Accelerating Times

"We live in a Cosmos where the creator has let go of the reigns, let the horses run wild and now those horses and new creator are me and you." – Howard Bloom

"I believe that the force that created life is betting that human beings will do something quite wonderful—like live up to their potential. …each of us has a responsibility for being alive… a debt we repay by trying to extend our areas of comprehension." – Maya Angelou

"How you live your seconds, is how you live your days, is how you live your life..." – Troy Gardner

"What is the universe doing questioning itself via one of its smallest products?" – D.E. Jenkins, Anglican Theologian

"My regret is that I am not [and society is not selectively] optimistic enough. It is not possible to project the fantastic worlds which will continue to open up to us in the coming years. Worlds which far transcend my most daring optimism." – F.M. Esfandiary

"Our task is to clothe nature. Our task is to impose meaning on being. There is no conscience in nature; our task is to imagine conscience. Our task is the discipline of standing against nature when nature-within-us counsels terrorizing. Our task is to carry a tradition of anti-hatred as strong as instinct itself. Our task is to invent civilization." – Cynthia Ozick

"Again and again, people with access to the prerequisites for food production, and with a location favoring diffusion of technology from elsewhere, replaced peoples lacking these advantages." – Jared Diamond

"Innovation occurs for many reasons including greed, ambition, conviction, happenstance, acts of nature, mistakes, and desperation. But one force above all seems to facilitate the process. The easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens." — James Burke

"Two billion years ago our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening." — Carl Sagan

"Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines." – Rodney Brooks

"Yes, we have a soul. But it's made of lots of tiny robots." – Giulio Giorelli

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, Audiocassettes/CD
Impressive audio production of the most epic historical narrative of our time. It's hard to believe Gibbon (1737-1994) was able to be so prolific in his 50-odd years, penning a 3,800 page masterwork which is adapted for audio here. You may not agree with the thesis of his morality-tale about the Fall of the Great Empire: one Amazon reader suggests Hans Delbruck's Barbarian Invasions, among other sources, provides a more accurate picture of the decline of the Western Empire, for example. Enjoy the narrative arc of this story, which will give a good tug on every single one of your human emotions by the time you've finished it.

As the Matrix prepared for its sequel, the producers released a series of animated back stories that explore its dystopian world with increasing depth. February's stream, "The Second Renaissance, Part 1" proposed a fascinating series of developments in robotic intelligence, projecting a strong feeling of run up to singularity. Unfortunately, such basic trends as human-machine convergence, personality capture, self-balancing immunity, and the incredible ethical depth and stabilization one would expect from open-ended learning systems are conveniently ignored for the sake of drama. "Robocrime" sounds like an oxymoron if ever there was one. We shall see soon enough. Still it's wonderful that today's artistic futurists are dealing squarely with singularity issues. For me, the opening and closing transitions to Part 1 evoke MEST compression to a world of inner space quite beautifully. Maybe I'm reading in a bit too much here? If you read Glen Yeffeth's Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in the Matrix, 2003, maybe not! Thanks to David Clemens.

7. Key Articles (Print and Online)

"Reality Bytes", Steven Johnson on Simulation, Discover, May 2003
If you've never read Jean Baudrillard's excellent but obtuse Simulacra and Simulations (1981), or David Gelernter's equally excellent and obtuse Mirror Worlds (1991), you need to know about these two fundamentally important books. Each is an early description of our emerging SimWorld, one which is progressively outcompeting what Baudrillard calls "The Desert of the Real." Johnson's article is a great introduction to a profound and still underappreciated idea: the pathway of local intelligence development is Inner Space, not outer space. Furthermore, it appears to be a special zone of Inner Space, what we may call the zone of the very complex (as opposed to very large or very small structures in the universe). Johnson's article summarizes what is happening in our current virtual spaces, and projects a little into our even more interesting future. We apparently aren't headed for the Matrix, but for simulations that map increasingly closely to reality, paradoxically giving us far more real world skills the more time we spend in virtual and the less in what will soon come to be termed "slow space." Hyperreality rules. Thanks to Scott Lemon.

No More Acceleration? Ted Modis on the Singularity.
In a 2002 article in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, as well as a followup in the May-June 2003 Futurist, systems theorist Ted Modis, author of Predictions, 1992, and Predictions: 10 Years Later, 2002, has concluded that we have reached a local "peak" of technological change, circa 1990. (Forecasting the Growth of Complexity and Change, Theodore Modis, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 69, No 4, 2002). Take a look at Ted's well-chosen data sets for universal emergences, which are nicely logarithmic until only very recently, in his interpretation. Unfortunately, he uses this data to conclude not that we have reached a temporary plateau or equilibrium, before the next punctuated surge in computational autonomy, but that we've instead reached an inflection point for the universe as a whole, and that all local technological change will continue more slowly from this point forward. Wow. Say that again, slowly please?

Such analysis is well worth mentioning, as it is so very rarely attempted, and is a welcome addition to the anti-singularity literature. But as well-intentioned and aesthetically symmetric as the Modis model is, I find it fundamentally deficient in its understanding of both the growing autonomy and the intrinsic multi-millionfold speedup in the evolutionary developmental learning occurring within the technologic substrate. It would seem there are a host of better explanations for his observed "dip" in innovation, over the last decade, if indeed it exists at all. Wasn't the 1990's the decade that gave us cheap cellphones and the commercial internet?

As a developmental systems theorist, I have proposed on the Acceleration Watch site, for example, that we might easily see a 20 year human-observed (but not technology-observed) apparent innovation plateau after the internet but before the emergence of the CUI network, one candidate for our next major socially obvious developmental "punctuation." Nevertheless, whether there is a recent "observed equilibrium" in the data or not is an important outstanding question for singularity studies, and for that we should be grateful to thoughtful contrarians like Ted Modis.

Shell Scenarios (to 2020 and 2050), 2003
Central to my own style of scanning and scenario construction as a developmental systems theorist and futurist, is an attempt to differentiate between evolutionary (chaotic, differentiating) and developmental (predictable, convergent) processes of change. The futurists at Shell call the latter "TINA" those unchanging things, or fundamental driving forces, for which "There Is No Alternative." Pierre Wack, working for Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970's was one of the first modern futurists to deeply understand the existence of developmental trends, calling these special features "tendances lourdes," or "unstoppable forces".

Roger Rainbow, Wack's current scenario planning successor at Shell, coined the "TINA" term for these forces in 1995, and identified three primary TINA trends: increasing globalization, market liberalization, and onrushing technological change. Since then, he's found them operating at the individual level as well (think of Paul Ray's wonderful book, Cultural Creatives). The TINA model lives on in Shell's latest scenarios (http://www.shell.com/scenarios), as well as their useful analysis of the "three R's" ("Regulations, Rules, and Restraints") that social groups commonly use to resist TINA trends. These obstructionist R's can be effective and useful in the short run (giving systems time to adapt), but are inefficient and ineffective in the long run, given inexorable developmental trends. Excellent insights here!

As a bonus, they've also got this cute graphic on their scenarios page. This guy's either a wearing a tight shingle skirt or he's been run over by a tire truck because he didn't see the massive change coming. You decide.

"In Search of Resilience," Gary Hamel and Liisa Valikangas, Harvard Business Review, late 2003

Dr. Gary Hamel, founder, and Dr. Lisa Valikangas, research director of the complexity-inspired business consulting group The Woodside Institute, have co-written new article for HBR on the increasing economic uncertainties in our accelerating technological world, and the increasing importance of resilience and organizational renewal as our competitive environment becomes progressively more volatile, and as the advantages of momentum subside, even in our largest firms.

They note, among many other indicia of increased turbulence in recent decades, that ten of the twenty largest U.S. bankruptcies in the past two decades occurred during the last two years. They list a number of excellent strategies for increasing innovation and remaining resilient, being able to roll with unexpected change. I'll have more to say on that subject once this excellent article hits publication. This might be a good time to get a year's subscription to HBR, which continues to be the top ranked management journal in the country. Thanks to Grace Reim.

8. ASF Editorials

Promontory Point Revisited: The Transcontinental Railroad and the Coming Conversational User Interface, Acceleration Watch.com, John Smart, June 2003
This essay explores the many network analogies that can be made between yesterday's railroad and tomorrow's internet. I give a name to our coming Information Technology (IT) Globalization Revolution, a successor to what has been called the Manufacturing Globalization Revolution of the 1980's and 90's, and consider both to be phases of our present Information Age. The nine page essay also briefly proposes some of the national educational priorities we that should have in a future where most of our planetary technological workforce will very soon be hungry, creative kids living in countries outside the U.S. border. I look forward to your feedback.

This essay is already ranked at #12 on the Google search for "Promontory Point." Thank you GoogleBrain!

John Fisher, a founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson has referred to the internet era as the beginning of a "golden age" of venture funding. I and others, most notably Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute, often compare it to the beginning of the era of transcontinental railroad construction. The railroad had its initial boom and bust well before most of the work had even started. The internet has also had its first boom-bust cycle, again of many to come before the technology is mature. As with the railroad, while the internet will ultimately bring benefit to all, the vast majority of the labor building the network is going to be done by hungry "immigrants" (today, our low wage tech workers rapidly emerging all over the world), and the winners will be those U.S. companies, large and small, that employ, manage, and partner with this labor force the most intelligently. IT Globalization ranges from Microsoft's ventures in Bangalore, Beijing, Singapore, and Malaysia, to any mom-and-pop enterprise that uses offshore programming, web, graphics, or manufacturing services, or the coming networked-game inspired virtual collaboration and creativity spaces of tomorrow. Expect much more of this in coming years.

Understanding the Limits of Bureaucracy: The Intrinsic Constraints of Top-Down Collectives
Consider these notes, made at a lecture by Dr. Peter Bishop during his "Social Change" class in the University of Houston's Future Studies program.

So what happened? These systems have consistently proven to be less flexible than we have feared. Non-democratic collectives are simply less economically powerful and less intrinsically desirable as investment environments than the decentralized, individualistic, and more out-of-control form of capitalism that was pioneered here in the West.

Top-down organization just isn't the most effective paradigm in the long run. That is apparently true in A.I. development, national planning, or in economic growth, pick your complex system. Bottom up, self-organized criticality is the primary developmental path the world takes at any time. German, Post-Soviet, and Japanese bureaucracies have all drifted closer to a more Western model in the decades since they emerged as major players on the world stage. Bureaucracy may be the necessary base to all cultures, but to the extent it can facilitate out of control, decentralized innovation and development, it apparently creates a much healthier, hardier national system. That's a fascinating insight. Thanks to Dr. Peter Bishop.

Thoughts on the "Prediction Wall:" Science Fiction Without the Future, Judith Berman, 2001
With increasing anxiety, many of our best thinkers have seen a looming "Prediction Wall" emerge in recent decades. There is a growing inability of human minds to credibly imagine our onrushing future, a future that must apparently include greater-than-human technological sophistication and intelligence. At the same time, we now admit to living in a present populated by growing numbers of interconnected technological systems that no one human being understands. We have awakened to find ourselves in a world of complex and yet amazingly stable technological systems, erected like vast beehives, systems tended to by large swarms of only partially-aware human beings, each of which has only a very limited conceptualization of the new technological environment that we have constructed.

Business leaders face the prediction wall acutely in technologically dependent fields (and what enterprise isn't technologically dependent these days?), where the ten-year business plans of the 1950's have been replaced with ten-week (quarterly) plans of the 2000's, and where planning beyond two years in some fields may often be unwise speculation. But perhaps most astonishingly, we are coming to realize that even our traditional seers, the authors of speculative fiction, have failed us in recent decades. In "Science Fiction Without the Future," 2001, Judith Berman notes that the vast majority of current efforts in this genre have abandoned both foresighted technological critique and any realistic attempt to portray the hyperaccelerated technological world of fifty years hence. It's as if many of our best minds are giving up and turning to nostalgia as they see the wall of their own conceptualizing limitations rising before them. Thanks to Jamais Cascio.

Underground Automated Highway Systems (AHS) For High-Density Cities: A 2030-2060 Scenario, Acceleration Watch.com, John Smart, August 2003
Tunnel Boring Machines, digging connector corridors underneath major cities will allow a significant upgrade to their transportation systems only another couple decades from now. Automated Highway Systems will be ready for prime time also about two decades from now. Finally, Zero Emission Fossil Fuel and Fuel Cell Vehicles will be solid technologies around that time as well. So what could we do with the convergence of those technologies in the thirty years after they arrive? I've written a new piece for SinguarityWatch that projects out those possibilities. What makes them particularly interesting, from my point of view, is their interplay with a circa-2060 technological singularity, or not, as the case may be. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Are We Doomed Yet? Sheldon Pacotti, Salon.com 3.31.03
A valuable, deep-thinking piece about the future of culture in our coming transparent society. Some commentary: First, Pacotti's "Ebola-AIDS virus" would be very likely to be a lot less virulent than one might think. Matt Ridley has recently gone on record commenting on the extreme difficulty of making anything more destructive than nature has discovered already. We fear that a little gene snipping here, a little recombination there, and we might make something superlethal, but bottom-up evolved, complex adaptive nonlinear systems (viruses or people) just don't work like that. If there were some simple genetic way to increase lethality of our co-evolving pathogens, nature would have discovered it long ago, and the surviving organisms would have long ago found their own simple and complex immunity countermeasures. In fact, that's exactly how immune systems have evolved. Read Steven Frank's Immunology and the Evolution of Infectious Disease, 2002.

Pacotti discusses Bill Joy's idea of "relinquishment," and sees its value in certain domains, but like Joy, he still sees it as primarily a top-down choice. Like many social commentators, he doesn't articulate just how much relinquishment has already occurred with regard to dangerous or dirty technologies, such as nuclear weaponry for example. Donald MacKenzie, in Knowing Machines, 1996, makes a good case for just how much social unlearning has gone on with regard to nuclear arms production. MacKenzie notes that nuclear disarmament has been proceeding so powerfully, and tacit knowledge decreasing so effectively, there is now a major shortage of people who can even dismantle nuclear weapons in coming decades, much less remember how to build one. Now that's effective social relinquishment.

Futurist Paul Wildman, "Life Futures," Journal of Futures Studies, 4(2), 93-108, 2000) notes:

"Some fifteen years ago now, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report cited the first death caused by a robot… This accident occurred in 1985 when a machinist at a Michigan company entered a robot's work envelope. Apparently not programmed to take human frailty into account, the robot used its arm to pin the man to a safety pole, killing him with the force. See "Death by Robot," Science Digest (Aug, 1985) pg 67."

Interesting. We can anticipate more of these kind of industrial accidents in coming decades, but I would expect our robots' learning capacities and ultimately, their universe-understanding and ethics to rapidly outstrip our own, as unpalatable as that outcome may seem to many of us. The Matrix II scenario sells movies, but it doesn't sell as real world futurism, at least in my book. Of course, we'll have plenty of time to observe how they react after more of these accidents recur in the initially-stupid bots of the 2010's, 20's and 30's. As intelligent appliances enter the home, our laundry folding, house cleaning, plant watering, food preparing and other chorebots will possess increasingly sophisticated world models every year forward into our extraordinary future.

"The Second Superpower" Googlewashing Effect, Andrew Orlowski, 3.4.03
Fascinating story about how a small group of webloggers coopted the top thirty spots on Google's PageRank with a reference to Harvard's James Moore's Techno-Utopian essay about the rising visibility of world public opinion, "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head." A great example that the internet, even faster than traditional media, can be wonderfully fluid to public opinion, but as Orlowski mentions here, it is perhaps too fluid at present, causing earlier definitions of this term to "disappear" (e.g., move lower down on Google's ranking lists). I'm sure we'll improve that in future versions of PageRank, Google's link ranking system. Orlowski uses this incident to launch into some of his own points about the lack of political or historical prescriptions in some of the new "second superpower" rhetoric, well-meaning as it is. Come to your own conclusions. Thanks to Mark Finnern.

Whole Earth Review's unpublished "Singularity Issue", Spring 2003 (Article PDF's available)
WER has done some commendable coverage of the impact and issues of technological acceleration in the 1980's and 1990's, publishing articles by Vernor Vinge, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and others. So it is a bit depressing to see them put together such a one-sided argument, in this, the first (or perhaps not, see below) major magazine devoting an entire issue to exploration of the technological singularity hypothesis. Vinge makes some minor updates to his classic 1993 article, The Coming Technological Singularity, which is a nice addition. But many of the other pieces don't do justice to all the writing and thinking that has been done on these topics in the last ten years by the internet community. To my knowledge, besides Vinge and Jamais Cascio, none of the serious writers on the topic, such as Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Damien Broderick, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Max More, Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom, Dan Clemmenson or myself were invited to submit pieces.

Editor Alex Steffen's article starts off well but veers into predictable eco-doomsayer perspectives, and no counterpoint is allowed. Transhumanist Jamais Cascio has a very thoughtful piece on the "Open Singularity," but he doesn't convince me of his point that secrecy is not needed in modern society. I'd suggest that we must acknowledge the tremendous value of secrecy in the real world. Atomic bomb secrets, trade secrets, secrets we keep from still-prejudiced individuals or institutions ("Don't Ask, Don't Tell") etc. Secrecy and privacy don't seem to be going away any time soon. Overall, WER could have done better with this issue. Still, we have to give them a lot of credit for being the first major magazine to at least carefully consider the phenomenon of continual accelerating change. Unfortunately, their organization has presently run out of money and they haven't been able to publish this issue so far. Please surf over and give them a small donation if you can spare it, this is an excellent future-focused organization that is well worth your support.

"Of Holes and Singularities…," The Harrow Technology Report, Jeff Harrow, 8.25.2003
We've mentioned HTR before as a great newsletter to have on your subscription list. Jeff has been covering the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing" (title of his previous in-house publication at Compaq) and speaking and consulting about accelerating technologies for years, and it shows. Here he introduces his readers to the concept of the singularity, and stakes his position as firmly "on the fence." Seems to me that's exactly where every singularity watcher (read: intrigued skeptic) should be. Only on the fence can you clearly see both sides of the terrain… and know when and where to jump! Thanks to Jeff Harrow.

Conferenza, Technology Conference Reports
Shel Israel's concise summaries of tech conferences he attends around the world, sorting the hope from hype. $199/year. Conferenza also has a free newsletter telling you about upcoming tech conferences that is worth joining, and some samples at their great site. This is one of the newsletters that Ray Kurzweil reads carefully to stay on the cresting wave of technological change, and my colleague and futurist Alex Lightman, author of the great book on our wireless future, Brave New Unwired World, 2002, is another subscriber. Thanks to Alex Lightman.

Piero Scaruffi's Book Review Newsletters (Thymos.com)
Piero reads and reviews some seriously interesting books each month on A.I., philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and related topics. Get on his mailing list to get his take on his favorite recent reads. Truly broad and insightful coverage.

Flavorpill
A new weekly cultural and entertainment events directory. Graphically well-designed. If you live in NY, LA, or SF, and sign up for their weekly HTML email, you'll soon discover that your Metropolis has become so vibrant in the last few years that there are now several really interesting events to consider attending each weekend. Cultural life was never so interesting. A welcome form of accelerating change! I'm looking forward to reading or listening to Flavorpill-descendants on my cellphone in another ten years. Thanks to Farsam Shadab.

10. Books, Nonfiction General

Digital Soul: Intelligent Machines and Human Values, Thomas Georges, 2003
Will tomorrow's most intelligent machines have ethics, emotions, and "soul?" This is a basic but useful introductory work, particularly for those who have never considered these issues before. Someone needs to make the basic arguments to help newcomers to transhumanism to see the world in a different way, particularly those with strong orthodox religious upbringings. See also George Dvorsky's insightful review at Betterhumans.com.

Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy, Mark Monmonier, 2002
Monmonier has authorred many excellent books on cartography. Here he explores the ramifications of studding our physical landscapes with tracking equipment. Security cams, ATMs, tollbooth EZ-Passes, and credit-card terminals archive a person's movements and transactions, with some of the data being cached in "data warehouses" for as-needed snooping when bad things happen. Match this with satellite surveillance advances and the coming GPS-on-a-chip technology for cell phones, and Big Brother's old telescreen technology looks primitive. Monmonier explores the dynamics of each particular data system, noting their specialized applications for agriculture, forest fires, storms, traffic, tax assessment, electoral redistricting, crime control, and more. He also points out that "geographic information systems" (GIS, see http://www.esri.com for leading examples) can integrate previously separate domains of data, to the delight of marketers. We can be glad of this incisive account of "dataveillance" and its implications for civil liberties. Thanks to Elle Martin.

Getting Things Done, David Allen, 2001
A widely recommended book on productivity and time management. In our constant battle to organize and motivate ourselves, a welcome source of advice. Handy wall chart included.

12. Books, Fiction (esp. Fiction Science/Science Futurism and Future Fiction)

© 2003 Accelerating.org. Accelerating Times is a free periodic newsletter of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF), a nonprofit corporation. Any small selection (less than 10%) of newsletter items may be freely republished with attribution and link to Accelerating.org or Acceleration Watch.com.

Advance Reviewers List: Please email us (mail{at}Acceleration Watch{dot}com) you'd like to be added to our list of advance reviewers, insightful individuals who have volunteered to receive ATimes and selected articles in advance of publication, when possible, in order to provide editorial feedback to improve them prior to release to the wider ASF community. Thanks.

January-August 2003

Newsletter of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit corporation.

7. Key Articles (Print and Online)

8. ASF Editorials

10. Books, Nonfiction General