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Wetmachine Blog: The Age of Imagination

The fifth era of relating society to technology?

The Mother of All Demos

By Stearns | December 22, 2008

I was able to go to the 40th Anniversary celebration of “The Mother of All Demos.” The 1968 live demo is most famous for introducing its hardware, including the mouse, but it was quite a bit more than that…
BERJAYA

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The Imagination Age

By Stearns | July 10, 2005

This month’s Tech Review has an editorial that begins “Inventing the future…” and end with these two paragraphs:

“Traditionally, Technology Review hasn’t written that much about society. Our subject matter is emerging technologies, and they have historically been purchased by corporations, universities, and governments. That’s because emerging technologies used to require an extraordinary capital investment, one well beyond the means of most people in their private capacities. Nor did most people see the need to experiment with really novel technologies. Thus the personal computer, the local-area network, the Internet itself were all first used in commercial, government, or academic settings.

”But this is changing. The spread of cheap laptops, handheld devices, affordable Internet access, Wi-Fi, and a dozen other consumer technologies has led to a wonderful explosion of new social applications for them. But here’s the really interesting thing: most of these social technologies have simple editing and programming tools that let ordinary folks do innovative things that risk-averse corporations and government agencies would be hesitant to try. We suspect that Technology Review will be writing about the impact of new technologies on society much more frequently. Besides, social technologies are more fun.”

Here’s the letter to the editors that I just sent:

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Inventing the Future: information as a game

By Stearns | February 14, 2005

I’ve written before about how I’d like to never be forced to enter a name into Croquet. A consequence of achieving this is that you wouldn’t often need a keyboard. (A keyboard can be incredibly useful. I’m not proposing banishment. I just want to be able to get along without it. Also, there’s still access to legacy apps with their textual forms that need to be filled out.)

Croquet is built on the Squeak platform. This weekend I discovered that the older PlayStation II has an Ethernet adapter, the new one has it built in, that there’s a guy porting Squeak to the PS2, and that Croquet’s own Andreas Raab has demonstrated in the past that Squeak can be ported to the PS2. I’d sure love to have game boxes be Croquet information appliances.

Now add to that the ability to create content from within the Croquet environment itself, and think of kids creating their own connected persistent worlds. Screw the “information age”, it’s the “age of imagination”.

At C5, Croquet anchorman David Smith laid out a vision of Croquet running on an iPod-sized device connected to a heads-up display in your eyeglasses. (Never mind that by then, most folks who need vision correction will have laser surgery rather than glasses.) Noting that the basic technologies needed for this already exist today, and the pace of development and adoption over, say 20 years (c.f. the Apple Macintosh and what it has wrought), David feels comfortable looking at this sort of technology horizon. I’d like to see Croquet on a PS2 be a step in that direction.

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