Technology Archives - Page 8 of 58

Soon, most of what you do on a computer will be done via bots

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“Is everything going to become a bot? I don’t think so. There’ll probably still be static apps for professional and authoring tools; Photoshop and CAD and Excel and Evernote aren’t going away; and video games will still be video games. Most of the squishy stuff in the middle, though, will go conversational. Anything that involves collaboration, communications, consumption, organization, etc. will probably become a bot. I think bots will replace 80% of what we use at work and half of what we use at home.”

Source: A Charge of Bots — The Tech World As We Know It Is About To Be Rewritten — Medium

As I’ve said before, it’s time for social organizations (churches, nonprofits, some businesses) to think through what the coming years of tech will bring… and one of the major revisions we’re going to see is the way we interact with tech. Messaging bots will be the driving force behind that.

When I use “messaging” and “bots,” I’m not referring to what we consider tools such as Facebook Messenger or Slack now. I’m also referring to interactions such as the voice driven Amazon Echo (or Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana etc). Bots will interact seamlessly with our lives from our music selections to our banking to the status of our HVAC home systems. Here’s a good rundown on bots from Re/Code.

There was a time when we thought software keyboards (such as on the now ubiquitous iPhone) would “never catch on.” The same with laptops. And a computer mouse. And color screens. And computers in your home. And punch cards.

Voice, gesture, and messaging bots will be the norm. Just as if you walk into our home now, the primary way to start playing music involves the salutation “Alexa,” followed by what you’d like to hear, rather than our previous practice just a few short months ago of having to go over to a computer keyboard and type in a search. It happened seamlessly and Amazon’s Echo, along with Siri, is just a sign of what’s to come.

Will everything we do with / on computers be taken over by bots and messaging? Of course not. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, some people need trucks but most everyone can get by with a car. You probably don’t launch Photoshop or complicated accounting software that often. If you do, don’t worry.

The point is, the way we interact with all of this tech we surround ourselves with is about to dramatically change. Think ahead for what that means for your business, church, group, and workflow.

Digital Colonialism

“Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive…”

Source: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism | Motherboard

Fascinating article.

If the developing world wants to use our internet, they must play by our rules, the thinking goes.

Reverse Engineering Humanity

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“We believe that a computer that can read and understand stories, can, if given enough example stories from a given culture, ‘reverse engineer’ the values tacitly held by the culture that produced them,” they write. “These values can be complete enough that they can align the values of an intelligent entity with humanity. In short, we hypothesise that an intelligent entity can learn what it means to be human by immersing itself in the stories it produces.”

Source: Robots could learn human values by reading stories, research suggests | Books | The Guardian

Our stories are important. Our ability to have, interpret, and produce intuition is seemingly something very human. However, we’re finding out that’s not necessarily the case.

Of Siri and Hesiod

There’s a very subtle but very real history behind Siri (and Google Now and Amazon Echo’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana) having a female voice and persona…

“But because the creatures in these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.”

Source: The Robots Are Winning! by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books

You Are Becoming Obsolete

I was born in 1978. The C2-8P with its futuristic dual floppy drives was cutting edge tech.

My oldest child was born in 2007. This had just been released and some of the first pictures I have of her were taken with it. She will never know a world without it.

LC was born in 2010, the same year as this. It is revolutionizing how we do everything from teaching and learning to making a medical diagnosis.

And now I have a four month old son who was born the same time this went on sell. He will never know a world that doesn’t include widely available and affordable VR (or AR).

I imagine that we’ll see a similar revolution in our society in the way that iPhone has changed us since 2007 because of virtual reality devices going “mainstream.”

Similarly, things we didn’t think could change are changing rapidly.

We’re seeing our political system transform seemingly overnight. We’re teaching our children with tools such as Coursera and Khan Academy that are replacing the need for highly skilled teachers of content. Even our religious landscape looks very different than it did 10 years ago.

Churches, schools, and politicians are all clamoring to stay relevant and not show signs of aging or becoming obsolete.

However, our bodies age and decline. When we pass mirrors, we still see ourselves in our mind’s eye at the height of our physical (and maybe spiritual) beauty. The wrinkles and scars don’t always register right away. Some of us seek out surgery or vitamins or juice cleanses or yoga to delay the inevitable. Most of us want to delay death.

Yeats would remind us,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Things fall apart. You will die. Your church will not look the same in ten years as it does today. Your child’s school will teach math differently than you learned math. Donald Trump may become our country’s president.

You will contribute some verse, however. Even after you are long gone as a corporal being, perhaps distant family will think of you or a depiction of you in some not-yet-invented VR machine will allow a great-great-grandchild to interview you for a project.

What about our churches, our schools, and our political system? What will our grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren say about them? Will they be comforting thoughts or will they react like teens in the video above reacted to Windows 95?

You are becoming obsolete. Embrace that and the decay and work for justice and peace in all that you do and with those you choose to worship, learn, or legislate with while you’re here. Worry less about the details that your obsolete brain is telling you matter.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

An honest thief

Fascinating read…

“The conclusion is inescapable: we must live our lives to promote the most overall good. And that would seem to mean helping those most in want—the world’s poorest people.

Our rule demands one do everything they can to help the poorest—not just spending one’s wealth and selling one’s possessions, but breaking the law if that will help. I have friends who, to save money, break into buildings on the MIT campus to steal food and drink and naps and showers. They use the money they save to promote the public good. It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars.”

Source: An honest thief

So long and thanks for all the fish, Twitter.

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“Say hello to a brand new Twitter. The company is planning to introduce an algorithmic timeline as soon as next week, BuzzFeed News has learned. The timeline will reorder tweets based on what Twitter’s algorithm thinks people most want to see, a departure from the current feed’s reverse chronological order.”

Source: Twitter To Introduce Algorithmic Timeline As Soon As Next Week – BuzzFeed News

Welp, there goes Twitter.

Sigh.

Ugh.

Damn.

Evidently, there’s talk of an opt-out, but we’ll see.

YouTube Donation Cards for Nonprofits

We recently began rolling out donation cards to US creators, which let your subscribers and viewers donate directly from your videos. Just add a donation card, pick a nonprofit, and start doing good. You can choose any United States, IRS-validated 501(c)3 public nonprofit organization and they receive 100% of the money donated. We’re excited to take this first step and look forward to expanding into other countries so creators across the world can power nonprofits they care about.

Source: YouTube Creator Blog: Transform a view into a donation

I could see this being a nice secondary stream of donations for nonprofits and churches in 2016…

Peak iPhone

Too Many iPhones

From earlier today before Apple’s Q1 Earnings call:

“When CEO Tim Cook reports Tuesday on Apple’s sales for the last three months of 2015, investors will be watching closely for any hints about how Apple’s signature smartphone is faring in the current quarter. Sales usually fall somewhat after the holiday shopping season. But analysts say it appears Apple has cut production orders from key suppliers in recent weeks, suggesting it’s lowered its own forecasts.”

Source: Is Apple Reaching Peak iPhone? | CBS

And from just now after the earnings call regarding the upcoming Q2 2016:

… The company expects to report between $50 and $53 billion in revenue. That would put it below the $58 billion it reported in Q2 2015 and would mark the first year over year decline in revenue for the company in years.The slight decrease can likely be attributed to falling iPhone sales, which have been predicted for some time now. In Q1, Apple reported sales of 74.7 million iPhones, which is just barely better than the 74.5 million it did in the same quarter last year. Apple did not say how many it expects to sell in Q2, but analysts have predicted declines as high as 25 percent.

Source: Have we reached peak iPhone? It’s complicated | The Verge

Apple sold an average of 34,000 phones per hour for 13 consecutive weeks. That’s incredible, but unsustainable, growth. If anything, Wall Street loves growth. With China’s economy on a rapid downturn and the U.S. economy weak due to a number of variables that could lead us into a potentially havoc Spring, Summer, and Fall, Apple is wisely hedging its bets on production. That’s especially wise since carrier subsidies for new devices are now non-existent in the U.S. and each new iteration of the iPhone undergoes a “meh, it’s not that different from my old one” period with potential upgrading users.

If nothing else, we’ve learned today that the media loves using the term “Peak iPhone” (give the term a google if you’d like to see).

Apple’s iOS Home Screen Problem

I flip back-and-forth between iOS and Android, mostly iPhone 6s Plus and a Nexus device, all the time and enjoy both operating systems (though I do enjoy Android more to be honest… much to the chagrin of my family and friends who all use iMessage on iOS and therefore I’m a “green bubble” when on my Nexus device).

However, I’m always curious as to why iOS users who transition or experiment with Android feel the compulsion to stack their home screens full of app icons.

Not that it’s a cumbersome way to navigate your mobile device (I think it is), but it’s a curious hold-over from the vision Steve Jobs and his devs had for the original iPhone in ’07. I’d wager that even he would think it’s time to move past that convention in 2016 (something which you can easily do on Android, but not so much on the aging iOS interface). Maybe Apple in the Cook Era is too deep in the institutional molasses.

Whenever someone wants to play with one of my Android devices who has previously been an iPhone and iPad only user for the last several years, they almost always respond positively and immediately to the widgets on my home screen.

“I like widgets a lot, and wish iOS had something similar.”

Source: A Week With Android — Medium

I do wonder how the masses will respond when / if Apple ever adopts widgets… the “rows and rows of apps” conventions has been successfully turned into a standard way of interacting with mobile devices here in the US.

However, that’s not the case in the Asian markets where Apple really wants to expand in the coming years as it has reached a relative saturation point in North America with devices. Apple is slowly sneaking widgets in via the Notifications shade, but I’m not sure how many users actually know / use / understand that interface.

Of course, I was totally wrong in 2007 about widgets and the iPhone, so what do I know?

Maybe the fear of being a “green bubble” will be enough to keep users on iOS, at least here in the US.

And don’t get me started on how / why the iPad Pro still uses the same “rows of app icons” convention…

Throughout his career, Bowie pushed the boundaries of music from all angles: His public persona constantly evolved as he shifted genres like a time traveler’s temporal jumps. He also wasn’t afraid to grasp at the future of business: He launched an ISP called BowieNet in 1998, saying at the time, “If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet.”

Source: David Bowie predicted the Apple Music future in 2003 | Cult of Mac

The Human Hope, the Cloud, and why 70% of internet traffic flows through Northern Virginia

Short but fascinating-to-ponder pilgrim’s progress piece…

And maybe my desire to submerge myself in that sediment, to weave The Cloud into the timelines of railroad robber-barons and military R&D, emerges from the same anxiety that makes me go try to find these buildings in the first place: that maybe we have mistaken The Cloud’s fiction of infinite storage capacity for history itself. It is a misunderstanding that hinges on a weird, sad, very human hope that history might actually end, or at least reach some kind of perfect equipoise in which nothing terrible could ever happen again. As though if we could only collate and collect and process and store enough data points, the world’s infinite vaporware of real-time data dashboards would align into some kind of ultimate sand mandala of total world knowledge, a proprietary data nirvana without terror or heartbreak or bankruptcy or death, heretofore only gestured towards in terrifying wall-to-wall Accenture and IBM advertisements at airports.

Source: Up to 70 Percent of Global Internet Traffic Goes Through Northern Virginia – Nextgov.com

The New York Public Library Uploads 200,000 Images for Public Use

What the web was made for… much more beneficial to humanity than social media silos or native content ads:

The New York Public Library just uploaded nearly 200,000 images you can use for free | The Verge: “The New York Public Library just released a treasure trove of digitized public domain images, featuring epic poetry from the 11th century to photographs of used car lots in Columbus, Ohio from the 1930s. Over 180,000 manuscripts, maps, photographs, sheet music, lithographs, postcards, and other images were released online Wednesday in incredibly high resolution, and are available to download using the library’s user-friendly visualization tool. It’s a nostalgist’s dream come true.”

2015 and the Return to Long Form

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It annoys me beyond belief when people tell me our podcasts “should be 20 or so minutes” on Thinking.FM…

All-day podcasts and brick-sized books. Or, why 2015 was the year the long form fought back | Books | The Guardian: “There is something almost inexpressibly appealing about this, in an era when almost all other content – articles, podcasts, videos, TV shows – arrives doing jazz hands, anxiously soliciting the reader’s or listener’s or viewer’s attention by means of outrageous headlines or self-conscious gimmicks, in a determined effort to make things seem more interesting than, on inspection, they turn out to be.”

We (I think unfortunately) gave in to the loud minority on Thinking Religion, but I still very much personally enjoy the flexibility and personality of long form podcasts. And books. And blog posts. And thoughts.

Despite our newfound digital souls, we’re rekindling the notion that not everything can or should be “bite sized” to satiate our digital materialism.

Parents Want to Know: Why Doesn’t iPad Have Multi-User Accounts Yet?

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It absolutely baffles me that there is no “Parent Mode” on iPads for adding multiple logins. Amazon does it insanely well with its FreeTime offering (my kids love it) on both Kindle DX tablets as well as “regular” Kindles. Android does it well and allows for parents to easily set up multi-user accounts on one device. Even Chromebooks do it well with managed user accounts (which is what we use for the kids’ laptops in our house).

I’m guessing the “buy an iPad for your kid if you don’t want them messing with your enterprise business files!” mentality of Apple has served them well.

Once Apple does enable multi-user or managed user accounts, people will laud Apple with a technological breakthrough despite the intentional foot dragging to cause more iPad sales.

iOS 9 iPad multi-user feature coming alongside split-screen apps | BGR: “However, the feature won’t launch with iOS 9.0 this fall, but sometime after that. Apparently, multi-user support is still in development, and might not be unveiled at WWDC next week.”

Nope, not yet.

A Second Life? Virtual Reality’s Coming Impact on Marketing

Emotion + Experience = Marketing

I do wonder about the scale of virtual reality. With Google investing in Cardboard, and Facebook spearheading Occulus Rift development, there is certainly a case to be made for mainstream adoption.

Of course, there was once such hype around Second Life as well.

Interesting read from Mike Elgan…

How Virtual Reality Is Redefining Marketing: “Advertiser-supported virtual reality and mixed reality content will have experiential marketing content instead of ads. These can not only be convincing and immersive, but potentially social and participatory. Best of all, they can go viral and spread across the world in minutes. And that’s why virtual reality and mixed reality will totally transform marketing. It combines the emotional impact of experiential marketing with the viral scalability of Web campaigns. “

Your Email Privacy (Thanks, Government)

Scary, true, and worth your attention if you value your privacy…

Mozilla will let go of Thunderbird | Boing Boing: “There are many good reasons to use standalone email clients, but for Americans one of the most compelling is the absurdly outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which treats any file left on a server for more than six months as ‘abandoned’ and accessible to law enforcement without a warrant (no, really!). That includes all your Gmail previous to June 2015. Really. All of the efforts to reform ECPA have died on the vine, because law enforcement loves this creaking piece of legislation.”

Vote out your representative if they don’t “understand technology.” That’s not an excuse anymore.

Google’s quantum computing announcement on December 8

It’s not exactly clear what this announcement will be (besides important for the future of computing), but Jurvetson says to “stay tuned” for more information coming on December 8th. This is the first we’ve heard of a December 8th date for a Google announcement, and considering its purported potential to be a turning point in computing, this could perhaps mean an actual event is in the cards.

Source: Google reportedly planning a ‘watershed’ quantum computing announcement for December 8

If Google has cracked quantum decoherence, we’re in for a very fascinating course of events in the next few decades.

It’s about the ads

“The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger Web when it’s all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser.

Google seems to have recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles could be to Google’s ability to serve ads. This is why Google’s project is called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry, desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you.”

Source: How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web—by sandblasting HTML | Ars Technica

“Speeding up the web” is a wonderful sentiment, but Google, Apple, and Facebook are well aware of the impending transition to a post-mobile computing interface that will transform how we see and interact with advertising.

Google AMP, Facebook Instant News, and Apple News are stop gaps to make a few more dollars on a rapidly transitioning medium (web advertising) as it exists in its current state.

NYT VR

Saving this for when we look back in 10 years on the first mainstream uses of VR in much the same way we fondly look back at web pages from the 90’s today…

“Today, The New York Times takes a step into virtual reality. NYT VR is a mobile app that can be used — along with your headphones and optionally a cardboard viewing device — to simulate richly immersive scenes from across the globe.”

Source: NYT VR: How to Experience a New Form of Storytelling From The Times – The New York Times

Amazon’s Retail Store, Uber Surge Pricing, and The Ever Changing Price of Things

“It’s all about the data. Under the hood, the Amazon store has a few unusual features. Every book has a shelf tag that includes a capsule review from the website, a star rating, and a barcode. There are no prices listed. To get the price, you scan the code with the camera of your smartphone and the Amazon app. If you don’t have a smartphone or the app installed, an associate can do it for you. This brings up the product page for the item you’re looking at, with full reviews, specs and pricing.”

Source: Amazon’s Retail Store Has Nothing To Do With Selling Books – Forbes

Price is the main motivating factor in most purchasing decisions under $50, so it’s interesting to see that Amazon is trading off that variable with the need to scan a code with its app on your smartphone in order to give you the information.

There’s a very good reason Amazon wants to do that, of course… if you have the app installed on your smartphone and use it in their store, they are able to (in relative real time) offer up a more customized, or personal, shopping experience to you based on what Amazon knows about you. If you’re online in 2015, that’s probably a good deal, especially for Prime members with Echo’s and a long purchase history like me and my family.

Variant pricing will initially surprise consumers. “What do you mean he gets to buy that Star Wars book for $2 less than I do?” will be a common refrain. Amazon knows my wife and I have a little boy due to arrive any moment now (or they should based on our recent purchases), and they know I’m a Star Wars fan based on my Amazon Prime Movies streaming, and purchase of toys and collectibles for our kids (*cough* … ) or the frequent amount of times our 5 year old asks Alexa to play the Imperial March from the soundtrack.

So, psychologically there’s a great deal more involved with a purchasing decision than price point.

As we move towards a cash-free and digital transaction based economy (thanks, Apple and Android Pay!) and continue to contribute both our data and our purchasing habits to recommendation engines, it will be more economically efficient to move towards a market where goods and services are based on context and situational awareness (Uber’s Surge Pricing, for example).

“Showcase Stores” such as Best Buy get this. Even the weekly grocery store discount ads in the newspaper circular (for us old folks) will follow this lead and require an app or an interface not based on universal pricing in order for the “cost” of something to be displayed. Our nearly automated financial markets full of nano-second timed transactions carried out by bots are already there.

Time for advertising and marketing to catch up.

It’s going to be a fun decade ahead.

“Hey Alexa, play my Beatles mix. And order more newborn diapers.”

Goodbye, Oyster.

“Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks. With that, we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months. If you are an Oyster reader you will receive an email personally regarding your account.”

Source: oysterbooks

Hmm… never a good post to make on a Friday night before Halloween… I wonder if it was poor uptake, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, or just market economics of the ebook subscription model?

This is the perfect opening to a scifi novel…

“With the help of James Jubilee, a former American arms control officer and now a senior science and technology coordinator for health issues in Kazakhstan, Dr. LaPorte tracked down Mr. Dey through the State Department, and his images and documentation quickly convinced them of the earthworks’ authenticity and importance.”

Source: NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient Earthworks

Get to writing, someone. I want to read this book and how humanity is shaken to its roots by startling revelations about our species’ history…