January 6. Emoya Estate: The Luxury Shanty Town In South Africa Offering 'Poverty Porn' For The Rich. For now this is about the rich, but suppose we recover from the ecological and economic catastrophes of the 21st century, and in one or two hundred years, everyone in the world is as safe and comfortable as the rich are now (but much less powerful). It might be normal to live in an "exotic hybrid of opulent luxury and extreme deprivation." Everyone wants to feel that their life is meaningful without taking real risks, but I'm not sure this is possible.
January 13, 2014. Some future predictions while the new year is fresh. The other day I got an email from a reader who recently graduated from high school, asking for advice in these difficult times. Ten years ago I would have said to get some land and learn low-tech skills like foraging and metalworking. Now I'd say the best skills are meta-skills like mindfulness and quickly noticing opportunities, and you should only go low-tech if you love it so much that you don't care if it's impractical.
I'm embarrassed that I ever predicted a technological crash, because the arguments are so hand-wavy. Instead, I expect artificial intelligence and biotech to spice up a decades-long economic depression as the global system muddles through climate change and the end of nonrenewable resources. Low quality manufactured items and industrial food will remain affordable, but good food, transportation, and services from actual humans will be more expensive. I think the best place to live is in a small house with a big yard in a city with a seaport or railroad hub. You want to be close to the supply lines, but have enough land to grow luxury foods like blueberries and good tomatoes. As you move farther into the country, the money you save by growing more of your own food will be less than the money you spend on transportation and shipping. Total self-sufficiency would be a good thing to write a novel about.
My generation was the first in American history to be poorer than our parents. Now the Millennials are poorer than us, and this trend will continue until the global infrastructure adapts to feed from a growing base of renewable resources, maybe around 2060. Meanwhile, if you can stay out of debt and find a low-stress job to build up savings, you'll be relatively well off. "Debt" is exactly as real as we believe it is. Mostly it's a trick to make people feel ashamed that they have no political power. Not that it would work any better if we felt angry. The system is totally locked down, and the most revolutionary political change of the 21st century, the unconditional basic income, will be necessary to keep the system stable, to turn the unemployed majority from hungry militants back into consumers.
Technology will promise revolution, but in practice ninety percent of the new powers will be used to keep the remaining ten percent from doing anything dangerous. By the year 2200 there will be no poverty, no disease, and no opportunity for anyone to make a difference, except by more quickly closing off the opportunity for anyone to make a difference. Reasonable people will know that they're better off than we were, but still fantasize about living in our time. Suicide will be the leading cause of death, and by 2300, any death not from suicide will be global news. By 3000 we will either be extinct or moved to another level of reality through some technology of consciousness that would seem completely loony if you described it today. Related: a clever image of reddit in the early 3000's.
January 15. Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report. I think this is an important prediction: instead of technology being all in your face, it will "fade into the background" and the world will look superfically low-tech.
January 17. The new Edge.org question is out. Every year they ask a bunch of supposedly smart people one question, and this year it's "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"
Overall the answers are weak. Even the ones I agree with are mostly unsurprising. For example: Alex Pentland and Margaret Levi argue against viewing the world in terms of rational individuals. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Cesar Hidalgo argue that perpetual economic growth is a cultural myth that is now obsolete. (I like Hidalgo's idea that the age of growth is neither eternal nor a dead end, but a phase transition.) And Luca De Biase explains how Elinor Ostrom refuted the "tragedy of the commons" by finding many systems throughout history that have managed a commons for the good of all without depleting it.
Sherry Turkle and Roger Schank have smart thoughts on "artificial intelligence", arguing that it's silly to expect robots and computers to replace humans or think like humans. Shank writes, "the name AI made outsiders to AI imagine goals for AI that AI never had."
In one of my favorite answers, Martin Rees hesitantly suggests the obvious: "maybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-human intellect -- just as Euclidean geometry is beyond non-human primates."
If I got to answer this question, I would write about objective truth, the idea that "there is" one reality "out there" on which all observers must eventually agree. This is a useful shortcut for everyday life, but careful scientists and philosophers should never talk about truth, only experience. I think we should expect different perspectives to have inconsistent experience, and consistency is something that emerges (imperfectly) when multiple experiencing perspectives 1) want to share the same universe, and 2) compare notes.
One answer is close to this, Amanda Gefter on "*The* Universe". First she mentions "horizon complementarity", where physicists resolve a black hole paradox by imagining the inside and outside of a black hole as different universes. Then she takes it farther, "to restrict our descriptions not merely to spacetime regions separated by horizons, but to the reference frames of individual observers, wherever they are. As if each observer has his or her own universe."
January 30. Reddit comment by Erinaceous on how to change the system. You should read the whole thing but here's a condensed excerpt:
Resistance only defines the edge of the system. It might be important to define that limit but it's just the limit. And the social limit is a hard place to be. What defines the centre is the institutions, the permanent effective networks that are space filling and area preserving. More interesting though is that the control points in these hierarchical systems are not the centres. They are lower down. It's the sales guy who moves between the management and branches and talks to all the people on the shop floor. It's the minor bureaucrat who actually makes the government run. It could be the bottom up institutions that people know to go to because they are so much more effective than the government services that are constantly cut back and falling apart. The ones that make them less dependent and more capable of being fully realized people. The institutions that are working to put themselves out of job instead of trying to maintain their power. So taking the centre is not really the strategy either. It's building the alternative that the centre has to contend with.
February 1-3. After Seattle's dominating Superbowl win, other teams will want to imitate them. But how exactly did they get so good? Did they get lucky in the draft? Are they smarter than other teams at finding overlooked talent? Have they made coaching innovations in pass defense? Yes, but I think the biggest factor is their team culture. Here's an article from the beginning of the season, The Seahawks believe their kinder, gentler philosophy is the future of football, describing how they use meditation, positive reinforcement, staff psychologists, and cutting edge technology to maximize everyone's mental and physical health. This article from last week is about how much fun the practices are, calling the Seahawks "the Google of football." And in a recent survey where players were asked which head coach they would most like to play for, Seattle coach Pete Carroll was the overwhelming winner. This will make it easier for them to sign free agents, and this advantage will continue until other teams follow the same path.
By the way, my favorite play was Percy Harvin's kickoff return. The way he accelerates between the 20 and 30 yard line, it's like he's a different species.
February 5. In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots. The NY Times asked mathematician Norbert Wiener to write an essay on the coming machine age, but mistakes by editors buried it until it was rediscovered in 2012. My condensed excerpt of their condensed excerpt:
These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
...
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.
Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.
February 12. This article, 10 Futuristic Materials, is utopian because it's childish. Aerogels could insulate a dome on the moon, carbon nanotubes could make towers that reach up to space, metamaterials could make invisibility cloaks, we could fly diamond fighter planes and live in metal foam floating cities and swing transparent swords. Sure, but once the Christmas morning novelty wears off, how exactly will this stuff improve our quality of life? There is a hint of intelligence in the final paragraph: "We'll develop clothing that can constantly project the video of our choosing (unless it turns out being so annoying that we ban it)." Yeah, remember when TV commercials were so annoying that we banned them, and now there are no more TV commercials?
In practice, technologies will be used by control systems to maintain their power and stability. This is especially true of weapons, but even information technology is in danger of being used this way. This reddit comment makes a thorough critique of ebooks, which can be locked down, controlled, and leveraged into economic domination in ways that paper books cannot. The author continues:
Let's say we invent the Star Trek replicator. Finally -- goods can be made out of thin air. Food can be made out of thin air. Replicators would be a scarcity destroying machine with the possibility of both destroying labor AND ending world hunger. It'd be a major shift for society. But insert the corporation and the capitalist who would wrap this machine's usage up in license fees, laws restricting usage, etc. They would use it to destroy labor, but they would prevent the device from destroying scarcity. It's too threatening to the power structures that control capital. You'll never technologically innovate yourself out of the exploitation of capitalism.
What about just using technology to make ourselves happy? Here's an article, illustrated with a great comic, about a Dutch biologist and his research into supernormal stimuli:
Tinbergen succeeded in isolating the traits that triggered certain instincts, and then made an interesting discovery. The instincts had no bounds. Instead of stopping at a 'sweet spot', the instinctive response would still be produced by unrealistic stimuli. Once the researchers isolated the instincts' trigger, they could create greatly exaggerated dummies which the animals would choose instead of a realistic alternative. Songbird parents would prefer to feed fake baby birds with mouths wider and redder than their real chicks, and the hatchlings themselves would ignore their own parents to beg fake beaks with more dramatic markings.
Of course the point is that humans play these tricks on ourselves when we eat junk food and watch TV and so on. The conclusion is that we have to learn the awareness to hold these urges in check. But as technology continues to make stimuli more powerful, can our awareness keep up? Here's a 2007 article on the subject, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.