No more geeks in fifty years?

By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Richard Demming wrote a short story called “The Shape of Things That Came” back in 1950.  The story, set in 1900, is about a writer who has traveled forward in time to 1950 and back again.  He tries to publish a story about the future technologies he has witnessed, but it’s rejected — the editor says it’s unbelievable because with so many advances in only fifty years, it’s impossible that everyone could take them for granted.

I read this story for the first time just last year, and I had to wonder what a modern version of it would look like with all the advances in technology we’ve seen since the fifties.  Just as in Demming’s story, today we take even the most recently introduced gadgets as commonplace components of our lives.

Now TechRadar has published nine predictions for the future of computing over the next fifty years.  If I’m still alive in 2059, it would be interesting to compare how closely reality follows these prognostications.  I’m guessing that they’re pretty far off the mark, given the history of such predictions and the accelerating pace of technology.  Even looking forward five years into the future is getting pretty dicey, never mind fifty.

For instance, take the predictions about photonics.  This is a technology that already exists.  Is it realistic to think that no better alternative will be developed in fifty years?  And will it really take that long for computing to reach zettascale?  Will advances in display, storage, speech, and touch be only refinements on what we already have?  Think of all the innovations in computing over the last fifty years and then tell me we can’t do any better than that.

But the one that really got my goatee is the ninth and last point: “Being a geek won’t matter”, because everyone will possess geek powers.  A commenter named “matrixdweller” captured my reaction precisely:

Making the assumption that everyone will be geeks would be like saying, back in the early 20th century, that everyone would be an auto mechanic since automobiles would proliferate to a great extent. The more concise conclusion would be that everyone would know how to drive.

Sure the technical know how of the average person will far exceed that of the average person today. Similarly on how each generation’s technical know how is more advanced than the preceding generation’s (my parent’s still can’t set their digital clocks). There will always be those that have a more advanced comprehension of a subject than the general population.

Of course there will be geeks — they just won’t be working on problems that will have already been solved for fifty years.  Instead they’ll be exploring new technologies that haven’t even been dreamt of yet.

Long live geeks!



Electric Dark Side

What would be the next step after playing music with a tesla coil? Stepping into the music yourself, wearing a Faraday suit, of course! Patrick from ArcAttack does just that, with an appropriate theme song. A comment at Metafilter says it all: “Now, see, if Vader had offered THIS to Luke as one of the benefits of the Dark Side, well, things would have just ended up a lot different.”

[via Metafilter]

Sand Music

Sound designer Diego Stocco realized this song by using various sound samples created with sand alone.

I had some sandbags in the backyard that I used in November during a rainy day. I was moving them to a different spot when I heard the noise of the sand. I thought that maybe I could try a new sound design technique so I bought some piezo film transducers and started to experiment with them.

The entire track is created only out of tuned sand tones. No additional sounds or waveforms. I emphasized the inner notes of the sand grains and mapped them on a sampler as a series of instruments. The grooves are all played live with various techniques, including taping two piezo films to my fingers.

[Via Neatorama]



Monday Morning Humor: Abstinence Programs

World of Warcraft: Because $15 per month is a really small price to pay to keep your son’s virginity!

In Search of Airness: Video of the Austin Air Guitar Preliminaries

Enjoy this brief glimpse into the world of competitive air guitar. Filmed by us last Wednesday at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz Theatre in Austin, Texas, these guys are just the preliminary qualifiers for the international air guitar championship. Relive the only good part of the 1980s that’s still good today as the long hair flies. And yes, if you’re in the Austin area, there’s another qualifier coming up in a couple months so you, too, can compete.

If you’d like to see the video in HD resolution, just hit this link, which will take you to the video’s high-def page on Vimeo.

Star Trek Character or Erectile Dysfunction Pill?

quiz_head_startrekvsed

It doesn’t often happen that the funniest thing I’ve seen all day would be a mental_floss quiz, but that happened today. And I thought of you. Can you identify whether ten names are Star Trek characters or erectile dysfunction medications? I couldn’t; my score fell within the margin of error for random guesses, which is pretty much what they were.

IE8 Presents: Remembering Stuff About the Internet

To celebrate the launch of IE8, Microsoft released a funny clip revisiting the best and worst of the web – from bleeding GIFS to pointless status updates. Enjoy!

Microsoft includes Apple stores in TV ad

Microsoft’s latest TV commercials take a stark step forward for the firm: it flat out acknowledges Apple.

In the past, Microsoft advertising had always focused entirely on its own products, unlike Apple which runs the direct comparison tactics of ‘PC vs Mac’. Even when Microsoft threw in a not-so-subtle reference in its ‘I’m a PC’ campaign, there was no sign of Apple.

That’s pretty standard practice in advertising: the largest firm in a market rarely acknowledges its rivals, while smaller firms use direct comparisons to try to overcome the perception that bigger is better.

But the latest Microsoft spot changes that. It features a character looking for a 17-inch laptop for under a thousand dollars. She goes into what is clearly an Apple store and, not surprisingly, fails in her quest, instead winding up getting an HP laptop from what appears to be Best Buy. Here is the commercial:

As well as focusing on the price, the ad takes a dig at Apple’s branding and marketing with the shopper declaring that “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person”.

That might be a risky tactic. It certainly fits in with the Microsoft argument that Macs are overpriced because they are fashionable, but the logical conclusion is that PCs are not cool products. Combined with highlighting that they are inexpensive (which can be read as ‘cheap’), and it’s not the type of branding most on Madison Avenue would advocate.

The Associated Press reports that the commercial was unscripted. The shopper, Lauren, was recruited through a Craigslist posting and told she could keep whichever machine she bought.

Microsoft explicitly advertising PCs as cheaper than Macs may be new, but it’s a point the company has made before. Last October Brad Brooks, who heads Microsoft’s consumer marketing, said there was an Apple tax: a series of costs such as limited choice and upgrades which make Macs even less value than their retail price would suggest.

Twitter hoping to tweet all the way to the bank

Bosses at Twitter think they’ve solved the site’s major problem: how to make cash without alienating the user base.

The company has confirmed it will offer premium accounts where businesses pay a subscription fee to access extra services, but maintains that the existing system of free accounts for all will remain unchanged.

Co-founder Biz Stone told Reuters he believed firms would pay to access services which will help them get “even more” value out of Twitter.

The firm isn’t saying anything else about what services a premium account would include. One possibility is that it would include getting priority access to Twitter’s servers, making such users less likely to see the dreaded “fail whale” that appears when the site is overloaded. That would be stretching the promise to maintain services to free account users: the functionality would remain unchanged, but the reliability would potentially deteriorate.

It’s also possible Twitter could be thinking of offering features such as an enhanced search or monitoring service. But it’s tough to see how the site would make those marketable without restricting the access that existing third-party services such as TweetDeck and Twirhl currently enjoy.

The news comes as Twitter announces it’s first significant revenue stream, a sponsorship deal with Microsoft. In return for its payment, the Microsoft branding will appear on ExecTweets, a site which carries a stream of Twitter posts from leading business executives.

Twitter has denied its received any cash from people who appear on ‘Suggested Users’, a list which appears alongside the site’s tools for finding existing friends on the service. As appearing on the list greatly increases the number of people following your messages, it would be a valuable opportunity for anyone using Twitter as a promotional tool.

However, Stone says spots on the list are not for sale. Instead the firm uses an automated program for identifying users with lots of followers who post regularly. Staff then check these results and pick out those which they believe people will genuinely be most interested in.