The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Lazar Kunstmann and Jon Lackman on “Preservation without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment”

TICKETS

Tuesday November 13, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

 

About this Seminar:

There is at least as much underneath Paris as there is above it. The secretive members of the Paris Urban eXperiment, known internally as “The UX”, have spent the last 30 years surreptitiously probing into this world – and improving it. A few years ago these underground hackers and artists became infamous when one morning the clock at the Panthéon, that had not worked in years, began chiming. It was just one of at least 15 such restorations done without permission.

In a first-time-ever public presentation, the UX spokesman, who goes under the name Lazar Kunstmann, along with author Jon Lackman from Wired, will present some of the theory and work of the Urban eXperiment. Lackman chronicled much of their work in the February print edition of Wired—which is co-sponsoring this event.

Samuel Arbesman is a mathematician and network scientist who has turned his powerful tools of quantification onto science itself. He’ll discuss his book The Half-Life of Facts at the Long Now Museum & Store on Tuesday, October 30th.

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor-recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the Brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.

But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics—literally the science of science. Knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives. – Arbesman.net

This Salon Talk will begin at 6:30pm on October 30th. Long Now Members can RSVP for a complimentary ticket (the code is in your email and our September Quarterly News) and additional tickets are available to the public for $8.

“The Decline of Violence”

Monday October 8, 02012 at the Herbst Theater, San Francisco

Steven Pinker’s prolific output for both academic and popular audiences has made him one of the most well-known evolutionary psychologists in the world. Trained formally in cognitive psychology, Pinker has tirelessly applied lessons from his groundbreaking research to a better understanding of the roles nature and nurture play in shaping human behaviors like language acquisition and violence. His popular books have taken on broad topics of human nature and explored their evolutionary and psychological roots.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language describes how humans learn language and surveys evidence indicating that our unique ability to communicate verbally has evolved to be an innate instinct. Though writing and the specifics of a particular language must be learned, all humans acquire grammar, implying that its basis is genetic and long-standing.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature follows a similar line of inquiry, arguing that the human mind is not simply a blank slate onto which society imprints all behavioral characteristics. Evolution has clearly shaped our psychology, Pinker argues, and accepting this fact does not validate racism or social Darwinism. If explored empirically, rather, an understanding of the evolutionary underpinnings of human behavior can lead us to more effective and equitable governance and stronger bonds across cultural differences.

Pinker’s most recent book and the subject of his upcoming lecture, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, further unpacks an underlying theme of some of his earlier books. If The Language Instinct proved language is an evolutionary adaptation encoded deep within our biology and The Blank Slate sought to cement the idea that humanity has many characteristics like language that add up to an essential nature that can be empirically understood (even if that nature is often highly customized within particular cultures), The Better Angels of Our Nature continues in this direction by showing that understanding what is essential about that nature and what about it can be culturally modified allows us to more rationally assess and govern ourselves.

In his New York Times review of the book, Peter Singer points out that it might seem strange to hear how humans have changed from someone who has made a name studying how we do not (Pinker once responded to an Edge.org question about how the internet is changing the way he thinks with “Not at all.”), but he explains that Pinker has never argued that nature and nurture are mutually exclusive. Rather, understanding our nature allows us to better nurture the traits we want to emphasize, reason being chief among those because it allows us “to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence.”

Steven Pinker presents the voluminous evidence that we’re becoming more peaceful and explains why on October 8th at the Herbst Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Birth of the Global Mind

Wednesday September 5, 02012 – San Francisco

 

Audio is up on the O’Reilly Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Video is up on the O’Reilly Seminar page for Members.

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The global mind is us, augmented – a summary by Stewart Brand

As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, O’Reilly was impressed by a book titled The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature, by Bruno Snell. In the four centuries between Homer and classical Athens, wrote Snell, the Greeks invented the modern human mind, with its sense of free will and agency. (In Homer, for example, no one makes a decision.) O’Reilly sees a parallel with the emerging of a global mind in this century.

Global consciousness was a recurrent idea in the 1970s—from Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and Omega point (“the Singularity of its day”) to “New Age mumbo-jumbo” such as the Harmonic Convergence. O’Reilly noted that the term “singularity” for technology acceleration was first used in 1958 by John von Neumann. In 1960 J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled “Human-computer Symbiosis.” O’Reilly predicted that “exploring the possibility space of human-computer symbiosis is one of the fascinating frontiers of the next decades and possibly century.”

Echoing Dale Dougherty, he says the Web has become the leading platform for harnessing collective intelligence. Wikipedia is a virtual city. Connected smart phones have become our “outboard brain.” Through device automation, Apple has imbued retail clerks with superpowers in its stores. Watson, the AI that beat human champions at “Jeopardy,” is now being deployed to advise doctors in real time, having read ALL the scientific papers. YouTube has mastered the attention economy. Humanity has a shared memory in the cloud. Data scientists rule.

The global mind is not an artificial intelligence. It’s us, connected and augmented.

What keeps driving it is the generosity and joy we take in creating and sharing. The global mind is built on the gift culture of every medium of connectedness since the invention of language. You gain status by what you give away, by the value you create, not the value you take.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Truth About the Book of Revelations

Monday August 20, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Pagels Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Pagels Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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War in heaven – a summary by Stewart Brand

“The Book of Revelation is war literature,” Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem.

In the nightmarish visions of John’s prophecy, Rome is Babylon, the embodiment of monstrous power and decadence. That power was expressed by Rome as religious. John would have seen in nearby Ephesus massive propaganda sculptures depicting the contemporary emperors as gods slaughtering female slaves identified as Rome’s subject nations. And so in the prophecy the ascending violence reaches a crescendo of war in heaven. Finally, summarized Pagels, “Jesus judges the whole world; and all who have worshipped other gods, committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts are thrown down to be tormented forever in a lake of fire, while God’s faithful are invited to enter a new city of Jerusalem that descends from heaven, where Christ and his people reign in triumph for 1000 years.”

Just one among the dozens of revelations of the time (Ezra’s, Zostrianos’, Peter’s, a different John’s), the vision of John of Patmos became popular among the oppressed of Rome. Three centuries later, in 367CE, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria confirmed it as the concluding book in the Christian canon that became the New Testament.

As a tale of conflict where one side is wholly righteous and the other wholly evil, the Book of Revelation keeps being evoked century after century. Martin Luther declared the Pope to be the Whore of Babylon. Both sides of the American Civil War declared the opposing cause to be Bestial, though the North had the better music—”He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.” African-American slaves echoed John’s lament: “How long before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”

But like many Christians through the years, Pagels wishes that John’s divisive vision had not become part of the Biblical canon. Among the better choices from that time, she quoted from the so-called “Secret Revelation of John”: “Jesus says to John, ‘The souls of everyone will live in the pure light, because if you did not have God’s spirit, you could not even stand up.’

“The other revelations are universal, instead of being about the saved versus the damned.”

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“Birth of the Global Mind”

Wednesday September 5, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Tim O’Reilly is a prolific maker of sense. For countless hackers and programmers the world over, his publishing company’s books have helped make sense of programming languages and web technologies. And more broadly, many of the applications and services built by those hackers have, in the last decade, brought about an unprecedented expansion of our very senses. A web user of today can possess awareness of people and events at a distance, to a depth, and with a quickness that was scarcely imaginable when O’Reilly Media was founded in 1978.

Our increasing ambient awareness of the inner and outer states of people all over the globe is the result of an important shift in the way web content is created. Viewing the web as a platform on which users can participate rather than simply consume was called Web 2.0, and O’Reilly was quick to support the skills, ideas and techniques that would enable web developers to embrace this perspective. Steven Levy hinted at why in 02005:

As it turns out, the levers and pulleys of this new Net neatly reflect the operating principles of the man who helped define it: a philosophy of participation and sharing and a sense that collective action will inevitably accrue to the greater good. The crucial technologies that make this happen – the digital infrastructure that makes the online world a perpetual swap meet of goods and ideas – are the culmination of all the stuff he’s been tracking, supporting, and popularizing for the past 20 years.

O’Reilly’s focus on the web as an enabling mechanism for social awareness and empowerment (and perhaps ultimately, a “Global Mind”) looks far into the future, but is also grounded in his interest in writings and thinking done thousands of years in the past. As an undergraduate, he studied Classics and retains an affinity for the lessons he learned from Socrates, Plutarch and others. In an interview about these lessons, O’Reilly credits them with helping him to spot the trends that have led to his success in business. But more than just spotting trends, he has described and refined them, molding glimmers of ideas into causes and campaigns taken up by large swaths of the digital world. This, too, he credits to his classical education:

In telling the same story over and over again in different ways, I’m following in the footsteps of the Greek orator (alas, I forget his name) who said “The difference between a man and a sheep is that a sheep just bleats, but a man keeps saying the same thing in different ways until he gets what he wants.”) Look at a series of essays like Hardware, Software, and Infoware, The Open Source Paradigm Shift, and What is Web 2.0? and you’ll see me pursuing the same ideas, refining, clarifying, and advocating till I get what I want.

O’Reilly has taken to calling the trend he’s been mulling over most recently – this interweaving collective oneness of our brains and programs – the Global Mind.

Like open source software and “Web 2.0”, the idea has been around since before Tim O’Reilly started discussing and promoting it. But as before, perhaps in his hands – after a few revisions, a few conversations, or a few lectures – the idea of the Global Mind will take the shape of something that can be evaluated, acted upon, and maybe even rallied around.

Tim O’Reilly makes sense of the emerging Global Mind on September 5th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer

Tuesday July 31, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Doctorow Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Doctorow Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Who governs digital trust?- a summary by Stewart Brand

Doctorow framed the question this way: “Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into—airplanes, cars—and something we put into our bodies—pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy.”

Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: “I can’t let you do that, Dave.” (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film “2001.” That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom?

The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users.

Apple computers such as the iPhone are locked down—it lets you run only what Apple trusts. Android phones let you run only what you trust. Doctorow has changed his mind in favor of a foundational computer device called the “Trusted Platform Module” (TPM) which provides secure crypto, remote attestation, and sealed storage. He sees it as a crucial “nub of secure certainty” in your machine—but only to the extent that it is implemented to allow owners to choose what they trust—not vendors or governments.

If it’s your machine, you rule it. It‘s a Human Right: your computer should not be overridable. And a Property Right: “you own what you buy, even if it what you do with it pisses off the vendor.” That’s clear when the Owner and the User are the same person. What about when they’re not?

There are systems where there is a credible argument for the authorities to rule—airplanes, nuclear reactors, probably self-driving cars (“as a species we are terrible drivers.”)—but at least in the case of cars, and possibly in the other two, it will not make us safer; it will make us less safe. The firmware in those machines should be inviolable by users and outside attackers. But the power of Owners over Users can be deeply troubling, such as in matters of surveillance. There are powers that want full data on what Users are up to—governments, companies, schools, parents. Behind your company computer is the IT department and the people they report to. They want to know all about your email and your web activities, and there is reason for that. But we need to contemplate the “total and terrifying power of Owners over Users.”

Recognizing that we are necessarily transitory Users of many systems, such as everything involving Cloud computing or storage, Doctorow favors keeping your own box with its own processors and storage. He strongly favors the democratization and wide distribution of expertise. As a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who co-sponsored the talk) he supports public defense of freedom in every sort of digital rights issue.

“The potential for abuse in the computer world is large,” Doctorow concluded. “It will keep getting larger.”

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Steven Pinker on “The Decline of Violence”

TICKETS

Monday October 8, 02012 at 7:30pm Herbst Theater at Civic Center

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

 

About this Seminar:

Steven Pinker changes the world twice in his new book, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined.

First, he presents exhaustive evidence that the tragic view of history is wrong and always has been.  A close examination of the data shows that in every millennium, century, and decade, humans have been drastically reducing violence, cruelty, and injustice—right down to the present year.  A trend that consistent is not luck; it has to be structural.

So, second, he boldly founds a discipline that might as well be called “psychohistory.”  As a Harvard psychologist and public intellectual (author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate), he sought causes for the phenomenon he’s reporting—why violence has declined.  Real ethical progress, he found, came from a sequence of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and mental tricks employed by whole societies to change their collective mind and behavior in a peaceful direction.

Humanity’s great project of civilizing itself is far from complete, but Pinker’s survey of how far we’ve come builds confidence that the task will be completed, and he illuminates how to get there.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Tim O’Reilly on “Birth of the Global Mind”

TICKETS

Wednesday September 5, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

“The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex ‘multicellular minds,‘” says Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media (books, conferences, foo camps, Maker Faires, Make magazine.)

Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate. Writing allowed that coordination to span time and space. Twentieth century mass communications allowed shared information and culture to blanket the world. In the 21st century, memes spread mind to mind in nearly real time.

But that’s not all. In one breakthrough computer application after another, we see a new kind of man-machine symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by human Google Streetview drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors. In the same way, crowd-sourced data from sensor-enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare, and new economies.

The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but to collective intelligence.

“The Truth About the Book of Revelations”

Monday August 20, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Watch Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Throughout her career as an historian and biblical scholar, Elaine Pagels has been piecing together the process by which many different writings inspired by someone named Jesus came to be singularly known as The Bible. By proxy, that process tells the story of how the disparate devotees of Jesus came to form a singular institution we know as the Christian church. In the centuries since, the interpretations of that book by that institution (or fragments of it), have heavily influenced history. Better understanding these parallel coalescences of text and tribe, as Pagels’s work has shown, can teach us about more than just some of the events of the first few centuries CE, but of balancing individual empowerment with group identity, the formation of orthodoxy, and the enduring power of a good story.

One of Pagels’ most popular books, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas explores the cache of texts discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. In it, she focuses on The Gospel of Thomas, which was written sometime between 40 and 140 CE. Of interest is the text’s interpretation of the salvation offered by following Jesus. Referencing a “light within each person,” this apocryphal gospel eschewed the “one true path” rhetoric that would eventually be incorporated into the official church doctrine for an Eastern-sounding individually achieved enlightenment. More recently, Pagels explored writings attributed to Judas that also didn’t make it into the doctrinal Bible and that similarly contradict official teaching. She discussed Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity with Stephen Colbert in 02007.

In her latest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Pagels turns her attention away from rejected and suppressed texts for one of the most popular and cinematic Biblical passages – The Book of Revelation. The historical record seems to indicate that it was written by John of Patmos to express the horror of the Roman army’s destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The author couldn’t openly demonize such a dominant force, so he opted to retain some plausible deniability by writing in vague, symbolic terms. Pagels also contends that though John was a follower of Jesus, he still considered himself and Jesus’s teachings Jewish, and feared that the developing schism from the existing Jewish Church would lead to a violent reckoning.

Pagels explains in an interview with PBS that several centuries after its writing, in an ironic twist, Revelation’s powerful imagery was repurposed by a bishop named Athanasius to threaten those who would taint his vision of a pure, singular orthodox Christianity – just the thing it was originally written to discourage.

Elaine Pagels discusses the lives stories can lead beyond their writers’ imaginations and the particularly storied life Revelation has lived on August 20th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.