Meeting notice: The 00.12.19 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topics: For at least a decade the implications of NT for information systems have been described in terms of huge increases in computational and storage resources. The direct consequences for bandwidth are just as dramatic and no further down the road. Multi-terabit broadband is well within the theoretical capacity of even contemporary fiber technology and switching rates seem poised to rise to the opportunity. While it might be a decade or two before nanophotonics presents early adopters with the option of putting petabits into their desktops (or however nodes are referred to by then), nothing obvious seems to be standing in the way. While there is not a lot of experience with the social and cultural effects of increasing computation (which has not stopped people from speculating about the consequences of superintelligent machines) in the case of bandwidth we have something more to go on. The cost of communications has been falling for tens of thousands of years -- initially with the invention of signal fires, drums, the domestication of the horse, and so on -- with direct and documented effects on the affected societies. This history suggests that on the most general level, as communications become cheaper, interaction rates will rise for all possible definitions of 'dealings' (which might include exchanging introductions, or buying from or selling to, or having sex, and so on). For instance, it would not surprise me to learn that the number of people with which the average citizen of an industrialized country 'has dealings' has grown by 10% a decade over the last fifty years. This might be thought of as the temperature of a society -- the rate at which social bonds are formed and broken. Presumably there is some kind of limit to the rate at which human relationships can be made and unmade without throwing the satisfactions of having a social existence at all into question. The most trusted relationships are those that can be guaranteed through personal experience; the usefulness of a relationship is a function in part of how well we have learned to adapt to it, etc. On many social issues, the value and meaning of a relationship rises directly with time. I think many of us might sense that we are nearing an intrinsic limit to the number of people we can have dealings with and still retain much sense of meaning in our social lives. This might be wrong: perhaps someday in the future the average friendship, perhaps even the average marriage, will last fifteen minutes and no one will mind. But if not, we may find our relationship to increased bandwidth changing. The analogy with temperature reminds us that systems rise through several phases with changes in thermal inputs. As the temperature of a solid state rises the relations of its molecules grew steadily less orderly until a realm is reached that permits the organization of convection cells -- a new phase of order. Under certain conditions, increases in entropy (on one scale) can generate order (on another). One has to wonder if something similar can be found in the analogy we are calling 'social temperature'. Perhaps when bandwidth becomes cheap enough friends and family members in different locations will routinely connect up their display spaces (which might range from palm devices to video walls) to give each a continuous 'window' into the life of the other. These windows would have no special function; they would not be primarily about work or even organizing social events, though they could be used for both if needed. They would have no function but to build a sense of a shared life; the equivalent of the communal life of a neolithic village, only more limited, defined, and controllable. (Presumably these windows would link through areas and perspectives set aside for the purpose; spaces that would play the role lounges or even water coolers do in commercial life.) While the identities of these shared spaces might turn over rapidly it is at least possible that people would choose to share spaces with the first friends they had made and the family members they first felt closest to throughout their lives. If so, this would represent a bandwidth-led phase change in the grain of social life. Worth noting. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In its current issue the editors of Technology Review choose the ten "emerging technologies" they expect to "change the world" over the next ten years: brain- machine interfaces, flexible transistors, data mining, digital rights management, biometrics, natural language processing, microphotonics, "untangling code" (this year's whack at modular programming), robot design, and microfluidics. For details see www.technologyreview.com. Biotech is notable for its absence. How does this list compare with your own? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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