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| Subject: | Re: [gislist] GIS in 20 years: Where is the future taking us |
| Date: |
06/23/2006 08:45:01 PM |
| From: |
Mick Wilson |
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I think that this is a fabulous question to pose to a
group like this. I am not at all sure that I have a
fabulous answer to offer. HOWEVER: in some sort of
perfect world we would see an environment in which the
current poor pre-science of environmental assessment
was at least brought up to the level of, say, 19th
century chemistry i.e...
- ubiquity of sensors and monitors will render
geolocated global environmental measurements cheap,
reliable, recurrent and meaningful, as distinct from
the current situtaion where such data are either
highly selected over short times in certain places
(say, a station measuring water pH daily at one point
on the Zambezi river for the six-month life of a
certain ptoject) or so synoptic as to reflect upon
continents and nations but not individuals:
- GIS, per se, will have been thoroughly subsumed into
generic information management _but_ the criteria,
methods and applications presently labeled as "GIS"
will be so thoroughly embedded in transactional data
exchange that smartarse postgrads won't even question
why it is that every demographic or economic statistic
already carries the obvious and necessary spatial (and
temporal) tags required for meaningful extrapolation
in space and time for their analyses:
- spatial data _*finally*_ divorced from the legacy of
map-based portrayal and encoding where they will, by
default, be recorded in a pure 'surfaceless' form i.e.
in a GPS-derived 4-D coordinate system independant of
geoids and instead dynamically recalculable from pure
satellite _or_ geolocated sensors' situation knowledge
viz other similar stations, and only rendered down to
2-, 3- or 4-D portrayals on the fly and as necessary:
- ontological awareness of automated systems will be
taken for granted, and so the way in which your
forest/landcover mapping system refers to Mount
Kilimanjaro will be meaningfully consistent with my
orographic rainfall model for eat African mountains
that - whooh! - happens to include a thing with
similar characteristics to yours (a bit south of the
equator, over 6000m high and so on) but a quite
different proper Swahili name like Kilima Njaro: it's
the same damned mountain, no matter what we call it
and any sensible post-GIS system will see that:
- spatial data would be rich enough (dense,
consistent, of adequate quality) that emperical
statements connecting cause, effect and consequence
might at least be subject to scrutiny by policy makers
on some basis of rigour at least slightly elevated
from the current level of opinion and expert
guesstimate: we're not sure _why_ sodium is a reative
alkaline metal but we damned sure know how it reacts
and can reliably predict the sorts of products that
will result:
- we might see the glimmerings of a predictive and
falsifiable earth science, one in which scientists can
make causal predictions within an error band less than
an order or magnitude of the pedicted value _and_
meaningfully propose why a projected value for mean
atmospheric temperature or equatorial ocean pH will
have _this_ value (plus or minus a small amount)
rather than some other: a relativity or quantum
mechanics theorem of interactive earth - or
earth-and-sun - systems _solely_ recognizable and
meaningful because of meaningful and comparable data.
And, no, I have not been thinking about this very hard
or long at all. Much.
--- Serge Bedard <sergio_tango_mi@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Good afternoon all,
> =
> I=92m currently preparing a paper on the impact of
> new technologies on our field. More specifically,
> I=92m addressing the consequences of the exponential
> growing rate of processor speed, computer
> performance, memory capacity, etc. that Ray Kurzweil
> is talking about in his last book =93The Singularity
> is Near=94.
> =
> Without going as far as him in the future and
> without addressing the philosophical debates on
> human enhancement and this kind of subject, I would
> like to give some ideas in my paper about the impact
> on our GIS field of coming technologies like the
> following:
> =
> - The developpement of Robot Drivers for
> road vehicles as illustrated by the DARPA challenge.
> Sebastian Thrun, Director of the Stanford AI Lab,
> thinks that by 2010, we'll have reliable urban robot
> driving. This, he argues will have huge impact on
> the way we drive. For example, a urban highway
> packet with vehicles at 4pm on a weekday is still
> only used at 8% of its capacity. This is because we,
> as bad human drivers, need a huge front and rear
> distance to drive safely. What if much better
> computer drivers are doing the job?
> =
> - Another technology that might be coming
> within the next 20 years is Personal Nanofactories
> (see this link for an interesting animation movie
> about this:
> http://
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