I’ve been reading more of the writing behind the notion of a singularity since some chats with Daniel a few months back. I forget how I came across it but I got around to reading Vernor Vinge’s original essay on the Singularity. It’s fascinating the read this and know that it was written in 1993. I have Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” up next on my reading list.
Tag: future
Status
Continuing in the style of last week I spent most of today reading my Instapaper backlog and listening to podcasts. Good day. Here are the highlights:
- Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic
- All aboard the Cocaine Express
- The Devastating Costs of the Amazon Gold Rush
- The New French Hacker-Artist Underground
- Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing
- Back to Work episodes #48 and #46
- Seminars About Long-Term Thinking: Universal Access to All Knowledge
Hypereconomics
Hyperconnectivity makes informational asymmetries a thing of the past; every party to a transaction can negotiate a sale fully informed.
Mark Pesce – Hypereconomics.
Why the Impossible Happens More Often
Humanity is migrating towards its hive mind. Most of what “everybody knows” about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible. What’s coming is so unimaginable that the impossibility of wikipedia will recede into outright obviousness.
Kevin Kelly – Why the Impossible Happens More Often.
Beyond the “smart city.” The future of city-living is going to so damn cool. (via Matt Pearson)
Rdio and my changing music habits
A while back I was reminded through Twitter of Rdio. I looked at it a few months ago but at the time was still stuck with my Palm Pre and didn’t want to pay for Flash only streaming. My how things have changed.
I’ve always had a massive music library. It approached some 14,000 songs before I culled it earlier this year. With all that music it’s funny that I never really listened to it all that much. For the most part I had a select group of albums that were played over and over again. The majority of my library was played once or maybe twice a year.
This is the first thing that Rdio has changed. Rdio lets me follow other users and see what they’re adding to their collections, playlists, and writing reviews of. It’s the digital equivalent of my time spent passing CDs back and forth between high school friends.
Rdio also kicks out recommendations based upon the music in my collection. Between these two sources of discovery I’ve found more new albums and artists in a week than I have in the last few months with iTunes.
The killer feature though is the ability to access all this as much as you want everywhere you are. With the web, Mac OS X, and iOS apps Rdio gives me access to all the music I want anywhere I am.
Instapaper is an app that has fundamentally changed the way I read and consume information. Having a single store of articles I want to catch up on that is available through the web, an iOS app, and my Kindle is exhilirating. Rdio does no less than that for my music habits.
If I’m hanging out with friends and someone mentions an album I can play it straight to my speakers immediately. I’m not out any money because the $9.99 a month Rdio charges gives me unlimited access to anything. The cost of browsing around for new music is essentially zero. I pay the same amount for taking a few listens to 100 albums and streaming my 10 favorites as I would for just cycling through my most-loved.
Sure, all this does mean that I’m outsourcing my music library to the cloud. But, it also means I’m not stuck trying to create a backup strategy for all those gigabytes of tracks. Also, if I want to I can purchase albums straight from Rdio for about the same price as iTunes.
Seriously, Rdio is like living in the future. It’s incredible.
3D printing: The printed world. 3D printers are already used as components and prototypes for some products. A future town may only need a printer instead of a factory.