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14 May 2010

Chapter finished: Forces for positive change

Filed under: H+ Agenda — David Wood @ 1:26 am

You have to give up to go up

These words from John C Maxwell often come to my mind. Recently, I’ve been trying to reduce various activities, in order so that I can dedicate more time to an activity I truly want to progress:

I’m trying to spend less time reading (for example, reading books)
I’m also trying to write fewer blogposts here
Instead, I’m prioritising writing material for my book “The Humanity+ Agenda”.

So, I have to apologise for lack of “normal service” in this blog.

However, I’ve now managed to complete a draft of chapter two of my book. That’s good news. You’ll find a snapshot of the current contents below. At the same time, I’ve taken the decision that I ought to add one more chapter into the contents (it will be chapter 3, “My personal journey”). So in a way I’m at the same situation as before: I still need to write 8 chapters. (But I can count the draft as 2/10 finished, whereas before I was only 1/9 finished.)

The chapter I’ve just finished drafting, “Forces for positive change”, is meant to be self-explanatory, so I won’t say anything more about it here now.

I’ve also been making some changes to the first chapter (based, in part, on suggestions I’ve received from reviewers). As I mentioned before, I’m keeping the latest drafts of all the chapters in the “Pages” section of this blog – accessible from the box on the right hand side.

I’ll be grateful for feedback. I may not act on that feedback immediately, but I’ll get round to it in due course!

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2. Forces for positive change

<< Previous chapter <<

How do people respond to mentions of possible global crises?

In my experience, people often find that kind of discussion awkward and embarrassing. They make a joke, or cough nervously, and try to change to a different topic.

One rationale for avoiding talking about an issue is if there’s nothing that can be done about that issue. After all, what’s the point of discussing a problem if you can’t change the outcome? There’s no merit in becoming unnecessarily agitated. Better to focus on matters where you can change the outcome. It’s as stated in the “acceptance clause” of the “serenity prayer” saying of Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me
The serenity to accept the things I cannot change…

That doesn’t apply in the case of the crises listed in the previous chapter. For example, there are plenty of steps that people can take to reduce the risk of environmental catastrophe. But these steps seem hard. And this triggers a second, more complex, rationalisation:

If the only responses to a perceived crisis are hard, it’s preferable to hope that the crisis isn’t real, or will go away of its own accord.
Alternatively, if the perceived crisis turns out to be real after all, it’s preferable to hope that it won’t have any impact in the foreseeable future.
In any case, it’s preferable to leave it to other people to worry about the crisis.

Here’s the sense in which this rationalisation is “preferable”: it’s psychologically easier. It allows people to go on living their lives as normal, concentrating on matters of work and play, family and friends, sport and culture. They deny that there’s anything significant they personally should be doing about the looming crisis. Therefore, they’re able to focus without distraction on other matters that are important to them.

This “denialist” approach can gather rational-sounding arguments in its defence. Part of the psychological comfort blanket is the observation that “we’ve been getting along fine, without things going badly wrong in the past, thank you – despite the warnings of previous doom-mongers”. One antidote to this is to highlight past occasions when things did go badly wrong, despite protestations of optimism from people who had become overly accustomed to a lengthy period of apparent calm and progress. The outbreak of World War One is a stark example. As noted by journalist Hamish McRae:

The 19th century globalisation ended with the catastrophe of the First World War. It is really scary to realise how unaware people were of the fragility of those times. In 1910, the British journalist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, in which he argued that war between the great powers had become an economic impossibility because of “the delicate interdependence of international finance”.

In spring 1914 an international commission reported on the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. The British member of the commission, Henry Noel Brailsford, wrote: “In Europe the epoch of conquest is over and save in the Balkans perhaps on the fringes of the Austrian and Russian empires, it is as certain as anything in politics that the frontiers of our national states are finally drawn. My own belief is that there will be no more war among the six powers.”

A different kind of response to a potential pending crisis is for people to latch on, firmly, to one apparent solution to that crisis. You know the kind of thing:

To prevent the risk of runaway global warming, we must, above all, reduce carbon emissions.
To prevent the risk of economic destabilization, we must, above all, constrain the greediness of bankers.
To prevent the risk of terrorists detonating weapons of mass destruction, we must, above all, increase surveillance of potential trouble-makers.

This is in line with the “action clause” of Niebuhr’s saying:

God grant me
The serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things that I can…

Yes, if a diagnosis is correct, it can be a good thing to focus single-mindedly on what needs to be done to fix matters. But if the diagnosis is incomplete, or flawed in other ways, this kind of single-track solution-thinking can obstruct a fuller discussion and even make matters worse. The passion of misguided courage or premature activism can pose just as many problems as does a denialist desire to damp down the conversation altogether. I’m a big fan of passion, but passion without wisdom can often be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. That’s why the final clause of Niebuhr’s saying is the most important one:

God grant me
The serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things that I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.

In a later chapter, I’ll review what I see as “Six dangerous temptations” which are, each in their own way, mistaken single-track approaches to the impending crises of the 2010s. But before that, it’s time for me to describe the approach that I view as much more promising.

In some ways, the approach I’ll outline is single-minded too. But please bear with me while I spell out the whole story.

2.1 Above all, technology

The single biggest force for positive change is technology.

Some examples:

Mechanisation frees labourers from the drudgery of tedious physical exertion.
New forms of transport allow people to travel and explore, further and faster.
Modern buildings provide unparalleled safety, shelter and amenities.
Medicine intervenes to cure miserable diseases and prevent early death.
Improved agriculture brings forth food to eliminate famine and nurture health.
Information technology keeps people informed of key developments.

In prehistory, it was first fire, then agriculture, then the wheel, that set humankind on the road to civilisation. In more recent times, the printing press enabled both the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Reliable clocks allowed accurate tracking of the positions of ships at sea, diminishing the risk of shipwrecks. The industrial revolution triggered a series of changes that enabled unprecedented degrees and variety of leisure time. The Internet, coupled with the spread of both computing and mobile communications, transforms virtually every area of life in almost every corner of the globe, regardless of the type of government.

How could technology address the crises listed in the previous chapter? In principle, the answers are as follows.

There’s more than enough energy reaching the earth from the sun to answer every human energy need, allowing the discontinuation of CO2-emitting fossil fuels. All that’s needed is the improvements in technology to harvest that solar energy, store it, and transport it to where it’s needed. Alongside solar energy, alternative energy technologies could play a role too – such as next generation nuclear fission reactors (to name just one of many possibilities). Moreover, improved technology can be used to generate and transport ample fresh water from sea water, and to cleanly manufacture quantities of whatever resources are needed.
Improved software systems could monitor and regulate the flow of financial resources around the world, to prevent economic destabilization or financial collapse.
Rapidly improving living standards, enabled by smart use of technology, visibly accessible to everyone on a fair basis, will take away much of the incentive people feel towards revolution or terrorism. Improved detection systems – akin to improved anti-virus systems in the software world, that limit the potential of damage from virus writers – will also play a part.
The same sorts of improvement will allow more and more people to experience higher peaks of human fulfillment.

But these answers are unpopular. Here are some key objections to what I’ve just proposed:

Technological progress is often slow and uncertain. For example, progress with solar energy or safe nuclear fission has long been predicted, but often has been delayed. We can’t afford the risk of waiting for technological improvements; we need to adopt other kinds of solution instead.
In any case, technology doesn’t address the underlying causes of human problems, such as faulty human nature, or dysfunctional social structures.
Worse, technology brings problems as well as solutions. (Refer back to section 1.5, “The existential crisis of accelerating change and deepening complexity”.)

In turn, here are my responses to these objections:

We need to invest substantially more in technological development – but do it cleverly. Happily, the rate of technological progress has itself been accelerating.
I disagree that technology only addresses “external” aspects of human life. Technology, wisely applied, can play a big role in improving both human nature and human social structure.
To ensure that we obtain positive results from technological progress, rather than negative ones, we need improved monitoring and management of the development and deployment of technology.

2.2 Above all, education

My deeper answer is that the set of solutions I’m advocating is pro-human even more than it is pro-technology. Technology provides the means, but it’s not an end in itself.

I’m not interested in technology for the “better gadgets” it can provide us. I’m interested in technology for the “better humans” it can help us to become.

That brings me to the topic of education: life-long learning, in which we continually improve all aspects of our knowledge and intelligence – including our social intelligence and emotional intelligence as well as our analytic intelligence.

There’s a crtically important two-way relationship between technology and education.

In one direction: clearer, smarter thinking, freed by good education from prejudice and misinformation, allows us to make better decisions about improving technology. It gives us the “wisdom to know the difference”.

In the other direction: improved technology provides vital tools to assist our thinking and allow us to learn more quickly. These tools include:

Widely accessible, easily searchable electronic libraries of the best thinking of the entire planet
Calculation engines that can swiftly compute the range of possible results of complex interactions
Healthy food, dietary supplements, medication, and stimulants, that allow people to concentrate more fully, while acquiring or using knowledge
Targeted “electronic learning” devices, increasingly hosted within rich virtual emulation environments, that allow individuals to quickly and enjoyably acquire specific knowledge and skills
Smart “personal digital assistants” that help debug our thinking and guide us through complex tasks
An online “cloud” of software services, containing both human and artificial intelligence, that can augment our own mental processes.

The “Internet of Computers” is in the process of transformation to an “Internet of Things” which connects literally trillions of data sensors around the planet. The result, in principle, is up-to-the-second information about every parameter of possible interest: crops, soil, water purity, atmospheric composition, temperature, underground vibrations…

The output of education is an improvement in individual human minds and improvement in the global human understanding. Yet education faces some steep challenges in the 2010s:

Merely the ability to think faster does not mean that we think better.
If we are victim to fundamental biases, we’ll use our greater intelligence to find clever justifications for continuing our biases, rather than to see more clearly.
If a society is victim to outmoded but persistent misunderstanding, the same “bias preservation” dynamics operate at a larger level.
Various vested interests are better organised than ever before – and have a battery of mind-turning tools at their disposal.

Psychologists have identified and catalogued large numbers of widespread but flawed modes of thinking – with names such as “confirmation bias”, “sunk cost fallacy”, “illusory correlation”, and “conjunction fallacy”. Alas, merely knowing about these flaws does not mean we are personally immune to them.

However, a credible positive message about the future can give people the courage to combat the cognitive shackles of intellectually repressive worldviews. Educating and exciting people about the radical transformative capabilities of emerging new technologies – including clean energy, robotics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, artificial general intelligence, and human rejuvenation engineering – can disrupt powerful entrenched cultural biases, such as those derived from fundamentalist religions or ideologies. Humanity+, as I see it, isn’t just an appeal for better technology; it’s an appeal for a better way of thinking about technology. This new thinking highlights the potential for improved technology, wisely deployed, to provide the kinds of solution that were at one time the sole province of religion:

Mental tranquility and exhilaration
Harmony between peoples and between nations
An abundance of resources, without scarcity
Lifespans that can in principle be extended indefinitely, containing ever greater variety and fulfillment.

To be clear, this education must clarify the perils as well as the promise of new technology, to allow us to choose wisely the courses of action that will fulfil the promise and avoid the perils. That choice will be far from easy. We’ll need all the help we can get. We’ll need great strength, as well as great wisdom. Some of that strength will come from improved social structures. And some will come from healthier, more vibrant individuals.

2.3 Above all, health

Education and health are like two sides of the same coin:

Education improves the mind, making us wiser (in all the many dimensions of the word “wise”)
Health improves the body, making us stronger (in all the many dimensions of the word “strong”).

Just as there’s a two-way relationship between technology and education, there’s a two-way relationship between technology and health.

In one direction: individuals who are healthier are able to work harder, are less prone to mistakes from tiredness or other psychological vulnerabilities, and contribute more to the growth of high quality technology.

In the other direction: improved technology provides numerous tools to improve our health:

To repair broken limbs or joints
To improve our immune systems
To address all kinds of diseases
To keep us fitter and more resilient, longer into our lifespans
To screen, proactively, for early warning signs of impending bodily failures.

Miniaturisation of medical tools has profound impacts on the effectiveness of many surgical processes. The evolution from “smart phones” to “smart things” is increasingly extending to “smart cells”. Techniques from industrial manufacturing and software programming are being re-applied at the level of items that can easily pass through our bloodstreams and other internal fluid systems. Rather than “programming silicon” we can look forward to increasing applications of “programming carbon”.

Technology not only has the capability of restoring us to health. It can take us beyond normal levels of health, to a state where we are “better than well”. It can do this, first, by making changes outside our bodies – providing us with machinery to magnify our strength, telescopes and microscopes to magnify our vision, loudspeakers to magnify our voice, and so on. But it can do this, second, by making changes inside our bodies. These changes are more fundamental and, therefore, tend to raise more apprehension. Many people feel these changes are “unnatural” and, therefore, should be opposed. But arguments about things being unnatural hold little weight for me.

There’s a saying attributed to the father of Orville and Wilbur Wright:

If God wanted man to fly, he would have made us with wings.

But who among us has refused to enter an airplane on the grounds that it would be “unnatural”? Indeed, who among us has refused to augment the natural protective and decorative aspects of our skin by covering much of that skin with clothing (something else that is “unnatural”)? Injecting young babies with vaccines is, again, far from natural. And what about cosmetic surgery? Not so many years ago, we might have said “yuk” at the prospect of someone having cosmetic surgery. Nowadays, it’s no big deal.

Imagine life in 20 or 30 years time, when people might routinely undergo hi-tech medical treatment that repairs, not just aspects of their skin and external appearance, but also lots of internal bodily damage – damage that you and I would describe as “aging”. Imagine that, as a result of such treatment, someone’s life expectancy is increased by 10 years, and imagine that the treatment can be repeated on a regular basis. Imagine that this opens the possibility for people routinely living far beyond the current maximum age of 120. Should we object to such treatment on the grounds that it is “unnatural”? My own expectation is that we will, very quickly, become accustomed to such treatment, and we’ll no longer bat an eyelid at it.

It will be like test tube babies. The birth of the very first test tube baby, in 1978, was accompanied by a fervour of hand-wringing and amazement. Nowadays, most people take the whole process for granted (whilst recognising that it’s made possible by very clever technology). Likewise, as treatments become available that make our bodies stronger and fitter, and which repair the cellular and inter-cellular damage known as aging, there will – to start with – be a huge press hullabaloo. But the hullabaloo will subside.

There are important questions over the desirability of people being “better than well” and having indefinitely long lifespans, and I’ll return to these in later chapters. However, as you can see, I have little respect for attempts to reject these treatments just because they are somehow “unnatural”.

As more people come to understand the potential for greatly enhanced health within the lifetimes of many people living today, there will be a profound shift in attitude. The shift is well captured in the amusing but profound fable written by Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant“. I expect that, in the next ten years, larger numbers of people will switch from what might be called a “pro-death” accommodationist viewpoint, which tolerates the fact of human aging and human death (albeit half-heartedly complaining about it), to an aggressive “pro-life” stance, that urgently seeks to accelerate research into the technology and treatment that can slow, then reverse the effects of human aging. This pro-life stance will vigorously campaign for a much larger portion of national budgets to be allocated to research and development of pro-life technologies. Instead of spending lots of time learning about, for example, sports team statistics, or the habits of the latest pop stars and movie actors, people everywhere will be exchanging information and ideas about pro-life technologies and treatments.

Is there a risk that a rush of interest in pro-life technologies will be at the cost of interest in other important technologies, such as those for clean energy? Perhaps. But probably not:

People who think they’re going to live longer will, other things being equal, become more interested in longer-term planetary well-being, rather than leaving that topic as something for subsequent generations to handle.
Technologies are frequently inter-dependent. There’s been a very useful “convergence” of cutting edge ideas from software, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence, among others. Many of the techniques that accelerate pro-life technologies will, at the same time, accelerate clean energy technologies.
Someone who becomes knowledgeable about science and technology due to an interest in life extension will tend also to discover lots of fascinating wider applications of science and technology.

This is where a renewed education programme, as briefly mentioned earlier, should have a big effect. The result should be a critical mass of informed citizens who have a shared broad understanding of the power and potential of science and technology to provide deep solutions to the major problems facing human society. Leaders of society will be unable to ignore this critical mass.

2.4 Above all, society

Recall one of the objections I mentioned earlier:

Technological progress is often slow and uncertain. For example, progress with solar energy or safe nuclear fission has long been predicted, but often has been delayed. We can’t afford the risk of waiting for technological improvements; we need to adopt other kinds of solution instead.

This objection can be re-stated, forcibly, against the specific pro-technology picture I’m painting. The objection runs as follows:

Technological progress is often slow and uncertain. The idea of technology making people significantly smarter (via improved education) and significantly healthier (via improved medicine) is fair enough in the long term, but don’t expect any big changes in the next 10-20 years. We should be focusing, instead, on other kinds of solution to the problems of the early 21st century. For example, we should be seeking changes in politics, and/or in the values that motivate human lifestyles.

As it happens, I agree with much of this objection:

I agree that technological progress is often slow and uncertain. However, we can and should take steps to make it faster, and less uncertain.
I agree that, in parallel with a focus on improved technology, we must also address the organisation of society, via changes that only politicians can authorise.
Again, I agree that we must also address the question of the values that motivate human lifestyles.

In the section after this one, I’ll revisit the topic of motivational values, under the heading “Above all, humanity”. For the moment, let’s briefly look at the question of the relationship between technology and society.

By now, you won’t be surprised if I say that there’s a two-way relationship between society and technology. In one direction, smart changes in legislation and social structure can have a big impact on the speed and effectiveness of research, development, and deployment of new technologies. And in the other direction, wise use of new technologies – such as the Internet – can boost the effectiveness of social structures.

Technology is developed by people and companies who are driven by various motivations, and constrained by various fears. The motivations cover both economic desires and non-economic desires – including the “reputation economy” and the “gift economy”. Changing the incentive structures can have a significant impact on the work performed. However, the impact is sometimes different from what prevailing wisdom would suggest. For example, over-emphasis of financial rewards can, in some cases, diminish the potential for people to uncover creative solutions, or to work together collaboratively.

When it comes to governing the effectiveness of technology development, the negative constraints can be even more important than the positive incentives. If a company fears bad outcomes from the result of some research, they’ll be less likely to undertake that research. These bad outcomes can include:

Being sued for huge amounts of money for patent infringement by someone who, it seems, has thought of a broadly similar idea
Undermining an existing profitable product line by the same company.

The system of patents grew up for good reasons, but operates at the present time in a way that frequently hinders innovation and collaboration, rather than rewards it. This system is overdue significant reform. Equally pressing is the need for governments to ensure the continuing vitality of their economies, striking a good balance between the requirement for competition and the requirement for collaboration. There also need to be checks on the ability of sophisticated, well-funded lobbyists to gain undue influence over the decisions of law-makers: democracy is far from healthy when vested interests have so much power. Finally, societies need to be constantly alert against the twin risks of under-regulation and over-regulation, in numerous areas of potential innovation, including new drugs, new mobile computing devices, new “cloud” services, new financial services, and so on.

None of this “social engineering” is easy, but it all makes a big difference to the likelihood of rapid progress with the development of key technology. With bad social structures, we get “the madness of the crowd”. With good social structures, we get “the wisdom of the crowd”.

2.5 Above all, humanity

So far, I’ve described four key themes, as priorities for the coming decade: technology, education, health, and society. There’s one more to add, which sits at the top of the whole structure: humanity. The diagram provides a reminder of the numerous two-way interconnections between these five key themes.

The whole point of all the effort on technology, all the long hours spent on education and learning, all the labour to improve our health, and all our social engineering, is to enhance human experience, in ways that are fully sustainable, open-ended, and equitable.

You may ask: what kind of human experience? My answer is: we can presently only begin to glimpse the possibilities.

Some hints are provided by our present-day peak experiences – from music, dance, sport, games, puzzles, theatre, reading, mathematics, discovery, exploration, meditation, friendship, family, community, gardening, pets, safari, food, drink…

You may ask: won’t this become boring? My answer is: why should it? There’s a whole universe in physical space for us to explore. And there are countless exotic universes in virtual space for us to create and explore. There will be numerous interesting people to get to know – not to mention huge numbers of fascinating artificial intelligences.

Humanity sits at the top of this structure, not only as the end goal, but as a way to decide, in principle, the value of activity throughout society. At present, countries tend to measure their worth via their GNP – Gross National Product – or some related economic statistic. Leaders are happy when their GNP increases, and perturbed when it falls. But it is widely recognised that GNP is a sorely inadequate measure. Stirring words from a fine March 1968 speech by US senator Robert Kennedy are worth quoting at some length:

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

However, so long as (to quote a saying attributed to Milton Friedman) “the business of business is business”, it’s hard to expect companies to set aside the quest for economic profits in favour of these broader human values. Shareholders will act in concert to fire management teams who fail to exploit profit opportunities. The remedy is as already stated: a critical mass of informed citizens who have a shared broad understanding of the power and potential of science and technology to provide deep solutions to the major problems facing human society. This mass of informed citizens can ensure that companies act in service of goals other than mere monetary reward.

Alas, everything I’ve spoken about in this chapter appears to come with a large price tag. Education and health already consume major portions of national budgets. Science research budgets are under great pressure, too. In a time of austerity, it’s likely that expenditure on all these areas will fall, rather than rise. Yet I have been arguing for an increase, in each of these areas. In later chapters of this book, I’ll expand these five priority areas into 20 specific research projects. I’ll make the case that these 20 projects should become priorities for all of us – as individuals, organisations, institutions, universities, industry, governments, and media. They all deserve a larger amount of attention, analysis, resourcing, and funding. Given our current severe economic constraints, that may seem a fanciful hope.

But there is good reason for this hope. We have in our favour the fact that improvements in any one of these areas feeds into improvements elsewhere. As our technology improves, our education improves, and so on. Rather than simply focusing on spending more money on each of these areas, we can focus on spending money more smartly on each area. Raising our game – in ways that I’ll explain – means that instead of “Education”, we can talk of “Education+”. Instead of “Health”, we can speak of “Health+”. Instead of “Technology”, we can speak of “Technology+”. Instead of “Society”, we can speak of “Society+”. And – you guessed it – instead of “Humanity”, we can speak of “Humanity+”.

At this stage, you will probably still have a large question in your mind: can we really expect the kinds of technological progress that I’ve been indicating as possible for the next 10-20 years? I’ll now seek to address that question in two different ways:

In the next chapter, I’ll describe my own personal history in the technology industry, highlighting lessons about both rapid and slow rates of progress.
After that, I’ll devote a chapter to each of the five key themes, highlighting each time actual progress that’s happening.

>> Next chapter >>

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9 May 2010

Chapter completed: Crises and opportunities

Filed under: alienation, change, climate change, Economics, H+ Agenda, recession, risks, terrorism — David Wood @ 12:16 am

I’ve taken the plunge. I’ve started writing another book, and I’ve finished the first complete draft of the first chapter.

The title I have in mind for the book is:

The Humanity+ Agenda: the vital priorities for the coming decade

The book is an extended version of the 10 minute opening presentation I gave a couple of weeks ago, at the Humanity+ UK 2010 event. My reasons for writing this book are spelt out here. The book will re-use and refine a lot of the material I’ve tried out from time to time in earlier posts on this blog, so you may find parts of it familiar.

I’ve had a few false starts, but I’m now happy with both the framework for the book (9 chapters in all) and a planned editing/review process.

Chapter 1 is called “Crises and opportunities”. There’s a copy of the current draft below.

I’ll keep the latest drafts of all the chapters in the “Pages” section of this blog – accessible from the box on the right hand side. From time to time – as in this posting – I’ll copy snapshots of the latest material into regular blogposts.

It’s my hope that the book will benefit from feedback and suggestions from readers. Comments can be made, either to regular blogposts, or to the “pages”. I’m also open to receiving emailed comments or contributions. Unless someone tells me otherwise, I’ll assume that anything posted in response is intended as a potential contribution to the book.

(I’ll acknowledge, in the acknowledgements section of the book, all contributions that I use.)

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1. Crises and opportunities

The decade 2010-2019 will be a decade of crises for humanity:

As hundreds of millions of people worldwide significantly change their lifestyles, consuming ever more energy and generating ever more waste, the planet Earth faces increasingly great strains. “More of the same” is not an acceptable response.
Alongside the risk of environmental disaster, another risks looms: that of economic meltdown. The massive shocks to the global finance system at the end of the previous decade bear witness to powerful underlying tensions and problems with the operation of market economies.
The rapid rate of change causes widespread personal frustration and societal angst, driving a significant minority of people into the arms of beguiling ideologies such as fundamentalist Islam and the militant pursuit of terrorism. Relatively easy access to potential weapons of mass destruction – whether nuclear, biological, or chemical – transforms the threat of terrorism from an issue of national security into an issue of global survival.

In aggregation, these threats are truly fearsome.

To improve humanity’s chances of surviving, in good shape, to 2020 and beyond, we need new solutions.

I believe that these new solutions are emerging in part from improved technology, and in part from an important change in attitude towards technology. This book explains the basis for these beliefs. This chapter summarises the crises, and the remaining chapters summarise the proposed solutions.

In the phrase “Humanity+”, the plus sign after the word “Humanity” emphasises that solutions to our present situation cannot be achieved by people continuing to do the same as before. Instead, a credible vision of wise application of new technologies can bring humans – both individually and collectively – to operate in dramatically enhanced ways:

Humans will be able, in stages, to break further free from the crippling constraints and debilitations of our evolutionary background and our historical experiences;
We will, individually and collectively, become smarter, wiser, stronger, kinder, healthier, calmer, brighter, more peaceful, and more fulfilled;
Instead of fruitless divisions and conflicts, we’ll find much better ways to cooperate, and build social systems for mutual benefit.

This is the vision of humanity fulfilling its true potential.

But there are many obstacles on the path to this fulfilment. These obstacles could easily drive Humanity to “Humanity-” (humanity minus), or even worse (human annihilation), rather than Humanity+. There’s nothing inevitable about the outcome. As a reminder of the scale of the obstacles, let’s briefly review five interrelated pending crises.

1.1 The environmental crisis

Potential shortages of clean drinking water. Rapid reductions in the available stocks of buried energy sources, such as coal, gas, and oil. Crippling impacts on our environment from the waste products of our lifestyles. These – and more – represent the oncoming environmental crisis.

With good reason, the aspect of the environmental crisis that is most widely discussed is the potential threat of runaway climate change. Our accelerating usage of fossil fuels means that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has reached levels unprecedented in human history. This magnifies the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, tending to push the average global temperature higher. This relationship is complex. Forget simple ideas about increases in factor A invariably being the cause of increases in factor B. Think instead about a dance of different factors that each influence the other, in different ways at different times. (That’s a theme that you’ll notice throughout this book.)

In the case of climate change, the players in the dance include:

Variation in the amount of sunlight striking earth landmasses, due to changes over geological timescales in the axis of the earth, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and the distribution of landmass over different latitudes;
Variation in the slow-paced transfer of heat between different parts of the ocean;
Variation in the speed of build-up or collapse of huge polar ice sheets;
Variation in numerous items in the atmosphere, including aerosols (which tend to lower average temperature) and greenhouse gases (which tend to raise it again);
Variation in the amounts of greenhouse gases, such as methane, being suddenly released into the atmosphere from buried frozen stores (for example, from tundra);
Variation in the sensitivity of the planet to the various “climate forcing agents” – sometimes a small change in one will lead to just small changes in the climate, but at other times the consequences are more severe.

What makes this dance potentially deadly is the twin risk of latent momentum and strong positive feedback:

More CO2 in the atmosphere raises the average temperature, which means there’s more H2O (water vapour) in the atmosphere too, raising the average temperature yet further;
Icesheets over the Antarctic and Greenland take a long time to start to disintegrate, but once the process gets under way, it can become essentially irreversible;
Less ice on the planet means less incoming sunlight is reflected to space; instead, larger areas of water absorb more of the sunlight, increasing ocean temperature further;
Rises in sea temperatures can trigger the sudden release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and permafrost – another example of rapid positive feedback.

Indeed, there is significant evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth a number of times in the past, most notably in connection with the Permian extinction event, when 96% of all marine species became extinct about 250 million years ago.

Of course, predicting the future of the environment is hard. There are three sorts of fogs of climate change uncertainty:

Many of the technical interactions are still unknown, or are far from being fully understood. We are continuing to learn more;
Even where we believe we do understand the technical interactions, many of the detailed interactions are unpredictable. Just as it’s hard to predict the weather itself, one month (say) into the future, it’s hard to predict the exact effect of ongoing climate forcing agents. The effect that “a butterfly flapping its wings unpredictably causes a hurricane on the other side of the planet” applies for the chaos of climate as much as for the chaos of weather;
There are huge numbers of vested interests, who (consciously or sub-consciously) twist and distort aspects of the argument over climate change.

The vested interests include:

Both anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear campaigners;
Both anti-oil and pro-oil campaigners, and anti-coal and pro-coal campaigners;
Both “small is beautiful” and “big is beautiful” campaigners;
Both “back to nature” and “pro-technology” campaigners;
Scientists and authors who have long supported particular theories, and who are loath to change their viewpoints;
Hardened political campaigners who look to extract maximum concessions, for the region or country they represent, before agreeing a point of negotiation.

Not only is it psychologically hard for individuals to objectively review data or theories that conflicts with their favoured opinions. It is economically hard for companies (such as energy companies) to accept viewpoints that, if true, would cause major hurdles for their current lines of business, and significant loss of jobs. On the other hand, just because researcher R has strong psychological reason P and/or strong economic incentive E in favour of advocating viewpoint V, it does not mean that viewpoint V is wrong. The viewpoint could be correct, even though some of the support advanced in its favour is non-logical. As I said, there’s lots of fog to navigate!

Despite all this uncertainty, I offer the following conclusions:

There is a wide range of possible outcomes, for the climate in the next few decades;
The probability of runaway global warming – with disastrous effects on sea levels, drought, agriculture, storms, species and ecosystem displacement, travel, business, and so on – is at least 20%, and likely higher;
Global warming won’t just make the temperature higher; it will make the weather more extreme – due to increased global temperature gradients, increased atmospheric water vapour, and higher sea temperatures that stir up more vicious storms.

A risk of at least 20% of a global environmental disaster deserves urgent attention and further analysis. Who among us would enter an airplane with family and friends, if we believed there was a 20% probability of that airplane plummeting headlong out of the sky to the ground?

1.2 The economic crisis

The controversies and uncertainties over the potential threat of runaway climate change find parallels in discussions over a possible catastrophic implosion of the world economic system. These discussions likewise abound with technical disagrements and vested interests.

Are governments, legislators, banks, and markets generally wise enough and capable to oversee the pressures of financial trading, and keep the systems afloat? Was the recent series of domino-like collapses of famous banks around the world a “once in a lifetime” abnormality, that is most unlikely to repeat? Or should we expect a recurrence of fundamental financial instability? What is the risk of a larger financial crisis striking? Indeed, what is the risk of adverse follow-on effects from the “tail end” of the 2008-2009 crisis, generating a so-called “double dip” in which the second dip is more drastic than the first? On all these questions, opinions vary widely.

Despite the wide variation in opinions, some elements seem common. All commentators are fearful of some potential causes of major disruption to global economics. Depending on the commentator, these perceived potential causes include:

Clumsy regulation of financial markets;
Bankers who are able to take catastrophic risks in the pursuit of ever greater financial rewards;
The emergence of enormous monopoly powers that eliminate the benefits of marketplace competition;
Institutions that become “too big to fail” and therefore derail the appropriate workings of the market system;
Sky-high accumulation of debts, with individuals and countries living far beyond their means, for too long;
Austerity programmes that attempt to reduce debts quickly, but which could provoke spiraling industrial disputes and crippling strikes;
Bubbles that grow because “it’s temporarily rational for everyone to be irrational in their expectations” and then burst with tremendous damage.

We must avoid a feeling of overconfidence arising from the fact that previous financial crises were, in the end, survived, without the world of banking coming to an end. First, these previous financial crises caused numerous local calamities – and the causes of major wars can be traced (in part) to these crises. Second, there are reasons why future financial problems could have more drastic effects than previous ones:

There are numerous hidden interconnections between different parts of the global economy, which accelerate negative feedback when individual parts fail;
The complexity of new financial products far outstrips the ability of senior managers and regulators to understand and appreciate the risks involved;
In an age of instant electronic connections, the speed of cascading events can catch us all flat-footed.

For these reasons, I tentatively suggest we assign a ballpark risk factor of about 20% to the probability of a major global financial meltdown during the 2010s. (Yes, this is the same numeric figure as I picked for the environmental crisis too.)

Note some parallels between the two crises I’ve already discussed:

In each case, the devil is in the mix of weakly-understood powerful feedback systems;
Again in each case, our ability to discern what’s really happening is clouded by powerful non-rational factors and vested interests;
Again in each case, the probabilities of major disaster cannot be calculated in any precise way, but the risk appears large enough to warrant very serious investigation of solutions;
Again in each case, there is deep disagreement about the best solutions to deploy.

Worse, these two looming crises are themselves interconnected. Shortage of resources such as clean energy could trigger large price hikes which throw national economies into tailspins. Countries or regions which formerly cooperated could end up at devastating loggerheads, if an “abundance spirit” is replaced by a “scarcity spirit”.

1.3 The extreme terrorist crisis

What drives people to use bombs to inflict serious damage? Depending on the cirumstance, it’s a combination of:

Positive belief, in support of some country, region, ideology, or religion;
Negative belief, in which a group of people (“the enemy”) are seen as despicable, inferior, or somehow deserving of destruction or punishment;
Peer pressure, where people feel constrained by those around them to follow through on a commitment (to become, for example, a suicide bomber);
Personal rage, such as a desire for revenge and humiliation;
Aspiration for personal glory and reward, in either the present life, or a presumed afterlife;
Failure of countervailing “pro-cooperation” and “pro-peace” instincts or systems.

Nothing here is new for the 2010s. What is new is the increased ease of access, by would-be inflictors of damage, to so-called weapons of mass destruction. There is a fair probability that the terrorists who piloted passenger jet airlines into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon would have willingly caused even larger amounts of turmoil and damage, if they could have put their hands on suitable weapons.

Technology itself is neutral. A hammer which can be used to drive a nail into a piece of wood can equally be used to knock a fellow human unconscious. Electricity can light up houses or fry someone in an electric chair. Explosives can clear obstacles during construction projects or can obliterate critical infrastructure assets of so-called enemies. Biochemical manipulation can yield wonderfully nutritious new food compounds or deadly new diseases. Nuclear engineering can provide sufficient energy to free humanity from dependency on carbon-laden fossil fuels, or suitcase-sized portable weapons capable of tearing the heart out of major cities.

As technology becomes more widely accessible – via improved education worldwide, via cheaper raw materials, and via easy access to online information – the potential grows, both for good uses and for bad uses. A saying attributed to Eliezer Yudkowsky gives us pause for thought:

The minimum IQ required to destroy the world drops by one point every 18 months.

(This saying is sometimes called “Moore’s Law of mad scientists“.) The statement was probably not intended to be interpreted mathematically exactly, but we can agree that, over the course of a decade, the number of people capable of putting together a dreadful weapon of mass destruction will grow significantly. The required brainpower will move from the rarified tails of the bell curve of intelligence distribution, in the direction of the more fully populated central region.

We can imagine similar “laws” of increasing likelihood of destructive capability:

The minimum IQ required to devise and deploy a weapon that wipes out the heart of a major city drops by one point every 18 months;

The minimum IQ required to poison the water table for a region drops by one point every 18 months;

The minimum IQ required to unleash a devastating plague drops by one point every 18 months…

Of course, the threat of nuclear annihilation has been with the world for half a century. During my student days at Cambridge University, I participated in countless discussions about how best to avoid the risk of unintentional nuclear war. Despite the forebodings of some of my contemporaries at the time, we reached the end of the 20th century unscathed. Governments of nuclear-capable countries, regardless of their political hues and ideological positions, found good reason to avoid steps that could trigger any nuclear escalation. What’s different with at least some fundamentalist terrorists is that they operate in a mental universe that is considerably more extreme:

They live for a life beyond the grave, rather than before it;
They believe that divine providence will take care of the outcome – any “innocents” caught up in the destruction will receive their own rewards in the afterlife, courtesy of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity;
They are nourished and inspired by apocalyptic writing that glorifies a vision of almighty destruction;
They operate with moral certainty: they seem to harbour no doubts or questions about the rightness of their course of action.

Mix this extreme mindset with sufficient raw brainpower and with weapons-grade materials that can be begged, bought, or stolen, and the stage is set for a terrorist outrage that will put 9/11 far into the shade. In turn, the world’s reaction to that incident is likely to put the reaction to 9/11 far into its own shade.

It’s true, would-be terrorists are often incompetent. Their explosives sometimes fail to detonate. But that must give us no ground for complacency. The same “incompetence” can sometimes result in unforeseen consequences that are even more destructive than those intended.

1.4 The sense of profound personal alienation

Environmental crisis. Economic crisis. Extreme terrorist crisis. Added together, we might be facing a risk of around 50% that, sometime during the 2010s, we’ll collectively look back with enormous regret and say to ourselves:

That’s the worst thing that’s happened in our lifetime. Why oh why didn’t we act to stop it happening? But it’s too late to make amends now. If only we could re-run history, and take wiser choices…

But there’s more. Here’s a probability that I’ll estimate at 100%, rather than 50%. It’s the probability that huge numbers of individuals will look at their lives with bitter regret, and say to themselves:

This outcome was very far from the best it could have been. This human life has missed, by miles, the richness and quality of experience that was potentially available. Why oh why did it turn out like this? If only I could re-run my life, and take wiser choices, or benefit from improved circumstances…

The first three crises are global crises. This fourth one is a personal crisis. The first three are highly visible. The fourth might just be an internal heartache. It’s the realisation that:

Life provides, at least for some people, on at least some occasions, intense feelings of vitality, creativity, flow, rapport, ecstacy, and accomplishment;
These “peak experiences” are generally rare, or just glimpsed;
The majority of human experience is at a much lower level of quality than is conceivable.

The pervasive video broadcast communications of the modern age make it all the more obvious, to increasing numbers of people, that the quality of their lives fall short of what could be imagined and desired. These same communications also strongly hint that technology is advancing to the point where it could soon free people from the limitations of their current existence, and enable levels of experience previously only imagined for deities. Just around the corner lies the potential of lives that are much extended, expanded, and enhanced. How frustrating to miss out on this potential! It brings to mind the lamentations of a venerable French noblewoman from 1783, as noted in Lewis Lapham’s 2003 Commencement speech at St. John’s College Annapolis:

[A] French noblewoman, a duchess in her eighties, …, on seeing the first ascent of Montgolfier’s balloon from the palace of the Tuilleries in 1783, fell back upon the cushions of her carriage and wept. “Oh yes,” she said, “Now it’s certain. One day they’ll learn how to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead.”

Acts of gross destruction are often motivated by deep feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration: the world is perceived as containing significant wrongs, that need righting. So there’s a connection between the crisis of profound personal alienation and the crisis of extreme terrorism. Thankfully, people who experience dissatisfaction or frustration don’t all react in the same way. But even if the reaction is only (as I suggested earlier) an internal heartache, the shortcoming between potential and reality is nonetheless profound. Life could, and should, be so much better.

We can re-state the four crises as four huge opportunities:

The opportunity to nurture an amazingly pleasant, refreshing, and intriguing environment;
The opportunity to guide global economic development to sustainably create sufficient resources for everyone’s needs;
The opportunity to utilise personal passions for constructive projects;
The opportunity to enable individuals to persistently experience qualities of human life far, far higher than at present.

I see Humanity+ as addressing all four of these opportunities. And it does so with an eye on one more crisis, which is the most uncertain one of the lot.

1.5 The existential crisis of accelerating change and deepening complexity

Time and again, changes have consequences that are unforeseen and unintended. The more complex the system, the greater the likelihood of changes leading to unintended consequences.

However, human society is becoming more complex all the time:

Multiple different cultures and sub-cultures overlap, co-exist, and influence each other;
Worldwide travel is nowadays commonplace;
Increasing numbers of channels exist for communication and influence ;
Society is underpinned by a rich infrastructure of multi-layered technology.

Moreover, the rate of change is increasing:

New products sweep around the world in ever shorter amounts of time;
Larger numbers of people are being educated to levels never seen before, and are entering the worlds of research, development, manufacturing, and business;
Online collaboration mechanisms, including social networks, wikis, and open source software, mean it is easier for innovation in one part of the world to quickly influence and benefit subsequent innovation elsewhere;
The transformation of more industries from “matter-dominated” to “information-dominated” means that the rapid improvement cycle of semiconductors transforms the speed of progress.

These changes bring many benefits. They also bring drawbacks, and – due to the law of unintended consequences – they bring lots of unknowns and surprises. The risk is that we’ll waken up one morning and realise that we deeply regret one of the unforeseen side-effects. For example, there are risks:

That some newly created microscopic-scale material will turn out to have deleterious effects on human life, akin (but faster acting) to the problems arising to exposure from asbestos;
That some newly engineered biochemical organism will escape into the wild and turn out to have an effect like that of a plague;
That well-intentioned attempts at climate “geo-engineering”, to counter the risk of global warming, will trigger unexpected fast-moving geological phenomenon;
That state-of-the-art high-energy physics experiments will somehow create unanticipated exotic new particles that destroy all nearby space and time;
That software defects will spread throughout part of the computing infrastructure of modern life, rendering it useless.

Here’s another example, from history. On 1st March 1954, the US military performed their first test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb, at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosive yield was expected to be from 4 to 6 Megatons. But when the device was exploded, the yield was 15 Megatons, two and a half times the expected maximum. As the Wikipedia article on this test explosion explains:

The cause of the high yield was a laboratory error made by designers of the device at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They considered only the lithium-6 isotope in the lithium deuteride secondary to be reactive; the lithium-7 isotope, accounting for 60% of the lithium content, was assumed to be inert…

Contrary to expectations, when the lithium-7 isotope is bombarded with high-energy neutrons, it absorbs a neutron then decomposes to form an alpha particle, another neutron, and a tritium nucleus. This means that much more tritium was produced than expected, and the extra tritium in fusion with deuterium (as well as the extra neutron from lithium-7 decomposition) produced many more neutrons than expected, causing far more fissioning of the uranium tamper, thus increasing yield.

This resultant extra fuel (both lithium-6 and lithium-7) contributed greatly to the fusion reactions and neutron production and in this manner greatly increased the device’s explosive output.

Sadly, this calculation error resulted in much more radioactive fallout than anticipated. Many of the crew in a nearby Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, became ill in the wake of direct contact with the fallout. One of the crew subsequently died from the illness – the first human casualty from thermonuclear weapons.

Suppose the error in calculation had been significantly worse – perhaps by an order of thousands rather than by a factor of 2.5. This might seem unlikely, but when we deal with powerful unknowns, we cannot rule out powerful unforeseen consequences. Imagine if extreme human activity somehow interfered with the incompletely understood mechanisms governing supervolcanoes – such as the one that exploded around 73,000 years ago at Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia) and which is thought to have reduced the worldwide human population at the time to perhaps as few as one thousand breeding pairs.

It’s not just gargantuan explosions that we need fear. As indicated above, the list of so-called “existential risks” includes highly contagious diseases, poisonous nano-particles, and catastrophic failures of the electronics infrastructure that underpins modern human society. Add to these “known unknowns” the risk of “unknown unknowns” – the factors which we currently don’t even know that we should be considering.

The more quickly things change, the harder it is to foresee and monitor all the consequences. There’s a great deal that deserves our attention. How should we respond?

>> Next chapter >>

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1 May 2010

Costs of complexity: in healthcare, and in the mobile industry

Filed under: books, business model, disruption, healthcare, innovation, modularity, simplicity — David Wood @ 11:56 am

While indeed there are economies of scale, there are countervailing costs of complexity – the more product families produced in a plant, the higher the overhead burden rates.

That sentence comes from page 92 of “The Innovator’s Prescription: A disruptive solution for health care“, co-authored by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang. Like all the books authored (or co-authored) by Christensen, the book is full of implications for fields outside the particularly industry being discussed.

In the case of this book, the subject matter is critically important in its own right: how can we find ways to allow technological breakthroughs to reduce the spiralling costs of healthcare?

In the book, the authors brilliantly extend and apply Christensen’s well-known ideas on disruptive change to the field of healthcare. But the book should be recommended reading for anyone interested in either strategy or operational effectiveness in any hi-tech industry. (It’s also recommended reading for anyone interested in the future of medicine – which probably includes all of us, since most of us can anticipate spending increasing amounts of time in hospitals or doctor’s surgeries as we become older.)

I’m still less than half way through reading this book, but the section I’ve just read seems to speak loudly to issues in the mobile industry, as well as to the healthcare industry.

It describes a manufacturing plant which was struggling with overhead costs. At this plant, 6.2 dollars were spent in overhead expenses for every dollar spend on direct labour:

These overhead costs included not just utilities and depreciation, but the costs of scheduling, expediting, quality control, repair and rework, scrap maintenance, materials handling, accounting, computer systems, and so on. Overhead comprised all costs that were not directly spent in making products.

The quality of products made at that plant was also causing concern:

About 15 percent of all overhead costs were created by the need to repair and rework products that failed in the field, or had been discovered by inspectors as faulty before shipment.

However, it didn’t appear to the manager that any money was being wasted:

The plant hadn’t been painted inside or out in 20 years. The landscaping was now overrun by weeds. The receptionist in the bare-bones lobby had been replaced long ago with a paper directory and a phone. The manager had no secretarial assistance, and her gray World War II vintage steel desk was dented by a kick from some frustrated predecessor.

Nevertheless, this particular plant had considerably higher overhead burden rates than the other plants from the same company. What was the difference?

The difference was in the complexity. This particular plant was set up to cope with large numbers of different product designs, whereas the other plants (which had been created later) had been able to optimise for particular design families.

The original plant essentially had the value proposition,

We’ll make any product that anyone designs

In contrast, the newer plants had the following kind of value proposition:

If you need a product that can be made through one of these two sequences of operations and activities, we’ll do it for you at the lowest possible cost and the highest possible quality.

Further analysis, across a number of different plants, reached the following results:

Each time the scale of a plant doubled, holding the degree of pathway complexity constant, the overhead rate could be expected to fall by 15 percent. So, for example, a plant that made two families and generated $40 million in sales would be expected to have an overhead burden ratio of about 2.85, while the burden rate for a plant making two families with $80 million in sales would be 15% lower (2.85 x 0.85 = 2.42). But every time the number of families produced in a plant of a given scale doubled, the overhead burden rate soared 27 percent. So if a two-pathway, $40 million plant accepted products that required two additional pathways, but that did not increase its sales volume, its overhead burden rate would increase by 2.85 x 1.27, to 3.62…

This is just one aspect of a long and fascinating analysis. Modern day general purpose hospitals support huge numbers of different patient care pathways, so high overhead rates are inevitable. The solution is to allow the formation of separate specialist units, where practitioners can then focus on iteratively optimising particular lines of healthcare. We can already see this in firms that specialise in laser eye surgery, in hernia treatment, and so on. Without these new units separating and removing some of the complexity of the original unit, it becomes harder and harder for innovation to take place. The innovation becomes stifled under conflicting business models. (I’m simplifying the argument here: please take a look at the book for the full picture.)

In short: reducing overhead costs isn’t just a matter of “eliminating obvious inefficiencies, spending less time on paperwork, etc”. It often requires initially painful structural changes, in which overly complex multi-function units are simplified by the removal and separation of business lines and product pathways. Only with the new, simplified set up – often involving new companies, and sometimes involving “creative destruction” – can disruptive innovations flourish.

Rising organisational complexity impacts the mobile industry too. I’ve written about this before. For example, in May last year I wrote an article “Platform strategy failure modes“:

The first failure mode is when a device manufacturer fails to have a strategy towards mobile software platforms. In this case, the adage holds true that a failure to strategise is a strategy to fail. A device manufacturer that simply “follows the wind” – picking platform P1 for device D1 because customer C1 expressed a preference for P1, picking platform P2 for device D2 because customer C2 expressed a preference for P2, etc – is going to find that the effort of interacting successfully with all these different platforms far exceeds their expectations. Mobile software platforms require substantial investment from manufacturers, before the manufacturer can reap commercial rewards from these platforms. (Getting a device ready to demo is one thing. That can be relatively easy. Getting a device approved to ship onto real networks – a device that is sufficiently differentiated to stand out from a crowd of lookalike devices – can take a lot longer.)

The second failure mode is similar to the first one. It’s when a device manufacturer spreads itself too thinly across multiple platforms. In the previous case, the manufacturer ended up working with multiple platforms, without consciously planning that outcome. In this case, the manufacturer knows what they are doing. They reason to themselves as follows:

We are a highly competent company;

We can manage to work with (say) three significant mobile software platforms;

Other companies couldn’t cope with this diversification, but we are different.

But the outcome is the same as the previous case, even though different thinking gets the manufacturer into that predicament. The root failure is, again, a failure to appreciate the scale and complexity of mobile software platforms. These platforms can deliver tremendous value, but require significant ongoing skill and investment to yield that kind of result.

The third failure mode is when a manufacturer seeks re-use across several different mobile software platforms. The idea is that components (whether at the application or system level) are developed in a platform-agnostic way, so they can fit into each platform equally well.

To be clear, this is a fine goal. Done right, there are big dividends. But my observation is that this strategy is hard to get right. The strategy typically involves some kind of additional “platform independent layer”, that isolates the software in the component from the particular programming interfaces of the underlying platform. However, this additional layer often introduces its own complications…

Seeking clever economies of scale is commendable. But there often comes time when growing scale is bedevilled by growing complexity. It’s as mentioned at the beginning of this article:

While indeed there are economies of scale, there are countervailing costs of complexity – the more product families produced in a plant, the higher the overhead burden rates.

Even more than a drive to scale, companies in the mobile space need a drive towards simplicity. That means organisational simplicity as well as product simplicity.

As I stated in my article “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity“:

The inherent complexity of present-day smartphones risks all kinds of bad outcomes:

Smartphone device creation projects may become time-consuming and delay-prone, and the smartphones themselves may compromise on quality in order to try to hit a fast-receding market window;

Smartphone application development may become difficult, as developers need to juggle different programming interfaces and optimisation methods;

Smartphone users may fail to find the functionality they believe is contained (somewhere!) within their handset, and having found that functionality, they may struggle to learn how to use it.

In short, smartphone system complexity risks impacting manufacturability, developability, and usability. The number one issue for the mobile industry, arguably, is to constantly find better ways to tame this complexity.

The companies that are successfully addressing the complexity issue seem, on the whole, to be the ones on the rise in the mobile space.

Footnote: It’s a big claim, but it may well be true that of all the books on the subject of innovation in the last 20 years, Clayton’s Christensen’s writings are the most consistently important. The subtitle of his first book, “The innovator’s dilemma”, is a reminder why: “When new technologies cause great firms to fail“.

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25 April 2010

Practical magic

Filed under: communications, Events, Humanity Plus, magic, marketing, UKH+ — David Wood @ 10:26 pm

I won’t reveal the content of the tricks. That would be unfair on the performer.

Our dining group at Soho’s Little Italy restaurant had been pleasantly surprised by the unannounced entrance of a lady magician, before the orders for coffee were taken. Where were we from, she asked. Answers followed, hesitatingly: Belgium, Germany, Sweden, New York, London…

The atmosphere changed from guarded politeness to unguarded amazement as the magician blazed her way through some fast-paced sleight of hand with newspapers, water, money, ribbons, and playing cards. Many of our group of hardened rationalists and technophiles were gasping with astonishment. How did she do that?

It was a fitting end to a day that had seen a fair share of other kinds of magic.

Despite my nervous forebodings from earlier in the week, the Humanity+ UK2010 event had seen a 100% turn out of speakers, ran (near enough) to time, and covered a vast range of intriguing ideas about forthcoming new technology and the enhancement of humanity. An audience of approaching 200 people in London’s Conway Hall seemed to find much to think about, from what they’d heard. Here’s a brief sample of online feedback so far:

Awesome conference – all your work paid off and then some!

Great conference today #hplusuk : thank you!

Enjoyed H+ event, esp @anderssandberg preso. Learnt about singularity, AI+, wireheads, future shock, SENS, protocells & more

Most enjoyable conference today. Thanks to the organisers and speakers

A few hours literally day dreaming, blown away by human cleverness. These people should be allowed to talk on prime time on BBC regularly

Humanity+ today was terrific. I particulary enjoyed the talks from Amon Twyman – Expanding perception and transhumanist art, Natasha Vita-More – DIY Enhancement, Aubrey de Grey’s Life Expansion and Rachel Armstrong’s Living Technology

Great talk @davidorban how the #internetofthings could free us to be human again. Couldn’t agree more. #hplusuk

Love David Pearce, a true visionary! #hplusuk

Behind the scenes, a team of volunteers were ensuring that things ran as smoothly as possible – with a very early start in the morning following a late evening the previous day. In my professional life over the years I’ve often been responsible for major events, such as the Symbian developer events and smartphone shows, where I had visibility of the amount of work required to make an event a success. But in all these cases, I had a team of events managers working for me – including first-class professionals such as Amy Graller, Jo Butler, Liza Fox, and Alice Kenny, as well as brand managers, PR managers, and so on. These teams shielded me from a great deal of the underlying drama of managing events. In contrast, this time, our entire team were volunteers, and there was no alternative to getting our own hands dirty! Huge amounts of thanks are due to everyone involved in pulling off this piece of magic.

Needless to say, some things fell short of perfection. I heard mild-mannered grumbles:

That there wasn’t enough time for audience Q&A – and that too many of the questions that were raised from the floor were imprecise or unfocused;
That the audio from our experimental live streaming from the event was too choppy – due to shortcomings in the Internet connectivity from the event (something that will need to be fixed before I consider holding another similar event there);
That some of the presentations had parts that were too academic for some members of the audience, or assumed more background knowledge than people actually possessed;
That there should have been more journalists present, hearing material that deserves wide coverage.

The mail list used by the Humanity+ UK organising team is already reflecting on “what went well” and “what could be improved”. Provisionally, we have in mind a follow-up event early next year. We’re open for suggestions! What scale should we have in mind? What key objectives?

Because I was rushing around on the day, trying to ensure everything was ready for the next phase of the event, I found myself unable to concentrate for long on the presentations themselves. (I’ll need to watch the videos of the talks, once they’re available.) However, a few items successfully penetrated my mental fog. I was particularly struck by descriptions of potential engineering breakthroughs:

Listed by Aubrey de Grey in the second half of his talk, “Human regenerative engineering – theory and practice“: Aubrey included several pages of news clippings about various new medical treatments or hypotheses, with potential significant implications for anti-aging treatment;
Covered by Rachel Armstong, in her film and talk about protocells having some features of living cells: “The impact of living technology on the future of humanity“.

This kind of information appeals to the engineer in me. It’s akin to “practical magic”.

I was also struck by discussions of flawed societal priorities, covering instances where publications give undue prominence to matters of low importance, to the exclusion of more accurate coverage of technological issues. For example, Nick Bostrom reported, during his talk “Reducing Existential Risks” that there are more scholarly papers on dung beetle reproduction than on the possibilities of human extinction. And Aubrey de Grey gave examples of sensationalist headlines even in a normally responsible newspaper, for anti-aging news of little intrinsic value, whilst genuinely promising news receives scant coverage.

What is the solution to this kind of broken prioritisation? The discussion among the final speaker panel of the day helped to distill an answer. The Humanity+ organisation, along with those who support its aims, need to become better at the discipline of marketing. Once we convey our essential messages more effectively, society as a whole should hear and understand what we are saying, and respond positively. There’s a great art – and great skill – to the practice of communication.

Some people dislike the term “marketing”, as if it’s a swear word. But I see it as follows. In general terms, “marketing” for any organisation means:

Deciding on a strategic focus – as opposed to a scattergun approach;
Understanding how various news items or other pieces of information or activism might be received by people in the wider community;
Finding better ways to convey the chosen key messages;
Engaging within the wider community – listening more than talking – and learning in the light of that conversation;
Repeating the above steps, with increasingly better understanding and better execution.

At 5pm, we had to hurriedly leave the venue, because it was needed for another function starting at 6pm. It was hard to move everyone outside the main hall, since there were so many intense group discussions happening. Eventually, some of us started on a 20 minute walk through central London, from Holborn to Soho, for the post-event dinner at Little Italy. The food was delicious, the waitresses coped well (and with many friendly smiles) with all our many requests, and the conversation was first class. The magician provided a great interlude. I left the restaurant, several hours later, with a growing list of suggestions for topics for talks in the normal UKH+ monthly meetings that could bring in a good audience. Happily, I also have a growing list of names of people who want to provide more active assistance in building an enhanced community of supporters of the aims of Humanity+.

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21 April 2010

Designing the Internet of Things

Filed under: Internet of Things, mashup* event, Mobile Monday — David Wood @ 2:10 pm

Computers; smartphones; … smart things.
The Internet; the mobile Internet; … the Internet of Things.

These two epic trends tell aspects of the same grand story. First, computing power is becoming more widespread, more affordable, more compact, and more miniature. Second, networked intelligence is becoming more widespread, more affordable, more effective, and more informed.

As a result, we can look forward to a time, in just a few years, where each of us owns more than a dozen different devices that communicate with each other, wirelessly and transparently. That will take the number of wireless modems in use in the world to upwards of 50 billion.

Going further, there are forecasts of no fewer than one trillion wirelessly connected “things”, where this time the connection will often involve simpler connectivity such as RFID. As reported recently in Wireless Week:

There will be 1 trillion devices connected to the Internet by 2013, said Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padma Warrior during her Wednesday keynote address at CTIA.

Warrior argued the boom in connected devices, applications and mobile broadband would change not only the wireless industry but society in general.

“The Internet is no longer just an information superhighway, it’s a platform,” Warrior said, citing the increased adoption of M2M technologies and the exponential growth of apps…

To prove her point, Warrior moved through a series of technology demonstrations with a Cisco colleague that detailed what it would be like to interact with next-generation mobile technology.

The pair showed off augmented reality in a subway system; location-based advertising and mobile coupons; and a mobile telepresence app.

“The next big revolution that will happen is the Internet of things,” Warrior said…

Evidently, the ever lower costs and increased quality of computing and connectivity are opening all kinds of new opportunities. It’s easy to speculate on possibilities:

Distributed arrays of sensors that can more reliably – and more quickly – highlight the changing concentrations of volcanic ash;
Luggage tags that know (and can report) where your luggage is;
Air conditioning units and heating units that can coordinate to act in concert, rather than independently;
A handheld toothbrush that can let you know if you’re not putting enough effort into cleaning the innersides of your lower right molars;
Smart sticking plasters that detect microscopic changes in skin condition or blood flow;
A monitor that can detect if you are too distracted (or too dozy) to drive safely. (Even better, put the driving intelligence into the car itself, rather than rely on human drivers.)
Surveillance cameras that can analyse what they are filming, being alert for security abnormalities;
Audio recording devices that can understand what they are hearing;
Smart glasses that can interpret what you’re looking at;
Smart digital signs that change their display depending on who’s looking at them;
And all of these devices connected together…

Does this sound good to you? We can debate some of the points, but overall, it’s clear this grand technology trend has great power to improve health, education, transport, the environment, and human experience generally.

So why isn’t it happening faster? Why is it that, as an industry colleague said to me recently, this whole field is in a state of chaos?

It’s chaotic, because we don’t know what’s happening next, nor how fast it’s happening. The use cases developers identify as important at the start of a project often turn out to be less significant than ones that turn up, unexpected, part way through the project. (That’s not necessarily a problem. It is, of course, a large opportunity.)

In short, although lots of the underlying technology is mature, the emerging industry of the “Internet of Things” is still far from mature. The roadmaps of product development remain tentative and sketchy. Speedy progress will depend on:

A few underlying technology issues – such as network interoperability, smart distribution of tasks across multiple processors, power management, power harvesting, and security;
Some pressing business model issues – since not all existing players are excited by the prospects of cost-savings which would in turn reduce their profits from existing products;
Some ecosystem management issues – to solve “chicken and egg” scenarios where multiple parts of a compound solution all need to be in place, before the full benefits can be realised;
Some project development agility issues – to avoid wasted investment in cases where project goals change part way through, due to the uncertain territory being navigated;
Some significant design issues – to ensure that the resulting products can be widely accepted and embraced by “normal people” (as opposed just to early adopter technology enthusiasts).

These are some of the themes that I will seek to explore as one of the speakers at the mashup* event in London on Tuesday 4th May, entitled “Internet of things: Rise of the machines“. In addition to myself, the other announced speakers are:

Many thanks to the mashup* team for organising this get-together! I hope to see you there.

Footnote: The ReadWriteWeb publish a useful series of articles about the Internet of Things. At time of writing, the most recent article in this series is “Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again“, which highlights the ideas and work of David Orban, Founder of WideTag. Here’s a brief extract:

Orban’s dream is that thousands of years of human subservience to machines will end because we will teach our machines how to not only take care of themselves, but how to take care of us as well…

These new machine networks will be so redundant and reliable that we will be freed from most of our machine-operating duties. We will get to be human again…

Extending these ideas, David recently spoke on the theme “Free to be human” at Mobile Monday Amsterdam. It’s a great introduction to many Internet of Things ideas:

By good fortune, David will be in London this weekend, since he’s one of the speakers at the Humanity+ UK2010 event. He’ll be addressing the Internet of Things once again, along with some thoughts on the progress of the Singularity University. In my experience, he’s a fascinating person to talk with.

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20 April 2010

Creative chaos under the ash cloud

Filed under: challenge, chaos, Humanity Plus, precautionary principle, risks, volcano — David Wood @ 11:45 pm

Seven months of careful planning looked like they were unravelling, in the final seven days.

Discussions about a gathering of futurist and transhumanist thinkers in London’s Conway Hall, on April 24th, have been underway for seven months. Behind the scenes, we’ve had a planning wiki, a mailing list, and a small group of volunteers each chipping in with suggestions and undertaking different tasks. A website for the event went live on 19th January, and we started taking registrations a week after that. Registrations built up, and up, so that I could finally feel comfortable putting my name to the following quote on a press release we issued, “Unprecedented gathering of futurist and transhumanist thinkers in London“:

The UK chapter of Humanity+, an organisation dedicated to promoting understanding, interest and participation in fields of emerging innovation that can radically benefit the human condition, announced today that registrations are on track for record attendance at the Humanity+ UK2010 conference taking place in Conway Hall, Holborn, London, on April 24th.

“Approaching 200 attendees are expected to take part in a full day of thought-provoking lectures, discussions, Q&A, and breakouts, led by a line-up of world class futurist speakers”, said David Wood, H+UK meetings secretary. “Participants have registered from as far afield as Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and the USA. The Humanity+ movement, previously known as the World Transhumanist Association, is coming of age.”…

However, on the very day of the press release, airplane flight restrictions were announced, for fear of damage from volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

At first, I wasn’t particularly worried. I thought that only three of the ten speakers were overseas, and that there would be plenty of time for flights to resume before the conference.

But the speakers are actors on the global stage, much in demand around the world. And I gradually learned that no fewer than six of the ten were stranded overseas – in Venice, Montreal, San Francisco, and so on. And the airplane flight restrictions kept getting extended. My heart sunk.

I half-imagined that nature was saying:

You Humanity+ people think you can do ‘better than nature‘. Pah! Take that!

What depressed me most was that initial tests at the venue had already suggested that Internet connectivity in Conway Hall was poor. So ideas of speakers delivering their presentations via video link seemed impractical.

But necessity is the mother of invention. Since there was a real possibility that members of both speakers and audience wouldn’t be able to travel to London, we were obliged to reconsider options for Internet connectivity. And this gives us the possibility for the meeting to rise above being a London-based event, into a happening with a real-time online presence.

I tweeted: What’s the best way to install, for one day, a temporary high bandwidth connection to a conference venue (in London, UK)?

Answers came, fast and varied. With help from a couple of people from the H+UK event planning team, I followed up about half a dozen different ideas. The Conway Hall administrators also proved very flexible and helpful. In a way, it’s still too early to say, but it now looks as though we’re set up:

To support remote speakers doing Skype video calls into the event, with the screen on stage showing, sometimes their face, and sometimes their slides;
And, to broadcast a live video stream of the event, on a service such as Ustream.tv.

So maybe technology can work around the ravages of nature after all! (At least in small scale. And, in the decades ahead, in ever larger scale.)

The ash cloud raises other questions relevant to transhumanism – especially how to deal with risk.

One moment, I was in email correspondence about conference logistics with the opening keynote speaker for the event, Max More. Max is on public record as being critical of the precautionary principle. A few moments later, I was watching the BBC news, where a “Cambridge volcano scientist” (I didn’t catch his name) was explaining that there’s something called the precautionary principle which means that aircraft flights through the ash cloud had to be forbidden. My mind did a quick double take.

To back up: Wikipedia describes the precautionary principle as follows:

The precautionary principle states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those who advocate taking the action.

This principle allows policy makers to make discretionary decisions in situations where there is evidence of potential harm in the absence of complete scientific proof. The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result.

In his 2005 article “THE PROACTIONARY PRINCIPLE“, Max offers the following criticisms of the precautionary principle:

The precautionary principle has at least six major weak spots. It serves us badly by:

assuming worst-case scenarios

distracting attention from established threats to health, especially natural risks

assuming that the effects of regulation and restriction are all positive or neutral, never negative

ignoring potential benefits of technology and inherently favoring nature over humanity

illegitimately shifting the burden of proof and unfavorably positioning the proponent of the activity

conflicting with more balanced, common-law approaches to risk and harm.

What should we conclude about the wisdom of shutting down the airspace above the UK, on precautionary grounds? That’s a good question to ask. If you take part in the event this Saturday, you’ll have the chance to ask Max himself about that point. (Especially since it now appears the airplanes are flying again, after all.)

Footnote: while writing this blog, I came across, for the first time, Max’s fine 1999 essay “A Letter to Mother Nature“. It’s well worth reading. Here’s how it starts:

Dear Mother Nature:

Sorry to disturb you, but we humans—your offspring—come to you with some things to say. (Perhaps you could pass this on to Father, since we never seem to see him around.) We want to thank you for the many wonderful qualities you have bestowed on us with your slow but massive, distributed intelligence. You have raised us from simple self-replicating chemicals to trillion-celled mammals. You have given us free rein of the planet. You have given us a life span longer than that of almost any other animal. You have endowed us with a complex brain giving us the capacity for language, reason, foresight, curiosity, and creativity. You have given us the capacity for self-understanding as well as empathy for others.

Mother Nature, truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die—just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom. You were miserly in the extent to which you gave us awareness of our somatic, cognitive, and emotional processes. You held out on us by giving the sharpest senses to other animals. You made us functional only under narrow environmental conditions. You gave us limited memory, poor impulse control, and tribalistic, xenophobic urges. And, you forgot to give us the operating manual for ourselves!

What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed. You seem to have lost interest in our further evolution some 100,000 years ago. Or perhaps you have been biding your time, waiting for us to take the next step ourselves. Either way, we have reached our childhood’s end.

We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution.

We do not do this lightly, carelessly, or disrespectfully, but cautiously, intelligently, and in pursuit of excellence. We intend to make you proud of us. Over the coming decades we will pursue a series of changes to our own constitution, initiated with the tools of biotechnology guided by critical and creative thinking. In particular, we declare the following seven amendments to the human constitution…

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16 April 2010

Mobile Developer TV: riffs on the future of technology

Filed under: Barcelona, futurist, Humanity Plus, YouTube — David Wood @ 3:03 pm

On the last day of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) industry tradeshow in Barcelona a few weeks ago, Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of AllAboutSymbian caught up with me. They explained:

We’re asking people what they see as the highlights of Mobile World Congress. Would you mind saying a few words to camera?

I have lots of respect for both Ewan and Rafe, so I was happy to respond. I expressed a few top-of-mind thoughts about Microsoft Windows Phone 7, the networking opportunities at the event itself, and about the growing interest in embedded connectivity (also known as “machine to machine” communications). The result is here, as Episode 148 of MobileDeveloperTV.com: “David Wood’s take on MWC“:

As you can see, I had the opportunity to say a few words at the end of the clip about the Humanity+ UK2010 event I’ve been organising. Once the filming stopped, the three of us continued chatting informally about this topic – which is (of course) a big and fascinating topic. Never someone to miss an opportunity, Ewan started filming again. The first question this time was “What films about the future do you like?” One answer led on to “just one more question” and then to “a final question” and even “a really final question”…

This became episode 149 of MobileDeveloperTV.com: “David Wood speculates on the future of (mobile) technology“. Ewan explains:

I grabbed the opportunity to ask David what his top 3 sci-fi movies were. What follows is an absolutely fascinating ‘real-time’ riff from David on where he sees the future going — in terms of technology augmentation — and what to do about the human race becoming far too reliant on technology that may well turn against us. Or that we simply couldn’t do without.

Many thanks to Ewan and Rafe for taking the time to edit and publish this second video, even though it’s some way outside their normal field of coverage!

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15 April 2010

Accelerating automation and the future of work

Filed under: AGI, Economics, futurist, Google, politics, regulation, robots — David Wood @ 2:45 am

London is full of pleasant surprises.

Yesterday evening, I travelled to The Book Club in Shoreditch, EC2A, and made my way to the social area downstairs. What’s your name? asked the person at the door. I gave my name, and in return received a stick-on badge saying

Hi, I’m David.

Talk to me about the future of humanity!

I was impressed. How do they know I like to talk to people about the future of humanity?

Then I remembered that the whole event I was attending was under the aegis of a newly formed group calling itself “Future Human“. It was their third meeting, over the course of just a few weeks – but the first I had heard about (and decided to attend). Everyone’s badge had the same message. About 120 people crammed into the downstairs room – making it standing room only (since there were only around 60 seats). Apart from the shortage of seats, the event was well run, with good use of roaming mikes from the floor.

The event started with a quick-fire entertaining presentation by author and sci-fi expert Sam Jordison. His opening question was blunt:

What can you do that a computer can’t do?

He then listed lots of occupations from the past which technology had rendered obsolete. Since one of my grandfathers was the village blacksmith, I found a personal resonance with this point. It will soon be the same for many existing professions, Sam said: computers are becoming better and better at all sorts of tasks which previously would have required creative human input. Journalism is particularly under threat. Likewise accountancy. And so on, and so on.

In general terms, that’s a thesis I agree with. For example, I anticipate a time before long when human drivers will be replaced by safer robot alternatives.

I quibble with the implication that, as existing jobs are automated, there will be no jobs left for humans to do. Instead, I see that lots of new occupations will become important. “Shape of Jobs to Come”, a report (PDF) by Fast Future Research, describes 20 jobs that people could be doing in the next 20 years:

Body part maker
Nano-medic
Pharmer of genetically engineered crops and livestock
Old age wellness manager/consultant
Memory augmentation surgeon
‘New science’ ethicist
Space pilots, tour guides and architects
Vertical farmers
Climate change reversal specialist
Quarantine enforcer
Weather modification police
Virtual lawyer
Avatar manager / devotees / virtual teachers
Alternative vehicle developers
Narrowcasters
Waste data handler
Virtual clutter organiser
Time broker / Time bank trader
Social ‘networking’ worker
Personal branders

(See the original report for explanations of some of these unusual occupation names!)

In other words, as technology improves to remove existing occupations, new occupations will become significant – occupations that build in unpredictable ways on top of new technology.

But only up to a point. In the larger picture, I agree with Sam’s point that even these new jobs will quickly come under the scope of rapidly improving automation. The lifetime of occupations will shorten and shorten. And people will typically spend fewer hours working each week (on paid tasks).

Is this a worry? Yes, if we assume that we need to work long hours, to justify our existence, or to earn sufficient income to look after our families. But I disagree with these assumptions. Improved technology, wisely managed, should be able to result, not just in less labour left over for humans to do, but also in great material abundance – plenty of energy, food, and other resources for everyone. We’ll become able – at last – to spend more of our time on activities that we deeply enjoy.

The panel discussion that followed touched on many of these points. The panellists – Peter Kirwan from Wired, Victor Henning from Mendeley, and Carsten Sorensen and Jannis Kallinikos from the London School of Economics – sounded lots of notes of optimism:

We shouldn’t create unnecessary distinctions between “human” and “machine”. After all, humans are kinds of machines too (“meat machines“);
The best kind of intelligence combines human elements and machine elements – in what Google have called “hybrid intelligence“;
Rather than worrying about computers displacing humans, we can envisage computers augmenting humans;
In case computers become troublesome, we should be able to regulate them, or even to switch them off.

Again, in general terms, these are points I agree with. However, I believe these tasks will be much harder to accomplish than the panel implied. To that extent, I believe that the panel were too optimistic.

After all, if we can barely regulate rapidly changing financial systems, we’ll surely find it even harder to regulate rapidly changing AI systems. Before we’ve been able to work out if such-and-such an automated system is an improvement on its predecessors, that system may have caused too many rapid irreversible changes.

Worse, there could be a hard-to-estimate “critical mass” effect. Rapidly accumulating intelligent automation is potentially akin to accumulating nuclear material until it unexpectedly reaches an irreversible critical mass. The resulting “super cloud” system will presumably state very convincing arguments to us, for why such and such changes in regulations make great sense. The result could be outstandingly good – but equally, it could be outstandingly bad.

Moreover, it’s likely to prove very hard to “switch off the Internet” (or “switch off Google”). We’ll be so dependent on the Internet that we’ll be unable to disconnect it, even though we recognise there are bad consequences,

If all of this happens in slow motion, we would be OK. We’d be able to review it and debug it in real time. However, the lessons from the recent economic crisis is that these changes can take place almost too quickly for human governments to intervene. That’s why we need to ensure, ahead of time, that we have a good understanding of what’s happening. And that’s why there should be lots more discussions of the sort that took place at Future Human last night.

The final question from the floor raised a great point: why isn’t this whole subject receiving prominence in the current UK general election debates? My answer: It’s down to those of us who do see the coming problems to ensure that the issues get escalated appropriately.

Footnote: Regular readers will not be surprised if I point out, at this stage, that many of these same topics will be covered in the Humanity+ UK2010 event happening in Conway Hall, Holborn, London, on Saturday 24 April. The panellists at the Future Human event were good, but I believe that the H+UK speakers will be even better!

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8 April 2010

Video: The case for Artificial General Intelligence

Filed under: AGI, flight, Humanity Plus, Moore's Law, presentation, YouTube — David Wood @ 11:19 am

Here’s another short (<10 minute) video from me, building on one of the topics I’ve listed in the Humanity+ Agenda: the case for artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The discipline of having to fit a set of thoughts into a ten minute video is a good one!

Further reading: I’ve covered some of the same topics, in more depth, in previous blogposts, including:

For anyone who prefers to read the material as text, I append an approximate transcript.

My name is David Wood. I’m going to cover some reasons for paying more attention to Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, – also known as super-human machine intelligence. This field deserves significantly more analysis, resourcing, and funding, over the coming decade.

Machines with super-human levels of general intelligence will include hardware and software, as part of a network of connected intelligence. Their task will be to analyse huge amounts of data, review hypotheses about this data, discern patterns, propose new hypotheses, propose experiments which will provide valuable new data, and in this way, recommend actions to solve problems or take advantage of opportunities.

If that sounds too general, I’ll have some specific examples in a moment, but the point is to create a reasoning system that is, indeed, applicable to a wide range of problems. That’s why it’s called Artificial General Intelligence.

In this way, these machines will provide a powerful supplement to existing human reasoning.

Here are some of the deep human problems that could benefit from the assistance of enormous silicon super-brains:

What uses of nanotechnology can be recommended, to safely boost the creation of healthy food?
What are the causes of different diseases – and how can we cure them?
Can we predict earthquakes– and even prevent them?
Are there safe geo-engineering methods that will head off the threat of global warming, without nasty side effects?
What changes, if any, should be made to the systems of regulating the international economy, to prevent dreadful market failures?
Which existential risks – risks that could drastically impact human civilisation – deserve the most attention?

You get the idea. I’m sure you could add some of your own favourite questions to this list.

Some people may say that this is an unrealistic vision. So, in answer, let me spell out the factors I see as enabling this kind of super-intelligence within the next few decades. First is the accelerating pace of improvements in computer hardware.

This chart is from University of London researcher Shane Legg. On a log-axis, it shows the exponentially increasing power of super-computers, all the way from 1960 to the present day and beyond. It shows FLOPS – the number of floating point operations per second that a computer can do. It goes all the way from kiloflops through megaflops, gigaflops, teraflops, petaflops, and is pointing towards exaflops. If this trend continues, we’ll soon have supercomputers with at least as much computational power as a human brain. Perhaps within less than 20 years.

But will this trend continue? Of course, there are often slowdowns in technological progress. Skyscraper heights and the speeds of passenger airlines are two examples. The slowdown can sometimes be for intrinsic technical difficulties, but is more often because of lack of sufficient customer interest or public interest in even bigger or faster products. After all, the technical skills that took mankind to the moon in 1969 could have taken us to Mars long before now, if there had been sufficient continuing public interest.

Specifically, in the case of Moore’s Law for exponentially increasing hardware power, industry experts from companies like Intel state that they can foresee at least 10 more years’ continuation of this trend, and there have plenty of ideas for innovative techniques to extend it even further. It comes down to two things:

Is there sufficient public motivation in continuing this work?
And can some associated system integration issues be solved?

Mention of system issues brings me back to the list of factors enabling major progress with super-intelligence. Next is improvement with software. There’s lots of scope here. There’s also additional power from networking ever larger numbers of computer together. Another factor is the ever-increasing number of people with engineering skills, around the world, who are able to contribute to this area. We have more and more graduates in relevant topics all the time. Provided they can work together constructively, the rate of progress should increase. We can also learn more about the structure of intelligence by analysing biological brains at ever finer levels of detail – by scanning and model-building. Last, but not least, we have the question of motivation.

As an example of the difference that a big surge in motivation can make, consider the example of progress with another grand, historical engineering challenge – powered flight.

This example comes from Artificial Intelligence researcher J Storr Halls in his book “Beyond AI”. People who had ideas about powered flight were, for centuries, regarded as cranks and madmen – a bit like people who, in our present day, have ideas about superhuman machine intelligence. Finally, after many false starts, the Wright brothers made the necessary engineering breakthroughs at the start of the last century. But even after they first flew, the field of aircraft engineering remained a sleepy backwater for five more years, while the Wright brothers kept quiet about their work and secured patent protection. They did some sensational public demos in 1908, in Paris and in America. Overnight, aviation went from a screwball hobby to the rage of the age and kept that status for decades. Huge public interest drove remarkable developments. It will be the same with demonstrated breakthroughs with artificial general intelligence.

Indeed, the motivation for studying artificial intelligence is growing all the time. In addition to the deep human problems I mentioned earlier, we have a range of commercially-significant motivations that will drive business interest in this area. This includes ongoing improvements in search, language translation, intelligent user interfaces, games design, and spam detection systems – where there’s already a rapid “arms race” between writers of ever more intelligent “bots” and people who seek to detect and neutralise these bots.

AGI is also commercially important to reduce costs from support call systems, and to make robots more appealing in a wide variety of contexts. Some people will be motivated to study AGI for more philosophical reasons, such as to research ideas about minds and consciousness, to explore the possibility of uploading human consciousness into computer systems, and for the sheer joy of creating new life forms. Last, there’s also the powerful driver that if you think a competitor may be near to a breakthrough in this area, you’re more likely to redouble your efforts. That adds up to a lot of motivation.

To put this on a diagram:

We have increasing awareness of human-level reasons for developing AGI.
We also have maturing sub-components for AGI, including improved algorithms, improved models of the mind, and improved hardware.
With the Internet and open collaboration, we have an improved support infrastructure for AGI research.
Then, as mentioned before, we have powerful commercial motivations.
Adding everything up, we should see more and more people working in this space.
And it should see rapid progress in the coming decade.

An increased focus on Artificial General Intelligence is part of what I’m calling the Humanity+ Agenda. This is a set of 20 inter-linked priority areas for the next decade, spread over five themes: Health+, Education+, Technology+, Society+, and Humanity+. Progress in the various areas should reinforce and support progress in other areas.

I’ve listed Artificial General Intelligence as part of the project to substantially improve our ability to reason and learn: Education+. One factor that strongly feeds into AGI is improvements with ICT – including improvements in both ongoing hardware and software. If you’re not sure what to study or which field to work in, ICT should be high on your list of fields to consider. You can also consider the broader topic of helping to publicise information about accelerating technology – so that more and more people become aware of the associated opportunities, risks, context, and options. To be clear, there are risks as well as opportunities in all these areas. Artificial General Intelligence could have huge downsides as well as huge upsides, if not managed wisely. But that’s a topic for another day.

In the meantime, I eagerly look forward to working with AGIs to help address all of the top priorities listed as part of the Humanity+ Agenda.

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5 April 2010

The ascent of money: huge opportunities and huge risks

Filed under: books, Economics, predictability — David Wood @ 9:36 pm

The turning point of the American Civil War. The defeat of Napoleon. The lead-up to the French Revolution. The decline of Imperial Spain. These chapters of history all have intriguing back stories – according to Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, in his book “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World“.

The back stories, each time, refer to the strengths and weakness of evolving financial systems.

Appreciating these back stories isn’t just an intellectual curiosity. It provides rich context for the view that financial systems are sophisticated and complex entities that deserve much wider understanding. Without this understanding, it’s all too easy for people to hold one or other overly-simplistic understanding of financial systems, such as:

Financial systems are all fundamentally flawed;
Financial systems are all fundamentally beneficial;
There are “sure thing” investments which people can learn about;
Financial systems should be picked apart – the world would be better off without them;
Markets are inherently insane;
Markets are inherently sane;
Bankers (and their ilk) deserve our scorn;
Bankers (and their ilk) deserve our deep gratitude.

As the book progresses, Ferguson sweeps forwards and backwards throughout history, gradually building up a fuller picture of evolving financial systems:

The banking system;
Government bonds;
Stock markets;
Insurance and securities;
The housing market;
Hedge funds;
Globalisation;
The growing role of China in financial systems.

Like me, Ferguson was born in Scotland. I was struck by the number of Scots-born heroes and villains the book introduces, including an infamous Glaswegian loan shark, the creators of the first true insurance company, officers of the companies involved in the Anglo-China “Opium Wars”, and Andrew Law – instigator in France of one of history’s first great stock market bubbles. Of course, many non-Scots have starring roles too – including Shakespeare’s Shylock, the Medicis, the Rothschilds, George Soros, the managers of Enron, Milton Friedman, and John Maynard Keynes.

Time and again, Ferguson highlights lessons for the present day. Yes, new financial systems can liberate great amounts of creativity. Innovation in financial systems can provide significant benefits for society. But, at the same time, financial systems can be mis-managed, with dreadful consequences. One major contributory cause of mis-managing these systems is when people lack a proper historical perspective – for example, when the experience of leading financiers is just of times of growth, rather than times of savage decline.

Among many fascinating episodes covered in the book, I found two to be particularly chilling:

The astonishing (in retrospect) over-confidence of observers in the period leading up to the First World War, that any such war could not possibly happen;
The astonishing (in retrospect) over-confidence of the managers of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund, that their fund could not possibly fail.

Veteran journalist Hamish McRae describes some of the pre-WWI thinking in his review of Ferguson’s book in The Independent:

The 19th-century globalisation ended with the catastrophe of the First World War. It is really scary to realise how unaware people were of the fragility of those times. In 1910, the British journalist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, in which he argued that war between the great powers had become an economic impossibility because of “the delicate interdependence of international finance”.

In spring 1914 an international commission reported on the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. The British member of the commission, Henry Noel Brailsford, wrote: “In Europe the epoch of conquest is over and save in the Balkans perhaps on the fringes of the Austrian and Russian empires, it is as certain as anything in politics that the frontiers of our national states are finally drawn. My own belief is that there will be no more war among the six powers.”

And Ferguson re-tells the story of LTCM in his online article “Wall Street Lays Another Egg” (which also covers many of the other themes from his book):

…how exactly do you price a derivative? What precisely is an option worth? The answers to those questions required a revolution in financial theory. From an academic point of view, what this revolution achieved was highly impressive. But the events of the 1990s, as the rise of quantitative finance replaced preppies with quants (quantitative analysts) all along Wall Street, revealed a new truth: those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.

Working closely with Fischer Black, of the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, M.I.T.’s Myron Scholes invented a groundbreaking new theory of pricing options, to which his colleague Robert Merton also contributed. (Scholes and Merton would share the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics.) They reasoned that a call option’s value depended on six variables: the current market price of the stock (S), the agreed future price at which the stock could be bought (L), the time until the expiration date of the option (t), the risk-free rate of return in the economy as a whole (r), the probability that the option will be exercised (N), and—the crucial variable—the expected volatility of the stock, i.e., the likely fluctuations of its price between the time of purchase and the expiration date (s). With wonderful mathematical wizardry, the quants reduced the price of a call option to this formula (the Black-Scholes formula).

Feeling a bit baffled? Can’t follow the algebra? That was just fine by the quants. To make money from this magic formula, they needed markets to be full of people who didn’t have a clue about how to price options but relied instead on their (seldom accurate) gut instincts. They also needed a great deal of computing power, a force which had been transforming the financial markets since the early 1980s. Their final requirement was a partner with some market savvy in order to make the leap from the faculty club to the trading floor. Black, who would soon be struck down by cancer, could not be that partner. But John Meriwether could. The former head of the bond-arbitrage group at Salomon Brothers, Meriwether had made his first fortune in the wake of the S&L meltdown of the late 1980s. The hedge fund he created with Scholes and Merton in 1994 was called Long-Term Capital Management.

In its brief, four-year life, Long-Term was the brightest star in the hedge-fund firmament, generating mind-blowing returns for its elite club of investors and even more money for its founders. Needless to say, the firm did more than just trade options, though selling puts on the stock market became such a big part of its business that it was nicknamed “the central bank of volatility” by banks buying insurance against a big stock-market sell-off. In fact, the partners were simultaneously pursuing multiple trading strategies, about 100 of them, with a total of 7,600 positions. This conformed to a second key rule of the new mathematical finance: the virtue of diversification, a principle that had been formalized by Harry M. Markowitz, of the Rand Corporation. Diversification was all about having a multitude of uncorrelated positions. One might go wrong, or even two. But thousands just could not go wrong simultaneously.

The mathematics were reassuring. According to the firm’s “Value at Risk” models, it would take a 10-s (in other words, 10-standard-deviation) event to cause the firm to lose all its capital in a single year. But the probability of such an event, according to the quants, was 1 in 10^24—or effectively zero. Indeed, the models said the most Long-Term was likely to lose in a single day was $45 million. For that reason, the partners felt no compunction about leveraging their trades. At the end of August 1997, the fund’s capital was $6.7 billion, but the debt-financed assets on its balance sheet amounted to $126 billion, a ratio of assets to capital of 19 to 1.

There is no need to rehearse here the story of Long-Term’s downfall, which was precipitated by a Russian debt default. Suffice it to say that on Friday, August 21, 1998, the firm lost $550 million—15 percent of its entire capital, and vastly more than its mathematical models had said was possible. The key point is to appreciate why the quants were so wrong.

The problem lay with the assumptions that underlie so much of mathematical finance. In order to construct their models, the quants had to postulate a planet where the inhabitants were omniscient and perfectly rational; where they instantly absorbed all new information and used it to maximize profits; where they never stopped trading; where markets were continuous, frictionless, and completely liquid. Financial markets on this planet followed a “random walk,” meaning that each day’s prices were quite unrelated to the previous day’s, but reflected no more and no less than all the relevant information currently available. The returns on this planet’s stock market were normally distributed along the bell curve, with most years clustered closely around the mean, and two-thirds of them within one standard deviation of the mean. On such a planet, a “six standard deviation” sell-off would be about as common as a person shorter than one foot in our world. It would happen only once in four million years of trading.

But Long-Term was not located on Planet Finance. It was based in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Planet Earth, a place inhabited by emotional human beings, always capable of flipping suddenly and en masse from greed to fear. In the case of Long-Term, the herding problem was acute, because many other firms had begun trying to copy Long-Term’s strategies in the hope of replicating its stellar performance. When things began to go wrong, there was a truly bovine stampede for the exits. The result was a massive, synchronized downturn in virtually all asset markets. Diversification was no defense in such a crisis. As one leading London hedge-fund manager later put it to Meriwether, “John, you were the correlation.”

There was, however, another reason why Long-Term failed. The quants’ Value at Risk models had implied that the loss the firm suffered in August 1998 was so unlikely that it ought never to have happened in the entire life of the universe. But that was because the models were working with just five years of data. If they had gone back even 11 years, they would have captured the 1987 stock-market crash. If they had gone back 80 years they would have captured the last great Russian default, after the 1917 revolution. Meriwether himself, born in 1947, ruefully observed, “If I had lived through the Depression, I would have been in a better position to understand events.” To put it bluntly, the Nobel Prize winners knew plenty of mathematics but not enough history.

These episodes should remind us of the fragility of our current situation. Indeed, as one of many potential future scenarios, Ferguson candidly discusses the prospects for a serious breakdown in relations between China and the west, akin to the breakdown of relations that precipitated the First World War.

In summary: I recommend this book, not only because it is full of intriguing anecdotes, but because it will help to raise awareness of the complex impacts of financial systems. It will help boost general literacy about all aspects of money – and should, therefore, help us to be more effective in how collectively manage financial innovation.

Note: There are two editions of this book: one released in 2008, and one released in 2009. The latter has a fuller account of the recent global financial crisis, and for that reason, is the better one to read.

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