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James Lileks reflects on the end of the world, September 11, 2003.
Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster
Craigslist and Top Down vs. Bottom-Up
The conflict between the top-down and bottom-up models of organizing society has been a big part of our discussion on the past few editions of FastForward Radio.
As outlined by Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist, virtually all of human progress has been driven by a bottom-up process that starts when motivated individuals generate ideas, methods of doing things, and actual stuff. When these ideas, methods, and stuff are allowed to freely interact with (or as Ridley puts it, “have sex with”) the ideas, methods, and stuff produced by others, something pretty amazing happens: you get many more (and better-developed) ideas, tremendously improved methods, and a massive increase in both the quality and quantity of available stuff.
Top-down structures such as government exist primarily to keep this process from going off the rails. Top-down models establish infrastructure and rules of play. But they can’t compete with bottom-up approaches to producing ideas, methods, and stuff. In fact, top-down structures are better suited to hindering these things enabling them.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. Not all ideas, methods, and stuff represent progress. When some industrious individual is working towards improved methods for stealing identities or selling children into sex slavery, you definitely want an effective way of slowing them, or better yet shutting them down altogether. There may be bottom-up solutions to some of these kinds of problems, and technology may provide more of these in the future, but for now I question whether any would be as effective as good old top-down.
Somebody tell me, for example, what the bottom-up solution would be for this:
Cybercriminals Creating 57,000 Fake Web Sites Every Week
(H/T: P. J. Manney on Facebook.)
Problems tend to arise when top-down entities become overly burdensome on legitimate bottom-up activity, or when they are seen as some kind of replacement for it. This is true whether the top-down entity is a government agency or a large business trying to rig the game against new entrants. Even more detrimental to progress is when businesses collude with government to try to block competition — that’s when top-down truly starts to get ugly.
All of which leads us to Craigslist. Latest developments:
Craigslist took down Adult Services
in the U.S. four days ago, replacing it with the word “censored”
without explanation. Advocates seized on the ambiguous move today,
calling on Craigslist to remove the infamous section in cities across
the world.
Interestingly, protecting children from being sold into sexual slavery (as cited above) is one of the reasons given for the shutdown. So this is an example of a good use of top-down authority, right?
Well…
Further along in the article, we read this:
Profit is a powerful motivator and the fact that Craigslist makes so
much money off these ads undermines its moral authority [UPDATE: A
reader points out that Craigslist started charging for these ads after
negotiations with attorneys general and National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children, so that credit card information could be kept on
file. But the ads now constitute a significant portion
of the site's revenue]. But is ending that revenue stream a worthy
pursuit, given the strong arguments that Craigslist does more good than
harm by making it easy for law enforcement to find and track sex
traffickers, and empowering prostitutes to escape often-abusive
middlemen?
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If Craigslist actually helps law enforcement agencies track down and arrest sex traffickers, why would the authorities want to close that part of the site down? Or maybe it’s someone else who wants to take Craigslist down. Career-minded state attorneys general? Traditional newspapers who have lost so much revenue to Craigslist over the years?
Hard to say.
All I know for sure is that it doesn’t get much more bottom-up than Adult Services ads on Craigslist. Maybe those ads represented real progress. Or maybe they represented a danger to society that needed to be slapped down.
That it’s hard to say which is the case just goes to show you how difficult sorting out all this top-down / bottom-up stuff can truly be.
Fast Forward Radio — The Acceleration Agenda
Phil and Stephen take a positive look at future society, future technology, and future lifestyles. What are the most promising indicators of a positive future? And what can we do to move things along?
Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio
The City of the Future
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Q. What do the following items have in common?
- Flying cars
- 300-story buildings
- Shiny jumpsuits
- Domed Cities
A: Each is a long-predicted feature of the future which has not shown up yet because it is not possible (or at least highly impractical) and because its implied benefits, if any, hardly seem worth the costs and/or risks.
Granted, the risks associated with shiny jumpsuits are more social than existential.
Anyhow, not so fast there on the domed cities says our good friend Brian Wang:
Previously the case
was made for improved feasibility [of creating domed cities] with existing covered areas and domes
in the 30-40 acre ranges and with costs of $400 million to 1 billion.
There is also new strong teflon material (EFTE) which is 100 times
lighter than glass and which can lower costs by 4 times. It was also
shown that Domed Cities can reduce heating and cooling costs and energy
usage by over 90%.Domed cities will enable every day to have moderate temperature and no
rain or snow and no ice formation. Current trends show the elderly
population will rise dramatically, obesity will rise unless there are
changes and about 3 billion people will be added to city populations in
existing or new cities over the next 30 years. Domed Cities will be
made far more walkable than current cities and enable citizens to be
more active which will reduce obesity and eliminate traffic deaths and
accidents. Ice and rain are a factor in about half of all of the more
severe falls. Falls on ice and snow are 5 times more likely to result
in a fracture. Falls still occur indoors now so falls will still occur
but increased risks factors from more slippery surfaces can be removed.
Also, many new cities will be in places like China and a well designed
domed city can be used to reduce air pollution, which kills 1 person
out of every thousand in China.
So let’s see if I’ve got this right — cleaner, safer cities where you never get rained or snowed on and where heating and cooling costs have been cut by 90% or more. An added benefit, it seems to me, would be that putting domes over cities greatly reduces the heat sink effect. If modern cities are contributing to global warming, domed cities would slow down or eliminate the problem.
The closest I’ve ever come to experiencing life in a domed city was staying at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville. The Gaylord is essentially a small city — with hotel, convention center, restaurants, shops, and a large park (including a small artificial “river”) a
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ll under one enormous transparent roof. Wikipedia tells us that the atrium covers about 4.5 acres.
There is very little sense that you’re somehow “indoors” when you’re sitting in sunlight with blue sky above, birds singing, and a light breeze blowing. The only real giveaway was that it was August and one could walk around quite comfortably in business attire. The temperature in the atrium was mid 70s — outside it was high 80s — and I’m guessing there was a 20-point or greater gap in humidity levels.
Here’s another item I could have added to the list at the top — weather control. Someday we’ll have highly advanced technology that will enable us to truly control the weather, presumably for the whole planet. In the mean time, weather control is pretty easy to accomplish in smaller spaces — all you have to do is enclose them. Of course, it’s a limited kind of weather control. The fact that you don’t get rained on in the Gaylord atrium didn’t prevent the entire complex from being partially submerged during the recent flooding.
The domes Brian is describing will be much higher, much lighter, and probably much closer to being completely transparent than the roof of the Gaylord atrium. Those cities will eventually offer all the benefits of being outdoors with none of the drawbacks.And of course, we’ll still have the whole rest of the planet undomed so nobody needs to worry about losing the outdoor experience.
Brian has done a whole series on domed cities over at Next Big Future. Read the whole thing:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/
FastForward Radio — Techonomy
Phil and Stephen welcome Brian Wang of Next Big Future for a readout on the recent Techonomy conference at Lake Tahoe.
techonomy (te-kän’-uh-mÄ“) n. [tech(nology) + (ec)onomy]
organized activities related to the invention, development,
production, distribution and consumption of technology-enhanced goods
and services that a society uses to address the problem of scarcity and
to enhance the quality of life.
Plus, with Brian on the show you can count on plenty of news about the future and energy.
Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio
About our guest:
Brian Wang is a futurist
who blogs about all things future-related at NextBigFuture.
He is the Director of Research for the Lifeboat Foundation and a member
of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force.
Let's Not Get All Excited
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It sounds pretty exciting when you first start reading it, but when you get to the bottom you realize that there might less to this than meets the eye.
It all sounds plausible enough — use RNA interference to knock out liver cancer by depriving tumors of the ability to to make proteins. No more proteins, no more cells. No more cells, no more tumor…get it? This is a new kind of warfare. Instead of sending in troops to engage the enemy one by one, we’re sending in Special Ops to cut off their supply lines. Starve the bastards.
The technique’s ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington’s disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.
Wow, the cure for everything! Can I get two bottles? But wait:
“I think RNAi could work for anything,” [John] Rossi [a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California] says. “But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good.”
See, this is how they get you. Just a cure for liver cancer. Ha. Who needs that?
Let’s Not Get All Excited
Image via Wikipedia
It sounds pretty exciting when you first start reading it, but when you get to the bottom you realize that there might less to this than meets the eye.
It all sounds plausible enough — use RNA interference to knock out liver cancer by depriving tumors of the ability to to make proteins. No more proteins, no more cells. No more cells, no more tumor…get it? This is a new kind of warfare. Instead of sending in troops to engage the enemy one by one, we’re sending in Special Ops to cut off their supply lines. Starve the bastards.
The technique’s ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington’s disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.
Wow, the cure for everything! Can I get two bottles? But wait:
“I think RNAi could work for anything,” [John] Rossi [a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California] says. “But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good.”
See, this is how they get you. Just a cure for liver cancer. Ha. Who needs that?
Computer / User Privilege?
At H+ Magazine, Brad Templeton outlines the case for giving computers a privileged status regarding our personal information not unlike that afforded to attorneys or priests.
If we’re afraid our computers will betray us, we won’t be able to use them fully. The harm incurred by that loss must be balanced against the benefits of catching more crooks. We’re going to use our computers a lot more than we use our doctors, lawyers and priests.
It might be argued, in fact, that we already use our computers a great deal more. And in dealing with lawyers, doctors and priests, there is a real conversation with a human being and we’re typically fully alert about what we say — and of the risks of saying it. With computers, we are usually casual. They are like intimate family. Not too far in the future, they will be implanted in our bodies. For some, such as deaf people with cochlear implants, computers are already connected to their brains. If you can’t trust the computer implanted in your skull, who can you trust? Thanks to this familiarity, the criminals among us seem happy to let their computers record as they commit their crimes. Often, they are just not thinking about it. Thus, we might feel that while the confessional becomes almost valueless without clerical privilege, the computer is only modestly diminished.
But it is diminished. Therefor, it seems that some level of privilege should be granted to us and our interactions with our most trusted technologies.
I like the idea. It certainly seems that the recent trend has been towards greater and greater police power, however, and I can’t help but wonder how fiercely the criminal justice system would fight putting such a standard in place?
UPDATE: Sort of related: 10 Fallacies About Web Privacy
Fast Forward Radio — Personalized Life Extension and Singularity Summit Recap
On a special extended 90-minute edition of FastForward Radio, Foresight Institute co-founder and president Christine Peterson joins us to talk about her upcoming conference on Personalized Life Extension. Register here — use the discount code FASTFORWARDRADIO for a $100 discount. Plus, George Dvorsky and PJ Manney help us round out our recap of the Singularity Summit.
About Our Guests
Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is the co- founder and President of Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects.
PJ Manney is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She is an occasional guest host on FastForward Radio as well as being our official Hollywood correspondent.
Canadian futurist, consultant and award winning blogger, George Dvorsky writes and speaks extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology — particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience.
Personalized Life Extension Conference October 9-10
This very exciting event is just a bit more than a month away. Says organizer Christine Peterson:
Join us for two days of practical, realistic exploration of what each of us can do to slow individual aging and live the longest, healthiest, most active life possible.
A terrific lineup of speakers includes Esther Dyson, Peter Thiel, and Greg Fahy as well as some folks we’ve been fortunate enough to have as guests on FastForward Radio: Terry Grossman, Sonia Arrison, Gregory Benford, and of course Christine — with whom we’ll also be chatting on our upcoming podcast.
The Conference will be October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. I personally can’t make it to California that weekend but I’m hoping we get a Speculist regular to cover it for us.
You can be that person! Register here. Get a $100 off the cost of registration by using the discount code SPECULIST.