Arthur C. Clarke and Prospective Search

Arthur C. Clarke is well known for having written about many technologies long before they are invented -- or at least before they become popular... In his 1979 book The Fountains of Paradise, about Space Elevators, Clarke anticipates the kind of prospective search system that we're building at PubSub.com. Of course, given his ability to see far into the future, Clarke describes prospective search as something which is as normal as looking up an address or getting a birthday reminder...

In Chapter 34, he writes:

...the same technology that had eliminated one set of tasks [remembering birthdays and updating address books] had created even more demanding successors. Of these, perhaps the most important was the design of the Personal Interest Profile.

Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day or their birthday. Morgan's list contained fifty items; he had heard of people with hundreds. They must spend all their waking hours battling with the flood of information, unless they were like those notorious pranksters who enjoyed setting up news alerts on their consoles for such classic improbabilities as:
    Eggs, Dinosaur, hatching of
    Circle, squaring of
    Atlantis, re-emergence of
    Christ, Second Coming of
    Loch Ness monster, capture of
or, finally
    World, end of.

Usually, of course, egotism and professional requirements insured that the subscriber's own name was the first item on every list. Morgan was no exception, but the entries that followed were slightly unusual:
    Tower, orbital
    Tower, space
    Tower, (geo)synchronous
    Elevator, space
    Elevator, orbital
    Elevator, (geo)synchronous

These words covered most of the variations used by the media, and ensured that he saw at least ninety percent of the news items concerning the [Space Elevator] project. The vast majority were trivial, and sometimes he wondered if it was worth searching for them. The ones that really mattered would reach him quickly enough.

... Punching the COFFEE and READOUT buttons simultaneously, he awaited the latest overnight sensation.
    ORBITAL TOWER SHOT DOWN
said the headline...

Will people really end up creating so many PubSub subscriptions that it will one day be customary to reserve a day each year (New Years Day or your birthday?) to cleaning and maintaining stacks of subscriptions? Will this be like making New Year's Resolutions? Will maintaining your PubSub subscriptions one day be considered like part of "spring cleaning?"

It is always fun to look into the future where what is exciting today becomes common place and humdrum...

bob wyman

Comments

[Phil Ringnalda]

Now I'm going wind up spending the whole weekend trying to come up with who else used that same idea of annual news subscription cleaning. Definately not Clarke, and my fading memory says older than that (I'm picturing a teletype printing out our narrator's new set of news).

But, I certainly hope that we won't be manually pruning our lists long enough to build up a norm around doing it on one particular day. If my aggregator can't tell me what I've lost interest in, what the last few things in that feed I did like were, and offer to either only get me the things from that feed that other people say I'll like or to just drop it entirely, in a few years, I'll be very surprised.

[Bob Wyman]

Phil, I think it might have been a Heinlein story. If I remember right, Lazarus Long had a list of persistent queries that Dora, the 'dorable computer that later became his daughter, was keeping track of for him.

bob wyman

[Peter Quodling]

Bob, I don't know where it tracks relative to works of (Science) Fiction, but this idea has been around in the technology space for a while.
I refer to the works of Jay Licklider and Robert Taylor, in the paper written back in 1968 titled (The Computer as a communication Device) see memex.org/licklider.pdf for a copy. It makes reference to a concept known as an OLIVER (Online Interactive Expediter and Responder.) (I believe this was also in honor of Oliver Selfridge - who came up with the concept.)

I have worked with some associates, to take this concept to the next level. We have even had in place a working "Oliver" that monitored communication within an organization, and made suggestions to improve it, and it's net effect.

Unfortunately, it has been relegated to the back burner, because the time and effort required are significant, and we must focus on the mundane issues of food on the table. Of course, the other interesting challenge would be how to license such a beast.

[s.nagarajan]

i extremely happy to read Mr clarke's scientific
predictions come true. can we read more? I would like to have Mr clarke's email address. at present is he in Srilanka? pl reply
regards
s.nagarajan

[George]

we cannot seem to find Arthur C. Clarke's official website, if there is one. we would like to have his e-mail address because our company wishes to build him a website for free, in return for his services in evolving the human mind. This man deserves a lot...