The claim that robots are taking our jobs has become so commonplace of late that it's a bit of a cliché. Nonetheless, it has a strong element of truth to it. Not only are machines taking "blue collar" factory jobs -- a process that's been underway for years, and no longer much of a surprise except when a company like Foxconn announces it's going to bring in a million robots (which are less likely to commit suicide, apparently) -- but now mechanized/digital systems are quickly working their way up the employment value chain. "Grey collar" service workers have been under pressure for awhile, especially those jobs (like travel agent) that involve pattern-matching; now jobs involving the composition of structured reports (such as basic journalism) have digital competition, and Google's self-driving car portends a future of driverless taxicabs. But even "white collar" jobs, managerial and supervisory in particular, are being threatened -- in part due to replacement, and in part due to declining necessity. After all, if the line workers have been replaced by machines, there's little need for direct human oversight of the kind required by human workers, no? Stories of digital lawyers and surgeons simply accelerate the perception that robots really are taking over the workplace, and online education systems like the Khan Academy demonstrate how readily university-level learning can be conducted without direct human contact.

With advanced 3D printers and more adaptive robotic and computer systems on the near horizon, it's easy to see that this trend will only continue.

Except for one arena, that is, and it's a pretty interesting one. Jobs where empathy and "emotional intelligence" can be considered requirements, often personal service and "high touch" interactive positions, have by and large been immune to the creeping mechanization of the workplace. And here's the twist: most of these empathy-driven jobs are performed by women.

Nursing, primary school teaching, personal grooming -- these jobs require varying levels of education and knowledge, but all have a strong caretaker component, and demand the ability to understand the unspoken or non-obvious needs of patients/students/clients/etc. We're years -- perhaps even decades -- away from a machine system that can effectively take on these roles; a computer able to demonstrate sufficient empathy to take care of a crying kindergartener is clearly approaching True AI status. As a result, we appear to be heading into a future where these "pink collar" jobs -- empathy-driven, largely performed by women -- are the most significant set of careers without any real machine substitute, and therefore without the downward wage pressure that mechanization usually produces.

This raises some big questions, of course, and not the least of which is how this will affect the social and economic status of these professions. Nurses may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better than university professors. Would this lead to a shift in the gender composition of these jobs? In a culture that remains beholden to the concept that men are the "breadwinners," might we see efforts to "masculinize" these roles? Recall that in the United States after World War II, there was a great deal of pressure on women to give up the "Rosie the Riveter"-type jobs they held during the war.

Conversely, if accelerating mechanization of jobs triggers the emergence of large-scale social support systems (like the Basic Income Guarantee) paid for by "robot taxes," does this mean that outside-the-home jobs are largely performed by women, while men stay at home?

What I'm saying is this: there is a terrible habit that many of us in the futures game seem to have of generalizing potential disruptions. That is, if robots are taking our jobs, then they're taking all of our jobs (except, ideally, for the jobs of futurists) and we start thinking through the implications from there. But disruptions aren't so easily flattened; when Gibson said that the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed, he wasn't just talking about geography, or even class. Big sociotechnoeconomic shifts don't just appear and redraw the landscape, they have to adapt to the existing conditions, and will themselves be disrupted by deeply-rooted cultural forces. We also have a habit of expecting that the most well-off financially are the most likely to resist big changes -- but what happens when the underlying notions of value themselves are changing?

I spoke last month at the Swissnex office in San Francisco (Swissnex is kind of the Swiss embassy for technology issues), at an event entitled "Data is (sic) the New Oil." The focus of the event was the tension between privacy and "publicy" (Stowe Boyd's term for the intentional revelation of aspects of one's life, the opposite of privacy). A video of the entire event is now online, and below you'll find the 15 minutes or so of my talk.

This talk covers what I wrote about in "Opaque Projections," but this is a moving image, with sound.

Last night (April 10, 2012), I spoke at the San Francisco Swissnex office on a panel entitled "Data is* the New Oil." When I was told the title of the panel, it struck me as an odd metaphor. Oh, I understand the intent: oil was the fuel for the 20th century industrial economy, and information is the fuel for the 21st. But oil has a key characteristic that simply isn't true for data.

Oil is limited -- we have a declining stock. Whether you think peak oil happened a few years ago, will happen soon, or is still a ways off, the truth is the same: there is a finite supply of oil, and unless we stop using it there will at some point be no more to extract. Nearly all of the other social, economic, and political aspects of oil derive from this fact. Its importance is inextricably linked to its scarcity.

Data (or information), conversely, is growing in availability. One study claims that we'll go from a global digital data footprint of 800 billion gigabytes (0.8 zettabytes) in 2009 to 35 trillion gigabytes (35 zettabytes) in 2020. If you need an energy metaphor, you could say that information works more like a "breeder reactor" -- processing the information we create allows us to create even more information. A service called "Dataminr" uses the 340 million-odd daily public Twitter posts to algorithmically monitor the world, and claims that it was able to tell its subscribers of Osama bin Laden's death 20 minutes before big media because of its ongoing analysis. It's not the first example of that kind of processing, by the way; Canadian epidemiologists at the Global Public Health Information Network scan newspaper articles around the world, spotting early indicators of emerging disease outbreaks.

In other words, information and data aren't scarce, they're increasing rapidly and dramatically.

But a related phenomenon is scarce, is declining in availability and increasing in value: opacity. Being hidden. Privacy.

Information isn't the new oil; opacity is the new oil. The ability to be opaque -- the opposite of transparent -- is increasingly rare, valuable, and in many cases worth fighting for. It's also potentially quite dangerous, often dirty, and can be a catalyst for trouble. In short, it's just like oil. (Which makes me wonder when we'll have a new OPEC -- Organization of Privacy Enabling Companies.)

Opacity isn't inherently good or bad -- it's both. To people who need privacy and secrecy to survive, opacity is immensely, critically valuable; for people who want privacy and secrecy to hide misbehavior, opacity is also rather important. But for individuals and organizations alike, opacity is becoming harder to maintain.

Some people have argued that privacy is dead. Typically, those making this argument are wealthy white guys, able to buy as much privacy as they want (and likely to get extremely annoyed when their privacy is violated). And for folks like these, opacity will always be easier to come by than for the rest of us.

This does not make people happy, unsurprisingly, and there have been a few different approaches to trying to hold onto a shred of opacity; as the technologies of observation and transparency continue to evolve, these approaches will have to evolve, too.

The first, and most common, is Regulation. Top-down and reactive, regulation says "don't violate privacy" and then punishes those who do. The only way that regulation stops the violation of opacity is through deterrence -- if I think I'll get caught and charged with a crime, I'm ostensibly less likely to want to do the bad thing in the first place. Ostensibly. In and of itself, regulation seems to be of declining value.

It's better when coupled with the second approach, Protection. Privacy protections tend to be bottom-up -- that is, undertaken directly by those who wish to keep things private -- and proactive. If nobody can see what I'm doing, my privacy is secure. Increasingly, this method of holding onto opacity requires strong crypto and smart technologies, but the real problem is economic: being able to stop others from seeing your personal information increasingly eats into their profits. And the kinds of tools that can protect me from Marc Zuckerberg can also protect a criminal from the government, so there isn't a lot of official encouragement to use individual privacy protection.

It's the last approach that really interests me: Pollution. Poisoning the data stream. Putting out enough false information that the real information becomes unreliable. At that point, anyone wishing to know the truth about me has to come to me directly, allowing me to control access. It's hardly a perfect option -- the untrue things can be permanently connected to you, and it does kind of make you hard to trust online -- but it's the one approach to opacity that's purely social and extremely difficult to stop.

Quick question: for those of you on Facebook, did you provide your real birthday? If so, why?

Part of the reason why commercial entities are able to run roughshod over our personal privacies is that we've become programmed to give them our information. They'll say in BIG SCARY LETTERS that you must provide truthful personal info, but seriously -- if you give Facebook a fake date of birth, how are they going to know? If you check in from fake locations, how can they prove you're not where you say you are? Your actual friends and family will know the truth.

And here's the fun part: if lots of people start lying about themselves on social media, even the truth becomes unreliable.

I think somebody should start selling T-Shirts that say, in big block letters, I LIE TO FACEBOOK. That may or may not be true for me -- but how would Facebook (or Google Plus, or Friendster, or whatever) know for sure?

So here's the big problem: we've become accustomed to the assumption that the status quo of deteriorating privacy is the only possible world. That's unlikely -- but the alternatives are going to be problematic in their own ways. Is a world of people lying about themselves preferable to a world of asymmetric transparency, where those with money and power can hide themselves but know whatever they want about you?

We're not likely to have a perfect future of (as David Brin says) privacy for me and accountability for everybody else. It's going to be a choice between various imperfect options. Wish us luck.

* Yes, yes -- grammatically, it should be "Data are the new oil."

I realize I just sort of left that post hanging, with the only conclusion being something on the order of "You maniacs! You blew it up!"

There are three general scenarios that come out of that last post.

The first, and most likely, is that we (as a planet) keep doing what we've been doing until things get even worse and we get much closer to irreversibility.

The second, and the one I hope happens, is that this scares enough people that there's a "cigarette phase shift" -- a rapid change in public discourse such that something that once just scientists and hippies cared about becomes a mainstream opinion.

The third, and the one that I fear, is that this becomes seen as a trigger to try out untested and potentially ridiculously risky geoengineering programs.

Now back to your regularly scheduled quiet grumbling.

In the middle of prepping for IFTF's 2012 Ten-Year Forecast event at the end of April, then traveling to Kazakhstan in late May. In the meantime...

US Experienced warmest March ever. Average temperature in the lower 48 states was 8.6 degrees above normal (although apparently not in California).

Or, in video form:

Unsurprisingly, permafrost in Siberia and northern Canada appears to be melting.

This is all something we've understood for quite awhile. A paper in Science in 1981 offered up a projection of temperatures, and the last 30 years has tracked closely (and slightly exceeded) the worst-case projection from that research.

Fortunately, there's something that can be done relatively quickly, relatively cheaply, and with relatively quick results: cut black carbon (mostly soot) and methane. It's not enough in and of itself, but would knock down temperature increases by 0.5°C, and give us more time to deal with the harder issues.

Of course, if the methane trapped under the permafrost is released, that plan gets a bit harder to accomplish.

None of this is news, in the sense of being an out-of-the-blue surprise. It's all stuff we've been talking about being a possibility for awhile. And it's now starting to happen.

A tech company called Envia Systems has announced that it is able to produce rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion, i.e., the standard kind of rechargeable batteries that go in everything from phones to electric cars) with a world-record energy density of 400 Watt-hours per kilogram! (Gigaom has lots of info, and useful background material.) Cool, right?

Yes? No?

Energy density is one of those really important concepts that not many people know about; it's not an exaggeration to say that a viable renewable energy future depends upon boosting energy density of batteries.

But it's hard to evaluate the importance of an announcement like this if you don't have context, so here you go:

Okay, 400 Watt-hours per kilogram (henceforth Wh/kg) means that one kilogram of battery material will be able to pump out electricity at a level of 400 Watts for one hour.

According to Envia, the best commercially-available Li-ion battery has an energy density of around 245 Wh/kg, so this new technology almost doubles that. This is good. Moreover, most Li-ion batteries operate at about 100-150 Wh/kg. The batteries in the Nissan Leaf, for example, have an energy density of about 120 Wh/kg (24 KWh/200kg). Tripling that density would, in principle, triple the range of the Leaf, taking it from around 100 miles to around 300 miles, a range close to a typical gasoline-powered car. This is very good.

But it's not revolutionary -- it's a (significant) incremental improvement.

That's because, even at 400Wh/kg, batteries still don't have an energy density anywhere close to fossil fuels.

Gasoline offers somewhere around 12,000 Wh/kg, 30x the energy density of the Envia battery technology. A Nissan Leaf with the same mass of gasoline-equivalent superbatteries would have a range of around 9,000 miles. Alternatively, to get the same 300 mile range as with the Envia batteries, the Nissan SuperLeaf would only need around 3kg of batteries.

I'm not discounting the importance of this breakthrough, not by any means, but it's important to keep this in context. There's a good reason why petroleum has such a hold on the world of transportation, and it's going to take a lot more than a tripling of battery energy density to beat it. Or, more to the point, moving beyond the gasoline automobile is going to take more than simply chipping away at energy density comparisons -- it's going to take a complete re-thinking of what we mean by transportation.

[UPDATE:]
As has been pointed out to me, in comments and in direct communication (and with varying degrees of politeness), this isn't an entirely fair comparison. It would be more accurate to compare the combination of energy density + drive efficiency.

Most standard automobiles have an average internal combustion engine efficiency of around 20% -- that is, of the energy available in the fuel, about 20% is eventually translated into motive force. So that 12,000 Wh/kg is effectively "only" 2,400 Wh/kg.

Electric motors, conversely, are extremely efficient at translating available energy into motive force; at 90%, that 400 Wh/kg Envia battery is still effectively 360 Wh/kg.

So a gasoline engine system 6.67x better than the Envia, not 30x better. The difference isn't as gobsmacking, but it's still significant, and remains a reminder of just how far battery technology has yet to evolve.

If there's a common trope about "futurism," it's that it gets everything wrong.

From jetpacks to vacations on the Moon, any discussion of futurism in broader culture very quickly turns into a listing of the various crazy things that "futurists" (whether or not they'd call themselves that) have said over the past century. Sometimes it's an easy one-off article, sometimes it's an entire book
or blog devoted the topic. Done well, it's a kind of indulgent ridicule: those futurists sure are whacky, but charmingly whacky.

Anyone who has read my stuff will know that I'm not really fond of being called a "futurist," although it's the most widely-recognized name for what I do. I don't make predictions, and I don't talk in certainties; I'm all about trying to illuminate surprising implications of present-day processes. I don't expect that the scenarios I offer will be right, but I do want them to be usefully provocative.

But that doesn't mean that I'm irritated by the focus on futurists being wrong (although I will admit to being tired of the "jetpack" trope; can't we come up with another stereotyped prediction?). I wrote a piece awhile back about "legacy futures," and pay close attention to the responsibility foresight professionals have to acknowledging when they get things wrong.

So when the term "forensic futurism" showed up today (see the extended entry for how & why), it hit me as something both useful and meaningful.

It's not enough simply to point and ridicule about whacky futurists. Those of us in the discipline really need to examine why serious forecasts can turn out to be terribly wrong. This takes two related forms:

A new volume on the evolving role of digital reputation, The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World is now out (also in Kindle format). Edited by my former Worldchanging colleague Hassan Masum (along with his colleague at the University of Waterloo, Mark Tovey), The Reputation Society includes essays by a wide array of writers, including Craig Newmark, Cory Doctorow, Alex Steffen, and me. My contribution, the cleverly-titled "The Future of Reputation Networks," is a set of scenarios of how online reputation systems might evolve over the next 10-20 years.

I use a classic two-dynamic scenario structure (whether the reputation networks are broad or narrow, and whether the reputation scores are directly assigned by users or "emergent"), resulting in four fairly different worlds.

In the extended entry you'll find one of the four scenarios, "Augmented Relationships."

Continue reading "Scenarios of Ill Repute" »

I've been mulling something of late, and it hasn't left me in a tremendously good mood.

Take a look at these two sets of graphs:

The first one is from the US Energy Information Administration, a group within the US Department of Energy tasked with coming up with independent statistics and analysis on US and world energy use. This chart is from the "International Energy Outlook 2011" report, released last September. It shows the breakdown of fuels used to generate electricity, given fairly conservative projections of growth and changing energy mix.

It shows that, by 2025 -- a little over 10 years from now -- coal will provide 10,200 terawatt-hours (TWh) out of a total of 28,700 TWh produced around the world, annually. By 2035, it's up to 12,900 TWh out of 35,200 TWh.

The second graph is from an article by David Roberts in Grist last year, "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change." Based on work done by leading energy/climate researcher Kevin Anderson (former head of the UK's Tyndall Energy Program), it shows how soon we as a planet need to start reducing carbon emissions, and how rapidly they need to decline given different "peak emissions" points. That's to avoid a 2 degree C increase in global temperatures, now understood to be a potentially catastrophic level of warming.

Here, we see that if we have peak emissions of around 65 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent in 2025, we have to be down to under 20 GtCO₂e by roughly 2035, and to zero GtCO₂ shortly thereafter. In energy terms, we'd have to go from this:

to this:

Basically, we have to replace over 21,000 TWh of electricity generation from coal and natural gas (yes, natural gas is less-harmful than coal, but still has a greenhouse impact) with an equivalent amount from some mix of renewable, hydro, and nuclear. And do it in 10 years.

Except it will have to be more than that, at least another 15,000 TWh more, because we'll have to replace all of the gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles on the roads around the world with alternative forms of transportation, all of which has to be electric (or human/animal-powered). And also add however much new power is required to run the various production lines day and night to make all of the needed photovoltaics, wind turbines, electric buses, and such.

For comparison, the world added... 15 TWh in solar in 2010.

Set aside issues of politics and economics, and simply look at raw logistics: is it even possible to undertake that kind of shift in 10 years?

As the second set of graphs above suggests, if we start before a 2025 peak, we'll have somewhat less carbon-based energy production we'd have to replace, and somewhat more time in which to do it. Not much, though -- even peaking in 2015 only pushes the deadline(!) out to 2050, if we're lucky (the red & blue lines in the graphs show alternative scenarios from the IPCC, none of which are very pleasant).

But given the current global political environment, it's difficult to imagine a real agreement to eliminate carbon emissions, taken seriously by all parties, showing up before the end of this decade.

So here are our three scenarios:

1) We manage to get a real global agreement in place within the next five-eight years, and spend the subsequent 25 or so years undertaking the largest industrial transformation imaginable. Politically implausible.

2) We don't get a real global agreement in place before 2025, and have to cut emissions by 10% per year (as Roberts notes, the biggest drop we've seen is 5% after the USSR's economy collapsed). Physically implausible.

3) Neither of those happen, and we start to see truly awful impacts, mostly in the developing world at first, all of which make the world politically more hostile and economically more fragile -- and make it more difficult to cut carbon emissions effectively.

This is why I think geoengineering is going to happen. Desperate people do desperate things, and when you hear sober scientists say things like population "carrying capacity estimates [are] below 1 billion people" in a world of 4 degree warming, it's hard to argue convincingly that the uncertainty and risks around geoengineering are worse.

Anyone who thinks that geoengineering is a way to avoid cutting carbon is an idiot. Geoengineering is a tourniquet, a desperate measure to stop the bleeding when nothing else can work in time. If Anderson's analysis is accurate (and, if anything, it may be optimistic), it's hard to see how we can avoid taking these desperate measures.