Wednesday, August 06, 2008

It Works

It may seem like the creation of a bored Mac junkie who's seen Minority Report too often, but I see a deeper significance in this intriguing Aurora concept video from Mozilla.

I'm always banging on about how, when we 30/40s were kids, transport was the cutting edge of tech, and seemed likely to remain so. Information Technology was new and exciting, but we just didn't know the half of it. Our young minds would have boggled that we'd seen our last moon landing, but would one day personally command more computing power than currently existed.

So that's how I see things like this today. I like it because it's aspirational and speculative, but in a direction relevant to the present. You can forget your jet pack - we're even retiring our supersonic airliners - but one day you'll have Deep Thought in an earring, and so will I, and we'll do magic with them. Who knows, maybe our information usage can evolve so far that there's just no new, or even uncommon knowledge left on Earth? Then we'll have to turn our gestalt thought-clouds loose on Outer Space once more; exploring vicariously, by remote sensing, as one giant non-hierarchical crew of a notional Argo; Metanauts, if you will.

And instead of a few crackly audio recordings of "The Eagle Has Landed." and "Houston, We've Had A Problem.", will the odysseys of the future be historicized in yottabytes of Twitter archives...?

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