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***SNS*** Special Letter: Gaps in Our Near-Future Agenda
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By David Brin ___
___
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Publisher's Note: Most of us now have learned that the best writers in science fiction are among the best true visionaries we have today, applying a combination of hard-science physics with a deep understanding of human affairs to show us our most likely, if not always most preferred, futures. David Brin has spent his life doing exactly this (and many other interesting things), earning himself an exalted place in the pantheon of those who try to see the future.
When we asked David to apply his skills specifically for our membership's sake, he did just that, creating a Special Letter which is the perfect combination of high intellect, scientific background, contrarian (and therefore, generally objective) thinking, and the general optimism that most technology leaders share.
I have no doubt that our members will read David's thoughts - and find themselves surprised and agreeing - sentence by sentence, which is the mark of his expertise. As he notes, we are experiencing a time so trying at the moment that it almost feels like some form of divine test, tough as it is, but it also seems as though, if we can bring rationality and scientific study to bear, we will be rewarded by a following period of great success.
I believe this is true, and that it is helpful to everyone to be able to see a bit farther ahead, in order to put our current problems and disagreements in perspective, and so as not to lose sight of the larger prize. - mra.
Gaps in Our Near-Future Agenda
by David Brin
For a living, I explore possibilities, or plausibilities, in both fiction and nonfiction. So when Mark Anderson - one of the world's best tech business seers - asked me to probe a few for SNS, I had to narrow down.
The future is a vast, unruly work-space, so I'll focus on the near-term realm of immediate opportunity.
First some good news: Individuals and societies are coping with change far better than we've seen forecast in dystopic books and films. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard professor Steven Pinker shows that per-capita levels of violence have plummeted each decade since WWII. And others tabulate an even broader optimism - with more accuracy than cynical despair. Much is going right with the world.
Most of these good things have happened since 1945 under the protective umbrella of a largely (maybe 75%) benign Pax Americana, with memes and values spread by Hollywood (e.g., diversity, tolerance, individuality, equal-justice). The unprecedented counter-mercantilist trade system set in place by Marshall, Acheson, and Truman, unlike those established by other Pax-imperial powers, encouraged the uplift of faraway populations - successively in Europe and Japan, then Korea, Taiwan, and so on - via the simple means of selling Americans trillions of dollars' worth of things we never needed: a process of "foreign aid via Walmart" that is as supremely ironic as it's been successful. Roughly two-thirds of humanity now lives in homes with electricity, sanitation, kids in school, and some recourse to predictable law. We seem to be about halfway from feudal darkness to well Star Trek. Hurrah.
Amid such progress, complacency would be as deadly as cynicism. For example: Is the world ready to dispense with the final imperial Pax (Americana)? As Mark often points out, the goose that has laid golden eggs for 70 years now has its neck on a chopping block. Mercantilist empires that we fostered as part of the Marshallian plan of world uplift now demonstrate shortsightedness by waving an axe over that neck, stealing IP and threatening to cut off the wealth machine that drove planet wide development. What is to be done?
Politics may be of little help. Just when a sagacious West is needed, American pragmatism is replaced by reflex dogmatism. The so-called "left-right axis" lobotomizes what should be subtle, multidimensional negotiations. But a few things do map onto that hoary-outdated metaphor. Psychologically, those who self-identify with the "right" tend to be suspicious of frenzied calls to improve the world, to improve society or ourselves. Even the very notion of improvability - through planned and coordinated effort - rouses visceral rejection.
In contrast, those who identify with the "left" tend to view everything as improvable, from justice to their neighbors' chubby kids. They frenetically demand urgent change, accompanied by relentless finger-wagging. Even those of us who agree with the need for broad and rapid progress can be put off by the left's particular (and peculiar) mania: stubborn refusal to admit that substantial progress has already happened. For some reason, that admission seems anathema. (Try mentioning Steven Pinker to folks on that extreme; you'll see reflexes as wrathful as any on Fox News.)
Clearly, any sensible person must side with those seeking progress and improvement in almost every realm. Science warns that our current prosperity teeters on not one knife-edge, but on many. We face a challenging minefield of potential failure modes, between now and (say) the year 2100, when population curves and rising access to wondrous technologies (cheap sustainables, space resources, and vast computation-modeling power, for example) seem to promise sturdy, better days.
I will set aside the possibility of "singularities" that might transform our grandchildren into slaves or gods. SNS members have little time for transcendentalists. So let's focus instead upon that minefield just ahead, from climate change to topsoil loss, from looming water crises to failures of capitalism or the social contract all the way to persuading millions of our neighbors not to hate the future1, inviting them instead to join us in facing it with courage.
Science and tech-driven business will play crucial roles in pragmatic problem solving, as will consensus decisions of an enlightened electorate, executed by their servant-government. Many endeavors are underway - we glimpse some at every FiRe Conference. But what's missing? Are there overlooked win-win opportunities?
Let me offer just a few brief mentions.
Saving news media. We may see the end of newspapers. Online pools of "volunteer content" should supplement, not replace, professional journalism. As top journals such as the New York Times desperately seek ways to monetize their expensively collected content, paid monthly memberships don't work, and click ads are unreliable. There seems to be a near universal misconception afoot.
People assume the root problem is that Web surfers only want what's free. This is a mistake. Folks are willing to pay a few cents to read a fine article. What they despise is: 1) advance commitment; and 2) any payment method that requires attention or passwords that slow down the surfing experience. Time and convenience are the irritants, not the cost of a nickel per article.
It should be possible to design a micro-payments system that would let users pay for content in penny-chunks without those drawbacks. The "next PayPal" would have a different business plan, aiming to handle myriad much-smaller transactions with nearly invisible grace. The clearing house could make a lot of money while providing salvation to professional news media.
The future of brick and mortar banking. Thousands of neighborhood bank branches are viewed as archaic liabilities by parent corporations that hope to move most traditional operations online. (Already, most Social Security payments are direct-deposit or via debit card, and soon the checks will no longer be mailed.) But the era of brick and mortar will not end. Why not?
Think about the utter-basic role of banking: it is to help customers mediate all of the credentials, proxies, and prosthetics for reputation - the money and credit that let us make deals for the house we live in, the food we eat, and the businesses we run. As much of this moves online, we find ourselves in a maelstrom of identity surrogates: passwords and codes and intricate rituals that all boil down to "I am me now let me at my stuff!" As Mark has shown us, these processes are primitive, awkward, and rife with flaws, from glitches to suspicious back doors to the fumbling security mistakes any of us might make. Many safeguards are clever. None are robust.
What will we fall back on, when (not if) we all suffer ID failure? Biometrics, of course. Humans exude dozens of unique signatures, from fingerprints and face-recog to DNA and otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), the tones which most of us emit from our own ears. Google lately hinted that it will jump all over biometrics, declaring that "the age of passwords will soon end" - something I spoke of in The Transparent Society. But if you are doing biometrics on a remote device (a phone or laptop or ATM), that's just another invitation for clever predators.
The first bank to really understand all this will offer 21st-century info-cred management to its customers, the only way that it can possibly be done through brick-and-mortar sites where you and I can go in person for credible biometric verification that "I'm me!" At the most basic level, this is what banking has always been about.
World-saving tech. You know about sustainable energy, better batteries, LED light bulbs, newfangled water filtration, and so on a shopping list of breakthroughs that just might add up enough to help us cross that minefield, especially if they are encouraged by good public policies. Other truly bold ventures are being explored by the rich, brave, and savvy - e.g., privatized space launch, exploring asteroidal resources, and cheap laptops for every kid on Earth.
Few breakthroughs will change our planet's prospects more than when biologists and entrepreneurs develop cheap, tasty, and safe vat-grown meat. On the closer horizon, we have learned at FiRe about burgeoning possibilities for massive-scale algae farming, which might create many parallel win-win opportunities.
More obscure? I'm unconvinced that all forms of "geo-engineering" for palliating climate change should be dismissed out of hand. So far, ocean fertilization experiments have concentrated on dumping big volumes of iron dust, something never seen in nature. Instead, why not aim to replicate what happens naturally in the great fisheries off Chile and the Grand Banks, by siphoning bottom-mud into existing currents? Simple proposals have languished, but they seem worth an experiment or two.
Societies, corporations, and nations may have been paying too much fad-attention to efficiency (e.g., just-in-time production) and too little to resilient systems that can weather sudden shocks of the kind we've seen too-often, lately. In nature, "efficiency" is only one desideratum. All species and organisms sacrifice some efficiency in order to maintain robustness, because life is filled with knocks and surprises. The lesson to business, governments, and individuals should have been made plain by the tragedy at Fukushima.
Here is one example that merits special attention. Again and again, from New Orleans to New Jersey to Japan, we've seen a populace betrayed by its fragile cellphone system at the very moment when it was most needed. At the very first [2003] FiRe CTO Challenge, we saw recommendations for simple changes to mobile tech that could retain basic service in even the worst disasters, empowering citizens to organize themselves, as New Yorkers did with startling effectiveness in the wake of the attacks on 9/11.
Perhaps in response, Qualcomm and several other groups are at last tentatively exploring ways by which our phones might pass text messages peer-to-peer, bypassing network towers. The big carriers seem to fear this, but they need not - phones can be programmed to report such texts for billing. Hence, the cellcos' obstruction is senseless - and doomed over the long run. When instituted (and it will be, sooner or later), this system will leave the US and other nations with a capable backup, crossing a whole continent with a basic text-telegraphy network, even were every tower in the country to go down. An opportunity for resilience that should be encouraged and accelerated.
One factor that may help to save us is the known effect that average human intelligence seems to have been rising, by modest amounts, for generations. Would it help if we found ways to accelerate that trend? Poul Anderson explored this possibility - the up and down sides - in his fine novel Brain Wave. There are many ways such a mixed miracle could happen. Stay alert to the possibility.
One small step is the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (http://imagination.ucsd.edu), newly established at the University of California-San Diego, where the brain and cognitive sciences will join with the arts and education to study this rare gift, seeking both to better understand imagination and also to teach or enhance the creative process in new generations.
For lack of space, I'll leave dozens of other near-future technologies and plausibilities for the pages of a novel. Suffice it to say that opportunities abound.
Focused philanthropy. "I want to spend the money I've got before I die," said Clive Palmer, an Australian billionaire, who is building a new version of the Titanic that could set sail in late 2016. "You might as well spend it, not leave it to the kids to spend, there will be enough left for them anyway."
Elsewhere, I've written about one quandary of great wealth: that half of our modern billionaires seem to "get" what it is for, while the other half reflexively clutch after a pattern of feudal, inherited oligarchy that dominated (and ruined) 99% of all cultures before the Enlightenment - a pattern that has never, ever delivered good governance or statecraft, nor happiness, science, or success, even for the oligarchs themselves.
It's nice to know that the Gates-Buffett-Rowling kind are motivated, making clear their sense of gratitude and obligation to a civilization that's been very good to them. Their type is less well organized than the carbon barons and gambling moguls who spent close to a billion dollars trying to influence the 2012 US elections. Still, their scattered and diverse efforts will contribute importantly to crossing the minefield.
The Buffett clade might have more success recruiting even more billionaires to the "good side" if they could offer their peers a clearly organized catalog of worthy, pre-vetted projects. I'm sure SNS members have their own favorite fantasies of potentially world-changing endeavors ("If only a billionaire would do that!"). In fact - what an idea for a TV show!
Creating post-Pax Americana. When one thinks in sci-fi terms, one learns to lift eyes from the myopic near-term. One topic I deem to be the elephant in the room that nobody comments on is What will be the governance of Planet Earth?
If one sets a novel or film a thousand years from now, no one expects the world to still be divided among fractious, nuke-armed nation-states. Well, then, what about 500 years from now? Two centuries? One? Somewhere on the horizon, in roughly a generation or two, it's clear that things will be different. Folks are uncomfortable discussing WCN: Whatever Comes Next. US citizens - except far-lefties - hate to even think about the end of Pax Americana. But it will end. Either because at some point it will fail or else - especially - if it succeeds.
What makes this much less abstract and more immediate is recognition that the transition is already underway, Every decade, more authority and influence devolves onto two of what can only be called branches of World Governance: the international courts and regulatory agencies, such as the World Trade Organization, that correlate with most of the roles of a governmental civil service. The parts of WCN that are openly political have been staved off. There is no planetary executive or legislative branch. But the infrastructural components are taking shape, quietly. A rare case in which the loony American far-right fringe is noticing (if over-reacting to) what the rest of us ignore.
A number of questions come up:
1) Should Americans get over their aversion to this topic and start discussing WCN? Now, while Pax Americana still has plenty of power to influence the design? Would not that design be far better if it bore our deliberate imprint, taking into account Americans' peculiarly individualistic hopes and fears?
2) Even in circles where WCN is discussed, few mention the most glaring fault in planetary governance: individual human beings have no "standing" before any international entity. Any at all. National governments, even as they are being rendered irrelevant by rising oligarchies, have jealously ensured that their citizens cannot bypass them and bring actions before world bodies.
One can understand why the United States, in particular, does not want its (still needed) actions as the Pax Power hobbled prematurely or subjected to premature nuisance litigation. I am sympathetic; we are still transitioning through the end of countless millennia of barbarism, and roughness can still be part of the process. Nevertheless, it is time to start pondering: the trend toward WCN will grow unwholesome if every kind of entity, from oligarchs and corporations to bureaucrats and politicians, can acquire standing except citizens of the world.
3) What if people do get standing? Isn't it inevitable? Then nations will be sued, of course. And the world is filled with longstanding grievances. Expect to see a rush to proclaim a statute of limitations. A transition period. And yet
and yet, there is one way in which this inevitable trend might prove of immediate value. Yes, today. Take a particular rogue state in East Asia that is run by a psychopathic regime. The world despairs over how to rein in that hermit kingdom's crazed and dangerous behavior. Sure, there is a mighty empire right next door that props it up. But that great empire simply shrugs at its client's antics: "What'ch'gonna do?"
That empire might be warned: "In the new era to come, nations may be liable for tort damages, even if criminal accountability is quashed. You know that such lawfulness is coming. And you are clearly (no matter how much you deny it) the enabler of this crazy regime. Do you really want to risk the trillions in liabilities that might ensue if your clients go berserk? As law gradually takes hold, you might want to think about that and consider tightening the leash."
I don't claim that we should all drop everything to expect the WCN millennium next week. Indeed, as an American, part of me dreads WCN, finding the whole notion creepy. Still, Pax Americana, no matter how beloved one deems it to be, will not be dominant 500 years from now. How long do you envision that things can stay the way they were in the world George Marshall made?
Cut your estimate by a factor of four, and prepare.
===
We are charging into uncertain territory, evading mines, snake pits, and quicksand with an agility that's stunning and that may end at any moment. Moreover, while we charge ahead, one-third of US citizens are clutching the nation's ankles, screaming "Stop!" while another third applies the whip of dour guilt.
Our paramount needs, right now, are courage and perspective. To take in the larger picture. To dauntlessly explore where we might be going. And to share with our fellow human beings a sense of what's spectacularly possible.
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With books translated into 25 languages, David has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. A film directed by Kevin Costner was based on his novel The Postman. Other works have been optioned by Paramount and Warner Bros. One of them - Kiln People - has been called a book of ideas disguised as a fast-moving and fun noir detective story, set in a vividly original future; while a hardcover graphic novel - The Life Eaters - explored alternate outcomes to World War II. David's science-fictional Uplift Universe explores a future when humans genetically engineer higher animals, like dolphins, to speak.
As a "scientist/futurist," David is seen frequently on television shows such as The ArchiTechs, Universe, and Life After People (the most popular show ever, on the History Channel) - along with many appearances on PBS and NPR. He is also much in-demand to speak about future trends, keynoting for IBM, Google, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Mauldin Group, and Casey Research, all the way to think tanks, Homeland Security, and the CIA.
With degrees from Caltech and the University of California-San Diego, David serves serves on advisory panels ranging from astronomy, space exploration, nanotech, and SETI to national defense and technological ethics. His nonfiction book The Transparent Society explores the dangers of secrecy and loss of privacy in our modern world. It garnered the prestigious Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association.
Copyright 2013 Strategic News Service and David Brin. Redistribution prohibited without written permission.
I would like to thank David for taking the time out of his extremely productive and busy days to create this special discussion for our members. This piece is now added to a long archive of careful, and usually cheerful, warnings about the rocks and shoals hidden in our decisions and waiting for us as a species. He's almost always right, and so I pay attention to everything he says and writes. We need to take courage from his historic examples, stop taking ourselves and our political parties so seriously, and return to thinking as part of an advanced species, seeking to solve very difficult, but surmountable, problems.
I also want to thank Editor-in-Chief Sally Anderson for putting all of these thoughts into perfect shape.
Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely,
Mark R. Anderson
CEO Strategic News Service LLC Tel. 360-378-3431 P.O. Box 1969 Fax. 360-378-7041 Friday Harbor, WA 98250 USA Email: mark@stratnews.com
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Mark Anderson is CEO of the Strategic News Service. He is the founder of two software companies and of the Washington Technology Industry Association "Fast Pitch" Forum, Washington's premier software investment conference; and has participated in the launch of many software startups. He regularly appears on the CNN World News, CNBC and CNBC Europe, Reuters TV, the BBC, Wall Street Review / KSDO, SkyNews, and National Public Radio programs. He is a member of the Merrill Lynch Technology Advisory Board, and is an advisor and/or investor in OVP Ventures, Ignition Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, the UCSD Calit2 Laboratory, the Global Advisory Council of the mPedigree Network (Ghana), SwedeTrade, The Family Circle (Europe), and the Australian American Leadership Dialogue.
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SNS: Special Letter: Gaps in Our Near-Future Agenda
Join Internet co-founder and FiRe Centerpiece Conversation thought leader Vint Cerf, on the subjects of "Safety on the Net," "Bit Rot," "Pseudonymity vs. Anonymity," "Network Resilience," "The Interplanetary Net," and much
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David Brin is a scientist, inventor, and New York Times bestselling author. His most recent novel, EXISTENCE (now in paperback), explores how near-looming technologies may affect the dangers and opportunities that we'll face in the coming decades.
