Is something still meaningful and true, even when it's been turned into a marketing slogan?

(Spotted in London, in the window of a brand marketing agency.)

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Andrew Revkin asked what I thought about his arguments for greater development and use of automated language translation technologies. In his piece "The No(w)osphere," Revkin writes:

As the human population heads toward nine billion and simultaneously becomes ever more interlaced via mobility, commerce and communication links, the potential to shape the human journey — for better or worse — through the sharing of ideas and experiences has never been greater. [...]

But language remains a barrier to having a truly global conversation...]

Automated translation remains clumsy, at best, these days. (One perfect illustration is the website "Translation Party," which translates an English phrase into Japanese, then translates it back to English, then back to Japanese, until it reaches "equilibrium" -- a point where the English and the Japanese auto-translate back and forth precisely.) Linguistic accuracy is a much harder problem than technology pundits of a few decades ago had expected. Nonetheless, as Revkin points out, there are a number of projects out there that suggest that a future of relatively useful automated translation is probably fairly near.

Here's the twist: I suspect that a less-than-perfect system would be better than an idealized perfect translation. Why? Because an imperfect system would require us to speak more simply and in a more straightforward fashion, with fewer culture-specific idioms and convoluted sentences, as we do today with our current tools. Working with people for whom English is not their primary language, I know that I need to speak and write in a way that doesn't lend itself to unintended ambiguity or confusion. If I knew that an automated system could be tripped up by overly-complex language, I'd be as careful and precise as possible.

But in everyday conversation, we don't tend to speak carefully and precisely. Correspondingly, an effectively perfect system would let us slip into the kinds of discussion and writing patterns that we use with other native speakers. I suspect that, counter-intuitively, this would lead to more confusion and friction, as meaning is culturally-rooted. A perfect translation of the denotation of a word or phrase may not carry the correct connotation; moreover, the translated word or phrase may have a very different connotation in a different culture.

In other words, translation technology that offers results that make sense linguistically, and carry the proper surface meaning of the words and phrases used, could well be close at hand. But translation technology that offers results that have the same meaning in both languages, especially with complex or idiomatic phrasing, probably awaits the arrival of relatively strong machine intelligence. Simply put, it would require software that understood what you meant, not just what you said.

We should be careful not to get these two outcomes confused. The more that we expect our translation tools to convert meaning, not just phrasing, the more likely we are to be unhappy with the results.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

...And just now my latest Fast Company piece popped up on the site. "Futures Thinking: Scanning the World" is the third in the occasional series on thinking like a futurist.

In my opinion, it may actually be the hardest step of all, because you have to navigate two seemingly contradictory demands:

• You need to expand the horizons of your exploration, because the factors shaping how the future of the dilemma in question will manifest go far beyond the narrow confines of that issue.
• You need to focus your attention on the elements critical to the dilemma, and not get lost in the overwhelming amount of information out there.

You should recognize up front that the first few times you do this, you'll miss quite a few of the key drivers; even experienced futurists end up missing some important aspects of a dilemma. It's the nature of the endeavor: We can't predict the future, but we can try to spot important signifiers of changes that will affect the future. We won't spot them all, but the more we catch, the more useful our forecasts.

It boils down to this: keep reading, keep asking questions, keeping looking for outliers... and if you think you have enough, you don't.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My latest Fast Company essay is up, and with it I return to the "Futures Thinking" series. This one, "Asking the Question," looks at how to craft a question for a foresight exercise that's most likely to generate useful results.

It's a subtle point, but I tend to find it useful to talk about strategic questions in terms of dilemmas, not problems. Problem implies solution--a fix that resolves the question. Dilemmas are more difficult, typically situations where there are no clearly preferable outcomes (or where each likely outcome carries with it some difficult contingent elements). Futures thinking is less useful when trying to come up with a clear single answer to a particular problem, but can be extremely helpful when trying to determine the best response to a dilemma. The difference is that the "best response" may vary depending upon still-unresolved circumstances; futures thinking helps to illuminate possible trigger points for making a decision.

As always, let me know what you think.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 6:05 PM | Permalink

My friend Stowe Boyd, consultant and provocateur, interviewed me recently for his Future of Money project. The video of that interview is now available at Stowe's blog, /Message.

It's a good conversation, although I clearly haven't learned the blogger video conversation practice of simply talking over the person I'm conversing with. I'm far too polite.

I start with the observation that all money is fantasy. I laugh/sigh when I see "gold bugs" going on and on about how money should be tied to gold, because gold has "real value." The only intrinsic value that gold has relates to how we can use it (in electronics, mostly, or as meal garnish); its utility as money is just as imaginary, just as "fiat," as post-Bretton Woods currency. It's a mutually-agreed upon fantasy. A "consensual hallucination," to steal from Gibson.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Slate's Josh Levin kicks off a series of articles on the possible future dissolution of the United States today with a piece about how a few different "futurologists" see the possibility. In "How Is America Going To End?", he talks to Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand (for GBN), and to me, covering the Fifty Year Scenarios I did for IFTF.

Cascio clearly believes that humanity has the ingenuity and the smarts to beat back threats to its continued existence. He doesn't, however, assume that the persistence of the United States is necessarily the most-desirable outcome. It's possible America will collapse as we try desperately to save it—or perhaps the country will shrivel up and go away when its time has come and gone. "It's not necessarily how America will survive," Cascio says, "but how do the values we hold dear … survive even if some of the institutions don't?"

I have to say, it's fairly rewarding to be held up shoulder-to-shoulder with Peter and Stewart.

Amusingly, the piece also includes a short -- six minute or so -- video interview. Embedded below, it's notable for me as a dire warning that I really shouldn't wear white.

The video embed sometimes forces a 15-second advertisement for (of all things) Amway at the beginning, so if you're ad-adverse, but have to have your Jamais-on-video fix, you can watch it at the Slate page.

Levin's series also includes a make-your-own Apocalypse game!

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sorry, don't know what came over me.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My intent, from this point forward, is to stop talking about the "long-term." No more long-term problems, long-term solutions, long-term changes. No more long-term perspectives.

In its place, I'm going to start talking about "multigenerational" issues. Multigenerational problems, solutions, changes. Multigenerational perspectives.

The advantage of the term "multigenerational" is threefold.

Firstly, it returns a sense of perspective that's often absent from purportedly "long-term" thinking. In a culture that has tended to operate on the "worry about tomorrow, tomorrow" model, looking at the next year can seem daring, and looking ahead five years can seem outrageous. But five years out isn't very long for long-term thinking; even ten years is better thought of as mid-range. Multi-generational, conversely, suggests that whatever we're thinking about may require us to think ahead 20+ years.

Secondly, it reinforces the notion that choices we make today don't just impact some distant future person (subject to discounting), but can and will directly affect our physical and cultural offspring. (Even those of us without kids of our own recognize that we have a role in shaping subsequent generations.) That is to say, "multigenerational" carries with it a greater implied responsibility than does "long-term."

Finally, it doesn't let us skip over the journey from today to the future. "Multigenerational" demands that we include generations along the way -- and while the core meaning of the term refers to human populations, one could stretch the concept to include other systems that show generational cycles.

This is a key difference between "long-term" and "multigenerational," but it's a subtle one. When we talk about the long-term, the corresponding structure of language -- and thinking -- tends to bias us towards a kind of punctuated futurism, pushing us to look ahead to the end of the era in question while leaping over the intervening years. This skews our perspective. "In the long run, we are all dead" John Maynard Keynes famously said -- but over that same long run, we will all have lived our lives, too.

I'm increasingly convinced that, when looking ahead, the focus should be less on the destination than on how we get there. Yet that's not how we discuss long-term issues. When we describe climate change as a long-term problem, for example, we inevitably end up talking about what it would look like down the road, after some "tipping point" perhaps, or at a particular calendar demarcation (2050 or 2100). Although there's no explicit denial that climate change is something with implications for every year between now and then, our attention -- our foresight gaze, as we might think of it -- is drawn to that distant end-point, not to the path.

My thoughts about "long-run" vs. "long-lag" problems cover a similar issue, looking at how our articulations of the future shape our thoughts of it. But this is a deeper problem, one that the "long-lag" concept only hints at.

"Multigenerational" has two drawbacks, however. The first is that, simply put, it's a bear of a word. Multi-syllabic, 17 letters in length, it requires a bit more effort than "long-term" to write or say. While not an insurmountable barrier, this does mean that sheer laziness will bias me towards "long-term."

The second is a bit more serious. As noted above, multigenerational implies looking ahead twenty or more years. If we consider a ten-year horizon to be the outer edge of medium-term, there's still the "near-long-term" range between ten and twenty years out to worry about. It's definitely not multigenerational -- hell, it's really not even generational. Yet it's still well beyond the comfortable "foresight window" for most people (which, in my experience, tends to be about five years). At this point, I'm likely to just roll that time range into multigenerational, but the inherent inaccuracy leaves me wanting a better solution.

I first started thinking about the multigenerational vs. long-term language a month or so ago, while talking with colleagues working on a new foresight-driven non-profit. Its utility was solidified, however, when Emily Gertz pointed me to this essay by science fiction writer and green futurist Kim Stanley Robinson, "Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme," which looks out at what's needed to develop a postcapitalism perspective. KSR is one of the best world-builder science fiction writers out there, in my opinion, and he has an excellent sense of historical patterns. If he's taken to using "multigenerational," then I feel confident of its value.

Language matters, especially when considering something that's intrinsically conceptual rather than physical. "Long-term" has a lengthy (!) history and deep cultural roots; I expect that I'll find myself using the phrase for some time, even as I try to shift to "multigenerational." But right now we're facing a century of what could easily be the greatest overlapping set of crises our civilization has ever seen. If we're to get through this era intact, we'll need all the tools at our disposal -- and to be thinking about the consequences of our actions with as much acuity and clarity as humanly possible.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

You might remember the story of old John Henry. He built rail lines, and could work harder and faster than any man alive. When the company brought in a steam-driven rail driving machine, though, they announced that they were going to fire all of the human rail workers. John Henry stepped up and challenged that machine.

Challenged it, and beat it.

And then dropped over dead.

Keep that in mind as you read this.

Roy Blount, Jr., the president of the Authors' Guild, wrote an editorial in the New York Times on February 25th, arguing that the text-to-speech feature of Amazon's new Kindle 2 electronic book reading device actually violates the intellectual property rights of the authors he represents, as it provides the functional equivalent of an audiobook, without paying for audiobook rights.

The crux of Blount's argument is that it's critical to set a precedent now, because the text-to-speech is an audio performance of the book, and even if the digital vocalization is now lousy, it won't always be.

Not surprisingly, authors who have more willingly entered the 21st century, such as Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and Wil Wheaton, have attacked Blount's argument with gusto. Wil even provides an amusing side-by-side audio comparison (MP3) of himself and the Mac's "Alex" voice reading a section of his new book Sunken Treasure.

For Scalzi, Gaiman, and Wheaton, the crux of the argument is that Blount's concerns are worse than silly, because nobody would mistake the text-to-speech for real voice acting. (Doctorow, as is his practice, focuses on the legal aspect of Blount's argument, finding it more than wanting.)

My take on this? They're all wrong (well, probably not Cory)... and they're all right, too. That is, Blount is right about the technology, but wrong in his conclusions, while Scalzi/Gaiman/Wheaton/et al are wrong about the problem, but right about the proper response. The reason that Blount's wrong is that he's just trying to hold back the tide, fighting a battle that was lost long ago. The reason that the 21st century digital writers are wrong is that they've forgotten the Space Invaders rule: Aim at where your target will be, not at where it is.

Text-to-speech is laughably bad now for reading books aloud.

Text-to-speech could very well be the primary way people consume audiobooks within a decade.

At present, text-to-speech systems that go from ASCII to audio follow a few pronunciation conventions, but otherwise have no way of interpreting what is read for proper emphasis. For the kinds of uses that current text-to-speech systems typically see, that's good enough. For reading books, especially fiction, that's not.

But it's not hard to imagine what would be needed to make text-to-speech good enough for books, too. In order to give the right vocalization to the words it's reading, an "AutoAudio Book" would have to have one of three characteristics:

• It could have been told in detail how to emphasize certain words and phrases, probably through some kind of XML-based markup standard. Call it DRML, or Dramatic Reading Markup Language. Given the existence of other kinds of voice control systems (such as speech synthesis markup language and pronunciation lexicon specification), such a standard isn't hard to imagine. It would take some pre-processing of the text files, though, to really make it work.

• At the other end of the spectrum, it could actually understand what it's reading, and be able to provide emphasis based on what is going on in the story (basically, what you or I would do).

• Somewhere in the middle would be a system that had a number of standard emphasis heuristics, and is able to take a raw text file and, after a little just-in-time processing, offer an audio version that would by no means be as good as a real voice actor, but would, for most people, be good enough.
  

The DRML version is possible now -- hell, I had DOS apps back in the 1990s that would let me add markers to a text file to tell primitive text-to-speech software how to read it. The "understand what it's reading" version, conversely, remains some time off; frankly, that's pretty close to a real AI, and if those are available for something as prosaic as an ebook reader, we have bigger disruptions to worry about.

But the "emphasis heuristics" scenario strikes me as just on the edge of possible. There would have to be some level of demand -- such as would arguably be demonstrated by the success of the Kindle 2 and its offspring. More importantly, it would require a dedicated effort to create the necessary heuristics; amusingly, Blount's editorial has probably done more than anything else to make irritated geeks want to figure out how to do just that. It would probably also need a more powerful processor in the ebook reader; that's the kind of incentive that might make Intel want to underwrite the aforementioned irritated geeks.

One can easily imagine a scenario in which we see a kind of "wiki-emphasis" editing, allowing tech-attuned readers, upon encountering a poorly-read section of an AutoAudio Book, to update it and upload the bugfix, thereby improving the heuristics. (Of course, that would undoubtedly result in orthographic edit-wars and dialect forking. But I digress.)

Ultimately, Blount's fears that a super text-to-speech system could undermine the market for professional audiobooks really have more to do with economic choices than technical ones. The requisite technologies are either here but expensive or just on the horizon, and the combination of technological pathways and legal precedent (as Doctorow describes) make the scenario of good-enough book reading systems all but certain. But that doesn't guarantee that the market for audio books goes away. The history of online music is illustrative here, I think: when the music companies were ignorant or stubborn, music sharing proliferated; when music companies finally figured out that it was smart to sell the music online at a low price, music sharing dropped off considerably.

The more that the book industry tries to fight book-reading systems, the more likely it is that these systems (whether for Kindles, or iPhones, or Googlephones, or whatever) will start to crowd out commercial audiobooks. The more that the book industry sees this as an opportunity -- keeping audiobook prices low, for example, or maybe providing ebooks with DRML "hinting" for a dollar more than the plain ebook -- the more likely it is that book reading systems will be seen as a curiosity, not a competitor.

None of these scenarios may be very heartening for authors, unfortunately. Sorry about that.

At least you're not likely to keel over and die competing with an automated audiobook.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

This Thursday, I'll be delivering the morning keynote at the Art Center College of Design Sustainable Mobility Summit. My talk will cover the big picture context for the kinds of debates and discussions swirling around the event. There will be the usual assortment of drivers -- along with a cheeseburger or two -- but I thought I'd offer a preview of where the talk ends up.

After going through an exploration of fundamental catalysts, I list three different lenses through which to view what tomorrow holds:

Participatory Future
Bottom-up drivers enable greater collaboration and participation, but also greater instability. This is a future of Open Source Design and Global Guerillas. This is a world where power comes from the Commons.

Interconnected Future
Technology-driven changes enable more sharing of information and ideas, but abandon the remnants of old intellectual property and privacy rules. This is a future of the Participatory Panopticon and Augmented Reality. This is a world where power comes from Relationships.

Leapfrog Future
Catastrophe and Opportunity combine to drive the creation of new economic, political, and social models. This is a future of Massive Disruptions and Unanticipated Consequences. This is a world where power comes from Creativity.

To unpack this a bit: These are clearly not necessarily mutually-exclusive scenarios, but different ways of thinking about how anticipation, response, and resilience manifest in an era of crisis. By power, I don't mean it in the "...flows from the barrel of a gun" sense, but in the "social engine of change" sense -- that is, how we enable our anticipation, response, and resilience. Although I don't discuss a set timeline, I think of these scenarios as operating in the fifteen-to-twenty year horizon.

I intentionally gave them all reasonably appealing names. I wanted to avoid any sense that I was pushing towards one or away from another, and especially wanted to avoid any intimation that this was a "good-medium-bad" set of linear scenarios.

There's very little narrative to these futures -- so little that I actually hesitate to call them "scenarios" -- but they do provide structure. They're scaffolds, frameworks upon which to build stories of tomorrow. I have a fairly limited time to give my presentation, so I won't be able to do much building myself.

My hope is that these three scaffolds will give the Summit participants a useful way of thinking about the various challenges and surprises they encounter at the event.

As always, I look forward to seeing what kind of responses these ideas generate.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

One of the secondary effects of the latest set of crises to grip the world is the rise of essays and articles from various insightful folks, laying out scenarios of what the future will look like in an era of limited resources, energy, money, and so forth. Most of these follow a similar pattern: a list of reasonable depictions of a more limited future, and at least one item that seems completely out of the blue.

The best example has to come from James Kunstler's description of the world to come in his "non-fiction" The Long Emergency and his explicitly fictional World Made By Hand. Along with his schadenfreude-soaked claims about the end of suburbia, automobiles, and all things superficial, he comes in with stark assertions that we'll all be making our own music and acting on stage for each other, instead of listening to that damnable recorded "rock-roll" music and the disco and suchlike.

Yeah, I'm no big fan of JHK's reactionary futurism, but this points to a bigger trend, one that I'm seeing across a variety of political spectra: the vision of an apocalyptic near-future as a catalyst for making the kinds of social/economic/political/technological/religious/etc. changes that the ignorant or deceived masses wouldn't have otherwise made.

This isn't just Rapturism, where a glorious transformation happens, which may or may not have nasty results for some; in that kind of scenario, an apocalypse isn't a trigger so much as a possible side-effect. In this kind of scenario -- "aspirational apocaphilia" -- the global disaster is a requisite enabler.

It's a notable trend in that it's something that those of us who consider ourselves ethical futurists need to pay close attention to in our own work. I'd love to see the current crises result in a variety of more sustainable social patterns -- but I have to be careful not to mistake my desire with what would be a useful forecast.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

A new economic superpower undermines established economic leaders. The collapse of complex financial instruments turn a boom into a bust. Banks fail in waves. Unemployment reaches up to 25% in some areas. A global depression holds on for more than two decades. Class warfare breaks out. Transportation networks stall -- along with industries dependent upon them -- as the main "fuel" for transportation disappears. Pandemic disease exacts a terrible toll. Religious fundamentalism skyrockets. Totalitarianism rises around the world.

I'm describing the 1870s-1890s. Hopefully, I'm not also describing the next couple of decades.

Historian Scott Reynolds Nelsen argues in the Chronicle of Higher Education that today's financial crisis bears a much closer resemblance to the Panic of 1873 and the resulting Long Depression than to the more familiar Great Depression of 1929. He writes:

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. [...] The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. [...]

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing).

Among the results of the 1873 Panic & Long Depression (lasting until 1896) were the labor movement and religious fundamentalism in the US, modern anti-semitism in Europe, and (according to Hannah Arendt) the origins of totalitarianism.

As for transportation networks and pandemic, they were actually connected issues. In 1872, equine influenza took hold in the US, infecting close to 100% of all horses, with a mortality rate ranging from 1-2% to 10%. The "Great Epizootic of 1872" froze horse-drawn transportation (even leaving the US cavalry on foot), which in turn stalled trains because of the lack of coal transport.

As a preview of peak oil it's admittedly shallow, but the similarities are there. The damage to transportation and industry in 1872 was a significant multiplier to the financial crisis; a modern collapse of transportation -- even if equally temporary -- would be potentially even more devastating.

Our understanding of and tools for managing the global economy are better now than in the 1870s, and there are enough divergent drivers to make the overall parallel more instructive than spooky. But while we may be missing some of the factors that made the Long Depression so bad, we have plenty new elements that threaten to make the current situation even worse: climate disaster, networked terrorism, and much more deeply-linked economic interdependence between states.

If we generalize a bit from the 1870s-1890s, a handful of key issues emerge as likely to have echoes today:

Why Obama's selection of Rick Warren to give an opening prayer at the inauguration is a lesson for environmental activists -- and poses a troubling question about the future.

If you follow political news in the US, you're probably aware that President-Elect Barack Obama has asked conservative Pastor Rick Warren to give the opening invocation for the inauguration ceremony (Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and open supporter of gay marriage, will give the closing benediction). Given that Warren is known for some fairly un-Obama-like statements (explicitly comparing gay marriage to pedophilia, calling for the assassination of Iran's leaders), this selection has been a smidge controversial, with quite a few liberals seeing this as Obama having "peed in the ol' cornflakes" of gay and progressive supporters. The uproar about this choice, however, has in turn been met with dismissive or angry replies from other Obama supporters, who say that having Warren speak for two minutes is pretty close to meaningless, and it's a good move by Obama to be willing to reach out to communities that didn't vote for him in November. Some even argue that it's smart politics for Obama to attack liberals to show his independence.

It struck me, reading the debate online (and having a mild debate of my own over Twitter with Howard Rheingold), that not only are both sides right in this, it's actually very useful to have this kind of debate be so public, even if it gets caricatured as "the Left vs Obama."

To begin to see why, imagine this: John McCain won, asked Warren to give the closing benediction, and asked Joseph Lowery to give the opening invocation as a way of reaching out to the communities that didn't vote for McCain in November. How would the conservative "base" respond to that choice? With anger. And it would certainly be seen as a problem for McCain to have so upset his supporters, not as a sign of strength.

This is a well-known process: radical positions become commonplace, shifting the "center" towards the fringe. This is known as the Overton Window, and as I noted back in January, it has the potential for being a decisive tool for shifting perspectives about the environment.

If the selection of Warren had been met only with "ho hum, it doesn't matter much, and it's useful politics for Obama," the conventional wisdom that Warren represents some kind of moderate position would be further solidified -- "see, even the crazy lefties think he's a moderate!" -- and might even give a subtle push to the idea that Warren is actually kind of liberal.

But with this immediate and loud turmoil over the choice, the conventional wisdom that Warren is a moderate gets eroded, and a new mainstream notion starts to emerge: Warren's views are actually pretty conservative, and Obama is being nice to the right wing in this, not simply embracing the center.

It's a quiet game, and not one that will be shifted by a single event. But what the reaction to the Warren choice helps to demonstrate -- and here's where this becomes useful for people thinking about changing the politics around global warming -- is that loud, angry voices can reshape the nature of the mainstream. These voices don't become the mainstream, at least not initially, but push what's considered to be the "moderate center" a bit more towards the desired position. We can see that now with gay marriage, as the "civil unions with the same rights" concept has become something of the cautious, centrist view, not something seen as radical and weird.

The question all of this raises, however, is what happens when countervailing groups both decide to operate as Overton Window drivers?

Remember, the basic concept is that by vocally espousing a truly radical position, what gets considered to be moderate shifts towards you by looking like a reasonable contrast. So when differing sides of an argument both start to use this process, do we simply remain at the status quo "center"? Or do we have a bifurcated center, and further fragmentation? Or does it become an opening for an entirely new position to take hold?

I'm also curious about what happens when you can identify an Overton process starting up. Take nanotech -- if the reasonable center was somewhere between "go fast, but pay close attention to problems" and "go slow," one could imagine that strident calls for (say) the arrest of anyone working on nanotechnology (as people engaged in crimes against the planet/humanity) to be considered on the unacceptable fringe. But as those calls persisted, even from a small minority, the reasonable center might start to shift to become something between "go slow" and "stop research," with more encouraging positions increasingly seen as radical.

So if we saw something like that, and didn't want to see the reasonable center shift, what could we do?

There's one of your Jobs of Tomorrow: Overton Window Engineer.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:26 PM | Permalink

Reading a talk given by science fiction author Ken Macleod, I came across this bit:

I used the term 'legacy code' in one of my novels, and Farah Mendlesohn, a science-fiction critic who read it thought it was a term I had made up, and she promptly adapted it for critical use as 'legacy text'. Legacy text is all the other science fiction stories that influence the story you're trying to write, and that generally clutter up your head even if you never read, let along write, the stuff. Most of us have default images of the future that come from Star Trek or 2001 or 1984 or Dr Who or disaster movies or computer games. These in turn interact with the tendency to project trends straightforwardly into the future.

What immediately struck me is that we all have this kind of cognitive "legacy code" in our thinking about the future, not just science fiction writers, and it comes from more than just pop-culture media. We get legacy futures in business from old strategies and plans, legacy futures in politics from old budgets and forecasts, and legacy futures in environmentalism from earlier bits of analysis. Legacy futures are rarely still useful, but have so thoroughly colonized our minds that even new scenarios and futures models may end up making explicit or implicit references to them.

In some respects, the jet pack is the canonical legacy future, especially given how the formulation (originally from Calvin & Hobbes, I believe), of "where's my jet pack?" has become a widely-used phrase representing disappointment with the future instantiated in the present.

People who follow my Twitter stream may recognize another example of a legacy future: Second Life. While the jet pack never really became part of anything other than Disneyfied visions of Tomorrowland, over the past five years or so Second Life came to represent for professional forecasters and futurists the vision of the Metaverse. Even though Second Life has yet to live up to any of the expectations thrust upon it by people outside of the online game industry, it has doggedly maintained its presence as a legacy future.

Just like legacy code makes life difficult for programmers, legacy futures can make life difficult for futures thinkers. Not only do we have to describe a plausibly surreal future that fits with current thinking, we have to figure out how to deal with the leftover visions of the future that still colonize our minds. If I describe a scenario of online interaction and immersive virtual worlds, for example, I know that the resulting discussion will almost certainly include people trying to map that scenario onto their existing concept of how Second Life represents The Future.

Sure, Second Life futurism may be a particular irritant for me, but the legacy futures concept can have much more troubling implications.

We can see it in discussions of post-petroleum transportation that continue to elevate hydrogen fuel cells as The Answer, even though most eco-futurists and green automotive thinkers now regard that technology as something of a dead end. We can see it in population projections that don't account for either healthcare technologies extending both productive lives and overall lifespans. We can see it in both visions of a sustainable future reminiscent of 1970s commune life, and visions of a viable future that don't include dealing with massive environmental disruption.

All of these were once legitimate scenarios for what tomorrow might hold -- not predictions, but challenges to how we think and plan. For a variety of reasons, their legitimacy has faded, but their hold on many of us remains.

This leaves us with two big questions:

All distant problems are not created equally.

By definition, distant (long-term) problems are those that show their real impact at some point in the not-near future; arbitrarily, we can say five or more years, but many of them won't have significant effects for decades. Our habit, and the institutions we've built, tend to look at long-term problems as more-or-less identical: Something big will happen later. For the most part, we simply wait until the long-term becomes the near-term before we act.

This practice can be effective for some distant problems: Let's call them "long-run problems." With a long-run problem, a solution can be applied any time between now and when the problem manifests; the "solution window," if you will, is open up to the moment of the problem. While the costs will vary, it's possible for a solution applied at any time to work. It doesn't hurt to plan ahead, but taking action now instead of waiting until the problem looms closer isn't necessarily the best strategy. Sometimes, the environment changes enough that the problem is moot; sometimes, a new solution (costing much less) becomes available. By and large, long-run problems can be addressed with common-sense solutions.

Here's a simple example of a long-run problem: You're driving a car in a straight line, and the map indicates a cliff in the distance. You can change direction now, or you can change direction as the cliff looms, and either way you avoid the cliff. If you know that there's a turn-off ahead, you may keep driving towards the cliff until you get to your preferred exit.

The practice of waiting until the long-term becomes the near-term is less effective, however, for the other kind of distant problem: Let's call them "long-lag problems." With long-lag problems, there's a significant distance between cause and effect, for both the problem and any attempted solution. The available time to head-off the problem doesn't stretch from now until when the problem manifests; the "solution window" may be considerably briefer. Such problems can be harder to comprehend, since the connection between cause and effect may be subtle, or the lag time simply too enormous. Common-sense answers won't likely work.

A simple, generic example of a long-lag problem is difficult to construct, since we don't tend to recognize them in our day-to-day lives. Events that may have been set in motion years ago can simply seem like accidents or coincidences, or even assigned a false proximate trigger in order for them to "make sense."

But a real-world example of a long-lag problem should make the concept clear.

Global warming is, for me, the canonical example of a long-lag problem, as geophysical systems don't operate on human cause-and-effect time frames. Because of atmospheric and ocean heat cycles (the "thermal inertia" I keep going on about), we're now facing the climate impacts of carbon pumped into the atmosphere decades ago. Similarly, if we were to stop emitting any greenhouse gases right this very second, we'd still see another two to three decades of warming, with all of the corresponding problems. If we're still three degrees below a climate disaster point, but have another two degrees of warming left because of thermal inertia regardless of what we do, we can't wait until we've increased to just below three degrees to act. If we do, we're hosed.

With long-lag problems, you simply can't wait until the problem is imminent before you act. You have to act long in advance in order to solve the problem. In other words, the solution window closes long before the problem hits.

We have a number of institutions, from government to religions to community organizations, with the potential to deal with long-run problems. We may not do well with them individually, but as a civilization, we've developed decent tools. However, we don't have many -- perhaps any -- institutions with the inherent potential to deal with long-lag problems. Moreover, too many people think all long-term problems are long-run problems.

(This argument emerged from a mailing list discussion of the Copenhagen Consensus. Smart people, with lots of good ideas, but clearly convinced that we can address global warming as a long-run problem.)

Sadly, recognizing the difference between long-run and long-lag problems simply isn't a common (or common-sense) way of thinking about the world. We evolved to engage in near-term foresight (and I mean that literally; look at the work of University of Washington neuroscientist William Calvin for details), and (as noted) we have developed institutions to engage in long-run foresight. Long-lag is a hard problem because it combines the insight requirements of long-run foresight (e.g., being able to make a reasonable projection for long-range issues) with the limited-knowledge-action requirements of near-term foresight (e.g., being able to act decisively and effectively before all information about a problem has been settled). Both are already difficult tasks; in combination, they can seem overwhelming.

A salient characteristic of long-lag problems is that they're often not amenable to brief, intense interactions as solutions. Dealing with such problems can take a long period, during which time it may be unclear whether the problem has been solved. Politically, this can be a dangerous time -- the investment of money, time and expertise has already happened, but nothing yet can be shown for it.

Another long-lag problem that shows this dilemma clearly is the risk of asteroid impact. It turns out that nuking the rock (as in Armageddon) doesn't work, but a small, steady force on the rock for a period of years, years ahead of the potential impact, does. Pushing the rock moves the point of impact slowly, and it may take a decade or more before we can be certain that the asteroid will now miss us. That's why the slim possibility of a 2036 impact of 99942 Apophis frightens many asteroid watchers: if we don't get a good read on the trajectory of the rock long before its near-approach in 2029, we simply won't have time to make a big enough change to its path to avoid disaster.

But tell people in power that we need to be worrying now about something that won't even potentially hurt us until 2036, and the best you'll get is a blank look.

My interest, at this point, is to try to identify other long-lag problems, and to see what kinds of general conditions separate long-run and long-lag problems. With both global warming and asteroid impacts, the lag comes from physics; with peak oil (and other resource collapse problems), conversely, the lag comes from the need for wholesale infrastructure replacement. What else is out there?

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Adam Greenfield on America's rejection of the future.

For a long, long time thereafter, I’d sit in idle moments and wonder just when future shock was going to happen. In my childish conception, it was something that would happen all at once, be precipitated by some obvious event - the proverbial straw - and stand out just as vividly and obviously as an outbreak of the flu when it did roll across the land. It took me years to understand the words as pointing toward something more poetic and metaphoric than clinically diagnostic. It’s a thought I’ve had occasion to dig up and reconsider this last week. Because this is what I’ve come to understand: Here we are. This is it.

Must read.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

You have my permission to slap the next futurist (foresight thinker, scenario strategist, or trend-spotter) who uses the expression "this changes everything" seriously. Slap them hard. Maybe a shin-kick, too, if you're into it.

The notion that some new development -- usually a technology, but not always -- "changes everything" manages to combine the most uselessly banal and the most pointlessly wrong observations in the field.

At the top end, it's part of what I'm starting to call the "cinematic bias" in futurism: the need to describe future developments in ways that startle, titillate, and would probably look pretty cool on-screen. Quite often, the items that fall into this category are simply impossible, or so implausible as to make me struggle to avoid lashing out with Dean Venture's infamous "I dare you to make less sense!" I'm not shocked when people from client companies offer up suggestions like these -- cinematic science fiction is the common language of futurism right now -- but I'm boggled when I see people who get paid to do this for a living coming up with misfires like "teleportation eases traffic problems!" or "population pressure solved by Moon colonies!"

Sometimes, it's not just implausibility, it's an unwillingness to deviate from The One True Future. Logic is irrelevant, except for the narrow conjectural pathway that leads the futurist from Point A to Point Stupid. Complexity goes right out the window, as do any notions of co-evolution, competing drivers, mistakes, or push-back. This is the kind of thinking that tells us that we don't need to worry about global warming/hunger/poverty/ocean acidification/resource depletion because NewTechnology will fix all of our problems, for ever and ever amen.

I'm not saying this out of pessimism, or even realism. It's I'm-not-trapped-with-my-head-up-my-posterier-ism.

At the opposite end of the "this changes everything" spectrum are those people who use this cognitive abortion of a phrase to describe something that might merit a page 14 mention in Widget Fancy. No, a new form of text messaging does not change everything. A new teen language trend does not change everything. And the latest update to an MP3 player most decidedly does not change everything.

You might think that the people offering up such exaggerated praise for minor developments are novice marketeers, trying on their big hyperbole pants for the first time. You'd be wrong. More often, such an utterance comes from someone who should be paying attention to such things discovering a new toy or trend that half the people sitting around the table already knew about (most likely the underpaid under-30 interns & employees). Simply put, saying that a new widget will "change everything" is just one step more articulate than holding up a napkin drawing and saying "ZOOM! WHOOSH! PEW PEW!"

What frustrates me most about the ascendence of the "this changes everything" meme is that its implicit opposite is "this changes nothing." Left out are the changes that really matter: the widgets and methods and practices and ideas that change the little parts of our lives, the everyday decisions, offering us new perspectives on old problems -- not solving them with a wave of the hand, but letting us see new ways to grapple with old dilemmas. This doesn't change everything -- in the real world, like it or not, we change everything. The longer we wait for magical technology or new MP3 players to do it for us, the sorrier we'll be.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Here's the opening of a work in progress....

Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. A super-volcano at what's now Sumatra's Lake Toba erupted with a strength more than a thousand times greater than that of Mount St. Helens in 1981. Over 800 cubic kilometers of ash filled the skies of the northern hemisphere, lowering global temperatures and pushing a climate already on the verge of an ice age over the edge. Genetic evidence shows that at this time – many anthropologists say as a result – the population of Homo sapiens dropped to as low as a few thousand families.

It seems to have been a recurring pattern: Severe changes to the global environment put enormous stresses on our ancestors. From about 2.3 million years ago, up until about 10,000 years ago, the Earth went through a convulsion of glacial events, some (like the post-Toba period) coming on in as little as a few decades.

How did we survive? By getting smarter. Neurophysiologist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition – including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead – evolved due to the demands of this succession of rapid environmental changes. Neither as strong, nor as swift, nor as stealthy as our competitors, the hominid advantage was versatility. We know that the complexity of our tools increased dramatically over the course of this period. But in such harsh conditions, tools weren't enough – survival required cooperation, and that meant improved communication and planning. According to Calvin, over this relentless series of whiplash climate changes, simple language developed syntax and formal structure, and a rough capacity to target a moving animal with a thrown rock evolved into brain structures sensitized to looking ahead at possible risks around the corner.

Our present century may not be quite as perilous as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano, but it is abundantly clear that the next few decades will pose enormous challenges to human civilization. It's not simply climate disruption, although that's certainly a massive threat. The end of the fossil fuel era, global food web fragility, population density and pandemic disease, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nanotechnologies – all of these offer ample opportunity for broad social and economic disruption, even devastation. And as good as the human brain has become at planning ahead, we're still biased by evolution to look for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard to manage.

But here's an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: By getting smarter. Only this time, we don't have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost intelligence. We can do it ourselves. Indeed, the process is already underway.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Brad Templeton wants you to stop driving.

Templeton (Chairman of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, programmer, dot-com entrepreneur, inventor of the "dot com" domain name structure -- no kidding! -- and more) laments the tens of thousands of people killed every year in traffic accidents, the waste of urban space for parking garages and gas stations, and the various institutional roadblocks to moving to renewable energy systems. But he doesn't suggest that you go get a bicycle, you lazy bum, or spend hours on packed public transit. He wants you to get a robot.

A robot car, to be precise.

Brad Templeton's set of essays, under the collective title "Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Will Really Take Us," explains exactly why robot (autonomous-driver) cars are possible, likely, safer, cleaner, and all-around a good idea. This isn't meant as a nuanced thought experiment; Templeton lays out page after page of statistics, arguments, and data. This is a massively detailed piece. If you think of an objection, chances are he's already covered it.

(Disclosure: Brad sent me a link to an earlier version of this piece, and I sent back numerous comments.)

Templeton doesn't make any claims that this would be easy, or that it could be done soon. As a professional programmer, he's well-acquainted with both the risks arising from relying on computer controls, and the difficulty of putting autonomous systems on the road alongside human drivers. He sees these as solvable issues, though, and points to present-day examples of extremely reliable coding and the "Darpa Grand Challenge" for automated drivers as reasons why. The social (particularly the legal-liability) issues are less-easily solved.

Probably the most provocative aspect of this piece is Templeton's effort to play out some of the consequences of a shift to robotic vehicles. Not only would autonomous vehicles allow for major changes to urban design (don't need downtown parking if your car can come when you call) and major reduction of accident rates (crash-avoidance would be the first form that car automation would take, potentially eliminated tens of thousands of crashes per year, saving hundreds of millions of dollars), we'd likely see the end of mass transit (with a few long-haul exceptions).

(His data on the overall energy efficiency of mass transit, versus standard, hybrid, and ultra-light automobiles, is startling.)

I suspect that both technophile and envirophile readers will find aspects of Templeton's piece to argue with, but I suspect you'll be surprised at how strong and reasonably well-supported most of his claims are. This is the kind of piece you go into thinking that it's all crazy, and come out thinking it's all quite plausible.

Do I believe him? I think he lays out a pretty compelling scenario. I do think he still under-estimates the social, cultural, and legal inertia likely to slow the rate of acceptance of such systems. This strikes me as almost certainly a generation-change issue -- that is, the rate of acceptance will map to the maturation of kids growing up riding in semi-autonomous vehicles. Lots of resistance for longer than expected, then boom, a phase shift.

But I doubt it will happen first in the US. Singapore, maybe Scandinavia, Japan almost certainly... but I expect USians to be watching this from afar.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Be afraid.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'll start this essay by leading with my conclusion: do we make it through this century? Yeah, but not all of us, and it's neither as spectacular nor as horrific as many people imagine.

Techno-utopianism is heady and seductive. Looking at the proliferation of powerful catalytic technologies, and the potential for truly transformative innovations just beyond our present grasp, makes scenarios of transcendence wiping away the terrible legacies of 20th century industrialism seem easy. If we're just patient, and don't shy away from the scale of the potential change, all that we fear today could be as relevant as 19th century tales of crowded city streets overwhelmed by horse droppings.

But if you don't trust the technological scenarios, it's not hard to see just how thoroughly we're doomed. There are myriad drivers: depleting resources, rapid environmental degradation, global warming, international political instability, just to name a few. Any of these forms of "collapse" would pose a considerable challenge; in combination, they're simply terrifying. Most importantly, we seem to be unwilling to acknowledge the significance of the challenge. We're evolutionarily set to look for nearby, near-term problems and ignore deeper, distributed threats.

But here's the twist: the impacts of these broader drivers for collapse and of technosocial innovation aren't and won't be evenly distributed globally. Some places will be able to last longer in the face of resource and environmental collapse than will others -- and (not coincidentally) such places may be at the forefront of technosocial development, as well. The combination of collapse and innovation will lead to profoundly divergent results around the world.

One disturbing aspect is that the slowly-developing/late-leapfrog world may not be hurt nearly as badly as the recent-leapfrog nations -- it may be worse to be China or Brazil than Indonesia or Nigeria, for example, because rapid industrialization based on carbon-age technologies still leaves you more dependent upon the collapsing resources than you had been, but not yet in a good position to leap past the collapse itself. The key example here would be China and India's growing dependence on coal (and, to a lesser extent, old-style massively-centralized nuclear power). In order to support their rapid economic development, they're stuck using energy technologies that are devastating both locally (through pollution) and globally (through carbon footprint). Add to this that China's economic and demographic situation is more unstable than many people think, and that India faces significant political threats -- including terrorism -- both internally and along its border.

So the dilemma here is how to construct a global policy that can take into account the sheer complexity of the onrushing collapse. If it was "just" resource depletion, it would be tricky but doable; but it's resource collapse plus global warming plus pandemic disease plus post-hegemonic disorder plus the myriad other issues we're grappling with. It's going to be difficult to see our way through this. Not impossible, but difficult.

The aspects that are on our side:

One of the hardest things to grapple with as a futurist is the sheer banality of tomorrow.

We live our lives, dealing with everyday issues and minor problems. Changes rarely shock; more often, they startle or titillate, and very quickly get folded into the existing cultural momentum. Even when big events happen, even in the worst of moments, we cope, and adapt. This is, in many ways, a quiet strength of the human mind, and a reason for hope when facing the dismal prospects ahead of us.

But futurism, at least as it's currently presented, is rarely about the everyday. More often, futurists tell stories about how some new technology (or political event, or environmental/resource crisis, etc.) will Change Your Life Forever. From the telescopic perspective of looking at the future in the distance, they're right. There's no doubt that if you were to jump from 2008 to 2028, your experience of the future would be jarring and disruptive.

But we don't jump into the future -- what we think of now as the Future is just an incipient present, very soon to become the past. We have the time to cope and adapt. If you go from 2008 to 2028 by living every minute, the changes around you would not be jarring; instead, they'd largely be incremental, and the occasional surprises would quickly blend into the flow of inevitability.

There is a tendency in futurism to treat the discipline as a form of science fiction (and I don't leave myself out of that criticism). We construct a scenario of tomorrow, with people wearing web-connected contact lenses, driving semi-autonomous electric cars to their jobs at the cultured meat factories, and imagine how cool and odd and dislocating it must be to live in such a world. But futurism isn't science fiction, it's history turned on its head. The folks in that scenario don't just wake up one day to find their lives transformed; they live their lives to that point. They hear about new developments long before they encounter them, and know somebody who bought an Apple iLens or package of NuBacon before doing so themselves. The future creeps up on them, and infiltrates their lives; it becomes, for the people living there, the banal present.

William Gibson's widely-quoted saying, "the future is here, it's just not well-distributed yet" is suggestive of this. The future spreads, almost like an infection. The distribution of the future is less an endeavor of conscious advancement than it is an epidemiological process -- a pandemic of tomorrows, if you will.

If futurism is more history inverted than science fiction, perhaps it can learn from the changes that the study of history has seen. One of the cornerstone revolutions in the academic discipline of history was the rejection of the "Great Men" model, where history was the study of the acts of larger-than-life people, the wars fought by more-powerful-than-most nations, and the ideas of the brilliant shapers of culture. Historians have come to recognize that history includes the lives of regular people; some of the most meaningful and powerful historical studies of the past few decades, from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to Ken Burns' popular "Civil War" documentary, focused as much or more on the everyday citizens as they did the "Great Men," and as much on everyday moments as on the "turning points" and revolutionary events.

What might a "people's history of the future" look like?

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

It's a standard trope in environmental commentary: we would need more than one Earth to support the planet's population, especially if everyone lived like Americans. The number of Earths needed can vary greatly, depending upon who's doing the counting. 1.2? Two? Three? Five? Ten? It's a very fuzzy form of ecological accounting, much harder to calculate in any consistent and plausible way than (for example) carbon footprints. But the "N Earths" concept is dubious for reasons beyond simple accounting imprecision. Simply put, it's adding together the wrong things.

Assertions that we'd need three (or five, or ten) Earths to support our now-unsustainable lifestyles may make for nice graphics, but miss a more important story. The key to sustainability isn't just reducing consumption. The key to sustainability is shifting consumption from limited sources to the functionally limitless.

Broadly put, there are three different kinds of resources:

LIMITED-SUBTRACTIVE
These are resources that have a finite limit, and once used, would be difficult or impossible to reuse. The most visible example would be fossil fuels, but most extractive resources would also fit this category. For some resources, the limits may be extended through recycling, but this has limits as well. As a resource dwindles, the resulting high costs may make otherwise expensive extraction methods feasible, but eventually the resource will just be gone. In the language of economics, these are both rivalrous and excludable resources.

The implication for the "N Earths" model: given enough time, we'd never have enough Earths. Oil will run out, whether in a decade or a millennium, as long as someone continues to use it.

LIMITED-RENEWABLE
These are resources that renew over time, but face a limit to total concurrent availability. These are largely (but not exclusively) organic resources: food, fish, topsoil, people. Water arguably could be included here, as well. These resources can be over-used or abused, but absent catastrophe, will eventually recover. Economically, these are considered rivalrous but non-excludable -- that is, they're the "commons."

This is probably the closest fit for the "N Earths" concept, but misses two very important aspects: use management (encompassing conservation, efficiency, and recycling), which can alter the calculus of how much of a given resource may be considered "in use" in a sustainable environment; and substitution, which can cut or eliminate ongoing demand for a given resource (the classic example being guano as fertilizer).

UNLIMITED-RENEWABLE
These are resources that renew over time, but where the limits to availability are so far beyond what we could possibly capture as to make them effectively limitless. These run the gamut from energy (solar and wind) to materials (environmental carbon) to abstract phenomena (ideas). No current or foreseeable mechanisms could fully use the total output of these resources. Economically, they're both non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

Where the limited-subtractive resources make any use non-sustainable, given enough time, with unlimited-renewable resources, all uses are inherently sustainable.

The argument behind the "N Earths" model is that we -- the global we, but especially the West -- need to reduce our consumption to the point where we no longer use more resources than the planet can provide. The argument behind this alternative model -- call it the "Smarter Earth" model -- is that we need to shift our consumption away from limited resources, especially limited-subtractive resources, as much as possible. It's not a question of consuming less (or more, for that matter), but a question of consuming smarter.

The immediate rejoinder to this notion is that "we can't eat ideas or solar energy." That's superficially true; however, plants are embodiments of solar energy, and ideas can allow us to use limited resources more efficiently. It's not possible with current or foreseeable technologies to shift entirely to unlimited-renewable resources, but every step along the way improves our sustainability.

Another response to this model is that it's essentially an argument for a techno-fix. Despite appearances, it's not. What I'm arguing for is more of a design framework, a guide for decision-making. Yes, that may often mean technological design, but it also encompasses community design (as John Robb has engaged in with his "Resilient Communities" work), economic design (do tax and regulation patterns promote a shift from limited-subtractive to unlimited-renewable consumption?), and especially memetic design (how do we construct a coherent narrative of what's happening around us?).

The goal of shifting consumption boils down to this: moving from a "never enough Earths" model for society, to an "all the Earth we need" model.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

How do you green the suburbs?

The bright green mantra, when it comes to the built environment, is that cities rule, suburbs drool. Cities are more (energy) sustainable, resilient, cultural, diverse, better for your waistline, surprise you with presents on your birthday, and so forth. Suburbs, conversely, are bastions of excessive consumption and insufficient sophistication, filled with McMansions and McDonalds, and are probably hitting on your spouse behind your back. My preferences actually align with that sentiment, but I've become troubled with the green urbanization push. The issue of the future of suburbia isn't as easy as simply telling people to move to cities.

Gentle question: when you convince the masses of people living in the ring suburbs to move back downtown, what happens?

(a) Everybody gets a place in the city, and a pony.
(b) Prices for places in the city shoot up, even in "down and out" areas, driving out low- and moderate-income current residents, and stopping all but the higher-income suburbanites from returning. Without any ponies at all.

Encouraging people to move from the suburbs closer to their place of work in the city because it's actually cheaper (when you include transportation) only works when nobody else does it. Once everybody -- or even a lot of people -- gets that bright (green) idea, the combination of increased demand and limited availability drives up prices. As big as cities may be, there are lots of people in the 'burbs. It may be possible to build more housing within the urban core, but you have one guess as to which neighborhoods are likely to be the ones knocked down to make way for new high-rise condos.

We're already seeing the reverse of the old "white flight" trope, where middle-class whites abandoned cities for the suburbs. Gentrification (with the artists as the "shock troops," we're told), re-urbanization, even "black flight" to the suburbs upset the conceptual models of the built environment that remained dominant in the US for the last few decades. Cities are back... and the suburbs may be abandoned to the low-income.

Everywhere? No. Overnight? No. An important trend? Very much so.

Why? Because figuring out how to make suburbs sustainable is increasingly an act of environmental justice. The displaced urban poor and middle-income will be even less able to afford the energy, transportation, and health costs of environmental decline.

We need to figure out how to upcycle the suburbs. It may involve traditional green ideas such as mass transit and bicycles; it may involve something a bit more complex, like a specialized version of LEED for neighborhoods.

But we need more innovation than that. Not just technology -- while cheap solar building materials wouldn't be bad at all, the real innovations in resilience and sustainability will come in the realm of policy and behavior. Society and culture. Not just the physical infrastructure, the connective sinews of communities. Metaphorical language is all we have now to describe it, because it hasn't yet been invented.

But here's the golden hope: the first one(s) to figure out how to do this, how to make suburbia sustainable and to do so at a breathtakingly low cost, will win the world. Because, as much as China and India and South Africa and Brazil are hot to get their hands on their local iterations of the 1950s American Dream -- a house, two giant cars, and a TV in every pot -- they'll be desperate to figure out how to afford it pretty damn soon. They'll be looking for this same elusive model, and will pay well for it.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

The Fermi Paradox -- if there's other intelligent life in the galaxy, given how long the galaxy's been here, how come we haven't seen any indication of it? -- is an important puzzle for those of us who like to think ahead. Setting aside the mystical (we're all that was created by a higher being) and fundamentally unprovable (we're all living in a simulation), we're left with two unpalatable options: we're the first intelligent species to arise; or no civilization ever makes it long enough. The first one is unpalatable because it suggests that our understanding of the biochemical and physical processes underlying the development of life have a massive gap, since all signs point to the emergence of organic life under appropriate conditions being readily replicable. The second one is unpalatable for a more personal reason: if no civilization ever survives long enough to head out into the stars, what makes us think we'd be special?

But I think there might be a third option.

(Warning: the rest hidden in the extended entry due to extreme geekitude.)

Continue reading "Pondering Fermi" »

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (30)

(The Big Picture is my series on the major driving forces likely to shape the next 20 years. The first post, on Climate Change, went up in early February.)

Truism #1: Human society's continued existence depends on the sustained flows of a variety of natural resources.
Truism #2: What that set of natural resources comprises can change over time.

We (the human we) have pushed the limits of many of the resources our civilization has come to depend upon. Oil is the most talked-about example, but from topsoil to fisheries, water to wheat, many of the resources underpinning life and society as we know it face significant threat. In many cases, this threat comes from simple over-consumption; in others, it comes from ecosystem damage (often, but not always, made worse by over-consumption).

The most obvious cause of over-consumption is population. Long a contentious issue for environmentalists, the argument that "we have too many people," logical in theory, faces serious ethical questions when turned to practice. One example: how do we decide who gets to continue living? Over-consumption is compounded by rising standards-of-living allowing more people to consume even more than before, and by a historically-rooted assumption that the Earth is big and can always provide.

But some resources simply have limits -- there's a maximum amount of oil to be extracted, or copper to be dug up. Some resources (topsoil, fisheries) can renew themselves, but at a rate far slower than our use. Unfortunately, what we've seen from other dwindling resources is that humans have a tendency to try to grab the last bits for themselves, even at the expense of others. This is the so-called "tragedy of the commons," and its most visible present-day manifestation has to be ocean fisheries. Many seafood species are the on the verge of total collapse, perhaps even extinction; official efforts to limit or halt fishing of certain species face desperate communities dependent upon the industry.

The other driver for resource collapse, ecosystem damage, is somewhat more complex. In some cases, such as honeybees, we still have little certainty as to why the resource is in such danger. In the case of wheat, the risk comes from a combination of human and natural activity.

If you hadn't heard that wheat is threatened, you're not alone. It's a relatively recent problem: a fungus known as Ug99. Emerging in Uganda in 1999 (hence the name), this black stem rust fungus seemed to be slowly moving north into the Middle East, not yet hitting locations dependent upon wheat as a primary food crop; this slow movement seemed to offer biologists time to come up with effective counters and to breed resistant strains of wheat, a time-consuming process. But that luck didn't hold.

...on 8 June 2007, Cyclone Gonu hit the Arabian peninsula, the worst storm there for 30 years.

"We know it changed the winds," says Wafa Khoury of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, because desert locusts the FAO had been tracking in Yemen blew north towards Iran instead of north-west as expected [...]. "We think it may have done that to the rust spores." This means, she says, that Ug99 has reached Iran a year or two earlier than predicted. The fear is that the same winds could have blown the spores into Pakistan, which is also north of Yemen, and where surveillance of the fungus is limited.

In Iran, the spore will encounter barberry bushes, which trigger explosive reproduction of Ug99 (and more potential for mutation). From Iran to Pakistan, and then to India (much more dependent upon wheat) and to China. From China, it can blow to North America (as dust and soot do already). The fungus ignores current strains of wheat with fungal resistance, because it initially faced monocultures of wheat with single markers for resistance, allowing for easy mutation and replication.

I'm just glad the Norwegian seed vault is now up and operating. But as disturbing as the potential for collapse may be, the second truism listed above offers cause for hope.

Ecosystem services is the term to remember this time around. It's tempting to think of ourselves as dependent upon the resources we currently use, but that's not quite right. What we depend upon are the services the various resources provide -- the energy, for example, or the protein. In principle, if we can receive those service a different way, we may avoid the repercussions of the collapse of a particular resource. It's true that, in some cases (like water), the resources effectively are the services, but even here, we have to be careful not to think of a particular source (e.g., aquifers) as being the only possibility.

Bird poop provides an instructive example. In the 19th century, guano from birds native to Peru offered the world's best form of fertilizer -- so good that guano became the subject of imperial ambitions, national laws, and international tension. In "When guano imperialists ruled the earth," Salon's Andrew Leonard quotes from President Millard Fillmore's 1850 state of the union address:

Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interest of the United States that it is the duty of the Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.

But by the end of the century, the market for guano had collapsed, along with Peru's economy, because of the development of industrial "superphosphate" fertilizer. It's worth noting that, even if superphosphate hadn't been developed, Peru would have been in trouble -- the supplies of guano were just about depleted by the time the market collapsed. That's right: The world was facing "Peak Guano," only to be saved by catalytic innovation.

Resource Collapse and... Climate Change
I addressed this in The Big Picture: Climate Change, but as I noted a week or so ago, a recent article by NASA's James Hansen points to another point of intersection. In "Implications of “peak oil” for atmospheric CO2 and climate" (PDF), Hansen and colleague Pushker A. Kharecha argue that the effort to keep atmospheric carbon levels below 450ppm (widely considered the seriously bad news tipping point) may be greatly helped by limitations on the amount of available oil. With a reasonable phase-out of coal, active measures to reduce non-CO2 forcings (including methane and black soot), and draw-down of CO2 through reforestation, limiting CO2 to 450ppm can be readily accomplished due to limits on oil reserves. This doesn't require the most aggressive peak oil scenarios, either -- simply using the US Energy Information Administration's estimates of oil reserves is enough. Using more aggressive numbers, atmospheric CO2 peaks at 422ppm.

We may end up avoiding catastrophic climate disruption despite our own best efforts.

Resource Collapse and... Catalytic Innovation
The clearest connection between resource collapse and catalytic innovation is in the realm of substitution services. Nobody wants oil, for example, people want what can be done with oil. That can mean other forms of energy, such as electricity (for transportation), or it may mean other sources of hydrocarbons, such as thermal polymerization (for plastics), and so forth. The big concern: will the substitute technologies be ready by the time the resource is (effectively) gone?

Often, the issue really isn't technology, but expense and willingness to change. Driving the cost of alternatives down to make them competitive with the depleting resource can be difficult; even more difficult can be getting people to accept a substitution service that isn't exactly like the old one (even if it's objectively "better"). Cultured meat would be far and away better than today's meat processing industry -- environmentally, ethically, health-wise -- but, even if the product looked, tasted and felt just like "real" meat, a substantial number of people would likely avoid it simply because it was weird.

More important may be questions of culture and "ways of life." Substitutions rarely mean the same workforce providing one resource shifts seamlessly over to its replacement; more often, the substitute comes from an entirely different region, or may require different kinds or numbers of workers.

It also means a change in mindset or interpretations of the world around us. I've commented before about the imminent emergence of photovoltaic technologies allowing us to make nearly any surface a point of power generation. To an extent, this seems superficially obvious, but try taking a walk or drive with your mind's eye set on what would be different with a solar world. What rationale would we have, for example, for not giving any outside surface a photovoltaic layer? How would we design the material world differently? What would disappear -- and what would suddenly become ubiquitous?

Or there may be larger issues of infrastructure delaying an otherwise "easy" transition. Take alternative power vehicles: in many ways, making the cars & trucks run on clean energy will be the easy part. Think of all of the gas stations that would have to change or go out of business; think of all of the jobs lost when old skills become less valuable; think of the thousands of car repair places needing to retrain and retool. If you take the scenario I posited in The Problem of Cars last year, imagine all of the elements of the present day that would have to change in order for it to become possible.

Resource Collapse and... Ubiquitous Transparency
As with the climate, the role of ubiquitous transparency is to keep a close eye on the flows of production and consumption that might otherwise be invisible (at least until it's too late).

The scientific benefits would likely be the proximate driver. Whether the ultimate users are regulatory officials or participating panopticoneers depends on the balance of top-down vs. bottom-up power. Ultimately, it won't just be the points of production being watched, it will be the points of consumption, as well.

Resource Collapse and... New Models of Development
This is both harsh and simple.

If the newly-developing nations persist in trying to follow a Western path of development, then the competition for dwindling resources will end up as a critical point of tension and, likely, warfare. The more powerful nations will scrape by, while the ones less-able to throw their weight around will suffer. The more that the newly developing nations emulate Western consumption, the more that they're likely to face famine, economic collapse, and millions of casualties.

Conversely, if the newly-developing nations take a leapfrog-alternatives path, with a strong emphasis on efficiency and experimentation, they could find themselves the eventual winners of the century. The leapfrog concept is straightforward -- the areas with less legacy infrastructure can adopt new systems and models faster -- and emerging catalytic technologies and economic models seem custom-made for new adopters. But this isn't without risk; the new systems and models are intrinsically unproven, and may not work as well as expected. Leapfrogging nations may find themselves facing famine, economic collapse, and mass deaths anyway, and probably compounded by the expenditure of resources needed by the leapfrog systems and the loss or weakening of the old systems.

Resource Collapse and... The Rise of the Post-Hegemonic World
Resource collapse isn't the cause of the rise of the post-hegemonic world, but it's an important driver. It weakens the powerful, and opens up new niches of influence. It triggers conflict, setting the mighty against the mighty. It reveals vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, it sets up the conditions for the emergence of new models of power, as ultimately the most effective responses to resource collapse will come from revolutions in technology and socio-economic behavior. Those actors adopting the new successful models will find themselves disproportionately powerful.

Right now, none of the leading great power nations seem well-suited to discover and adopt such new models. The same can be said of the leading global corporate powers. The climate and resource crises of the 2010s and 2020s will be compounded by a vacuum of global leadership.

Ultimately, I suspect that the identity of the pre-eminent global actors of the mid-21st century will surprise us all.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Setting aside its religious imagery, the opening stanza of The Second Coming remains one of my favorite go-to sources for "uh oh" language in my writing.

In conversation at IFTF this morning, a reference to a profound oddity in crop markets led to the coining of the phrase "Yeats Signals," a play on the IFTF term "weak signals" (referring to subtle indicators of big changes). The profound oddity is this:

Whatever the reason, the price for a bushel of grain set in the derivatives markets has been substantially higher than the simultaneous price in the cash market.

When that happens, no one can be exactly sure which is the accurate price in these crucial commodity markets, an uncertainty that can influence food prices and production decisions around the world. [...]

Market regulators say they have ruled out deliberate market manipulation. But they, too, are baffled. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates the exchanges where these grain derivatives trade, has scheduled a forum on April 22 where market participants will discuss these anomalies and other pressure points arising in the agricultural markets.

This simply should not be happening, and yet it is. As an indicator of major instabilities in what had been structurally stable (if not always predictable) markets, it's a big one. Big enough that it wouldn't take much to imagine this as a sign of a major financial crisis in the global food market -- something with profound economic and health implications for everyone, including the rich countries.

It seems to me that we've been seeing more than our fair share of Yeats Signals lately.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Paul Saffo gave the Long Now Seminar tonight. Here are some of his more telling observations:

The biggest mistake a forecaster can make is to be more certain than the facts suggest.

When changes cluster at the extremes, it's a certain bet that more fundamental change lies ahead.

The future constantly arrives late and in unexpected ways.

Good "backsight" is necessary for good foresight.

Cherish failure -- we fail our way into the future.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The "Uncanny Valley" is the evocative name for the commonplace reaction to realistic-but-not-quite-right simulated humans, robotic or animated. Most of us, when encountering such a simulacrum, have an instinctive "it's creepy" response, one that is enhanced when the sim is moving. Invented by roboticist Masahiro Mori, the Uncanny Valley concept is typically applied to beings (broadly conceived) as they become increasingly similar to humans in appearance and action.

But what about beings as they become less similar to humans -- following the path of transhumans and, eventually, posthumans?

An article in the latest issue of New Scientist (subscription required) prompted this question. Thierry Chaminade and Ayse Saygin of University College London began to investigate how the Uncanny Valley phenomenon worked, and performed brain scans on people encountering simulacra of varying degrees of human likeness. They found spikes of activity in the parietal cortex.

This area of the brain is known to contain "mirror neurons", which are active when someone imagines performing an action they are observing. While watching all three videos, people imagine picking up the cup themselves. Chaminade says the extra mirror neuron activity when viewing the lifelike robot might be due to the way it moves, which jars with its appearance. This "breach of expectation" could trigger extra brain activity and produce the uncanny feelings.

The response may stem from an ability to identify - and avoid - people suffering from an infectious disease. Very lifelike robots seem almost human but, like people with a visible disease, aspects of their appearance jar.

Clearly, such a reaction does not require that the observed "human" actually be sick, only that its behavior and/or physiological characteristics seem a bit off. This could, conceivably, include human beings with "enhanced" characteristics -- "H+" in the current jargon.

Science fiction visions of space-adapted posthumans with hands for feet or wings for low-gravity flight would obviously seem at least "a bit off," but the enhancements need not be that radical. In fact, it's possible -- even likely -- that the less-radical changes would end up being more disturbing. Enhancements to optical capabilities might change the appearance of the eye. Improved neuromuscular systems might make everyday actions -- grabbing a coffee cup, picking up a child, even walking along the street -- look unnatural. Accelerated cognition might make verbal interactions disjointed, even bizarre.

As long as these changes fall into the broad ranges of current human variety, we'd be unlikely to see an unusually negative response. But if they are clearly outside the realm of the "expanded normal," and if they have external manifestations that are readily identifiable, it may very well be that the reactions of unmodified people -- and perhaps even the reactions of other "H+" individuals! -- are significantly more negative than one might expect. In this scenario, the enhanced person wouldn't just seem weird, he or she would seem wrong.

If this is possible, then it has profound social and political implications for transhumanist and other H+ advocate agendas for human enhancement technologies.

For example, if the typical reaction of unmodified people to enhanced humans is "that guy really creeps me out," it may be easy for opponents of these technologies to generate a legal and cultural backlash.

Similarly, if the gut reaction to a moderately modified human is to see him or her as no longer human, political struggles could get very ugly very quickly.

It's unlikely that the first generations of human enhancement technologies -- which would most likely just be adaptations of therapeutic medical technologies -- would engender this kind of response. But if we follow the logic of the human enhancement model, we will at some point over this century start to introduce changes to the human physiological and behavior model that will fall well outside the realm of human variability. It's possible that we'll have enough other kinds of simulacra and non-human persons in our midst that we'll take such modifications in stride, and have no qualms about keeping the transhumans in the human family.

But it's also possible -- arguably, more possible -- that the emergence of significant modifications to humanity will trigger deep responses in the human brain, ones that we may very well not like.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Oh, and my contribution to Blog Action Day? Simply this:

It's a picture of Saturn, taken by the Cassini probe. It's a shot of Saturn eclipsing the Sun -- a view that we could never get from Earth. Cassini was launched a decade ago, and has given us incredible science and beautiful images of our solar system's second most awe-inspiring planet. But look closely at the picture, just above the rings on the left side.

That little blue smudge visible above Saturn's ring, barely 2-3 pixels across?

That's us.

Everything we have done, every life lived, everything we are, is little more than a tiny dot. Our world is far more fragile than we might wish, but there's nothing else like it that we've yet found. We abuse it at our peril.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Another idea I want to get out and into at least my working lexicon.

Security through Ubiquity refers to the reduced vulnerability to attack that can manifest due to being part of a transcendently common multitude; in this context "attack" includes social approbation and the deleterious effects of a loss of privacy.

This apparent security comes from several sources:

I'll have more to say about this soon, but I just want to toss the idea out to the noösphere and make it visible.

Molecular Rights Management refers to the panoply of technologies employed to prevent the unrestricted reproduction of the products of molecular scale (atomically-precise, nano-fabricated) manufacturing technologies. The source concept for the term is digital rights management, technologies employed to prevent the unrestricted reproduction of digital products. As of yet, no actual molecular rights management technologies exist.

MRM is likely to emerge for two primary reasons: the continued need for intellectual property controls, so as to prevent a wave "napster fabbing;" and the need for security to prevent the production of controlled goods ("assault rifles," figuratively or literally).

MRM could reside in the design media (the CAD files and the like), such as with single-execution licenses, digital watermarks, and so forth.

MRM could reside in the production hardware (the "nanofactory"), such as with systems that "store" all designs online (no local storage), blacklist systems that a nanofactory would check an input design against, smart systems that recognize disallowed designs as they are being made, even in disconnected parts, and so forth.

MRM could reside in the network, with agents that check the designs loaded in a nanofactory for proper licensing information.

Given that the final results of a nanomanufactured product can, in principle, be used without any need to connect back to the original fabber or design, the impact of MRM on end-users is likely to be less onerous than the impact of DRM has been on the users of digital media. Couple that to the safety/security aspects, and it seems to me that MRM is likely to be broadly tolerated, and potentially even accepted.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Okay, this is one everyone can play with, and hopefully won't lead to veiled recriminations and bitter feuds in the comments. It's also perfect for a lazy summer weekend.

This one nicely riffs on a few recurring themes here at OtF: open source scenarios, human agency (that is, the future is something we do, not something done to us), and the possibility of achieving a positive future. It's one of those "web meme" things that kids today are all talking about; I'll take the traditional path and tag five people, and encourage them to tag five of their own (etc.). Please feel free to play along in the comments or on your own blogs. Here we go:

Fifteen years is a useful time period for thinking about the Future. It's long enough that we'll go through a couple of major political cycles, see noticeable improvement in common technologies, and undoubtedly experience a radical breakthrough or two. At the same time, it's near enough that most of us will expect to still be around, living lives that might not be too different from today's.

So here's the task: Think about the world of fifteen years hence (2022, if you're counting along at home). Think about how technology might change, how fashions and pop culture might evolve, how the environment might grab our attention, and so forth. Now, take a sentence or two and answer...

I've had three particular web pages open in my browser for a couple of weeks now. I knew that they were saying something to me, but I wasn't quite sure what. I think I may now have finally figured it out.

The future belongs to those who find the present insufficient.

The phrase is a deliberate variation of something that Clay Shirky argued recently, that the future belongs to those who take the present for granted. By this, Clay means that people who can accept the (technological) conditions of the present are better-able to see what's next than people who are still wrestling with whether those conditions of the present make sense. He cites Freebase and Wikipedia in this: while some people still argue about whether Wikipedia is a good thing, folks at Metaweb are already building a next-generation collaborative knowledge base.

Look at these two graphs, generated by Forrester Research for the New York Times and for Business Week.

The Time graph shows the comparative value of mobile phones, computers and television across five different generational cohorts*. For Gen Y, computers and phones are more important than TV, in that order; for Gen X, phones and television swap rank, with computers still on top; for the remainder, TV is the most personally valuable technology of the three. The Business Week graph splits similar cohorts (Gen Y has "Youth" split out at the bottom end, and a "Young Teen" is added below that) along six different online usage patterns. What's notable is that, although these are all ostensibly computer-based activities, some of the activities map nicely to abstracted uses of TVs and phones. The same cohorts that put TV above computers and phones predominantly engage in passive consumption of online content; the same cohorts that put phones above the others predominantly engage in social networking. (Gen X'ers seem to do a little bit of everything.)

Now, from the "takes the present for granted" perspective, these graphs can be interpreted to mean something along the lines of Boomers are still trying to figure out if social networking tools are a good thing, even while younger generations are just going ahead and using them as if they've always been there. That maps to the moral panic we've seen about MySpace and the like. As older generations say "wait, it can do *that*?" the leading edge says "of *course* it can."

But taking the present for granted is not enough. Saying "of *course* it can do that" isn't a catalyst for change, it's a symptom of complacency; it's looking back with a sneer at what has gone before, forgetting that the present that one takes for granted will be just as ridiculous soon enough. Transformation comes from saying "...but why can't it do *this*?"

And this is about more than technology. The exact same set of reactions -- "wait," "of course," and "but why" -- work equally well to social and political phenomena. We could apply the reasoning to global warming, for example:

Failure happens. Strategic plans that don't take into account the possibility of failure -- and propose pathways to adaptation or recovery -- are at best irresponsible, at worst immoral. The war in Iraq offers an obvious example, but the potential for failure in our attempts to confront global warming* may prove to be an even greater crisis. This is why I'm so adamant about the need to study the potential for geoengineering: we need to have a backup plan. And if that fails to head off global disaster, or (if done without sufficient study and preparation) exacerbates problems further, we need a last-ditch plan for recovery.

What does it mean to prepare for recovery? I've described it before: a civilization backup, holding a full record of who we are as a civilization, built in a way to facilitate recovery after a global disaster. This is something of an ambitious plan, however, and is not likely to even be considered for decades. In the meantime, a smaller-scale project would be entirely feasible -- and it turns out that such a smaller-scale backup appears to now be underway: the Book & Seed Vault.

So we pose this question: Are we as a civilization to be knocked back to a hunter-gather stage, or is there a way we can leave a legacy that provides for the future of mankind? [...] The Book and Seed Vault, Inc. has been formed for this purpose— gather and safely maintain long term storage of our civilization’s knowledge, plant seeds and medicinal seeds.

Much like the seed storage facility in Norway, the Book & Seed Vault would maintain supplies of seeds for key edible and medicinal plants; unlike the Norwegian effort, the Vault would also include an assortment of books, mixing academic, instructional (including a full selection of MAKE magazine, I hope!), and cultural. Long-term plans include underground concrete bunkers dotting the continent, but for now, the initial vault will be in rural Oregon.

It's clear that the Book & Seed Vault is a very new organization, with great ambitions but limited resources. They just started up in the last few months, and their expertise seems a bit uneven -- lots of detailed info about preserving books, but more general plans for handling the seeds. I suspect that they'll drop the plans to archive CDs and DVDs in short order, when they look at the infrastructure involved for handling electronic media.

In fact, the Book & Seed Vault may prove to function better as a model and instructions than as an actual vault. We'd need more than one site for any kind of disaster recovery system to be truly useful; we have to assume that many of the eventual locations will be unavailable, so the more the better. The right scale for something like this is probably the "community" -- a bit bigger than your neighborhood, but smaller than a city.

Think of it as open-source disaster prep -- a site and set of resources offering detailed instructions (which can be updated by the users, of course) showing you how to build a recovery vault for your community. What are the physical specs for the facility? Which seeds are appropriate for your regional climate? What are the key instruction manuals and guidebooks to include? How best to store and protect the vault's contents? I could see this done as a wiki and mailing list, probably with some YouTube videos demonstrating various techniques for proper seed and book storage.

This kind of idea isn't simply updated survivalism, it's part of a larger effort to develop greater social resilience.

Now there's a sequel to Mad Max I'd go see: a post-disaster society run by farmers and librarians!

*[If global warming isn't a sufficiently compelling threat for you, substitute the existential problem of your choice: asteroid strike; zoonotic pandemic; biowarfare; molecular manufacturing-based warfare; unfriendly AI. As long as the disaster remains limited to a Class 1 or Class 2 Catastrophe (i.e., some humans left alive to try to recover), human civilization would have a chance to return.]

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My colleague at the Institute for the Future, David Pescovitz, stuck my face on BoingBoing in the link to the Accidental Cyborg article (yikes!), but told me about this terrific sticker made for Gareth Branwyn's hip replacement.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Wednesday, May 23, 2007. Remember that date. It's the day the Earth became an urban planet.

Working with United Nations estimates that predict the world will be 51.3 percent urban by 2010, the researchers [demographers from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia] projected the May 23, 2007, transition day based on the average daily rural and urban population increases from 2005 to 2010. On that day, a predicted global urban population of 3,303,992,253 will exceed that of 3,303,866,404 rural people.

For the first time in history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. This is, in many ways, the single most important indicator of whether we'll survive this century. Here's why:

Urban centers support people more efficiently than do small towns, villages, and the countryside. This isn't just true environmentally or economically; it's arguably also the case when it comes to the kind of intellectual ferment that drives innovation. New ideas are the sparks coming from the friction between minds -- and you get a lot more friction in the city. Urban growth, over time, makes us all stronger.

Cities require complex support systems, however. Complex infrastructure offers plenty of opportunities for failure, whether via natural disasters or human causation. Isolated failures will happen, and not pose a systemic threat. But repeated -- or un-repaired -- system failures would inevitably drive people out of the cities, by choice or by necessity.

As long as the overall proportion of urban dwellers to rural denizens continues to grow, we can reasonably conclude that human civilization is doing a decent job of maintaining its overall system integrity. If that pattern reverses -- if we start to see the proportion of urban to rural edge back towards rural dominance -- it's time to look for signs that civilization's systems are collapsing.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Forgive me, Warren, but I must disagree.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

See, what he misses here is that Worldbuilding is its own form of art, and very much its own kind of business. Worldbuilding is what I do pretty much every gig for Institute for the Future, for Global Business Network, for Monitor Institute, and for essentially every corporate, government, or non-profit client I've worked with over the last decade. That great clomping foot of nerdism is what the clients want to see, because they can then use that as a backdrop for their own stories about their organizations.

The art of Worldbuilding comes from knowing what to omit, from knowing what needs to be surveyed and what can be tacked up as a Potemkin Future. It becomes an intensely detailed game, figuring out what the readers want to know, covering what they need to know, teasing them with the implications of a fuller vision, and creating an effective illusion of paradigmatic completeness.

Harrison has it wrong: it's not the biggest library ever built, it's a painting of a library that seems to go on and on, with some prop books on a table in the foreground. Make sure those prop books are interesting enough, and the reader will never try to explore the rest of the library.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I've long been a proponent of the core Viridian argument that "making the invisible visible" (MTIV) -- illuminating the processes and systems that are normally too subtle, complex or elusive to apprehend -- is a fundamental tool for enabling behavioral change. When you can see the results of your actions, you're better able to change your actions to achieve the results you'd prefer. I've come to understand, however, that it's not enough to make the invisible visible; you also have to make it meaningful.

The canonical example of how MTIV works is the mileage readout standard in hybrid cars. Almost invariably, hybrid owners see a gradual but noticeable improvement in miles-per-gallon over the first month or so of hybrid vehicle ownership. This isn't so much the car being "broken in," but the driver: because of the mileage readout, the hybrid driver can see what driving patterns achieve the best results.

A growing number of non-hybrid cars now include miles-per-gallon readouts; will we see similar improvements in driver behavior as a result?

Possibly, but not likely. The hybrid miles-per-gallon readout comes in two forms: an average mileage, whether calculated for the current tank or the total vehicle miles; and a real-time, current mileage display, which will fluctuate significantly while one drives. As far as I have found, the non-hybrids with mileage readouts only include the average mileage display, not the real-time display. (Update: Howard notes in the comments a few makes of non-hybrid cars that do have both the average and real-time displays. I would be very interested in an examination of driver behavior -- and possible changes in behavior -- for those cars.)

This is useful information, to be sure; it's good to know what kind of mileage a vehicle gets in real-world use. But as a means of MTIV, it's not terribly helpful, because it breaks the connection between the action and the result. After the first few dozen miles of a given tank of gas, the average mileage readout changes very slowly, and only with sustained greater-than-average or less-than-average mileage driving. Small variations get lost in the noise. This means that minor changes in driving behavior can't be mapped to minor changes in miles-per-gallon. Without that connection between "I did this" and "I got that," drivers can't as easily learn to drive in a more efficient way. The driver needs to be able to compare behaviors and results to learn what works best. Both forms of display are necessary. The average mileage is the context for the momentary changes, and it's the comparison between the two that provides meaning.

This dilemma isn't just an issue for cars.

Late last month, the UK's environment secretary, David Milbrand, proposed putting ecological impact labels on all food products sold in UK stores. These labels would focus on the amount of carbon emitted as the result of the production of the food item. In this, the UK government is playing catch-up with some of its businesses, as the grocery chain Tesco announced in late January that it would be adding carbon labels to the products it sold. And now the Carbon Trust, a UK non-profit that works with businesses to reduce their greenhouse impacts, has embarked on an effort to build a labeling standard for adoption across industries. (It should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favor of this sort of labeling!)

So let's say this works out, and soon every bag of crisps you buy has a little label on it showing how many grams of carbon resulted from that bag's production. Now you can compare it to other snacks, and try to eat only the goodies with smaller numbers in the label. But while that level of comparison is helpful, it doesn't offer the larger context necessary to make the comparison meaningful. You still don't know whether both the (e.g.) 100g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of crisps and the (e.g.) 50g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of carrots are outrageously high, ridiculously low, or vanishingly irrelevant.

In order for any carbon labeling endeavor to work -- in order for it to usefully make the invisible visible -- it needs to offer a way for people to understand the impact of their choices. This could be as simple as a "recommended daily allowance" of food-related carbon, a target amount that a good green consumer should try to treat as a ceiling. This daily allowance doesn't need to be a mandatory quota, just a point of comparison, making individual food choices more meaningful.

The food carbon labels without the recommended amounts is roughly like the real-time mileage readout on a hybrid: useful data about one's immediate actions, but without any way of measuring overall results. Similarly, the recommended allowances without abundant carbon labels is akin to the average mileage display: a way of seeing overall goals, without any way of directly connecting action and result. Both the individual data and the broader context are necessary.

This is a pattern we're likely to see again and again as we move into the new world of carbon footprint awareness. We'll need to know the granular results of actions, in as immediate a form as possible, as well as our own broader, longer-term targets and averages. This is certainly not a surprising observation. We're still early enough in the carbon awareness era, however, that even the obvious steps are useful to note.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I like Stewart Brand, and he and I seem to get along pretty well. I first met him at GBN a decade ago, and I run into him fairly often at a variety of SF-area futures-oriented events.

But I found myself grumpy and frustrated after reading "An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’" in Sunday's New York Times, a profile of Stewart and what he calls his "environmental heresies."

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

Brand seems to retain an image of environmentalism that may have been appropriate in the 1970s, but has diminishing credibility today: the anti-technology, back-to-nature hippie. Today's environmental movement is urban, techie, and far less likely to refer to any assertion as "heresy" (although, in the case of the handful of people who still try to deny the existence of global warming, we're happy to use the term "stupidity"). Stewart Brand is nailing his environmental heresies on the door of a church that was long ago abandoned... or, at the very least, taken over by Unitarians.

This isn't to say that the Bright Green types have fully embraced Stewart's views. There's little support for aggressive nuclear power production among the new environmentalists, and the various positions concerning biotech are complex, to say the least. There's little disagreement with his love of cities, but in this case, Brand is almost a latecomer. Ultimately, the positions that Stewart stakes out appear more to be arguments against his own past beliefs than against the claims of modern eco-advocates.

David Roberts, over at Gristmill, dissects the nuclear argument exceedingly well, and rather than reiterate what he wrote, I'll just point you to it. The short version, in my phrasing: the Bright Green reluctance about nuclear power has far more to do with it being centralized infrastructure and dated technology than with any fear or loathing of atoms. The environmental situation in which we find ourselves demands a fast-learning, fast-iterating, distributed and collaborative technological capacity, not a system that bleeds out investment dollars and leaves us stuck with technologies already on the verge of obsolescence.

If we're looking for resilience, flexibility and innovation, the nuclear industry is not a good place to start.

With regards to biotechnology, resilience, flexibility and innovation are definitely possible, at least in the years to come. Brand argues that genetic engineering has the potential to be a major tool for dealing with global warming's effects, and he's not the only one making claims of the sort. There's no consensus Bright Green position on environmental biotech, but there are plenty of voices calling for the responsible use of biotech (and nanotech) as a way of combatting climate and ecosystem disruption; moreover, most people arguing for holding off on bioengineering do so out of concern that we still have more to learn before we can undertake such solutions responsibly, not out of a flat opposition to the technology.

Stewart asks, "where are the green biotech hackers?" Rob Carlson -- one of the original open-source bio thinkers, now a leading expert in synthetic biology -- has an answer: they're here, but they're still working under the radar.

We're coming, Stewart. It's just that we're still on the slow part of the curves. [...] At the moment, synthesis of a long gene takes about four weeks at a commercial DNA foundry, with a bacterial genome still requiring many months at best, though the longest reported contiguous synthesis job to date is still less than 50 kilobases. And at a buck a base, hacking any kind of interesting new circuit is still expensive. [...] So, Mr. Brand, it will be a few years before green hackers, at least those who aren't support by Vinod Khosla or Kleiner Perkins, really start to have an impact.

Green biotech hacking is still in the punch-card era, and as Stewart himself could tell you, computer hacker culture really didn't take off until you got past punch-cards into time-sharing, where the cost in time and money was low enough that mistakes were something to learn from, not dread.

As for cities, I'm not sure I could find many modern enviros still clinging to the notion that, on the whole, rural life is intrinsically better than urban life. There are plenty of individual examples of terrific rural homes and awful urban homes, of course, but in the aggregate, there's no question that communities in dense, urban settings have a smaller footprint than communities of the same size in suburban and rural settings. And the notion that population size is still at the top of the environmental hit list is seriously out of date; all signs point to a global population peak of below 10 billion, and possibly no more than 8 billion -- of concern to the extent that more people means more consumption, but by no means a panic-inducing Malthusian threat.

The conventional meaning of "heretic" is one who goes against dogma, and the positions that Stewart takes here just don't meet that requirement. There's no doubt that it would be possible to find self-described environmentalists who fit the stereotype that Stewart is responding to, but one of the hallmarks of the modern environmental movement -- and the reason why the "heresy" model is arguably obsolete -- is that, when it comes to solutions, nothing is a priori off the table. All solution options can be considered, but they must be able to stand up to competing ideas. Even if some of us believe that some of the solutions he advocates don't stand up to the competition, we aren't going to try to claim that Stewart Brand somehow isn't an environmentalist. As long as he recognizes that the Earth's geophysical systems are under extraordinary duress, and that business-as-usual is driving us headlong into disaster, he's one of us -- even if the ways we want to avoid that disaster vary.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Environmental architect William McDonough is said to have asked, "If a person described her relationship with her spouse as merely 'sustainable' wouldn’t you feel sorry for both of them?"

The word "sustainability" has come to dominate environmental discourse, employed to mean a condition in which we take no more from our environment than the environment is able to restore. It's a reasonably goal, but a limited one. Sustainability is a static concept: it says nothing about change, or improvement. McDonough's point is that "sustainable" is hardly a condition worth celebrating; at best, it's the maintenance of the status quo.

It seems to me that what we should be striving for is an environment -- and a civilization -- able to handle dynamic, unexpected changes without threatening to collapse. This is more than simply sustainable, it's regenerative and diverse, relying on both a capacity to absorb shocks and to co-evolve with them. In a word, it's resilient.

If we're to survive the 21st century, we need to be striving for environmental and civilizational resiliency.

In a "sustainable" environment, we live in constant fear of greed, accident or malice tipping the balance away from sustainability, returning us to the spiral of over-consumption and environmental depletion. Ironically, the goal of environmental sustainability is highly likely to put us on the path of ongoing environmental management. To an extent, this is already true -- ecologist Daniel Janzen argues that we're better off thinking of the environment as a garden to be tended than as wilds to be preserved -- but sustainability as a goal means constant vigilance. It's not simply that the environment can no longer be considered "wild;" in the sustainability paradigm, the environment can only be considered a subject. A sustainable world is one that manages to avoid imminent disaster, but remains perpetually on the precipice.

The underlying problem with the concept of "sustainability" is that it's inherently static. It presumes that there's a special point at which we can maintain ourselves and maintain the world, and once we find the right combination of behavior and technology that allows us to reduce our environmental footprint to a "one planet" world, we should stay there. For some sustainability advocates, this can include limiting ourselves technologically, as suggested by the frequency with which such advocates dismiss "techno-fixes" as simply allowing us to continue to behave badly. More broadly, as a strategic goal, sustainability pushes us towards striving to achieve success within boundaries; the primary emphasis of the concept is on stability.

"Resiliency," conversely, admits that change is inevitable and in many cases out of our hands, so the environment -- and our relationship with it -- needs to be able to withstand unexpected shocks. Greed, accident or malice may have harmful results, but (barring something likely to lead to a Class 2 or Class 3 Apocalypse), such results can be absorbed without threat to the overall health of the planet's ecosystem. If we talk about "environmental resiliency," then, we mean a goal of supporting the planet's ability to withstand and regenerate in the event of local or even widespread disruption.

Like sustainability, resiliency is a strategic concept, intended to guide how choices are made. But resiliency doesn't presuppose limitations; rather, it encourages the diversification of capacities, in order to be responsive to uncertain future problems. We can think of this as "strategic flexibility" or "maintaining our options," but it comes down to avoiding being trapped on a losing path.

When applied directly to environmental strategies, resiliency may appear similar to sustainability in superficial ways. Both sustainability and resilience would encourage aggressive moves to greater energy efficiency, for example. The similarity of tactics belies a divergence of intent, however; for sustainability the purpose is to reduce our impact to below a certain threshold, while for resilience, it's to increase the resources available to meet future problems. We see overlap like this because resiliency embraces the near-term goal of sustainability, inasmuch as resiliency recognizes that the depletion of planetary resources and ecosystem diversity is a self-destructive process.

For me, environmental resilience is a much more satisfying philosophy than environmental sustainability because of its emphasis on increasing our (our planet's) ability to withstand crises. Sustainability is a brittle state: unexpected changes (natural or otherwise) can easily cause its collapse. Resilience is all about being able to handle the unexpected. It does not ignore the need to be "sustainable" in the most general sense, but does not see that as a goal or end-point in and of itself. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

The "Good Ancestor Principle" is based on a challenge posed by Jonas Salk:

...the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors?

The two-day Good Ancestor Principle workshop focused primarily upon teasing out just what it would mean to be a good ancestor, and a bit upon exploring various ways of making sure the Earth inherited by our descendants is better than the Earth we inherited. But a surprisingly large part of the conversation covered a question that is at once unexpected and entirely relevant: just who will our descendants be?

The baseline assumption, not unreasonably, was that our descendants will be people like us, individuals living deep within the "human condition" of pain, love, family, death, and so forth; as a result, the "better ancestors" question inevitably focuses upon the external world of politics, warfare, the global environment, poverty, and so forth (essentially, the WorldChanging arena). Some participants suggested a more radical vision, of populations with genetic enhancements including extreme longevity. Sadly, this part of the conversation never managed to get much past the tired "how will the Enhanced abuse the Normals" tropes, so we never really got to the "...and how can we be good ancestors to them?" question, other than to point out that we ourselves may be filling in the role of "descendants" if we end up living for centuries.

Instead, we ran right past the "human++" scenario right into the Singularity -- and with Vernor Vinge in attendance, this is hardly surprising. (Not that Vinge is dead-certain that the Singularity is on its way; when he speaks next week at the Long Now seminar in San Francisco, he'll be covering what change looks like in a world where a Singularity doesn't happen.) This group of philosophers and writers really take the Singularity concept seriously, and not for Kurzweilian "let's all get uploaded into Heaven 2.0" reasons. Their recurring question had a strong evolutionary theme: what niche is left for humans if machines become ascendant?

The conversation about the Singularity touched on more than science fiction stories, because of the attendance of Ben Goertzel, a cognitive science/computer science specialist who runs a company called "Novamente" -- a company with the express goal of creating the first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He has a working theory of how to do it, some early prototypes (that for now exist solely in virtual environments), and a small number of employees in the US and Brazil. He says that with the right funding, his team would be able to produce a working AGI system within ten years. With his current funding, it might take a bit longer.

According to Goertzel, the Singularity would happen fairly shortly after his AGI wakes up.

It was a surreal moment for me. I've been writing about the Singularity and related issues for years, and have spoken to a number of people who were working on related technologies or were major enthusiasts of the concept (the self-described "Singularitarians"). This was the first time I sat down with someone who was both. Goertzel is confident of his vision, and quite clear on the potential outcomes, many of which would be unpleasant for humankind. When I spoke to my wife mid-way through the first day, I semi-jokingly told her that I'd just met the man who was going to destroy the world.

Ben doesn't actually want that to happen, as far as I can tell, and has made a point of considering from the very beginning of his work the problem of giving super-intelligent machines a sense of ethics that would preclude them from wanting to make choices that would be harmful to humankind.

In 2002, he wrote:

...I would like an AGI to consider human beings as having a great deal of value. I would prefer, for instance, if the Earth did not become densely populated with AGI’s that feel about humans as most humans feel about cows and sheep – let alone as most humans feel about ants or bacteria, or instances of Microsoft Word. To see the potential problem here, consider the possibility of a future AGI whose intelligence is as much greater than ours, as ours is greater than that of a sheep or an ant or even a bacterium. Why should it value us particularly? Perhaps it can create creatures of our measly intelligence and complexity level without hardly any effort at all. In that case, can we really expect it to value us significantly? This is not an easy question.

Beyond my attachment to my own species, there are many general values that I hold, that I would like future AGI’s to hold. For example, I would like future AGI’s to place a significant value on:

1. Diversity
2. Life: relatively unintelligent life like trees and protozoa and bunnies, as well as intelligent life like humans and dolphins and other AGI’s.
3. The generation of new pattern (on “creation” and “creativity” broadly conceived)
4. The preservation of existing structures and systems
5. The happiness of other intelligent or living systems (“compassion”)
6. The happiness and continued existence of humans

(From his essay "Thoughts on AI Morality," in which he quotes both Ray Kurzweil and Jello Biafra.)

The issue of how to give AGIs a sense of empathy towards humans consumed a major part of the Good Ancestor Principle workshop discussion. The participants recognized quickly that what this technology meant was the creation of a parallel line of descendants of humankind. In essence, the answer to the question of "how can we be better ancestors for our descendants" is answered in part by "making sure our other descendants are helpful, not harmful."

Ultimately, the notion of being good ancestors by reducing the chances that our descendants will be harmed appeared in nearly every attempt to answer Jonas Salk's challenge. It's a point that's both obvious and subtle. Of course we want to reduce the chances that our descendants will be harmed; the real challenge is figuring out just what we are doing today that runs counter to that desire. We don't always recognize the longer-term harm emerging from a short-term benefit. This goes back to an argument I've made time and again: the real problems we're facing in the 21st century are the long, slow threats. We need our solutions to have a long term consciousness, too.

That strikes me as an important value for any intelligent being to hold, organic or otherwise.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 1:34 PM | Permalink

(click for larger version, of course)

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My colleague at IEET, George Dvorsky, posted a list of concept about the future that he sees as vital for people who consider themselves to be intelligent to know and understand. His goal is admirable: too much of what passes for public discourse (in the United States, at least, but from what I can see, also in much of the rest of the West) is deeply focused on the past, and much too narrow. Moreover, it's not simply that we've become a culture of niche thinkers; it's that the niche thinkers that dominate public discourse have seemingly decided that their particular set of niches (largely issues of domestic politics and economics) are the only important ones.

George's list is, by and large, a good one. I'd quibble about a couple of items he includes, but nothing strikes me as outrageously out-of-place. (I do wish he'd add links to the terms to help people who don't recognize various entries get up to speed, however.) He covers, for the most part, terms concerning advances in human engineering and in information and material technologies, with particular emphasis on various manifestations and implications of non-human intelligence(s).

George asks for additions, so in that spirit, here's a list of 10 more terms and concepts intelligent participants in the 21st century should understand. Mine has links. :)

• Carlson Curves
• Climate refugees (PDF)
• Climate system tipping point
• Cognitively modified organisms
• Continuous partial attention
• Extended identity
• Open-source warfare
• Post-hegemonic politics
• Thermal inertia
• Uncanny valley

I'm not entirely satisfied with this list; it remains a bit too tech-focused. Still, in combination with George's list, this looks like the beginnings of a good primer for dealing with the key issues of the new century.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It seems to be common practice among bloggers, columnists and other species of pundit to offer in the closing days of December a few predictions about the year to come. These usually include some brief sentences about how well or how poorly the predictions from last year fared, and the best include a tongue-in-cheek undercurrent, a subtle implication that the author knows as well as the reader just how ridiculous this whole thing really is. Aside from the blatantly satirical offerings, however, most of these year-end predictions are meant to be taken seriously to at least some degree, and provide a tangible sense of where the author thinks the world may be heading in the months to come.

As someone who thinks and writes about the months (and years) to come on a professional basis, I find these efforts a kick to read. I won't add my own, in part because it would be redundant (I write about the future all the time), and in part because the real fun comes from seeing people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about much beyond the next quarter, next project or next release pulling on their Futurist Pants™.

I enjoy reading them in large part because they often fall into the same traps that can snare the pros, but do so in much more obvious ways. The real value of the myriad forecasts for 2007 emerges not from what they predict, but from how they predict it. These predictions are a terrific training field for critical analysis and skeptical reading of futurist prounouncements of all kinds.

In that spirit, here are eight guidelines for how to read predictions (and scenarios, and forecasts):

Cui Bono?

• Are they just parroting recent headlines? Are the forecasts and predictions simply rehashes of news items from the last couple of months? These subjects are rarely as important in the medium or long term as they seem in the here and now, but are the current triggers for blog links and Slashdot debates.

• Poked in the eye by the invisible hand? Would the predictor be likely to benefit professionally if the "hot trend for the new year" actually manages to take off? While this doesn't necessarily mean that they're pushing the idea deceptively, it does mean that they're less-likely to be on the lookout for competing ideas and serious roadblocks.

• Are they just reading their own marketing? Many of the end-of-year predictions come from advertising agencies, trade organizations, and other groups trying to get a bit of press. When the forecasts include buzzwords that don't buzz and "consumers" making radical changes to their behaviors because of some swoopy new gadget, chances are you're seeing an effort to predict the future by marketing it.

Less Than Meets the Eye

• Shock and Awe? At the other end of the prediction spectrum are those forecasts that are so disruptive and radical that they simply beg for argument. While they may have some tenuous technological or social justification, they're the kinds of assertions that often get added to lists to make them appear less conventional.

• Why? Next-year forecasts that simply offer up bulleted lists of terse sentences (e.g., "• Foobar defeats Google.") may be amusing, but offer little insight. Predictions that don't include even a cursory effort to explain the reasoning or offer a justification all too often include forecast items that have few reasons or justifications to begin with.

Positive Signs

• Have you heard of this before? Somewhere between the items that everybody knows about already because they've been in the headlines, and the items that nobody knows about because they're internal marketing jargon, are those items that specialists are starting to pay attention to, but few others have picked up on yet. If you encounter a prediction that refers to something you haven't heard about, but you find hundreds of sites digging into its implications when you google it, there's a good chance that you've found a useful forecast.

• Greater than the sum of its parts? Do the authors make connections between the predictions, or do they toss each out as unrelated phenomena? No technological or social development happens in isolation, and very often changes in one arena can profoundly alter the course of other trends and practices. Forecasts that show interconnections have a sense of a bigger picture.

Lastly...

• What did they miss? Have the "future" predictions already happened, but just haven't been widely noticed? Are there other known factors at work that would prevent or substantially alter the predictions? Does one prediction cancel out another, without explanation? Are there alternative outcomes that are just as likely, and equally if not more interesting? Do the predictions miss an obvious connection or combination that could end up being far more influential than any of its component changes?

End-of-year forecasts make for a fun read, and are usually done in a spirit of play and cameraderie. Even the ones that are blatant marketing efforts can provide some surprises and (very occasionally) insights. This set of guidelines should not by any means be read as a condemnation of the practice. In fact, I'd like to see more people making lists of predictions and forecasts, as at the very least, it would provide more chances to practice skeptical futurism. Besides, with enough minds, all tomorrows are visible -- the more of us playing in this space, the better chance we have of spotting surprises before they happen.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

BY CLICKING "I AGREE" YOU ACCEPT THE PROVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE.

Rebecca Blood listed me as one of the folks to take a shot at the One-Sentence Challenge, as offered by Paul Kedrosky:

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area, whether it's entrepreneurship, hedge funds, venture capital, or something else?

Examples: An economist might say that "People respond to incentives". I had an engineering professor years ago who said all of that field could be reduced to "F=MA and you can't push on a rope".

A couple of good ones come immediately to mind: the GBN motto, "the future is uncertain, and yet we must act;" Bruce Sterling's "the future is a process, not a destination;" Yogi Berra's "prediction is very hard, especially about the future." But this really should be one of my own. So here's my try:

The future is built by the curious -- the people who take things apart and figure out how they work, figure out better ways of using a system, and explore how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

How's that?

Passing this along, I'd like to see this challenge answered by:

• Green LA Girl [Siel responds here];
• Mike Treder [Mike responds here];
• Bruce Sterling;
• Kim Allen [Kim responds here];
• Violet Blue;
• Eric Townsend [JET responds here];
• Stuart Candy.

And, of course, anyone who wants to chime in here in the comments.

(Thanks to everyone who has participated!)

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

There's a story I've seen about a philosopher who bet an engineer that he could make a robot that the engineer couldn't destroy. What the philosopher produced was a tiny little thing, covered in fur, that would squeak when touched -- and when threatened, would roll onto its back and look at the attacker with its big, glistening eyes. When the engineer lifted his hammer to smash the robot, he found that he couldn't. He paid the wager *.

Evolution has programmed us, for good reasons, to be responsive to "cute" creatures. Even the coldest heart melts at the sight of kittens playing or puppies sleeping, and while parents respond most quickly to their own children, we all have at least some positive response to sight of a child. Given all of this, it wouldn't be surprising if our biological imperatives could be hijacked by things that are decidedly not puppies and babies -- but approximated their look and behavior. Like, for example, a robot.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle has studied the effects of technology on society for years. Recently, she brought a collection of realistic robotic dolls called "My Real Baby" to nursing homes. Much to her surprise -- and dismay -- the seniors responded to these artificial dependents in ways that mirrored how they would interact with real living beings. They weren't fooled by the robots; they knew that these were devices. But the artificial beings' look and behavior elicited strong, generally positive, emotions for the elderly recipients. Turkle describes it thusly:

In bringing My Real Babies into nursing homes, it was not unusual for seniors to use the doll to re-enact scenes from their children’s youth or important moments in their relationships with spouses. Indeed, seniors were more comfortable playing out family scenes with robotic dolls than with traditional ones. Seniors felt social “permission” to be with the robots, presented as a highly valued and “grownup” activity. Additionally, the robots provided the elders something to talk about, a seed for a sense of community.

Turkle is bothered by the emotions these dolls -- and similar "therapeutic" robots, such as the Japanese Paro seal -- trigger in the adults interacting with them. She argues:

Relationships with computational creatures may be deeply compelling, perhaps educational, but they do not put us in touch with the complexity, contradiction, and limitations of the human life cycle. They do not teach us what we need to know about empathy, ambivalence, and life lived in shades of gray.

Turkle is particularly concerned with the issue of the "human life cycle." She worries about emotional bonds with beings that can't understand death, or themselves die. "What can something that does not have a life cycle know about your death, or about your pain?" she asks. She fears the disconnection with the reality of life when children and adults alike bond with machines that can't die. But this machine immortality may be a benefit, not a problem.

Many, likely most, of the seniors who embraced the robotic children were seriously depressed. Aging is often painful, physically and emotionally, and life in a nursing home -- even a good one -- can seem like the demoralizing final stop on one's journey. Seniors aren't the only ones who are depressed, of course. According to a recent World Health Organization study published in the Public Library of Science ("Projections of Global Mortality and Burden of Disease from 2002 to 2030"), depressive disorders are currently the fourth most common "burden of disease" globally, ranking right behind HIV/AIDS; moreover, the research group projects that depressive disorders will become the second most common burden of disease by 2030, above even heart disease. Depression is debilitating, saps productivity and creativity, and is all too often fatal. Medical and social researchers are only now starting to see the immensity of the problem of depression.

The ability of the therapeutic robots to reduce the effects of depression, therefore, should not be ignored. The seniors themselves describe how interacting with the robots makes them feel less depressed, either because they can talk about problems with a completely trustable partner, or because the seniors see the robots as depressed as well, and seek to comfort and care for them. Concerns about whether or not the robots are really feeling depressed, or recognize (let alone care about) the human's feelings, appear to be secondary or non-existent. Of far greater importance are the benefits for helping someone in the depths of depression to recover a sense of purpose and self.

If you were to look for a My Real Baby doll today, you'd be hard-pressed to find one. They were a flop as commercial toys, with a common reaction (at least among adults) being that they were "creepy." That kind of response -- "it's creepy" -- is a sign that the doll has fallen into the "Uncanny Valley," the point along the realism curve where the object looks alive enough to trigger biologically-programmed responses, but not quite alive enough to pass for human -- and as a result, can be unsettling or even repulsive. First suggested by Japanese robotics researcher Masahiro Mori in 1970, the Uncanny Valley concept may help to explain why games, toys and animations with cartoony, exaggerated characters often are more successful than their "realistic" counterparts. Nobody would ever mistake a human character from World of Warcraft for a photograph, for example, but the human figures in EverQuest 2, conversely, look close enough to right to appear oddly wrong.

As work on robotics and interactive systems progresses, we'll find ourselves facing Creatures from the Uncanny Valley increasingly often. It's a subjective response, and the empathetic/creepy threshold seems to vary considerably from person to person. It's notable, and clearly worth more study, that the nursing home residents who received the My Real Baby dolls didn't have as strong of an "Uncanny Valley" response as the greater public seemed to have. Regardless, it's important to remember that the Uncanny Valley isn't a bottomless pit; eventually, as the realism is further improved, the sense of a robot being "wrong" fades, and what's left is a simulacrum that just seems like another person.

The notion of human-looking robots made for love has a long history, but -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- by far the dominant emphasis has been on erotic love. And while it's true that many emerging technologies get their first serious use in the world of sexual entertainment, it's by no means clear that there's a real market for realistic interactive sex dolls. The social norms around sex, and the biological and social need for bonding beyond physical play, may well relegate realistic sex dolls to the tasks of therapy and of assistance for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to ever find a partner.

But that doesn't mean we won't see love dolls. Instead of sex-bots driving the industry, emotional companions for the aged and depressed may end up being the leading edge of the field of personal robotics. These would not be care-givers in the robot nurse sense; instead, they'd serve as recipients of care provided by the human partner, as it is increasingly clear that the tasks of taking care of someone else can be a way out of the depths of depression. In this scenario, the robot's needs would be appropriate to the capabilities of the human, and the robot may in some cases serve as a health monitoring system, able to alert medical or emergency response personnel if needed. In an interesting counter-point to Turkle's fear of humans building bonds with objects that can not understand pain and death, these robots may well develop abundant, detailed knowledge of their partner's health conditions.

Turkle is also concerned about the robot's inability to get sick and die, as she believes that it teaches inappropriate lessons to the young and removes any acknowledgment of either the cycle of life or the meaning of loss and death. Regardless of one's views on whether death gives life meaning, it's clear that the sick, the dying, and the deeply depressed are already well-acquainted with loss. The knowledge that this being isn't going to disappear from their lives forever is for them a benefit, not a flaw.

We're accustomed to thinking about computers and robots as forms of augmentation: technologies that allow us to do more than our un-augmented minds and bodies could otherwise accomplish. But in our wonder at enhanced mental feats and physical efforts, we may have missed out on another important form of augmentation these technologies might provide. Emotional support isn't as exciting or as awe-inspiring as the more commonplace tasks we assign to machines, but it's a role that could very well help people who are at the lowest point of their lives. Sherry Turkle is worried that emotional bonds with machines can diminish our sense of love and connection with other people; it may well be, however, that such bonds can help rebuild what has already been lost, making us more human, not less.

-=-=-=-=-

*(If anyone has the source of this story, I'd love a direct reference.)

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Lots of nano-news over the past week or two -- and most of it good!

Clean Bill of Health: One of the big questions about nanomaterials arising in recent months concerns the toxicity of nanoparticles, particularly carbon nanotubes. Since carbon nanotubes have applications ranging from solar power to artificial muscles (see below), their almost-magical potential would be blunted by confirmation of nasty effects on living tissues. Rice University is one of the leading institutions studying the biological effects of nanomaterials, so it was welcome news that a Rice University group (working with the University of Texas) has found through in-vivo tests that single-wall carbon nanotubes have no immediate harmful effects, and that they are flushed from the bloodstream within 24 hours -- long enough to be useful for medical procedures, but not long enough to trigger potential longer-term effects.

Obviously these tests need to be replicated and built upon, but still -- good news!

Muscles Made of Yarn: One potential application in the body of carbon nanotubes may be in artificial muscle fibers. University of Texas at Dallas researchers have come up with a way to use carbon nanotubes, would together like yarn, as electro-chemical actuators acting essentially like muscles. According to Technology Review:

By spinning carbon nanotubes into yarn a fraction of the width of a human hair, researchers have developed artificial muscles that exert 100 times the force, per area, of natural muscle. [...] The yarns are created by first growing densely packed nanotubes, each about 100 micrometers long. The carbon nanotubes are then gathered from a portion of this field and spun together into long, thin threads. The nanotube yarn can be just 2 percent of the width of a hair--not even visible--but upwards of a meter long.

There's still much work to do to make nanotube yarn a full replacement for muscles, but their potential is clear. Among the many issues surrounding powered prosthetic limbs and walking robots is the insufficiency of current artificial muscle/muscle replication technologies. At present, mechanical muscles are far weaker than biological muscles, gram-for-gram. If this line of research is successful, the situation may end up reversed.

Viva!: A biotech company with a comic-book name, StarPharma, has come up with a novel nano-material-based gel designed to block the activity of HIV and Herpes viruses. VivaGel™ is a "vaginal microbicide," made to be self-applied by women. It contains dendrimers -- synthetic polymer molecules shaped like the branches of a tree -- structured to stick to the linking surfaces on the virus in question, effectively making it impossible for the viruses to attach to the binding points on their cellular targets. The viruses can't harm the cells (or the host) because their molecular latches are clogged.

This kind of physical attack on a pathogen is less apt to result in the kind of rapid evolutionary adaptation that is seen with traditional antibiotic and antiviral medicines. The virus has to be able to connect to the right spot on a cell to take it over, so there's a very limited assortment of molecular structures it can have on its binding sites -- evolving away from the dendrimer being able to clog the site means evolving away from the site being able to link to the target cell. Adaption remains possible, of course, but just much less likely.

Dendrimers are interesting molecules. Because of their branching structure, it's actually possible to design dendrimers that can target different viruses simultaneously. In principle, VivaGel™ could be an all-purpose viral STD blocker. StarPharma (not a wholly-owned operation of LexCorp) has begun safety trials with UC San Francisco.

Nano-War, Uh, What is it Nano-Good For? Moving away from nano-materials, fellow futurist Michael Anissimov spotted the publication of the academic work Military Nanotechnology, written by Dr. Jurgen Altmann. The book covers the application of nanomaterials as weapons, the use of nanoscale devices as sensors and the like, and the use of nanofabrication technologies to create novel systems. Altmann even looks at the policy implications of the use of human augmentation technologies for military purposes. The answers to how to respond to the development of these technologies won't come easily, but will be even harder to devise if we wait until the technologies are already available.

Unfortunately, as Michael notes, the people who need to take these issues seriously are likely to dismiss this as way off in the future, if they even give it that much thought.

Urgency Noted: That doesn't mean that nobody is paying attention. The National Materials Advisory Board has just released a congressionally-mandated review of US nanotechnology policy. Although it looks chiefly at policies around nano-materials and current research into nano-scale devices, it does take a few pages to consider some of the implications of nano-fabrication. My colleagues at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology have studied the report in detail, and have offered their own take on its findings.

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) expects that the NMAB report will accelerate research toward the development of molecularly-precise manufacturing. However, without adequate understanding and preparation, exponential atom-by-atom construction of advanced products could have catastrophic results. Conclusions published in this report should create a new level of urgency in preparing for molecular manufacturing.

Most of the risks arising from all forms of nanotechnology are familiar, at least on their face. What nano-scale engineering, particularly molecular manufacturing, does is to make those risks happen much more swiftly, more cheaply, more easily, and in greater abundance. It's not that we don't know how to deal with toxic particles or readily-obtained weapons; it's that we've never lived in a world in which the particles could result from such a wide variety of common products, and the weapons could be so hard to detect and yet so powerful. Some of the risks associated with molecular technologies are novel, to be sure, but the core lesson we need to learn has less to do with how to respond to individual threats than with how to grapple with an environment in which the threats arise orders of magnitude more quickly than ever before.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An offhand comment at the Institute for the Future workshop yesterday sent me spiraling off in a new direction. Tom Arnold, Chief Environmental Officer of Terrapass, made reference to "CMOs," and I didn't catch the particular context of that abbreviation (he meant "Chief Marketing Officers," as it turned out). But divorced of its intended meaning, the term "CMO" took on a new definition:

Cognitively Modified Organism

Much to my surprise, nobody has used that term before (at least nobody that Google knows about, and that's all that counts these days). But it's a term with a clear application, most probably used to refer to living beings with intentionally-altered mental (and emotional) characteristics. In this usage, a cognitively modified organism, or CMO, has had its brain wiring altered in an essentially permanent way to induce a particular behavior or mental state -- a hardwired version of Pavlov's Dogs. It could also refer to organisms modified in a way to induce mental/emotional changes when consumed, such as with the fruiticeutical as imagined by IFTF's Jason Tester.

We already live in a world in which we know enough about brain chemistry and behavior to be able to make fairly replicable modifications via drugs; as we learn more about the genetics underlying brain chemistry, we'll be able to experiment with the concept of making more-or-less permanent modifications to behavior in these ways. It won't happen to human beings right off the bat, of course -- we'll be monkeying around with the brains of non-human animals first. We'll probably even find useful results from the ongoing manipulation of non-human animal behavior through the modification of cognitive structures and chemistry.

If we're lucky, it will only go as far as needed to perform useful neurotherapies. If we're less lucky, we'll find these technologies as the near future equivalent of steroids, superficially therapeutic systems used for clumsy augmentation. If we're entirely unlucky, this will be a dangerous new tool for advertising and marketing -- memetics with teeth, as it were.

Oops, there was the bell! Time for dinner.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's the classic dilemma of both foresight and environmental consulting: how do you get the people with the power to act to pay attention? Political leaders rarely pay sufficient attention to issues of systemic sustainability and planning for long-term processes, at least before events reach a crisis. There are numerous reasons why this might be, ranging from election cycles to crisis "triage" to politicians not wanting to institute programs for which they won't be around to take credit. It's nearly as difficult to get leaders to pay attention to complex systems, with superficially different but deeply-connected issue areas. If you were to try to bring together political, business and community leaders for a day-long discussion of, say, what life might be like at the midpoint of this century, with a focus on environmental sustainability coupled with economic, cultural and demographic demands, how much support do you think you'd get?

In Hawaii, over 500 leaders showed up on Saturday the 26th for just such an event, including numerous state legislators and former Hawaii governor George Ariyoshi. Legislative support for the Hawaii 2050 Sustainability project was so great, in fact, that funding for the project received a near-unanimous override of the current governor's veto. The meeting hall was filled to capacity, and the buzz of excitement from the participants grew throughout the day. They could tell: this was the start of something transformative.

The Hawaii 2050 Sustainability project is remarkably ambitious, seeking to create, over the course of the next 18 months, an entirely new planning strategy for the state's next half-century. This strategy will shape how the state handles a tourist economy, a swelling population, friction between cultures and, most importantly, an increasingly dangerous climate and environment.

Saturday's event kicked off the process, mixing a variety of traditional presentations on Hawaii's major dilemmas with four immersive scenarios created by Dr. Jim Dator, Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy at the University of Hawaii's Graduate Research Center for Future Studies. (Jake and Stuart, of course, invited me to Hawaii this last week to talk to some of the grad students and to attend the Hawaii 2050 event; I got a chance to meet and converse with Dr. Dator, as well.) The four scenarios represented a diverse array of possible futures for the state, and included a high-growth world, a limited-growth outcome, a collapse scenario, and a near-Singularity possibility. Participants each stepped into two of the four, and had an opportunity to discuss and evaluate one of the two they saw.

Details of the four scenarios, including links to relevant resources, can be found in this PDF.

The goal of the scenario presentations was to illustrate different possible outcomes, giving the participants a context in which to think about their present-day issues around sustainability. This can be a powerful technique, as it reminds us that choices have consequences, but that sometimes events outside of our control can shape how our choices play out. Scenarios remind us of the complexity of history, by showing how that complexity can evolve in the days and years to come.

The two scenarios I encountered were the near-Singularity world and the collapse world. In the first, nanotechnology, biotechnology and a broad enthusiasm for human and social enhancement technologies allowed widespread radical longevity, thriving colonies on the Moon and Mars, and near-complete management of geophysical processes on Earth. With one minor exception (the existence of point-to-point teleportation), this was, if anything, a fairly conservative take on the Singularity scenario, but the near-universal reaction I witnessed from participants was fear and displeasure. Few of the participants wanted the kinds of enhancement technologies offered in the scenario dramatization, and all lamented the decline of the "natural" world and local culture. I noted at the time that I was the youngest person in my sub-group(!), and easily in the youngest 10% of the conference as a whole; I do wonder what the reaction to this scenario would have been from a larger younger-person contingent.

The near-Singularity scenario was presented in a fairly tongue-in-cheek fashion, and even those who found the world unsettling left the room in relatively good humor. This carried over to the second world my group saw, the collapse scenario, positing an independent, militarized, and resurgent royalist Hawaii struggling to deal with a peak-oil energy collapse, climate disaster, and global economic meltdown. One person stated quite vocally that he found the conceit offensive, but most participants accepted the scenario's elements -- it may have been a dangerous, depressing world, but it was more familiar than one with rejuvenation biotechnology, nanofabbers and Mars colonies!

I'm told, however, that those who entered the collapse scenario first were fairly traumatized by the presentation (attendees were treated as newly-arrived refugees), and this shock carried through when they swapped over to the near-Singularity world.

The main caution I have about the set of scenarios is the translation from "this is a world of tomorrow" to "these are choices you'll have to make about tomorrow." The collapse world had a clearer pathway from the present than did the near-Singularity world -- and in some ways, that makes sense -- but all would have been better-served with a minimal set of bullet-point-style summaries outlining which choices and dilemmas today lead to or militate against the various scenarios. It's too easy for participants, when confronted by future stories that are too disturbing, to wave them off as impossible or "silly" if they don't have explicit links to the present.

But even without the easy-mode handouts, this was a remarkable event. Think about it: community, political and economic leaders of an American state spending a day living in different futures, all with the goal of figuring out sustainable pathways. Imagine doing the same thing for California or New York, or even a national government. What would it take for leaders outside of Hawaii to start thinking about the future in terms of systems and sustainability?

Hawaii had a secret advantage. 36 years ago, the state convened the Hawaii 2000 project (PDF), helping the decision-makers of 1970 to think about their choices and planning strategies. Futurists from Alvin Toffler to Arthur C. Clarke attended, as well as some of the people -- such as Jim Dator -- still working on Hawaiian futures. The set of scenarios about the state's condition in the distant future of 2000 ranged from paradise to commercial near-disaster. Dator tells me that the general consensus, unfortunately, is that the subsequent legislatures ignored the project's recommendations, and that the real world Hawaii of today best matches the near-disaster world feared in 1970.

Such a combination of accurate projection and dismally wrong choices arguably made the Hawaii 2050 project possible, as the earlier project demonstrated both how relevant foresight workshops can be and what happens when their results are discarded. Hawaii 2050 is the state's chance to make up for what happened to Hawaii 2000.

I'm cautiously optimistic about this process. The argument that Hawaii ignored the last scenario project to its own detriment dovetails nicely with the growing prominence of the "Inconvenient Truth" memeplex. More and more people in positions of civic responsibility are realizing the existential risks associated with climate collapse, but in Hawaii, they've had the tools for figuring out strategies for success in their kit for over three decades. I have no doubt that more than one attendee at Saturday's conference realized that, if Hawaii becomes a leader in the field of local and regional environmental response, it has the potential to be an economic dynamo in the years to come.

I hope that Hawaii's project becomes more visible. If Hawaii hadn't experimented with a futurist project 36 years ago, it's unlikely that the state would have even considered such an oddity today. If Hawaii is successful with the 2050 Sustainability endeavor, however, it could in turn serve as a role model for other political entities looking for a proven set of techniques for grappling with uncertainty.

A great deal is riding on the shoulders of this project, even more than its supporters might suspect.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The next five days will see a potentially interesting -- at least to me -- intersection of a variety of important dynamics I've been following closely.

• Global guerillas, or the reaction to them. What should be an hour wait for the flight will be several hours as Janice & I wrangle with security. This habit we in the West seem to have of responding to the most recent security brouhaha, no matter whether the threat was actually new or persistant, is just one of the ways the bad guys win. Frankly, I suspect that "foiled" plans are more disruptive than "successful" attacks. If a plane blows up, we all freak out, but eventually get back to normal. If a terror cell is arrested preparing for an underwear bomb, suddenly we'll all be subject to even more intrusive inspections for years to come.

• The stickiness of virtual communities. This trip will be the longest I've gone in quite some time without at least poking my head into my current preferred metaverse, World of Warcraft. It's not that I'll miss the raids and battlegrounds and whatnot all that much, but I'll really miss the cameraderie of my friends and colleagues.

• Climate awareness. Weather in Hawaii is close to perfect -- a balmy mid-80s, with occasional passing rainshowers. But lurking over the horizon is what could be the strongest Pacific storm season in quite a while. No tropical storms are predicted for this stay, but it's inevitable that Hawaii will get hit in the near future. What happens to a city under weather siege when there's no place to run? The Sustainability 2050 project will have to confront the question of what conditions like that would do to the state.

• Immersive futurism. My talk on Thursday night will address the changing face of futurism, with the emergence of "experiential futurism," whether using role-playing, immersive environments or artifacts. I see this as part of a larger trend towards the democratization of futurism: no longer will we be content with experts telling us what the future will hold, now we want to be able to experience it -- and to change it, through our own choices.

See you on the beach.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The future is an ongoing conversation.

Our futures are words yet unsaid.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"

     —Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet

The idea that tomorrow is a destination, an "undiscovered country," is the lifeblood of classic futurism. We wish to see where we are headed; we want to know what hidden shoals to avoid, and which strong currents to follow. It's this idea of the future as a place just over the horizon that allows us to imagine the "end of history," to fear getting to the future as a race to be lost, to see tomorrow as a land we have yet to conquer.

But what if we instead imagine tomorrow in wholly different terms. What if tomorrow is a word we have yet to speak? The future can be an ongoing conversation, filled with phrases and pauses, debates and soliloquies, a conversation in which all of our voices can be heard. A conversation is larger than any single sentence, although each word is important. It has a narrative and flow, but can head off in surprising directions (although often quite predictable, in retrospect) as new ideas occur to us and new participants enter the scene. A conversation may have had a beginning, but it need not have an ending, as long as we have something to say.

If the future is an undiscovered country, it belongs to none of us (except, perhaps, those who we might displace when we take possession); if the future is an unfinished conversation, it belongs to all of us, as it only matters as long as there are voices to be heard.

The notion of tomorrow as a land just out of reach is an artifact of an age long past, when those who sought to change the world did so by seeking out its most distant edges, whether for trade, treasure or empire. The concept of the future as conversation, however, resonates with today's world, where changes come through mutual creation, collaborative innovation, and the growth of our networks. Inspiration is far more meaningful than exploration in today's world; anticipation -- of the next word, of the next moment -- far more powerful than expectation of what's over the horizon.

An undiscovered country could be found and given name by a lone explorer; conversations, by definition, require more than a single voice. Some speakers will stand out, to be sure, and individual voices may guide the course of the discussion, for a time. But a conversation is not owned by any single person, no matter how vocal; the words move on, the subjects shift, and in due course the conversation bears little resemblance to past debates.

This isn't simply philosophical mumbling. How we speak shapes how we think. As long as we speak of the future in geographic language, we'll continue to look at our choices for tomorrow in terms of ownership, demarcation and, ultimately, limits. Where is the future when there no more lands left to discover?

A conversational metaphor for tomorrow has neither the history nor the breadth of the geographical metaphor, and we will likely speak of horizon-scanning and frontiers and such for some time to come. But it is to our benefit to pay attention to the words we use, and what they truly mean, rather than allow the language of exploration and conquest to remain as unexamined jargon, words that unknowingly shape our vision. It's more important now than ever before that we as a civilization learn how to build an understanding of how the future is shaped into our present-day decisions. We shouldn't let that understanding be created through language with diminishing relevance to our lives, our ideas and our tomorrows.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week, at a talk in Hong Kong, Stephen Hawking made what struck me at the time as being such a reasonable and obvious observation that I didn't think it needed commentary:

''It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,'' Hawking said. ''Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.''

To my surprise, Hawking's comments have been taken by otherwise intelligent people to mean that Hawking believes that the Earth is, or should be, "disposable," and that moving into space would be a way to escape global warming rather than mitigate or reverse it.

I'm 99% certain that this is not what Hawking meant (I can't find a transcript of the speech, so I'll leave that remaining fraction of a possibility open for now). It's pretty clear to me that what Hawking is talking about instead is the fragility of the planet, and the recognition that, for human civilization to survive over the long run, we can't keep ourselves limited to a single home. As Hawking suggests, we face a multitude of existential risks, and the best efforts to eliminate one won't come close to eliminating them all. Even if we manage to avoid a "tipping point" threshold for global warming, for example, we would still face threats from pandemic disease, nuclear war, or the classic asteroid impact.

In the face of such risks, the wise approach is to do what we can to prevent the problems from arising, as well as to do what we can to make certain we can recover if the problem happens too swiftly, too aggressively, or too unexpectedly to be countered. In short, to borrow from the familiar realm of computer tech support, we need to perform both planetary maintenance and civilization backups. Programs and projects to head off global warming, to shift incoming asteroids so that they miss Earth, to improve global health and development, and so forth -- the kinds of good, incredibly important efforts described every day at places like Gristmill, Treehugger, and WorldChanging -- exemplify what I mean by planetary maintenance; looking to a future where humans live on more than one world, what Hawking is talking about, exemplifies what I mean by civilization backups.

I've talked about other kinds of civilization backups before, starting with Norwegian seed archive vaults to muse about information access in a post-disaster world. These are massive projects, and could take decades to complete, but letting us rebuild after planetary-scale disasters. Off-Earth colonies are just another variation -- not because they'd let us leave Earth behind, but because they'd help Earth recover.

But backups are not substitutes for maintenance. Dealing with disasters after the fact is always far more costly, time-consuming and frustrating -- and, on the scale we're talking about, life-threatening -- than performing regular maintenance. Maintenance projects (fighting global warming, eliminating global poverty, eradication of pandemic diseases) reduce our need to use backups; backup projects are our last hope when maintenance fails.

Hawking's comments weren't calling on us to abandon efforts to keep the Earth healthy, or to plan to abandon the Earth, period. They were a reminder that sometimes maintenance fails, and that if human civilization is worth keeping around, we need to think big.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Bruce Sterling did me the honor of devoting an entire Beyond the Beyond blog post to my Twelve Things... item from a couple of days ago. He provided an additional service by disagreeing with part of my post, and explaining precisely why. I figured I should pay close attention.

Bruce, while stating that the "draft of a list of twelve principles here is pretty good," grabs onto the apparent contradiction between my point #1 ("Nobody can predict the future") and my point #2 ("Not everyone is surprised by surprises"). If someone has successfully identified an upcoming change before it happens, haven't they predicted the future? He writes:

((((If I frame an obvious truism as a "prediction" and you feel any genuine surprise, then prediction, as a social act, has taken place. I'm like an Egyptian priest with some elementary understanding of astronomy, who can and will win awestruck admiration when he foretells an eclipse. If somebody foretells that the sun will go dark and nobody else expects the sun goes dark, that is a major revelation. That's not a measure of the absolute unlikelihood of the predicted event. It's a measure of the social distance between specialized insight and general incredulity.)))

(((It makes no pragmatic difference how the predictor found these astounding things out. Frankly, nobody much wants to know that. Generally a futurist spots future trends by spending a lot of time closeted with obscure geeks. He does some groundwork and he scrapes up some poorly distributed future. That's not second-sight. It's kind of a lot of work, and for most people it's rather boring. The whole point of hanging out with futurists is that they will do that kind of thing for you. They can also generally talk about it in some persuasive, jazzy way that eases your native incredulity.)))

Bruce is largely correct, of course, and his point here about "the social distance between specialized insight and general incredulity" is worth emphasizing. Futurists are, in some ways, a different species; for better and for worse, most people don't think in the same ways or about the same things that futurists do. But remember that what I wrote wasn't a Field Guide to Futurism (although, now that I mention it...), it was a set of reminders for journalists approaching futurists for the purposes of reportage. The purpose of point #1 derives from the very same social distance between specialized insight and general incredulity that Bruce describes.

When journalists report on people who describe themselves as futurists, they may not understand why a futurist would make a given observation; what we often get as a result are assertions of certainty. I doubt there are many professional foresight workers out there claiming perfect predictive knowledge, so I have to assume that this comes from how some journalists perceive futurists operate. Point #1 was meant to inoculate reporters against such beliefs.

The kind of reportage prompting point #1 is most visible in the generally superficial articles about emerging trends and upcoming technologies. But as I say later on, Gadgets are not Futurism. Bruce reminds me that the more important kinds of foresight work is heavily science-based, and can make accurate predictions of future events based on existing research. We shouldn't treat a climate scientist (as a pointed example) with the kind of jaded skepticism that we might have for a pop culture trend guru.

So here's how a reworked point #1 should look, taking into account this diversity:

1. "Prediction is very hard, especially when it's about the future." -- Yogi Berra Completely accurate foresight is a rare thing; most of the time, good futurism means getting key elements right, even if the superficial details are wrong. Predictions based on physical principles and scientific knowledge tend to do better than those based on "trendspotting" and "cool hunting," and are more likely to be corroborated by other specialists. In every case, however, the most important question to ask is "why?" Why would the suggested change happen? Why would people make the predicted choice? Why would we see this particular outcome?

What do you think?

(BTW, the picture of Saturn and Encedalus at the top of the post is a call back to Bruce's own Saturn/Encedalus post earlier today.)

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

J. Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, and was an economic advisor to President Clinton; Susan Rasky is a senior lecturer in journalism at UC Berkeley, and was an award-winning reporter for the New York Times. Together, they have compiled for the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard lists of what economists need to know about journalists, and what journalists need to know about economists, in order to result in useful and accurate economic reporting. The lists are straightforward, and if followed would make a world of difference.

This is a remarkably good idea, one with direct application in a number of disciplines that are important for society but prone to obfuscation and confusion in the press: environmental science; bioscience; computer science (pretty much all sciences, in fact); developments on the Internet; and, of particular focus here, futurism and foresight. It's too easy for poorly-informed journalists to skim off unrepresentative (but sound-byte-friendly) examples and concepts, and help to further public confusion instead of help to clear it up.

This isn't because journalists are corrupt or stupid or anything like that: by and large, they're generalists talking about fields that they probably didn't study, under time and financial pressure from editors and publishers who almost certainly know even less. It's a wonder that reportage about science, technology and the future isn't worse than it already is.

Although I think the "12 Things Journalists Need To Know" model has broad application, I'm only going to look at the futurist/foresight area here, and am only going to compile the list for journalists writing about futurists. Fortunately, the instructions for economists about journalists is quite applicable to academics and specialists across disciplines.

Here's my initial draft of 12 -- what would you change?

1. Nobody can predict the future. This should go without saying, but too often, reports about trends or emerging science and technology tell us what will happen instead of what could happen. In fact, most futurists and foresight consultants will avoid making any predictive claims, and you should take them at their word; any futurist who tells you that something is inevitable probably has something to sell.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. The corollary to #1, be on the lookout for people who saw early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an "overnight success" worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and "bolt from the blue" changes have been on someone's foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that "nobody expected," look for the people who actually did expect it -- chances are, they'll be able to tell you quite a bit about why and how it took place.

3. Even when it's fast, change feels slow. It's tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel "shocked" or "overwhelmed." In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren't thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

4. Most trends die out. Just because something is popular or ubiquitous today doesn't mean it will be so in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There's every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon -- and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

5. The future is usually the present, only moreso. Conversely, don't expect changes to happen quickly and universally. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work -- even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

6. There are always options. We may not like the choices we have, but the future is not written in stone. Don't let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking about what might prevent it from happening.

7. Dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years. A favorite pundit cliche is the "dinosaurs vs. mammals" comparison, where dinosaurs are big, lumbering and doomed, while mammals are small, clever and poised for success. In reality, dinosaurs ruled the world for much, much longer than have mammals, and even managed to survive a planetary disaster by evolving into birds. When a futurist uses the dinosaurs/mammals cliche, that's your sign to investigate why the "dinosaur" company/ organization/ institution may have far greater resources and flexibility than you're being led to believe.

8. Gadgets are not futurism.Don't get too enamored of "technology" as the sole driver of change. What's important is how we use technology to engage in other (social, political, cultural, economic) activities. Don't be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays -- ask why people would want it and what they'd do with it.

9. "Sports scores and stock quotes" was 1990s futurist-ese for "I have no idea;" "social networking and tagging" looks to be the 2000s version. Technology developers, industry analysts and foresight consultants rarely want to tell you that they don't know how or why a new invention will be used. As a result, they'll often fall back on claims about utility that are easily understood, familiar to the journalist, and almost certainly wrong.

10. "Technology" is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. This means that, very often, the real utility of a new technology won't emerge for a few years after it's introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a "new technology." Those real uses will often surprise -- and sometimes upset -- the creators of the technology.

11. The future belongs to the curious. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don't just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don't just ask their competitors; their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers, the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

12. "The future is process, not a destination." -- Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story -- people won't reach the "future" and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

When talking with a futurist, then, don't just ask what could happen. The right question is always "...and what happens then?"

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

David Brin wrote a provocative and thoughtful response to my futurist matrix idea, and posted it over at his blog. Unfortunately, the system he uses -- Blogger -- has once again broken its comment system. Rather than wait to reply, I've decided to post my response to his response here. (David -- this is an updated version of the email I sent.)

The futurist matrix is clearly a work in progress, and the changes have been slow and evolutionary. The main difference between the first and second versions of the matrix is in the terminology, not the concept -- I dropped the word "realist," and replaced with "pragmatist." More importantly, I tried to make the sub-headings less normative, less apt to appear biased towards one particular option along an axis.

I suspect I'll need to do something similar with "optimist" and "pessimist." The danger of using commonplace terms in a setup like this is that readers' interpretations of the words may not match my use. The present sub-headings of "inclusive success" and "exclusive success or failure" are more accurate than optimist/pessimist, and I'll likely make them the axis labels.

These more expressive terms help to illustrate a seemingly-illogical aspect of the matrix: the combination of ideologically opposed groups in the same philosophical box, such as Marxists and Dispensationalists in the lower-right quadrant. But the matrix is less concerned with a group's ideology than with its eschatology: how do the philosophies see the future unfolding? As Brin points out, neither Marxists nor Dispensationalists would see themselves as particularly pessimistic. But while they may see a happy future world, it's a world limited to the true believers. They may want everyone to become a true believer, but people outside of the circle cannot achieve a successful future.

There is a bigger problem with putting exclusive success and failure in the same box, though, one that Brin gets at with his Paul Erlich example: it's a pejorative combination, implying that the two are equivalent. I certainly wouldn't be happy in a Left Behind world (in fact, I'd probably be hunted down by the Tribulation Commandos), but few Dispensationalists would see their own success as a form of failure -- while they would likely see the upper left world as indicative of one where they've lost. Failure becomes an issue of perspective, not objective reality.

For many pragmatists, exclusive success and failure may in fact be equivalent concepts; many (most?) people willing to accept different pathways to positive change would see the success of a limited group of people at the expense of everyone else as a form of failure. Even the doomiest doom-sayers among the peak oil and civilization collapse crowd (e.g., James Howard Kunstler) wouldn't see being right as a form of success, even if pockets of well-prepared survivalists carried on (although they may get a bit of schadenfreude out of saying "I told you so" as the boat sinks).

So perhaps it's better to drop "failure" as a hard term, recognizing that each of the four quadrants would likely be seen as a "failure" outcome for somebody.

Regarding some particular points Brin raises:

Andrew Jackson Wickline, my grandfather, the man I was named for, died three years ago, shortly before Memorial Day; a veteran of World War II, he was given a military service on Memorial Day itself, 2003.

A short while before he died, Grandpa Jack gave me a box of old photos from the war. Over 500 pictures, taken by the company chaplain for the 80th Field Hospital, and offered to the men afterwards; Jack was one of very few who took copies of the pictures. I've scanned a small handful of them, and put them up on the web, but I really need to scan them all.

The photos are yellowed and clearly showing their age, but they are intact. Will the same be said in sixty years for the pictures we take today? My hard drive is full of images, taken by all manner of digital cameras -- but few have been printed out, and while I have multiple backups, digital media is inherently ephemeral. Formats change; people get sloppy. I have disks with essays from graduate school in formats that I can no longer read. How long until I can no longer read the image files found on some old CD I burned years ago?

Physical objects are not permanent, and I couldn't share the photos from the middle of the last century so easily without converting them first to digital form. I know the value and power of electronic media. I simply wonder how much of our future's past will be lost when locked into long-discarded formats and devices.

It is especially incumbent upon those of us who think about the future to remember what has gone before. The future doesn't just happen; events don't emerge fully-formed, like Athena from Zeus' head. The world in which we live is the result of myriad victories and mistakes, chances taken and decisions regretted, paths followed and options ignored, people loved and people forgotten. Too often, we pay attention solely to prominent names, the leaders and celebrities, and give them credit for creating the present. Artifacts like a box of old photos from a long-ago war remind us of how today's world was truly shaped, and the roles that everyday people played in making it come about.

I look at the people in my grandfather's photos, and wonder: did they know they were remaking the world? Were these simply snapshots to them, vacation photos with an edge, or did they recognize that they were documenting their roles in a monumental political transformation? How would our understanding of the second world war differ if everyone had carried a camera, not just one person out of hundreds, or thousands?

Under Mars, a site archiving soldiers' photos from the present Iraq War, gives us a hint. For some soldiers, the pictures are simply snapshots, a way to hang onto a moment with friends. For others, they are historical records, filtered not through the eyes of a journalist or through the official accounts, but anchored to their own perspective, their fear and elation and wonder and horror. These are the artifacts of a citizens' history of the world -- if we can remember how to view them.

Memories are imperfect, and photos -- digital or physical -- have an aura of authority, but are no less subjective. But in the gathering of myriad subjective stories and images, a collaborative truth emerges. The more memories that get added to this collection, the more powerful the truth; beware histories that are written solely by victorious leaders.

My grandfather, Andrew Jackson Wickline, gave me many gifts over the years, but this box of photos is an incredible legacy. Every time I look at them, I sense their gravity and power. I don't know what I'll do with them -- I'm very happy to listen to suggestions -- but I do know that I'll treasure them. They're tangible evidence that history comprises the lives of all of us, not just the great and the famous, and that all of our actions help to shape the world to come.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday's post What's Your Future has gotten a bit of attention, and much of the commentary (especially the discussion following the post itself) has been quite useful and interesting.

Upon reflection, I think the use of "Realist" to denote the top of the vertical axis is somewhat confusing. I use the term to mean a position/ideology that welcomes compromise and embraces ambiguity; unfortunately, I noticed that a few people seemed to take it to mean "realistic" (or, better yet, "reality-based"). Given what that suggests about the opposite end of that spectrum, people who might feel some sympathy for the (e.g.) Optimist-Idealist box would reject that position.

I'd like to replace the term Realist with Pragmatist.

To further clarify, by Pragmatist I mean "open to multiple methodologies," and by Idealist I mean "strong preference for a particular methodology." In both cases, "methodologies" is intentionally broad.

So, as a revised matrix:

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

How do you envision the future? Are we on the verge of dystopia? Soon to be transformed by accelerating change? Ready to strap on the jet packs to pick up our food pills? Settling in for a long struggle?

It struck me recently, while talking with my friend Jacob Davies, that the relative success of WorldChanging and similar projects could be linked to the re-invigoration of a worldview combining optimism (a belief that success is possible, and can be broadly achieved) and realism (a belief that global processes are imperfect and cannot be perfected, and change happens through compromise and evolution). Jacob gave some further thought to this idea, and elaborated a bit on its implications in a comment at the Making Light weblog. The combination of belief sets -- optimism vs. pessimism, realism vs. idealism -- offer us a matrix for describing divergent ways of looking at the future.

It's important to note first off that there isn't a strict correlation here between politics and foresight worldview. Both premillennial dispensationalists (the Left Behind, "rapture ready" types) and traditional revolutionary Marxists would be situated in the lower-right Idealist-Pessimist box, for example. It wouldn't be hard to find similar pairs of contrasting ideologies for the other boxes.

Instead, let's populate the matrix with examples of differing approaches to understanding a changing world.

In the upper left, Optimist-Realist, we can put WorldChanging and its fellow-travelers -- success is possible, but requires a clear understanding of problems and a willingness to adapt to meet changing conditions (use new tools, work with new allies, etc.). I put myself in this category, too (unsurprisingly), and I suspect that a large portion of the new generation of people doing foresight work would call this box home.

In the upper right, Pessimist-Realist, probably the most familiar manifestation would be the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction, where the world is complex, change is messy, and the best we can hope for is staving off the worst of it for our own (likely small) group. As Jacob noted, many traditional environmentalists fall into this box; I'd also put various critics of technology such as Neil Postman or Bill McKibben in this category.

In the lower right, Pessimist-Idealist, we can find (as noted) the religious revolutionaries, be they Left Behind-type Christians, Caliphate-fixated Muslims, or Third Temple-building Jews, all ready to wash away the unbelievers and enemies in order to transform the world. I would also put the "back to the Pleistocene" Deep Ecologists here, too, the folks who think that the only way to save the planet is to wipe out 9/10ths of the population.

Finally, in the lower left, Optimist-Idealist, are those who see a transcendent, transformative future available to all. The most visible manifestation of this worldview can be found in those who see the advent of a technological Singularity fixing the world's problems and giving us all near-infinite knowledge and power. I don't put all Transhumanist-type folks here; James Hughes is an excellent example of someone who sees both a potential for technology-driven transformation and the need to work to make sure the benefits extend beyond a small group of elites. But anyone who has read Ray Kurzweil's books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near knows how readily the Singularitarians can slip into millennialist language.

For now, this matrix gives us a taxonomy of futurism, but it may prove to be a useful tool for understanding heretofore unexpected alliances (such as the growing anti-technology coalition between some environmentalists and some religious conservatives).

Where would you put yourself? What does this matrix miss?

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

David Brin keeps a running tab of the "predictions" he got right in his 1991 novel Earth. He didn't write the book as a piece of forecasting, but has managed to get a variety of things right about how the early 21st century would look.

It may be time for me to start my own list.

In 2003's Transhuman Space: Toxic Memes, I wrote about the "Spacer Tabi:"

TRANSHUMAN STYLE: THE SPACER TABI Ever since humans moved into space full-time, the quest for comfortable, useful, and attractive clothing for zero gee has been unending. A variety of outfit designs have come and gone over the decades, but one item has stuck around: the tabi. Based on the Japanese split-toe slipper, the so-called "spacer tabi" allows for both comfort when walking in positive-gee environments and the ability to use the crude gripping ability of one's toes in zero gee.

[...] Spacer tabis come in a wider variety of color and fabric on Earth than they do in space, and have become popular in most urban settings. Most adults in Fourth and Fifth Wave countries have at least one pair of spacer tabis in the closet.

Today's boingboing brings us this bit of news:

Space-sneakers like a Japanese toe-sock

I don't know about you, but I'm totally ready to buy a pair.

It's actually pretty unusual for futurists to get their scenaric elements right. That's not to say that the projections/forecasts are useless. Even "wrong" pieces of foresight are usually wrong in illustrative, useful ways, and get us to keep our eyes open for changes to culture (or technology or politics) that we may otherwise have ignored. Futurist work isn't really about telling people what will happen, but about getting people to anticipate change from a new perspective.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how we make long-term decisions. The trite reply of "poorly" is perhaps correct, but only underscores the necessity of coming up with reliable (or, at least, trustable) mechanisms for thinking about the very long tomorrow. Many of the biggest crises likely to face human civilization in the 21st century have important long-term characteristics, and our relative inability to think in both complex and actionable ways about slow processes may be our fundamental problem.

Whether we're talking about asteroid impact, global warming, introduction of engineered self-replicating devices (biotech or nanotech) into the environment, or radical longevity, we seem stuck in the mindset that says "if it's not a squeaky wheel, it gets no grease." It's a triage mentality -- we're dealing with bloody, awful problems right here and right now, and something that won't affect us for decades is something we can ignore for the moment. The thing is, these aren't the kinds of problems where the cause and the effect happen close together, and they're not the kinds of problems that can be dealt with quickly. If we wait until they're the bloody, awful problems of right here and right now, it's far too late. So why is it so hard to think in the long term?

Our brains evolved in conditions where individuals would likely live just a few decades, and some of the explanation for why it's so hard for us to think long-term comes from that. We may not be wired to do so easily, and teaching ourselves to think creatively about the future might be as difficult as training any other kind of behavior that runs against biological pressures. If this is so, it would suggest that long-term thinkers may end up a kind of "monk," disconnected from the everyday world, potentially given respect and support but rarely completely understood by society at large.

It could also be a function of the relatively rapid pace of technological innovation. This would have two big repercussions: the first is that we become accustomed to thinking of present-day problems as simply being a matter of engineering -- we may not be able to do X now, but surely we'll come up with a way to do it cheaply and easily in The Future, so why worry?; the second is that we are often burned by attempts to "predict" the future of technology, and find the pace of change a bit overwhelming. If so, this suggests that better thinking about longer-term problems is a process issue, and a better methodology would potentially work well.

A lot to mull on here, and I don't have good answers yet.

Posted by Jamais Cascio at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)