San Francisco

Technology is about to rewrite what it means to be human, according to a convention of futurists. Meeting at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco, hundreds of scientists, engineers and technology experts discussed a future in which robots wrote their own code, and implants allowed the human brain to process data at incredible speeds.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sep. 5, 2007 (KGO) - An exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco will give you a glimpse into the world of espionage, featuring code words, secret prisons, and the like. To say that Berkeley's Trevor Paglen is obsessed with what others have called "the Dark Side of the War on Terror." is an understatement. Last year, he coauthored the book "Torture Taxi," a look at the CIA's "Extraordinary Rendition Program."

 

If you've been in a subway car in San Francisco, London, Boston, Rio de Janeiro or one of several other cities recently and thought you saw a short film playing along the dark walls of the tunnels, you're not going crazy.

In fact, what you saw was one of the latest forms of advertising technology, which is slowly taking over one of transit riders' last refuges from commercial messages.

The technology, which comes from companies such as Canada's SideTrack and New York-based Submedia, is just what it sounds like: ads displayed on subway tunnel walls in nearly 10 cities worldwide promoting products from companies including Microsoft, Target, Coca-Cola, Reebok and Honda.