When he speaks to the crowd at the national millennium celebration or a California tech conference, 10-year-old David Dalrymple might need some help reaching the microphone but his words carry a lot of weight. Via e-mail, UMBC’s youngest student recently discussed his team’s win over the area’s best budding tech entrepreneurs, his vision of our technological future and his plans to rule the world.
Your team recently won the Greater Baltimore Technology Council’s collegiate
“Mosh Pit” business plan competition with a digital utility metering
device. What does it do exactly?
It sends the data from a power consumption sensor to the Internet in
real-time. This would enable monitoring of industrial equipment as
well as quick checking of power consumption by consumers and power
distributors.
What are some typical applications of this device? For instance,
could I log on at work and tell if I left the coffeepot on at home?
Sure. You could even make coffee from work if you wanted to.
Another application is in a restaurant setting – what I
call
“fine computerized dining” and involves computers at each table.
You
could have your PDA transfer your dietary restrictions and food
preferences to a restaurant computer, and the restaurant computer
could
come up with a menu custom-created for you. Then you could play
trivia
games with others in the restaurant on this same computer while
waiting
for your meal, and then use the same computer to check out
automatically
(no waiting to get your bill, waiting again for the wait staff to
pick
up your credit card, waiting again to get the credit card slip to
sign).
The restaurant can also use these computers to automatically
update the menu if a dish becomes unavailable (so as not to have
customers drooling over items they won’t be able to have), lower
prices
to increase sales in, say, overstocked vegetables or increase prices
when,
say, steak becomes low in supply, have paint programs installed to
keep
children busy without always buying new coloring books or special
child
menus or paper table covers, advertise items the restaurant sells
(special hot sauces, mugs, shirts, etc.), and much more.
Was your age ever an issue between you and your team members?
No. It wasn’t a problem at all.
Are you interested in business?
Yes. I would like to start the company I.D.E.A.S. to sell the IDEA
Protocol.
The IDEA Protocol is a communications system that
alleviates
many of the problems I see with electronic device communication. It
allows any electronic devices to transfer data, regardless of their
“smart-ness” or processing power. Such a project is a dubious
undertaking, but precursors’ work, such as Jini, proves that the
technology is possible, though not necessarily profitable.
I believe that with a combination of innovation, good
design,
widespread marketing and financial good sense, such a product
should be viable.
Are you talking about something along the lines of a “smart
kitchen,”
where the refrigerator knows when you are out of milk?
A smart kitchen is one of many relatively unimportant consequences
of
the IDEA Protocol. It wouldn’t be much of an innovation, since
plenty
of smart kitchen products are readily available.
What is Jini?
Jini was
originally
touted as a Java-based platform for “smart ”
operation. However, though its uses are far and wide, they do not
include “smart everything, from letter opener to mainframe.” That’s
kind of what I’m trying to do.
By the way, a smart letter opener,
though seemingly useless, could keep track of incoming letters, and
even
provide information about the letter being opened (perhaps lowering
the
risk of anthrax exposures) from some kind of RFID (Radio Frequency
IDentifier, a dumb system which can be queried for a single long
number)
inside the envelope, linking to e-mails or information packets on the
Web. For more on Jini, see wwws.sun.com/software/jini/.
You presented at Richard Saul Wurman’s famous Technology Entertainment Design conference last
year. What was it like rubbing elbows with Martha
Stewart and AOL’s Steve Case?
The crowd at TED is a truly exceptional group of people. Meeting
them was great. Talking to them was pleasurably enlightening.
Sitting
down with them for an intellectual conversation was happiness
itself. New York Times best-selling authors, Pulitzer prize
winners, Nobel
laureates, Grammy award winners, artists, designers, visionaries,
outstanding technologists, and other superior people in their fields
come together in Monterey, California for an invigorating
conference. I thought it was also a great opportunity and
personally established
contact with lots of great people, including one who got me a slot
at Microsoft Research to make a presentation there this spring.
Was there one celebrity sighting or exchange that was
particularly
memorable for you?
Sorry, but no. All of them were enjoyable, and I don’t have
favorites.
I enjoy meeting everyone who’s fun to be around, regardless of their
celebrity (or not) status.
What does the future hold for technology in your view? What do you predict will be
the biggest technological change we’ll see in the next decade?
Technology is not constant. It grows at X rate. What many do not
know is that X rate grows at Y rate. And what even fewer realize is
that
Y rate grows at Z rate. Z rate is very low, but Y rate has been
astronomical since (literally) the beginning of time. X rate is now
tremendous, promising a faster computer next month. When computers
were first invented, it took a decade to release the next product.
In
other more confusing words, technology will continue to advance at a
rate that will continue to advance at a rate that will continue to
advance; this spawned the extremely fast artificial evolution now
occurring in electronic products.
Is there one advance, though, that you think we will see in the
next
decade? In an essay you wrote that is posted on the Internet (http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0001.html) you mentioned a car that you can tell to “go to Wal-Mart.” Is
that something you expect to see?
Don’t read too much into [my essay titled] “The Future.” It’s a mishmash mix of my
memes
and my dreams.
In other, less esoteric terms, “The Future” is a
combination of what I really think will happen and fantasies. The
Wal-Mart story is something I really think will happen. The baby
born
with a PCMCIA card slot is not.
You began to read at 18 months. What is your favorite book?
My favorite book is “When Things Start to Think” by Neil
Gershenfeld, professor and director of the Center for Bits and Atoms
at MIT. I
recommend it to anyone.
Why did you like that book so much? You struck up a correspondence with Gershenfeld as a result of reading it didn’t you?
Why does a rose smell sweet? Why do I like that book so much? Is
there
intelligent life in space? These questions have yet to be answered
by
science. Science is unruffled by this, and still progressing at — among
other places — MIT.
“When Things Start to Think” was written by [the] head of the Things that Think consortium,
now
known as the Center for Bits & Atoms, at the MIT Media Lab. As I
really
enjoyed his book, I decided to write him a half-congratulatory,
half-begging for more letter to him. This started up a
correspondence
between us, and through this correspondence, I received the Lego
Mindstorms Robotic Invention System. After a period of void in our
communications, I received a letter in November [1999] inviting me to speak
at
the turn of the millennium celebration. After that, as they say,
it’s
all history.
What’s next for you? Graduate school, business, ruling the world?
I don’t know when I’ll graduate [from UMBC]; in fact, I do not expect anything
of my
graduation, except that I expect to graduate and hopefully be a
smarter
and wiser person. I’m hoping to not long from now be taking
graduate-level classes, but am in no rush to graduate with my bachelor’s.
After my degrees at UMBC are finished, I plan to go to the MIT Media
Lab (http://www.media.mit.edu/); for graduate school, then proceed to
start
my own business. Eventually, within the next 10 to 15 years, I need to
get something of a working version of the IDEA protocol working,
which
would be a full-time job for many years.
By buying out Microsoft,
AOL Time Warner, Broderbund and the Office of Homeland Security
(Armed
Forces, Pentagon, DoD, etc.), I could conceivably rule the world.
😉 Not that I would do such a thing – I have no desire to rule the
world
nor save the world; my goal is simply to make the world a better
place in whatever ways small or large that I can.
