Now we can have a billion cameras everywhere that are virtually invisible. Bravo! At some point privacy invasive technologies will be so available and advanced that clothing and walls will no longer have any point other than to keep out the wind. Luckily advanced deep learning technology will be there to save us by making fact indistinguishable from fiction.
Reminds me of another Scifi book called "Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw in which the story uses the idea of "slow glass": glass through which light takes years to pass.
Yes. It will happen. I bet low energy radio systems (like helios) will connect them up but that won't be for a long time or in my lifetime.
There's a fantastic sci fi book called "Metaplanetary" by Tony Daniel where he invented this and many other fantastic ideas. Imagine that there are billions of little computational nodes around you in the dust ("the grist"). Imagine sentient computer programs, who have human rights. Imagine what people would do who don't believe they are really sentient - yes, they'd torture or kill them. He has some sequels but last time I looked he hadn't published the conclusion book in a long time. He worked in IT in some area. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116171.Metaplanetary. I'll agree with the reviews there that the book starts up a little hard to follow, but then it races away.
Metaplanetary was published in 2001? "Computational dust motes" features in "A Deepness in the sky" by Vernor Vinge which was published in 1999 so Tony Daniel didn't invent the concept. I wouldn't be surprised if the concept is even older tbh.
This has 2 limitations; if everybody becomes less interesting at once, we will merely redefine what "not interesting means" bringing us back to square one. If one individual sets out to become the most uninteresting person ever, a beautiful paradox opens up. By doing so, he immediately becomes an object of interest. I can imagine some douglas adam-esque twist where he unwittingly gains the power to control the weather or something.
Pay a fee monthly if you want not to be traced seems much more probable. Not much unlike today when celebrities need to pay a company to buy houses for they, hiding the name of the buyer.
The image is of a lens, not a complete camera system. I imagine the system is still a fair bit larger. Moreover, the image you're seeing here has also been deconvolved: it is not the "real" image from the camera.
”The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29, 2021, in Nature Communications.”
Sounds like the university PR-department was smoking something.
> Well, this is probably not the best example because human bodies are much taller than wider, so their volume wouldn't grow as fast as with a cube if you wanted to scale them.
It doesn't matter what the ratio in dimensions are, if you scale up while preserving them, volume goes up as the cube of linear measure.
Misleading headline; the graphic in the article makes it quite clear the device is much larger than the "salt grain" that most of us would imagine. And the text of the article mentions a "coarse grain of salt" in a rather slippery attempt to gloss over this.
Still very impressive technology, but, a very misleading headline.
