GE Adventure

I was especially interested in talking to the asset management guys for two reasons:

1. I’ve been thinking about spimes/blogjects for a few years now. (In the words of Bruce Sterling, “In a world of spimes, even the simplest objects – furniture, cutlery, power tools – will be little more than material billboards for a vast, interactive, postindustrial support system.”)
2. I just read about how ants deal with traffic and have been generally fascinated by emergent systems since reading, appropriately enough, Emergence. (One of the most interesting findings in the ant study is that ants don’t really overtake one another, even when the ant in front is going slow. That’s because they are working in the best interest of the system as a whole, not as individuals.)

So … What does this have to do with trucks? Well, for one, part of the goals of what Veriwise is up to is to create systems that can both communicate with the world at large, but also allow individuals to communicate knowledge directly with one another without a central hub. What’s more, they are looking at biological systems for cues in how to help systems organize on the fly. There’s about a million more things to talk about in regards to what we saw in the “trailer of the future”, but I’m going to hold off for a bit and try to organize my thoughts into more logical chunks. Just wanted to get these two down for now.

Photo by DavidDennisPhotos.com used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.