Video Sci-fi Predictions, True and False (Video 2) 27
Male Speaker1: Last month somebody put out a paper application to demonstrate how you could do a tractor beam in a river actually using, I don’t know what the focusing technology was but basically turning water – currents of water in the flow path of the river into actual macro scale tractor beam to manipulate objects in the river and/or anybody of water technically and move it around, both repelling it and bringing it forward. So that’s kind of fascinating.
FeMale Speaker1: Is that with resistance or like?
Male Speaker1: Actual, you could do it like a tugboat. Yeah, it’s not, I don’t know what the focusing mechanisms are but it can hold a great deal of mass.
FeMale Speaker1: Is it a magnet?
Male Speaker1: No.
Female Speaker 1: How do they work?
Male Speaker2:No, it’s the very irregular pattern of waves.
Male Speaker1: Okay.
Male Speaker2: That creates a feedback circle so I don’t understand the pattern at all but it was
FeMale Speaker1: Like water waves you mean
Male Speaker2:Waves in water
Males Speaker1: Which is, it’s just a scaled up analog of the quantum photon traps because that’s the way to reverse quantum level if you generate waves it will blockade and trap around and you can actually move the object. In that vein, actually I’ve seen an application video in the last month or two where somebody had setup a system of ultrasonic speakers and about six panels of speakers and it’s actually a research group in Japan, it’s not attached to Sony actually, but they were demonstrating, the engineers were tuning the speaker set and then taking a beaker full of Styrofoam beads and just dumping it in. It would spread and you would actually have beads levitating in the middle of open air. The box they got it is about 3’to 1 meter on the side and the engineers are going to be tweaking nobs and the beads are suddenly going in vertical shape, back to horizontal shape, back to a spread pattern, into a single ball, into kind of tree landscape. So somewhere between levitation and tractor beam effects, that was still kind of small scale, but it’s getting there.
Male Speaker3: And another thing we’ve got, well, today is Gerd headset but they are saying in the thing I found was the Bluetooth headsets. Unfortunately unlike Star Trek where the communication officers are the only one talking, everybody that wants to be obnoxious can go down the street talking to themselves, that’s my personal opinion there.
Male Speaker1: Actually I am very surprised, I am yet to see anybody doing a Bluetooth headset that doesn’t looks like you had an earpiece.
Male Speaker3: Yes.
Male Speaker1: Because that would be very cool, people go why do you have a giant cylinder hanging out of your ear it goes through the earlobe, not going to _______that would be cool.
Male Speaker3: But that’s ______their comparison to that.
Make Speaker1: Another one that I am fond of again, there are numerous authors wrote about in various times, in various iterations, and various power sources, but the most famous perhaps being Heinlein, Starship Troopers, but we have powered exoskeletons now. We have both controlled manually through hand controls as well as with the development of the mind reading hardware in Japan, that’s straps on, it’s the reading version of the deep brain stimulation. You can actually or the party trick of train yourself as a Jedi to turn on for a newly effect, you can levitate a ball thing, it’s now actually being converted into controlling robotic exoskeletons. And unfortunately I didn’t mean to catch the opening of the World Cup in Brazil this year but supposedly there was going to be one of the 12 Brazilian paraplegics who at the end of the opening ceremonies would actually walk out on to the field in a leg only exoskeleton, having been trained, and having some surgery to allow for contact between the base of the spinal column undamaged and the exoskeleton the former paraplegic was supposed get up from the wheel chair and walk out on the field and deliver the first kick of the opening game. But I didn’t actually see it if that happened.
Male Speaker2: It did.
Male Speaker1: Excellent. So, we’re making great strides – pun intended – in that direction as well.
Male Speaker3: They haven’t done the battle suits or the thing from the Aliens.
FeMale Speaker1: No.
Male Speaker1: They are working on it.
Male Speaker3: Well, the one thing I want to say... they’ve done it but it still had to be somewhat suspended, it wasn’t totally autonomous yet.
Male Speaker1: Not autonomous but the group in Boston that’s doing BigDog, they’ve got, what’s their Atlas, thank you.
Male Speaker2: Boston Dynamics.
Male Speaker1: Boston Dynamics. I need my notes, obviously. This is wearing down over time, where is my onboard storage?
Male Speaker 3: You should have it on your phone.
Male Speaker 2: You need to plug in behind your ear like
Male Speaker 3: ______
Male Speaker 1: We will get to things that didn’t pan out in a minute. But the Boston Dynamics, so besides having BigDog, which is the autonomous weight-bearing robot that the marines are actually currently field testing and it can carry something like 500 pounds of cargo never mind the fact that they can hear you for five miles away because the turbine engine is so loud, but that’s the one you can see videos online, you shove it and it will tip over and reorient itself and it’s running over obstacle courses. That group is actually working on autonomous exoskeleton suit as well, so.
Female Speaker 1: So, I like the Wayback machine, so we are going to jump back into Wayback bearing machine and Jules Verne, space wizard like crazy, visionary guy, submarine, moon landing. They were saying that pretty much in from here to the moon, he had a Florida launch site. They launched to the moon – in an aluminum capsule and had accurate calculations of the amount of force that would be needed to do a lunar landing. So, that’s a lunar launch. So, that was – that’s pretty good, I think. Good predictions there.
Male Speaker 2: And I also talk about the tricorders and somebody did create one a while back, it’s about 10,000 oh mI mean it was a tricorder app, but it kind of got attacked by PVS going no you you are copying our stuff, with doing that. But how many things can do it these right now? You can use a flash light app, there is a thing in bunch of these, I think either use it for a scale for small weighted items, you actually can use it as a level there is a wonderful suite of apps, just to use it for building applications.
Male Speaker 1: Yep. So, most of your smartphones already have potentiometers and accelerometers. So, they can do inertial tracking. The newest generation of smartphones actually is going to include barometric measurements. So, you can actually tell the atmospheric pressure where you are, so it’s a pocket weather station on top of everything else. Yes, it’s a camera, it brushes your teeth, it cuts – wait, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Female Speaker 1: It slices, it dices. It can translate.
Male Speaker 1: Translate? That’s in progress. I actually have, if you haven’t seen it the word lens, is you use your camera, you take a photo or a live of another language, a written document and it will do its best to translate it for you. Google Translate is trying a live, actual translating, getting there that you can actually plug in audio feed and somebody will actively run through the translation as it goes.
Female Speaker 1: Oh, that’s nice. And I also like the – they’ve got that – well just like recognition of things, music, I don’t know what the app is, but like you record a little bit of the whatever music is playing
Male Speaker 1: You should be using Shazam.
Female Speaker 1: Yes.
Male Speaker 2: Yeah and it will
Female Speaker 1: Shazam and it will tell you what the song is. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
Male Speaker 2: But they also have the barcode reader. You’re sitting in the store, and you say is this a good price and you look at the barcode and it will give you information and there is various apps like, okay this store charges this much, but same item in this store is a different price.
Male Speaker 1: All right. Now, for a real fun, what did the office get wrong? Okay. My favorite again, coming back to this device. With something like 70% of the world that accesses the internet these days, goes through a smartphone and the remainder use a desktop or laptop interface. Thankfully, Gibson got it wrong. People are not actually directly jacking into their brains to access online yet. I don’t think we are actually going to go that way given what Gibson wrote about as well as numerous role-playing games and various from the media that sure, you bring the net into your head, including all the 4chan. No, let’s don’t go there.
Thank You, Transcript Gods (Score:2)
This time, with the transcript included. Thank you.
Have I not read enough sci fi to do this myself? (Score:2)
Holodeck: no
Brain jack: no
Spring-powered post-apocalypse: no
Ubik: no
Universal constructor robots named Trurl and Klapaucius: no
Three laws of robotics: no
Matrix: no
Hyperdrive: no
Warpdrive: no
Smuggling software on cranially implanted usb sticks: no
Lightsabers: no
Triffids: no
Ender's game: starcraft
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No, I'm pretty sure he means Ubik. [wikipedia.org]
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From some of the awesome SF/thinly disguised political satire by the Polish author Lem. He inspired things like Douglas Adams's "Infinite Improbability Drive" and "Deep Thought" with the Trurl and Klapaucius stories. His automatic poet (first simulate a universe and then ...) shows the brilliance of both the writer and the person that translated the story into English. "Solaris" is probably his most unfilmable story yet was turned into two movies (pr
These guys seem fairly ill-informed. (Score:2)
They're pretty awesome at drawing parallels between last sci-fi technology and state-of-a-couple-of-years-old technology.
If I was going to be on a panel where I talked about universal translators, I'd at least mention near-realtime language translation in your own simulated voice over Skype/Kinect or at least translating ASL in near-realtime as well. Exoskeletons? Forget that we're actually having them let the paralyzed walk, we'll just talk about Boston Dymanics BigDog instead of ReWalk or other technolo
Re:These guys seem fairly ill-informed. (Score:4, Informative)
Please, machine translation is still fucking terrible. Look at this:
Japanese: (denwaha kakattekitara moshimoshi surundayo)
Google translate english: Telephone've got to Hello Once an incoming
Real english: when the phone rings, you should say hello!
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One presumes you pick up the phone in the middle there...
Covered nicely by Desmond Bagley way back (Score:2)
Sadly it's not about simple substitution but getting a machine apply rules for context and determining those rules is the bloody hard bit that Moore's Law can't help us with.
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Exoskeletons? Forget that we're actually having them let the paralyzed walk, we'll just talk about Boston Dymanics BigDog instead of ReWalk or other technologies. Heck, we covered package-loading exoskeletons here in the last few months.
And people bitch about Slashdot being behind the curve... :)
True sci-fi videos (Score:1)
Here you can find strange videos related to sci-fi and life from outer space :
True sci-fi vidz [google.com]
Enjoy !
Wrong! (Score:1)
Sci-fi does not make predictions, it tell stories.
Can you guys shorten this to the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
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He claimed that a superconductor would have a uniform temperature over the entire length of the superconductor. It's how Louis Wu kills sunflowers since they heat up part of a superconductive cable while another part of the cable is submerged in water.. the resulting cloud kills the sunflowers.
Obviously there's no existing material that would have high-enough temperatures to do a similar experiment, but maybe a materials science guy could chime in about whether or not these materials actually maintain unifo
As summarized by Eddie Izzard: (Score:1)
"But finally tonight, finally tonight I just want to talk about the future. The future. Where will the future be? Science Fiction writers, they write it down, they write it down in books. And then it becomes films, and then it all comes to pass, like those doors in Star Trek (makes whooshing sound) we've got them now! That's about it! But that's happened."
Information and Knowledge Free (Score:2)
One thing I found interesting right at the beginning was about whether information and knowledge should be free. It would seem logical that a core level of information and knowledge should be freely accessible on the internet and be provided by the state. The core of this information being all about the management system of the state (being local, state or federal), what they are doing, how they are doing and why they are doing it, something of vital importance to a democracy. Expanding upon this of course
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One thing I found interesting right at the beginning was about whether information and knowledge should be free.
Later on they talk about a (presumably LCARS) Tricorder-like app disappearing from "the" app store, stongarmed by CBS without any criticism (and also genuinely wonder why there are no bluetooth sets shaped like Uhura's earpiece). So they seem "on board" with a strong "intellectual property" regime or at least put it in the "things fall down", "a hot stove hurts when you touch it", everyday-thruths-that-just-are-and-not-given-a-second-thought category.
Which brings us to the information that really should be
Missing the point slightly (Score:2)
One good recent example is the film "Predes