Posts Tagged ‘future’
Visit to the future
I was a bit nervous just before my latest talk in Hong Kong, mainly due to the fact my pre-talk preparation time — to calibrate the demo and get almost everything tracking appropriately — was cancelled at the final second, due to a conference scheduling SNAFU. But the show should go on, especially when there are a number of hundred folks in the audience.
Also, they couldn’t get a camera set up until finally about fifteen minutes into the speak, so you miss the components wherever I speak about Will Wright, Gordon Moore, Lance Williams, my dad, C.P. Snow, Myron Krueger, Hiroshi Ishii, Marco Tempest, Arthur C. Clarke, J.K. Rowling, Babak Parviz, Verner Vinge, George Lucas, and the parietal lobe. BTW, the fact that there even is a recording reflects wonderful function by some very challenging-operating tech-support men and women.
All element of the thrill of a reside display! SIGGRAPH Asia has kindly place the video up on YouTube, so you can see, for yourself, my tiny go to to the long term.
Future hands
Just due to the fact our human bodies have these certain hands, it doesn’t necessarily stick to that they are the only types of hands our brains could ever be great at using.
Whilst it is accurate that our brain’s parietal lobe gives huge computational machinery for assisting in manipulating objects with our hands and fingers, it is not necessarily accurate that the parietal lobe evolved only for these certain human hands, with their five jointed digits and single opposable thumb.
Evolution is parsimonious, given that it proceeds by way of a type of haphazard hill-climbing algorithm. It’s significantly much more economical (and reachable by means of the random walk of evolutionary steps) for a brain to encode a set of common procedures for person studying, than to challenging-wire into our neurons all the particulars of particular grasps and gestures.
We see something similar in spoken language. Human young children have evolved to discover any language that follows a widespread set of procedural rules, not any one distinct language such as Japanese or Serbo-Croation.
This loose coupling suggests an intriguing chance: As our technological innovation continues to advance to the point exactly where we will be ready to have the sensation of physical manipulation — as properly as gestural communication with each other — making use of what ever bodies we pick, possibly we will evolve those virtual bodies in different methods.
It may possibly be far more useful to have tentacular fingers, or two thumbs on each and every hand, or something even more radically various. In a sense this question comes down to understanding the functional set of learnable procedures encoded in our parietal lobe, since any modification to our virtual bodies that is not supported by our brain’s hardware will not achieve wide acceptance.
There is undoubtedly precedent for searching at such issues. In specific, something analogous has happened throughout human historical past in the evolution of musical instruments. The assortment of extant musical instruments is huge, nevertheless no instrument will survive from 1 generation to the following unless of course our brains can control our hands when playing that instrument. In a way, the corpus of well-liked musical instruments serves as a type of functional roadmap of our brain’s parietal lobe.
If, soon after mastering the underlying technologies, we manage to “physically” evolve the virtual bodies with which we will communicate in cyberspace, that will lead to all sorts of fascinating concerns. For instance, I wonder what it will imply for the future evolution of musical instruments.