was glad to switch to them for reading books: people would always look at me a little condescendingly as I pulled a book from my back pocket to read at the supermarket’s checkout counter… but nobody was sparing a moment when I would stand there staring at the phone in my hand. Battery life sucked, and on phones that are intensively used in their various functions still you can drain the juice pretty quickly.

But it is likely that you have the phone with you all the time, and I remember that the dentist in Croatia didn’t seem to be too upset as I asked if it was ok to read while she was working on my teeth. (I think it was “Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom” by Cory Doctorow, in the picture. Correct me if I am wrong.)

I have been looking forward to special ebook readers, and I use a Cybook Gen 3 now, thanks to my friends at Simplicissimus, based on electronic ink, with great battery life of literally weeks, fantastic screen which the more light you have the better it gets to read from. The software on the Cybook is not great, and they have no client software for your PC, but I found Calibre to be close to an “iTunes for books” client, if a little rough at the edges.

So what’s new? What is different from before, apart from the device instead of the paper? A lot, most of it due to the Internet, and more will change still.

Before the Internet the bookstore, the library, and the newstand were the main places where you would find things to read. Not anymore. Nowadays with a simple query you can start on a journey of exploration that leads you through online magazines, wikipedia articles, essays, blog posts, all related to your starting point, and all interesting. It is probably not uncommon to open these pages as new tabs on a browser, and after having looked at them, rather than read them in an orderly manner, leave them there, and save them for later, eventual reading. Recognizing this common behavior the Instapaper service with its ‘read later’ browser button was born: it enables me to quickly save what I eventually want to read, and through the magic of RSS syndication, and device synchronization find it on my ebook reader, or iPhone for that matte

I contend that this is what ebook content and ebook reading devices are really for: reading collected materials, discovered through relevance, and recommendation engines, which get funneled automatically through to the device.

Yes, we will keep reading novels as well. But they will change too! The shape, size, and rhythm of the modern novel have all evolved as a consequence of the implicit dialog between readers, and the publishing industry. None of these parameters is a given. You would not pay ten dollars for a ten page masterpiece, but no publisher would be able with the help of its wholesalers and the bookstores to put it on the shelves at a lower price. Don’t you ever get the feeling that a great novel, entertaining as it might be, would have been much better at 400 pages rather than 800? Often what you glimpse there is economics of the publishing industry at play, rather than unrestrained creative outpouring.

With the ebook, and online distribution, many of the previous rules stop being valid, or necessary. For the novel, serialization will be back in vogue. Asimov’s Foundation cycle was originally released in the pulp magazines of the ’40s as a series of short stories, and only later was collected in a trilogy. And these days we have publisher TOR releasing Cory’s latest novel, Makers, in 80 weekly installments on its website.

So we will see a flourishing of new forms of creative writing too: poetry, collaborative fiction, tweet-stories, and more.

Journalism is not going to die just because the traditional printed newspapers are not finding a way to survive. Similarly, even if many of today’s players in the sector will try to resist change, and will find it impossible to adapt to the new, writing, and reading will be with us in the electronic age, and for the better for both!

As new gadgets come out on the market, with more features, options, and possibilities for personal and professional use, I like to try them out when I can. Rather than doing it in parallel, and somewhat superficially, my preference when possible is to actually live with the devices sequentially for an extended period of time, and make sure that I not only try those features that are either evident, or are pushed by their makers, but also have the chance to stumble upon unforeseen usage patterns by myself.

I did have the chance in the past months—after having used several Nokia devices for years and last a Nokia N82—to experience mobile life with an HTC Magic phone based on Android, and finally settle on the Apple iPhone 3G S (thanks, friends!).

As I twittered about passing from one phone to an other, several people asked for my impressions, and this post is a response to them. It would have been hard to fit it in 140 characters. It is however definitely not a comparative review of the phones, or the operating systems powering them. I don’t think I’d be good at that. It’s more a series of impressions, and subjective leaps of judgment from me… You are welcome to let me know what you think.

Phones are much more today than just for calling and talking, of course. They are full-blown computers, and they have to recognize and embrace this. Still, they can’t sacrifice the call feature: quality, duration, signal stability are all fundamental in their use. I often drive for one or two hours, and very often call while in the car using the headsets that are available. (I am a fan of wireless devices, but the hassle of separately charging a bluetooth headset made me abandon them for the moment. I am ready to pick them up again eventually…) The best headset is the one with the Nokia N82: sturdy, feature rich, and very convenient to handle when not plugged in through its extra necklace-like strip. The HTC phone doesn’t come with one, so I probably used a generic headset… The iPhone’s headset has good voice quality, but the microphone’s background noise reduction is inferior to Nokia’s. The worst for me is its relative lack of sturdiness: it seems like I chew them up one per month or two weeks. And they are not cheap… I pull the cord too hard, it falls on the floor and I step on the headset. Something happens, and I have to by an other one. Should check if I can buy them bulk.

The quality of the voice call is probably best on the Nokia, but I don’t think I objectively can distinguish between them.

The best call stability—the capacity of the phone of keeping the call up at varying signal strengths—is again with the Nokia, with iPhone second and HTC Magic the third.

I also love the resilience of the Nokia hardware. During the years I did everything with Nokia phones, dropped them, went over one with a car, got them wet, etc. and they seldom broke. The typical scene is for the phone to apparently shatter on the floor, with a convincing noise, going to pieces, but in reality just quickly disassemble itself in three-four parts which can be easily snapped-back together. After the first two-three times I would not even ask myself if it would work when I’d turn them on. they always did.

I didn’t drop the HTC Magic or the iPhone (yet, as I know it will happen sooner or later), but I expect them to be much more fragile. At least they give that impression. I would have already dropped the iPhone, except that the headset plug is strong enough to hang the phone from it. Not good for the headset, but saves the phone from the impact!

As far as the phones’ hardware design and usability is concerned a lot has been said about the iPhone, much of it positively I think, so here are a couple of remarks about the other two:

In general Nokia’s extra buttons are a little ridiculous. Group calls, application lists, programmable, contextual, changing shape, icon, position with each model. Really annoying. Getting in the way, confusing.

The HTC Magic has fewer ones, and there haven’t been enough models to see if they have settled on something. The impression is however that there wasn’t too much thought put in the hardware design, and the button placements. No big mistakes, except a huge glaring one, which I am describing below.

As the phone is for more than just calling, its interface has to accommodate other activities, as unobtrusively as possible.

Here Nokia is not great. There are too many ways to accomplish the same task, there are different types of responses from the phone for apparently similar actions, and there are very, very painful but now fundamental activities, like browsing the web. Even with Opera Mini, which I recommend, the browsing is not a fluid and natural activity.

Many people have used Nokia phones for many years, so it could seem that it is easy to accomplish an action. But as you stray from the simple ones, and want to manage podcasts, snap photos and upload them to your Flickr account (this was actually fairly smooth on the N82), everything becomes cluttered and unintuitive.

So how is Android? Immature, unsettled, and very badly coupled with the hardware. One example, the major mistake:

When you search on the phone, on most applications you have three separate choices to start the search. The physical button on the bottom of the phone, a virtual button at the top of the screen, and a second virtual botton and the bottom of the screen. Looks like a minor issue. But the cognitive overload that results from the repeated decision that has to be made “which button do I want to push?” is a constant, nagging weight on the use of the phone, subtracting from, and almost negating the ease of use which probably was the starting consideration on designing it.

This is just one example, but the same spirit of apparent freedom that engenders overhead and frustration permeates the entire operating system.

An additional very surprising negative of the HTC Magic and Android was—and I am not sure which one is more to blame—the lack of speed and the inaccuracy of the virtual keyboard.While typing with your thumb on the iPhone is not as quick as it is on a physical keyboard, it is a rather pleasurable experience. On the HTC Magic it is invariably painful and frustrating.

Also the lack of multitouch support on the screen is laughable, with the map needing a zoom button, instead of the familiar two-fingered zoom gesture.

So once again, each of these phones are not just for calling, and their built-in applications don’t exhaust the range of possible activities either. Each of them has a store. And here, once again, the clear winner is the Apple App Store for the iPhone. The Android Store is very much at the beginning. Maybe it will quickly fill up with exciting, and unique solutions, but that hasn’t happened yet. The Ovi Store by Nokia is even more painful, as the phones don’t come with the store client software, so it has to be installed before you can get anything from the store, and the hardware differences of the phones make it so that not all applications are available on all the phones. You have to first choose your phone model, and then you can see what you are allowed to get…

It is evident that I prefer the iPhone… so I will try to collect in the next few months some negatives about my experiences with it as well.