From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 11:26:25 MDT
Regular Expression wrote:
> When you sit at your computer it's tempting to think of yourself as a
> recepticle for the information flowing from the Internet, but this is a
> half truth. In fact, your computer is the recepticle, and all it sees is
> so much binary data. the computer chooses how to interpret the data,
> transforming them into more convenient forms and using output devices to
> let you interpret the data as audio, text, graphics, etc.
Yes, but, I don't want to "sit at my computer". I want full
access to computational resources and the Internet at all times
I am awake without having to sit at a box. The age of a box you
go and sit in the presence of should end rather quickly now.
Ubiquitous computing and wearables (eventually implantables) are
where I believe much of the future is and where the maximal
power for change, especially more IA, is.
>
> If more bandwidth is available to your computer, it will be able to
> receive information (media) with greater information density. The
> high-density media, while conveying essentially the same information as
> its low-density equivalent, could in many cases be easier for the
> average Internet user's brain to assimilate.
>
Producing high-density media is easy. Making fully use of it to
produce high-information content is something else again.
Personally I would not be happy to see bandwidth eaten for
glossier and glossier adware and more visually attractive empty
infotainment with relatively little real information.
> For instance, would you rather:
>
> 1) Go to "tv://cnn.com" and be presented instantaneously with a
> fullscreen HDTV-quality pointcast of the night's headlines, as
> personalized for your interests;
>
The personalization agents should scan all the worlds news feeds
and web sites and present me with news. I am not a consumer for
some one source's pap. CNN is egregiously offensive imho.
> 2) Hear the morning news on your way to work while chatting with a
> speech-based information processing agent; or
>
Sure, but this does not take particular high bandwidth. A
cell-phone call (already existing) to a voice processing app
(already partially existing) to apps that server up information
from your own and others computers would suffice. Doable with
current infrastructure (and one of the projects I want to get to
someday).
> 3) Sit down in front of a computer terminal and click monotonously on
> hyperlinks, squinting at pages of advert-filled fluff, applying crude
> visual data-mining techniques trying to glean the information you're
> interested in?
>
But this problem could well get worse as the bandwidth is eaten
by more and more intense ad saturation and more and more people
attempt to fence off various content and charge a toll for
entrance.
> In other words--greater bandwidth for our computer networks may equate
> to greater effective throughput for our wetware networks (our brains, or
> minds, or whatever we're calling them today))
>
Yes. I have nothing against greater bandwidth at all. It just
isn't a panacea. Greater connectivity (everywhere!) at even
today's aDSL speeds is a higher immediate priority to me. YMMV.
> Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
>> I fail to see how the high bandwidth final mile will significantly
>> advance society, culture, or humanity as they currently exist.
>> Only when the end recepticles have a much higher bandwidth
>> than those currently in place (i.e. we have posthumanist
>> entities) does it seem to me that higher bandwidths will
>> be useful.
>>
Depends on what we are talking about as "higher" and what kind
of apps run on the local user's boxes versus out on the net. I
and my household can easily make use of a T1 (and currently have
about 3/4 of that). If you include all voice communication, TV,
computer, radio and so forth in "bandwidth" you discover the
average US home already does have significant bandwidth coming
in. How much is needed in the opposite direction depends very
much on more individual factors for now. We could easily dream
up apps running in the household that would use parts of that.
But really, the historical point is that when the bandwidth
increases new uses of that bandwidth follow closely that were
not easily predicatable.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:51 MST