I have a new article up on Fast Company about programatic matter, synthetic biology, robotic swarming, and the future possibilities of architecture.

As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework.

More…

Nassam shivers and lets out a sort of gurgling squawk. The falcon is used to this but doesn’t particularly enjoy the process as the cold metallic carbonation of sange works its way through his vasculature. Exhaling a volume of musty smoke, Moseek puts down the old stained pipe, wipes his dark, wrinkled hands on a cloth, and rubs a bump behind his left ear to initiate the pairing sequence.

It’s easier with his eyes closed. The periphery narrows and sharpens into impossible detail, the colors shifted and slightly muted across a much wider visual spectrum showing him parts of the world occulted by typical human sight. Nassam shares odd bird thoughts with his friend, memories of flight and the desire to hunt, the pairing allowing them to join in this internal space, each self still individuated and yet overlapping in a cold, slightly-prosthetic intimacy.

After their brief inner greeting Moseek initiates the tuning kit. His view of Nassam’s optic feed blurs behind an array of alpha transparencies representing the sange interface. He moves through a set of viz showing various physical stats, runtime exceptions, and waypoint logs now streaming from the bird. Opening a new module, he uploads the package to its container. His humming returns, rising with intensity through the tonal melodies, something old and sad and vast. He binds the package, extracts its contents, and executes the program.

Nassam begins to shake erratically, loosening small feathers into the dimly lit air of the hut. With the sudden shifting of Moseek’s feet, puffs of dust stir in the narrow sunbeams cutting through cracks in the mud walls. The sweat beading his brow is running muddy and tan. Now panting uncontrollably, Nassam lets out a guttural squawk followed by a very unsettled droning. The bird of prey is scared and losing control. Moseek fights back his own autonomous response as his breath quickens and his hands begin to shake. His heart is pounding so loud it seems to boom in the space between them. Through the shared cascade of hormones and adrenaline he struggles to maintain the interface, rapidly adjusting parameters to combat Nassam’s stress while modifying the properties of the new program binding directly to the falcon’s nervous system. In the hut his hands wave in furious gestures grabbing at invisible objects. The humming breaks free of Moseek’s lips and rises into full-throated vocalization of the ancient songs passed to him by the ancestors, their movements and intonations now paired with macro functions driving the constructs. Like a conductor, he works the virtual interface running on Nassam’s wetware with deliberate passion and a divine providence born of faith and faith alone.

The great bird is still shaking but he’s finding a rhythm as the upgrade settles in and seeks homeostasis. The rush of user interface begins to subside showing only a few fundamental metrics. Their small mud hut resolves finely in Nassam’s optic channel as Moseek hums the bird’s name calmly and tenderly, placing his hand softly on the back of his wet, feathered neck.

For a moment of eternity they merge souls and fall into emptiness together through the shared un-space of self.

——-

The sun is high & heavy over the parched desert lands. This burning star that has stood watch over the world since it’s dawn, has given life to the fallow earth and then baked it into dust again and again, unborn witness to the rise and fall of kingdoms like seasons on the wind. This sun is but a messenger for a greater power, a distant race beyond the edges of space.

The streamlined silhouette of Nassam streaks across the raging star like a bullet before opening his wings and banking hard to the west. The village below is tiny and distant, set back to the east and nestled like gathered stones at the foot of the high escarpment. Thermals press upward beneath his wings, lifting him further towards the scattered clouds. In his cells he feels the geosync telemetry broadcasting his location along a finely encrypted invisible filament of data, offering subtle waypoints to guide his reconnaissance. Not especially necessary for a falcon of Nassam’s caliber but it makes his job a bit easier.

The parched and bleached sandstone crumbles softly under Moseek as he shifts his weight. It’s yellow hues paint the dark cotton of his clothes with endless memories of the desert. The mouth of the cave above the village offers a shaded view as long as one is willing to move with the sun. The spotting scope tracks Nassam while Moseek multiplexes the senselink pairing of the bird’s viewport and the hijacked satt uplink. Sitting cross-legged in the dusty cave the three views layer in his mind’s eye, richly intercalated with sange and cannabis. He is Moseek the Watcher, Nasaam the Hunter, and Nommo the God of the Sky.

The Nommo visited his people, the Dogon, in the dawn of civilization. Amidst a fiery torrent they descended from the sky into the great lake that once bathed the lands. It is said that the God of the Sky rose from the boiling waters covered in a million brilliant metal scales, each one reflecting the whole of creation. The Nommo came from the lake and gave his people knowledge of the heavens by which they could understand their role in the world of things, and through which they would communicate with the race beyond the edge of space. Sometime in a new age the Nommo would return and take them up to the homeland in the stars.

When the wars of Mohammed came to Africa, he thought the emissaries of Nommo had returned. They shined in the sky and breathed fire on the invaders. One day as a boy, he stood in the street with his arms outstretched, welcoming the emissary of Nommo as it dropped from the sky. But as it drew closer Moseek could see no heaven in its metal skin, only the sudden horror of death as his village erupted in flame. The screams of his kindred tore through his ears and burned themselves into his heart. He knew that the emissaries of Nommo would not return as long as such dragons held the sky.

Now, up in the cave, one instance of Moseek tracks Nassam with the spotting scope verifying his altitude & trajectory while a second uses a combination of sacred gestures and vocal intonations to petition the emissary of Nommo. The sattlink returns the coordinates of a dragon flying above the western quarter – a skunkworks UAV drone under the AFRICOM banner. He passes these to Nassam and watches through the raptor’s eyes as a small glowing point appears on the horizon. Nassam’s sharp focus zooms in on his target a thousand meters below and beyond as he folds his wings and begins to dive steadily.

The great bird is indeed imposing to most mammals yet still small and fast enough to be invisible to the average machine eye. But the newer AFRICOM drones are not unused to sharing close quarters with hybrids like Nassam and have keen senses that can pick up electrostatics within about 5 yards. It’s a thin radius but enough to give the hyperkinetic machine mind time to formulate a response.

Nassam rapidly converges on the drone from above. Then, just as he enters the sense perimeter, executes a double barrel roll placing himself below the belly of the beast close enough to reach out and grab it with his talons. The remote Moseek immediately begins the patching sequence tracing leads through the raptor’s contact into the drone’s own bioelectronics. Nassam is now off-radar, folded into the drone’s cloak, but Moseek’s intrusion is registered and it’s up to him to skate around the internal defenses of the dragon. Chanting again in the dusty mouth of the cave, growing cooler as the evening sun falls into the orange haze of the eastern horizon, he recompiles his three instances into his remote projection and invokes the serpent of Lebe. The invocation executes an icebreaker subroutine in the mind of the dragon breaking through its defenses, granting Moseek access. The interface folds and he now advances through endless Arabesque archways finely decorated in jeweled mosaics and geometric lineworks, falling over him again and again, each one unique and brilliant. The dragon can feel his presence as he pushes closer to its core. The arches dissolve into jagged columns of black iridescent scimitars and pikes, the floors crawling with scorpions and beetles.

In the cave Moseek is rocking and chanting, wildly throwing gestures into the air around him. The setting sun calls the winds up the face of the escarpement, whipping the frayed edges of his worn clothes and spinning up transient vortices of dust. His eyes, half-open, roll up into his skull. With each gesture the defenses of the dragon fall away until he confronts only two immense, deep serpentine eyes opening slowly to show fibrous yellow irises around slitted black pupils. The gaze holds him, bound & immovable, smaller and smaller within the great and horrible eyes of the dragon. A white heat pours out of them, widening beyond the edges of the feed, bleeding into his own mind until he can no longer sense himself at all.

Outside of time, he wakes to an enormous shining emerald lying on its side. It’s so big, or so close, that it fills the bottom half of his view. But then it shifts, the color changing and seeming to move inside itself, flowing along to the left. He senses the ground beneath him is moist; his cracked toes now soft and mushy. He starts to rise, a bit wobbly, pressed up from the algae mats beneath his feet, slowly regaining his sensibility. The emerald is not a stone but the great river Niger. And he is standing at its edge.

A deep heaviness rises from his chest and he feels the tears begin to spill down his parched cheeks. He’s turning inside out failing to understand why until the emerald surface stirs and a form rises. The murky river water slides off the visitor showing a billion mirrored scales covering its body. In each scale he see’s a moment of his life playing back to him. He see’s every single moment simultaneously flashing across the flesh of this being from the great river, every soul he has touched, every eye he has held in his gaze, every act of love, of hatred, of will and desire. Every rivulet of water on every scale is matched by the relentless tears streaming from his eyes. A deep, sonorous rumble rises from the throat of the visitor, universally vast but only for Moseek:

“You are almost ready…”

The Emissary of Nommo slips silently back into the womb of the river, leaving merely an echo of a ripple on its endless and enfolded surface.

Everything turns black. His body slackens onto the dusty remove high up in the Dogon escarpment. In the west, a flash reports in the evening sky and Nassam falls to the earth.

—-

The fragile light of dawn edges into the cave, tentatively revealing the new day. The winds have settled to a faint breeze clearing away the cold night air. Nassam, ruffled and a bit askew with feathers flickering in the cool breeze of morning, nestles against the unmoving body of Moseek. His clothes are covered in yellow dirt and his arms are tossed against his chest in counter angles. A thin rivulet of blood runs from his nostril, red and iridescent with sange. The great bird, Nassam The Hunter, is purring and nuzzling the warm and silent body of his friend.

From some desolate void, Moseek slowly wakes, bleary, his eyes crusted and dry. Barely understanding himself or his situation he drapes a weakened arm across the back of the great raptor and tugs the bird even closer, innocently cherishing the life and love of his familiar. In their embrace the sange fields couple and Nassam shares the flight record from their encounter with the AFRICOM drone. Moseek, more awake but longing for some thick coffee, sighs with an unresolved combination of relief and regret. They have survived a serious brush with the dragon but there is no record of his meeting with the Emissary of Nommo. He is left with just a crash log from the icebreaker and a handful of stack traces off Nassam’s sange.

The great bird shuffles slightly in the dust.

—-

The street market is bustling with busy villagers moving to and fro under the mid-day sun. Rugs and carts and makeshift tables covered in goods & produce beckon to the senses with a dazzling array of intriguing qualities. Moseek pauses to inspect a vat of cheeses packed in dry ice, the dioxide steam licking up and quickly evaporating in the heat of the day.

“Opiated goat cheese, my friend! Will the miracles of medicine never cease?”

He feels a dull pang of horror (and a slight bit of shame) at the thought of goats genetically engineered to express narcotics through their milk. Something unholy, yet fundamentally appealing to a hashish eater like himself. He drifts momentarily to sad thoughts of goat kids getting weaned from their mother’s soma… then to the children of his village getting hooked on cheese tar. With a courteous nod he moves on. He can’t afford to get lost in an opium dream. There is too much work yet to be done.

Several weeks have passed since his encounter with the Emissary but the impact of it has only burned more brightly through the passing of time. He sends Nassam out every afternoon to search for the dragon, convinced it is the key to his salvation and to the safety of his tribe. He knows he must bind with it again and then destroy it before the fiery rain falls on his village. But there have been no signs, and the dry Harmattan trade winds are announcing their annual return. Soon the sky will be too thick with dust for the dragons to fly, and the river too low for the…

“Moseek! My friend! How is that great bird of yours? Why does he not visit this old merchant? The sun gets taller and the winds blow hotter and too long have I not scratched his chin and patted his head!”

The booming voice of Haman the Merchant breaks him from his ever-drifting obsessions. The man is tall and thick and not without his share of padding, always expressing an avuncular fondness for Moseek and his bird. He has a kindness tempered by strength and experience, made all the more genuine by his steady manner.

“Ah, peace be with you, Haman.” Moseek extends his hands and they clasp, exchanging constructs through the sange coupling. “Nassam has been very busy.”

“Chasing your dragons, I suppose, eh? Let him rest! Send him to me. I have a nice plate of organs set aside just for him!” He rests his finger along the side of his nose for a lingering moment, peering over his black sunglasses with eyes boring into Moseek’s.

“Be wise and talk with our friend in the caves…” he says softly then, booming again, “Let Nassam come visit, yes? I am lonely!”

“Soon, Haman. Soon.”

—-

The afternoon heat is thick and the winds are lifting the yellow dust from the steep slope and throwing it into Moseek’s face. Each steady step he takes up the escarpment launches clouds of fine particulate into the air. He tugs and slides the light headscarf, narrowing the slit through which he can see just enough to stay on track. In the distance, the reedy melody of the Prophet uncoils sinuously, modulated by the flickering of the winds.

Ibn al-Alaaq is tall and wiry and, in spite of his age, he paces across the cave erratically. He’s been living here since the Oil Wars when the westerners returned to Africa hoping to contain the Islamists. Many died on the sword of their own fanaticism but Ibn al-Alaaq was among a strain of anarcho-jihadist’s far more pragmatic than their Sharia-toting brethren. If he couldn’t convert you to the words of the Prophet, perhaps he might interest you in some Moroccan hashish or Malaysian pornography before the inevitable Rain of Fire comes from Allah to purge the non-believers? Straightening his white beard, he walks towards Moseek and embraces him.

“Allah akbar, Moseek. How do the days guide you?”

“Not too clearly, I am afraid. And the winds do not promise better sight.”

Ibn al-Alaaq sets an old tarnished kettle on a heating element embedded in a small table. The scent of cardamom and clove begins to fill the still air in the enclosed cave, walled with built-in fineries and well-appointed with rugs and linens.

“Tell me, Moseek… Why has the Prophet brought you on this day to me, hmm? I do not think you are here again already for cigarettes.”

“No, sayyid. Not today.” He reaches out his hand for Ibn al-Alaaq to grasp. “I am looking for a dragon.”

The sange couples between them and in an instant the same package that Haman shared in the market earlier now copies to Ibn al-Alaaq. The packet unfolds and they both watch the infrared satt feed of a drone grounding out beside a wide river, tucked just below the fold of a low hillside.

A grin spreads across the wrinkled face of Ibn al-Alaaq. “Nothing escapes the sight of Haman, eh? Just like your falcon, he has eyes! This craft you seek, last night it fell. You would indeed be lucky if by the river it still rests. The scout herds, they are most fastidious! But I happen to know they have a distraction… recovering a smoldering fleet of oil rigs. The jihadists, you see, they are also fastidious!”

“Will you help me find the dragon? The trace, it is corrupted.”

—-

Moseek has already reconnoitered the site through Nassam but still the fear antagonizes his gut. The lands here are unsafe and his cloaking efforts may not have protected him completely. As if understanding his apprehension, the shadow of Nassam passes ahead of him reassuringly, from high up above, his sentinel. And of course, Nassam does understand the fear that cuts at him, in an intrinsically animal way, through the remote coupling that binds their senses and in the ancient bioelectronics that drive the trembling gut of all creatures. For Moseek, the simple fear of discovery is slight compared to the deeper apprehension of grappling with the mind of the dragon… or facing the Heart of Nommo and the merciless existential cleansing that attends all such confrontations with the infinite. It is biology that sounds the alarm of fear in the face of physical threats but it’s only wisdom that rightly prepares us for the willful annihilation of the self.

The great bird sends the crash site coordinates to Moseek’s visual stream, hanging faintly but distinctly in his view. The two triangulate, leading him over marching dunes fuzzed with sand blast until they flatten out to the edge of the shimmering river. There is no one else anywhere near. He must cross. Without the wings of Nassam he must cope with natural barriers on his own so he edges into the cool flow of the water. Soon he’s almost up to his neck digging his feet into the river bed to fight the current. But the river seems just calm enough, its fury dimming by heat & wind taxing the headwaters. In a flush, he feels the Nommo tugging at him from under the surface. The vision of the emissary attenuates his affect and turns his heart gently towards the timeless moment of communion. Then he feels himself slipping with the current, loses his footing and comes free, his head gone under. Flailing his limbs to find ground, his toes scrape at the sandy riverbed looking for a hold. He’s able to just kick off a few times towards the opposite bank and into the shallows. Pulling himself to the shore, panting and soaked, he gapes at the river aghast as if betrayed, then up at the baleful star beating down on him without mercy. His legs give as he collapses on the muddy banks straining to hold his conscious mind.

High in the sky above, Nassam let’s out a falcon cry while simultaneously pinging Moseek repeatedly through the sange link. The great bird executes an agitant batch to kick Moseek’s endocrine system, pumping adrenergics into his bloodstream. His visual field shimmers and Nassam’s view embeds above his right eye showing him the proximity to the fallen dragon. With a bit of a jolt he sits up and rights himself, finding his feet and picking up the march again, barely aware, back onto the dry faint yellow sands curving and rolling with the serpentine river.

Finally, tucked into a fold of the dunes in the foothills below the graying eastern escarpment, Moseek finds the dragon. Scarred and broken, it’s wings shattered, the abraded gunmetal hull lies at rest already being consumed by the desert sands. He brushes the sand aside and with a careful prodding finds and releases the board hatch. OLEDs flicker in machine semaphore communicating it’s dire state to some esoteric technician who will never arrive in time to meet its needs. For Moseek these are signs of life.

With Nassam on watch above and the falcon’s viewstream piped into his field, he centers himself and begins a light chant, humming just under his breath. As the falcon keeps watch, Moseek will patch directly into the dragon. For this he takes advantage of the drone’s still-flickering perimeter electrostatics, invoking the sange to couple into the field manifold. His humming grows more distinct, each inflection and modal shift triggering functions in the interface, exploring the dragon and revealing its secrets.

Once again he’s passing through the Arabesque gateways, again and again, jeweled and ornate but now more dulled and tarnished. With each gateway that rolls over him, the textures decay further, the jewels and scripts and carvings flaking aways as he passes beneath them, eroding into sands spilling off their crumbling facades and picked up in the whipping wind. The decay turns to dust swirling around him, the once-glorious gateways now disappeared into time and memory. Through the maelstrom a blackness appears and he’s gripped in sudden terror anticipating the terrible eyes of the dragon to blink from the void beyond. He feels a scuttling at his feet and looks down to see the ground crawling in obsidian scarab beetles, their tiny legs picking at his toes. He wants to jump, to scream and cry but he’s held motionless, paralyzed. He’s sure the dragon is upon him.

Nasaam is circling lower, descending towards the figure of Moseek on the sands below. His coupling has been obscured and he can’t see what Moseek see’s. Only a black obsidian wall obscuring the interface. He must return to his friend and manually link.

The scarabs begin flowing away revealing an empty desert expanse under night skies speckled with starlight. He is alone in the emptiness beneath the firmament. On the far horizon the impossibly swollen moon hangs yellowed and full. Instinctively, he begins to walk towards it. His feet track across thistles buried in the cold sands pricking his skin and drawing out small drops of crimson life onto the desert floor. From each drop green sprouts push up through the crust, arching skyward into buds that yawn open into colorful flowers. He trods on across the barren wasteland leaving a rainbow trail of life in his wake. His heart is bursting.

Gliding lower, Nassam sees Moseek stumbling back towards the river and fails to comprehend any reason. He folds his wings to quicken his approach.

He’s walked an eternity across the wasteland, his aching feet bleeding under the baleful moon, but now behind him a vibrant jungle rises with life. The noise of it all booms with birdsong, the cackling of primates, and the furious cries of leopards and jaguars. As soon as he’s aware of the sound the cacophony shifts into an insectile droning, rising up to a crescendoing wall of noise that resonates in his very bones. Every cell seems to be held in its impossible harmonic. And then, suddenly, silence.

Two black obelisks stand before him, just beyond them a soft pool of aquamarine. His heart stops. The surface of the water stirs. He falls to he’s knees and prostrates himself before the shimmering vision rising from the pool.

“Moseek.” the impossible voice intones.

He lifts his head to once again witness his life painted across the infinite scales of the Emissary of Nommo.

“It is time.”

His flesh begins to flake off and float up above him into a small whirling dust devil. With it his memories unspool, racing past him in loops and eddies, detours of time and space now freed from the corporeal constraints of existence. His life collages before him, each frame holding his entire self as it was at that moment, as if he were a thousand Moseek’s living parallel but somehow joined in union or perhaps continuously recompiled into the sense of a single self. The countenance of eternity enfolds his awareness completely into its plenum. That which is Moseek has been exhausted, drawn out and collapsed into nothing, everything. His awareness, his consciousness, and his entire life compressed into a singular infinite point. He is the Emissary. He is Nommo.

At the river’s edge, Nassam the Falcon stands next to the rigid body of Moseek, nudging him with his beak, scanning him for signs and states. Panicking, he initializes administrative agency and begins cutting deep into Moseek’s construct. Immediately he see’s the sange has been compromised by the drone ice. The virus is spreading quickly throughout his nervous system, replacing the sange mesh with its own scaffolding. The great falcon executes an array of aggressive icebreakers while fire-walling off the remaining native sange. With a unique gutteral call that rings into the heavens, Nassam opens a backdoor to the coupling interface allowing him direct access to Moseek’s core ontology. His feed glitches and shifts and then he’s staring directly at the Emissary, his own avian life blinking back at him in silvery luminescence.

A falcon may hold to myths but they are the archetypes fundamental to nature’s majesty. The sun, the sky, the waters, the land… He has no vision of a glorious afterlife forever waiting to be fulfilled upon his death. His mythos is in life and its living. He lets out another cry.

Before Nassam the emissary shivers, and in a brief moment the dragon slips out from behind its beautiful mask. He hops onto Moseek’s back and cries into his ears, pressing his talons into the flesh until they touch the bones of his ribcage, pouring all of his computational power through the conduction points. The emissary shatters and the merciless eyes of the dragon howl with blackened fury at this defilement from a lowly bird.

On the plains of eternity, the un-Moseek that was Moseek splits from its singularity inside the Emissary, yielding a second point, a copy of himself. The copy begins to reflect, becomes aware. Tears pour down it’s cheeks at the magnificent loss of divinity held just a moment before. And yet, this Moseek remains bound to the graduated Moseek now joined to the Emissary. He raises his head and looks back at the shimmering vision, seeing only himself standing before him on the perfectly still surface of the pool. The Moon beyond darkens to show the yellow eyes of the Dragon closing. Above the clear pool Moseek the Emissary nods to Moseek the Child and slips silently back into the waters without leaving a single ripple on its surface. Moseek, now alone, collapses onto the desert sands as the night sky washes over him like a thick, syrupy wave of nothing.

At the river’s edge his body goes limp and Nassam the great bird let’s out a cry to end the Ages.

—
Sand blows in tan sheets across the folding expanse, dried and spare revealing little more than the signature of wind and the distillation of night and day. The river runs thin and languid, its calm betrayed only by the cooling air and listing sun drooping towards the autumnal horizon. Soon the headwaters will swell and spill down the back of the serpent returning life to the Dogon expanse. Along the embankment a frail but willful kapok sprout reaches up from a small mound in the river bed.

The wind races under his wings, banking and rolling against the thermals, then tucking to dive a thousand meters before opening to catch the air again, rising up to the sky, a silhouette against the raging sun. Nassam the Emissary sees the world through both old and new eyes, a phoenix born of a fire that forged two minds into a third.

The attempt to recompile the machine image of Moseek the Child into his corporeal form failed, unsurprisingly. This has never been done to much success. His body was left to the sands and the vultures and, eventually, the return of the river tides. So Nassam merged the construct of Moseek the Child with his own, leaving Moseek the Emissary inside the Dragon, maybe wandering the eternal desert or, hopefully, tunneling into the AFRICOM networks. Although there’s a continuity and an intimacy granted by the merging of selves in the un-space of sange, Nassam the Falcon misses the warm comfort of his friend, as he would miss the blowing winds and the heat of the sun.

Pausing on the free lift of a thermal, he looks towards the earth and sees the kind hand of Haman the Merchant waving up at him, an enduring smile stretched across his weathered face. Thankfully, blessedly, there are others who are so moved to offer their good graces to those who would have such friendship. And sometimes, these friends will help a bird to hunt the dragons.

Nassam the Emissary beats his great wings and climbs the sky with the power of the aeons.

Continuing its annual tradition of walking the lines between genuine social goodyness and highfalutin’ techno utopianism, the TED2013 conference kicked off this week in Los Angeles. Gathering together some of the brighter minds and more well-heeled benefactors, attendees come to tease apart the phase space of possibility and to take a closer look at how we consciously examine and intentionally evolve our world. Among the many threads and themes, one in particular tugs deeply at both aspirational humanism and existential terror.

On the early pages of this year’s conference blog is a sensational, video-heavy list of the 10 best robots from TED. Featuring autonomous birdbots, dancing ballbots, silicon helpers, procedural comedians, affective mimics, and, of course, a smattering of tomorrow’s robowarriors, the cavalcade of robotic evolution marches on with genuinely awe-inducing cadence. The field of robotics is being lifted by the same tides moving all industries: ubiquitous microcontrollers, breakthroughs in materials science, the global web of shared knowledge, and the mature capital markets looking for new profits.

And we humans appear to be deeply enthralled with robotics, both as hope and harbinger. Turning our hands to create better hands, we develop robotics as a means to extend our abilities, explore the kinetics of cybernetics, and to understand, or perhaps even question just what it means to be human. Through our desire to glimpse the spark of awareness in the cybernetic eyes of the Other, we always project our selves into that mirror. And so the shape of robotics necessarily recapitulates the shape of humanity and our relationship to nature.

Setting aside the philosophical considerations for a moment, it’s worth considering how the landscape would shift to accommodate the presence of robotic, autonomous cohorts. Self-driving cars may be the nearest robofauna to meet us on the modern Savannah plains of the carpool lane, edging out the humans for priority, but those TED videos remind us of how many more species are at play in the human-assisted evolutionary tides. If survival is of the fittest, even programmatically, then our swimming, walking, flying, trotting creations will seek to protect and sustain themselves – even if only so we won’t be bothered with the responsibility.

As we populate the world with more and more self-guided machines how will they advocate for their own needs amidst the competitive landscape? Are we introducing machine competitors into the survival marketplace? Of course we are, but this may not be immediately different from any other competitive machine. The internal combustion engine has certainly competed quite well for resources that may otherwise go to us humans. So too has the corn-based biofuel engine, as seen by the coupling of ethanol stocks to the price of corn. Regardless of the skin, more resource consumers brings more competition. The long-prophesied robot wars may yet come to pass… Especially if we continue to mold them so fittingly in our own image.

If we might soon join gangs of self-driving cars on the freeways, then a scenario takes shape where we encounter other forms of mechanical flocking. We may run with machine herds, glinting & gleaming, the evening skies joined by murmurations of silvery drones. Aibo’s and Roomba’s might become house pet companions scuttling along for walks in the park. In this scenario, what micro machines might cling to our arm hairs testing skin flakes or trudge along the walls of our intestines sending SMS notes about the quality of our, uh, byproduct or line our mind meats facilitating neural mesh nets and wireless brain-computer interface? Do we trust the intimacy involved in these relationships?

Cybernetic control systems, biomimetic musculatures, micro-controlled servo arrays, machine vision, machine sensing, machine learning… The outcome is inevitably going to recapitulate biological structures and behaviors but with a distinctly manufactured aesthetic sensibility. Machine sensing, machine watching, machine swarming… machine memory, and machine modeling of future states & outcomes. These are the ingredients for genuinely emergent and unexpected behaviors. Consciousness isn’t so much as a switch you turn on and a program that executes. It’s likely to be more of an irreversible manifold that expresses on top of innumerable complex functions.

The bardic philosopher, Terence McKenna, likened us humans to coral animals extruding shells of technology around ourselves. In the same tradition, Kevin Kelly speaks of a natural force of Technium that expresses through our heads and hands. Whether Technium is its own thing or merely an expression of humanness itself, there is indeed some natural force of biology and complexity that works through our manipulation of matter, taking form in ways that evolve our very ability to create. The iterative process of create-evaluate-revise drives what began as a clumsy cobbling of raw materials towards greater and greater refinement and efficiency, inevitably approximating the extreme perfection of natural systems. Nature is the template for everything. It’s just that our creations are not yet mature enough to really look like it.

So if we are compelled to recapitulate nature into our creations, and if we are compelled to turn our innate evolutionary and competitive imperatives into machines extensions & adaptive advantages, then we will very likely loose upon the natural world an array of biomimetic machines. And it’s likely that we will continue to lay the complex and unpredictable patchwork for emergent forms of directed behavior, stigmergic flocking, and at least the seeming mimesis of self-awareness.

Machine intelligence may someday decouple from human supervision though it will likely retain the watermark of humanity for some time. Or at least, by the time it does so, it will very likely be contained by the same natural rules as the rest of us worldly occupants. That or, you know… Rise of the Robots.

New meaning to “blue screen of death” ;) MT @seth_fletcher: Carlos Ghosn: Autonomous cars “without any doubt” part of future… by 2020.

— chris arkenberg (@chris23) January 14, 2013

Also interesting re: autonomous cars: autobotnets, vehicular ddos, remote firmware exploits, stigmergics & unexpected swarming, etc…

— chris arkenberg (@chris23) January 14, 2013

@changeist biometric spoofing, route hijacking, flexible meshnet computing… oh! oh! street racing algo mod’s!!

— chris arkenberg (@chris23) January 14, 2013

@changeist and that’s just on my lunch break ;)

— chris arkenberg (@chris23) January 14, 2013

I also “like” (or “find interesting”, in the Chinese proverbial sense) the idea of rogue agents seizing control over vehicular fleets to direct and coordinate their movements towards some sort of goal, e.g. assembling to bust a road barricade or defend a bank heist. Interesting times, indeed…

[Apologies/nods to Scott Smith.]

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Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Mr. Feng decided to hire players in his son’s favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng… Feng’s idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.

The article itself is a bit bland but the concept is ultracool and ripe for embellishment. Son hires mercenary clan to defend himself against father’s hit men. Or, son hires hackers to destroy dad’s credit so dad turns to Lawnmower Men to wipe son’s digital identity. How about a new niche of virtual assassin’s paid to neutralize annoying troll’s, spammers, or distant relatives with bothersome religious/political agenda’s? Social media assassins that target Twitter & Facebook accounts for permanent deletion… How safe is the virtual self when we don’t have the hard-wired instinct to protect it in the way we do our own bodies?

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director at PC gaming powerhouse Valve Software, recently spoke with Kotaku about the shifting landscape of games distribution and his company’s move into the living room.

Ten years ago Valve established Steam as a primary distribution channel for its titles and add-on content. Just this month they’ve released Big Picture, establishing a foothold in the living room by essentially porting the Valve experience to the TV. With a new controller and interface, user’s can play games, stream content, and access Steam through Big Picture’s front-end.

Speaking to Kotaku, Newell suggested that Valve and other competitors will release custom branded hardware solutions for the living room within the next year. User’s would be able to buy an official Valve gaming console (likely to be a lightweight PC or Linux device) and plug it into their TV. While this may seem surprising to many who have suggested that console gaming is in decline, Newell let slip the compelling hook for game’s developers.

“Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment… If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that’s what some people are really gonna want for their living room.”

As content has dematerialized and gotten loose and slippery, content houses have been trying to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle and retain control over their IP. Hardware offers such a controlled environment and, thanks in large part to Apple, hardware manufacturing is easier than it’s ever been. It wouldn’t be too surprising if, a few years down the road, Valve decides to lock down distribution completely by shunting all its users onto a low-priced piece of branded hardware. Plug it into your TV, launch Steam, and pull content direct from the Valve server farm.

Now imagine if they release Half Life 3 and you can only buy it through their hardware…

[Related: Hardware, the ugly stepchild of Venture Capital, is having a glamor moment]

It may be symptomatic of our times but the delta between weak signal & fast-moving trend seems to be getting shorter & shorter. Compelling innovations are bootstrapped rapidly into full-fledged solutions, enabling a highly-efficient lab-to-home ecosystem. While it’s been percolating for years, the emergence of consumer 3D printing really only landed on the hype cycle in the past 12 months or so but in this time there have been considerable advances.

There seems to be a legitimate consumer trend emerging to enable lightweight, distributed manufacturing of at least rudimentary objects. This trend is drawing capital into the innovation pipeline and pushing the tech forward with better, simpler desktop printers, lower price-points for high-end additive & subtractive printers, and greater strength and stability of substrate materials.

Large legacy players are beginning to flex their muscle in order to defend the markets they’ve patiently carved out for the last decade or three. Patent wars and M&A consolidation will shape the emerging ecosystem as much as innovation. In DIY garage labs, tinkerers & makers are pushing the tech into new territory whether or not the manufacturers (or policy makers) approve. In the middle, the consumer market is being slowly educated about 3D modeling, reality capture, and 3D printing while service providers start to wake up to the opportunities in helping consumers move into the era of personal manufacturing. The distribution of home printers, local tech hubs, and enterprise-scale print services will likely reflect the growing competence of this young market in fully grokking the complexities of 3D.

To this end, Autodesk, hot off this year’s Autodesk University, has been developing a suite of consumer apps that are starting to look like a lightweight toolchain for the 3D print pipeline. With their 123D line of tools, a user can use 123D Catch to capture a rough 3D mesh of a real-world object, like a small statue. Send the mesh into 123D Design to clean it up, 123D Sculpt to smooth out the curves, and then send it off to their partners at Shapeways for printing (or elsewhere for laser cutting or CNC milling, if you need some real engineering tolerances). When you’re done, Shapeways will sell it for you in their online marketplace. Autodesk is betting that they have the tools and talent to educate a new set of hobbyist makers and 3D modelers. And of course, they hope to move some of those folks into the professional tier of the Autodesk platform. [However, more than anyone else, Minecraft may be educating the next wave of 3D modelers...]

As Autodesk works to warm up a new base of skilled creators, hardware manufacturer’s are heating up a war to win the desktop. MakerBot has a new flagship desktop printer just as Cubify is grabbing more attention with their competitive offering. The difference is that Cubify is owned by 3D Systems – arguably the largest fish in the 3D printing pond. They’ve recently announced a patent suit against another newcomer, Formlabs, for infringing in on a 3D Systems patent for sterelithography. 3D Systems has seen its stock price soar over the past year and they certainly intend to defend and capitalize on that trend.

And yet it’s unclear if desktop 3D printing will win out in the same way that it’s oft-cited predecessor will. Though there are analogs, printing paper was a much simpler proposition for most, especially after PostScript came along to normalize it all. But 3D is a whole other beast. Certainly in the near term it will be more common for niche makers to work with a local tech hub like TechShop and Maker’s Factory who’ve already invested the capital to gear up with the latest and greatest 3D print hardware. The Maker’s only have to build the mesh and then send it to the printer. In this scenario, the mesh itself becomes a product. Why buy a new toy from Mattel when you can download a model from some cutting-edge kid in Seoul and print it out yourself? A strong ecosystem honors the professional content creators while building a distribution channel through which they can sell to less-skilled consumers. Office supply chain, Staples, see’s a future in this workflow. They recently announced a plan to offer in-store on-demand 3D printing, shifting the balance slightly away from the desktop.

The consumerization of 3D printing is deeply appealing to the masses. It gives us hope for The Jetson’s “on-demand everything” printer, especially as it begins to converge with bio & nano fabrication. But is this really a good thing? As future’s researcher Scott Smith notes in his blog, Changeist, an era of widespread, cheap consumer-driven 3D printing could produce another cycle of landfill crapjects and downstream print waste. It will also enable local production of even more dangerous products, like 3D-printed guns. As the hype cycle wears off it will be incumbent on industry & policy to navigate these waters and work to manage such outcomes.

For better or for worse, modeling in 3D is hard. It will take many years to educate a sustainable market of prosumer 3D makers. But there are other ways to build a mesh. Reality capture is a methodology and toolset to scan objects and translate them into 3D models. The aforementioned 123D Catch mobile app from Autodesk does this. You use your phone to scan an object and then the Autodesk cloud crunches it and transforms it into a mesh and texture. Earthmine is doing this on a grand scale, driving around their Google-esque cars with MARS collectors on their roofs, grabbing full XYZ coords for every pixel. Recently acquired by Nokia, Earthmine is building a massive dataset that effectively represents every point of every surface in a city. Turn this data into a mobile layer interface and you can pretty much draw anything you want as a world overlay with millimeter precision. Earthmine – and Nokia – now has a virtual representation of much of the urban environment. The hugely-popular Kinect from Microsoft is a reality capture device, using infra-red to build depth maps of everything it sees. It’s being used to scan objects for 3D printing, and to map interiors and reconstruct them as virtual representations. As both Nokia and Microsoft realize, aligning the virtual world with the physical draws the cloud out of its servers and onto the face of reality.

An example of where all this can come together is the work of Chris Thorpe. He owns a historic steam engine, called Winifred, built in 1885. In his efforts to restore and record the beautiful beast, he’s worked with Digital Surveys, a company specializing in high-quality laser scans for industrial facilities, to scan his steam engine into 3d space. They scanned the engine to generate a point cloud, and from that they built a solid mesh. The resulting models are stunningly clean and accurate. With such a sophisticated representation they not only have a remarkable historic artifact preserved and shared but they are now printing their own replacements parts to keep her running (with the help of Shapeways). This type of restoration process could become universally available, enabling a new wave of reconditioning and home maintenance. (As an aside, my uncle was using a CNC mill in his garage to machine his own engineered parts for high-performance RC helicopters. This was in the very early 1990′s, iirc.)

It’s easy to see that much of the excitement about 3D printing is due to how innately disruptive it is to the many industries that have benefitted from their own scarcity for so long. When you can print replacement parts to fix a broken radiator, that is deeply threatening to many interests. Likewise, when a clique of rogue separatists design and machine the next super gun or weird bomb, and then share the schematics online, the dynamics of power shift perceptibly. Industrial stalwarts and national policymakers will try to contain the threat and defend the interests of the incumbent class. And yet, in an age of austerity and inequity this type of utility is extremely valuable to the majority of people trying to get by amidst relative scarcity. Reality capture makes the world easily translatable into fungible data, and 3D printing promises to empower individuals and communities to take greater control over their own economic destiny. Together, these technologies are converging to make the expression of imagination and innovation easier and more powerful than ever before.

When the 2012 election returns came in there was no more tragic and revealing figure than Karl Rove. His live reaction in the Fox newsroom after the network called Ohio for the Democratic incumbent was that of a man at odds with reality. He simply couldn’t grasp that his narrative had slipped free from the world, the map hewn in twain by the sudden jutting of an unexpected iceberg.

Rove was clearly very surprised by the results in Ohio. So much so that a cynical eye might think he was suffering his own mutiny at the hands of his operatives – an apoplexy born on the rending of his utter confidence that the fix was in. He was like Mortimer Duke at the end of Trading Places, unwilling to accept that the Duke’s scheming had failed to corner the market. You could almost imagine Rove screaming “turn the machines back on!” and falling to his knees on the floor of the Fox soundstage.

If the tides are indeed turning – and that’s a big “if” – then Rove is the ship left behind on dry ground, with much of his party trying to figure out why their charts failed to keep them clear of the rocks. But when your strategy is to make the maps say what you want them to say, there’s little pity when the terra firma reasserts itself against you.

The maturity of the GOP in the digital age was born on a keen insight that if you owned the narrative, then you would own the vote. As GOP operative Frank Luntz advocated, control the language of the issues to frame them in terms favorable to your party. Marketing wizards like Clotaire Rapaille pointed towards the deep emotionality of people and the value of appealing to the older, more animal parts of the brain – desire, belonging, safety, fear. Frame the language to reinforce these triggers. Use highly emotional wedge issues to motivate voters and drive them to the polls. Tap in to fear and draw the opposition as a threat to everything you believe. Roger Ailes and Fox News stepped in to carry the narrative to the masses.

In the 2012 election cycle, the GOP continued to push an emotional narrative of fear and anger. From challenges to clean energy & climate science, question’s of Obama’s citizenship, and claims of supposed socialism (laughable), to painting health care reform as state fascism, defining women’s rights as an edict of God, and entirely dismissing the role of non-white Americans as anything other than lazy moochers or illegals, they drew their maps around a narrative that simply did not meet with the facts evident to most people who actually live in the world around them.

And yet they thought that if they yelled loudly enough and painted their opponents with enough tar, the facts would somehow bend to approximate their telling of reality. In the middle of all this stands Karl Rove manipulating the untenable base of southern religious fundamentalists and poor, old, white people clinging to memories of a world that simply no longer exists. His spotlight is dimming, his hands getting shakier, and his map is looking less and less like the territory.

Demographics are carving out the cherished base of white males. It’s easy to get them riled up with fear and anger but it leaves them unequipped to effectively contribute to the growth of our republic. In their zeal to pursue a Southern Strategy, the Romney campaign has lost women, Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and the fleets of geeks & intellectuals building the new information economy. They ran on a platform more befitting the 1950’s than the second decade of the 21st century.

And this is the point where the tragedy of Karl Rove reveals the depths of the American psyche. For a hundred years we’ve been caught up in our own narrative. We created the American Dream and then refused to wake from it when the Global Reality came knocking. The GOP strategy of controlling the dream to keep the sleeper comfortable has frayed and shown its failure in translating into effective policy relevant to the times. More so, it has engendered unwillingness to collaborate with half of the management staff – the Democrats – who seem to believe in a fundamentally different version of reality. And perhaps most damaging to the republic, the GOP-led Fox News insistence on propagating a narrative of fear, division, and victimization has inflicted legions of otherwise-decent Americans with a near-militant hostility towards compromise and collaboration. If Rove is the rational cunning of the GOP, perhaps the tentacled blob of Donald Trump/Bill O’Reilly/Glenn Beck/Insert Latest Caustic Blowhard is its raving blindness, sputtering and Tweeting(!) for revolution on a technology platform run by a generation of tech-savvy, globalized people with little time for Old World priests of yesteryear. Honestly, what has Trump lost by this election? Does anybody really believe he’s so principled? The Democrats may be spineless and corrupt but the real failure of the GOP is that they far too often come off as assholes, plain and simple.

Hopefully, the 2012 election results suggest that the US electorate is waking from the dream and is beginning to understand that the territory beats the map every time. In spite of the anti-socialist, anti-government, anti-liberal froth churned up by the Right, Obama was still re-elected on a pretty decent somewhat-right-of-center record. The list of progressive wins is considerable: equal rights for marriage in Maryland & Maine, legalization of marijuana in Washington & Colorado, Elizabeth Warren – a true progressive voice for the Left – winning Massachusetts, and the defeat of Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock after their contemptible & woefully ignorant comments about rape & pregnancy. When you draw Islamic Sharia into the spotlight as the new Big Fear, it helps if your own party doesn’t come across as equally intolerant, totalitarian nutjobs.

In the midst of this stands New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, who magnanimously thanked President Obama for his big government assistance with Hurricane Sandy (or at least was smart enough to reach across the aisle to the likely winner a week before the election). Christie is looking like a model for a functional and, dare I say, respectable GOP. Next to him is Nate Silver, the superstar statistician who showed the unbeatable value of mathematics while simultaneously reminding us all of the silly, unreliable theatrics inherent to popular punditry on both sides. Sandy herself put climate change and global warming center stage and arguably did more to move that discussion forward than any sitting politician in the last 10 years. Imagine if FEMA was disbanded and emergency disaster assistance outsourced to private, for-pay service providers? The market is not much incentivized to allocate capital to disaster relief.

The net result looks like a win for facts and a blow to truthiness and narrative-based electioneering. Whether the parties will be able to clean their wounds and come together to tackle the many looming & threatening problems we face remains to be seen. It’s hard to work together when every concession is felt as a defeat and when the party echo chambers continually reinforce division & polarization. Football politics does not talk about sharing the endzone. Likewise, the electorate is fickle and often small-minded. These wins may just be another swing of the pendulum and savvier electioneering may swing it back in 2014 or 2016. The results today, however, will certainly drive an evolution in the dialectic of US politics. Statistics are the new sexy, as incomprehensible as this seems, but the Jocks have been losing ground to the Nerds for years now. Rove may play a part in 2014 when they do turn the machines back on but it’s unlikely that his credibility and influence will recover its former might.

The GOP seems to be at a crossroads where it can either hitch a ride with reality and step into the 21st century, or double-down on its deal with the devil and push further into segregation and balkanization. The former would honestly be surprising but then, I assumed this election would go to the Supreme Court, as I have since 2004 so… maybe Democracy still sort of works. (Or, as someone tweeted into the election Twitter stream, rigging the votes doesn’t matter when the candidates are already rigged.) The latter scenario, where the Good Old Party retreats into fear and incites greater rebellion, could lead to a southern revolution and a possible breaking of the republic. A true test of Big Government versus State’s Rights, with generals, super-empowered billionaires, cartel lords, and rogue agents fighting to control the spoils.

Whether or not you agree with Obama and the Democrats, it’s imperative that our government returns to a model of collaboration and compromise, and that we all work to diminish the voice & influence of anti-science neophobes in determining our collective ability to grapple with the great challenges of our times. We have the tools to understand the territory with greater detail and accuracy than ever before in human history. We cannot afford to keep getting lost in compelling maps that lead us away from reality.

A typical mature tech company has a portfolio of desktop products arrayed across discrete business units that operate more-or-less independently from one another. Each product has its own cost center and revenue stream, and generally tries to align its specific strategic objectives with those of the C-suite while still accommodating the unique needs of their market. The business unit execution layer is padded with seasoned engineering professionals who know everything about the product but are often necessarily insulated (and self-insulating) from emerging trends that move more quickly than the corporate controllers care to admit. These point products evolve from being the innovative centers on which the brand was founded to becoming conservative mutual funds that drive & secure the corporate bottom line. As the business becomes more dependent on defending these revenue streams, investment in innovation drops, being replaced by M&A of new technologies and outside resources.

A consequence of this typical lifeline is that adjacent business units typically do not communicate with each other any more than is necessary in order to integrate shared core components and resources. In fact, they are often pitted against one another internally for budget and resources and the ability to actually innovate outside the constraints of risk tolerance imposed by the CFO. This effect is amplified by sloppy M&A that forces existing talent to integrate with incoming teams that are supposedly better able to innovate (M&A, after all, is essentially telling your existing employees that they aren’t good enough at innovation). The result is a mature and sluggish portfolio that functions not as a unified whole but rather, as several competing companies within the larger corporate shell.

Around the start of the ‘Naughties efforts to bundle point products into integrated suites kicked off the conversation about the most critical element necessary to the successful integration of products into coherent services: communication. Bundled suites forced business units to start collaborating with each other in order to build an elemental skeleton of interoperability across their products. Otherwise, they risked being seeing as merely a discounted box of apps. Adobe Systems was, at the time, the flagship model for this process, bundling its production apps into a single Creative Suite offering on top of which they could build interop services.

Procedurally, these efforts are reduced to minimum requirements set by product managers that prioritize development tasks in engineering. New product features must then compete for priority with cross-application integrations. A product with a lot of weight can defend its own features and push back on integrations with weaker adjacent apps in the product portfolio. Most mature companies confront this reality as their cash cows push back on requirements to integrate with weaker performers, new acquisitions, and efforts to address emerging markets. While the market often sees a company as a monolithic whole, internal politics more closely resemble a league of nations.

While many software houses have had the better part of 10 years to try to integrate their point products into coherent suites, most have not successfully built in service layers, much less effectively integrated the cloud. Many are still trying to figure out how to build some form of professional social network or notifications system on top of their legacy applications. Now they have to extend a mobile, three-screen service layer across their duct-taped ecosystems while biting the sour bullet of an out-dated monetization scheme that can’t accommodate multiple interface points and Agile, eternal-beta product development. In other words, cloud services & free mobile apps don’t make sense to accountants that see the world in terms of discrete products and channel sales. Most have barely been able to execute effective subscription services. Likewise, business units with revenue models built around the sales of their individual products are usually de-incentivized to collaborate on service layers with other groups. Revenue recognition is not aligned with platform collaboration.

So it’s with this legacy that mature software companies are lumbering into the cloud. Their CEO’s want to be Steve Jobs but fail to understand that Apple’s success has had more to do with organizational restructuring and engineering discipline than vision or celebrity “reality distortion”. They pin execution on short-term marketing efforts rather than investing the time and money and painful re-orgs necessary to build infrastructure that can actually scale to an effective cloud solution. (If your mobile development is considered part of your marketing efforts, then you will fail to make anything truly useful and sticky. A “free” mobile app that effectively extends the functionality of your core desktop/cloud solution is actually a feature, not an independent development line looking for it’s own revenue.)

Autodesk is suffering from this right now with the roll-out of its mobile 360 service – a well-intentioned effort to migrate its existing paid users onto mobile that managed to break their relied-upon (and paid for) workflows. In the rush to plant the mobile flag they failed to take the time to communicate requirements effectively to their internal stakeholders; to prioritize a bottom-up infrastructure build out; and to develop a coherent top-down design architecture in alignment with their core user base. Their best users are suffering the effects of this hesitancy to adequately commit to the cloud.

Integrated solutions are not built from the periphery. The cloud is not going away. Software companies must evolve and adapt. In this space, risk aversion results in poor execution. CFO’s must commit the resources necessary to build scalable solutions. Understand that cloud-mobile service solutions are first and foremost about back-end infrastructure. The execution layer must be refreshed with engineers who understand how to build for the cloud. Revenue recognition models must be re-oriented to incentivize collaboration across point products instead of fostering competition. All efforts must center on building effective communication between internal stakeholders. And please please please stop de-funding user studies and ethnography. Your senior principle architects may have big brains but their ideas are very likely out of touch with how your products (and those of your competitors) are actually being used. And, whether they mean to or not, your sales team in the channel will tell you more about how they defend their commissions than how the market is changing. Implementing an analytics layer can rationalize use and should be of highest priority across all interface layers – desktop, mobile, & cloud. Make the data work for you but don’t get starry-eyed about Big Data. Get better at analyzing the little data that’s within reach. If you don’t really know the needs of your users, then how can you effectively prioritize product requirements?

Lone visionaries often sell gullible VP’s & CEO’s on shiny solutions that the company is simply unequipped to implement. The result is a lot of pain, a lot of wasted money, and unbelievable burn-out of employees who really genuinely want to do the best for the company and the users (and who very often raise red flags left and right that are ignored by management until it’s too late).

If you really want to be the next Steve Jobs, then take your time to implement effectively instead of racing to meet quarterly targets with poorly-thought-out half-solutions. The cloud is not easy. And effective cloud solutions are not built on lightweight marketing ploys. This is a tectonic shift in how we all do work. Success requires tectonic implementation strategies. Otherwise, the lightweight upstarts will build the solutions for you from the ground-up. And the market may accord them so much value that they can casually dismiss your attempts to buy up their innovations for your aging and tired portfolio.

Apple recently booted Google Maps from its iOS 6 release, replacing the world standard for mapping & location with its own offering (having cobbled together the acquisition spoils from C3 Technologies). For people actually trying to find their way around, the results have been less than stellar. Complaints abound.

Google has had 5 years of public use to refine their service, built on 6 more years of tech & imagery grabbed from their acquisition of CIA-funded Keyhole, Inc. Google Maps & Google Earth have arguably revolutionized the way we relate to place & space, enabling us to extend ourselves across the world exploring it in rich detail – or to simply find a gas station in an unfamiliar city without fear of getting lost. Google’s mapping products remind us that they’re still a pretty cool company that seems committed to being more than just AdSense jockeys.

Of course, Apple knows that the center around which we bind our digital and analog lives is location, and they don’t want Google sitting on that plum as paid intermediary.

As they say, the map is not the territory. But maps are typically trying to get as close to the territory as possible. Sometimes reliance on our maps puts us in conflict with the territory when the two diverge (also a common psychological malady). Of the many possible ways of seeing these divergences, there’s a process of transcription happening – a copy operation trying to replicate the solid world within the virtual. Rough drawn maps are replaced by satellites. Street lines replaced by street views from spinning cameras. Topography is replaced by LIDAR & 3D mesh giving height to texture-mapped surfaces. Top-down flat images of cities are extruded onto 3D objects. How long before we can see our friends walking around in living, immersive maps as little dots or profile gifs or articulated avatars..?

Through lens and scope, algorithm and pixel, we read the world, copy it, and then rebuild it adjacent to the original. With such a complex transcription process, copy errors are inevitable.

Google Maps have had their share of interesting aesthetic glitches, anomalies, and odd captures (and some cool creations like the Street Ghosts project to print life-size images of people captured on Google Street View and place the cut-outs in the same real-world spot as the original image). Likewise, Apple’s new mapping service, while possibly unreliable to folks trying not to get lost, offers a rich trove of New Aesthetic images contorted through some slight of algorithmic and telescopic confusion. Another signature reminder of the blinking machines peering at our live’s and showing us what they see. In turn, the errors breed more algorithms to crawl through sets of image tiles looking for glitches, reporting & repairing them to get the map closer to the territory, to make it more… human (until they seize the nanofabbers and start modding the territory to match the map glitches..). To quote Clement Valla speaking of Google Maps in his essay, The Universal Texture:

These collected images feel alien, because they are clearly an incorrect representation of the earth’s surface. And it is precisely because humans did not directly create these images that they are so fascinating. They are created by an algorithm that finds nothing wrong in these moments. They are less a creation, than a kind of fact – a representation of the laws of the Universal Texture.

The landscape of Apple Maps sometimes buckles, bridges stretch & bend, ground planes suddenly heave up as residential blocks ripple & melt. Like a malformed limb or facial dysplasia, the representational worlds of Apple & Google maps express these transcription errors like genetic mutations cast in grand scale. Meaningless to the bots, these programmatic deformations betray the organic nature of their creators. In our deputizing of sensing machines & autonomous code to recapitulate the world into intangible warehouses & hand-held mirrors, the resulting simulacrum bears the bugs & glitches & beta-testing scars of our quickening drive to capture it all.

I find the result to be rather entertaining. But I won’t be updating my iPhone to iOS6 any time soon. There be dragons…