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Five Disruptive Technologies You Hardly Ever Hear About

People who think a lot about the future follow trends like anyone else. In fact, that’s their job, at least in the better sense of “follow.” But both senses are true. They tend to over-predict over-predicted outcomes like “The Metaverse” — a set of new virtual world experiences cited, curiously enough, in an older form of virtual worlds (i.e., the novel). There’s always the standing prediction of A.I. “coming soon,” to lure us with a potential liberation from the drudgery of thought. And then there are the all-too-common buzzwords floating around, like “convergence,” just begging some genius to build that one device to rule them all. [Read more →]

Second Earth

Technology Review: Second Earth

Now that Linden Labs has open-sourced the Second Life client, if any Google Earth engineers chose to study it, I might no longer be the only person lucky enough to know both the Google Earth and Second Life internals well enough to make a bold statement on a mashup of the two. It would be great if others (besides me) could do so soberly. Because all I’m hearing lately is a lot of “wouldn’t it be great?” and not much “here’s how” and, better yet, “here’s why” practical discussion.

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