I went to see Daniel Suarez and Andy Weir read at an SF in SF event at the Emerald Tablet in North Beach last night.  Suarez is one of my favorite authors and has a new novel out called Influx that deals with the authoritarian control of innovation.  Andy Weir is a new author whose book, The Martian, has attracted a lot of attention.  It’s about an astronaut stranded on Mars and is notable for its adherence to scientific accuracy.  Weir, like Suarez, started out self-published, but sold enough copies independently to get picked up by a publisher.

I am halfway through Influx now and in some ways it continues a central theme found in Suarez’s work.  He is is concerned about the way technology can concentrate power into fewer and fewer hands as it progresses.  His novel deals with the stagnation of innovation idea by suggesting that innovation has actually occurred, but that it is continually harvested and hidden by a secret government organization that is intent on maintaining social order.  He also suggests that an attempt to create superhuman AI capable of innovative insights, but lacking in free will, is an abomination.  It represents for him a sort of cybernetic slavery that could put unthinkable power into the hands of a single person.

I haven’t read Andy Weir’s book, The Martian, but his reading was very compelling.  He tells the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars in the form of smart-assed entries into a mission log.  Weir is a computer programmer and was obsessed with getting all of the technical details correct in order to make the story scientifically feasible.  He credits this adherence to scientific accuracy for providing him with many unexpected plot twists as he thought through the scenario one step at a time.  His book has received a good amount of positive press and I look forward to reading it.

During the question and answer period, I brought up Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph Project, which is encouraging SF writers to write stories that can inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers to create innovative technical breakthroughs.  Suarez was ambivalent about the idea and Weir was frankly opposed to it.  In Weir’s view, entertainment should be entertaining and not aspire to social benefit.  I found his position interesting because The Martian seems that it would fit quite nicely into the Hieroglyph Project.  It appears to be a positive story that highlights the ability of humans to overcome difficult obstacles and also shows the feasibility of humans traveling to and surviving on Mars.

For my own part, I was previously much more skeptical of the impact that science fiction can have on the future of innovation, but I have become more amenable to the idea over time.  Technological progress is a story that involves science in a complex dance with economics, politics, and other cultural forces.  Even in this scientific era, the stories we share shape how we conceive of reality.  Great stories of positive and plausible future outcomes have inspired not just engineers, but also politicians and business people.  Utopian stories are justly criticized by Pinker and others, but we do need a common narrative to move in a coherent direction as a society.  It may be that storytellers do have an important role to play and need to take up this difficult responsibility.

So much can go wrong in the  future and many paths must be avoided, but what directions SHOULD we go in?  Our stories can point the way.  I haven’t finished Influx yet, so I can’t say in what direction Suarez would point us.  Weir offers his own succinct answer:  We should go to Mars.

I recently attended the 2014 Foresight conference, which is a nanotechnology conference that was held in Palo Alto.  They have a strict media policy, so I can’t write about the presentations per se, but a lot of the scientists have already published related work, so I will focus on those ideas.  I would like to address the gap between basic research and commercialization here in the US, and how that fits into global trends for the future.

Banning Garrett of the Atlantic Council gave a presentation on the Global Trends 2030 report by the National Intelligence Council.  I look forward to reading that in full and writing a separate summary, but the gist is that the world population will become more urban and the global middle class will be growing dramatically:

“Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively, owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class.”

The report also asks a crucial question:

“Will technological breakthroughs be developed in time to boost economic productivity and solve the problems caused by a growing world population, rapid urbanization, and climate change?”

Timothy Persons of the GAO gave a presentation on nanomanufacturing.  One key point was that there is a funding and investment gap between basic research in the labs and commercialization by the private sector.

Persons mentioned the industrial commons being built by SUNY Albany and UT Austin to help transfer technology developed at those schools into the private sector and bridge that gap.  Although the US leads the world in scientific research, technology developed here is often commercialized overseas.

One barrier (highlighted in the media recently) to commercializing scientific research in the US stems from problems with reproducibility.  A recent Bayer study showed that many cancer studies were not reproducible.  I had previously focused on problems with incentives in academia that reward showy, positive results, while downplaying reproducibility and research with a lower media impact.  But another issue came to light during discussions with various scientists at Foresight.  The scientists were asserting that the reproducibility problem is based on not recognizing the “control parameters” of the experiments in question.  There are some crucial parts of experiments that grad students or lab techs are taking for granted, or not noticing, and then not recording properly.  So there are some opportunities there to capture and document these processes better.

Many schools already have technology transfer offices, and startups are created all of the time, but a lot of good ideas languish for lack of funding.  Scientists tend not to be business people, so they often just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next interesting research topic.  I am reminded of the hipster/hustler/hacker paradigm.  Startups need a hipster (or designer) to make a product cool, a hacker or engineer to make a product work, and a hustler to make a product sell (i.e. ensure the product is satisfying a demand in the market).  But scientists are fairly removed from this triad of personalities.  Scientists are not engineers, let alone designers or MBAs.  So who is going to capitalize on all this great technology?

The NIC is showing us that the world faces huge challenges in generating enough energy, food, and clean water for everyone.  Not to mention the environmental pressure from the increased consumption that will occur as billions more enter the global middle class.  Technology will be absolutely essential to facilitate favorable outcomes for humanity.  It makes sense for us all to focus on this key gap in the technology development process that occurs between basic research and the manufacturing of products for the market.

Edward Snowden’s revelations call to mind George Orwell’s 1984.

When I was planning do a futurist review of 2013, I initially thought that I would just talk about some of the cool developments in technology and imagine how great things would be if they all panned out.  But this techno-optimism only tells part of the story.  Ramez Naam gave a great talk at Humanity+ 2012 criticizing bad futurism for ignoring economics and glossing over the downsides.  Benjamin Bratton recently gave a TED talk criticizing TED, in which he pointed out that culture dictates how technology plays out in the real world.  So as I review the year, I am going to try to address both the positives and negatives of some key economic, cultural, and technological developments of 2013.

One positive cultural narrative that caught my attention recently was presented by Stephen Pinker in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Pinker makes a convincing case that humans have become less and less violent over the years.  Even the bloody 20th century had fewer war deaths per capita than previous eras.  However, one big idea in Pinker’s theory (which he borrowed from Hobbes) is that as states rise, violence decreases, because the state assumes a monopoly on the use of force.  This discourages individuals from hurting others for their own gain.  The problem is that the power of the state can grow too much.  As Edward Snowden has revealed, the US government has almost omniscient powers of surveillance.  We effectively live in a panopticon of constant surveillance.  We may be on a path toward a world with absolutely no crime, but where your every move is monitored by Big Brother and the PreCrime Police come and take you away before you are able to commit a crime.

 The negative story of the economic decline of the US has also figured prominently in 2013.  Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high, and wealth inequality is reaching medieval proportions.  Yet, worldwide poverty seems to be at an all time low (if the World Bank numbers are to be believed).  So I wonder if we rich Americans are biased in our view of economic decline.  Maybe it’s a good thing for Americans to get marginally poorer if the rest of the world gets richer.  But an even brighter vision is of economic growth where everyone can benefit as more human potential is tapped.  As millions of people in places like China and Africa rise from abject poverty and are freed from disease, they will be able to learn, reach their full potential, and participate in the world economy.

Since I do love science and technology, let me indulge in some bright and dark notes from this year.  On a downbeat, we are seeing more and more problems come to light with the current state of science.  The bottom line is that many scientific papers are rubbish and cannot be reproduced.  This may be due to bad incentives; scientists are rewarded more for flashy positive results than mundane or negative results.  But a study that reveals a hypothesis to be flawed increases human knowledge more than a paper which falsely overstates a significant breakthrough,

Nonetheless, there were some technological developments worthy of note.  Consider the CRISPR gene editing technique, which can very precisely modify genes using an immune strategy from bacteria.  Conventional virus based therapies can add good genes, but cannot repair problem genes the way CRISPR can.  George Church discussed this at the 2013 Foresight conference, and further studies have shown its potential to modify genes in mammals.  Unlike many science stories that cause a big stir initially, but are never heard of again, this one seems like the real deal. This breakthrough may give the GMO industry an incredible new tool to customize organisms, possibly even humans.  If it works in humans, many congenital diseases could be conquered.  People may even be able to get modifications that make them more resistant to diabetes or Alzheimer’s.  The dark pessimist in me worries that we may see humans modified without their knowledge or consent by overreaching governments.  Or we may see the rise of a new elite that can outcompete the have-nots.

A deep learning AIs concept of faces and cats.

In the artificial intelligence world, we are seeing big breakthroughs in “deep learning.”  This is a machine learning algorithm that somewhat mimics the neural networks found in brains.  Google has used it to analyze videos and identify human faces and, of course, cats.  This past year, AI researcher Andrew Ng built a much cheaper deep learning system using graphics processors (GPUs), so Google’s $1 million deep learning computer cluster could be matched by a $20,000 system.  The fact that Facebook is jumping on board by snapping up their own deep learning guru makes me suspect that this is not a flash in the pan.  Also, my favorite Bay Area AI researcher, Monica Anderson, seems to approve of this general approach to machine learning.   This could be an incredibly powerful AI.  The big downside of AI getting too powerful has been well explored from Frankenstein to The Terminator, so I won’t belabor this point; there are folks who are thinking deeply about how to prevent those scenarios.  But one big upside of AI could be to help us sort through this overwhelming firehose of information that is growing all the time, so that we can make sense of this world and find solutions to problems.

In conclusion, 2013 had both positive and negative developments.  Technologically, there were some amazing advancements, including the CRISPR gene editing technique and deep learning AI.  Economically, there emerged a complex story of economic stagnation in developed nations, paired with a reduction in poverty in the developing world.  Politically, we saw some chilling examples of government overreach in surveillance.  My hope is that futurists will expand their horizons beyond the technological, to think about the best role for our government going forward, and the best paths toward greater economic inclusion.  The optimists among us should take heed of the pessimists’ warnings.  For their part, the pessimists should take a moment to pause in their dire predictions and ask themselves, “Yes, this could all go terribly awry, but what do I think should happen?”  At the end of the day, if we take into account all the competing forces that define what is possible, I do believe we can chart a course toward progress.

[UPDATE 2/10/2014]

I actually wrote up a presentation for the first Transhuman Visions conference on this topic and those notes are here: http://bit.ly/tv-oak.

I attended Foresight this year and some scientists were asserting that the reproducibility problem is based on not recognizing the “control parameters” of the experiments in question.  There are some crucial parts of the experiment that the grad students or lab techs are taking for granted or not noticing and then not recording properly.

Also, I am taking Pinker’s modern murder decline numbers with a grain of salt after Annissimov pointed out that modern medicine might be masking the violence of modern times by saving victims that would have otherwise died.  Of course, modern guns make it easier to attack others, so that should be taken into account, not to mention that attempted murders have probably gone down, but nonetheless, these are valid questions around Pinker’s trends.