“If you’re going to do something truly novel, there isn’t anybody who can tell you how long it’s going to take or how much it’s going to cost. NASA’s contract with Grumman stipulated three things: performance, schedule, and cost. Well, it didn’t take us long to figure out that it didn’t quite work that way. Performance was absolutely critical. Schedule came next, and cost was a derivative of the first two.”
Joe Gavin, director, Apollo Lunar Module Program, Grumman Aerospace Corporation.
My almost 4,000-word essay on futurism and the problems generated by linear projections of technological change is finished and has been loaded onto Scribd. Here’s a sample:
Here is where we get to the nub of my contention that projecting linear trends based on what effects future radical life extension alone would have on present-day American society simply is not good enough, certainly not for the well thought out, detailed prognostications we need from professional futurists in order to think through some serious questions on our rocketing, accelerating, technological civilization. We need the kind of robust future scenarios that deal with developments in a wide range of fields and social sectors. We need to see how these developments may fit together, spurring each other on. In short, we need better predictions in order to plan our own lives. Unfortunately, we’re not getting them.
It is misleading to tell people that if you scrimp and save, refuse to retire early, educate yourself for jobs that are quickly vanishing, do this, do that, and do those other things, you may, just may, survive (barely) in an economy dominated by a bunch of healthy, skilled, very experienced old people you can’t possibly compete against.
Why? Why is this misleading? Because this simply will not happen. Yes, I know a number of bad science fiction stories have posited the war between the generations in response to shrinking societal wealth, but as I mentioned above, there is simply no way aging will be cured while nothing else changes. These scenarios are structured in this way by writers in order to give their woebegone protagonists sad, dreary lives that they struggle against in vain. They do this, presumably, to amuse their readers.
It is misleading to assure people that they will continue to enjoy the privilege of living in a society with Social Security, pensions, companies, even money, in a society that has the technological wherewithal to defeat death. Any “technosphere†that’s advanced enough to produce a radical life-extension technological revolution must also be capable of generating technological revolutions of comparable power in all other aspects of life—and will do precisely that.
The trends we are already experiencing in such fields as genetics, manufacturing automation, computer hardware and software, robotics, and finally nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will continue due to popular demand, barring a large disaster. As we track these trends, we foresee them converging in very interesting ways. We can project a wide range of scenarios to a time when we won’t have or need many of the traditional societal institutions we now believe to be indispensable.
We simply cannot tacitly assume that the society we live in today will continue to bump along for 20, 30, 40, 50 years with but a few minor technological upgrades. This isn’t realistic. This isn’t what the trend lines are telling us.
Proponents of the existence of accelerating technology are telling us 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. And life-extension technologies will play an integral role. They won’t be hermetically sealed away from those other technological developments.
It’s time to replace the linear concept of “this will happen, which will cause this to happen, which will cause this to happen…†with the non-linear concepts of technological synergy and convergence. Synergy occurs when two or more trends catalyze and amplify the effects of one another. 2 + 2 = 16. Convergence occurs when once separate technologies draw closer to one another, integrate, and produce wholly new and largely unanticipated technological offspring.
When I saw this one, I immediately thought of the Speculist:
Within 50 years humans will merge with machines and become both superintelligent and immortal, in an event known as the technological singularity. So says the ever-controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil. We pick his brains on his latest initiative, the Singularity University, and on his plan to use advancing technology to bring his father back from the dead in our exclusive interview with him this week.
Kurzweil is just one of many players who have tried to map out the future of the human race, and tried to ensure that their vision comes true,
Check out the full article here.
The five futurists listed were Vernor Vinge, Walt Disney, Alvin Toffler, the Club of Rome and H.G. Wells. All of the descriptions are interesting. The one on the Club of Rome is particularly interesting in that it stated flatly that all of the predictions as to how economic development would continue on their “business as usual track” turned out to be true. BUT, they failed to account for accelerating technological development. Oopsie. But, I guess they had a reasonably good excuse. Like most futurists in the Seventies, they had either never heard of the concept of acceleration or discounted it as unwarranted optimism.
My latest article has been posted at Helium.com. Check it out at this link.
Here’s a sample:
Consider the most striking form of fractal: the Mandelbrot Set. Mandelbrot generated a collection of points on a graph by taking a series of complex numbers, squaring each of them, adding the original number to each, and squaring them again and again. If the number remains finite after many such iterations, it remains in the Set and is plotted on the graph.
The resulting shape is composed of successful solutions to what is truly an extraordinarily simple equation. Paradoxically or not, it’s the most complex and beautiful object in mathematics. When software displays the Set in false colors, a viewer can be excused for concluding that the Set is a Set of infinities.
Software displays segments of the Set along its rich, complex edges, under greater and greater degrees of magnification. As each tiny portion is magnified, more detail emerges. Mathematicians insist that the Set holds the entire set of Julia sets in infinitely many places in its infinite numbers of levels of organization. An eternity would not be long enough to explore the Set’s many hidden splendors.
Watch as “…its disks grow spikes of prickly thorns, spirals and filaments curl outward and around, bearing bulbous molecules that hang infinitely variegated like grapes on God’s personal vine.â€
This lovely description of the Mandelbrot Set is taken from James Gleick’s book, “Chaos,†which I commend to anyone interested in a more in-depth exploration of fractals and chaos theory.
Wouldn’t it be WAY COOL if our highly advanced future avatars could play in a version of Second Life loaded with n-dimensional fractals. Wheeeeee!
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!
I found this announcement at Kurzweil’s web site:
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.
The webcast should run there.
I hope so.
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.
“Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor saysâ€
Written by Elaine Jarvik
Published in the Deseret News April 20
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 can’t remember if this one was the same article mentioned by Michael D. on FastForward Radio, but I find it fitting to post this right after my last entry. Imagine this capability combined with Wolfram/Alpha. Imagine the trends and tendencies in nature and in human society it will be able to deduce that we can’t possibly grasp because we can’t possibly master the avalanche of data involved.
In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.
Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.
The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind
Stephen Wolfram announced that his new “not a search engine,” Wolfram/Alpha, will premiere in May. This software package will enable users to query it, like Google, but instead of running a search for lists of appropriate web pages, it will calculate the answer to a query using information extracted from web pages.
I’ve written an essay giving background on Wolfram and his career. In it, I discussed the possibility that the development of Wolfram/Alpha may speed up the development of true AI. It is posted on ScribD.
Here is Wolfram’s official announcement on his blog, including his own description of Wolfram/Alpha.