The Global Risks Report 2011 from the World Economic Forum highlights two primary megatrends with the potential to inject significant disruption into global systems. From the report:
Two risks are especially significant given their high degrees of impact and interconnectedness. Economic disparity and global governance failures both influence the evolution of many other global risks and inhibit our capacity to respond effectively to them.
In this way, the global risk context in 2011 is defined by a 21st century paradox: as the world grows together, it is also growing apart.
It is worth noting how inter-related these two megatrends are as wealth consolidation into an elite class enables them to further deconstruct global governance mechanisms. This has been a feedback loop for at least the past 40 years, if not longer, as western growth fueled the rise of non-state economic bodies & super-empowered individuals who then lobbied against regulatory measures that would aim to keep their rise in check and mitigate the risk of disparity. Elites consolidate more money & power, further driving disparity and eroding governance. What results is an interstitial vacuum where corporate intervention fails to see any profit motive and where state intervention lacks the funds or will to govern effectively.
In effect, the combination of super-empowered non-state actors, failures of state governance, and widespread economic disparity undermines the Rule of Law by releasing elites from accountability and driving the underclass deeper into criminality.
Within these megatrends they cite three important risk factors:
The “macroeconomic imbalances” nexus: A cluster of economic risks including macroeconomic imbalances and currency volatility, fiscal crises and asset price collapse arise from the tension between the increasing wealth and influence of emerging economies and high levels of debt in advanced economies.
The “illegal economy” nexus: This nexus examines a cluster of risks including state fragility, illicit trade, organized crime and corruption. A networked world, governance failures and economic disparity create opportunities for such illegal activities to flourish. In 2009, the value of illicit trade around the globe was estimated at US $1.3 trillion and growing. These risks, while creating huge costs for legitimate economic activities, also weaken states, threatening development opportunities, undermining the rule of law and keeping countries trapped in cycles of poverty and instability.
The “water-food-energy” nexus: A rapidly rising global population and growing prosperity are putting unsustainable pressures on resources. Demand for water, food and energy is expected to rise by 30-50% in the next two decades, while economic disparities incentivize short-term responses in production and consumption that undermine long-term sustainability.
These risk factors are certainly of concern but it’s worth looking at how they represent symptoms of an underlying current. Macroeconomic imbalances & illegal economies are two sides of the same coin, both indicating that the fundamental truths of economics are no longer applicable to the current global system. The territory has shifted but the map has yet to be effectively updated. The legacy code of macroeconomics is far too simplistic to contain the realities of the modern globalized marketplace.
Furthermore, undue faith in free markets has blinded the regulatory eye to the simple fact that markets have been thoroughly gamed by a small class of particularly savvy players. Markets are in no way free and it’s a fine trick of the big players to turn blame towards state regulation rather than admitting their own aggressive influence. The light being shown on Rupert Murdoch’s empire during the News of the World scandal is a prime example of this posturing. Murdoch has used his media empire to champion the free market mythology and to challenge state governance while shrewdly re-drawing the regulatory and tax laws to suit the needs of his own business.
Thus, the rise of the illegal economy is both a necessary alternative to a broken formal economy thoroughly gamed by elites, and a perverse imitation of the seemingly above-the-law attitudes of those very same elites who are in many ways idolized by the downtrodden.
Similarly, but perhaps more fundamentally, the water-food-energy nexus arises as a consequence of the growth models so canonical to historic economics. These models arose before there was a nuanced understanding of finite natural systems. Growth was eternal and all economic success has been measured against metrics of expansion. Extract more oil, mine more resources, build more cities, sell more gizmos, hire more people, expand into new markets. But again, the map was too simple to really reflect the territory. Resources are finite. The planetary system is ultimately closed and you can’t send waste away and import new resources (at least not yet or any time soon).
The common picture that emerges is that our models for how civilization interacts with the physical world, and the governors that have emerged over millenia to keep the global system in relative stability, are out-dated and losing relevancy. The system is moving into a phase change and will shed many legacy governors and force the maps to be re-drawn. This is, arguably, where we stand today amidst the obvious turmoil of our world – a world that is being completely revolutionized by globalization, ubiquitous computing, and asymptotic population growth.
Across this landscape arise five risks to watch:
Cyber-security issues ranging from the growing prevalence of cyber theft to the little-understood possibility of all-out cyber warfare
Demographic challenges adding to fiscal pressures in advanced economies and creating severe risks to social stability in emerging economies
Resource security issues causing extreme volatility and sustained increases over the long run in energy and commodity prices, if supply is no longer able to keep up with demand
Retrenchment from globalization through populist responses to economic disparities, if emerging economies do not take up a leadership role
Weapons of mass destruction, especially the possibility of renewed nuclear proliferation between states
These are the more pragmatic and addressable drivers forming the new governing mechanisms. They will draw towards them the coordinated efforts of many interests. Grappling with these emergent threats will build the structures necessary to contain them effectively. However, the traditional reliance on state governance to overcome these challenges looks increasingly unreliable, and it remains unclear whether corporate solutions will offer trustworthy substitutes. More likely, responsibility will fall on local efforts, distributed collectives, community governance, and investment and championship by benevolent economic elites. This perspective offers another view of the WEF2011 paradox, “as the world grows together, it is also growing apart”.
Of note, the solution space is much greater than in the past. The upside of population growth and the rise of the developing world is that the resource pool for creative innovation in the face of these risks is now larger than ever. Likewise, the tools for knowledge gathering and collaboration are readily available to most of the world and offer incredible power, capacity, and scalabilty. The phase change will continue to be full of turbulence but the sandbox for innovation is huge and the timeframes for iteration are tiny.
Thus a global network that shares best practices, promotes lessons learned in one part of the world for application in another, and assists its members both to better prepare before an event and better respond after can be of enormous value. By establishing direct channels of communication to government leaders, risk experts from some of the world’s leading companies, academic institutions, NGOs and other parts of society can provide valuable assistance in times of crisis.
“Facebook really represents a battleground for ideas. It’s becoming an area for propaganda, for influence, for memetics, for advertising, for marketing. It is like any other public square: highly diverse and opinionated, potentially volatile and easily influenced by third parties.”
Click through the above link for the rest of the article.
I was in Bangkok in 2009 and one of the first things that I encountered was this 40-story building, bonewhite & hollow, looming over the Chao Phraya river – one of many such abandoned structures but this one had a special aesthetic that rather captivated me. I took a bunch of photos, marveled at its very existence, and let the subliminal details and tides settle in for some future reflection. (There’s always too much to absorb to have any time to really process while “in the field”.)
Just last week Boing Boing picked up a post from the Abandoned Journey urban explorers who had recently documented their journey into the building, revealing in the process it’s name: Sathorn Unique. The name itself conjures up all sorts of cyberpunk-ish thoughts but I won’t belabor those here at the moment. Suffice it to say that, not having known that the structure even had a name, learning it’s title was revelatory. The Abandoned Journey document was a temporal reflection of my own meeting with the structure 2 years ago, sparking a re-connection with the subtleties of that experience and immediately led to some new understanding of how this particular ghost tower is in many ways an expression of our times.
So I’ve started a new project called Sathorn Unique, exploring the various concepts & feelings inspired in me by the building of the same name. This project is an attempt to both express those un-nameable currents through my own musical interpretation (spacey, deep, hip hop instrumentals), and a process of documenting that expression and capturing some of the threads within our own world that appear to be presented by Sathorn Unique.
The course of recent events across the Middle East & North Africa have highlighted both the power in organizing & reporting protest movements using network technologies and the weakness inherent in their corporate & state-controlled architectures. While social media & mobile phones have not explicitly created the revolutions we’re witnessing in Egypt, Libya, & Bahrain and the protests mounting in many other regions, they are making it much easier for collective actions to coordinate, inspire, and outwit the authorities. Conversely, ruling classes are now far more savvy to the threat these tools bring and will quickly act to shut down internet & SMS services that might undermine their authority. The tension in this dynamic emerged in 2009 when Chinese Uighurs in Xinjiang had mobile access removed by the government in an attempt to quell their uprising. And these tactics have played out repeatedly since as design patterns for resistance & rebellion formalize into institutional playbooks.
In this context, mobiles offer immediate & direct communication with allies while social networks offer distributed coordination and instantaneous global reporting. Indeed, the ability to capture and share information across the world is ultimately the most threatening aspect of such hyperconnected protest movements. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube empower protesters to be field reporters,capturing atrocities and inviting the rest of the world in to see. It is this universal witnessing that makes a local protest into a global movement. It brings normative pressure from the free world into old and rigid totalitarian regimes. Once such regimes could easily crush uprisings with limited exposure. Now they find themselves cast on the world stage in a glaring spotlight. Dispersed & sympathetic legions of like-minded freedom hawks mobilize around these events lending moral & technical support to ensure their success. Aging dictators wrinkle in the sun as their every word & action is shared & deconstructed by the world at large. And so these rulers move quickly to try and shut down the networks, to hide from the light and roll their rule back into the pre-dawn of geographic isolation.
And yet the revolution spreads. Mobiles & social networks transmit ideology & emotion, outrage & courage. Everyone wants in on the spectacle and the hope of real change that it invokes. It might not be too hyperbolic to suggest that True Democracy, co-opted and tarnished by Western realpolitik, so often used as an excuse to prop up the very dictators who’ve held these people in fear for decades, might break out through the networked world, demanding its due and even resuscitating the anemic corpus of the American protest movement.
But this assumes many things. Douglas Rushkoff and others have begun to point out the relative weakness of the internet and of mobile networks. Corporate choke points quickly buckle under government pressure and the threat of national security. So people naturally look for ways to build resilient networks that can resist the hunger & fear of power. Ways to route around the censorship.
Of course, revolutions are not the only things that need resilient ad hoc networks. Increasingly, large-scale construction projects require on-site network support, with or without internet backbones. Emergency relief, as we saw in the Haiti earthquake in 2010, also require fast response to restore communication networks. Any sufficiently large regional disaster could knock out communications & database access leaving first responders in the dark and victims & families struggling to find help & relief support. It’s important to understand that these services require local networks but don’t necessarily require internet access. In emergencies its critical that quickly-scalable ad hoc regional networks can be deployed to restore basic communications and access to necessary information, be it status updates or institutional knowledge bases.
Mobile phones are a valuable infrastructure that often gets overlooked in discussions of resiliency. Everyone has a phone so everyone is a potential node. Research in wireless meshnets that use mobile phones instead of carrier backbones offer localized solutions for resilient networks. If a city loses it’s carrier support, if AT&T & Verizon are offline, mobiles can default to a lilly-pad model where voice & data move from phone to phone, hopping across the community through wireless overlaps. The phone becomes the hot-spot and a personal IP address. This allows information to pass from across the mobile meshnet until it reaches an internet uplink, such as a Meraki node. In this manner individuals can still coordinate resources & activities if, say, an earthquake or a dictator has taken mobile carriers & ISP’s offline, and can hop to a strong wireless uplink outside the range of blackout.
To look forward, local mobile meshnets could be used as distributed processing clusters, like a SETI At Home for mobiles. Consider the processing power latent across a city of 20 million mobile subscribers, such as Tokyo. As smart phones integrate more diverse sensors, mobile meshnets could be addressed as distributed sense platforms, analyzing air quality, for example, or deputized as camera arrays. [Klint Finley expands on this idea over at ReadWriteCloud.] Consider what could be done with an API for addressing clusters of mobile sensors. [Update: Imagine the types of shared augmented reality experiences that might be possible across localized mobile meshnets... eg bands could push experience layers out to their audiences during concerts - any venue could run a layer that would automatically sync with a user's phone/headset when they entered it's radius of activity.] When mobiles have the ability to firewall from selected authorities or create opt-in experience zones users might develop incredibly sophisticated tools for distributed in-field utilities. Of course, so might criminals and insurgents… and regimes.
There’s a tremendous amount of work advancing these technologies. The events in the Middle East & North Africa, coupled with the creeping authoritarianism and neglect in western countries, are lighting a fire under innovators to figure it out. Likewise, major mobile manufacturers are exploring this space to anticipate consumer demand and create differentiating features to compete in the impacted & accelerated smartphone marketplace. The internet & mobile communication have rapidly proven themselves to be indispensable to the lives of billions of people. Any efforts to exert power and authority over them on a mass scale while run into fierce challenges born from the simple nature of human ingenuity & adaptation. And yet, there are many reasons we should not take such access to mobile communications and the internet for granted.
John Gilmore’s famous quote (and Mark Pesce’s analysis) applies here: The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Whether that censorship comes from corporations, dictators, or acts of god is immaterial.
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[Update: Check out the World Community Grid for crowd-sourced cluster computing. Would be great to see them include mobile when the tech catches up...]
[Definitely read this Tech Crunch post, Humans Are The Routers, by the founder of the Openmesh Project, Shervin Pishevar.]
In the lead up to it’s big annual event in Davos, the World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network has published its Global Risks 2011 report. Here are some of the top-level highlights, taken verbatim from the report. I encourage people to read the entire report as each section is broken out into considerable detail including multiple scenarios. There’s also an overview at Business 21C.
“The world is in no position to face major new shocks.”
2 Cross-Cutting Risks:
1. Economic disparity: Wealth and income disparities, both within countries and between countries, threaten social and political stability as well as economic development.
2. Global governance failures: Weak or inadequate global institutions, agreements or networks, combined with competing national and political interests, impede attempts to cooperate on addressing global risks.
3 Important Risks in Focus:
1. The macroeconomic imbalances nexus: This cluster of three economic risks – global imbalances and currency volatility, fiscal crises and asset price collapse – is characterized by both internal imbalances (within countries) and external imbalances (between countries).
2. The illegal economy nexus: Illicit trade, organized crime and corruption are chronic risks that are perceived as highly likely to occur and of medium impact. As a highly interconnected nexus representing the illegal economy, however, experts see these risks as of central importance to the global risk landscape.
3. The water-food-energy nexus: Water security, food security and energy security are chronic impediments to economic growth and social stability. Food production requires water and energy; water extraction and distribution requires energy; and energy production requires water. Food prices are also highly sensitive to the cost of energy inputs through fertilizers, irrigation, transport and processing.
5 risks to watch:
1. Cyber-security: cyber theft, cyber espionage, cyber war, and cyber terrorism.
2. Demographic challenges: population “cluster bombs”, global graying and demographic dividends.
3. Resource security: extreme commodity price volatility and extreme energy price volatility.
4. Retrenchment from globalization: In many advanced economies strengthening political forces either directly or indirectly advocate retrenchment from globalization.
5. Weapons of mass destruction: the key WMD risk is felt by most experts to be that of nuclear proliferation, both among states and non-state actors, closely followed by the potential use of biological weapons.
3 ways for leaders to improve their response to complex and interdependent risks:
1. Proactively address the causes, rather than the symptoms, of global risk, identifying effective points of intervention in underlying structures and systems.
2. Devise coordinated response strategies to address the existence of difficult trade-offs and the threat of unintended consequences caused in part by increased interconnectedness.
3. Take a longer-term approach to assessment and response, particularly when seeking to manage global risks that emerge over decades rather than months or years.
On this the first day of the new year the state of my thoughts feels like a reflection of the world at large. Tumultuous, hopeful-yet-fearful, seeing innumerable strands & details yet struggling to hang on to them, much less to weave them into some coherent story about the future. Change has become so constant and accelerated that the event horizon seems nearer and nearer: the crystal ball has clouded and tomorrow could be radically different from today.
This is what the Singularity folks are tugging at, and what the Mayans supposedly alluded to almost 1500 years ago. That the feedback loops between culture, technology, and our very selves would become so tight and quickened that we’d begin to lose our ability to keep up with it all. The system would accelerate to such an incomprehensible pace that it would all seem to be slipping from our grasp. Then, like a boiling point, everything would undergo a state change, a phase shift into something born of the past but wholly new.
A singularity in physics is a point of absolute density most notably observed within a black hole. It’s so dense that it’s gravitational pull becomes massive, inescapable. Around the singularity is a spherical area physicists refer to as the event horizon. Within this area even light cannot escape, so nothing can be seen within the event horizon from the outside. Cross the line and you are doomed to collapse into singularity.
In contemporary usage, the Singularity alludes to, among other things, the notion that there is some point in our near-future where our lives have shifted so dramatically that the world, our technologies, and perhaps even the nature of our selves are unrecognizable and unforseeable from our current timeframe. Like the event horizon around a black hole, it’s impossible to see what’s on the other side; impossible to predict the next phase state. There are examples throughout natural systems that illustrate such phase shifts, from the formation of ice crystals in water to the emergence of a hurricane or tornado from an otherwise incoherent weather system. But it’s a much more challenging task to imagine such a sudden shift at the scale of global human systems. We have models for complexity & emergence but we have no real ability to model what the next global economic system might be or how human consciousness might shift when billions of minds are wired together in instantaneous communication.
Singularity or not, the world has become arguably post-historical. For millenia history was a book written by a few to record what was seen and known within their domain. Often bounded by geography, language, and political persuasion, the writing of the historical record has been a fairly narrow niche, curated by a relative few. As such, history has retained a reasonable amount of coherency. The post-modern world is post-historical because now virtually everyone is contributing to the historical record. There is no central curation or organizing principle. Every blog, Flickr account, Tweet, Facebook status, HuffPo & RedState post – all of these are writing the historical record. In a world where everyone can publish, who’s account is the most accurate? Is there even such a thing as historical accuracy anymore when so many witnesses chime in with their take? Even Wikipedia is a dynamic, ever-shifting crowdsourced story, constantly amended and updated around the ongoing dialectic of our unfolding. Without a single history we become post-historical, atemporal, and, arguably, much further from the shores of truth.
Indeed, our modern age seems to have little use for truth, tending much more towards the subtleties of persuasion and the blunt cudgel of opinion. In a choppy sea of philosophical relativity it’s more about how you can make your story the most influential among competitors. Pundits and politicians, marketers & evangelists all know this well. We’re all learning this in the internet age, each of us curating our personal brand in the social web. But this din of persuasion and memetic mudslinging has gotten so amplified that it’s drowning out sensibility and rational discussion, much less actual strategic coordination around the very real and threatening issues of our time. Having grokked the power of global broadcast everyone is yelling through their own personal megaphone. And the din is deafening (and oh so entertaining!). Not only do we struggle in a sea of data overload but we’re constantly tossed about by the onrushing waves of opinion. So much data, so much opinion, and so little ability to rationally parse and comprehend it all.
This too may be symptomatic of our transit towards some higher order. Sometimes the best way to remodel a house is to tear it down and rebuild from the ground up. Surely the din makes it considerably more difficult to forecast the future. Is North Korea really going to start a nuclear war in Asia, or is it just rhetorical sabre rattling? Nothing new for seasoned diplomats but now it’s not just a matter for war-room scenarios and diplomatic cables. Now it’s fodder for the 24hr newsfeed, the blogosphere, and the tweetstream. We all share the uncertainty, the fear, the speculation… the net shares as much emotion as it does data. And we’re all open to being manipulated by those who would use such information to persuade us towards some unseen ends. As everything seems to become increasingly disordered so too does our own mental ability to organize the internal maps we keep of the world. As the world comes undone, so too do our minds. Herein lies both the opportunity for emergence of new orders, as well as the very real potential to be subsumed by the chaos and pass into void.
In a post-historical age of persuasion, forecasting the future becomes less predictive and more strategic. It’s less about how we expect the world to unfold and more about how we construct the world to become. Forecasting becomes an activist pursuit. Within increasing chaos there is increasing opportunity to apply new forms of order. The plenum is infinite potential. The slate of civilization appears to be wiping itself of many of the legacy systems we’ve been running on – industrial, economic, religious – now crashing into the finite resource limits of planet and population and fed crazy pills by the sudden massive outlier of the internet.
Transition is always marked by change & uncertainty, passing out of one phase into another as of yet unknown. Expectations reveal the psyche of dreamers more than the machinations of reality. Yet the two may converge if we will it to be. And of course, these thoughts reflect my own biases – western, American, Anglo, middle class, male. My world appears to be fading, threatened while Asia and the African continent perhaps see the shifting sands with greater hope. Asia, the return of the Dragon. Africa, the sandbox for the next global operating system. Not to belittle the very real and endemic suffering that wracks both continents but their indicators are heading upwards while ours appear to be on the decline. Of course the west is seized by apoplectic spasms. Its hegemony and exceptionalism is fading like the tarnished capital rotundas of the Byzantium. State competency is in decline. Deficits run rampant. Internal bickering, moneyed elections, and a bought, scandal-hungry media destroy any hope of democratic collaboration. The corporation is on the rise eager to displace democracy. The gap between Wall Street and Main Street is widening into a nihilistic chasm big enough to swallow the entire American Dream. Super-empowered individuals have more sway over our futures than do rulers. Insurgencies, criminal syndicates, and terror networks all have risen with the empowering tide of technology. The international order is increasingly looking like a great, heaving disorder.
Yet each of these admittedly-fearsome trends is also an enabler for new solutions unencumbered by the Old Ways. In the decline of the state grows the rise of the city-state, localism, and community building. In the economic gap is born innovation and self-empowerment, local resiliency & durable investments. Many super-empowered elites are not actually evil and are spreading their billions across the world for good causes. And every insurgency is in some ways just an angry local makers collective. The design patterns are often agnostic across good & bad. It is intention & compassion, hope & courage, that make the difference.
Here in the impossible post-historical year of 2011 we’re not quite as far along as we thought we’d be but, damn, look at all we’ve accomplished! Look at the crazy majesty of it all unfolding from that beautiful lotus singularity! Look at the dreams and imaginations given life! Look at the subtleties of humanity revealed and shared across the globe! Look at the deep currents of evolution, physics, and biology, seemingly lost and abandoned in the moment but so obviously masterful and commanding in the long-term. We are, each and every one of us, in a dance with nature, spinning away at times but always compelled to return and dance in step.
As the Great Wheel turns the future remains as it always has: a dream waiting to awaken.
Emergent technologies often inspire great excitement attended by utopic visions of how they will transform our lives for the better. Yet all innovations introduce risk and the likelihood of unforeseen consequences. The transhumanity stack of technologies – life extension, medical & genetic modification, brain-computer & brain-machine interface, and virtual & augmented realities – offer great opportunities for human enhancement but pose profound risks for all aspects of humanity & civilization. It is critical to confront these dangers and temper the enthusiasm of tranhumanism with diligent risk assessment and thorough scenario modeling for possible outcomes.
To wit, here are 5 scenarios that explore the possible dangers embedded within transhumanism. This is, of course, by no means an exhaustive list but is simply intended to encourage further risk analysis. Most or all have probably been addressed by others elsewhere, and this list is not intended as a criticism of those presently active in the transhumanity community.
1. Population growth from longevity & senescence studies
Life extension looks great from an individual or group perspective but it’s a resource nightmare from a national and global angle. Current human population is about 6.8 billion with most linear estimates projecting somewhere around 9 billion by 2050. If life extension is designed to be readily available to anyone & everyone, we can expect two outcomes: considerable population growth as longevity outpaces mortality, and a rise in global GDP and its commensurate resource consumption as working age extends towards the centenarian. People living longer means people will consume more in the course of their lifetimes. Consider the competition for resources & ecological carrying capacity we currently face in 2010 and roll that forward 40 years with a massive global population and members of the workforce that can potentially stay employed for 70 years….
2. Inequity of technology distribution — the Transhuman Gap
The flip-side of the resource consumption issue arises if we admit that transhuman technologies will not be evenly available to all; that socio-economic factors will gate who has access to technologies that extend human capabilities. In this context, population dynamics will not be appreciably influenced by human life extension as only a small subset of the populace will have access to such enhancement. Indeed, genetic modification, brain-computer interface, advanced prosthesis, and access to virtual & augmented realities are all presently gated by economic barriers to entry that are not likely to diminish any time soon. AR & VW’s may become ubiquitous & cheap but real human enhancement through interventionary technologies will mostly fall along class lines, giving rise to a wealthy tier of augmented & enhanced individuals. If only the wealthy are most able to afford enhancement, the socioeconomic divide will be reinforced by the Transhuman Gap, further disenfranchising those already at a competitive disadvantage by their class circumstances. From such economic disparity, reinforced by the inevitable moralizing and judgments from both sides of the gap, social cohesion will be further challenged and class distinctions will begin to take on a biomechanical & genetic aspect with the threat of technology-enabled superiority.
3. Techno-elitism, civil discord, and eugenics
Throughout history elite classes have used their status & abilities to influence the control systems that govern those beneath them. Likewise, the underclass has looked at elites with both admiration & disdain, occasionally rising to join their ranks but, more often, rising up to knock them down. Civil strife is a common outcome of disparity, driven by inequities in access to resources, opportunities, and power. A class of techno-elite transhumans would pose a profound existential threat to the underclass who might very well perceive themselves as being forever cut-out from the Democratic ideal that “all humans are created equal”, no longer able to compete in any capacity without transhuman enhancements. The anger and victimization from such an outlook would very quickly translate into moralizing against the crimes of human augmentation and stigmatizing those who pursue such “un-natural” and “un-holy” enhancement. In turn, the techno-elite may feel inclined to judge the underclass as “unfit” or “un-evolved” – two distinctions that have historically led to great atrocities.
4. Co-option of transhumanity by fascists, oligarchs, and super-empowered individuals
The slippery slope of this scenario posits the rise of a transhuman ruling class who, when challenged by the underclass, recede into their own sense of authority & enhanced intelligence to determine that the only appropriate course of action is to subjugate the masses and shepherd the rise of transhuman governance. If transhuman enhancement is truly advantageous, yet remains available only to an elite class, then in all likelihood those elites will embrace the technology to their competitive advantage. Since it would be folly to assume that human technological enhancement will remediate our most basest evolutionary program of survival of the fittest, the likelihood of enhanced predatory elites seizing global power is not so small. The darkest scenario might see transhuman governance requiring control & tracking implants in all newborns – perhaps a bit hyperbolic but not inconceivable if the type of global predators that currently traverse societies gained access to advanced transhuman technologies.
5. Fractured reality
Virtual worlds and augmented reality offer many compelling experiences across the spectrum of entertainment, socialization, marketing & advertising, collaboration, and modern knowledge work. At their core, these technologies intermediate our experience of the world, giving third parties access to program our sensorium. Brain-computer interface technologies are working to extend this access to the core structures of our brain, kicking off a wave of neurotechnologies able to more specifically & accurately influencing the mind-brain interface. The opt-in path through designer reality gives us the ability to modify the way we interface with the phenomenal world, electing to commit more of our selves to virtual experiences & relationships, or to overlay our environments with the images of our choosing rather than confront the physical world solely on its terms. While affinity groups will accrete around specific worlds & layers the barriers between differing experiences of objective reality will multiply when the world I experience is markedly different than yours. As the Transhuman Gap threatens social cohesion through class, reality design threatens cohesion across all classes by erecting virtual constructions between adjacent-but-unrelated digital worlds. While we may feel a sense of agency in creating such personalized experiences we do so in digital layers most likely owned by 3rd parties or accessible through public APIs. We may inadvertently wall ourselves off from each other but we’ll become even richer targets for profilers, influencers, and governors. The slippery slope in this scenario suggests that governance might enforce realities onto subjects or that dangerous identity groups might create monstrous, all-encompassing layers as indoctrination tools & neuro-propaganda towards the engineering of social movements. Considering how supremely the television has been used to influence the masses with only basic access to eyes and ears, it’s not unlikely that greater access into the transhuman will yield a greater ability to influence and manipulate.
Again, these scenarios are not meant as accusations or designed to arouse a fear of transhumanism but, rather, to encourage critical thinking along the dystopic possibilities of the future transhuman phase space, as it were, in order to better control for such outcomes. As the saying goes, all technology is inherently neutral. But this glib statement does not acknowledge that all technology is born of humanity and wielded by our hands alone. To paraphrase a great modern philosopher, all of the animals are capably murderous.
I’ve been wanting to play around with video more so as a test project I taped myself talking about complexity for a few minutes. It’s very seat-of-the-pants and ad-hoc. I spent about 1.5 hours on this total which is a pretty amazing statement about the power of technology in the modern age. If I do more of these, I’d like to get them down to about 2 minutes each. This one clocks in at just past 4 minutes. As always, your feedback is welcomed & appreciated.
My partner forwarded me a great article by the late Donella Meadows, titled Places to Intervene in a System. The whole article is recommended but this summary of hers if quite useful as a framework for evaluating and influencing complex systems. (See also John Robb’s idea of the systempunkt for the modern warfare version of this thinking.)
9 Places to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness)
9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Material stocks and flows.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).
3. The power of self-organization.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
If you like to live on the edge and gaze deeply into the future, a great collection of like-minded folks will be gathering to discuss the possible futures of humanity – and how to make them. From their site:
The Humanity+ at Caltech program will be divided into four main themed sessions. These sessions are:
* Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods
* Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan
* Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds
* Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis
A wide range of interesting, professional speakers, from both the for-profit and non-profit worlds, will address each of the four themes.
This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs – a project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term. Thanks to Tim Maly of Quiet Babalon for running such a great project!
“He would see faces in movies, on T.V., in magazines, and in books. He thought that some of these faces might be right for him…”
The word “cybernetic” derives from a Greek word, kybernetes, meaning “rudder” or “governor”. A cybernetic process is a control system that uses feedback about it’s actions in an environment to better adapt it’s behavior. The cybernetic organism, or “cyborg”, is a class of cybernetic systems that have converged with biological organisms. In this increasingly mythologized form, the cyborg embodies the ongoing dialectic between humanity & technology, and is an aspirational figure onto which we project our superhuman fantasies. While it offers security, enhancement, and corporeal salvation the cyborg also presents an existential threat to the self and to the cherished notions of being uniquely human.
It’s a gamble but we don’t seem able to leave the table. As we offload more of our tasks into technology we enhance our adaptability while undermining our own innate resilience as animals. We wrap ourselves in extended suits of shelter, mobility, health, and communications. We distribute our senses through a global network of hypermedia, augmenting our brains with satellites & server farms & smart phones. Increasingly, our minds & bodies are becoming the convergence point for both the real & the virtual, mediated through miniaturization, dematerialization, and nano-scale hybridization. Our ability to craft the world around us is quickly advancing to give us the ability to craft our bodies & our selves.
“And through the years, by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind… Or somewhere in the back of his mind… That he might, by force of will, cause his face to approach those of his ideals…”
Computation is miniaturizing, distributing, and becoming more powerful & efficient. It’s moving closer & closer to our bodies while ubiquitizing & dematerializing all around us. The cybernetic process has refined this most adaptive capacity in little more than 50 years to be right at hand, with us constantly, connected to a global web of people, places, things, information, and knowledge. We are co-evolving with our tools, or what Kevin Kelly refers to as the Technium – the seemingly-intentional kingdom of technology. As Terence McKenna suggested, we are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. By directly illustrating how our own fitness & bio-survival becomes bound to the survival of our technology, the cyborg is a fitting icon for this relationship.
Technology has historically been regarded as something we cast into the world separate from ourselves but it’s worth considering the symbiosis at play and how this relationship is changing the very nature of humanity. As we venture deeper & deeper into the Technium, we lend ourselves to it’s design. By embracing technology as part of our lives, as something we rely upon and depend on, we humanize it and wrap it in affection. We routinely fetishize & sexualize cool, flashy tech. In doing so we impart emotional value to the soul-less tools of our construction. We give them both life & meaning. By tying our lives to theirs, we agree to guarantee their survival. This arrangement is a sort of alchemical wedding between human & machine, seeking to yield gold from this mixture of blood & metal, uncertain of the outcome but almost religiously compelled to consummate.
“The change would be very subtle. It might take ten years or so. Gradually his face would change it’s shape. A more hooked nose. Wider, thinner lips. Beady eyes. A larger forehead…”
In the modern world, our identities include the social networks & affinity groups in which we participate, the digital media we capture & create & upload, the avatars we wear, and the myriad other fragments of ourselves we leave around the web. Who we are as individuals reflects the unique array of technologies through which we engage the world, at times instantiated through multiple masks of diverse utility, at other times fractured & dis-integrated – too many selves with too many virtual fingers picking at them. Our experience of life is increasingly composed of data & virtual events, cloudy & intangible yet remote-wired into our brains through re-targeted reward systems. A Twitter re-tweet makes us happy, a hostile blog comment makes us angry, the real-time web feeds our addiction to novelty. Memories are offloaded to digital storage mediums. Pictures, travel videos, art, calendars, phone numbers, thoughts & treatises… So much of who we are and who we have been is already virtualized & invested in cybernetic systems. All those tweets & blog posts cast into the cloud as digital moments captured & recorded. Every time I share a part of me with the digital world I become copied, distributed, more than myself yet… in pieces.
It can be said that while we augment & extend our abilities through machines, machines learn more about the world through us. The web 2.0 social media revolution and the semantic web of structured data that is presently intercalating into it has brought machine algorithms into direct relationship with human behavior, watching our habits and tracking our paths through the digital landscape. These sophisticated marketing and research tools are learning more and more about what it means to be human, and the extended sensorium of the instrumented world is giving them deep insight into the run-time processes of civilization & nature. The spark of self-awareness has not yet animated these systems but there is an uneasy agreement that we will continue to assist in their cybernetic development, modifying their instructions to become more and more capable & efficient, perhaps to the point of being indistinguishable from, or surpassing, their human creators.
“He imagined that this was an ability he shared with most other people. They had also molded their faces according to some ideal. Maybe they imagined that their new face would better suit their personality. Or maybe they imagined that their personality would be forced to change to fit the new appearance…”
In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the young Tyrell Corporation assistant, Rachel, reflects on her childhood memories while leafing through photographs of her youth. These images are evidence of her past she uses to construct her sense of self. Memories provide us with continuity and frame the present & future by reminding us of our history – critical for a species so capable of stepping out of time. Rachel’s realization that she is a replicant, that her memories are false implants deliberately created to make her believe she’s human, precipitates an existential crises that even threatens Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard, surrounded as he is by photos of his own supposed past. This subtle narrative trick suggests that replicants will be more human-like if they don’t know they’re replicants. But it also invokes another query: If memories are (re-)writable, can we still trust our own past?
Yet both characters do appear quite human. They laugh and cry and love and seem driven by the same hopes and fears we all have. Ridley Scott’s brilliance – and by extension, Philip K. Dick’s – is to obscure the nature of the self and of humanity by challenging our notions of both. Is Rachel simply another mannequin animated by advanced cybernetics or is she more than that? Is she human enough? When the Tyrell bio-engineer J.F. Sebastian sees the Nexus 6 replicants, Pris and Roy Batty, he observes “you’re perfect”, underlining again the aspirational notion that through technology we can be made even better, becoming perhaps “more human than human”. This notion of intelligent artificial beings raises deep challenges to our cherished notions of humanity, as many have noted. But the casual fetishization of technology, as it gets nearer & friendlier & more magical, is perhaps just as threatening to our deified specialness in it’s subtle insinuation into our hands & hearts & minds.
In Mamoru Oshii’s anime classic, Ghost in the Shell, the female protagonist – a fully-engineered and functional robotic human named Kusanagi – at once decries those who resist augmentation, suggesting that “your effort to remain as you are is what limits you”, while simultaneously becoming engaged in a quest to determine if there might be more to her than just what has been programmed. She celebrates her artifice as a supreme achievement in overcoming the constraints of biological evolution while also seeking to find evidence that she is possessed of that most mysterious spark: the god-like ingression of being that enters and animates the human shell. Oshii’s narrative suggests that robots that achieve a sufficient level of complexity and self-awareness will, just like their human creators, seek to see themselves as somehow divinely animated. Perhaps it’s a method to defend the belief in human uniqueness but those writing the modern myths of cybernetics seem to imply that while humans aspire to the abilities of machines, machines aspire to the soulfulness of humans.
“This is why first impressions are often correct…”
Chalk it up to curiosity, the power of design fictions, and an innate need to realize our visions, but if we can see it with enough resolution in our mind’s eye, we’ll try to bring it to life. The Ghost in the Shell & the Ghost in the Machine both intuit the ongoing merger between humanity & technology, and the hopes & fears that attend this arranged and seemingly-unavoidable alchemical wedding. As animals we are driven to adapt. As humans, we are compelled to create.
“Although some people might have made mistakes. They may have arrived at an appearance that bears no relationship to them. They may have picked an ideal appearance based on some childish whim or momentary impulse. Some may have gotten half-way there, and then changed their minds…”
Humans are brilliant & visionary but also impetuous, easily distracted, fascinated by shiny things, and typically ill-equipped to divine the downstream consequences of our actions. We extrude technologies at a pace that far outruns our ability to understand their impacts on the world, much less how they change who we are. As we reach towards AI, the cyborg, the singularity, and beyond, our cybernetic fantasies may necessarily pass through the dark night of the soul on the way to denouement. What is birthed from the alchemical marriage often necessitates the destruction of the wedding party.
“He wonders if he too might have made a similar mistake.” – David Byrne, Seen & Not Seen
Are we working up some Faustian bargain promising the heights of technological superiority only for the meager sacrifice of our Souls? Or is this fear a reflection of our Cartesian inability to see ourselves as an evolving process, holding onto whatever continuity we can but always inevitably changing with the world in which we are embedded? As we offload more and more of our selves to our digital tools, we change what it means to be human. As we evolve & integrate more machine functionality we modify our relationship to the cybernetic process and re-frame our self-identity to accommodate our new capacities.
Like the replicants in Blade Runner and the animated cyborgs of Ghost in the Shell we will very likely continue to aspire to be more human than human, no matter how hard it may be to defend our ideals of what this may mean to the very spark of humanity. What form of cyborg we shall become, what degree of humanity we retain in the transaction, what unforeseen repercussions may be set in motion… The answers are as slippery as the continuum of the self and the ever-changing world in which we live. Confrontation with the existential Other – the global mind mediated through ubiquitous bio-machinery – and the resulting annihilation of the Self that will necessarily attend such knowledge, may very well yield a vastly different type of humanity than what we expect.
The Institute for the Future has published it’s 2010 Map of the Decade from the Ten Year Forecast program. I contributed research, analysis, and forecasts for carbon markets, global energy resource disposition, and new models of adaptive power.
We presented the program to many Fortune 500, NGO, and government subscribers this past April in an amazing 2-day conference at the magical Cavallo Point at the northern foot of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Thanks again to IFTF for the chance to work with such great folks digging into the major currents & challenges of our times!
From their site:
The future is a high-resolution game. Never before has humanity been
able to explore the emerging landscape in such detail, to measure the
forces of change at such vast scales, and to fill in the details with
such fine grain. But this high-resolution grid is not complete. It
challenges us to envision and build the future we want. As both gamers
and creators of the game, we will fill in the grid over the coming
decade.
A non-deterministic system is one that is so complex that it’s future state cannot be predicted to any great degree of certainty. Weather systems, ecosystems, and economies are examples of interdependent dynamic systems that are composed of so many elements and exhibit so many emergent behaviors that it’s impossible to effectively forecast their futures. Conversely, deterministic systems are more reliable, like clockworks, where every component is known and each behaves & interacts exactly as expected. The difference between the two is in their degree of complexity and our ability to reveal the mechanisms beneath their behaviors.
This reasoning begs the question: are so-called non-deterministic systems ultimately knowable and actually deterministic? If we posit a supercomputer (or superbeing) capable of knowing every piece of a complex system and understanding the physical properties of how that system would interact, would it be possible to make exact predictions for that system? In other words, is a non-deterministic system really just a very complex deterministic system that we don’t yet know enough about? The supposition here is that emergent properties are coded by the parts.
This leads to the next question: is emergence a reversible process? Take proteins, for example. Proteins are polypeptides – linear sequences of amino acids. This initial configuration as a sequence of parts is called the primary structure, and we know the exact primary structures of many proteins. We also know a lot about the biochemistry of amino acids. Yet, a large puzzle of our times is understanding how the primary structure of proteins gives rise to their secondary & tertiary structure – the unique 3-dimensional shapes that turn polypeptide chains into functional components such as enzymes. Indeed, there are massive distributed efforts to understand how the completed 3-dimensional structure of proteins emerges from the serial coding of polypeptide chains [ See Folding At Home].
Most assume that protein folding is a behavior that is knowable, ie deterministic. The hope being that it should be possible to design novel proteins and understand why defects occur in protein folding. But does this imply that many or all seemingly-non-deterministic systems, whose utter complexity is reinforced by layers & layers of emergence upon emergence, are indeed knowable? If the emergence of 3D protein structures from serial components is not some magical event, then might the same be said for larger complex dynamic systems like weather and economies? And what does this mean for epistemology? It would seem that such talk veers back towards Newton’s Clockwork Universe, suggesting that if all the parts are known to sufficient degree, and all their behaviors & affinities known as well, then it should be possible to forecast it’s state at any time in the future. Indeed, Newton’s own very deterministic Laws of Motion scaled up to accurately model the motions of our solar system.
Of course, this begins to challenge the very notion of free will, not to mention thermodynamics and quantum mechanics which both appear to inject chaos and unpredictability into the physical world to a very deep degree. And perhaps it is these aspects of the universe that modulate complex systems into ultimately non-deterministic behaviors, like a well-spring of randomness bubbling up from the quantum plenum injected into Newton’s clockworks. The world does indeed seem highly unpredictable, especially in this day & age. As do the many unfathomable actions of us humans and our damned free will. In fact, it may just be that some things are definably unknowable in totality, as the great mystery traditions would suggest, each pole always containing the seed of it’s opposite, oscillating in some eternal dance unknowable beyond the Seven Veils.
What fate would befall the edifice of Science & Rationalism if it were truly proven that God does indeed play dice and the future is ever but a game of chance? We may reveal the secrets of protein folding and perhaps even be able to predict weather accurately beyond 3 or 4 days. But beyond that what is the boundary of knowability?
At it’s core, the drive towards a fully-realized augmented reality is about the accessibility of information. The ability to quickly interrogate our environment in ways that reveal valuable data is a powerful adaptive capability conferred by the intersection of ubiquitous computing & augmented reality. The knowledge contained in the cloud becomes immediately visible, context-aware, and anchored to the solid world in which we move, both revealing formerly-hidden data and inviting participation & collaboration in new social annotations. The opportunity for AR to facilitate discoverability & social connections, to help reveal and share ourselves, and to reinforce social ties through visual signifiers is indeed quite promising. Yet as the hardware & software of augmented reality matures (particularly with respect to head-mounted visual overlays) it becomes possible that this technology will reinforce social elitism & designer realities, neo-tribalism, territorial conflicts, and socio-economic disparity by simultaneously inviting the wholesale tagging of our world while undermining the shared reference of objective reality we have relied upon as a fundamental socializing force since the dawn of humanity.
The Global Risks Report 2011 from the World Economic Forum highlights two primary megatrends with the potential to inject significant disruption into global systems. From the report:
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