A common habit in forecasting, particularly in energy futures & economic growth, is to take roughly linear trends and extend them over the next few decades. The notion is that there is inertia in what has already happened that will make the future look markedly similar, or at least there will likely be a more-or-less linear movement along an existing path. For example, many forecasts suggest that energy consumption will increase by 50% towards the year 2035. This is based on data over the past 30 years that is then extrapolated forward along expectations, so you get graphs that look like this one from the EIA’s 2009 Annual Energy Outlook Early Release Overview:

The graph shows mostly linear growth in energy consumption. The assumptions here are that, given previous growth rates, and given a rough set of expectations about future growth, energy consumption will steadily grow across all sectors. Yet you’ll notice a few bumps & dips for transportation & industrial in the later months of 2008 and early 2009. These suggest outlier events. Outliers are the unexpected events, the Black Swans that come out of nowhere and blow expectations out of the water. In this case, economic activity got a big boost by the inflated gains of the securities market, then took a dive after all the hidden risks came to the surface. The following graph from the same EIA report really highlights the 2008 economic black swan:

Here we see the market prices for the primary energy sources. This graph really shows the instability churned up by the securities outlier. As the ultimate determinant of just about all economic activity (nothing happens without energy) we can see energy prices climbing at the same time demand was ramping up (compare to the last graph of consumption). Then heading into the crash energy prices plummet as fears mount, workforces are downsized, factories go dark, and productivity retracts in the face of economic doom. In spite of expectations the market collapse came as a surprise. Yet, forecasts still commit global energy consumption to a future of roughly 50% growth in demand (see those post-2010 consumption lines in the first graph?). In spite of obvious turbulence in past performance the forecasts assume typical, linear economic growth out to 2035.

While such linear approximations offer hope of anticipating and, hence, preparing for the future, to some degree they represent a logical fallacy of projecting linear trends onto complex, non-linear systems. Living systems like weather patterns, anthills, and global economics are approximately non-deterministic. That is, they’re so complex and have so many feedback mechanisms that they’re mostly unpredictable (weather predictions are still only more-or-less valid for about 5 days out). Much of this complexity arises from the turbulence generated by feedback loops and interconnections across every scale of the system. The power laws underlying dynamic systems take small values and iterate them over time into very large values. This is the mechanism underlying the oft-mentioned Butterfly Effect and one of the drivers for outlier events. Imagine a dust devil spinning up on an otherwise calm desert floor…

Nature seeks homeostasis – a dynamic equilibrium around a point of stability. The counterpoint to runaway feedback loops and suddenly emergent outliers are the damping effects of control elements. In climate, the tendency for hot & cold to equalize will usually mitigate a storm and return clear skies. The dust devil gives up it’s angular momentum to shifting pressure & temperature gradients. Looking at our current affairs we see that total economic collapse has (so far) been averted through aggressive attempts to dampen the turbulence by injecting massive amounts of state capital into the financial system. These interventions & market regulations are control structures put in place to govern for relative economic homeostasis. When they work and things are relatively quiet, they keep those trend projections nice & linear.

Linear projections help us continue to get things done based on fairly reliable expectations. But avoiding the next economic catastrophe requires a deep study of the many threads & amplifiers that drive black swan events. Outliers occupy the thin edge of statistical possibility yet almost always have tremendous consequences. They are, by nature, entropic & disruptive, shifting the territory and demanding new adaptations. To return to the global energy domain, what outliers might be slowly iterating to challenge the forecasts of 50% growth in demand? What catastrophic black swans might be lurking off the radar? What scientific breakthroughs and game-changing innovations might be weaving together towards a complete re-orientation of power requirements, transport, or industrial fuel?

Studying a system for outliers and looking for the signals & trends that might lead to the next Black Swan, as well as examining the conditions that have led to previous outlier events, can inform forecasts that are much more attuned to resiliency and adaptation.

[Update: The mobile phone is a great example of a high-impact outlier with a small physical footprint that achieved global ubiquity within 10 years. The pace & breadth of it's adoption suggests that interventionary technologies can rather quickly have major impacts, challenging heavily invested and entrenched businesses. Imagine an energy outlier with a similar device profile that enabled people to generate & store enough power to run a small home or drive an electric car 100 miles...]

Such is the lure and danger of virtualized humanity. Can we be led into virtuality in a way that makes us more human? What design ethos and practices might wield the web as a tool to build better people? And what might this relationship, this merger between humans and machines look like in 20, 30, or 50 years? The web is so young and so shiny and we’re all rushing in to look at each other through new lenses. As you suggest, it’s rather important to consider how we’re changing the web in ways that change us…

By moving parts of our lives online, into digital networks, we’ve stepped into a virtual social & cognitive space. Humanity, as a species, is increasingly virtualized in the digital domain: we represent ourselves through crafted interfaces & intermediary social profiles, icons & avatars; we speak through bytes and 140char bursts, passing urls and embeds. This is a new form of social transaction and, likely, brings with it all sorts of subtle & not-so-subtle behavioral conditionings and entrainments, eg the dopamine burst of getting a new Follower. Our greatest human construct – the webernets – is undoubtedly changing what it means to be human. Yet, we also bring our social humanity – the innate empathy and morality that makes us care for each other, often with altruistic disregard to our own gains – into this domain in ways that empower great acts of kindness & collaboration. I guess your post highlighted for me the tension between these two aspects of “virtualized humanity” and the call to empathic designers to engineer humanistic solutions and help entrain us towards a more successful integration with the virtual in ways that reinforce the physical world.

Full-size image here.

Market
Steady progress in medical & military implant BCI over the next 10 years, with significant
advances in repair of sensory, motor, and neurological impairments. Finer resolution,
amplification, and interpretation for EEG headsets yielding reasonable engagement with
simple computation, communication, & services. Minimally interactive commercial eyewear
for media & information content, with most advances emerging from military R&D. Society
will gradually evolve towards tighter integration with machine computation.

Better treatment. Finer resolution. Augmented eyewear.

Fortress
Economic, religious, and sociopolitical factors push R&D deeply into medical and military
segments, with limited but consequential flow into black markets. Minimal commercial
applications will surface, while cultural penetration proceeds primarily through invasive
and state-mandated use for control, surveillance, and tracking. Socioeconomic differences
between agents fitted with augmentations and those without will widen the Transhuman Gap,
further reinforcing class disparity and tensions while putting increasing pressure on
insurgent groups to acquire BCI technologies for logistic & disruptive advantage.

Restricted research. Control mechanisms. Black markets & insurgency.

Transformed
Medical advances in BCI & BMI eradicate sensorimotor afflictions and bring physical
augmentation into the common fabric of society. Military research pushes R&D into
highly advanced applications that rapidly move into the civilian marketplace. Widespread
adoption of Augmented Reality establishes a new baseline for human functionality while
freeing creatives to experiment with novel modalities of expression. Profound advances
in nanotech & neurocomputation remove the boundaries between mind, brain, computation,
machines, & AI, revealing a deeply interwoven fabric of hypermind.

Ubiquitous bci. Transhumanity. Hypermind.

The Industrial Revolution emerged from a mechanistic world view and a scientific method that focused on isolated, ideal systems. This clockwork methodology enabled the rapid construction of the modern world yet masked the systemic impacts of industrial growth. The consequences of this mechanized, replacement-part philosophy have been wrought across living systems, eroding the natural environment and threatening human welfare, often to the reward of the most aggressive and self-serving. Yet the unavoidable effects of industrialization have forced humanity to evolve it’s awareness, turning our philosophies of nature and industry towards a more holistic & intentional understanding of living systems. We’re quickly learning the need to look beyond the immediately observable bounds of our creations and place them within larger contexts of community, society, environment, and legacy. This logical shift from Cartesian mechanism to relativism and holism is changing the way we design our world. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our evolving nature is deeply informing our human systems and crafting emergent solutions that look much more biological than mechanistic. Yet, this transition is extraordinarily chaotic as the foundations of civilization are re-examined and upgraded to the new paradigm, concurrent with a massive explosion in human population, a rapidly shifting global energy landscape, new classes of super-empowered actors and collectives, a global information network, instantaneous non-local communication, and a increasingly unpredictable natural environment. It may seem that we’re racing against our own technologies to save ourselves and the planet… Or perhaps Gaia & Technos are co-evolving and seeking homeostasis through their interplay with humanity.

I was recently interview by Klint Finley over at Technoccult. He asked me about foresight methodologies, BCI, augmented reality, systems, and information overload.

Excerpted:

What sort of skills and technologies do you think it’s most important for people today to learn to live in the future?

Accept that we live in a world of great change. You have to be agile and prepared to adapt. The fundamental global systems of civilization are shifting with the impact of instantaneous communication, globalization, and ubiquitous computing. Add to this the threats of climate change and a declining fossil fuel infrastructure and you have a tremendous amount of challenges ahead. I feel it’s critical to embrace the change and try to both anticipate and design the future. The future is not yet writ so you can always influence it, perhaps now more than ever.

Continued here.

“Roughly speaking, we can think of the OECD as the oil users, and the Non-OECD as the coal users.”

This quote from energy investment analyst, Gregor MacDonald, should be deeply considered, particularly given the realities of world energy use and demographics. Simply put, the West is getting older and it’s growth has slowed considerably. Meanwhile, the developing world is seeing rapid population growth, now contributing almost 5 billion people to the global register. The ten largest cities in the world are mostly non-OECD* and as they further industrialize and pull more people out of the slums, they’ll need more power to drive their growth. With economic disparity choking access to petroleum, reinforced by much higher oil prices, the developing world is rising on coal-fired utilities and marching towards it’s own industrial revolution.

Source: Gregor MacDonald, 2010.

It’s my sense that these realities are not being deeply considered by many of the people involved in the debate about climate, energy, and sustainability who seem to be focusing primarily on China and the developed world. Yet population growth, industrial activity, and energy use has slowed to nearly flatline across Europe and the United States over the past 10 years, and their rate of population replacement is now negative. While coal use is a reality that may be declining in the West, it’s on the rise across the rest of the world. The other half of the planet is industrializing rapidly and it’s doing so by burning massive amounts of coal**. China, with a population of approx. 1.3 billion, gets a whopping 68% [adjusted to 2009] of it’s energy from coal. India, with aprrox. 1.1 billion people, derives about 60% of it’s energy from coal. While considerable efforts are being made to build out renewables the sheer size of these populations and the rate of their growth ensures many years of coal use before solar & wind will substantially offset their energy requirements. Likewise, countries heavily invested in coal exports, like Russia & Australia, are incentivised to promote it’s use for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the World Coal Institute would have us believe that there’s enough coal to last 130 years at current rates of production.

Given that coal use is so large and embedded as a global energy resource and financial commodity, it is imperative that the coal industry and it’s technologies are upgraded to reliable clean coal and carbon recapture solutions. These are, in my opinion, some of the most important developments that the climate discussion should be pressing for, amended as pre-requisites to World Bank and IMF funding. Western industrialism is cooling. Capitol is moving to the developing world and the second industrial revolution is beginning. We have the opportunity to try and intentionally design it to avoid the pitfalls of the western path. Whether or not we accept anthropogenic warming we know that burning coal is dirty and bad for living things.

Believe me, I don’t want to say this. And I know the proclivity of the coal industry to promote less-than-marginal solutions disguised as “clean coal”. But it’s critical that we accept the abundance of coal, it’s presently-irreplaceable energy intensity, and it’s ongoing use across the world so we can focus on real solutions to making it cleaner over the next 20 years while we build out the necessary renewable infrastructure.

* Tokyo – 35,676,000; New York-Newark – 19,040,000; Ciudad de Mexico – 19,028,000; Mumbai – 18,978,000; Sao Paulo – 18,845,000; Delhi – 15,926,000; Shanghai – 14,987,000; Kolkata – 14,787,000; Dhaka – 13,458,000; Buenos Aires – 12,795,000 (2007) [Note that non-OECD countries often have census numbers lower than actual population size, due to under-reporting across slums.]
** For more details & numbers on rising coal use in non-OECD, see: EIA International Energy Outlook 2009 for coal.

I’ve been on a music production bender since the new year. The results have come together in a new free EP I’ve released through Bandcamp: Western Rains. It’s wet and devotional, a sort of dubstep electro platter featuring eastern vocals and world percussion. Give it a listen. If you like it, please share!

My older music is at N8UR. I’m always interested in collaboration (or licensing!) opportunities…

The foresight & strategy group, KedgeForward, has featured me in their first KTLS: KedgeForward Thought Leader Series. They’re doing great work – check out their Holoptic Foresight Dynamics series, as well as their excellent presentation on Food Systems in 9 Minutes. I’m honored to be included in their list of Thought Leaders.

The question they pose:

“Do you see a transhuman species emerging? If yes, what present drivers are catalyzing this meme and evolutionary movement? If no, what ideas or emerging trends are discouraging or disrupting such a movement?”

And my answer:

“In strict terms, a species must be capable of passing on it’s adaptations to offspring through sexual transmission. In as much as transhumanism is proceeding through genetic engineering, it may be possible that enhancements to longevity, health, and physical & perceptual structures could be transmitted along the germ line, though there remain significant challenges to such deep modification, least of which are the attendant moral & ethical questions…” (continued at KedgeForward)

I followed COP15 pretty closely and, though I was hopeful, I didn’t really expect any major consensus among the G20. The differentials between the cooling western arc of history and that of the developing world in the East, coupled to the uneven distribution of natural energy resources across the geo’s, ensure that many conflicting interests will dominate the world chess board for some time. Carbon markets will likely build some dampening feedback into the global system by tying energy use & emission directly to the balance sheet but their successful adoption really depends on convincing Goldman Sachs et al that there’s tons of money to be had, not on getting the G20 to agree on a universal treaty.

The simple fact is that the scenarios show climate change accelerating more quickly than global markets. Given the inability of nations to set terms, as well as the fundamental folly of trying to manage such a huge globalized system as a top-down exercise in governance, it has become incumbent upon business and communities to drive the real behavioral change necessary to shift the economy of production and consumption to a more sustainable posture. The necessary bottom-up compliment to a systemic marketplace and/or governance scheme is the intentional re-engineering of human behavior. The tension between the global dialog of governance and the overlooked role of designers in social change is creating a new breed of sustainable systems engineers. The growing class of systems & social designers are building the next operational structures of civilization that will work to mitigate environmental & social destruction by engineering more efficient, sustainable, and holistic solutions to the diverse needs of our world.

As a note of criticism, while we arguably need rapid change, I feel that the environmental movement has erred in orienting it’s brand message around anthropogenic warming. The science may be sound but the position is not defensible against the psychological tactics of the opposition. The models simply aren’t good enough yet to prove beyond a doubt that humans are directly responsible for warming the planet. I believe intuitively that we are but no model or network of models is yet capable of effectively running that simulation. There are too many open holes that the masses will never understand. It’s just too big of a message; too scary. What we do know is that plastics are bad, energy should be conserved, pollution hurts living things, fossil fuels are dirty, and waste and over-consumption are a tax on the future. The environmental movement should focus on these known’s to continue the really applaudable work they’ve done to grow conservation efforts and bring awareness to the deep impact of our industrial economy, extending these efforts to encourage life-cycle analysis, triple-bottom-line accounting, and cradle-to-cradle planning while working directly with designers to intentionally engineer human behavior and ideology towards a more holistic and biomimetic relationship to the planetary ecology in which we live.

The Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR) 2009 is a scenario-based strategic planning activity that looks out to the year 2025 and considers alternative futures (i.e., “scenarios”), missions the Intelligence Community (IC) might be called on to perform, and the operating principles and capabilities required to fulfill those mission… The insights gleaned are intended to help shape the next National Intelligence Strategy and other planning and capability guidance documents.

The document considers four scenarios based on the NIC’s Global Trends 2025 report: World without the West, Politics is not always local, BRIC’s bust-up, and October surprise. These are plotted against two axes: Global Cooperation & Key Players. The scenarios thus represent movement between State-Dominated & Non-State-Dominated Actors, and Aligned & Fragmented Global Cooperation. [Wish I could embed the graphic but it's locked in the PDF.]

From this scenario map I want to consider first why non-state-dominated actors might be more important to the global landscape in the next 15yrs. States function as, literally, governors of the system for which they are responsible. They’re tasked with maintaining a degree of socioeconomic equilibrium in the face of change. Yet state governance is relatively immature and considerably laden with the legacy code of The Enlightenment. Most of the prevailing governing structures did not anticipate the world in which we find ourselves today. The rate of change has become so accelerated and the system of civilization so complex that significant broad control of nations has become nearly impossible. Even cities are struggling to manage the change tearing through their streets. This suggests a declining ability of large states to effectively manage their domains, both through inability to manage internal complexity and over-extension across the globalized world. The perennial torpor of state bureaucracy is much slower to adapt leaving more nimble actors room to innovate & thrive.

So with respect to the Key Players axis of the QICR Report, I’m inclined to predict a rise in non-state-dominated actors (eg corporations, NGOs, militias, cartels, super-empowered individuals…) increasingly pulling power away from state institutions. This, of course, will be against a background of hardening state bodies (eg Iran, Russia, China…) trying to clampdown on their power typically through authoritarian means. But the pre-eminence of state control is already fading against rising non-governmental powers. Of particular note is the empowerment of ideological-based insurgencies and organized crime. These elements deliberately undermine state authority often directly challenging control with open source warfare tactics, as in Somalia, Mexico, Iraq, and Af-Pak. Similarly, corporations do this with increasing boldness but generally stop short at armed aggression (though maybe Xe/Blackwater will cross this line…).

The second consideration involves the axis of Global Cooperation. What are the factors at play here? Treaties, trade, military, Bretton-Woods structures like the UN and World Bank, and the structures of government and the Rule of Law all give cohesive input to the system. Working against such cohesion are identity politics, self-interest, tribalism, and the injuries wrought by history. Technology has certainly enabled cooperation and the Social Media Revolution seems to reinforce the basic human nature to share and collaborate. Yet it’s likely that such a popular movement will take time to erode the catatonia of bureaucracy enough to make a significant difference in government. Historically, foreign policy has primarily been a function of managing competition, aggressing towards resources and defending against incursions. So it would be a considerable shift to see a great degree of cooperation across governments, the difficulty of which is presently illustrated by the delicate climate negotiations at Copenhagen.

So with respect to the Global Cooperation axis, my sense is that people and groups and even larger NGOs are indeed cooperating more but governments and corporations are still driven primarily by competition and prone to territorial disputes. The very nature of state borders delineates an “Us vs. Them” posture, as does the Art of War mentality still deeply lodged in the corporate marketplace. This oppositional influence effectively reinforces the ascendancy of non-state actors, particularly identity-based groups and NGOs that can show more competency and humanity in addressing the very real problems of the world. In many ways globalization itself has played a major role in challenging tribal structures and incentivizing cooperation. Buoyed by the waves of commerce, the devices of instantaneous global communication have washed up on the shores of almost every developed & developing nation. Tools of instantaneous collaboration have been surprisingly empowering to insurgencies and militias now much more capable of coordinated strategies and global networking. Ultimately, non-local social networking is likely to undermine racial and nationalistic tendencies while enabling affinity-based collaborations. Yet, in spite of such tremendous connectivity, governments continue to proceed from territorial geopolitics while citizens are living increasingly in a world without borders. This gap will produce increasing tensions in the near-term before yielding to new forms of emergent governance over the next decade.

The primary outlier today is climate change. Shifting patterns of rainfall and arable land may radically redraw the map of cooperation. Rising food prices and massive migratory displacement are obvious precursors to substantial internecine resource conflicts and all-out war. In such a scenario states will radically harden borders and identity politics will cohere around resource rights and the safe-havens of nationalism and religious fervor. If India has to absorb millions of Bangladeshi’s as the Himalayas melt, Indians will face much stiffer competition for local jobs & resources. This pattern could play out all over the world given the mosaic of effects predicted by current climate models. In such a crisis, it’s unclear whether the insurmountable US military will act as global peacekeeper or merely reinforce the interests of its owners.

Nevertheless, humans seem to be innately wired to cooperate and help others. As a species, we’re arguably on a path that reinforces this nature. Our technologies keep making it easier & easier to connect across the world and collaborate towards great heights. Tribalism continues but there is a trend towards tribes of affinity rather than tribes of geography. Whether we can collaborate enough and in time to avoid a return to global tribalism is an open topic. As animals, our access to food & water will determine everything, as will the struggle to maintain energy flow towards all of our technological endeavors.