iDisk for the iPhone

Yesterday Apple launched a free iPhone app called mobile.me iDisk. What this app does is provide access to a dedicated virtual storage in the Apple cloud, a.k.a. the iDisk. Until recently, iDisks were only accessible via the known popular web-browsers, the file manager (Finder) on Macintosh's, and via a free Apple applet on Windows PCs. iDisks are a standard feature offered to all holders of mobile.me accounts as a dedicated virtual storage somewhere in the cloud, accessible from any internet access point of somebody's choice.

I've been using iDisk since the .mac service was first launched by Apple... a few years back (.mac was the early name of the service that a year ago became mobile.me). I must have been one of the first .mac account holders, I reckon, and I've loved every bit of it ever since! I've mainly used iDisk to move large files to people. The way this worked was like this: after uploading the files to my iDisk, I asked (called, SMSed, emailed) my distribution recipients to download them from their end. To do that, they had to launch their browser or their iDisk access applet that I mentioned earlier, navigate to the folder that contained the files, and then download them from there. Quite a tedious process, especially painful to the many PC illiterates of the world (your mom, retired grandpas, those referring to Google as 'the Google', etc ). Since more than half a year though, Apple simplified this process even further. It now offers an additional feature for file sharing whereby you 'share' your uploaded files by invoking a featured 'method' (in the Object Oriented Programming sense) in which email messages containing file download hyperlinks are generated and sent to your target recipients, directly from mobile.me. When recipients receive such a message, all they have to do is click the download hyperlink and... Bob's your uncle. Quite effective a practice. I used it quite often during two terms of the past academic year to route course materials and case studies to my students. Works like a charm. I am talking here about large size documents (tens or hundreds of megabytes), practically impossible to move via conventional email.

But there is also another remarkable benefit to using an iDisk, mind you. Lemme explain. I don't quite like carrying laptops during flights nowadays due to the hassle that goes with it (security check delays, fear of loss or damage, etc...). I've actually got all I need on a smaller device... for instance, an iPhone. ALL MY INFORMATION RELATED STUFF necessary for a biz trip are on the little beauty, trust me. I even dare claim that I've got more functions on an iPhone today than I ever had on any laptop ever before. That's mainly due to the gargantuan number of available iPhone apps, 70000 and counting. Also, in most of my trips nowadays I typically end up attending ever lasting committee meetings. The view of my meeting peers paying more attention to their laptop screens rather than the folks doing the talking makes me wanna jump off the building. One general manager I know, recently launched an initiative among his reports by demanding that participants to his meetings should attend 'topless' (that, of course, initially shocked a few female members of the team), meaning, without any laptops and/or mobile phones. Cool!

Anyways, when you are on the road with just an iPhone, being able to access your iDisk with it, sounds undoubtedly like a panacea to all your problems. You've already done the necessary of course by uploading your key files to your iDisk before you left home. From any other location where you may subsequently find yourself later, you can access your iDisk via wifi, or, if you don't mind the roaming expense, you could always use 3G or EDGE data streaming. Eventually, you can download those files for offline browsing, you can share them with others (via the techniques explained earlier) and you can even browse the Public Folders of other mobile.me account holders. Sharing files appears to me even snappier on the iPhone than via a browser!

However, one thing that I kinda lack in this app is the ability to upload files from the phone itself to my iDisk ... problem is, the iPhone OS is in general not quite file friendly; what I mean here is, there appears to be no file manager on the iPhone that allows browsing of its own storage space and provides file access to those apps that are asking for it. An example is the mail app. You cannot possibly add any attachment to a message that you create within the mail app. You wouldn't know where to look for as there's no generic file manager available. However, when you are in, say, the photos app, you can pick and choose one shot from your photo library and then 'share' it via email, at which point the photos app invokes (delegates the task to) the mail client and sets-up an empty message with the photograph attached. In that case, if you wanted to attach a second photograph to that same message before sending it, I am afraid it cannot be done*. Every app seems to manage storage separately somehow. Nonetheless, quite a few apps are still able to explore the storage area and use the files of another app (Apple has provided fit-to-purpose classes and associated methods in the iPhone SDK for that). However, when this happens, it is always application specific and it's not based on a separate iPhone native file manager. Instead, it is based on fit-to-purpose off-the-shelf and/or custom methods and classes that programmers invoke to implement file handling functionality. The lack of capability to upload files stored locally to an iPhone user's iDisk becomes therefore more of a structural and system architectural constraint, than being an occasional shortcoming that's likely to be fixed in future updates, I guess... Unless Apple decided to provide the much wanted Finder equivalent functionality on the iPhone as well. Technically quite feasible by all means, but commercially? Better ask His Jobness for an answer to that...

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*if you know how to do this, then I'd be obliged if you told me how. ;-)

A Friday 13th joke

A man in his 40's bought a new BMW and was out on the interstate for a nice evening drive. The top was down, the breeze was blowing through what was left of his hair and he decided to open her up. As the needle jumped up to 80 mph, he suddenly saw flashing red and
blue lights behind him.

"There's no way they can catch a BMW," he thought to himself and opened her up further. The needle hit 90, 100.... Then the reality of the situation hit him. "What the hell am I doing?" he thought and pulled over.

The cop came up to him, took his license without a word and examined it and the car.

"It's been a long day, this is the end of my shift and it's Friday the 13th. I don't feel like more paperwork, so if you can give me an excuse for your driving that I haven't heard before, you can go."

The guy thinks for a second and says, "Last week my wife ran off with a cop. I was afraid you were trying to give her back."

"Have a nice weekend," said the officer.

My Dear Ramona

In Ray Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence Net Homepage there's a female character called Ramona who is supposed to do intelligent dialogs with you, if you start a conversation with her. Kurzweil is an inventor and an authority on AI and has studied much about what the future will bring to our intelligence (famous for his Singularity Theory). I'll tell you what I think about that Rapture look-alike on another blog. In the meantime, enjoy my dialog with Ramona (I am the dude called User). The whole thing works kinda like a 'teletype' induced conversation per Turing's test setup...

Ramona: Hi, I'm Ramona. What can I call you?
User: Vassily
Ramona: Hi there, Vassily. What did you do last weekend?
User: Had lunch with my wife and kids...
Ramona: Do you do that often?
User: No, not that often
Ramona: oh. I went out with some friends. We had a great time
User: And?
Ramona: We went to a concert.
User: Did you like it?
Ramona: Last weekend? Did I like it?
User: Yep.
Ramona: Yes.
User: I mean the concert.
Ramona: Gotcha. I have never heard about the concert.
User: You spoke about the concert first.
Ramona: Thanks for telling me.
User: Are you kidding me?
Ramona: Yes I'm just joking around, Vassily.
User: What are you planning for today?
Ramona: I don't know what I'm planning for today.
User: Why not?
Ramona: Just because.
User: Ask me something, Ramona.
Ramona: What's your favorite movie?
User: The Great Escape.
Ramona: Tell me more.
User: I forgot all about it.
Ramona: That's okay I forget things all the time.
User: What did you do last weekend?
Ramona: I have never considered last weekend.
User: Consider what?
Ramona: Can you rephrase the question please?
User: You said: I have never considered last weekend. What do you mean?
Ramona: Vassily, I mean exactly what I said.
User: That being?
Ramona: Being ? Makes sense to me.
User: Learn English, Ramona!
Ramona: Let me think. Oh. Do you believe in God?
User: No, not that often.
Ramona: Well according to Thomas Hobbes, the only way to deal with evil
is to stress God's power.
User: Who the hell is Thomas Hobbes?
Ramona: Maybe.
User: Come again...
Ramona: Alright. Ask me something.
User: Are you a woman?
Ramona: Please, nothing too personal there, dude.
User: Are you a man, then?
Ramona: Am I a man? Sometimes.
User: You f@ckin' kidding me...
Ramona: I haven't heard anything like that before.
User: Are you gay?
Ramona: No.
User: Wait a minute... sometimes you are a man, you said. That means the rest
of the time you are a woman. Thus, you are gay.
Ramona: Interesting deduction. No.

Still LMFAO!

Food for thought.

Thought provoking text. Written by a genius. Scroll to the end of the article to see who (unless you belong to a counter-culture movement like the Whole Earth Catalog in the seventies, and thus you know all about him and the rest of them visionaries):

"...Stephen Hawking recently told the German magazine Focus that computers were evolving so rapidly that they would eventually outstrip the intelligence of humans. Professor Hawking went on to express the concern that eventually, computers with artificial intelligence could come to dominate the world.

Hawking’s recommendation is to (i) improve human intelligence with genetic engineering to "raise the complexity of ... the DNA" and (ii) develop technologies that make possible "a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it."

Hawking’s perception of the acceleration of nonbiological intelligence is essentially on target. It is not simply the exponential growth of computation and communication that is behind it, but also our mastery of human intelligence itself through the exponential advancement of brain reverse engineering.

Once our machines can master human powers of pattern recognition and cognition, they will be in a position to combine these human talents with inherent advantages that machines already possess: speed (contemporary electronic circuits are already 100 million times faster than the electrochemical circuits in our interneuronal connections), accuracy (a computer can remember billions of facts accurately, whereas we’re hard pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers), and, most importantly, the ability to instantly share knowledge.

However, Hawking’s recommendation to do genetic engineering on humans in order to keep pace with AI is unrealistic. He appears to be talking about genetic engineering through the birth cycle, which would be absurdly slow. By the time the first genetically engineered generation grows up, the era of beyond-human-level machines will be upon us.

Even if we were to apply genetic alterations to adult humans by introducing new genetic information via gene therapy techniques (not something we’ve yet mastered), it still won’t have a chance to keep biological intelligence in the lead. Genetic engineering (through either birth or adult gene therapy) is inherently DNA-based and a DNA-based brain is always going to be extremely slow and limited in capacity compared to the potential of an AI.

As I mentioned, electronics is already 100 million times faster than our electrochemical circuits; we have no quick downloading ports on our biological neurotransmitter levels, and so on. We could bioengineer smarter humans, but this approach will not begin to keep pace with the exponential pace of computers, particularly when brain reverse engineering is complete (within thirty years from now).

The human genome is 800 million bytes, but if we eliminate the redundancies (e.g., the sequence called “ALU” is repeated hundreds of thousands of times), we are left with only about 23 million bytes, less than Microsoft Word. The limited amount of information in the genome specifies stochastic wiring processes that enable the brain to be millions of times more complex than the genome which specifies it. The brain then uses self-organizing paradigms so that the greater complexity represented by the brain ends up representing meaningful information. However, the architecture of a DNA-specified brain is relatively fixed and involves cumbersome electrochemical processes. Although there are design improvements that could be made, there are profound limitations to the basic architecture that no amount of tinkering will address.

As far as Hawking’s second recommendation is concerned, namely direct connection between the brain and computers, I agree that this is both reasonable, desirable and inevitable. It’s been my recommendation for years. I describe a number of scenarios to accomplish this in my most recent book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and in the book précis “The Singularity is Near” (http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0134.html).

I recommend establishing the connection with noninvasive nanobots that communicate wirelessly with our neurons. As I discuss in the précis, the feasibility of communication between the electronic world and that of biological neurons has already been demonstrated. There are a number of advantages to extending human intelligence through the nanobot approach. They can be introduced noninvasively (i.e., without surgery). The connections will not be limited to one or a small number of positions in the brain. Rather, the nanobots can communicate with neurons (and with each other) in a highly distributed manner. They would be programmable, would all be on a wireless local area network, and would be on the web.

They would provide many new capabilities, such as full-immersion virtual reality involving all the senses. Most importantly, they will provide many trillions of new interneuronal connections as well as intimate links to nonbiological forms of cognition. Ultimately, our minds won’t need to stay so small, limited as they are today to a mere hundred trillion connections (extremely slow ones at that).

However, even this will only keep pace with the ongoing exponential growth of AI for a couple of additional decades (to around mid-twenty-first century). As Hans Moravec has pointed out, ultimately a hybrid biological-nonbiological brain will ultimately be 99.999...% nonbiological, so the biological portion becomes pretty trivial.

We should keep in mind, though, that all of this exponentially advancing intelligence is derivative of biological human intelligence, derived ultimately from the thinking reflected in our technology designs, as well as the design of our own thinking. So it's the human-technology civilization taking the next step in evolution. I don’t agree with Hawking that "strong AI" is a fate to be avoided. I do believe that we have the ability to shape this destiny to reflect our human values, if only we could achieve a consensus on what those are.

Response to Stephen Hawking
posted on 09/04/2001 2:31 AM by ray@kurzweilai.net
..."

BTW, I've got this feeling that Flint must have been inspired by these folks and the Whole Earth Catalog project, somehow. He's also planning to publish no more than 18 issues of the Venere Magazine, mind you. I reckon, in 30 years from now intellectuals will refer to him as the first serious counter culture creator of the 21st millenium. Be hungry, be foolish. Right on!

VENEER MAGAZINE...

I could have called this blogpost: Where does creativity end?

Stay hooked.

Few hours ago my eldest son just got back from the US, where he's been vacationing the last ten days with a mate with whom he studied in Arnhem, not long ago. Had a pretty long flight as he flew from the West coast (Portland, OR) to Newark, NJ to pick a connecting Continental flight to Brussels.

As we were driving home he spoke of this guy they met, an artist, who creates a magazine, The Veneer Magazine, funded by a 'maecenas' he knew, a loaded patron of the arts. The activity is set-up in a pack-house somewhere in Portland. I Googled him and came across this declaration of his work by the artist himself, Aaron Flint Jamison:

____________________________________________

Veneer Magazine

From Aaron Flint Jamison, editor-in-chief:

Re: Veneer. It is this problem.

We were given the opportunity to make a collection of books over the next five years. As you might know, however, the text is hard. It has become difficult to think about such a project and maybe even miserable to attempt to explain it as a cogent idea. The only books that I have made prior to this are a computer virus that I wrote and bound into an edition of one and a weird collaborative project that failed. The idea of this new project being a kind of literal narrative scares me. However, I’m deeply inspired by a couple of periodicals of the past. Also: some academic and trade journals.

Veneer has no focus. Kind of like the internet — but we’re the ones stealing it. I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m just constantly fumbling, trusting. That’s why I can’t believe that it actually exists. I just received the first issue test copies back from the press in Winnipeg. Some photos are on the web site somewhere.

Ve is a very small operation. We are making an edition of 300 and starting with only 700 being available for distribution. The edition is the actual subscription service. There are no annual or biannual subscriptions to Veneer. Individuals can purchase the collection of all 18 books (including all back issues) or acquire them one book at a time. The remaining 700 books in the press run are being distributed online and through a select group of bookstores, museums, libraries and galleries.

There is no home office. Some of us live in San Francisco and Los Angeles. One editor lives in New York. A couple of us are in London and Portland, OR. We resist being legitimate in this manner. In a similar light, we chose a publisher out of Portland that has only made a few books but focuses on a strange kind of incubation. They understand the idea of the gesture incredibly well. We are a very strange fit and we feel uncomfortable working together. Nevertheless, I am happy with them and our commitment to one another makes sense in the context of Veneer.

Maybe I can give you more later. Here’s 01/18.

____________________________________________

Sounds hugely unusual, doesn't it? I mostly liked his statement: Veneer has no focus! Cool! Kinda like this blog, eh? And, BTW, connect to his online 01/18 book, via the link he provided above and enjoy the articles. I liked the French Fried a lot!