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.