A desire to discuss our continuing ‘entanglement’ with the shadow-world of data brings me to the steps of a large house in McClean, Virginia. I’m still a good ten yards from the door when it opens in anticipation to reveal a tall, healthy looking man in his mid-sixties, immaculate in a three-piece suit with a welcoming smile on his face. “Hello,” he says and extends a hand. This is Vint, husband of Sigrid, and one of the men who invented the Internet.
We sit down in Vint and Sigrid’s library and he hands me his card. Vint Cerf. Google. Chief Internet Evangelist. (“I tried for Archduke, but it didn’t work,” he joked on his appointment).
“This is sort of silly,” says Vint. “It’s the 21st century and we’re handing out little pieces of cardboard. It’s an 18th Century practice.” As our conversation progresses I’ll learn that Vint has an eye for the silly. A recent invitation to a gathering of Catholics saw him arrive in traditional Spanish academic regalia (a costume given to him during one of the many ceremonies he’s attended to receive honourary degrees). When asked what religion he represented Vint replied, “Geek Orthodox”.
It’s because of Vint and his colleagues that we have the internet, the ‘network of networks’ that allow computers and other devices to communicate despite the fact they they may run different ‘operating systems’ (e.g. Apple Mac OS, Windows, a mobile phone platform) and are connected to different networks. It was Vint and Robert Kahn who developed the software that answered the question ‘how do I get data that lives on a computer on one network to another computer on a different network when both might be using different technologies?’ – a problem then called the ‘Inter-Net problem’. But Vint hasn’t rested on his laurels (which, having been instrumental in one of the most important inventions since the internal combustion engine, he’d have the right to). Today he works at the highest level at Google, promoting fair and equitable internet access for all, trying to help us map out our entangled future. He has written
In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well–either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of … objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. “Where are my glasses” you will ask. “You were last within … reach of them while in the living room,” your mobile or laptop will say.
“So, do you agree with Daniel Hillis?” I ask. “Are we Entangled?” (see my earlier post ‘The Knowledge Combustion Engine” to read about Danny Hillis’ ‘Age of Entanglement’ argument, or see his whole essay from The Edgehere)
“This is not new,’ he replies without a beat. “We have always been entangled with our technology, we’ve always been entangled with knowledge. It may be more obvious now, because of the way it manifests. But if you were a cave man you might have become quite dependent on tools that you built, because without them you might be able to feed yourself, so you needed the knowledge to make those, or you needed the knowledge to find somebody who could make them. And then you also had to know that that thing over there was a sabre tooth tiger and it was a really good idea to get away from it, because the people who didn’t understand that didn’t survive to put their genes into the gene pool.”
In short, entanglement with knowledge and technology keeps you alive. In a way technology’s story is our story. I’m reminded of something Chris Anderson at TED said to me, which I recite to Vint.
I think there is such a thing as moral progress, driven not by any difference in the DNA kids are born with, but just driven by what they see, and seeing more of humanity just naturally flicks on certain switches
“Because the Internet allows us to see more of each other,” I ask, “is it therefore an engine for moral progress?”
“Well, yes and no,” he replies. “There are several phenomenon that this connectivity imposes on us. One of them is awareness of what’s going on in the world, more than we would otherwise, sooner too, almost in real time. The problem with this is that we can misunderstand or misapprehend what it is that we have just learned or discovered or encountered. When you read about the bombs that are going off in Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s front page news here you start to get the feeling that you are at risk, that the world is a dangerous place, and the side-effect of this is that you experience an anxiety which is not necessarily warranted given where you are. It’s like doctors think the world is full of sick people because the mostly see sick people. So perspective starts to leak away because of this connectivity. The good side of it is that we encounter people we never would have encountered, we have an opportunity to rub ideas together we might never have had the chance to explore – and I think that’s incredibly powerful. So my optimistic statement of the day is not that information is power, but that information sharing is power and I think that that’s repeatedly demonstrated in the course of human history – that the sharing of information makes us all more powerful – and that any society that suppresses information harms itself in large measure.”
Scientia potentia est. Knowledge is power.
That ‘the internet is nothing new’ (or that what it allows is nothing new) is a common theme throughout our talk. When I ask Vint how the Internet influences our decisions, for instance, he responds, “We’ve always been influenced by prominent people, by the books we read, the movies we watch. Our friends tell us things and we listen, our parents tell us things and we listen (or not) but the point here is that we get clues about what’s of interest and importance, and we have done in the past. Today we get a larger number of clues from a large number of sources. We have more potential inputs that we ever had before. But in principle it’s the same process. I think we’re being influenced by a larger number of participants, or maybe another way of saying it is a larger number of people have the option of interacting with you – and I think that’s an important.”
This ability to increasingly interact is a powerful engine for innovation, what Chris Anderson of TED dubbed ‘crowd accelerated innovation’ and I call ‘The Knowledge Combustion Engine’. “The openness of the network contributes greatly to people’s ability and willingness to collaborate,” says Vint. “I’m a huge fan and a huge believer that if you give people the opportunity, they will frequently take advantage of that and do interesting things.” He believes that we’re seeing, “what happens when you amass enough computing capability, communications capability to organise that information and make it not only accessible but make it also amenable to your contribution to it. So this ability to aggregate large amounts of information from many different sources in a coherent way (which Google would say is, ‘organising the world’s information and making it accessible and useful’) has dramatically changed our ability to understand our world around us and to be aware of and react to what’s happening.”
“We are Entangled,” I say.
“Yeah, we are Entangled,” replies Vint.
….
As ever, more of this (and more coherently presented) will be in the book…
My last night in New York was very New York. I meet up with Adrian to grab some beers after he gets off work and end up staying out past 3am. It’s good to spend a solid evening with him, making a new friend, getting down to swapping stories about our families, dreams, hopes, aspirations. One thing to say about Adrian Mukasa is that he has the gift of the gab. There isn’t a pretty girl in New York he can’t strike up a conversation with, which means we both end up on top of somewhere called Bar 13 drinking with students.
It’s completely bizarre. This is the sort of crowd I would never have seen in my own student days – the ‘take lots of drugs because we haven’t worked out what to do with out brains yet’ crowd. They’re smart, well-spoken, sparky and out to get completely caned. The resident drug-dealer is a forensic psychologist. I’m a curio here and have a number of conversations with students who approach me in various stages of cognitive disarray. I don’t whether it’s because I’ve spent a year traveling and meeting a wide range of thinkers, but I’m not uncomfortable, which I would have expected to be. (I’ve always found drugs very, well, icky). Somehow I’ve switched into travelogue-observer mode. I’m interested in what’s going on, but detached from it, which is a strangely nice feeling. I feel like I’ve stepped into one scene of a play, whose end I will never see. Suddenly I’m glad I’m older. Really glad.
Today I meet with my US editor Rachel Holtzman, ‘my’ promotion and publicity team at Penguin (Lisa, Beth and Jessica) as well as one of the head honcho’s in Penguin, publisher Bill Shinker. They’re lovely people, sparky, interested, interesting and, I’m glad to report, keen on the book. We have a long, good-natured discussion and it feels funny to think this group of people will be promoting my work. I wish I’d taken them all chocolates. Bill tells me my publication date, 5th February 2011 – which means around that time I’ll be back in the states doing heavy rotation on publicity, which I’m looking forward to.
After the meeting I head to Washington DC on the train. Washington is a kind of a culture shock out of New York. It’s clean, has a modern metro (with sensible maps) and the people seem, well, shiny. Beyond that of course there is the city’s famous architecture and monuments and I spend a barmy evening wandering to the White House, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, feeling like a proper tourist. But I’m not here for tourism, I’m here because tomorrow I’m to meet someone who helped invent something extraordinary…
It changed the way we organised society, it changed the way we educated ourselves, it changed the idea of work, and it changed the way we did business. We built infrastructure the like of which had never been seen before. Railways, roads, sewers, waterways, ports. These were new technologies. Today we don’t think of the road as a technology, or a sewer. But they are. As Google’s ‘Internet Evangelist’ Vint Cerf says, “If you grow up with a technology, it’s not technology. It’s just there.”
In 2009, John Seely Brown ex-Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation told a crowd of Silicon Valley business leaders how deep the industrial revolution was embedded in their high-tech business structures. “The structure and architecture of the firm reflects the structure and architecture of the infrastructure on which the firms are built,” he said. “Organisational infrastructure leverages the properties of infrastructural architectures.” Now, as a couplet this may fail to grab you as much as “You killed my father!” / “No Luke, I am your father!” did me when I was six, but Brown (paraphrasing the work of Harvard’s Alfred Chandler) is saying something profound.
Society is built on top of those roads, railways and schools, rather than those things being created underneath us as a means of support. Seely is saying that roads and schools shape us far more than we shape our roads and schools.
Educationalist Sir Ken Robinson points out that, “there were no systems of public education around the world before the nineteenth century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism”. We built our school systems on top of the industrial revolution. We didn’t build the industrial revolution because of the collective effort of a pre-existing state-wide school system. (If you haven’t seen Ken’s TED talk, I recommend it. Not only is it a revelation, he’s also very funny).
We develop new technologies, that became infrastructure that shape society – and the infrastructure of the industrial revolution is still with us. That infrastructure grew rapidly and then reached a plateau. Cars are not radically different, nor are trains or indeed aircraft from their counterparts a generation ago. Neither are roads, railway tracks, airports, the judiciary, the school system or our systems of government. “Our infrastructure has been stabilised for a shockingly long period of time,” says Brown, “and we have now built institutions on top of that that expect that kind of stability.”
Our institutions are also still promoting a educational mindset that is born of the industrial age too. Ken Robinson says:
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn’t matter where you go, you’d think it would be otherwise but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
Skills that will get you a job in an industrial society are valued the highest. The problem with this is that we’re moving from the industrial age to the information one and our institutions and education needs to shift. This isn’t to say that mathematics and languages aren’t valuable, but that those qualities that come from studying the humanities (understanding social systems for instance) or the ability of the arts to promote creativity and curiosity will become more so.
“We have a brand new type of infrastructure,” says Brown – and that infrastructure is the internet technologies that allow us to tease out and manipulate the world of data in a way never before possible. This new infrastructure will shape us just as profoundly as our industrial infrastructure did.
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A man walks into a shop and picks up a packet of kitchen roll. As he does so an image appears on the packet telling him how much bleach was used in its manufacture. He picks up another and compares. The second gets a ‘green light’ that appears as ghostly image on back of the packet, signifying eco-friendliness. He chooses the latter as his purchase. Now he makes a phonecall, holding out his hand where the numbered buttons of a keypad appear sketched in light on his palm. He dials the number by tapping his own skin. Later, on the way to the airport, he pulls out his boarding pass and across the top some text appears telling him his flight is twenty minutes delayed.
This sounds like a scene from an (admittedly quite dull) science fiction movie, but it is not. These are scenes from a demonstration of a new device developed at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group – a combination of mobile phone, wearable camera and tiny projector that the lab’s director, Pattie Maes, calls ‘Sixth Sense’ – a technology designed to provide seamless and easy access to “information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant, to help us make the right decision about whatever it is we’re coming across,” to help us “make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take.” (Click on the video below to see ‘Sixth Sense’ in action).
Everything is surrounded by a cloud of data you can’t see. A piece of clothing isn’t just the physical garment. In the shadow-world of data it is also how much it costs, whether it was manufactured ethically, the instructions for how best to wash it and so on. Crucially, your behaviour towards it may alter with access to any one of these pieces of data. Imagine walking into a trainer shop and being able to instantly see, by looking at a product’s bar code, whether it was made in a sweatshop or not, or if the shop around the corner had the same shoes on sale.
We are already beginning to layer this world of data on top of our day-to-day experiences. Download the ‘Better World Shopper’ App onto your iPhone for instance and it will give you an instant rating of a manufacturer’s record in regard to human rights, environmental policy, animal rights, social justice and community involvement. Google Goggles makes use of your mobile phone’s camera to recognize landmarks, book covers, even wine labels and return internet searches that relate to what you’re pointing it at. This is data layered over reality, or (depending how you look at it), reality revealed by data.
At a rapid pace we are becoming used to the idea that data should be accessible wherever we are, and on whatever subject we demand it, yet at the same time it’s hard to comprehend that the Internet is younger than I am, and the World Wide Web younger than my eldest niece. The ability of Internet services like the web and e-mail to connect both humans and machines has already had implications for society that we’re only just beginning to wake up to, implications as profound as those of the Industrial Revolution. We are now in a relationship with Internet-based technologies that we can’t get out of. Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis has written:
We have linked our destinies, not only among ourselves across the globe, but with our technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, our own theme is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines. Welcome to the dawn of the Entanglement.
As Vint Cerf said to me recently, “This is not new. We have always been entangled with our technology, we’ve always been entangled with knowledge. It may be more obvious now, because of the way it manifests. But if you were a cave man you might have become quite dependent on tools that you built, because without them you might be able to feed yourself, so you needed the knowledge to make those, or you needed the knowledge to find somebody who could make them. And then you also had to know that that thing over there was a sabre tooth tiger and it was a really good idea to get away from it, because the people who didn’t understand that didn’t survive to put their genes into the gene pool.” In short, entanglement with knowledge and technology keeps you alive.
Technology’s story is our story. Knowing how to turn Entanglement into Symbiosis and how the new infrastructure of data and networks can shape us, will determine who wins and who loses as we continue our shift from the Industrial to Information age. Countries that do not grasp the shift, especially in the way they educate their citizens will suffer. “We need to rethink a whole set of institutional architectures,” says Brown, to enable us to build organisations that focus on what he calls “scalable peer-based learning”, and what you and I would call ‘staying smart enough to keep up.’ Last year in Boston I met Juan Enriquez, author of As the Future Catches Youand a seminal speaker on how technology and knowledge are transforming us.
“I worry that if you’re not educated in this stuff, you’re toast,” he said. He’s very clear that new technologies quickly change the fate of nations, especially as knowledge becomes ever more accessible. “You don’t have to own a large piece of land or a lot of resources to get rich very quickly, but you do need to go to school. That didn’t use to be true. It used to be that it didn’t matter how smart you were, if you weren’t the king or part of the noble classes you were toast. Now you can get wealthy, and you can do it very quickly, but you have to do it through education. You see, the consequences of not being educated today are far different from what they were. You know, in the 1950s you had a high school diploma, you went to Detroit you did fine. That’s not true anymore.”
As Ken Robinson remarked to his audience at TED. “You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you are not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, because you won’t be an artist. Benign advice. Now profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.” He continues,
Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity and for the future it won’t suffice. We have to rethink the fundamental principals on which we are educating our children. What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely … and the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being so that they can face this future.
In short, critical thought, creativity, curiosity are the skills that need to get up the educational hierarchy as society shifts to a fluid infrastructure built on data and the links between it. Where we were taught to be arithmeticians now we must become mathematicians. Where we were taught vocabulary now we must learn semiotics. Where we taught to accept the industrial infrastructure as a fixed edifice we must now learn that the information infrastructure is a fluid tool to be pulled and shaped. Where we worked in silos, now we must learn to harness the crowd, to play our part in manipulating our collective creativity to solve the world’s problems and embrace its opportunities. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society.” She was entirely and completely wrong.
Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems by thinking at the same level we were at when we created them” and by the same token we cannot solve our problems by leveraging the same infrastructure we used in creating them either. Politics, education and the press must, and will, out of necessity, change. Already we are seeing this shift, as the press wonder how to survive spreading a meme of division and conflict in a world that is increasingly collaborative. We are turning away from our newspapers and turning to each other. MIT is placing its courses online for free. TED is putting the world’s greatest speakers at our fingertips. Politics is the luddite. It’s not just industrial, it’s pre-industrial. It’ll change the last and it’ll hurt the hardest. Those nations who fail to understand this, that fail to change their institutions and equip their populaces by shifting to an educational paradigm born out of the coming information age instead of one made of the old industrial one, face a bleak future. Some nations will leapfrog ahead, offering a unprecedented opportunity for the developing world, perhaps taking something of story of the 60s most notable failed state (Singapore, now a knowledge powerhouse) to heart.
I call it the ‘Knowledge Combustion Engine’ and you are the fuel in the tank.
I’ve spent the last year being assailed by new ideas and ways of seeing the world at an unprecedented (for me) rate. The coming revolution in personal genomics, the project to create artificial life, the Transhumanists’ journey to ‘transcend our biology’, robots that get mood swings, machines that demonstrate curiosity, a post-scarcity world promised by atomically precise manufacture, holidays in space and our continued entanglement with the world’s biggest machine (the Internet). All of these are to one degree and another coming down the line, as long as the Maldives (and the rest of us) can stay above water, using our technologies and ingenuity to remove carbon-dioxide from our atmosphere (while simultaneously ushering in an energy revolution). I’ve met scientists, philosophers, gone diving with a president and invented a cocktail on the way. Now as I approach the end of my journey I’m looking for people who can help me make sense of it, to somehow pull all these strands together into a coherent view.
In his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology Eric Drexler approaches the future by asking three questions – what is possible? what is achievable? and what is desirable? The question of what is possible seems easy to answer. As we learn to control the very atoms of matter, the mechanisms of biology and the power of computation there is, in fact, very little that we can’t do, in a physical (and indeed virtual sense). Solutions to climate change? Already developed. An end to the energy crisis? No sweat, sign on the line. Holiday in space? Why not, join our frequent flyer progamme. World peace even? Seems only reasonable.
But when we ask what is achievable, well that’s a different story. Because what we achieve will largely be determined by what we collectively decide is desirable. As George Church told me all those months ago at Harvard Medical School as we discussed personal genomics, “The only thing that puts this kind of medicine far away is really will, right? The question is, how motivated are we?” Do we, as a planet, have the will to take the bounty on offer while mitigating the risks? To get the medicine but not the weapons? To enjoy abundant clean energy while dealing with climate change? To use our technologies to bring us closer together, rather than isolate us?
It’s to ponder questions like these that I’ve come to meet Chris Anderson, the CEO of the TED Talks, the pre-eminent meeting of, as Chris puts it, “people who can offer a lens through which to see the world in a different way.” Every year Chris and his team gather together the world’s leading thinkers from every discipline and give them 18 minutes to tell the rest of the world how they see things. The results can be found on TED.com. Here you can see Ray Kurzweil summarise his law of accelerating returns, or Kevin Kelly talk about his idea of ‘The One Machine’ that the internet will become, or Hod Lipson demonstrate his robots (along with a host of other mind-shifting presentations that make you see things from a different angle). TED tells a different story of our world than the one we’re used to seeing, and it’s the same story I’ve seen on my travels. There is no shortage of fresh ways to see our future. It turns out we’re not necessarily looking at a damage limitation exercise, but a possible renaissance. But first we have to see it. Only then can we have to make it happen.
Seeing it is a revelation. We’re so used to being told that everything is getting worse, that the planet is doomed or that the next pandemic to finish you off is just around the corner, or that technology will subjugate us. It’s a world where a book called Is it me or is everything a bit shit? becomes a best seller. And it’s not true. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. Klaus Lackner has a machine, that works now, that takes CO2 out the air. George Church has co-developed a process that can take that CO2, mix is with sunlightfor pity’s sake! and create gasoline. Thin film solar technologies will soon take power to where there is no grid, while at the same time mobile devices will continue to take the world’s knowledge (accessed on billions of mobile devices) to every corner of the globe. Solar power continues to show exponential rises in efficiency while nanotechnology is already changing the face of manufacturing and will continue to do so. Medicine may soon see an end to a host of the things that kill us. This story is not being told, which is perhaps the biggest threat to our future. Not that it couldn’t be better, but that because we can’t see it, we don’t know it’s an option.
“The history of ideas is a really thrilling history,” says Chris, “and ultimately that is what will drive all of our futures. There’s a very boring view of the world which is that ‘things happen’ and you can’t really do much about it.” It’s something he’s experienced himself. “After I left university I became a journalist, then I started a company… and then fifteen years were taken over by all the stress of working. I didn’t have much spare time to think. When the whole ‘dot com’ bust happened the huge gift I got was discovering, holy crap, there’s so much amazing new thinking out there.” I know what he means. Before I decided I actually wanted to answer the question “what next?” I was on the same treadmill, too busy to look up to realise that the story we’re told wasn’t necessarily the only game in town. This book didn’t start off with the word ‘Optimist’ in the title. It was my agent Charlie, who when I told him the sort of thing I was finding out, remarked on how uplifting some of it was and suggested the change.
We communicate through stories. It is stories that grab us the most and it stories we identify with. Hollywood knows this, political spin doctors know this, newspaper editors know this. “What the story?!” ask editors pointedly when young journalists bring well written pieces that lack a narrative. My own editors were keen to make sure this book had a personal story, and encouraged me to make sure it wasn’t lost in the rush of facts. Chris is very interested in stories, and how the Internet, as it continues its prodigious growth across the globe, can help us, for the first time, tell a story that includes everyone.
The most memorable thing for Chris about the 2009 TED conference was a dance troupe called The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. “This troop could not have existed ten years ago. They exist because kids who used to just dance down on the street corner started filming themselves, putting it up on YouTube and suddenly the community that they’re comparing themselves to is a global community. This kid in Tokyo sees a move from Detroit and innovates within hours, puts it online and so on, so the pace of innovation is dramatically increased.” John Chu, who created the troupe from finding the most popular of those YouTube clips says, “Dance has never had a better friend than technology. Online videos and social networking have created a whole global laboratory online for dance.” It’s not just in dance. “This is happening in hundreds of areas of human endeavour,” says Chris. “I’ve started to call it ‘crowd accelerated innovation’ and I find it incredibly exciting.”
Chris thinks rather than letting go of our humanity, we are re-discovering it. What could be more human than the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers? Kids from diverse backgrounds from across the world, innovating and collaborating to bring a new dimension to an art form as old as society, using technology to help them express themselves and innovate physically with their bodies, to meet, to collaborate, to just dance – and then show the world. Look what we did. Here is something of the exponential growth in wisdom, community, understanding I was looking for to go with Ray Kurzweil’s accelerating technologies.
“The acceleration of knowledge and ideas made possible by the fact that humanity is connected for the first time is vast,” says Chris. “The re-discovery of the spoken word as a tool for communicating is a big deal. If you think about it we evolved as human-to-human communicators. It was the village camp fire, the elder standing there with his painted face on a starry night, fire crackling, drums beating and telling a story and every eye locked on his and all those mirror-neurons in all those brains syncing up with what he was saying. By the end of this story his whole village would go to war against another village or make peace.”
“So TED is one of the new storytellers?” I ask
“It’s one of them. That mode of communication kind of got lost in the print age because it didn’t scale, it was a village-sized technology at best. To me it’s thrilling that it now scales and so one great teacher can inspire many people. One of the things that we see as our role is to try and help nurture that process of re-discovering how to do that, because I think we got to a place where lessons became a person in suit mumbling behind a lectern reading their notes for an hour while a class of people snoozed.” Suddenly, horrifying images of my ‘O’ level economics class come pouring into my brain. I shudder. “It shouldn’t be like that,” says Chris. “So, one of things we see, and this was a big kick for me, is TED speakers competing. An unexpected consequence of putting this stuff online is speakers are looking at what other speakers are doing and are putting in far more preparation time than they ever used to.”
Just as YouTube became a laboratory for dance, TED is becoming a laboratory for the art of oration. Here you will see a statistician blow your mind and end his talk with some sword swallowing. Here you will find Steven Pinker explain that the world is getting safer, and Robert Wright mix philosophy, sociology and stand-up comedy to give one explanation as to why – a theory he calls ‘the non-zero sum game’. I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of lesson I can get on board with.
“We’ve actually got to bring back real creativity and find a way of nurturing that in the education process,” says Chris. “In the age of Google the notion of having to cram all these little brains with facts is bonkers. What’s needed is to build skills like how do you stimulate people to ask the right questions? how do you stimulate people to have a meaningful conversation? to think critically? What are lenses you give people to think about the world? I mean, if I’d have been taught Robert Wright’s non-zero view of history that would have had tremendously more value to me than endless facts about French kings.” It seems that the two things Artificial Intelligence needs the most if it’s ever to stop playing chess and start playing Madlibs, are the two things we need the most too: curiosity and creativity.
What is our collective story today and who tells it? The storytellers of our day-to-day lives used to be the press and our politicians. Like all good storytellers they used emotion to hook us into one of two, on the face of it, very uninspiring, dull stories. Story one: life happens to you, the future is not going to be very good (especially if you vote for that guy), it was better in the old days, you’ve got to look after yourself, the world is violent and unsafe, your job is at risk, the generation below you are feral and dangerous, things are changing too fast and you can’t trust those immigrants/ scientists/ left-wingers/ right-wingers/ nerds/ geeks/ religious people/ atheists/ football fans/ the rich/ the poor/ what you eat/ your neighbour. You are alone. Make the best of it. Vote for me. Buy my paper. I understand. (Story two is, in summary: ‘Shock! People have sex.’)
It’s hardly inspiring is it?
But the story is beginning to be told by other people now, by the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, by speakers at TED talks, by Mohamed Nasheed who battled dictatorship to the brink of his own death and then got on with battling climate change, by Cynthia Breazeal who wants to build robots that help children learn, by Vicki Buck who quit government to create jobs to take on global warming, by George Church who wants you to stay healthy longer, by Eric Drexler who wants to usher in a post-scarcity world using technology on the nanoscale, by the good people at Konarka who take electricity out the sky and give to the developing world. A story being told by the curious and the smart, that inspires the curious and the smart in all of us, by people who wonder and ask the kind of questions that haven’t been asked before. Crucially, none of them wait for permission to ask those questions, or then to find the answers. It is being told through writers who find themselves traveling across America and readers of blogs who might say in the pub, “did you know the technology exists to make petrol out of the air?” It is being told by the cult of the possible, who seek to achieve, to bring us what we desire. Peace. Understanding. Space to love each other. People who encourage us to evolve.
Eric Drexler has written, “As the Web becomes more comprehensive and searchable, it helps us see what’s missing in the world. The emergence of more effective ways to detect the absence of a piece of knowledge is a subtle and slowly emerging contribution of the Web, yet important to the growth of human knowledge.”
I think we’re beginning to see, collectively, what’s missing, and crucially we’re now able to do something about it. Technology doesn’t give you permission like your teachers did. It gives you agency – to ask, to learn, to connect, to do. It says, “go on then, show me what you’ve got”.
“I don’t know that the future’s going to be better,” says Chris. “But I think there’s a very good chance that it will be and I think that’s something that everyone can do to further increase that chance. There are several quite profound and inspiring ways of thinking about the world that suggest there are these trends that have the potential to drive a better future and I think there is such a thing as moral progress, driven not by any difference in the DNA kids are born with, but just driven by what they see, and seeing more of humanity just naturally flicks on certain switches that make people more empathetic. Of course, the future might well be truly horrible. I think it’s all to play for and I think everyone of sound mind and conscience should be in the game, trying to shape it in the right way. It’s a very false and shallow view of history to say that it’s just one thing after another. Ultimately though our history is the history of ideas. It’s a really thrilling history and ultimately that is what will drive all of our futures.”
Ideas, creativity, curiosity – and dancing. Now there’s a mix.
More of my talk with Chris, will of course, make it into the book…
I arrive in New York after a long and slow train from Boston to Penn Station (surely a place specifically designed to confuse foreign travelers?) The constant rains have hit the trains hard and I was lucky to make it. (The rain kept coming putting large parts of the east coast under water and the service was later suspended due to flooding.) The delays mean I hit the New York rush hour carrying my luggage, which is about as much fun as gallstones. I make it to Lounge 47 in Long Island City to meet gent and scholar Adrian Mukasa, the wise-cracking videographer I met in this bar during my last visit and who has generously found me an apartment in Queens for my stay. We catch up over some beers before I head to the apartment. It’s blissfully quiet, which is just about the most important thing anywhere I sleep needs to be (and completely unlike my flat in London which is assailed from all sides by the lives and loves of my neighbours).
Today I meet my editor at Penguin Avery, the quietly formidable Rachel Holtzman. We have lunch at the swanky Marea restaurant bordering Central Park. Rachel has a kind of steely-softness that New York specialises in. She’s got a kind heart, but I suspect suffers fools about as gladly as the Vatican would respond to public conversion to catholicism by Gary Glitter right now. I’m glad to hear she’s happy with the four chapters I’ve delivered so far, and that the publicity and sales people at Penguin have responded well to the book (indeed, I’m to meet them, and the publisher Bill next Tuesday). Talking to Rachel also helps me begin to pull together some ideas about how the book’s narrative will play out. Most exciting however is that she’s brought a mock up of a front cover, and it’s brilliant. It’s simple but has a New Yorker kind of vibe. As soon as it’s finalised (we discussed a few tweaks) I hope to post it up here.
I spend the afternoon in the main branch of the New York public library preparing for tomorrow’s interview with Chris Anderson, CEO of the mighty TED talks. I’m hoping Chris will help me pull together some of the threads and trends I’ve been battling with, in short, to help me make sense of everything. Given that the TED talks are a nexus for the presentation and discussion of new ideas and ways of seeing the world Chris is probably in the top ten people assailed by the most new ideas on a regular basis on the planet – and so, I hope, has managed to develop a way of bringing them all together into a coherent world view, or (more likely), a coherent attitude to approaching the future.
After all, on one side you have James Lovelock who says, there’s no way to save the planet and on the other you have Ray Kurzweil who, as I reported in a recent post, says ‘Malthusian concerns’ about us using up the world’s resources are facile because they assume nothing in technology changes (i.e. we can engineer ourselves out of the climate crisis – and indeed just about anything else we care to think of). Meanwhile, in the middle you have eco-pragmatists like Stewart Brand (who I hope to interview in a couple of weeks) whose Whole Earth Discipline is described as ‘an eco-pragmatist manifesto’. (You can see Stewart talk about ‘four environmental heresis’ here.
I had hoped to pop in to see Cleveland Cutler at Boston University today to discuss the ‘nuclear renaissance’ but despite agreeing to an interview and numerous phone calls and e-mails to chase (including several chats to his administrator who assures me Cleveland will ‘call me back’) there has been a deathly, and let’s be honest, outrageously rude silence from the professor, not even a simple “I’m sorry, I need to cancel”. Having extended my stay in Boston (and my imposition on Tracy’s hospitality) to make time for this meeting I find this, well, just a bit arsey and disappointing. I must think of a suitably cutting joke about baldy geographers.
Instead I head into Cambridge and say hello to the personal robotics lab. Sadly both arch-enemy of lazy writers Polly Guggenhiem and uber-robotics pioneer Cynthia Breazeal aren’t there, but the ever-friendly Dan Stiehl who I met last time is on hand and I do get to see Nexi (the lab’s latest sociable robot in action). In tune with the lab’s focus on human-robot relationship Nexi is interacting with a young boy, no older than eight who finds Nexi’s human-like tracking of his movements as he dances in front of her enthralling. Despite being made of moulded white plastic Nexi’s face can express a whole gamut of emotions – her big eyes blinking, her white plastic ‘eyebrows’ moving, her mouth expressing slack jaw boredom (when not much is happening) to tight lipped interest (if the boy is doing something intriguing) or annoyance (if the boy gets too close). It’s startling to see how quickly all of us just accept Nexi as somehow sentient.
I give Nexi a personality. In fact, I can’t help myself, because this is a robot that acts in a, well, recognisably human way (and is therefore the exact opposite of Keanu Reeves). This is no accident. This is exactly what the Personal Robotics lab wants you to do.
Robot
Keanu
“We put people at the core of what we’re trying to do,” explained Cynthia last time I was here. “A lot of work in robotics is still very focused on technology but in our lab we put these robots in front of real people so we can understand their impact. My group takes the relationship between social robots and people seriously and are trying to design for both sides. It’s not just about having the robot understand people, we’re trying to make people understand the robot so you’re naturally able to use your own way of thinking about the world to understand what must be going on in the mind, so to speak, of the robot.”
Mind of the robot? Let’s not get into that here, I have two chapters that address the subject of Artificial Intelligence in the book…
In the meantime, check out this animation of Nexi that demonstrates her range of facial expressiveness.
Last time I was in Boston it was gloriously sunny. This time Boston is alternatively a nipple hardening freeze-fest, or worse-than-London-in-February festival of rain. Still, a weekend in Boston is not to be sniffed at. This weekend I’ll see a performance and then be in one.
I head to the Boston Public Library, a fantastic edifice to erudition and, conveniently, next to the half price theatre tickets booth in Copley Square where I randomly pick my evening’s entertainment – a play called ‘Entertaining Mr. Sloane’ by British playwright Joe Orton. I was hoping to see how an American cast would handle the peculiarly English quirks of Orton’s dark humour (and the accents). It turns out the cast is all British, which is no doubt good for the play, but ruins some of my fun.
The library is one of those beautiful, old school, vaulted ceiling places and I feel all proper and Bostonian as I write. My pre-theatre dinner is jollied by a conversation about technology and faith with the sociable Ellis, a Methodist preacher in a sharp suit, with an easy laugh who laments his church’s inability to keep pace with modern means of communication.
Today I stay at Tracy’s flat to read. Tracy herself is out an about for most of the day, including a trip to church with her mum who is aggressively intrigued by me. “Hello,” I say. “I’m staying with Tracy for a few days.” “I can see that!” she exclaims “But who are you?!” I get the impression she thinks I may be some decidedly unsavoury love interest of her daughter’s and when I tell her I’m in Boston researching a book this is met with suspicion but, ultimately, a request for a free copy. Tracy later tells me that her mother is a selfless servant of others and has “difficulty chilling out”.
That evening Tracy has arranged for a group of her (sociable and likeable) friends to see me do a brief set at Harvard’s Comedy Studio, arguable the most intelligent crowd, well, anywhere. It’s the sort of crowd that tends to heckle with technical points, rather than disdain. I don’t get any heckles, but after my set (which, I have to say, went rather well) one medical researcher did approach me to question my reading of a neuro-anatomy paper that forms the basis of one of my routines. Only in Harvard.
As is the tradition at the Comedy Studio after the show the comics and Rick Jenkins (the owner, and tonight’s generous compere) descend to the Karaoke Bar below to listen to drunk students ruin soft rock hits from the eighties (as if those weren’t bad enough already). Tracy takes a rather brilliant photo that juxtaposes Rick and the Karaoke lyrics to a diVinyls hit.
It’s amazing how quickly you can accept international travel as work-a-day. When I started my journey a flight heralded a feeling of adventure in me. Now, it’s like getting in a car. Another thing that’s changed is my attitude to my interviewees. When I first secured an interview with my quarry in Boston I was slightly intimidated. ‘How do you talk to someone like that?’ I asked myself, the ‘that’ in question being Ray Kurzweil. Now, as I come to end of my journey and try to tie it all together I find less trepidation in myself. I’ve spent the last year meeting extraordinary people, and I’ve got used to it. Turns out extraordinary people have plenty enough ordinary about them to get hold of.
I arrive in Boston, deal with the ever rude and superior immigration staff and am picked up by Tracy Wemett, who you may remember as Konarka’s PR woman and driver of some, shall we say, reckless enthusiasm. Tracy, on hearing of my return to Boston has generously offered me her basement for the week, which makes a welcome change from hotels. Still, we’ve got to get to her apartment alive which, given her driving, is not a certainty.
Since I saw Tracy last it seems I haven’t been the only one to notice her maverick approach to the road. One speeding ticket too many and she’s been required to take a driving education course by the state of Massachusetts. The results are reassuring. She tells me, “I was told I’m the sort of person who will make a road where there isn’t one.” She pauses. “Apparently that’s not good.”
I spend the next day preparing for my interview with Ray. (I also take a visit to meet genius-entrepreneur Howard Berke at Konarka, who was, like many genius-entrepreneurs, a mixture of enthralling, socially odd and genuinely entertaining. More on him in my chapter on Solar).
Ray Kurzweil is variously an inventor, guru, madman, prophet or genius depending on who you listen to. One indisputable truth is that Ray is a very good inventor. He invented the first machine that could scan text in any font and convert it into a computer document, a technology he applied to building a reading machine for the blind (which led to him, on the side, inventing the flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer too). Stevie Wonder was the first customer – and this in turn led to Ray inventing a new breed of electronic synthesizers that captured the nuances of traditional ones. (In a former life as a musician I coveted the ‘Kurzweil K2000’ but not being very successful musician I could never afford one). Our interview opens in much the same way as Ray’s last book The Singularity is Near (hereafter referred to as TSIN). “The philosophy of my family, the religion, was the power of human ideas and it was personalised,” he says. “My parents told me, ‘you Ray can find the ideas to overcome challenges whether they’re grand challenges of humanity, or personal challenges’ ”.
Ray’s journey to visionary genius/ techno-prophet/ crazy person (delete as appropriate depending on your prejudices) had its genesis in his attempt to work out a way to time his inventions for maximum impact. “I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can’t get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment,” he writes on page three of TSIN. So Ray started looking at technology trends and he saw something extraordinary – a clear, unmistakable pattern of exponential innovation, something he calls ‘the law of accelerating returns’ – a phenomenon centred around the idea that technology regularly doubles in efficiency. Such doubling is seen, for instance, in the increasing processing power of computers. Reality has kept pace with the predictions of ‘Moore’s law’ with almost unwavering allegiance, with performance per dollar doubling about every 18 months. But Ray says the effects of the law can be found, well, nearly everywhere, that the law of accelerating returns is the governing law of all creation.
To understand the implications of Ray’s idea you have to get your head around how potent a force it is if something has the propensity to double. Think of it this way. Let’s say you travel a metre with each step you take. If you take ten steps you’ll have covered ten metres. Now imagine that instead of each step progressing one metre, it somehow doubles the distance you covered with the last one. So while your first step covers one metre, your second covers two and by your third your stride is four metres. The difference between ‘normal stepping’ you and ‘doubling stepping’ you is extreme and gets ever more so. As a doubling stepper your first ten steps will cover not ten metres, but one thousand and twenty four. Instead of covering the equivalent of about 1/10th of a football field you’ve covered over ten. And with your next step you’ll cover ten more – with the step after that covering another twenty whole pitches.
By the time you’ve done just 27 steps you’ve traversed 67 million metres, or to put it another way, you’ve gone one and a half times round the world. Your next step? You double that distance and do another 67 million metres. At this rate you could walk to the sun and back (and be 85% of the way to Mars) in 38 steps (your last step having covered 137,438,953,000 metres). One can only imagine the trousers you’d need. Meanwhile, normal stepping you is about a third of the way down a football pitch. Now, of course, you can’t step like that but technology, says Ray, can. And he’s not wrong.
Certainly on my trip I’ve seen other examples of mankind’s exponential adventure, in the plummeting cost of genome sequencing, or the ‘cost per watt’ performance of solar technologies for example. Ray cites these examples and others. The first hundred pages of TSIN almost bludgeons the reader with graph after graph, based on historical data showing exponential growth in the number of phone calls per day, cell phone subscriptions, wireless network price-performance, computers connected to the internet, internet bandwidth and so on. These all have a computing flavour, but Ray sees exponential growth of knowledge too, citing exponential growth in nanotechnology patents as an example. What about the economy? Ray plots exponential growth in the value of output per hour (measured in dollars) in private manufacturing and in the per-capita GDP of the US. Ray quotes example after example because he want us to get past what he sees as an inherit prejudice in our human thinking.
“Our intuition is linear and I believe that’s hard-wired in our brains. I have debates with sophisticated scientists all the time, including Nobel prize winners that take a linear projection and say “it’s going to be centuries before we…” and “we know so little about…” and here you can fill in the blank depending on their field of research. They just love to say that. But they’re completely oblivious to the exponential growth of information technology and how it’s invading one field after another, health and medicine being just the latest.”
You can’t get to Mars in 39 steps wearing linear trousers (like the one’s most of our minds wear). You need exponential ones (like technology has). But because we’re hard-wired to think in linear, rather than exponential terms we fail to see when things are coming, argues Ray. We’ll be far further than we think, far quicker than we expect. Ray predicts for instance that by the middle of the century we’ll have artificial intelligence that exceeds human cognition, a game-changing explosion of intelligence that we will merge with to usher in the next stage in our evolution – a human-machine hybrid, enhanced with similar exponential bounty brought to us by entwined revolutions in nanotechnology and biotechnology. Aging will be ‘cured’ and we’ll be able to move onto a more stable platform than our frail biology. At the same time we’ll have solved the energy crisis and dealt conclusively with climate change.
“All these Malthusian concerns that we’re running out of resources are absolutely true if it were the case that the law of accelerating returns didn’t exist,” he says. “For instance, people take current trends in the use of energy and just assume nothing’s going to change, ignoring the fact that we have 10,000 times more energy that falls on the Earth from the Sun every day than we are using. So if we restrict ourselves to 19th Century technologies, these Malthusian concerns would be correct.” In other words, the law of accelerating returns in solar energy will soon see a green energy revolution, as the technology keeps doubling its efficiency. Ray reckons five years from now solar will be taking coal to the cleaners when it comes to cost per watt. We won’t be switching to solar because we want to save the planet, we’ll be doing it to save our bank accounts.
“I just had a debate this week at a conference held by The Economist with Jared Diamond who basically sees our civilization going to hell in a hand-basket and points out various trends and makes this assumption that technology is a disaster and only creates problems and he has really no data to point to, it’s just aphorisms and scoffing at technology with no analysis. But he’s got a bestselling book because people love to read about how we’re heading to disaster.”
Part of understanding what Ray is getting at requires you to understand that he sees all creation as an exercise in information processing. Everything can be expressed as data coming in, some kind of manipulation or interaction, and some data goes out. So, two atoms collide (data in), they interact in some way (data processing) and emit light and heat (data out). This is the most boring way ever to describe fire, but it doesn’t take away from the essential premise that everything can be viewed as a manipulation of information. In other words, everything (including you) is an ‘information technology’ and therefore the law of accelerating returns becomes the fundamental law that governs all creation.
In 1999 Ray published a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines in which he applied this law to make predictions, and handily he made a bunch for the decade from 2009. Critics and advocates alike have lept on these, loudly proclaiming “Ray was right!” or “Ray was wrong!” depending, it seems, on how they view the world – and all ignoring the fact that Ray didn’t say his predictions were for one year, but for the period beginning 2009. “Most of Kurzweil’s predictions are actually astoundingly accurate,” writes one blogger, while another asserts his forecasts are “ludicrously inaccurate.” Oh dear.
My own analysis is that, with the odd caveat, Ray seems to be on the right track with his predictions and many seem extremely prescient. According to Ray 89 are correct, 13 are “essentially correct”, three are partially correct, two are ten years off, and just one is wrong (but he claims it was tongue in cheek anyway). Certainly there is some pride in Kurzweil’s response to his critics and you could argue he’s stretching the point a bit when he defends some of his predictions, massaging the semantics of the prediction to match the current situation, but, all that aside, he’s still been right more often than he hasn’t. By anybody’s reckoning that’s prediction nirvana, and a skill any investor would love to have (oh, Ray’s latest venture? A hedge fund.)
But part of the problem with Ray Kurzweil, or rather part of the problem in talking about Ray Kurzweil is that he raises strong emotions. Trying to separate reasoned debate from the howl of emotion that his work provokes is hard. Take the view of Douglas R. Hofstadter, now a cognitive scientist at Indiana University, but more famously the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – an attempt to explain how consciousness can arise from a system, even though the system’s component parts aren’t individually conscious. (This is a key area of study for Ray too, because it is through reverse engineering the human brain that he believes we’ll be able to unlock the mechanisms of mind, replicate them in machines and so free ourselves from the biological limitations of our brain). Here’s what Hofstader has to say about Ray’s ideas:
“I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two…”
That’s like Stevie Wonder saying, “I can’t work out if Paul McCartney is a genius or a wanker”. Such is the trouble with talking about Ray. (You can see the full text of the interview this comes from here)
As I comment throughout An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, the advance of new technologies, particularly biotechnology, make many people (including me) uncomfortable – and then Ray comes along and says, ‘belt up, things are going way faster than you thought, and by the way, that means I’m not going to die. Would you like to transcend your biology with me? Hurry now’. It’s no wonder our linear-trousered brains are stretched to the limit, no wonder some people find Ray just too difficult to engage with. And on the other side of the coin are those who do see Ray as some kind of prophet, whose ideas save them from the sticky issue of their mortality. Ray’s ‘Singularity’ – the moment at which ‘strong AI’ arrives and we merge with it – has been called “the Rapture of the nerds” (a phrase coined by science fiction author Ken MacLeod). These Utopian-techno-nerds don’t really help Ray’s cause. I advocate the approach of Juan Enriquez, the founder of Harvard Business Schools’ Life Science Project, and another Boston resident, who told me, “Do I always agree with Ray? No. Does he make me think? Always.”
It seems to me (from my linear trousered perspective) that progress in robotics, AI, synthetic biology and genomics brings philosophical questions such as “what does it mean to be human?” into your living room, and not in an ‘interesting-debate-over-a-glass-of-wine’ sort of way, but in a ‘right-in-your-face-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it?’ sort of way.
When the possibility that the hand your mate Robin lost to cancer three years ago can be replaced by a robotic one with a sense of touch becomes a real option we begin to ask ourselves, ‘Is that hand really part of Robin? If I shake that hand am I really shaking Robert’s hand? Gee I don’t know. I feel kinda weird’. (By the way, Robin isn’t fictional, he’s Robin af Ekenstam and you can watch a video of his new hand being attached here). And just as we can start to engineer robot hands and merge them with humans, we will soon, thanks to the law of accelerating returns, be able to engineer to genuine robot intelligence and merge it with our brains, argues Ray.
“The basic principles of intelligence are not that complicated, and we understand some of them, but we don’t fully understand them yet. When we understand them we’ll be able to amplify them, focus on them – we won’t be limited to a neo-cortex that fits into a less than one cubic foot skull and we certainly won’t run it on a chemical substrate that sends information at a few hundred feet per second, which is a million times slower than electronics. We can take those principles and re-engineer them and we’re going to merge them with our own brains”.
It’s statements like this that bring Ray into conflict with many scientists who think he’s not so much running before he can walk, as getting in jet fighter straight out of the crib. Although, for Ray, that’s kind of the point. Crib to jet fighter is really just a few doublings after all, the law of accelerating returns in action. But for some, Ray is a bit like Tracy. He makes a road where there isn’t one, they say.
One thing is certain. If a conscious human-like intelligence is ‘computable’ (i.e. it can be run on a machine substrate) the processing power to compute it will be within reach of the even your desktop very soon. Hans Moravec wondered, “what processing rate would be necessary to yield performance on par with the human brain?” and came up with the gargantuan figure of 100 trillion instructions per second, which is one of those numbers that generally makes most of us go “hmmm, I think I’ll make a cup of tea now.” To put this number in context, as I was ushered into the world in the early seventies IBM introduced a computer that could perform one million instructions per second. This is onemillionth of Moravec’s figure. By the dawn of the millennium chip-maker, AMD, were selling a microprocessor over three and half thousand times quicker (testament to a technological journey that had been populated with continual exponential leaps in processing power throughout the intervening period). This yielded a chip that is still 280 times less powerful than the brain’s computational prowess (by Moravec’s reckoning) but is a staggering upswing in power nonetheless. Intel have just released their ‘Core i7 Extreme’ chip which is forty times faster than the AMD device from 2000 and computes at the mind-numbing speed of 147,600,000,000 instructions per second – or about one seventh of Moravec’s figure. At this rate your new laptop will achieve the same computational speed as the human brain before the decade is out. Soon after that, if the exponential trend continues, your laptop (or whatever replaces it) will have more hard processing muscle than all human brains put together. This will happen sometime around the middle of the century according to Kurzweil.
Supercomputers have passed Moravec’s milestone and it’s therefore no surprise to find various projects using them to try to simulate parts of animal and human brains, merging neuroscience and computer science in an attempt to get to the bottom of what’s really going on in that skull of yours. It’s important to realise that simulating something often takes more computing power than being something (aircraft simulators have more computers than actual aircraft for instance) and a complete simulation of an entire human brain running in real-time is still beyond the reach of even the most powerful computers. But not for long. Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project (which works by simulating individual brain cells on different processors and then linking them together) believes “It is not impossible to build a brain, and we can do it in ten years.” He’s even joked (or not, depending on how seriously you take the claim) he’ll bring the result to talk at conferences. Markram has similarly upset more conservative voices in the AI field. Even Ray thinks he’s over-optimistic. (The prediction falls outside the curve predicted by Ray’s graphs by a hefty margin).
You can see Markram’s TED talk (where he suggests he’ll be bringing the Blue Brain back to the conference as a speaker within a decade) below.
I find myself thinking back to my talk with George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. If you accept evolution as an explanation of how humanity came to be, that the common genetic code of all living things is proof that you, I and Paris Hilton all, at some point, evolved from the same source (that source being a collection of molecules that became the first cell) then one way of looking at the human being (and therefore the human brain) is ‘simply’ as a collection of unthinking tiny bio-machines computing away – reading genetic code, and spewing out ‘computed’ proteins and the rest. We’re machines too, just wet biological ones. You are an information technology.
Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks makes this argument as well. “The body, this mass of biomolecules, is a machine that acts according to a set of specified rules,” he writes in Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines
Needless to say, many people bristle at the use of the word “machine”. They will accept some description of themselves as collections of components that are governed by rules of interaction, and with no component beyond what can be understood with mathematics, physics and chemistry. But that to me is the essence of what a machine is, and I have chosen to use that word to perhaps brutalize the reader a little.
In short, intelligence and consciousness are computable, because you and I are computing it right now. I compute, therefore I am. George Church was less brutal in his take on the ‘human machine’. “I think of us more and more as mechanisms,” he told me. “We’re starting to see more and more of the mechanism exposed and it just makes it more impressive to me, not less. If someone showed me a really intricate clock or computer that had emotions and self awareness and spirituality and so forth I’d be very, very impressed and I think that’s where we are heading, were we can be impressed by the mechanism.”
But something’s not sitting right with me, and it’s not that I don’t like being called a ‘machine’ (believe me, that’s nothing compared to some of the heckles I’ve had). In fact, the machine metaphor makes a kind of sense given what I found out at Harvard.
It was Cynthia Breazeal, head of the personal Robotics lab who I met last time I was in Boston that expressed it best. “The bottom line is there’s still a long way to go before we can have a simulation actually doanything. I mean they can run the simulation but what is it doing that can be seen as being intelligent? How does that grind out into real behaviour, where you show it something and have it respond to it? I still think there’s a lot of understanding that needs to be done. I do, I really do. I think we’re making fantastic strides but I think,” (she dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, smiling) “there’s a lot we still don’t know!”
Cynthia nailed the root of my discomfort. Someone can give you the best calculator in the shop, but if you’ve never learned any maths, it’s largely useless to you. If the brain is computable, it’s not that we won’t have the processing power to recreate its mechanisms, but that we’re still a long way off working out how to drive that simulation. If you’d never learned to read your eyes could take in the shape of every letter on this page, but it’d mean nothing to you, and printing it out photocopying it a hundred times (or even inventing the printer and photocopying machine in order to do so) wouldn’t help you either. Just as you had to learn to read, AI and neuroscience research, collectively, have to tease out not only what it is they’re looking at, but what it means.
Sure, there’s exponential growth in processing power, but the jury is out as to whether there is an equivalent growth in understanding how to use that power more ‘intelligently’, to create (to paraphrase one of Henry Markram’s analogies) a concerto of the mind by playing the grand piano of the brain. If there had been, maybe your new laptop would be one-seventh as smart as you are. But it isn’t. This is where the strength of projects like the Blue Brain (and Cynthia’s work) really lie – as tools to slowly help us to pose the right questions that will lead to a better understanding of intelligence, emotion and consciousness.
This is what I really want to ask Ray. “Have you got any graphs that clearly show an exponential growth in understanding? or in the ability of us to collectively make sense of the great philosophical questions, the intractable questions – ‘What is life?’, ‘What is consciousness?’” I ask. “Have we seen the law of accelerating returns in our understanding of these questions? Is our knowledge, our wisdom also keeping pace?”
“Well, I’m actually working on that in connection with my next book which is called How the mind works and how to build one,”says Ray.
Well he would be, wouldn’t he?
More of my interview with Ray will, of course, be in the book…
I’m about to set off on the road again – heading to the US to interview singulatarian Ray Kurzweil, eco-nuclear advocate Cleveland Cutler, Google Vice President and ‘father of the internet’ Vint Cerf, TED conferences CEO Chris Anderson, Google environment honcho Dan Reicher, Stuart Witt – the general manage of Mojave Spaceport, the good people of XCOR spaceplanes and, if all goes well, nanotech genius Eric Drexler and ‘eco-pragmatist’ Steward Brand… I’ll also be fitting in a short gig Harvard’s Comedy Studio (arguably the nicest room on the East Coast).
Those who follow this blog will know it’s been in hiatus as I’ve got down to actually writing the book, and to prove I’ve been working I thought I post up a taster – to whit, the first sections of the first three chapters. Naturally these will change before publication, but I hope they whet your appetite and I’ll be blogging as I hit the US.
Chapter 1
“The World’s Most Dangerous Idea”
Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough. – Groucho Marx
I’m on a train to Oxford wondering how long I am going to live.
This isn’t because I think we’re about to crash, nor is it a reaction to the sandwich First Great Western have just sold me. It’s because a few weeks ago the stalking horse of Mortality popped into my head and, without invitation, asked, “what are you going to do with the rest of your life then?” (Mortality, it turns out, sounds a lot like my father). Whatever the answer, one thing I do know is that my future will play out in a world different to the one we’ve all grown up in.
The times they are a-changin’ sang Bob Dylan as the sixties got into the full flow of social revolution. Fifty years later there’s another revolution going on. Population is rocketing, the planet is becoming urban (over half us now live in cities), medicine is curing the previously incurable and ninety year olds take parachute jumps[i], spaceships are owned by businessmen, the climate is changing and the world’s knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection.
So I’m setting out on a journey that I hope will tell me what the world of my future will look like, and help me answer the most personal and yet the biggest of questions. A question all of us ask.
‘What next?’
But first I need to work out how much ‘next’ I’m likely to see. Or, to put it another way – how long have I got? How long is my future?
The answer I’ll find in Oxford challenges everything.
Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key. – Alan Bennett
On the 26th June 2000, approximately 22.5 kilograms of carbon, 70 kilograms of water, 2.5 kilograms of nitrogen, 1.4 kilograms of calcium, and a half-kilogram mix of 54 other elements (including just over a tenth of a milligram of uranium and enough phosphorous to make 2,500 cigar-lighting matches) walked into the East Room of the White House.
“Nearly two centuries ago, in this room, on this floor, Thomas Jefferson and a trusted aide spread out a magnificent map,” said then US president Bill Clinton. The map in question was the result of the first coast-to-coast overland exploration of the United States and the ‘trusted aide’ was Meriwether Lewis. But Bill had come to talk about another map. “Without a doubt the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind.” Was it true? Had they finally found a guide to the location of Rupert Murdoch’s soul?
Seventeen years earlier a man called George Church and a handful of his peers suggested making the map Bill was actually referring to; a completed ‘human genome’ – a writing down of the genetic cookbook from which each human is uniquely baked. It’s a cookbook small enough to be stored in nearly every one of your cells but contains enough information to explain why one bag of mostly oxygen, hydrogen and carbon is Bill Clinton, while a similar quantity of exactly the same stuff is you.
The accolade for sequencing the human genome was grudgingly shared by Celera Genomics (co-founded by Craig Venter) and a publicly funded international effort led by the National Human Genome Research Institute. Actually Venter’s team did it better, faster and over ten times cheaper[i]. They also tried to patent much of the knowledge.
Naughty Craig.
Subsequent outcry from press, public and many scientists, along with some hastily prepared legislation put the kibosh on such capitalistic ambitions. Celera’s stock price plummeted. Venter got fired and he ruefully remarked later, “my greatest success is that I managed to get hated by both worlds.”[ii] But he had birthed a new era.
Even though you can’t read the cookbook, your cells (and now technology) can – and getting hold of a copy (otherwise known as ‘having your genome sequenced’) could one day play a part in saving your life, as well as changing the normal experience of going to the doctor after you get ill, to hardly having to visit them because you didn’t get ill in the first place.
[i] Private vs. Public Sequencing Effort, page 110, As The Future Catches You, Juan Enriquez, first paperback edition, Three Rivers Press
My momma always said ‘life was like a box of chocolates…you never know what you’re gonna get’. – Forrest Gump
The biotech revolution goes way beyond the realm of human medicine – making it without doubt one of the most important stories of our age. Every living organism has a genome[1], cookbooks we’re now learning how to edit – the ‘genetic modification’ that occupies so many headlines. The twin sibling of personal genomics is synthetic biology – the tools, techniques and knowledge that today allow us to recode cells and (within “a year or two” thinks George) enable us to fabricate entirely new ones to our own designs.
Such things, not unreasonably, give a lot of people pause for thought. Fiddling with life is something many of us believe should be reserved for more divine engineers than ourselves, the argument being that biology isn’t a tool to be re-programmed in the same way we load software into our iPhones. Others echo the view of biologist (and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) James Watson who said, “If we don’t play God, who will?”[2]
One man – who, some critics argue, already thinks he is God – is Craig Venter. As the CEO and Chairman of Synthetic Genomics he has stated (with only a smidgen of irony) that he has the “modest goal” of using synthetic biology “to replace the whole petrochemical industry”. One way he hopes to do this is by genetically engineering algae to excrete diesel. He’s not joking, and to prove it he did a deal with every environmentalist’s favourite bad boy Exxon Mobil, who are ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into the idea.[i] This kind of investment isn’t an isolated event. San Francisco based LS9 (co-founder: one George MacDonald Church) have modified the genetics of E. Coli bacteria so that if you feed them sugar they make petroleum – attracting the attentions (and the money) of oil giant Chevron.
This isn’t science fiction. You can visit LS9’s pilot plant in San Francisco, pour a gallon of their bacterially produced gasoline into your car and drive off. A plant with 2.5 million gallons of annual capacity is underway[ii]. Want more? Venter has a life form on the drawing board that makes fuel after eating carbon dioxide – a potential ‘one stop’ solution to both the climate and energy crises. Elsewhere, Joule Biotechnology are already using genetically altered photosynthesizing bacteria to take in waste CO2, mix it with sunlight, and make petrol. (Joule’s scientific advisor? Er, G.M. Church). When Newsweek asked Venter if his fuels would work in today’s cars and energy systems he replied, “Basically everything we’re making will work in the existing infrastructure.”[iii] He calls it ‘fourth generation biofuels’. You call it petrol.
Having just got my head around the idea that we can read our code (and the code of everything else) it now seems that there’s plenty of people working on the idea of re-writing it – combining code from different organisms to make them do exciting and novel things. And with every organism on the planet being inexorably sequenced there’s one hell of a master cookbook of gene-recipes to choose from and combine.
How about a bacterium that makes biodegradable plastic?[iv] Or one that pumps out components for anti-malarial drugs?[v] Well, both already exist (both versions of E. Coli again[3]). If you’re diabetic it’s almost certain your insulin supply is also produced by E. Coli bacteria whose genome has been tinkered with, and soon genetically modified plants will be producing it too[vi].
It’s not a short leap of the imagination (or, some argue, the technology) to design and breed a mosquito that immunizes you against malaria rather than giving it to you (a bug you actually want to get bitten by) or to recode diseased cells to make them healthy (like re-booting your computer, or upgrading its software).
But as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Spiderman both knew, with great power comes great responsibility.
[1] So does every virus. In fact the first genome to be sequenced was that of the snappily titled and bijou-genomed Bacteriophage MS2 virus, back in 1976.
[2] Watson has lost quite a lot of friends of late with overtly sexist and racist remarks. If anyone’s going to play God, I hope it’s not Watson.
[3]E. Coli, I find out, is a family of bacteria that are a workhorse species in genetics. That’s because they have a ‘simple’, and therefore an easily fiddled-with, genetic make-up. Despite the bad reputation the bacteria get from a few black sheep in the family it’s generally a benign bug. You have a whole bunch in your gut right now generating Vitamin K2 (a vitamin also found in lots of those uber-healthy dark green vegetables like spinach).
[v]http://www.springerlink.com/content/h0461211537185u0/ – Expression of a synthetic Artemesia annua amorphadiene synthase in Aspergillus nidulans yields altered product distribution – David Lubertozzi and Jay D. Keasling – Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology – July 24th,2008
and a seminal speaker on how technology and knowledge are transforming us.
Eric Drexler approaches the future by asking three questions – what is possible? what is achievable? and what is desirable? The question of what is possible seems easy to answer. As we learn to control the very atoms of matter, the mechanisms of biology and the power of computation there is, in fact, very little that we can’t do, in a physical (and indeed virtual sense). Solutions to climate change? Already developed. An end to the energy crisis? No sweat, sign on the line. Holiday in space? Why not, join our frequent flyer progamme. World peace even? Seems only reasonable.
is described as ‘an eco-pragmatist manifesto’. (You can see Stewart talk about ‘four environmental heresis’ 
in which he applied this law to make predictions, and handily he made a bunch for the decade from 2009. Critics and advocates alike have lept on these, loudly proclaiming “Ray was right!” or “Ray was wrong!” depending, it seems, on how they view the world – and all ignoring the fact that Ray didn’t say his predictions were for one year, but for the period beginning 2009. “Most of Kurzweil’s predictions are actually astoundingly accurate,” writes 