My Own Pirate Radio

One of the reasons I like DemoCamp is that each time I come away with a few cool new tech snippets (”nerdlets?”). Below are four I took away from the most recent event. For in-depth recaps of the entire event see Chris Nolan’s entertainingly caustic demo reviews and Joey DeVilla’s coverage.

1. The folks at unspace.ca have built a very intuitive and usable datagrid control and search UI. Froody.

2. BlogMatrix is doing some interesting work blending microformats with the blog paradigm. I can imagine some neat B2B applications, and I’m curious to see how the product evolves into a sustainable business. It sounds like they already have some paying customers, which is great.

3. There is room for innovation in spreadsheets and UI for tabular data. Dabble DB rocked the house.

4. Chris Nolan’s talk convinced me to kick the tires a little harder on Ruby on Rails and start using firebug.

A bunch of things lately have really got me thinking about what human qualities can and cannot be digitized. (This is inbetween more mundane tasks like shopping for winter tires. I’ll bet Greek philosophers didn’t have to shop for winter tires right in the middle of theorizing. Geez.)

Here’s a list of things that cannot be digitized:
* Sensation. Many people have been working on this for decades — vision, voice reco, smell, tactile, taste — with slow progress. I do think this will eventually be cracked for many practical applications. But not all?
* Aesthetic appreciation, e.g. of art, music, sunset, poetry, that sound you hear in sea shells
* Emotion
* Creativity
* Dialog. Remember Eliza? I wonder what the state of the art is now. Not much better I’ll bet, because you need…
* Understanding of context. Surely there is a shorter word for this concept? Lack of contextual comprehension is the reason voice recognition is stuck at 95%.
* Consciousness. Although reading wikipedia’s definition, I think humans are losing ground to machines on some aspects of consciousness. [5 minutes pass….] Wow, it’s worth reading that definition and just spending a few minutes clicking the outbound links from it.

So we still have some high ground on the algorithms. But the list is disconcertingly short! And it isn’t normalized; “consciousness” seems like it subsumes so many other things. What have I missed? Help me make a better list, or point me to someone who already has.

This post is about two experiments.

(1) The Search Engine Experiment is a web page for comparing relevance of various search engines. Try it; you might be surprised.

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