Results tagged “future” from Converjed

I've started work on a pet Futurology project called Five by Five - five themes over the next five half-centuries.

As a first element I've just updated my future timeline - mainly focussed on space exploration and AI development. Other issues like poverty. the environment and politics will be added as part of the larger project.

BTW the wiki that the timeline on is one of the reasons there are less posts to the blog - the wiki is a better tool for some of the writing I'm doing at the moment - and easier to use from the iPhone!

And this is where the infantry are going - FIST - Future Infantry Soldier Technology, with a whole mix of networked technologies so soliders can have a HUD showing where their team-mates are (and their health/ammo state) and where the enemy is, and the view through their gun site - useful for shooting round corners. The radio data system even sounds like the sort of self-routing AX.25 system I used to demo at the School of Signals in the 80s.

And here's the link to the similar US Future Force Warrior programme on Wikipedia, and a good vendor site on the project. And integrating AI into the system.

Just spotted this in a post about the SLGOGP - the "metaverse" standard for Second Life and SL type virtual worlds:

"2) Scale the Second Life Grid architecture to support the
industry-projected situation in the next 10 years, where virtual worlds
will comprise at least 60 million regions, 2 billion users and in-world
concurrency of 50-100 million residents."

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLGOGP_Draft_1

http://memebox.com/futurescanner

Interesting looking blog

This is the second Greg Egan book I've read. The first was Permutation City and that was excellent and the first book in which the idea of copies/upload/personality constructs (PC) made some sort of sense. With Diaspora Egan goes well beyond that, 150 pages in its an excellent book. Even though written nearly a decade ago it visualisation of a future for humanity is far better than most modern SF authors, and it should be quoted as much as Snowcrash when it comes to talking about virtual worlds. The opening chapter describing the "birth" of a new PC, and that PC's first interaction with external data streams, and then its avatar and its virtual world home are superb.

For the record, and it doesn't include any spoilers, Diaspora identifies a future only 100 or so years out when humanity has post-signularity fragmented into about 4 different "species" (compare with the BT future evolution chart I posted a fortnight or so ago):

- Statics - organic, unmodified humans (i.e. us)
- Exhuberants - organic modified humans, whose modifications range from cosmetic to the extremes to cope with hostile environments such as the sea and space
- Gleisner robots - "uploaded" and (I assume) digitally evolved humans who live in mechanical bodies
- Polis residents (I don't think he gives them a name as the story is from their point of view) - uploaded and digitally evolved humans who live in virtual worlds (although those worlds have feeds of the physical world, have agency in it through robots, and can step out into it through Gleisner robots.