Another (Early) Wave

Don't Blink or You'll Miss It

Tuesday, March 7, 1:37 p.m. ET: The theme of ETech this year is the name of a four-year-old book, "The Attention Economy," meaning what happens in a world of information overload. As the Internet fire hose blasts us with too much information, attention becomes more valuable than ever.

Conference moderator Rael Dornfest told the crowd that Web aggregators and instant-communication tools today are bombarding people with information. Tomorrow's success stories, he added, likely will involve filtering and focusing.

"I think there are some great businesses to be built on giving you less," said Dornfest.

SF's Sterling: Everything Will Be Searchable

Tuesday, March 7, 12:34 p.m. ET: You've got to love a conference where the host invites a famous writer to deliver the opening speech, only to have the writer read the host's own work aloud in mock ridicule.

So it went Monday night when famed science fiction writer Bruce Sterling opened the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (dubbed "ETech") here in San Diego with a speech about the coming Internet of Things. Sterling read out loud from host Tim O'Reilly's writings about what O'Reilly calls the "Web 2.0" technologies shaping the Internet today -- a smattering of stuff like open-source software (applications that treat the Internet as a development platform) and Web sites that harness user input.

Sterling, idol of geeks everywhere, wore a black leather bomber jacket and funky blue tie over black duds as he addressed a ballroom full of 1,000 self-described " alpha geeks." Dropping his leather jacket on the floor behind him, he poked fun at the idea that anyone could make sense of "emerging technology" while it was still emerging. Besides, if you really break down the components of Web 2.0, said Sterling, they amount to "a roll call of social improvements."

But Sterling was taking issue with the phrase "Web 2.0," not the ideas behind it. His speech was a satiric literary bomb hurled at the tech industry's inability to come up with helpful language to describe new ideas and innovations. Sterling said the computer industry made major missteps decades ago by calling those early math machines "computers" and then coining phrases like "artificial intelligence" and "intelligent machines" to describe them- -- phrases that stuck and shaped how people viewed computers throughout the 20th century.

"Computers are not smart in any useful sense of the word," Sterling declared "They don't think. They don't have any intelligence."

Had the early pioneers adopted better words to describe what computers do -- "ranking and sorting," instead of "thinking" -- someone might have invented Google 20 years earlier, he added.

Sterling warned against "freezing the language" too early. Yet he seemed to spend a lot of time trying to do just that -- freeze the language of the future right now, especially with the word he has coined for what today's technologists often call "ubiquitous computing," the coming world in which physical objects increasingly are tagged and tracked wirelessly over the Internet.

Sterling wants us to call these futuristic objects "spimes." That's the word he came up with to convey the idea of objects assuming new identities once they are tagged electronically and have vast amounts of data linked to them -- data that can be tracked and sorted and ranked, just like Google does with Web pages.

His word appears to be a mash-up of space and time: "I call an object like that a 'spime' because objects like that are trackable in place and time."

Science fiction author Bruce Sterling talks with Release 1.0 editor Esther Dyson after his keynote speech for the ETech conference. (Leslie Walker - Post)

Sterling didn't talk much about the future world of spimes, but you can read about them in his recent book titled "Shaping Things" or at his blog. The sci-fi visionary encapsulated his ideas in humor by saying spimes will let people engage with physical objects better, thanks to their "auto-magical inventory voodoo."

"With a search engine of things, I no longer hunt for my missing shoes in the morning. I just Google them," he quipped.