This is the second part in my coverage of TEDx Berkeley 2013.   Read Part 1 here.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I found the speakers somewhat underwhelming.  I felt that most of the talks would have been better if they were much shorter.  There was a lot of  personal storytelling that I guess is supposed to be a hallmark of TED type talks, but the message of the stories often seemed arbitrary and not germane to the topic of the event: “Catalyzing Change.”

Mallika Chopra, daughter of Deepak Chopra, gave a touching at times, but meandering account of her family’s history.  Her topic was ostensibly about the importance of intention and she opened her talk with this powerful quote from the Upanishads:

You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

― Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

I don’t think she did a great job expanding on that idea, but I am grateful to her for bringing it forth nonetheless.  She also led a meditation at the end of her talk in which she had the audience breathe and self-affirm by repeating the phrase “I am” while she asked questions: “Who am I?” “What do I want?” “How can I serve?”

The “How can I serve?” question calls to mind Seligman’s concept of Meaning from his PERMA model.  But I was most interested in this question of “What do I want?”  It seems incredibly important to first know one’s own desires.  Desires imply goals.  From there, it seems obvious that one should consider how one’s own plans and actions are furthering or detracting from those goals.  Here’s a perfectly reasonable set of instructions for living.  But I confess that I don’t do this very often.

Next up was Dan Millman, author of the Way of the Peaceful Warrior.  He did a handstand.  He is 68.  He trotted out some platitudes: live in the moment, be the change you want to see in the world, yadda yadda yadda.  I did like his comment that we don’t have a spam filter in our heads referring to a common tendency toward negative thoughts.  And I must say, he did pull out some good quotes:

“I’ve suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.” –Mark Twain

 

“The lesson is simple, the student is complicated.” – Barbara Rasp

 

He admonished the audience to “Just Do It” and to pay attention to the quality of each moment as these will aggregate to define the quality of your life.  That’s all well and good, but I was left with the impression of having sat through an infomercial for a down-to-earth, athletic, new age guru’s self-help products.

Berkeley professor, Ananya Roy spoke next on the topic of “(un)knowing poverty.”  She started her talk by audaciously declaring that she lived in public housing.  Her point being that the government spends twice as much on the mortgage tax deduction for middle class homeowners than it does on the entire Department of Housing and Urban development.  So in her view the rich get state help while the poor must rely on self help.  Roy disparaged the idea that poverty could be alleviated by donating $5 toward micro-loans in the Whole Foods checkout line, calling it hubris.  She asserts that there are underlying systems in place whereby poverty is produced and privilege is maintained.

Roy told a moving story of her travels to India in which she was confronted with the unbridgeable gap between wealthy westerners and the poor of the global south.  ”How much does a domestic help worker make in the US?” she was asked.  The ridiculously low (by Bay Area standards) figure of $500 per month was suggested. But domestic help workers in the Indian slums she was visiting make the equivalent of $13 per month.  This shouldn’t be surprising given that half the world lives on less than $1000 per year.  Think about that for a minute, fellow Global Notherners.  That’s friggin’ brutal.  Roy mocked those Berkeley folk who are more comfortable aiding poverty in distant places that aiding the homeless on the streets of the Bay Area.  But the poorest of the poor here barely qualify as poor by global standards, so I am conflicted about that.

Roy went on to relate that a certain fellow living in this Indian slum told her that there should be no homelessness in the US since no citizen should be denied a home.  The US should permit the poor to build shacks on unused land.  So this person living on perhaps $13 a month took solace and pride in the fact that he was not homeless.  Sadly the government came and razed the shanty town he was living in soon after.   Roy was justifiably outraged that nearby middle-class developments were left intact in spite of the fact that they violated the same zoning rules that justified the removal of the shanties.  In fact these communities were touted as examples of economic development.  The rich get state help, the poor get self help.  Learn more at #GlobalPOV.

Karen Sokal-Gutierrez spoke next on the world pandemic of tooth decay.  If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, take a look at some of the pictures of little kids whose teeth have rotted right out of their heads.  Horrid.  But the insidious part about this is the link that she drew between cheap junk food and tooth decay in the Global South.  She recounted scenes of parents putting soda into baby bottles.  I saw Food Inc. so, you know, I was already disgusted by the perverse folly of farm subsidies and their negative impact on public health.  But it never occurred to me how this junk food problem would impact the developing world.  Here we have unsophisticated consumers being bombarded with false advertising and starting to face economics where junk food is cheaper than healthy food.  According to Sokal-Gutierrez, this toxic food is even making it’s way into remote rural villages.  Unbelievable.

I will continue my coverage of TEDx Berkeley 2013 in further posts soon.

I attended TEDx Berkeley 2013 today and it was my first TED type event.  I was largely unimpressed by the talks and felt somewhat isolated in the sea of twenty-somethings that attended the Zellerbach Hall event on the UC Berkeley campus.  Nonetheless, I will try to share some shards worthy of interest.

The event was divided into three programs entitled Dream, Create, and Impact.  Being a night person, of course I missed the entire Dream section which occurred from 10:00 – 11:30 am.

Louann Brizandine, author of the Female Brain, was the first speaker that I was able to see.  Her basic thesis being that men’s and women’s brains differ biologically, largely due to hormonal influences.  She gave a folksy presentation light on facts.  Better writers than I have beaten up on her previous work for this tendency.  She referred to babies as “marinating” in hormones and included a photo of a large breasted woman in her slides to grab the attention of straight men (and presumably some gay women?).  She indulged in what I like to call “evolutionarily adaptive storytelling” by telling the audience that evolution has shaped men to be attracted to large breasted females since large breasts are a signal  of high estrogen levels and thus fertility.

I don’t mind this sort of storytelling, but it’s more interesting if some empirical evidence is shown.  This particular story suggests that smaller breast sizes would be evolutionarily maladaptive, and it’s not clear that this is true.  Of course, these stories certainly oversimplify evolution.  Intuitively, it has long seemed to me that nonadaptive but neutral traits should survive in populations as long as they aren’t specifically maladaptive.  Organisms that maintain a variety of these neutral traits would appear to be more robust since a neutral trait for one environment might turn out to be life-saving under changed circumstances.    Setting my own confirmation bias aside, I have found some evidence to suggest that evolution is less driven by adaptation than some may think.

But I am digging deeper than Brizandine delved during her talk.  She went on to touch on the differences between how boys and girls like to play.  Here she did cite Eleanor Maccoby’s work which suggests that socialization has a limited impact on gender roles. Brizandine described girl play as being relational in nature while boys prefer rough physical play. She suggested that brain circuits are powered by hormones, and cited the anecdotal story of a transgendered person going from female to male who experienced a drop in tolerance for converstations with his female friends.  This example makes her arguments more palatable to me.  Determinist though I am, I get annoyed by arguments biased toward nature in nature vs nurture discussions.  I am attracted to theories of behavior that allow for change and allow for agency.  I like the idea that a biological woman that really, really, wanted to think more like a man could take hormones and achieve some aspect of that.  That’s why epigenetics is also fascinating to me.  Give me the wisdom to know what I can change…

Read Part 2 of my TEDx Berkeley 2013 coverage here.

I went to see Mickey McManus plug his latest book, Trillions, at the Bay Area Future Salon held at SF Tech Shop last week on April 9th.  McManus heads Maya, which is a “design consultancy and technology research lab.”  I’m coming to believe that the more meta your business is, the more important you are.  What the hell do these guys actually do?  Well, they built an “information-centric environment” for DARPA called Visage for one thing.  McManus made some bold claims about this being based on the idea of digital DNA but, you know, actual DNA is pretty hardcore technology, so I have my doubts.

McManus’ thesis is that economics will make it cheaper to embed computation into objects than to forgo it.  This vast internet of things will contain trillions of computers, dwarfing the current internet.  It will quickly make today’s techno-catch phrases of clouds and webs seem quaintly antiquated.  I have to like anyone who refers to cloud computing as a sunset technology.  So refreshing.  And he can certainly turn a nice phrase here and there.  This trillions-scale internet of things will “turn the sock inside out.” Instead of data being “in the computer” we ourselves will be living “in the data” so to speak, since our entire environment will be completely interwoven with computation and data.  And this is a done deal as far as McManus is concerned. The markets dictate it and so it shall be…within 5 years.

McManus trotted out another nice phrase to describe this internet of things: unbounded malignant complexity.  Nice!  Soon everything around you will be a potential vector for cyber-attack.  Imagine your refrigerator getting infected with malware, or your medical prosthetics.  Of course I have riffed on this theme before, and Vinge imagines that this future will have all the stability and permanence of the financial markets.  McManus suggests we look to nature for solutions to this complexity problem: biomimicry for information systems.  He characterizes nature as being organized into hierarchies of layered complexity where simpler components form foundations for more advanced structures.  Cells make up bodies which form families which form communities, etc.

It’s not clear to me how this model can be applied to information systems in a novel way, but that’s why McManus makes the big bucks.  I got a copy of the book, I will read it and get back to you.  In the meantime, you can check out this article that McManus published about nature’s “generative frameworks” on the techonomy site.  This seems like it might be an interesting site by the way.  They put on conferences in Tucson and Detroit.  I think I will try to get myself invited to one.  Kurzweil is speaking at their Tucson conference this year.  Lord knows I can’t get enough Kurzweil.   In that techonomy article he admonishes business to create frameworks that allow their users to create inventions.  But I am skeptical of this generative framework jargon.

Sure, Apple did it with apps on the iphone.  Web 2.0 is all about harvesting user generated content and data.  This isn’t really new stuff, but again, jargon-meister McManus gives us a new name for a familiar phenomenon: exhaust data.  The era of trillions is going to push big data to even bigger bigness.  All of these devices will be generating unimaginable yottabytes of “exhaust data” and the savvy business hustlers of today should be positioning themselves to find those opportunities for data exhaust recycling.  Because nature wastes nothing, don’t you know.

McManus also delved into this idea of data liquidity and suggested that some analog of shipping containers was needed in the information systems world.  As shipping containers led to an explosion of international trade by providing a common API for physical transport, McManus envisions an informational equivalent to make the internet get even more crazy with the sharing and whatnot.  He asserts that DNA plays some similar role and is actually nature’s currency.  Which strikes me as a weird thought – the economics of trading DNA? Nature is the best example of market dynamics?  Really?  This is good stuff.  And of course it follows that the oceans can be thought of as nature’s backup drive providing the ultimate in data resiliency.  Actually maybe referring to the oceans as nature’s central banks is a better analogy.

Again, I have a hard time seeing how this plays out in information systems.  But then, I lack vision.  McManus suggested that Maya’s Visage system for DARPA which I referred to earlier makes use of this data containerization concept.  He also talked about the fact that most disagreements are identity disputes and that matter unlike data always has a unique identity and doesn’t require Universally Unique Identifiers.  Was he trying to hint at where this ubiquitous computing could go?  The ultimate merging of bits and atoms?  I cannot say, but it’s an intriguing thought.

Over all, McManus was upbeat.  He sees a world of limitless possibilities, rife with business opportunities.  What unimagined synergies will these trillions of computing devices facilitate if the right connections are made?  Maybe you can’t picture why your sock drawyer should communicate with your stereo, but then again, when Jobs cut an early deal with the Beatles, he agreed not to take Apple into the music business.  Ha, talk about lack of vision.  Er, wait, this is Jobs we are talking about.  Anyway, McManus admonishes would-be entrepreneurs to seek out unlikely partnerships today because the trillions will make all connections possible…or something.

I attended Michael Kim’s Habit Design meetup tonight, which was billed as a fireside master class with BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford.  It was held at design firm Ideo’s office, under the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, which was plentiful with distressed, recycled wood.

Michael Kim asked everyone to read up on Fogg’s work before attending this meetup, so I complied.  Not to make him sound creepy, but Fogg seems to be working out some sort of framework for the operant conditioning of humans.  I am a little confused by this stuff.  On the one hand, his behavior model seems quite intuitive.  It stands to reason that the harder a task is, the more motivated one has to be in order to be persuaded to perform that task. On the other hand, there is no empirical evidence offered that this is actually true.  As one fellow attendee pointed out, the flat earth theory was quite intuitive as well.  So while Fogg’s lab resides at Stanford, his work has a highly unacademic feel to it.  Citations are sparse to non-existent in the material I reviewed, and I didn’t see any papers based on actual experiments.

But QS isn’t properly scientific either, and I have argued that it provides value by giving us insight into ourselves.  I am willing to concede that habit design might be useful to help individuals craft their own behaviors to reduce harmful habits and increase positive habits. I was initially interested in habit design because I wanted to increase the frequency of my own writing habit.  I did build a decent writing habit for a few months recently during a lull in business, but I found it much harder to maintain once business picked up again.  Fogg’s ability factors offer some insight into this. I often feel too exhausted mentally to write after working all day.  So one obvious solution this suggests is to simply stop expending mental effort at work (Ah, if only it were that easy.).

Many of the people at these Habit Design meetups are app developers and business people.  Fogg ran a successful and high profile Facebook app class in 2007 that spawned apps that reached millions of people.  So a lot of Silicon Valley types started paying close attention to him and his work.  He advocates lean startup, agile style models of development where various ideas are attempted and iterated toward completion.  Little effort is expended for each initial prototype and only ideas that pan out receive additional effort and resources.

Now all this sounds well and good and properly entrepreneurial.  But I found Fogg to be a bit glib in the way he treats this topic of persuasion through technology.  Assuming that these behavior design tools of his work, he is potentially arming young, hungry, ethically challenged Silicon Valley hustlers with brain washing technology.  I would have preferred to hear some mention of the ethical implications of behaviorism in the marketplace.   It seems that when Skinner’s ideas were ejected from academia, the mantle of behaviorism was quietly taken up by corporations.  As this fellow Jay pointed out, the casinos for example have figured out plenty of tricks to control the behavior of their prey, err, “customers.”

Capitalism is sort of a massive genetic algorithm generating all sorts of unsavory behavior control strategies.  I usually console myself with the belief that humans are pretty canny and quickly learn the tricks of advertisers and other mercenary persuaders.   But if this pseudo-science turns into real science as with neuromarketing, then more and more of us will be in real trouble.  I don’t want to end up in the thrall of some corporation whose marketing department figures out how to attack my weakness for Star Wars memes.  Seriously, if some habit designer sets up just the right sequence of triggers, the next thing I know I’ll be spending all of my disposable income on action figures.

But there is a real self-help angle here.  The fact is that many of us struggle with modifying our own behaviors.  Several ignite talks were given by folks who figured out ways to change their own habits by modifying their environments or by taking baby steps to build up routines that could be expanded on.  Fogg’s tiny habits program may have helped many people change their habit by supplying triggers via email.  I like the simplicity of focusing on triggers and ability instead of motivation.  We only can do what we are capable of doing and I can see how a trigger and reward can help to get you moving.  So go ahead, learn to ring your own bell and salivate.  In additional to training yourself to take that daily run or forgo that delicious doughnut, you might inoculate yourself against the incessant ringing of those product engagement bells.

I was recently challenged by Dinelle Luchessi, Director of Community and Media for the Health Extension Salon, to describe my own vision of a positive future.  Dinelle took exception to the part of my first Health Extension Salon blog post where I suggested that focusing on positive future scenarios (i.e. utopia) was comparable to drinking the Kool-Aid.  This is a question that I have been struggling with since I first heard Neal Stephenson bring it up at Black Hat 2012 when he was launching his Hieroglyph project.   Stephenson argues that the dystopian futures portrayed in science fiction in the past 30-40 years have contributed to the stagnation of innovation.  He suggests that the positive visions of SF’s Golden Age inspired engineers and scientists to innovate by giving them an “over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision.”  This theme was re-iterated by several speakers at the Humanity+ conference last year as well.

My gut reaction is to reject this idea.  ”Never trust science fiction writers who tell you how important science fiction writers are,” I said.  ”Writers are merely reflecting the Zeitgeist,” I said.  ”Blame politics and the markets,” I said.  There is a fatalistic part of me that thinks that this deterministic clockwork universe is constrained to click forward to the next possible state.  Humans who think their decisions matter are simply deluding themselves.  But this isn’t how I live my life.  Like most people, I assume that my decisions matter.  So my rejection of the idea that writers can shape the future is in some ways an abdication of responsibility.  It may be that we owe it to ourselves and future generations to envision and discuss positive future scenarios.

I will set aside the question of what “positive” means for now.  I have poked into that question somewhat before.  Humans don’t and probably shouldn’t have universally shared values.  But I am not entirely a cultural relativist.  Ethnocentric as it is, I am happy to assert that secular Western liberal values are inherently superior to the alternatives.  I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that freedom and equality are cool ideas.

One way to approach a positive vision of the future is to project apparent trends into the future.  Pinker points out that violence is declining.  Matt Ridley reveals that we are using cleaner and cleaner energy over time.  World poverty shows a clear pattern of decline.  So a general vision of a clean, well-fed, and peaceful future world seems reasonable.  But we can’t just sit back and assume that these trends will continue.  What actions can we take today to move toward a better future?  Consider the population problems in the Global South.  If a good future involves humans breeding less, educating women seems to be one of the best approaches to reducing population growth.

Improving the lives of the poorest might be considered a lateral improvement in the human condition.  But globalization is not innovation.  We’ve already figured out how to control population growth in the developed world.  Here in the Global North, we want something more interesting.  That’s where Health Extension Salon’s goal comes in: working toward a healthy 123-year-old.  Not decrepit 123-year-olds, but vibrant and lively geezers.  This would cause some demographic problems if introduced to the entire world all at once, but it will probably be first achieved in the rich, low population growth countries anyway.  I like equality and all, but let’s not get too carried away.

So what would a future first world filled with healthy 123-year-olds look like?  I like to use Stewart Brand as a role model for how to live an extended lifespan.  Brand himself has had several encore careers: founding the Whole Earth Catalog in the 60′s, the Global Business Network in the 80′s, and the Long Now in the 90′s, which he still guides.  It seems inevitable that as human lifespans increase, we will all be taking on multiple careers in one lifetime.  For that matter, the accelerating pace of change suggests that we will all need to continually learn new skills even if lifespans don’t increase dramatically.  So we all need to explore new forms of education.   Some will benefit from online learning, others will build skills and knowledge through play and experimentation at the local hackerspaces springing up around the world.

Hackerspaces bring to mind the question of a positive future for us here in the US.  Fiscal cliff concerns and our weak economy have lead some to question whether our nation’s finest years are behind us.  China is seen as ascendant.  But what about a future where automation and rising standards of living destroy China’s labor arbitrage advantage?  What if desktop manufacturing really does change everything?  A world where we print out physical goods, just in time, as we need them, is cool for many reasons.  It cuts down on environmental damage though lowered energy requirements and material waste. And it promises an amazing consumer experience of instant gratification coupled with unimaginable personalization.  The US could become the top manufacturer once again, though the export situation gets a little weird in that future.

I have argued before that our modern first world society has left us socially isolated and disconnected from the lifestyles we evolved into.  To me a positive future would have us adapt our society to match our evolutionary constraints.  Perhaps we could reorganize ourselves into 150 member intentional communities to take advantage of our hardwired social unit size.  This might even help solve environmental management problems by breaking up common areas into smaller segments.   We all need a little green space around us to keep our brains working properly anyway.  I like the idea of intentional communities because people should be free to break out of restrictive local traditions and cultures if they choose.  Culture should be voluntary.

So that’s one take on a good future:

• a lateral spread of wealth and education that raises the third world out of suffering
• medical innovation that dramatically extends the healthy lifespan of some
• technical innovation that reshapes how items are manufactured to conserve resources and improve consumer experiences
• cultural innovation that creates a new “village” community without trapping anyone in restrictive parochial boondocks against their will

I want to thank Dinelle Luchessi for challenging me to write this up.  It makes me feel pretty hopeful when I think about the possibilities for a positive future.  I will try to address some of the ways that the political and market roadblocks to these scenarios might be overcome in coming posts.

I attended Health Extension #6 at Y Combinator this evening.  I’ve been working too hard lately and I wanted to get back into the groove and hang out with a hip crowd.  And really who is hipper than Silicon Valley bio-hackers?  They loosened up the format this month and we weren’t forced to participate in community building like we were last month.  I honestly sort of missed being forced into community building.  I have a tendency toward the path of least resistance, so I just chewed the fat all evening instead of contributing anything useful.

Akhsar Kharebov, Silicon Valley Health 2.0 founder, kicked off the evening a book report on Eric Topol’s Creative Destruction of Medicine.  Kharebov portrayed Topol as a superhero on the order of BatMan or IronMan with a billion dollar’s worth of institute resources at his disposal.  Topol is apparently a trouble-maker who is pushing for more personalized medicine via the integration of biological data.  He seems like he would be well aligned with the QS movement.  Which makes sense, since these Health Extension Salons have a strong QS connection themselves.

The next speaker, Dr. Saul Villeda, captured the audience’s imagination with a presentation of his work on rejuvenating cognitive function of older mice using blood from young mice.  This was very inspiring stuff.  The audience chirped in with much speculation about the mechanism.  Is it that the young blood introduces good stuff or does the old blood just have bad stuff?  I thought it was interesting that plasma and not whole blood was used.  It seems that we should be able to easily test the effect on humans given that plasma transfers are common practice   But of course these lab mice are all practically identical genetically, so that makes it easier for them to share blood.

Villeda also sagely pointed out that many treatments cure diseases in mice without working on humans.  He is  digging into this further to determine what factors in the blood may be responsible for this.  He is also interested to see if this may contribute to longevity, but he noted the high cost of studies like this.  He ended his talk for a plea for us all to call up our friends and relatives in Red States and ask them to call off their austerity dogs, err, congressmen.  The scientific community is deeply concerned about the effect the sequestration cuts will have on research funding, and we should be too.  I will take my shots at academic research here and there, but it sure beats the alternative.

After the talks, I enjoyed chatting with acquaintances old and new.  I was taken to task for calling utopians kool-aid drinkers.  I know that I vacillate between Whiggism and pessimism, but I don’t want to put down positive thinkers in general.  One point that was brought up was that positive thinking is required to tackle hard problems.  After all, if everyone thinks the hard problems are too difficult to achieve we end up with the best minds of our generation writing HFT algorithms on wall street or trying the iterate the next generation of groupon or some other SoLoMo triviality here in the valley.  I totally get that, so I hear by retract most of my criticism of positive thinkers.  Cynicism produces at least as  many problems in the world.  I definitely don’t want to throw cold water on the folks who are working to extend healthy human lifespans to 123 years.  I want in on that.

I was invited to give a talk to a group of MBA students at USF last week on the topic of Futurism.  Yep.  No kidding.  Anyway, I have been taking opportunities to harvest money from the environment lately and it has distracted me from futurism and caused me to neglect my writing. I appreciated the opportunity to share some ideas with young people who will be going out into the world soon to try to make a go of it.  The problem is that I didn’t feel that I had a lot of upbeat and encouraging views to share.

I started out by digging into a recent Smithsonian interview with Jaron Lanier that Rachel Haywire shared last month.  Lanier is continuing his bearish stance on web 2.0.  Data spies like Facebook and Google are pulling value out of the economy by appropriating  content without compensation.  He cites Google translate as an example since it utilizes the work of millions of existing translations without compensating the translators.  However,  those translators presumably already got paid for their services, and there wasn’t previously a very hot market for discontinued stereo manuals translated into 5 languages.  So I am not sure that value is really being taken out of the system.

This is actually largely true of a lot of Web 2.0 stuff.  Sure, people are generating content that is being monetized by Google and Facebook.  (Facebook does make money, right?)  But it’s not like there was much of a market for the junky content we all dump onto the internet anyway.  And since the only way to make money on the internet is via advertising, a simple ad-blocker steals that value back from the “data spies.”  But you have to admire fiery fusillades like this from Lanier:

There’s this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. [Meanwhile], it’s shrinking the overall economy. I think it’s the mistake of our age.

He might have a point in regards to high frequency trading.  A recent study suggests that it might actually pull out liquidity instead of increase it. Lanier supposedly address this topic as well in his next book, Who Owns the Future?

Next, I pulled out some of Venkatesh Rao’s ideas from the Entrepreneurs are the New Labor.  I really like this piece and I think it’s worth talking about more.  Rao basically makes the point that as markets develop there are fewer unknowns and the advantage drains away from “hustlers” (startup founders) toward the bankers (or VC’s).

Hustlers lost their main weapon: specialized and indispensable knowledge of murky emerging markets.

In his piece, Rao draws our attentions to the robber barons of the 19th century like Carnegie and Vanderbilt who leveraged unique knowledge of the “emerging market structure and state of play” with regards to the steel and railroad industries.  He compares them to Jobs and Gates who scored huge successes in the emerging computer industries but contrasts those giants with the Y Combinator-style startups that just build some modest feature for an existing product or service.   It seems obvious that first movers are going to get access to low hanging fruit in any new market, but I do like the way Rao lays it out.

But that makes me feel somewhat sorry for the young people I was talking to.  These are MBA students at a private US College, not war orphans in Africa, so I guess I don’t feel so very bad for them.  But I can definitely relate to their first world problem: how to build a life for yourself in this tough economy with shrinking prospects.  Rao’s piece suggested that the startup incubator path might supersede the MBA path at some point.   If you build a modest startup that shows enough promise, you can get aqui-hired by a bigger firm who recognizes your talent.  Whatever crumbs of equity the VC’s let you keep can be thought of as a signing bonus.  Why pay for an MBA when you can get paid to acquire real world experience to boost to your career?  But maybe the kids that already plunked down for USF don’t want to hear that.

I also trotted out my typical bearish position on China.  If automation continues it’s ongoing trend then we can arguably expect this to steal away China’s labor arbitrage advantage.  And automation does seem to be a brutal and ruthless juggernaut, threatening to buggy whip all of our jobs away.  Why just check out this awesome robot from IPI that finds and flings boxes around with ease.  I mean how is an MBA student going to compete with that thing?

One often stumbles upon Utopian visions in the thoughtspace of futurists.  Supposedly HG Wells was one such and he was touted by Kim Stanley Robinson at Humainty+ last year as having this massive positive effect on society, including Bretton Woods.  But Pinker takes a dimmer view of Utopians and suggests that any worldview that includes a goal of infinite utility lasting forever rationally justifies the most horrible attrocities to be committed toward that end and pulls out Pol Pot and Hitler as his bogeymen.  The fact that we can have a somewhat coherent set of alleged Utopians that includes both Pol Pot and HG Wells suggests some problems.  First, terms like Utopia or Utility or Infinite Fun are poorly defined and even if we could all agree on a universal good, the best approach to reach those ends are difficult to determine.

Take Kevin Kelly’s criticism of Thinkism which might suggest that we need some than intelligence to solve the world’s problems.  Michael Anissimov understandably takes exception to that argument, and Kelly’s argument is clearly flawed in some ways.  (uh, you can already simulate biology today, Mr. Kelly)  But progress toward any grand social goal, let alone Utopia, is deeply constrained by messy cultural artifacts like economics, politics, and even (God help us) religion.  We have enough food to feed the world, and we have the technology to get to Mars. (or close enough)  So why don’t we do those things?  Clearly not everyone agrees that feeding the world or going to mars are the right things to do.  So how to choose a Utopia?  One solution is to create a Godlike AI to rule them all, over-riding all these conflicting goals by assuming everyone would agree if they were just simulated properly.

This is problematic for a bunch of reasons.  But I fear that math is a poor tool to use to solve the best-path-to-utopia equation, err, problem.  Too much hand-waving is required.  For example, even if we assume that Infinite Fun will be had by populating the universe with “humans,”  how do assign probabilities to different approaches to achieve that?   Even if we drink the thinkism koolaid, one could argue that Augmented Intelligence is more likely that Artificial Intelligence.  I mean, we have a good track record with Augmented Intelligence.  Arguably every application we call AI now is just Augmented Intelligence.  Humans are running these programs and debugging the code.  Maybe we could just bootstrap to rulers of the universe by augmenting a bunch of humans.

More likely is that these cultural artifacts like economics, politics, religion, and even taste will bog us down.  Maybe that’s ok.  Maybe  static visions of Utopia are basically over-fitting and wouldn’t be adaptive to changing environments.  A caveman would probably have imagined a Utopia of endless summer with fat, lazy herds of meat passing continuously by his cave…  Actually that doesn’t sound bad when I think of it, but you get my point.

I attended my first Health Extension Salon at Y Combinator tonight.  This is a movement building group started by biotech entrepreneur, Joe Betts-LaCroix, whose goal is to extend the healthy lifespan of humans to 123 years and beyond.  I first bumped into Joe over at Quantified Self and I especially enjoyed his 28-hour day experiment.  I am always up for some health extension action and of course I was curious to see what Y Combinator looks like,  especially after reading “Entrepreneurs are the new Labor” by Venkatesh Rao.  Rao portrays Y Combinator as sort of a next-generation MBA program and the space did have a collegiate air about it…  But I digress as usual.

The  salon started out with a healthy (but probably not organic), semi-paleo buffet style meal, followed by presentations, then breakout working sessions with socializing at the end.  This is a salon for taking action.  The ultimate goal is to help develop technology that actually increases human health span.  The Health Extension Salon folks have a plan to vet health extension ideas: scientific breakthroughs, folk remedies, cheeseburgers, etc. using public forums.  The best ideas will funnel down to the scientific advisory board and then the cream of the crop will be pumped down to the money people to setup various vehicles to develop these ideas further.  One such vehicle might be a Health Extension Incubator funded with VC capital.  Another might be a non-profit funded with philanthropy money.

It’s interesting that this group seems to have deep ties to Quantified Self.  The wonderful Alex Carmichael was there greeting attendees.  This is interesting because Gary Wolf told me last year that he wanted to see if QS could evolve into a more action-oriented community.  There are many talented and competent people that are part of QS, and I have heard of several projects that were spawned by connections made at QS.  It seems that Joe picked up on this vibe and decided to make action a core value of this new community.  Enough yakking people, let’s do this.

Now you might be asking yourself, “What is this ‘Health Extension’ you speak of?”  Well, see we used to call this stuff “Life Extension” but we kept getting funny looks.  Normal people and scientists alike would smile nervously and edge toward the nearest exits.  Even though life expectancy has more than doubled in the past century, the maximum lifespan has increased at a more modest rate.  The verified oldest human was 122 years old when she died in 1997 which is only about 20 years older than the oldest human in 1798 who was 103 years old.  So the average person is living longer, but the oldest people aren’t getting much older.  Also, it turns out that people are more open to longer life if they consider the possibility of retaining health as they age.

Realistically, it’s improbable that we will see dramatic life extension in the near term.  But even now, we can help more people stay healthier later in life.   Diet and exercise  blah blah blah.  The Health Extension Salon folks want to push the boundaries of health extension interventions beyond the current standards.  The first presenters at last night’s salon reviewed highlights from the Foresight conference this year.  I covered that pretty thoroughly already, so I won’t rehash that here.  I will say that one of the presenters echoed Stephenson’s theme that futurists need to focus on happy utopia stories so that money people will contribute to health extension research.  This idea annoys me for two reasons: first futurists (and SciFi writers) who are negative are responding to the mood of their time and secondly, money people (and SciFi readers) are rightfully wary of anyone who has obviously been drinking too much kool-aid.

But anyway, the featured presenter of the evening was Stuart Kim of Stanford.  His lab studies the genetic component of aging.  Kim discussed some work sequencing the genomes of supercentenarians but it is unpublished, so I will say no more.  However, I will engage in wild speculation and imagine how cool it would be if they could locate a supercentenarian gene and hand it over to George Church to plug it into his CRISPR gene editor.  Boom, bio-hack to turn on live-to-old-age mode, so much cooler than god-mode.  Of course I would want version 3.0.   Who know what havoc this gene-editing roulette might wreak?

After the presentations, I sat in on the Media group and we plotted a media strategy to help fulfill the Health Extension Salon mission.  I hear social is big now.  The other teams meeting last night were community, information, and science.  I enjoyed myself and I look forward to helping out and possibly blogging for the Health Extension Salon.  I guess I will need to tighten up my scientific research first though.  I don’t want to come across like a grinder or something.

I guess I am out of it, but I never read Dale Carrico‘s work until recently.  I guess Carrico is a “critical theorist” and rhetorician who has been beating up on “futurological discourses” for years.  He seems to be some sort of leftist post-modernist, and he loves to trot out intricate and embellished language that almost reminds me of those continental types like the Situationists.  I really enjoy Carrico’s writings.  Which is to say, I enjoy whatever shards of meaning fall out when I attempt to unravel the tangle of his rhetorical empurplement.

I mean, check this out:

Discourses of “Bio-Enhancement” always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an “enhanced” human capacity, morphology, or lifeway — whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary — and hence all such discourses express a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook. Anyone who would claim or aspire to engineer an “optimal,” idealized, postulated homo superior with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.”

- Dale Carrico, Futurological Brickbracks

Tell me that doesn’t remind you of this other Marxist:

“IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.”

- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 

I mean, what the hell are these guys saying?  But this isn’t a rant against post-modernist obfuscation, it’s a post about Carrico’s criticism of futurology.  That quote from Brickbracks seems to boil down to, “If you talk about bio-enhancement, then you assume that you have the right to call something good even if others disagree with you.  And really anyone trying to improve on humans is a Nazi.”  To the first point, well, yeah, anyone can call anything good if they want to… To the second point, birth-control is a bio-enhancement unavailable to much of the human population and thus your argument is invalid.

I want to listen to Carrico’s criticism, I really do.  Because I struggle with narratives of progress.  I find myself saying, “But wait, what about all this bullshit going on?”  But I also can’t ignore that something like progress is really going on here.  So I will put up my dukes and take a shot at one of Carrico’s essays from 2009: Superlative Futurology.  I do highly recommend Carrico’s work, because someone has to mock out the nerds that drink too much Kool-Aid, it helps keep us honest.

Carrico makes a lot of good points in Superlative Futurology.  He criticizes futurist’s “dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence” as infantile, anti-political, and irrational.  There is some merit to these points.  In many extreme futurist narratives, death is overcome and humans have mastered nature to create superabundance.   Maybe Carrico is right, and we futurists need to turn away from the Pleasure Principle, grow up, and get to work facing reality.

It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic vision of collaborative problem solving (via consensus science) and consensual self-determination (via the provision of general welfare and the maintenance of the rule of law) instead a kind of faith-based initiative in which technoscience is invested with hyper-individualized wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal “transcendence,” a vision of idealized outcomes and personal aspirations for superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance — a vision that seems to me conceptually confused and terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

- Dale Carrico, Superlative Futurology

Ouch, that smarts.  But if we pick it apart, there are a lot of assumptions embedded in that passage.  I mean is anyone really turning away from science to pursue futurology?  And what is this “consensual self-determinism” of which he speaks?  Whatever “general welfare” and “rule of law” we happen to have still laying around this dump are remnants of vicious class struggles.

Carrico goes on to assert that techno-elites are somehow circumventing “stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change.”  Ha!  Yeah, right.  So many people are just itching to jump into the conversation about the future but those damn techno-elites just won’t let them into the conversation.  It’s not the techno-elite’s fault that everyone is too busy staring glassy eyed at screens all day, mindlessly clicking the “Like” button to trigger serotonin bursts…oh wait.  But seriously, people are generally too absorbed in nonsense to think about this stuff.  Not to mention the fact that technological change generally isn’t a function of deliberation in the first place.  Technoscientific change seems to happen when a breakthrough gets recognized as a market opportunity and then grabbed by some hustler.  That, or the military just has it built.  I guess sometimes a consortium gets together and comes up with standards or something, but that is just book keeping.

I could go on, but I will leave it here for now.  It seems that Carrico has a good understanding of the futurist scene and some valid criticism of it’s excesses.  But I will need to dig into his work more to convince myself that he isn’t a bit deluded about the nature of politics and technology.  Nonetheless, he is such an interesting writer that I will enjoy discovering which parts of his work are bullshit and which are not.