Privacy policy of this web site: Get Over It.
Subtitle: How I learned to stop worrying and love the 3-D web
The internet is acting as a strong solvent, penetrating along all of our urban spaces, breaking off chunks of the real space in which we live, exposing those chunks and dissolving any corresponding visibility boundaries in our society. With those boundaries so also dissolves privacy. Eventually, the remaining fragmentary volumes of one's personal space and time data that are not yet public will be such small fragments as to no longer be worth fighting for. When apathy about spacial and temporal personal data firmly set into mindset of a clear majority of the populace, then such an event will be an irreversible "privacy singularity" (PS). Such an event might happen well before the predicted technological singularity. Currently notable people and celebrities are typically not surprised when they meet strangers that know a great deal about them. This experience might become more commonplace for less-notable people, and, eventually, almost everyone.
The primary parameter of spatial privacy is distance: how big a cubic volume can I as a person have in which I can expect to keep obscure and not observed and/or depicted on the Internet? Can my bedroom and bed be depicted based on observations (or by proxy with an educated-guess)? Does the Internet know about specific hairs in my left nostril (for some people, the answer is already "yes")? Time also matters: can my daily schedule be determined? Another very important effect of a good AR/VR is to zoom in and zoom out and deeply look out into space. Try NASA's APOD. In your zooming, as you pass through the distance regime that we exist in, you will be able to zoom into houses and into a person.1 What you want is to smoothly transition from Google Earth's satellite views to this house-zoom view and then have models of each house to some reasonable (but ever-increasing) level of accuracy and detail based on reality or educated guesses. In order for the environment to be compelling, both people, building and other interesting objects such as cars and furniture, will eventually be included. We will have a full-up reality-based virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) which looked like the real world and people around us.
Buildings
In the late 2000's, computing sees the emergence of several new developments including:
- the Geoweb, perhaps best exemplified by GoogleEarth and WikiMapia
- the 3D Web, best exemplified by Second Life
A benefit of Web 2.0 is a greater sense of both a local and global community. Personally, I lived in the same house in a decent residential neighborhood of Palo Alto (3400 block of Waverley St.) for five years and never got to know anybody on the block, even the families in the houses next door on either side. I would rather have known something about my neighbors' lives, their work, what web sites they might have. Ten years ago, there was no easy way to figure that out. There was a web site called 411.com used to sort the phone book by home address, but it has since changed. With sites like WikiMapia, it is becoming easier to browse neighborhoods and get to, in a sense, know your neighbors. It would also be nice to be able to browse local businesses on a map to save an gasoline and whatnot. These new trends present the opportunity to converge them into an intense mash-up project that could present an intuitive environment that will allow urban America and the World to explore high-resolution replicas of American urban spaces via their computers in a safe manner and with an experience that is rich and compelling. The environment will continue to converge to match the real world in which we are actually immersed and to track our world with ever-greater levels of spacial and temporal fidelity. In effect, many of the traditional notions of the frontiers of exposure would dissolve and significantly recede from their currently established boundaries. It only takes a small amount of innovation] to further organize such information and make the ensemble of data more compelling.2 One can still see a view into the results of a test run for Barron Park of Palo Alto of the earlier DoWikiMap.java program mentioned in the footnote. That program will soon be updated an more flexible and user-friendly.
An example of the penetration of buildings is Ohio University Without Borders. Start with their older virtual tour based on still images then click on central green (with all of the sidewalks criss-crossing). Click on buildings numbered #9 Chubb Hall #1 Cutler Hall #8 Memorial Auditorium and see what they look like. Instead of loading new software onto you computer, you can just look at this video of what a reality-based VR is like, skipping over the first 30 seconds of introduction. The view pans past these three buildings in VR. You can download the Second Life client, register and then visit this page and click on the "teleport now" button and it will launch the SL client and take you into the model via the URL secondlife://Ohio%20University/20/36/24 . The model is a just the central buildings of the campus, depicted as being on an island for GPU efficiency. You can enter the buildings and the interiors are done fairly well, with partial interior floors, windows, etc. The staircases are rendered as ramps and the interiors might be simplified fakes so that these avatars/sims can walk/fly around more easily, but you can still see that a lot of work went into these models. Again, it seems like it is only the central half-dozen buildings or so but it sets a serious example of VR/AR. Those residences will increase in detail until they become functionally complete, as information about wires, pipes, ducts and utility hookups is added. OU also has a webcam, in the northwest corner of the central green, looking north. When is Stanford going to get into this and model up the Quad and rest of the academic buildings? Compare the USF St. Petersburg 2-D Tour with the 3-D tour viewable in Google Earth. Perhaps COLLADA will allow models to be imported into Second Life. In some later version, maybe your favorite objects will follow.3. There are new buildings being added every day.4 Services exist to have large buildings done for a fee.5
In a full model, you will be able to look around a real room, see what is in it and then get information about the objects you select. In a high-detail AR/VR, you will be able to drill down to the manufactured objects and see not only product data sheets and manufacturer's web sites, but how the objects are manufactured. A much deeper mash-up is possible for Silicon Valley and later the World. The City of San Jose Planning Divisions has already started to supply models of public buildlings in Google SketchUp, so it seems that Palo Alto and Mountain View view will not be far behind.
First the public spaces are added, then everything, including the residential areas. These new methods of organizing data often miss the opportunity to integrate with more traditional sources of intelligence such as
- The telephone directories, supplemented by full indexing in the style of the Haines Criss+Cross Directory
- Global real estate information such as that provided by Zillow and in-house virtual tours such as that provided by TourFactory
I created a hollow 3d model for a local donut shop that you can see in Google Earth and I added an entry for Happy Donuts in WikiMapia. You can see on the WikiMapia page that I added a lot of URL's for the equipment in the shop. It might include WiFi hotspots. It might include photos taken from a low-flying airplane (click on bird's-eye view), photos taken at street level, and videos and take tours of nearby houses. Having all of this information online is something that has happened in only the past ten years. Wikipedia shows that organizing and cross-referencing this kind of information is not much more work. If you live in any large urban area in America, then this kind of information is coming to your area within the next few years. Palo Alto is merely a convenient area to systematize and optimize these processes so that they will be cheaper to deploy worldwide and quickly become what we will then accept as normal. A terrain based on reality will be built up. There are already some computer games that are moving in this direction. Technically, the USA in 2008 is in a state of war, but the individual can still contribute to creating a TS in the USA. I spent some time at a donut shop in 2006, thinking about these issues. The shop had three inspiring features:
- The shop never closes: it is open 24/7
- The shop has WiFi service
- Stanford students pack the shop most evenings working hard on their coursework
These kinds of settings are ideal for testing out higher levels of detail within computer models of buildings and androids that are based on real life.
People
In a fairly complete model, you will be able to identify some or all of the people around you. Ideally, it would include a lot of people. In a static configuration, it might include some representation of people in their beds (because that is where they stay put and do not move around very much). One could then add real people as they move around. It would include real cars and real license plate numbers. It might include the many thousands of State professional licensees at arranged by geographic location. It might include the information from the local municipal urban planning databases. Buildings and furniture alone will not adequately describe the world around us. We would want to added people and transport information. Initial progress in adding people to such a model would likely occur with young people and at universities. As more and more complete models of Universities are created, more pseudo-real-time dynamics will be added. Faculty will appear in their offices and follow their schedules. Students will their personal data and their schedules to the model. Both will move out into the surrounding communities, especially to businesses starting with places that traditionally provide WiFi services. Soon after that, all businesses will be added models, complete with floor plans, of residential homes will appear. Cars with real license plate numbers and furniture will appear. Citizens added to the model will initially be show in their canonical configuration: prone and in bed, with additional information to depict them "awake" or "at work". More dynamics will be added for greater fidelity in convey what is happening in the real world. People will voluntarily equip their cars with GPS devices and later start to wear them on their persons. It seems that more and more young people simply want to boldly communicate their information for the sake of helping others.6
Just as an water/oil emulsion might go through a phase inversion if enriched with the lesser component, the bulk of our society may experience a inversion from its current basis of ignorance, obscurity, mystery, tunnel vision and religion to one of data, fact and evidence where, in effect, almost every person is addressable by every other person much as academia is within the halls of higher learning. If such an inversion were to occur, then the new boundaries will abandon personal space as a demarcation point and will be set merely against strictly abstract security constructs such as security codes, bank ATM PIN's, confidential information handled by licensed professionals such as financial data, and the a limited number of physical security mechanisms such as the tumblers of locks and the shape of their corresponding keys. Identity-theft companies like LifeLock are able to protect you even when your social security number is public knowledge. Secure records and communications will still be possible. Much else that is real in space and time (including each person's genotype and body images) will potentially be known by all other living persons. After that, other factual data such as the kind enumerated on NNDB fills out some basic facts. One might also then include a narrative biography of information based on sources of various levels of reliability. You might argue that this is all just a new form of gossip of mixed reliability. On top of this thick substrate of reality, one might then want to create a transient layer of fantasy that is varied and later selectively rinsed off, depending on factors such as the reasonableness and reliability of the data.
One could re-examine a real community and the real problems via the concepts embodied in games like SimCity. One can find other schedules to enable yourself to watch objects fly in the sky, such as the International Space Station (or watch this shakey video or this less shakey video). You can find out about airplanes flying nearby.7 Perhaps someday it will be considered normal to be able to find out who is on all such flying public vehicles. If parts of our world were still mysterious, we all want to know what goes on behind closed doors. The Internet is the prefect medium for answering in an adult fashion these questions using local, detailed data. Such an AR/VR would allow us to see the pipes under our local sidewalks and peer into an architectural mockup of buildings and the many ares in our living spaces. People do want to track each other just like they already do on http://www.dopplr.com/ .8
Some personal information is already available via:
- Maps from municipal and other sources and other urban planning data
- online self-organizing open intelligence aggregators such as Wikipedia (+200K persons, geo coords for many places) and NNDB (+25K persons) with much supplemental data
- the increase in the open sharing of personal data, especially personal space data and schedules, via Web 2.0
- Large public sources of local intelligence such as that available via the State Department of Consumer Affairs which lists the business address of every professional license holder and services such as Intelius (which owns addresses.com) and US Search (which own whitepages.com)
There is also http://people.yahoo.com/ , http://www.theultimates.com/, http://www.anywho.com/ and lots of other shell that lead back to Intelius.
Any reasonable attempt to control the invasion will fail since the process is occurring on multiple fronts. To appreciate how the morale of such reactionaries can be shattered in a non-linear fashion, one might examine the success of Sherman's March to the Sea. The goals of the March were not to actually destroy the physical plant and decimate the population of the South, but instead to destroy specific targets of long-term psychological importance such as cities and cultural treasures, especially antiquities, so as to break the will of the Southern people to continue resistance to the invasion. At the tactical level, just as some web sites now endure distributed denial-of-service attacks from the Internet, less notable people might soon experience distributed denial-of-privacy, such as is already demonstrated by the Wikipedia document collaboration project's biographies of living people. The faculty of Universities already display a high degree of professional transparency. Regulated professionals also must maintain transparency for the sake of the consumer's heath and safety.
The model will include representations of ourselves within this elaborate mash-up, complete with representation of our anatomically complete bodies, complete with skeletons and internal organs. It will be presented so that the viewer can relate to his or her own body and see the interior structures and recognize the benefits of such a view.9 You can already choose the appearance of an avatar in Second Life or in other games. People might be displayed as an android with clothes, in just their hair and skin or perhaps a depiction of themselves without skin.1011 Even those who disapprove of all-body depictions might treat it as a "teachable moment" rather than attempt to hide such depictions.
Look at this one-hour high-tech hysterectomy performed live on the internet on September 20, 2006 . This is just one of about 600K such procedures performed that year. The patient, in her mid-40's opts to preserve her ovarian function thus the ovaries are left in, avoiding any need for hormone replacement therapy. She is childless and suffering from metro-menorrhagia. She has small amounts of endometriosis. In the case, patient chose to remain anonymous. The robot "docking" onto the patient is not shown. Note also how young the surgeon is and that the robotic system he is using does not provide haptic feedback. The two tools you see are the monopolar scissor on the left and a PK dissecting foceps on the right. The surgeon has to avoid damaging the ureters leading to the bladder. The detached uterus is pulled out whole through the introitus and vagina without requiring morselating and the vaginal cuff is sutured closed. The high-tech aspects allow the surgery to be minimally invasive and the patient goes home 24 hours later. Note how that tone and even some of the vocabulary is that you would expect to see on NASA TV. See Surgical Advances in Axillary and Sentinel Lymph Node Dissections, which is about the state of the art in minimally invasive breast cancer surgery. Note that they are now using BlueTooth connectivity technology in instruments used on the patient on the table the operating room. There are also some circumcision videos referenced over on the Learning From YouTube page. Also view these anatomy dissections videos from the University of Wiscosin. Look at how the educators touches the partially dissected cadaver with their bare hands. That is the level of mature intimacy and detail that should be conveyed in a proper VR/AR. An important learning opportunity is not necessarily to train medical personnel but to encourage the user to learn more detail about their own human condition. Ideally, a cadaver that is demographically as much like the user as possible would be presented so that the user becomes intellectually reflective and recognizes themselves and their friends in the information presented.
Here are some pioneers chose to share their information about selected facets of their life:
- Sam Sloan with thousands of other web pages about his life
- Nikki Craft who continues to fight laws that are based on gender
- Jennifer Ringley via webcams in her home
- James Watson releasing his genotype
Both
Note how the ending of the film Solaris has a final scene with a "island" rendering (skip ahead to the last two minutes) similar to the OU campus is rendered in Second Life. The premise of the film is that an advanced extraterrestrial life is reclusive or highly distributed and communicates with humans by determining what a human wants and then providing sensory inputs such that the human experiences what they want.
Another way of approaching this agnostic mental state is to view the film Koyaanisqatsi. Here are a few clips with the original minimalist music by Philip Glass:
trailer - Narrator at end: Until now, you've never really seen the world we live in
part1 part2 other part
Vessels Pruit Igoe Cloudscape Ending (rocket failure)
ko-yan-nis-qatsi (from the Hopi language), n.
1. crazy life
2. life in turmoil
3. life out of balance
4. life disintegrating
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living
Francis Ford Coppola shows time-lapse footage of natural and artificial landscapes at different levels of perspective and zoom. The speeding-up and slowing down shows repeated patterns of movement of people and nature that you might not recognize in real time. It might prompt you to think about where our society is headed in the 10-to-20 year time frame. It might help you to make wiser choices about what to do with those years ahead of you and for the lives of your offspring and future generations in a more serious fashion. Face the reality and the real world in which we exist. Do you see the patterns presented? Do you recognize them from other domains of study? The way that the people move through these spaces and the minimalist music tends to emphasize the patterns and suggests how the individual might wish to organize their movements with greater attention to detail. Compare the highway scenes to those in the Solaris film (the last 30 seconds of that clip). Note the work of the Long Now Foundation.
The near-future might realize Brin's 1998 vision of The Transparent Society (TS) for even larger segments of society. Brin gives examples in his book that are very similar to the 2007 Jared Massey scenario.12 A more transparent society will easily justify itself. We could think of lots of games and PSAs and other educational, useful and fun applications without putting vulnerable people at excessive risk. See also Public service announcements (PSA) to show how the web can open the door to better-informed civics and legal advice. Soon enough, making such information available will be justified by those rescued after becoming lost or injured/unconscious and their GPS data leads to rescues. There are many other examples of the benefits of more information in the areas of public health, medicine, mental health, career building, ecology, civics and other aspects of social responsibility as individual consumers and voters. Our American society is now the verge of being able to provide with better information about the World immediately around us. This new opportunity is not just so that we can become better-informed consumers but so that we become more aware of each other. Now consider again that the Internet is a penetrating solvent tending towards revealing the details of our living space on a global scale. More transparency may also help to reduce vice.13
It seems that a "domino effect" will happen in the next few years and result will be more data for everyone. In 2007, progress was made in showing everything about the world we live in (every useful object and every person). YouTube in the form of a lightly-censored "Internet TV" allows any person to broadcast novel new content that might not be permitted on commercial or public TV. Surgery live on the Internet is already yesterday's news. The next obvious step in maps like Google Earth and WikiMapia is to provide information about the insides of buildings including homes and include people. Over a period of a few years, people will become inured to fake floor-plans of their homes and fantasy-based depiction of themselves as androids in various renderings. Just as some accomplished and meritorious people get tired of an incorrect Wikipedia biography about themselves, more Americans will get so tired of the false data being presented as their floor-plans and body images that they will simply provide the true data and then go back to their regular lives. They will recognize that it does not put them in danger nor is it degrading or objectifying. The only other choice is to deny reality and put Galileo back under house arrest for the remainder of his days or some other dumb tactic to delay the inevitable. The moons of Jupiter are clearly visible. Any one human being is not the center of the Universe, neither are they the purpose of the Universe, nor is our species, nor is our Earth, nor our star. While such an agnostic view might be discouraging to some by emphasizing the objective reality in which we actually exist, to many it will provide them with more detail about our reality and it might help them to use their time on Earth more wisely.
What is required in 2008 is vision and bold leadership. Technology leaders often just ask the public to deal with this sort of change in a calm and mature fashion.14 New collaborative efforts for biographical information will simply plan for 300 million Americans and include their interesting objects and surroundings. It will be difficult for any one American to claim that they were singled out or suffered significant emotional distress because of a computer image. Carly Fiorina liked HP Cool Town. In reference to her in her book, "Tough Choices", in Chapter 20 "A Thousand Tribes" in the section about HP Labs:
On one of my first visits I was shown something called Cool Town. It was truly impressive. Cool Town later became the centerpiece of my very first public speech about HP and my vision for the company… Carly Fiorina, ''Tough Choices'', 2006
She was not kidding. Curvaceous Carly (OMG, how she hates it when I notice the svelte figure of this 50-something female) wowed 'em at the Com Con:
"In Cool Town, everything is connected. It is a model for how appliances, plus e-services, plus infrastructure will deliver what people want. Cool Town is about reinventing the Net to work for people." Carly Fiorina, November 15, 1999, 1999 COMDEX speech
As Brad Patrick says:
"The deeper the penetration of the technology, the deeper the penetration of the content, the more we have the ability to improve everyone’s lives." Brad Patrick, January 31, 2006, talk at the Berkman Center
This page build upon an earlier Transparent Society page.
See also my January 11, 2007 website
Career opportunities
California should start the plans for a new agency with the DCA. This agency will be responsible for new professions that will emerge as the Internet massively innervates our society with circa-2006 off-the-shelf generic commodity technology. The Data Wraith and the Civics Generalist should be regulated and licensed. The Data Jester will be regulated simply by being institutionalized in the appropriate facility from time to time. The top of the heap is the A-hole Royale; they have the same mission as the Data Jester but they are on duty 24x7 and are far beyond the reach of modern psychotropic medicines. How long they last in that role varies significantly from person to person because the first generation is still learning about the limits of the human mind to withstand being so far ahead of their time in terms of social policy. Andrew Martinez is an early harbinger of the A-hold Royale and he did not make it to the age of 40.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality of personal information is an ongoing concern. A flexible approach to all personal information might be to simply add a time value to all personal information, even highly sensitive information such as abortions and how much money people have. For different categories of confidential information, we might have guidelines (e.g. 30 years) before such information is released to the public. Of course, the purpose is to slowly and gently reduce these numbers over time until the populace recognizes that confidentiality and privacy are the same concept.
Anna Marie Morrow
My only child is Anna Marie Morrow. Her photo and name appeared in a public newspaper in 2008.
Mountain View High School instrumentalists hit all the right notes April 30, 2008
She is playing the bass flute in the photo on the left and her best friend, Dani Grant, is on the right. Dani's sometimes takes Anna to synagog even though I took Anna to Roman Catholic Mass at a younger age. It is all good. I like them both. My ex-wife is Dr. Suzanne Margaret Frank She used to work for the Santa Clara Children's Shelter and Juvenile Hall, providing health care to children of criminals and children who are criminals (including juvenile rapists and murderers). Suzanne used to volunteer for SART and collect the evidence from the genitals and other body regions of child victims, go to court and present the evidence in technicolor detail, saying things like "Ladies and gentlemen (and those who have yet to make up your minds - no, she did not really say this part) of the jury, please observe the short laceration of the 7-year-old girl's hymen at 2 o'clock in this image is clear indication of the trauma and blah blah blah…." Suzanne had to state her name in court. She was usually aiming to add five more years onto the prison sentence with her professionalism, careful attention to detail in the equipment used (an expensive culpascope that sometimes had mechanical problems…) never letting her eyes off of the evidence until it was in the policeman's custody (super-strict chain-of-evidence rules), blah blah blah. Now, many of those perpetrators and perverts are out on parole, probation or whatever. Some of them are dying of AIDS and whatnot. Suzanne and I have daughter: Anna Marie Morrow. She is turning into an fine young woman. I no longer have to be secretive about Anna because she has been in the newspaper. I do not even care if Suzanne regrets letter Anna's photo in the paper. It does not matter to me: I am free at last. I can tell the world: my only child is Anna Marie Morrow. I can say it!
If any of those perpetrators ever find and harm Anna, then, when the news reaches me, I will laugh out loud and have dinner at a nice restaurant. Suzanne could have a funeral or memorial or whatever and I will not even pay attention. Then I will find out who the perpetrator is, where they are in our Solar System and I will surround him or her. I will be laughing and enjoying myself, even masturbating. Then I will tighten the ring and make only one promise: no matter how many times the perpetrator asks for permission, he or she will not get permission from me to die quickly. They will get competent medical aid, if practicable and required. I will not feel emotion about it: those are merely my programming instructions and I have the money, the mind, the physical stamina and the freedom to take and hold such objectives should the need arise. Afterwards, I will go and have dinner at another nice restaurant and consider giving Anna a posthumous half-sibling. That is how it workds in my world, fellas, so if you resent Suzanne's role in law enforcement, then get over it. The police, even the lousy ones, are the good guys and protect the next generation. If you have AIDS and try to take someone with you into oblivion, then consider this: if I get my hands on you, I will force you to live longer, to your regret.