Shrinking the Planet @ AC2005

After lunch at Accelerating Change 2005 we progressed into a series of breakout sessions. The first of of my choices was tough, but I went to a session titled Shrinking the Planet given by:

Peter Barrett, Microsoft IPTV
Scott Rafer, Feedster

Peter started off commenting on the growth of bandwidth to the home, and also the improvements in codec technologies. Both of these are combining to create an environment for on-demand IP delivered video content. This environment is quickly becoming the foundation for supporting the long tail concepts for video. He showed some demos of IPTV, and talked about the metadata that will be exposed in the TV guide - like how many people are watching a particular show, or even specific people you know like your family and friends. He said that the project is based on the DVR concepts, and that one of the initial partners is SBC with their Project Lightspeed.

Scott began his talk with some thoughts that are similar to mine ... that AI might just come from millions of interconnected humans. He referenced Dodgeball, and expanded on this theme with various potential mash-ups of various datasources. His slide titled Humans Will Be My AI gave a number of examples where large amounts of data - aggregated by humans - become the valuable source of metaperspectives. It was almost funny how many people were uncomfortable during the Q&A with his perspective of AI not necessarily being something that is created on a computer from some lab. Maybe one day ... but sooner then that I believe that humans are quickly becoming the "sensors and actuators" at the edges of a growing AI ...