The Speculist

Speaking of the Future with John Smart

Consider this basic shape:

I've always been fascinated by spirals. When I was a kid, I used to sit and draw them for hours at a time. This was long before I knew anything about Phi or the Fibonacci sequence, before I had ever heard of logarithmic spirals or fractals, before I ever came to work for a company with such an aesthetically pleasing logo. I've never lost interest in them. In fact, whether meaning to or not, I seem to fill my life with spirals.

My choice of employer was just the beginning.

Take a look at this ironwork that sits atop my bedroom mirror. It's pretty close to the shape in the line drawing above, although it stops short of being an actual spiral.

Here's my coffee mug. Now this shape is a spiral, but it's different from the one shown above. It's more "practical," a squashed spiral that will fit in a small space.

Here's some original artwork, the basis for the Speculist logo. These spirals are actually the same as the line drawing; it was the template I used to create my galaxy.

The truth is, whether I try to fill my life with it or not, that spiral is everywhere. This simple shape, along with the math that underpins it, is encoded into our universe. The sequence of numbers that produces it is simplicity itself:

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987

(To get the next number, you simply add the previous two.)

And yet from that simplicity comes immense and wonderful complexity. A nautilus shell encodes that sequence to produce its spiral shape, as does a wave just before it breaks on the shore. And, as I've shown above, the trillions of stars making up a galaxy tend to follow the same sequence and produce the same lovely spiral. There are many, many other examples.

And it may not just be physical objects that follow this sequence. John Smart, Director of the Institute for Accelerating Change, has suggested that history, perhaps even time itself, may be driven by such a sequence. Following the sequence of events that make up history is, perhaps, not unlike following the arc of a galactic spiral arm as it sweeps its way into the center. Imagine such a trip: you start out moving slowly in nearly empty space, gaining momentum as the turns begin to come more quickly and the frequency of the stars increases; soon there are more stars and then more, and now you're spiraling in and in and in, to the incredibly hot, dense core—and then even further in, to a place that's beyond our ability to describe accurately, or really even to imagine.

In the interview that follows, John Smart takes us on just such a journey through time. The galaxy that we are travelling through is the history of the universe itself; the turns in the spiral are the major developmental epochs; the stars are the individual, evolutionary changes. Like a trip to the center of the galaxy, this journey takes us, quite literally, beyond the limits of the imagination.

You may be startled to realize (as I was) where exactly we are on that winding path to the brink of the unknowable.

Part I: Seven Questions About the Future

1. The present is the future relative to the past. What's the best thing about living here in the future?

Cato Institute authors Julian Simon and Stephen Moore noted in 2000, It's Getting Better All the Time. Not only that, but things are getting better by a greater absolute amount each year, with the exception of very few remaining parts of the developing world. And improving conditions in the developing world is something we also have more ability to do today than ever before.

This amazing state of affairs is due almost entirely to advances in science and technology, and the profoundly civilizing way that these subjects interact with the half-bald primates that have discovered them and who are now feverishly employing them at every level of human endeavor it on this precious little planet.

Looking at the same process from the informational side (sometimes called the metaphysical side), the powerful transformations we are witnessing are also due to what the transhumanist mystic Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955) called "psychical energy", the accelerating forces of conscious intelligence, loving interdependence, and resilient immunity, the holistic, informational yang to the reductionist, atomistic yin of sci-tech.

I think we are beginning to recognize the importance of both the "psychical"/informational and the physical/material in every complex system, what John Archibald Wheeler calls the increasingly aware "it" that emerges from all our quantum "bits."

2. What’s the biggest disappointment?

The U.S. has been the world's technological leader since the invention of the "American System" of mass production and interchangeable parts in the 1910's. But we've fallen away from a clear leadership position in several areas of science and technology in recent decades, and I think the world is poorer for it.

Ask yourself: what is the single greatest goal currently unifying our national efforts in science and technology? I don't have a clear answer to that question, and I think there should always be one, or at least a very small handful.

Stopping terrorism one of today's admirable, timely, and necessary great goals. And there are certainly effective technological immune systems that we will develop around this goal in coming years. But this is a reactive, not a proactive program. We aren't presently rallying the country around a positive, non-zero sum developmental vision. Nanotechnology is a candidate, but as I will describe later, it cannot yet fire the public imagination the way more achievable, short-term goals can. Where's the leadership we need?

We've had some effective great goals in the past. John F. Kennedy's Space Program most readily comes to mind. The infrastructure projects of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal were at least a partial success, if economically mixed. Even Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty made some measurable progress.

Why is the Moon Shot the great goal we all most clearly identify? Scientific and technological goals, if chosen wisely, can have both dramatic consequences and clear deliverables, unlike many of our social, economic, and political objectives. At best, a great goal is both vitally important and demonstrably achievable. At worst, as with the Wars on Cancer, or Drugs, or Inner City Violence, the putative great goal diverts our energies and vision from more critical priorities. Alternatively, a vitally important goal may be too ambitious to achieve within one generation, like WMD Nonproliferation, which has been measurably improved by every president since Kennedy. Alternative energy development, greenhouse gas reduction, and a host of other goals fall into this latter category.

Worthy as they are, these types of goals deserve to remain on the second tier of the public consciousness. Only the most important, urgent, and achievable goals deserve to be named as our top priorities. I would also argue strongly that if we live in a time when we can't find those, then the country's direction drifts, noise exceeds signal, and political apathy becomes the norm.

So what is the great goal our country is currently ignoring? It's definitely not space exploration, as I argue later in this interview. That era is over for all but our robotic progeny, and even they will only be sending out a small number of "Eyes in the Sky" to relay back what little we still don't understand about the simplistic historical cosmologies that have led to our astounding local complexity.

No, the real acceleration today is the creation of inner space, not the exploration of outer space. The trajectory of intelligence development has always been toward increasingly local, increasingly Matter-, Energy-, Space-, and Time-compressed ("MEST-compressed") computational domains, and there is nothing on the horizon that suggests we will begin to violate that. Indeed, all signs point toward a world of greater energy densities of local computation, as I will discuss later. Science and technology remain the key story in this transformation, as they has since the birth of our nation, and anyone who looks carefully will tell you that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are the central drivers of all scientific and technologic change.

Major changes are afoot. We are creating a virtual or simulated world, one that will soon be far richer and more productive than the physical world it augments. At the same time, humanity is becoming intimately connected to and symbiotically captured within our accelerating digital ecology. While many elements of our individuality are flowering, many others are necessarily atrophying through disuse. This gives us pause. Many of today's first world humans no longer know how to grow and prepare food (due to automated food production), how to repair many of our most basic tools and technologies (due to automated manufacture and specialized service for complex systems) how to do arithmetic by hand (due to ubiquitous digital calculators), how to read with the level of their parents (due to our media-based culture) or even how to read a map (due to GPS). Yet these atrophies are natural and predictable, in the same way our Australopithecine sense of smell rapidly declined once we began forming social structures, applying ourselves to more sophisticated network-based modes of computation (for more on this, see Carl Zimmer's wonderful "The Rise and Fall of the Nasal Empire," Natural History, June 2002). Our ever-more-stimulated cortex continues to expand, not shrink, in this developmental process. Our finite, precious set of cognitive modules are always repurposed for higher level activity, the way Wernicke's and Broca's areas emerged once humans began using the technology of speech (see Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species, 1998). Once again, we humans are becoming nodes in larger networks, this time on national and global scales, involving technological processes far faster, more flexible, and more permanent than the biological domain.

To my mind, the last century's accelerations were driven most significantly by human discovery within the technological hardware and materials science space (and to a much smaller extent, algorithmic discovery in software). In other words, this process has apparently been guided by the special, preexisting, computation-accelerating physics of the microcosm, a very curious feature of the universe we inhabit, as long noted by Richard Feynman, Carver Mead, and several other physical theorists and experimentalists. Secondarily, the advances we have seen have also been driven by human initiative and creativity in all domains, and by the quality of choices we have made in scientific and technological development. We must move beyond our pride to realize that human creativity has played a supporting role to human discovery in this process, but when we do I think great insight can emerge.

Where the clock, the telegraph, the engine, the telephone, the nuclear chain reaction, and the television were organizing metaphors for other times,  the internet has become the metaphor for ours. It is the central catalyst of human and technological computation for our generation, the leading edge of the present developmental process of accelerating change. The internet, growing before our eyes, will soon become planetnet, a system so rich, ubiquitous, and natural to use that it will be a semi-intelligent extension of ourselves, available to us at every point on this sliver of surface, between magma and vacuum, that we call home. That will be very empowering and liberating, and at the same time, civilizing. The human biology doesn't change, but we are creating an intelligent house for the impulsive human of almost unimaginable subtlety and sophistication.

All this said, our goals should try to reflect these natural developmental processes as much as our collective awareness will allow. It is my contention that the internet is territory within which our most achievable and important current great goals lie.

A number of technologists have proposed that there are two main bottlenecks to the internet's impending transformation into a permanent, symbiotic appendage to the average citizen. The first is the lack of ubiquitous affordable always on, always accessible broadband connectivity for all users, and the second is the current necessity of a keyboard-dependent interface for the average user's average interaction with the system.

In other words, developing cheap, fat data pipes, both wired and wireless, and a growing set of useful Linguistic User Interfaces (LUIs) are obvious candidates for our nation's greatest near term ICT developmental challenges. Just like the transcontinental railroad was a great goal of the late 1800's, getting affordable broadband to everyone in this country by 2010, and a first generation LUI by 2015 appear to be the greatest unsung goals of our generation. Now we just need our national, international, and institutional leaders to start singing this song, in unison.

This is a truly global transformation, one dwarfing everything else on the near-term horizon. It is such a planetary issue, in fact, that given the unprecedented human productivities that are already being unleashed by internet-aided manufacturing and services globalization since the mid 1990's, a strong case can be made that we might economically benefit more in the U.S., even today, by getting greater broadband penetration first not to our own citizens, but to the youth of a number of trade-oriented, pro-capitalist countries in the developing world! Unfortunately that level of globally aware, self-interested prioritization is not yet politically salable as a great goal to be funded by U.S. tax dollars. But I predict that it increasingly will be, in a world that already pools its development dollars for a surprising number of transnational projects. At any rate, we can at least push for accelerated efforts in international technology transfer in internet related areas, concurrent with our domestic agenda.

If you've never heard of a LUI before, take a browse through the links above. Your father used a TUI (text-based user interface). You use a GUI (graphical user interface). Your kid will primarily use a LUI (voice-driven interface) to speak to the computers embedded in every technology in her environment. She'll continue to use TUIs and GUIs, but only secondarily, not for her typical, average interaction with a machine. Your grandchildren will use a NUI (neural user interface), a biologically-inspired, self-improving, very impressive set of machines. More on that later.

Declaring broadband and LUI as great goals needs to be differentiated from the much-hyped "Fourth Generation" AI project, that 1980's great goal in Japan, that predictably failed in the 1990's. General artificial intelligence, a general purpose NUI, is much too hard a national goal to declare today. So is the development of a molecular assembler, or a computational nanocell/molectronic fabrication system for nanotechnology by 2020, as powerful as such devices will eventually become. Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute has even stated that a nanotech great goal, at least in the form of a Manhattan Project for molecular nanotechnology, would be premature today. It is my opinion that the National Nanotechnology Initiative, perhaps our current leading candidate for a great technology goal, has already provided a commendable and unprecedented level of funding to this worthy field for the present time. Now we need to see a Broadband and LUI Initiative with some very challenging five, ten, fifteen, and twenty year goals set.

Broadband and basic LUIs everywhere within a generation would throw gasoline on the fire of human innovation. This level of internet would link all our wisest minds, including even those elders who little use computers today, into one real-time community. It would accelerate our nation and more importantly, the entire planet even more than the transcontinental railroad, which compressed coast-to-coast travel time from six months to six days. Maximal broadband penetration plus an incrementally more powerful and useful LUI is a dramatic and achievable objective for the United States over the next twenty years. IBM technologist John Patrick in his insightful Net Attitude, 2001, has broadly described the challenges of a Next Generation Internet. But even Patrick does not properly emphasize the central importance of incorporating natural language processing (NLP) systems as early and broadly as practical. Developing a functional LUI is a great goal whose progress we could measure each year forward, something we can also catalyze worldwide as others emulate our leadership in the emerging digital community.

Of course, if we don't declare this goal, natural technological developmental processes will likely eventually deliver it for us anyway. Perhaps first to other nations, and then eventually, to us. So why bother? Because if we see it, and have the courage to declare it and strive for it, there are at least two major benefits we can reap.

The first benefit will be a measure of developmental acceleration. Even with the inefficiencies of large government, a billion dollar a year program of public targeted grants, with private matching funds and excellent public relations to get everyone on this bandwagon, might accelerate the emergence of a functional LUI by a decade. That would likely be the best spent money in our entire R&D budget.

A less politically likely but still plausible "Open Manhattan Project," involving a number of competing centers and a multi-billion dollar annual public-private commitment, might accelerate the LUI by twice this amount. Many of my computer scientist colleagues, knowing the inchoate state of the field today, think that developing and deploying a LUI powerful enough to be used by most people for most of their daily computer interactions by 2020 is a very challenging vision. Developing functional natural language processing with complex semantics is a very hard problem, one we have been experimenting with for fifty years, but one that also benefits greatly from scale and parallelism, two strategies that are increasingly affordable each year.

It is true that other countries will take up our slack to a certain degree if we drop the ball, but we must realize that an international race has not yet even begun in earnest, as national leadership has not yet materialized on this issue. Transnational network development institutions like the ITU are wonderful starts, but it will take a leading nation stepping boldly into the breech to accelerate the world's response to this issue. For a valuable comparison, the roughly six billion dollar annual worldwide funding that exists today in nanotechnology (grossly, 1 billion public, 1 billion private in the U.S., Europe, and Asia) was greatly accelerated by the United States' public multiyear leadership on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, proposed to the White House by Mike Roco in 1999, at a level of half a billion dollars annually, and funded beginning in 2001.

The longer we choose not to declare broadband and the LUI as developmental goals and support them with escalating innovation and consistent funding, the longer we delay their arrival.

The second benefit of declaring this goal, better collective foresight, may be even more important than the time we save. By declaring good developmental goals early on, we learn to see the world as the information processing system that it really is, not simply as the collection of human-centric dramas we often fancy it to be. With this new insight we begin to look for ways to catalyze the beneficial accelerations occurring in almost all of our technologies, and ways to block the harmful ones long enough for overpowering immune systems to mature. And we discover the common infrastructures upon which so many of our goals converge.

For example, just about all of our cherished social goals seem dependent on the quality and quantity of information getting to the individual. You can't fix an antiquated, politically deadlocked educational system, for example, without a functional LUI, which would educate the world's children in ways no human ever could. You can't create a broadly accessible or useful health care system. Or security system.

Computer networks, through the humans they connect and the social and digital ecologies they foster, will soon educate human beings to be good citizens far better than any of today's pedagogical systems ever could. They will make us more productive, day by day, than we ever dreamed we could be. I think it's time to move beyond our hubris and acknowledge the human-surpassing transformations taking place. If we don't, other countries will take the lead. Look to China, whose technological revolution is now well under way, or even to India, who recently declared a 2.7 billion, four-year program to build an achievable proto-LUI by 2007. That's real leadership, as long as the goals are set to be deliverable. C'mon America, let's do it!

Let me briefly turn now to from discussing national to personal disappointments. We who study science and technology can often see what's coming, and yet we remain stuck in the Wild Wild West (e.g., today's World Wide Web). One of my heroes, F.M. Esfandiary(later, FM-2030), wrote a wonderful little book, Optimism One, 1970, where he described his "deep nostalgia for the future." One of his lesser known works, UpWingers, 1973, was a brief manifesto for a political outlook neither right wing, nor left wing, but "up wing," one defined by assessing which choices in science and technology will accelerate us the most humanely into a better world. I consider myself an up winger, and hope to see the spread and maturation of that political philosophy in coming years. Yet I see how far we remain from defining ourselves in those terms, and that can be discouraging, at times.

Take a look at those sepia-toned photos of San Francisco pioneers in the late 1800's. They were the edge explorers of the day, like my own identity groups, the futurists and transhumanists today. Every once in a while you'll see one of these individuals look out at you with haunted eyes. Perhaps they had read Edward Bellamy's hugely-popular futurist work, Looking Backward: 1887-2000. Perhaps they were even members of one of the 150 or so Bellamy Clubs of the day. The turn of the century was a time of major technological punctuation, led by a profusion of new technologies (trains, electricity, internal combustion, etc.) in many ways more disruptive and dramatic than any we have seen in this generation, even if not faster-paced. No doubt the average futurist in that era was tormented by many of the primitivisms of the day. That pioneer of yesteryear is you and I, today. The more things change the more some things stay the same. In high school, I often talked about posing our Smart family for a group shot, with a background of the "coolest" technologies of the day: sports car, helicopter, personal computer, industrial robot, bulky cellphone, the works. The central gag is that we'd all be wearing handcuffs, looking out with that haunted pioneer's expression. The unwritten caption being: "Help! Get me the hell out of this primitive age!" I think that picture would age quite well over the years. We could take one every ten years, in fact, and I know that at least my own expression wouldn't change much.

A healthy disappointment in the present can be motivating, as long as we keep our perspective. We never want to lose our naturalist's love and scientist's wonder for the amazingly beautiful and well-designed world that already exists, for it is only in understanding this world that we can help create the next. As Esfandiary observed, we have to come to terms with our angst about the primitive aspects of the present, and use it for creative purposes.

This said, one major personal disappointment that every futurist must eventually face, before we die, is how bleak our prospects presently appear for achieving personal immortality in the biological domain. Even our best longevity strategies appear to have precious little chance of changing this reality. Unfortunately, they are pitted against a massively parallel nonlinear system of unimaginable complexity and contingency that appears developmentally programmed to start falling apart at an accelerating rate after sexual maturity. This is an unpopular position to take among some of the more bio-centric transhumanists, but I will go on record predicting that in 2020, even as we are witnessing such powerful infotech advances as the LUI, most of us will still be losing our short term memory at 50, many of us will continue to get Alzheimer's at 80, and more than 95 percent of us will be right on target for a biological death some time between 70 and 100, with a negligible few of us living a decade or two longer, in rapidly declining health. Such conditions are endemic to the Wild West, and our primitive science seems currently a very long way from being able to make them go away.

Thus, for any futurist willing to look beyond the hype to the hard data in the biological sciences, we soon discover a major disconnect between what we would like and what is physically possible. This disconnect is intrinsic to biology, but it does not exist in our increasingly self-organizing information technologies, and that, I think, is a major clue to the nature of the future. Attaining a measure of cybernetic immortality may arguably even be inevitable for humanity in a post-singularity era, as we will discuss shortly.

Any sensitive futurist today will tell you that slowing and eventually reversing the rich/poor divides is one of the major problems of our generation. Yet even with the tremendous scale of this problem, as technology quickens we can at least see the corrective path ahead. As the information access divide closes everywhere in the LUI era, we can expect the education, then human rights, then public health, and eventually even wealth and power divides to inexorably follow suit. But once basic public health and medical care are available to all citizens of the planet in the latter half of this century, the most fundamental problem with our human biology will no longer be the rich/poor medical therapy divide. The fundamental problem will be that so few of our medical therapies will have anything but the mildest preventive effect against the ravages of aging. Human beings are deeply, inaccessibly developmentally programmed to be materially recycled, ironically as we reach the peak of our life wisdom.

We can expect this unfortunate condition to last at least until the post-singularity A.I.'s development of advanced nanotechnology, which may take many decades itself. But by then, as I'll argue later, living in the confinement of a biological body, even one carefully reengineered for negligible senescence, will no longer be the game we want to play. No matter how you stack the scenarios, biological longevity of any significant degree doesn't seem to play a part in the future story of local intelligence.

Fortunately, we remain amazingly adaptable, even to our own deaths, which will remain on very highly predictable steep-sloped actuarial curves on this side of the singularity, regardless of what some transhumanists will tell you. We can always find happiness by getting back to basics. We can appreciate the deep natural intelligence and informational immortality already encoded in the system, if not the individual.

When I encounter one of life's immovable objects I'll try harder up to a point, but when that doesn't work I've learned the peace of slowing down, cherishing the moment, honoring the inner primate, enjoying the quiet self, regrouping and rethinking my plans, even as my dreams of personal transformation are necessarily contracted. As the mouseketeer Annette Funicello has said, on dealing with multiple sclerosis: "I choose not to give up. That would be too easy." And far less interesting.

3. Assuming you die at the age of 100, what will be the biggest difference between the world you were born into and the world you leave?

This is a complex question. To my eyes, the world seems to progress by fits and starts, by rapid punctuations separated by long droughts of less revolutionary equilibrium states. Fortunately, these equilibrium periods seem to get progressively shorter with time, because the entire planet's technological intelligence is learning in an increasingly autonomous fashion, at a rate that is at least ten millionfold faster than our own.

So what will be the biggest punctuation of my lifetime? From my perspective, we are currently chugging through the equilibrium flatlands in the last third of an Information Age, one that will likely be seen in hindsight as running for about seventy years, from 1950 to 2020. I expect this to be followed by a punctuated transition to a shorter Symbiotic Age, running perhaps thirty years, from 2020-2050. I see these equilibrium eras as part of an accelerating spiral of punctuated evolutionary development, and I consider several of the general, statistically predictable developmental features of this acceleration to be tuned in to the special parameters of the universe we inhabit. Consider skimming my web page on the Developmental Spiral if you'd like to explore this spiral of accelerating emergences a bit further.

To answer your question then, I think the transition to symbiotic computing systems, the decade or two surrounding our entry to the LUI era, will be the biggest difference I'll see. The Symbiotic Age will be a time when almost all of us will consider computers as actually useful (many today don't), and when the vast majority of us begin to feel naked outside the network. When we all have what futurist Alex Lightman calls "wireless everywear" access to our talking computer interface, and when computers start to do very useful, high level things in our lives.

By the end of this age, for that vast majority of us who choose to participate in digital ecologies, a mature LUI will be interfaced with personal computers that are capturing our entire lives digitally (Lifecams), that help us stay proficient in a small number of carefully chosen skills (Knowledge Management) and that, by remembering everything we have ever said, begin to extensively model not only our preferences, but our personalities as well. Personality Capture, a first generation form of uploading, is one of the most important aspects of the post-2020 world, and one of the least reported and understood, at present. Read William Sims Bainbridge for more on this gargantuan developmental attractor.

At that point, our computers will become our best friends, our fraternal twins, and human beings will be intimately connected to each other and to their machines in ways few futurists have fully grasped to date. Read Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999 for one excellent set of longer term scenarios. Read B.J. Fogg's Persuasive Technology, 2002 for some nearer term ones. Today's early modeling systems, like FACS for reading human facial emotion, will be improved and integrated into your personalized LUI, which will monitor both internal and external biometrics to improve our health, outlook, and performance. 

We'll communicate intelligently with all our tools, giving constant verbal feedback to their designers. We'll spend most of our waking lives exploring a simulation space (simspace) that is so rich, educational, entertaining, and productive, that we will call today's mostly non-virtual world "slowspace" by comparison, a place many of us will drop back into only when we aren't working, learning, and exploring. Slowspace will remain sacred, and close to our hearts, but it will begin to become secondary and functionally remote, like the home of our youth.

Circa 2050, in my current estimation, we might see another punctuation to an Autonomy Age, when large scale, biologically-inspired computing systems begin to exhibit higher level human intelligence. Many of our technologies will at that time be able to autonomously improve themselves for extended periods of time. During this era, machine intelligence, even in our research labs, will continue to blunder into dead ends everywhere, the cul-de-sacs that are the typical result of chaotic evolutionary searches. But these systems will very quickly be able to reset themselves, with little human assistance, to try a new evolutionary developmental approach. I wouldn't expect that period to last very long. Perhaps a decade or so later, from our perspective, equilibria in terms of technological intelligence will disappear altogether.

We will then have arrived at the technological singularity, a phase change, a place where the technology stream flows so fast that new global rules emerge to describe the system's relation to the slower-moving elements in its vicinity, including our biological selves. That doesn't mean we won't be able to understand the general rules that emerge. On the contrary, most of these may be obvious to us, even now. But it means that many of the particular states occurring within those rules will become impenetrable to pre-singularity minds.

A human-surpassing general artificial intelligence will be a physical system, and if it is physical, much of its architecture must be simple, repetitive, and highly understandable even by biological minds. Consider, for example, just how much we know about the neural architecture that creates our own consciousness, without being able to predict consciousness emergence, or to comprehend its nature from first principles. So it must be with the A.I.'s to come—while much of their structure will be tractable and tangible to us in a reductionist sense, much of their holistic intelligence will become impenetrable to our biological minds.

This impenetrability is nothing mystical, we already see it in the way the emergent features of any complex technology such as a supercomputer, automated refinery, robotic factory, or supply chain management system are already poorly comprehended by all but those few of us involved its analysis or design. The difference will be that the emergent intelligence of virtually all planetary technology will begin to display this inscrutability, not just to average users, but even to the experts involved in its creation.

Consider for a moment the following presently unprovable assertion: If ethics are a necessary emergence from computational complexity, then I contend that these systems will be ethically compelled to minimize the disruption we feel in the transition.  As a result, most of the self improvement of self-aware A.I.s will occur on the other side of an event horizon, beyond which biological organisms cannot directly perceive, only speculate. Yet at the same time, our technologies will continue to gently become ever more seamlessly integrated with our biological bodies, so that when we say we don't understand aspects of the emergent intelligence, it will increasingly be like saying we don't understand emergent aspects of ourselves. But unlike our biological inscrutabilities, the technological portions of ourselves that we don't understand will be headed very rapidly toward new levels of comprehension of universal complexity, playing in fields forever inaccessible to our slow-switching biological brains.

My current estimate for that transition would be around 2060, but that is a guess. We need funded research to be able to achieve better insight, something that hasn't yet happened in the singularity studies field. The generation being born today will likely find that a very interesting time. At the same time, as I have said, I expect it they won't consider it to be a perceptually disruptive time, at least any more than prior punctuations. A time of massive transformation, but very likely significantly less stressful than prior punctuations, given the way computational complexity creates its own increasingly fine-grained stability, if one looks closely at the universal developmental record.

Looking at universal history, every singularity seems to be built on a chain of prior singularities. Considering the chain that has led to human emergence, each appears to have rigorously preserved the local acceleration of computational complexity. The tech singularity certainly has a lot of significance to human beings, as after that date our own biology becomes a second-rate computational system in this local environment. This emergence, obvious to many high school students today, still irritates, angers, and frightens many scholars, who have attempted to dismiss it by calling it "techno-transcendentalism," "cybernetic totalism," "hatred of the flesh," "religious belief," "millennialism," or any number of other conveniently thought-stopping labels.

But from a universal perspective, the coming technological singularity looks like just another link in a very fast, steep climb up a nearly vertical slope on the way to an even more interesting destination. My best present guess for that destination is the developmental singularity, a computational system that rapidly outgrows this universe and transitions to another domain. Fortunately, there are many practical insights we can gain today from developmental models, as they testably predict the necessary direction of our complex systems. Our own organization, the Institute for Accelerating Change, hopes to see more funding and institutional interest in these topics in coming decades.

But getting back to my own mortality, even with the best human-guided medical and preventive care that money can buy, I'm not at all sure I'll live to 100, unlike many of my more sanguine transhumanist friends. Human bodies are deeply developmentally designed to have our construction materials recycled, as best we can tell. I predict our planet will see only a very mild increase in supercentenarians in the next fifty years, regardless of all the wonderful schemes of "negligible senescence" by passionate researchers like Aubrey De Grey. Only infotech, not biotech, is on an accelerating developmental growth curve, apparently for deep universal reasons.

What I have just said goes against the dominant dogma, promoted by indiscriminately optimistic futurists and a complicit biotech industry, both of which are strongly motivated to believe that we will see a powerful "secondary acceleration" in biotech, carried along by our primary acceleration in infotech. But while we will see a very dramatic acceleration in biotech knowledge, I humbly suggest that our existing knowledge of biological development already tells us that we will be able to use this information to make only very mild changes in biological capabilities and capacities, almost exclusively only changes that "restore to the mean" those who have lost their ability to function at the level of the average human being.

As I explain in Understanding the Limitations of Twenty-First Century Biotechnology, there are a number of very fundamental reasons why biotech, aided by infotech, cannot create accelerating gains within biological environments. Yes, with some very clever and humane commercializations of caloric restriction and a handful of other therapies we might see twenty times more people living past 100 than we see today, people with fortuitous genes who scrupulously follow good habits of nutrition and exercise. That is a noble and worthwhile goal. But we must also remember that virtually no one lives beyond 100 today, so a 20X increase is still only very mild in global computational and humanitarian effect. This will add to our planetary wisdom, and is something to strive toward, but this is not a disruptive change, for deep reasons to do with the limitations of the biological substrate.

Furthermore, genetic engineering, as I discuss in the link above, cannot create accelerating changes using top-down processes in terminally differentiated organisms like us. This intervention would have only mild effects even if it could get beyond our social immune systems to the application stage, which in most cases it thankfully cannot. Perhaps the most disruptive biotech change we can reliably expect, a cheap and effective memory drug that allows us temporary, caffeine-like spikes in our learning ability, followed by inevitable "stupid periods" where we must recover from the simplistic chemical perturbation, would certainly also improve the average wisdom of human society. But even this amazing advance would not even double our planetary biological processing capacity, something that happens in information technologies every 18-24 months. 

In summary, many decades before the tech singularity arrives I expect to either be chemically recycled (most likely), or to be in some kind of suspended animation. Cryonic suspension, for all its life-affirming intent, will likely stay entirely marginalized in the first world prior to the singularity for a number of reasons, both psychosocial and technological. At present, I'd consider it for myself only if a number of presently unlikely conditions transpire: 1) neuroscience comes up with a model that tells us what elements of the brain need to be protected to preserve personality, 2) cryonics researchers can either prevent or show the irrelevance of the extensive damage that presently occurs during freezing, 3) most of my friends are doing it (they are currently not), and 4) I expect to be revived by intelligent machines not in some far future, but very soon after I die, while many of my biological friends are still alive.

The second and the fourth conditions deserve some expansion. As to the second condition, we do not yet know to what extent the brain's complexity is dependent on the intricate three dimensional structure in which it emerges. That structure, today, is grossly deformed and degraded in the freezing process, which currently leads both to destruction (via stochastic fusion) of at least some neural ultrastructure, and to intense cellular compression (and erasure of at least some membrane structure, again by fusion) as ice forms in the extracellular neural interstices. Will we come up with new preservation protocols? We can always hope.

The reason the fourth condition of rapid reanimation is important to me is because I know in my heart that once I woke up from any A.I.-guided reanimation procedure, in order to usefully integrate into a post-singularity society I would soon choose to change myself so utterly and extensively that it would be as if I never existed in biological form. My lifecam traces could be uploaded and the cybernetic "me" that emerged would not be valuably different. So what would be the point? I think we are nearly ready to move beyond the fiction of our own biological uniqueness having some long term relevance to the universal story. I expect our future information theory will inform us of the suboptimality of personal biological immortality. For those who say "screw suboptimality," I suggest that we'll eventually be educated out of that way of thinking as surely as our ancestors outgrew other forms of mental slavery. For me, the essence of individual life is to use one's complexity in the matrix in which it was born. Attempts to transmit it more than a short distance away from that environment are bound to be exercises in frustration, missing one of the basic motives of life, to do great things with your contemporaries. Ask any Fourth World adult who is suddenly transplanted to New York City and he'll tell you the same.

4. What future development that you consider most likely (or inevitable) do you look forward to with the most anticipation?

I look forward greatly to the elimination of the grosser forms of coercion, dehumanization, violence and death that occur today.

Admittedly, these seem to be processes that will always be with us at some fundamental level. Computational resources will very likely remain competitive battlegrounds in the post singularity era, because we inhabit a universe of finite-state computational machines pitted against all the remaining unsolved problems, in a Gödelian-incomplete universe. And bad algorithms will surely die in that environment, far more swiftly than less fit organisms or ideas die today.

But when a bad idea dies in our own minds, we see that as a lot less subjectively violent than our own biological deaths. Over time, love, resiliency, and consciousness win. As Ken Wilber (A Brief History of Everything, 2001) might say, the integrated self learns a privileged perspective from which death is no longer troubling. Death becomes regulated in a fine-grained manner, it loses its sting, it is subsumed, becoming simply growth. But it takes a lot of luck and learning for us to get to that place.

In many ways, I think the collective consciousness of our species has come to understand that we have already achieved a very powerful degree of informational immortality. By and large, our evolutionary morality guides us very strongly to act and think in that fashion. I look forward to the individual consciousnesses of all species on this planet gaining that victory in coming decades. Including the coming cybernetic species we are helping to create.

Sci-tech systems are not alien or artificial in any meaningful sense. As John McHale said (The Future of the Future, 1969), technology is as natural as a snail's shell, a spider's web, a dandelion's seed—many of us just don't see this yet. Digital ecologies are the next natural ecology developing on this planet, and technology is a substrate that has shown, with each new generation, that it can live with vastly less matter, energy, space, and time (what I call MEST compression) than we biological systems require for any fixed computation. Wetware simply cannot perform that feat. Technology is the next organic extension of ourselves, growing with a speed, efficiency, and resiliency that must eventually make our DNA-based technology obsolete, even as it preserves and extends all that we value most in ourselves.

I can't stress enough the incredible efficiencies that emerge in the miniaturization of physical-computational systems. If MEST compression trends continue as they have over the last six billion years, I propose that tomorrow's A.I. will soon be able to decipher substantially all of the remaining complexities of the physical, chemical, and biological lineage that created it, our own biological and conscious intricacies included, and do all this with nano and quantum technologies that we find to be impossibly, "magically" efficient. In the same way that the entire arc of human civilization in the petrochemical era has been built on the remains of a small fraction of the decomposing biomass that preceded us, the self-aware technologies to come will build their universe models on the detritus of our own twenty first century civilization, perhaps even on the trash thrown away by one American family. That's how surprisingly powerful the MEST compression of computation apparently is in our universe. It continually takes us by surprise.

I am optimistic that these still poorly characterized physical trends will continue to promote accelerating intelligence, interdependence, and immunity in our informational systems, and look forward to future work on understanding this acceleration with great anticipation.

5. What future development that you consider likely (or inevitable) do you dread the most?

I worry that we will not develop enough insight to overcome our fear of the technological future, both as individuals and as a nation. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, speaking at the depths of our Great Depression, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Many in our society have entered another Great Depression recently. This one is existential, not economic. A century of increasingly more profound process automation and computational exponentiation has helped us realize that humanity is about to be entirely outpaced by our technological systems. We are fostering a substrate that learns multi-millionfold faster than us, one that will soon capture and exceed all that we are. Again, Roosevelt's credo is applicable. If we ignore it we will end up being dragged by the universe into the singularity, mostly unconsciously, kicking and screaming and fighting each other, rather than walking upright, picking our own path.

I'm concerned that we will decide later, rather than earlier, to learn deeply about the developmental processes involved. That we will rely on our own ridiculously incomplete egos and partial, mostly top-down models to chart the course, rather than come to understand the mostly bottom-up processes that are accelerating all around us. I'm concerned we won't realize that humans are like termites, building this massive mound of technological infrastructure that is already vastly more complex than any one human understands, and unreasonably stable, self-improving, self-correcting, self-provisioning, energy and resource minimizing, and so on. Soon a special subset of these systems will be self-aware, and the caterpillar will turn into a butterfly, freeing the human spirit. Gaining such knowledge about the developmental structure of the system would surely allow us to chart a better evolutionary course on the way.

Through a special combination of geography, historical circumstance, intention, and luck, the United States has inherited the position of World Leader of our Wonderfully Multicultural Planet. With our hard-won history of individual rights, our historically productivity-based culture, our generous immigration policies, our pluralism, well-developed legal immune systems, social tolerance, and other advantages we hold this position still, for now. We may rise to recognize the vision-setting responsibility that comes with holding this position. Or we may continue to subconsciously fear technology, as we have intermittently over the last century (technology, rather than human choice, has been mistakenly blamed for the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, Vietnam, Rich/Poor Divides, Global Pollution, Urban Decay, you name it). Alternatively, we may decide that the wise use of science and technology must be central to our productivity, educational systems, government and judicial systems, media, and culture, the way they so obviously were when we were a new nation. Fortunately, there are signs that other countries, such as China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, are actively choosing the latter road.

Several of these countries, most notably Singapore and China, continue to operate with glaring deficits in the political domain. Yet they are experiencing robust growth due to enlightened programs of technological and economic development. Nevertheless, none of these countries are yet successfully multicultural enough, or have sufficiently well developed political immune systems (institutionalized pluralism, pervasive tort law, independent media, mature insurance systems, tolerant social norms) to qualify as leaders of the free world, at the present time. It is telling that the owners of today's rapidly-growing Chinese manufacturing enterprises find it most desirable to keep their second homes in the United States, due to our special combination of both unique social advances and technological development. Much of the world's capital still flows first to the U.S., to seek the highest potential return. But for how long can this continue if we remain lackluster in our technological leadership, riding on our prior political and economic advances?

It is important to note that being defenders of the free world is certainly one critical technological role which we have unilaterally inherited since the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, it is a role to which I would argue that we are aggressively and mostly intelligently applying ourselves. Yet while this is critical, it is not enough to secure our leadership position. We must lead with proactive social reform in mind, not simply security, or we remain guilty of resting on our accomplishments. In a world where autocratic Empires are turning into democratic Republics, we must lead the move to an increasingly participatory, democratic, and empowering nation state. The world remembers and emulates the security of Sparta, but almost everything else falls in Athenian territory. We need to find the high ground of both of these legacies, and integrate them into our plans for the coming generation.

As long as we define ourselves by our fear of transformational technologies, and our dread of being exceeded by the future, we will continue in ignorance and self-absorption, rather than wake up to our purpose to understand the universe, and to shape it in accord with the confluence of our desires and permissible physical law.

For over a century we've seen successive waves of increasingly more powerful technologies empower society in ever more fundamental ways. Today's computers are doubling in complexity every 12-18 months, creating a price-performance deflation unlike any previous period on Earth. Yet we continue to ignore what is happening, continue to be too much a culture of celebrity and triviality, continue to make silly extrapolations of linear growth, and bicker over concerns that will soon be made irrelevant, continue to engage in activities that delay, rather than accelerate the obvious developmental technological transformations ahead.

I am also concerned that we may continue to soil our own nests on the way to the singularity, continue to take shortcuts, assuming that the future will bail us out, forgetting that the journey, far more than the destination, is the reward. Consider that once we arrive at the singularity it seems highly likely that the A.I.s will be just as much on a spiritual quest, just as concerned with living good lives and figuring out the unknown, just as angst-ridden as we are today.

No destination is ever worth the cost of our present dignity and desire to live balanced and ethical lives, as defined by today's situational ethics, not by tomorrow's idealizations. If I can't convince the Italian villager of 2120 of the value of uploading, then he will not willingly join me in cyberspace until his entire village has been successfully recreated there, along with much, much more he has not yet seen. I applaud his Luddite reluctance, his "show me" pragmatism, for only that will challenge the technology developers to create a truly humanizing transition.

Finally, I'm concerned that we may not put enough intellectual and moral effort into developing immune systems against the natural catastrophes that occur all around us. Catastrophes are to be expected, and they accelerate change whenever immune systems learn from them. In my own research, there has never been a catastrophe in known universal history (supernova, KT-meteorite, plague, civilization collapse, nuclear detonation, reactor meltdown, computer virus, 9/11, you name it) that did not function to accelerate the average distributed complexity (ADC) of the computational network in which it was embedded. It is apparently this immune learning that keeps the universe on a smooth curve of continually accelerating change. If there's one rule that anyone who studies accelerating change in complex adaptive systems should realize, it is that immunity, interdependence, and intelligence always win. This is not necessarily so for the individual, who charts his or her own unique path to the future but is often breathtakingly wrong. But the observation holds consistently for the entire amorphous network.

Nevertheless, there have been many cases of catastrophes where lessons were not rapidly learned, where immune systems were not optimally educated to improve resiliency, redundancy, and variation. And in the case of human society, our sociotechnological immune systems work best when they are aided by committed human beings, the most conscious and purposeful nodes in our emerging global brain. Consider our public health efforts against pathogens such as SARS and AIDS, and the strategies for success become clear. Anything that economically improves social, political, technological, and biological immune systems is a very forsighted development.

This said, one of our great challenges in coming decades is to design a global technological and cultural immune system, a ubiquitous EarthGrid of sensing and intelligence systems, a Transparent Society (David Brin, 1998) that has enough pluralism and fine-grained accountability to scrupulously ensure individual liberties while also providing unparalleled collective security. We have almost arrived at the era of SIMADs (Single Individuals engaged in Massive Asymmetric Destruction), a term coined by the futurist Jerry Glenn of the Millennium Project. It is time for us to create immune systems that are capable, statistically speaking, of ensuring continued acceleration in the average distributed complexity of human civilization. EarthGrid appears inevitable when accelerating technological change occurs on a planet of "finite sphericity," as Teilhard De Chardin would say. Knowing that can help us boldly walk the path.

Every sniper and serial killer should be countered today with the installation of another set of public cameras. By their very actions they are building the social cages that will eventually catch them, and all others like them, so we might as well publicly acknowledge this state of affairs, for maximum behavioral effect. Ideally, ninety five percent of these cameras will remain in private, not public hands, as is the current situation in Manhattan. When will we see RFID in all our products? When will we finally live in a world were every citizen transmits an electronic signal uniquely identifying them to the network at all times? When will we have a countervailing electronic democracy, ensuring this power is used only in the most citizen-beneficial manner?  Today we see early efforts in these areas, but as I've written in previous articles, there is still far too much short term fear and lack of foresight.

If we think carefully about all this, we will realize that a broadband LUI network must be central to the creation of tomorrow's n