A sixth sense for everybody?

I watched this movie on Boingboing about the “Sixth Sense” project by the MIT Media Lab and Pranav Mistry in particular. It shows a device which allows you to interact with your surroundings and gather meta / contextual information from it. You don’t have to interact with other people since you’ll carry your omnipotent device to ask questions. This is not so far from the way some people interact with their smartphone, which seems to become more and more powerful. The “sixth sense” prototype  is in my opinion ‘just’ an ubersmartphone. From a technical perspective I find it not quite as interesting as the questions it raises from a social, economical and environmental perspective.

Questions such as: how do we interact with our environment? Are we able to make more informed decisions if we have more information available? Will this have an impact on human-human relations and what kind of impact?  My ambivalent thoughts on this device thus far may be best summed up in these two quotes:

“The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed”

William Gibson (science fiction author)

“Resistance is futile”

The Borg (a race of aliens in the fictional universe of Startrek)

We live in interesting times.

ps: I embedded the movie at the rear of this post.

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Updates…

Due to an intensive workload more or less since december last year I still haven’t finished my new design for this site. So please bear with me and ‘enjoy’ the default WordPress theme.

Happy birthday GNU

I just watched a small endorsement err, short film made by British multi-talented Stephen Fry on Free Software. Although I find his use of plumbing as a metaphor to compare software with a bit strange, it does seem to get the message across. Personally I like the analogy of science versus bad science better. In any case its a nice short clip to introduce Free Software to those not aware of its existence.

From the press release:

The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to “good science” and contrasts it with the “kind of tyranny” imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense (http://gnewsense.org) and free software generally, for freedom’s sake.

Happy Birthday GNU!