My Other Notes - The Future

Sesh Velamoor is a native of Hyderabad, India, but he now lives in the US. As a director of the Foundation for the Future, he oversees seminars and programmes aimed not at predicting the future, but at creating an arena for discussion about the future. The foundation holds yearly seminars, Humanity 3000, that are intended to go on until the year 3000, and to discuss the state of humanity. It also awards the Kistler Prize and the Kistler Book Prize for research the relates the genome to society. (Among the recipients are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins).

On the Foundation's website, the interested will find an enormous amount of material from both Humanity 3000-seminars and other interesting seminars touch on future issues. Kistler is also invoved in private space travel and really stands out as an engaged citizen when it comes to future studies.

I will try to write more about the FoF soon.

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Professor David Levy's research borders on the kind of thing that will get materialistic people to sneer: one of his conferences was entitled ”Information, silence and sanctuary” and it became so popular that Levy spent time both on CNN and in the national as well as international press talking about what obviously touched a deep concern in many of us. But what, exactly, is this concern? The best way to answer that may be to point out that there are many different concerns that combine into an overarching suspicion that technology may be destroying something very important in our society. And this is not necessarily luddite intuition, either. It may have more to do with the fact that technology is designed differently than biological systems. A computer – to take a very simple fact – does not need to sleep. Biological systems do. Sleep recharges them and allows them to reorganize, heal and develop. But biological systems are not the template for designing technology – instead we seem to have defaulted to the idea of the machine as a universal model for society, organizations and our life.

Professor Levy has been a part of this process in different capacities for some time. He did his PhD at Stanford in artificial intelligence, but after this he went to London to learn calligraphy and bookbinding. He then went back to Palo Alto and worked within what might be one of the most important technological think tanks ever, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center – Xerox PARC. After two long periods at this institution (credited with such innovations as the laser printer, graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse) he came to Seattle. Here, at the Information School, he teaches something different, however – he teaches the need for leisure.

The course he is giving – on contemplation and technology – is a course that uses Josef Piepers ”Leisure as the basis of culture” (1947) as a starting point. Piepers essay, Levy explains, is fundamentally against all kinds of rush culture, arguing that those who are too preoccupied in fact accomplish nothing lasting. Overwork is nothing else than idleness – since it leads to nothing. What we need instead, Pieper claims, is leisure – time to contemplate, think and develop. (And no – professor Levy says – that does not mean golfing or working out in the gym).

Professor Levy recently finished a workshop – in the form of a retreat – where he developed the theme of silence and sanctuary further with an aikido sensei, a calligrapher and a zen abbott. Aikido – for those of you who do not know this – is a martial art focusing on harmony and peace. What on earth does this have to do with technology? Professor Levy answers calmly that it is obvious: these three arts are about mindfulness, and the theme for the workshop/retreat was mindfulness, work and technology.

Mindfulness has developed – under that name – as a stress management technique drawing heavily on buddhist meditation but devoid of any religious overtones. In books like ”Whereever you go there you are” researchers and philosophers have explored what it means to actually be present in the present, and how this affects you – mentally, neurolgically and spirtually. Mindful technology...that sounds nice – but is it possible to design mindful technologies? Are not all technologies efficient, productive and in a deep sense mechanizing? Perhaps, says Levy, but he rejects any idea of qualities as inherent in technology. It is, in the end, more about how we use technology, and how we allow it to use us.

*

The information society knows no luddites. This is, in itself, a fascinating fact. There are no groups that wish to destroy technology or wreck machines (excepting the occasional lust to do so when somebody answers their mobile phone the umpteenth time on your commute back home) any more. The original luddites and the original techno-sceptics were for abstaining from the use of technology. They wanted an option to drop out of the industrial society. There seems to be no, or few, examples of groups that think this possible today.

The counter-revolutions of the information society are actually adaptive strategies rather than opposing strategies. ”Life hacking” is one fascinating example of this. Life hackers mix heavily from several different sources and end up with a productivity-focused, anti-procrastinator and tool-happy movement that incarnates in blogs and seminars all over the country. Life hacker have assembled their particular adaptive strategies from three sources: they use and rely heavily on Dave Allens Getting Things Done – a system for task management that turns everything into an item an an inbox that then is handled with a simple algorithm. They also rely on technology of different kinds – tools and tricks – to increase their productivity. Some of them experiment with drugs, sleep deprivation and...mindfulness to create an environment where they can produce more. The life hackers refuse to become victims in the information society stress war, so they become collaborators instead. In a sense life hacking is about adapting to the machine's way of life – by sorting and searching through the inbox in an extremely mechanistic fashion.

Well, it works. It works splendidly for those that try, but there are of course...lapses. People do well for a while and then they return to the disorganised, messy life they led before they successfully started to imitate simple machines. They become biological systems again, and ”fail” in applying the different rigorous systems developed by productivity experts and computers.

Life hackers want it all: they want peace of mind and they want maximum productivity. You cannoy fault them for ambition, but what are the actual results? The believers will tell you, as believers are wont to do, that they succeed very well, thank you. But the truth is that they succeed only if they maim their fuzzy, blurry and disorganised biological nature.

The other adaptive movement is the slow movement. Slow food, slow reading, slow travelling, slow sex...All of this is celebrated as the modern individuals answer to ever more speed. If the Life hackers try to adapt fully, the slow movement at least resists one component in the information society – the speed, the rate of change. Against fast food and other atrocities, they suggest that we consume time more fully and do one thing at a time. Slowly. But how slow? And should it be uniformly slow? No – obviously not: even slowers – let us call them that – will move quickly when they need to, and their ”counter-revolution” is little else than a wish to signal that they need small remissions from the current rate of change. They ask not that development over all changes or slows down – they ask for slow...well, hobbies (if sex can be a hobby).

Resistance, the Borg are fond of noting, is futile. Well – the resistance to the information society is not only futile, it is half-hearted. Mellow. Cooly uninterested and collaborative.

*

Professor Levy, however, is not half-hearted in any sense of the word. He has just begun what might become one of the more interesting projects in the field of informatics: he is working on finding new technologies that are open to mindful use in different ways. One small thing, he notes, that could have large effects is if we could change the everyday working posture of people working on computers. Hunched over the keyboard, cramped, these people – you and I included – look as if they have been crippled and crooked and bent by a cruel master. Speech recognition, sensors, new displays may actually allow us to stand and straighten up, to actually acquire a proud posture while working.

Who knows what could happen in the future if we would work as free men and not crippled slaves...

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John McCarthy is a living legend. Yes, this is a tired cliché and it makes you sigh and think ”oh no, not another one...” But in this case it happens to be true. Let's review the facts:

1) McCarthy coined the term ”Artifical Intelligence”. There. Ok? No?
2) McCarthy invented LISP. Now?
3) McCarthy has been a leading researcher in AI for more than 50 years. Get the picture?
4) McCarthy has, as a side project, started one of the most passionate and useful collections of arguments to prove that material progress is sustainable.

You know, we could go on. But lets drop the clasifications for a while. When I knew I was going to Stanford, one of my aims of course quickly became to meet with Professor McCarthy. He kindly assented and I had the privilege to spend two hours with him discussing the future of AI, sustainable material progress and science fiction. At almost 80 he is as mentally agile as ever, and is still working on research in AI, he has also recently started his first science fiction novel.

The future of AI

Professor McCarthy is confident that AI will continue to develop. Or, as he notes: ”There was a hundred years from Mendels discoveries until we charted the genome – we still have time.” This does not mean that he downplays the problems with AI, however. Brute force, speed, for example will not be enough. We definitely need something more than mere speed, he says. But exactly what that is, is not certain.

Now, mind: we have come far. Computers routinely beat great chess players. They create swarm-like intelligences in computer games. They create the vast majority of non-player characters in virtual worlds. AI helps with everything from word processing to traffic planning. The applications are out there and they continue to develop. But there are still things that we cannot do. One of the things that remains hard is to allow a computer program to fram context. Look at another, more complicated game, like the Japanese game of go (or Chinese game, depending on your historical views). Computer programs play very poor go, and the reason, professor McCarthy thinks, is that go forces the players to think about the board in regions and to subdivide and find reasonable regions to compete in. What regions are reasonable, however, seems to be a hard problem to solve.

Sure, in chess we have kingside and queenside regions – players subdivide the field into these regions – but it turns out that this division is unnecessary for a computer. A computer does not need to think about these regions at all because of the speed with which it can explore the tree of possible moves. Not so in go.

One of the current research projects that McCarthy works on is related to this problem. McCarthy is trying to develop a logic of contexts and approximate concepts. How do we work with these as human beings? How do we develop concenpts that are in a basic sense vague? We seem to be able to handled vague concepts with ease, and this increases our intelligence.

When I suggest that this seems like thinking from the later Wittgenstein, especially when Wittgenstein speaks about the use of concepts such as ”game”, McCarthy seems uneasy. He really does not like Wittgenstein (even accuses him, if half jokingly, of setting back the field of philosophy anout fifty years, singlehandedly). You know, he says, he even led Bertrand Russell astray. That is quite some achievement.

McCarthy has a strong belief in logics, and in a sense he is a purist. He does not believe that we need new forms of logic – like modal logic – or probabilities. McCarthy thinks that these areas have their uses, of course, but to him they are far less important than pure logic. This is also reflected in his recommendation to people wanting to study AI: he recommends them to study mathematical logic, and to read analytical philosophy (i.e. Russell before he was corrupted by Wittgenstein...)

This strong belief in logic also forms the basis of McCarthy's rejection of the different critiques of AI that have emerged over the years. He mentions Dreyfus, Penrose and others and when I ask him if he believes their critique has relevance for the field, and if there are things that human minds can do that are not translatable to algorithms he simple says ”no”. And there is an incredibly strong point here: the burden of evidence should, of course, be shifted to the person arguing that there are things the human mind can do that are not algorithmic. Becase what are they then? Penroses answer – that quantum-level qualities of the human mind makes it unique – simply sound to ridiculous, and it is not even clear how such an hypothesis could be empircally verified.

But the question of AI could still be obsolete. There are many other possibilities. One simple possibility would be this: before we have computer programs that achieve human level intelligence, the clear bordeline between human and other intelligence will have been blurred and it will no longer be relevant to speak about artificial intrelligenve. Rather, we will speak about symbiotic intelligence, connoting all kinds of intelligence networks that can develop. One simple such symbiotic intelligence – between humans – is Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedians depend in a high degree on Google so they use the advanced page-ranking mechanisms in Google to enhance their editorial capabilities. The end result is a mesh intelligence where the artifical and ”natural” components interact seamlessly.

Perhaps we will not discuss AI separately, and perhaps we will give up the idea of trying to acsertain the intelligence of computer programs. The question of AI may well be a category mistake: asking if a computer program is intelligent, may be lika asking if a human organ is intelligent. It is the networks resulting from interactions between different components – artifical or not – that is the relevant unit of intelligence.

McCarthy is reluctant to think so. He thinks that before the line between human and artifical intelligence blurs we will have developed some sort of artifical intelligence. He even thinks that there could very well be a graduate student out there today, who has solved the basic problems that still riddle the field. But we don't know yet. He defintely seems to think that AI will become a reality, and that we will have to deal with programs that are as intelligent as – or much more intelligen than – we are. This is a truly fascinating future...

The future of material progress

The second subject of our discussions are the pages that professor McCarthy has set up on sustainable material progress. McCarthy, who describes himself as an extreme optimist (one who thinks that things will work out well even if people do not heed his advice), has spent a tremendous amount if time with these pages, and the most populat of them have recieved a lot of traffic. The pages are the perhaps biggest collection of reasons to be upbeat about the future of the world that exist on the Internet. (Why does he do it? "The usual mixture of public spirit and ego").

I ask professor McCarthy why he is so optimistic. What made him do this? His answer is very interesting. He simple states: "I never stopped".

Then he explains that in the 50s everybody was this upbeat about the future, and as far as he is concerned there are no reaons not to be. McCarthy – in this sense – is a relic from another, much more positive, era when it comes to the view of the future. He thinks that human kind will continue to develop, populate the galaxy and expand it's powers indefintely to the borders set down by the first and second principles of thermodynamics. This is almost dizzying for someone like myself, whoi grew up in the shadow of the cold war, with imminent threats of global waming, comets and other prophesies of doom. But it is also liberating.

McCarthy supports his argument with facts, sources and a lot of data. But when I ask him if he has recieved a lot of criticism, he says ”No, sadly not.” He thinks that this is because his thinking is so deviant from the current thinking of the day that he safely can be ignored. This is probably true, but this speaks against not him, but more against our current zeitgeist.

Take one simple example. McCarthy is a strong proponent for nuclear power. He thinks that nuclear power and hydrogen will constitute a stable energy system that can sustain material progress for a long, long time. (Until the sun goes cold at least, and we will have to have come up with something else to live on by then). In his unbridled support for nuclear energy he is almost alone. Even those that argue in favor of nuclear energy today, do so from an argument of necessity. Peter Schwartz recently did this in a seminar held by the Long Now foundation – and his argument was that if we rely on oil we will have geopolitical tensions that will end in global war. So in a situation where the alternative is global war, nuclear energy could be ok.

McCarthy notes that this issue has become enormously ideologized. And the ideology is tainting the rational assessment of the technology, and this really makes him irritated. He cites numerous examples where nuclear energy is almost eliminated from discussions of future energy, just because it is controversial.

In this, and in the overall pessimism of the future, McCarthy finds no other explanation than the radical movement of 1968. The movement created a ”the-end-is-near”-mindset that has turned out to be incredibly hard to break – in part because the 68-generation now is in power in most media outlets, companies, public sector agencies and other places. The optimistic generation of the 1950s is, like McCarthy a generation emeritus.

But McCarthy has great faith in the future (though I sure that he would scoff at that description – it is not for him about ”faith”). He thinks that we will continue to develop and that the future will out. The risks – that a public ideology of doom creates a negative selective pressure on innovations, science and investments – are there, but they will be overcome.

Extreme optimism, anyone?

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John LeGates has a tremendous experience in working with ICT-policy issues, as well as with policy analysis. When I meet him I want to discuss the future, but he starts off with issuing a caveat: he does not know how to predict the future, and it is clear that he does not think that anyone else does either. His grounds for this belief are simple: look back ten years and see who actually managed to predict the future.

He is his own counter-example, however. Back in 1980 LeGates wrote a paper that reduced the entire media industry to panic. He tried to sketch the plausible implications of information technology on the media world, and when I ask him now what he thought he got wrong, what he would change, he thinks for quite some time, and then answers, serioiusly, that he probably wouldn't change anything except for the timing. In a sense he thought that what is happening now (see the earlier post on a crisis in American media) would happen sooner, but it is happening now.

Well, what about the media then? LeGates predicts a two-tiered development (or rather: observes today that news industries are dividing into two distinct markets: the global/national and the local. Local news will always be needed, but global/national news may become commodities. This is not a novel idea, there are others who think the same. And on the commodity market of global and national news we could easily imagine that we will see a market for analysis and refined commentary emerge. The blogs are early entrants in this market, though LeGates thinks that they lack editorial quality (but that this might be changing). Personally, I think that editorial objectivity may have a niche market, but lessons from early American media seem to indicate that partisan, vile and propagandistic media can succeed quite well.

And the media is, of course, not the only sector of society that is being disrupted by the new technologies that develop. The natural question to ask is of course if the future will continue like this. John LeGates thinks it will not – he thinks we will see even more instability and an increased rate of change. While he is reluctant to predict the future, he notes that there are things happening now: forces, actors, trends – that can be used to understand the present, and often this is as useful as you could expect. One of the strongest and most persistent trends is that price/performance is increasing continually. And this in turn will lead to evermore instability and innovation. Often disruptive innovation, at that.

LeGates mentioned Moore's law as an example. I ask him whether he thinks that there are bounds to the development of price/performance and Moore's law. He smiles and says that there has always been such limits. And funnily, he notes, these bounds will always be reached in eight years or so. With regular intervals a paper is published that states that things cannot continue to evolve like they have sofar – but during the 40 years LeGates has been working with technology policy, well, they have continued to develop quickly breaking through all bounds.

The bounds, he explains, are there. But they are functions of the tools we have today. So when somebody say's that Moore's law will only hold true another 8 years, well they are correct: but only if we assume that nothing happens in eight years. And this never happens. During the eight years advances, changing technology bases and other trends eliminate the bounds. Progress knows bounds, but it keeps pushing them ahead.

This is really interesting. There should be a word for this phenomenon, and it is reminiscent of the worry horizons I tried to explore in a previous post. This boundary horizon is where our current tools will become worthless and fail to accelerate change. Over time it would be reasonable to guess that the boundary horizon has become shorter and shorter, and of course, on could formulate the singularity as the point where our tools become worthless the moment they are invented. The relationship between the tools of progress and progress is not well explored, and the tool horizon/boundary horizon may well be a useful concept to introduce in futures studies.

What slows this down then? Well, one thing, we agree – is regulation.John LeGates explains that all technologies go through phases and that during it's development at technology ”acquires the usually stakeholder accretions”. That is, the technology becomes politicized. This phenomenon might even be accelerating. As our society becomes more and more technology focused we seem to think that technology needs to be analysed and assessed from a societal standpoint earlier than before.

LeGates says that when he discusses this with large corporations, a worrying pattern is emerging. Many large companies note that they get more back from a dollar spent in the regulatory/legal department than in R&D. This is, of course, an extremely short-sighted view, but it seems to hold true. This encourages lawsuits over patents and copyrights, lobbying for retaining different regulatory perks (especially for large telcos) and other legal/regulatory strategies over basic research and development.

It seems as if R&D is perhaps best conducted, not within old firms, but in new entrants. Overall it may well be true that it is cheaper to buy these entrants than to finance research of your own. This would lead, in the long run, to an innovation system where large companies invest little or nothing in research. But the big question is if this is rational: if a dollar invested in research in a large company typically, over a time of ten years, returns two dollars, and if that same money could be used to by innovative firms the problem becomes two-fold: what are the costs for acquiring capital for these small innovative firms and what are the losses the large company suffers (or the gains) when it is continually forced to merge with smaller, more innovative companies? The equation looks quite complicated.

John LeGates finishes with an interesting observation: he notes that there is so much happening today that we tend to miss, and that there is no need to try to predict the future. The only thing we have to do is look around us and identify where we are today. That in itself is a very hard task. What is the state of the art in computer science, nano-technology and biotech? Who knows?

Maybe this is already the future.

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Today I went out to Bethesda and visited with the World Future Society (yes, they need a web site remake, and they are getting one), an organization with a membership of some 25 000 people in 80 different countries, all focused on future studies in it's different shapes and forms. Mack, who has more than 36 years of experience in the Future Studies business, is a fascinating figure. He basically knows everybody in the future studies sector, has taken part in most of the large projects and travels extensively to conferences and events all around the world. As the president of the WFS he has a daunting task: to educate and further the field of future studies. But things are looking brighter by the day.

On methods

The first thing we discussed was if there is any kind of consensus on methods in future studies. Mack maintains that there is at least a core of methods that - even if they come in variants - most futurists are familiar with. As examples he mentioned technology impact assessment scenarios, the Delphi method and cross impact analysis. These methods form a core tool set for future studies. All of them were born, more or less, in RAND after world war II. These methods are accepted, but they are now also being challenged by less quantitative methods such as casual layered analysis. (Now, I am sceptical of that one, but will try to learn more - postmodernism is so, so...boring).

On Ray Kurzweil

Considering that the singularity believers (many of them are best characterized as believers, although Kurzweil himself is harder to pin down in this category) are invading the field, it was interesting to hear that Mack - even though he far from agrees with everything Kurzweil says - thinks that Kurzweil has one important valid point. The rate of change is increasing. Mack's view on this was that we see clear evidence of additive and enabling effects that create and support a law of increasing returns. There are also unconnected developments, but many phenomena actually seem to change faster. What, then, does this mean for future studies? They must become more frenetic, Mack answers. They become less leisurely and need to be implemented faster. (Theoretically, of course, there is a limit where the time it takes to perform the study and implement it in a complex organization actually exceeds the validitytime of the analysis. When this happens future studies become positively harmful to organizations, since they would be more helped by (or their only possibility is to) going into a solely reactive mode.)

On implementation

One of the perhaps most difficult tasks that any futurist faces (no matter what they call themselves) is of course to implement the strategies suggested in the results of their future studies. This is hard in the extreme, but Mack says that there are some things to remember: ensure leadership buy-in at an early stage, and best of all (if possible) engage the corporate leadership in the studies themselves. Then ensure that the staff circulates in this role - the risk is otherwise that the corporate futurist becomes an isolated satellite on his own mission, gradually going out of the organization's orbit. Sunset clauses and time limits may ensure that this does not happen (as examples of extremely succesful future studies groups Mack mentioned some of the many 2000-groups formed in 1980). Mack also pointed out that even succesful change sometimes actually will require a scapegoat - a worrying proposition for anyone involved in strategic change.

On software

One of the perhaps most interesting developments right now is the development of dedicated software for future studies. Mack maintained that this might very well happen, but that there are several problems intertwined with developing these tools. One is that they may very well become examples of black box analysis: the software provides an analysis but the grounds or calculations it is based on is opaque to the recipient. Such analysis is rarely useful since you do not know what the factors behind the analysis were, and what to do if they (or even if they have) changed. Future studies remain - in a very positive sense - a craft requiring experience, knowledge and transparency. One could even argue that the results of future studies - the actual visions of the future, scenario or matrices you have - are far less relevant than the process itself, since it accentuates the situation you are in, the critical factors and counterfactors of change as well as the possible course of action.

Mack also said that he would be happy for someone to open up a Stockholm Chapter of the WFS, and this seems like a good idea. All interested contact me and let's see what we can do!

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