WC Archive

Building an argument for a better world runs into a recurring problem: people like to imagine awful futures. Seriously. There are undoubtedly numerous explanations for this, ranging from Cassandra complexes ("I warned you, but you didn't listen!") to Terriblisma, the wonderful term Alex dredged up out of Renaissance Italy to describe the awe-filled feeling one gets from witnessing utter devastation. The unwillingness to imagine positive futures may be a wish to avoid hubris, or it may denote an underlying hope to be wrong, to encounter a good future as a pleasant surprise.

For most of the last decade, my job (in its various manifestations) has been the development of scenarios, plausible stories about the future. Usually, these scenarios were linked to a given organization's strategic concerns, whether that organization was as large as a global IT manufacturer or as small as a local school district. Sometimes, the scenarios were used to build out dramatic worlds for film, television, or games. Occasionally, the scenarios were simply an exercise in thinking through what the next five, ten, or fifty years might look like.

When people set out to think about the future, the first (and usually only) question they ask is "what if things go wrong?" This is by no means a bad question (in fact, it would be nice if it were asked more often). But focusing only on negative outcomes blinds one to the possibility of things going right. The possibility of victory. I'm not alone in this observation; Alex has spoken in the past of working with environmental groups, asking what their "win" scenario looked like, and getting nothing but blank looks in response.

What does the future hold? Building a better future takes foresight: you need to have a sense of how things are changing, what you're going to be up against, and what new tools and systems may be available over the coming years. While there are myriad writers trying to tell you (or sell you...) their visions of what tomorrow may bring, few of them are truly useful if you're trying to change the world.

Quite a few futurists fall into a trap of imagining that the invention of things is a good way of thinking about the future. British Telecom has a forecasting department that specializes in just this, and has published a calendar of technology development. As the document was initially published in late 2001, and we are about to enter 2004, looking at how well they mapped out developments in 2002 and 2003 is a useful exercise. We seem to have under a month for the first talk show hosted by a robot to hit the airwaves, for example.

Not everyone who focuses on devices and innovations is content to simply list things in a terse "10GHz chips -- 2006" format. MIT's journal Technology Review publishes an annual "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World" article, going into substantial detail about how the inventions work, how they are used, and what the next steps are in their development. The 2003 listing, from early this year, has been made available here; the 2004 edition, due out in a month, will likely be available initially only to subscribers.

More recently, Fast Company magazine took a similar approach, listing "5 Technologies That Will Change the World." As with the Technology Review piece, the article goes into some detail about the people and processes involved in the creation of the new systems.

Of course, the world is more than innovative new technologies and processes. Politics, demographics, design, and more all help shape global outcomes.

But few of these futurist and forward-looking projects take the next step, and consider how the developments, changes, threats, and opportunities they describe combine with those described by others. How does an increase in average lifespan mix with the proliferation of tiny, wireless, networked cameras, for example? At first blush, they seem unrelated -- and they are, superficially -- but upon reflection, one can start to imagine how a growing elderly population might use ubiquitous networked cameras for their own personal security (fearful of roving bands of teenagers), how an overtaxed healthcare system might use abundant netcams as a way of monitoring seniors who don't need onsite care but might need rapid responses to a fall or heart attack, how active older people might use mobile networked cameras as a tool for prompting their gradually failing memories when meeting someone new, trying to recall where they put their keys, etc. (frankly, I could use something like that now...). I'm sure you could think of others.

None of these musings would necessarily have been apparent just from thinking about the implications of either aging demographics or wireless cameras, but pop right out when you put the two together.

In part two, I'll talk a bit more about how we can use this as a tool for building a better world.

As WorldChanging often links to sites and stories which reflect the ideas and activities of younger people, it is worth noting that one of my heroes, a person whose ideas and values parallel those of WorldChanging, just turned 86 years old. Arthur C. Clarke ostensibly writes science fiction, but in reality what he does is show us our own potential. OneWorld South Asia has an interview with Sir Arthur, discussing topics as varied as what he thinks of satellite television and how we can all work to solve issues of poverty and inequality.

In this interview, he utters a line which I think describes our efforts at WorldChanging perfectly: I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy, if only because it offers us the opportunity of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cyborg Democracy had a post yesterday about the game series Transhuman Space. I note this for several reasons. The setting of the game is interesting and provocative. A game like this is a different way of thinking about the future. And I'm one of its authors.

Transhuman Space is a role-playing game setting. (No, not on a computer. This is old-school paper & dice role-playing, kind of like Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, people still play games like these, although the number of players is way down from 10 or 20 years ago.) It actually comprises 11 books, covering what the world of 2100 looks like on Earth and throughout the solar system, and doing so in as scientifically and conceptually plausible a manner as possible -- there's no faster-than-light travel, telepathy, or humanoid alien life. I wrote two of the books: Broken Dreams, just released last week, which looks at the developing world and the global politics of intellectual property in 2100, and Toxic Memes, due out in the spring, which examines conspiracy theories, political movements, urban legends, and the like in 2100. (The links in this paragraph will take you to the description pages for each book; the images are linked to larger versions of each cover.)

Most of the books (including mine) run about 100,000-150,000 words, with only about a quarter of the text focusing on game mechanics. The rest is detailed exploration of what life may be like a century from now, from the minutiae of popular food trends and clothing styles to broader issues of environmental conditions, political struggles, and the extension of human rights beyond what we currently call "human."

(No, not involving swimsuits.)

Mark Kleiman runs a political blog I subscribe to with my RSS reader. In response to novelist Michael Crichton's rant that global warming is just bad science, he recently posted a brief but insightful exploration of why, although predictions are usually wrong, thinking about the future -- and, in particular, building models to tell us about how the future may unfold -- is still a useful and important endeavor:

Right, then. We can't know what the world will look like in 2100. But unless we also don't care what the world looks like in 2100, or unless we think our current actions have zero predictable impact on what he world will look like in 2100, we need to make decisions now -- we are, in fact, making decisions now -- in which results a century hence are part of the objective function.

Uncertainty about the results of our actions will indeed suggest that we should discount predicted far-future effects vis-a-vis more predictable near-future effects (this in addition to the normal discounting for the time-value of resources). But not to zero, surely?

In short, as we used to say at the scenario-planning company I worked for in the 1990's, "the future is uncertain -- and yet we must act."

Dale Carrico, in his "Progressive Futures" column over at BetterHumans, takes a thoughtful look at the "precautionary principle." For those unfamiliar with the term, the most-broadly accepted definition is from the Wingspread Statement:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties.

While much of the debate in emerging technology circles focuses on the first part of the statement, Carrico instead gives his attention to the last sentence, arguing that the precautionary principle has the best chance to both protect us from hazardous results and still encourage innovation and experimentation when it is open to broad participation:

I think many underestimate how often the most reasonable assessments emerge from open encounters among actual stakeholders to questions at issue. Even expert knowledge is most useful when it is answerable to multiple and contending stakeholders to a question, rather than imposed unilaterally by an organized authority (whether corporate or otherwise), the particular and interested viewpoint of which it will tend to reflect, often to the cost of sense. Even people who weight potential harms unreasonably strongly may still be readily persuaded to undertake risks when benefits are made clear or the rewards offered for undertaking them are sufficient enough. Again, it isn't clear to me why anybody can be so certain that a technological development answerable to these more democratic demands would necessarily have failed to deliver even historically a comparable level and speed of developmental achievement than we have managed otherwise, and certainly it is hard to see what would be appealing in such a view today when democratic ideals are broadly affirmed.

Scenarios are powerful tools for getting people's attention. That's something we need to remember as the Pentagon's sudden climate change report continues to stir controversy. A purely factual, present-knowledge-based report to the Department of Defense about the possibility of a whiplash ice age would not have sparked the same kind of public reaction that the scenario did. Scenarios bring issues to life in a way that straight reportage often cannot.

But the real point of using scenarios is not publicity, but foresight: we build scenarios not to hype an idea or predict the future, but in order to see more clearly the choices we will be facing. By building a model of how the future could turn out, we can then explore how our plans and goals would be challenged and strengthened in such a world. To that end, nearly all scenario projects result in a small number (3-5) of divergent narratives, giving the readers a broad set of perspectives on possible outcomes.

Scenario narratives are more powerful than detailed checklists of possible outcomes in large part because they paint a picture of what we would find outside our window (or on our computer screen) if we actually lived in that world. Some more elaborate scenario projects use representational artifacts -- videotaped news reports, magazine articles, even advertisements purporting to be from the scenaric future -- as ways of changing the scenarios from something one reads into something one experiences. By making the possible futures more than a simple listing of assertions, scenarios make it easier to imagine how one would react, and what one can do now to prevent -- or encourage -- such outcomes.

Useful scenarios have a number of aspects in common:

Andrew Zolli at Z+ Partners points us to the BBC's new series, If..., which brings plausible scenarios of near-future developments to the (British) TV screen. This ongoing series dramatizes different possible scenarios of the future -- of power problems, of explosive social inequality, of generational conflict, etc. -- in order to provoke discussion and thought about the choices we make now.

The show's editor, Peter Barron, describes why scenarios are useful tools for thinking about the future:

Are we guilty of scare-mongering?

Not any more so than the Emergency planners, BT or the CIA when they create their future scenarios.

Only a hopeless optimist would make a plan based on the best case scenario.

On IF we tackle the difficult and uncomfortable issues head on. That way, if there are problems ahead perhaps we stand a better chance of preventing them or at least getting out of their way.

At this point, the series is only available on the BBC in the UK; they currently don't have the distribution rights to put the episodes on the web. If the show comes to BBC America, it might be time for me to get a satellite dish...

What happens when you combine mobile communications, always-on cameras, and commonplace wireless networks? We're going to find out very soon.

Mobile phones and PDAs with cameras are increasingly common; one in six phones sold in 2003 had a camera in it, and last year cameraphones actually out-sold other digital cameras. But, as this photo (which I took with my Sony-Ericsson T610 cameraphone and cleaned up a bit) shows, image quality from cameraphones is often quite poor. That's a temporary problem, however; Nokia just introduced a one megapixel camera phone, and other phone manufacturers are sure to follow suit. Within a decade, your phone will likely be able to take pictures at least as good as your present-day digital camera.

The bigger change will come from an entirely-new class of hardware -- what I call the "personal memory assistant." Both Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have built test versions of wearable cameras designed to record the world around you as you go about your day (the HP wearable always-on camera is the illustration at the top of this post). Nokia and HP are working on the software required to make such cameras usable. If you've seen or used a TiVo, imagine a TiVo for your day-to-day life. If you don't think that's revolutionary, consider that human memory is notoriously faulty; what happens when a person can have perfect recall?

There is no reason why wearable personal memory assistants wouldn't be linked to wireless networks. There are good reasons why they would be, in fact: to let others see what you're seeing (so that they can help you); to access greater computing power for image-recognition (including, eventually, facial-recognition routines so that you never forget a face); and for off-site storage of what you're recording, giving you far greater capacity than what you could have on-camera (and keeping the images safe if the unit was lost or damaged). I suspect that nearly all of these systems, once they come to market, will have wireless communication built-in.

Of course, along with these new devices come a host of new dilemmas. Just as with cameraphones today, there will be people using them for various unethical purposes. The situation will be made worse by the potential invisibility of these systems: it may be difficult to tell whether a given pair of glasses is web-camera-enabled just by glancing at it. There will undoubtedly be attempts to embed software in the cameras to prevent the recording of copyrighted material, or to make an obvious noise if the image appears too much like a naked body. Perhaps there will be a mandate of a "remote shutoff" switch iin the devices, so that theaters and locker rooms and the like can automatically prevent wearable camera functions. Some of these fixes will work, some won't.

Now tie this technology to what Alex posted yesterday about Way New Urbanism. Mobile systems combined with GPS and GIS and social software and RFIDs and "smart dust"... These are tools to reshape your relationship with your environment, other people, and even your sense of self.

I offer up this scenario in order to ask: if we know these devices are on their way, are really already here in crude form, how can we use them as tools for good? Are these systems the harbingers of a Transparent Society, or are they the makings of a Panopticon Singularity? Does the sousveillance concept make sense, a world where we are all have the ability -- and responsibility -- to "watch the watchmen?" Would these be the perfect tools for corporate whistleblowers and anti-corruption activists?

This could be big.

For those of you with a morbid interest in just how bad an asteroid strike could be (see our post Life in the Shooting Gallery for our chances of being hit), the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona has an Earth Impact Effects Program, allowing you to calculate just how big the fireball, crater, and other effects would be. No fancy graphics, just cold numbers and text.

Example: I live about 30 miles outside of San Francisco. If a 10 meter porous rock asteroid were to hit there, with a strike energy of about 27 kilotons of TNT, it would leave a crater of 1192 feet, I'd feel ground shaking of about 3.5 on the Richter scale, and the sound of the boom would be about 40 dB. The average intervel between impacts of this size is 6.8 years (fortunately, not all on San Francisco).

Universe Today has the details on the simulator.

Today's Salon has a good article about how easy it is to doctor photographs with digital technology ("A Picture Is No Longer Worth A Thousand Words," registration or click-through ad required). Towards the end of the piece, the author, Farhad Manjoo, and one of his interviewees, photographer Pedor Meyer, make an excellent point, reinforcing some of the complexities we discussed recently in A Participatory Panopticon?:

[Meyer says:]"...if you don't have other sources to confirm something, you can't conclude it happened. Now enter into the picture this fact -- over the last 12 months there have been more cellphones with cameras sold than all other cameras, digital or analog combined. Cameras are becoming ubiquitous. We have the possibility for the first time to cross-reference everything, something that was never done before. It doesn't matter if the picture is a shitty little picture, it's a reference." And if you have enough references, it doesn't matter if one person doctors an image; if a hundred -- or maybe a thousand -- cellphones say a massacre occurred, it probably happened.

In a cross-referenced, constantly photographed world -- a thing that might scare you but that is probably becoming inevitable -- we would probably have better proof of what actually happened in an important event than we do today.

Automobile designers love to create "concept cars" -- vehicles which will never actually see the showroom floor, but demonstrate ways in which new technologies or design ideas can be implemented. Sometimes, the concept vehicle just looks like an oddly-muscular version of a modern car or truck, as if the designers were hoping for it to be included in the next Batman movie. And sometimes the concept car looks nothing like anything currently on the road, a design guaranteed to stop traffic. Such is the Toyota PM -- the "Personal Mobility" vehicle.

First unveiled at the Toyota Motor Show last October, the PM is a single-passenger electric vehicle designed to fit in a niche somewhere between the convenience of a motorcycle and the comfort of a regular car. The website "HowStuffWorks" has a good, heavily-illustrated write-up of how the PM is supposed to work, along with some previews of other Toyota concept cars (including the "Alessandro Volta," a hybrid sports car able to go 0-60 in 4 seconds and still get around 35 miles per gallon). While I doubt we'll see funky single-passenger cars like this on the road any time soon, even in small-car-friendly places like Japan and Europe, many of the innovations in the PM design will certainly find their way into actual production vehicles.

But while the science-fiction-styling and joystick controls may draw the initial interest, what leapt out at me was the description of the PM as a mobile networking device:

If you find this article valuable, please support WorldChanging. We are a nonprofit website, and are able to continue our operations largely through your donations. You may also find our other pieces on tools, models and ideas for building a better future useful. Check 'em out!

How come nobody sells a hybrid diesel car?

For those of you familiar only with the sooty smoke belching from older big-rig trucks or the foul smells from 1970s diesel cars, the question may come as a surprise. But modern diesel engine design coupled with the much-cleaner types of diesel fuel increasingly available (particularly "biodiesel") make diesel vehicles a surprisingly environmentally-friendly choice. Diesel-hybrid-electrics would be an obvious positive development. So why don't we see them?

I suppose the answer varies depending upon where you are. In the US, the diesel fuel available in most locations remains the old, dirty, high-sulfur variety, so a hybrid diesel actually wouldn't be a significant improvement in emissions; once low-sulfur regulations take effect in 2006, this may change. In Europe, where advanced-technology "clean" diesel autos are one-third to one-half of the auto market and growing, some diesel cars already get mileage roughly equivalent to hybrids, so I suspect there's simply less demand.

The irony is that diesel hybrids could be far more efficient and clean than anything now on the market, without any leaps in technology. The combination of modern clean diesel engines, Prius-style serial hybrid-electric systems, and biodiesel/vegetable oil fuels could provide amazing mileage, cleaner air, and vastly reduced petroleum dependency. Comfortable, powerful sedans could get upwards of 80 miles per gallon and be carbon-neutral.

(More in the extended entry...)

I've never been particularly worried about the threat of "grey goo" -- self-replicating nanomachines devouring everything in their path. Anything that tore apart and reassembled the physical world fast enough to be truly dangerous would likely cook itself from the heat output. But ever since the nanotechnology guru Eric Drexler mentioned the possibility in his seminal nanotech manifesto, The Engines of Creation, out of control nanoassemblers have become a staple of bad sci-fi and easily-startled doomsayers alike. Still, it's good to see that Dr. Drexler (along with Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology) have published a paper spelling out precisely why free-range nanoassemblers, goo-making or otherwise, are simply not needed for the imminent nanotech revolution.

The article, Safe Exponential Manufacturing, will be freely available from the Institute of Physics electronic journals page until July 9. It's a PDF, and you'll have to create a free account on the site to get access to it. For those of you not interested in making that effort, this press release from CRN summarizes the argument.

Contrary to previous understanding, self-replication is unnecessary for building an efficient and effective molecular manufacturing system. Instead of building lots of tiny, complex, free-floating robots to manufacture products, it will be more practical to use simple robot arms inside desktop-size factories. A robot arm removed from such a factory would be as inert as a light bulb pulled from its socket. The factory as a whole would be no more mobile than a desktop printer and would require a supply of purified raw materials to build anything.

“An obsession with obsolete science-fiction images of swarms of replicating nanobugs has diverted attention from the real issues raised by the coming revolution in molecular nanotechnologies,” said Drexler.

This said, I doubt that the grey goo meme will go away. If anything, it serves as an unpleasant metaphor for the the potentially serious disruption full-bore molecular nanotechnology would unleash upon the economy, and will keep us all on our toes about potential military applications of nanoengineering (even if it's only used to produce cheap, non-replicating hardware). Still, it's good to know that, even if the meme exists, the threat doesn't.

Traffic sucks. It wastes time, it adds to pollution, and it increases driver stress levels. While taking public transit can be a good alternative, often that option simply does not exist. Making traffic worse are those all-too-frequent episodes when, after crawling along for an hour, the traffic suddenly -- and inexplicably -- picks up, as if the traffic jam was nothing but the ghost sensation left over after the original trigger had long ago departed.

To the surprise of some, more roads and more lanes don't help. Traffic jams don't occur due to the number of cars on a given road so much as due to the distance between cars. Less space between your car and the vehicle in front of you means that you have less time to react to sudden moves, and are more likely to engage in a kind of high-speed stop-and-go, hitting the brakes briefly in response to the car in front of you doing so; if the car behind you is driving too close to you, then it will also have to brake, and the too-close car behind it, and so forth. These "pinch effects" propagate backwards along the highway like a wave.

The simplest solution is for people to drive more intelligently, keeping sufficient space between vehicles to buffer the transient braking, sudden lane changes, and unexpected (but brief) changes in speed of the car in front. You're also less likely to end up in an accident if you leave more space. But since traffic planners and safety experts have been trying to get people drive this way for a long while without much success, it's a good idea to look at some technological assistance that might help.

New Scientist and The Economist this last week identified two very different technological approaches to reducing the driver-distance traffic jam problem.

New Scientist looked at a German traffic simulation system used to predict where these "pinch effect" traffic tie-ups will occur on the autobahn. Recent changes to the model, taking into account the fact that cars can't slow down instantly and the bad driving habit of keeping too close to the car in front, allow the model to "see" incipient jams up to an hour before they form. Once predicted in this way, the information can be made available to drivers, who can then change their driving routes or times accordingly. Unfortunately, the system is currently a victim of its own success: so many people choose alternate routes based on the predictions that the forecasts are becoming less accurate.

The Economist, conversely, is looking at "Adaptive Cruise Control" (ACC), which combines standard cruise control speed management with vehicle radar watching how close the car gets to the vehicle in front. According to projections by the University of Michigan, if 20% of the cars on the road were equipped with ACC, the clear-highway traffic jams would be eliminated (this suggest, of course, that a similar result would obtain if 20% of human drivers drove better, but I digress). This sounds great, except that the system isn't smart enough to adapt the way human drivers do, and ACC can actually make things worse under certain (unspecified in the article) bottleneck conditions. Ironically, the solution suggested by the developers is to let ACC vehicles driver closer the car in front than would otherwise be safe; since ACC systems can react far faster than humans to sudden changes in condition, even vehicle distance of less than a second between cars can be safely maintained. The article doesn't mention what happens when the ACC computer fails.

So which will work better -- more information or more computer control? From a just-in-time, flexibility perspective, the individual car ACC system is the winner, making traffic jams less likely regardless of the path or time chosen, although if too few drivers have the system (or drive safely), the effect is minimal, and the ACC-equipped car is stuck. From a plan-ahead/plan-for-trouble perspective, the road information approach is better, as it makes it possible (in principle) to avoid the tie-ups completely regardless of what you're driving, and if the computer system crashes (as they all do), the worst that happens is that you're in an unpredicted traffic jam.

Fortunately, both approaches are complementary, and are moving from the labs to the real-world. The ultimate effect of these developments may well be that traffic tie-ups based on too-close driving will be a thing of the past sooner than we think. Quite a pleasant surprise.

The Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is now hosting an exhibit entitled "Transportation Futuristics: Visionary Designs in Transportation Engineering." The exhibit -- which runs from July 6 through September 30, 2004 at the Bernice Lynn Brown Gallery -- is accompanied by a "virtual gallery," which puts many of the illustrations online. The site covers autos, monorails, hover vehicles, and more -- the range of this bestiary of imagined vehicles is simultaneously amusing and staggering. While the fevered transportation dreams of the early part of the 20th century are well-represented, the exhibit also includes some much-more-recent offerings, from the Moller Sky Car to various manifestations of "Personal Rapid Transit" and "Intelligent Transportation Systems." The one thing each of these transit designs have in common is that they never really managed to revolutionize transportation -- they were all, to varying degrees, futures that never were.

For those of us who make thinking about how the future could unfold our profession, exhibitions like "Transportation Futuristics" hold an almost fetishistic fascination. While some of the designs featured in the show are clearly hand-waving "wouldn't it be great if..." sketches, many are the result of long hours of debate, research, and informed speculation. They were not offered up in expectation of failure. These vehicles and systems were considered to be plausible -- or at least possible -- extrapolations into a future yet to unfold.

(continued in the extended entry)

One way to get some insight into the way things are in the present is to imagine how things would have turned out had some key historical issue been resolved differently. What if the Germans had won WW2? What if Apple had licensed the Mac interface in 1986? What if Los Angeles hadn't torn up miles of streetcar lines to build highways? And so forth. The imagined outcome doesn't have to be better than the present situation, of course, or even entirely plausible. But thinking about historical contingencies can be a good way of seeing otherwise subtle connections between events, ideas, and people.

Historians call these "counterfactuals;" science-fiction writers call them "alternate histories." Most people just think of them as "what if..." stories, which is just what OutlookIndia calls them in its special issue of essays about how India -- and, sometimes, the world -- would be different today had various historical events turned out differently. Even for those of us not steeped in the details of South Asian history, the essays make for fascinating reading; not only do the stories provide insights into how present-day India actually came about, they reveal the concerns that modern Indian historians (and amateur historians) have about India's place in the world.

A list of some of the What If... stories should get most of you clicking over (the alternate history buffs hit the link quite awhile ago):

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is, for me, one of the best examples of the intersection of activism and anticipation. The CRN founders -- Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix -- have a detailed understanding of the science underlying the growing field of nanotechnology, and a strong desire to make sure that when the molecular nanotech era arrives, we (as a civilization) are ready for it. I've talked about CRN a few times before -- and they're on WorldChanging's small link list -- and while I don't necessarily agree with all of their conclusions, they are far and away the best resource around for understanding the implications of emerging molecular technologies.

The CRN blog and the newsletter are valuable information sources, but by far the most useful -- and challenging -- part of the CRN site is their Thirty Essential Studies section, where they lay out the research that should be done over the next few years to better understand how we can deal with potentially game-changing technological developments. By and large, these are not technical questions, but social, political, and economic ones -- that is, they are the questions of how the technology is developed and used by people. While many of the suggested studies are very nanotechnology-focused, the Thirty Essential Studies taken as a whole could serve as a model for other groups interested in a given early-stage technological development.

Treder and Phoenix are not neo-Luddites, as they clearly believe that the potential benefits of molecular nanotechnology are numerous and transformative. But neither are they Nano-Cheerleaders, as they ask hard questions about the ways in which molecular manufacturing would affect jobs, military power, and the environment. They are (although they don't actually say so) embracing the Precautionary Principle -- they're trying to figure out the ways in which nanotechnology could emerge, so that we can avoid the pitfalls and disasters.

Molecular nanotechnology is coming, and coming soon. Skeptics are harder to find with each new development, and governments around the world are starting to talk openly of using molecular nanotech as an economic and military equalizer. The more we can work now to think about, to plan for, and to direct the nanotechnological era, the better off we'll be.

As Emily posted about a few days ago, there's a growing level of anxiety out there about the ways in which genetic modifications could alter what it means to be human. One of the most visible manifestations of that, in this Olympic year, is the fear that "gene-doping" could make it impossible to determine whether a given athlete has had modifications done to enhance strength, speed, flexibility, or other sport-related physical abilities. Biochemical modifications, no matter how subtle, will eventually be discovered; gene-doping may not be detectable at all through traditional methods.

Gene-doping is the process of introducing new genetic material into cells in order to induce new or increased physiological products (proteins, hormones, etc.). A gene-doping process to increase muscle production has been shown to be successful in mice tests and is moving swiftly to human trials; it has enormous potential for treating muscular dystrophy. The athletic applications are self-evident.

Here's the scenario, then: as I noted in my post on Friday about Harvard Medical School's Personal Genome Project, it's very possible that cheap, fast genome sequencing technology will be widely availble by 2010. It will almost certainly be available by 2012, in time for that year's Summer Olympics. I suspect that the first use of individual genome scanning we'll see outside the doctor's office will be at Olympic events, and, from there, spreading through amateur athletics around the world. By late in the next decade, we'll probably see gene-scanning done as a matter of course even at the high school level.

It's possible that this cycle will start even by the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, but I suspect that it will take a global scandal to push institutions towards the regular use of genome scans. The idea of having one's DNA on file is just unnerving enough that I expect to see push-back, at least at first. I may be wrong; we could well see genome sequencing technology deployed at the next Summer games.

How would this work? I'm not a geneticist, but it might play out something like this: Since gene-doping is a targeted, localized process, it doesn't change the genome in every cell of the body. Genome sequencing-based doping tests would probably do a comparison of genes from sport-appropriate muscle groups (thigh muscles for runners, shoulders and arms for shot-put, etc.) and a random selection of unrelated body parts. Down the road, as gene-doping techniques become more sophisticated, there might be a requirement for all amateur athletes to register their genomes at an early age with an international committee, so the DNA would be available for later comparison should the athlete compete on the world stage.

The question, for me, is where does this lead? Will we start looking for evidence of gene-doping in other competitions where it might be useful? Will we see mandatory DNA tests for spatial-processing modifications at high school "Math Field Day" events, or memory improvement doping at the National Spelling Bee? Or will this lead to a future where genome modifications are seen as no more unfair than any other training technologies?

One of the ideas we've talked about in some detail on WorldChanging is the "participatory panopticon" -- the notion that the evolution of networked mobile personal cameras (i.e., cameraphones) will trigger big changes in how we interact with each other both individually and socially. Signs of this are hard to miss, but key aspects of the revolution are still missing. One important step will be to make the devices wearable, not hand-held; primitive versions of such devices are already on the scene. Another step will be to make these devices record images constantly, not just when the user clicks a button, to allow the user to review what s/he had previously seen. Again, primitive versions of this concept are in development, although these are set to record a picture a minute -- a snapshot, not a journal.

When I say "big changes," I mean it. The number one comment I get when I talk about the participatory panopticon is "Great! I'll never lose another fight with my wife/husband!" Mildly amusing, sure, but think about it: what does it do to a relationship when everything you ever say to each other may be recorded for later review? And we shouldn't assume that partners will just shut off the capture when talking to each other. Even for healthy relationships, the ability to recall exactly what one's partner said (a grocery store request, for example, or a casual mention of a favorite movie) will be hard to ignore.

That's off in the future -- but how far off? One key reason why such devices are currently limited in how often they record an image is storage. Taking one high-resolution image every minute can add up quickly: taking a 5 megapixel image every minute will fill a typical 50 gigabyte hard drive in a matter of a couple of weeks (depending upon compression and whether it ever gets turned off). Filling that same space with 24 frame-per-second video would take far less time, probably less than a day at a reasonably high resolution.

Colossal Storage may have the technology on track to make this concern go away: "3D rewriteable atomic holographic optical data storage nanotechnology". This article at the physics and technology news site PhysOrg.com, although basically a rewrite of a Colossal Storage press release, gives some detail (and is more readable than the company's website). If the technology they've developed works -- and they claim that it will, of course -- we could see relatively inexpensive 10 terabyte to 10 petabyte removable disks (with read/write speeds in the 1000 Mbps range) on the market by 2009.

10 terabytes is 10,000 gigabytes; 10 petabyes is 10,000,000 gigabytes. With that kind of storage, it becomes possible to imagine keeping a real-time video (and audio) record of one's life, swapping disks out perhaps only once a year. (I have this sudden image of one spouse shouting to another from across the apartment, "Honey, do you remember where we put 2013?" "You put it away last April, do a lookup!")

There are other uses for such a volume of storage, of course, particularly in medical research. While the data from the Human Genome Project fits nicely on an iPod, data from the Brain Atlas Project will likely take "petabytes." But for most people, keeping a record of one's own life is the use that has the most potential to demand massive amounts of storage.

Colossal Storage may be onto something important, or may be little more than big promises and dodgy research. I'm not qualified to say, and would certainly appreciate comments here from people who can parse the research material linked on the company's website. But regardless of whether this particular development works out, the technology is coming, and faster than we may be ready for.

In a nice bit of serendipity, just as we were posting today about Fab Labs and the potential for "personal fabricators" upending material design and production processes, Chris Phoenix at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology was writing about the next step beyond even that. In his essay "Living Off-Grid," Phoenix describes some of the more prosaic implications of the development of nanofabrication systems -- a technological leap quite possible within the next couple of decades, and almost certain by 2040 (and I'm being intentionally conservative with these estimates).

Most notably, Phoenix argues that the use of nanofabbers will allow individuals to see exactly how big their "ecological footprint" really is:

The developed nations today have a massive and probably unsustainable ecological footprint. Because production is so decentralized, it is hard to observe the impact of consumer choices. And because only a few areas of land are convenient for transportation or ideal for agriculture, unhealthy patterns of land use have developed. Economies of scale encourage large infrastructures. But nano-built equipment benefits from other economies, so off-site production and distribution will become less efficient than local productivity. Someone living off-grid will be able literally to see their own ecological footprint, simply by looking at the land area they have covered with solar cells and greenhouses. Cheap sensors will allow monitoring of any unintentional pollution--though there will be fewer pollution sources with clean manufacturing of maintenance-free products.

What Phoenix doesn't address is whether there would be even greater advantages to not going off-grid, but instead to combine efforts in dense distributed networks. While living the self-sustaining, rugged existence is a Waldenesque fantasy for some, urban environments remain enormously popular. The molecular nanotechnologies that Phoenix describes will be even more beneficial for those living in dense communities than for those living in quiet isolation.

French automaker Peugeot is set to start its third "Challenge the Imagination" design contest (warning, Flash-heavy website), open to anyone 14 years or older. The winner gets to see her/his design built as a full-scale concept car on display at the 2005 Frankfurt Auto Show (yes, including the flight to Frankfurt), along with €6,000 and a prize. 29 runners-up will also receive recognition and cash -- the 11th-30th get €300. Not bad.

This year's theme is "design the car of your dreams." Past themes have included "the future of 2020" and "back to the future." Peugeot is looking at both exterior design and vehicle concept -- you turn in up to 500K worth of jpegs and 100K of text -- so a truly worldchanging design is entirely possible.

Designs must be submitted by e-mail between October 15th and midnight (French time) December 8th. Full rules here (PDF). Peugeot encourages the use of the Free/Open Source Blender3D software for rendering the designs. Blender3D which can be downloaded for Windows, MacOSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and more here.

Here's your chance to have a voice in what the car of the future could look like.

(Via IDFuel)

This afternoon at the Accelerating Change Conference 2004, David Brin, author of The Transparent Society,and Brad Templeton, chairman of the board at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, debated the relative virtues of transparency and privacy.

(I should admit a personal interest in this right up front: way back in 1996, I "debated" Brin in the pages of Time magazine on this very subject (the text of the article can be found online). My own views have evolved a bit since then; the "participatory panopticon" essays I've written here at WorldChanging reflect the ambivalent nature of transparency-enabling technologies, and my appreciation of both their benefits and drawbacks.)

In the extended entry, you'll find the notes I took during the Brin-Templeton debate. It seems they both want to play the role of the "realist" in the discussion. The core of Brin's argument is that surveillance technologies are here, and we should fight to make sure that they are two-way, and not just in the hands of elites; the core of Templeton's argument is that widespread transparency technologies will inevitably be corrupted and co-opted by those in power, and that we're better off fighting to hold the line where it stands now. It's the sign of a good discussion that they both made very strong cases for their views.

When we read about "wearable" computers, we generally see accompanying pictures of awkward-looking college students wreathed in cables and black plastic or adorned with oversized sunglasses with all sorts of bumpy protruberances. But such images are an artifact of the requirement that computers be encased in hard shells. Such a limitation may now be falling away. Recent advances in flexible electronics have made it possible to weave computational intelligence, including both input and output, directly into fabric. We may soon be in a world where wearable computers don't just show up on the cover of Wired, but also on the cover of Vogue.

Eleven years ago, WorldChanging Ally #1 Bruce Sterling wrote a brief essay for cyber-counterculture magazine Mondo 2000 entitled Computer As Furoshiki, which described a computing device in the form of a meter-square piece of cloth. Solar-powered, the fabric could serve as a display, was touch-sensitive, and could even fold itself with embedded artificial muscles fibers. Computer As Furoshiki laid out a vision of pervasive computing that feels very different from the mobile-phone-and-eyewear-centric conventional notion of the future. Cloth is more intimate than hard plastic; clothing is as much an extension of our skin as it is a tool. A world where computing devices are regularly embedded in fabric is one where the computer adopts that same intimacy. It's a kind of cyborgism, without the messy implants.

Green Car Congress turns us on to the new Sustainable Mobility Project report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD): Mobility 2030. The final report from a two year research project, Mobility 2030 covers a broad range of transportation issues. The list of "indicators of sustainable mobility" give a small taste of what the full report covers: accessibility; financial outlay required of users; travel time; reliability; safety; security; greenhouse gas emissions; impact on the environment and on public well-being; resource use; equity implications; impact on public revenues and expenditures; prospective rate of return to private business. It's a pretty mainstream approach -- there's no talk about more radical solutions -- and appears to represent a mobility-focused iteration of what I've come to call the New Baseline. There's a lot of data here, and I'm still reading through it. As you might expect, the report is big: 180 pages, and a 5.7MB PDF download.