Daylight savings time by continuous adjustment

Did you remember to set your cellphone's clock back an hour for daylight savings time?  Of course not!  It happens automatically.

World time is effectively synchronized.  You can schedule a zoom meeting over several continents and everyone will arrive within a minute.  This remarkable fact, which we take for granted, is a side-effect of advancements in communication technology.  In the last century, it could take 5-10 minutes to start a meeting with people in the same building.  

The problem with springing forward is that we suddenly lose an hour.   Does it have to be that way?  

Suppose the servers that set our cellphone clocks made continuous adjustments throughout the year.  Spread the one hour we need to lose in the spring over the course of the winter.  Days are a few seconds shorter in the winter, a few seconds longer in the summer.  

What about clocks that are not on the net?  Won't they go slowly out of sync?  Yes, but that already happens.  Unconnected timepieces are always suspect.  The only clocks you trust are on your networked devices.

The planet changes gradually.  Our clocks should too.

When everybody films everything

Trending in 2014:

• dashboard cams
• cop cams
• home security cameras
• GoPro
• Google Glass
• stealth video glasses
• first person hyperlapse video
• quantified self

We are recording more and more of our personal lives, and we are starting to do it with passive devices that film whatever is in front of them.

What happens when the technology advances a few more steps?  We will have:

• unobtrusive devices
• recordings that are streamed directly to the cloud and stored forever 
• batteries that lasts all day
• high resolution video and high quality stereo audio
• a digital rights system that protects everyone's privacy

It will occur to many people that they might as well just record everything, all the time, and they will eventually forget how to turn it off.

Privacy

We enter a new era of digital rights when people begin recording their everyday conversations.  If you film me talking to you, you own the recording.  You can play it for yourself whenever you want.  But there would be terrible consequences if you can make it public without my permission, or hide it from me.  Most communication would go off camera.

There has to be a way for the subjects of a video to control access to it.

How do we know who is in a video?  The video is geo-coded, and let's say the direction it's pointed in is known, and the positions of the people nearby are known (since they are also creating geo-coded videos), then we can be accurate about who is in the video, and therefore who needs to be consulted on allowing access to people who were not there.  Face recognition is a double-check.

Some principles:

• I can always access my own feed, no matter who is in it.
• I can access any feed that I am in.
• If I am the only person in my feed, I have complete control over its access by other people.
• If my feed contains other people, I cannot necessarily share it.   I need permission from the other people.
• I can release any feed containing me to any given group.  But it only becomes available to that group when everyone in the feed allows access by that group.
• Each person can set a default access level.  If I'm going out, I may want everything to be by default public.  For many people, that will be the default most of the time. But there's an easy way to switch to private whenever I want, and that means any video that includes me will require my explicit permission to share.

People can decide to make portions of their feeds available to various groups, and the general public is one such group.

The movie of your life

First person videos are always lacking something -- the hero of the story is behind the camera, never seen.  As recording becomes omnipresent, there will be images of you in feeds filmed by other people.  Software will be able to stitch together the information in multiple videos to create something resembling a movie about your day, automatically selecting scenes with interesting content, showing you as you appear to the people you have encountered.

Hitchcock said "drama is real life with the all the boring parts cut out".  The same software that presents the interesting moments of your day can make the movie of your life, at various running times.  Everybody may have a novel in them, but someone has to write it.  Your life movie is generated automatically.  All you have to do is wear the device.

Passive filming produces videos that are mostly dead space.  No one watches them from start to finish, much less live.  But they capture rare moments of interest that are missed by active recording.  The times we pose for a photo and say "cheese" are significant but dull.  Will will stop interrupting our lives to take pictures and start  picking key frames from video feeds instead.

Our collective perceptual universe

Taken together, these videos form a complete record of  whatever is seen and heard by all the people wearing recording devices, and we are stipulating that is everyone.

The vast majority of the information we receive is through sound and image.  By a remarkable coincidence, these are also the two senses that can be captured and replayed at will.  Or maybe it's not a coincidence.  We could have developed methods to record and play back sequences of smell, or touch, or tastes, by why?  Odorama never caught on.  Audio and video is enough.

Metaphysics

There is a much richer physical reality that causes the video and audio, far more difficult to capture, but we are also stipulating that the recording devices are as good as our senses.   For our normal human purposes, the deep physical reality below our awareness is not important.  We have only our perceptions of it to work with to build the world of experience and ideas. The perceptual world is becoming tractable in a way the physical world below cannot be.  These feeds form the bedrock and raw data for any true description of the perceptual world.

Street View Video

The feeds available to you are stitched together into an interface like Street View.  You will be able to pan and zoom around the map and inside buildings, now with a lot more granularity and the added dimension of time.  You can sit at a cafe and watch the world go by all day, thanks to feeds from multiple patrons, or see a concert from the point of view of every audience member.

Street View Video will become a partial 3d model of the physical world, over time.  How do we combine multiple feeds?  Street View does its best to morph one street photo to the next as you virtually walk down the street.  The corresponding action for video is a lot more complicated.  The work on hyperlapse video applies here, now applied to multiple feeds from multiple sources.   Each new feed of the same event from a different perspective clarifies some part of the unified model.

Your complete history is a combination of your own feed and the feeds of everyone around you.  The 3d model gives out at the edges.  You can't go watch that tree falling in a forest unless someone was there to see it.

Information extraction

We can also make symbolic models using this raw data, recognizing speech and faces across multiple videos.  Individuals would be represented by point locations, and speech by text.  This leaves behind most of the detail at the raw feed level in favor of a more compact model that's easier to navigate and contains much of the interesting information.  You might explore at this level, then dive down at times into the raw feeds for the actual video.

The software that edits out the boring stuff will rely heavily on recognized speech and natural language processing methods like text summarization and named entity recognition.

Speech

The meaning of a word is only approximated by a dictionary definition.  Meaning is determined by use.  Which use?  Some uses are more equal than others, but the full story of a word would include every use.  Every time someone has uttered or written a word, they contribute some epsilon of meaning to it.  Web-based written text allows this kind of analysis now, the new thing is that we can now see the much larger corpus of speech as well.

Levels of summarization

At a much higher level, there is the News, where reporters write descriptions of events by summarizing the feeds of the participants.  Summarization at this level is beyond the software I am imagining.

Beyond News is News Analysis and finally History, which summarizes thousands of news reports.

All levels of summarization will be traced back to the raw data they describe.  In the future, there are no more arguments about facts, only about interpretations.

It is amazing that this is in the realm of possibility.  The perceptual world is huge but finite and we may someday have enough storage for the whole thing.

Republican epistemology

Republicans are convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that Obamacare is wreaking untold havoc on the American public.  Premiums are skyrocketing, businesses are not hiring, full-time workers are getting their hours cut, and doctors are no longer accepting insurance.  It is an unmitigated disaster.

There is no need for a study to show this.  They just know it. How?  It's obvious.  If you ran a business with 50 employees, wouldn't you cut a few to avoid giving them all healthcare?

Given this undeniable fact, they can't understand why anyone would be in favor of it.  Supporters of Obamacare, including the president, must want to destroy America.  That's the only explanation.  They are drunk with power.

Republicans know that illegal immigrants are dangerous to America. According to Steve King, for every child of illegal immigrants “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

How does he know that?  Again, no study is needed.  It's obvious.

What else do they know?  That our $17 trillion debt is crippling us, social security is going bankrupt, being gay is a choice, global warming is a hoax, evolution is just a theory, and gun control has no effect on gun violence. Also, American has the best healthcare system in the world.

It's becoming clear that the core problem with the extreme right is one of epistemology.  How do you know what you think you know?  What counts as evidence?  Do a few anecdotal stories confirm or invalidate a theory?  Does personal experience count more than statistics over a large population?

The left doubts itself, pays attention to studies, listens to the poles.  It has biases of its own, but understands that it should argue from facts to theories.  Rachel Maddow is exhausting as she lines up facts to support her claims.  The right skips all that hard work.  It reasons directly from a strong theory about human nature to policy.  Humans are entirely motivated by self-interest, for money or power, and individual self-interest is the best basis for policy.  With such a powerful theory, there is no need for facts.    

A beautiful illustration of this point, from the Daily Show:

Aasif Mandvi: "What about all the reports that say illegals benefit the economy?"

Denis Lynch: "I don't like to read the reports, I'm not a reports guy."

- Reports be damned!

- Illegal immigration costs a great deal of money.

- It's that simple!

- It's that simple.

- You'd think it would be more complicated.  With millions of people interacting with the economy in untracked ways.  You know.  You'd think you would want to sit down with a calculator, really figure this out.

- You don't need a calculator.

- No?

- No, I've done my research.  I go down to the border, I hide in places such as bushes, I see what's coming over, how many are coming over, and the numbers are breathtakingly scary.

Similar examples are rampant inside the bubble.  Think of Michele Bachman repeating the story of a woman she just met, proving that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation.  Global warming is a hoax, exposed by the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.  Mitt Romney will win the 2012 election by a landslide.

Republicans just know things.  

Total Recall by Google Glass

Google Glass records video effortlessly and unobtrusively.  No need to take out a device and point it at people.  It's enough to turn your head in the right direction.

This is a post about what will happen many years from now if they become a commercial success.  I'm mainly interested in Glass's ability to record video and audio.  The heads-up display presents tough problems, including the nerd image that will follow it around after Fred Armisen's review on SNL.  It might go the way of the Segway.  So drop the heads-up, and make it just a recording device. 

When would you want to put them on?  Maybe not every day, but it would be a great replacement for a handheld cellphone or camera at special occasions, weddings, graduations, and parties.  

Rent a pair for a party and watch as your use evolves.  At first, you warn people before you record, as if you have a normal camera stuck onto your face.  But you forget to turn them off one time and you realize, why bother turning them off and on all the time?  Just keep them on and set to record.  So what if a lot of it is dull, you can edit out the boring parts later.

Cameras capture the future.  You hold up your camera and ask people to say cheese.  If they blink, take another picture.  If something interesting happens, you may ask people to stage it again for the camera.  You decide to take a picture, then you take it.

This is a camera to capture the past.  It records everything in case something interesting happens.  When it does, just go back in your video stream and grab it.   The past has a much better user interface than the future. Taking a picture becomes the action of selecting frames from existing video. There are no split-second decisions to make.  No need to be on alert for the decisive moment. You have every moment.

To save space, the device keeps a window of a few hours.  If something happens you want to save, do it before it gets deleted.

After the party, you pick a few interesting images and post them.  Digital cameras, with near zero cost per picture, have already made it free to"shoot many, save few".  Continuous video fills in the gaps.  Everything you see is recorded, so nothing can be missed. 

You can concentrate more fully on the here and now.  You never have to decide to take a picture . . . now.  Put on the glasses and forget about them.

If this works, and people find it compelling, we are on the road to some revolutionary changes.  

First, you will not be the only one to rent a pair of Google Glasses for a party.  What happens when everyone at the party is wearing them, recording everything?  Now sharing and privacy become complicated.  There are lots of private conversations at a party, so each person has to decide which parts of their video streams will be made public, to which part of the public.  To tell a secret from everyone else, both people have to turn off their glasses for a moment, or tag the moment as private so neither person can share it.

After the party, you can go online and see what happened from various points of view.  Imagine an interface that shows several streams at the same time.  Or software that can stitch the multiple streams together into a 3D animated model of the party over time, and you will be able to watch it from any point of view.  You become a fly on the wall, floating from one conversation to the next.   The quality of the model at any location depends on the number of recordings from different angles of the same thing. 

In a few more steps, it's a new world.

People start wearing them not just for parties and special events, but for everyday life.  Walking down the street.  Going to school.  The day at work.  A day of shopping.  Who knows when something interesting might happen?  

Use grows widespread as more and more people see the benefit of continuous recording.  A pair of glasses is included with every cellphone.

People starting leaving them on all the time.  Why turn them off?  Eventually, you forget where to find the off button.  You keep them on your nightstand, still recording in the dark while you sleep.  Black motionless silence compresses well.  

Finally, as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, the motivation to delete old video fades.  Why bother?  Let it all accumulate, up there in the cloud.

In the end, everyone will have a complete video record of everything that happened to them in their life.  Most of it is boring and will never be viewed by anyone.  But there are moments that occur, the good times here and there, that you will return to over and over.  In retirement homes, reviewing your life will be an alternative to endless television. You can also watch the publicly available parts of other lives, of people close to you or not.  

There will be software that takes the raw material video of your life, extracts the interesting parts, and creates the movie of your life.  Or of your college years.  Or of yesterday.  Massively Open Online Reality TV (MOORTV).

You can always decide to shut off the glasses, or go dark for awhile. Meeting someone the first time, you'll know how often they go dark.  There is a general expectation that you will make much of your life available to other people.  You want some people to know a lot about what's going on in your life.  A student can make part of her stream available to her parents all the time, so they can watch any part they like.

But some people will want to share with no one.  Be very careful around them.  Will percent of time spent dark be a public measure of moral rectitude?  Will hiding nothing be not only a sign of exhibitionism but sometimes a sign of saintliness?

The combined video streams from all over the world can be integrated into an animated 3D model that constitutes a new kind of world history.  A model of the world over time.  Zoom down to any location and time, and watch what happened then.

But one thing could derail the whole train of events.  You look like a dork wearing Glass.  What is it that looks bad?  The heads-up display.  Nothing here requires a heads-up display.  You need a high-def camera, or two for 3D, and two microphones, that can wirelessly stream to the phone in your pocket and eventually the cloud.  And not look stupid. Some day it will be possible to pack all that into a frame that looks like normal glasses.