Future Portal-2050

The Future of Gaming

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 10:30:00 +0000

Future Planet- The Future of Gaming

The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, forecasts that by 2050 advances in Gaming technology will accelerate the emergence of a new form of Virtual Reality- Reality 2.0 integrated with society’s cultural, work and technological practices. It will also assist society in coping with the impact of Global Warming and other potential threats to life's survival on our future planet.

Gaming has now become a mainstream activity for all demographics- playable anywhere anytime, often for free. Simple combinatorial games such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush are now freely available via the Internet on mobile platforms, downloaded on a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. With the rapid penetration of the Internet, gaming is now a part of our everyday lives.

Now the art and science of Gaming encompasses dozens of new categories in the form of multiple overlapping genres, powerful games engines and mobile platforms, as well as AI enhanced virtual and augmented reality effects and glasses. And within each of those categories countless crossover combinations and alluring formats are evolving.

In the following analysis we will explore the major trends likely to have the biggest impact on the shaping of gaming and in the process the moulding of our future social environment.

Infinite reams have been written in gaming blogs about the pros and cons of the various specialised consoles and game-playing platforms - consoles such as PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Wii U and the new VR helmet entrants etc. Gaming has been building as a global form of entertainment for many years- advancing in popularity, sophistication and financial reach; from the earliest forms of arcade video games in the 60s to the 70s black-and-white 2D games like Pong, to the first primitive shooting games in early eighties

Then to the more complex life-like 3D war games such as Battlefield 3 in the nineties and more recently to games of fantasy, role playing, graphic realism, story telling and mind blowing virtual reality including Avatar, Second Life and its sequel High Fidelity in the present era.

The evolution of gaming is also about the rise of the new generation of multiplayer games and powerful PCs and laptops with multicore chipsets and GPUs, based increasingly on Linux variants such as SteamOS. Now the increasing popularity of the nextgen super mobile Phones and Pads such as the Tegra K1 android tablet with advanced features set to match the full power of consoles has arrived. But the choice is still expanding exponentially, with games increasingly cross-platform, with a common content base streamed from the Internet.

Today’s massive multiplayer Internet platforms exploit limitless Cloud capacity in the sky, capable of streaming to tens of thousands of players and onlookers simultaneously - as at the recent Twitch event Pokemon gameplay- similar to a world televised Chess championship except it's more interactive; the beginning of a new form of uber crowdgaming.

In the future games will also connect to home video screens and full 3D/UHD surround helmets, goggles and cockpits, providing similar effects in real life to the Minority Report or Star Wars Holodeck scenarios.

Of course there has also been a back reaction to this complexity - recapturing the simple joys of adolescence with countless indie mobile games on inexpensive phones, such as the previous Flappy Bird and its latest spinoff Flapmmo.com. But these still allow features such as increasing levels of difficulty, reward points and performance statistics etc.

So the world of gaming is now on a trajectory that requires it to offer ever more powerful graphics and special effects when the storyline requires it and yet more realism.

The trendline seems set for more complexity and real life emulation.

Enter physics.

Models based on the pervasive laws of physics can replicate the properties of the natural world using engines capable of generating rich 3D environments- algorithms that mimic real world phenomena like subtle lighting and shadow effects, the dynamics of wind and rain, sky and cloud textures, the deformation of materials, collision of particles, fire and heat implosions and the movements of flocks of birds, forests and rivers.

Beyond that is the physics and chemistry of human and animal movement, skin texture and facial expressions, including seamless actions and reactions mirroring complex cognitive behavioural and psychological responses in realtime. Also utilising biofeedback- pulse rates, respiration, body temperature etc, allowing the delivery of personal immersive and customisable experience back to the player. The layers of feedback and cumulative effects can eventually threaten to disrupt the timeline momentum of a game, so their introduction has to be carefully controlled.

As the quality and complexity of online games improves, more people spend more time playing them, until the game becomes an intrinsic part of their lives. Interactive role playing has also become key, where the player is part of the storyline and chooses the action pathway- evolving from the early games of Battlefield Galactica, Dungeons and Dragons and SteamPunk.

Now game playing has become a mega industry, with the classic Grand Theft Auto V generating $1billion in sales within three days of release. And a new set of game experiences in - Zelda, 300: Rise of an Empire, Civilisation V, Assassin's Creed, Brave New World, UE4, Ashphalt 8, San Andrea and Anomaly 2 playing out in true HD virtual reality, using ultra VR surround helmets, devices such as Microsoft 3D Kinect motion controller and imaging system as well as the lure of realistic graphics interfaces including direct Brain to Computer and Brain to Brain cognitive Interfaces, linked to full holographic sensory surround.

So ultimately we find ourselves in the another space altogether- the realm of augmented and virtual reality. And how do we know that these realities will mark the next phase of Gaming? Because they already do.

Virtual reality in entertainment has been around a long time - in sci-fi films such as The Matrix, Tron and Avatar. But from a gaming perspective also in early prototypes such as cockpit arcade games, flight simulators and popular 3D games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

But now VR technology has taken a gigantic leap in the form of the Oculus Rift and Morpheus headsets and other similar technologies that allow games to be visualised in 3D in synch with head and body movements linked to a kinetic controller. Although currently still restricted to developers, streamlined VR helmets and glasses will become a standard commodity item for game players and now the social media, selling for less than $100.

At the same time Augmented reality- allowing multiple layers of information and images and visual effects to overlay real world images has become almost commonplace with Google Glass now leading the charge, assisting doctors, engineers and machine operators to work in dangerous or restricted environments and advertisers and marketers to target potential customers on the move with ubiquitous product messages.

In the near future therefore it will become increasingly difficult to separate the ‘virtual’ from the 'real' - integrating game role playing with actions in real life.

As early as 2030 most of our lives will be immersed in this shared reality- linking game playing with art, entertainment, technology, science, work and daily life routines such as shopping, entertainment, social exchange and travel. Meanwhile the new world of startups is providing more creative and efficient ways of implementing everyday processes in ecommerce, the media, services and entertainment via mobile platforms and will increasingly be implemented via a games interface.

This will be accelerated by the Internet of Things or intelligent objects. The internet of objects will allow the built environment of human civilisation to be simulated and controlled via sensors and actuators allowing for cross or X-reality- the fusion of virtual and real processes, to become the norm.

Alternate realities will then surround us not only visually, but at all sensory levels- tactile, oral, taste and smell. They will also be populated by virtual life forms living within virtual societies, creating virtual communities endowed with their own sets of goals and behaviour patterns. These new realities will be multi- dimensional, operating in realtime surround simulations; increasingly inseparable from the real reality.

Artificial life or A-Life is also being created in the computer science laboratories and translated to gaming practice, based on the spontaneous computer generation of emergent behaviour of role playing avatars that mimic the dynamics of social and biological evolution. Virtual life avatars also simulate reality equipped with artificial intelligence, generating their own unique problem solving capability and supporting human needs.

By 2040 the Web will offer an all-immersive 3D environment combining elements of social networks, virtual worlds and geolocation, linked to a dense Google Earth Matrix; allowing closer interaction with friends and contacts in their daily lives and workplaces as well as workers in a remote wilderness or critical disaster area. These physical representations or models of our earth and its social environment represent mirror worlds and mirror communities.

Such communities already exist in the form of creative non-violent games such as Farmlife 2, The Sims 4 and Jurassic Park, limited only by the imagination of their creators and players; meshing with the real world of sensory information as its users navigate through their daily lives.

Prototypes of virtual worlds will then not be limited anymore to the relatively static domains of 20th century IMax cinemas, Museums and Planetariums- innovative as they may be. They will represent an emerging Metaverse of potential and realised realities- past, present and future. It’s then just a small step to create proto-reality spaces like the Star Treck Holodeck, not just for entertainment gaming but for real life enhancement and problem-solving.

By 2050 therefore gaming models will have begun the transformation into an integral part of a new human reality- Future Reality 2.0

In hindsight it can be seen that virtual, augmented and X- realities are early phases in an ongoing evolutionary transition towards the acceptance of virtual forms as part of everyday human co-existence. In the process we have crossed the threshold into a new dimension, extending human perception and interaction; linking with ubiquitous object sensory and actuator networks based on low cost wireless and optical technologies to create mixed realities.

Such a dense networked web will help integrate physical reality with virtual computing platforms generating the ability to react to real-world events in effective autonomous fashion. This creates a revolutionary relationship between human society and the Web, with the urgent need to understand the way our behaviour and future processes will become inevitably shaped by its cyberspace evolution.

In other words the world is evolving its own electronic nervous system via a dense mesh of neural-node type networks, eventually connecting and encompassing vast numbers of objects- living and non-living on the planet and in space. It is already beginning to host an immersive 3D sensory environment that combines elements of social and virtual worlds with increasingly complex geolocation mapping applications that allow the planning and monitoring of natural and urban ecosystems; providing a powerful tool to cope with climate and political change.

The approaching climate Armageddon will be a critical accelerator in the emergence of serious problem-solving gaming technology.

Rich two-way cross-reality experiences will be the norm, capable of streaming virtual and remote phenomena into the user’s physical space, via video feeds and images uploaded from object sensors and human brain machine interfaces. But this process can also extend into the past and future, allowing real-time access to historical and future trendline data streams, vital for analysis in business and the sciences as well as education and entertainment.

The implications and potential of these virtual advances are enormous, pointing the way towards the next momentous shift in the evolution of human life and our world- a fusion of real and virtual, past present and future-

Welcome to the new game of Reality 2.0.

But gaming technology is already becoming mainstream in the world of business, education, science, sports and war planning. This is so-called serious gaming. applied to activities such as event and conflict strategy, business decision-making, education and workplace operations- skills including flight simulator training, remote exploration- using robots and drones, heavy equipment maintenance, rescue missions and disaster management- all operated remotely like an arcade or console game.

The following examples provide some insight into the application of gaming principles in these fields-

Conflict and Disaster Gaming

Conflict and disaster management involves the application of strategic planning methods by defence and service strategists to evaluate and improve methods and performance in response to case study scenario options; testing the way a plan might play out or be affected by complex and unpredictable interactions; then mitigate any exposed risks.

Advanced gaming technologies such as the Oculus Rift/Facebook and Sony helmet and intelligent agents, assist in simulating the requisite immersive virtual reality to improve the flexibility, efficiency and quality of the decision-making involved.

Sports and Event Gaming

Gaming in the context of live sporting or entertainment events has recently received a boost using a system to provide every fan at a sporting event with a personalised phone wifi and location app- Mobbra, allowing them to receive background content such as player interviews, game statistics and interaction with other spectators. This turns such major events into a truly interactive gaming experience.

Crossover between virtual gaming and real life skills is also being extended to select gamers as competitive racing drivers at Nissan’s GT academy of Gran Turismo, on the basis of their virtual driving skills.

Science and Educational Gaming

Research in how people learn and interact in online gaming environments can assist in designing enhanced ways for science learning- integrating gaming technologies into classrooms and research facilities.

Digital games are an example of how technology can engage thousands of participants in solving problems - including scientific discoveries.

This symbiosis has been taken to a new level through the latest use of Crowdsourcing- using gaming to exploit the support and creativity of non-experts in a variety of scientific disciplines, to help solve complex problems, through the power of many minds working in tandem with computers and the Web.

For example Phylo is a game that allows users to contribute to the science of genetics by aligning sequences of DNA, RNA and proteins to find functional similarities and learn how they have evolved over time. Humans are better at solving such visual puzzles than computers and Phylo represents molecular groups by the alignment of vertical coloured pieces on a screen. There are currently 16,000 registered users working to solve such puzzles.

Foldit is another example; a protein folding game capable of solving puzzles such as the optimum folding patterns of chains of amino acid that make up the building blocks of enzymes and proteins and cracking the code of how an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus is created. It took the gamers only three weeks to create an accurate model of the solution using virtual amino acid strings on a video screen which had defied professionals for years.

Now the next level of gaming has been reached by connecting video game players directly to a real robot controlled biochemistry lab for synthesising and testing the RNA/Amino acid sequences.

In addition a number of phone app games have been developed by physicists to help non-experts understand what goes on in a particle collider including-

LHSee, designed for players to search for the elusive Higgs particle discovered last year at the CERN Large Hadron Particle Collider.

Another particle app- a retro-style arcade game, guides a character Ms. Particle-Man in a quest to find the Higgs particle while navigating mazes, dodging hazards and colliding with other elementary particle.

What began as a simple pinball-like game morphed into a much richer world inhabited by characters that took the form of various subatomic particles- photons, leptons, gluons, quarks and even dark matter play starring roles.

Video games are also having an enormous impact on children at school, particularly mobile gaming- providing a sense of empowerment. But that impact is often seen as disruptive to the learning process. So the aim is now to change that perception and harness the creative potential of gaming to enhance the child’s educational experience.

By the next decade it is likely the power of the Web will be fully deployed towards this new learning paradigm based on an immersive gaming virtual reality. This will be applied for all age groups including training for adults, supporting the full range of training needs from trade apprenticeships to strategic management skills. It will become a standard function of school and university teaching and research in the near future.

Game Theory Applications

As gaming becomes more scientific in its quest for greater realism and performance in the practical application to real world problem-solving, there will be an inevitable convergence with the theory of gaming.

Game Theory is about making better decisions to maximise value in games that simulate negotiation of power or asset status between individuals or groups. The gaming is based on an understanding of the mathematical rules governing the dynamics of the process- the probabilities of potential success or failure of an action or strategy, to determine the level of risk involved in achieving an outcome.

But there are many options governing the rules of a game- cooperative or non-cooperative negotiation, the sharing or hiding of knowledge, uncertain or incomplete information, multiple parties with different objectives, non financial goals, gaining a long or short term advantage and uncertain starting conditions and constraints etc.

Originally it was the domain of economists, used to model simple zero sum outcomes relating to economic or trade advantage, with the interaction between two parties.

But the scope of the theory has widened in recent times to include complex risk assessment in many domains- diplomacy between nation states in international relations, climate change, food and water security impacts on populations and competition between corporations in the technology, finance, energy and resource sectors.

Gaming is therefore likely to have a major impact on helping to solve humanity’s problems in the future- as a tool for finding more ethical and sustainable solutions to its needs.

End Game

The vision of a transition to a second reality through gaming is slowly coming together, but is just the beginning of solving a series of massive interlocking technological and engineering problems.

Nothing close to this level of VR realism had ever been attempted in gaming before.

The Oculus Rift can convert computer graphic images to full VR in simplified games environments such as Doom 3 and Gears of War, linked to Kinect devices simulating movement and motion gestures in 3D; but to capture full sensory information in realtime, seamlessly integrating it with the laws of physics and biology at the same time is another matter entirely

Both the computing and bandwidth capacity needed to drive the process would have to scale up an orders of magnitude at least, leveraging the latest supercomputers and prototype quantum processors. Bandwidth capacity could be achieved by utilising the latest breakthroughs in optical fibre technology at terabit speeds allowing multiple strands of an optical data streams.

But above all, the Web would have to be much cleverer, based on breakthroughs in AI, virtual SDN- Software Defined Neural Networks, Data Linked Architectures and Decision Engineering technologies to connect and route linked information packets to the appropriate decision nodes autonomously. This would utilise a more intelligent and sentient structure more like the human brain and a strategy optimised to gaming priorities. It would also have to incorporate a heterogeneous architecture allowing combinations of different processors such as GPUs with specialised capabilities to work seamlessly in harmony.

Such architectural advances are already on the drawing board including projects by DARPA and Google, incorporating the massive power of the next generation of superclouds and data centres, based on synchronising tens of millions of distributed decision processing nodes.

But Gaming as a paradigm is just starting to evolve into a more sophisticated form - a science which can be applied to solve scientific, business, technological and global governance problems, merging with existing AI and simulation software. It is now becoming an integral part of human culture with all human activity and innovation seen as a form of Game.

This is a pivotal moment in human history- the transition towards acceptance of virtual abstract and symbiotic forms as part of everyday human existence, in the process crossing the Rubicon into a new existence.

By 2050 this new era of a vastly extended multidimensional reality, linked directly to the senses, but still dependent on the present physical world which has evolved over the past 4.5 billion years, will be ushered in.

It will be the beginning of an adjustment to an immersive sensory environment- a Meta-World, that will combine elements of the social and physical, using increasingly sophisticated geospatial mapping and modelling; allowing virtualisation of complex processes, objects and environments, while at the same time enabling the autonomous management of the planet’s natural and urban ecosystems in the face of pervasive global warming.

It will take the form of a gigantic Game with every person a player- intimately involved in the global decision-making process. If the transition succeeds, the reward will be enormous- a new opportunity for humanity to reset civilisation within a more ethical and peaceful framework, coupled to an enormously creative scientific and philosophical awareness; capable of neutralising global warming and moving to the next level of human social evolution.

The Future of Reality 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 09:17:00 +0000

The Director of The Future Planet Research Centre- David Hunter Tow predicts the emergence of a new reality- Reality 2.0, based on a combination of advanced Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and the creativity of the emerging human Superorganism by 2040, as an essential step in helping avoid the potential destruction of human civilisation.

A schism is emerging in the fabric of reality from a human perspective.

This is not a rending of the spacetime continuum, but a radical shift in the reality of human perception and existence.

On the one hand is our existing notion of reality- Reality mark 1.0, governed by the four forces of nature- gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, that have shaped our world since its birth four and a half billion years ago and in which we as the modern human species have evolved.

Since our civilisation took off around 15,000 ya we have harnessed many forms of energy – water, wind, steam, electricity and nuclear. At the same time we have reaped the riches of the electromagnetic spectrum, using probes of all wavelengths for communication and the exploration of our universe. This has eventually enabled us to conceive a richer reality, to expand the old limits limits and begin to throw off the shackles of Reality 1.0.

And then about fifty years ago something changed – something profound; the arrival of computers that enabled humanity to digitise, process, store and disseminate the information substrate of our world – both natural and man-made, eventually guiding it through networks to a multiplicity of destinations.

Eventually this networked information infrastructure morphed into the global Internet and its acolyte the Web, enabling the emergence of the current ubiquitous information world and a new reality- Reality 2.0.

Within this new reality things have been moving at lightning speed. Basically our civilisation is rapidly taking a new form- becoming increasingly digital. All human processes and procedures encoded as algorithms and knowledge have been systematically digitised and at the same time have become largely dependent on the Internet- the primary driver of our digital revolution.

We are in fact, through our social networks, smartphones, tablets and future glasses, watches and wearable electronics, being rapidly linked in a giant multidimensional network as one living system, co-dependent - sharing a common computing/communication resource as one organism – a Superorganism.

And now the new Superorganism is starting to flex its muscles, to create its own world, shaping it to its own needs. And our reality will never be the same again.

The major enablers of Reality 2.0 include all forms of digital and virtual reality including-- Augmented reality, Simulated and Artificial reality as well as Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence – all based on the power of The Intelligent Web Mark 4.0.

We may now have the genesis of a radically different Reality, but it is still immutably coupled to our original Reality 1.0, because both are governed by the same laws of physics embedded in the wider Universe.

If Reality 1.0 fails – so does Reality 2.0 and any future realities, like a set of dominos – because the laws of nature such as Thermodynamics- governing entropy and the conservation of energy and information demand it. Our realities are small beer in the overall cosmic enterprise, centred around one small rocky planet of which there are probably millions in our galaxy, rotating around an average sized main sequence sun along with 10 billion similar others in one of 100 billion spiral galaxies in our universe, which in turn may be just one of a trillion others capable of supporting life.

So it’s early days in our evolutionary trajectory, but already an extremely significant shift has begun for every human being.

This might suggest we are heading towards Ray Kurzweil’s fabled Singularity- an unlimited technological nirvana in which our control over the universe and its unlimited power will be itself unlimited. But reality is never that simple.

Along the way there’s been a complication- Global Warming. And global warming is about to put a giant spanner in human hubris.

Two thousand years ago there were less than 100 million homo sapiens on planet earth. One thousand years ago still less than 300 million; a hundred years ago a billion inhabitants and now the world’s population has exploded to 7 billion, heading towards 9 billion by 2050.

Our use of fossil fuels has also increased, over100 fold in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution; but particularly over the last fifty years-and that’s when things started to really get out of control. The level of carbon in our atmosphere has now reached the apocryphal 400 parts per million, most of which has been generated by use of fossil fuels, the highest since early humans walked the earth. And still our appetite for oil and gas and coal continues to soar.

Global warming or more euphemistically Climate Change continues unabated, despite all the good works relating to renewable energy, sustainable and conservation technologies. In addition according to the latest expert analysis, we are depleting our planet’s resources such as food varieties, productive soil, fresh water, clean air, animal and plant biodiversity and many minerals, at a rate equivalent to 150% of its sustainable capacity.

There’s not much you can seriously plan for without factoring the impact of global warming into the equations and models of the future- whether it’s war or peace, food and water security, human migration, education and health, engineered infrastructure, social institutions and democracy. But many Governments and fossil fuel producers still blandly play out scenarios which largely ignore or downplay its impact.

As a result Reality 1.0 is rapidly becoming unsustainable for human survival with the inevitable collapse of our civilisation likely to be getting very imminent by 2030; just in time for the next generation, when the cycle of growth in the major economies of the world will likely come to a grinding halt and then go backwards.

In addition, climate change together with hyperfast environmental and technological change is at risk of being amplified at the social level by The Darwin Factor or Evolutionary Thrashing

Evolutionary thrashing is the sting in the tail of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Evolution only works when the system that is evolving, has adequate time to adapt to its changing environment; by mutating its DNA in the case of biological systems or by changing its planning and production models in the case of manmade systems such as cars, in response to its customer’s needs. Either way if the system doesn’t adapt quickly it usually dies or goes out of business- which it regularly does.

In other words, evolutionary thrashing occurs when evolution doesn’t have time to do its coping thing before the next wave of change occurs. And if this keeps happening in accelerating mode then the system will never be able to reach an accommodation with its environment; which generally means it’s doomed.

In the meantime on the technological front there’s no shortage of fixes for rapid fire climate variation, including new types of renewable energy and more efficient methods of utilising existing energy sources- even fossil ones.

All these fixes are largely now dependent on the ubiquitous power of the Internet/Web and here’s the problem. This jewel in the crown of our civilisation is now under heavy fire not only from trashing due to the violent tantrums of global weather, but from criminal gangs and autocratic regimes seeking to hack its vital knowledge. Without access to this massive global computational/knowledge powerhouse, increasingly globally distributed through Clouds and mobile technology, most of the R&D and production technology driving today’s applications and services- from engineering to manufacturing, to construction and agriculture and communication, will falter and eventually implode.

Previous analysis in this blog has predicted the potential risks if the imbalance between the needs of society and available computational capacity widens. If global warming continues on its upward trajectory and the cost of repairing the damaged infrastructure, both physical and social, continues to escalate, eventually most of the earth’s remaining resources will be depleted just in the struggle to survive and we will be left without the means to overcome the basic problem.

It’s a vicious circle. Humans need to get global warming and cyber sabotage under control in order to avoid its capacity to trash our ecosystems and infrastructure, or else we lose the capacity to maintain the core services of our fragile civilisation. But to get the impacts of runaway warming under control and maintain our standard of living, we need to utilise every advance in technology and creative computational power at our disposal, which is primarily dependent on the Internet and World Wide Web.

So if Reality 1.0 is rapidly becoming unsustainable, how do break out of this catch 22 and transition to a better life in Reality 2.0. How do we prevent the quagmire of Reality Mark 1 from sucking the life out of our planet and us.

The answer is very carefully, using the most advanced technology and human innovation we can muster, from a meta vantage perspective.

Roman generals did the same thing. When they needed to get a true picture of the progress of battle they stood on the nearest hill not down in the chaos of the fighting.

Which brings us to the centrepiece of the Reality problem and perhaps its solution.

Firstly we have no choice in this transition as a society. Our current reality has been irredeemably damaged and is provably unsustainable. This is not our planet’s problem- it’s our mindless stewardship of it.

So our attitude has to change. There is no alternative. If we don’t reduce fossil fuel consumption a Venusian sauna climate will make life a living hell for future generations. Our economic mindset also has to change. It is locked into a perpetual growth/profit cycle which is demonstrably suicidal. So our transition to Reality 2.0 needs to be radically but delicately managed through a new meta medium and a new mindset.

This new medium or layer of social and technological change needs to act as a buffer, allowing us to remediate Reality 1.0 without being swept up in its carnage, while at the same time transitioning to a new level of cognition.

That extra layer will be a combination of advanced forms of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence combined with human ingenuity and compassion.

Artificial Intelligence- AI, is already embedded in thousands of processes and algorithms including – the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases, the optimisation of the design and production of artefacts - whether electronic, biological, mechanical or chemical, with the capability to become automatically more flexible through self-adaptation. AI technology is increasingly based on many processes that are innate in nature including- evolutionary algorithms, rule based cellular automata, neural networks, the human immune system and insect search and foraging techniques.

At the same time a quantum leap in the range of the Internet is about to explode through the Internet of Things in which any object equipped with an intelligent interface such as a sensor or actuator and even a brain/computer interface can be connected to the Web and managed as easily as a Personal Computer or phone.

This will be a major step in connecting the world- our original reality, with the emerging one.

Virtual Reality is also making great strides in creating simulations of natural organisms and events from viruses to dinosaurs as well as increasingly life-like gaming, providing a potential escape hatch in the form of parallel worlds. It means we can already visit and explore the wonders of this world without impacting its sanctity. It can enhance our ability to apply intelligent solutions to simulate and manage the weather, harness the sun’s incredible power, design exotic materials based on super-strong grapheme and invisibility optics, perform remote surgery and space station repairs, manufacture organs using 3D layering techniques, use virtual money and understand mass human behaviour through analysis of social network data. We have also started to create virtual life through the medium of cyber-agents, robotics and synthetic cells.

In other words we are beginning to create a simulated reality of our world and life based on the power of the Web and human creativity.

By 2040 the power of Reality 2.0 will be hugely amplified by the mind power of the emerging Superorganism – the connected brain power of 8 billion cooperating humans linked to the computational capacity of a quantum Internet as well as an Internet of trillions of intelligent objects.

This may just provide the breathing space and intelligence we need to remediate the damage we have caused to our pristine planet.

But it’s very easy to forget that all this promise is contingent on the successful and ongoing reclamation of Reality 1.0 – the avoidance of a hollowed out planet. It’s not a one-off. This will remain a monumental challenge for future generations.

All our technological and social progress will be lost in the blink of an eye if destruction from an out of control planet, short term greed or ongoing conflict continues to dominate out future.

These are not sci-fi fantasies. Humans are quite capable of destroying their future and have come perilously close to it many times in their short history. It’s basically just luck that we’re still here.

But if we can finally extract ourselves from the day to day confusion and focus on regaining the long term potential benefits of a sustainable and peaceful world, eventually our two realities will seamlessly merge and our future descendants will thank us.

The Fuuture of Surveillance

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:34:00 +0000

Future Portal - The future of Surveillance

The author David Hunter Tow, predicts that by 2030 the equivalent of a global PreCognition machine will be in operation with everyone a Person of Interest as portrayed in The Minority Report film.

The state of surveillance and reconnaissance technology and its multiple applications is now evolving at warp speed creating unprecedented Future Shock to civilisation’s social fabric.

Surveillance is already big business- very big business and is likely to continue to expand exponentially into the foreseeable future, attracting the good, the bad and the ugliest elements of society.

The problem is that without careful controls, the runaway consequences of such a pervasive and intrusive phenomenom is likely to be catastrophic for humanity.

The main technological and social components of the global surveillance trendline are already emerging; woven together into a dense matrix from which there will be no easy escape.

They include-

The Knowledge Web

The most important component is the Web/Internet itself- the core asset and artefact of our civilisation, leveraging the knowledge of our society.

This massive information network is already evolving into something beyond society’s capacity to control- the means of generating and accessing all civilisation’s knowledge content and application. It now connects over 3 billion humans and in the near future trillions of computing devices, machines and sensors. It already allows a dense interchange of information, expertise and ideas relating to the sciences, arts and social experience that support all aspects of human existence on planet earth.

All knowledge advances, including not just basic data, but the algorithms, processes and techniques used to processs information, are being funnelled at hyperspeed into its heart, like a giant black hole swallowing the energy of billions of suns.

And emerging from the other side just like a white hole is a whole new universe- the promise of a cornucopia of untold intellectual riches and wisdom. Giant science and social observatories are now being constructed- models containing trillions of variables to assist in forecasting the future; reducing the risks that could wipe out our world in the blink of an eye- catastrophic economic, environmental or existential collapse.

The Web itself is rapidly moving to the next level- becoming more intelligent and self-determining; adapting and learning with the computational intelligence of billions of human and cyberagent minds; rapidly taking on the characteristics of a living superorganism.

Once encapsulated, content can be mixed and matched, processed and recycled ad infinitum just like matter, until it finally emerges in a form that in the best scenario will benefit humanity and allow it survive and achieve its potential in the future.

But there is an alter ego- a dark side to the Internet/Web. In order to achieve this magical transformation, this perpetual knowledge generator at the heart and soul of our civilisation, it must also become a superb surveillance machine, with intelligent sensors to act as its eyes and ears- everywhere.

The following categories of sensors are now commonly used to support the Internet/Web

Embedded Sensors-

Sensors are incredibly important, because without them to monitor the processes and systems of our planet, including our own bodies, our wonderful chocolate factory would quickly die. It can only operate as a supersystem if it is fed a continuous diet of up to date, relevant and reliable information.

By linking to a variety of intelligent sensors, some incorporating the distributed ability to process signals using artificial intelligence, the Web can capture the raw material it requires to weave our social matrix and is already doing so in increasing volumes, as its appetite for problem solving expands.

Sensors therefore must therefore also evolve to become smarter- becoming more like multi-component systems, which can now be constructed in a vast variety of forms. For example- as force and field detectors embedded in the limbs of autonomous robots, capable of working on complex tasks with humans; as clouds of tiny artificial insects or smart dust that can automatically cooperate to monitor deadly environments without risking human lives; as nano-biosensors small enough to enter and navigate human cells to keep us alive; as the instrumentation of unmanned drones capable of locking on to a target and activating a kill switch against human beings; and as road location catseyes, continuously communicating with driverless cars to avoid accidents and gridlock.

But rapidly changing climate and social change triggered by global warming will be the main driver for this technology in the future, requiring intelligent sensors embedded in every form of natural and man made ecosystem; allowing for constant adaptation and maintenance, utilising closed feedback loops linked to the Intelligent Web for its solutions.

Such smart sensor networks are already operating in every sphere of work and social activity including-

Maintaining engineered Infrastructure- embedded in roads, bridges, dams, pipelines, grids and power stations.

Monitoring ecosystems- natural systems such as-forests, rivers, water, soil, air and energy resources providing feedback to regulatory authorities to protect their integrity and survival.

Coordinating manufacturing and logistical facilities- factories, plants, container centres, warehouses, ports. airports, railways, traffic systems etc to efficiently manage the manufacture and delivery of products and services.

Personalising Health - advances in smart phones and mobile technology equipped with biosensors have opened up unlimited opportunities to monitor and support an individual’s health needs on an unprecedented personal basis- delivering just in time interventions linked to the latest diagnostic and treatment algorithms on the Web. Also using nanosensors to track disease pathways at the cellular and molecular level.

Managing Disasters and Conflict - protecting the security of those living in war and conflict zones – including law enforcement precincts in cities and urban areas; using a range of sensors to protect and monitor the security of communities and public assets. These are increasingly delivered by smartphones as well as pervasive CCTV cameras, mobile robots and in the future small agile drones.

Satellites / Probes – Eyes in the Sky-

Ssensor systems, involving high resolution cameras and global positioning devices attached to space based telescopes, aircraft, balloons, unmanned drones, explorers and probes of all types are now widely used to detect the electromagnetic spectrum of the planet’s resources in most wavelengths- optical, infrared, ultra violet, radio etc. The results are used to feed data to web based or smartphone apps for analysis covering- weather forecasts, disaster interventions, animal distribution, ecosystem health, 24 hour communications and video news footage..

.Military / Spy networks - satellites track the world’s most secret military and government installations and test sites using software that enables surveillance of the remotest areas on the planet. This information is also used for research, using images from Google Earth satellite maps to replace traditional archaeological methods; by Governments to monitor border integrity and NGOs to safeguard wildlife against poaching in protected areas. Powerful probes and remote autonomous vehicle landers are increasingly used in space exploration to obtain fly by views of planets, moons and asteroids and in the future mining options.

Drones / UAVs – these are likely to become common in the future, sharing airspace with piloted aircraft. They are currently used for surveillance spying and kill missions, but in the future will be used for reconaissance by most governments, NGOs and private corporations.

They can monitor a range of information sources, vastly reducing the operational risk in conflict areas; allowing surveillance by sensors that can record full motion video, infrared patterns. radio and mobile phone signals. They can also refuel on remote short airstrips, extending effective air range by thousands of kilometres.

Nextgen drones will be autonomous and smaller, able to navigate and eventually make target decisions, controlled by complex algorithms and Web feeds; eliminating human operators from the decision loop entirely. They will be used by every type of organisation - criminal networks, private security businesses, NGOs and social activist groups, providing a variety of logistical, security, news gathering and research services.

But many legal, ethical and regulatory issues remain to be resolved before UAVs will be able to operate in lockstep with human controlled vehicles. There is now fierce pushback by the community against another method of individual privacy invasion.

Intelligent Devices

With the imminent arrival of the Internet of Everything the focus will be on every object in relation to surveillance - machines, electronic devices and systems that can communicate with other machines as well as human users will be the first objects of interest to be caught in the net. These will include complex systems such as supersmart phones and robots as well as everyday home and office devices such as cameras, TVs, printers, video recorders, toys, game consoles, microwave ovens, toasters, fridges etc, all equipped with forms of embedded sensors and actuators including chipped product and ID codes. Eventually trillions of such active objects including life forms – plants, animals and humans- will be linked to the Internet through a variety of communication protocols including including DNA sequences and brain interfaces.

Robots of all types will be pervasive in the home, workplace and industrial areas including- humanoids, capable of intereacting and cooperating with humans in work areas such as retail stores and factories or performing home support services- initially cleaning, food delivery, health and companion support. They will eventually be capable of more sophisticated decision-making and autonomous operation equal to humans in every activity and finally acting in surveillance / supervisory mode.

Social Networks /Media

Humans are also expanding their remit in the surveillance game in the form of citizen reporters, scientists and observers, using smartphones to gather information from their local environment, then feeding it through social network media. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter already provide feedback on the latest breaking news across the globe, particularly in entertainment, crime and disaster areas, often creating ad hoc networks to provide alternative coverage when standard communication fails as in Haiti- offering critical on the ground suppport and impact assessment as first responders.

Phone cameras have already proved the single most important surveillance tool available to communities in times of crisis; also a tool for democracy that has already proved crucial in capturing proof of abuse during the Arab Spring. Citizen reporters, and community activists equipped with such devices constantly feed the Web with realtime events, capturing evidence of illegal activities and promoting events of public interest through crowdsourcing. The social media therefore provides a significant back channel in disseminating realtime information around the globe like a Mexican wave, as well as signalling emerging trends such as disease epidemics and political developments.

In addition, activist NGOs, whistleblowers and mass movements- Greenpeace, Wikileaks and Occupy all contribute to this channel, providing background monitoring and surveillance of big business and Government corruption; a form of ethical surveillance crucial to a democracy.

Cyber Espionage

Cyber espionage is now rife around the world. Serious cyber attacks are a daily occurrence particularly between nations such as China, US, Russia, Britain, Iran and Israel, with the intent of covert acquisition of national secrets, Intellectual property, financial assets and personal information.

But cyber espionage is also a form of intrusive surveillance.

Current cyber malware such as Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu and Miniduke are all primarily surveillance and reconnaissance weapons capable of performing spy missions as well as crippling vital target infrastructure. This routinely involves copying critical screen images, websites, emails, documentation and network traffic in general.- performing extensive data mining, copying, transmitting and deleting files for espionage purposes.

The Pentagon’s Plan x is a good example of the exploding surveillance syndrome now overtaking society. It aims to create a new surveillance and operations system to map the digital battlefield of cyberspace and define a playbook for deploying cyberweapons. It will provide a realtime graphical rendering of this cyberworld showing ongoing operations and realtime flows of networked data around the world like a large scale computer game. This visualisation or surveillance model of cyberspace requires intensive reconaissance of both friend and foe. But it is already out of date- a model more appropriate for the sci-fi films of the nineties. It will soon be superseded by a much bigger prescence – a multi-dimensional cognitive model in which players are linked directly to the Intelligent Web.

The US is also assembling a vast intelligence surveillance apparatus to collect information about its own citizens as well as those overseas actors perceived as terrorist risks, integrating the resources of the Department of Homeland Security, military , local police departments and FBI. In the near future this will be expanded to encompass the whole range of US and overseas allied security agencies. This machine will collate information about thousands of US citizens and residents many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing, to assist the FBI initially in its ongoing eternal and surreal war against home grown terrorism.
According to news reports there are now almost 4000 federal, state and local organisations working on domestic counterterrorism projects, following the 2001 attacks. Obviously this is getting out of hand, making it virtually impossible to achieve any realistic goal for achieving a coordinated system.
There are also a number of legislative bills relating to Internet surveillance awaiting ratification including – SOPA, PIPA and CISPA. The first two speak to copyright protection of content on the web threatening to close down any remotely implicated site, which opponents say infringes on the right to privacy and freedom of access to the Web; while the third relates to the monitoring of private citizen information or spying on the general public, in the name of investigating hypothetical cyber threats and ensuring the security of networks against cyber attack.
All three have met with fierce opposition from advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as ignoring the legal rights of supposed infringers and excessively intrusive and draconian.

Future Shock

While the benefits of the future Interne/Web are enormous in terms of greater knowledge leading to a higher quality of life and a safer existence for humanity, there are concurrent significant downsides which will quickly escalate, potentially leading to a loss of control of humanity over its destiny.
The existential risk is that transition to such an always on and pervasive entity as a global surveillance machine, monitoring a large proportion of the planet’s natural, engineered and cultural environment, could lead to a big brother society in which everyone is a person of interest.
The major disruptions noted as already emerging, relate to the inevitable erosion of citizen privacy and equitable access to the the Internet in the name of security, with new US laws such as SOPA and CISPA due to be enacted. These purportably aim to provide greater protection for intellectual property and personal rights but at the same time have the potential to erode democratic rights.
In other words the beneficial potential of the Internet/Web is at risk of being subverted, emerging instead as a vast spying or surveillance machine.
But this is just the beginning of a slippery slope in human rights attrition.
The surveillance mechanisms outlined will inevitably lead to much greater personal freedoms restriction, which in turn will increase pressure for some form of predictive capacity to choke off dissent. This is likely to escalate no matter what legal safeguards are adopted.

In the paranoid world of the spy/surveillance agencies, networks will become impossibly entangled – much more so than in the current geopolitical/security maze. If there are 4000 domestic agencies in the US currently involved in covert surveillance, how many more are there internationally and how many will there be involved in the surveillance game when the cyberespionage paranoia really explodes?

Who is friend or foe when every nation and major organisation is spying on every other?
As mentioned, prediction/forecasting models are already in widespread use – and so they should be in a world threatened by global warming and economic collapse. Projects such as the FuturICT Social Observatory, although not gaining EU funding in the immediate future will continue, monitoring vast amounts of information, searching for trends and elusive signals to save the planet.
It is good science when forecasting is applied to reduce risks to our civiliisation. But when such mechanisms abuse power by tightening control over populations it is the beginning of an unravelling of democratic standards.

Autocratic and fascist states throughout history have applied such techniques to their people, punishing political enemies and dissidents in the process. The current surveillance technologies amplify this potential for misuse a thousandfold, exploiting the Web as civilisation’s greatest asset for potential benefit, turning it instead into a quasi Surveillance/Precog machine with the capacity to predict an individual’s movements and actions.

Governments have lost the ability to solve this problem.

Even if there is the will it has become too complex.

The Future is at a tipping point- and the outcome does not look promising.

Future Cyberwars- War of the Worlds

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:19:00 +0000

The author provides an analysis of the striking similarities between the 19th century H G Wells narrative- War of the Worlds and the CyberWar scenarios now looming a hundred years later between nations on Earth. The War of the Worlds - a science fiction novel written by H G Wells in 1895-97, tells of the invasion of Earth by an alien race of Martians.
It is one of the earliest stories that forecasts a major conflict between humans and a species of technologically advanced aliens. The storyline can be interpreted in a number of ways but generally it provides a glimpse of a dystopian future in which forces of evil threaten to destroy human civilisation through the use of superior technology without regard to the planet’s inhabitants.

In terms of today’s cyber advances the storyline now seems rather naïve, but its influence over a hundred years ago was immense; combining the shock of new technology with rampant terrorism and the threat of annihilation. It spawned half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, comic book adaptations and a television series. But its main impact remains the terror that can be inflicted on a population by unknown forces outside human control.
Today humankind finds itself on the cusp of another War of the Worlds. But this time it’s far more terrifying and real. Instead of an alien species wielding weapons of mass destruction, the main protagonists are superpowers wielding equally destructive cyber weapons, with the forces of good and evil becoming increasingly blurred.

Now with the leaked admission that the Obama administration authorised development and implementation of the Stuxnet virus in conjunction with Israel, and probably the subsequent development of a much more dangerous virus- Flame, the War of Worlds scenario may be beginning all over again.
Stuxnet was designed to covertly sabotage the operation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment centrifuges- around a fifth of the total used for the separation of radioactive isotopes, slowing down the Iranian nuclear program. But the virus inadvertently leaked to the wider Internet allowing cyber security agencies to disembowel its modus operandi.

Flame is apparently a much more ambitious and dangerous worm, which has been stalking super sensitive information on the net for several years, primed to spy on and steal information from computers, initially across the Middle East. In the process it performs extensive data mining- copying, transmitting and deleting files for espionage purposes at will. The code’s malicious actions went undetected by 43 antivirus programs before finally being outed.

This massive computer worm- around 20Mb of code, has been designed more as a complete malware ecosystem than a single virus, even rumoured to contain its own App store which can be customised and mutated to attack different applications and achieve different goals.

Most significantly Flame appears to be part of a continuing State sponsored hit campaign against Iran and other perceived enemies of the free world, using a different team of programmers and platform from Stuxnet, but commissioned by the same covert agency- likely the NSA in the US, It shares several hallmark features of its predecessors- Stuxnet and Duqu and was probably tested at Dimona – the HQ of Israel’s atomic weapons development site.

Like Duqu, Flame is primarily a reconnaissance weapon, able to copy screen images , websites, emails and network traffic and according to the Russian based Kaspersky Security Lab currently dissecting the virus, it has infected around 1000 computers. Iran confirmed that computers belonging to several high ranking officials appear to have also been penetrated by Flame.
One of its best tricks was to initiate a so-called Collision attack on the Microsoft Terminal Services encryption algorithm. This allows it to spoof the Microsoft Digital Certificate signing service by simulating a legitimate security update from Microsoft, using a cheat code to install entire copies of malicious code automatically.

But Flame’s real significance lies not just in its potential to perform spy missions and cripple specialised target machines such as centrifuges, but its capacity to destroy national infrastructure and engineering/manufacturing systems in general. This is what differentiates it from a less potent weapon of espionage and escalates it to an all-out agent of war. Its sheer breadth of functionality sets it apart.
Flame is therefore a precursor of the next-gen virtual machines of destruction in a world which is already primed for conflict!
Whoever is controlling Flame has now ordered it to self-destruct and erase all traces of its existence to avoid risk of its escape into cyberspace like Stuxnet, as well as prevent duplication of its code by outsiders.
According to experts, a self-immolation or "suicide" module can locates every Flame file on disk, removing it and then overwriting the disk with random characters to prevent anyone obtaining information about the original infection.

But too late. It is already in the hands of numerous security experts and probably criminal and Black Hat groups as well. So it is only a matter of time before a new improved mutant version of Flame appears.
And this process of enhancement will continue with ever-escalating frequency.

Pandora’s cyber box has now been prized open, with the Obama administration being accused of human rights failures on two fronts. First the use of drones to arbitrarily assassinate state enemies and now its use of covert cyber actions to disable enemy infrastructure.

This failure of US moral standing has immense consequences for the world as a whole.

Now all bets are off and an era of global Cyberwars has been unleashed – unstoppable even if wiser heads realise the immensity of the risk it presents to future world peace and stability.

The strategists at the Pentagon and NSA have broken a cardinal rule.
They have assumed that information and knowledge can be contained and controlled in the same way as warships, jet fighters and high tech weaponry. But information is not like guns. It inevitably leaks- particularly in the new digital age, regardless of how many Top Secret stamps and digital certificates are placed on it. Any covert virus no matter how well camouflaged will inevitably reveal itself as it spreads via the Internet and the Planet’s networks, acting as a template for future incursions.

Criminal cartels, terrorist groups and rogue states- in fact any group that can harness the talents of gifted software specialists can now play with the same toys as the big boys. Size doesn’t matter anymore!!

This is simple physics and is why the US’s obsessive paranoia relating to the Bradley Manning and Wikileaks prosecutions is also doomed to rebound in the longer term. If anyone is to blame for massive leaks such as CableGate, it’s the US government and its incredibly sloppy information containment and access protocols; allowing a low level administrative clerk access to data which supposedly is inimical to national security- able to be routinely copied to a lady Gaga CD.

Now it’s happened all over again with the release of the Stuxnet and Flame viruses.

But apart from the blatant hypocrisy and buck passing involved in this otherwise theatre of the absurd, the information would have eventually leaked regardless. And the argument that it is in the national interest for citizens not to know how their governments are spoofing the other side- aka diplomacy- is also a remnant of medieval times.

With the admission that the use of cyber technology against a State enemy was approved from the President’s Office down, blow-back has begun. Every nation, friendly or otherwise will now develop a similar capability and use it if necessary for its own strategic purposes.

This is not an overly difficult or expensive exercise. Every country such as- Israel, Estonia, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela and Somalia already has access to the same equally creative and intelligent minds as the US and often more so. Any State or organisation for that matter can establish a group of twenty or so elite software engineers and replicate Flame or a more potent version of it in the same timeframe. In the recent global CyberOlympics the Netherlands came first, while in the Cyber Defence University challenge 2011, Russian and Chinese teams from St Petersburg and Zhejianc trounced the elite US colleges.

The roadmap to full blown Cyberwars is now clear to see.
Cybercrime is the precursor of Cyberwar. It is a relatively new phenomenon but because of its recent scale and game-changing implications for both government and industry it has rapidly become the dominant risk theme of the 21st century.
The opportunity for cyber attacks grows daily as corporations and governments continue to amass information about individuals in complex networks across the Web and at the same time new generations of cyber activists, some motivated purely by money and others by the desire to expose and destabilise corporations and governments, continue to hack into organisational secrets.

In a recent Norton Cybercrime Report, it was reported that breaches of various types claimed 431 million adult victims last year, with 73% of adults in the US alone incurring estimated financial losses of $US140 billion. As a criminal activity, cyber incursion is now almost as lucrative as the illegal drug trade. The total cost last year, including lost productivity and direct cash losses resulting from cyber intrusions associated with viruses, malware and identity theft is estimated at $US 388 billion.

The security firm McAfee also in a recent report, listed a range of cybercrime technologies deployed including- denial of service attacks, malware, spam, phishing, social site engineering, mobile phone viruses, botnets and phone sms Trojan messages. Also more recently, hacking drones- small remote controlled unmanned aerial vehicles- UAVs, which can automatically detect and compromise wireless networks, by locating a weak spot in a corporate internet connection, have been used. To make matters worse, the first flaws in the advanced encryption standard used for Internet banking and financial transactions as well as Government secure transmission, have been discovered.

But most worrying, security experts from McAfee have confirmed the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving infiltration of the networks of 72 organisations around the world including- the UN, the governments of the US, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada, ASEAN, the International Olympic committee and an array of companies from defence contractors to high-tech enterprises including Google- with most of the victims unaware until recently of the breaches.

This represents a massive loss of economic advantage- possibly the biggest transfer of IP wealth in history. Currently every company in every industry of significant size, with valuable IP, contracts or trade secrets is potentially under attack and this will inevitably extend to smaller organisations such as strategic hitech start-ups in the future. At the national level it involves exposure of sensitive state secrets including policy intentions and decisions covering all levels and functions of Government- trade, defence and industry policy.

The stakes are huge; a challenge to economies and global markets from both an enterprise and State perspective. This is an intolerable situation. But because it has exploded at such speed, the response to date has largely been fragmented and ineffective.

But an even more ominous threat has now emerged- the Mafia State. Mafia states include criminal groupings such as the Russian, Bulgarian and Eurasian cartels, now using cyber technology, to achieve global reach. Their mission is not just to hack credit cards and phish identities, but to infiltrate Governments at the highest level- the networks of power including senior politicians and bureaucrats, security and police department heads and major corporate executives.

Mafia dominated States include- Russia, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Kosovo, the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Guinea. Because of the global economic crisis they have been able to acquire valuable companies and assets at bargain prices and because of record unemployment levels have been able to hire experts in every field relevant to their operations- lawyers, accountants and now software engineers. This is about much more than pillaging credit cards and trade data or bringing down unpopular sites. It’s about creating a criminal ecosystem that challenges democracy.

On a global scale, therefore cybercrime is already morphing into full blown Cyberwar!

The world's superpowers have already begun to introduce new cyber-policies to desperately protect their intellectual property, infrastructure and financial assets, as well control the flow of information within their populations. Despite their tenuous cooperation to eliminate the threat of cyber intrusion, each is also covertly preparing for the new era of Cyber Espionage.

The US is working feverishly on Plan X devised by the Defence Advanced Research Agency - turning to the private sector, universities and even computer game companies as part of a grand effort to fast track its cyber warfare capabilities. Plan X’s goal is to dominate the new digital playing field, just as it has in the past- the traditional physical battlefield; wishful thinking at best and at worst living in a dangerous delusional bubble.

The earlier US Cyber Manifesto has also been stymied. This policy aimed at supporting open access to the Internet while at the same time pursuing a policy of aggressive physical deterrence against any foreign powers such as China and Iran or organisations like WikiLeaks, which attempt to penetrate US computer systems. But even this policy is meeting resistance from vested interests on issues of regulatory control and government surveillance of business system security.

The European Convention on Cybercrime is currently bogged down because EU governments are reluctant to share sovereign IT information with other powers, even if friendly. But this may change in the future as the pressure on the Eurozone to become a United States of Europe intensifies.
China on the other hand is going for the jugular, establishing The State Internet Information Office with the express purpose of regulating and controlling its vast internet population. It has even considered building an alternative Internet to sidestep the US controlled ICAAN if a plan for an alternative UN-ITU managed forum cannot be agreed. Other dictatorial regimes across the world, from Syria to Saudi Arabia have also introduced extreme punitive measures to monitor and control access to the Web by dissidents, particularly now with democratic unrest sweeping the world, catalysed by the Arab Spring.

But the US, with the release of Stuxnet and Flame have taken this War of the Worlds to another level. They have attacked the infrastructure of an enemy nation- the very heart and soul of its social and technological integrity. In doing so they have unleashed a hydra-headed cyber-monster which could destroy the fabric of society and humanity with it.
Cybercrime and Cyberwars go hand in hand. One is just the flip side of the other. Breaking into confidential files – whether war plans or credit cards is espionage combined with fraud, while breaking into and disabling a nation’s industrial and infrastructure assets is an act of war.

From now on Cyberspace will be the new battleground and each group will be racing, not to cooperate, but to seize the opportunity and control the process for their own ends. For many Governments, businesses and criminal groups the glittering prize of domination will be too hard to resist.
The world had turned upside down in the blink of an eye.

All parties now understand that the nature of conflict and balance of world power is shifting with lightning speed, obsoleting overnight the nature of traditional war and economic dominance in a globalised cyber-world. Future conflicts will not be about destroying an enemy armed with billion dollar hi-tech armaments such as tanks, jets and warships, but will be primarily played out on a digital chessboard in future cyberspace.

Oversize superpower military budgets are no longer necessary or prudent when an equally lethal attack can be waged with virtual weapons at a tiny fraction of the cost.

What value a sophisticated weapons system if it can be disabled by an elite group of cyber hackers with a Stuxnet or Flame type virus?

What value armies of highly trained soldiers if their command and control centres can be disabled with a few keyboard strokes and a swarm of smart software agents?

What value the trillions of dollars spent on containing Al-Qaeda if the economic and logistical systems supporting the attack can be thrown into disarray by a powerful artificial intelligence algorithm?

But the military establishments of the major powers are still coming to terms with the mind-blowing ramifications of Cyberwar. Not only will their weapons soon be obsolete but they will be too.
And as in the War of The Worlds, this can include control of robotic devices such as today’s drones as well as Satellite systems- not just used for surveillance, but for tracking the world’s ecosystems and helping preserve the planet. But today’s smart sensory devices are also coming in micro packages- smart satellites the size of milk cartons that can be launched by groups such as the White Hats. UAV swarms and mini drones, such as currently being manufactured by Venezuela for Iran, that can carry lethal payloads, not in the form of bombs, but chemical agents.

With the new Internet protocol Ipv6 about to be launched, with the capacity to link the Internet to any electronically embedded physical artefact, such micro devices can be controlled and disabled exactly as the Iranian centrifuges.

Any physical object or service that can be linked to sensors and a wireless antenna including- manufacturing and production machinery, vehicle and transport networks, communication hubs, security systems, medical devices, electricity grids, bridges and roads, as well as billions of consumer and industrial devices, have now been drawn into this digital vortex.
These scenarios are rapidly becoming the stuff of nightmares - and why? Because the US Administration, the Pentagon and its acolytes, couldn’t resist displaying their Alpha prowess- taking the morally low road to retribution, when negotiations faltered; using the same flawed self-serving logic that allowed a million civilians to be incinerated at Hiroshima.
Dominance in tomorrow’s world is now about nimble minds, artificial intelligence and super smart algorithms. Any country on the planet will be able to afford to train an endless stream of talented young agile minds to code complex cyber warfare algorithms, especially when the latest efforts by the major powers, such as Stuxnet and Flame and the dozens of other worms and malware are already available as templates on the black market.
Anything that a superpower such as the US or China throws at this problem in the future will rebound on them the next day or the next hour.

And recruiting the best young hackers and software engineers and stashing them in a modern day Bletchley Park like the code breakers working on the Nazi Enigma machine, isn’t going to work either. The competitive advantage of MIT, Harvard or University of Pennsylvania trained software engineers is about to evaporate as the STEM – Science Technology Engineering and Maths faculties of these elite educational establishments begin to churn out free courseware, enrolling hundreds of thousands of eager students free of charge online around the world.

Under the new mantra of free education, the next generation will be able to study courses in software engineering, artificial intelligence and Web science at the same rigorous level as their fee paying contemporaries from these world class institutions. With the venture capital already provided for massive online startups such as Coursera and Udacity, courses are being designed by the leading US professors and specialists in these domains, eventually creating a base pool of millions from which to draw the best coders from any country.

This is an immensely good thing, allowing poorer nations to bootstrap to the same educational and technical levels as the developed world in a very short time; providing essential skills for tomorrow’s society and increasing global productivity and innovation in a time of desperate need.
But it’s a nightmare when it coincides with an Alpha superpower’s naked ambition to dominate tomorrow’s Cyber killing fields.

But for the major protagonists of the neo War of the Worlds, the main goal is to control the ultimate prize of civilisation –the Internet/Web- humanity’s knowledge hub. Alarm bell are already ringing in the US Congress where desperate warnings are being issued of the chaos that will occur if control is ceded via the International Telecommunications Union-ITU, to the 160 nations of the UN that currently have no say in managing a system that increasingly controls their destiny. This is the US displaying its most arrogant behaviour – arguing in autocratic terms that it’s far better to have a wise benevolent dictator superpower than a ragbag democracy which includes India, China, Europe and Africa to oversee such an essential asset.

So the race is on to co-opt the most advanced cyber technology to gain a global edge. Present day cybercrime technologies however will appear largely primitive within the next few years. The emphasis will shift to the application of much more sophisticated Cyberagent software technology.
The first generation of software agents appeared in the nineties and was used to trawl the Web, applying basic search procedures to locate information resources such as online shopping or travel sites and locating the best prices.

The second generation emerged around five years later. These programs were smarter, incorporating artificial intelligence that enabled them to make decisions more autonomously to meet their operational goals. They were deployed mainly in simulations of interactive population and component behaviour in a variety of environments- shopping malls, supply chains as well as disaster and conflict areas. In addition, they possessed superior negotiation and decision logic skills, using Game theory and semantic inferencing techniques.

But the third generation agents will be something else again. These will be based on complementary combinations of advanced AI techniques such as- ‘evolutionary algorithms’, that allow them to constantly improve their skills; 'neural networks' for superior pattern recognition and learning; ‘bayesian logic’ for powerful inferencing capabililty; ‘ant foraging' to help find the most efficient paths through complex network environments and ‘swarm' technology, allowing individual agent intelligence to be amplified by working cooperatively in large groups.

They will increasingly also be capable of tapping into the enormous computational intelligence of the Web, including the public databases of mathematical and scientific algorithms, eventually allowing their intelligence to be amplified by a factor of a hundredfold over previous agent capabilities.

Such agent swarms will also be equipped behaviourally and cognitively to focus on their missions with laser or Zen-like concentration, to the exclusion of everything else, until they have chased down their quarry; whether corporate strategic plans, government covert secrets or nuclear missile blueprints.

This Uber-level of intelligence will transform Agent swarms into formidable cyber strike forces, which could operate under deep cover or in sleeper mode, transforming into harmless chunks of code until a cell and attack is activated and can also replicate rapidly if additional forces are required.
Although this might sound like science fiction, the AI techniques involved, such as evolutionary algorithms, neural networks and swarm architectures have been in common use in business and industry for over ten years. The ability to harness them in cyber strike force mode is only a matter of time.

But all parties are now beginning to understand that the nature of conflict and the balance of world power is shifting with lightning speed, obsoleting overnight the nature of war and traditional economic dominance in a globalised cyber-world. As outlined, future conflicts will not be about destroying an enemy armed with billion dollar hi-tech armaments but will be played out largely in future cyberspace.

But the option of a full blown Cyberwar eventuating has just received an enormous boost from the latest risk assessment of global warming. Now we are informed, prior to the next global warming conference in Rio +20, that the earth is very close to a tipping point, with a maximum of ten years to reset the parameters of carbon consumption and overuse of the planet’s finite natural resources. Otherwise Armageddon is irreversible. This will dominate major policy discussions in all political forums from now on.

Cyberwars are far more likely to flourish in chaotic times of critical food and water shortages, with countries desperate to secure access to critical resources. That time is not far off, with estimates of major food shortages and rising prices as early as 2013, with a follow-on spike in global conflict highly likely.

The threat of all out Cyberwar is now an urgent issue that transcends lines between individual enterprises or governments. Unless a global cyber security framework, binding both the private and public sectors can be engineered, a world of disorder will rapidly emerge - a turbulent world, where evolutionary change in shorter and shorter timeframes will cease to be adaptive and become ultimately destructive.

The second War of The Worlds will emerge with no happy ending.

The Future of Life in the Universe

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:06:00 +0000

It is proposed that increasing evidence for the diversity and ubiquity of life in the universe indicates a strong Darwinian selection effect, which in turn indicates that life is an integral part of the Universe, playing a major role in its evolution as a living ecosystem.

Life as an Information Processor-

The traditional formulation and scope of physical laws fails to adequately describe complex biological systems. Describing life in terms of the laws of matter and forces is insufficient to capture its complexity or emergent properties. Life can be defined in biological terms by a number of processes and states including adaptation, reproduction, metabolism and evolution. Cell-based components and combinations are linked in multi-dimensional networks to create a living organism, each link defining a critical relationship. The complexity of these networks combined with a dynamic evolving process driven by the need to survive marks a key difference between animate and inanimate phenomena.
However adaptive living systems may be primarily differentiated by their capacity to utilise and process information by storing, monitoring and transforming it. Information is coded, stored and processed in the neural network structures of the brain and nervous system, the DNA, RNA and protein structures of the cell including its microtubule scaffolding, as well as the myriad other chemical, sensory, signalling and metabolic feedback loops that allow life to function within a complex environment.
By transforming information, life evolves towards greater complexity. The more complex life becomes, the better it’s able to learn, adapt and continue its trajectory in the universe.

Ubiquity of Life
With the discovery of a wide spectrum of exoplanets, now approaching 800- including some smaller planets similar to earth, It is now estimated that a substantial proportion of stars have planets, with 160 billion in the milky way alone, as well as potentially trillions of unbound planetary mass bodies and those that orbit brown dwarfs.
The latest simulations also suggest that planets may be common throughout the universe despite the diminishing rate of star formation, with even low mass, dim stars conducive to life on close orbit planets. In the future stars will be richer in the heavier elements critical to life - carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, created by earlier generations of red giant stars, while heavier elements up to uranium will continue to be formed by supernova explosions.
Therefore it can be inferred there is likely to be more life in the future universe, existing on earth-like planets, which will consist almost entirely of heavier elements.
In addition, the discovery of molecular oxygen ions in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Dione generated by bombardment from charged particles or photons from the sun or a moon indicates that the ingredients for life may also be abundant on icy space bodies. Subsurface water such as exists on Jupiter’s moon Europa, may also combine molecular oxygen with carbon, to generate life.
Added to this has been the discovery that life can adapt to and flourish in a range of inhospitable environments on earth, from deep ocean hydrothermal vents, to nuclear power plants and beneath the desert. New forms of RNA viruses linked to archaea have also been discovered in the boiling acid pools of the Yellowstone National Park.
Once life gets started it is also very tenacious. Five catastrophic events and many smaller ones have occurred since life’s emergence 3.8 bya, on occasions wiping out up to 90 % of life. But it has always managed to regenerate, often in similar forms.
It is therefore highly probable that life will continue to evolve throughout our universe regardless of catastrophic events on individual planets.
Now combine this cornucopia of potential life with our new understanding of the origins of life and Lee Smolin’s ground breaking work on Cosmological Natural Selection; extending the process of evolution to the creation of life-supporting universes across the vast landscape of different epochs and regions of the Multiverse. The result is a surprising shift towards a much more eco-friendly view of our universe.

Origins of Life
Our understanding of the origins of life and the universe has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, but only recently have the pieces of the jigsaw have come together, allowing us to see the future in a radical way.
There are a number of theories accounting for the origins of life. Did it emerge locally on earth or piggyback in the form of complex organic molecules or microbes on comets and meteorites from other planets within our own solar system or from deeper space?
Regardless, early life on earth did thrive despite the bombardment of sterilizing impacts of meteorites, perhaps by adapting to cooler habitats deep in the crust under the early oceans. Most ancient microbial fossils date from before 3 billion years ago, but the structure of cells implies a long history of even earlier evolution.
The first stage in the evolution of cellular life may have been originally based on an RNA- Ribonucleic Acid template, predating DNA.
In 1980 it was shown that a strand of RNA can act as a template for making another strand of complementary RNA and in 1991 an RNA molecule was synthesised that could make copies of shorter chunks several nucleotides long and join them together. Some RNA molecules can also act as simple enzymes, enabling RNA to both encode information like DNA and perform cutting and joining operations like a protein enzyme.
RNA based life forms could therefore have evolved over millions of years prior to the evolution of the more stable DNA, assembling proteins as well as replicating other RNA molecules for information storage and transmission.
However RNA is more vulnerable to damage than DNA, so at some point in time evolutionary pressure forced proto cells to switch from making RNA copies of an RNA genome to DNA copies of a DNA genome.
But the central mystery of how such a molecule as RNA emerged from early chemistry has remained elusive. The enigma now appears to have been partly solved by Martin A. Nowak, a Professor of Mathematics and Biology and Director of the Program of Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University. He has developed a mathematical model of evolutionary dynamics, that simulates the emergence of a pre-life molecular system in the form of efficient self-assembling polymer chains; demonstrating that the molecular building blocks of DNA and RNA provide an evolutionary starting point in pre-life genesis, self-assembling more efficiently over time and accelerating the process of polymerisation.
By the 1960s living organisms had been categorised into two groups- prokaryotes and eukaryotes, with comparative genomics and proteomics strengthening the view that modern eukaryote and prokaryote cells had long followed separate evolutionary trajectories. The simpler prokaryotes, thought to be synonomous with bacteria have traditionally been considered the logical ancestors of the more complex eukaryotes.
But in the late 70s a three-domain hypothesis displaced this assumption. This standard model of genesis suggests that from a common ancestral root evolved three branches representing the domains of life. Genetic sequencing has since shown that life diverged first into archaea and bacteria. Eukaryotes may then have evolved from archaea, subsequently absorbing genes from bacteria twice and acquiring both mitochondria and chloroplast organelles.
But several other anomalies pointed to a more complex starting point. The pattern of evolution appeared not to be as linear or tree like as traditional Darwinian theory may have hypothesised. In fact, lateral or horizontal processes of gene swapping probably occurred many times. Eukaryotes may have evolved from some precursor cell that was the product of a number of gene transfers. The three major domains of life probably therefore arose from a population or pool of primitive ancestral cells that differed in their genes.
By tracing back common proteins from all three it appears plausible that a global organism- the Last Universal ancestor- LUA possibly existed as one superorganism across the oceans of the world as early as 4 billion years ago, evolving In a cooperative rather than a competitive manner. So this latest theory suggests that life emerged a number of times in a variety of ways and provides solid support for the convergent theory of evolution.
A new twist has recently added an extra and crucial dimension to this story- the discovery of a form of life based on inorganic chemistry. Up until now, all life on earth has been assumed to be based on organic biology- carbon in the form of amino acids, nucleotides and sugars etc. But Professor Lee Cronin at Glasgow University has engineered a form of self-replicating, evolving, non-carbon based cell with life-like properties. It has opened the possibility of creating micro organisms from inorganic chemicals- proving that evolution is not just a biological process. This suggests that there may be many alternate sets of non-carbon life forms and that the evolutionary principle may have much more general application than previously understood.
Supporting this argument, Nigel Goldenfeld a physicist and Carl Woese, the biologist who defined a new kingdom of life- the Archaea and developed the RNA World hypothesis, have hypothesized that life is a universal emergent phenomenon that occurs in systems that are far from equilibrium, as Ilya Prigogine originally proposed.
They postulate that evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena, but that it’s full potential has been historically limited by its original biological straightjacket.
One of the strongest and most obvious examples of evolution as a generic process is the genetic algorithm, as previously defined - a method that mimics the Darwinian process of mutation, crossover, selection and replication in abstract mathematical form. A genetic algorithm explores the evolutionary landscape, searching for optimal design solutions, reflected by the DNA processes of life, in the form of local minima.
This indicates that life, as it has evolved on Earth, is just one local solution within a vast landscape of possible options, biological or otherwise. If that's the case, biologists have been studying only a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture.

Creating Life- A New Horizon
Now with increasing confidence, humans have entered the creation business, generating new biological and artificial life forms supporting this hypothesis and expanding the future tableau of life.
Craig Venter and his team were the first scientists to sequence the human genome and have now created the first artificial DNA life-form; a tiny new bacterium or synthetic cell, controlled by human engineered DNA, with its genetic instructions determined by human life.
By creating the first biological life form humans have crossed the rubicon of creation by bypassing natural evolution, opening the floodgates of life’s evolutionary future.
New synthetic life structures can now be created to order by designing novel DNA, facilitating the assembly of genetic building blocks into living systems in the same way that electronic components are combined to manufacture electrical circuits.
Because of this breakthrough it will now be possible to create not only new types of bacteria, but eventually variations in the spectrum of many other living species – plants and animals, including perhaps a new species of humans. In other words, bringing biological life from the super-natural to the human-natural realm of genesis.
Concurrently with developments in synthetic biology, other variations of life in the form of Intelligent software agents and robots have been developed by computer scientists. Such innovations represent life’s evolution in the form of adaptable evolutionary software programs designed to provide autonomous and cooperative problem-solving support to humans through the application of artificial intelligence.
Software agents are a classic example of potential alternative emergent life forms, described as Artificial A-Life or Virtual Life in contrast to 'normal' Biological Life or B-Life.
The principles of A-Life are already being probed and analysed through computational models relating to complexity, self-organisation, diversity, feedback, autocatalysis, cellular automata, network and chaos theory.
Although such organisms might appear goal-directed, they simply do what evolution has shaped them to do. The apparent complexity of their behaviour is largely a reflection of the environment in which they find themselves. This complexity increases dramatically as the environment comes to include information feedback from biological living systems.
Now science’s Pandora’s Box has been opened to release three players in the great game of life- biological, synthetic and virtual. All three will have to learn to co-exist and accommodate with each other, As the biological, technological and social barriers dissolve they will eventually merge into a new entity- Meta-life- a universal autonomous manifestation of intelligence.
Humans are already cooperating in larger and more diverse groups via the Internet to solve more complex scientific, engineering and ethical problems. These require multi-disciplinary and real-time interaction across diverse fields of knowledge to solve the critical challenges facing life today including global warming, environmental pollution, population control, conflict mediation, disease management and the new frontiers of space exploration.
As a result, such virtual communities of researchers and social architects supported by AI technologies are already establishing a presence on the Web representing the prototypes of future symbiotic ecosystems- the early prototypes of universal Meta-life communities.
These developments clearly demonstrate that life is now at the threshold of its most significant transformation. In the near future, the links between AL, SL and BL will be virtually seamless. Powerful AI techniques in the form of neural nets, swarm systems, fuzzy logic and evolutionary algorithms, will merge with the massive pattern analysis capacities of the Web’s computational intelligence; complementing human decision making at a fundamental level and creating a permanent nexus.

Why does Life Exist?
Finally we return to the existential question of not whether life may exist in a kaleidescopic range of novel combinations in the universe, but why it exists at all?
According to Darwinian evolutionary principles, life’s generation and existence on this or any other planet is the result of a selection effect by its environment; not the result of random roulette chance or a deistic manipulation of the laws of nature of this universe.
This is the ‘Third Way’ hypothesis that the Centre has championed over the last ten years. The Universe has not adapted to the highly improbable set of conditions essential to triggering our form of life. Instead, life has adapted to the physical conditions set by the universe- which itself has adapted to the physical and chemical properties of the much larger multiverse.
That is why there is such a perfect and improbable fit for life’s existence on earth and why a certain class of earths, galaxies and universes are likely to be teeming with life similar to our our own. Based on the ubiquity of extreme types of life’s adaptation on this planet, alternate forms are likely to be equally abundant on different earths in different universes.
Part of the answer is connected to the revolutionary idea that cosmologist Lee Smolin introduced over a decade ago, which postulates that each generation of universes has the capacity to spawn child universes, each with slightly altered physical parameters and laws in a mutated form of its parent, eventually creating stars, planets, heavier elements, complex organic molecules and eventually life in some form.
In other words, universes capable of generating life will be also selected by the larger environment of a possible multiverse in the biological Darwinian sense, according to the rules of mutation, selection and replication.
This scenario can then be combined with new information-based evolutionary theories, to offer a third and more verifiable way of explaining life’s existence.
Since its genesis as single-cell organisms on earth nearly 4 billion years ago, life has continued to evolve towards higher levels of genetic and neural complexity; expanding its capacity for more complex information processing, decision-making and knowledge generation. This has allowed it to continue to adapt and survive in a radically changing environment and strongly implies the existence of a powerful Darwinian evolutionary selection process at work.
New information and decision network evolutionary theory also suggests the possibility that life is selected by the environment of the universe as an efficient form of information processor, with the capacity to progress towards higher levels of processing and intelligence, as predicted by stronger versions of the Anthropic principle. Such systems therefore have the requisite complexity and capacity to maximise the amount of information generated over the life of the universe.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the symbiosis of human and computational intelligence has greatly amplified the level of information and knowledge generation and will continue to do so at an exponential rate. This ratcheting process will likely result, in the view of a number of philosophers physicists and cosmologists, in the eventual emergence of a super-intelligent form of life and mind, expanding to become co-existent with the cosmos.
But regardless of such a final outcome, if life has been selected by its cosmic environment as an efficient generator of information, then its capacity to manage entropy and energy resources within its ecosystem -the universe, would be more efficiently and effectively achieved.
This then would be the primary function and role of life in the universe.
As a corollary, life could equally be seen as selecting the living space most appropriate to its continued and enduring evolution. Biological processes might in fact be the means of selecting those laws of physics that best boost life’s own survival. The prerequisite conditions for such opportunistic systems will narrow down the range of possible structures to a small proportion of available configurations, including but not limited to those in which the laws of physics support life as we know it.
A universe teeming with life therefore generates a rich ecosystem, exhibiting emergent system properties- an integral player interacting at every level, as it does on planet earth. It is a dynamic selection outcome of the world we live in and may indeed alter the universe’s capacity as a system to survive, by generating and applying information and knowledge on a grand scale.
The corollary is that the universe is a living entity – interwoven with and exploiting the properties of life.
This is a more realistic way to think of our universe- not as a remote landscape filled with stars, galaxies, black holes, gas and planets with some life forms thrown in by chance; but as a rich ecological system with life at the front and centre of its being.
Philosophical futures have shifted significantly over the past millennium, from the dark despair of the nihilistic ‘heat death’ of the universe to a more optimistic outlook based on an evolutionary ‘becoming’ paradigm.
The problem was that most philosophical models lacked a rigorous scientific basis, a mechanism capable of explaining life's interaction with the cosmos in anything but the most rudimentary meta-physical terms.
Recent forward thinkers such as mathematical physicist Professor Frank Tipler, have gone some way towards providing an alternative to this doomsday view; arguing that in the far future life may exist in a more abstract form, with the capacity to indefinitely delay such an outcome through the generation of an infinite amount of information. Another alternative may be that life will have the capability to create and populate alternate universes.
Tipler also argues that meta-intelligence becomes coexistent with the cosmos, with the rider that the Omega point or ultimate observer may be required to bring the entire universe into existence. In other words, the universe has no determinate form until observed and measured.
An Omega point is therefore postulated as an inevitable outcome of a Multiverse ecosystem capable of sustaining life.
This has enormous philosophical ramifications for us all.

The Future of Education

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:30:00 +0000

The author forecasts an education revolution over the next 30 years that will include whole of life learning and personalised instruction in any topic, anywhere and anytime; driven by the knowledge explosion, the new social media and Intelligent Web.

Over the coming decades the process of learning and education will undergo a profound shift, from the traditional classroom/face to face method of knowledge transfer to a much more abstract model, where teaching will be largely separated from its current physical infrastructure, such as classrooms and campuses, in much the same way as the content of a printed book is becoming abstracted from its physical medium in digitised eBook form.

The human learning process will be driven by the need to adapt to its social environment; primarily the increasing rate of change in the knowledge and skills required to support future civilisation’s technology, culture and services. This will occur in tandem with society’s immersion in an increasingly cyber environment.

The Education Revolution is therefore inextricably linked to two major drivers -

The Knowledge Revolution- the hyper-fast generation of information and knowledge processes;

The Cyber Revolution- the transformation of the world’s knowledge base, including all processes and services to digital form, distributed via the Web.

The trends in this revolution are already evident and will become pervasive in the near future on a global basis. They include online teaching access, open content, real-time wireless web delivery, independent courseware provision, virtual reality teaching environments and lifelong education at a personalised level.

By 2020- online education will dominate university and school learning. This will allow resources and investment to be more effectively applied to the quality and delivery of courseware- anywhere, anytime.

Already a growing acceptance of online learning in major universities and schools, has generated the development of hybrid curricula- a combination of online options and traditional face to face classroom teaching and tutoring. However some institutions such as the global Phoenix University already operate solely as virtual campuses, offering global online courseware.

This shift will have many beneficial flow-on effects for both individuals and communities, including reduced travel time and more flexible delivery of courseware, making learning more affordable and accessible, particularly for working and part time students.

Studies have already suggested that students in online learning environments perform as well as or better than those receiving face-to-face classroom instruction. Traditional teaching institutions therefore will find it increasingly difficult to compete with online cyber innovations on a cost, convenience and quality basis.

The Open Content movement is also generating momentum in the new educational universe. Open content allows all sectors of society, including poorer populations in developing nations, to benefit from the education revolution, using the Web to deliver the collective courseware of major teaching institutions across the globe, free of charge.

This valuable resource is already offered by a number of prestigious tertiary institutions including- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, and Harvard. In addition the Open Courseware Consortium now has 200 members, 4000 courses and 44 sources in 7 languages

At the same time the development and provision of formal educational curricula will no longer be solely the preserve of schools and universities. Most larger business enterprises already provide in-house training and even accredited degree programs in specialised areas related to their own services, such as computer communications and hospitality. There is also a trend towards companies offering supplementary training on a modular basis, credited towards traditional graduate and post-graduate qualifications.

In addition, knowledge reference sites such as Wikipedia are providing free semi-structured online courses and books by aggregating existing reference material. This trend will continue, with independent courseware developers eventually dominating the growing market for expanding on-line content.

Developing countries such as India and China are also funding massive expansion programs in their schools and universities, for example graduating over 250,000 engineering and computer science students each year; rapidly catching up with the West in the quality and innovation of teaching methods.

To compete with the rise of the new breed of online training institutions, traditional institutions have linked with global partners, as well as fostering local community and business relationships. This trend reflects the shift in urban environments towards lifestyle autonomy, incorporating the full range of essential support services for local communities, including- education, health, leisure and knowledge access, primarily utilising the very high bandwidth of the Web. Such centres will typically combine online training with practical vocational and workplace experience.

Learning technology will be dominated largely by the new social media- social networks, augmented reality, virtual worlds, video gaming etc, delivered via smart mobile multi-purpose devices connected to the web.

By 2030 the full power of the web will be deployed towards this new learning paradigm, including powerful simulation training environments based on immersive virtual reality.

Augmented and virtual realities will allow procedures and knowledge to be absorbed within 3D virtual worlds and games, capable of simulating most services and applications; supporting the full range of training needs from trade apprenticeships to strategic management skills.

The benefits of teaching in such VR environments include the capacity to explore real life situations without risk, as is currently practiced by pilots using flight simulators and the more objective and automatic monitoring and assessment of performance criteria.

The application of virtual worlds to education will become a standard function of school and university teaching and research in the near future. Users are already using such technology to socialise and connect through personalised avatars. These worlds can therefore be quickly adapted to provide learning support and feedback between students, with the added potential to create teaching avatar support. Gaming environments can also be adapted to offer student support for the solution of complex real world problems in areas such as conflict, climate change and economic analysis.

Traditional human teaching supervision with still be vital for young children, but games already play a large part in their development and this role will accelerate in the cyber age.

Social media sites are also creating environments where scientists can experiment with new research techniques, by applying intelligent agents to simulate interacting populations. These methods are increasingly being applied to studies of educational modalities between students and teachers. Worlds such as Second life are already providing virtual campuses for some of the world's most prestigious universities such as Harvard and Stanford; offering a research environment in which to come to terms with the transition from the traditional to the new networked cyber campuses.

2030 will also see the acceptance of two additional trends- whole of life learning and personalised instruction. Both will be driven by the exponential rate of change in the social,work and cyber environments. Whole of life vocational learning will become both essential and natural as it is realised that secondary and tertiary learning is just the beginning of human cognitive challenges. This trend is already underway, facilitated by the web’s pervasive access to the world’s digitised knowledge storehouse.

Enterprise organisational boundaries and work practices will become increasingly fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisations; adding value to each enterprise and in turn continuously allowing workers to acquire new skills, linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.

Work and education patterns will therefore gradually adapt to a cycle of seamless knowledge generation and acquisition which in turn will trigger the need for more personalized education. This will be facilitated by the Web’s pervasive social reach, providing flexibility of learning options- mixing and matching with an individual’s lifestyle and experience.

By 2040 it is anticipated there will be a scramble within public teaching institutions to fill emerging educational and training gaps in courseware at all levels- primary, high school, undergraduate and post graduate studies. But the knowledge explosion will now be too fast for traditional course development and management methods, demanding support for constantly emerging cross-discipline training, combined with an emphasis on general problem-solving and creative skills.

Most institutions will be under enormous pressure to keep up with the demands of the medical, legal, science and engineering professions, incorporating the latest technologies; with capacity seriously lagging the accelerating knowledge advances.

It is realised that catch-up can only be achieved by facilitating the development of Web-generated courseware, combined with continuing global open content accessibility; largely driven by automated methods and delivered on demand.

This period will mark the beginning of the end for the traditional one-trak qualification pathway. Instead, performance assessment will be based on the quality, relevance and value of an individual’s skills and capabilities in relation to business, professional and social requirements; whether applied to medicine, astrophysics or cabinet-making.

Formal education will have reached a critical threshold as it is understood that ongoing personal learning is an essential driver for human survival and progress- and always has been. Education will be seen not as a sub-set of techniques that is applied only within a formal qualification factory. It is an essential component of each individual’s development regardless of age, position or ability within society.

Such an expanded view will also generate new modes of alternate education, nurturing creativity and encouraging learning for learning’s sake. For example the Free/Slow University of Warsaw- FSUW-offers an informal, non-profit centre for interdisciplinary studies; providing for student participation on the basis of the excitement of knowledge discovery and cultural experience for its own intrinsic sake, rather than for the pursuit of profits alone.

By 2050 the intelligent Web 4.0 will be capable of autonomously generating knowledge in synch with new work patterns and individual requirements, delivered directly, eventually through neural as well as sensory interfaces.

The Web will generate, host and deliver best practice training material autonomously, as it is beginning to do for information resources in a service economy. Over time this will be develop consistent quality outcomes competitive with most traditional options and encompass the complete spectrum of learning, distilling the best techniques from both human and artificial intelligence. This trend towards automatic algorithmic knowledge and pattern discovery is already evident in the sciences- biology, physics and astronomy.

By 2050 the abstraction of learning from its traditional infrastructure of classrooms and campuses will be complete in most advanced nations, with the major teaching institutions morphing into community support centres for research and services integration. The role of the Intelligent Web within the educational universe will have been transformed into that of a senior partner with humans, continuously forecasting new skill requirements and generating the required support programs; creating new courseware as a public resource, belonging to the global commons.

This will finally allow the developing world to achieve equal status with the developed world in terms of access to knowledge, training and the realisation of human potential.

The Future of Civilisation 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:48:00 +0000

David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre argues that the combination of the recent triple major disaster in Japan, the GFC and looming world recession, together with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement, have provided the final triggers for the rapid evolution of Civilization 3.0 in the fight for human survival.

These world-shaking events send a timely message to the rest of the world, that the form of civilisation and the social norms we have become accustomed to and lived by over the last few centuries, is over.

Civilisation 1.0 began over 15,000 years ago with the founding of the earliest settlements and villages around the world, as hunter gatherers settled down to take advantage of the rich sources of edible grasses and natural foods growing mainly around the fertile delta areas of the great rivers and coastal areas of the world. These early habitats evolved into the first towns, cities and eventually nation states. At the same time, the first writing and number systems evolved to keep track of the products and services that developed and were traded by modern humans. Also with the growth of towns and trade across the world and the use of wood for building and smelting, the clearing of the forests across Europe began.

Civilisation 2.0 then emerged, with more sophisticated means of production using wind and water; rapidly accelerating following the industrial revolution in the 18th century with the harnessing of steam and later electricity and combustion engine power. These innovations were dependent on the burning of fossil fuels- coal and oil on a massive scale, allowing the West to steal a march on the rest of the world; colonising its populations and exploiting its wealth.
The manufacture of goods and services then increased on a massive scale; everything from food, textiles, furniture, automobiles, skyscrapers, guns and railway tracks- anything requiring the use of steel, cement or timber for its production.

The major cities expanded on the same original settlement sites as Civilization 1.0 - coastal ports, river delta fertile flood plains, regardless of the risk from subsidence and earthquakes.
The energy revolution was rapidly followed by the communications and information revolution- grid power, telephone, wireless, radio, television and eventually computers. Later, nuclear power was added to the mix.

Then in the second half of the 20th century the realization finally dawned that the planet’s resources really were finite, following the many dire predictions for decades previously.
Now at the current rate of consumption by a global population of 7 billion, projected to grow to 9 billion by mid-century, combined with the Armageddon of global warming, the planet is rapidly running out of fresh water, food, and oil. At the same time the grim effects of the escalating levels of carbon in the oceans and atmosphere has triggered more frequent and severe weather events- major droughts, floods and storms, adding to the impact of earthquakes in highly populated urban areas.

These problems are now bigger than any one nation can handle and can only be effectively addressed on a global basis. This will inevitably need to be coupled to a higher level of social awareness and democratic governance, in which everyone, not just politicians, are involved in the key decision processes affecting the planet.

Welcome to Civilisation 3.0.

Civilization 3.0 is just beginning, but is already being tested. From now through the rest of this century comes the hard part. Tinkering around the edges won’t do it for the planet and its life- including humans, any longer.
The planet’s climate is already in the throes of runaway warming, regardless of what forces caused it, because of the built-in feedback processes from the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, to the release of huge methane reserves in the northern tundra and ocean floor.

But this is just the start of our problems.
Some areas may get a short term reprieve with local cooling, but overall the heating process appears to be unstoppable. The Faustian bargain that humans struck to establish Civilisation 1.0 and 2.0, when the planet was teeming with natural resources, is about to be redeemed. Humans are being called to account.

By 2020 the cost of solar, wind and biofuels is likely to be at a baseline level comparable to that of fossils fuels, due to major technological advances currently underway, such as artificial photosynthesis. But because of the flawed democratic process, major businesses and corrupt governments can still undermine the critical mindset needed for radical change, with calls for short term profits drowning out the desperate call by future generations for long term survival. It is therefore highly likely that we will still be emitting copious amount of carbon by 2020 and starting to exceed the safe limits of temperature rise.
In addition, supplies of fresh food and water, particularly in developing countries are already dwindling, with the potential to create further malnutrition and conflict.

So Civilisation 3.0 has to get serious.

One of the major recent initiatives at the heart of the fight-back revolution is the concept of a smarter planet. The Japanese experience has now reinforced that concept. Every built object and operational process will eventually need to be embedded with sensors and its performance and integrity continuously monitored and assessed in relation to natural disasters and sustainability.

Everything from roads, transport, bridges, railways, buildings, dams, power plants, grids and information systems, as well as human knowledge and skill capacities, will need to be urgently upgraded. Even towns and cities will have to be redesigned to avoid future worst case natural and manmade disasters and provide a more sustainable living space for future generations.
In addition, the loss of critical ecosystems and species will compound the infrastructure problems of the planet, requiring re-prioritization of the value of the natural environment and fair re-allocation of its resources on a global scale.

The current level of risk and waste in the built environment is now seen as both unacceptable and avoidable. By applying new technologies already available such as smarter materials, safer engineering methods, improved communications and sophisticated computer modeling, risk can be dramatically reduced.

The new sustainability standards will need to be set much higher; at a much smarter level than previously accepted, in order to reduce carbon emissions, optimize performance and enable more responsive adaptation within a fast deteriorating physical and social environment. This will be mandatory as the escalating scale of the risk becomes apparent.

At the heart of this revolution will be the powerful mathematical algorithms and intelligence capable of making optimum decisions at a far greater speed and with less human intervention. In turn this will require instant access to the Intelligent Web’s global resources of specialized knowledge, artificial intelligence and massive grid computing power.

By 2030 however, panic will be building across the globe. The safe levels of temperature rise of 2%, expected to hold until the end of the century, will likely be breached and physical and social problems will escalate.

Any realistic solution for human survival will require living and working together cooperatively and peacefully as one species on one planet, finally eliminating the enormous destruction and loss of life that wars and conflict inevitably bring.
Although cooperation on a global scale will be vital, individual nations will be tempted to free ride, as populations react with violence and anarchy to shortages of basic necessities through rising prices and inadequate infrastructure, particularly in hard-hit developing economies.

A massive mind shift will be required across the planet to achieve this level of cooperation; a more collaborative and creative process will need to evolve and quickly, harnessing all human knowledge and technological resources. To achieve this level of cooperation non-democratic states will need to democratize or be excluded from the resulting benefits and the old forms of democracy will have to be upgraded to a more inclusive and participatory level if human civilization is to avoid slow annihilation.
The stress of the human fight for survival will also present myriad ripple-on challenges relating to maintaining a cohesive social fabric. Democracy and justice are basic options, but also providing adequate levels of health, work and education will get a lot harder. This will require adaptation on a vast scale.

By 2040 the trendlines will be set and through the social media, the risks will need to be openly and clearly relayed to all populations. This will be similar to the collective discipline and mindset required many times in the past by nations threatened by the fear of war and decimation.
It will now need to be replicated on a global scale

Beyond increasing renewable energy and reducing waste, the fight for survival will require the implementation of other more radical innovations, including the eventual geo-engineering of the weather and climate. The science and technology needed to achieve such a complex outcome is unlikely to be achievable before 2050 and in the meantime our civilization may be in free fall. However it will probably be the only solution capable of reversing rather than just slowing the headlong rush to chaos.

Other radical solutions will involve the need to accelerate our level of knowledge generation. This is already taking place through advanced methods of automatic pattern analysis and algorithm discovery, applying artificial intelligence methods and the immense computational intelligence of the Web.

It will be a bootstrapping process. The faster the increase in knowledge acquisition, the more powerful the potential intelligence of the Web will become, which will then further accelerate the increase in life-saving expertise. This exponential process may be further accelerated by promoting higher levels of networked ‘swarm’ behavior, combining human intelligence on a grand scale across the planet. The benefits of collective intelligence acting like an advanced insect hive are already being realized, with research teams combining in larger and larger groups to solve more and more difficult problems. It has been demonstrated that an increase in synergy resulting from collective intelligence in complex self-organising systems allows ‘smarter’ problem solving as well as greater decision agility.
For example 50 European Universities have recently combined in the FuturICT project; an EU billion dollar flagship project to model, predict and solve future planetary and social problems. And this is only one collective project out of thousands, with increasing collaboration between US, European and Asian science and technology groups.

With all these initiatives, will Civilization 3.0 survive ?

It will likely be a very close call, dependent largely on whether our increase in beneficial knowledge can outstrip the planet’s rapid descent into environmental and social oblivion- a potential runaway pre-Venusian scenario with no end in sight.

It is similar to the Red Queen scenario in Lewis Carroll’s- Alice through the Looking Glass, in which the red chess queen has to run faster and faster just to maintain her position. Humans will also have to become smarter and smarter just to stay ahead of the approaching Armageddon.

The odds in fact will be very similar to the climate bottleneck that almost eliminated our early Homo sapien ancestors 20,000 years ago as they struggled to survive the last ice age. Only a small band of perhaps several hundred survived thousands of years of frozen hardship, finally regrouping and reaping the rewards that evolved following the great melt.

Modern humans can also can reap a future cornucopia if they have the courage and skill to survive the looming crisis in our evolution.

Many other civilisations across our universe may well have faced a similar bottleneck. Those that survived will have gone on to reap the untold riches of Civilisation 4.0 with its mastery over the physical laws governing our world and galaxy. Along the way Civilisation 5.0 will emerge, possessing not only the immense scientific capability needed to solve any physical problem, but enough wisdom to avoid future social catastrophes.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The Japanese catastrophe and many others, including the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004 leaving 300,000 dead, should have given us all a clarion call.
This is not a bad dream, from which we’ll all awake tomorrow with business as usual. The future of Civilisation 3.0 and our unique intelligent life-form really is in the balance. Let us hope ours will be one of the few or perhaps the only advanced civilisation to have survived such a test, so that our children and our children’s children can live to experience the untold wonders of our planet and universe.

But the Red Queen will have to run very fast indeed.

The Future of Diplomacy

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:03:00 +0000

The author argues that the current model of Diplomacy is out of synch with the new participatory model of democracy in the 21st century and needs to be replaced with a more inclusive vision.

The age-old art of Diplomacy was never going to cut it in the 21st cyber century.

Let’s take a closer look at the heart and soul of the traditional model of Diplomacy.

According to Wikipedia, Diplomacy is based on the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states, including the conduct of international relations through the intercession of professional diplomats, usually relating to matters of peace-making, trade, war, economics, culture, the environment and human rights; with treaties usually negotiated by diplomats prior to endorsement by national politicians.

It also employs a number of techniques to gain a strategic advantage or find mutually acceptable solutions to a common challenge. This is basically a process of vetting, exchanging and assessing information with the overall aim of extracting an advantage by the major players involved. One might sum this up in the modern day context as the informal application of Game Theory as applied to the social sciences.

Diplomacy therefore acts as more of a back channel to the day to day negotiations carried out between politicians, expert advisers and bureaucrats and still operates largely opaquely within the public domain.
Until its European beginnings in Greece, such behind the scenes negotiations were considered beyond the remit of the general population and were conducted largely in secret. The criteria for deciding this cloaking of information interplay were inevitably fuzzy, depending on the perceived political sensitivities of the issues involved. This fuzziness continues today, ranging from outright censorship and obfuscation, to qualified and partial disclosure on a need-to-know basis, to the open and transparent release of all relevant information, albeit governed by a minimum time limit between an event and its disclosure; the rationale being that past decisions with hindsight may prove either embarrassing or adversely impact ongoing resolution.

Of course the semantics of diplomacy have always been fuzzy - as indeterminate in fact as a government finds expedient. And it is argued that this is an inescapable fact of life because human behavior and politics are not precise sciences, but based to a large degree on the shifting sands of perception, uncertainty and personal bias.
Gleaning reliable information at a dinner party on the state of trade, build- up of arms or a county’s UN voting intentions is increasingly unlikely to yield any information of significant value, as the contents of CableGate has demonstrated. Such information, until recently, was supposedly kept safe from public or competitive gaze in encrypted government cyber vaults. Now however the credibility of this scenario is in tatters as ‘state secrets’ are increasingly being disinterred for public consumption by whistle blower organisations such as WikiLeaks. But the sky hasn’t fallen in – primarily because of the limited relevance of this ‘top secret’ data menagerie.

But the primary reason for the rapidly approaching use-by date of diplomacy in its current form is its confliction with the increasing transparency of modern democracy.

At the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current 2st century, democracy continues to spread throughout Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.
Democracy is supposedly based on the principle that populations should have access to the reasoning behind national policy so as to better participate in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle should therefore extend to the practice and protocols of diplomacy as it provides part of the input to the decision-making process.

In other words, democracy although imperfect, should offer each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision outcomes and on that basis, behind the scenes diplomatic maneuvering can act to subvert that process. For example 80% of the UK population was against involvement in the Iraq war. At the same time the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was actively working behind the scenes with the US government to impose his own view and counter the groundswell of public opinion. The same counter-democratic process occurs over and over again on critical issues affecting government policy throughout the world, legitimising the covert and often regressive nature of diplomacy.

But democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is still evolving. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of model, which harnesses the expert computational intelligence of the Web.
By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place.

However the cloak and dagger practices still embedded in standard model of diplomacy is putting it at odds with this more open participatory model. The business of diplomacy is therefore increasingly out of synch with the modernisation of democracy: and increasingly this gap is widening and the rumblings of disquiet are becoming louder.
The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.

Diplomacy has traditionally soft pedaled on such human rights issues in private forums, but it is increasingly seen as the wrong approach and the wrong forum. Issues relating to democratic rights are best delivered in the open forums of the UN or other public institutions open to the media. Even if diplomacy is restricted to pre-vote lobbying, the modus operandi should be made transparent to avoid the potential for a conflict of interest and corruption that has often surfaced for example in Olympic and world sporting venue lobbying.

The spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level, openly within the European parliament. While lobbying pressure from voting blocs is still commonly applied, the political and philosophical bias of the lobbying groups is in most cases transparent.

The raison d’etre of diplomacy therefore is to oil the decision wheels of democracy and as such the basis of its operation should be equally available to all members of a democratic state. Diplomats as well as politicians have party allegiances and obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best of democratic intentions
The global spread of new technology and knowledge not only provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing, but is an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy, limiting the value of traditional back channel diplomacy. Such cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive and open public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution.

Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries or political controls. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funneling them to the political process. These are often coupled with online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response. As this back channel explodes it leaves little space for former closed room hearsay.

In an age of Google and satellites, no information is sacred- not even the site of a nuclear facility in North Korea, a logging fire in the Amazon or an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. There are also a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.

By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise to that offered by the best human advisers, including diplomats.

It might be argued that there is still a need for the role for foreign affairs apparatchiks and diplomatic staff in lobbying, interpreting, nuancing and promoting the national interest on behalf of their political masters. But this is also rapidly becoming redundant in the modern networked world where every policy decision, utterance, and body language shift among political leaders is recorded, analysed and spread instantly around the world via the social media.

Decisions are being made increasingly in real time and the reasons behind them are also exposed and discussed around the world in real time. The days of closed clandestine meetings are over. News feeds and aggregation, blog and video sites ravenously ingest and recycle every piece of political and economic information captured by smart phones and citizen journalists for popular consumption on an endless 24/7 cycle.

The main argument for maintaining the diplomatic status quo is that making such social substrate information generally available might act against the ‘national Interest’ by providing a non-complying country with a significant negotiating advantage. In other words, not all sovereign states might be equally willing to share their inside knowledge with others.
This of course this is self-serving nonsense.

The National Interest is almost always best served by open discussion and debate within its population and peers, with all information cards on the table, leading to better decision-making whether relating to welfare or war as well as making the policy makers more accountable. The record shows that the opposite almost invariably leads to corruption as well as bad decision-making skewed by political conflicts of interest. Those that don’t comply with future global ethical standards in political or financial dealings, as already with corruption, will pay a heavy price in lost investment and prestige in regional and global forums and accelerate the scourge of global cyber-war.

We are also accelerating towards a globalised society in which all major decisions by any one state will affect all others, whether relating to global warming, financial governance or technology advances. In such a world there can be no free riders. The decisions of every nation will be scrutinized continuously to ensure conformance with global governance norms. The stakes will be too high and the interests too interrelated for it to be any other way.

Information is increasingly spread equally around the world by the ubiquitous power of the web invading traditional walled gardens, using a variety of tools such as video phones, Google Maps and citizen journalism; with the results spread globally within seconds by social media sites. Information captured in this way is far more relevant than recycling snippets of ‘who said what’ at a late night bar.

Of course this shift to the general public’s involvement in the diplomatic process is strongly objected to by the thousands of bureaucrats and technocrats in the diplomacy industry, threatening the mystique of their raison d’etre. But inevitably their future role is more likely to be restricted to implementing policy – not creating or influencing it.
As the expert knowledge and expertise from the 7 billion minds connected to the world’s continuously updated storehouse of knowledge on Web 4.0 begins to permeate all levels of society, the pervasive influence of yesterday’s diplomatic overtures will finally dwindle away.

The recent exposure of gigabytes of leaked diplomatic cables and emails, like the Pentagon Papers before it, is an expression of the fault lines between the old and new worlds of diplomacy. WikiLeaks however is also an expression of the power of real democracy at work, where the connivances and shallowness of the substratum of diplomatic knowledge has been excavated and the Emperor has been found to be stark naked. What it exposed was a mountain of largely banal and uncomplimentary cross-talk relating to foreign governments and their machinations, with little real substance. The exception was video footage of a number of US atrocities including the cold blooded gunning down of Reuters correspondents and many other obscenities that had previously been covered up in the name of maintaining diplomatic relations.

Certainly information of substance such as the strength of a nation’s economy or trade surplus could have been more accurately and cheaply obtained by trawling the Web and in the future will be infinitely more reliable, extracted from a variety of expert sources.
The same could be said of information relating to current or future military conflicts, using Google maps to pinpoint the size and strength of nuclear installations or clandestine buildup of forces. Information relating to sensitive military planning and deployments will need to be kept securely encrypted, much more rigorously than previously, but this is hardly the stuff of diplomacy. It should not be confused with the need in a true democracy for full public transparency and acceptance of the arguments for and against involvement in a conflict in the first place.

As demonstrated in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, governments are not above applying spurious non-sequitor arguments for home consumption to justify their own agendas. Human rights information about political activists is another casualty of the skewing of diplomatic double-speak, distributed still on many news channels. But the web is rapidly reaching the point of knowledge and inference maturity that can expose most diplomatic obfuscation. It is also equipped as mentioned, with algorithms to weigh evidence and the probabilities of truth in future decision processes.

Diplomacy’s future role therefore, if it is to survive at all, is as a complementary subset of the new democratic model, for an open cyber society. As such it must keep in lock-step with democracy’s fast evolving shift towards a more inclusive model, avoiding the artificial disjunction between overt and covert social knowledge management with its divisive overtones and elitist origins.

The Future of Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:01:00 +0000

Democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is evolving at a rapid rate. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of democratic model and the harnessing of the expert intelligence of the Web. By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place.

Democracy has a long evolutionary history. The concept of democracy - the notion that men and women have the right to govern themselves, was practised at around 2,500 BP in Athens. The Athenian polity or political body, granted all citizens the right to be heard and to participate in the major decisions affecting their rights and well-being. The City State demanded services and loyalty from the individual in return. There is evidence however that the role of popular assembly actually arose earlier in some Phoenician cities such as Sidon and Babylon in the ancient assemblies of Syria- Mesopotamia, as an organ of local government and justice.

As demonstrated in these early periods, democracy, although imperfect, offered each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision-making processes. It therefore provided a greater incentive for each individual to cooperate to increase group productivity. Through a more open decision process, improved innovation and consequently additional wealth was generated and distributed more equitably. An increase in overall economic wellbeing in turn generated more possibilities and potential to acquire knowledge, education and employment, coupled with greater individual choice and freedom.

According to the Freedom House Report, an independent survey of political and civil liberties around the globe, the world has made great strides towards democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900 there were 25 restricted democracies in existence covering an eighth of the world’s population, but none that could be judged as based on universal suffrage. The US and Britain denied voting rights to women and in the case of the US, also to African Americans. But at the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current century, democracy continues to spread through Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.

Dictatorships or quasi democratic one party states still exist in Africa, Asia and the middle east with regimes such as China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, the Sudan, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, seeking to maintain total control over their populations. However two thirds of sub-Saharan countries have staged elections in the past ten years, with coups becoming less common and internal wars gradually waning. African nations are also starting to police human rights in their own region. African Union peacekeepers are now deployed in Darfur and are working with UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.

The global spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level. The global spread of new technology and knowledge also provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing; an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy.

The current cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution. Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funnelling them to political processes. These are often coupled to online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response.

In addition there are a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and medical stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.

By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise as that offered by the best human advisers.

It might be argued that there is still a need for the role of politicians and leaders in assessing and prioritising such expert advice in the overriding national interest. But a moment’s reflection leads to the opposite conclusion. Politicians have party allegiances and internal obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best advice. History is replete with such disastrous decisions based on false premises, driven by party political bias and populist fads predicated on flawed knowledge. One needs to look no further in recent times than the patently inadequate evidential basis for the US’s war in Iraq which has cost at least half a million civilian lives and is still unresolved.

However there remains a disjunction between the developed west and those developing countries only now recovering from colonisation, the subsequent domination by dictators and fascist regimes and ongoing natural disasters. There is in fact a time gap of several hundred years between the democratic trajectory of the west and east, which these countries are endeavouring to bridge within a generation; often creating serious short-term challenges and cultural dislocations.

A very powerful enabler for the spread of democracy as mentioned is the Internet/Web- today’s storehouse of the world’s information and expertise. By increasing the flow of essential intelligence it facilitates transparency, reduces corruption, empowers dissidents and ensures governments are more responsive to their citizen’s needs. Ii is already providing the infrastructure for the emergence of a more democratic society; empowering all people to have direct input into critical decision processes affecting their lives, without the distortion of political intermediaries.

By 2040 more democratic outcomes for all populations on the planet will be the norm. Critical and urgent decisions relating to global warming, financial regulation, economic allocation of scarce resources such as food and water, humanitarian rights and refugee migration etc, will to be sifted through community knowledge, resulting in truly representative and equitable global governance. Implementation of the democratic process itself will continue to evolve with new forms of e-voting and governance supervision, which will include the active participation of advocacy groups supported by a consensus of expert knowledge via the Intelligent Web 4.0.

Over time democracy as with all other social processes, will evolve to best suit the needs of its human environment. It will emerge as a networked model- a non-hierarchical, resilient protocol, responsive to rapid social change. Such distributed forms of government will involve local communities, operating with the best expert advice from the ground up; the opposite of political party self-interested power and superficial focus-group decision-making, as implemented by many current political systems. These are frequently unresponsive to legitimate minority group needs and can be easily corrupted by powerful lobby groups, such as those employed by the heavy carbon emitters in the global warming debate.

By 2050 a form of global consciousness will have evolved, where the back channel of opinion and reason will gradually subsume today’s hierarchical and populist consumer/brand filtered political models. New forms of the democratic process at the community and regional level are already growing, pointing towards the emergence of a new form of truly representative public participation and cooperation.

This trend towards a fairer and more peaceful society must continue if the human race is to survive the uncertainty and turmoil ahead..

Future of Migration

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:32:00 +0000

The author contends that the future of Global Migration is governed by the laws of physics and that the flow of information, knowledge and education across borders will inevitably be followed by a flow of human skills on a global scale.

This scenario is based on the physics of the Least Action Principle, which postulates that any dynamical process, whether the trajectory of a ray of light or orbit of a planet, follows a path of least resistance or one which minimises the 'action' or overall energy expended.

Physicist Richard Feynman showed that quantum theory also incorporates a version of the Action Principle and underlies a vast range of processes from physics to linguistics, communication and biology. The evidence suggests a deep connection between this principle based on energy minimisation and self-organising systems including light waves, information flows and natural system topographies, such as the flow of a river.

Information is now flowing seamlessly to every corner of the planet and its populations, mediated by the Internet and Web; reaching even the poorest communities in developing countries via cheap PCs, wireless phones and an increasing variety of other mobile devices.

Half the population of the developing world in Asia and Africa now have access to the Web via inexpensive mobile phones. Individual local farmers and small businesses increasingly use them to transfer money, track commodity prices and supplier deliveries and keep in touch with relatives and their community. They are also the ideal medium for transferring knowledge as the basis of the education process.

In sync with the flow of information and knowledge there is now a global flow of educational material online including open access courseware resources. Courseware is a critical resource already offered by a number of prestigious tertiary institutions including- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Harvard, in addition to free knowledge reference sites such as Wikipedia.

The trend-lines in this open learning revolution are already evident and will become pervasive in the near future. They include online 24 hour access to the Web, open content via free courseware, and real-time wireless web delivery; making it much cheaper and easier for the flow of knowledge to reach previously illiterate societies and communities, particularly as a generational shift takes place.

At the same time the human learning process is being driven by the need to adapt to a fast changing work and social environment, to provide ongoing support for society’s needs in the new cyber-age. This shift in turn is being driven by the increasing rate of knowledge generation providing new opportunities.

By 2030 the full power of the Web will be deployed towards this new paradigm. At the same time work practices will become increasingly fluid, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisations on a contract or part-time basis; adding value to each enterprise and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.

And so by 2040, the flow of information followed by the continuous flow of educational courseware, together with improvements in standards of living, will have largely eliminated the inequalities of skills and training that currently exist between developed and developing nations.

The Action Principle will finally allow the developing world to achieve equal status with the developed world in terms of access to knowledge, training and the realisation of human potential and facilitate the free movement of human workers and their families between workplaces globally.

Already there is a large transfer of skills between countries like India, with a vast pool of engineering and computer science graduates, and the West’s need for such skills. This may be in the form of virtual outsourcing or physical transfers of a skilled labour force on short term contracts. The same process currently operates between EU countries to fill capacity shortages on a regular and continuing basis.

At the same time as the information/education/workflow convergence is occurring at a worldwide level, two other major drivers of global migration are accelerating - global warming and global conflict.

Planet earth is now reaching a catastrophic tipping point, where it is realised that humans have probably left their run too late to limit global temperature rise to the maximum safe 2 degrees centigrade and atmospheric carbon levels to less than 450 ppm.

The evidence is starting to become apparent from a number of sources. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain snows feeding the major river systems in Asia and Africa, the disintegration of the northern tundra threatening the release of vast amounts of methane, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, disruption of most ecosystems including the coral reefs and tropical forests, ocean warming, threatening the phytoplankton base of the food chain, and increases in extreme climate related events- droughts, floods, rising ocean surges in coastal areas, tornados etc. These are already threatening to overwhelm even the wealthier nations’ capacity to rebuild damaged and obsolete infrastructure.

Rampant global warming will inevitably lead to major disruption of the world’s food and fresh water supply chains, seriously affecting at least half the world’s population. This will result in vast migration movements as the rivers and food bowls of China, India and Africa dry up and deadly tropical diseases such as the malaria and dengue fever, spread.

In turn these factors will result in increasing social chaos and conflict unless managed on a global basis.

To stabilise the situation, the 1951 UN convention on refugees will need to be strengthened and expanded to establish a world humanitarian body with the powers to override national sovereignty and mandate the number of climate and conflict refugees that each region will be required to accept, according to capacity and demand.

Migration has always been a routine way of coping with floods and droughts going back to the earliest civilisations, when there were few borders and the numbers affected were trivial in comparison with today’s 7 billion population and its vast infrastructure.

The magnitude and frequency of environmental hazards is now beginning to place enormous pressure on the capacity of many communities to survive. The recent IPCC / Stern Review of the economics of climate change estimates that climate refugees will reach 200 million by 2050.

An idea of the coming wave of human migration can be glimpsed from a sample of recent natural disaster statistics, which do not include earthquake, volcanic or tsunami events.

Mexico was a source of 1 million environmental refugees a year during the 1990s with increased hurricanes and floods also the root cause of its economic crisis.

Large-scale government enforced relocation programs in Vietnam and Mozambique moved hundreds of thousands of people to cope with worsening floods and storms in 2000.

Six million environmental refugees in China have been created by the expanding Gobi desert. Migration in China and India has also been greatly amplified by development of projects such as China’s Three Gorges, which displaced 2 million people.

The 1998 monsoon floods in Bangladesh covered two thirds of the country and left 21 million homeless.

In 2008, floods following the Burma cyclone forced hundreds of thousands to flee, with little assistance from the Burmese junta.

In 2010, record monsoon rains in Pakistan caused the Indus River to burst its banks, causing millions to relocate.

Although most of these events created internal rather than external migration, it is unlikely that this will continue to be the case, with rising temperatures forecast to force tens of millions to move from tropical to more temperate regions, due to ongoing droughts over the next twenty years.

There are also an increasing number of conflict refugees from autocratic and despotic regimes and failed states. Tribalism and fear and suspicion of the ‘other’ is still strongly embedded in the DNA of human evolution, leading to scapegoating of migrant groups in tough economic times. Examples include Muslim harassment in Christian countries, Neo-Nazism in Europe targeting African refugees and inter-religious conflict in Asia and the Middle East.

The refugee diaspora has greatly expanded in conflict zones across the globe over the past two years, driven by upheavals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast, as well as persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Burma and Bhutan. Criminal violence, as now endemic in Mexico, is likely to add to this misery.

It is estimated that almost a million people are smuggled and trafficked across international borders each year, using increasingly sophisticated methods by criminal organisations linked to a range of other crimes- identity theft, corruption, money laundering, and violence ranging from debt bondage to murder- earning of the order of $10billion.

By 2030 mounting humanitarian crises are likely to make assistance to all climate and conflict refugees mandatory as it is realised that a piecemeal national approach will result in far worse disruptions to society in terms of the uncontrolled spread of violence in a very unstable time.

Any country that avoids its international obligations and attempts to free ride the system will be ostracised and severely sanctioned.

Europe already contends with a growing number of refugees from North Africa, which include economic, climate, disaster and conflict refugees, but with the upturn in Middle East violence and difficult economic times is battling xenophobia in its member states.

By 2040/50 most of the new migration infrastructure will be in place and communities will have to adjust accordingly. In an already largely globalised multicultural world where most nations have already accepted other cultures for several generations, even if begrudgingly, this will not be as revolutionary a development as many might expect.

It is therefore likely that the paradigm of controlled but flexible migration worldwide will cease to be controversial, endorsed and managed under the auspices of the UN, as a globalised One Planet philosophy gains traction.

It will be the only solution capable of managing cross border refugee flows in a time of looming climate disruption, but also the most economic means of allocating valuable human resources in a globalised educated world to areas of greatest need, as humans fight to save their planet.

Future of the Media

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:38:00 +0000

The end of traditional media as we know it is forecast by 2050, with the demise of large media oligarchies, the dominance of ubiquitous personalised web channels, freelance citizen reporting and blogging, automated online news aggregation and analysis, the downgrading of traditional advertising to an entertainment role and the rise of the Global Commons model, combined with the power of the Intelligent Web.

By 2012- most major print media will have been forced to radically adapt towards an online multimedia model. Newspapers are already in turmoil as they switch to a primarily online model with revenues collapsing as traditional advertising revenue streams dry up. Loss of classified and banner advertising is unable to be compensated by online revenues.

New revenue models are already being frantically trialled, with more flagship publications resorting to pay-walls as well as smart phone and tablet PC download apps, using the same model as the music and now book industries. These are having limited success, but as the stream of multimedia news and commentary outlets expands, offering alternate options to the larger publishing oligopolies, it is clear that this strategy will have a limited shelf life. At the same time page layouts, features and editorial are being outsourced, further fragmenting the print media industry.

To boost news gathering and editorial in the face of diminishing returns, both traditional news and specialist commentary sites will simultaneously open up reporting to largely unpaid citizen journalists and freelance bloggers, as is already occurring. This in turn will encourage syndicated commentary. There is also the beginning of a major trend to personalised and hyper-local online reporting by major news publishers, aimed at attracting small community interest groups and advertisers. This trend will also be increasingly reliant on local citizen reporting.

Traditional news media, both local and global, will be rapidly reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams, will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia mobile platforms such as new generation smart phones and tablets, already evident.

By 2020- traditional free-to-air broadcast television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of tumultuous change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic, personalised to individual taste, viewable anywhere, anytime- primarily on mobile media screens in 3D. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous with news and information filtered and customised to cater for every personal whim.

All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively new generation multimedia readers for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage, but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited archival storage utility/cloud sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.

Most print and video media will be available via direct ultra-fast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores will also convert largely to downloads, already accelerated by Google Edition’s retail alliance with the US Independent Booksellers Association. In turn, traditional booksellers will be forced to compete for download business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs, offering additional direct media experiences. These hubs will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future (ref Future of Cities). On demand direct 3D retinal projection technology will also begin to compete with download media access.

In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with media spaces such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to become the dominant entertainment form. News, entertainment and sport will then become truly interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic environments for maximum immersive reality effect.

The media will now evolve as differentiated reality streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- in-depth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog storyline formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating ongoing news scenario loops.

In addition the number of individual and small group freelance multimedia blogs, twitter-type conversation feeds and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially, exploring every aspect of societal experience and linked to ubiquitous location-based and augmented reality options. The blurring of professional and citizen journalism via blogging, stream-of-consciousness conversations and automated story generation and will continue to expand.

By 2030- free-to-air networks, except for some public broadcasting, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand content.
Public broadcasting will continue to receive strong support from community groups.
Specialised channels covering real-time activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance spaecialised groups and directly brokered for distribution to consumer groups on social networks and hubs.

Film and video production will also fragment, dominated by small independent producers and creative groups working on particular projects within virtual teams; marketing their services directly to consumer groups and market intermediaries.

By 2040- all news category coverage including- political, economic, financial, cultural, environmental and technological, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating largely independently of human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of contracted specialists supported by the web- not permanently tied to any particular media organisation.

The web behemoths such as Google and Microsoft will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun, with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of technology and knowledge, freely accessible for the global benefit. This trend will eventually make tied in-house news-gathering and reporting functions largely redundant.

In addition, traditional advertising models will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control. This will utilise ultra- intelligent media search/knowledge mining agents, allowing consumers to dictate their own in-depth information requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising, embedded within social media and available only on a request basis, will become the last remnant of the original dominant form.

Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia look-a likes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra-web enterprises such as Google. These will be forced to cede part of their global knowledge dominance in their own survival self-interest.

The Internet/Web will now be controlled by and open to all people on the planet via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, finally devolving away from US control.

By 2045 news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push/feedback basis; tailored to all net-citizens and ever-changing special interest groups and operating in diverse virtual social realities.

Advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks, supported by semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future Web) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers; continuously updated, with strictly authenticated information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences. The remaining informational advertising forms will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and educational knowledge basis only.

By 2050 the major media organisations will now be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media generation and dissemination will have shifted to countless creative individuals and small-scale media enterprises operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the Global Commons and Intelligent Web.

Future Trend analysis and scenario creation will become the new buzz- increasingly significant to knowledge creation and the largest media growth segment; merging with the gaming and entertainment markets, as humans commit to increasingly virtual and future-based development technologies. At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media processing, as all aspects of reality event discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision capacity of the Web 5.0.

The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and immersive entertainment for human civilisation. This will be facilitated by the automatic collection of events by embedded sensors in every artefact and all environments on the planet- delivered instantly via ultra-fast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection.
Its role will encompass documenting and projecting the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.

Web 5.0, as a synthesis of human and cyber extended knowledge, sensory experience and intelligence, will merge with and start to take ultimate control of this medium.

Future of War

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:03:00 +0000

Hyper-aggressive wars and conflicts- that is those not waged directly in defence of a nation or region, cause massive destruction to human life and its environment as well as the lives of future generations.
Therefore it is morally incumbent on all governments and populations to avoid or minimise the horrendous social and economic consequences involved.

In addition, wars are not only destructively immoral in terms of life and property but also illegal under National and International law. At the Nuremberg trials following the defeat of Nazi Germany, aggressive wars were judged to constitute the worst of international crimes, with prevention the major reason for founding the United Nations.

Methods for managing such conflicts and avoiding escalation of violence between major powers have been greatly bolstered since the end of WW2, with the creation of institutions such as the UN, NATO and the EU. In addition, new methods of mediation and diplomacy have gradually evolved in which third party nations and groups are involved in the resolution and management of conflict and peacekeeping processes. Although these methods are far from perfect, there are grounds for optimism that over time, combined with increasing globalisation ensuring the intermeshing of all national interests and cultures, major conflicts between and within States will become impossible to sustain.

Post cold war there have been numerous civil and neighbouring national conflicts, often involving ethnic or separatist groups, creating great suffering and subsequent large flows of refugees. However there is room for optimisim as a study of wars and armed conflict, The Human Security Report: War and Peace in the 21st Century, shows that the number of armed conflicts has fallen by 40% since the end of the Cold War.

Also since its establishment, the UN has played a significant role as effective peacemaker, with a positive outcome achieved in 66% of peace missions. There has also been a sixfold increase in UN efforts to prevent wars from starting, a fourfold increase in UN peacemaking missions to end unresolved conflicts and an elevenfold increase in the number of states made subject to UN sanctions.

A variety of techniques from mediation and peace-keeping to trade sanctions and threat of reprisal, are being applied in order to force warring parties to the peace table. These have been applied with mixed success in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir, Northern Ireland and the Sudan, with Burma a recent success, while high-pressure mediation is continuing in more intractable conflict areas such as Palestine, Somalia, The Republic of Congo and North Korea.
There is no doubt that that we are witnessing the evolutionary genesis of globally mediated methods for permanently maintaining peace across the planet.

But it is now clear that most military analyses relating to the future of war are severely skewed and one dimensional, failing to adequately factor in drivers beyond traditional geopolitical pressures. These future drivers- primarily global warming, globalisation and cyber-culture are now approaching with the force of a tsunami and will overwhelm all other historical and traditional military drivers by mid-century.

Failing to adequately take their consequences into account is to blindside both history and future reality, with the potential to lead to further irrevocable impacts on a fragile world.

Globalisation involves the interweaving of the cultural, educational, legal, economic, political, and technological protocols of all nations in a dense web of dependencies and relationships. China and the US for example are now joined at the hip on trade and economic matters despite ideological disparities and are mutually interdependent. The US needs China’s financial reserves to prop up its massive dollar debt and as an export market, while China needs a strong US dollar to guarantee its investments and US markets for a large proportion of its exports. Although there are moves to disengage this will not happen in the foreseeable future.

These two superpowers are also indirectly connected by the web of alliance and trade networks within the international community as a whole. They are now both too big, too interconnected and too focussed on trying to improve the quality of life of their own populations to become involved in massively destructive global warfare.

The outstanding template for globalisation is of course the European Union, which now links the economies of 27 nations, that up until a century ago warred continuously, with massive loss of life and potential. Now their populations work together, trade together, marry together and share a common currency despite the current difficulties in the Eurozone. The EU is the third force in an increasingly multi-polar world, counterbalancing both the US and China. Emerging economic powerhouses such as Brazil, India, South Africa and Russia make up a fourth force, with other major regions such as the South East asian bloc also exerting an inceasingly powerful influence.

Globalisation is also being accelerated by the Cyber revolution- providing access by all populations to the world’s knowledge base and providing an unstoppable catalyst for democracy, despite short term futile attempts at national censorship. It now mediates civilisation’s social, scientific and commercial progress, with the potential to provide enormous computational and decision power for future global governance.

Simulated war-gaming, involving complex scenarios based on holistic social, cyber and economic factors, will therefore be increasingly applied to pre-evaluate the potential outcomes of waging war. The result will be that military imperatives will play a significantly reduced role in the future. This will be accelerated by the emerging dimensions of cyber and economic warfare, which within the next decade will overtake military systems capacity as key determinants in the geopolitical supremacy stakes.

Cyber warfare in particular will become increasingly common, used as a proxy for direct weapons-based assault. Recent major attacks on 3,000 major companies and Government institutions worldwide, demonstrate the potential for even small groups to wage global computer and economic warfare- cking and hijacking strategic planning data and shutting down critical control systems and infrastructure.

But global warming is the biggest challenge, with its impact the greatest potential threaT ever faced or likely to be faced by our civilisation. By the middle of this century the budgets of all countries, particularly those of the major and middle powers will be focussed on mitigating the massively destructive and disastrous outcomes including- increased frequency and severity of catastrophic events such as floods, droughts, blizzards and hurricanes resulting in massive damage to both the natural and engineered environment, acidification of oceans, loss of biodiversity, scarcity of food, water and energy, disease pandemics and unprecedented refugee flows.

The stresses on all societies will be enormous, but only through global cooperation will anarchy and conflict will be constrained. This will require planning and allocation of resources on a global scale. The budgets and assets of all major powers including the US, China, India and the EU will need to be synchronised and focussed on avoiding this over-riding threat to the future of humanity. National rivalries will be subsumed and military and weapons programs drastically cut.

A timeline on the evolution of this process is as follows-

By 2020- battlefield strategy will evolve towards one that is increasingly fought in covert form – not through the use of large-scale traditional weaponry as in previous wars, with conventional military values becoming obsolete. Most attacks will be focused on subduing increasingly integrated terrorist and criminal groups, military juntas and authoritarian regimes as well as legitimate minority ehtnic groups.

A high proportion of battlefield operations will be automated, with drones and robots operating remotely and eventually autonomously, using satellite and sensor surveillance and the latest Web based intelligence for decision support. Cyber and economic warfare will also play an increasing role, conducted both by governments and criminal and terrorist groups.

At the same time there will be greater emphasis on a variety of peace-keeping and mediation initiatives, involving a range of alliances between Governments, NGOs and military forces such as the new-look NATO, operating at the local level in cooperation with civilian populations. These strategies will increasingly be applied to support failing and dysfunctional states and establish democratic institutions in fragile states such as Iraq and Afghanistan where clumsy US policies have largely failed. This will become the primary template for future military operations.

By 2030- superpower states – US and China, will no longer able to sustain long term conflicts using 20th century arsenals of air, sea and land forces. The US will be forced to abdicate its traditional 20th century role of global military dominance as its resources become spread too thinly and it struggles to maintain quality of life for its population against unsustainable mounting levels of debt.

Similarly China, India and middle power nations will be forced to channel most of their resources to developing infrastructure, capacity and social services. Numerous flashpoints involving quelling local insurgencies and ethnic uprisings will remain. Increasingly the UN and representative government groups such as the present G20 will work together to minimise conflict globally. The EU will be seen as the template for global cooperation and peace-keeping will become the norm for conflict containment.

By 2040 – it is realised by most nations that conflict and wars are increasingly unsupportable on both moral and economic grounds. Globalisation wikk

ll continue to accelerate, with the creation of more complex networks of alliances and treaties binding nations and regional groups. At the same time countries will start to lose their traditional sovereign status, with pressure for more fluid cross border immigration relaxation and economicmanagement as in the EU. The mixing of races and nationalities will ease pressure for conflict, and provides greater accessibility to global health, education, and knowledge resources.
The reality of climate change, with its increasing frequency of disaster events, will force ideological disparities to play a secondary role.

By 2050- all available global resources will be marshalled to overcome the immense problems associated with global warming, with the end of wars between nations in sight.

Future World Order

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:47:00 +0000

Three years ago the emergence of a New World Order was a relatively simple outcome of the political process- both to understand and predict. The prognosis primarily involved the rise of Asia in economic terms followed by a relatively orderly transference of political and financial power from the West to the East, resulting in the emergence of a more multi-polar globalised world over the next 30 years.

The signals for such a shift were clear then and still are- up to a point.

Following a rapid period of industrial development, as occurred in Europe after its industrial revolution, Asian nations are now playing social and technological catch up.

The speed of Asia's advance has been breathtaking, Before the West's industrial revolution, Asia accounted for almost 60% of the world's economy. By WW2 this had slipped to 20%. It is now projected to rise back to 60% by 2020. Asia is in the middle of a long-term growth phase, even accounting for the current financial meltdown mark 2, that extends back to the Meiji Restoration period in Japan in the 19th century and the end of Imperial rule in China at the beginning of the 20th century. By 2040 it is predicted that China will be the world’s leading economy, followed by the US and India.

In India and China the middle class now accounts for over ten percent of the population. It is also upwardly mobile in terms of its consumer and knowledge culture. Combined with improved access to education, science and technology, this means the push for political pluralism is now inevitable. It is also inevitable that the new regional Asian grouping- the East Asian forum will begin to play a dominant over the next 5 years, extending the present ASEAN forum to include over 2 billion people in a model similar to that of the EU.

This transition to equalization of opportunity in the east was always a given. Then along came the greatest financial catastrophe of the modern era with the potential collapse of the Eurozone and the contagion spreading throughout the west.

The US is US$15 trillion in debt and counting and the main lender is Asia. China has a US$2 trillion surplus in currency reserves. Within the decade economic power will have passed to Asia, with the US no longer in the drivers seat of the world’s capital markets. Its banking structure is already emasculated and unlikely to ever recover its former glory.

China is now banker to the world.

But creating a new multi-polar and globalised world order has only just begun. It is about much more than Asia’s rise to power. The current economic and political architecture is totally bankrupt and will have to be rewritten in a radical new language- a hybrid of socialism and capitalism with various other ethical and green sustainable strands woven in. And this new architecture will need to have the flexibility to continue to evolve and adapt as the cultural, social and technological landscape around it changes at breathtaking speed.

Tinkering around the edges with an infusion of Government backed liquidity and greater regulation isn’t going to cut it this time around. After all what we are witnessing is at least a 50% write down of the world’s wealth, which among other downsides is going to force a return to poverty for tens of millions in the developing nations.

The US has been living with serious structural deterioration for more than a decade- negligible levels of private savings, chronic balance of payment s deficits and domestic budget shortfalls. Foreign savers have funded these gaps. Half the US treasury bills on issue are now foreign owned, while sovereign wealth funds are diversifying out of US debt and taking influential positions in some of America’s iconic companies. While China’s growth rate has retreated below 7 percent, the West’s growth rate is negative.

And still the world leaders, bankers, economists and investors have no real solution to this cataclysmic disaster, let alone a real willingness to take responsibility for it. It’s as if after a few years and an infusion of a few tens of trillions of dollars the bad news will go away and life will return to ‘normal’ – business as usual again.

When you’ve got the current level of uncertainty in the collective economic and political mind and basically flying blind, you know there is zero probability that this will happen.

But this is just the beginning of a great unwinding of current civilization. The sudden shock to the world’s traditional order will create many unforeseen ramifications- some chaotic and violent. We already see social unrest in China, Russia and Europe. This has the capacity to turn anarchic as the economy continues to deteriorate. Combined with worldwide food, water and energy shortages in a time of global climate change, this shock has the potential to put immense pressure on social norms.

We’ve arrived suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the 21st century at a great impasse, a great disjunction in human affairs.

But there is also a great opportunity to fast track reform of a flawed system from the ground up. This crisis can be turned to huge advantage for all humanity, providing the solutions are applied with great creativity, courage and cooperation.

It’s not a time for more of the same- for more great leaders and hubris. Instead it requires the harnessing of collective wisdom, knowledge and responsibility; extending beyond the false pride and patriotism of the national political process, tangled in its debilitating web of self-interest, delusion and corruption.

We can already see the tentative beginnings of this New World Order- Mark 2.

Pressure to reform unrepresentative voting structures of the UN; moves to establish a more inclusive grouping of middle power decision-making nations- from the G8 to G20; initiatives to reform the IMF and World Bank; the rise of the NGO community as an ethical counterweight to political decision-making; the continued rise of democracy; greater national cooperation supporting global conventions on human rights, conflict mediation, global warming, the sea, trade, health, science, legal and financial protocols etc; and the rise of the internet with its promise of providing equal access for the developing world to the sum of human knowledge.

But time is short. The luxury of leisurely progress toward achieving these critical goals is past. All options must now be on the table and open to radical reform- ideological, economic and social.

After all, nothing less than the future of human civilisation and the well being of the planet’s seven billion inhabitants is at stake.

Future Darwinism

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:43:00 +0000

Future Darwinism - Towards a Unified Theory of Evolution

Darwin's year in 2009, celebrating the 200th birthday of perhaps the most profound thinker of the modern era, is also an appropriate time to explore the ramifications of next stage in the Darwinian revolution.

The biological theory of evolution is undoubtedly the most powerful paradigm ever conceived by humans to explain their own existence. Since Darwin's epoch-making treatise, Origin of Species, published a hundred and fifty years ago in 1859, evolution has been centre-stage, universally recognised as the driving force in the emergence of all life, including modern humans, from the genesis of the first cells on this planet, almost 4 billion years ago.

However, despite its ubiquitous brilliance as the jewel in the crown of human intellectual achievement, the notion of Darwinian evolution has never been developed to its full potential. It remains instead largely constrained within its biological cradle, often limited in its everyday connotation to the lowest common denominator of 'survival of the fittest'.

The intention of this and subsequent columns on the Future of Darwinism will be to re-evaluate and explore the future potential of the Darwinian model and to demonstrate that its current scope and application is only the tip of the intellectual iceberg.

By combining its formidable biological principles including the immense field of genetics, with those of systems, network, quantum, complexity and information theory, it emerges as an incalculably deeper and richer model than previously contemplated.

The major thesis currently now being explored by a number of eminent researchers drawn from the spectrum of physical and social sciences, demonstrates that the evolutionary engine that drives biological development also drives all other dynamic adaptive processes at the physical, social, cognitive, economic, political and technological level and is in fact the major dynamic governing the Universe, past present and future.

It is further proposed to explore in future posts the social ramifications of recent developments in artificial intelligence and the immense computational power generated through the Internet, that mark the next crucial stage in human evolution; involving the inevitable symbiosis of vast computational intelligence with the power of the human mind.

These two 21st century conceptual goals - a universal all-encompassing Unified Theory of Evolution based on the original Darwinian model - coupled with the emancipation of human intelligence via the future Web, together provide a vastly more powerful paradigm for exploring the future of Darwinism, life and human potential.

Future Blogsphere

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:42:00 +0000

A new force is shaping global political and social culture. The millions of Weblogs or blogs being generated and refreshed daily are now starting to provide a meta-communication platform- the Blogsphere 2.0 of incredible power and complexity.

Information and opinions are now being exchanged, transformed and sifted at a global meta-level in real-time across national and international boundaries and timezones. At the same time traditional blogs are merging with all other forms of media communication- online newspapers, social networks, news aggregation sites and micro conversations on mobile media such as Twitter.

The Blogging phenomena in general provides vast potential for collaborative learning, marketing, public relations, political, social and civic discourse and at the same time allows bloggers to bypass traditional corporate media gatekeepers.

Blogging is increasingly therefore seen as an extension of consumer and political activism. Fifty percent of bloggers express an opinion about a company or product at least once a week. Seventy seven percent of online consumers view blogs as a useful way to gaining insight into products they are looking to buy. And out of the estimated 20 million blogs, over a million feature discussion relating to environmental and ethical issues.

Major enterprises are also beginning to incorporate this resource into their marketing plans, with the accepted model of advertising changing to capitalise on the blogsphere’s connection-shaping influence in both the real and virtual social world. For example larger companies have started recruiting ‘brand ambassadors’ or key social figures in the community, paid to drop brand references into blog comments or background conversations on Twitter.

Future Trends

But the greatest significance of the future Blogsphere 2.0 will be felt at the social level. Blogs are increasingly being linked to social, professional, and political networks. Citizen journalism will flourish as more individuals publish their views and experiences and more information is distributed at both the community and global level. This will reshape the voice of community, civil rights and democracy as more people are exposed to new topics and opinions without the need for third party intermediaries such as politicians or television commentators, acting as filters. Citizen generated media will therefore be free of the restrictions of traditional top-down media and dramatically increase consumer control over media content.

Blogs already allow ideas and innovation to become part of popular culture. Once an idea exists in the online world it immediately also propagates globally in the real world, facilitating knowledge sharing within developing countries. A form of participatory democracy will then emerge, decreasing the elite power of traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

Most importantly, the emerging Blogsphere 2.0 will not just become a major new voice for the global mass media, but the beginning of a significant global consciousness, reflecting the views of all inhabitants of the planet, with the power to shape future opinion and consumer culture.

Future Economics

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:41:00 +0000

The recent failure of classical economics to predict and manage the catastrophic failure of the world’s financial system has triggered a re-evaluation of the whole basis of current economic theory, which has been applied to sustain capitalism for the last 100 years. .

By the end of the 20th century traditional economics was dominated by the classical paradigm based on notions of rational consumers making rational choices in a simple supply/demand world of finite resources, with prices constrained by decreasing returns; all driving the economy to an optimal equilibrium point.

Twentieth century economists had finally realised their dream of creating a rational, rigorous and well-defined mathematical model for describing the workings of the global economy. This standard model has been applied by business leaders, finance ministers, central bankers and presidential advisers ever since.

Up until recently classical economic theory has appeared to work adequately by a process of trial and error. In stable times people are generally rational and optimistic and the theory describes reality reasonably well. But in extreme circumstances people panic and the theory fails spectacularly, including the performance of the quantitative risk algorithms beloved by hi-tech stock market traders.

Unfortunately such a clockwork model has proved over the last four decades to be seriously out of synch with reality, as global markets have been roiled by a series of disastrous credit, market, liquidity and commodity crises. The predictions of the standard model have failed to match real world outcomes, generated in succession by the Savings and Loan, Asian, Mexican, Dotcom and now toxic mortgage bubble disasters.

In this ‘mother of all’ excess greed debacles, high risk mortgage loans were repackaged many times over into opaque risk financial instruments, such as Collateralised Debt Obligations or CDOs, which ended up through the unregulated banking system in the portfolios of nearly every bank and financial institution around the world. Because of lack of regulation, members of the shadow system such as hedge funds and merchant banks borrowed scores of times their own worth in cash. When the CDOs finally failed, the losses rippled through the world economy. The banks stopped lending, leading to further business failures and investors were then forced to sell previously sound stocks causing a stock market crash.

But this crash is far more serious- perhaps even more than the Great Depression, as it cannot be contained within borders as easily or so simply solved by mass lending and job creation programs. Now we have the biggest banks, manufacturers, miners, energy suppliers and whole national economies from the US to Iceland toppling like dominoes around the world, under trillions of dollars of debt - with no end in sight.

In fact a number of interdisciplinary thinkers, starting in the seventies, began to question the credibility of the entire basis of the classical economic model, likening it to a gigantic academic exercise rather than a serious science. And it gradually began to dawn on this group that at a number of the key premises or axioms underpinning the existing model were seriously flawed.

As mentioned, the first is the assumption that humans are rational players in the great game of market roulette. They are not. Behavioural scientists have shown that while people are very good at recognising useful patterns and interpreting ambiguous or incomplete information in their decision-making, they are very poor when it comes to performing complex logical analysis, preferring to follow market leaders or flock. This can further amplify distorting trends.

The new theories of behavioural finance argue that during a bubble the rate of buying and selling can become manic, resulting in irrational decisions. Making money actually stimulates investor’s brain reward circuitry, causing them to ignore risk and making it difficult to value stocks accurately.

But perhaps the most critically flawed assumption is that an economic system always reaches an ideal point equilibrium of its own accord. In other words, the market is capable of self-regulation- automatically allocating resources and controlling excesses in an optimum way, with minimum outside interference.

Since the nineteenth century the fundamental principle underpinning economics has been based on the idea that the economy is an equilibrium system- a system that moves from one equilibrium point to another, driven by shocks from external disruptions - technological, political, cultural etc- but always coming to rest in a natural equilibrium state.

The new emerging evolutionary paradigm however postulates that economies and markets, as well as the internet, enterprises and the brain, are all forms of complex adaptive systems in which agents dynamically interact, process information and adapt their behaviour to a constantly changing environment- but never reach a final equilibrium or goal.

In biological evolution, the natural environment selects those systems that are able to best adapt to its infinite variation. In economic evolution, the market is a combination of financial, production, trading, cultural, organisational and regulatory elements which adapt to and influence a constantly changing ecological, social and business environment.

In essence, economic and financial systems have been fundamentally misclassified. They are not perfect self-regulating systems. They are enormously complex adaptive networks, made up of individual agents which interact dynamically in response to changes in their environment- not merely through simple price setting mechanisms, tax or interest rate cuts, liquidity injections or job creation programs. They must be understood and managed at a far deeper level.

Modern evolutionary theorists believe that evolution is a universal phenomena
and that both economic and biological systems are subclasses of a more general and universal class of evolutionary systems. And if economics is truly an evolutionary system and general laws for evolutionary systems exist, then it follows there are also general laws of economics which must be harnessed. This contradicts much of the standard theory in economics developed over the past one hundred years.

The economic ecosystem is now fed by trillions of transactions, interactions and non-linear feedback loops daily. It may in fact have become too complex and interdependent for economists and governments to control or even understand. It may therefore, as several eminent complexity theorists have recently stated, be on the verge of chaos. Too much or not enough regulation can distort the outcomes further- creating ongoing speculative pricing bubbles or supply and demand distortions.

There is now an urgent need to understand at a much deeper level the genie that modern civilisation has engineered and now let loose. This can only be done by admitting the current crumbling edifice is beyond repair and building a radical new model from ground zero; a system that incorporates the hard science of network, behavioural and complexity theory.

A new adaptive evolutionary model is not only essential- it is the only option.

Future of Energy

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:34:00 +0000

By 2015 India and China will both have outstripped the US in energy consumption by a large margin. Cap and Trade carbon markets will have been established by major developed economies, including India and China, as the most effective way to limit carbon emissions and encourage investment in renewable energy, reforestation projects etc.

There will have been a significant shift by consumers and industry to renewable energy technologies- around 25%, powered primarily by the new generation adaptive wind and solar energy mega-plants, combined with the rapid depletion of the most easily accessible oil fields. Coal and gas will continue to play a major role at around 60% useage, with clean coal and gas technologies still very expensive. Nuclear technology will remain static at 10% and hydro at 5%.

Most new vehicles and local transport systems will utilise advanced battery or hydrogen electric power technology, which will continue to improve energy density outputs.

Efficiency and recycling savings of the order of 30% on today’s levels will be available from the application of smart adaptive technologies in power grids, communication, distribution and transport networks, manufacturing plants and consumer households. This will be particularly critical for the sustainability of cities across the planet. Cities will also play a critical role in not only supporting the energy needs of at least 60% of the planet’s population through solar, wind, water and waste energy capture but will feed excess capacity to the major power grids, providing a constant re-balancing of energy supply across the world.

By 2025 a global Cap and Trade regime will be mandatory and operational worldwide. Current oil sources will be largely exhausted but the remaining new fields will be exploited in the Arctic, Antarctic and deep ocean locations. Renewable energy will account for 40% of useage, including baseload power generation. Solar and wind power will dominate in the form of huge desert solar and coastal and inland wind farms; but all alternate forms- wave, geothermal, secondary biomass, algael etc will begin to play a significant role.

Safer helium-cooled and fast breeder fourth generation modular nuclear power reactors will replace many of the older water-cooled and risk-prone plants, eventually accounting for around 15% of energy production; with significant advances in the storage of existing waste in stable ceramic materials.

By 2035 global warming will reach a critical threshold with energy useage tripling from levels in 2015, despite conservation and efficiency advances. Renewables will account for 50% of the world's power supply, nuclear 15% and fossils 35%. Technologies to convert CO2 to hydocarbon fuel together with more efficient recycling and sequestration,along with hydrates, will allow coal and gas to continue to play a significant role.

By 2045-50 renewables will be at 70-75% levels, nuclear 12% and clean fossil fuels 15-20%. The first Hydrogen and Helium 3 pilot fusion energy plants will be commissioned, with large-scale generators expected to come on stream in the latter part of the century, eventually reducing carbon emissions to close to zero.

However the above advances will still be insufficient to prevent the runaway effects of global warming. These long-term impacts will raise temperatures well beyond the additional two-three degrees centigrade critical limit.

Despite reduction in emissions by up to 85%, irreversible and chaotic feedback impacts on the global biosphere will be apparent. These will be triggered by massive releases of methane from permafrost and ocean deposits, fresh water flows from melting ice causing disruptions to ocean currents and weather patterns.

These will affect populations beyond the levels of ferocity of the recent Arctic freeze, causing chaos in the northern hemisphere and reaching into India and China and the droughts and heat waves of Africa, the Middle East and Australia.

The cycle of extreme weather events and rising oceans that threaten to destroy many major coastal cities will continue to increase, compounded by major loss of ecosystems, biodiversity and food capacity. This will force a major rethink of the management of energy and climate change as global catastrophe threatens.

Increasingly desperate measures will be canvassed and tested, including the design of major geo-engineering projects aimed at reducing the amount of sunlight reaching earth and reversal of the acidity of the oceans. These massive infrastructure projects would have potentially enormous ripple-on effects on all social, industrial and economic systems. They are eventually assessed to be largely ineffective, unpredictable and unsustainable.

As forecasts confirm that carbon levels in the atmosphere will remain high for the next 1000 years, regardless of mitigating measures, priorities shift urgently to the need to minimise risk to life on a global scale, while protecting civilisation's core infrastructure, social, knowledge and cultural assets.

Preserving the surviving natural ecosystem environment and the critical infrastructure of the built environment, particularly the Internet and Web, will now be vital. The sustainability of human life on planet Earth, in the face of overwhelming catastrophe, will be dependent to a critical degree on the power of the intelligent Web 4.0, combining human and artificial intelligence to manage food, water, energy and human resources.

Only the enormous problem-solving capacity of this human-engineered entity, will be capable of ensuring the continuing survival of civilisation as we know it

The Future of Health

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:13:00 +0000

Within the next thirty years to 2040, the following scientific and technological trends will be deeply embedded in the global Medical / Health Ecosystem-

Global-Personalised Medicine

Most developed countries will have established comprehensive electronic Health Record Systems to track lifetime patient medical and general health histories including DNA genome sequence and microarray SNP test results.
By 2030 it will also be possible to sequence the human genome at the personal level for less than $200, providing more accurate individual disease prediction and prevention. In addition, an individual’s medical records will provide personalised drug and vaccines protocols based on genetic response variants. Whole-of-Life e-health records will be accessible initially within countries and regions across the developed and much of developing world, eventually allowing the creation of online global networks of personalised records from pre-birth to death.

As well as the information records technologies outlined above, there will be a major trend towards providing expert biomedical advice and services to individuals and populations across the planet, utilising the communication modalities of the Web.
Libraries of medical and hospital patient records including scanned images, will be linked in vast virtual databases by 2030, to provide remote expert support to local medical teams and practitioners. In addition advanced surgical techniques, applied remotely using robotic, virtual and augmented reality technologies will be in widespread use.

Smart mobile phone technologies will also function as personalised helpers, performing real-time monitoring and transmission of patient status data- pulse rate, blood pressure etc, via inexpensive sensor networks, forwarding continuous data to expert hubs for online analysis and intervention.

The Grid/Mesh/Sensor Web will provide ubiquitous communication support for the acquisition and delivery of knowledge on a global basis. It will incorporate virtually limitless bandwidth as well as high levels of redundancy and security to guarantee continuous and fail-safe operation. Sensor webs, collections of wireless processing nodes that can capture local sensor data and transfer it to a processing hub, will play a vital role in customising and updating mobile devices such as smart phones; supporting applications that constrained by a constantly varying environment or context such as the monitoring of patient well being.

These developments will be particularly valuable for developing countries with limited health support resources.

The Intelligent Web 4.0

By 2030, current versions of the Social Web 2.0 and emerging Semantic Web 3.0 will have evolved to the next level of autonomy and intelligence-Web 4.0. The Web’s evolution will have made many important contributions to the biological sciences through the application of new knowledge, network science, logical inference and artificial intelligence.

Web 4.0 will be ubiquitous, powered by a smart computational sensory, computational grid/mesh enveloping and connecting human life and encompassing all facets of social and scientific activity- always on and available. It will connect not only most of the 9 billion individuals existing on the planet by 2050, but also link with other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically available objects. It will interact with the repository of most available knowledge of human civilisation- including algorithms, protocols and processes, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis.

Through Web 4.0, human intelligence will have co-joined with advanced forms of artificial intelligence, creating a higher or meta-level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving requirements essential for civilisation's future progress, including medical diagnosis and management.

Systems Biology

The power of the web will be supported by a new way of unlocking a deeper understanding of nature and its evolution- Systems Biology. This marks a paradigm shift from traditional reductionism to a more holistic level of understanding of biological phenomena- interpreting organisms in terms of information processing networks at the system rather than component level of genes, proteins, environmental factors etc.
Systems biology also marks the beginning of a more quantitative science, highlighting the causality and dynamics of biological interactions by applying mathematical models and the capability of simulating interactions at all levels- cells, organs and the total organism.
This paradigm will be central to further progress in understanding the patterns of life in terms of biological networks processing digital data.

Genetic-Tissue Engineering

Applying genetic engineering or gene therapy techniques, corrected genes can be inserted into cells including adult stem cells taken from a patient affected by a particular disease. The future treatment of diseases such as heart failure and breast cancer will also be revolutionised by the option of growing new organs and tissue inside the human body using the patient’s own stem cells and biodegradable scaffolds to avoid immune rejection.

Molecular engineers are already beginning to create custom-built proteins with enhanced functions, including the capability to correct disease genes causing haemophilia, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anaemia.

Stem cell therapies, including both adult and embryonic stem cell differentiation, will be commonly applied by 2030 to the scaffold synthesis and repair of human tissue and organs including—complex skin sheets, cartilage, blood vessels, bone, eyes, spine, pancreas, liver and heart muscle- mimicking their biological counterparts.

Cyber-Human Symbiosis

The linkages between cyber-computer technologies and human biological systems is now well advanced and includes development of the following applications-
Interactions through Virtual and Augmented Realities;
Sensory augmentation implants- such as the Cochlear and early retinal devices;
Prosthetics- such as the recent DARPA funded neurally controlled prosthetic arm –combining technologies of signal processing, electrical and mechanicalengineering and neuroscience.
Brain interfaces-which will enable a paralysed person to pick up a cup and drink, using interpreted brain signals.
Artificial hippocampus- to assist patients with memory deficits;
Brain image extraction- reconstructing and displaying images using fMRI mapping; Building brain functions at the system level- applying evolutionary self organising and learning principles;
Interactive humanoid robots- to provide company and support

Current developments including synthetic biology, cyber-human symbiosis and bioengineering also signal the creation of new and enhanced life forms for the first time in human history. This will open a portal for the explosion of human potential beyond the confines of biological evolution alone.

The impact of cyberspace on the evolution of the brain is also likely to be very significant over the coming decades. Children are constantly being neurally rewired as the interactive Internet becomes a seamless part of their lives for example in the form of video games and social networks.

NeuroEngineering

NeuroEngineering technology will be commonly applied by 2030, involving a greater understanding of brain function and enabling enhancement of human intelligence, memory and creativity. Significant advances are already being made towards simulating and emulating the brain’s capacity for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, using advanced 3D fMRI and Optogenetics. This recent technology combines genetic engineering with optics to study specific cell types, using fluorescent dyes to better visualise the functions of various groups of neurons and their interactions. This allows the location and dynamics of neural circuits controlling behaviour in animals to be studied and controlled, including food seeking, decision-making and stress avoidance. It also reveals new targets for drugs that can regulate neurons and lead to better treatments.

Cognitive enhancement compounds will also be widely used by 2030; applied to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia as well as enhancing human decision-making, alertness and memory capability. Two enhancers- methylphenidate and amphetamines, have already been shown to alter the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in neural synapses. Enhanced dopamine signalling may improve learning by focusing attention and interest on a task.

Brain simulation is also a nascent field offering huge future potential. IBM has already simulated a brain with a billion neurons and ten trillion synapses- equivalent to a cat’s cortex or 4.5% of a human brain; while a team of European scientists have taken the first steps towards creating a silicon chip designed to function like a the cortex of a human brain. By simulating a fundamental microcircuit, down to the level of individual neurons it can be used to test genetic variations in particular neurotransmitters, mimicking what happens when the molecular environment is altered using drugs.
With research and development converging on all fronts in this field- both at the hardware and software level, it will be only a matter of time until a brain with human-level complexity is scaled up for experimental use.

NanoBioEngineering

Molecular biology has largely been applied as a reductive science but now synthetic biologists are building machines from interchangeable DNA parts that work inside living cells, deriving energy, processing information and reproducing.Flexible reliable fabrication technology, together with standardised methods and design libraries have enabled a new generation of biological engineers to already create new organisms from biological components,from the ground up.

The technologies of the first generation of Medibots is now well progressed. Medibots are tiny robots that only a few millimetres in size that can work internally and are designed to enter our bodies through the mouth, ears, eyes and lungs and swim through the bloodstream. Bby 2030 they will be commonly used to conduct robotic surgery, install medical devices inside the body, including a camera in a capsule small enough to be swallowed, deliver drugs and take tissue samples. remote control is conducted by a surgeon via a computer console, in the same way that a present day astronomer works.

Self-replicating, autonomous nanoscale robots are also being bioengineered and will change the face of healthcare and life enhancement. Nanoscale machines and motors will be inserted inside cells which can then self-assemble and seamlessly integrate with the cell. Smart implants and tiny biological fuel cells are also on the drawing board, capable of producing electricity from glucose and oxygen in the bloodstream.

The Web Takes Control

As previously outlined, the intelligent Web 4.0 will be in full play by 2040 and beyond as a symbiotic extension of life-intelligence on a global scale. It already functions as the central information- processing hub for life on the planet, enabling the successful design and delivery of most complex knowledge generation projects.

The web is evolving, not as an application sitting on top of the Internet, but as a living organism in its own right; because it encapsulates all human as well as artificial intelligence. In addition it already links biological life and artificial life in forms such as software agents and learning machines such as intelligent robots, as well as providing enormous computing power for civilisation’s repository of knowledge.

Most importantly it will have co-joined with human intelligence as an active partner, creating a higher or meta-level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting autonomously the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving essential for civilisation's future progress.

By 2040 the evolutionary trajectory of the Web, within its human and planetary environment, will have necessitated it taking responsibility for most major medical and health management decisions, becoming the senior decision partner in the process with humans.

Major health decisions will require verification and confirmation by the Web’s enormous informational intelligence, encompassing as it will, all medical knowledge, protocols and diagnostic algorithms. In addition, this intelligence capacity will allow it to creatively partner and effectively manage key local and global medical research projects.

The benefits to humanity of autonomous Web intervention in the medical-health decision space will be seen as enormous; allowing far more efficient and rigorous diagnosis and problem-solving, with many lives saved and quality of care improved. For example, real-time, optimal planning will be particularly critical in managing future pandemics, particularly as global warming continues..

On the basis of the current Trendlines this capacity will continue to grow, with human decision input becoming increasingly peripheral; as is the case already in many major engineering, transport, communication, financial and logistical operational areas, where realtime responses are required and optimal algorithms scientifically accepted.

The Web 4.0 and its descendents will then have taken virtual control of the evolution of medical-health science and practice

Future of Food

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:07:00 +0000

By 2015- global warming will be beginning to have a major impact on food production. Dislocation in climate patterns, increasing frequency of droughts and floods-including the drying up of the major river systems of Asia, plus rising population and cultivation of biofuels will result in less arable land and rising costs of food production.

This will lead to increased prices of staple foods such as rice, wheat and maize as well as meat, forcing another 100 million people in developing countries into malnutrition, including 10 million children in India alone. This is in addition to the already 1 billion already affected by poverty and malnutrition.

This will have severe flow on effects for the future of developing countries as malnutrition severely impacts the cognitive capacity of the next generation.

Food aid will also be under pressure from richer countries, as governments are forced to provide priority for food security to their own populations, particularly following a decade of financial turmoil. Friction will also be created as major population countries such as China begin buying up arable land in poorer countries such as africa as a hedge against future food shortages.

By 2025- the world population will have grown to more than 8 billion. Global demand for grain and animal production will now significantly outstrip supply. To satisfy demand, cereal production needs to increase by 50% and animal production by 90%.

Additional arable land equal to 150 million hectares or a minimum 10% of the 1.5 billion hectares already under cultivation will be required to keep pace despite improvements in agricultural management and technology. This is likely to come in the short term from areas such as the Congo and Amazonia, accelerating the onset of global warming and drought as forests are further fragmented.

This will inevitably create global unrest and conflict with waves of mass migrations in developing countries to the cities. In turn this will accelerate the need to make cities and urban environments more food self sufficient, through use of treated sewage, local community food gardens, based on urban harvested water runoff and solar energy collection.

By 2030- major programs will be underway to recover genes from ancestor plant species that originally evolved to cope with drought and salinity, together with a return to original middle eastern and African dry land farming techniques.

There is recognition that conventional breeding techniques for plant traits such as tolerance to dry conditions, may be too complex and time consuming to achieve within the available urgent timeframes. Genetic modification provides the only answer, with accelerated cooperative science initiatives to increase crop yield, drought tolerance and disease resistance.

Bright spots will be a major shift from grains to tuber crops such as potatoes, which need less land and water than grain and are extremely nutritious, with four times as much complex carbohydrate and better quality proteins than grains. In addition meat products will synthesized from culturing the muscle cells of a broad range of animals, bypassing the need to slaughter them.

Animal production as a primary source of protein will also be seen as unsustainable, as is large-scale use of arable land for cattle grazing. Monoculture and irrigation farming is also phased out as unsustainable in terms of inefficient water and land useage. Poultry remains viable on edge of farmland and cities.

World fisheries are also at major risk by 2030, with fish traditionally providing 20% of animal protein. All fish, crustacean and sea mammal stocks are already severely depleted despite greater conservation controls. The oceans are rapidly becoming too acidic to support sea life including plankton and shellfish. Ocean dead zones, depleted of oxygen, are spreading fast.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization- FAO draws up contingency plans for global food management, planning for relocation of populations from the drying tropical zones to those of the more habitable northern and southern latitudes.

By 2040- glacial and mountain snow fed sources of water will be in full retreat across the globe. As a result the major river systems in Europe, South America and Asia, providing water to the traditional farming areas of southern Europe, Pakistan, China, India, Afghanistan and Vietnam, begin to dry up.

China’s vast rice fields, providing food for 400 million people and India’s wheat, fruit and vegetable farming locus in the Punjab are severely affected. Most of Africa, the Middle East and Australia will be in permanent drought, combined with major depletion and contamination by natural gas extraction of the groundwater aquifers.

Human habitation in the mid latitudinal belts- 30 degrees north and south of the equator, becomes unsustainable. The only regions with adequate rainfall, guaranteed to support stable food production and human society, are in the high latitudes such as- Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, part of Northern Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. Small communities continue to survive in drought areas by building shelters and growing food underground, using still active aquifers and solar energy.

By 2050- global warming will be out of control with unsustainable limits to suitable land for agriculture, with contention between retaining forest as a carbon sink and clearing it for agriculture.

Friction reaches flashpoint between the major nations over land, food and water security. Massive human migrations are occurring globally – from poorer to richer countries and from drier to wetter habitats.

Giant solar energy generating belts become operational across North Africa, Middle east, Southern US and Australia, providing power for high density population centers and high intensity farming hubs to feed them.

With the world population reaching 9 billion, an extra 1 billion hectares more land are needed for food production- equal to the landmass of US. At the same time commercial fish and seafood species have collapsed.

It is recognized that only global cooperation beyond national borders can avoid conflict, anarchy and starvation for billions. Global food production, distribution and allocation plans are activated under the auspices of the UN.

Global cooperation in achieving the equitable allocation of land, water, energy and food resources through the advanced communication and knowledge mechanism of the Intelligent web 4.0, becomes the only realistic means of avoiding global anarchy and the disintegration of human civilization.

National boundaries and political hubris become irrelevant when the survival of human life- perhaps the most advanced life-form in the universe - is threatened

Future of the Web

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:20:00 +0000

By 2015 Web 2.0- The Social Web- will have developed into a complex multimedia interweaving of ideas, knowledge and social commentary, connecting over three billion people on the planet. In combination with the genesis of the next generation Semantic Web 3.0 it will automatically analyse, interpret and create new forms of layered knowledge beyond the world of today's blogs, wikis, videos, images, augmented reality, podcasts, social networks and games.

Over the next decade these early trends will continue to evolve at a frenetic pace. Social networks will both fragment and unify, catering to special groups, but also overlapping and creating within the next few years a global social network of networks. At the same time, social networks, virtual communities and game worlds will converge, along with powerful simulation technology, to create the first realistic virtual realities. Social and enterprise networks will also have converged.

By 2020 Web 3.0- the Semantic Web- will have made many important contributions to new knowledge through network relationships, logical inference and artificial intelligence. It will be powered by a seamless computational mesh, including trillions of sensor webs and virtual channels layered on the Internet, enveloping and connecting most human life.

It will encompass all facets of our social and business lives- not just data, but equations, algorithms, techniques, procedures, processes and protocols- always on and always available, to manage most of the services that humanity and life requires.
Web 3.0 will connect not only many of the 7-8 billion individuals on the planet, but also link with other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically embedded objects and cyber-physical systems. The Social and Semantic Web will have combined.

By 2030-40 Web 4.0- the Intelligent Web- will be ubiquitous- able to interact with the repository of almost all available knowledge of human civilisation- past and present, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis.
Web 4.0 will mark the beginning of a new intelligent entity- a sentient and cogniscent multidimensional network, powered not only by billions of ultra-fast tiny processors and unlimited communications bandwidth, but by the first quantum computers, capable of processing trillions of operations in parallel. Human intelligence will have co-joined with advanced forms of artificial and virtual intelligence, creating a higher or meta-level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting the complex decision-making and problem solving capacity required for civilisation's future progress.

By 2050 Web 5.0- The Wise Web will have emerged, embedding all biological and artificial life within a global cooperative intelligence. All critical decisions affecting our planet and life, including those relating to global warming, sharing vital resources, health management and the ethical resolution of conflict and human rights, will be guided by this global intelligence.

The Wise Web will mark the beginning of a new threshold in human civilisation- a new form of global consciousness- in which all life will be embedded.

The Future 2050- Foundations

noreply@blogger.com (David Hunter Tow) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:31:00 +0000

This is the official blog of Future Portal- 2050, a series of forecasts defining the future of life, technology, the sciences, arts, society and civilisation- leading up to the year 2050

Each entry will forecast scenarios of future milestones in the evolution of a major field of human endeavour at ten year intervals, up to the middle of the 21st century.

With current exponential rates of change impacting all aspects of life and human civilisation, it is essential to define longer term scenarios to guide our application of science and resources to help maximise the survival and potential of life on this planet.