What direct brain interfaces will be like

I use my phone as a clock while I'm sleeping so that when I wake up I can tell what time it is.  Receently, I've been waking up and then falling back asleep again a couple of times early in the morning. 

Since it's only one more button press to check an email once I'm looking at the time on the phone and I have a compulsive email-checking habit, my early-morning barely-conscious self often skims a couple of incoming messages before falling asleep again.  I barely have memories of these events but I do have the knowledge from reading the emails. 

For the last couple of days I've been waking up just knowing things without really clear memories of how I got that knowledge.  This is what m guessing direct brain interfaces will feel like.  It's really not creepy at all.

If I start receiving stress-inducing emails in the middle of the night I might stop this habit.

Google Wave

I'm at the Google Wave developer qquasi-conference this weekend.  It's one of many things I'm showing up to in order to get a good sense of what's going on in various parts of the software industry. 

There's an abridged introduction to Google Wave on youtube here:  (well, it's still 10 min, but that's down from 1hr20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itc4253kjhw

It's basically a much more flexible, much more multimedia melding of online discussion forums, wikis, and emails. Google is encouraging a lot of third party developers to create embedded objects and chatbots for google wave.  The development team for Wave is only three people, but I'm currently in a room full of 100 or so individual developers who are playing around with the Wave platform.  Creating an open platform for an ecosystem of developers is a great way of getting lots of innovation without that much capital investment.  Apple did it brilliantly with the iphone app store.  They get 30% of the proceeds from any app sold for the iphone, and all they had to do is set up a platform for these developers to use.  

Anyway, one of the interesting things about Wave is that because it's very easy to create chat-bots for any discussion, anyone trying to organize something over email can use a collection of these bots to help the discussion along.  For example, there are bots that will add relevant links (eg a map for an address, the IMDB page for a movie you mention, definitions of technical terms, the answer for a simple question), bots that will help find a time that everyone can attend a gathering etc.  When you start a discussion online, you  can invite these bots along to help the discussion.

A few years ago I had the thought that in the future everyone will feel like a CEO because they will have a bunch of specialized artificial intelligences  working for them.  This seems like a first step towards that future.

Last weekend's photo trip to Garin Regional Park

danea and I have been meaning to do a photo safari for a while.  Yes, when the clouds roll in right before sunset you get some very interesting views:



 

Downtown Oakland:

( More pictures... )

More on Flickr

Speaking of sunsets...

Here's some late afternoon light over in Pescadero:


(another similar one)

And here's a sunset in Menlo Park of all places, from that day a few weeks ago when it rained.