Let me try to answer his question to the Identity Gang here:

Has Identity 2.0 got anything to say about this? Is the[re] some strategy where we can put a positive marker in our scribblings [all over the web] so that automated processes can find them all and bring them all back together?

Identity 2.0 is Dick Hardt’s term, so I’m looking forward what his answer is to this question. But from a LID perspective, I completely agree with Julian’s question, and we have lots of things to say about that, such as:

• The LID POST Sender Profile, and LID POST Receiver Profile (in beta at mylid.net) are specifically targeted towards this use case. Follow the links to find out more, but in short:
• Using those LID profiles, a LID-authenticated sender can send an “HTTP Post” to a receiver with an arbitrary payload. This HTTP Post is a slightly extended version of the HTTP Post virtually any website uses to let people post, but it is authenticated and involves both sender and receiver:
• Both by the sender and the receiver get copies of the post. The policy of what they do with it is up to them (e.g. put on a web page, forward to e-mail etc.)
• The Post is contextual — not just “send message to person/site XYZ”, but “send message in the context of this particular URL”, e.g. a blog post that somebody is commenting on.
• The entire HTTP Post is digitally signed, so nobody can tamper with it or repudiate it afterwards. It also has a time stamp.

So in the LID world, we already address this problem, without requiring anybody to rely on a search engine, for example,to figure out what they posted. That’s because the sender has a full log of everything they ever posted using LID. (Which requires broad adoption of this protocol going forward, but the technology is there already.)

You can try it out by going to my mylid.net/jernst LID URL, and send me a message, for example. (”Hi” is fine, spam is not!) If you go there and can’t see how to do it: you first need to identify yourself against my LID URL using your own LID URL because as a matter of policy, I don’t accept anonymous messages there. (If you don’t have one, you can get a LID from signup.mylid.net for example.)

Updated with link to Julian’s question now also on his blog.

Just discovered Dave Winer’s Outliners.com page, which has lots of screenshots and info on outliners, like MORE.

MORE! I remember how devastated I was when I heard reports that Symantec (I think it was, right?) had decided to cease development of MORE. It was such a great program! (Although it never got its screen refreshes right in slide mode.). I wrote papers for conferences in it, progress reports, zillions of slide presentations, and collections of many, many ideas. Who knows, maybe I stored The Great Idea in a MORE file that I can’t read any more, and the world is a worse place because of it

Thanks for putting this up, this is great!

And I claim we still don’t have a replacement for MORE. The features in PowerPoint, for example, are only a small subset of what MORE could do, … Dave, are you going to recreate it as the OPML editor? If so, more power to you!

Originally, I was supposed to talk about LID at SD Forum today, but instead we moved it to October 27, because Ray Kurzweil is in town to speak about how we will all become immortal through technology. So I’m sitting at SAP Labs in Palo Alto instead, listening, being amazed, dazzled, inspired and I don’t know what, all while attempting to blog it. Bear with me …

Steve Jurvetson is introducing him.

So here’s the talk in bullet-point form

• Software is indispensable already today, and it will increase in its capabilities.
• by 2020 we will understand the software of everything, including the software we (people) run on. Will allow us to re-program, such as by turning off genes. We understand our biology as software now.
• Nano-technology will allow us to change us — but the value will be in information.
• Software will take over the world, and eventually the universe. Need to recognize exponential growth even of the growth rate. Will make 20,000 years of progess of the 2000 speed within the 21st century.
• E.g. it does not take 100 years to map the brain (which would be the year 2000) rate of growth
• Got interested in this as an inventor. 95% of investment projects that he and Steve Jurvetson see are fine, but the timing is wrong, so they would fail. Enablers aren’t there. So he became a student of technology trends, to come up with models for where technology would go.
• Can you predict the future? Certain aspects are very much predictable. E.g. cost of a MIPS in 2012, or cost of a base pair, or resolution of a brain scanner.
• If you have a sufficiently complex system, with many interacting and random parts, you can predict system behavior quite well. General answer: double-exponential trends.

The Paradigm Shift Rate is now doubling every decade.

• Many examples for double-exponential growth. Applies to biological and technical evolution.
• Technology is a tool-base that evolves. Double-exponential comes from the simultaneous evolution of the tool and the product. [my terms]
• Spends some time explaining what linear and exponential means (I skip this it’s standard math)
• Makes a side joke on how useless the predictions about social security are, if the singularity occurs around the same time social security runs out
• Moore’s law is the fifth (!) exponential-growth law in computing (vacuum tubes etc.). It doesn’t matter whether Moore’s law runs out, a sixth exponential-growth paradigm will kick in (e.g. molecular/3-dimensional techniques).

All kinds of information technologies double their power every 12 months (right now). Moore’s law is only one example of many. But the rate of growth is growing, too.

• Functional emulation of the brain will probably be possible by 2013, maybe earlier, with the then-best supercomputer.
• IT is now 8% of GDP (software, electronics)

The biotechnology revolution: the intersection of biology with information technology

• There is no more "drug discovery", it’s now strategically planned intervention at specific stages in specific reaction phases.
• We are gaining an entire new toolkit by reprogramming biological processes.

Every form of communication is also doubling every year in price, performace

• It wasn’t surprising to see the internet coming. He had a graph on it in the mid-80’s already, because the trend was clear.
• Also, miniaturization.
• We have reverse-engineering red blood cells, and have nano-bots that can do the same thing.
• He’s talking about blood-cell-sized robots that exist today for animals. They will shortly download new algorithms from the internet.

He’s now getting into specific objections that he’s hearing against his projections about the singularity.

• Where will we get the software for running an artificial brain?
• Non-invasive brain scanning is doubling every year in capability. There is now a real-time brain scanner for live brains that can observe clusters of neurons firing.
• But brains are so complex? But it’s encoded in the genome, which is only 800 million bytes. If you eliminate redundancies, its about 30-100 million bytes. The brain is about 30-60 millions bytes.
• Example: cerebellum. Looks very complex, but is created from just a handful of rules. Analogy: Mandelbrot set.
• Models often get simpler at a higher level, not more complex.
• The bulk of human intelligence is based on pattern recognition: the quintessential example of self-organization.
• Shows a voice-to-voice automatic language translation from English to German. Very impressive.
• Most of his projects are about pattern recognition.

Now some predictions:

• 2010: Computers disappear. Lots of bullet items what this means, e.g. electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses.
• 2029: 1000 dollars of computation will be 1000 times the human brain. (Wow)
• Nano-bots. Neural implants. Full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses. Expansino of human intelligence.
• in 2050, the predominant form of intelligence will be non-biological.
• Life expectancy will explode.

I was somewhat disappointed by his answer to my question in the Q&A section: "If the rate of change increases, the stresses in our global society are also increasing. What can we do to alleviate them?" His answer was a pure technologist’s answer: "… because all of this wonderful new technology, we will solve them.". The trouble as I see it — see current international security events — is between the Lexus and the Olive Tree, not between the Lexus and the Chevrolet:

He quotes Darren Platt (unfortunately, he does not provide a link), who apparently said:

…shorter assertion lifetimes will always prevail over longer assertion lifetime values, given the infrastructure to deal with them is in place.

I very much agree. Which is why LID is an “on-line” system, built around light-weight on-line queries that can be composed and executed in real-time, as opposed to a batch/off-line system as most other digital identity systems.

I blogged about this back in March.

Of course, there is nothing to prevent anybody to use LID really slow, so it can cover the “batch” case as well. The other way around doesn’t work, however: like with all software systems, making something (like a digital identity system) real-time that wasn’t designed for it is next to impossible, so buyer beware.