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.