UPDATE: And check out this NPR segment on solar power: “Solar Firms Eye Bright Future In U.S.“
Author Archives: Stephen Gordon
FastForward Radio
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discussed the possibility of a mundane Technological Singularity.
No, not a Singularity where we only get stuff we don’t need – like a razor with infinite blades – we’re talking about the Singularity we’d get if both practical molecular assembly and artificial general intelligence prove impossible. Could you even have a Singularity without those things?
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Solar as a Service
Drive around and look at the rooftops in your neighborhood. If your town is anything like where I live chances are you won’t see any solar panels. Take a good look. In fact, take some pictures to document how your town looked circa 2008. By 2018 those rooftops will, mostly, have solar panels. Don’t worry they won’t be ugly boxes- at least not for long. The way solar will look will change too.
Solar has been around for decades, but it hasn’t been accepted. Things are about to change – partly due to technology, but also because we’ll find the right business model.
A good example of how this worked is the mobile phone. They were also around for decades before they were broadly accepted. In the 1967 movie Clambake, Elvis Presley’s character took a call on a car phone. It was a plot point that his oilman dad had to call every mobile phone register throughout the country to find him. And of course it was very important to the believability of this car phone that Elvis’ character was very rich.
In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas’ character did business from the beach with this brick:
We laugh at the brick now – you could throw a hip out carrying this in a holster – but it was an incredible leap forward from the Elvis phone. It was no longer tied to a car. And it was a true cellular phone – no mobile registers to call – just dial the number like a house phone. On the downside it was still analog. And it was still a status symbol – Gordon Gekko had one because he was rich.
By the time of the 2004 action film Cellular, it was an important plot point that everyone had cellphones.
Cellphones are dirt cheap now. I got laughed at the other day when I pulled out my Go Phone. Yeah, I bought this thing around Christmas of 2006 for $20 as a “disposable” cell phone. Its still going strong. I plan to become marginally less dorky by buying an iPhone… soon.
Anyway, solar will be adopted in a similar fashion. Sunshine’s free, but the panels have been expensive. Payback on these things has been longer than their useful life. Typically people have resorted to solar only if grid electricity was unavailable. That’s changing. The word is that solar is slowing becoming competitive with grid power.
There’s been another problem with solar – you get the risks associated with owning the power plant. If there’s a problem at the hydroelectric damn its not your problem, but if there’s a problem with your solar panel, it is your problem.
Until now. Recurrent Energy is now offering “solar as a service.” They come to your site, set up the panels, and plug you in. They maintain ownership of the panels, so if there’s a problem, they’ll fix it. They promise that their service “supplies competitively priced solar electricity, displacing expensive peak-time utility power.”
I think this business model will be an important part of the move to solar. If the price is competitive with the grid (or better) and the risks of ownership remain with a power company, why not make the move?
FastForward Radio
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon hosted a panel on The Future of of Fit (and Fat). The panelists were PJ Manney, Brian Wang, and fitness expert and entrepreneur Shawn Phillips.
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Reader's Choice Video 7
Well, since Phil made the choice last week, I thought I’d thow out the video this week:
Give that bot a skin or shell and it would be ready for mass production. Note that built-in segwayesque mobility.
UPDATE: And don’t miss this one. Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote Hacks. A $50 interactive white board, 3D head tracking for like $10. H/T to my brother Daniel. Cool stuff:
Our Philanthropist Future
At the end of our last FastForward Radio show, Phil and I imagined what a future without scarcity would be like. One dystopian possibility is that we all sit in our virtual reality rooms and do basically little else.
Obviously, we hope for a better future than that.
Back when we had Ivan Kirigin on FFR he mentioned the sci-fi novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.” That novel imagines a world with very little scarcity. Goods are manufactured by robots and everyone has everything they need. “Whuffie” has replaced money. Whuffie is a constantly updated rating that measures credibility and how much esteem and respect other people have for someone. It would be like an eBay feedback score for your entire life. Whuffie determines who gets the few things that remain scarce: the best house sites, a table in a crowded restaurant, or a good place in a queue for a theme park attraction.
The novel’s author seems to be preparing for that system. You can download Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for free.
But we don’t have to invent a new currency system like Whuffie to achieve a Magic Kingdom future. If scarcity really came to an end for most things then the prices of those things would fall toward zero. The things that remain scarce –like that Park Avenue penthouse with the choice view – would remain expensive. Money already is a representation of how the world values our contributions – including our credibility. There is always the issue of whether that valuation is fair, but that would be the case with Whuffie too.
But let’s say you find yourself living in a future with little scarcity. You have everything you need and want, you like the place you live, and you’re tired of playing Halo version 12 in your VR room. What do you do next? During the podcast I suggested that self improvement might be a big part of the picture. And it might. But a life spent in self-improvement that is never applied to useful work would seem pretty empty too. What to do?
FastForward Radio
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon will talk about the future of fun. If automation gives us more free time, what will we do with it?
Could entertainment, recreation, and “experience” industries become the center of the economy? Will RPG’s, video games, and virtual reality blur the line between entertainment and real life?
Would this be a good or bad thing?
Stream the latest show:
Or:
Or download MP3′s for all the archived shows at:
Click “Continue Reading” for the show notes:
Cancer Immunotherapy
The UK Telegraph is reporting a big step forward for cancer “immunotherapy:”
A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.
They’re being careful not to say the man was cured, but its a remarkable recovery for a guy that was pretty far gone. It was advanced skin cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs. Apparently he’s healthy now.
This is a similar therapy to that proposed by Dr. Zheng Cui. Dr. Cui has proposed that the healthiest immune cells might be found outside of the patient – in the bodies of young healthy immune cell donors who are found to have particularly strong anti-cancer immune systems. These donations would be collected seasonally because it seems that sunlight makes a significant difference in the potency of our immune systems.
Last November Phil had the opportunity to interview Dr. Cui both in print and for the FastForward Podcast (here’s the show, here’s the show notes).
DNA/RNA Componet Molecules Found in Meteorite
Uracil and xanthine molecules were found in the Murchison meteorite. Scientists have been able to rule out Earthly contamination by examining the carbon in these molecules. These molecules contained carbon 13. This would be highly unusual for terrestrial carbon but would be expected in carbon found in space.
The title to the news article I read is misleading: “Genetic Material Found on Meteorite.” Genetic material would imply a partial strand of DNA or RNA – something with some biological instructions intact. These are just component molecules for DNA or RNA.
Buts its still a big deal:
While no one has established the connection between the development of life on Earth and the molecules’ presence on meteorites, the discovery does shed light on the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy. If the basic ingredients are zipping around throughout the cosmos, the likelihood of life taking shape wherever the chemistry is right is most certainly increased.
The implications are profound. Some, like Nick Bostrum, would argue that this is bad news. I’d argue that there is a great gulf between component molecules and sentient life. The Great Filter may lie behind us.
Update: Related topic:”Christian Theologians Prepare for Extraterrestrial Life.”
The FastForward Radio Call-in Guide
One of the coolest things about having a live talk show (as opposed to pre-recorded like we used to do it) is that we can now take your calls during the show. But we’ve missed some calls. In an effort to minimize this problem, here is the “FastForward Radio Call-in Guide:”
When you call a talk radio station that broadcasts on the AM/FM dial, you’ll typically talk to a call screener before going live on the radio. We wouldn’t be surprised if Blogtalkradio eventually offers that capability. But they haven’t yet.
So, when you first call our show (or any other Blogtalkradio show), you’ll hear the show, but you’ll be on mute. There is no audible alert to the hosts that there is a caller. The switchboard operator has to see there is a call and unmute it.
Stephen usually serves as the switchboard operator. But, being a host, he’s also trying to think of coherent things to say on the show. Sometimes his attention wonders from the board. There have been shows where we’ve learned after the show that we had a caller (the Blogtalkradio system gives us the number of callers… post show), but we were never aware we had a caller during the show.
There have been other occasions where Stephen sees the caller – and wants to bring them in – but is waiting for a break in the conversation to do so… when the caller hangs up.
So, either way, please be patient. You’ll get brought in as soon as there is a break in the conversation or Stephen wakes up.
So, what are you waiting for? Call in!