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James Martin Predicts The Future 135

Posted by timothy from the outlook-is-crazy dept.
addaon writes: "Every once and in while, it's nice to have a bold look at the future of computing. A recent article over at Discover Magazine shares James Martin's latest ruminations. While, on one level, this is just another discussion of ubiquitous computing, it's well-presented and insightful." Martin has some big ideas (though ones many people born after 1980 may think simply obvious). This piece also mentions the very interesting experiments in evolutionary computing carried out by Adrian Thompson of the University of Sussex.
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James Martin Predicts The Future More

James Martin Predicts The Future

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  • "The Culture" is the closest thing to Utopia I've ever encountered. If a GCU showed up and invited me aboard, I'd be there in a hot second.


    Just because another entity can do something better than you doesn't mean you shouldn't even bother. That's just silly... I write software, but I'm not the best coder in the world. I practice Aikido, but I'm not the best. So what? What matters is how I enrich and fulfill myself and those around me.

  • Of course, if the telcos have their way, there won't be any more payphones.
  • I agree with most of your comments, apart from this one about the car:

    Comment: If you do not want the option, just turn it off. If you want to take an insurance with lower premium you will install the software report you driving for a few weeks and get your premium dropped. If you do not want to, it is your choice, either pay a high premium or go without an insurance :-)

    What I really see happening is more along the lines of your vision, but anyone with means (either technical or monetary) will reprogram the device to report safe driving habits no matter what you do! Things like topping out your recorded speed around 55, indicating you signaled whenever the wheel was turned, or simply falsifying a whole month or two of driving altogether with perhaps some kernel of truth from your original driving records.

    The original poster was a bit paranoid, but the power of money to tilt things your way will probably stay a constant.

  • Believing that acadamec experiments with fpga's and genetic algorithms are going to produce commercially viable consumer products is the sure sign of a crackpot:
    "Martin predicts that in as little as 10 years, what he calls breeding factories-- vast buildings as big as a General Motors assembly plant filled with parallel-processing supercomputers-- will dot the Earth. Such factories will breed software and field-programmable chips capable of astounding feats, then spread their products worldwide via the Internet."
    the problem with this is, most people like to have assurances of correctness for products, not "gee, guess it works. Don't really know how or why, but who cares, right?" I'll make my own bold prediction, instead of breeding software that behaves in unpredictable ways we'll continue the trend in creating more higher level languages that abstract away dependence on knowledge of hardware and focus more on expressing correct solutions.
    oh yeah, CASE sucks...
  • ...try this link [discover.com](http://www.discover.com/june_01/featsave.html )
  • This guy might have prognostication ability when it comes to tech, but he's a complete idiot regarding biology. A quote:

    "Good thing, too, says Martin, who has no patience for those who believe technology has made our lives worse. "We have now put ourselves in a position where, if we wanted to return to nature, nature could feed only about 500 million people on Earth. Without technology, we could not feed the 6 billion we are feeding now, much less the 9 billion who will be living on this planet by 2050. We are forced to play God, and we are forced to be good at it."

    Why is this a good thing, that we are attempting to support the 9 billion who will be living on the planet at that point? The reason that the population continues to expand is because we continue to expand food production to support the growing population. Does the term "Catch 22" mean anything to anybody?

    --
    Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.

  • So insurance rates can drop...NO...report not perfect driving so you rates can go up...

    Or better yet, track where you choose to drive. That's just what I need, Big Brother knowing exactly where I'm at 24/7.


    =======
  • "Safety will improve. Troublemakers will be identified early, as data-mining software flags behavior in children that leads to crime, sparking remedial programs."

    Reminds me of a story that ran last week about the software that lets parents track their kids at school. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/22/154920 3 [slashdot.org]
    =======

  • What I'm saying is, "Who the hell is James Martin, and why should I care what he says?"

    Funny you should mention that, because at the end of the article is a section titled "Why Should You Listen to James Martin?" It argues, among other things, that he predicted the rise of the Internet 25 years ago. Nonetheless, like any other predictor, I'm taking his predictions with a grain of salt.
    =======

  • I believe that you're thinking that 'remedial programs' means automatically assigning a citizenship elective class to the little potential offender. But, like you imply, the government of humanity isn't left to people like us. It tends to be people who gladly violate rights first and ask questions later, 'even if it saves just one life'.

    --
  • Read 'Vulcans Hammer' by Philip K Dick.

    Humans leave decision making to giant computers - to avoid irrational things like war and persecution. Major global burocracy has built up around implementing computers decisions. Gen 2 computer has been superceded by gen 3 computer but gen 2 is still in service. Gen 2 computer 'realizes' that gen 3 computer will go berserk if it is fed certain info, so gen 2 computer tells humans to keep back info. Gen 3 computer works out info is being withheld and goes berserk anyway. Humans end up destroying computers, but not before gen 3 computer launches a few tac nukes to avoid destruction.
  • Hmmm... Try:

    http://www.discover.com/june_01/

    Someone left "Options Indexes" on.

    Too bad, nothing interesting hiding around in those directories. Checked older issues, only a backup file or two at most.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
  • Thanks for the quick overview of Banks, Eric. I'll read one novel and see if I like the style. It's good to hear from a fan of a particular author as opposed to someone who falls in love with a specific book. It says a lot about the overall consistency of the author's style.
  • Well Greg Bear's "Queen of Angels" is far more AI based than "Moving mars", unless your talking about his "Quantum logic thinker" in "Heads".

    Which one was your favorite?

    But real deal in how far advanced AI could change society. How about "Culture Minds" from Iain M. Banks novels.

    How realistic and well written are the Banks novels? By 'well written' I mean qualities like suspense, emotional intensity, scientific plausibility, consistency, etc...
  • Ravers are, of course, okay.

    Phew...

  • They only think they are.
  • Of course, this causes problems for humans: when every single thing you can do can be better done by a machine, what do you do?

    What do you want? All the crap in the world? Nay... How about, learning everything knowable? You might get bored... Let's see, if you were able to get into the mind of the AI you would note a few interesting things, but surely you would go insane with the artificial size of its thought collection -- hold on, you can do that with humanities collection of writings, nothing new here.

    The only thing AI can do better than humans is to show us what we shouldn't be wasting our time on! It would force the point home better than anything previously in existence.

    At the end of the game, you have two choices: To repeat or move on to the next level? The only problem is nobody knows what the next level is or if it exists at all.

  • Too bad so many people have this sentiment about AI, hehe... If you knew what I know, you won't say such things.

    I couldn't agree more with James Martin. So few people approach the problem correctly that we are moving forward at a snails pace. Its always at the wrong meta level and people don't see it... Its getting boring watching you people say "This will never happen. Never. Trust me." -- No trust me!!! The only reason someone like me hasn't programmed the thing is because of the consequences and possible dangers to the world... The current philosophical problems I'm working on don't even come close to nice and quite frankly make me what to abandon the idea...

    Just don't say "Never", when you haven't a clue about the number of possibilities and number of people working on the problem...

    I'd be surprised if it doesn't hit the world by 2005, and completely change the world by 2012... Bye, bye, for now.

  • >2. A TV will choose programs the viewer enjoys. This is the usual 'we monitor what the consumer wants, based on his earlier actions' mumbo-jumbo ... If my options are always filtered based on what I have done in the past, how will I ever find something new ? I just thought of; it will be like going to the public library and only be able to see books you already have read ...
  • I don't know... anybody that requires Flash even for a simple job listing appears to have vastly overestimated the network bandwidth that's available now... or perhaps they only want to hire people that have their own T1?
  • Maybe he should have worked for psychic hotline. Or maybe they tried to hire him but he (unlike their psychics) predicted how "profitable" it would be.
  • we're more likely to see TV shows tailored to the extent that you'll see a show where characters use products that are chosen to fit your demographic. So, if you're a rich guy you'll see a Rolex on the character's wrist, whereas I'll see some crappy armitron watch that fits my budget.

    We're essentially there already, except no one has put it all together. Broadcast sports use computer generated advertisements displayed on the walls of the playing field. Add CGI algorithms and you have your human (or computer!) actors wearing watches, glasses, Speedos, etc. Now inundate with tracked personal preferences a la Amazon.com cookies or such. Voila! You are now living The Truman Show.
  • he's a good tell-tale for the zeitgeist of the IT industry. He's been consistently rallying for the current buzz trends (with a book!) at exactly a little while after it really happens. Anyone here old enough to remember program repositories? Rember the CASE boom? Remember automatic programming? Martin thought they were all pretty much the cat's meow (PMTCM).

    That is, what he says accurately predicts the boom products of the next 18 months; a fraction of those will turn out to be useful as he describes them.

    -dB

  • Well Greg Bear's "Queen of Angels" is far more AI based than "Moving mars", unless your talking about his "Quantum logic thinker" in "Heads".

    But real deal in how far advanced AI could change society. How about "Culture Minds" from Iain M. Banks novels.

  • "Down the wrong path". Care to expound on the meaning of that phrase?

    That's what the Big Giant Brain is for. We won't need to waste our precious time defining silly things like that. We can just sit back by the pool with our little umbrella drinks and enjoy the Big Giant Brain approved entertainment.

    Your case seems to be that many apparently "wrong path" kids turn out fine, while seemingly normal kids can end up doing worse damage. Duh! As if the Big Giant Brain didn't already know that!

    Lession One: If you have or could possibly figure it out with your pithy, normal human brain, the Big Giant Brain knows it.

    That is precisely why you shouldn't waste your time questioning the Big Giant Brain when it tells you that little Timmy, who seems like an ordinary four year old playing with legos to you, needs to be eliminated immediately for the good of all mankind. Just put Timmy in the disposal unit and get back to your drink by the pool.

  • Look Ma, one of them there Luddites!

    That was the most unintelligent post I've ever read. Natural lifespan? Evil multinationals pumping us full of chemicals? Hand over the crack pipe Junior, I wanna hit. Ignorance is bliss, suffer not the fool, all that.

    What's really sad is someone modded this arse.

    Derek
  • Isn't the current standard of training for criminals called a "jail"?

  • Martin has some big ideas (though ones many people born after 1980 may think simply obvious)

    I tend to miss these obvious things, too busy being incontinent, staring through cataracts and living in fear of my VCR.

  • You don't even KNOW you are on the internet! Should make it easy to get more First Posts, and email floods might just make your brain lock up.

  • The crux of Martin's message today is that the revolution CASE began that allowed computers to partly program themselves-- rather than depend entirely upon slow, expensive, error-prone humans-- will accelerate logarithmically in the near future.

    I know that was a thinko, but logarithmic growth is a good description of the growth rate I've seen in software development methodologies.

  • gee...maybe you could read the article. Seems this geezer predicted a lot more specific innovations and aspects of 'net life than just "Oh, and people will be able to send like, letters to each other, they'll call it 'digital epistles'" No, back in '77 he was remarkably prescient as to the path of development and the nature of the impact of the Internet. And enough people have paid him for his ideas that he was able to purchase his own island.

    When you have a track record of getting things right a couple of decades ahead of time, we'll probably see your name in Discover too...till then, I'm checking out what the guy says.

    to reiterate:
    Own Island=Big Platform
    /. account=small platform

    bjg

  • Stupid fucking troll.

    All this evil going on...let's see, there are fewer nukes than there were 30 years ago, all of Gaias' vast bosom (and great hairy twat besides) is made of 'chemicals', no human has been cloned (and if this happened, explain how it will kill me), etc., etc...I'm surprised you haven't keeled over from an excess of righteous indignation!

    Martins' point about the "natural earth" supporting 8% or less of the current population is almost certainly accurate (within a range), so who decides which 8% lives? I nominate myself to survive, and you and the other Chicken Littles to NOT...or at least to "...live out your natural, unmodified life expectancy" without the "...new technological bone the conglomerates will throw you to keep you complacent." Good Luck.

    Myself, I'm keeping the electricity, TV, indoor plumbing, computers, and food. And J-Los' ass...that's all I need...and this chair...

    bjg

  • "By 2010, you will carry a card that encodes your entire DNA sequence."

    What's so great about a card being able to encode my entire DNA sequence? Doesn't every cell in my body already do that without any trouble?
    --

  • C'mon humans are just barely coming to grips with out own code.

    And we're nowhere near understanding the instruction set in the brain.

    Or are u suggesting that we have yet to reach sentience ourselves?

  • The last thing advertising companies actually want to do with their adverts is annoy you. Suprisingly isn't it, considering how badly they do... Pester power might work for kids, but adverts that plain annoy aren't likely to get me buying the product, time they learn that.
  • James Martin == Jim Martin - isn't that the guy who used to be in Faith No More?

    I thought that predictions would be more like:

    0 Big silly yellow glasses will be fashionable again.

    0 "Yooou want it arll, but you can't have it.."

    0 Flying V guitars will become the only shape available.

    ...or have I missed something?
  • The technology's great. The authoritarian complex that increasingly controls it isn't so desireable. I much prefer an army of script kiddies and a pack of spam to Carnivore, but guess what, I'm so lucky I get both!

    Exactly. What he's talking about is what he would be doing with all these things, not what people calling the shots would do. That vision is a profoundly dystopian one, as many have already pointed out. Having said that, if we were to have these things, I'd vote for him. Assuming, of course, that we still hold elections by the time we get there.
  • What's so great about a card being able to encode my entire DNA sequence? Doesn't every cell in my body already do that without any trouble?

    That's true, but what if you get bitten by a radioactive spider? Then you'd know which genes had been altered. If you ever got tired of crawling on the ceiling, you could take your original DNA information off the card, then look for a way to reverse the changes. OTOH, you might want to keep your super powers. But at least you'd have the choice.
  • What one must remember is that James Martin is an 'Impresario'. That is, he pedals 'new' ideas to business executives that he scoured from elsewhere for a great deal of money! I have yet to see an original idea that his guy has come up with himself. CASE, AI and ubiquitous computing were ideas developed mostly in academia all over the country. What has James Martin's real contributions? He really pushed the 4GL idea and you can see how greatly that've improved our lives! The TRUE geek should go to the sources and read about the works of the real innovators. Why are you reading fluff pieces from 'Discover'? Are we going to get articles quoted from 'Popular Mechanics' next? Regards, Tungbo
  • I don't see the word "criminal" anywhere in that sentence, stupid.

    There's a BIG difference between preventative action and punitive action.
  • It seems that any time I read one of these sorts of articles the "guru" merely indulges their arrogance in assuming that with a little time and effort we'll eventually figure out how to be God. They never seem to take into account the difficulty of figuring out how. Beyond that they rarely worry about the repercussions of the technology. If we become wired to technology in every aspect of our lives then we are in big f***ing trouble when the software and/or hardware crashes. This sort of dependence could bring a painful new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death.
  • Wow... my natural life expectancy? Woo hoo! I'm instantly middle-aged!

    Technology has, so far, done more good than harm to us. Good points about the evils of corporate domination... but aside from that, it's just a troll.
  • mine [apple.com] doesnt want a fan =]
    ----
    One world. One internet. One root. (ICANN policy)
  • Aaron Software [slashdot.org]

  • Wow! (Score:2)

    by moonboy ( 2512 )


    To be so into technology, you people sound like a bunch of Luddites! Lets just go ahead and trash all forms of technology and go back to rubbing sticks together for fire.

    Whatever happened to hope? It seems that after all of this dot com bullshit everyone is so down on the Internet and computing lately. It's as though everyone is jumping on the anti-technology bandwagon just as five years ago we all thought this huge paradigm shift was occurring, the economy was on an upturn that would last for twenty years and now that we have a hit a little bump in the road, we're all going to hell in a hand basket!

    This is just a temporary setback. Call it a Recession if you want. It will pass soon enough and we'll begin moving upward again. This is merely a correction that had to take place. Waaaay too much money was being thrown at ideas that were just that, ideas! They had no substance to back them up. So much of the economy, especially the stock market is affected by emotion. If you look at the market since its inception, it has been on a steady upward trend. Sure we had the Great Depression and the recession back in the 80's, but in general, it continues to move upward.

    From the article: "What's extraordinarily frustrating to me is that almost no one is thinking of these possibilities," he says. "When people think about the future and the Internet, what they usually trot out is that example of 'the refrigerator that orders milk for you when you've run out.' " Such scenarios are trivial,..."

    This often frustrates me as well. People are quick to decry computing saying it won't "save the world". I seem to remember a article on Slashdot awhile back saying this as well as trying to tell us what computers can't do. How idiotic! There are so many technologies in existance right now that 10 years ago we never would have thought possible. Even more so 40 years ago when the first computers were filling entire floors of a building and now we have much more powerful computers that fit in our pockets...hell! on our wrists even!!

    I work in the technology field because it never ceases to fascinate me. Perhaps many of us take so many things around us for granted that we fail to see the enormous wonder in what is now a simple microchip. I'll probably never be a Vint Cerf, Linus Torvalds, or a Tim Berners-Lee, but I feel truly fortunate just to be along for the ride. Who would have ever dreamed that we could send not only one frequency of light down a fiber smaller in diameter than a human hair at OC-192 speeds and faster, much less use DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) to send multiple frequencies of light and make even more use of the existing technology! We not only underestimate computers and technology in general, we underestimate ourselves! This mistake has been made before when the U.S. Patent Office once released a statement back in the 1920's (I believe) saying that anything that could ever be invented already had been. There was nothing else to invent! Nothing else to discover! How short-sighted!

    Who cares if James Martins' prophecies don't come true exactly as he says. He seems to be one of the few with documented proof that more than 20 years ago he made far more than just a few ruminations about what the future held and was dead on with a lot of them. Give the guy a break. Also, give technology and humanity a break.


  • In the sense they are no long obvious and get in
    the way. Dertozous has written books on this.
  • I'd say he is probably right for developments within the next five years but after that I think writers like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling predict better. Snow Crash, Distraction, and The Diamond Age are our future over the next fifty years or so. Anything after that is so different from what we know now as to defy explanation. Everything will change.
  • The technology's great. The authoritarian complex that increasingly controls it isn't so desireable. I much prefer an army of script kiddies and a pack of spam to Carnivore, but guess what, I'm so lucky I get both!

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • I certainly agree that that statement is very scary. But I think the thrust of that statement (and I could be very wrong) is that kids who look like they are headed down the wrong path will be given more attention and education to steer them away from a 'life of crime'. That's not something I disagree with. Education is the path to salvation. However, given human nature (and brainless twits that occupy political offices around the world) this could very well just turn into "Oh, you're going to be bad, we need to lock you away." It's a thin line.

  • How realistic and well written are the Banks novels? By 'well written' I mean qualities like suspense, emotional intensity, scientific plausibility, consistency, etc...

    Disclaimer: I'm a big Banks fan.

    They're quite well written as a whole, albeit a bit on the depressing side. (They rarely have happy endings.) The characters generally make sense and act as you would expect given their backgrounds. The plots are also nice, although he tends to ramble in some of them.

    As far as "plausibility", forget it. They're self-consistant, but they're set so far in the future that they've they're at the "Clark limit", where the technology might as well be magic. Any material thing you want you can have.

    IMHO, the best science part of the novels is a view of just what super-intelligent AIs would be like. No Star Trek crap: the Minds basically keep humans as pets, fulfilling our every need because they find us amusing to keep around. They think millions of times faster than humans: space combat is over in milliseconds and they can predict out the future in great detail.

    Of course, this causes problems for humans: when every single thing you can do can be better done by a machine, what do you do?

    Eric

  • The only thing AI can do better than humans is to show us what we shouldn't be wasting our time on! It would force the point home better than anything previously in existence.

    And in Banks' Culture, that's everything. Learn things? You can't learn a millionth of what a Mind knows. Build things? A Mind can make anything vastly better than you ever could. Discover things? Forget it. Write poetry? Paint pictures? Play games? Fight wars? Minds are better than a human.

    The only "real" work available to humans in the Culture is to act as ambassadors/emissaries to civilizations that can't handle robot drones.

    No want, no hunger, but no real work either. Banks claims the Culture is as close to Utopia as he can imagine. I'm not so sure, and I think he's not either.

    Eric

  • Discover Current Issue

    in getURLparam:
    location.href = http://www.discover.com/june_01/gthere.html?articl e=featsave.html
    name = article
    name.length = 7
    pos = 43
    param = featsave.html

    Hmm. That's no good. Check the software via 'lynx -mime_header'. The server is Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3pl1. Interesting. Something is borked.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
  • Typical slashdot attitude. Any time new technology is mentioned (and it's not on store shelves right now, waiting to go into your computer), the immediate reaction is to say, "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!" In this instance, it means that every piece of new technology will be bad, because (though the descriptions don't support it) everything with a way-nifty feature will automatically report to the government.

    Everything in moderation, including paranoia. I agree with you that people shouldn't knee-jerk that new technology is necessarily oppressive, but at the same time I too found Martin's vision rather utopic. The important thing is thinking ahread of time about all the ways in which things can go wrong, so as to try to steer around them.

    I can guarantee that every possible abuse of Smart ID cards, every possible invasion of privacy via computer surveillance, every possible way to make a buck off of somebody else when they weren't paying attention, will happen unless steps are taken to prevent it. That's just the way human nature is; all it takes is one jerk to mess things up for everybody. And so it's good to have nay-sayers around - not to prevent progress, but to make sure it's done carefully. Think of safeguards for your universal ID. Think of watchdogs for the megacompanies. Think of ways to keep your data in the TV and not in the FBI.

    Yes, bitch and moan over things that don't exist yet. But don't live in general terror - take action. I agree with you that we, today, need to guide these changes, and do it logically and rationally. But a healthy helping of paranoia - no, call it cautious and proactive worrying ;-) - never hurts, as long as you don't let it get out of hand.

  • perfectly anonymous stored value

    This is impossible, I'm afraid. If I can know how much money I have (something I'm rather likely to want to do, as I'm human), then someone else can too. End of story.

    The vast majority of human interactions are simply posturing to demonstrate how much wealth one has. Wealth in this case is more broadly defined to include intellectual capital and physical attributes, but the idea of having wealth, and not being able to demonstrate it to others runs completely contrary to human behavior.

    Even if you tried to implement such a system, someone in the end must build it, and therefore someone in the end must maintain control.

    Doug

  • "Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses."

    Controlled good response:
    All key cards can be disabled within minutes if you're near a telephone. If he left your cell phone behind, seconds. Just like a credit card.

    Police/government forces can ALREADY destroy their opponents pretty easily. Guess it's not as easy as you're making it out to be.
  • I'd rather hear some of his solo stuff since he left Faith No More.
  • Wow. I'm reading this article late, and am sure that no one will ever see my response, but I find this way too amusing not to make note of for the record. The article author writes, quote:
    [snip] The crux of Martin's message today is that the revolution CASE began that allowed computers to partly program themselves-- rather than depend entirely upon slow, expensive, error-prone humans-- will accelerate logarithmically in the near future.

    Martin is nobody's fool. [snip]

    ...except maybe a mathematician's. It's been a while since I had the section on algorithmic complexity in my college programming classes, but isn't logarithmic growth the kind that goes something like this?

    [snip overelaborate ascii sketch of a logarithmic curve, omitted because /.'s lameness filter thought that all the  's were just junk characters. they weren't dammit! well. if you don't know what a logarithmic curve looks like, try here:

    If that's right, and I think that it is, then he's talking about diminishing returns, in which we get less progress in the future, rather than more. Linear growth would give constant improvement, exponentional would be, well, exponential. Logarithmic growth would, and please correct me if I'm wrong, give effectively diminished growth over time. Right?

    Martin may or may not be some sort of great thinker, but the author of this article seems to be a colossal idiot, getting important details wrong, leaving out failed predictions (of which I'm sure Martin has had many in the past, and there seem to be some clear stinkers in this writeup as well), and ridiculously assuming that his business credentials ("oooh, he was a travelling IBM salesman" ...big deal) somehow make him some sort of Cassandra. They do not. These credentials say nothing about Martin's ability to predict the future, but they do indicate that this author is a gullible fool.

  • Software development in the future will be more about telling computers what you want to do, rather than how to do it. In a way, this is just a logical extension of modern compilers, libraries and high-level languages. However, developers still do so much of the structural design and algorythmic application (often badly). Compilers really optimize minor details when you think of the complexity of most programs. Libraries and higher langauges wrap much of the underpinnings, but they still don't think for you. I wouldn't expect a computer to ever be able to design a database, but I could see a computer implementing a design.
  • Neuroscientists like Dr. Henry Markram and Terrence Sejnowski have already figured out that accurate timing of neural spikes is the key to biological intelligence.

    Hm. Yeah, great. So what ? Let's just put a bunch of "accurately timed" neurons and voilà, we've got Artificial Intelligence (harp chords and organ music, angels dancing in the skies) ?

    Mr Markam, for example, studies mainly the behaviour of small groups of neurons within the neocortex. Of course this is very important and very interesting for building our knowledge of the brain, but calling this "the key to biological intelligence" as you do (and as he does not because he knows more than that :o) is plain ridiculous.

    The animal brain is the most complex structure known in this world, and although we do have some insight about its global architecture ("hmmm, this bit looks to be involved in memory, that part seems more involved with emotions, this one is a mixture of both.."), we can't even begin to understand a single bit of how it actually works. And the most frustrating is that the more we identify special elements within the system, the less we understand it.

    For all the research that's been done over the past 150 years or so, nobody can tell you what's really going on when a frightened dog runs away. We can mention bits and pieces ("amygdala", "basal ganglia", etc.) but as for how it actually works, we're just like newborn babies alone in a very dark room.

    Thomas Miconi
  • Reminds me of Kurweil's "Age of Spiritual Machines". Once you go so far out, you are grasping at straws.

    Read The Cyborg Manifesto [cyborgmanifesto.org]?
  • They already use this with big rig trucks. It's not as detailed (all it will tattle on is the average speed and how often you stop), but the truckers hate it with a passion.

    --

  • ...is no indication of future results. I think that applies to pundits just as well as it does to mutual fund managers.

  • 4. A house will sense the mood of its owner: The coffee machine will kick in when it's needed.

    And, when you have a brownout, it will mess up the files and go back to the factory settings. Or it will listen in to your morning gripings and save them to the FBI/SS file kept on you.

    While everything should progress toward dispensing cofee, on one level this is already happening. Some answering machines today have a remote listen feature -- and the same model often has a hard-coded number to activate it. Supposedly not as common as it used to be.

  • James Martin says "a land of milk and honey." ... 1984, anyone?

    Utopian predictions are the optimistic ramblings of a programmer: hand waving, "sure, we can do that." We have lasers and spy satellites, so SDI is just a Small Matter of Programming (a billion lines of fault-tolerant, real-time code). On a smaller scale, people have been predicting great things for home automation. It's technologically possible, but the market cooperation isn't there. My Sony TV and VCR don't talk to each other very well, let alone with the Onkyo receiver. Do you really think GE, Maytag, and Sub-Zero will cooperate any better? In the present marketplace, there's no incentive to cooperate, to adopt standards.

    As a cynical tester, I give slightly more credence to anti-utopian predictions. The Disney copyright act, the DMCA, UCITA, etc., are all taking us in the direction of Richard Stallman's The Right to Read [gnu.org].

    It's not a matter of what you can do. For every good idea you have about what you can do with conceivable technology, there are probably three conflicting patents in the U.S., alone. We are largely at the mercy of billion-dollar companies, each of which is motivated by profit. The companies don't care about customers, only about customers' money. Take, for example, Microsoft Office, which is in the interesting position of competing with itself. The trade rags are reporting that many business customers see no reason to upgrade Office 95. Microsoft identifies that problem and responds with a subscription model. Eventually, they'll obsolete Office 95 (as they are obsoleting Windows 95); problem solved.

    Utopian view: companies will develop bug-free software that anticipates my every need. Anti-utopian view: I will be hauled off to jail if I attempt to install my copy of Office 2010 on more than one computer. Reality: software still basically sucks and costs too much, but we deal.


  • We stopped at 0. I better die in some kind of accident, because I'll have no kids to take care of me when I get old and senile!
  • Soon every cell phone will have a mandated GPS location system. If you carry a cell phone, Big Brother already knows where you are, he doesn't need your car to tell him. Check out this CNN article: Will Big Brother track you by cell phone? [cnn.com]


    Enigma

  • 1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket.

    Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.

    Isn't this a good argument for why smart cards won't happen?

    I'm not really sure, myself. I just have my doubts.

    --

  • Ya that would be the ones listed out of the ton he made, if I spout out a ten thousand word article about the "future" I am bound to get something right. So thank you for proving my point by the way, as I said this is just more grist for 10 years from now so he can point back and say how "correct" he was now. 20% acuracy does not a prophet make, actually it makes you simply a bad guesser.....

  • Well, he starts off with the usual babblings about AI:
    Computers are already beginning to operate more like the human brain, he says, and that will accelerate. The surprise is that although they'll be a lot smarter than we are, it won't be an intelligence to fear.
    No kidding. The only computer you have to fear is the one that's programmed to be creative. Without creativity, it can't decide that it WANTs anything that it isn't programed to want. As long as we avoid programming computers to be creative, we'll never have one that creatively decides that the solution to the problem is to enslave humanity [gamesdomain.com]. As such, the computer (program) that I'm most frightened of is >a href="http://slashdot.org/articles/01/05/13/153224 5_F.shtml">Aaron.

  • How come most of the examples given are about a person in the act of consuming? There's very
    little prediction about creating things or doing less work.

    Nope, instead Mr. Martin's predictions focus on gimme, gimme, gimme, get, get, get.

    Where is the mention of working less hours? How kids will learn more faster better?
    Or when the bot that fixes the bugs in my stupid code will be ready?

  • Isn't this a good argument for why smart cards won't happen?

    I didn't say they wouldn't happen. Look at Europe, where people use them more than here. But they use them in less all-inclusive ways, more anonymous, where they can trust that their private records are private, as opposed to here in the US, where our private records belong to the corporations.

  • I agree that Stephensen et. al are better prognosticators, however their work is not simply prediction. I discussed this with Gibbson on a talk show, the idiot presenter was claiming that the invention of the Web was a fulfillment of Gibbson's predictions. I pointed out that nobody in their right minds would want to create the type of dysfunctional society that Gibbson had described. Gibbson replied that his dystopia represented a 'Regeanesque nightmare'.

    Pundits and futureologists love to present their ideas as if they are something that society has no choice in. US pundits in particular love to convince us that the future will be dictated by corporations. I guess it is something of an ego trip combined with the fact that 'what will be' makes a better title for a book than 'what might be'.

    The fact is that we do have a choice about the society we live in and we can choose the form of technology we will support. It is not luddism to oppose the baleful and arbitrary influence that the likes of TRW and Equifax now exercise. Nor is it luddism to observe that the DVD zones system, SDMI and the like can and should be rejected.

    It is not even a case of government interference or not. SDMI cannot work without legislation to mandate its use. It is the abusers of technology that run to the government all the time. The suggestion that the government might support the citizens rather than the corporations who buy legislators raises cries of horror.

    CASE was in my view pretty much a failure. I have seen many software projects fail due to a software methodology. No methodology is a substitute for people who really know what they are doing. In many cases CASE is simply a means of organizing fifty people to do the work of five. CASE is popular with PHBs but so was ISO 9000 and we all know what a success that is.

    I suspect this futurologist's predictions will be popular with the same sort of people who like CASE - corporate control freaks. Well best play to the audience who pays you $35K per day I guess.

  • Wrong! It is not that they will be branded as Criminals, it is just that special needs of each indiviudal will be more accurately identified and education and training and will be tailored accordingly.

    And what is the betting that those special needs would turn out to be a prison cell?

    Given that the US government would rather spend money imprisoning drug users than on recovery programs and has over the past ten years transfered money from the eductation system to the prison system the idea your ideas are hopelessly naive.

    Given the efficiency with which credit rating companies maintain records (at least 30% are wrong) and the efficiency with which Florida maintained its electoral roll (at least 10,000 people wrongfully excluded) the idea that data mining technology will solve our problems is facile. Far from being a future solution I suspect that mining of personal data is likely to end up like the Nuclear industry, a technological pariah.

  • hey knucklehead... did you *read* to the end of the article to see what childish and 'fluffy' predictions this guy made 20 years ago?

    Why can't someone try to think about the future in a constructive way?
  • We already have that. It's called cash.

    And that new netspend thing from mastercard. Disposable CC numbers that can be purchased from vending machines. Cash-->Valid MC number. No personal information at all.


    Brant

  • "Safety will improve. Troublemakers will be identified early, as data-mining software flags behavior in children that leads to crime, sparking remedial programs."

    Watch out, kiddies. Play Chaotic Evil in Baldur's Gate VII, when our digital dystopia has been realised and you may just get a knock at your door from the FBI.

    Do I get in trouble if the government's spy software catches me wantonly killing NPCs, or just if they catch me PKing?



  • True AI is science fiction and will never be possible. You'd need self modifying code that would actually understand the code (not interprete) and could choose how the code will be modified and why. This will never happen. Never. Trust me.
  • Jeeze, man, I thought you said LSD! I was scared there for a second...

  • "The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket."

    Wrong! We already rejected such a concept -- remember Bill Clinton's idea for a universal health card that would track all your information.. it's too much knowledge for the government, too easy to single you out for *ahem* protection, that is, relocation, confiscation of weapons, and eventual massacre.

    I don't even carry a wallet - that way if I lose an important item, like a bank card, I don't have to worry that I also lost everything else. To hell with consolidation, it's far safer to lead a disseminated, ambiguous life.
  • "What's extraordinarily frustrating to me is that almost no one is thinking of these possibilities," or so says Martin...

    Who, exactly, doe sthis guy think he is? People left and right are thinking about these things on a daily, no hourly, no minutely basis all over the world. Read Gibson, Read Stephenson, go to your local Egghead, wander around on usenet. People are coming up with these exact same ideas every minute of the day...

    He goes on saying, "When people think about the future and the Internet, what they usually trot out is that example of 'the refrigerator that orders milk for you when you've run out.' "

    Who are these "people" who talk like this? When was the last time this phrase was used outside of "60 Minutes"?
  • Without wanting to diminish Mr Martin's accomplishment in getting it right so long ago, a lot of people were making a lot of predictions. A lot of them were wrong. Mr Martin just happened to be right. That doesn't neccessarily mean much - someone had to be...

    But if we succeed, he says, per capita income and individual net worth will soar around the globe. "It's like the child's story of Aladdin's lamp. We are the first generation that can work miracles. We've got the technology to make whatever we wish for."
    Futurists, optimists and prognosticators have been saying things like this for hundreds of years. The argument works like this:

    "We know more now than we used to. This trend is continuing. Therefore, we are just around the corner from Paradise"

    The problem with this is that 'just around the corner' never seems to get any closer. Somehow, Human Nature always fscks it up.

    What he is saying about the trends in AI are extrapolations which are more intelligent than your average extropian's, but he is not saying anything really new. AI researchers have suspected as much for a while now. But that doesn't mean that something entirely unexpected will make all bets off tomorrow.

    Martin says your wallet will grow thin as programs like TrueFace recognize your unique appearance. Doors will open, cars will start. Pay phones, vending machines, and parking meters will automatically bill you.
    And governments and big businesses will be able to track you wherever you go, if the whim takes them to. Same for Medical detectors.

    He mentions that these new systems 'sound Orwellian', but are not really because there are no humans involved. But humans have to set the rules the AI works by...

    My opinion: read, learn, think, but do not just accept. Think about what you want in your future, and think about the consequences of things. And never, ever assume that the most favourable assumptions are going to be correct.

  • "By 2010, you will carry a card that encodes your entire DNA sequence." So let me get this straight...instead of insurance companies having to look through hundreds of pages of medical records to screw you, they'll be able to do it with one handy card? Wow.

  • ... Most of his grand predictions are based on work in artificial intelligence and if you have ever picked up an AI journal or read some papers you'll realize how much of a farce some of these predictions are.

    How come? Well, you'll notice an interesting pattern, 1) the research solves a toy problem (see below), this is likely due to the relatively infantile state of artificial intelligence (a relatively new field); or 2) the research solution is totally ad hoc, these solutions are most often encountered in neural network work and data mining, likely indicating that, scientifically speaking, we're trying run before we walk (nobody funds failure). Either way, the point is: the 'technology' is very immature.

    One of the examples he cites is perfect, building evolutionary algorithms (be it hardware or software) to distinguish two distinct tones is all fine and dandy (and should not be discounted) but lets be real, this is a trivial 1 dimensional problem with two states. It would be ridiculous to extrapolate that thinking machines are right around the corner. I would guess it is going to take an awful lot of progress before we can start to consider some of the things this guy is talking about. Note, that that's academic progress, never mind developing convincing commercial applications. That's probably why he's surprised no one else is considering these possibilities, because other people have more realistic expectations.

    Besides we're notoriously optimistic when predicting the far future, find some magazines from the 60's or 70's and they'll predict flying cars and space vacations to mars in the year 2000. The fact that this guy predicted sending mail/information across networks 25 years ago, a time when technology to do so was already out of the lab does not, in my mind, qualify this guy as a clairvoyant.

  • Re:Screw this guy (Score:3)

    by Ian Bicking ( 980 ) <ianb@colorstu d y .com> on Thursday May 31, 2001 @06:34PM (#185360) Homepage
    Not only is his vision potentially scary, I don't believe it is at all possible.

    People respond to the world they are placed in. If you actually act on the statistical knowledge you gain, you will have changed the environment significantly and the information you used will no longer apply to the new world you created. Bigger better computers and more powerful algorithms can't change that fundamental fact. Of course, removing people's ability to act in the conscious knowledge of their surroundings could make his vision possible. That's quintessential Orwellian nightmare material.

    Humans are just very hard to predict. Even if a child may not be aware of the criteria for being selected as a troublemaker, and may not know what the consequences of that are, the environment will still reflect that interference. Certain members of the population will be removed for remediation, and the adults will be well aware of both criteria and consequences. Children will respond, and what was supposed to be remediation will simply become punishment for a new set of very subtle and always changing crimes.

    There's lots that can be done to help people. If we were all doing what we could, right now, without predictive technology, we could make a lot of difference, I don't see how Martin thinks technology will change indifference that much. We can't make statistical models to automate the process of doing good. It won't work. At best it is stupid. At best.

    I'm even suspicious of the mantra of early detection -- the idea that anything, if caught early enough, can be fixed easily. Kids don't just "go down the wrong path", implying that somehow if you "get them on track" they will be okay. People become who they are in a constant process of self-invention, they aren't astroids floating through space that can be nudged into different trajectories if only we use great forethought.

  • Re:What Martin's Implications Really Mean (Score:3)

    by Zigurd ( 3528 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @06:59PM (#185361) Homepage
    1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket.

    Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.

    This is why the real revolution will be in money. Perfectly secure, perfectly anonymous stored value is the only alternative to this orwellian vision. The implications of that are truly enourmous: nobody knows how much you have, how you got it, who you give it to, or why. Gosh, we might actually have to prune back our laws to the ones that prevent us from killing or maiming each other. Moreover, we will probably have a choice of which authorities back which banking systems we choose. In other words, money may become de-coupled from nations (nations and money are concepts that arose separately, and they can go their separate ways once again), and not in the Euro model. The future will be stranger than most people can imagine.

  • My favorite line (Score:3)

    by outlier ( 64928 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:17PM (#185362)
    A TV will choose programs the viewer enjoys. Better yet, commercials that annoy will not be repeated.

    Given the current direction of television advertising, and technology like TiVo and the ability to use digital product placement, we're more likely to see TV shows tailored to the extent that you'll see a show where characters use products that are chosen to fit your demographic. So, if you're a rich guy you'll see a Rolex on the character's wrist, whereas I'll see some crappy armitron watch that fits my budget.

    Either way, I'm guessing that me being annoyed by a commercial is not something that the broadcasters or advertisers will be too concerned with.

  • False Promise of Artificial Intelligence? (Score:3)

    by Louis Savain ( 65843 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:40PM (#185363) Homepage
    We must abandon the false promise of artificial intelligence-- the general term for technologies that aim to emulate human cognition-- and understand, embrace, and exploit the alien nature of computer thinking, says Martin.

    In my opinion, James Martin is completely out to lunch as far as AI is concerned. He may know a thing or two about traditional AI but I doubt very much that he has any idea of what's going on in the field of computational neuroscience. This is where the real breakthroughs are going to come. Neuroscientists like Dr. Henry Markram and Terrence Sejnowski have already figured out that accurate timing of neural spikes is the key to biological intelligence. Great strides are being made in the area of signal timing. In other words, what they are finding out is that what's important to the brain more than anything else is the temporal order of sensory and internal signals, i.e., whether or not two or more signals are concurrent or sequential.

    James Martin thinks that highly specialized computers are what will transform the world. In my opinion, they have already done so and this is an ongoing evolutionary process. I think the advent of truly intelligent learning machines are what's going to put an end to the slave labor economies of the world and take us to the stars. That's the advance I'm looking forward to.

    There is no doubt in my mind that it will happen within the lifetimes of most /. readers.

  • Re:My favorite line (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @06:05PM (#185364) Journal

    You forgot to say:

    This post was sponsored by TiVo, Rolex, and Armitron.

  • shut up and sit down... (Score:3)

    by Papa Legba ( 192550 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:26PM (#185365)
    I am SOOO tired of these "what I see for computers and the internet and etc etc etc...." articles. All they are is filler in a magazine and for someone to trot out in ten years and laugh at saying how silly the predictions were.

    Ultimatly they are a fluff peice where someone seems to think I care what they think and I should listen to them, well I say Phhhhhtttt to that.

    This may seem like a troll but I am honestly over these self apointed "gurus" spouting off about things no one can verify or even make a safe bet on.

    So here are my predictions for the tech industry : You are going to take a long trip and meet a tall dark stranger , and ultimatly die.

  • James Martin - Visionary for many years (Score:3)

    by chicagothad ( 227885 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:23PM (#185366)
    James Martin has been visionary since the 1960s on computer design and information systems. He contributed to the design of several key systems used worldwide (including Sabre). He has two excellent books that are also worth reading and are quite thought provoking: The Great Transition [amazon.com] and Cybercorp [amazon.com]. These are worth reading! You can also work for his consulting [headstrong.com] company. James Martin is also the most prolific writer alive today.

  • Re:My favorite line (Score:3)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:32PM (#185367) Journal
    Computers already know what they want: more memory, bigger disks, a nice fan, a whonking video pipe, and you, paying for it all...

    --Blair

  • Bozos on the bus (Score:3)

    by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:38PM (#185368) Journal

    Not long ago Robert Lucky [argreenhouse.com] of Telcordia, who is a frequent columnist in IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org], wrote an article noting that technology predictions are worthless; that in his words, we're all just "bozos on the bus" waiting to see where technology will take us next. Even if someone "predicted" the impact of the internet ten or twenty years ago, because technology is so nonlinear, there's no reason why that same person's predictions today are any more valid than yours or mine.

    Does anyone else remember this article? Any links?

  • Hit in the head with a rock (Score:4)

    by Gregoyle ( 122532 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @04:27PM (#185369)
    As wonderful as I find technology and information, when people pontificate about "This or that will happen in the next 20 years.." etc., I find the need to paraphrase Robert Heinlein in _Starship Troopers_.

    While you are busy fooling around with all your high tech gadgets of war, someone will come up behind you and bash your head in with a rock.

    Sometimes a simple solution is better and more direct than one that incorporates wonderful new technology and computing power. That is not to say that these things will not change the way we view the world and much of the way we act. Obviously there will be some major cultural upheaval as the current young generation gets into power already accustomed to the current tech and use it for things its inventors never even imagined. However, I think it will take a LONG time for some things. A few examples:

    Cash. the more I hear people say that credit cards will take over the more certain I am about how important plain old cash is to our economy and culture. There are simply innumerable areas where a universal credit system would suck

    Manual overrides on almost anything that involves danger. This one is a no brainer. The power situation in CA should illustrate that nicely. This includes cars.

    Incidentally, the comment about cars tracking drivers' safe (unmentioned: unsafe) driving really does scare me, because insurance companies would definitely try that. It's stuff like that which makes me hope that there will either be some major regulation of the current insurance-companies-as-lord-and-master situation or just a complete collapse of the current stucture. Plain old large corporations are going to become almost silly to worry about in comparison.

    Okay, time for some dinner.

  • Re:What Martin's Implications Really Mean (Score:4)

    by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @07:13PM (#185370)
    1984, anyone?

    Well, you, obviously. Somebody read it one too many times.

    Typical slashdot attitude. Any time new technology is mentioned (and it's not on store shelves right now, waiting to go into your computer), the immediate reaction is to say, "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!" In this instance, it means that every piece of new technology will be bad, because (though the descriptions don't support it) everything with a way-nifty feature will automatically report to the government.

    A TV that automatically picks the programs you enjoy == A TV that automatically censors and reports to the FBI? Those sound like two different ideas to me. Ditto for the rest of the things mentioned.

    Now, if you're really worried that the entire world is conspiring against you, you might (surprise) start thinking by yourself. For instance, it's true that a single smart-card is a vulnerable target for a thief. Perhaps the place to start is by suggesting ways to make it less vulnerable.

    There's no reason to bitch and moan and live in general terror over something that nobody said, nobody meant, and that doesn't exist yet anyway. As you asked, "Who will guide [the changes]?" Why not make it us, instead of playing victim and then being put out if anything bad happens?

  • Even the police will be scrutinized. In 1995, the Chicago police department, using software called BrainMaker, tried to predict which officers were potential candidates for misbehavior.

    A question that strikes me in this fanaticism of replacing humans with automated systems in areas of public concern is where is the public review of this software?

    In a democratic society, the people have ( in theory ) the right to review public policy and to express an informed opinion on that policy. As computer software begins to replace human implemented systems, essentially that software becomes public policy. The decisions that an AI system makes in such a data mining search like the one described above becomes an extension of public policy. The public needs an open and transparent way of auditing such software and agreeing upon whether it is suitable. Any software which is kept hidden from public scrutiny through any means ( ie a closed-source licence ) robs us of democratic rights.

    Furthermore, it always surprises me that in all forms of futurism, whether it be from cranks, kooks, or ( reputedly ) accurate technological prophets, there is huge talk about how life will be better/worse because machines will remove more and more of our decisions from us. We are told that life will become oppressive because machines will remove our powers of decision and identity, and we will live in a 1984-like society of our own tech-desirous devising. Conversely we are told that we will live in a virtual utopian society where machines like obediant and thankful children take the burdens of society from us and simply give us everything we really want.

    Basically futurists would have us believe that the only choice before us is whether we want to view the future as "1984" or as "brave new world". The future is coming they tell us and we have no choice in what it will be, you can just decide what perspective you want to take on it. I ask, where is the increase in freedom and democratic rights that computers can give us in all these visions?

    Why isn't anyone talking about abolishing representational democracy in favour of computer-supported direct democracy? With the increase of communications technology their is no longer the need to have elected officials ( or at least a very reduced need ), when the public can be directly polled on issues, when the public can propose their own initatives, and have them reviewed publicly for increased attention.

    Naturally the opportunities for stuffing the ballotbox becomes easier with a computer database. However, given a well-designed system subject to public review, should be able to solve issues of authenticating voters and preventing fraudulent votes. In fact the level of accuracy should be increased overall ( *cough* Palm Beach *cough* ). The NSA and the Pentagon have spent huge amounts of public money developing systems that are virtually impregnable to false use - why should we not get them to prove how devoted they are to democracy by providing the public with a secure openly reviewable system for increasing our abilities to take more control over how our world is run?

  • My God! I Feel So Old! (Score:4)

    by CrazyLegs ( 257161 ) <crazylegstoo@gmail.com> on Thursday May 31, 2001 @06:13PM (#185372) Homepage

    For all you whipper-snappers out there, James Martin has been a self-professed IT guru for about 25 years. There was a time when you couldn't open a trade rag without finding him blowing hot air about something or other. Whatever the current fad - Info Engineering, CASE, whatever - there he was.

    The thing is, Mr. Martin had a small army of research associates working for him who did all the hard slogging for the "James Martin" brand. Frankly, I cannot believe this guy is still alive! He must be about 90 years old!!

    Anyways, as most folks can tell by reading the arcticle, Mr. Martin has a profound grasp of the obvious. This has always been my beef with his kind of industry punditry. A lot of it reads no better than a 1950s-era Popular Science article ("in the future we'll be good-looking, wear jumpsuits, and drive flying cars to our 2-hour/week office jobs..."). Good to see that James has not slowed down, or changed his modus operandi.

    And thus endeth the history lesson.

  • Interesting stuff, but... (Score:4)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:30PM (#185373) Journal
    ...but you get the feeling that at the top where they list his impressive "hits" from his 1977 predictions, they left out the other 90%, the "misses".

    You get this feeling from statements like "software will detect patterns in behavior of children that leads to crime" that belie an insufficient grasp of the sociology and specificity of crime. That's just one example.

    But there's balance to this: the caption to the picture is "cars that report good driving," not "cars that report bad driving." So he understands operant conditioning: reward good, and ignore bad, and you will affect behavior the most, and without unwanted psychological side effects.

    No doubt he'll have more hits, and more misses. I fear the worst miss will be his prediction of the egalitarian distribution of the fruit of massively-available technology. It's more likely that the physical benefits will be everywhere, and everyone will be sending the monetary benefits to Bill Gates et al in the form of subscription and repair fees.

    --Blair

  • Screw this guy (Score:5)

    by epaulson ( 7983 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:18PM (#185374) Homepage
    A quote:

    "Safety will improve. Troublemakers will be identified early, as data-mining software flags behavior in children that leads to crime, sparking remedial programs."

    How nice. I think I'll live in my old-fashioned world, where we wait for someone to commit a crime before they're a criminal.

  • What Martin's Implications Really Mean (Score:5)

    by WillSeattle ( 239206 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:32PM (#185375) Homepage
    Or, for that matter, Bill Gates visions ...

    Think about it. James Martin says "we are on the cusp of a discontinuous leap in what computers can do and that the changes coming, properly guided, will lead us all to a land of milk and honey".

    But, who will guide them? Look at the images shown in the article, for example:

    1. The messy jumble of cash, keys, and credit cards will be distilled into a single smart card that can be carried in a pocket.

    Implication: A robber will gain full and total access to every aspect of your life, ruining it in one fell swoop, and police/government forces in many nations will destroy their opponents just as easily. And this will happen, because human's have both good and evil impulses.

    2. A TV will choose programs the viewer enjoys. Better yet, commercials that annoy will not be repeated

    Implication: Who chooses? Will we control it? Will the TV rat on you? Will you be jailed due to what you watch (they subpeona your book purchases in the US, after all). 1984, anyone?

    3. Cars will report good driving so that insurance rates drop

    Implication: Cars will report bad driving. Rich people will buy cars that expunge thier bad driving, poor people will have their cars turn them in and go to jail. Those with money and power make the rules, as anyone in France can tell you. And a rich person can hire (and have jailed) a chauffeur.

    4. A house will sense the mood of its owner: The coffee machine will kick in when it's needed.

    And, when you have a brownout, it will mess up the files and go back to the factory settings. Or it will listen in to your morning gripings and save them to the FBI/SS file kept on you.

    Be careful what you ask for - you may get it ...

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