Well, hey, just be glad that you aren't one of the Seven Most Bizarrely Unlucky People who ever Lived.

Number one on the list is the only human being ever to be nuked twice. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima in the when the first bomb hit and Nagasaki when the second one hit and lived (until quite recently) to tell the tale. The link to this story comes via Jim Elvidge, who espouses an interesting variation on the Simulation Hypothesis. Per Elvidge, anomalies such as these can be viewed as Easter eggs -- little clues that our universe may be, if not an outright practical joke, perhaps an excessively elaborate work of performance art.

I'm not sure that any of these coincidences rise to the bizarreness level required to question the universe around me, but the guy who got struck by lightning seven times is pretty interesting. I can't quite get my head around the odds against that, as stated in the linked article. It seems that human history could have run many times over without this ever happening.

So it's an outlier, for sure. But proof that the world is a simulation? I'll need something even weirder, I'm afraid.

We interviewed Elvidge a while back and are looking to have him back on the podcast soon.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

First we had Glenn writing about the singularity in Popular Mechanics. Pretty pedestrian stuff for those who are familiar with the subject, but potentially a real eye-opener for a lot of regular PM readers.

Next we find National Geographic -- celebrating the Darwin's 150th -- giving four scenarios for human evolution. The first two are kind of a waste of time, but the third one is "Humans Achieve Electronic Immortality."

In National Freaking Geographic.

Finally, Cracked -- a name that to me will always mean "Mad Magazine Wannabe" -- we find 5 Materials that Will Make the World as We Know It Obsolete.

Tagline: "Your, uh...ass is calling."

Okay, I didn't say they had gone highbrow or anything, but the technologies described are pretty much spot on.Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, and Cracked. This stuff is going mainstream.

Next time we do one of these, looks like we'll have to take it up a notch.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

J. Storrs Hall of the Foresight Institute shares an unusually bleak scenario with the Foresight Senior Associates in his most recent e-mail:

The coming collapse

We don't have a decision market -- what Robin Hanson called "idea futures" when he invented them -- in the efficacy of our government's fiscal and monetary policies. But we have something close: the price of gold. As I write, gold is nearing $1050 an ounce, an unprecedented high. The logic of the market translates this into confidence at an unprecedented low.

Part of this caution is due to recent revelations of plans among the Arabian Gulf states, China, Russia, Japan, and others, to move out of the dollar as the oil reserve currency. Part is due to the fact that our policies of bailing out failing businesses are like of the Japanese in the 90s, which led to a "lost decade" of severely stunted economic growth. And part is because we've been living high by borrowing, and the rest of the world is beginning to wonder whether we'll ever pay it back.

The problem is, that world-straddling empires don't just have a lost decade. When the British Empire collapsed in the decade following World War II, standards of living in England went from the highest in the world -- London was essentially the world's capital as late as 1910 -- to those of a third-world country. The top empire has a lot of advantages that it loses when it drops back into the pack, such as having its currency be the reserve and thus being able to print its way out of tight spots. Losing those advantages has a multiplier effect on what would otherwise be a mild, or at least not precipitous, decline.

One of the reasons the British collapsed as far as they did should give us pause. The Empire had accumulated a host of structural inefficiencies which they could get away with before, but were a huge drag on an economy trying to be competitive. We have these in spades, along with the fact that our science and engineering education, and levels of interest among young people, is dismal.

You may be surprised to hear this kind of thing from Foresight, because we usually have an optimistic take on the future. In fact, the technical outlook has never been brighter: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and molecular biotech are increasingly in our grasp and have, more clearly than ever, the potential to change our future drastically for the better. Matter printers, personal robot servants, and a cure for aging would give us a fantastic standard of living no matter what the rest of the world might do.

But these things will not happen by themselves. They have to be invented and built. And that means they have to be invested in. And that means people have to understand that they are possible, and in the not-too-distant future.

And that's where Foresight comes in.

Yours sincerely,

Josh

J. Storrs Hall, Ph.D. President Foresight Institute

I think Josh has thrown down the gauntlet, not just for Foresight but for everyone who believes that a vastly better future is in our grasp, that it's something we can achieve sooner rather than later. Is the coming collapse inevitable? I believe it is no more inevitable than the Malthusian end-state of humanity laid out by Robin Hanson that we discussed on last night's show.

I am reminded of this passage from A Christmas Carol:

``Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,'' said Scrooge, ``answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?''

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

``Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,'' said Scrooge. ``But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!''

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge.

``Am I that man who lay upon the bed?'' he cried, upon his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

``No, Spirit! Oh no, no!''

The finger still was there.

``Spirit!'' he cried, tight clutching at its robe, ``hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?''

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

``Good Spirit,'' he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: ``Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!''

A change of direction is possible, requiring first a change of heart. What will happen over the next 10, 20, 30 years depends a little on what we imagine to be possible, a little more on what we expect to happen, and a whole lot on what we insist must happen.

The choices are:

1. We experience a gradual, or even rapid, decline over that period, orchestrated and carried out by a political class composed of two parties each of which ceaselessly insists it is fighting against such a collapse, while doing little or nothing to help us realize the truly game-changing technologies that Josh described above, the ones that can turn everything around. We ultimately land in an end-state somewhat north of sheer misery (we hope), but far less than what we knew was possible.

2. We take charge of the process ourselves, either replacing the aforementioned political class with people who really get it, or bypassing them altogether. We work to bring about truly meaningful economic change by way of highly achievable technological progress. And over the next 30 years, we launch the biggest economic boom in human history, making a tiny blip out of every period of growth that has come before.

Yes, there are plenty of scenarios that fall between these two, but these are the bookends -- these are the possibilities we should be looking at as we decide what steps to take next.

I think anyone who has read the book will agree: we don't want the nightmare to become our reality. We want to wake up and have a very merry Christmas. If the courses be departed from, the ends will change.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

GeekPress links to an interesting story about the frustration that Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts feel about having their preferred keyboard layout left out of most smart phones. Here's an interesting tidbit:

When American inventor Christopher Sholes developed the first modern typewriter in the 1860s, the keyboard layout was in alphabetical order. That was problematic: When two neighboring keys were pressed in rapid succession, the machine jammed. Mr. Sholes later rearranged the layout, placing the most commonly used keys away from each other. Like that, "qwerty" was born. The name comes from the first six keys on the upper left row of letters on the keyboard.

Now many of this have heard or read this before, but it bears repeating: the keyboard you are using was deliberately designed to be difficult to use. It was designed to make typing slow.

Probably the second or third implementation of typewriter technology overcame the key-sticking problem that originally led Sholes to take such drastic action. But by then the damage was done. QWERTY was established, and it has managed to hang in through the age of the IBM Selectric to the introduction of the personal computer and all the way to the iPhone.

Will we ever abandon QWERTY? That's a tough question. It's a well-established standard. And however effective a replacement standard (Dvorak or some other) might be, nobody wants to have to learn how to type on a keyboard with a different layout. We face a similar problem in the US with the metric system. The metric system is more logical, easier to learn, and much more widely accepted than the English system. But switching over would be a huge pain in the butt.

Now we could start teaching kids to use a new keyboard standard -- without burdening those of us who know the old way -- but that would require maintaining two standards. Our computers would support that just fine; unfortunately, we currently lack on-the-fly key relabeling. So in a two-standard world, keyboards would either be labeled confusingly with more than one letter on each key, or people would always be running the risk of having to use the wrong kind of keyboard. (Which of the two standards would a public kiosk use? What if you need to borrow your spouse's laptop?)

So I don't know. We might not get rid of QWERTY until we get rid of -- or massively reduce dependence on -- keyboards by way of the Conversational User Interface.

But all this QWERTY talk makes me wonder if there aren't a number of other QWERTies out there -- artifacts of a bygone era that provide clearly sub-optimal solutions, but that we keep around because of the enormous inertia associated with them. QWERTY is kind of a pure example because it was deliberately designed to be slow. The English measurement system was not designed to be quirky and confusing -- the folks who came up with it were doing the best they could -- and it only seems quirky and confusing when compared to a subsequent, more logical system.

Still, I think it's fair to say that the English measurement system is a QWERTY. And speaking of English QWERTies, how about English spelling? As many critics have pointed out over the years, our current spelling conventions are hardly the most efficient and logical way of expressing the language in writing:

Why does the English language have so many words that are difficult to spell? The main reason is that English has 1,100 different ways to spell its 44 separate sounds, more than any other language. Some of the results of this are:

Words that have the same sounds but are spelled differently,

Words that contain letters that have nothing to do with the way the words are pronounced,

Words that contain silent letters; that is, letters that must be included when you write the words even though they are not pronounced,

Spelling rules that have lists of exceptions - words that do not follow the rules and thus must be memorized separately.

But for all those problems, spelling would be a difficult problem to solve. Do you think a Dvorak keyboard looks strange? Do you find talk of liters and meters and degrees Celsius confusing? Well, that stuff is a piece of cake compared to the kinds of changes we would have to make in order to clean up English spelling.

Standards of various kinds are not the only QWERTies out there. There are other deeply embedded social norms that have achieved QWERTY-hood or that are well on their way to becoming QWERTies. How about the idea that everybody needs a land-line phone connection in his or her home? There is a growing group of folks who have decided that that's a QWERTY -- and they get by just fine with their mobile connection. Or how about the idea that having a job means showing up at an office (or other workplace) every day? As telecommuting presents itself as an increasingly viable option for more and more jobs, mandating employee presence at "the office" every day -- at least for certain occupations -- begins to look more and more QWERTY-like.

Our future of post-scarcity promises to turn our entire view of "employment" -- at least insofar as we have defined it as a prerequisite to earning a living -- into a QWERTY. It seems likely to me that there are a number of QWERTies lurking in our current educational and health care infrastructure.

Moreover, speaking of infrastructure, how many QWERTies are embedded in the technologies we rely on every day? How many QWERTies are there in your car, your telephone, your computer, your refrigerator?

And take it a step further -- what QWERTies are built right into the human machinery? I can think of at least one whopping QWERTY that we evolved ourselves into and that we would do well to be rid of. There must be others.

Let's discuss.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Note: Stephen has suggested that the following is a little too long for the show notes for Sunday's show, so I'm presenting it here as a stand-alone entry.

I. The Question

The question is whether accelerating and converging technologies are leading us to a future in which we can all fully understand the world around us, and what kid of transformative effect on the world such an understanding wil provide. HapyCrow gives the example of repairing his own Jeep, and points out that doing the repairs himself it not always the economically effective approach. He then says:

It's a tall order to say that massive social change will happen when we can all work on our cars -- but when we can all comprehend the rest of the physical and political infrastructure around us, and represent them in a way that aids this comprehension, vast social and political change will be upon us. For starters, it will cut the legs out from underneath progressivism's assumption that technocrats need rule on our behalf. While that will discomfit political liberals, it will also provide cold comfort to the other sides of the aisle(s). If poorly-distributed, it could lead to techno-oligarchy (the informed making better decisions), or else it could lead to something radically less hierarchical and more communal.

It's unlikely that it would empower Marx' dream that one could be a fisherman in the morning, a painter in the afternoon, and write operas in the evening...for now, anyway, I suspect that not even brilliant software would make any opera of mine enjoyable. YET.

Let's put aside the question of political infrastructure -- for now -- and just look at the physical infrastructure.

Initial sniff test: Is understanding as big a deal as HC says?

Although I believe that massive increases in individual understanding of the world are on their way, I question the possibility of people achieving a full understanding of the world around us. But before we go there, let's spend some time pondering why it is that we don't already know everything.

II. Why we don't all know everything (a): distribution of knowledge

It is by design that we each don't understand everything about our physical world. If each of us could carry all human knowledge around, the total amount of human knowledge would have to be a tiny subset of what's available.

So each of us understands just a slice. This specialization of knowledge has been going on at least since the hunter-gatherer days. After all, some of us were hunters; some were gatherers. When the total amount of knowledge exceeded what one human being could reasonably carry around -- or even what one human being might reasonably need -- we started distributing knowledge amongst ourselves.

Today, knowledge is massively distributed amongst the population.

Not only do we not work on our own cars, we don't perform our own root canals.

Direct TV sends a guy out to calibrate the satellite dish -- most of us have no idea how to do that.

Many of us have someone do our taxes for us

Just this past weekend I spent $60 getting the sprinkler guy to come out and adjust watering times -- because I couldn't figure out the dials!

Distribution of knowledge is tremendously empowering. If all doctors were required to know everything about treating illness and injury, once again there would be a lot less TO know, and we wouldn't have specialists. No oncologists, pediatricians, endocrinologists, OBGYNs. A century ago, the model for medical practice was much closer to this. Today, we as consumers of health care benefit from the fact that doctors are empowered to specialize in whatever interests them most.

This brings up another interesting point: distribution of knowledge has been -- for the most part -- self-organizing. A more or less free market lets us have a society in which appropriate numbers of people earn how to be auto detailers, beauticians, civil engineers, and astronauts.

Interestingly, the wide distribution of knowledge is a problem for those who emphasize self-reliance and who worry about what to do if civilization hits some kind of reboot. One of HC's commenters says:

I have two advanced degrees, and AT BEST I think I could get me and mine back to the early stone age. I mean, sure, I can use a flint and steel if I've the gear, but I'm not your go-to guy for taking raw iron ore out of the ground. Tanning hides, making felt, and some VERY elementary spinning is about all I'm good for in that department.

Here's my problem with post-apocalyptic survivalist scenarios / fantasies: If things really do fall completely apart to the point that I'm going to have to spin my own yarn, tan my own leather, and freaking smelt my own iron ore, the chances that I personally will be one of the remnant of human survivors trying to set up Farnham's Freehold are close enough to zero that I just don't spend a lot of time worrying about it, much less preparing for it. If the world falls to that point, most of us won't be here well before we get to that point.

Plus, I believe there are strong arguments to made that we probably won't get to that point.

Yes, everyone's house should be well stocked with emergency supplies. But should we all learn how to tan leather so we're ready for the Mad Max world? Count me out.

Sure, he wears leather, but we never see him tanning any.

Continue reading "On Knowing Everything" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sometimes you read something or see something on TV and you think, "Hey, that's kind of neat."

And then, once in a great while, a few minutes later you think, "Wait a second."

And then you wonder if you haven't had just the briefest glimpse of how profoundly different our world is about to become.

So, judge for yourselves...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I started writing a comment in the thread on my Better All the Time piece from Friday when I realized that, length-wise, it was growing into a post of its own. So here we go.

Leo wrote:

Until humans know that happiness results from virtuous behavior and that such knowledge informs and directs our own behavior, we will continue to pursue the gratification of our sensory appetites. Such behavior leads to an every increasing level of vice, accelerating one on the downward spiral into the abyss of despair and unhappiness. It is happiness, so understood, that is the basis of the phrase in our Declaration of Independence, "Pursuit of Happiness".

Sally responded:

[T]he kind of capabilities Singulatarians are projecting for future people and societies allow people to pursue all kinds of fun and take care of their responsibilities and themselves. They want more, more, more, and they get it.

The dissipation of alcohol, sex, drugs noted yesteryear and today are a function of comparatively low level of technological capability as expressed in our amusements rather than punishment for sinners.

I agree. While we do see individuals from time to time falling into the spiral that Leo describes (and that's a tragedy), humanity as a whole pushes on.

If anything, I believe that material progress has aided humanity in becoming more virtuous. I pointed out in my post that we are less violent than our primitive ancestors. Look at how much progress has been made over the past few centuries in recognizing and realizing the idea of human rights. The abolition of first the slave trade and then the practice of slavery was a by-product of the industrial revolution. History shows that more capable people, with better resources at their disposal, tend to be nicer than less capable people with fewer resources.

This doesn't mean that there aren't still bad people, nor does it mean that those same resources never get used to do terrible things. But the trend is towards greater empathy with our fellow human beings. Our future selves are highly compassionate beings -- that's one of the things that makes them so darn sexy.

Mark wrote:

If you extrapolate the evolution from single cell to human (more power, knowledge and longevity) into the future, you eventually get to omnipotence, omniscience and immortality which is a common definition of God. So, perhaps God did not create man, but man's destiny is to evolve into God.

Tracing the progression of humanity towards godhood is something akin to tracing the the progression of our present state of affairs towards "the most wonderful world imaginable." The closer we get to any one conception of it, the more we have to refine what we mean by the term. Let's just take one of your characteristics of God, omnipotence, and give it a fairly standard definition: infinitely powerful. (Omnipotent actually means "all-powerful," not "infinitely powerful," but I think most of us would agree that God is widely described as having infinite power.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky (no fan of the God meme) does an excellent job of showing the fallacy of glibly tossing the term "infinite" around, when in reality we can barely get our heads around very large numbers. He writes:

Graham's number is far beyond my ability to grasp. I can describe it, but I cannot properly appreciate it. (Perhaps Graham can appreciate it, having written a mathematical proof that uses it.) This number is far larger than most people's conception of infinity. I know that it was larger than mine. My sense of awe when I first encountered this number was beyond words. It was the sense of looking upon something so much larger than the world inside my head that my conception of the Universe was shattered and rebuilt to fit. All theologians should face a number like that, so they can properly appreciate what they invoke by talking about the "infinite" intelligence of God.

If human beings are currently at a capability level represented by the number 1, perhaps the powerful beings I described in my piece would be represented by the number 100. If those sexy immortal billionaires with super powers then become a thousand times more powerful than that, and then a million times more powerful than that, and then a billion times more powerful than that, they are still roughly as far from being infinitely powerful as we are right now. Going back to my analogy of a one-celled organism trying to figure out what it needs to do to become human, that woefully simplistic creature is much, much closer to us than we are to an infinite being. (In fact, it is infinitely closer.)

Interestingly, if we were to reach a capability level represented by the vast-beyond-imagining number that Yudkowsky describes above, we would be much more powerful than "God" as conceived in the minds of most believers. In fact, we wouldn't need to go nearly that far to achieve a level of capability that far transcends what most people picture when they think of "God." I don't think this means that we're moving in on divinity. Rather, I think we need vastly expanded imagination when it comes to contemplating human potential, much less the nature of God.

Hitnrun wrote:

"I think they would laugh at that question. The answer is so obvious. Likewise, if we had even a rough approximation of what life will be like for people in the future, we would be equally amused at the suggestion that those folks might be less happy than we are."

That's quite an amazing fallacy. Just because something seems "obvious" to an outsider with no data doesn't make it true.

Of course, in the examples I gave there is some data although it's hardly exhaustive. However, these people aren't entirely "outsiders." Human beings of any era will agree that being eaten by bears is negatively correlated with happiness, while having a warm and dry place to sleep is positively correlated with happiness. The net human experience is that over time we have fewer of the former type of factor to contend with and get many more of the latter as given.

In any case, if it's a fallacy to make assumptions about the level of happiness of people living in other eras, then those who claim that people were happier or just as happy in the past are committing precisely that fallacy.

SparcVark wrote:

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

. . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

-Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Is the "new transhuman man" just the "new socialist man" with slightly updated wishful thinking?

Sally responded:

Good prognosis from Trotsky, but Marxism was a very bad treatment.

Turns out Trotsky was right for all the wrong reasons.

Marx KNEW technological development was accelerating in the 19th century, but failed miserably by not studying the tech itself and not extrapolating those trends.

Well, that was ONE of his many mistakes.

Marx looked at human history and saw an ancient power struggle between classes. He saw technology as an enabler of conducting and winning a war between classes rather than as an evolutionary catalyst to societal change. In his view, it takes an armed uprising to put the means of production into the hands of the workers. Wrong. It turns out that technological development ultimately puts the means of production into the hands of the workers, and that a capitalist system fully supports the transition. The singularity, particularly the economic variety, promises to bring about much of what 19th century communists and other Utopians envisioned. Are we just touting a new version of their "wishful thinking?" I suppose we are, in much the same way that the Wright brothers carried forward a new version of Leonardo's "wishful thinking" about heavier-than-air flight.

Donald Fagen wrote:

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be free when their work is done
We'll be eternaly free, yes, and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be!
What a glorious time to be free!

You know, Donald, I always assumed that your namesake was being sarcastic with this song. But the idea suggested here is pretty much where I think we're headed. The basic programming for that machine ought to be something along these lines.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Collapsatarianism

I watched a movie with my family a few nights ago called Aliens of the Deep , a Disney documentary. It was ostensibly about the ocean floor and depths heretofore unrecorded, but it was also about space exploration. In context the two were presented in a very similar and light. And it occurred to me (as I am sure was part of the goal of the film) that space exploration is well and good and we should be exploring more and more often. But we also need to better understand our home planet.

Then for a day or two after that I got caught up on a few TED talks.

Nathan Wolfe shows us that understanding our world is both simpler and more complex. Of course it would make all of us (humans) safer if we could deal with viruses before they become human adapted. A breakthrough modern idea that would have made no sense a hundred years ago.

Will we? How do you get funding to chase viruses in pigs and birds and on the ocean floor when they are no current threat to humans while grandma is in the hospital dying?

Then you got this awesome funny story from Julia Sweeney . Her voice gets on me after awhile too but she has the comedic timing and dramatic narrative, which is a great combination.

And it is not exactly her point, but she reminded me that we have an unbalanced way of establishing the relative truthfulness of something. Mom and dad said it, grandparents believe it, most of the neighbors are on board- oh, it must be the truth. And so slavery propagates for multiple generations. Or other wackiness like – dirt is good for you, bathing is bad. Leeches and blood letting will cure your headache. And so on.

And that brings me toMichael Shermer "> Part comedy, all serious and a great illustration of how we believe whatever we think makes sense. Even though in the cool calm moments or when we’re watching someone else do it, we know it is not likely. And just in case you’re thinking you are safe because you only believe what you see or hear, there’s Al Seckel. We see things all the time that confuse hell out of our bizarre excuse for a brain.

We’re apparently better at establishing the probability of truth or correctness than we used to be. But is it enough? Enough to survive? Enough to move toward singularity? Or enough to get my flying car? Utility fog? Life extension?

Or do we collapse under our own collective stupidity? Glenn Beck says he thinks we are close to failing if not already there. He has been pining for the national mood of 9/12. The Galtists and the Collapsetarians are getting all kinds of attention. I think they are wrong. And I am hopeful and even optimistic.

Let us back up a bit.

How do we know anything? When do we decide we know instead of merely believe? I’m not sure there’s always a bright line, especially when we’re predicting the future. I think we can almost all agree that when predicting, we move from knowing to believing pretty quick, because we cannot know the future.

(Related, but separate: What should we know instead of look up? Or even ignore? Or when is it appropriate to know a little but no more? Or know a little more, and well? Or even to master a subject? (see George Leonard, Mastery and Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers.))

Will there be a general or severe “collapse” as discussed by Brian Wang on a recent FFR and on recent Speculist posts?

Highly unlikely, at least not for any of the reasons that Collapsatarians are predicting. We are at risk, but we are more at risk from things we cannot predict: asteroid collisions, viruses and disease, colony collapse disorder eliminating bees, for example.

Things we already know, even if we cannot predict, we can mitigate. Things we know enough about that we can predict we can also mitigate. We can alter our behavior and we can choose. When we are really getting it right, we can also organize.

It is like we’re driving on a curvy highway. The collapsists are focused on the curve. BUT we can turn the wheel. We always have, intentionally or emergently or just by luck.

Yes, perhaps it is dark and we need more light to avoid overdriving our headlights. Oddly, the kinds of things that suggest slowing down so as not to overdrive our headlights, climate change, cap & trade, oil alternatives, etc., are not interesting to most coallapsists. They want to focus on accounting issues, tax policy and implied or actual loss of value in their stock portfolio.

I do not dismiss moral failings as symptomatic of something negative. And I would not trivialize the value of high morals as part of the reason we can thrive and survive as we have. But to suggest that the stock market is down so our agricultural production is sure to follow is just … well, it is a tough connection to see.

So we know, for example, that human life span got longer. I believe it will continue to extend. And I hope it extends a lot.

How do we use that information to decide what to do (or what to know)?

Perhaps we should we recognize that our population and economy have moved on from 1935 when life expectancy and Social Security eligibility happened to both be 65 years old. (Social Security history denies that one drove the other.) The demographics and actuarials have moved on –we should too.

Perhaps we should recognize that driving a car is practical and fun and Risky. In fact anything we do that accelerates our head to 15 mph or higher w/no helmet is risky. The math says we should avoid doing that when we are younger and the loss or penalty for fatality or significant injury is greater.

But we frequently determine value the wrong way. Or we are bad it, most of the time. Or at least we are not nearly as good at determining value as we think we are. See Dan Gilbert. (All too often we underestimate the odds of our future pains and overestimated the values of present pleasure.)

And now we have the Collapsatarians.

They are wrong for several reasons, and Brian Wang did a great job asking the most useful questions.

But let me say this- Yes, the Roman Empire collapsed. But Rome is still there, though we do not call the people Romans, we call them Italians. Likewise, the Spanish Armada was defeated and the dominance of Spain was irrevocably altered. But there is a still a Spain. And a Spanish Armada. Yes, Spain still has a navy, it just does not dominate the high seas as it once did. Likewise, the era of the British Empire ended. But I have been to Britain since then – it is still Britain.

I think a major part of the problem or part of the confusion is a belief or desire that becomes a belief that becomes what collapsists think we know. It is a desire/belief/idea that there is order and organization. That someone is in charge.

There is no order. There is little meaningful organization. And hardly anyone is in charge of anything.

If the President of the United States could push the right button and keep GDP growing and keep employment high and make the nation secure just because he was President, he would. He would! Always. But it is way more complicated than just the most powerful person in the world willing it to be so.

No one invented AIDS. No one put mercury in our dental fillings so we could be tracked by the fluoride in the water supply. No one faked the lunar landing.

But we are a pattern seeking, order seeking anthropomorphicizing species (see Al Seckel above). So when we can find a pattern that suggests order and control, we believe it. And even if we cannot prove it, that belief turns into us knowing it.

So I conclude that the collapsists are wrong. Because:
- There is no way they could know;
- Anything they can identify that could predict problems so significant that would lead to collapse, we can mitigate, and;
- I just do not choose to believe it.

Posted by Michael Darling at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I caught Things to Come on TCM last night. H. G. Wells was the author of the book The Shape of Things to Come, on which the movie was based, and, interestingly, was closely involved in the making of the film. Filmed in 1936, it's a movie that takes us through 100 years of future history of the world.

As the host on TCM pointed out, it's very interesting -- with 76 years of that predicted 100 years now in humanity's rear view mirror -- to consider what Wells got right, and what he got wrong. The story is set in a thinly-disguised London renamed "Everytown" (I've visited a lot of towns all over the world, but have only been to one where you regularly see these and where you often have a view of this). We first see Everytown at Christmastime in the year 1940, when war breaks out. The World War projected in the movie is disturbingly similar to the real thing in some respects, especially the portrayal of aerial bombardment of urban civilian populations. What Wells (fortunately) got wrong was the duration: the War drones on for decades and ultimately brings civilization as we know it to an end.

By the year 1970, Everytown is under the control of local despot called the Boss who wants to go to war with the nearby Hill People in order to take their coal and convert it to fuel for his shabby fleet of non-functioning airplanes. The nation-state as we know it is gone, along with the infrastructure that kept it going. Although the Boss dreams of bringing some pieces of that infrastructure back for his own personal enrichment, no one has seen a working airplane in years.

And then, one day, an airplane lands in Everytown -- a sleek, futuristic model (still propeller-driven, alas) unlike anything anyone has ever seen. The pilot, decked out in what must surely be the dorkiest helmet in the history of science fiction, has no interest in or use for the Boss, and instead seeks out the local technorati. He explains that he is part of a new brotherhood of "airmen," a technical elite who have headquartered themselves in Basra -- yep, the same Basra -- and who have carried on the technological progress of the human race that was cut short by the war and ensuing chaos. This new fraternity calls itself Wings Over the World and it is ready to usher in a new chapter in the history of humanity.

Before long, an entire fleet of enormous futuristic aircraft descend upon Everytown and conquer it. It's unclear to me whether they kill the Boss or he kills himself, but Wings Over the World is otherwise pretty much nonviolent -- essentially slipping the entire town an airborne roofie, allowing them to wake up later to find themselves now under the control of the benign and progress-loving airmen.

The airmen conquer the entire world in this fashion and, true to their word, bring in a new age of peace and prosperity. We next see Everytown in the year 2036. The city is utterly transformed, an underground techno-paradise with rolling green hills above it. And now humanity is ready for it's next big adventure -- the first voyage to the moon!

It just goes to show you: technology is hard to predict. In parts of the world-war montage, we see tanks that look more advanced than anything we have today, and this would have been in the 40's or 50's. But a trip to the moon? Wells gives us 67 years more lead time on that one than we needed.

So, as prophecy, the movie fails. The world wars didn't bring down civilization. From their ashes, a dictatorship of the proletariat did not emerge. Airmen never conquered the world. We don't live underground. The state has not withered away.

That is one big helmet

But it's interesting to see how, in some ways, Wells' communist Utopian tropes are not that different from some of our own favorite ideas. When you get a choice as stark as Wings Over the World vs. the Boss, it's not hard to be for the people who want to set humanity free and who want technology to improve everybody's lives -- even if they are a bunch of commies. And in 2036, when a Luddite rebellion threatens the moon mission, there's, like, no way I'm siding with those losers. Their position seems utterly incoherent to me: arguing against the very progress which has made their easy, healthy, lengthened lives possible. It's hard to imagine that people would take that position.

So score a big one for Wells: he got that exactly right.

The other thing that Wells got right was the transformative power of technology. We look for nanotechnology and artificial intelligence to enable, ultimately, a reboot of human history. It's not surprising that people saw that potential in earlier technologies, especially things like electricity, industrialization, the telephone, radio, etc. Wells gave us an intriguing scenario: the Aeronautic Singularity.

And he was closer to being right than we might suppose at first glance. After all, air travel has been a major enabler in the emergence of the global economy. This isn't the global economy that Wells was looking for, but I'm not sure he would completely disapprove. If he could see the real 2009, he might be disappointed that there are still nation-states, and that capitalism is still with us, but the ability to review a century that tried communism and found it severely wanting might temper his disappointment.

On the upside, the second world war did not destroy civilization. We still have nation-states, but a global civilization is emerging. Whether it ends up under one government might not matter as much as we once thought. And whether the world is largely "socialist" or "capitalist" might not matter that much either, not when technology threatens to distort what those terms mean beyond recognition. In 1936, nobody had the idea that technological development and more or less free markets could create a world in which all material goods ultimately become...free. But that is an idea that we have spent a lot of time exploring here recently. And it's an idea that's catching on.

Chris Anderson explains it very well:

Wells thought aviation was the transformational development that would allow us to rebuild the economy from scratch. Before him, Marx thought the same of industrial production. They were both right to the extent that there is, ultimately, a set of technologies that can make that possible. But they were both wrong about capitalism. It turns out that we needed it to give us those technologies. The Luddites in Things to Come arguing against a trip to the moon or any further technological development share something in common with the great visionaries who imagined the world in which those Luddites dwell -- both groups fight against the very thing that makes everything they want possible.

The visionaries who extolled the greatness of human accomplishment missed out on a huge one -- figuring out how to pay for Utopia. It is not just humanity's great scientific and technological advancements that enable ushering in a new age -- it is our economic achievements as well. Thanks to capitalism, by 2036 we may well live in a world far more abundant, clean, and free -- and with humanity better poised to carry on the march of progress -- than anything Wells or Marx could have imagined.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Or, as The Wall Street Journal puts it:

The Jetpack: An Idea Whose Time Has Never Come, but Won't Go Away

....The question is whether any normal person would do this. Pilots flying the devices jet around with 1,300-degree steam shooting inches from their legs while they worry about landing before the pack runs out of fuel in 30 seconds.

I think jetpacks will become increasingly popular, but they are a long way from being practical. They have that in common with lighter-than-air aircraft. People like the idea of blimps and dirigibles, but by and large the practical applications aren't there. Until a technology has a practical application -- and it's hard to imagine one for jetpacks until they become a lot safer and enjoy a much greater range than they do today -- it is destined to remain a niche (in the case of blimps) or cult (in the case of jetpacks) technology.

Niche is one peg up from cult. If jetpacking were to, pardon the expression, "take off" as an extreme sport (which has been predicted for a few years now) it would achieve niche status.

But the dream of sustained, individual jet- or rocket-powered flight, say something like this...

...is probably going to remain a dream for a long time to come.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Michael Anissimov explains:

2200 will never come. Our brains will be accelerated by a factor of millions before 2100. 2200 won’t be for millions of years.

It's not an entry -- just an offhand comment in a thread about a picture of Mars terra-formed. Gotta love Michael's blog. The Nuclear Test is great, too.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No matter who you voted for or what your expectations are for Barack Obama's presidency, today is a great day for America. Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

And this has grown old, and maybe it's the last time to say it, history moving so fast, but there's something we all know so well that we are perhaps forgetting to see it in the forefront. But a long-oppressed people have raised up a president. It is moving and beautiful and speaks to the unending magic and sense of justice of our country. The other day the journalist John O'Sullivan noted that 150 years after slavery, a black man stands in the place of Lincoln in the inaugural stands, and this country has proved again that anything is possible, that if we can do this we can do anything. That is a good thing to remember at a difficult time.

A lot of people thought they would never live to see this day, and were wrong. The future came faster than expected. It tends to do that, which is why I'm a little disturbed by Colin Powell's remarks on the inauguration in light of the celebration of MLK day

Even with Barack Obama’s election as President, Powell also talked about not letting King’s dream die.

"He would never rest. He would never be satisfied. He would still be beating that drum," Powell told the crowd.

Sorry, I have to take issue with the word "never." If Powell just meant that Dr. King would "still not be satisfied," then I can certainly see that. But to say that he would "never" be satisfied is to argue that a satisfactory resolution of race relations in this country is not achievable, that it lies perpetually out there somewhere beyond the horizon.

On the most recent FastForwad Radio, we discussed a potential coming Utopia. I argued that Utopias are achievable but that they are always relative and that they don't seem like "Utopia" to the people who live there. The reason is that by "Utopia," we tend to mean a future in which no more problems exist. That probably can't happen. Completely solve any of the world's major problems -- poverty, disease, war -- and you will still have a world in which problems exist. The people who live in that world, though far better off than we are, will still believe that they have difficult lives, filled with dangers and risks.

But in his "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. King did not describe a world in which all problems are solved. He described a world in which one major, complex, ugly, and seemingly unsolvable problem was eliminated. The power of the speech is predicated on the idea that somehow, maybe, someday, the dream will come true. If he had prefaced his remarks with the words "Now, of course, none of this will ever happen, but..." how effective would that speech have been?

Believing the future we want is possible is a major contributing factor in how we bring it about. We must be careful about how we throw that word "never" around.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You have got to love a story like this:

Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes

Russians patent shockwave storm-squelch scheme

A Russian professor at an Ohio university has applied to patent a method for snuffing out hurricanes by flying jet fighters around the eye of the storm at supersonic speeds.

Professor Arkadii Leonov and his collaborator Atanas Gagov, both of Akron Uni, actually filed their patent application "Hurricane Suppression by Supersonic Boom" last year.

There is plenty to love about this idea --

1. It's original.

2. It relies on existing technology.

3. If it works, it solves a huge existing problem.

But if it does work, I think it will ultimately fall to supersonic unmanned drones to carry out this task. I know we already send aircraft into storms for scientific observation, but something tells me that whipping around the perimeter of a hurricane at supersonic speeds opens up a whole new level of risk.

(Via FuturePundit.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

On Sunday's FastForward Radio, we talked a little about Bjorn Lomborg's recent piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he makes the case that funds spent today on solutions to climate change would be more effective if spent directly on other problems such as poverty, hunger, and disease:

Whatever is spent on climate policies saving one person from hunger in 100 years could instead save 5,000 people today.

This same point is true, whether we look at flooding, heat waves, hurricanes, diseases or water shortages. Carbon cuts are an ineffective response. Direct policies -- such as addressing hunger directly -- do a lot more.

Taking Lomborg's figures as being anywhere nearly correct, dealing with the future versus the present places us in a major moral dilemma. Do we help a few in the future or a great many today? This is an intriguing problem, and (unfortunately) on the show, we didn't deal with it as effectively as I would have liked, instead allowing ourselves to be caught up in two major digressions.

1. Free Markets Vs. Central Planning

This is beside the point. Lomborg assumes a government solution either way -- he's talking, after all, about the most effective way to spend government funds -- but one can assume a free market solution or a hybrid government / free market solution, and the problem is the same. Whether it's government, business, NGOs, or whatever, the question is do we get the benefits now or look for benefits later?

What's interesting about Lomborg's analysis is that it flies in the face of the normal present good / future good dichotomy. Normally, we say we can save a few lives right now or many lives later. But in the case of the specific benefits of climate change spending, Lomborg argues, we get more benefits spending the money now directly on those problems than we would trying to solve them via climate change.

2. Adoption Rates of Technology

This arose primarily because I misstated one of Lomborg's arguments. I made it seem that Lomborg was arguing that Germany should not spend money on solar energy now, but that they should wait until the technology is better and they can get more benefit from it. This led to protests that this is a circular argument -- the technology will always be better in the future, so one should never buy it now.

In fact, Lomborg is saying something else. He doesn't state a position as to when Germany should adopt solar energy -- now or later -- he just uses how much they are spending as a departure point to talk about how the money could be better spent. In this case, he argues that $150 billion is better spent on making renewable technologies better than deploying them now:

Amazing good could come from using Mr. Obama's $150 billion primarily to invest in creating new technologies, rather than simply subsidizing existing ones.

Investing in existing inefficient technology (like current-day solar panels) costs a lot for little benefit. Germany, the leading consumer of solar panels, will end up spending $156 billion by 2035, yet only delay global warming by one hour by the end of the century.

If Mr. Obama invested instead in low-carbon research and development, the dollars would go far (researchers are relatively cheap), and the result -- maybe by 2040 -- will be better solar panels that are cheaper than fossil fuels.

Obama's proposed $150 billion and Germany's proposed $156 billion are different buckets of money (although they are roughly the same amount.) Lomborg is suggesting that we get more leverage spending on development now and deployment later. As an economist, my guess is that he would suggest an economic inflection point occurs when our development dollars have secured technologies that can be deployed roughly as efficiently as the technologies they are replacing.

On the program, Stephen noted that massive improvements in solar technology might come quite a bit sooner than Lomborg's projection of 2040. He also described a somewhat different inflection point, when consumers -- rather than governments -- will be ready to make the switch:

The pragmatic public has little reason to adopt solar power until its cheaper than buying electricity off the grid. When it becomes cheaper to adopt solar than to use the grid - meaning the payback period for the equipment is reasonably short - the public will begin adopting solar. Even as solar continues to be improved.

Ray Kurzweil has called the point at which solar becomes cheaper than grid the Solar Singularity.

The difference between how the public looks at these problems and how larger institutions -- corporations, NGOs, government agencies -- is that as individual consumers, we are going to spend money on technology only when we think it's a good buy. An early adopter might have bought an LCD or plasma TV just when those technologies became available, and pushed the market along for relatively late adopters like myself. But even the early adopter would make the purchase thinking he or she was getting a good deal for the money. Being first has a lot of value in and of itself.

However, how many consumers will pump money directly into television R&D? In that model, you don't actually get a TV to use now, but you know that later there will be better TVs and you will be able to purchase and enjoy one of those. Would consumers ever be willing to divert entertainment dollars today for a better future tomorrow? Well, Brian Wang makes the intriguing argument that they should be willing to do just that:

People should consider diverting $100-150 per year in science fiction movies, DVD, books, toys and games towards actual scientific attempts at life extension and molecular nanotechnology. This does not include another average of $60-100 per person on cosmetic surgery, vitamins and dietary supplements. Why settle for imagination, illusion and fake procedures and invest in attempts at real solutions ?

Note: You can also just divert some money from this or other sources depending upon your personal priorities. ie. still buy science fiction but eat out less or buy less junk food which is bad for you anyways. Go to the movies less and rent the DVD and accumulate a fund for putting towards actual research. Recognize that in most cases vitamins do nothing and put those funds towards research that has the potential to make a big difference.

I think this is an excellent idea. And something we should think about is what are ways that we can make money spent on futuristic entertainment help to fund research to bring about a better future?

Still, I think that this is where institutions have the edge over individual consumers. On the program, I lamented something I called "institutional thinking," which tends to view the future in a very limited and linear way. But the upside to institutions -- and again, I'm thinking about government agencies, NGOs, and forward-looking corporations -- is that they are perfectly willing to put funds into research now. They will spend money on direct research much more willingly than consumers will.

The real trick is to get both individuals and institutions focused on the kinds of disruptive, non-linear developments that can lead to massive positive change. Nanotechnology and biotechnology have the potential to do more to cut carbon emissions than any plans on any UN or other government agency drawing board. (Plus, these technologies offer the promise of reversing damage already done to the environment.) So what we need to see happen is for those developments to become part of everybody's plans: consumers, government agencies, non-profits, corporations.

We need to strike a balance between funding research that will get us to those promising changes and funding relief to problems that currently exist. How that should play out for large institutions is the conundrum Lomborg faces us with, and the solution he offers is focusing on what will bring the largest overall benefit. Some of that will be future-directed, some will be in the here-and-now.

But as individuals, here's a modest proposal: let's make it a 50-50 split. If you donate $100 to Save the Children (or a similar organization), donate $100 to Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (or a similar organization.) And let's all find a way to give twice what we're currently giving.

That should be a start.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A very smart fellow named Paul Otlet put the basic ideas together 74 years ago:

However, that was only his latest-and-greatest thinking on the subject. In fact, he attempted to implement a more primitive version of the Internet in the 19th century!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle poses an interesting question about the $700 billion bail-out package -- "How much is that in Apollos?" By his math, that money could have bought us seven Apollo programs or 70 Large Hadron Colliders. He then goes on to introduce a whole new currency, which begins at the bottom with the chump-change Allen ($25 million, what Paul Allen has kicked in either to SpaceShipOne or his telescope array project) and works through such units as the Shuttle ($1 billion) until we reach the big daddy, the Budget ($ 3 trillion.)

This is all true, but the bottom line is we've already had our Apollo program, the LHC is (sort of) up and running, and I really don't think anybody would want to buy 700 new space shuttles. What if we had that money to spend on something completely new, such as...

1. Space Elevator. Nobody really knows how much one of these would cost, but I have to believe that $700 billion would take a significant bite out of the development and deployment costs. Easy, reliable, cheap, and continuous transport of people and goods into space (and back) would open up the new frontier in ways we can barely even imagine.

   

2. Nuclear Fusion Power Plant. I'm thinking that with this kind of money, we could try out three or four of the most promising ways to get fusion power going, (including Bussard's concept) and put the best one in production. We could solve the foreign oil problem once and for all. Oil would be obsolete. In fact, I think it's safe to say that virtually all other ways of producing energy would be obsolete.

   

3. Universal Assembler. How much of our $700 billion would it take to build a machine that can make anything, including more universal assemblers? With one of these, we could have all the Apollo programs and LHCs we want until the end of time, without ever tapping the taxpayers again. Oh, and we could eliminate the notion of "poverty" once and for all.

   

4. Cure for Aging. I know this one's controversial -- some people are really opposed to the idea of curing the world's deadliest disease. I don't know, if you ask me whether I want the government to spend $700 billion "lubricating the credit markets" or giving me an extra 150 years to live...maybe I'm just selfish. Plus, I think a cure for most other diseases would come along for the ride with this one.

   

5. Friendly Artificial Intelligence. This would probably be the best investment of all. I bet we could have this for way less than an Apollo -- probably just a couple of Shuttles. But a friendly, artificially intelligent being, able to evolve its own intelligence at an accelerated pace would not only help us to ensure that an unfriendly AI never gets the upper edge on our planet, it would be able to show us how to do any of the other items on the list for a lost less than $700 billion.

   

I'm not arguing for or against the bailout. If it prevents the next great depression, it was no doubt worth it. It's just interesting to consider that we could spend the same amount of money (or considerably less) not just in an effort to prevent a catastrophe, but as a means to fundamentally transform our world for the better.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

No, not that game.

Much more significantly, by outlining an energy plan as comprehensive the one that Barack Obama outlined last week, John McCain is now in the running for one of these:

As we announced on the most recent edition of FastForward Radio, we will be awarding the presidential candidate who outlines the most speculicious program -- that is, the plan with the most Speculist appeal -- with a FastForward Radio coffee mug. Remaining zealously apolitical, we will not be endorsing any candidates for President, but we are pleased to provide a significant motivation to both candidates to get focused on positive future scenarios, especially those driven by emerging technologies and emerging possibilities.

While McCain did not put a timeline on his plan to get us off what I'm going to call hostile foreign oil (not necessarily all foreign oil) he did specifically mention one of our favorite approaches to energy independence: flex fuels. He also had some intriguing things to say about retraining the workforce in a global economy. We'll take a look at McCain's speech on Sunday's podcast and decide whether he has taken the lead in the race for the mug or whether Obama still has the edge.

And a reminder to both Senator Obama and Senator McCain -- if either happen to be reading this -- any use by either of you of the phrase "space elevator" ought to just about clinch this thing. So don't be shy.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Architect Eugene Tsui is walking the line between the two with his two-mile-high Ultima Tower concept.

Blogger Mahesh Basantani comments:

We’ve seen a whole slew of gigantic, volcano shaped, city-in-a-building towers, each promising to be the largest building in the world. First it was the wacky X-Seed design for Tokyo, and then even Norman Foster got into the game with his proposal for the massive ‘Crystal Island’ development in Moscow. Well now, architect Eugene Tsui is taking the gigantic volcano tower concept to a whole new eco level, by taking design inspiration from the natural world. His new design for the Ultima Tower – a 2-mile high Mt Doom-esque structure - borrows design principles from trees and other living ystem to reduce its energy footprint. We are always intrigued by architecture that uses biomimicry – the borrowing of principles from nature’s designs - and Tsui’s concept for this towering, ultra-dense urban development has certainly captured our attention with its thought-provoking design.

The base of the tower is 7000 feet in diameter. Solar panels on the outside would provide a good deal of the the required energy for operation. Additional power would come from wind turbines. Plus, Tsui describes a method of generating energy based on temperature differential between the bottom and the top of the tower. (I'me familiar with the idea of generating power using the temperature differentialin water; I suppose air would work the same. But if there's that much difference in temperature between the top and the bottom of this thing, either the top or the bottom -- I'm guessing the top -- would be pretty uncomfortable.) The 144 elevators would be powered by compressed air.

In addition to trees, one of the inspirations from the natural world for this design was an African termite mound:

Tsui's design calls for the tower to be surrounded by lakes on all side, which got me wondering -- why not ocean? Could something like this be constructed out at sea, attached to a huge platform bolted to the sea floor? It would be like the ultimate oil rig. If so, I think a design like this would be a good endgame for the Seastedders -- folks who want to, in their own words, "create permanent dwellings on the ocean - homesteading the high seas."

Their concept photo looks a lot less ambitious than the Ultima Tower:

On the other hand, it looks like it's designed for -- among other things -- agriculture. That would probably be an important consideration when building a self-contained habitat out at sea. Ultima Tower would be a huge undertaking even on land. But I love the idea of having it sit out somewhere in the middle of the Pacific -- an independent city-state. There's something very appealing about that.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michio Kaku says there are three:

Type 1 impossibilities

Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes

Type 2 impossibilities

Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realised millenia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes

Type 3 impossibilties

Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition

Kaku has some interesting speculations on when we'll be seeing things like teleportation and time travel.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Some interesting comments from reader Nato Welch in the discussion thread of the most recent FastForward Radio:

Take by way of example California's recent law prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to take RFID implants. If jobs are scarce, and competition among workers necessitates taking on modifications in order to compete effectively, then a form of distributed //duress// (Dale's term) accomplishes an effective circumvention of self-determination even where direct coercion may not.

So our commitment to morphological liberty, if it is to be practical, demands a bit more than simply enjoining direct forms of coercion, but also the creation and maintenance of societies where relinquishment of technological interventions is not only permitted, but actually practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated.

Excellent point. What Nato is describing as "morphological liberty" begins with non-coercion; it can't end there. But where does market pressure end and out-and-out coercion begin? This is a tricky question.

Let's step back from human augmentation and look at some more mundane forms of technological adoption. On a recent Frontier Airlines flight, I was surprised to hear the flight attendant announce that Frontier Airlines "no longer accepts cash." Anyone wanting to use the DirecTV service or purchase a cocktail now has to use a credit card. Okay, granted, credit card "technology" is so ingrained in modern commerce -- especially travel-related commerce -- that the expectation that passengers on a commercial flight would have access to it seems pretty reasonable. The number of passengers who purchase their tickets via cash or check (is that even possible any more?) is no doubt vanishingly rare.

Continue reading "Plateaus of Completeness" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In response to the video I made last year asking attendees at a library conference how much change they will see if they live to be 100, a filmmaker, visionary, and old high-school buddy of mine offers this compelling scenario:

So take that, grandma!

For your reference, here's the original video:

Something that caught my attention on a recent viewing of this video was Bob Treadway's (second) answer to the question: "maybe what's more interesting is what won't change." Being a Speculist and all, that struck me as a kind of contrarian answer. So it's interesting to note that in starting to read John Naisbitt's Mind Set!, his first and establishing mindset is as follows:

While many things change, most things remain constant.

What's great about this idea is that it is infinitely arguable. Of course, bear in mind that if you take the "more things change than don't" position, you aren't just arguing with Bob Treadway; you're arguing with the Megatrends guy.

So let's hear it, folks. Do more things change or do more things stay the same?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Lets pay a little game. Below you will find several headlines from the now-defunct Weekly World News. For those who never had the privilege of standing in a US grocery store checkout line during the 80's or 90's, let me explain that the WWN was a schlocky tabloid publication that eschewed the normal celebrity gossip in favor of the most randomly bizarre, outrageous, and absolutely preposterous "news stories" you can imagine. Tucked in the middle of all that nonsense is a real headline from an actual current news story.

Your mission is to see if you can identify the real news story:

Seeing Eye Squirrels For Blind Dogs

Blind Man Regains Sight After Doctors Implant Son's Tooth in His Eye

Groom Freezes at Nudist Wedding

Severed Leg Hops 75 Feet!

Scientist Invents 'Reverse Lightbulb' that Makes Room Darker

Doctors Reattach Siamese Twins

Think you've got it figured out? Well, click here to see which one is actually news.

How did you do? If presented with that list, I believe I would have gone for the freezing nudist groom or the hopping severed leg. But, no.

The procedure is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. It is described thusly:

McNichol’s son Robert, 23, donated a tooth, its root and part of his jaw for his father’s surgery. McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, and a lens was inserted into a hole drilled in Robert’s tooth. The procedure required two surgeries lasting a total of 15 hours.

How wonderful that a man's eyesight has been restored. But what is more striking to me about this is -- even if you guessed correctly -- how well that headline fits in with the others. We live in an age of such robust possibilities that it is getting difficult to make a claim that is so outrageous that it is rejected at face value. Maybe this is why the WWN went out of business; they just couldn't compete with the real news any more.

A world in which real news is as outrageous as faux news becomes risky if we allow our sense of credulity to grow at the same pace that possibilities are increasing. I think the key is to continue to be startled by, and to push back against, claims that sound outrageous.

With that in mind, is anyone prepared to tell me that the headline linked above is, in fact, a hoax? If it is, I am hardly the first to fall for it.

As Paul Simon put it:

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
Thats dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Dont cry

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's a future scenario for you. Imagine this trend catching on and staying with us:

While the headlines concentrate on peace breaking out in Iraq, that's but part of a worldwide trend for the last few years. Violence has also diminished, or disappeared completely, in places like Nepal, Chechnya. Congo, Indonesia and Burundi. This continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere.

Via InstaPundit.

Merry Christmas!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When the SpecuWife and I first started going out, I was something less than the very model of emotional stability and maturity that you've all come to know so well from reading these pages. I had this rather quaint idea that she and I could keep things casual and avoid getting into a a full-blown relationship. In fact, I wouldn't even allow the word "relationship" into our conversations. I insisted on using a euphemism, "the R word."

Well, in the words of John Cleese explaining that the woman should, in fact be burned as a witch because she turned him into a newt -- I got better.

These days, I just couldn't be more comfortable with the word relationship, so I now use the same euphemism to refer to a different word, a word that I think is all too frequently offered up as a pretext for being a total lame-out, buzzkill, or any other variety of foot-dragging techno-progress-a-phobe.

That word, of course, is "realistic."

So it isn't too surprising that when I used the R Word in a recent comment thread, reader and frequent acerbic commenter Mdarling called me on it:

Realistic? really?

How about these for some realistic guys:

- “640k ought to be enough for anybody.” – Bill Gates 1981

- “So we went to Atari and said, “Hey we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.” And they said, “No”. So then we went to Hewlett Packard and they said, “Hey, we don’t need you; you haven’t even got through college yet.” – Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s pc.

You know this area of tech blindness at least as well most, better I would think

I'm not asking for my own personal orbital vehicle nor even my flying car (though I think a flying Segway would be wicked cool and not that hard technologically). I just want enough electric storage to move 1500-2000 pounds for 80-100 miles, that can recharge overnight. The technology exists now- though I admit there is no market and Toyota was right to hide the plug in outlet on the early Priuses. ("Priusi" ?)

So the realism you are urging is on the market- not the technology. And this may be one of those Catch-22's where no one will build it commercially because there is no market and there is no market because the thing is not commercially available.

Well, he's got me there. When I use the word "realistic," I'm talking strictly in terms of what the current political/social/economic infrastructure will allow, certainly not what is technologically possible. Personal orbital vehicles and flying Segways, much less the modest electric car that MD is looking for definitely could be developed in a reasonable time frame. I mean, we've already had electric cars, so all we're talking about doing is tweaking the specs of something that already exists.The Apollo program showed us how fast an idea can become technological reality, and it only scratched the surface. The greater the level of motivation, the longer the list of things that we will allow might be "realistic."

It's kind of like When World's Collide. I think if we had a couple years warning of Earth's certain demise, we could have a substantial population living in space -- maybe in space stations, maybe on Mars -- within that time. But failing that level of motivation, changes are bound to move more slowly. So in spite of warnings from serious people who are looking at issues much more realistically than most of us would ever care to, there is still no space ark under development.

But there would be if there was general agreement that we needed one. Just as there will be flying Segways when the technology is there, and the technology will be there sometime before the world at large is good and ready for it, but long after the good-and-ready point for people like MD (and me, for that matter.) Meanwhile, we can at least take solace in the fact that we do have some early prototype drawings of this technology in old Dick Tracy comic strips. I wanted to reproduce one here, but I cannot find any online. There is a reference to the technology here, however, with some very cool images of a more -- you guessed it -- realistic prototype:

So, what do you want to see in the next five years -- fully electric cars dominating our highways? Personal flying platforms? Personal orbital spacecraft? Personal Star-Trek style replicators? Or better yet, transporters?

Here's a thought to ponder:

Putting all social, political, and (most) economic considerations aside for a moment, what is the most outrageous, unrealistic technological development that we could see in place one year from today. Five years? Ten years?

I think several of the ones I listed above could happen in that period. What do you think?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Via GeekPress, here's a profile of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, whose game-theory methodology for predictiong the future we discussed in a recent FastForward Radio. It's an interesting methodology:

The elements of the model are players standing in for the real-life people who influence a negotiation or decision. At each round of the game, players make proposals to one or more of the other players and reject or accept proposals made to them. Through this process, the players learn about one another and adapt their future proposals accordingly. Each player incurs a small cost for making a proposal. Once the accepted proposals are good enough that no player is willing to go to the trouble to make another proposal, the game ends. The accepted proposals are the predicted outcome.

To accommodate the vagaries of human nature, the players are cursed with divided souls. Although all the players want to get their own preferred policies adopted, they also want personal glory. Some players are policy-wonks who care only a little about glory, while others resemble egomaniacs for whom policies are secondary. Only the players themselves know how much they care about each of those goals. An important aspect of the negotiation process is that by seeing which proposals are accepted or rejected, players are able to figure out more about how much other players care about getting their preferred policy or getting the glory.

Bueno de Mesquita has achieved an impressive list of correct predictions using this approach, although as Karl Hallowell recently reminded us, people in this line of work tend to play up their successes. For example, how impressive is it that he predicted that the UK would leave Hong Kong 12 years before it happened? Wasn't their lease about to expire, anyway? On the other hand, two independent evaluations of his work (one by the CIA and one by fellow academics) have shown him to be about 90% accurate.

The earlier article that I read about de Mesquita in Good magazaine mentioned that he is scrupulous in not making information such as the outcome of the 2008 Presdiential elections availabe. This is interesting, in that he doesn't mind making sweeping statements about what policies will and will not work regarding Iran:

The details of his study of negotiation options with Iran are classified, but Bueno de Mesquita says that the broad outline is that there is nothing the United States can do to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear energy for civilian power generation. The more aggressively the U.S. responds to Iran, he says, the more likely it is that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. The upshot of the study, Bueno de Mesquita argues, is that the international community needs to find out if there is a way to monitor civilian nuclear energy projects in Iran thoroughly enough to ensure that Iran is not developing weapons.

If real, the ability to make accurate predictions about the future represents a unique form of power. How interesting that he leaves this particular matter open-ended. As described above, wouldn't Beuno de Mesquita's methodology have provided an outcome to the situation with Iran? It's notable that here he talks about how things will work out if... Of course, it's possible that he's just being evasive becuase he's not allowed to talk about the results. But I can't help but wonder whether he has seen the future, he doesn't like what he sees there, and now he's trying to do something to stop it.

Would such an act represent an abuse of Bueno de Mesquita's (hypothetical) power? The fact that he won't give away presidential election results indicates that he doesn't want his information to be used to change how things would have otherwise worked out. But then that's absurd. Somebody is paying his company to make predictions (the State Department is mentioned as one of his clients) and you can be sure that they are acting on the information.

So it's possible that Bueno de Mesquita sees a very bad end coming to the Iran situation, and he is giving the above warning as a means of trying to prevent it. And that is just a little scary.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Eve Matelan provided us a link to this intriguing article delving into whether the Soviets ever actually built a version of the Doomsday Machine discussed in the movie Doctor Strangelove:

In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.

An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.

Well, um, yikes.

Okay, everybody -- have a great weekend!

BTW, Eve has some thoughts of her own on the Doomsday Machine and other less terrifying future-related topics. You can catch her in one of my (still-being-edited) video montages from the Singularity Summit.

Linkathon

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

...comes around.

Over on the right-hand side, the diagram is a little sketchy on what happened between the U S WEST and QWEST eras. Also, it reads as though there was an entity called "U S WEST" which then acquired Mountain Bell and the two Northwestern Bells, rather than the reality which was that USW was a merger of those three spun off as a separate company after AT&T's divestiture.

Years ago, I remember being at educational sessions at USW where we would talk about the company's strategy in the face of the many changes going on in the telecom business. Those geniuses had it all figured out that we would be one of the last few standing. And darned if they weren't right, in a sense.

(But maybe not so much on the "genius" thing, really.)

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I wasn't paying attention, the team working on the Metaverse Roadmap wrapped their project and published the results. By way of background:

Over the past year the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) and its supporting foresight partners have explored the virtual and 3D future of the World Wide Web in a first-of-its-kind cross-industry public foresight project, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR). We use the term Metaverse in a way that includes and builds upon Neal Stephenson’s coinage in the cyberpunk science fiction novel, Snow Crash, which envisioned a future broadly reshaped by virtual and 3D technologies.

The MVR has “near-term” anticipation horizon of ten years (to 2017), a “longer-term” speculation horizon of twenty years (to 2025), and a charter to discover early indicators of significant developments ahead. Seeking diverse points of view, our process included an invitational Metaverse Roadmap Summit, public and expert surveys, a few workshops and roundtables at major U.S. conferences, social meetups, and a public wiki. Many helpful people from the IT, virtual worlds, professional, academic, futurist, and lay communities contributed ideas to the MVR.

The Metaverse comprises four components near and dear to the hearts of all Speculi:

Virtual Worlds
Mirror Worlds
Augmented Reality
Lifelogging

You might begin with the excellent summary found here. If you think the web of today is a distinctly different beast from the web of 1997, you are correct. But we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's the nicest thing anybody has said about me for some time. Now, we're not just talking about handyman skills. Who cares about that? Let's address a serious scenario -- say you got sent back in time 2000 years and you wanted to push civilization along like that guy did in Lest Darkness Fall? Could you do it, or would you be like the business man in that Twilight Zone episode who thought he would make a fortune by traveling into the past and inventing all the technology that the world would need -- only to realize that he didn't have the technological chops to pull it off.

Well, you don't have to wonder about how well you would fare in that scenario. There's a quiz that can help you evaluate how you would do, so -- should the opportunity present itself -- you'll know whether it would be worth the trip.

My results were as follows:

Hey, 19th century. Not bad!

Via GeekPress, where Paul scored an impressive 10 out of 10.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

Well, I didn't get 10 out of 10, but I'm happy to report that I'm also useful!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Charles Stross writing for BBC News:

We've had agriculture for about 12,000 years, towns for eight to 10,000 years, and writing for about 5,000 years. But we're still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history.

Don't we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don't. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us.

Indeed, we've acquired bad behvioural habits - because we're used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we're on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

Stross describes a world -- not too far off, where every moment of every individual's life is recorded and where 100 kilograms (or less) of diamond-based storage can store an entire century's worth of experience for the population of the planet. One of the commenters on this thread over at Dean's World suggested that people living in the present age are not experiencing the same level of dramatic change as people who were born in the 1870's. The fact that the developments Stross is talking about strike us as even a little plausible confirms for me that all eras of change that humanity has faced to date are just a blip compared to what's coming.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There are a lot of reasons why trying to predict the future is no easy task: the complexity of the variables involved; the sheer number of those variables; the tendency of human fears, hopes, ambitions, and expectations to branch out in new and unexpected directions.

All of this adds up to give us the Law of Unintended Consequences, or maybe what I'm getting at here is a corollary to that law -- the Law of Completely Unexpected Results.

For example: how is that Sushi has become a huge culinary favorite all over the world? There are complex answers to that question, and one could draw several lines through time from the non-Sushi past to the very Sushi-centric present. But how did it all start? Where did it come from? Would you believe empty cargo holds on trans-pacific passenger flights?

In the early 1970s, executives at Japan Airlines fretted that the cargo holds on their Vancouver-to-Tokyo flights were often empty. So the airline asked its Canadian freight coordinator, a man named Wayne MacAlpine, to look into whether these planes could be crammed with bluefin tuna from Prince Edward Island. McAlpine was somewhat baffled by the request, since fishermen on the island, some 2,800 miles to the east of Vancouver, didn’t much care for the bluefin’s taste—as he Teletyped back to his bosses in Japan, “What [the fishermen] did after they caught them is they had their picture taken with the fish and dug a hole with a small bulldozer and buried them.”

The airline executives were stunned: each buried bluefin could garner hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in Japan, a country already suffering the ravages of overfishing. The company took the unprecedented step of importing five Canadian bluefins for a 1972 auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The giant tunas proved a hit, selling for the then-steep price of $4 per kilogram. The race to satiate the world’s toro jones was on. “Sushi was nearly two millennia old,” writes Issenberg, “but it was that morning at Tsukiji that the current experience of eating it was born.”

So, some thrifty executives need to cash in on unused cargo space, and poof! Three and a half decades later there is a sushi bar in virtually every shopping mall in the US. That's not the only reason, but it's a huge one. And one has to wonder whether most of us would have ever even heard of sushi had those JAL execs decided to put something else in those cargo holds.

So, what's the life going to be like three and a half decades from now? Who knows? But one thing's for sure -- dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of future-shaping decisions such as the one that those airline executives made way back then are being made every day.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Serious scientific research is being done in some pretty far-out areas, such as

Invisibility

and

Time Travel

to name only two.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's the opening from Stephen's recent entry on a bad shopping experience with Target:

As the amount of data and intelligence available to merchants increases, so should our expectations as customers. Some stores seem to get this, others don't.

Now here's the "same"phrase translated from English to Japanese, then back to English, to Chinese, back to English, to French, back to English, to German, back to English, to Italian, back to English, to Portuguese, back to English, to Spanish, and then finally once more back to English:

Whereas they probably use it, our switches of the emergency of the hope of the commerce of the commerce therefore magnify the data of the client and the intelligent amount. Together if the memory, that one he to take with this, other subjects if memorizzato like.

One Carl Tashian wrote a program to abuse phrases by passing them iteratively through computer translation programs. Of course, even if translation programs were 99.9% accurate and reliable not just for vocabulary but for idiomatic phrases, it would still be an abuse of them to use them this way. If you make a photocopy of a photograph, then photocopy the copy, then copy that copy and on and on, you will see a lot of degradation of the picture even with a really good copier.

Still, the results are interesting to say the least. Even tiny, simple phrases such as "I love you" get pretty mangled. In fact, the odd title of this entry is really just the intended title, "Communication Is Challenging" sent through the wringer. At least that one is in the ballpark, I guess.

Important to note: this is state-of-the-art as of 2003. Maybe the technology has improved since then?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Here's the first of three videos that I am putting together from the Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference which I attended last week. This one has responses to one of the Seven Questions About the Future:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via InstaPundit, author Charles Stross has some interesting things to say about the future:

This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn't happened yet — we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.

And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.

And just imagine all the alternative versions of that story that they'll be able to model!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts on the conference, I was particularly intrigued by what Chip Nilges of the Online Computer Library Center had to say. His talk was very interesting on a couple of levels. On the one hand, libraries are more networked and web-enabled than I realized (and apparently becoming more so all the time.) My question to Chip had to do with how individual libraries can drive web traffic to their sites based not on individual pieces of content -- everybody has a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls -- but on types of content, content that makes a particular library particularly interesting. (This isn't as big a problem for academic libraries as public libraries. Tools that Chip described such as Google Scholar will drive readers to a particular academic library based on content type.)

My example: I suggested that the Atlantic City Public Library probably has more resources on the Monopoly board game than most -- maybe more than any other. If a web browser is looking not for a particular book or article about Monopoly, but rather general information, that library should be one of the top resources that comes up in a Google search. But if you do a Google search on Monopoly, you won't find that library -- at least not anywhere near the top. And Chip admitted that the tools he described don't allow for that kind of granularity. I think if libraries are going to continue as individual entities -- both online and in their bricks-and-mortar edifices -- this is going to have to change.

Librarians see themselves as being competitive with services like Google and other search engines because they both claim the same primary value proposition -- they both want to be the Gateway to All Knowledge. I think Librarians get to keep that role with the patrons who walk into the library. As Joan Williams pointed out in the conference's concluding session, librarians can add value to a search by helping to filter through the noise and irrelevance that typically comes up in a web search. That's great. But Libraries can't compete on the web as the Gateway to All Knowledge. There are too many of them, and there's way too much overlap. Individual libraries need to draw traffic based on their individual characteristics. Right now, the only individual characteristic that leads a web search to a particular library is location.

As far as web presence is concerned, these libraries need to grow a personality.

But that's just the beginning. Working together, I think libraries in general should start working on being the source of information on particular topics. (I realize this cuts against the grain. How can we talk about being the source for a particular topic when we're the Gateway to All Knowledge?) By running web campaigns on particular topics, libraries can work together to raise their overall profiles on the web. Plus, once those links are there, they tend to persist.

Do a Google Search on Death Sucks and see who comes up. But I don't think that guy has published anything new on that subject for some time. Still, that blog entry continues to drive traffic to this site.

So maybe libraries should work together this year to promote themselves on the web as particularly good resources for, say, nutritional information; then those links will still be in place and will still be driving people to their websites next year when they promote themselves as sources of information on alternative energy sources.

Another good topic for this kind of promotion -- the future. After the conference, I'm starting to think that libraries have a particular role to play in helping to create awareness about the future. Maybe the Gateway to All Knowledge can evolve into the Gateway to the Future.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference, Day 1 Re-Cap

Here’s a run-down on the sessions I attended at the first day of the conference:

You Are Becoming Me and I Am Becoming You! Setting the Record Straight on Latinos Being the Majority Population in the US

Salvadaore Avila, Las Vegas – Clark County Library District

Salvadore Avila quickly brushed past his provocative title, pointing out that Latinos will not be in the majority in the US for some time, and that the increased incidence of intermarriage between Latinos and Anglos will ultimately render the transition less dramatic than we tend to picture it today. Based on the rest of his talk, I take the title to be an attention-getting device, offered up tongue-in-cheek.

Continue reading "Conference Day 1" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've been to two sessions so far at the Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference so far. Kurzweil killed with his keynote -- got a standing ovation. At lunch, I was talking to a couple of the librarians who mentioned that they were surprised at how optimistic he is.

I'll have lots more to say later, but my initial observation is that accelerating change thinking -- including the Singularity, although Ray did not explicitly go there -- continues to move into the mainstream. A librarian conference isn't exactly a dentist or Realtor get-together, but neither is it a Foresight Nanotech Vision Weekend.

These folks may be surprised by what they're hearing, but not shocked or scandalized. They are pleasantly surprised.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Just got directed to this site. What to recommend? Start with Neil Gershenfeld on fab labs. Don't miss Martin Rees and Robert Wright. Keep going and you'll hit Ray Kurzweil. Lots of amazing, eye-opening stuff.

It's all good.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One day the lion will lie down with the lamb. In the meantime, we've got this:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the past couple of weeks I've been introduced to two websites (there are probably others) that provide glimpses into the futures via a "news" format. That is, the scenarios are written in news story form, so we read about the future as the present (or to be very technical, the recent past, which is what news actually is.)

Pontus Edenberg gives us a kind of MSM view into the world that's coming with his News of Future site. This is an attarctive and well-researched site. I especially like the tabs that let you pick which future year you want to visit. Commiserate with the MSM look and feel, these are mostly pretty conventional futures we're looking at, here. No alien invasions. No global thermonuclear wars. No singularity. Here's a fairly representative news bite from the year 2050:

At a press conference today it was announced that the first tourist heading for Mars will be the 38-year-old US businessman Patrick Clifford. He will leave the earth in the launching window of June 2052 and set his foot on the surface of Mars in November, together with the other 6 astronauts assigned for the mission to further explore the planet.

Contrast that with Future Fragments, a blog written in the year 2030. These fragments of the future are bit more personal than Edenberg's news, a little more obscure, and kind of raw the way blog posts sometimes tend to be. Typical snippet:

Random inaccessible memory they call it. Eventually you were numb from the uncertainty, knowing less and less about your past, about yourself. All we knew then, though, was that something didn’t feel right. Something you couldn’t quite keep in your sights, like trying to keep a bead on a target moving just too quickly. People started to be … different, strange. Jones used to sit on his bunk, staring blankly at the same sepia-toned digiframe, the images of a pretty blonde cycling one by one in perpetual cycle. He’d done it every day since we started the programme together, staring intently before the transfers began. A look of confusion spread and grew deeper like some cancerous root as the weeks withered past. Eventually, he looked up at me, a thin needle-like tear cutting down his haunted face, and he asked, “Is this my wife?”

I'm enjoying both of these sites quite a bit. Would be interested to know what others think. Would also appreciate being directed to other future news sites.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you think about the space program - getting to the moon - the lunar space program was literally achieved using slide rules. It's a technical achievement which shouldn't have happened. It is incredible that they were able to do it... They did it 50-60 years ahead of when they should have been able to do it... The orbital tracking system that was up on the wall... it was updated with motors and gears - someone was back there checking to make sure it was in the right spot. That's gearpunk. That isn't a space program in a modern sense. That's gears and slide rules and people doing the math... It was a political race, so it's not that surprising that we had a lull after [achieving the Moon]. The goal and function of the program had been achieved. The political point was made."

Sci-Fi author Tobias Buckell (March 20, 2006 Fast Forward Radio interview)

The science fiction subgenres of steampunk and gearpunk are set in alternate histories in which modern technological paradigms happen earlier, but are accomplished by way of the science available in that time period.

In "real life" inspiration often leads what should be possible. The transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866. The U.S. Civil War had just finished and it would be another three years before the first U.S. transcontinental railroad would be completed, but from that year forward there has always been instantaneous communication between America and Europe. That was 50 years before the more obvious solution to transatlantic communication – radio - was able to broadcast across the ocean.

Other times it seems that we miss opportunities. Charles Babbage came close to delivering a Turing-complete computer in the mid-19th century – almost a century ahead of the 1943 arrival of the first working Turing-complete computer, ENIAC. It's little wonder that steampunk is commonly set in an alternate history where Babbage was successful. Imagine where we'd be today if computer development were 100 years further along.

It seems likely that most breakthroughs arrive "right on time." The Wright brother's flight is a good example. Of course their achievement was remarkable. Internal combustion engines might have been developing nicely at the turn of the century, but there still wasn't an engine with a sufficient power to weight ratio when they got started. So the Wright brothers took the best engines they could find and rebuilt and tinkered with them until they could coax just enough power out of the engine to make that first flight possible.

Meanwhile, there were other inventors working to be the first in the air. It's even possible that there were other heavier-than-air flights before the Wright's. With all this activity flying was destined to happen by 1903 – give or take a few years.

Phil once suggested that expectation has a lot to do with our advancement. If there is an expectation that something worthwhile is possible, we tend to work hard to make it happen. I agree. And if we're moving slow, the problem could be a failure of imagination.

The idea that history has momentum but inspired individuals can make a difference also came up in our recent conversation with Dr. Aubrey de Grey. De Grey agreed that if life extension is possible it would come about eventually, even if he or any other single individual pursuing the goal stopped working. But, he quickly added, if his work helped advance the life extension timetable by even a little, then millions of lives that would otherwise be lost would be saved. That, he said, "strikes me as a worthy goal." Indeed it is.

By the way, I think Tobias is exactly right about the 1969 Moon landing. It was accomplished about 50-60 years ahead of time. That would put us returning to the Moon, to stay, sometime between 2020 and 2030. That sounds about right.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Randall Parker comments on whether sequencing the Neanderthal genome means that we'll eventually meet some of our old homeboys face to face, and if so what issues that will raise:

Neanderthals might not make nice semi-people. Would they be smart enough and capable of being civilized enough to qualify for human rights? One of the biggest debates of the 21st century (at least until the robots take over) is going to be on the question of which attributes must an intelligence possess to be eligible for rights and even to be eligible for not immediately getting destroyed or at least imprisoned. But that debate hasn't started in earnest yet because all the politically correct liberals are still denying that genetics plays a big role in creating cognitive characteristics that determine why human societies take the forms we see.

What if we found that the Neanderthals were not only much more intelligent than us, but much nicer, too? Not likely, I realize. But maybe they just weren't brutal enough to survive in the face of competition with their homo sapien cousins. What if we're Cain to their Abel?

Or maybe they're still around, are of roughly the same intelligence as us, have impeccable taste, and are just a little bristly when the whole subject of their "extinction" comes up. This idea has been explored recently...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephen and I have been trying to work out the difficulties of recording an episode of FastForward radio with four people on the line. Now the Skype folks are giving us this:

Skype Technologies SA is piloting a new community conference call service, which can support as many as 100 callers, and is also offering a beta version of its new Internet calling software designed for easier use, the company said Wednesday.

The Skypecasts conference service allows online communities to schedule calls that anyone around the world can join.The service is currently being tested by select Skype partners but a beta version for the general public will be launched soon, Skype said.

Hey, maybe we could have some kind of audio get-together for Speculist readers. A mini-convention. Who's in?

Nope, I'm not allowing comments here. If you'd like to participate in the Speculist audio conference, give us a call:

(318) 775-0127

Normal long distance charges apply. You can reach the same number (and avoid long distance charges) by using Skype:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Well, maybe it won't be the rats that take over. It looks as though the pigs are starting to get a hoof up in the race:

AMES, Iowa - Max Rothschild has been trying to "build" a better pig for almost 30 years, since he took a job cleaning up after the hogs at his alma mater, the University of California, Davis.

The idea is to find and exploit the genetic variations of the best pigs, which Rothschild and like-minded agricultural researchers say will radically change the industry.

Of course, this kind of research takes us more in the direction of plumper hams and crispier bacon than it does an eventual porcine coup d'etat. But still. It's interesting that pigs can be improved upon, but humans must not.

One thing we don't have to worry about is super-intelligent killer corn taking over the planet. At least not if Poland has anything to say about it:

WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's parliament has passed a law which removes genetically modified seeds from a national register, effectively banning their sale.

"This should be interpreted as a ban on the sale in Poland of genetically modified seeds," Wojciech Mojzesowicz, head of parliament's agriculture commission, told AFP.

Naturally, we do need to be concerned about horrendous damage that irresponsible genetic research might eventually lead to, especially seeing as the cost of sequencing and synthesizing genes is plummeting, and we are drawing ever nearer to the age of widespread gene-hacking capability available on the desktop.

But I think we also need to be worried about the harm that the kind of superstitious dread that surrounds genetic research might cause. Genetic alteration of the food we eat and of our own bodies will take place in time. If the Western powers remain skittish about involving themselves in these developments, they merely assign the work to other hands. It won't go away.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In the case of an interspecies smack-down between human beings and lab-rats, who do you think would win? You might say the answer is obvious, but let's look at this for a moment.

What have we got going for us? Opposable thumbs, big brains, civilization/technology/control firmly in place. The lab rats are ours to toy with (poor things.) They don't stand a chance.

Or do they?

The one thing they would appear to have going for them is a lack of regulatory prohibitions concerning their advancement. For a lot of pretty sound reasons (along with a lot of Luddite/buzzkill reasons), you can't just go out and build Human Being 2.0. But there's little if anything stopping somebody from building Lab Rat 2.0, 3.0, 9i, Lab Rat 2009 Mega-upgrade, etc. The lab rats might go blasting right past us. Then it's their show.

Could it happen? Well, it seems unlikely. But people are talking about it nonetheless. Maybe as a precaution, we ought to give a thought as to how we can make treatment of lab animals as humane as possible. We should probably be doing that, anyway. But, you know, if the shoe might one day be on the other foot...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via GeekPress, author Dan Simmons provides about as bleak an outline of the future as can be imagined, in short-story form.

I don't think this future will happen, primarily because I believe that there are other forces at work in the world besides political forces. But could it happen? As scenarios go, this one certainly passes any initial sniff-tests that one might wish to apply.

It could happen.

The answer to a scenario is another scenario. Simmons wants to warn us about dangers he sees as imminent. On this site, we have dedicated a good deal of time and verbiage to spinning out scenarios that speak to a very different kind of future, mapped against what we see as a relentless spiral of improvement. However, we have to concede that there are risks and choices to be made even if these scenarios turn out to be correct.

Ultimately, the future comes down to what choices lay before us, all of us -- the items that occupy our possibility space -- and the actions that we take to bring them about. Simmons' nightmare future is out there. A series of bad choices might just land us there. (Simmons asserts that most of the choices have already been made.) But that future is one of many, and I don't believe -- as the time-traveler from Simmons' story asserts -- that time is a river whose course can't be changed.

We are the river; the choices that we make and don't make. I'm pretty sure Dan Simmons must believe that, too, or why bother writing about any future?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Here's a fun site where you can write and rate quick descriptions of what will happen in the future. If you have an opinion about the future of anything, you're qualified.

But be warned, it's kind of addictive!

Oh, and keep it clean, kids.

As for what L2si stands for...those who know, know. Those who don't? Welcome to the Speculist!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sure, it sounds like a cheesy skin flick from the 70's, but they're serious:

The colony aims to be self-sustaining in its requirements for sustenance, but it will nevertheless function in symbiosis with Earth. As a result, trade between the lunar colony and Earth will flourish, with the lunar colony contributing towards the development of research and scientific activities, such as, for example, the supply of alternative energy based on advancements in Helium3 fusion power, and provision of structural materials for spacecraft and satellites in earth orbit as well as deep space. At this time of potential fossil fuel shortages, threats of global warming, cultural clashes, and population explosion, this concept might well be what stops man's over-exploitation of Mother Earth by uniting governments and nations, scientists and laymen in mutual cooperation and understanding.

From reading the article, it sounds like they're stuck in a permanent planning stage. But maybe not.

This could make for some interesting discussion. In fact, let's make a poll out of it.

(via Rand Simberg)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Michael Strong opines that the solution to some of these dangerous, intoxicating delusions that we've been talking about -- at least to the extent that they show up in academia -- might be predicition markets:

Prediction markets may provide a powerful antidote to academic abuses of power. Just as critical experiments have enforced a reality-based ethos of scientific integrity in the hard sciences, so, too, prediction markets may be used to enforce a reality-based ethos of scientific integrity among those who make claims about society, politics, and economics. When theoretical speculations in the hard sciences repeatedly produce false predictions they are marginalized. We need to create just such a system for the social sciences.

For those of us who believe that excessive respect for academic opinion has led to avoidable poverty, waste, and human misery due to adherence to the misguided policies proposed by academics in the past century, then the need to create a more reliable system for discovering the empirical truth about the political and social realm is urgent. Moreover, prediction markets have the added benefit of allowing ordinary people to make money, possibly fortunes, by exposing those unfounded academic beliefs that are most widely accepted at present. Society wins, ordinary people win, and we create an incentive for people to focus their energy and attention on discovering important facts about the future.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

In addition to assessing the probabalilities of various outcomes, I think predicition markets may eventually incorporate more elaborate descriptions of the future. Compare a potential future as described by the Foresight Exchange with a different future as described by Long Bets. Foresight -- along with most other currently operating predicition markets -- is currently interested primarily in the ouctomes. Long Bets, on the other hand, is as interested in the arguments supporting the outcome as it is in the outcome itself. However, even the Long Bets approach is binary. The thing either will happen or it won't, so an argument is provided for each side.

In fact, there are many different sets of circumstances and events that can lead to the same outcome. I'd like to see a prediction market that rewards both correct answers and the best analyses as to why an outcome will occur.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 27, 2016

You finally made it. Wimbledon, Centre Court. An audience of thousands looks on cheering. The Chair Umpire calls out, "Quiet Please....Quiet." The crowd hushes as you bounce the ball twice, throw it high in the air, and serve. This is match point. This is for the championship.

A godlike voice drowns out the crowd, "Honey, could you put that game on pause and come help your son with his Algebra?"

You sigh. "Okay." The real world intrudes. You take off your sports goggles and ear pieces. Center court disappears. You are back home in the large VR gym you put in behind the garage.

The gym is 18 meters square with a vaulted ceiling - the size roughly of half a tennis court plus the out-of-bounds. You spent extra for the high ceiling so you could play basketball. A lower ceiling would have be sufficient for many sports including tennis and golf, but you love playing half-court with your son. You like to play hoops in the Hawaiian setting, overlooking the Pacific. He prefers the inner-city midnight hard court with boom boxes blaring. You both get your wish... at the same time.

Basketball is a game that doesn't translate well in full VR mode. You can't bump into virtual players, or pass the ball to, steal from, or be fouled convincingly by players who aren't there, at least not with this technology. You'd need a brain hack for that, and you're not quite ready to take that step. With this form of VR, contact sports require actual players. So you and your son play one-on-one basketball in AR - augmented reality. You see each other, the basketball you are actually playing with, and the goal - all virtually unchanged. But the surroundings change.

It's different with tennis. Only half the court is real. No jumping the net to shake hands after playing here. The "net" is located half a meter in front of the back wall. Of course it's a virtual net. A real net catches tennis balls as they are served. Usually the ball is simulated too... only on serves is the ball real. The racquet you hold is real enough - real with force feedback built in. It convincingly simulates the feel of hitting the ball. Sometimes you play simulated players. Other times you play other human players via the Internet - most from their own VR gyms.

You've golfed the most exclusive courses in the world from this room. But your ground prosthetic isn't perfect. It's a 2 meter square synthetic grass platform that can be inclined in all directions to about 30 degrees. The false grass can "grow" to simulate the green, the fairway, or the rough. You're a bit dissatisfied with this model lately. Your buddy bought the recommended upgrade last month and it's much more realistic - variable grade simulation with realistic sand trap emulation. But you've read the feature set of the next upgrade that's coming out in six months. You've decided to wait. No need to keep up with the Jones's when you can leap ahead.

You love bowling in here, especially with the 1979 package. Somehow bowling with the Steve Miller Band on the jukebox and smoke in the air just seems right. You don't play many other sports. Your friend with the better golf ground likes to play racquetball. But racquetball screws up your tennis game. "One racquet sport at a time" you say.

Many people hunt in VR. You've even heard that one VR vender will ship you meat - cow meat of course - equal to whatever kills you make in their environment.

You've found that the VR gym is limited only by the prosthetics you can afford. You've purchased three major packages: golf, bowling, and theater seating. Tennis just requires the racquet and a ball catching net. The 6-person-row of theater seating rolls in robotically from the side closet when called for - just like the golf ground, and the bowling apparatus. Most movies are available pay-per-view the same day they open in the cinemas. When you put on your goggles the IMAX screen is larger than the room it replaced.

As the lights turn out while you leave, you remember you were worried that you wouldn't use the gym enough to justify the expense. Instead, you've found that other rooms in your house go unused. Your den, dining room, home office, and even (you smile) the bedroom gets used less.

As you go in to help your son on his homework you ask your spouse, "Why can't our next house just be a big VR room?

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 01:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Per Ray Kurzweil, it's a question of when, not whether. And probably sooner rather than later:

A U.K. government think tank has forecast RFID-tagged driverless cars on roads by 2056.

"Given the ability of several cars to navigate a complex route in the recent DARPA competition completely autonomously and a General Motors project to demonstrate driverless cars traveling at 60 miles per hour by 2008, the projection of RFID-controlled cars by the year 2056 is a good example of linear thinking," says Ray Kurzweil. "I believe we can anticipate cars to be doing much of our driving for us in the 2020s if not sooner."

No word on flying cars. Personally, I think anybody who says we won't have them by 2010 is engaged in linear thinking. But then, I'm no Kurzweil.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN: "Beyond Tomorrow" had a segment recently about an anti-collision radar system for passenger cars. Such a system could really cut down on distracted driver-type accidents. It also looked to be ready to market in Europe.

The Mercedes test vehicle has long range and short range radar systems that surround the car. The car is programmed to stop rather than rearend somebody if the driver is distracted.

There are a couple of practical reasons why we'll have driver assist systems for awhile before we'll see complete automation. First, these initial driver assist systems won't have to be anywhere near as sophisticated as those systems that competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge.

Second, there's the issue of products liability. This Mercedes is equipped with a "driver assist" system, not full automation. It's a little like a driver's ed car. There's a safety brake, but you are still the driver in command. If you have an accident, then (arguably) you couldn't blame the manufacturer unless a system malfunction directly caused the accident.

But if the car is doing it's own driving, then obviously the car manufacturer would have a difficult time avoiding responsibility in the event of an accident.

So, we'll see a slow march toward full automation via various "driver assist" systems. At first it will be simple collision avoidance by braking, then collision avoidance by steering out of the way of a crash.

Eventually these systems will take on all the tasks associated with driving. Then you'll just give it a destination and sit back and enjoy the ride.

UPDATE AGAIN: Well, that didn't take long. Apparently Honda UK is offering a driver's assist sytem that amounts to a full freeway autopilot.

I'll be taking a wait-and-see approach.

H/T to eisendorn.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Individual contributor. That's my classification at work. It means that I'm a manager (reasonably senior), but no one reports to me.

So what does that tell us, exactly? That I'm a foot soldier? A worker bee?

Actually, it means that I am -- to some extent -- a unit unto myself. Some tasks require a team. My tasks require a team of one. Which is not to say that I'm not a part of any team. As a matter of fact, I'm part of several. But they are all of the dotted-line, cross-functional, here-today-gone-tomorrow variety. I participate in teams, but my role is not that of a team member. My role is that of an individual contributor.

Reading over Glenn's thoughts on bigness and smallness, a thought occured to me that may be an answer to his rhetorical question: "How big can small get?"

My "organization" at work has one member -- you can't get any smaller than that. But that wasn't the question. The question wasn't how small can small get, but rather how big can it get. What it comes down to is this: How big can a group of one be?

The answer is...a lot bigger than it used to. Glenn talks about a corporation being a web of contracts and the business world being a web of relationships. Exactly. Is it any wonder that the dominant metaphor for the Internet would be that of a web? All bloggers are individual contributors; a few of them have achieved a level of prominence and influence that large media orgnaizations could not. One can be more than many. Small can be bigger than big.

Part of the resaon for this is what I have dubbed de-industrialization:

After 20 years or so, it's easy to forget that a small revolution in its own right occured when, all of a sudden, virtually anyone anywhere could produce typeset copy. If you wanted to be a publisher, all you needed was a computer, a laser printer, and access to a photocopier. Publishing, or at least a good-sized piece of it, was de-industrialized. That is to say, the big industrial components that only a big company could afford to purchase, house, and operate -- in this case, a linotype machine and an offset press -- were made optional.

Over the past two decades, de-industrialization has emerged in many other areas. The recording industry has been massively de-industrialized. The equipment for making a musical recording has been simplified, but that's nothing compared to the change in infrastructure used to distribute a recording. We no longer need factories to press vinyl records; at this point, even burning CDs is starting to seem kind of quaint and clunky.

De-industrialization has empowered the individual in a very literal sense. One person can now do what it used to take many to do. That's why we are all (mostly) now our own travel agents, photo processors, and print shops. Not to mention grocery clerks.

Artists have always been individual contributors. But now musicians can record, market, and sell their work without a studio and without a label. Now novelsists can write, publish, and distribute their works all on their own. Small is as big as big, if not bigger.

One more example. We now have this notion of the long tail. Not only can individual producers be as big as, if not bigger than, large organizations; individual consumers -- markets of just a few or perhaps as few as one -- can be bigger than mass markets.

So maybe, in the future, small will be bigger than big, and one will be bigger than small. Kind of Zen, isn't it?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Recently I've been reading up on Australia's long term plan to erect a Solar Tower. Click here to see the concept video [scroll down to the "View an Artist Rendition of the Solar Tower" link].

The Solar Tower website claims that this structure will be the tallest building in the world. You can tell by the picture that it won't be a close contest. If, that is, this Solar Tower is completed before a Space Elevator.

That thought led me to this: why couldn't the Solar Tower serve as the base of an Austrialian Space Elevator?

The planned site for this solar tower is in the remote outback of Buronga in the Wentworth Shire of New South Wales, Australia. This sort of remoteness is also a key requirement for the Space Elevator. You want it far away from normal flight paths to avoid accidental collisions. But remoteness will also help guard against intentional 9/11-style terrorist attacks.

Both the Space Elevator and the Solar Tower would work best near the equator. The Solar Tower could provide the electricity needed to power the Space Elevator laser. It could power an entire space port. There's even the possibility of using the Solar Tower's rising hot air directly to cut the cost of part of the lift through a hot air balloon principle, or by aiding a stirling engine.

Both the Solar Tower and the Space Elevator are big projects that will benefit the private sector but will require governmental effort. Perhaps some of the engineering expertise needed for one project could benefit the other.

Synergy all around.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It's just not my usual style. However, I couldn't help but pause for a moment upon reading this (via Paul Hsieh):

Tiny black holes could soon be made on demand in particle accelerators, but shortly after their birth, they might blink out of existence. In the 14 October PRL, a team proposes a mechanism for this vanishing act: The space around these black holes could wrap upon itself and bud off, forming a new baby universe that is invisible to us. Such an event might signify the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three we are familiar with and might give clues to the properties of the extra dimensions.

Tiny black holes, baby universes, extra dimensions--these are my kind of people. Still, I can't help but wonder...

What if the tiny black hole doesn't fade into it's baby universe on schedule? I mean, I realize that it's tiny but it's also a BLACK HOLE. Haven't they been known to like, swallow things? Like planets? I'm just asking.

Or what if the tiny black hole drops off into its little universe on schedule, are we sure the process is through? We don't really have much of an idea as to the dynamics of relationships between universes, now do we? Is it possible that if you send something into another universe, some kind of equilibrium insists that something else comes back? Sure, it would probably be benign and, of course, "tiny" but then again... we don't really have any reason to assume either of those things. Something huge and nasty might come back. Something tiny and nasty might come back.

There are a lot of options.

Finally, have the scientists planning these tests read this book?

The scientists in this story try something equally inoccuous-sounding, but they accidentally trigger the destruction of the universe. Oops. Who knew?

Sure, it's just science fiction. But very recently, any talk of tiny black holes and baby universes would have been science fiction, too.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Cole Kitchen for getting me straight on which Greg Egan book I was thinking about.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You tell me...

Alien spacecraft? No.

Proposed design for Mars lander? Nope.

New ride at Walt Disney World? Sorry. Thanks for playing.

It's a bunker, folks. That's right, 74 square feet of safety from...well, whatever you're scared of:

The Bunker is an aerodynamic, monolithic reinforced concrete structure capable of withstanding monster hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires, blizzards, military and terrorist attacks and extreme water pressure for underwater applications.

Available in above ground, underground, and underwater models.

(Via Distractech.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

...and I want it now.

Six inches of snow on the ground this morning, and the leaves on the trees haven't even all changed color yet, much less fallen off. This means hundreds of pounds of snow weighing down the branches of the maple tree out front, with some limbs cracking and falling off. I shook the snow off the low-hanging branches two hours before taking this picture. There's no keeping up, plus I can't possibly reach the upper branches, from which I have already lost two big limbs.

I was commenting to my daughter as I drove her through the slush to school: "There ought to be a law against having a snowstorm so early." But then, there's really no point having a law until we have the means to enforce it.

Of course, come to think of it, both the technology and the regulation will probably be applied initially to hurricanes, where it's much more needed, not annoying early snowstorms.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article in the October issue of Technological Forecasting & Social Change (only the abstract is available for free access online) proposes that technological innovation is not exponential and open-ended, but rather subject to economic limits. As explained in the article's abstract:

A comparison is made between a model of technology in which the level of technology advances exponentially without limit and a model with an economic limit. The model with an economic limit best fits data obtained from lists of events in the history of science and technology as well as the patent history in the United States. The rate of innovation peaked in the year 1873 and is now rapidly declining. We are at an estimated 85% of the economic limit of technology, and it is projected that we will reach 90% in 2018 and 95% in 2038.

The author, Johnathan Huebner, comes to this conclusion by measuring innovation two ways:

1. The relationship between the number of patents issued in the US over the past century and population growth.

2. The relationship between total world population and the development of "important innovations" as (subjectively) defined in Bryan Bunch and Alexander Hellemans' book, The History of Science and Technology.

So what Heubner describes as a decline in innovation is not, in fact, a decrease in the total number of innovations being developed, but rather a drop in the number of innovations per capita. According to Heubner, US patents peaked in the year 1914, while worldwide innovation peaked in the year 1873.

In an excellent review of this article, John Smart raises a number of questions about Heubner's analysis. He begins by showing how even a per capita "decline" in patents depends largely on the years included in the sample set:

Huebner provides U.S. patent data which show that, when normalized to total U.S. population, there was a patenting peak in 1914, a significant drop from 1914-1985 to 50% of the 1914 value, and a recent rise between 1985 and 1999 back to 75% of the 1914 value.

...I do not know why Huebner's patents graph didn't have data more recent than an average from 1990-1999 as its most recent point. From my perspective, if 2003 data were included they would have refuted his argument that U.S. patents per capita fit a bell curve and are now in a declining trend. And when we take a longer view, issued utility patents increase 14 fold from 1870 to 2003, while U.S. population increased only 7 fold over the same period.

Smart observes that Heubner makes a better case for an overall worldwide decline in per capita innovation, noting that similar ideas have been proposed by Tessaleno Devezas and George Modelski, as well as Francis Fukuyama and John Horgan. He suggests that there may well be a per-capita saturation point for innovation within a given population, similar to a saturation point previously observed for a population's energy consumption once its per capita income exceeds a certain point.

However, Smart also notes that Heubner's analysis is countered by others (himself included) who see technological advancement accelerating continuously throughout human history. He suggests that an apparent decrease in innovation may be due to the fact that more and more innovations occur "under the hood," below what he describes as the "threshold of easy perception." These might include innovations taking place within open source development systems, or which are developed by machines themselves.

In addition to the points Smart raises, I think another question that bears asking is whether there is any particular significance measuring the development of innovations on a per capita basis. The entire human population potentially benefits from each new technological innovation. The size of the population might be a factor in determining how quickly (or whether) certain sub-groups within the population get to realize the benefits of that innovation, so there is probably a case to be made for the significance of per-capita adoption of innovation.

But development?

Consider agriculture. Crunching a few of the numbers presented here, in 1850 there were 16 US citizens for every one US farm. In 1990, there were 122 US citizens for every one US farm. Over that period of time, farmers dropped from making up about 70% of the US labor force to a slot somewhere between two and three percent.

Meanwhile, from 1930 to 2000, the number of irrigated farming acres in the US went from about 14 million to about 50 million. Over that same period, corn yields have increased from about 40 bushels per acre to about 150.

Total and per capita agricultural output have increased while total and per capita participation in agricultural activity have decreased. *

So there are clearly some fields of human endeavor, including those upon which we are most reliant for our survival and progress as a species, in which drastic decreases in activity when measured on a per capita basis have no impact on that activity's ability to bring us ongoing (in fact, ever-increasing) benefits.

The decline of participation in farming is primarily due to one of the factors that John Smart suggests may be responsible for the per capita decline in innovation -- automation. The tractor probably put more farm laborers out of work than any other single invention. Efficiencies from automation are then augmented by increasing yields, which come from improved pest control, better soil management, and genetically superior crops. The impact of all these factors is cumulative. Every year, it takes the efforts of fewer workers to provide more food faster. The analogy to innovation is not a perfect one, but the role of automation and the cumulative impact of past innovations are both factors that we have to consider when assessing whether innovation is in decline.

In listing those influential thinkers who share Heubner's view that innovation may be in decline, Smart mentions Kenneth Boulding and Brewster Kahle:

They have independently suggested the era around the end of the 19th century, with the invention of the internal combustion engine and the commercialization of electricity, the era of Edison, and Tesla, was a far more innovative age than the one we live in today, as well as a time with significantly greater social impacts of accelerating technological change.

Smart contrasts major developments from that era from the ones we are seeing today:

Ask yourself, how many innovations were required to make a gasoline-electric hybrid automobile like the Toyota Prius, for example? This is just one of many systems that look the same "above the hood" as their predecessors, yet are radically more complex than previous versions. How many of the Prius innovations were a direct result of the computations done by the technological systems involved (CAD-CAM programs, infrastructures, supply chains, etc.) and how many are instead attributable to the computations of individual human minds? How many computations today have become so incremental and abstract that we no longer see them as innovations?

So here we have several factors at work: automation, the cumulative effect of previous innovations, and the fact that today's innovators are working what is in some ways a more fertile and productive field than was available to their predecessors. None of that seems particularly indicative of a decline in innovation.

One final thought: even if technological innovation is truly in decline, either on a real or per capita basis, the total creative output of the species is definitely on the rise, both in real and per capita terms. I don't think anyone would seriously argue that point. There are more literate human beings than at any time in the past, and literate human beings make up a greater percentage of the population than they have at any time in the past. There are more venues for creative expression than could even have been imagined a generation or two ago -- not just publications and galleries and theatres, but blogs and podcasts and film studios run out of the garage.

The demand for creative output is at its highest level ever. Moreover, by evolving from consumers to producers of such output, the population is changing the nature of that demand. Creative content is increasingly something that we demand of ourselves, for ourselves. What can we expect, ultimately, from people who insist upon their own creativity, who appear to be willingly and willfully evolving themselves in a more creative direction? Such questions would be difficult to answer adequately in an entire book, much less a "final thought" which is already running a bit long. But it seems likely that we can expect such people, ultimately, to be equally demanding of the society they belong to and the world they live in. Demanding more of society would mean social reforms unlike any that we have considered before. Demanding more of the world itself would mean that the age of scientific discovery and technological innovation, far from slowing down as they approach some end point, might be on the verge of truly beginning.

* US population in 1850 was appx. 23,000,000. So the total number of farmers (70% of the population) was about 16,000,000. In 1990, the population was 248,000,000. So the total number of farmers (we'll round up to 3%, even though it wasn't actually that high) was about 7,440,000. A big drop both in real numbers and per capita.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (1)

Via GeekPress, Joanna Glasner has an interesting piece on Wired News about the advisability of investing in life extension technologies. She makes a cautious case that such investments could prove worthwhile, if entered into carefully, and she ends the piece with this thought:

Still, investors focusing on life-extending breakthroughs have time to be patient. If it all works out, and we really do live forever, that should provide plenty of time for a portfolio of biotechnology stocks to turn a profit.

Hmmm...if it does pan out, and we do live forever...or even, say, 500 years...what kinds of investments make sense? Einstein is reputed once to have quipped that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. For those of us who only get to piddle around with it for 50 years or so, that may be a little hard to believe. But given enough time -- and that's what life extension ultimately promises, more than enough time -- we gain some perspective.

Putting money into a 401K for a few decades is like accidentally leaving the garden hose on overnight. You get up the next morning, and yeah, it's pretty squishy back there, but no big deal. Given enough time, however, even a muddy little trickle like the Colorado river can carve out the Grand Canyon. Likewise, even a small amount of money, compounded at a modest rate over sufficient time, will yield a fortune.

Lazarus Long explained it like this:

$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $l00,000,000—by which time it will be worth nothing.

Not too encouraging. But then again, old Woodrow Wilson Smith tends to be a little more cynical than he really needs to. Let's examine that "it will be worth nothing" thing. I can think of three possible reasons why that might be the case:

1. Two hundred years from now, you'll be dead. So the money is worth nothing to you. (Kind of a strange argument for a man who lived more than 1,000 years to make.)

2. Two hundred years from now, for whatever reason -- maybe you forgot? -- you will not care about the money, once again making it worthless to you.

3. Two hundred years from now, because of inflation, $100,000,000 just won't be worth that much.

For the sake of simplicity, we can skip the first two interpretations. Let's assume that life extension will work and that, 200 years from now, we'll still be interested.

How much will our money be worth? I'm going to simplify LL's formulation a bit and compound the interest annually rather than quarterly. At that rate, in 200 years the $100 dollars will have grown "only" to a little more than $70 million. That still sounds like a lot of money to me.

Of course, we need to adjust for inflation. (I'm not going to try to adjust for other possibilities, such as the decline of the dollar or its eventual replacement with another currency. Could happen. I doubt it. Anyway, we'll assume that, as savvy, long-term investors, we'll keep our money in the best currency to ensure long-term growth and stability. That's probably going to be the US dollar, anyway.)

Inflation is a very difficult thing to measure long-term. But if goods and services tended to go up, on average, 3% in price over the course of the 20th century, that is probably as good a guesstimate as any as to what we can expect to happen over the next 200 years.

So, not being an economist I do the math as follows:

If our $100 grew at 4% interest for 200 years, it would be worth about $123,000.

So Lazarus is wrong. Our investment isn't worthless, it's just "worth less" than it looks. In the year 2205, $70 million simply won't buy what it used to. What will it buy? Approximately what $123,000 will today. So over time, you have multiplied your initial $100 worth of spending power by a factor of more than a thousand.

Not too shabby!

Anyway, whoever heard of just investing a hundred dollars? The real trick would be to pay into your future wealth account over a period of years and then just let it go to work."Set it and forget it" as they say on the infomercials.

So let's put $600 a year into our account (that's a measly $50 a month) for twenty years and then revisit it after a total of 150 years has elapsed. After all, 150 years is just a drop in the bucket to someone with an indefinite lifespan.

By then, our initial disciplined investment will have grown to more than $160 million. After doing the inflation buzzkill adjustment, we see that in the year 2155, $160 million will get you right around what $3 million will today. That's not bad. Plus, if you can hang in there for another 50 years -- take a part-time job, write a book, I'm sure you can think of something to kill the time -- you will have a little more than $28 billion (yep, billion with a B) which will buy you approximately what $21 million (with an M) will today.

That's the ticket. And you know, even though you may not (to coin a phrase) live to see it, in a world where lives are getting longer, wouldn't something like this be worth a shot? At the very worst, you would be leaving a nice (NICE!) nest egg for your long-lived children or grandchildren.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Glenn Reynolds's latest TCS column is a quick recap of the history of human civilization. He starts out by describing the lives of our remote ancestors, some 10,000 years ago:

What material possessions exist are homemade, except for a very small amount of stuff purchased from itinerant traders carrying a few rare luxuries. Children aren't sent off to school, but hang around the adults as they go about the business of the day. A few activities, like big-game hunting, are off-limits to the kids, but in general they grow up quickly, and are a part of what goes on.

Breezing through several millenia of agriculture, empires, and industrialization, Glenn demonstrates how radically human societal structures have been altered by technology:

Big organizations doing big things: It's the story of the 19th and 20th Centuries. In fact, it was so much the theme of those centuries that it's easy to forget what a departure this was from the rest of human history. But it was a huge departure, brought about by the confluence of some unusual technological and social developments.

And it was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it made people in industrialized countries a lot richer. On the other hand, it created a lot of social strain, as traditional ways of living were disrupted by the new ways of doing business.

Parents and children were separated. Husbands and wives were separated. "Work" became something separate from the rest of life, and itself became different. An old-style blacksmith made a plowshare or a sword from beginning to end. A worker in Adam Smith's needle factory, or Henry Ford's automobile factory, performed a single repetitive task with no real connection, emotional or intellectual, to the overall product.

Then, of course, along comes the information revolution and Moore's Law. When the tiny microchip replaces the massive deisel engine as the driver of economic growth, vast organizational structures start to look...well, if not obsolete, maybe a little superfluous.

Years ago, just when desktop publishing was becoming huge, I worked for a software company that sold a typographical and page layout system. One of our favorite marketing tag lines was a quote (variously attributed to Ben Franklin, W. R. Hearst, and others):

"The power of the press belongs to those who own one."

This quote has since taken on new meaning in the age of blogs. After 20 years or so, it's easy to forget that a small revolution in its own right occured when, all of a sudden, virtually anyone anywhere could produce typeset copy. If you wanted to be a publisher, all you needed was a computer, a laser printer, and access to a photocopier. Publishing, or at least a good-sized piece of it, was de-industrialized. That is to say, the big industrial components that only a big company could afford to purchase, house, and operate -- in this case, a linotype machine and an offset press -- were made optional.

Over the past two decades, de-industrialization has emerged in many other areas. The recording industry has been massively de-industrialized. The equipment for making a musical recording has been simplified, but that's nothing compared to the change in infrastructure used to distribute a recording. We no longer need factories to press vinyl records; at this point, even burning CDs is starting to seem kind of quaint and clunky. Likewise, in his TCS piece, Glenn talks about how someone with a digital camera, an internet connection, and some good software can do things the big three networks couldn't even imagine doing back in the 60's.

But de-industrialization is not limited to publishing and other communications technology. As Glenn mentions in his column (and as Stephen has written about extensively here and here and lots of other places) the end of industrialization as we know it comes when individuals can produce their own goods, and possibly even the energy to produce those goods, on their own. The industrial revolution came about in the first place because bigger was better: a factory was far more efficient at producing widgets than a single skilled widgetman. With fab technology, that will no longer necessarily be the case. The desktop fabricator won't be specialized to produce one particular thing (or kind of thing) and it is no more or less efficient if it produces one or a thousand units.

As Glenn correctly points out, de-industrialization will not completely undo industrial society. There will still be large corporations and government entities; many of us will continue to live "standardized" lives, with sharp distinctions between the home and the office, recreation and work, career and family, etc. But as these distinctions are increasingly seen as optional -- as is already the case for many who now work from home, their employers having partially de-industrialized the notion of "workplace" -- human society will begin to evolve into something new.

To be sure, these new ways of organizing oursleves will have some things in common with our remote past that industrial society did not. Easing the distinction between workplace and home sounds nice; easing the distinction between work and play sounds fantastic. But we aren't moving back to the hunter-gatherer days, or to any model we can easily identify. De-industrial society will be as much as a surprise to us (or our descendants) as industrial society was to the descendants of our agrarian ancestors.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

The Geological Society of London reported last month that a super-volcano is 5-10 times as likely to occur than a major meteorite impact, but could be just as disastrous.

An area the size of North America can be devastated, and pronounced deterioration of global climate would be expected for a few years following the eruption. They could result in the devastation of world agriculture, severe disruption of food supplies, and mass starvation. These effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilization.

Phil and I recently examined the ten threats to civilization reported by The Guardian. To review they are:

1. Climate Change
2. Telomere Erosion
3. Viral Pandemic
4. Terrorism
5. Nuclear War
6. Meteorite Impact
7. Robot Takeover
8. Cosmic Ray Blast
9. Super-Volcano
10. Artificial Black Hole

One question that The Gaurdian left unanswered was, "which of these risks is the biggest?" Risk equals the probability that the risk will occur multiplied by the damage it would do if it did; or:

Risk = Probability x Consequences

While any of these disasters might be sufficient for the task of doing us in, some of these scenarios are more worrisome than others. I completely discount telomere erosion (manageable consequences, and I think zero probability). And the risks of climate change, viral pandemic, terrorism (which is a viral meme), and nuclear war are not likely to result in human extinction were they to occur.

We are a uniquely adaptable species, so climate change is not likely to kill us all. There's no benefit to a virus or to terrorists to wipe out all of humanity. And the risk of global nuclear war seems to have faded as the risk of regional nuclear war has increased.

Physicists have reassured us that the artificial black hole risk is nothing to worry about - zero probability. I don't know whether to be reassured by recent experiments or not. Obviously scientists didn't create a black hole, but they got something totally unexpected - a perfect liquid at a trillion degrees. How certain can these guys be that there is no risk of disaster if they are capable of being completely surprised?

That said, there's no point in arguing the level of this risk with people who know much more about the probability than I. That leaves "meteorite impact," "robot takeover," "cosmic ray blast," and "super-volcano." If we accept the Geological Society of London assessment (and I've got no reason to doubt it), then risk of meteorite impact is significantly less than "super vocano." So we're down to three.

The risk of extinction from a supernova was downgraded in 2003.

Scientists at NASA and Kansas University have determined that the supernova would need to be within 26 light years from Earth to significantly damage the ozone layer and allow cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation to saturate the Earth's surface.

An encounter with a supernova that close only happens at a rate of about once in 670 million years.

That risk is pretty remote. So, we're down to two great existential risks: robot/AI takeover and super-volcano. Which takes the "Big Risk" title?

Each has much to recommend it.

Ray Kurzweil tells us that the state of art in A.I. and computer science is perpetually ahead of what the public realizes. We could wake up one day in a world dominated by super-intelligent machines before we could mobilize to stop it.

Not that we could stop it if we tried. If we legislated against super-A.I. here in the U.S., it would simply push its development elsewhere. The potential payoff is too valuable to ignore, and we humans tend to push the envelope regardless of risk or benefit. If it's possible to do, it will be done.

There is no question of "if" with a super-volcano - only when.

The Earth tends to have super-volcanic eruptions every 100,000 years. The last super-volcano to blow was 74,000 years ago. This doesn't mean we necessarily have 26,000 years until the next huge eruption. The Yellowstone super-volcano tends to blow every 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago. We're overdue.

Time to pick the "Big Risk" champion. Drum roll please.....

And the winner is...

ROBOTIC TAKEOVER!

Why? Both scenarios are pretty grim. But the human race survived the last super-volcano, and I have hope that we can survive the next one - if not on earth, perhaps in a self-sustaining off-world colony.

But the risk of robotic takeover will be with us wherever we go (see the DUNE novels and Battlestar Galactica). I agree with Kurzweil that our best bet is to be part of the leap.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The "flying car" concept contemplates a vehicle that's as simple to operate as automobile. The average adult will not feel comfortable and safe flying an aircraft until piloting is made much simpler. In "That Flying Car Problem" I imagined a push-button aircraft that would do it all: file a flight plan, communicate with air traffic control, take off, fly, and land at your destination without interference. You'd just have to tell it where to take you. It would be a robotic air taxi.

This is the future of air travel and NASA is already taking the intermediate steps to get us there.

The folks at NASA have built something called "The Highway in the Sky." It's a computer system designed to let millions of people fly whenever they please, and take off and land from wherever they please, in their very own vehicles…

...here’s how it works: In a NASA animation, pilots focus on one main screen. It’s very much like a videogame. Keep the plane inside the box, away from other vehicles, and the plane’s computers automatically guide them towards their destination. They can even follow the highway down to the ground.

This is just a part of NASA's plan. Through the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) program, NASA is working on aircraft computing, advanced flight controls, Highway in the Sky displays that would overlay the windshield, and automated air traffic separation and sequencing.

Automatic separation and sequencing is extremely important. A head-up display showing a virtual highway is useful only if the highway is clear. As Jim Strickland suggested in the comments, "[an air] traffic jam would be very, very bad."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the regular features at The Speculist during its inauguration was Phil's "Seven Questions" interview. Phil's last question was always "Why is it that in the year 2003 I still don't have a flying car? When do you think I'll be able to get one?"

Phil was asking the question metaphorically (when I answered I wrote about how large scale tech has been trailing small tech for the last thirty years). But really. It's 2005 and we still don't have flying cars. What gives? When Phil asked Aubrey de Grey, he got a more direct answer:

You don't have [a flying car] because it's very hard to build something that fits the bill — fast, safe, affordable. "Safe" is probably the hardest.

Of course, when I think of a "flying car" I imagine something like this:

But it doesn't look like we're going to get a gravity-defying roadster anytime soon. For now, this flying car will remain a "past-futures" fantasy. But why can't we have an intermediate vehicle - a "fast, safe, and affordable" aircraft; an everyday, everyman aircraft?

Safety is a big part of this problem. A "safe" aircraft is "idiot-proof." Most adults of average intelligence can be taught to be reasonably safe behind the wheel of a car. The flying car has to be comparably safe or it will never be adopted.

In order to be safe today, a pilot must be smart, fly constantly, have an understanding of his aircraft, a respect for the weather, and be humble about his skill. Many pilots don't measure up to this, let alone the average "Joe."

The answer is a push-button aircraft. You command it to "take me to Hot Springs, Arkansas" and it would file a flight plan, communicate with air traffic control, take off, fly, and land at your destination without interference from the pilot. Obviously this would require a sophisticated computer and software.

Assuming that could be accomplished in the short run, there is another obstacle to the everyday, everyman aircraft. Present-day aircraft are often more trouble than they're worth, especially for short trips. Even people who have spent $100,000 + for a private plane often find that they don't use them enough to justify the expense. Every flight requires a trip to an out-of-the-way airport and arrangements for ground transportation at the destination. Airports are put in out of the way places because they take up so much land.

If airplanes were made simple enough so that more people flew, and the amount of land required for a runway were reduced, then there would be more airports, making it more likely that an airport would be at or near your desired destination. Heliports don't take up significant space - a good flat roof fits the bill. But helicopters are difficult to operate, and, even if a fully automated helicopter were developed, it would still require constant, expensive maintenance.

And the helicopter still wouldn't be as safe as a fixed wing aircraft. There is a certain altitude range for helicopters called the "dead man zone." If you lose your engine in this zone then there is insufficient time for the formerly powered rotor to be switched to auto-rotate mode. You drop like a rock to the ground.

Carter Aviation Technologies is developing a hybrid solution to these problems. Their "Cartercopter" allows vertical take off and landing, will fly as fast as a fixed wing aircraft (which is much faster than a helicopter), and will not be subject to the "dead man zone" problem. Why no "dead man zone?" Because as a gyroplane it is always in auto-rotate mode. If you lose power you just float down. Theoretically it would be safer than either a helicopter or an airplane in a power-off emergency landing.

There's nothing new about gyroplanes. They've been around since 1923. But this form of aircraft has been neglected since the helicopter became practical. Carter Aviation saw an opportunity to innovate.

The Cartercopter's first innovation is depleted uranium on the tips of the overhead rotor. Depleted uranium makes the tips of the rotor very heavy. While safely on the ground the overhead rotor is powered up by the engine. A gyroplane rotor is never powered in the air because it lacks a rear-stabilizing rotor like a helicopter. But once the Cartercopter's rotor is spinning, the heavy tipped blade will maintain its spin and provide significant lift before the aircraft even begins its roll forward.

Second, the aircraft has wings like what you would expect on a fast moving jet. These wings are small and thin to hold down drag, but small wings provide limited lift. Without the rotor, the aircraft would stall at about 150 knots - the rotor makes up the difference.

At cruising altitude, the CarterCopter's third innovation becomes available. Overhead rotor drag makes traditional gyroplanes very slow. The drag of the rotor is a cube function of the speed of the rotor. And the faster a traditional gyroplane flys, the faster the overhead rotor turns creating increasing drag. But the Cartercopter slows the rotor speed as airspeed increases. By slowing the overhead rotor from about 300 rpm to 100, the drag on the Cartercopter is significantly reduced which allows speeds comparable to fixed wing aircraft.

You might be wondering why they don't just stop the rotor if drag would be reduced. Stopping the rotor would reduce drag, but it would be costly to engineer a stopped rotor, and the aircraft is safer with the rotor still spinning. This slowed rotation appears to be a smart compromise.

If a flying Delorean is out of the question, a fully automated Cartercopter would be a nice consolation prize.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the video page at Discovery.com where you can see the program that inspired this post.

UPDATE II: And here's a link to a 60 minutes print story on "flying cars" that also mentions the Cartercopter.

UPDATE III: In the comments Jim Strickland points out two additional problems with "flying cars" - noise pollution and petroleum depletion. To that I would add increased fossil fuel emissions.

Hydrogen fuel cells could address all of these problems. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles run on electricity produced by hydrogen. It would be very quiet, would not deplete petroleum reserves, and would be clean for the environment.

Honda has done some impressive work in the last few years improving power output of fuel cell vehicles (see here and here). Whether fuel cells have been developed to the point that they could power an aircraft is another question. Probably not...yet.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

InstaPundit links this morning to the Guardian's Top Ten List of doomsday predictions. My take is that these problems are all more or less fixable, with a little ingenuity. Let's have a look.

1: Climate Change

By the end of this century it is likely that greenhouse gases will have doubled and the average global temperature will have risen by at least 2C. This is hotter than anything the Earth has experienced in the last one and a half million years.

Well, no. According to the Klima Climate Change Center:

Changes in our climate have been occuring naturally. Ice core data have shown that the surface temperatures for the past 420,000 years have been following a steady rhythm of warming and cooling, suggesting that climate is affected by natural forcings and feedbacks.The global temperature record of the last 420,000 years shows that the amplitude of warm and cold (interglacial and ice age) events does not go beyond 8 °C.

So a 2 °C shift is well within the experience of the planet within the past 42,000 years, never mind the past 2 million. Will the 2 °C rise bring about devastation? Will it even happen?

Consider this possibility: maybe global warming is the only thing standing between us and the next ice age.

The solution to the Global Warming Doomsday scenario is twofold:

-- Elimiate the politics and hysteria from the discussion

-- Then define appropriate action

Stephen here - I was preparing a post on the same subject, but Phil beat me to the punch. My thoughts will be italicized.

There is a general concensus amoung scientists that the world is warming and that human activity is part of the problem. It is my belief that (whether fortunate or unfortunate) world petroleum production will soon peak. Petroleum prices will rise until alternatives become attractive. As those alternatives are adopted, they will be developed - made more efficient, and cheaper.

Many of these alternatives are also cleaner for the environment. I am thinking of mainly of hydrogen, but helium-3 and even cold fusion remain possibilities.

2: Telomere Erosion

My theory is that there is a tiny loss of telomere length from one generation to the next, mirroring the process of ageing in individuals. Over thousands of generations the telomere gets eroded down to its critical level. Once at the critical level we would expect to see outbreaks of age-related diseases occurring earlier in life and finally a population crash.

The telomere-shortening problem has been identified as one of the Seven Deadly Causes of Aging. Top minds are already at work on how to solve this problem for individuals. If Stindl's (highly speculative)theory of species-level telomere-shortening pans out, I'm sure that whatever we come up with to address the problem for individuals will have some applicability at the species level.

If so, we'll have yet another example of life-extension research providing "practical" (yeah, like there's nothing "practical" about extending human life) benefits.

I think this theory is bogus. I've never heard of an upper limit for the life expectancy of a species in the fossil record. If this were a problem why do we have turtles?

But if I'm wrong and our species were due for telomere extinction in the next century, I'm convinced we would be able to engineer our way out the crisis. Provided some other catastrophe doesn't set us back to the Stone Age, there will be a technological solution to this problem long before it became an issue.

3: Viral Pandemic

Within the last century we have had four major flu epidemics, along with HIV and Sars. Major pandemics sweep the world every century, and it is inevitable that at least one will occur in the future. At the moment the most serious concern is H5 avian influenza in chickens in south-east Asia.

There are some specific, practical steps we can take concerning avian strains of the flu from Asia.

Longer term, nanotechnology looks like our best pandemic defense.

We're overdue for a bad flu (whether from nature or some imprudent research accident) - which is a virus. I'm also concerned that we are currently losing the antibiotics arms race against bacterial infections.

Back in 2003 Glenn Reynolds wrote briefly about "peptide nanotubes that kill bacteria by punching holes in the bacteria's membrane... By controlling the type of peptides used to build the rings, scientists are able to design nanotubes that selectively perforate bacterial membranes without harming the cells of the host."

This is an exciting development because bacteria would have trouble adapting to this kind of attack. As long as these nanotubes could differentiate between bacterial membranes and host membranes and penetrate bacteria, it would be lethal to bacteria.

4: Terrorism

Today's society is more vulnerable to terrorism because it is easier for a malevolent group to get hold of the necessary materials, technology and expertise to make weapons of mass destruction. The most likely cause of large scale, mass-casualty terrorism right now is from a chemical or biological weapon.

Well, call me crazy, but I think what's called for here is an outright global war on terrorism. We could even call it that -- The War on Terror. The Guardian doesn't mention whether any such solution has been considered.

Also, like with item 1, I think it's important for us all to truly understand the problem.

The Guardian exposed their bias by failing to mention the War on Terror. I recommend this article to those who would like to "understand the problem."

5: Nuclear War

In theory, a nuclear war could destroy the human civilisation but in practice I think the time of that danger has probably passed.

Solution: End communism in Europe. Done. Problem solved. Hey, who am I to argue with Air Marshal Lord Garden?

It wouldn't take an all-out nuclear war to set our civilization back twenty years. Those who think the United States has overreacted to 9/11 would think back fondly on these carefree days were a nuke to explode within our borders.

The risk of a state actor in such an attack is low. This is one big reason why it's so important for the U.S. to win the War on Terror. Certainly Al Qaeda wouldn't hesitate to use a nuke against us if they could get one. Our risk is reduced if they're busy running and dying.

6: Meteroite Impact

Over very long timescales, the risk of you dying as a result of a near-Earth object impact is roughly equivalent to the risk of dying in an aeroplane accident. To cause a serious setback to our civilisation, the impactor would have to be around 1.5km wide or larger.

A nasty potential problem, to be sure. While some folks are working on how best to assess and categorize the risk, others are developing actual solutions to the problem. Note that the proposed "tugboat" method is superior to the nuclear options we looked at a few years ago. Blasting an asteroid into little bits just means that we'll be bombarded by thousands of little meteorites rather than one big one.

We are now entering a time when it would be possible to deflect or destroy threatening objects. Our ability to protect ourselves should improve over time barring some other catastrophe.

7: Robot Takeover

Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half-century. By 2050 I predict that there will be robots with humanlike mental power, with the ability to abstract and generalise.

Such robots need not become a threat, but they could. Glenn Reynolds and Scott Burgess are having some fun with the idea of "Robot Overlords," but this is actually a fairly serious risk. Fortunately, as with Telomere shortening and asteroid impacts, there are excellent minds looking at the problem. The solution seems to be to make robots as friendly as we can while we're still the ones making them. (Before they start making themselves.)

What might work is a requirement that strong A.I. always be tied to a human. Symbiotic A.I. would help ensure that humanity is transformed rather than supplanted.

8: Cosmic Ray Blast

Once every few decades a massive star from our galaxy, the Milky Way, runs out of fuel and explodes, in what is known as a supernova. Cosmic rays (high-energy particles like gamma rays) spew out in all directions and if the Earth happens to be in the way, they can trigger an ice age.

Well, first off, I just have to ask -- if it's going to trigger an ice age, isn't this our best hope against global warming?

Okay, seriously, we know we don't want to be exposed to all that radiation. But what can protect us from a star exploding light years away? Here are three thoughts:

-- Figure out a way to destroy, without unleashing the cosmic rays, all stars in the immediate vicinity. (Raises major ethical and logistical issues.)

-- Figure out a way to move our solar system safely out of the galaxy. (Still logisitically difficult, but ethically okay.)

-- Build a protective Dyson Sphere around the solar system (Cheap, safe, and easy!)

Also note that a smaller-scale Dyson sphere might be used to protect us from Asteroid collisions.

Supernovas are out of human control and so aren't worth worrying about. Even an interstellar civilization would be destroyed unless it was spread over distant stars.

9: Super-Volcano

Approximately every 50,000 years the Earth experiences a super-volcano. More than 1,000 sq km of land can be obliterated by pyroclastic ash flows, the surrounding continent is coated in ash and sulphur gases are injected into the atmosphere, making a thin veil of sulphuric acid all around the globe and reflecting back sunlight for years to come. Daytime becomes no brighter than a moonlit night.

Based on my detailed analysis of the recent made-for-TV movie on the subject, I think our best bet is to create some kind of release valve for these systems. The pressure in a caldera system builds and builds until the gasses and magma begin to vent, leading to massive explosions. But what if we created a way for the system to vent slowly over a period of years? Obviously, this would require some engineering beyond what we currently have. (But it would be significantly easier to do than the Dyson Sphere.)

Also, slowly releasing volcanic ash into the atmosphere might be another way to offset global warming.

A Super-volcano is out of our control, but humanity might survive if it had a permanent off-world presence. In fact, a permanent off-world presence would protect humanity from extinction in all but the supernova, artificial black hole, and telomere erosion scenarios.

10: Earth Swallowed by Black Hole

Around seven years ago, when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was being built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, there was a worry that a state of dense matter could be formed that had never been created before. At the time this was the largest particle accelerator to have been built, making gold ions crash head on with immense force. The risk was that this might form a stage that was sufficiently dense to be like a black hole, gathering matter from the outside.

If we're worried about being swallowed by home-made black holes, my suggestion is that we don't make any. If we're worried about rogue black holes wandering in from deep space, the solution will probably lie with some kind of combination of the solutions for problems 6 and 8.

Failing that, there's always the Space Ark.

Apparently most physicists don't think this is a real danger. I hope they're right.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

Nothing to worry about, apparently:

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. - Scientists say the odds of another catastrophic volcanic eruption in Yellowstone within anyone's lifetime are extraordinarily remote, but that's exactly what happens in a made-for-television movie that will air this Sunday.

Discovery Channel has a neat promo for the movie, along with some good geological/historical information about Yellowstone. Should be a fun movie. I'm eager to see whether Denver gets totally wiped out.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We've seen how Napster, Kazaa, and other file sharing protocols shook up the music industry. The film industry is next as broadband technology allows larger exchanges of data. These shakeups, as significant as they've been, are just a small taste of what's ahead. I've written several times about fab labs (here, here, and here), but I've never fully explained why I find these machines so fascinating.

Fab labs are going to rock the world economy like no technology has since the advent of the internal combustion engine. People wonder about the future potential of the Internet - this is a big part of it.

At first, fab labs will be a novelty. They will be hailed as a way for U.S. manufacturers to compete with cheap overseas labor. For the most part manual labor will be eliminated altogether. These first fabricators will be large machines capable of a narrow range of manufacturing. Consumers will be happy with the new goods, mostly plastic toys at first, cheap and marked "Made in America." The Chinese will grumble.

Then some electronics manufacturer, perhaps even a Japanese firm like Sony, will begin single-step fabrication of electronics in factories close to the markets - often right here in the U.S. These electronics will be cheap and tough. The toughness is fortunate because they won't be repairable. They will be a solid piece of plastic with the electronics embedded within. The electronics will be embedded, printed really, within the plastic like another layer of ink on a page. Again, consumers will be happy.

Around this time a large home-building operation will start fabricating homes. The homes will be compared to Henry Ford's Model T. A three-man crew will be able to run a fabricator capable of producing a completed home within three days. The homemaker will run three shifts so that the fabricator can operate night and day.

Homebuyers will love these new cheap homes. Homeowners will grumble as home prices dip.

But the real shakeup will begin when some enterprising computer firm offers the first home fab lab. It will connect directly to the computer and look like a large printer. But it will also "print" solid objects. The first models will be capable of fabricating simple things. Manufacturers will laugh nervously at these first models. "Who wants to pay $5,000 to wait 48 hours to print a toothbrush?" they will ask. And they'll be right. At first just a few nerdy enthusiasts will have them. But they'll begin writing and exchanging fab plans.

That whoosing sound you'll hear will be money flying out of the manufacturing and distribution sectors into computer companies (and elsewhere). The home fab labs will get cheaper, faster, and more capable.

And the file sharing black market will grow by leaps and bounds. There will be congressional hearings as companies like Apple and Motorola complain that their intellectual property, the plans for iPods and telephones, are being cloned or just flat stolen and posted on the Internet. There will be efforts to outlaw or limit these devices. People will be jailed for fabricating illegally powerful new fab labs. Others will go to jail for intellectual property theft. But consumers will demand better and better fab labs. Ultimately the majority will rule.

We'll get the fab labs, but intellectual property theft will be prosecuted more and more seriously. Other types of petty theft will become less common. Why shoplift when you can steal the fab plans for the Playstation 5 off some obscure website or file sharer? File sharing will be heavily policed, but the black market will always be with us.

There will be other changes. Brick and mortar retail stores will be converted to public spaces or abandoned. Some public spaces will be restaurants, coffeehouses, clubs, bars, and churches. But multi-use space will be in increasing demand as connectivity tools allow easy coordination of impromptu events.

Large retail stores could be converted to neighborhood industrial fab labs. These heavy-duty fab labs will fabricate products that are too big or complicated to fabricate at home.

Engineered town areas may seem artificial, but so is the isolation of sitting alone in front of a computer all day. People will want to congregate in places like this, even as the need for shopping is reduced. Reduced, but not eliminated. We won't be eating fab food anytime soon. Just like the restaurants, the grocery stores will be with us.

UPDATE: Correction on the fab food speculation: We've all seen cakes with pictures printed into the icing with food coloring. At least one chef is experimenting with these food printers in the preparation of more sophisticated dishes.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

This is the text of a speech I gave last night. It took first place in the local competition for best inspirational speech. I'll be presenting it at the area competition on March 8. Stay tuned.

Let me tell you about my favorite episode of the Twilight Zone.

A couple wakes up one morning and discovers that their home is overrun by faceless workmen dressed all in blue. Terrified, they run out of their house to discover that their neighborhood has been completely abandoned, except for these strange workmen who are busy tearing everything down.

Eventually, the couple manages to find the foreman of the work crew and he explains what’s happened. Somehow, they’ve slipped through the cracks of time. According to the foreman, time doesn’t work the way we would expect. Every second we pass through is a unique and complete world unto itself. For each second of time, these workmen have to build an entire world. And then once we pass through that second, the workmen have to tear that world down to make room for more time to come.

So, in this story, time is kind of like the frames in a movie. We all know that when we watch a movie, we aren’t really seeing moving pictures. We’re seeing individual still pictures arranged to create the illusion of motion. And of time.

Continue reading "All Our Tomorrows" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (3)

NewScientist reports that libido may soon be quantifiable through the monitoring of brainwaves:

Monitoring the change in specific brain waves could be the first quantitative method for measuring libido, new research suggests.

The technique measures attention, rather than sexual desire specifically, but Yoram Vardi, at Rambam Hospital and the Technion, both in Haifa, Israel told NewScientist: "We found that sexual stimuli are the most potent."

So far 30 people with normal sexual function have been tested, but if further tests are successful, Vardi hopes his method will have many applications. These could include quantitatively analysing the libido-lowering (or enhancing) side effects of medication or even supporting legal claims of a reduction in sex drive after an accident.

Okay, the medical side-effects and accident claims deal are important. Of course they are. But I think there are some significant implications here that NewScientist has missed. What we are talking about, after all, is the first tentative steps towards transforming Getting One's Groove On from an art to a science.

That's huge.

For example, what if it can be established that eating chocolates gives the typical woman a 10% libidinal boost in responding to a particular stimulus, where a glass of fine champagne provides an additional 6% boost? Or what if it can be shown that a particular perfume gives the average man a whopping 27% boost? It won't be long before someone creates an environment loaded with stimuli, touching all of the senses, which have been clinically proven to increase libido. The long-cherished dream of the babe lair (or male equivalent thereof) will finally be achieved.

Moreover, if a quantifiable scale of attractiveness can be established to augment the quantification of libido, some researcher will eventually introduce a formula showing how much alcohol it takes to drive the libido number up to the point that one risks compromising interactions with a partner with an unacceptably low level of attractiveness. Such a formula could help us completely eradicate the phenomenon known as beer goggles.

But it's not all good news. Should some kind of home kit become available for measuring brainwaves, men will be at unprecedented risk from perennial dangerous questions such as

"Do you like my hair this way?"

or

"Do I look fat in this?"

The libido measuring technology would at this point become a polygraph. The best defense in such a situation would be to blame some interefering factor in the environment:

"Come on, Honey, I really do like it. It's probably just those antehistimines I took yesterday. You know how those things are always messing up my brain waves."

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Suraya and I visit Malaysia (her home country) every other year, usually at Christmas time. Two years ago today we were on the island of Langkawi, which is on the border of Thailand and Malaysia. Langkawi has sustained tremendous damage in the wake of the tsunamis; the final death toll is not yet known. If the earthquake had occured two years to the day earlier than it did, we would almost certainly have been on the beach when the tsunami hit. Or, for that matter, if our travel plans this year had been more in line with our normal preferences, we would have been on the beach in Penang or Langkawi or Phuket yesterday when the waves hit. (This year there were several family events taking place right around Christmas that made it impossible for us to schedule any beach time.)

One thing might have stopped us from doing so. We were having a late breakfast and watching CNN yesterday morning when the news broke about the earthquake. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I thought the fact that the earthquake occured on the far side of Sumatra from where we were would prevent Malaysia from having to worry about tidal waves. But I think that had I actually been on the coast, I would have suggested staying well away from the water...just in case. The CNN report mentioned the possibility of tsunamis, but there wasn't any warning to stay out of the water. There was no sense of urgency, at least not in the initial report I saw. It wasn't like, say, a tornado warning.

I can't help but think that a number of tourists in Phuket and the Maldives and other places watched that report before turning off the TV and heading to the beach. (The tsunami danger that was mentioned was only for India and Bangladesh.) If the report had been a very specific warning not to go near the water, I think some lives would have been saved.

There's been some discussion about how a tsunami warning system could be put in place for the countries impacted by this catastrophe. Some official government-sanctioned system would probably be a good idea, but failing that an educated media would certainly help. If CNN and the BBC had immediately begun broadcasting a warning that all coastal areas within the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea were in danger of imminent tidal waves, hundreds or even thousands of lives may have been saved. It's true that there are millions of poor in Indonesia and Bangladesh who live in remote areas and probably don't have access even to BBC radio, much less CNN. But local broadcasters would have quickly picked up the news, as would law enforcement and other agencies. Word of mouth could have accomplished quite a bit.

Memetics is still a new field; we have a lot to learn about how ideas are propagated and how they spread. But can anybody doubt that an unambiguous warning of danger would have spread much more quickly and would have reached many more people (especially if repeated continuously throughout the two hours) than a note to the effect that hmmm, there might be danger? It's all about urgency. I'm not trying to be critical of the media. As others have pointed out, this is such a rare thing to have happened it's no wonder it caught everyone off guard. Still, in light of this catastrophe, a very positive step for media organizations to take would be to recognize the role they can play in mitigating this kind of disaster in the future.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (5)

We'll create a MMORPG stock exchange, via which we'll make a fortune. The we'll use that fortune to fund our helium-3 mine on the moon.

See how it all works together!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

...not that there's anything wrong with that.

Wired magazine has published in its December issue a lengthy story on fabrication laboratories, or "fab labs." (Hat tip to KurzweilAI)

A fab lab is a miniature factory for the digital age. The latest version consists of three Linux PCs, a laser cutter, a combination 3-D scanner and drill, a numerically controlled X-Acto knife, and a handful of RISC chips. Set it up, turn it on, and you can crank out not only solid objects like eyeglass frames and action figures but, thanks to Gershenfeld's research, electronic devices like radios and computers, too.

Go and read the whole thing, but come back and read my post on fabricators originally published March 31 of this year:

Non Nano News

One of the "Drexlerian fantasies" that we who dwell in our parent's basements hold dear is the "nanofactory."

The nanofactory is imagined as an appliance, maybe as small as a Mr. Coffee, maybe as big as a refrigerator, that manufactures whatever is desired from individual molecules up. This has been called the ultimate technology. With the development of the nanofactory the only cost of material possessions would be the energy it takes to manufacture them and the information to build it (the cost of raw matter would be negligible). Presumably you would shop online, buy a design, download it, and then have your home factory make it for you. The energy cost would be reflected on your electric bill.

There are new developments constantly in the nanotech industry (here's a good source for staying current). But even we optimists understand that we are presently a long way from developing self-replicating nanoassemblers � the basic component of a nanofactory.

Personally I see no reason why automatic home factories need wait for the development of exotic nanotech.

Imagine a computer driven factory that uses raw materials (shredded plastic, wood pulp, various metals, silicon) to assemble whatever product you require using downloaded designs. The cost of the raw materials would be small. In fact, much of our trash could be recycled for these materials. The value of material possessions would be reduced to the cost of the raw materials, electricity, and the information to assemble it. In fact, you would have nearly all of the benefits of a nanofactory and few of the dangers. There would be no possibility of gray goo or homemade plagues with such a factory.

The technology I'm talking about is not decades away. Commercial forms of this technology are being tested now. On the large scale Engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis is perfecting his �Contour Crafting� process that will automatically construct an entire home directly from a computer plan.

Degussa AG, one of the world�s largest manufacturers and suppliers of construction materials, will collaborate in the development of a USC computer-controlled system designed to automatically �print out� full-size houses in hours�

Khoshnevis believes his system will be able to construct a full-size, 2,000- square-foot house with utilities embedded in 24 hours. He now has a working machine that can build full-scale walls and is hoping to actually construct his first house in early 2005.

Contour Crafting uses crane- or gantry-mounted nozzles, from which building material - concrete, in the prototype now operating in his laboratory - comes out at a constant rate.

Moveable trowels surrounding the nozzle mold the concrete into the desired shape, as the nozzle moves over the work�

Khoshnevis is now perfecting a system to mix such materials continuously in industrial quantities right at the Contour Crafting nozzle, �the way a spider makes silk to build a web."

-Via Futurepundit.

NewScientist has more:

Khoshnevis's prototype robot hangs from a movable overhead gantry, like the cranes at ship container depots. Khoshnevis speculates that they could also be ground-based, running along rails and able to build several houses at one time. But it would be more difficult to create autonomous wheeled robots that have sufficient accuracy and precision.

The first house will be built in 2005. If the technology is successful the robot could enable new designs that cannot be built using conventional methods, for example involving complex curving walls.

On the small scale, engineers at the University of California in Berkeley are developing technology to "print" in one process an entire electronic application - external plastic case and moving parts included.

The trick is to print layer upon layer of conducting and semiconducting polymers in such a way that the circuitry the device requires is built up as part of the bodywork.

When the technique is perfected, devices such as light bulbs, radios, remote controls, mobile phones and toys will be spat out as individual fully functional systems without expensive and labour-intensive production on an assembly line.

Three-dimensional printers are already valuable tools for making prototypes of newly designed products. They deposit layers made from droplets of smart polymers, which gradually build up into 3D shapes. Such printing techniques have become so sophisticated it is now possible to print working prototypes with mechanical parts that move as they would in the final product.

But Berkeley's crucial addition to this art is to allow the electronics to be included in the printed device, rather than being added at great cost later on.

The first automatic factory in the home will probably be simple - it could assemble all-plastic goods. This would be sufficient for many toys and kitchen utensils. Similar devices have been in use commercially for some time now.

Three-dimensional printers are already valuable tools for making prototypes of newly designed products. They deposit layers made from droplets of smart polymers, which gradually build up into 3D shapes. Such printing techniques have become so sophisticated it is now possible to print working prototypes with mechanical parts that move as they would in the final product.

Automatic assemblers that could use different materials would follow. Assemblers for electronics would come later.

This development will bring vast new wealth to consumers and will present the patent holders for commodity goods with the same peer-to-peer challenges that the RIAA has faced.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at March 31, 2004 10:38 PM

Comments to the original post:

I could see this type of thing developing on a neighborhood basis first, much like a Kinkos. You'd choose a design off the internet, perhaps customize it, then direct it to your neighborhood fab center, where you could pick it up at your leisure. Eventually the technology would evolve to the point where in-house fab would be the norm.

Posted by: David Young at April 1, 2004 11:17 AM

David:

I agree that this technology will be developed for commercial uses first. Only later as prices come down would I expect to see this in homes.

A Kinko's fabricator would be used for entirely different purposes than a home fabricator. For example, if I need a tooth bush and a toilet plunger I'm not going to wait at Kinkos while they fabricate these items. I'd go next door to the Dollar General (who would probably be fabricating them regionally instead of importing).

I might use a home fabricator for such items. I could download a design for these two items, load it into my fabricator and let it go to work.

A Kinkos fabricator would be used for specialty projects � perhaps to make a model to be used in a business presentation. It would not be used for commodity items.

Posted by: Stephen Gordon at April 1, 2004 12:47 PM

As soon as you can use a fabricator to build another fabricator, things will start getting really interesting.

Posted by: Ken at April 2, 2004 01:13 PM

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Why should an infantryman always have to carry his ammunition? A soldier could be equipped with a modified rifle that forwards target coordinates to an artillery battery that would automatically fire on the target. The targeting and firing decisions would be made solely by the infantryman with the pull of a trigger.

The advantages to such a system would be significant. Each soldier would have a practically inexhaustible supply of ammunition that he doesn�t have to carry. And since the projectile is not launched from the soldier�s location, a single well-placed soldier could do incredible damage to the enemy without giving up his position.

Obviously this would not be the best weapon for all situations. Line-of-sight is often the best way to shoot. There are obvious problems with using such a system in close combat or indoors. And there are many cases where an artillery shell would be overkill. The soldier�s rifle would still need to shoot bullets.

The problems with artillery have always been accurate targeting, and on-time delivery. This system would address both problems. The forward soldier could provide precise target information, and the automatic pull-of-the-trigger firing would speed delivery.

Moving targets can�t wait on the arrival of an off-site artillery shell, but if this system were used to target a laser weapon, delay wouldn�t be a problem. Actually, such a system could be used to target any kind of long-distance weapon. Perhaps the soldier could even choose from a menu of options.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Here's an entertaining, if extremely unlikely stroll down memory lane from somewhere in the future. Here's my favorite part:

President Jeb Bush�s popularity was enhanced when his eldest son married Chelsea Clinton, following her acrimonious divorce from her first husband, a Hollywood actor. �It�s better to be married to someone who strong morals,� said a beaming Mrs. Clinton, speaking to the press after the ceremony.

I think the actor should have been named, but then maybe it's no one we've heard of. Yet.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By popular demand (well, Stephen asked for it, and he's a popular guy) here's the text of my recent speech, which expands on the ideas presented in the original exponentials post.

Mr. Toastmaster, my fellow Toastmasters and guests, our story begins with the invention of a game called Chaturanga in India some 1400 years ago. Chaturanga is the precursor to the game we call chess; it's played on a board similar to the one used today for chess, checkers, and backgammon. The ruling prince of the region where the game was developed was so taken with Chaturanga that he summoned the game's inventor and offered to reward him for his genius.

Now the man who invented Chaturanga was, indeed, a genius. He asked the prince that he be given only a very modest reward. Just one grain of rice placed in the first square of the Chaturanga board. That's all. Oh, and then two grains of rice in the second square and four in the third and eight in the fifth and so on, doubling until all 64 squares were filled.

Well, the prince was pretty shocked that his subject should ask for such a paltry reward, but he felt he had to comply. So he dispatched one of his stewards to fulfill the order. It took the steward a while to report back, and when he did the news was not good. Although harvest was just completed, the gift was going to completely exhaust the royal granaries. And they were only on the 40^th square!

In fact, it turns out that if you were to keep doubling until you reached the 64^th square, you would have an amount of rice greater than the total yield of every rice crop in the history of the planet earth. The inventor of Chaturanga had trapped the prince with what mathematicians call a geometric progression. As we follow the progress of the rice as it doubles with each step, we're witnessing what's called an exponential increase.

As the example with the rice grains shows, any time we witness an exponential increase, we're in for quite a show. Things start out small and get crazy really quickly. Let's look at a few exponential trends that are unfolding in our world today. (My first three examples come from an article by Rodney Brooks that appeared recently in MIT Technology Review.)

Continue reading "Amazing Exponentials, The Speech" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ScrappleFace is usually pretty amusing, but this piece didn't strike me as being the least bit funny.

Evocative, yes.

Tragic, possibly.

Eloquent, undeniably.

But not funny. Have a glimpse of a world that should have been:

Continue reading "What Should Have Been" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Referencing some commentary from the Belmont Club, Glenn delivers a quip containing an astounding sketch of a possible future:

Perhaps this is how we will, ultimately, convert the whole world into a bunch of diplo-speaking social-welfare pacifists, one quagmire at a time. . . .

In other words, what if the whole world were Europe? First off, the planet would be no more or less an annoying place than it is now. We would be no better liked than we are now. But it would be a wonderful world, because there really would be peace — and that's Peace, not "peace." We would be in no more danger from the rest of the world than we currently are from Europe.

Ah, some will argue, but Europe is threat, a very grave threat to freedom. Well, yes and no. Europe is a threat not because of any aggression they are likely to undertake on their own, but only because of their weenielike tendency to wink at the agression of others...even those who would systemtically destroy their civilization if they could. Take away the real aggressors — that is, make them weenies, too — and Europe is no more dangerous than Berkeley.

Sure, Berkeley can be kind of a pain in the ass. But it can be a lot fun, too. It's a college town. There are some great clubs and restaurants. And bookstores. On the whole, Berkeley is a pretty good model for the rest of the world. And a much more realistic one than, say, Dallas. We, of course, along with (possibly) the UK, Australia, and some of Eastern Europe, will have to continue to be Dallas. Any time somebody tries to make the transition from aggression-appeasing-weenie to aggression-pursuing-psycho, there needs to be a counter-force to slap them down. Meanwhile, we will continue to grow and nurture our own weenie contingent, who will make it a bit easier for us to get along with the rest of the world.

Weenie World should be the stated long-term goal of US foreign policy. Failing that, I think it is at least worthy to be a scenario studied by the Global Business Network. I can only think of one book (and later movie) that developed the Weenie World scenario. Are there others?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)