Autonomic Computing promises to make both our hardware and software more agile and secure, by allowing them to self-manage themselves. Four critical aspects of autonomous computing are: 1) self-protecting: ability to diagnose and protect the resource from attacks, 2) self-healing: ability to recover from failures and attacks, 3) self-configuring: ability to reconfigure in order to become more efficient, and 4) self-optimizing: the ability to constantly tweak the parameters in order to perform the task at hand in a more effective and efficient manner.

While IBM has led in this topic, many have begun to contribute in areas related to server reconfiguration and software that heals itself. Please see the following links for more information:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/autonomic/
http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic/manifesto/

Remote (Driverless) Driving

I decided to analyze the topic of remote driving, and was amazed at how much research has already been conducted. Some research has focused on driving a vehicle remotely, but in the sense that an external device must be physically close to the vehicle (such as a wire). Other research has required that no other vehicles be on the same road as the test vehicle, which is fine for development purposes, but not as an end goal. However, the most promising research I found was conducted by GM, which can be read at:

 http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=d8u0m82o0&show_article=1

The article states that although remote, or driverless, cars can be on the road by the year 2018, the biggest hurdle in its path is society itself. Society must decide what to do with the technology, whether it will trust it, or find use for it. Some challenges will remain, such as automatically responding to unforeseen failures, like blown tires. Nevertheless, it is a promising area that will definitely have an impact on all of us.

PsychoHistory - Analyzing themes from The Futurists

In the chapter titled "The Futurists",(from the book: The Fortune Sellers) the author states that "Given that people individually and collectively are not very predictable and that social theories are weak, making predictions about the behaviors of various groups of people can be very dangerous." This statement reminded me of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, where the concept of psychohistory is introduced as a means of predicting what humans, as a mass, will do in the future. A curious side note is that some critics have surmised that Asimov was influenced by Karl Marx's theory of history writings, which were also discussed in the same chapter. Please see the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/creating-real-life-version-of.html