Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales on School Cred

WVW: Students cite the Britannica all the time. Will teachers accept the Wikipedia as readily?

Wales: I would say not right now. But that’s our goal. Toward that end, the really fast-paced, high-activity, live-editing model means that you can go write some nonsense in an Xbox article right now and it’ll probably be reverted within five minutes. But it’s a little chaotic at the moment. What we’re working on in the community is how can we put together a review process that will let us identify stable versions of the article, versions where we say, “yeah, this one’s Britannica quality,” and flag that so that we can put out an edition either on CD or to be indicated on the Web site: approved articles that would say, “We’ll stand behind this in the way that Britannica would.” Then we’ll have live updating. It’s just a question of how to sift through things. How do we sift things and find the nuggets of gold and try to encourage more of that? Britannica’s a couple hundred years old, but we’ll catch up soon enough.

The Father of the Xbox on Console Gaming Today

Seamus Blackley, formerly of Microsoft and "father" of the Xbox...

WVW: Now that you can look down on the hardware arena as an outsider, what do you think about the current directions being taken in consoles?

Blackley: Consoles work because there’s a social pattern that involves sitting in front of the television to be entertained in your home. Games naturally appeared there as a “programming choice.” This is the same reason that video games appeared in arcades—people had a social pattern of playing coin-operated amusements that Nolan and others exploited by making machines that had the same usage pattern, but had novel content.

As we see consumer behavior change today, as we do with Facebook, for example, new places to put games emerge. There’s a moment here where we have to watch and see what this means for game-specific hardware, and it’s very interesting. On one hand, you have Kinect and its ilk, running on HD and possibly 3D televisions. On the other, we see handheld play patterns shifting to new devices such as the iPad. It is fun to see that nearly every new device that releases to consumers becomes a de facto game platform.

Snopes.com Founder Barbara Mikkelson on Why We Have Urban Legends

The second interview in "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" is with hoaxbuster extraordinaire Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder and principal author at Snopes.com. At one point in our conversation, I asked her about the root cause behind why the Internet is so replete with tall tales.

WVW: Can you generalize about whether there is a point to urban legends? Do they serve a purpose?

Mikkelson: They are often used to give voice to any number of anxieties or concerns people have. It’s like, if you were feeling anxious about something in your world and along came this story which just perfectly illustrated exactly what you were feeling uneasy about, you would turn and share it with others because you would be able to say, “See, see. This is exactly what I was saying. This is exactly what I’ve been feeling lately.” That’s why these stories get spread as much as they do.

Another reason for them is that sometimes these stories are expressions of how we would run the world if we were in charge. In other words, that good people would be rewarded; bad people would be punished. It’s a way of expressing a sense of unease with how things happen.

Ray Kurzweil Optimistic on Averting Catastrophe

With about one week until the debut of Architects of Tomorrow Volume 1, I thought I'd offer a piece from one of my favorite headliners in this collection. Ray Kurzweil was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, but he sure hasn't slowed down in the 21st. As one of the most public voices in artificial intelligence and a pioneering inventor of many common computing technologies, he contributions to society can't be underestimated. My question, though, is whether the best is yet to come.


One of Kurzweil's favored research fields is human longevity...

WVW: As we see in your books, such as Transcend and The Singularity is Near, you believe we’re close to having the technology needed to radically extend human life. Even if similar technological feats allow us to solve issues such as energy shortages, there’s no getting around the problem of aging societies and overpopulation. Unless these longevity technologies come with a built-in zero population growth switch, how can we avoid this impending risk?

Kurzweil: The idea behind radically extending human life is to stop and reverse aging so we won’t be “aging.” As for overpopulation, the same technologies that will extend longevity will also vastly extend resources. We have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100% of our energy needs. The total amount of solar energy we are producing is doubling every two years, and we are only eight doublings away from meeting all of our energy needs. The technology underlying this is the increasing application of advanced material technologies such as nanotech to solar panels. Once we have inexpensive energy, we can easily convert the vast amount of dirty and salinated water we have on the planet to usable water. We are headed towards another agriculture revolution, from horizontal agriculture to vertical agriculture where we grow very high quality food in AI-controlled buildings. These will recycle all nutrients and end the ecological disaster that constitutes contemporary factory farming. This will include hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables and in vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat—that is, meat without animals. Even PETA likes this idea.

Desktop nano factories will enable us to produce high quality modules to snap together high quality yet inexpensive housing. There is a Singularity University project devoted to this concept. Look at the cover of last week’s Economist magazine, it features a picture of a violin that was printed out using a contemporary three-dimensional printer. This spatial precision of this technology is improving exponentially. And there’s plenty of land available, just take a train trip anywhere in the world and you’ll see most of the land is not really used. We aggregate today in crowded cities because this was a good way to communicate, but the need to do this will dissipate as virtual reality becomes equal to real reality in resolution and realism.