You know, maybe I was too hard on Lanier‘s idea that people should get paid for the use of their personal data.  Sure, it seems far-fetched right now, but it would pose an interesting solution to this NSA PRISM privacy scandal.  At one point in ‘Who Owns the Future” Lanier suggests that citizens could set a price on their data.  So whoever wanted a copy of it, would need to actually pay the citizen who created that data directly.  Lanier even considers the consequences of criminals trying to game the system:

A criminal who sets a high price on his data to avoid being tracked while committing a crime will find himself owing that amount if law enforcement has to get a warrant to track him in order to gain a conviction. On the other hand, if law enforcement doesn’t get a conviction, the price of the data will be taken out of a department’s budget. This balance of power can be tweaked to find a reasonable sweet spot generally balancing police effectiveness and civil liberties protection. Maybe the police would only owe up to a fixed limit, unlike civilian actors. However, a reasonable, intermediate solution to the quandary of access to digital information would come about without requiring constant reinterpretation.

Lanier, Jaron (2013-05-07). Who Owns the Future? (p. 304). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

He’s really proposing a market based solution here, which should theoretically appeal to libertarians and other capitalists.  Of course my main gripe is that it’s hard to build a market from scratch.  Also, the NSA aren’t really law enforcement people.  It actually seems less incendiary for the FBI to be snooping on us since they theoretically are steeped in due process and rule of law.  The NSA are more like military guys.  They don’t need no stinkin’ badges.  Though I guess the recent spying is actually A-OK from a legal point of view due to the Patriot Act.  Good luck getting that monstrosity declared unconstitutional with the current Supreme Court lineup.

But suppose that anyone who wanted access to your data actually played by Lanier’s rules and paid you some amount for it.  This would be a pretty decent solution.  The NSA would need to wedge another line item onto their top-secret budget, and in theory, this would force them to be somewhat more discriminating about who they wanted to snoop on.  Also, we would all get a nano payment and some notification that we were being watched and by whom.  This is a far better scenario than the current one and it does have the virtues of being market based and scalable.  Such a good idea, but really, really hard to see how it gets instantiated.  Think on this you smart people who care about privacy!

I watched Elon Musk‘s recent interview at “All Things Digital” (D11) and found it inspiring.  Musk got his start by sort of co-founding PayPal, then he went on to found SpaceX and later he co-founded Tesla motors.  That is fairly ridiculous as it stands, but then SpaceX has had unprecedented success and Tesla’s Model S is getting rave reviews.  So he is a formidable business man, but what I admire most about Musk is the vision.  He sees the obvious fact that we need to stop using gas powered cars at some point and so he goes and builds one (the best one).  He recognizes that life on earth is fragile and wants humans to be a space faring species.  So he goes and starts dramatically reducing the cost of space travel with SpaceX.   I have a buddy over at SpaceX who posted that they are working on a “Mars Colonial Transporter.”  Who else gets to work on such cool stuff?

It’s interesting that he is connected to Peter Thiel.  Thiel is always talking about how the internet boom hasn’t lead to many physical innovations.  He particularly carps about transportation not being faster.  I guess he has Musk’s work in mind when makes these comments.  Musk is all about transportation: space, car, and now a possible alternative to high-speed rail?!  I want to jump into some sort of pod in SF and get to LA in 30 minutes.  That would be awesome.

I also found it interesting that Musk recommends that young bright people forgo Silicon Valley. He says there is enough money and talent exploring digital space.  Musk suggests taking those tech skills out into the world and disrupting markets where innovation has stagnated which are dominated by just a few major players.  I guess that’s what he did in the aerospace and auto industries.  This seems reasonable.  Innovation in Silicon Valley has started to look a bit peaked.  Yeah, social, mobile, local, whatever.  I heard George Packer on the radio tonight pumping his new book and talking about how these startups are all about reducing friction in everyday life and that the Valley in general is out of touch with middle America.  I don’t doubt that is true.  Maybe the kids should heed Musk and go forth to conquer other worlds once they have learned the agile way of iterative improvement.

I just finished reading Jaron Lanier‘s “Who Owns the Future” so I will share some of my impressions of this book.  I was actually surprised at how few people were familiar with Lanier when I mentioned that I was reading him at various outings over the past few weeks.    So I guess it’s worth reviewing who this dreadlocked, ancient instrument playing macher is.  First off he wrote “You Are not a Gadget” which I haven’t read but I guess is an attack on the debasement of media by Web 2.0 which allowed the voices of the anonymous, unwashed masses to drown out the truly talented and is leading to the downfall of culture or something.  You might go read “Digital Maoism” if you are interested.  I am sure our friend Bert would have plenty to add if he cared to.  I don’t want to start a fight or anything,   but I will say that experts are probably somewhat overrated and leave it at that for now.

The premise of Lanier’s new book “Who Owns the Future” is that big data players are shrinking the economy by leveraging the largest servers to achieve information supremacy and then radiating risk out into the world.  So big servers don’t just radiate waste heat, they expel risk as well.  And they do this by forgetting apparently. Reversible computers don’t get hot and in Jaron’s ideal world remembering the provenance of data would balance risk.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Lanier calls these big data players “Siren Servers”

A Siren Server, as I will refer to such a thing, is an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest, and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact with it.

 

Siren Servers gather data from the network, often without having to pay for it. The data is analyzed using the most powerful available computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage.

 

That plan will always eventually backfire, because the rest of the world cannot indefinitely absorb the increased risk, cost, and waste dispersed by a Siren Server. Homer sternly warned sailors to not succumb to the call of the sirens…

 

Lanier, Jaron (2013-05-07). Who Owns the Future? (p. 50). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Lanier’s Siren Servers span many industries:  Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Walmart are all Siren Servers.  The insurance companies that only want to insure those that don’t need insurance qualify, as do the financial firms that packaged up those sub-prime mortgages and the ones that continue to engage in high frequency trading.  Now that’s a lot of ground to cover and my friend Robin once warned me to be wary of any idea that seems capable of explaining every possible phenomenon.  To the man with a hammer…

But Lanier does make some good arguments about the creepy and damaging nature of big data in business.  One big glaring problem I see is that he asserts that they are shrinking the economy.  Now I went to see him speak at the JCCSF last month and he said  during his talk that he wants his ideas to be tested empirically.  So I tried to dig up data that suggests the world economy has shrunk since oh, 1995.  I mean he tries to point to the debt and slow growth of the US and Europe as evidence but you can’t just ignore globalization.  Even he admits that this big data approach allowed Walmart to peacefully manage the rise of China.  These Siren Servers have helped enable globalization.  So it seems reasonable to look at the effect of the internet on world GDP or GWP and not just the US GDP.  I looked at the World Bank website which has some kludgy tools online.  I am not much of a researcher, but it seems like world economic growth has been pretty decent in spite of the internet.  Thus, one of Lanier’s main premises might be ill-founded.  Where is the evidence that markets are actually shrinking in the first place, let alone that this hypothetical shrinkage is caused by the internet?

Sure, I can see how Google Translate could in theory put translators out of work, but an empiricist should demand to see the numbers.  Surely Lanier could have employed a human to look up employment rates and wages of translators before and after the launch of Google Translate.  But he didn’t, he just asserts that Google is shrinking markets.   I could tell a story about how Google Translate enables millions of small businesses to roughly communicate with billions of customers who speak other languages.  So screw the translators that can’t keep up.  (Just kidding, Google Translate still sort of sucks.  Human translators aren’t obsolete yet.)  But that’s my problem with Lanier’s book.  He examines how these Siren Servers operate and then imagines how they must be impacting the world but then doesn’t actually show plausible evidence of causation.  Sure, the finance industry’s big meltdowns and those too-big-to-fail bailouts were bullshit.  But was that really caused by having servers that were too big?  Or did the regulation get a little too loose?  I say let them have their servers and bring back Glass-Steagall.  Then there is some utterly bogus comparison between the number of people Kodak employed compared to Instagram.  Uh, hello, some people were employed making all the smartphones that instagram runs on.  Also, last time I checked, dedicated cameras were still being produced. Get with it, Jaron.

I don’t want to be too negative about Lanier.  I agree with him that the middle class needs artificial levees to exist.  This was recently illustrated to me by Ananya Roy‘s talk at TEDx Berkeley this year. I also get that having a middle class is probably important since the uber rich simply won’t purchase enough super-yachts to keep the economy chugging along.  But I just have to facepalm in response when Lanier’s ultimate solution seems to be that everyone should get paid for the use of their data.  I mean, err, what planet are you living on again?  Sure, Ted Nelson‘s two-way links and other Xanadu visions would have helped preserve the provenance of data somewhat, but Lanier dramatically downplays the technical challenges.  I once heard Dan Kaminsky give a talk where he said something like: the internet we have now is in place because it’s the only thing the engineers could patch together that didn’t crash all the time.

But even if we imagine that some technical solution could be made to work, the real problem with this is that people don’t expect to get paid for generating data.  That’s the crux of the problem.  How do we get to a culture where people expect to get paid for their damn data?  Lanier imagines a cabal of alpha Siren Server owners getting together and agreeing to pay for data to prevent the economy from crashing.  Ha, if only the plutocrats were so wise.  We don’t have enough Elon Musks up there in the billionaire social stratosphere I’m afraid.  It seems that Lanier imagines that if only he and his elite network pioneer buddies had made a few crucial design changes at the dawn of the internet then this would have all played out better and we would have a more humanistic information economy.  But I have my doubts.  The internet is probably just as deeply shaped by human nature, politics, and even religion as it shaped by technology.  The tech folks can put stuff out there, but it’s a complex combination of factors that will determine what sticks and what doesn’t.  I wish this was just a network topology design problem.

Now let’s say that I am sympathetic to the whole Lights in the Tunnel theory.  Maybe technology will shrink markets if handled incorrectly.  Lanier makes another assumption that I take exception to.  He simply takes for granted that there would be a messy revolution if automation crashes the economy too badly.  I actually doubt it.  Armies already have more than enough technology to put down a revolution.  It seems clear now that Egypt’s revolution was a farce and that the army only stood aside to welcome their new Islamist overlords.  Look at Syria.  Look at the USA.  There is no way that the US public could overthrow the US military.

One might imagine that our military is made up of Americans who would never kill fellow Americans.  But you know, there are Americans and then there are AMERICANS.  And even that distinction will rapidly become moot anyway.  Autonomous military drones could well make revolution completely impossible.  So no, you don’t get to threaten the plutocrats with revolution to make them crack open their pocketbooks and start sharing the wealth.  They are way ahead of you on that front.  But of course I am being melodramatic again.  The elites have a whole slew of non-lethal revolution defusing tools.  Take mass media for example.

At the end of the day, I do want content creators to get paid and I see that this is a real problem right now.  I dutifully paid for my copy of “Who Owns the Future” by the way.  Maybe Amazon will be the company to save content.  Maybe it will take an  internet business model that is actually based on something other than selling advertisement.  But if I could come up with that, I wouldn’t publish it here.  I would hightail it right down to Sandhill Road and cash it in…  Oh, pardon me, daydreaming again.  Anyway, I like Lanier.  His heart is in the right place, he points out some ugly aspects of big data.  But as I said, he isn’t empirical enough for my taste and he is a bit overly infatuated with the idea of experts.  Also, his silver bullet solution of creating an information economy based on individuals selling their data is ludicrous for a large number of reasons.  Nonetheless, it’s good to have these contrarian futurists out there shouting at the vast machine that is bearing down on us all.

[UPDATE: 6/9/2013]

Bert did chime in thank goodness, expand the comments to see his outstanding contribution.  I did want to address the question of shrinking markets.  Bert found this list of 10 shrinking US markets that does seem to have reputable providence.

The full list is below:

It raises the question of what is meant by “Siren Servers shrink markets.”  Does Lanier mean US markets or world markets?  I argue that world markets are more relevant, but let’s take a closer look at the list above.  Some of the markets (mills, apparel) is probably caused by globalization and we would expect to see corresponding increases in developing markets. Some of the shrinking markets are almost certainly offset by increases in other areas.  Land lines suffer while wireless booms.  Newspapers and Record stores are part of that troublesome content problem and I will concede the point that the internet has hurt those markets and will continue to do so until we come up with a better way for content creators to get paid.  Also decreases in video postproduction or photofinishing ARE arguably due to software eating their lunch.  Technically, Lanier wasn’t ranting against all software, just the big data stuff that requires the personal data of millions to be effective.  At the end of the day, I would just say it’s hard to track which of these shrinkages aren’t offset by real growth elsewhere.  For example, does the fact that video postproduction is easier to achieve with software make it cheaper to create good looking video?  Couldn’t this translate into an expanded market for video in general?

Ach, so much work, it drains my energy and I cannot write.  I must kick this revenue addiction.  But I have found time to attend events and also to think a little.  I went to see Jaron Lanier plug his new book “Who Owns the Future?” at the JCCSF last week.  I duly paid for a copy of this and am reading it now.  Maybe I will write some sort of book review.  But more likely I will just interject ideas from the book over the next few months.  He makes a compelling case that the big data applications (from Google to high frequency trading) are shrinking markets and that maybe the “exhaust risk” they give off is somewhat unhealthy for society.  Of course I have my quibbles which I will air at some point.

Moving on, I attended Health Extension #9 this week and it was awesome.  It was held at this new incubator called RunWay in the same building as Twitter on Market street.  I hesitate to call it the “Twitter Building” since I understand they only have three floors, which is typical of these big data economy shrinkers.  Twitter has a massive global impact and the HQ doesn’t even fill a single office building.  Well, anyway, it’s a cool old building and Runway seems like an interesting space with all the startups and whatnot.  It had a “lean” feel to it which as a consultant I avoid like the plague.  (More accurately, lean startups avoid spending money on consultants like the plague.)  But the folks that operate Runway were generous enough to host a Health Extension Salon, so I won’t bash on them.

The first speaker was Michael Conboy filled in for his wife, Arina Conboy who was ill that evening.  The Conboy’s work focuses on stem cells and aging.  Michael described the basic mechanism by which stem cells repair damaged muscle.  He revealed the surprising finding that older organisms don’t have significantly fewer stems cells nor are these stems cells seriously impaired in any way.  Yet there is something in the environment of older bodies that inhibits the very beginning of the chemical pathway that wakes a stem cell up and causes it to transform and bind together with other cells to rebuild damaged muscle.  Thus older organism end up with more scar tissue and less muscle repair.  So it seems that some of the negative impacts of aging could be counteracted if this “Delta Notch” pathway could be safely reactivated.  I don’t think there is a supplement for this yet.

The next speaker was Sonia Arrison who was plugging her own new book “100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith.”  I also duly purchased this book because content creators ought to get paid.  Arrison gave a very positive talk in which she talked about some of the impacts that longer lifespans will have on society.  She lamented that the inspiring story of the little girl saved by a lab grown trachea was largely overlooked by the media.  Arrison seems to have been fairly vigorous about supporting material.  One of he projections based on projecting historical trends forward was that longer lifespans are correlated with greater economic expansion.  She admitted afterward that she didn’t take automation into account but she sagely noted that we can’t predict how that will play out.  Maybe Jaron Lanier and Michael Ford will be proven wrong and humans will find some role to play in the automated future.  I sure hope so.  Anyway, I will be reading her book soon and I will try to write up a proper review.

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.