Time's Conveyor

Today, driving through Concord, I passed a funny-looking house with a sign: Octagon Farm. It reminded me of the huge octagonal barn at Linvilla Orchards, where we used to get corn and other rustic produce in the summers when we were teenagers. I thought I might like to drive back through that area with my siblings and see the place again.

That brought back a vague memory of being prisoners in the back seat as my father and one of his siblings dragged us kids through some old familiar stomping ground of theirs, droning on about this and that detail, absent landmark, or memory. How ridiculous they seemed, concerned with things so far in the past.

I guess I didn't understand time then. The life of an old person is the same length as that of a young person; it's just made of shorter years. Time is a conveyor belt that comes out of your chest and proceeds down a track that is only maybe a hundred feet long. The far end is a little harder to see but still well in sight. As things happen they emerge onto the belt and roll away. But as they roll they get more and more flattened till they're something like a stack of cardboard cutouts and stage backdrops.

As an example, I'm sure that, when I was a teenager, my father's and uncle's memories were as close to them as Linvilla Orchards is to me now. See? Not at all receded into irrelevance and ridiculousness the way I had imagined from the back seat. My umpteen years of memory were stretched out to an extent that would place their memories out of reach.

My father's reminiscences in turn reminded me of another backseat torture as my father drove his father through long country roads to enjoy the farmland scenery and autumn foliage. How indescribably boring. I didn't understand how the new stuff, like the shopping mall my childhood self would have preferred, can become so tiresome, and that sometimes only old places have freshness.

Linville's barn (which when I knew it was already a retail store, a Country Living Experience) has burnt down, but they intend to build a replica on the spot. I'm sorry you can't see it, it was something to behold, right in that area there.

Kevin Kelly's Technium

From Kevin Kelly's introduction to the book in progress he's blogging on his site The Technium:

For the past year and a half I have been studying the history of technology, the arguments of technology's critics, projections of its future, and the tiny bit of technic philosophy that has been written, all with the aim to answer a simple question: How should I think about new technology when it comes along?

Kelly was editor of The Whole Earth Review and then Wired, and wrote the Bible-chapter-level Out of Control. He reviews Cool Tools at his site.

Generation Z(ero)

Damn! I forgot to worry about the weather!
--a friend looking out the window on the morning of a trip.

Worries about the long-term future of the human genome are ironic on a couple levels. In short, DNA will become easy, and then obsolete, in the space of one generation (Z) or two.

One version of legacy-worry is C.S. Lewis's notion, expressed in his The Abolition of Man (and correct me if I've misinterpreted) that any action that affects the future is immoral because, basically, the future has no say in it. In my reading of the book, he seems to gloss over some things: That every action or inaction has an effect on the future. That even prosaic choices (of mates, food, childrearing practices, etc.) effect the gene pool. That no one chooses to be born or into what family, or even species, they will be born. That if people in the future have a right to make their decisions, then there must be some decisions that are ours to make as well. These seem important points in any discussion of our effects on future people. Lewis is either putting forth an important subtlety that I don't understand, or a brazen absurdity I don't know how to deal with. I mention The Abolition of Man because I've heard it upheld as a paragon of thinking about the future.

Then there's the more prosaic and reasonable concern that popular adoption of methods that change the gene pool more directly could have catastrophic, perhaps irreversible, unintended consequences.

The concern about irreversibility cancels out in a way: just the idea that we would make widespread genome changes, and not see the results until too late, implies a technology that can deploy genetic changes among large numbers of people quickly. It's hard to imagine such a technology without the ability to make backups of individuals' genomes, and without the ability to reverse the changes it makes. (Your entire genetic makeup is about as much data as is on a CD or keychain flash drive. The portion of that that isn't duplicated in every other human is much less, about one percent.)

The larger irony is a larger version of trying to imagine genetic technology advanced enough to cause widespread problems but not advanced enough to make backups and restore from backups.

Try to imagine a technology that gets to the point of making dangerous changes to everyone's genome, and stops there. In particular, try to imagine people with that level of technical flexibility...stopping at DNA and protein as materials to make people with, when we already have materials with better properties, and are close to building things at finer levels of detail than DNA and protein can.

When I think about this, I throw in another factor: if being based on our inherited DNA is essential to what makes life meaningful, then it seems to me we should think in terms of the time scale that self-run DNA evolution takes: thousands and millions of years.

Here are some scenarios I do and don't see coming out of this mix of constraints:

Unlikely: that we cause catastrophic widespread effects, without having progressed far, such that civilization collapses and we don't get farther. In other words, most of us set out on a narrow bridge which snaps before we get across. My optimistic doubts about this are that, on the one hand, we won't be able deploy big changes widely before making very big advances in technology, and on the other, that we wouldn't be that reckless if we had the chance. This is the most reasonable version of genome worry: that we might make big changes far in advance of the knowledge that would make them safe. But it's a short-term worry.

Possible: that technological progress stops really soon, like within a year, and stays stopped for millennia. This could happen by a physical catastrophe, war, or by some ideological catastrophe much more serious than what we call the Dark Ages.

Not possible: that technology progresses, that we make only very conservative changes to the human genome, and that AIs do not take over and obsolete us, for more than a hundred years. The problem is that very quickly, abandoning DNA becomes a perfectly conservative thing to do.

Not possible: that technology progresses, we completely refrain from directly changing who we are, and AIs don't take over. Besides the problem of controlling AI without mandating a dark age and without cyborging, the problem here is imagining everyone getting to the point of understanding what steps are perfectly safe, but steadfastly refusing to take them. I see this as more likely than the above scenario of reasonable changes stopping with DNA, but not much more.

Not likely: that technology progresses and we leave our genome alone, but become chewy centers within cyborgs, or emotion centers within AIs, such that we think of our human core (on those infrequent occasions when we do) as a small part of ourselves--but untouchable. I find it hard to imagine the combination of yuck factors that would permit this without allowing transcendence of that particular awkward core technology. On the other hand the CPU in all modern Windows and Mac OS computers, and almost all Linux computers, is essentially a large well-designed computer pretending to be a very small, badly-designed 8086.

But is anyone who is concerned with the long-term future of the human genome, concerned that it be preserved carefully in this chewy-center, appendix or spandrel scenario?

So the irony is that while the long-term future of the human genome might be important, that's only in the case where civilization dies or goes brain-dead from some non-genetic cause, and we're hoping that having current-design humans around will increase the chance of civilization emerging from the catastrophe hundreds of years later, rather than waiting for a new worthy species to evolve. But maybe there are better ways to provide for that possibility, rather than restricting the options of the majority of the population in the short term.

My arguments are I-fail-to-imagine arguments. But what I am failing to imagine is that the strange, tragic and absurd corner-cases are the ones people are thinking of when they worry about our genome. More likely, it seems to me, they haven't thought through the middle- of- the- road cases.

The wider-still irony is that being concerned about the long-term future of the human genome is failing to understand the magnitude of changes that are going on. It's a failure to think ahead. Maybe a better worry is to ask, how do we ensure that our essential values, information, properties, abilities, and so forth, are being preserved at each step as we change the details of ourselves and our technologies?

It's the Spiritual, Stupid!

Half a bee, philosophically,
Must ipso facto half not be.
But can a bee be said to be,
Or not to be... Do you see?"
--Monty Python, "Eric the Half-a-Bee"

"A thousand plastic flowers
won't make a desert bloom."
--Fritz Perls

The topic of my sermon today doesn't exactly fit the "It's the X, Stupid!" prototype but close enough. Also, the term "spiritual" may be a stretch for some; in fact I'm thinking of something closer to "Existential" myself.

A lot of the qualms people have about future technologies or their effects, don't have much to do with the technologies themselves, but rather, underlying issues in people's lives that thinking about new possibilities stir up. Often someone writing about the future will express a qualm in general terms that seems embarrassingly close to an admission of the author's own rug-swept angst.

I mean issues in a person's life like: what's the meaning of it? Or, what to do with it?

The example I'm really thinking of is longevity. "But what in the world," conservatives ask, "will people do with all that time in their lives?" I can't reproduce the horror, rebuke and utter puzzlement with which this question is asked, but that's the mix.

Deciding what life means and what to do with it is a tough one. The Existentialists came up with descriptions of the human condition that sound like horror movie scripts, captions for The Scream, or lists of imbalances of the bodily humors. The Void is scary enough that it's possible to understand why, when the prospect of more healthy lifespan is opened up, some people's first focus is on the associated voidspan.

But people horrified in this way probably haven't solved (any more than I have) the problem for life as they previously knew it, either. Technology, change and the future aren't central to the question, they merely disturb the rug. That cloud of dust, it's old dust-- it's the spiritual.

The X in "it's the X" was originally Content. Amidst new things like interactive software, hypertext, web pages, animated GIFs-- no wait-- Flash! and so forth, it's easy for a designer, an author, a company, a culture, to get lost in the technology aisle, shopping for and pasting together bits of glitter. Sometimes communicators need to be reminded that they're supposed to be getting Content across. Lately a mutant ideal says that Web 2.0 is about Community, stupid. This requires a shift from Content gear, but you see the pattern.

So by analogy, technology is only stuff to support, or stuff that distracts from... life, but what is life supposed to be?

This post isn't about answering questions like that, it's to say that existential or spiritual questions belong to us as individuals and belong in our lives. Facing The Void isn't a mistake, an imposition, a fault, or a wrong turn. It's having a seat at the table, being a player in a game whose score isn't settled. Neither technology, nor a lack of technology, nor external restriction on technology answers spiritual questions.

What I'm getting at is that "we," in any collective way, can't make spiritual choices for us, the individuals. If the issue is spiritual, then "we" have no business making decisions for us. Nor are we as people who steer technologies or policies of any sort responsible for including spiritual solution-packs with each new turn. Spiritual questions are real but personal.

The horror at new choices implies that life is a cruise that technologists and policymakers are in charge of, and that it's unfair to change the options available once the cruise is already in progress, since the new situation might not match the passengers' expectations. But life was never for anyone to plan for-- or promise to-- anyone else. The teeth-gnashing reality of spiritual uncertainty should remind us that finding meaning, or creating meaning in life is our right as individuals, one that no one else can give, take away or buffer.

The fact that nonaggressive things you do in your life may open up unexpected possibilities in my life, is part of God's own cruise package for a world with more than one passenger. I don't think the trip would be worthwhile if it weren't so.

Star Trek vs. The Jetsons

In a previous post I said the 1960s vision of a question-answering typewriter has come true with Google. Then I thought, look at the freakin' format of this blog, it's a display from Star Trek: The Next Generation, fer Roddenberry's sake.

A couple of the big items from Star Trek have come true. Mainly the cell phone. Wall-sized flat TVs that double as computer displays. Transporters on a one-particle level. Sliding doors are pretty common in supermarkets anyway. Hand phaser not, but truck-sized, repeatable laser weapons are in the bidding stage at the U.S. Defense Department. Not the tricorder exactly, but many phones contain a movie camera, day planner, calculator and GPS.

Everyone makes fun of 1950s visions of the future, the domed cities and flying cars. Sometimes the conclusion is drawn that we're uniformly very bad at predicting the future, or that the future is impossible to predict. But Star Trek proves that Gene Roddenberry's kind of prediction-- that if people need something enough and it's obvious enough, they'll work till they get it-- makes some sense.

The Star Trek communicator was simple and obvious. The domed city and the flying car, in contrast, seem to flout their strangeness. They extrapolated the most modernistic things around at the time, while the communicator extrapolated down the middle of the road.

The lesson obviously isn't that only plain things happen. Maybe plain things are safer bets, though.

Reasonable Radical

Finally I figured out what I really do. I'm a de-mystic.
--Richard St. John, Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich

I love everything technical and obscure. I just hate the fact that it's obscure. I think of the 20th century as the Sheet Metal Age, when everything's true insides were enclosed in tin shells, enameled and chromed, and sculpted to look like what they weren't-- or to look like nothing much, so long as it's not what they are. I feel about the inner workings of things like I do about literacy. We're supposed to be familiar with the world we're walking around in. Not just familiar but able to grab hold and adjust. Otherwise we would be like that character of dystopian horror, The Consumer. I also love psychology and politics. I want to know why people act oblivious, why they put up with not knowing, not having control. But also what might be possible and how.

So I developed a habit of joining discussion groups of disaffected nerds like myself, hoping, you know, that we would figure it all out and reform the world.

After a while I noticed that disaffected nerds seem to fall into two categories. The first are the grouchy sticks- in- the- mud. These people seem to carry an enormous kit of reasons why it'll never work and it ain't gonna happen. Sometimes they have particular detailed scenarios of how the world is going to go to hell. You know, that plan will never work because the Mafia will blow you up with nukes before you get started. You may wonder why the grouches stick around in groups of reformer wannabees. I wondered that.

The other type is the person who has a shining radical idea that, if only people would embrace it, would solve all our problems. But the radical never seems able to convincingly explain his ideas or give them traction, and no amount of feedback, friendly or hostile, seems to draw him out in a satisfying way. He may be blissfully self-assured, or annoyed at how everyone misconstrues his points and fails to understand the logic. He may spend his time in detailed definitions of terms each more obscure and frustrating than the last. But he's in his world and it seems far away.

(There's a third type: polite, well- spoken, interested in things, but seemingly not obsessed with knowing everything and changing everything at once. How can anyone be like that?)

I decided that if I could, I would like to be a "reasonable radical." I want to learn about new ways of thinking that cut through confusion and show simplicity at the heart of things, and yet be able to attach these ideas to points that matter, and be able to talk about them in a sensible way, without having to hole up in an obscure terminology, and without having to shield my eyes from parts of reality that spoil the story.

By radical I don't mean leftist, but just "at the root." Any idea that undercuts everything and proposes a different foundation. Here are some of my favorites:

• All living things and people are just machines.
• Our minds are just like running computer programs.
• We are clouds of matter and energy flowing according to differential equations.
• There is no externally-defined right and wrong.
• Money is the neurotransmitter of value in the world.

The "radical" part of my ideal is to be able to take ideas like that and admit their truth, to be committed to truth, grit the teeth and sweep away superstition. There are ideas that can serve as metaphors for everything, but more than metaphors, they are thoroughly true for everything, and it's important to be able to follow an idea to that point and look at the world seriously from a new perspective. Sometimes radical ideas have radical applications, but sometimes having faced up to an idea mainly serves as a reminder of fuzzy or fearful ideas you had before you faced it, in case you run across their kind again.

But the point isn't just to be punched in the gut and set spinning, or to convert to a new religion. It's still the same world after a radical idea as it was before. The same things are real and true. A metaphor for everything is also a metaphor for nothing. Hopefully you'll be set to interesting rethinking of things you took for granted before.

The "reasonable" part is not to be overly impressed or thrown by radical ideas, while respecting their power and truth. Pulling out a radical idea to impress or snowblind people can be charlitanism or self-delusion. As far as I know the only immunization against that is to have picked up, handled and filed away a dozen radical ideas oneself. The thing to do with a radical idea is to try to see how it can help you, to compare the view through it to the view around it. But also, to separate the dizziness and flinching from the real issues. "Now that we know this is true, what do we have to do?"

I think the reflex to tie free- floating ideas back to the cold ground is what sticks- in- the- mud are really up to. They've just come to assume that's all you can do, or that such effronteries must be brought down with vengeance and in flames.

Between the people who won't take in any idea, and those who wear their one idea like a suit, there isn't much useful conversation. The adversarial model of ideas is boring.

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.)