His
genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers embedded in equipment,
such as medical devices and cash machines. He often received standing
ovations at conferences for his creativity and showmanship while his
research forced equipment makers to fix bugs in their software.
Jack
had planned to demonstrate his techniques to hack into pacemakers and
implanted defibrillators at the Black Hat hackers convention in Las
Vegas next Thursday. He told Reuters last week that he could kill a man
from 30 feet away by attacking an implanted heart device.
Without the right approach, the continual distraction of multiple
tasks exerts a toll that disrupts performance. It takes time to switch
tasks, to get back what attention theorists call “situation awareness.”
Interruptions disrupt performance, and even a voluntary switching of
attention from one task to another is an interruption of the task being
left behind.
Furthermore, it will be difficult to resist the temptation of using
powerful technology that guides us with useful side information,
suggestions, and even commands. Sure, other people will be able to see
that we are being assisted, but they won’t know by whom, just as we will
be able to tell that they are being minded, and we won’t know by whom.
9am to 1pm: Throughout the day you connect to your Dekko-powered
augmented reality device, which overlays your vision with a broad range
of information and entertainment. While many of the products the US
software company is proposing are currently still fairly conceptual,
Dekko hopes to find ways to integrate an extra layer of visual
information into every part of daily life. Dekko is one of the companies
supplying software to Google Glass, the wearable computer that gives
users information through a spectacle-like visual display. Matt
Miesnieks, CEO of Dekko, says that he believes "the power of wearables
comes from connecting our senses to sensors."
Researchers at Belgian nonelectronics reseach and development center
Imec and Belgium’s Ghent University are in the very early stages of
developing such a device, which would bring augmented reality–the
insertion of digital imagery such as virtual signs and historical
markers with the real world–right to your eyeballs. It’s just one of
several such projects (see “Contact Lens Computer: It’s Like Google Glass Without The Glasses”),
and while the idea is nowhere near the point where you could ask your
eye doctor for a pair, it could become more realistic as the cost and
size of electronic components continue to fall and wearable gadgets gain
popularity.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Wearable Technologies
conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Eric Dy, Imec’s North America
business development manager, said researchers are investigating the
feasibility of integrating an array of micro lenses with LEDs, using the
lenses to help focus light and project it onto the wearer’s retinas.
The biggest barrier, beyond the translation itself, is speech
recognition. In so many words, background noise interferes with the
translation software, thus affecting results. But Barra said it works
"close to 100 percent" when used in "controlled environments." Sounds
perfect for diplomats, not so much for real-world conversations. Of
course, Google's non-real-time, text-based translation software built
into Chrome leaves quite a bit to be desired, making us all the more
wary of putting our faith into Google's verbal solution. As the
functionality is still "several years away," though, there's still
plenty of time to convert us.
There will be limitations, however. It's easy to think that a life-sized
human being, standing in your living room, would be capable of giving you a hug,
for instance. But if that breakthrough is coming, it hasn't arrived
yet. Holodeck creations these are not. And images projected through the
magic of HoloVision won't be able to follow you into the kitchen for a
snack either — not unless you've got a whole network of HoloVision
cameras, anyway.
The implications of Euclid’s technology do not stop at surveillance or
privacy. Remember, these systems are meant to feed data to store owners
so that they can rearrange store shelves or entire showroom floors to
increase sales. Malls, casinos, and grocery stores have always been
carefully planned out spaces—scientifically arranged and calibrated for
maximum profit at minimal cost. Euclid’s systems however, allow for
massive and exceedingly precise quantification and analysis. More than
anything, what worries me is the deliberateness of these augmented
spaces. Euclid will make spaces designed to do exactly one thing almost perfectly: sell you shit you don’t need.
I worry about spaces that are as expertly and diligently designed as
Amazon’s home page or the latest Pepsi advertisement. A space built on
data so rich and thorough that it’ll make focus groups look quaint in
comparison.
Of course the US is not a totalitarian society, and no equivalent of
Big Brother runs it, as the widespread reporting of Snowden’s
information shows. We know little about what uses the NSA
makes of most information available to it—it claims to have exposed a
number of terrorist plots—and it has yet to be shown what effects its
activities may have on the lives of most American citizens.
Congressional committees and a special federal court are charged with
overseeing its work, although they are committed to secrecy, and the
court can hear appeals only from the government.
Still, the US
intelligence agencies also seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of
doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness,” he wrote, “while
telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, James Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, was asked at a Senate hearing in
March whether “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at
all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s
answer: “No, sir…. Not wittingly.”
The drone is carrying a laptop so it can communicate with the headset,
but right now the sticking point is range; since it's using wi-fi to
communicate, it'll only get to around 50-100m.
"It's
not a video game movie, it's a cyberpunk movie," Cargill said. "Eidos
Montreal has given us a lot of freedom in terms of story; they want this
movie to be Blade Runner. We want this movie to be Blade Runner."
INTERVIEWER
There’s a famous story about your being unable to sit through Blade Runner while writing Neuromancer.
GIBSON
I was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because I
was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to
imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few
minutes were better. Later, I noticed that it was a total box-office
flop, in first theatrical release. That worried me, too. I thought,
Uh-oh. He got it right and nobody cares! Over a few years, though, I
started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film
of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it
affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started
building office buildings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.
The
concept was formally introduced in William Gibson's 1984 punkn novel,
NEUROMANCER. Although this first novel swept the Triple Crown of
science fiction--the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards--it
is not really science fiction. It could be called "science faction" in
that it occurs not in another galaxy in the far future, but 20 years
from now, in a BLADE RUNNER world just a notch beyond our silicon
present.
In Gibson's Cyberworld there is no-warp drive and
"beam me up, Scotty." The high technology is the stuff that appears on
today's screens or that processes data in today's laboratories:
Super-computer boards. Recombinant DNA chips. AI systems and enormous
data banks controlled by multinational combines based in Japan and
Zurich.
