Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

What Goes Around

…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.

Recommended Reading

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.

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Technologically Useful

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:

Techscore.jpg

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!

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Lemonade

In a recent post, Stephen remarks:

Our current level of technology and civilization is not just the product of our scientific, political, and religious heroes. Fools and villains had a role too. Without the advancements the U.S. had to make to wage World War II – and those of captured Nazi scientists – it would not have been possible for the United States to put a man on the Moon in 1969. We wouldn’t even have tried except for our contest with the “evil empire.”

I’m not suggesting that we celebrate bad people for the work they force from good people. But the human network is capable of surprising advancement in spite of stress – and sometimes because of stress. It proves the cliche’ “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

It’s true. Whether acting as individuals, nations, or an entire species, the human imperative is to improve the human condition. The challenges we face are either thrust upon us by nature or created by us. Whenever we solve a problem, we tend to overcompensate — the additional value created sometimes becomes a new problem that needs to be solved, and sometimes allows us to enjoy new benefits that we weren’t even looking for. An example of the first type of overcompensation is built into us genetically — our ability to store fat on our bodies. Human beings developed that ability as a means of not starving to death, but now in places where food is abundant, human health suffers significantly when we allow too much fat to develop on our bodies. So we have new problems and we begin developing new solutions.

Stephen’s example of the birth of the space program fits into the latter category of overcompensation. The problem the US government was solving was one of making sure that not all the missile experts from Nazi Germany ended up helping the Soviets figure out how to blow us to smithereens. Sending a man to the moon was partly the resolution of a new struggle that emerged and partly a tremendous bonus we got as a result of solving the first problem.

Something about Stephen’s analysis sounded very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. For some reason, it reminded me of the interview I did with John Smart a few years ago. I started reading back through the interview, and then it hit me:

In my own research, there has never been a catastrophe in known universal history (supernova, KT-meteorite, plague, civilization collapse, nuclear detonation, reactor meltdown, computer virus, 9/11, you name it) that did not function to accelerate the average distributed complexity (ADC) of the computational network in which it was embedded. It is apparently this learning of our immune systems that keeps the universe on a smooth curve of continually accelerating change. If there’s one rule that anyone who studies accelerating change in complex adaptive systems should realize, it is that immunity, interdependence, and intelligence always win. This is not necessarily so for the individual, who charts his or her own unique path to the future but is often breathtakingly wrong. But the observation holds consistently for the entire amorphous network.

lemonade.jpg

So the adage that “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” does not apply just to humanity. If John Smart is right, there’s a universal imperative which underpins the human imperative. The overcompensating that we do in the face of challenges isn’t just an effective strategy; it’s what sentient beings are bound to do in a universe driven by the Law of Accelerating Returns. Give the universe lemons, it makes lemonade. Being, as we are, a part of that same universe, human beings seem to have little choice but to do likewise.

I agree with Stephen that we shouldn’t celebrate oppressors, even though fighting them may lead to more benefits than simply ending their oppression. Nor should we be happy when faced with problems like climate change or peak oil. But we should take comfort in the fact that any challenge we face is likely to result not only in a solution, but also in new, unanticipated value being added to the overall human equation — along with new problems, allowing the cycle to begin again.

Lemonade, anyone?

(Cross-Posted to BetterHumans.)

Killer Mice!

How can gangs of tiny mice take out an albatross 300 times their (individual) weight? I guess it helps that the bird just kind of sits there:

The scientists describe a brutal attack to illustrate the finding that chicks didn’t seem to fight against the attackers. “No chicks displayed appropriate behavioral responses to attacks, even though mice had eaten through the body wall of one filmed albatross chick and were consuming the contents of the chick’s abdominal cavity,” they write in a report of the research published in the journal Biology Letters.

By late September 2004, 100 of the 256 monitored albatross chicks had died. Before the mouse attacks, all the chicks were apparently healthy, suggesting the rodent thugs didn’t target weak or sick individuals.

Warning: the video may be a little disturbing for bird-lovers. (That was quick. Now it appears that the video is gone.)

Not responding to being devoured would be what I would call a significant evolutionary maladaptation. These birds need to get serious about self-defense.

Losing the Ability to Forget

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.