The Technium

Sourced Quotes, 14

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 01:01:04 -0800

Find one – that’s right, just one – video game that is not about learning. -- Keith Devlin, profkeithdevlin blog, January 29, 2012

The internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. -- Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Feb 17, 2012

The easiest way to become irrelevant is to stop. -- George Clooney, The Australian, Standing on the side of history, February 20, 2012

Whenever I tackled the impossible or the miraculous, I remembered the magician Rene Lavand, who had only one arm. Poet and extraordinary card manipulator, he baffled fellow illusionists by concluding his brilliant demonstrations with, "What I just showed you can also be done with two hands!" -- Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, 2002, p. 236.

Usually we talk about whatever is the most urgent question right now. Sometimes, especially early on, the most urgent question is to figure out what the most urgent question should be. -- Paul Graham, What Happens at Y Combinator, February 2012.

If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. — Shawn Achor, The happy secrete to better work, TEDXBloomington, May 2011

We don’t really live in a country. We live on the Internet. -- Mr. Ljung, Betabeat, February 28, 2012.

Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. -- Keith Sawyer, via Jonah Lehrer, Groupthink, The New Yorker, January 30, 2012

The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as "intellectual capital" and the "culture industry," come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are the highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos. -- David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, 2000 p. 11

The best way to get the most out of engineers is to surround them with other great engineers. -- Felix Salmon, Why Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't listen to management gurus, Reuters, February 10, 2012

Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots. -- Cole Stryker, The New York Times, February 27, 2012.

There are only two types of companies, those that have been hacked and those that will be. -- Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, in the New York Times, March 5, 2012.

A genius is the one most like himself. -- Thelonius Monk, Monk's Advice, 1960, Lists of Note.

Cosmicism

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:27:36 -0800

It's become accepted among some academics that movies and even long TV series are the high art of this era -- the literature of our time. Video games are still considered low art, not quite the great masterpieces of our times. But I believe the best of them will be seen as masterpieces with a decade. This long and rough essay argues that the epic role playing action game Mass Effects (1,2, and 3) is one such cultural masterpiece.

What I found interesting is not its claim that ME is the greatest of all sci-fi stories, but its claim (which I agree with) that embedded in its vast sprawling creation, are some key post-modern ideas. In other words centuries from now, academics will go back to Mass Effects and "read" it, not by what it says, but by what it assumes. This essay tries to unravel some of the assumptions in the huge alternative universe of Mass Effects. The author claims its key assumption is "Cosmicism." He says:

"Cosmicism is not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe. It’s far worse. Instead, the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence."

He says, "Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity." In the game Sovereign (a god-like eternal entity) declares: "Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal. We are the pinnacle of evolution and existence."

Warning, there is dense insider-jargon that is both off-putting, near non-sensical, but also attractive for its deep revelation of concerns, such as the following paragraph:

Further, the fear associated with biological destiny translates to transcending the biological in both body and mind. Citadel Space is dominated by the same law as Dune’s planetary empire: a ban on artificial intelligence. The quarian war with the geth is not merely the victory of the cylons but also an allusion to the Bulterian Jihad. As a result even the friendly EDI, who never actually does anything to indicate she is a hyper-rational decision machine (i.e. HAL 9000), is viscerally feared by the Illusive Man, Joker, and Shepard herself. Legion’s playful mocking of biological limitations contains implications of organic obsolescence.

There's a lot going on. I don't think this essay is the last word on any of it, but in it I got a glimpse of a nascent cultural barometer.

Filling Turing's Cathedral

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 11:19:29 -0800

I did a long interview with George Dyson in the current Wired. We discuss the origins of software, and how a small band of geniuses 60 years ago made the system we are still using today. The two most powerful technologies of the 20th century—the nuclear bomb and the computer—were invented at the same time and by the same group of young people. But while the history of the Manhattan Project has been well told, the origin of the computer is relatively unknown. Excerpts:

Me: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?

George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.

...

Me: How did the MANIAC project get started?

Dyson: The von Neumann project was funded to do H-bomb calculations. It was a deal with the devil: If they designed this ultimate weapon, they could have this fantastic machine.

Me: So the creation of digital life was rooted in death?

Dyson: In some creation myths, life arises out of the earth; in others, life falls out of the sky. The creation myth of the digital universe entails both metaphors. The hardware came out of the mud of World War II, and the code fell out of abstract mathematical concepts. Computation needs both physical stuff and a logical soul to bring it to life. These were young kids who had just come through World War II, who could repair the electronics on airplanes and get them flying the same day, and von Neumann put them together with mathematical logicians who could imagine a universe created entirely out of 0s and 1s.

…

Me: What were these guys like?

Dyson: They were hackers. They were young men and women, mostly in their twenties. The ones in their thirties were considered old. They did all the things hackers do: working all night, living for their code, arguing over whether a problem was due to software or hardware. They kept logbooks where they left notes telling the next shift what they had done, and they filled them with dark nerd humor, the same sort of sarcastic jokes you find on email and comment threads today. Von Neumann was warned by the director that his “computer people” were consuming too much sugar—when sugar was still rationed. And they were fast. They completed the entire project in less time than it took me to write about it!

...

Me: Other than bombs, what did they use the MANIAC for?

Dyson: They were gung ho on numerical weather prediction, and they made amazingly good progress in the first few years. Remember, all they had was 5 kilobytes of memory, running at a speed of 8 kilocycles. Yet by 1954 they were predicting weather for the northern hemisphere.

Sourced Quotes, 13

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:26:46 -0800

When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk. -- Philipe Petit (who tightroped between the Twin Towers), Man on Wire, 2002, p. 213

Slowly slowly, form follows funding. -- Clay Shirky, Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users, January 4, 2012.

The web is evolving from a place to find things, into a place to do things. — Reid Smith, Knowledge Technologies Conference, 2001

[In the publishing business] the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers. -- Dave Winer, Scripting News, December 29,2011.

The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask. -- Max Tegmark, Our Universe Grew Like a Baby, Edge, January 16, 2012

The biggest surprise for any new president is the strain placed upon the “decision-making muscle,” since the choices that come upon him every day are precisely those the rest of the government has not been able to resolve. -- James Fallow, Obama Explained, The Atlantic, March 2012.

I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters. — Neal Stephenson, Getting Big Things Done, Solve For X, February 2, 2012

I prefer pirates to SOPA. I would rather lose a piece of my profits than lose access to others' thoughts. -- Greg Stolze, Google+ January 18, 2012

If you struggle financially, upgrade your social skills. Money flows through people. -- Steve Pavlina, Google+, January 16, 2012

Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals of the valuable historical and State papers deposited in our public offices … let us save what remains not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time but by such a multiplication of copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident. -- Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson to Ebenezer Hazard, Philadelphia, February 18, 1791. In Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters, edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America

[Tim Berners-Lee] told me about his proposed system called the ‘World Wide Web.’ And I thought, well, that’s got a pretentious name. — Ian Ritchie, TEDGobal Talk, July 2011

Classic internet cartoon from xkcd.

The Ciphers of Social Media

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:18:34 -0800

Who are all these people in my circles?

To my astonishment over 560,000 people have put me in their Google+ circles. That is over half a million strangers who want to hear what I say on Google+. That crowd is far greater than the number of people subscribing to Wired magazine during the years I was editing it.

Where did these half million people come from? And who are they? Because they are starting to post a lot of spam in the comments. You the reader don't see much of this spam because Google does a fantastic job of suppressing it so it's invisible to readers. But as host I see the hidden spam grayed out so that I have the opportunity to undo it in case an entry is legit, but that has happened only once so far. All the other times Google has expertly and accurately removed spam before it displays.

Still, there is enough comment spam that it got me to wonder: how many of my circlers are spammers?

With the help of my research assistant Camille Cloutier, we randomly sampled my great circle to see who was there. I'll tell you our conclusion and then how we got there.

Conclusion: Most of the half million people following me on Google+ are ciphers. They have signed up, but have not made a single public post, or posted their own image or a profile, or made a comment. They aren't home. The only place you'll see people are in the same small set of 100 "recommended" people they follow, of which I am one.

That is why I have half a million followers. Not because I have half a million fans, but because I am on a default list to fill an otherwise empty street when folks sign up.

Camille paged through a subset of 5,000 of my circlers, and then took 5% of that 1% to inspect closely. So I can't say this very small sample has any statical significance, but it may serve as a hint. (If you want to inspect the Google spreadsheet with the minute breakdown of what we found it's here.

This chart plots the number (out of the sample) of my "followers" vs the number of others who have added them to their circles.

This graph plots the number of followers with how many they are following. Most of the ones they are following are recommended "celebs".

What we found was that only 30% of Google+ers made any public activity. And 6% were outright spammers. So the good news is that spamming occurs at a low percentage (and as I said, Google does a marvelous job filtering it out), but the bad news is that most of Google+'s inhabitants are ciphers. Not there. Ghosts. 36% had not even filled out a profile. Now, it is possible these ciphers are busy posting stuff privately on each other's streams, but that is not the impression I get looking at their profile.

It is important to note that this great vacuum may be present solely because my followers are so artificially inflated by the recommendation machinery. I suspect that most normal Google+ accounts not on a recommendation list will have a more organic spread of followers, with many fewer ciphers.

This same cipher effect has been noted on Twitter, which also provided newbies with a recommendation list of folks to follow. And their circles also were inflated with ciphers and bots. Two journalists at Popular Mechanics magazine hand checked 1,000 of their Twitter followers. Here is one of their breakdown:

Real people: 24.6 %
Legitimate companies or organizations: 14 %

Fake or spam: 48.6 %

Unclear: 12.8 %

So more than half of their Twitter followers are ciphers.

This has been verified by PeakAnalytics, which observes that the more followers you have the higher percentage will be ciphers. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claims to have 1.3 million followers. But last August a group at Indiana University did an analysis of some of the 2012 Presidential candidates and found that 76% of Gingrich's 1.3 million Twitter accounts lacked a profile biography. That doesn't prove they are all fake, or bots, but it does say they are ciphers.

Chart from Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.

Google, the big data wizard, knows in great detail who is who on Google+. They can tell from activity, links, associations, or lack thereof, who is real or not. Ciphers are a benign problem, unlike spammers. Many of the ciphers are real people, who are inactive now, but might be later. Their inactivity is not hurting anyone. But businesses believing they are there may experience failures.

The main lesson of the Social Ciphers is to beware of large numbers in social media. The larger the number, the more fluffy it is. Real or not, these folks are just not there.

Next Phase of Commercials

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:43:59 -0800

Superbowl commercials often foreshadow the norm in everyday TV commercials later. I noticed several things about this year's crop of commercials.

1) They are definitely getting weirder, more whimsical, trying harder to catch your attention -- while you check your email. They are no longer competing against the possibility of you leaving for the bathroom; they are competing with you re-watching the previous commercial on your Tivo or your iPad.

2) They are also more self-reflective, self-parodying, and complex. They "quote" not only cultural references, but specific other commercials. They often work only if you've seen other commercials, usually predecessors in the same line. In this way, each commercial must be "read" as part of a larger, longer work. Those Bud commercials go way back. The more commercials you've seen, the more you get out of the new one.

3) These are not primarily advertising products or service. They are advertising the commercial itself.

4) The commercials run during this 46th Superbowl are only one stage in a multi-stage organism. A fair proportion of the commercials debuting on the Superbowl were released earlier in teasers on the internet. You can think of these early clips as trailers for the commercial. They were, per point #3 above, commercials for the commercial. Or think of them as eggs for the hatchling. Then after the Superbowl, the advertisers released the extended forms of the commercial, also on the internet. I am aware of at least three ads which did that this year: Chevrolet/OK Go, Ferris Bueller, The Avengers. Which means the early clips were commercials for the commercials of the commercials. Or these are three stages of ads: egg, larva, adult. But this year, it seemed a good quarter of the commercials shown were for movies, which are themselves often hours-long product placement vehicles. So that makes a fourth stage, a further extension of whatever story is trying to be told. Since movies are sequeled if successful, the idea can grow to a fifth size, dozens of hours long.

5) All this suggests that the "natural habitat" of a commercial is on the internet. That's where it is born, develops, matures and dies. Its brief, mayfly-length appearance on the Superbowl is primarily an ad to get you to watch it grow on the internet.

6) I predict that in a few years from now we'll start to see 4.5-minute length commercial shorts that come after the extended-play version. Or maybe even "directors' cut" versions. These outright unabashed commercials will run as long as a pop hit tune, and in format resemble a music video. We'll see YouTube-ish channels that will charge you to watch them. I make this forecast based on the fact that this prime attention-niche is just one adjacent-possible step away.

Fixity vs Fluidity

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:05:23 -0800

On his blog Nick Carr spells out the typographic fixity of the classical paper book. It's a great exposition of all the attractive parts of the big fat heavy paper books. [The image below is of book tombstones.]

I summarize his list of Four Fixities:

Fixity of the page -- The page stays the same. Whenever you pick it up, its' the same. You can count on it, and refer and cite it with certainty.

Fixity of the edition -- No matter which copy of the book you pick up, anywhere, it will be the same, so the fixed content is shared, and within an edition, the same always.

Fixity of the object -- Paper books last a very long time, and their text doesn't change as they age.

Sense of completeness -- A sense of finality and closure that became part of the attraction of literature.

These are very real, and very attractive qualities. And Carr is absolutely correct that they are some of the qualities that will disappear in ebooks, at least in the versions of ebooks we can see now. He is correct to point out that we will miss them, and that we should be aware of this loss as we chose what kind of books we buy or write.

However, Carr did not list the corresponding downside/upside of ebooks, but there are Four Fluidities of the ebook:

Fluidity of the page — Can flow to fit any space, any where, any time.

Fluidity of the edition — Can be corrected or improved incrementally.

Fludity of the item — Can be kept in the cloud at such low cost that it is "free" to keep and constantly slipped to new "movage" platforms.

Sense of growth — The never-done-ness of an ebook (at least in the ideal) resembles a life more than a stone, animating us as creators and readers.

These are some of the things we gain. Will these fluidities be enough to outweigh the fixities we lose?

Finally, both of these character sets, of fixity and the fluidity, are driven by technology, of paper and electrons. Paper favors fixity, electrons favor fluidity. There is nothing to prevent us from inventing another technology of text, a third way, that might be "in-between" paper and electrons, or might have some of the qualities of the first set and some of the second. I am not convinced that these are binary qualities, nor do they have to only be extremes. It may be possible to invent fixed electronic books, or rigid ebooks, or sticky text in between.

The Next Transitions in the Technium

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:30:49 -0800

What kinds of developmental thresholds would any planet of sentient beings pass through? The creation of writing would be a huge one. The unleashing of cheap non-biological energy is another. The invention of the scientific method is a giant leap. And the fine control of energy (as in electricity) for long-distant communications is significant as well, enabling all kinds of other achievements. Our civilization has passed through all these stages; what are some future transitions we can expect -- no matter the fashions and fads of the day? What are the emergent thresholds of information and energy organization that our civilization can look forward to? Most of these thresholds are gradual, so we can't assign dates, but each of these structures seem to be a natural transition that any civilization must reach sooner or later.

* AI - There are many varieties of artificial intelligence, and no formal definition for any of them. By whatever measure, a civilization capable of producing synthetic minds similar to its own, or superior in some facets, has reached an important threshold, not the least which is a great compounding acceleration of its progress.

* A-life -- Likewise there are many types of artificial life possible, from derivatives of natural biological life, to a-life running on an alternative chemical base-pairs, to self-reproducing dry life more akin to nano-bots. Sustainable self-reproducing, self-evolving creations enable huge innovations and bring huge problems. It is a major transition.

* Methuselarity - Health care and science keep extending the average longevity of humans, and increasing the rate at which it is improving. Right now science is extending the expected lifespan of humans in the developing world a few days per year. If this rate keeps accelerating, at some point scientific progress will increase expected longevity from one day per year, to one year per year. When longevity increases at one year per year, that effectively creates immortality, or Methuselarity, for anyone who reaches that threshold. They become like the biblical Methuselah and live for a thousand years, on average.

* GlobeNet -- Over time we keep adding sensors and monitors every few kilometers on land and on the sea until we form a dense grid of sensors covering the globe. There will be thermometers, wind speed jigs, rainfall meters, sunlight sensors, air pollution particle detectors, radiation meters, earthquake probes, climatic gas sensors, animal motion detectors, sea level and wave detectors, traffic sensors, DNA sensors, and little things that measure anything we can think of place on a regular basis on the surface (and deeper) of the planet. All of these form a blanket of sensitivity providing the planetary mind (us and machines) a real-time awareness. For the first time we'll have a quantifiable globe.

* Global Superorganism -- The stage at which several billion sentient beings spread over a planet and several quadrillion smart machines merge into a unified system that is always on. This global system of interacting smart agents exhibits emergent behavior and degrees of autonomy that is not present in its constituent parts. On some planets the global superorganism will reach artificial intelligence before a stand-alone AI does. It's not clear which way Earth is headed.

* Memorex -- Every bit of writing, music, photography, painting in civilization is digitized and recorded in a machine-readable way. All knowledge, in all languages, from all ages, in all media is stored in a way that is universally accessible to all people and machines. In other words, the universal library becomes real, but not just books, but everything created, past and present, and it is available anytime. This threshold of civilization-scale knowledge becomes both a global memory and a global awareness.

* Borg -- Another threshold is crossed when any individual can import the global Memorex onto their own minds. Civilization-scale memory available to, or within, all individuals.

* Mirror World -- A one-to-one mapping of both the natural and built worlds onto a full-scale simulation of those worlds. This huge global model runs in parallel to the observed worlds. At first the functions of large organizations are mirrored in a simulation, then entire cities will be reflected in a real-time city simulation. Eventually every major node, sensor-net, agent, or variable on Earth is simulated in real time in this global model. Sort of like Google Earth but with every process, and every ecosystem, as well as every building. The mirror world is used both as an experimental test bed for science and predictions, and as an entertainment medium, as in a second life.

* Class I Energy -- The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed three major levels of energy production for galactic civilizations, which he called Class I, II, and III. Class I was the maximization of energy from the entire planet, Class II was maximizing the available energy from its star, and Class III was exploiting energy from its galaxy. Humans have not yet reached Class I, so that threshold is still in front of us.

* Universal Family Tree -- Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. We will clearly see exactly how I am related to you. We'll also see how everyone is related at some point to everyone else no matter where they were born. The big surprise will be the short hops between us. This common tree of descent will aid health care, medicine, and science, but will also aid peace. Greeks and Turks, Jews and Arabs, Koreans and Japanese will see they are far more related than not.

* Knowledge of All Species -- At some point a civilization wakes up and takes a comprehensive and systematic inventory of all the other living species on its planet. This step is similar to mapping all the elements of matter. It realizes that in order to model and manage its ecosystems it must know all the ingredients and all the interacting parts, just as it takes knowing all the elements in order to do chemistry. This threshold of the knowledge of all species includes sequencing the DNA of every species as well -- a huge asset that also enables it to recover and resurrect known extinct species.

* TransHumanity -- When beings gain control of their biological evolution they begin to mess with it. But not everyone will be eager to do so. At the point that humans begin to engineer their own genomes, there will be a significant number of individuals, families and groups who will refuse to do so. For every person who says "Over my dead body will I or my child be engineered," there will be someone else who says, "Bring on the mutants!" Thus there will inevitably be a forking of the gene line. The threshold is not engineering genes since we have been doing that slowly and ignorantly all along, but a clear splitting off of a subgroup. Whether or not each becomes a non-breeding separate species doesn't matter. Transhumanity means at least one fork of the species is deliberately self-engineered.

* Singularity -- As commonly defined, a singularity means an infinite pace of change. We don't know what that looks like because, as commonly defined, it is inherently unknowable. For this reason I don't find this transition useful in prospect, only in retrospect. We have been through one singularity so far -- the invention of language. A few of the above might be also initiate singularity but we'll only know after the fact.

There are a bunch of other transitions such as Downloadability, Time Travel, Telepathy, etc., -- well mined by science fiction -- that would qualify as important information/energy thresholds, but which do not seem inevitable to me at the moment.

Are there other near-future stages that you think any civilization on the galaxy must pass through if it survives long enough?

Life at the Edge of Space

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:02:33 -0800

Life is very pervasive. How high into space does earthly life exist? The Clotho Project aims to find out.

How far off the earth’s surface does life exist, and what is the nature of the organisms that live there? The Clotho Project is a collaboration between the Mavericks Foundation, civilian space explorers, and several of the worlds leading scientific, academic and research institutions. The main mission is to carry out the first general survey of life in the upper atmosphere, including the upper portions of the stratosphere and mesosphere, as well as exploring areas of particular interest such as the biology of clouds and the airborne extent of algal blooms.

Not stated is the fact that the Mavericks Foundation is a co-op of amateur rocketeers. Folks who very carefully and scientifically make huge homemade rockets and launch them to the edge of space. They do it for fun, for the challenge, and for science.

The quest for the limits to earthly life is a good one. So is furthering the catalog of life on Earth. The search for species at the edge of space aligns with the All Species Inventory, which I co-founded.

I will bet that there are far more species of life up there than any biologist would dare predict right now. Probably tens of thousands. Some of these stratospheric species probably have curious adaptions for living in near vacuum and drastic temperatures. Useful genes.

Undetectable Technology

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:31:42 -0800

Karl Schroeder, science fiction author of the novel Permanence, writes about the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox says that if there is an infinite universe there must be an infinite number of civilizations at advance stages that would emit evidence of their presence, but as far as we see in any direction, there are none. The skies should be full of aliens, but are not. Why not?

Schroeder's explanation is a re-phrasing of Arthur C. Clarke's famous declaration that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Schroeder's declares:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

That is interesting and a very plausible answer. Basically, we can't detect really advance civilizations because their technology is so advanced that is operates in harmony with a planet, and it uses some kind of communication that looks like natural radiation, etc., to such an extant that it appears to not be there. The civilization acquires a sort of natural technological camouflage. Think Pandora in Avatar.

[Green Planet image by Ivan Raposo]

But what Schroeder says afterwards is even more profound in terms of the technium.

If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

His theory suggest that what technology wants is to be "natural," not just biologically natural, but geologically natural, or like self-regulating Gaia, natural on a planetary scale. I didn't quite reach that far in my book, so I am glad to have been pushed even further by Schroeder.

We Are Stardust

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:11:42 -0800

Every year at year's end the intellectual impresario (and my literary agent) John Brockman asks his clients and friends a Question. For 2012 the question was WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? About 200 of us answered, compiled here. The collection is a good read.

My answer:

We Are Stardust

Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?

[Image from C. Smith at Curtis Schmidt Telescope]

A Whole Lot of Nothing

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 23:51:44 -0800

I live about 2 km from the ocean. I rode down on my bike today and just hung out on the shore to watch the waves crashing over each other. This is what it looked like on our beach in Pacifica. As I sat on some rocks watching the waves roll in and the wind whipping the foam at the top, and the sun shinning through the crest of the wave, I was overcome with the certainty that everything I was seeing was immaterial. It was real, but it was not solid. Despite the hard rocks I was sitting on, despite the gritty sand on my feet, despite the pounding water in the surf, despite the force of wind on my cheeks, despite my knowledge of how fatal the ocean can be to life, despite all these clear and unmistakeable signals, it was (and still is) clearer yet, that at their essences, all these things are really made of something intangible, without weight, something close to what we think of as information.

Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. What is a oxygen atom made of? Not oxygen, but of smaller particles, like protons and electrons. And what are they made of? Mostly space. In a lecture I just watched, Brian Cox gave a figure for how empty an atom is. It is 99.9999999999999% space. And what is that remaining 0.000000000000001% non-space made of? Nothing that we would call hard, or material. It is some wavicle, some quantum superposition, some intangible force. Maybe it is simply information. We actually don't know what matter is at the bottom, but we do know it is fungible into energy and information.

So in a very real sense, the drops of water splashed up by waves thundering on the beach before me, and the sand churned up from the beach, are just patterns of the immaterial. Water and sand are real patterns just as the waves are real patterns; but they are patterns of a kind of nothingness.

I know the monks on the tops of mountains have been saying the real world is immaterial for eons, but the difference is that now we say can it precisely, and in such a scientific way that we can predict what else we should see if this view is correct. So far we can't use ordinary words to describe what this fundamental intangible is. Wavicles don't mean anything. Neither does the concept of a quantum particle being in two places at once. All we have is the language of mathematics, which few can speak. And what the maths say is that the tons of water rolling in under the light of a sun 93 millions miles away and pounding the sand in front of me is all really mostly nothing, and the little that is not nothing, is really just another kind of nothing.

This is hard to see at sunset on the beach along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. But this afternoon I could see it.

Making Holes in Our Heart

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:36:23 -0800

[CES Image by Jaymi Heimbuch]

I know the feeling. You are wandering around a huge harshly-lit hall full of tables displaying electronic stuff, new devices that all look the same but claim to be different. It is the CES show, the largest consumer electronic show in the world. The hall is overwhelmingly vast. You very quickly don't care to see any more stuff. It is not different. You despair. The whole scheme of more stuff begins to look trivial, meaningless. You start to think just like this reporter from the floor of CES:

There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill it up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.
They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

Electronics are our talismans that ward off the spiritual vacuum of modernity; gilt in Gorilla Glass and cadmium. And in them we find entertainment in lieu of happiness, and exchanges in lieu of actual connections.

If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled.

Yes, this is what technology does to us. Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continuous discontentment. I agree that it is the source. New technology forces us to be always chasing the new, which is always disappearing under the next new, a salvation always receding from our grasp.

But I celebrate the never-ending discontentment that the technium brings. Most of what we like about being human is invented. We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches which we have to scratch, digging extra holes that we have to fill, creating new desires we've never had before.

I understand why we feel ashamed at how easily we can make ourselves envious and discontent, but I offer this comfort during our despair: It is worth it.

We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart. We are stretching our boundaries, and stretching the small container that holds our identity. Of course there will be rips and tears. Late-nite informercials, and cavernous CES halls of unsellable gizmos, are hardly uplifting techniques, but the path to our enlargement is very prosaic, humdrum, and everyday. The only real progress that sticks is boring.

Sourced Quotes, 12

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:52:15 -0800

People who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly. -- Steven Johnson, Anatomy of an Idea, December 14, 2011

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. -- Jeff Bezos, Wired, Jeff Bezos Owns the Web, December, 2011

Why aren't all movies available through all [online] channels? The movie companies these days must have some irrational fear of giving the customers what they want. -- David Pogue, State of the Art, New York Times, December 29, 2011.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. -- Karl Schroeder, The Deepening Paradox, November, 2011

There's something direly mean spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak. - Bruce Sterling, A Statement of Principle, 1994,

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up. -- Seth Godin, Seth Godin's Blog, December 11, 2011

Getting a job is really dumb because then you'll only get paid when you’re working. -- Steve Pavlina, Personal Development for Smart People, July 21, 2006.

Anything you say before "but" in a political statement doesn't count. - Rick Falkvinge. TechDirt, January 5, 2012

If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again. -- Penn Jillette, God No, p. 129,

It's true: never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade. -- Merlin Mann, Twitter, April 20, 2010

Computers -- the gizmos themselves -- have far less to do with techie enthusiasm than some half-understood resonance to The Great Work: hardwiring collective consciousness, creating the Planetary Mind. Teilhard do Chardin wrote about this enterprise many years ago and would be appalled by the prosaic nature of the tools we will use to bring it about. But I think there is something sweetly ironic that the ladder to his Omega Point might be built by engineers and not mystics." -- John Perry Barlow, in email cited in Out of Control, 1994

[Cartoon by Roz Chast, New Yorker, March 22, 2010]

What the Public Commons Is Missing

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:30:00 -0800

The natural home for ideas and creations is in the commonwealth, the public domain. We cleverly give the creators of ideas and art and inventions a temporary monopoly for their creations outside of the commonwealth in order to encourage them to make more new things. That is good. For a while that temporary period in the US was 58 years after the work was created for copyright and 17 years for patents.

Unfortunately, as creators became corporations, they have lobbied for laws (and financially supported the elections of lawmakers) that have extended the "temporary" period till it is in effect, unlimited for copyright.

That means that many works of film, literature, and music that ordinarily would have gone into the public domain this year (ones finished by 1955) will not. This page lists some of the 1955 works that are not going public: Lady and the Tramp; To Catch a Thief, The End of Eternity, etc.

It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar.

A tragedy of the commons occurs when members behave selfishly and deny the commons what is due. As Disney shows, when members keep their creations out of the common pool for others to exploit, their gain is only short lived. Mickey Mouse, Superman, and eventually Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker all belong in the commons. The world will be a better place when they are.

We should repeal unreasonable intellectual property laws, to keep the incentives for a period no longer than the life of its creators (how can you be invented if you are dead?). But in the meantime, imagine what the creative public could do with these works, and weep — because nothing like that will happen for a very long time.