As an active participant in the Information / Communications Technology domain (ICT), this is perhaps one of the most influential videos I have seen in the last several years.  We are now, again (as with the emergence of the Internet), on the verge of a new great frontier in human ingenuity.

I’ve been tracking the progression of advents in bio-synthetic technology for a while now. Aside from this recent breakthrough in producing a bio-synthetic cell, there are also some significant developments happening in the overall scope of collective access and participation to the knowledge, technologies, and applications involved in this budding frontier.  Essentially, the bio-tech and neuro-tech domains are beginning to go open-source and non-centralized by a trend very similar to the way the software and internet industry has in the last 10 – 15 years.   The means of bio-engineering are now reaching a level of accessibility and automation that will allow for research, innovation, and applications to go well beyond the traditional scientific and corporate institutions–and into private laboratories, and even into the kitchens of people’s homes.

Can you imagine the potentials of 100,000s of independent, networked, and open-source scientists and technologists focusing on issues such as Cancer and HIV in their own homes in the same way that, say, Linux, Wikipedia, and FireFox have been developed?  This same kind of collective intelligence can also go towards innovations in bio-fuels and other green technologies.  And that’s just the very tip of the synthetic iceberg …

The implications are profound and staggering!

“Andrew Hessel reasons that Synthetic Biology will be the next big IT industry.  In his remarkable talk Andrew talks about the parallels between IT and biology.”

video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23owdOuLjc

blog page link: http://blog.michaelgaio.com/2010/06/18/the-internet-of-living-things/

“We are attempting to operate our society on obsolete code. … Legacy sytems to legacies we don’t even remember.

…

How much of this is the bias of the medium, and how much is it the biases of the people who program our technology for us? And how do we know which is which?  How can we even tell them apart?  What I believe is that we won’t know until we understand how our technolgies work, and how our technolgies work on us.  I do believe that if you are not programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple.”

“We get text. … Instead of getting priests to read everything to us … we make our own words. We get the printing press. Instead of depending on a few scribes, now anyone can write. Now we get the computer, now anyone can program reality. Now that’s not what actually happened though.

…

We get the computer. Do we get a nation of programmers? No, we get a nation of bloggers. Now we have the great ability to write, but we don’t know how to program. We write in the box that Google gives us.

My issue is that at each stage, when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one stage behind, one generation, one iteration behind the medium they are using.  And an elite, maybe a new elite, learns to actually use the thing.  … Programming is even bigger than the printing press.  It’s as big as text.  Text gave us Judaism. The printing press gave us Protestantism. What does this one give us?”

video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k

blog page link: http://blog.michaelgaio.com/2010/04/07/program-or-be-programmed/

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of CMSs available out there.  Some of the more popular CMSs over the last several years have been: Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, and WordPress.  Ruby on Rails has also been gaining popularity with web developers, and though it has CMS capabilities, it is really gaining attention for other good reasons, such as it’s exquisite ease of use to programming developers.  Django is also a newly emerging web framework that includes CMS built with Perl (a more advanced programming language).  All of these above mentioned frameworks are open source and free.  Then there are also proprietary CMS frameworks available, such as Water and Contribute.

As a web enthusiast, I’ve been conducting on-going research in CMS options for a few years now.  I’ve tried Drupal, and found that it was very difficult to integrate good design into.  I’m using WordPress for a few different blogs (such as this blog), and it is a really good CMS for blogging, and I can see how it can even be extended as a framework for more general web site publication.  I’ve also successfully used Water for a few client projects because of it’s rapid development, and ease of use for the client.  Joomla is an off-shoot from Mambo (there was some contention with the founders of the Mambo open source project), and so Joomla is considered better than Mambo all around.  Yet I had not really considered Joomla too much until now.

I recently came across an article that represented the popularity of a few of these CMSs using Google Trends, and so I decided to do my own trends research:

It’s apparent how Mambo dropped off after Joomla emerged from Mambo.  WordPress has had a steady climb being used widely in the blogging community.  Perhaps Joomla has surpassed WordPress simply because Joomla is a more encompassing framework for websites in general (where WordPress is specialized for blogs).  In any case, both WordPress and Joomla are great open-source frameworks with huge communities behind them, providing a wide range of plug-ins, components, template themes, and other options for custom development and support.

Which to choose: WordPress or Joomla?  After discussing it a bit further with a developer friend, I’ve decided It really depends on what you want to accomplish.  Joomla is a bit grander in scope, includes community building components (for a community or social website), and may end up having more options as far as overall component-enabled functionality.  WordPress is geared mainly for blogs, and so is more streamlined and perhaps simpler to use, has loads of functional plug-ins, and yet can also be re-geared to represent a something beyond a blog, more like a typical website.

Today, Homo sapiens is faced with a rapid modification of his environment, a transformation for which he is the involuntary collective agent. I am not implying that our species is threatened with extinction or that the “end of the world” is approaching. I am not preaching millenarianism. Rather, I would like to point out an alternative. Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to “communicate” through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence. In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by the problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn … to collectively invent ourselves as a species.

- From Pierre Levy’s principle work Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace

With the emergence of collective intelligence via the advents of the internet (web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, etc), an augmentation of symbolic language can be realized within the unfolding of a collectively engineered medium and universally orchestrated message.
[ originally published here: http://spacecollective.org/MichaelGaio/4258/The-OverLanguage ]

 The Flash splash page is also updated in hypercosmic brilliance as well: www.michaelgaio.com 

Diamonds are forever. Are you ready to live with the clarity, brilliance, and high value of such a perfect gem–and then literally pass it on to future generations … forever? According to an article at BBC News, you will.

The current trend of digital storage technology is about to go vertical. In just a few years, advents of digital storage and recording devices will be available to document our entire lives in perfect audio and video–continuously (24/7/365). We will then pass forward the high-defination and intelligently organized content of our collective lives into an indefinite future.

Currently, anyone with about $600 can go out and buy a Terabyte hard drive. Many current cellphones and PDAs also have ample storage capacity, as well as audio and video recording. We can extrapolate the current trends toward a near future where nearly everyone will be able to have enough storage capacity, and the devices in their hands to nearly effortlessly record their entire lives. As the author of this article suggests, we are on the brink of entering into real history:

“We’re only a few years away from the cost of data storage dropping so far that we can record ‘everything’ that happens to us: our location at any given time, what we are hearing, what we are seeing, and what we are saying or doing.”

“For the first time ever, the human species will have an accurate and unblinking, unvarnished view of its own past as far back as the dark ages of the first decade of the 21st Century, when recorded history ‘really’ began.”

Think about it: we lack nearly any accurate rendering of human history from 1000 – 2000 years ago (just a couple of old scrolls and stone tablets). I’ve seen perhaps a few dozen black-and-white photographs and have read only a few texts that were created only 100 years ago. When I look at my family photo albums, the images are tinted yellow, and appear just about as old as the scrolls of ancient Sumeria. From when I was between 3 – 5 years old, there is about a minute of recorded film (with no audio, of course). Fortunately, I was an avid journal keeper–and I now have a stack of about a dozen or so hand-written journals on my book shelf that loosely document my life from 18 onward. Today I take lots of photos and keep a blog (and yet, since entering my 30′s, I’ve become increasingly less concerned with recording the content of my life as opposed to investing time into generating new content of life). Interestingly, in just a few more years, I will be able to record just about everything in multimedia detail, while not needing to become overly concerned with the technical process of it. Even more, as overall information technologies continue to advance, all of my personal life content will be automatically indexd and organized for very efficient recall and cross-referencing.

“With your phone converting all the speech it hears to text (and storing that, too, and indexing it by time and location it becomes possible to search it all – like having Google for your memory.”

Once we pass into this technology paradigm, the process of collectively generating an impeccably detailed, broadly diverse, and long-lasting multimedia record of collective history will continue to evolve in its methods, means, and implications. As storage mediums get increasingly granular and smaller in size while simultaneously growing greater in capacity–we will approach another threshold: molecular and atomic archiving. Eventually, we will be able to record binary code at the molecular and even atomic scale.

“Consider a carbon crystal, created (and edited) one atom at a time by nanomachinery; there are two stable isotopes of carbon, and we can use a Carbon-12 atom to represent a binary 0 and a Carbon-13 atom to represent a binary 1.

One gram of this substance could store 10 to the power 21 bytes (887,808 petabytes) – the equivalent storage of more than 11 billion typical PCs.

By way of comparison, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2,200 petabytes (2.5 x 10 to the power 18 bytes) of data – enough to fill the hard drives of more than 28m typical PCs.

If we can figure out how to read and write data on the atomic scale, you could store the sum total of all the data we recorded in 2003 on a grain of sand.

Using nanoscale diamond as data storage, six hundred grams (about one and a quarter pounds, if you’re my generation) can store a lifelog, a video and audio channel, with running transcript and search index, for six billion human beings for one year.”

Sand, glass, crystal, and diamond could make very good storage substrates as they are each carbon/silicon based chemical structures with highly calibrated molecular symmetry matrices and optimal transparency (for optical read/write methods). Given that modern scientists have somewhat recently ushered us into the “New Diamond Age“, having invented methods for artificially growing synthetic diamonds in a lab, a next reasonable step will be to invent a way to “burn” a diamond (just as we now “burn” a CD with lazer) with the content of petabytes of knowledge and experience. Once a diamond is “burned” with data at the atomic scale, it will essentially last for millenniums and beyond.

I find the implications of this coming revolution in collective memory incredibly inspiring:

Imagine a day when dust sized nanobots drift through the air of your living room capturing audio and video (in super-high resolution) of every experience from multiple views of perspective, instantly logging with impeccable detail every nuance of experience and the environment into a super-intelligently organized hyper-array within a ubiquitous and transparent global communications network. Combine this with the inevitable advents of semantic systems and ontological engineering, and suddenly–life itself becomes far better than movies (YouTube gone toroidal)!

But what about security and privacy? Of course these are the most obvious concerns–and will be magnificent hurtles to overcome along our way to match social and spiritual evolution alongside the progressive strides of such technology [link here to future blog page on the archetectonic issue of human security and it's spiritual, psychological, philosophical, and technological correspondents].

Given that we do move though the coming bottle neck of social evolution and the environmental challenge–imagine a time centuries from now when it will be a common tradition for all people to review the moment of their birth–re-experiencing that potent and original moment with incredible and sensible detail. Future historians can render composites from vast resources of archived content into a life-like virtual reality (hello HoloDeck). They will interactively explore reconstructions of very specific moments in history, taking note to nuances that we may take for granted today. Everybody will be accountable and truly recognized for every small or great contribution (or lack of contribution) in their entire lifetimes. Each person may realize a uniquely compelling sense of presence and responsibility within the powerful scope of a collective witnessing to their every action–a witnessing shared not just by billions in an instantly networked global community in local time, but also for countless future generations. This aspect alone may contribute significantly toward a holistic integration of personal/collective psychology, result in a much greater sense of fulfillment while living life (feeling a deeper sense of security that your time well spent will be remembered), and be a key element in resolving the psychological problem around death. At the end of people’s lives, the very best moments, contributions, and messages are transferred onto a “hyper-diamond”, and then placed with the family gem collection, or passed along to kin as a diamond ring or pendent (where stories and experiences of the family lineage are continuously added).

Take into perspective that organic diamonds formed from oily carbon refuse of ancient plants and dinosaurs hard-pressed under tons of rock and eons of time into the most endurable and valued of gems today. Now again we cross a threshold of time into a new eon: where the dinosaurs of our gigabyte hard-drives full of photos, videos, and blogs will soon be placed within the vast archives of a complete composite of our unique stories. All that we say and do over the next few decades will, perhaps, even become mythologized onto the very atoms of a glimmering hyper-diamond–brilliantly cut with the multifaceted perspectives of a shared human legacy of immeasurable value.

Shine on you crazy diamond …

And keep an eye out for Lucy in the sky …

~ Michael Gaio

[300707]

[reference article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm]

Check this link: http://michaelgaio.com/photos/secondlife

See a Flash-based map that presents comprehensive information on the importance of biodiversity to human health.  This was a joint project with Harvard University’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Free Range Graphics, and myself as the Flash interface designer and programmer.

See the Biodiversity map: www.earthscope.com/chge

And crack the “(Bio) DaVersity Code”, a great related Flash cartoon based on the “Davinci Code” movie: www.daversitycode.com

So interesting that we just happened to launch this on National Polar Bear day!

Also be sure to see the Species Alliance film preview.

This Flash RIA (Rich Internet Application) was based on a mapping engine I developed in 2003, officially implemented on EarthDance, and then repurposed as the “Global Network Map“, a downloadable Flash application.