Future Imperfect

Thinking about how things change together, not in isolation, and how, when thinking about future changes, one should sight on appropriate landmarks to gain perspective, reminded me of the example in the opening paragraphs of David Friedman's Future Imperfect (note: a twenty-chapter book draft in a single html file!):

I recently attended an event where the guest speaker was a cabinet member. In conversation afterwards, the subject of long term petroleum supplies came up. He warned that at some point, perhaps a century or so in the future, someone would put his key in his car's ignition, turn it, and nothing would happen–because there would be no more gasoline.

What shocked me was not his ignorance of the economics of depletable resources--if we ever run out of gasoline it will be a long slow process of steadily rising prices, not a sudden surprise--but the astonishing conservatism of his view of the future. It was as if a similar official, a hundred years earlier, had warned that sometime around the year 2000 we were going to open the door of the carriage house only to find that the horses had starved to death for want of hay. I do not know what the world will be like a century hence. But it is not likely to be a place where the process of getting from here to there begins by putting a key in an ignition, turning it, and starting an internal combustion engine burning gasoline.

Citing Future Imperfect is enough for one post. His subject is close to mine here:

This book is about technological change, its consequences and how to deal with them. In this chapter I briefly survey the technologies. In the next I discuss how to adjust our lives and institutions to their consequences.

I am not a prophet; any one of the technologies I discuss may turn out to be a wet firecracker. It only takes one that does not to remake the world. Looking at some candidates will make us a little better prepared if one of those revolutions happens. Perhaps more important, after we have thought about how to adapt to any of ten possible revolutions, we will at least have a head start when the eleventh drops on us out of the blue.

David Friedman is one writer who deliberately applies perspective.

Speaking of sighting and citing: how is it that sounding, as in water depth measurement, was called that long before the invention of sonar? (The phrase "sound out" was derived from sounding rather than the other way around.)

Warmup: "We are as gods..."

Stewart Brand famously opened the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog with these words:

PURPOSE

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing--power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Brand says in the Winter 1998 Whole Earth Review:

Credit where it's due: I stole the line. Page one, chapter one of A Runaway World? by British anthropologist Edmund Leach (Oxford, 1968) begins:

Men have become like gods. Isn't it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be? How might these fears be resolved?

But at some point Leach continues,

We simply must take charge of our own fate. We must somehow see to it that the decisions which have long-term consequences are taken by men who understand what they are doing and not by bewildered amateurs.

Amateurs, of course, being exactly who Brand wanted to empower.

(I learned of the Brand-Leach connection in the excellent book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff (p. 155))

Warm-up: 87 Bad Predictions

Just saw this linked to indirectly by BoingBoing:
Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future

about ways of thinking about the future

I follow or take part in lots of discussions of the future, and besides being keen on all the juicy futurific topics themselves, I always find myself noticing the ways people think about the future, and wondering, how should we think about it?

For instance (and because I'm self-conscious about this): what do I even mean by "the future?" People are always thinking about the future: tonight's dinner, a coat of paint for the house, college for the kids... Everything's about the future; what sense making it a separate topic? What's up with treating it like something new?

So one way to think about "the future" is skepticism at the term. What assumptions is someone smuggling in under such a generality? Will they use it to excuse themselves from common sense in some way? On the other hand I'm being slightly disingenuous and dramatic because of course I think there's a Future.

Turning around now, my instinctive response to any two-sentence dismissal or debunking of a popular belief or concept, is to wonder how the supposed debunking can be used to clarify just what the wisdom in the popular wisdom is, so:

The difference between The Future and tonight's dinner is that people have planned a lot of dinners before. The Future is what's unprecedented, and not just the random exact placement of an almond sliver on a green bean, but, well there's an html thingie for a Spanish Inquisition of things like this:

• unprecidented--at least to most people
• coming soon to a theater near you
  
• important--at least to a lot of us
  
• non-random and possible to think about in useful chunks

I have seen gung-ho futurists, budding technocrats out to finally rid us of things I hold dear, and people who think that my favorite improvements will destroy everything they hold dear. Some people focus on an ironic harm to the exclusion of everyday good. People fret over piecemeal scenarios like, "What happens when everyone lives to 200 but retires at 65?" There's a particular form of optimism disguised as skepticism, as in, "I know why that's never going to happen." A lot of questions aren't so much about the future as let back out of the box by thinking about it. If everything is up for grabs, then, What does it all mean!?

Do you know the answer to that one? It doesn't do to just dismiss all the crazies and worriers-- especially if you think that anyone who isn't worried isn't paying attention. Change really seems to be happening faster, while our lifetimes are getting longer, so that more times more is being stuffed into our brains. "The future" seems to be defined by what's difficult to think about. Sometimes it's a demon who carefully tends our buried muddles until they sprout in our front yards.

I want to know, how can we think about this stuff without going nuts? In particular, are there ways to get handles on things to turn them for the better, in some qualitative way better than just building better mousetraps and bandaids, greasing the skids?

For that matter, what kind of future counts as okay, worth working toward, sufficiently grand? How can it be possible for people to see the future as something other than baffling, scary and alienating? One metaphor (getting slightly ahead of myself) is of continually re-packing for the Mayflower-- what's worth keeping and can be packed in a trunk? Can we take seeds?

I collected lists of ideas, both fallacious and hopeful, in the backs of a couple notebooks, enough to write about for at least a month. Time to dig em up and air em out.

Robot Takeover Or Takeunder?

In the previous post I said that the view that writing is an old hybrid AI might have some bearing on whether robots take over, by which I meant, get better and better until they surpass us and become the main stream of civilization and history.

One optimistic view is that if AI keeps being designed as extensions to our minds, prostheses, implants or upgrades to our brains, then we, or "we," will stay in the driver's seat along whatever ride intelligence takes in the future. We could call this "takeunder." (Notice how "natural" the driver's seat analogy seems, even though a driver's seat is essentially a prosthetic fitting? Similar earlier analogies: in the saddle, at the reins.)

So, the idea that literature is a hybrid AI ("there, that wasn't so painful, was it?"), and the analogy between literature and Google+web, are examples of takeunder ... but what they prove about the future is hard to say.

I think writing is at least an example of how it could go well, or how it could be made to go well. Just think how we take art and writing-- information media external to our brains-- and call them "the humanities." That's a picture of what it could mean to be at home in cyberspace (& of course having a picture is reassuring). On the other hand, we're not guaranteed to have the sense, necessary understanding, foresight, style or grace to go that way.

Oh good, this gives me a seque into The Great Good Place.

Postscript: Above "I say," "We remember the things we've read as if [books were] a way to talk to those people again." It's books that talked to, and were talked to by, those people. We call them our memories of our past, but it's books' memories, held for us. The authors talked to books, pretending to talk to an audience, and the books talk to us, pretending to be the authors. The arts of authors creating simulations of themselves, and of readers believing the simulations, are a symbiosis-- cybernesis?-- that has evolved and is evolving over time.

Before Google there was Grep

I think that Google really is an AI, or at least 1/3 of a hybrid AI whose other two thirds are people and writing.

You type a question into a keyboard and so often you get the answer. That was the dream of AI back in the 1960s, and I find it strange that people don't appreciate that we've reached that milestone. People are jaded because they understand how it works. The fact that we thought the problem was so much harder passes unnoticed.

Before Google and the web there were books. People plus books formed a similar hybrid AI that was just slower. We all grew up with literature. The funny thing about it is that we don't think of it as an AI. We remember the things we've read as if all of history, science, art, etc. happened to us, as if we personally knew the people involved, and books are just a way of reminding ourselves of the details we've forgotten, a way to talk to those people again. Human culture has grown accustomed to literature and we are raised as children to think of this AI as part of ourselves.

I used to think this way about grep(*) before there was Google. I was amazed how much trouble people would want to go to to organize things in computer systems, when so often just grepping for a string(**) would find you the thing you wanted. (Funny how similar grep's and Google's names are.)

Google and grep are like the 80/20 solutions that people talk about, only it's 80% of the results with only 2% of the effort.

The power is in the ability to name things. Before computers and the web, indexing, storing and retrieving were hard; now they've become trivial compared to the work of forming a question. I think we haven't intuitively caught up with how much of explicit intelligence is covered by those operations.

And yet it's not that Google is an unacknowledged rival intelligence. Just as books are our heritage, we own the web and Google. It is "our" intelligence. Google is a bunch of glial cells (another g word!), a shepherd to our stuff. If Google were to disappear or misbehave, we would just have to build another.

So, we are strangely arrogant, or rightly so, or both. Maybe this is what it means to be an executive, or the conscious patina on a mind, or a monarch...a titular head. This could be relevant to the question of whether robots will take over, or maybe it's not.

(*) grep is the Unix command that searches for strings, or string patterns (**), within a file or collection of files on a computer.

(**) Oh yeah, a "string" means a word, a name, a phrase--a sequence of typed characters. Patterns mean this "or" that, "anything containing this", "anthing that starts with this," etc. Suddenly I'm self-conscious about thinking of words as sequences of bytes.

Infest Wisely

Infest Wisely is a science-fiction movie whose seven episodes are being posted as they are developed. It seems to be about technology that you install within yourself by swallowing things.