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4 October 2019

A Silicon Valley centred view of the prehistory of smartphones

Filed under: films, Psion, smartphones, Smartphones and beyond, Symbian — Tags: , , — David Wood @ 7:11 am

The first thing to say about the film General Magic (official site, IMDb) is that you should watch it.

The film is available on iTunes, and on Amazon Prime, and from lots of other places too.

It tracks the rise and fall of the company with the same name as the film – General Magic – and the impact of the people involved in the subsequent rise of the smartphone industry.

Here’s the trailer:

General Magic was conceived inside Apple in 1989, and, as reported at the time by the New York Times, was spun out as a separate entity in 1990:

Three well-known technologists from Apple Computer Inc., including perhaps its most distinguished programmer, Bill Atkinson, are forming a new company.

Mr. Atkinson and Marc Porat, another Apple researcher, are leaving Apple to form General Magic Inc. They will be joined by Andy Hertzfeld, who designed much of the operating system of the Macintosh computer in the early 1980’s but who has not been with Apple for six years.

The company, which will be based in Mountain View, Calif., will make products known as ”personal intelligent communicators.” While the company would not elaborate, industry analysts believe this refers to handheld devices that can store appointments and other information and transmit and receive information, either over telephone lines or over the airwaves…

Mr. Atkinson, 39 years old, has been with Apple for 12 years. He is best known for developing Hypercard, a program included with every Macintosh that allows users to organize information on computerized notecards…

Dr. Porat, 42, who will be president of General Magic, came to Apple in 1988 and was manager of business development in the advanced technology group.

Much of the vision of the company came from Marc Porat, the company’s first CEO. The film quotes from a visionary email Marc Porat had written in 1990 to John Sculley, at the time Apple’s CEO, about the kinds of devices their platform would enable:

A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object… It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used. It will offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal. Once you use it you won’t be able to live without it.

The film also shows a large book of design ideas, dating (it said) back to the same formative era. Here are a couple of sketches from the book:

(the name given to the concept device in this sketch is “remotaphonputer”), and

General Magic operated in stealth mode until 1993. By that time, many of Apple’s key employees had transferred to work there, all inspired by the vision of designing a hardware and software platform for handheld “personal intelligent communicators”. Also by that time, the company had assembled a formidable collection of investors, including AT&T, Sony, Motorola, Philips, and Panasonic. These backers were joined in due course by British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, France Telecom, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, NTT DoCoMo, Nortel, Sanyo, and Toshiba. All these companies provided a senior executive to what was known as the “Founding Partner’s Council”, and backed General Magic with a financial stake of up to $6M each.

One powerful feature of the film is the interweaving of lots of archival documentary footage, shot during the company’s formative period by Sarah Kerruish. That shows, for example, a young Megan Smith saying that, one day, the technology would fit onto a device as small as a “Dick Tracy wristwatch”. Smith later served under Barack Obama as the USA’s Chief Technology Officer. As it happens, another young employee at General Magic, Kevin Lynch, went on to lead the Apple Watch project. And that’s only the start of the list of stellar accomplishments which lay ahead for one-time General Magic employees. As the film points out, around 98% of the present day smartphone market can be traced to efforts of two people who sat close to each other in the General Magic workspace: Andy Rubin, the designer of Android, and Tony Fadell, who is credited as “father of the iPod” and “co-inventor of the iPhone”. Rubin is mainly missing from the movie, but Fadell appears regularly, speaking with great passion.

With the aid of Goldman Sachs, General Magic IPO’ed in February 1995, in a huge publicity wave. The company’s stock price promptly doubled.

However, the company was already facing many issues. I touched on these in a short section in my own 2014 book Smartphones and Beyond, in the chapter entitled “Die like IBM, or die like Apple”. That chapter referred to various ideas contemplated by Psion in the mid 1990s as its software team laboured to create what would later be known as Symbian OS – software initially targeted for a device code-named “Protea” (this would reach the market in 1997 as the Psion Series 5):

Psion’s confidence about the prospects for its forthcoming 32-bit software system (the future Symbian OS), that was so high when serious coding had started on that system in late 1994, had grown considerably more tentative by the first half of 1996. One reason was the repeated delays in the development project, as mentioned in the previous chapter. But another reason was the changing competitive landscape.

Mounting competition

As the Protea project zigzagged forwards, sideways, and sometimes backwards, with uncertain and seemingly unknowable end date, Psion’s senior management wondered from time to time whether a different software system, obtained from outside the company, might prove a better bet for future mobile products.

For example, there was a period of around a week when senior management were enthralled by the “Magic Cap” system from a Californian company with the audacious name “General Magic”. General Magic had been spun out of Apple in 1990…

Partners and investors for General Magic included Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Philips, Matsushita, and British Telecom. A powerful buzz about the company’s future meant that its stock price doubled on the first day of its IPO in February 1995. It was therefore understandable that Psion senior managers would consider joining the General Magic party, and licence Magic Cap for use in their PDAs. After all, one of them whispered, think of the cost savings from not needing to maintain such a large in-house team of Psion’s own software developers. How much simpler to utilise ready-made software, created by the same team that had achieved such marvels in their earlier careers elsewhere in Silicon Valley! And how cute the Magic Cap software seemed, with its real-world metaphors and winsome bouncing rabbit.

That particular fancy soon evaporated. The Magic Cap software might appear cute, but closer examination revealed shallowness (weak functionality) in practice. The devices brought to market – by Sony and Motorola – were pale shadows of what the General Magic marketing machine had previously led people to expect. In contrast, Psion could see the strength in depth baked into the developing 32-bit Epoc software system. Psion’s development team escaped this particular axe.

(See here for a longer excerpt from that chapter.)

Total sales of the two devices running General Magic’s software were a paltry 3,000 units. The devices fell a long way short of the vision, and had few redeeming features. The company started a brutal downward slide. Investors were left high and dry. The post-IPO stock price of $26 per share had fallen to $1.38 by 1999.

The film highlights a major learning: the way to implement a grand vision is via a series of incremental steps. Don’t try to fit every desired innovation into a single release of a product. Do it in stages, with good quality throughout. That’s a lesson which Tony Fadell took with him from General Magic to Apple in later life, where he oversaw regular increments to the functionality of the iPod, which in time laid the foundation for a similar set of regular increments in the functionality of the iPhone.

What the film emphasises less is the difficulty posed to the company by its wide set of powerful investors and their divergent interests. The governance problems of General Magic were high in the minds of the executives from Ericsson and Nokia who visited Psion’s offices in central London in April 1998 to discuss the potential formation of the Symbian joint venture. With the approval of a team from Nokia that included Mikko Terho and Juha Putkiranta, Ericsson’s Anders Wästerlid included the following points in a set of guiding principles:

Avoid the structure of General Magic

Need to be able to act fast

Need to learn how to deal effectively with conflicts within the group of owners

Yes, Ericsson and Nokia wanted other companies to become involved with the joint venture, in due course. However, they offered this practical observation:

The more people who are in the boat, the tougher it is to start. But it’s easy for more people to jump in once the boat is moving.

(That meeting, as well as many other steps in the formation of Symbian, are covered in a later chapter of my book, “Death Star or Nova”.)

To its credit, the film highlights one more way in which the vision of General Magic failed to anticipate market development: lack of appreciation of the forthcoming importance of the worldwide web. The services accessed on General Magic devices would be provided by the network operator, such as AT&T. It was an intern who, apparently, first drew this omission to the attention of the General Magic leadership.

Where the film does less well is in the implication running nearly all the way through, that the work of General Magic laid a uniquely important basis for what smartphones subsequently became. One commentator states, “Without General Magic, there could never have been Android”.

In this regard, the film provides an overly Silicon Valley centred view of the prehistory of today’s smartphones.

Here’s just some of what’s missing from that view, and from what General Magic was trying to accomplish:

  • The emergence (as just mentioned) of the web
  • Push technology, pioneered by BlackBerry RIM
  • The devices in Japan running on NTT DoCoMo’s network, with their rich ecosystem of iMode apps and services
  • The devices running Brew services on Qualcomm phones
  • Simple PC connectivity, as pioneered by Palm
  • Access to enterprise services, led by Microsoft’s handheld computers
  • Nokia’s first communicator, launched in 1996, running software from GeoWorks
  • The first device marketed as a smartphone, the GS 88 launched by Ericsson in 1997, also running GeoWorks software.

Last, but not least, I am bound to mention the very considerable thinking that took place at Psion, from the early 1980s onwards. When I started work at Psion as a software engineer in June 1988, I discovered that a huge amount of design had already taken place for what would eventually become the Psion Series 3 communicator. That design was an iteration on what Psion had learned in a number of earlier projects, including two generations of handheld organiser products. On the launch of the Organiser in 1984, Psion had declared the device to be “The world’s first practical pocket computer”. This phrase headlined a magazine promotion which can be found, along with lots of other useful archive material, on Eddie Slupski’s ‘Bioeddie’ website. The magazine article went on: “The Psion Organiser will change the way you work.” It was a prescient claim.

(For more about these early design ideas at Psion, see, you guessed it, another chapter from my book, “Before the beginning”. For the causes of Psion’s eventual departure from the consumer handheld space, see later chapters of the same book.)

It’s often said that history gets to be written by the victors. The world’s most successful smartphones, by far, are from two Silicon Valley companies, Apple and Google. Therefore Silicon Valley insiders have the right to emphasise the flow of personnel and ideas from General Magic to these current platforms. Indeed, it’s a fascinating story.

However, my own view is that one dimensional accounts of history – however absorbing – are likely to mislead. The best products and services are able to integrate insights and contributions from multiple diverse backgrounds.

25 January 2019

To make a dent in the universe

Filed under: films, London Futurists, politics — Tags: , , , — David Wood @ 10:36 pm

Suppose you saw that science and technology had the potential to significantly extend healthy lifespans, but that very few scientists or technologists were working on these projects.

Suppose you disagreed with the government spending huge sums of public money on the military – on the capability to kill – and wished for more spending instead on the defeat of aging (and all the terrible diseases that accelerate with aging).

Suppose you felt that too many leadership decisions in society were influenced by out-dated ideologies – for example, by belief systems that regard as literal many of the apocalyptic statements in millennia-old religious scriptures – and that you preferred decisions to be determined by cool reason and scientific evidence.

What might you do?

If you were Zoltan Istvan, in October 2014, you might decide on an audacious project. You might decide to announce your candidacy for becoming the President of the United States, as a representative of a newly conceived “Transhumanist Party”. You might decide that the resulting media attention would raise the public understanding of the possibility and desirability of using science and technology in favour of transhumanist goals. You might decide the project had a fair chance of making a dent in the universe – of accelerating humanity’s trajectory onwards and upwards.

Here’s what Istvan wrote at the time, in the Huffington Post:

Should a Transhumanist Run for US President?

I’m in the very early stages of preparing a campaign to try to run in the 2016 election for US President. I’ll be doing it as a transhumanist for the Transhumanist Party, a political organization I recently founded that seeks to use science and technology to radically improve the human being and the society we live in.

In addition to upholding American values, prosperity, and security, the three primary goals of my political agenda are as follows:

1) Attempt to do everything possible to make it so this country’s amazing scientists and technologists have resources to overcome human death and aging within 15-20 years—a goal an increasing number of leading scientists think is reachable.

2) Create a cultural mindset in America that embracing and producing radical technology and science is in the best interest of our nation and species.

3) Create national and global safeguards and programs that protect people against abusive technology and other possible planetary perils we might face as we transition into the transhumanist era.

In line with his confident personality, Istvan went on, in the very next paragraph, to issue a challenge to the status quo:

These three goals are so simple and obvious, you’d think every politician in the 21st Century would be publicly and passionately pursuing them. But they’re not. They’re more interested in landing your votes, in making you slave away at low-paying jobs, in keeping you addicted to shopping for Chinese-made trinkets, in forcing you to accept bandage medicine and its death culture, and in getting you to pay as much tax as possible for far-off wars (places where most of us will never step foot in).

In later months, Istvan decided to add two more ingredients to the project, to increase its potential impact:

  1. A declaration of a “Transhumanist Bill of Rights” in Washington DC
  2. The journey of a huge coffin-shaped “Immortality Bus” across the USA, to reach Washington DC.

What happened next has already been the subject of chapters in at least two books:

After the books, the film.

“Immortality or bust” has its first public showing tomorrow (Jan 26th), at the historic United Artists Theatre in Los Angeles, as part of the Raw Science Film Festival. The film has already received the “Raw Breakthrough Award” associated with this festival. In view of the public interest, I expect people will have the chance to see it on Netflix and/or HBO in due course.

I had the opportunity to view a preview copy earlier this week. The film stirred a range of different emotions in me, particularly towards the end. (Spoilers are omitted from this blogpost!)

The producer, Daniel Sollinger, cleverly weaves together several different strands throughout the film:

  • The sheer audacity of the venture
  • The reactions of Istvan’s family – his wife, his mother, and his father – and how these reactions evolve over time
  • The various journalists who are shown interviewing Istvan, sometimes expressing sympathy, and sometimes expressing bemusement
  • Istvan’s interactions with the other transhumanists, futurists and life-extensionists who he meets on his journey across the USA
  • The struggles of the bus itself – the problems experienced in its “plumbing” (oil), as a kind of counterpoint to Istvan’s wishes for radical improvements in human biology
  • Encounters with members of different political parties.

There were a couple of times I wanted to yell at the screen, when I thought that Istvan’s interlocutors were making indefensible claims:

  • When John McAfee (yes, that John McAfee) was giving his interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory
  • When John Horgan of the Scientific American effectively labelled transhumanism as a kind of cult that posed a problem for the good reputation of science.

Assessment

How will history ultimately assess the Immortality Bus and the Transhumanist Bill of Rights? In my view, it’s too early to say. In the meantime, the film Immortality or Bust provides a refreshing birds-eye view of both the struggles and the (minor) triumphs of the adventure so far.

Those who would criticise Istvan for his endeavours – and there are many – need to say what they would do instead.

Some choose to work on the technology itself. That’s something I respect and admire. My own assessment, however, is that the community of transhumanists needs to do more than contributing personal efforts to the science, technology, and/or entrepreneurial development of pro-health startups. We need to change the public conversation – something that Istvan has persistently tried to do.

In particular, we need to find the best ways to raise public awareness of the possibility and desirability of many more people getting involved in science and technology projects in support of significantly increased human flourishing. We need to answer the naysaying objections of bioconservatives and other opponents of transhumanism. We need to affirm that humanity can transcend the limitations which have held us back so many times in the past – the limitations in our bodies, our intellects, our emotions, and our social structures. We need to proclaim (as on the opening page of my own newly published book) that a new era is at hand: the era of sustainable superabundance – an era in which the positive potential of humanity can develop in truly profound ways.

We also need to transform the political environment in which we are all operating – a political environment that, if anything, has grown more dysfunctional over the last few years. That takes us back to the subject of the Transhumanist Party.

Going forwards

The Transhumanist Party which Istvan conjured into existence back in October 2014 has travelled a long way since then. Under the capable stewardship of Gennady Stolyarov (who took over as Chair of the party in November 2016), the U.S. Transhumanist Party has grown a leadership team of many talents, a website with rich content, and a platform with multiple policy proposals in various stages of readiness for adoption as legislation. It has revised, twice, the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, with version 3.0 being agreed by the party’s internal democratic processes on Dec 2-9 last year.

So far as I’m aware, there’s no v3.0 (or even v2.0) of the immortality bus. Yet.

What about overseas? Well, most of the Transhumanist Party organisations set up in other countries, from 2015 onwards, have long since faded from view. In the UK, however, a number of us feel it’s time to reboot that party. Watch out for more news! Or come to the London Futurists event on the 2nd of February, “Politics for profoundly enhanced human wellbeing”, where you will hear announcements from the UK party’s new joint leaders.

1 April 2012

Discovering and nourishing an inner ‘Why’

Filed under: books, challenge, Energy, films, leadership, marketing, motivation, passion, psychology — David Wood @ 1:21 am

Where does the power come from, to see the race to its end?

In the 2012 year of London Olympics, the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire” is poised to return to cinemas in the UK, digitally remastered. As reported by BBC News,

The film tells the true story of two runners who compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics despite religious obstacles.

It will be shown at more than 100 cinemas around the country from 13 July as part of the London 2012 Festival.

Starring Ian Charleson and Ben Cross, the film won four Oscars, including best picture, screenplay and music for Vangelis’ acclaimed score.

Although the film is 31 years old, producer Lord Puttnam believes the message is still relevant.  “Chariots of Fire is about guts, determination and belief…” he said.

This is a film about accomplishment against great odds. More than that, it’s a film about motivation that can enable great accomplishment. The film features athletics, but the message applies much more widely – in both business life and personal life.

I vividly remember watching the film in its opening night in Cambridge in 1981, and being so captivated by it that I returned to the cinema the following evening to watch it again. One part that has wedged deep in my mind is the question I’ve placed at the top of this article, which comes from a sermon preached by Eric Liddell, one of the athletes featured in the movie:

Running in a race… is hard. It requires concentration of will. Energy of soul… Where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.

Liddell’s own answer involved his religious faith, including following the principle that forbade playing sport on Sundays. Viewers can take inspiration from the film, without necessarily sharing Liddell’s particular religious views. The general point is this: Lasting personal strength arises from inner conviction.

Anyone watching the film is implicitly challenged: do we have our own inner basis for lasting personal strength? Do we have a ‘Why’ that gives us the power to pick ourselves up and continue to shine, in case we stumble in the course of our own major projects? Indeed, do we have a ‘Why’ that inspires not only ourselves, but others too, so that they wish to work with us or share our journey through life?

In similar vein, the renowned writer about personal effectiveness, Stephen Covey, urges us (in his celebrated book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”) to Begin with the end in mind and to Put first things first:

Are you–right now–who you want to be, what you dreamed you’d be, doing what you always wanted to do? Be honest. Sometimes people find themselves achieving victories that are empty–successes that have come at the expense of things that were far more valuable to them. If your ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step you take gets you to the wrong place faster…

To live a more balanced existence, you have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There’s no need to over-extend yourself. All it takes is realizing that it’s all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities…

I was recently reminded of both Chariots of Fire and Stephen Covey when following up an assignment given to me by a personal coach. The assignment was to view the TED video “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek:

This talk features high on the page of the TED talks rated by viewers as the most inspiring. Watch the video and this high placement won’t be a surprise to you. I liked the video so much that I downloaded the audio book the talk is based on: “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”. I’ve been listening to it while walking to/from work over the last few days. It’s been both profound and challenging.

Sinek’s central message is this:

People don’t buy ‘What’ you do, they buy ‘Why’ you do it.

To back up this message, Sinek tells a host of fascinating tales. He offers lots of contrasts, between individuals (or companies) that had a clear, inspiring sense of purpose (their ‘Why’), and those that instead became bogged down in the ‘What’ or the ‘How’ of their work. The former generated loyalty and passion – not so the latter. Examples of the former include Southwest Airlines, Harley Davidson, Starbucks, the Wright Brothers, Martin Luther King, and Apple. He also gives examples of companies that started off with a clear sense of purpose, but then lost it, for example due to changes in leadership, when an operational leader took over the reins from an initial inspirational leader.

Sinek repeatedly contrasts “inspiration” with “manipulation”. Manipulation includes both carrots and sticks. Both inspiration and manipulation can lead to people doing what you want. But only the former can be sustained.

One vivid example covered by Sinek was the leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton of the 1914-16 Trans-Antarctic Expedition. According to Sinek, Shackleton gathered crew members for this expedition by placing the following advertisement in the London Times:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. —Ernest Shackleton.

Another of Sinek’s example is how the Wright Brothers succeeded in achieving the first powered flight, beating a team that was much better funded and seemed to be better placed to succeed, led by Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley.

In Sinek’s view, it’s not a matter of having energy, or skill, or financing; it’s a matter of something deeper. It might be called ‘charisma’, or ’cause’:

Charisma has nothing to do with energy; it comes from a clarity of ‘Why’. It comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself. Energy, in contrast, comes from a good night’s sleep or lots of caffeine. Energy can excite. But only charisma can inspire. Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not.

Energy can always be injected into an organization to motivate people to do things. Bonuses, promotions, other carrots and even a few sticks can get people to work harder, for sure, but the gains are, like all manipulations, short-term. Over time, such tactics cost more money and increase stress for employee and employer alike, and eventually will become the main reason people show up for work every day. That’s not loyalty. That’s the employee version of repeat business. Loyalty among employees is when they turn down more money or benefits to continue working at the same company. Loyalty to a company trumps pay and benefits. And unless you’re an astronaut, it’s not the work we do that inspires us either. It’s the cause we come to work for. We don’t want to come to work to build a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.

There’s a bit too much repetition in the book for my liking, and some of the stories in it can be questioned (for example, the advertisement supposedly placed by Shackleton is probably apocryphal).

But the book (like the TED video) has a tremendous potential to cause people to rethink their own personal ‘Why’. Without clarity on this inner motivation, we’re likely to end up merely going through the motions in activities. We might even seem, from outside, to have many achievements under our belts, but we will (to return to Stephen Covey’s analogy) have climbed a ladder leaning against the wrong wall, and we’ll lack the power to inspire the kind of action we truly want to see.

I’ll finish with a few thoughts on what I perceive as my own ‘Why’ – To enable the widespread radically beneficial application of technology:

Technology, deployed wisely, can do wonders to improve the everyday lives of humans everywhere. But technology also has the potential to do very serious damage to human well-being, via unintended disruptions to the environment and the economy, and by putting fearsome weapons in the hands of malcontents.

As a technology super-convergence accelerates over the next 10-20 years, with multiple hard-to-predict interactions, the potential will intensify, both for tremendously good outcomes, and for tremendously bad outcomes. We can’t be sure, but what’s at risk might be nothing less than the survival of humanity.

However, with the right action, by individuals and communities, we can instead witness the emergence of what could be called “super-humanity” – enabled by significant technological enhancements in fields such as synthetic biology, AI, nanotechnology, and clean energy. Progress in these fields will in turn be significantly impacted by developments in the Internet, cloud computing, wireless communications, and personal mobile devices – developments that will ideally result in strong positive collaboration.

The stakes are sky high. We’re all going to need lots of inner personal strength to steer events away from the looming technology super-crisis, towards the radically beneficial outcome that beckons. That’s a cause worthy of great attention. It’s a race that we can’t afford to lose.

17 April 2011

Towards inner humanity+

Filed under: challenge, films, Humanity Plus, intelligence, vision — David Wood @ 11:06 am

There’s a great scene near the beginning of the film “Limitless“.  The central character, Eddie (played by Bradley Cooper), has just been confronted by his neighbour, Valerie. It’s made clear to the viewers that Valerie is generally nasty and hostile to Eddie. Worse, Eddie owes money to Valerie, and is overdue payment. It seems that a fruitless verbal confrontation looms. Or perhaps Eddie will try to quickly evade her.

But this time it’s different.  Eddie’s brain has been switched into a super-fast enhanced mode (which is the main theme of the film).  Does he take the opportunity to weaken Valerie with fast verbal gymnastics and put-downs?

Instead, he uses his new-found rocket-paced analytic abilities to a much better purpose.  Picking up the tiniest of clues, he realises that Valerie’s foul mood is caused by something unconnected with Eddie himself: Valerie is having a particular problem with her legal studies.  Gathering memories out of the depths of his brain from long-past discussions with former student friends, Eddie is able to suggest ideas to Valerie that rouse her interest and defuse her hostility.  Soon, she’s more receptive.  The two sit down together, and Eddie guides her in the swift completion of a brilliant essay for the tricky homework assignment that has been preying on Valerie’s nerves.

Anyone who watches Limitless is bound to wonder: can technology – such as a smart drug – really have that kind of radical transformative effect on human ability?

Humanity+ is the name of the worldview that says, not only is that kind of technology feasible (within the lifetimes of many people now alive), but it is desirable.  If you watch Limitless right through to the end, you’ll find plenty in the film that offers broad support to the Humanity+ mindset.  That’s a pleasant change from the usual Hollywood conviction that technology-induced human enhancement typically ends up in dysfunction and loss of important human characteristics.

But the question remains: if we become smarter, does it mean we would be better people?  Or would we tend to use accelerated mental faculties to advance our own self-centred personal agendas?

A similar question was raised by an audience member at the “Post Transcendent Man” event in Birkbeck in London last weekend.  Is it appropriate to consider intellectual enhancement without also considering moral enhancement?  Or is it like giving a five year old the keys to a sports car?  Or like handing a bunch of Mujahideen terrorists the instructions to create advanced nuclear weaponry?

Take another example of accelerating technology: the Internet.  This can be used to spy and to hassle, as well as to educate and uplift.  Consider the chilling examples mentioned in the recent Telegraph article “The toxic rise of internet bullies“:

At first glance, Natasha MacBryde’s Facebook page is nothing unusual. A pretty, slightly self-conscious blonde teenager gazes out, posed in the act of taking her own picture. But unlike other pages, this has been set up in commemoration, following her death under a train earlier this month. Now though it has had to be moderated after it was hijacked by commenters who mocked both Natasha and the manner of her death heartlessly.

“Natasha wasn’t bullied, she was just a whore,” said one, while another added: “I caught the train to heaven LOL [laugh out loud].” Others clicked on the “like” symbol, safe in their anonymity, to indicate that they agreed. The messages were removed after a matter of hours, but Natasha’s grieving father Andrew revealed that Natasha’s brother had also discovered a macabre video – entitled “Tasha The Tank Engine” on YouTube (it has since been removed). “I simply cannot understand how or why these people get any enjoyment or satisfaction from making such disgraceful comments,” he said.

He is far from alone. Following the vicious sexual assault on NBC reporter Lara Logan in Cairo last week, online debate on America’s NPR website became so ugly that moderator Mark Memmott was forced to remove scores of comments and reiterate the organisation’s stance on offensive message-posting…

It’s not just anonymous comments that cause concern.  As Richard Adhikari notes in his article “The Internet’s Destruction of Critical Thinking“,

Prior to the dawn of the Internet Age, anyone who wanted to keep up with current events could pretty much count on being exposed to a diversity of subjects and viewpoints. News consumers were passive recipients of content delivered by print reporters or TV anchors, and choices were few. Now, it’s alarmingly easy to avoid any troublesome information that might provoke one to really think… few people do more than skim the surface — and as they do with newspapers, most people tend to read only what interests them. Add to that the democratization of the power to publish, where anyone with access to the Web can put up a blog on any topic whatsoever, and you have a veritable Tower of Babel…

Of course, the more powerful the technology, the bigger the risks if it is used in pursuit of our lower tendencies.  For a particularly extreme example, review the plot of the 1956 science fiction film “Forbidden planet”, as covered here.  As Roko Mijic has explained:

Here are two ways in which the amplification of human intelligence could go disastrously wrong:

  1. As in the Forbidden Planet scenario, this amplification could unexpectedly magnify feelings of ill-will and negativity – feelings which humans sometimes manage to suppress, but which can still exert strong influence from time to time;
  2. The amplication could magnify principles that generally work well in the usual context of human thought, but which can have bad consequences when taken to extremes.

For all these reasons, it’s my strong conviction that any quest to what might be called “outer Humanity+” must be accompanied (and, indeed, preceded) by a quest for “inner Humanity+”.  Both these quests consider the ways in which accelerating technology can enhance human capabilities.  However the differences are summed up in the following comparison:

Outer Humanity+

  • Seeks greater strength
  • Seeks greater speed
  • Seeks to transcend limits
  • Seeks life extension
  • Seeks individual progress
  • Seeks more experiences
  • Seeks greater intelligence
  • Generally optimistic about technology
  • Generally hostile to goals and practice of religion and meditation

Inner Humanity+

  • Seeks greater kindness
  • Seeks deeper insight
  • Seeks self-mastery
  • Seeks life expansion
  • Seeks cooperation
  • Seeks more fulfilment
  • Seeks greater wisdom
  • Has major concerns about technology
  • Has some sympathy to goals and practice of religion and meditation

Back to Eddie in Limitless.  It’s my hunch he was basically a nice guy to start with – except that he was ineffectual.  Once his brainpower was enhanced, he could be a more effectual nice guy.  His brain provided rapid insight on the problems and issues being faced by his neighbour – and proposed effective solutions.  In this example, greater strength led to a more effective kindness.  But if real-life technology delivers real-life intellect enhancement any time soon, all bets are off regarding whether it will result in greater kindness or greater unkindness.  In other words, all bets are off as to whether we’ll create a heaven-like state, or hell on earth.  For this reason, the quest to achieve Inner Humanity+ must overtake the quest to achieve Outer Humanity+.

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