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.

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.

On Solitude and Technology

What does modern solitude look like?  In an era of the buzzing cell phone does refraining from picking it up when it rings count?  Or do you need to unplug completely?

Sometimes technology can make our lives simpler: I like my dishwasher.   But how do we avoid being the tools of our tools? 

On Solitude

Being able to spend time alone deep in thought or even doing nothing is important to many philosophical traditions.  Zen monks take vows of silence and Descartes called his philosophical works the meditations. Leo Babauta chronicles a number of great thinkers from Albert Einstein to Mozart who sang the praises of solitude.

So often, solitude is also equated with nature. As a college student enamored of both Thoreau's Walden Pond and my ability to live in a walkable urban setting, I thought a lot about what solitude looks like in a modern world.  All major transcendental traditions encompass the back to nature ethic, but it has always seemed too simplistic to equate rural living with solitude and simplification.  Thoreau never intended his time on Walden Pond as a permanant solution, nor did he believe everyone needed to move to a cabin:  his two years were intended to serve as an experiment in pealing away the needs of life to its essence.  What is simple about having to drive thirty minutes by car, or having to use a septic system?

Can you find urban solitude and quiet if it means being able to use the simplest mode of transportation possible, walking, to secure your needs?  Some people claim they don't mind their commute because that is their alone time to listen to music or just relax.  I never feel alone when I drive: I am thinking about other cars and anticipating what is going on around me.  Walking is the only mode of transportation that let's me really be alone and lost in my thought.