Gadzooki

Predicting The Future Of Tech, Part II

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Not so hot on the heels of Quimby, I’m going to give my own predictions for what the major technological innovations will be over the next century. I’m not too good at this stuff, unfortunately. For the most part, I tend to be of the opinion that futurists are full of it. I think the trend, looking back over last 50 years or so, is that we’ve come up with things that would’ve blown people’s minds back then, but our innovations have largely been different from the things that were fantasized about. So there’re no conscious robots or flying cars, and the space program isn’t where people thought it would be, but we do have the Internet, 3D accelerators, digital cameras, video conferencing over IM, and miniscule cell phones in every pocket.

I think that, to a large degree, the areas where we came up short are areas where philosophical or other ideological dreams and desires of the age skewed expectations. So, for this entry, I’m going to try, as much as I can, to stay practical and extrapolate future technology from what we have now, and what our needs are, and to guestimate where it looks to me that it’s all going. Of course, this is bound to be extremely inaccurate: we’re estimating 100 years here, not just 50. Imagine trying to predict where we’d be now back in 1906. But, without further ado, let’s look ahead, all the way… to the year 2106:

In the year two-thousaaaaaand!

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What to do? What to do? A developer’s conundrum.

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There’s a couple of articles from earlier this week that make related points about the current situation in the game industry. The first is a report in financial site The Street about the possible fallout if Nintendo strikes gold when they release the Wii sometime this fall, as seems increasingly likely since their big splash at E3. Apparently, if Nintendo does well, it will be bad, or at least not good, for most 3rd party developers, who, up until E3, had written off Nintendo and were putting all their eggs in the Microsoft and Sony baskets. From the report:

“No one’s going to make money on the software except Ubisoft,” whose Red Steel title Nintendo showcased at E3, says one hedge fund manager, who is short shares of THQ (THQI – commentary – Cramer’s Take) and Take-Two Interactive (TTWO – commentary – Cramer’s Take). “Everyone got caught flat-footed.”

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The Uncanny Valley

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There’s an interesting article by Carrie Gouskos over at Gamespot about the “uncanny valley”, a term borrowed from a 1970 article by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, in the magazine Energy (Japan’s robot-enthusiasm goes back quite a ways).

Mori measured the positivity of people’s responses to being exposed to robots with differing levels of human visual and behavioral resemblance. This degree of comfort with a human likeness is referred to as “familiarity”. What Mori noted is that as an automaton becomes more human-like, the level of familiarity rises, as you would expect.

However, at some point, before reaching near-perfect human approximation, there is a place where it goes from “cute representation” to “soulless and unsettling mockery of humanity”, causing the level of familiarity to bottom out, before rising back up again. This was represented as a steep valley in Mori’s graph, the area where a something has an eerily close (ie uncanny) resemblance to humans, hence the “uncanny valley”.

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