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.

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.