Future

The recent actions of Apple and Amazon to punish e-book publishers that had differing views and to further control over book consumption. As well as the death of J.D. Salinger and the issues surrounding his book The Catcher in the Rye lead me to believe we should be concerned about the future of books for all of us.

Both Amazon and Apple are moving to control distribution of e-books to their respective devices, and thereby dominating delivery and consumption as has happened to music. The music business has been very happy to get Digital Rights Management services on their itunes music and we should expect the same from the book publishers. You will not own your book but instead have a possibly term limited, third party controlled access.

The unfortunate thing is that people are more likely to try and break the controls on music and not on books. The very information that we have collected to advance our society will be exactly that which is locked away. The library industry is surely fretting at its ability to continue to delivery borrowable materials in a world where the false scarcity no longer exists. But we still need the library, we need the access and we do not need it limited.

Now what does Holden have to do with this. Well for anyone who doesn't know, the book has had a long history of controversy for its content. I quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye

  "In 1960 a teacher was fired for assigning the novel in class. He was later reinstated.[28] Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.[29] In 1981, it was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States.[30] According to the American Library Association, The Catcher in the Rye was the tenth most frequently challenged book from 1990–1999.[9] It was one of the ten most challenged books in 2005, and has been off the list since 2006.[31]"

There were then, are today, and will be books that annoy parents and various groups. But maybe next time the material will exist in an e-book DRM vendor controlled format. That makes it only one short click from being filtered forever.

Who would do such a thing? Well this is where we get back to our vendors. Amazon had pulled an entire publisher Macmillan, and Apple is well known for filtering and rejecting Apps with little or no feedback or reasoning. And they both have this power as they are the only way to get to those users.

Someday, Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs companies will come under pressure to filter, or define material as inappropriate for their platforms. When that day comes I hope Holden and his future friends have also spilled some real ink and not just been as virtual as any other imaginary electronic world.

In todays Guardian there is a bit about the dangers of intellectual property in science. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/26/science-shackles-int...

"The drive to commercialise science has overtaken not only applied research but also "blue-skies" research, such that even the pure quest for knowledge is subverted by the need for profit."

"For example, it is estimated that some 20% of individual human genes have been patented already or have been filed for patenting. As a result, research on certain genes is largely restricted to the companies that hold the patents, and tests involving them are marketed at prohibitive prices. We believe that this poses a very real danger to the development of science for the public good."

I personally cannot believe we are doing this to ourselves. I find the idea of someone owning a discovery ridiculous, there is no invention, there is no need to keep it for yourself. And in most cases, research is already funded through tax dollars and grants fron the public purse.

Imagine if you will other discoveries about the natural world throughout history if today's conventions applied.

So probably not my best examples. But the reality is that these are things that happened in nature. This is the world around us. Should anyone own gravity? Or be able to license breathing a given mix of air?

So what about the argument that discovery costs money? Microscopes don't just appear, science has a price. This is indeed true, but also why for thousands of years research has been performed both by the independent scientist and with the assistance of public money. Advancement of knowledge like the rising tide, lifts all minds for the better. Science must continue as a public good. Sell me your mousetrap, not license me the genes of the mouse.

As we continue the endless march into the future ask if it should be behind a pay wall and make sure to stock up on rocks.

Here is an interesting story about learning from flies and simplifying the computational requirements of sight in order to better emulate vision and provide for a much lower cost way to detect motion and obstacles the coming generations of small robots.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/fly-eyes/

I was just in a conversation (or is IRC only ever a fight) this morning where I was arguing against trying to construct large exact models of things in order to replicate human biological behaviours without looking around at simpler implementations that could be the inspiration or answer.

One of the upsides of having little children and insomnia is that I get some extra time to think about things I have read.

This article http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23354/page1/ by Ed Boyden of MIT was rolling around in my head the other night and led to some thoughts.

He touches on the futurist concept of singularity, a time of such rapid technology change that we cannot envision the future beyond it.

I am not a big fan of singularity as I know it today, there are a couple things that bother me

- The expectation that something like this should happen in or near this time period. This sounds like an 'it's different now, we are special' argument to me.

- Why such a limited focus and frame, on the grand scale of the universe, perhaps the last 40,000 years have been the singularity on this planet.

- And why does it have to include advanced AI, is the singularity just simply the day the machines take over, if so, then the human spec on the universe will be even shorter than we hoped.

The other topic he gets to is artificial intelligence needing a motivation and goals so it has a feedback loop to continue its advancement. Again this raises some questions for me

- I see really only two kinds of motivation, Ego (greed,want,recognition) and Primal (needs,death). So, assuming we are only smart enough to start our machine with one of these and no balance, take your pick.

- And why are we so interested in the idea of a wanting, self advancing machine? an army of Datas (ST:TNG) to do our bidding? I thought we answered that in the 80s.

- If we do make it here, the future I fear is not that the machine gets bored or sad or gives up, it is that we do. Once we build something smarter than ourselves and switch to sloth, perhaps we wouldn't know a singularity and that the machines had taken over if it happened to us anyway.

Enjoy the rest of your day inside the Matrix.