When the good news punches through the bad.

I can't remember a time when there was this much bad news out there! Wildfires, financial catastrophe, hurricanes - it just doesn't stop!
Thankfully, I had something of an epiphany last night as I was driving in my car listening to radio news. There was a 30 second news story about a new tuberculosis detection system that had been developed with military funding, and was now being developed for medical use.
Then the station went back to describing the conflagration of wildfires in Southern California. And I thought, "Wait a minute!" That little piece about the new medical device is more significant than that. In fact, there are about a half-dozen technology news items that come out in a single day, and they never fail to be about new discoveries or processes that could someday make our lives much better and easier. Sooner or later, all these discoveries are going to add up to a much more tech-enriched existence for all of us, far outweighing the momentary bad news that the media focus on. Isn't THAT good news?

Update: Gene Sequencing

A new data point just appeared in the news. 23andme.com, the personal gene sequencing company that Google invested in a while back, now offers their service for $399. Their original price was $1000.
This isn't a whole-genome sequence, but identifies about 500,000 SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) to give clues about roughly 80 personal characteristics.

The original price was offered on 12/04/2007, so I have calculated the price half-life at 0.77 years.

At this rate, a $99.00 offering will be due in about 2 years.

Price Half-Life for Gene Sequencing

Given the cost of a particular technology at two dates, you can calculate the half-life for the cost of that technology. Then, you can use the half-life to make estimates of that cost in the future.
For example, Moore's Law says that the price-performance of computer technology is about 18 months. That's the time it takes for the cost of the technology, relative to its performance, to halve. With a half-life of 18 months, one million dollars of computer power falls to $1000.00 in a little over five years.

I've just been able to calculate the half-life for sequencing a human genome. On 5/31/2007, James Watson was given his complete genetic sequence. It cost $2 million to decode. Today, Knome, Inc. is offering a complete sequence for $350K. From these dates and costs, I calculate that the half-life for the cost of this technology is 6.13 months.
Now I can extrapolate out to a $1000 genome. The answer is: 5.09 years from today.
We'll check back in a year or two (or when another data point occurs) to see how well this tracks.

Google has invaded my neighborhood.

The other day when I was using Google Maps, I noticed that in my local area, the map showed the streets in blue outline. This means that these areas are viewable at street level; that Google has driven down MY street taking panoramic photos.
I'm not one of the people who objects to this. I think it's very cool.
A few doors down from my house, a neighbor happened to be out at his mailbox. He was caught on-camera, and now anyone traveling (virtually) down my street has a way to associate that face with that address.
Someday, image-recognition will be so mainstream that you will be able to locate all the photos of a person that are on the Web.

And, if our society becomes more transparent than it is now, which I believe it should, this capability will expand to include real-time access to all of those surveillance cameras. Eventually, the real-time location of every individual in the world will be tracked.

This has huge implications, as I'm sure you're thinking. We will need to control access to information about ourselves, in a more transparent was than is done now. Currently, you have NO IDEA who is looking at your personal records. In fact, cube workers have been caught looking at medical records of celebrities that they were "curious" about.

Someday, you will be notified and asked for permission any time someone accesses your most personal information. You will be able to set levels of access such that you can relinquish control over certain public records. Right now, you have to pay a little extra to NOT be listed in your local telephone directory. In the future, you may be able to sell access to your records.

There's a lot to be said on this topic. I will keep going, soon.

Something's Going on

Do you think the Singularity is a mainstream idea yet?
I wonder. I am not tuned into television - I haven't had cable since I changed towns about 11 years ago, and there's no over-the-air television where I live, so I don't watch TV news. I just don't have a feeling for it.
I don't recall the Singularity ever being mentioned on a.m. news radio, or on NPR, for that matter.
Do Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner's comments at the Intel Developer Forum last week represent the mainstream? What about the geek-mainstream? And what is the percentage of geeks in the overall population?
I intend to track the acceleration of change through various means. I haven't figured out how, exactly yet, but I did have one idea:
My gmail account today tells me that I have 7081 MB of storage on my account. Two days ago, I had 7074 MB. I have gained 7 MB, or about 3.5 MB per day since then.
If I measure that in a month or a year, will I detect a change in the growth rate of my storage? And if I keep track of the growth, will it show an exponential curve?