Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Shadows of What May Be

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.

FastForward Radio — Living in the Dream Time

On a special Wednesday edition of FastForward Radio, futurists Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon explore various issues related to the future, including the future of human evolution. Recently at the Speculist we’ve been talking about whether humanity is evolving away from negative traits such as racism, but we’re also forced to confront the issue of whether we’re evolving towards negative traits such as obsessive media-driven attention-seeking.

Recent studies show that human beings are becoming more fertile. Is there a chance that increased fecundity will lead to a dumbing down of humanity as depicted in the movie Idiocracy? Taking a longer view, are we living in a mysterious dream time that comes before the true beginning of human history, and making (perhaps unfortunate) choices that will impact trillions of lives for many billions of years to come?

Tune in and discuss.

Archived recording available here:

Listen to FastForward Radio... on Blog Talk Radio





Good News. Really.

It just doesn’t sound like it at first:

AP) NEW ORLEANS A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

Yes, what possible chance does the “offspring of such relationships” have of finding acceptance in American society in this day and age?

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Okay, fine, but not everybody gets to be president. And there’s no question that some people who come from a mixed-race background have a very difficult time of it. So I guess it’s perfectly reasonable that this guy would come to the conclusion that such people should simply therefore not exist at all. And that he should be the one making that decision.

My wife comes from a mixed-race background; my baby daughter, even more so. If people like Keith Bardwell were calling the shots, neither of them would ever have been allowed to be born.

However, I said there was good news and there is. Leave it to James Taranto to spell it out:

Bardwell’s protest that he is not a racist is laughable. Nonetheless, the inevitable hand-wringing about the persistence of racism in America is bunk. This story underscores the immense racial progress America has made.

Within living memory, this would not even have been a news story. As recently as 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in 16 states, including Louisiana. Today Bardwell, for voicing views that carried the force of law a little over 40 years ago, is viewed by almost everyone as an outrageous freak. Bardwell is just a guy with a stupid and crazy idea who decided to make a personal statement rather than do the job he was hired to do. He is not a symbol of inequality in America.

Absolutely. We are rapidly evolving away from this kind of bigoted, narrow-minded ignorance. The good news here is how utterly shocking this story is. Such attitudes simply no longer have a place in American society, thank God.

Things really are getting better all the time.

Ah, Andromeda

She’s lovely.

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She overwhelmed us when we first saw her — literally opening up whole new universes of possibility:

Andromeda, a hop and a skip away in galactic terms at 2.5 million light years, was the first galaxy to be recognised outside the Milky Way, and the nearest spiral galaxy to our own.

Its discovery transformed our understanding of the universe. Beforehand it was thought that the mere 200 billion or so stars of the Milky Way represented the entire cosmos.

Since Andromeda was confirmed to be a separate entity, itself containing around a trillion stars, the estimate has grown to include more than 100 billion galaxies, each containing tens or hundreds of billions of stars.

And now, all these years later, we notice her again and find her to be as graceful, mysterious, and alluring as ever. Nice neighborhood we live in, isn’t it?

Friday Videos, Flu Edition — Week 2

Well, I’m still not back on my blogging game (obviously) but in my achy insomnia last night I came upon some items of interest. I give you the original trailer for Star Wars:

Just goes to show you how much George Lucas changed movies. In a post-Lucas world, a trailer with this level of teh suckage would never see the light of day.

And please note the movie’s title: no episode number, now “New Hope” nonsense. Lucas had not yet dreamed up a number of things that he “planned all along,” including apparently — spoiler circa 1980 follows — the fact that Vader was Luke’s father.

From the Youtube comments:

You can’t say you wouldn’t have liked this trailer because you don’t have a 1977 mind dude.

It was ALL different in those times, even the way we conceived coolness.

It was a remote and strange epoch in human history, that’s for sure. I have high school pictures that could very much make this guy’s point.

Next we find:

See how Lucas changed the world? This looks like an infinitely better movie than the first one when in fact it was only substantially better. From the voice over at the end, I take it that this was a “now showing” trailer, not a “coming soon” trailer — I’m not sure whether that distinction even exists today.

Finally, a trailer for a movie that was never released — at least not with the title shown:

Lucas claims that he had to change the title at the last minute because he suddenly realized that revenge is not a Jedi value. While that speaks to the overall coherence of a guy who planned so many things “from the beginning,” I’ve also heard that this was a head fake on merchandising. He knew what the title would be all along, and when his officially approved action figures and so forth hit the market, they had the right name on them. Any merchandise labeled “Revenge” was immediately spotted as a fake.

Note to Harvey — I don’t think it’s where I cough so much. I just need to break this habit of licking doorknobs.

Friday Videos — Sagan Remixed

I’m in bed with the flu, so blogging has been even lighter than the lighter-than-usual recent norm, but I had to post this. Via Harvey, here’s Carl Sagan singing (sort of) some truly profound ideas:

And is it just the cough syrup talking, or does Carl sound a little like Kermit?

UPDATE: Was catching up on my podcast listening and only just realized that this was this week’s closing music! Sorry, I’m a little slow…

FastForward Radio with George Dvorsky and PJ Manney

Stephen
Gordon welcomes guest-host PJ Manney and guest George Dvorsky back to
fastForward Radio to talk about where technology is leading us and to
continue the discussion about whether we are alone in the universe.

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If you listen live you can contribute to the show by joining the text chat.  Our chat host Sally Morem will be on hand to lead the discussion. Get all the details on listening live at our audio host, Blog Talk Radio. The show starts at:


10:30 Eastern/9:30 Central/8:30 Mountain/7:30 Pacific.





 About Our Guests 


Canadian futurist, consultant and award winning blogger, George Dvorsky has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology – particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and Humanity+. georgedvorsky.jpg

As a frequent guest and occasional co-host — not to mention our official Hollywood correspondent — PJ Manney brings a unique perspective to FastForward Radio. She is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She has written extensively on H+ topics, having previously been involved in motion picture development (Hook, It Could Happen to You, Universal Soldier) and writing for television (Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess).

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Who Are They Sticking it To?

Via InstaPundit, the new Futurisms blog from The New Atlantis is providing some live and in-depth coverage of the Singularity Summit with surprisingly restrained snark for an organization that takes such pride in its association with Leon Kass. Of course, the snark does come through from time to time, along with what appears to be genuine puzzlement over the tone of much of the audience reaction to certain ideas. Here’s a snippet:

A questioner asks what the FDA has to say about this, since they don’t recognize aging as a disease (yet). Benford calls on David Rose to answer the question. Rose says the FDA is regulating health, but he says “everyone in this room is going to hell in a handbasket, not because of one or two genetic diseases,” but because we’re getting uniformly worse through aging. And that, he says, is what they’re trying to stop. Scattered but voracious applause and cheering. It’s that same phenomenon again — this weird rally attitude of yeah, you tell ‘em! Who is it that they think they’re sticking it to? Or what?

Gosh, I can’t imagine. Maybe it’s people who, upon seriously examining radical life extension, immediately start looking for ways to “help in forming the sort of public opinion that will be necessary to stave off some of these developments.” Or maybe it’s those who describe the inevitability of aging in poetic, if not romanticized terms…

This drama of growing old, passing down, and passing on is hardly new. It has always been at the heart of the human lifecycle, recognized by the wise men and women of every age

…and who put the blame for increases in dementia (and the increased fear of the possibility thereof that many suffer from as they age) squarely where it belongs — medical progress:

The rising prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias in old age only makes these questions about the trajectory of life more acute. Besides the normal fear of senescence and death, many people are horrified at the thought of ending their lives only after a long period not just of physical frailty and disability but also of mental incapacitation, impaired memory, diminished awareness, loss of modesty and self-control, distortion of personality and temperament, inability to recognize friends and loved ones, and general dullness and enfeeblement of inner life. It seems a cruel irony that the very medical advances that have kept many of us reasonably healthy into a ripe old age have, by the same token, exposed us to the ravages of incurable and progressive dementia, and to the prospect that our life’s drama may well end with an extended final act marked by a gradual descent into mindlessness.

You can see how the New Atlantis gang might have a hard time connecting the dots, here. They have achieved such a lofty moral, spiritual, and intellectual state that they have a difficult time even imagining that the positions they routinely take on issues — being manifestly and self-evidently correct — could be seriously opposed by anyone, much less in a vocal and enthusiastic way.

FastForward Radio — World Transformation for World Leaders and Getting to a Post-QWERTY Future

Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon use recent encouraging, acceleration-aware commentary from Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu as a jumping-off point for defining what the world’s leaders need to know about accelerating change and the transformations we’re currently experiencing. Plus, what does the origin of the standard QWERTY keyboard have to say about where the world is going and what needs to change? Tune in and find out! 




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Archived recording available here:

Listen to FastForward Radio... on Blog Talk Radio

A Post-QWERTY World

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.