If this story isn’t a premo example of the power of the wisdom of the crowd, or self-organizing processes, I don’t know what could be:
Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites.
The enormous dataset provides a global picture of “what the world is paying attention to”, the researchers say. They ran statistical analyses to identify the more important clusters on each map. Next they analysed the text tags added to photographs in those clusters, as well as key visual features from each image, to automatically find the world’s most interesting tourist sites.
According to Flickr, New York is the world’s most photographed city. But London contains four of the seven most photographed landmarks in the world – Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern art gallery, Big Ben and the London Eye. Some bizarre results emerged – the Apple Store in Manhattan is the fifth-most photographed place in the city.
Now just imagine what Wolfram/Alpha could do with this data. Wow!
Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but as a “computational knowledge engine,” it’s quite different from Google and other search engines.
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
Stephen Wolfram’s first public presentation of Wolfram|Alpha will be at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, April 28, 3:00 EDT. If you cannot attend the presentation in person, the live webcast may be an option.
Tonight Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon spoke with guests Alvis Brigis and Marisa Vitols about how to get the word out about the Singularity to a broader audience.
Our chat host Michael Darling led the chat discussion. Get all the details on listening live at our audio host, Blog Talk Radio.
By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t
produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more
often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming
the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve.
(See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)
In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety
of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in
countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but
in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus
first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants
like sulfur dioxide.
As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more
efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to
natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit
of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably
steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University
and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
The Good News
These Kuznets graphs confirm that the best way forward for the environment is
by way of technological and economic development. Technological progress gives
us the means of producing energy in increasingly clean ways and adds to our
ability to mitigate damage that’s already been done. Malthusian
and Luddite approaches are
wrong because they assume a zero-sum world (which this is not) and they ask
the developing world to forego many of the benefits of technology and economic
growth that we in the developed world take for granted, meanwhile demanding
that the developed world to take this whole standard of living thing down a
notch. Yet somehow a philosophy which is as indifferent to the human misery
it allows (and causes) as it is ineffective in protecting the environment —
the developing world will just revert to burning charcoal and peat once you
take all the other infrastructure away — dubs itself Sustainability.
True sustainability requires adopting an approach that improves the lives of
the people involved. There is only one truly sustainable direction for humanity…forward.
Consider the fact that primary schools, high schools, colleges and universities were established when information production and dissemination was very expensive, while at the same time gathering teachers and students together in one location was comparatively inexpensive.
The economics (in the bare-bones sense of the term—what’s easiest?) of the situation demanded the establishment of formal, physical schools so that hard-won knowledge could be passed onto the next generation.
This is no longer the case, as this article points out so well. Information in the form of books and lectures can be captured and posted online. Students may access them at will. The new information technologies are turning the economics of schooling upside down. And as a life-long learner, I’m glad.
My niece in Arizona will be graduating with an associate degree from Phoenix University this summer. She may or may not go on to “normal†college. I hope she doesn’t. The flexibility of her schooling and work life will be lost.
I urge her and other students her age and younger to seriously consider never going to a physical college or university. Learn as much as you can as fast as you can as cheaply as you can online. While doing so, get experience in the workplace. You’ll be far better prepared for life in the 21st century than your fellow students who take the traditional educational path.
Last fall, David Wiley stood in front of a room full of professors and university administrators and delivered a prediction that made them squirm: “Your institutions will be irrelevant by 2020.”
Wiley is one part Nostradamus and nine parts revolutionary, an educational evangelist who preaches about a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free.
Institutions that don’t adapt, he says, risk losing students to institutions that do. The warning applies to community colleges and ivy-covered universities, says Wiley, who is a professor of psychology and instructional technology at Brigham Young University.
America’s colleges and universities, says Wiley, have been acting as if what they offer — access to educational materials, a venue for socializing, the awarding of a credential — can’t be obtained anywhere else. By and large, campus-based universities haven’t been innovative, he says, because they’ve been a monopoly.
But Google, Facebook, free online access to university lectures, after-hours institutions such as the University of Phoenix, and virtual institutions such as Western Governors University have changed that. Many of today’s students, he says, aren’t satisfied with the old model that expects them to go to a lecture hall at a prescribed time and sit still while a professor talks for an hour….
The following are outtakes from my essay [work in progress] responding to this particular article:
“Living Longer: Planning for Longer Life-Spans,” by Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies. Originally published as “Extended Life-Span,” in The Futurist, April 1998, pp. 17-23.
You’re wondering why I’m responding to such an old article. Well, there are two reasons, one tied in with the theme of my comments on Steely Dan’s song, IGY. The future that never was. The other is more mundane. I stumbled onto it in an old file.
Here we go.
Cetron and Davies discussed [in the article] the 1995 discovery that melatonin acted to slow down aging in mice. It seemed at the time to be the key to solving the mystery of aging.
There were at that point 50 distinct theories of aging. Clearly, researchers hadn’t dug deep enough. Metatonin wasn’t it. This article does not mention the chromosomes’ telemaraes. Clearly their effect on aging hadn’t been discovered by 1998 or Cetron and Davies would’ve mentioned it.
Yet they riffed on all this excitement on melatonin, speculating on all the changes they were expecting in society that would grow out of life extension. Here’s a brief summary of how they thought things would go:
Their analysis dealt almost exclusively with the impact that growing average life spans were already having on the American and world economy. Cetron and Davies pointed out that our current retirement systems, including pensions and Social Security, were in 1998 (and are today) becoming rapidly obsolete. We’re living much longer now than the old “65 and you retire” paradigm established by Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s when very few workers lived that long.
As you’d imagine, their scenario for how extremely long lives would hit our current system is catastrophic. No company could support the enormous numbers of retirees for decades under such a system, neither could personal savings, neither could government programs. All would be crushed financially under the enormous strain.
[At this point I'll draw out in the full essay some of the very different conclusions on our potential future based on Kurzweil's and others' work on the idea of the Singularity.]
Here is where we get to the nub of my contention that projecting trends based on what effects life extension alone may do to present-day American society simply is no longer enough.
It is misleading to tell people if you do this, that and the other thing, you may survive (barely) in an economy dominated by a bunch of healthy, skilled, very experienced old people.
It is misleading to assure them that we will still have an economy with Social Security, pensions, companies, even money, because with the trends I detailed above, we can project to a time when we won’t have any of these things, and make a very good argument for this possibility.
Instead, if my trends hold true, we will be living in an extraordinarily rich information environment worked by superbly crafted robots that do all of the physical labor far better than we can with the enormous riches of invention and production that only a Midas could envision.
Life extension advances will not be hermetically sealed. Any “technosphere” that can produce life-extension technology can also produce, and will produce, all of the other things I’ve noted in this essay. How? By technological synergy and convergence:
Genetics (curing what ails us, and doing so much more)
Robotics (building whatever we desire on command)
Nanotechnology (doing all of the above at smaller and smaller scale, with the kind of precision that will seem magical to us today)
Information (like the physical side, growing more and more precise, and also far more voluminous)
Computers (directing all of these processes)
Two (of many) results of synergy and convergence of technology trends:
1. Replicators (think Star Trek)
2. Cell repair mechanisms (fixing what ails us cell by cell, so not only do we enjoy a greatly expanded life span, but the elderly no longer are elderly. All are young again as every mistake is fixed)
The lesson here for futurists is simple: Never, ever project your future along one linear cause and effect axis. There will be many changes and they will interweave and interact in many interesting ways. The mistake about melatonin wasn’t that big a deal. But the single-minded, single-strand projection based on it was.
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.
Some sexy immortals / folks with super-powers.
Unfortunately, the only actual billionaire pictured is not immortal,
but you get the idea. (Bet he would be a big contributor, though.)
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.
Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving
world
Special
Dispatch
April
17, 2009
Inspired by some extraordinarily
positive developments from last week, we are running a series of Better
All the Time special dispatches this week and next.
Articulating the Future of Humanity
I’m a big believer in the Human
Imperative, which states that human beings are, essentially, reconfigurers
of the universe in search of an optimum configuration. What will that eventual
configuration look like? I can’t begin to describe it. If the first single-celled
organism had been capable of thinking, it might have imagined — given the
hint that its descendants would eventually evolve into something called “human
beings” — that the primary advantage of being human would be a vastly
expanded capacity for finding food. And, yes, thatis an advantage,
but I think we can all agree that — from where we sit — it misses the point
by a fairly significant margin.
Likewise, I can assert that the endgame for the Human Imperative is a vastly
expanded capacity for, and realization of, human understanding, capability,
and happiness. And, yes, our optimum configuration of the universe will provide those things. But it will provide so much more. If we as a species
continue in the direction that we’re currently going, we will at some point
achieve the most wonderful world imaginable. At that point, we will carry
on in the direction of improvement towards either
a) an unimaginably wonderful world, or
b) a newly defined most wonderful world imaginable, provided courtesy
of a great leap forward in our ability to imagine.
Trying to define the most wonderful world imaginable is challenge enough.
If I try to tell you anything about the world described by either a) or b),
above, I’m in the position of that single-celled organism attempting to wrap
its metaphorical head around string theory or a Mozart aria or even — keeping
it within that creature’s sphere of interest — a pint of Haagen Dazs.
It just can’t be done.
So we have to stick with what we’ve got, even though it is, at best, the
faintest shadow of what the reality will be. Just to reiterate, what we’ve
got is “a vastly expanded capacity for, and realization of, human understanding,
capability, and happiness.” So we’ll all be smarter. We’ll all be more
capable. And we’ll all be happier. (And by the way, that’s a lot smarter,
a lot more capable, and a lot happier.)
Some might want to argue that third point. After all, haven’t people always
been happy and unhappy? Isn’t it fair to say that our modern technological
society has brought as much grief and misery as it has goodness? Weren’t,
say, our hunter-gatherer ancestors just as happy as we are today?
I would have to say yes, no, and definitely not.
Yes, there have always been happy and unhappy people.
No, technology has not brought as much grief and misery as it has goodness.
Granted, it has brought a lot of grief and misery. But keep in mind
that we are reconfigurers of the universe. Each new configuration seeks to
build on improvements from the past. Our aim, however misguided our attempts
to achieve it might be, is to increase the amount of human understanding,
capability, and happiness. We get it wrong a lot — a lot – but we
get it right more often. Besides, if technology really brought more misery
than happiness, we would see massive efforts to relinquish and suppress it.
But those movements are by and large fringe affairs.
No, the hunter-gatherers were not as happy as we are. I would venture to
guess that they had pretty much the same capacity for happiness that
we have, but daily hand-to-mouth survival tends limit opportunities for exploring
that capacity. Many of them lived under constant threat of being eaten by
predators. Oh, and their chances of being killed by one of their fellow human
beings were about 20
times as great as what we face today. It wasn’t quite the idyllic existence
many like to picture.
So we’ll be happier. Why? Because our material needs will be met better?
Um, yes.
Maybe money doesn’t buy happiness, but not having to worry about money
could sure buy a lot of peace of mind for a lot of folks. It’s like our ancestors
and being eaten. Take another item off the list of human woes and you’ve got
a happier human population.
Or put it this way. Take your time machine back to the middle ages. Find
some locals and explain to them that in the era you’re from, most people live better than the king
does in their day. What do they think — will people be happier in such a
world? 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.
So what will their lives be like? Again, this is just a sketch:
They will be able to do more and understand more. They will be physically
perfect–healthier than we are, as well as stronger and less prone to injury
or illness. There lives will go on indefinitely and they will be young and
healthy throughout. They will live in what we would take for unbelievable
luxury and opulence (although they won’t see it that way.) Their improved
understanding of how the world works, coupled with their vastly improved technology,
will give them the ability to perform amazing feats, things that today can
be done only in science fiction and fantasy stories.
To summarize — and I repeat, this is a single-celled organism describing
humanity — they will be sexy immortal billionaires with super powers. And
even at that stage, we’ll be a long way from the optimum configuration. But
that at least gives us something to work with.
Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving
world
Special
Dispatch
April
17, 2009
Inspired by some extraordinarily
positive developments from last week, we are running a series of Better All the Time special dispatches this week and next.
Articulating the Future of Humanity
I’m a big believer in the Human Imperative, which states that human beings are, essentially, reconfigurers of the universe in search of an optimum configuration. What will that eventual configuration look like? I can’t begin to describe it. If the first single-celled organism had been capable of thinking, it might have imagined — given the hint that its descendants would eventually evolve into something called “human beings” — that the primary advantage of being human would be a vastly expanded capacity for finding food. And, yes, thatis an advantage, but I think we can all agree that — from where we sit — it misses the point by a fairly significant margin.
Likewise, I can assert that the endgame for the Human Imperative is a vastly expanded capacity for, and realization of, human understanding, capability, and happiness. And, yes, our optimum configuration of the universe willprovide those things. But it will provide so much more. If we as a species continue in the direction that we’re currently going, we will at some point achieve the most wonderful world imaginable. At that point, we will carry on in the direction of improvement towards either
a) an unimaginably wonderful world, or
b) a newly defined most wonderful world imaginable, provided courtesy of a great leap forward in our ability to imagine.
Trying to define the most wonderful world imaginable is challenge enough. If I try to tell you anything about the world described by either a) or b), above, I’m in the position of that single-celled organism attempting to wrap its metaphorical head around string theory or a Mozart aria or even — keeping it within that creature’s sphere of interest — a pint of Haagen Dazs.
It just can’t be done.
So we have to stick with what we’ve got, even though it is, at best, the faintest shadow of what the reality will be. Just to reiterate, what we’ve got is “a vastly expanded capacity for, and realization of, human understanding, capability, and happiness.” So we’ll all be smarter. We’ll all be more capable. And we’ll all be happier. (And by the way, that’s a lot smarter,
a lot more capable, and a lot happier.)
Some might want to argue that third point. After all, haven’t people always been happy and unhappy? Isn’t it fair to say that our modern technological society has brought as much grief and misery as it has goodness? Weren’t, say, our hunter-gatherer ancestors just as happy as we are today?
I would have to say yes, no, and definitely not.
Yes, there have always been happy and unhappy people.
No, technology has not brought as much grief and misery as it has goodness. Granted, it has brought a lot of grief and misery. But keep in mind that we are reconfigurers of the universe. Each new configuration seeks to build on improvements from the past. Our aim, however misguided our attempts to achieve it might be, is to increase the amount of human understanding, capability, and happiness. We get it wrong a lot — a lot – but we get it right more often. Besides, if technology really brought more misery than happiness, we would see massive efforts to relinquish and suppress it. But those movements are by and large fringe affairs.
No, the hunter-gatherers were not as happy as we are. I would venture to guess that they had pretty much the same capacity for happiness that we have, but daily hand-to-mouth survival tends limit opportunities for exploring that capacity. Many of them lived under constant threat of being eaten by predators. Oh, and their chances of being killed by one of their fellow human beings were about 20 times as great as what we face today. It wasn’t quite the idyllic existence many like to picture.
So we’ll be happier. Why? Because our material needs will be met better?
Um, yes.
Maybe money doesn’t buy happiness, but not having to worry about money could sure buy a lot of peace of mind for a lot of folks. It’s like our ancestors and being eaten. Take another item off the list of human woes and you’ve got a happier human population.
Or put it this way. Take your time machine back to the middle ages. Find some locals and explain to them that in the era you’re from, most people live better than the kingdoes in their day. What do they think — will people be happier in such a world? 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.
So what will their lives be like? Again, this is just a sketch:
They will be able to do more and understand more. They will be physically perfect–healthier than we are, as well as stronger and less prone to injury or illness. There lives will go on indefinitely and they will be young and healthy throughout. They will live in what we would take for unbelievable luxury and opulence (although they won’t see it that way.) Their improved understanding of how the world works, coupled with their vastly improved technology, will give them the ability to perform amazing feats, things that today can be done only in science fiction and fantasy stories.
To summarize — and I repeat, this is a single-celled organism describing humanity — they will be sexy immortal billionaires with super powers. And even at that stage, we’ll be a long way from the optimum configuration. But that at least gives us something to work with.
