Interview with Future Me

"If your future self could be talking to you now, what would s/he have to tell you about the future?"

Future Me has a clear advantage over Present Me.  He has already seen things I haven't yet seen plus he knows everything I already know, too.  He also has the benefit of hindsight and he can see the mistakes I am yet to make, the opportunities I will either ignore or fail to exploit to their full potential.  He's in a pretty good position to dole out any amount of useful advice - if only he's prepared to share it.

I'm guessing you're feeling pretty smug, Future Me, looking at your fledgling self - are you full of pity for me or am I an OK guy?  Are you angry at me for moving in the wrong direction for what must be obvious to you from your time-warped position of knowledge?

Is Future Me telling Current Me that I should have embraced this technology and bypassed that one?  Hardly !  They're all just stepping stones to something better.  Future Me will not be hung up on a specific technology.  He will laugh at me for worrying whether I can operate devices that run iOS, Windows, Android.  Who cares what the programming environment is?  Future Me assures me that these devices all talk happily to each other through control processes that render the underlying operating system irrelevant to the user.

I'm pleased to see that Future Me confirms that the power of language is even more important where we're headed.  Not the formal, academic English of yesteryear but the ability to be understood, without ambiguity in just a few words.  There's no time to compose long tomes - immediacy is key but the skill that will make my voice heard above the billions of other communicators is the use of succinct, inciteful, honest, no nonsense words, laced with humour and compassion.

I'll be communicating with so many more people every day than I currently do and I'll have a lot less 'alone time'.  Escaping to a quiet place will be far more challenging.  Why would I want to hide out anyway?

What does the future hold?

Future Me has great news for me about the technology interface.  In fact Future Me won't need baffling words like "interface" because using technology will require little or no help for me to harness it.  I will be surrounded by complex technology but interacting with it will be far less complicated than it currently is.  I won't need a training course or a user guide to show me how to operate it.  It will be intuitive - it will understand my voice and will respond to my touch.  I won't need to think how the technology worked - I'll just expect that it will behave predictably.  It won't frustrate me but instead will guide me forward.  I will welcome the opportunity to use it rather than worry that it might fail me.

Future Me will be amused that I'm hung up on trying to predict which gadget will succeed and which will die because they failed to adapt to the changing world.  He tells me that I should, even in 2013, be well aware that all devices have a limited shelf life and are constantly evolving into something faster, smarter, cheaper.  I should already know that display devices, communication tools, are throwaway consumables and that aspect will not change.  If I think today's devices are smart I have some wonderful surprises ahead and I will be stunned by my own naivety.

The greatest message of hope that Future Me will have for Current Me is that quality of life through better health is just around the corner - there is unbelievable advance in prevention and cure coming in every aspect of medicine.  Today's blunt, invasive and dangerous surgery looks positively barbaric alongside the micro- and nano-surgery techniques that are already taking their early steps around me now.  Those diseases that have killed or crippled people we know are mostly treatable or preventable in the not too distant future.  If only they had been available in my current time, how different life would be for our family.  Future Me can see what is possible whereas I can only hope that the cure for those life threatening ailments is nearly here.

I think that my meeting with Future Me has left me exhausted but happy.  There's a bright world ahead and Future Me is not going to spoil the surprise by giving me all the details.  But hang in there, accept that nothing stands still, hone those social skills and embrace every opportunity to interact with your fellow man.

Water, water everywhere

The third of my life-altering historical technologies – irrigation . . . .

Modern irrigation canal

Agriculture does not exist without the presence of water.  Some areas are naturally supplied with plentiful water but if we are limited to what falls from the sky as rain or what runs through the landscape in the form of rivers and streams, only a fraction of the land would be used for agriculture.

A simple yet vital technology that has given humankind control over the land for millennia is the ability to irrigate.  In the simplest terms this involves moving water from one place to another by the means of a channel or pipe.  It’s the ability to artificially regulate how little or how much water is applied to the land.

Look how the people of Asia have created terraced fields to grow rice.  Look how people all over the world have drained low lying areas and tamed the flow of water to their fields with drainage channels and canals.  Look how otherwise arid desert has been transformed into arable land by piping in water, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.  Look how ingenious technologies that allow that water to be pumped uphill have opened up even more land to the benefits of irrigation.

Terraced irrigated field

It’s almost impossible to measure how this ability to control the flow of life-giving water to the land has shaped both the historical and modern world.

Another one of those foundation technologies that has enabled exploitation of land across the entire globe for thousands of years. 

Oh the humble bar code

Bar Code

An historical technology that’s still enormously useful today is the bar code.

We see them everywhere – on every product we buy from the supermarket, retail store.

They are used the world over for inventory control.  They identify the product model, the manufacturer.  They can uniquely identify millions of products, wherever in the world they are used.

Given that they use a pretty lo-fi monochrome series of vertical bars they can be printed on a huge number of materials, they are incredibly precise.  Built-in error prevention exists in the form of a check digit line that uses an algorithm to ensure the code has been scanned accurately.

Although we seldom give them much thought they are one of those base technologies that our modern world needs.  Without the ability to rapidly scan large numbers of products we couldn’t have supermarkets or retail warehouses of the convenience we expect.  Throughput of product counting, selling, warehousing would be drastically reduced. 

QR Code

Barcodes took retail sales out of the corner shop era.  They mean that shops no longer need to price each article, the price can be adjusted immediately without any re-pricing of the individual items.

The vast depots of Amazon and Walmart could never be accessed without barcodes and derivatives.  Supermarkets couldn’t draw on the in-depth sales analysis that tells them precisely who bought what and how much.

It’s a technology that will be with us for many years to come.  It’s given rise to other optical marks such as the QR codes that can hold so much more information, such as web URLs.

Humble but such a vital part of modern commerce.

Asteroid alert

I'm heartened to hear that we're not just leaving it up to the likes of NASA to watch out for those pesky asteroids.  Looks like private enterprise is keen to get involved, too . . .

http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/01/17149251-private-groups-join-search-for-dangerous-asteroids?lite

S-t-r-e-t-c-h

Springy, stretching battey wires 

I'm always interested in developments involving battery technology.  We've made huge advances in batteries in recent years but they are still the Achilles heel that limits portability and longevity of use.  Take a look at this article that discusses an innovation in flexible battery materials

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21585817

Materials used for batteries are often very heavy and that limits their portability.  Look at the huge weight impediment for battery powered vehicles.  Not only are they massive, they have so much weight that a good degree of power is devoted to propelling this extra weight.

Battery weight in the future may not be such an issue if materials like Aerographite, developed at Kiel and Hamburg University of Technology move from the lab into full scale production.

Lighter than air space age material

Droid woes

Huawei G300

I love my smartphone.  I resisted buying one for a long time but last year I treated myself to a well specified but cheap chinese Android - the Huawei Ascend G300.

Huawei Ascend G300 (review)

Like many phones it doesn't have much on board memory but this one does have a MicroSD slot that allows you add up to 32GB.  This is great for storing music, photos plus I've moved all the applications that I can to run from the card, to free up the internal memory.  Recently I started getting an annoying 'Insufficient storage available' error whenever I tried to install a new app or when Google Play tried to automatically update an existing one.  First it was intermittent, now it happens all the time.

Aaaaaa-rrrrrr-gfffffg-hhffffhh

It turns out that this is an extremely common error, particularly with cheaper phones but by no means restricted to the cheap models (Galaxy S2 and S3 users were also reporting problems).

So what does the message mean?  Well it's a memory availability issue but it's really not very clear what part of the memory in the phone is 'insufficient'.  Certainly it's not my 32GB card, which is more or less empty - it's either the 'internal SD' or the 'internal memory'.

Considering how common the problem is and the number of impacted Android users out there the suggested resolutions are quite 'insufficient'.  The average Android phone owner is not a computer geek who wants to spend hours trawling through technical forums and tweaking settings just to keep the phone functioning.

This is a good example of mainstream technology letting down the mainstream user.  Most of us just want a phone, a laptop, a tablet to work.  Turn it on and away you go.

IMHO the manufacturers need to stop selling us short on phone memory and make sure that their phones will run the OS smoothly without user intervention.  Failing that, one of the top downloads on Google Play should be a free app that takes the guesswork out of memory management and automatically makes the best use of the phone's resources.  There are such things for rooted phones but again, this is not something your average Jo wants to do.

Swings and roundabouts

http://news.msn.co.nz/nationalnews/8496825/dotcoms-extradition-hearing-delayed

Yes, interesting question – who won?  Not sure that anyone has won yet but there are a mix of wins and losses on all sides:

·         Delays to Dotcom’s extradition case have kept him out of prison, which is obviously a win for him.  I’m guessing that he is indicted on federal charges rather than just state ones so if he had been extradited they could have put in a deep hole of a federal prison.

·         As Dotcom said to the media, the seizure of his servers by US authorities and freezing of most of his assets cost him millions and put him out of business so the US authorities won that one.

·         The long reach of the US government to bring about arrests of non-US citizens outside of the US sent shockwaves through the file sharing industry.  Most of the big names are running scared and have either shut down completely or changed their operating models

·         The shoddy legal standing for his arrest and the long delays to the extradition proceedings has meant that Dotcom has been able to get out of prison, has got some of his assets back and is free to carry on his business.  Another Dotcom win.

·         Dotcom has learned very quickly what can be used against him as far as the Megaupload model goes.  His newly launched Mega service further distances his business from knowledge of what people store on their accounts – a model he hopes will protect him and his company from accusations of participating in piracy.

·         Dotcom may be the devil incarnate as far as the US state department is concerned but business people don’t necessarily share that view.  Look at how Dotcom has managed to recruit the chief of InternetNZ to head up his new venture.  In the glory days of Megaupload he had no problem getting celebrities to front his commercials.   

·         The US authorities leaned heavily on New Zealand to bring the action in the first place.  Another win for US government in showing the world that they can still bully other nations.

·         As they say, no publicity is bad publicity. Dotcom has become something of a folk hero, particularly here in NZ.  He’s managed to cast himself as an innocent victim of state brutality – particularly with the violence of his arrest and the presence of his pregnant wife through the siege.   He doesn’t look like a criminal mastermind.  Honestly, can anyone be scared of a man who is a success in panto?

·         A dubious win for NZ – we are now famous/infamous for something other than agriculture, tourism and hobbits.  Harbouring suspected international pirates will win kudos in some quarters even if it sends shudders through others.

I’d say that there’s no clear winner as yet and that the legal process mistakes made by the US and the NZ could mean that he either never goes to trial or that the charges will be greatly diluted. 

Dotcom has learned some costly lessons from the Megaupload takedown