Intrinsitivity

10 More Future Web Trends

1. Integration into everyday devices
2. Hyperlocal
3. Data retrievel/manipulation agents;
4. Read/Write/Request Web (a.k.a. a "living machine agent")
5. User-controlled, open Internet Identity
6. New forms of Internet Interaction
7. Extended Reality
8. Expert Systems
9. Personalized Medicine
10. Blog reading automatically input into our brain

Robots Take on Social Tasks

A new device by iRobot Corp. resembles the company’s disc-shaped Roomba vacuum cleaner but has a webcam bulging from the top.

It’s designed to enable parents on a business trip to feel they’re almost at home. For example, a parent could remotely send the wheeled robot into a bedroom, where the children could open a book in front of the robot’s camera. The parent could then read the story aloud and watch and hear the kids’ reactions. The family could also converse.

It seems to me that randomness is a measure of ignorance and not a state of affairs without directed action or purpose. Any event can be analyzed for patterns of activity. When such patterns are discovered, that event is given order.

Yet, in a very real sense, the event in question had order prior to our recognition of it. In other words, our recognition of order did not endow the event with order. It simply gave us a sense of order in the event.

Words like “chance” and “chaos” express our ignorance of order, not the lack of it. To think otherwise is to think that thoughts shape reality. If thoughts shaped reality, then we would live in a very chaotic world, indeed.

Recognizing order allows us to create more of it or, if we choose, to decrease it, creating more chaotic conditions. Norbert Wiener might say that our recognition of order creates a feedback loop whereby we gain control over an inherently entropic system.