Once upon a time here at the annual ACM/SIGGRAPH conference there was a message board. It was a big cork board that had the letters of the alphabet printed along the top. People would write notes on paper and stick them up with push-pins. You would find messages by looking under the first letter of your last name.
At some point, once everyone had a mobile phone, the message board was retired. Sometimes I hear people say “Remember when people actually wrote messages on paper to find each other at SIGGRAPH?”
Yet I still remember, a few years back, trying in vain to connect with a colleague whose European mobile did not work in the U.S. She had no easy way to reach me, and we spent most of the conference not managing to connect. I remember thinking at the time that the old fashioned message board would have connected us very quickly. As it happened, we finally ran into each other at random on the street, on the very last day of the conference.
This year a research group was showing off a “proxy robot”. You put on V.R. goggles and gloves, and the robot moves around in a remote location, mimicking your movements. Meanwhile it sees, hears and feels whatever you see, hear and feel. I wonder this is the first glimmerings of the conference itself going the way of the message board. Why bother with airplanes and hotel rooms when you can just send your proxy robot in your place?
There may come a day, perhaps not that far off, when people will say “Remember when people actually showed up in person to the SIGGRAPH conference?”
I suspect it is going to be a lot harder to recognize the proxy robots on the street, too! You’ll get close and realize its the wrong shade of metallic 😉
it reminds me that film : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/
It’s a bit “Bruce Willis save (again) the world”, but the questions about identity, what is consciousness, where is the limit between safety and living life are well asked.
Perhaps we will become what we market most.
Yes, the message board is obsolete, and yes it was a pain in the ass to operate (you might not have realized this, but it filled up, and things had to be filed, etc).
The problem is that it has not been replaced. There are people I do not know how to get ahold of, and without a message board, I had no way to reach them (assuming they were even in town).