During his Seminar, Jesse Schell recommended a number of books and other resources that have informed his conception of the Gamepocalypse.  Here’s a list of the books for the curious:

• Authenticity, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II
• Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse
• The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
• Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn

He also mentioned a movie called Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, a website called Couch to 5K, and plenty of other fascinating things.  Oh, he’s on twitter too: @jesseschell

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Listen to the audio of Jesse Schell’s “Visions of the Gamepocalypse” (downloads tab)

Gaming the World

In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of “gamepocalypse—where every second of your life you’re playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked.

The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiosity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom.

Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors, because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our predictions are right or wrong….

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

Jeff Rothenberg once said “Digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first.”  This is basis of an interesting debate between New York Times writer Jeffrey Rosen who recently published “The End of Forgetting,” and Scott Rosenberg’s rebuttal on his blog. (Excerpt from Rosenberg below)

But Rosen is too busy hatching plans for “expire dates” on social-network postings and other artificial-forgetting schemes to give his head the Janus-turn his subject demands. The idea that the Web has a long memory is hardly new (here’s J.D. Lasica’s piece on how “The Web Never Forgets” from 1998). But there is a flipside to this notion: Information online can be fragile and fleeting, as well. There is an entropic quality to everything that is shared online. Data gets lost; servers die; databases are corrupted; formats fall into disuse; storage media deteriorate; backups fail.

Rosen’s piece along with new projects such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere project are reactions to a feeling that we are losing privacy in the digital age.  These reactions have an unfortunate side effect however – if we encrypt or auto delete our data, we will lose it forever.

Privacy and security concerns generally have a short half life.  While you might not want your drunk college photos to be a part of a future employers decision making criteria, you will certainly lament losing all your chilhood photos by the time you are 60.  If we lost the treasure trove of human to human interactions that is now being recorded on the web it would truly be a tragedy.  Imagine how much more we would know about ancient Rome, Egypt, or the Mayan culture if we could sift through their Facebook logs…

PIXELS was written and directed by Patrick Jean and produced by One More Production, It was featured as part of our “Long Short” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Jesse Schell’s “Visions of the Gamepocalypse” SALT.

PIXELS by Patrick Jean from ONE MORE PRODUCTION on Vimeo.

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

At a recent Long Now seminar, Ed Moses mentioned in passing that we now produce enough bullets each year to kill every person on the planet — twice. We are a violent species; we hunt, we organize in gangs, we go to war. Today the U.S. is prosecuting two wars, and there are hotspots around the world from Darfur to Mexico.

At the same time, global defense spending is rising by 8% a year. We face unquantifiable threats from nuclear, biological, and robot weapons. And, of course, there will almost certainly be new conflicts over food, water, and other resources.

And yet –

Over the long term, it’s possible that war may actually be on the decline. The UN defines a “major war” as an armed conflict which causes more than 1,000 violent deaths a year. Just ten years ago, the world had fifteen major ongoing wars. Today there are seven.

In fact, Steven Pinker has argued that if you’re a young man (the group most likely to bear the burden of soldiering), your chances of dying in an armed conflict are lower than at any time in history: “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” His essay is a few years old, but it’s worth reading if you haven’t seen it before: A history of violence.

Here are some other recent news stories and opinion pieces about the future of war (somewhat U.S.-centric, as the U.S. accounts for nearly half of global military spending, and most “advances” are taking place here):

1. Money and the military:

• Top 10 military spending nations
• Report proposes downsized military
• China’s 2010 military spending 1.5 times larger than defense budget
• The purchasing power of peace

2. Ironically, even as we eliminate nuclear warheads:

• U.S. plans to increase nuclear spending

3. High-tech combat:

• The transformation of American warfare: fighting wars with robots
• War of the machines
• This is the future of war
• U.S. engaging in virtual cyber-war

4. War, what is it good for:

• Seven reasons why we can’t stop making war

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

Radoslav Zilinsky’s 2007 artwork “The World”

A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages.  Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky’s site.  (Found via Coolvibe.)

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Watch the video of Frank Gavin’s “Five Ways to Use History Well”

The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.

Huge text and speech corpora of varying degrees of structure already exist for many of the most widely spoken languages in the world—English is probably the most extensively documented, followed by other majority languages like Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Given some degree of access to these corpora (though many are not publicly accessible), research, education and preservation efforts in the ten languages which represent 50% of the world’s speakers (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese) can be relatively well-resourced.

But what about the other half of the world? The next 290 most widely spoken languages account for another 45% of the population, and the remaining 6,500 or so are spoken by only 5%–this latter group representing the “long tail” of human languages:

Equal documentation of all the world’s languages is an enormous challenge, especially in light of the tremendous quantity and diversity represented by the long tail. The Parallel Speech Corpus Project will take a first step toward universal documentation of all human languages, with the goal of providing documentation of the top 300 and providing a model that can then be extended out to the long tail. Eventually, researchers, educators and engineers alike should have access to every living human language, creating new opportunities for expanding knowledge and technology alike and helping to preserve our threatened diversity.

This project is made possible through the support and sponsorship of speech technology expert James Baker and will be developed in partnership with his ALLOW initiative. We will be putting out a call for volunteers soon. In the meantime, please contact rosetta@longnow.org with questions or suggestions.