Extreme Futurist Festival Pre-Party with Dorkbot SF, 11-30-2012, Part 2

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

This is Part 2 of a three-part review of the XFF pre-party. See Part 1 here. See Part 3 here.

This party was held at RallyPad which is “an incubator and workspace for non-profits and social entrepreneurs.” It was a decent space I guess. I like that location down on 2nd Street near Market. I’ve had some clients down there. It’s very vibrant during the day with all the office workers milling about. You can grab organic salads at Harvest & Rowe for lunch. It’s civilized.

After the cyberpunk panel, I went milling about and talked to people. One fellow asked if we had met at a Ribbonfarm event, but I had never heard of it. It turns out to actually be a blog by a fellow named Venkatesh Rao. I haven’t had a chance to look it over much, but Rao wrote a book called Tempo: timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making and the subtitle alone convinces me that he must be cool. But I was having a hard time understanding how you have an event at a blog. I guess that’s a thing bloggers do now. I have my own Futurist Meetup so I can see how that could work. But my group is more of an informal discussion group. I also bumped into Michael Anissimov and he told me about a recent blog entry in which he defends “Thinkism” from Kevin Kelly’s critique. I look forward to reading this and pitching in my own opinion from the peanut gallery, but that is for another post.

I went back and checked out the speakers at some point and heard the end of Michael Keenan’s well presented take on robotic cars. I understand that he was got a lot of info from Brad Templeton who is helping Google with their car now. I saw Brad speak on this topic and got to hang out with him a bit at Foresight 2010. The basic argument is that humans kill way too many people in car accidents and robotic cars would save lives. Of course a lot of driving jobs will be eliminated by robotic cars, but the police would also cut staff since so many resources are devoted to traffic related work. Insurance and alcohol companies will push for their adoption while teamsters and motorheads will oppose it. I’m with the bean counters on this one.

For me the highlight of the evening was H+ magazine editor Peter Rothman’s talk: The Singularity Already Happened. Rothman started by outlining various opinions on the Singularity held by: Cosma Shalizi, Mark Pesce, Henry Adams, and Kevin Kelly. We might draw from these views that either the singularity already happened or it’s meaningless. Rothman himself makes an argument similar to Kelly’s that Kurzweil’s exponential charts are misleading, but I think they are splitting hairs. Exponential growth means something even if the date 2035 does not.

Rothman goes on to make the point that multiple singularities in communication have already occured. Humans presumably went from pre-linguistic, to spoken, then to written and finally to active (software) communication. It was arguably impossible for humans prior to each of these changes to predict what would happen afterward. Just as it will be impossible for us to predict the next paradigm shift. We suspect that it’s AGI, but we may be like cavemen predicting that the future will simply be a progression of longer and more complex spoken words.

Rothman then suggested that the number of Facebook friends we all have is indicative that our intelligence must already be exploding ala the Dunbar number. It takes more intelligence to handle larger social groups. While this is born out somewhat by the Flynn effect, many pundits have pointed out that Facebook friends don’t involve the same level of engagement that traditional meatspace friends do. There are a bunch of casual acquaintances in there.

But it’s an interesting idea that this greater social interaction is a sort of singularity. No one predicted social as a killer app way back in 2002. Building on this social singularity idea, Rothman showed a chart which plotted the growth of derivative patents. That is to say, patents which referenced other patents grew dramatically which either suggests that we are running out of novel ideas and low hanging fruit or that we are becoming masters of collaboration. The pessimist in me prefers the former, Rothman likes the latter.

Rothman went on to describe a bunch of military tech and his own involvement in air defense narrow AI. This was really an amazing talk packed with history and data. But the pièce de résistance was the idea that a malicious AGI might already be out in the wild now. Rothman suggested that we follow strange flows of money, power, and ideas. He cited crazy trades that drove Kraft’s price up, strange flows of wealth to the top 1%, massive energy consumption increases, and mystery NSA data centers. This stuff was pure gold for a Sci Fi writer. I kept wishing that Daniel Suarez was around to take notes. I won’t bother to comment on less radical explanations of all these phenomenon. Suffice it say that I would apply Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Nonetheless, it was a great talk and I look forward to Peter posting the slides so that I can review his many wonderful sources.

There is more to say about this amazing party and I still haven’t even gotten into the Humanity+ conference proper.

See Part 3 here.

Extreme Futurist Festival Pre-Party with Dorkbot SF, 11-30-2012, Part 1

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

The Extreme Futurist Festival organizers held a fund raiser tonight in SF along with DorkbotSF at RallyPad to pay for bleachers so that we can see SRL do it’s thing at the XFF. This event had some counter-culture undertones that are missing from most futurist events that I attend. The night started out with a panel discussion supposedly about cyberpunk between Val Vale, R.U. Sirius, and Rachel Haywire.

I guess Vale started Re/Search magazine. I remember seeing the Modern Primitives book they put out in the early 90’s. It introduced us hillbillies in Buffalo, NY to the idea of voluntary genital mutilation, which was helpful. Vale brought up some of the ideas that often concern futurists such as the problems content creators face getting paid in the digital realm. He seemed somewhat saddened by the idea that young people must turn to startups to pay the rent. This must be what it means to live in the Silicon Valley bubble. Even here in the Bay Area, only a small number of people are resorting to start-ups. Vale suggested that people will need to create stores to sell paper and tangible media to make a living… Uh, Lanier he ain’t. But I sympathize with his pain. I guess Re/Search couldn’t hang with the digital disintermediation.

Vale pulled out a J.G. Ballard quote: sex * tech = the Future, which really makes no sense to me unless “the Future” = “internet porn.” Still, I guess I will look him up and skim some of Ballard’s work. I did like how Vale compared the Web 2.0 idea of user-contributed content to the DIY and “anyone can do it” ethic of Punk Rock. A lot of my cherished 80’s British New Wave bands were inspired by how crappy the Sex Pistols were. “Hell if they can do it, why not us?” Are blogs, tweets, and user comments the natural cousins of punk rock? I can see a parallel between the punk degradation of music and the bloggers degration of journalism anyway.

Rachel Haywire is organizing the XFF and she spoke a bit about her love of transgressive hyper-intelligent “counter-counter-culture”(sic). Rachel lamented that the Nazi’s ruined Eugenics for the rest of us. “Total Fail.” (She must be going for understatement of the year award.) Pearce and others brought up the potential for genetic engineering to reduce suffering at the Humanity+ conference but I worry about the risks. In closing, Rachel threw down a funny poem about sexbots in the future using “let me tell you about my Ted talk” as a pickup line.

R.U. Sirius edited cyberpunk magazine, Mondo 2000 which was quite dear to me in the late 90’s when I arrived in the Bay Area. It first introduced me to the idea of smart drugs (but not where to get them unfortunately.) William Gibson was probably my favorite Science Fiction writer at that time and he really was the founder of cyberpunk in my mind. Cyberpunk is dark and gritty. It is cynical about the dominance of corporations and explores how tech can be repurposed by hackers and criminals. “The street finds its own uses for things” as Gibson says. But Sirius offered that Gibson himself never considered his novels to be dystopian. Would today’s world seem dystopian to our agrarian ancestors?

R.U. Sirius was quite funny and talked about cyberpunk as a memeplex that included conceptual, industrial, and performance art along with hacker culture. “Drug influence cyber hippies dancing on the edges of corporate culture.” He even suggested the wild idea of using genetic engineering as a drug by adding schizophrenic genes to go on an insanity trip. Nice. In his mind, Mondo 2000 really imagined the future while Wired focuses on the prosaic and dull reality of today. But it seems to me that Wired figured out how to work in the online format while Mondo simple did not. That’s too bad.

My coverage of and commentary on the XFF pre-party continues here.

Quantified Self: What am I tracking and why?

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

Quantified Self

If you aren’t familiar with Quantified Self, it’s basically a group for people who are tracking information about themselves such as the number of hours they slept or how many calories they have eaten each day. Some people do this to solve tricky health problems, others are trying to optimize their own health or behavior. Some just love lots of data and graphs and such. QS was started by Wired founder Kevin Kelly as an informal group meeting in his living room but has grown into an international phenomenon.

Why do I track?

I am not as into self-quantifying as some people are, but I do want to optimize my health and my behavior to some extent. I don’t really like the word optimize in this context, but I am already relatively healthy and functional so I guess it fits. Supposedly you can manage what you measure, so it makes sense to measure things that are important or that you suspect or correlated to important things.

What is important to me?

A big motivation for my own tracking came from wanting to write more. I don’t want to just be an IT guy for the rest of my life, so I wanted to change my own behavior to include more writing. That is why I got into Habit Design and willpower. I am also interested in longevity and intelligence. I want to extend my bodily and cognitive health span as much as possible.

What do I track and how?

Currently, I am using a Fitbit One to track my physical activity. I’ve used simple pedometers before but this new Fitbit is crazy. It records steps, distance, flights of stairs climbed, and even sleep. Sleep? Well it records how still you are in bed anyway. It’s not as cool as a Zeo, but it seems less intrusive to strap on the Fitbit wristband than the Zeo headband. Fitbit has a free website to view your data, but you can’t export it without paying. Self-tracking gadget vendors that make it hard to access your data are a big pet peeve of QS’ers. It’s our data, how dare anyone try to sell it back to us or worse yet, prevent us from accessing it in a raw format. We want to manipulate it and chart it and stroke it, etc. Therefore, I was happy to jump through a few hoops to get my fitbit data exported to Google docs.

So physical activity is obviously important for physical health. But more evidence is accruing that it’s important to cognitive health as well. See, embodied cognition. Also, there is that study that suggests your longevity is better improved by not sitting than even by exercising. I do have a standing desk now, but I am not ready to add the treadmill to it just yet.

Since I am trying to write more, I use WordPress to tell me how many words I am writing each day. Many writers say that the best way to improve your writing is to simply write as much as possible. I loosely subscribe to the 10,000 hours approach to mastery as promoted by Gladwell in Outliers or Colvin in Talent Is Overrated (loosely I say.) So it’s good to get the raw numbers: words per day. Now I just need to a plan, a coach, feedback, and to push myself further and harder. Ahem, moving on.

I track how many calories I’ve eaten each day using LiveStrong.com. Frankly, though, this is a tough one to keep up with. Livestrong has a good food database and it’s fairly easy to get accurate nutritional information, but you have to manually enter each thing you eat. The holy grail of self-tracking is the tracking that happens automatically. There are some apps out there that help by letting you snap photos of your food to tell you how many calories it contains, but I am skeptical of the accuracy.

Calories have an obvious effect on health. Calorie restriction and intermittent fasting are two well supported strategies for health extension. I am especially attracted to the idea that fasting may be helpful even without calorie restriction. However, I have always had a tendency to neglect eating (I forget to eat), so I don’t need to strive for that. I am more interested in the idea that eating more calories might make me more productive. When I first started tracking calories, I found that eating a breakfast with carbs and protein seemed to be correlated with more billable hours. (Being a consultant, I have tracked this metric over the years for it’s financial benefits.) So I wonder what the correlation will be between calories and words written.

Another metric I am trying to track is social events. I have found that a good social event inspires me to write. Also, I heard a speaker at QS claim a correlation between blood sugar stability and socializing with weak links (i.e. acquaintances as opposed to loved ones.) I have often found it easier to delay meals when hanging out with acquaintances myself. Maybe it’s a thing.

I was inspired by a guy from QS who complained that Dual N-Back cognitive training tasks were too exhausting. They certainly are. I did it for one-month according the to the Jaeggi protocol, but I had trouble doing it on an ongoing basis. So I signed up for Lumosity instead which offers much shorter and more varied exercises that work on your speed, memory, attention, flexibility, and problem solving. I track that Lumosity score as a proxy for cognitive health. However, quantified-mind.com is a platform explicitly designed to test cognitive performance changes in response to specific interventions. So I will try to get into that at some point.

These preceding metrics can all be collected daily (in theory.) But I am also tracking my lab results for things like cholesterol and c-reactive protein (an inflammatory marker.) I would like to track these more frequently, but I get queasy around needles, and Kaiser is stingy with gratuitous tests demanded by healthy people like myself.

Now crunch the numbers.

Well actually that’s a problem I hear a lot of QS’ers complain about. We gather all this data (or fail to gather it and have huge gaps as the case may be) but now what? Many of us lack the time or statistical know-how to do a proper analysis and suss out the interesting correlations. Luckily for me, I was asked to help demo this statistical analysis tool called Wizard for Mac at the next QS meetup. It looks like just the thing to walk statistical neophytes like myself through a regression analysis to determine a calories eaten to words blogged correlation.

What next?

There are a number of other things I would like to track, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Given how important heart rate variability is, and the fact that I went and got a Wahoo heart monitor and SweatBeat IOS software, I should be tracking my HRV score each morning, right? Well, the strap IS a bit cumbersome… Never mind, I’m doing it starting tomorrow morning, I swear.

Since reading Kurzweil’s Fantastic Voyage and Transcend on life extension, I have been supplementing irresponsibly. I just pop a bunch of supplements and don’t really track the physiological consequences (aside from the occasional liver function test.) Ideally, I would find a good concierge doctor (that wasn’t a quack) who would help me determine which nutrients I am actually deficient in and which supplements I might actually benefit from. However, I am getting the sinking feeling that supplements might not be very helpful at all. Study after study is throwing cold water on the quick-fix-by-popping-a-pill approach. Dammit, it’s hard work to stuff your face with vegetables day and night.

Finally, I would love to track how many words I’ve read each day. In theory, my Kindle has some of this information. But I would probably need to embark on an epic hacking voyage to gain access to this knowledge. I played with RescueTime for a while, which gives you in-depth analysis of your time spent online, but I got a little bugged out by the privacy implications. I would prefer a local database.

At the end of the day, I feel that self-tracking is worthwhile for it’s own sake. The unexamined life is not worth living. I agree with Kevin Kelly when he says that QS helps us expand the very definition of the self. Even if I never nail down that correlation between X and Y, I still have a better sense of who I am and what I am doing by paying attention to them.