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  • February28th

    I was flattered to be invited to talk at Matt Locke’s “The Story” conference recently. ‘Conference’ is probably the wrong word. It’s more a Confluence – of thoughts and ideas about narrative in all its forms; its proponents, its enemies, its wise old heads, its enthusiastic upstarts and the technologies and methods that influence them.

    I missed the morning sessions because I was on a plane returning from Seattle but heard many people talking positively about what had transpired, most notably a presentation by Karl James of The Dialogue Project. (Luckily Karl recorded a rehearsal for his talk and you can download it and read his thoughts on the event here).

    The brief, as provided by Matt, was achingly simple and vexingly open-ended – essentially “tell us a story, or tell us about stories”. Due to that flight I only caught the final few sessions to see how other people had interpreted that brief but liked what I saw.

    I’m was blown away by the stories Martin Parr captured in his photography (a medium I’ve never really been a big consumer of) and have vowed to look up more of his work. Sci-fi storyteller and Boing Boing mainstay Cory Doctorow in conversation with comedy writer Graham Linehan was a hoot. It’s always nice to see a quick wit in action – and Linehan has a preternatural ability to find a jokey tangent or punchline bullseye with seemingly no effort at all. His self-effacing dry humour almost (almost) distracts you from the realisation that the man is clearly one of the sharpest knives in the draw. (And as one tweeter remarked, it was nice to be at a conference where a reference to ‘Ted’ wasn’t citing Chris Anderson’s Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, but the magisterial sitcom Father Ted, which Linehan co-wrote).

    My positive experience seems to chime with the general reaction – although not everyone was happy. One blogger found the event cliquey – (“the whole thing felt like a rather incestuous social media circle jerk, rather than a thoughtfully curated and coherent event” she wrote). It certainly was the case that a lot of the speakers know Matt (and each other) quite well – after all, it’s Matt’s event and his CV rather insists he knows lots of people interested in storytelling. (For my own part there was no incestuous jerking. I only met Matt when he called me to ask if I might take part and I had never met any of the other speakers before)

    On a personal note I was pretty nervous to be going on stage last, trying to be funny (after Linehan), talking about the future (after Doctorow) and using photos I’d taken to illustrate some points (after Parr). I was also only surviving on adrenalin having not slept for over a day while crossing time zones. The most obvious result of this was I managed to talk very fast, even for me.

    Naturally I chose to concentrate on the narrative of the future, this being my key interest (and I suspect why Matt asked me to take part) and re-iterate one of the biggest bees in my bonnet – that we can’t make a better future until we can imagine it. I elected to throw in as many of the inspiring ideas and technologies I’d found in my research into my allotted twenty minutes. The problem, of course, in doing that is that I neglected (somewhat out of necessity, but now on reflection, also by oversight) to balance that with the true immensity of the grand challenges we face and the troubles that inevitably lie ahead with all our technologies. That’s all in the book of course, but the omission caused one tweeter to accuse me of being ‘ahistorical’ – which given my approach was probably fair from where she was sitting.

    My own personal mission is to promote an optimism of ambition about our future, and couple that with our best creative and critical skills to realise those ambitions. It’s obvious stuff but not enough people are saying it. Going into the future thinking it’s rubbish could become a dangerous fait accompli. I don’t mind pessimists (I like to call them ‘critical friends’ who keep you sharp and raise all the important challenges) but I refuse to let any of them even dare take the idea of a better future off the table. It’s as lazy an attitude as wishful thinking, that allows you off the hook of the responsibility we all have to improve things for each other.

    A final thought on stories. They’re only one weapon in reclaiming the future. Not everything is a story and nor should it be. Systems are not stories, although stories live in systems (and sometime influence them). For example, the climate is one system we won’t understand (and the consequences of it changing) only by telling stories.

    My colleague Katherine Rose at Flow Associates pointed me in the direction of this talk by Philip Trippenbach, who says “Maybe journalists shouldn’t tell stories so much. Stories can be a great way of transmitting understanding about things that have happened. The trouble is that they are actually a very bad way of transmitting understanding about how things work.”

    So, The Story made me reflect on when stories work in building a better future – and when they are a distraction. Overly optimistic stories from a wishful thinking crowd do as much damage as pessimistic ones that crush our ambition.

  • April7th

    With Vint the Entangler

    With Vint the Entangler

    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 Edge here)

    “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…

  • April1st

    "It's all to play for" - with Chris Anderson at TED

    With Chris Anderson at TED

    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 sunlight for 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…

  • March30th

    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.

    Tomorrow’s going to be an interesting day…