The Future is Coming--Will We be Ready?

When I think about what the next fifty year's hold, I think about my great grandmother.  She was born in the early 1900s on a farm in Golden Pond Kentucky.  By the time she died the automobile had completely remade American society (see Jane Jacobs, the interstate, the death of the hat), air travel meant she could be in Tokyo in less than 24 hours, plastics reigned supreme and the Internet had been invented.  All this when as a child she listened to first hand accounts from relatives who lived through the civil war and showed her the caves they hid in when the "Yankees" came through.

As a millennial, the amount of technological development that is likely to occur in nano technology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, over the next fifty years is going to rapidly alter human society.  Not since the greatest generation will people have lived through so much change.  The past thirty years have seen tremendous changes in how we communicate, but the technical development that is around the corner will radically alter how we get around (self driving cars), how we get goods and services (3-D printing), what we eat (lab grown meat), and how long we live (nano medicine).

We are not ready. Policy has a terrible track record when it comes to regulating innovation. Whether Wall Street financial trading (Credit Default Swaps), Internet communications technology (Net Neutrality 2015), or transportation technology that set off a mad scramble to license self driving cars, policy and regulation tend to lag badly.  This isn't always a bad thing since it provides time for technology to take off, and invention is actually more about figuring out its uses than its creation. However, as technological change gets more rapid, and the types of changes on the horizon portend larger more seismic changes in society we also leave ourselves vulnerable to becoming the tools of our tools.  The outsize influence nano medicine or artificial intelligence promises to have on society means that people need a voice in the process. What that voice can and should look like is actually what we should be spending more time on.

It's not like there aren't possible examples of what these guidelines could look like.  Scholars have long understood that studying technology in terms of its what it actually does (separate communication and transportation, for example) can let us anticipate challenges facing innovations such as the Internet by looking at historical issues that arose similar inventions like the telegraph.  We should be approaching the future in the same way: recognize that policy is always going to lag innovation, but to protect people look to history to anticipate when protections are needed and what they might look like.  Don't try to regulate each individual new technology, but look for broad similarities between new technologies and old technologies to categorize innovation into various policy spheres. To understand your future, look to your past.

Sci Fi isn't all Technology

I thought this NPR list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books was really interesting.  So often when we talk about the future we focus on how technology is changing everything.  It's app this, and 3-D printer that.  The reality is good sci fi is more about how change impacts society, and the tensions that change creates.

Good sci fi isn't just about technolgy, but about making you question how we live, and especially what choices we make and which ones are being made for us.

The Cabin in the Woods

This morning I went swimming in Walden Pond. Floating on my back I could see the blue sky framed by the trees and even with the noise of the kids and tourists crowding the shore the experience was amazing.  I floated in the muffled sound of the water and the quiet of the sky.

Afterward I retreated up the path to find the site of Thoreau's cabin.  I had hiked it once almost ten years ago with my husband on a rainy October day. This morning was bright and sunny, though the cool shade of the trees provided a restive respite. I wandered the trail under dappled leaves, catching glimpses of the shimmering water which was almost turquoise.  The path was mostly empty and the dirt path ate the sound of my footsteps.   I walked through the forest, stopping frequently to enjoy the trees, the sticks, to watch the fish in the water.  The path meandered along the shore's edge, gently rolling down, then up, then down again. I cross the bridge past the meadow and stumbled on a small cove that had been discovered by a young family.  A simple wooden arrow pointed to the house site where Thoreau's cabin once stood.

I walked up the hill into a clearing with a pile of rocks, two foot high stone pillars marking the foundation.  I stood in the clearing and listened for birds.  I heard crickets and the hum of bugs.  In the time I stood there several families entered and left the site.  Some lingered long enough to read the signs.  One father told his son to "put a rock on the pile," which the sign said was a tradition started by the Thoreau Society to represent the idea that while the cabin may not remain, Thoreau's ideas live on.  I couldn't help but think that Thoreau might have preferred that we each instead remove a rock, until his woods were as unmarked as if no one had ever been there.

Yet the idea of one's legacy as a pile of rocks is powerful: the notion that small pebbles, placed one at a time over a long, sustained period of reflection can build itself into a physical presence, something real and enduring is comforting.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and you have to start somewhere, but too often we think we will fail and never start at all. I know sometimes I get intimidated by my ideas, want to write and get my thoughts down, but don't.  Yet on a day to day basis the work is as simple as placing a pebble.  If we can focus on that who knows what might get built, what ideas born.

The sign next to the rock pile quote Thoreau that he "came to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.  And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." The rocks stand as a nice testament: challenging us to live each day in a way that places another pebble on the pile, motivating us ourselves to take small steps forward. Do something every day that leaves an impression, because even if it is not organized into a foundation, it represents you were alive.

The Sleep Lost to History

Modern life and technology have changed the way we eat, live, travel, and work.  One radical fundamental shift that doesn't get a lot of attention is how we sleep.  Not only are most people in the U.S. sleeping on a clean, bug free synthetic matress and pillow in a dedicated room (with only one other person on average no less!), but historians suggest that the standard eight hours of sleep a night is a historical fiction.  References in diaries and other documents reference segmented sleep, or the first and second sleep.  People often slept for an initial four hours, then got up for an hour or two to ready, interpert their dreams, pray, or have sex, only to fall back into sleep for an additional four hours of rest.  Many modern insomnia cases may actually be people reverting to this natural cycle, which has also emerged in sleep stuidies as a natural pattern when people are deprived of artificial light for 14 hours a day. There is even research that our biological clocks work on a cycle slightly longer than 24 hours, perhaps as an evolutionary advantage.

There are some fascinating articles about how the introduction of artificial light changed the pattern of daily life both physically, but also socially. Street lighting came to Paris in 1667, and followed in Lille and Amsterdam within several years.  Coffee houses stayed open later.  Secret underground nighttime religious services by those being prosecuted for their beliefs also normalized the use of the night.  Suddenly, the night became a place with things for reputable people to do, and not just the bastion of burglers.

So next time you wake up in the middle of the night, realize you may just be reverting back to a historical, natural pattern. 200 years isn't long in evolutionary terms for our new sleeping habits.

*You can download a computer program Flux to minimize your exposure to blue light before bed.  It has the added benefit of letting you see the web through rose colored glasses.  Or you can just minimize your screen time for the several hours before bed.  

Radio in a Post Radio World

Radio seems to be a dying art, unless of course you're listening to public radio. Even competing with the TV, Netflix streaming, and the Internets sometimes nothing beats a good radio show.

Try listening to this show about the history of night by historian Robert Ekirch in the dark with some candles. He talks about first and second sleep, and all the things people would do at night during their somabulatory hours.

Or this awesome discussion of patent trolls (hint* includes bonus mequito laser beams).

Of course, if you don't want to listen to radio you can always read about it in Sarah Vowell's Radio On: A Listerner's Diary.   

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Interesting show on NPR talking about what innovation looks like.  The metaphor of the light bulb going off, or the Eureka! moment paint a picture of ides as singular and original, but in reality innovation may be a more dynamic process of layering findings and ideas.  This notion doesn't fit with the American patent system at all.

The show is quite interesting, particularly the third segemnt which can be found here.

Essentially ideas and innnovation involve three key concepts:

• Ideas are borrowed, shared, and built on others' ideas
• Interaction is key
• Sobriety. It helped when people started drinking coffee or tea instead of getting sauced all day when alcohol was a means of dealing with unsanitarty drinking water.  

Coffee houses served as hubs for the exchange of ideas about politics, philosophy, technology and science. Steve Johnson argues that it wasn't just the lack of alcohol, but the proxemics of the space which supported the interaction of people from different backgrounds and expertise. 

So where do these conversations take place today?  On list serves?  Bulletin boards?  On the Google Bus or on Facebook (haha I joke!)?  If it is Davos and Ted Talks we're in trouble, because these types of settings are self-selecting and filter out the kinds of people who can offer new, outside perspectives.  Even confining interactions to within a private company could prove problematic.  These disruptive insights are valuable, yet they might not make it through the filter. 

Locations don't need to be physical, though there is value in face-to-face exchange.  How do we design spaces for these types of interactions to happen? What about in a society with increasing inequality?  We need to address and think through where good ideas come from if we want to ensure that good ideas can generate even better ones. 

In a Digital 24 World MH 370's Dissapearance Fascinates

Many have complained about the journalistic coverage of missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370.  The 24 hour news cycle has gone big on conjecture and rumour, with experts in no way connected to the investigation coming on air to speculate on their thoughts and opinions.  The reporting has reached near hysteria levels, reminiscent of the summer shark attack reporting back in 2001.

No trace of the plane has been found, little information has been confirmed, and the majority of passengers were not American: all factors that would typically predict little coverage by U.S. media.  Despite this, the American media and the public have been widely fixated on the disappearance of the Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

What explains the unusual levels of coverage is that for the average viewer this story is, at its core, about the role of technology in our lives, not an airplane, and not even the passengers.  In a world in which the average viewer can't fathom traveling to grocery store undetected by GPS, convinced that the NSA is listening to their every call, and a soldier in control of a drone is able to kill a target from thousands of miles away, the notion that anything as large as an aircraft can simply disappear is deeply shocking.  The idea that 239 people could be untraceable is unnerving.  As much as citizens are concerned about the fact that we can't seem to go anywhere without anyone noticing, there is also security in knowing that someone can always come to your aid.

Fundamentally, Americans feel so wired and connected to the grid that the idea one can fall off it is both exhilarating and terrifying. That there are areas of the world that are completely inaccessible seems foreign over a hundred years after the closing of the frontier, challenging deeply held and fundamental assumptions about modern society.  We take pervasive electronic surveillance and the intrusion of technology into our lives as an immutable fact--regulating and setting limits on these developments has been dismissed as fantasy outside the realm of possibility, and yet the disappearance of MH 370 demonstrates that these technologies are not yet so pervasive and fixed that we don't have the opportunity as a society to decide what their limits or expansions should be.

The opening of what some have dubbed the electronic frontier, with its restructuring of communication and society, and the tension between freedom and control inherent to technology was supposed to mean that we were in a new era in which we had mastered control of the physical terrain. The revelation that there are still physical limitations to the reach of these technologies suggests there is still time to address what their roles and limits should be not just in areas to which these technologies have not been extended, but also where they have already been accepted into the routines of our daily lives.

The disappearance of flight MH 370 is a very real tragedy for the passengers, crew and families involved, and we need to not lose sight of that.  Wild speculation and rumour don't help. Yet the story also opens the opportunity for a productive dialogue about what it means to live in a truly connected society.  We are still sorting out the role of technology in society and human lives, and we still have decisions to make.  Let's also not lose sight of that opportunity.