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Comment by tomwalsham | Hacker News Reader

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications.

Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat.

It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat, VOIP, Videochat - there are fundamental reasons to stick with certain technologies (Fax, POTS, FB and Twitter excepted). There is disruption to be had, but there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts.

The services need to adapt, and incumbents do restrict progress, but the 'email killer' notion is not well conceived. Most people don't use email as a 'todo' - that's an extension, not a replacement. This is why Rapportive has a market, but is not _the_ market.

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An idea I've been musing on: is there a fundamental set of problems of humanity from which all economic activity is derived? For example:

"Shrink the world": couriers, seafarers, caravans, riders, roadbuilders, railroads, telegraphs, automobiles, steamships, dockworkers, truck drivers, aviation, telephones, email, social networking, videoconferencing.

"Organize labor": lords, finance, education, recruiting, HR, management, information systems, law, accounting.

"Keep us safe": militia, pikemen, shamans, legions, samurai, knights, musketeers, standing armies, chemists, doctors & nurses, the military/industrial complex.

"Food and shelter": self-explanatory.

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/10/catalog-of-wealth-creatio...

"Find stuff to burn" is a pretty big chunk too.

"Control more energy than your body can produce"

The "sex & war" category seems to be a great catalyst for innovation. These days, "sex" of course means "Internet porn".

"Money for primarily good feelings, not stuff": charity, religion, theater, tv, films, gambling, music, story books, fashion, holidays, tourism.

Not sure if this answers your question, but the fundamental problem from which all economic activity is derived is scarcity.

Don't know if you'll get this,

but it's cause we all want to grow. To keep the gains from growing, and insure it's invested. We intrinsically don't want to see kids starve, why?

That answer's the perspective, I think.

> there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts.

Yes, and newer protocols often carry emulation layers for older protocols, so we have things like POTS running on top of TCP/IP, when just several years ago most of us still had TCP/IP running on top of POTS via dialup modems.

The other day I needed my insurance company to send a fax to my bank (banking regulations mandate the use of faxes rather than electronic formats to share documents). The insurance agent did it by hitting a few keys on her computer. A piece of paper didn't leave her office, but it arrived on cue at the bank's fax machine nonetheless.

Sidenote: One of the interesting side effects of the internet disrupting traditional retail is that the losses in traditional lettermail delivery are being offset by massive gains in package delivery. The USPS has pilloried itself by doubling down with huge new investments in the part of its business that is shrinking instead of pivoting into the obvious growth opportunity.

Some would argue Email is little more than USPS over IP.

I think the most interesting aspect of modern communications - accidentally in the 90s, deliberately in the post-twitter-era - is the simple addressability of people.

There was a tradition of letter writing for centuries (visit the British Library), but it required some level of introduction to connect. The academic roots of email broke some communication boundaries (to the time-detriment of prominent academics), and Twitter has opened the same addressability to celebrities and field-leaders (with a more voluntary twist I would say).

Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide.

Being able to self-create a platform of value that you can offer to people you wish to network with is crucial (I created a magazine to accomplish this objective).

> Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide.

If only that were the whole of it. The sender must have some value to provide in the eyes of the recipient. But the recipient will actually have to look at the message in order to determine if this is the case or not. That decision alone makes many messages that were sent with value '0' a net negative to the recipient.

Hence all the spam. If the 'providing of value' would be a thing we could determine in advance then the low barrier would not be an issue.

Effectively a spam filter determines that the value of a message is '0' to the intended recipient to avoid them becoming negatives.

The breakthrough in your comm analogy will come with the translation of thought to word.

We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation, then send that to the recipient.

This will be wired-telepathy - the recipient will get a message which they can receive any way they choose; visually (email - they read it) audio playback, or thought-injection. It is played back on the nerves and is "heard" in their head as a thought. (evolutionary results to be sure)

As a life long Cyberpunk enthusiast who, at 37 years old, has been using computers daily since I was 8, I really have concern over the mental health of the yet-to-be digital world.

I.E. the ADHD that will result in direct cerebral access to information 24/7.

What will be the impact on the (generally) serially wired brain to vastly parallel inputs?

I suspect massive upheaval on the social level. There will always be adopters of immersion, as there will be the future Amish who will eschew all digital, but the median social reaction will be a result more of our true, and unknown, innate biology that we wont even be aware of until this happens.

Asher's Gridlinked supposed a limited set of society [operatives & wealthy] who could manage this fulltime connection, and even then it was perceived as unhealthy.

Wikipedia has undoubtedly changed how our generation views knowledge, but it's still a pull-technology. Outbound messaging will still be a push-technology (nobody wants to compose an email of their stream-of-consciousness, and brains are poorly wired to retain full structure in mental 'RAM')

Wetware doesn't add significant differences to the existing protocols - merely a more rapid input mechanism than checking your phone. Assuming contact is voluntary, people will not opt for the PubSub model for comms. If you choose to use it for trivia, caveat emptor.

Sure, but I was not saying that there will be compulsory receipt of info... though, given human nature and the already prevalent propensity for people to be overly responsive to the flood of alerts - I see a negative impact on conscious.

It will be very interesting to say the least.

Personally, I am already overly unacceptable to the karma endorphin boost from reddit, quora and HN. I was thinking about this just the other day; I was originally against karma being hidden on posts, but now, I like the fact I am less enticed to for bias based on that number.

We already continually scan for karma upticks on all our primary sites. This is bad...

> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation

Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically impossible to extract this information through the electrical activity on the scalp.

For this vision to become reality we need a new imaging device that has both the temporal resolution of an EEG, and a spatial resolution that probably needs to be better than an MRI.

In summary: Certain things are impossible. I can say with certainty that no algorithmic improvement will allow this to work using an EEG. I don't know whether it is physically possible to create a non invasive imaging device that allows such a signal to be detected reliably, but it certainly does not exist today, and it seems like a leap of faith to assume that it definitely will exist at some point in the future.

Your judgment that present technology is inadequate is based on the assumption that computers need to learn to read the human thoughts.

What about the inverse, that the humans learn how to think in a way that a computer understands? That will be much easier, as humans learn much better than computers, and also much safer - I will have complete control over which of my thoughts the computer can detect and interpret.

The human learning to adapt to the machine has been the way EEG-based brain computer interfaces have been made for a couple of decades. Using machine learning to adapt the machine to the human is a much more recent development.

It is possible today to make EEG controlled devices. They typically differentiate between a small number of real or imagined movements in the user. This is awesome, because it can allow severely paralyzed people to communicate, control a wheelchair. etc. Nevertheless, the algorithms used to do this are perfectly useless when it comes to distinguishing whatever words the user is internally vocalizing.

The keyboard is not very good at determining which words I'm internally vocalizing either, still seems to work. The point I'm trying to convey is that maybe we can learn to transmit words using some form of brain reader, but that measures something else than vocalizing.

I can key morse code at 40wpm with two muscles. With one hand I can chord at 120wpm. On a stenowriter I can transcribe about as quickly as most people can read - 250wpm.

I've invested an extraordinary amount of effort into improving the speed at which I can interface with a computer; I think the practical limit is about 300 baud, half-duplex.

Of course, we're trying to establish an interface with a bafflingly complex lump of grey meat, but are we really daunted by the idea of outpacing a V.21 modem?

It doesn't actually need to be noninvasive. If an invasive procedure is useful enough and can be made safe, eventually it will be ubiquitous.

The problem with invasive is upgrading.

Doesn't have to be "brainwaves". The brain has a few outputs that can be highjacked (e.g. a computer with a neural interface that appears to be another muscle in the body). I don't know whether the bandwidth of these outputs is sufficient for interesting communication; we've evolved to take in far more data than we produce.

Edit It seems that more direct methods of neural interface are already plausible: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37873/

Killer app for email is idiot-proof cryptographic signatures and cryptography.

It's baffling to me that a squiggle on a bit of paper is more trustworthy than a properly implemented cryptographic signature.

You are contradicting yourself. On one hand, you state that a "killer app", i.e. something that everyone would use is cryptography. On the other hand, you state that the vast majority of people trust a squiggle on paper, rather than actual crypto. If the average joe doesn't care about crypto, why would a crypto email be interesting?

You'd need to find a way to make crypto interesting. Lots of email don't have crypto, so if you sell something that does crypto well, then you can corner the newly created crypto market.

A peer-to-peer system for sharing music/films that does good strong crypto (and faster than tor) would do the job.

There is ResoMail which does it, and it seems it's not very popular.

I don't seem to understand why did you put "Facebook Messages" in a line of great inventions. Isn't it just another "Live Chat"? Am i missing something?

Facebook (and Twitter to some extent) solve one of the biggest problems of email which is the concept of verified sender.

I add it to the paradigm shifts as it resolves (in its own [large] namespace) a longstanding problem with email.

I add it to the 'transient' list as its solution is purely driven by network effects which leaves it vulnerable to the next player sideways market dissolution.

It's a bit of a stretch to say they solved it. I'm not on FB and so FB to me don't matter. On the other hand, I'm part of an Active Directory of my company, so AD solves this problem for me at work. But none of them guarantee that the email came from the particular person and not from a dog.

No, Facebook Messages and Facebook Chat are two different things.

http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/

Yes anyone who says that "email isn't a messaging protocol" has probably been smoking to many of those funny Jazz cigarettes.

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