Your living room will never be the same again

I want to talk about the Kinect today, BUT this post is NOT about video games. Even if you're not interested in Xboxes, Kinects, or video games in general, you may still want to read this because the point I'm making (I'll get the mystery out of the way right now) is that the Kinect is not a videogame controller. Whatever it's marketed as, it's really an interface test, and one that suggests the future really is going to be awesome. It's the beta test for the scifi living room.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about Microsoft has just released a device called the Kinect which attaches to the Xbox. Using cameras, infrared detectors, microphones, and sundry other "sensors" the Kinect is capable of recognizing body movements and sounds. Speak and the Xbox will hear you. Wave your arm and your onscreen avatar will wave its own arm and I don't just mean "an avatar," I do mean "your avatar" since the software behind the Kinect is capable of recognizing individuals. It's motion control without the remote. The Kinect is being compared to Sony's Move controller and Nintendo's Wiimote. I do not believe this is an appropriate comparison. They're playing in the same market, for now, but they're not the same thing. I think Microsoft was making something else entirely, and it all hinges on that phrase "without the remote."

This was supposed to be the future, goes a common joke, I want my jetpack. I want my video phones. I want my voice-controlled computers. I want my "Minority Report" gesture control. Well, four out of five isn't so bad. We'll keep working on the jetpacks, but in the meantime, the Kinect prototypes all those other things (and quite a few more)

Sure, you can play games with it - some of them are even fun - but the real point is that you can control your Xbox with it. The games are incidental.

I call it a prototype and a beta test because right now it has bugs that need to be ironed out. A video game system is the perfect place to start such a technology. No business will accept such bugs, not if they have to pay for it, but market it as a game and suddenly people will line up for the thing. They'll deal with the bugs because they're having fun. They'll complain, and Microsoft will listen. They'll be delighted, and Microsoft will listen to that, too. They'll play with this new toy and Microsoft will learn enough to turn that toy into a tool.

The Kinect has already been hacked. It took less than a week for clever programmers to write whole new purposes and functions for the Kinect. Microsoft initially released a statement condemning such hacks. At the time, I thought it was a legal CYA: If someone figures out how to infiltrate the FAA and take over airplane flights by holding out their arms and making buzzing noises, Microsoft could always claim "we told them not to." That initial opinion was reinforced when a Microsoft employee admitted they're not actually going to do anything about the hacking, that they are, in fact, delighted. But just the other day, Microsoft made a third clarification: they ARE delighted, they do want people to continue what they're doing, but what they're doing isn't hacking per se. The so-called-hackers are using the outputs without modifying the internals. That's fine, says Microsoft, please continue, the other stuff is still illegal. So now I just think it was supposed to be an IP CYA and someone in the R&D department failed to notify the legal department that the rest was highly desirable. It's free research from the masses. It's crowdsourcing (although disorganized and organic). I'm sure Microsoft has someone taking notes about, devising applications for, and learning from every new hack that gets posted on the net.

And there are already some pretty exciting things out there:

• The guy who can render what the Kinect sees as a 3D environment, even going so far as to accurately measure the objects in it
• The guy who can modify the skins/appearance of the people (and cats) in Kinect's sight
• The pair who turned the Kinect into a digital puppet show
• The group who combined the Kinect and the Roomba into a robot that accepts takes gesture control
• The group who uses the Kinect as a multitouch, multiuser interface for Windows 7
  

I'd expect that Microsoft is pretty excited about that one, but I'd also expect that they've been working on that exact interface before they ever released the Kinect to the public. Consider that Microsoft is the same company that produces the Microsoft Surface, a multitouch interface designed for use in a public/group setting. The lessons and applications learned working on the Surface will almost certainly translate well to the Kinect, and vice versa. The big difference is that the Kinect can do it in three dimensions.

Now consider that the Xbox already permits DVD watching, as well as access to Netflix, Twitter, and Facebook. The update that allowed the Xbox software to handle Kinect integration was the same update that added access to ESPN 3. I am certain that this is not a coincidence. It's one more incentive for people to interact with this new device, one more thing people can do without hunting for a remote. Once people are comfortable with this in the living room, it won't be difficult to move it to the office, or anywhere else for that matter. Once people are comfortable with this in the living room, they won't want to operate any other way.

I'm really looking forward to the future. Jetpacks can wait. This is cool now.

The View From Here (Part 1?)

[Note: this is a long and occasionally rambling entry, more essay than blog. It's possible I had a lot of coffee before writing it (I should try that with my book writing, maybe I'd get more done). In any case, I apologize for nothing but you HAVE been warned...]

For a variety of reasons I feel like taking a look at the future. It is a fascinating place and completely unpredictable, part of what makes it so much fun to think about. The point of this exercise is really to highlight just how strange it could be. I’m not declaring prophetic truths (unless I am, in which case, I will totally take credit for it later), I'm just exploring interesting possibilities. Or I was until The Engineer hijacked my train of thought.

It must be futurist week here in the offices of Blogger & Blogger. At the same time I was drafting this blog entry, The Engineer posted his own discussing the Singularity and recent steps towards its realization. For those of you who have not heard of the Singularity (or who are planning to follow the above link "later, probably when I'm done reading this"), I'm just going to go ahead and steal The Engineer's definition (don't worry, I'm not spoiling anything from his post, but you should probably read it first anyway):

Mankind's progress and rate of learning so far has been limited by the ability of our brains to process, assemble, and assimilate information. There may come a time in the future when we build a robot or a software computer program that is, effectively, smarter than we are. At that point, the pace and progress of learning is no longer bound by our brains.

The part where I disagree with The Engineer and other Singularity fans is when they define it as the point where the future becomes impossible to predict. The reason I disagree (and those of you paying attention should have already realized what this might be since I mention it in the second sentence) is that I think we've already reached that point. I consider the future unpredictable now (which, on review, is a strange sentence in and of itself). I suspect, however, that this is a semantic distinction, that those talking about the Singularity are using technical and highly constrained definitions of the words "predict" and "future."

So we won't go there, instead there's a larger issue I have with the basic definition selected by The Engineer, namely the idea that the processing power of our brains is currently the primary limiting factor in our technological progress. The point being made in the original definition is that someday we will make machines that are smarter than we are and that these machines will in turn be able to design even smarter machines (and, presumably, will choose to act on that ability) in an accelerating chain reaction that dramatically transforms the world into something we are completely incapable of comprehending with our (relatively) limited intellect. I don't disagree with that assessment, I disagree that it will take machines that are recognizably more intelligent than we are. Further, I disagree with the distinction I keep seeing between "human brains" and "technology." What I really mean is that I think it has already happened and that it occurred, depending on how extreme your definition, sometime between 1891, 1829, or 1680 (depending on your willingness to accept the declarations of certain bold book titles) and the invention of language.

Now before I go further, I must admit that, like much of the Internet, I'm speaking out of my rear-end here. I have read some of what has been written on the Singularity, but not all. I got through about half of Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" before it put me to sleep and, given that it was a Mids shift at work where we were allowed to read, but not encouraged to fall asleep, I had to put it aside and return it to the fellow who lent it to me. This was about five years ago and I never went back. So you're dealing with a certain amount of intellectual laziness here. I've cobbled together the bits and pieces I know and am presenting an armchair-general (or armchair-quarterback, if that's your preferred metaphor) assessment of the situation without the benefit of actual rigor in my investigations. This entry is a thought-experiment of sorts and if you want to know more I, like LeVar Burton, insist that you not take my word for it but instead seek out the numerous and varied (and more legitimate) resources who DID apply some rigor. Certainly don't quote me in an argument with someone who knows what they're talking about. It may not go well. And, if YOU happen to know what I'm talking about and what parts are complete bunk, please feel free to correct me in the comments section.

That being said, now I'm going to talk about something I DO know a little about, a concept known as distributed cognition. This is the idea, discussed by Edwin Hutchins in his book Cognition in the Wild, that our thought processes do not constrain themselves solely to the inside of our brains. We put our thoughts out in the environment, distribute our cognition amongst ourselves, amongst our tools, and across time. Even something as simple as a pen and paper enables us to process thoughts that would take much more effort alone if they could be considered at all. Our brains are NOT distinct from our technology any more than our brains are distinct from our bodies. Sure they can be separated conceptually, but separate them in practice and you're not going to get much done.

My earlier pronouncement was, perhaps, a bit ridiculous, but the point remains that even with the limited technology available, by the late nineteenth century we were already designing artifacts and systems that could not be comprehended in their entirety by a single person thinking alone. Throw a computer into the tool pile and now the "unpredictable future" horizon is much much closer. Link those computers and watch everything accelerate again. The Internet appears to be doing for human thought something much like what economics did for our production, enabling the efficient distribution of cognitive resources. Now we're talking about crowdsourcing, emergent behavior (ok, that one has exsited as long as insects, but the effects on our own development become much more dramatic), the long tail (Chris Anderson), blobjects and spimes (Bruce Sterling), and "cognitive surplus" (Clay Shirky). Okay so what I'm really doing in that last sentence is listing trendwords and popsci style bestsellers, but I think you can see why I believe artificial intelligence as we commonly think of it is not strictly necessary to make the future unpredictable. We are already much more intelligent than our brains can handle.

And now we're at the point I wanted to START this entry. Maybe in a future entry I'll talk about the computer program that can extrapolate the shape of Notre Dame from a pile of photographs (start at minute 4:00 if you don't want to watch the whole thing), the phone app that knows where all your friends are right now, the system capable of determining who will leave the bar with whose phone number before the participants know, and what I think these all mean for how hard it is going to be to explain to our kids what the world was like when we grew up. Forget walking to school in the snow (although that may be hard to explain, too), try explaining collect calls, or even a busy signal, to the child that grows up carrying the Internet in their back pocket. Then again, maybe I won't write that entry. After all, the future is unpredictable.