Past vs. Future

In what turned out to be a riveting evening, historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz fire-hosed each other with enough ideas, frames of reference, ripostes, and eloquences to lead to a clear conceptual divergence. At the same time, the two were discovering, live in front of an audience, new ways they might work together on future projects.

Ferguson began by pointing out that while we face many futures, there is only one past, and its residents outnumber us— only 6 percent of all humans are now alive. Historians, he said, “commune with the dead. We re-enact their thoughts, in their context and ours.”

Historians look for rough regularities, such as he found in his analysis of the wars and hatred played out in the 20th Century. In his book, WAR OF THE WORLD, he describes how the combination of economic volatility, ethnic conflict, and failing empire always led to spirals of lethal violence. The advance of science and technology has not eliminated the possibility of violence but may have made it more powerful than ever. The three causes are still in play. “Our job is to keep them from coinciding again.”

Ferguson ended with a critique of Schwartz’s book on scenario planning, THE ART OF THE LONG VIEW, which he thought showed signs of “heuristic bias.” When Schwartz asked Ferguson to expand on that idea, Ferguson pointed out there was a whole chapter in the book about “The Global Teenager,” which seemed spurious. It merely reflected Schwartz’s personal experience: “You were a teenager when teenagers mattered. ”

Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that “great events should have great causes.” Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with “counter-factual history” helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to “think about what didn’t happen.” The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past.

In Schwartz’s opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM were derailed by reading Ferguson’s WAR OF THE WORLD. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.”

Schwartz characterized Ferguson’s view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. For Schwartz, the second half of the 20th Century showed an upside momentum, with a fraction of the violent deaths—5% of humans killed violently in the first half, 0.2 % in the second half. The Cold War ended quietly. Women were liberated. China took off. Prosperity accelerated. Everything from Wikipedia to cellphones empowered the grassroots.

In response, Ferguson noted Schwartz’s “faith in technology” and proposed it reflected his training as an engineer. “Aren’t you like the pre-1914 people who said that war was impossible because of all the new technology and commerce?” Schwartz agreed that the parallel is worrying.

Ferguson said, “I think our difference is that I’m a pessimist and you’re an optimist. You’re Pangloss and I’m Cassandra.” Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, “It would be churlish not to be an optimist.” Ferguson said, “That would make me skeptical about technology. The world leader in science and technology in 1940 was Nazi Germany.”

Questions from the audience ended with one asking whether optimism or pessimism was a more useful way to think about the future. Schwartz said, “Optimism lets you imagine how you can overcome problems, and those possibilities motivate change.” Ferguson said, “You must always focus on worst-case scenarios, and history will teach them to you.”

-Stewart Brand

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Clay Shirky and Brian Eno recently spoke on The Power of Networks in London.  You can listen to the complete audio from a link here, and some video snippets here.

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Stewart Brand was quoted in this weekends NY Times piece on how the many X Prizes seem to be driving many areas of innovation (automotive, space travel, genomics etc).   Peter Diamandis the director of the X Prize Foundation will be speaking in our Seminar Series in September on this exact issue…

The complexities of creating the auto prize illustrate a wider problem of how to come up with ever more novel tests of human ingenuity over time. Mr. Brand of the Long Now Foundation predicts that contests will soon pursue “things we truly think of as impossible.”

Mr. Brand’s wish list includes machines that defy gravity or that allow us to read the minds of other people.

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I was reminded yesterday when speaking with one of the SETI board members of the very interesting conundrum we might find ourselves in if we in fact did receive a message from space.  Above is some imagery from the first seriously high powered transmission from earth, dubbed the Arecibo message:

The [01974] transmission consisted of a simple, pictorial message, aimed at our putative cosmic companions in the globular star cluster M13. This cluster is roughly 21,000 light-years from us, near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, and contains approximately a third of a million stars.

So the best case scenario is that this data reaches a civilization in 21,000 years.  Which means they think up some brilliant response, and then beam it back.  Even if we found life much closer, it is most likely that the conversation delay would be at least a thousand years or more.  So what does one say in a multi-millennial conversation?  At least on the terrestrial end, each response would be made by wildly different civilizations.

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Decoding and recoding life

To really read DNA accurately and understand it thoroughly, you need to be able to write it from scratch and make it live, Venter explained.

His sequencing the first diploid human genome (with the genes from both parents) last year showed there is much more genetic variation between humans than first thought. His current goal is to fully sequence 10,000 humans and bring the price for each sequence down to $1,000. With that data, his says, “We’ll begin to really learn what’s nature and what’s nurture.”

“Microbes make up one half of the Earth’s biomass.” Venter’s shotgun sequencing of open-ocean microbial samples revealed that every milliliter of ocean has one million bacteria and archaea and ten million viruses even in supposedly barren waters. Taking samples on a round-the-world sailing trip showed that every 200 miles the genes in the microbes are 85% different.

“Microbes dominate evolutionary diversity,” Venter said. Some 50,000 major gene familes have been discovered. Humans and other complex animals have a small fraction of that in our own genes, but the “microbiome” of our onboard microbes carry the full richness. Only 1/10th of the cells in a human are human; the rest are microbes. There are 1,000 species in our mouths, another 1,000 in our guts, another 500 on our skins, and those with vaginas have yet another 500 species.

Analysis has shown that a tenth of the chemicals used in our body come to us via our gut microbes. “We are what we feed our bacteria and what they give us.”

In an effort to determine what is the minimum gene set for life, Venter’s team took a 500-gene bacteria and began knocking out genes. They got the viable set down to 400 and realized that the only way they are going to understand the complexity is by mimicking it. They would need to synthesize a working genome artificially, first on a computer and then with assembled base pairs and “boot it up” in a living cell, making a new, unique species. They devised techniques that repaired errors during synthesis, and they demonstrated that a genome from one kind of bacteria could be implanted in another and come to life there, changing one species into another. “It was true identity theft.”

“This software builds its own hardware,” Venter marveled.

He emphasized that synthetic biology does not re-do Genesis, but it does offer a kind of Cambrian explosion, building on 3.5 billion years of evolution to go in an infinity of possible directions. The range of possibilities is indicated by an existing organism that can take 1.75 million rads of radioactivity in 24 hours, which explodes its genome. It can reassemble the shattered genome and live on. It can go dormant for millions of years, and live on. That means life may already have migrated between planets.

Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he’s working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a “4th generation biofuel,” where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors.

“Ten million genes are the design components of the future,” Venter concluded. “With combinatorial genomics and casette-based construction, we can make millions of genomes per day.”

During the Q & A I asked Venter why he spends so much of his time speaking in public, 150 talks a year. He said he sees that as part of his scientific work, to prepare the public for the big changes coming. He wants to avoid repeating the mistakes made with genetically modified crops (GMOs), where there was insufficient transparency and regulation, and irrational opposition by environmentalists, which crippled a crucial field.

The public should feel it is included in every stage of genetic science and emerging biotechnology.

–Stewart Brand

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As more prep for Venter’s upcoming talk this Monday…

LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!
An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm

This year’s Annual Edge Event took place at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT on Monday, August 27th. Invited to address the topic “Life: What a Concept!” were Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd, who focused on their new, and in more than a few cases, startling research, and/or ideas in the biological sciences.  You can see more on this link.

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Dispatches from Extremistan

A “black swan,” Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event.

Examples: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events.

Part of the problem is that we ignore the “silent evidence” of the nonobserved and nonobservable. We compute probability from the success of survivors. No one writes or reads a book titled “How I Lost a Million Dollars.” Another problem is that we revise our own predictions and intentions unconsciously to match what actually happens. We disguise having been wrong by pretending we were right. This is “confirmation bias.”

There are TWO kinds of randomness, two realms in which events happen…

Mediocristan is dominated by the average— one new observation won’t change much. If you are measuring the weight of a large sample of humans, adding the heaviest person in the world won’t change the result, whereas measuring the average wealth of a large sample of humans would be transformed by adding the wealthiest person. Mediocristan is the realm of the Law of Large Numbers and of the Gaussian Bell Curve.

Extremistan is dominated by extremes. Every year 16,000 novels are published in English. A handful of best-sellers absolutely dominate. This is the realm of the power-law curve and the Long Tail. Extremistant defies prediction. You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that the main dynamic of Mediocristan is energy, and the main dynamic of Extremistan is information. Anything social is Extremistan.

Thus there are two kinds of experts. A soufflé chef really is an expert and can be trusted. An economist is a pseudo-expert. “Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.” All you get from a Council of Economic Advisors is an illusion of control. Stock market analysts have proved to be worse than nothing.

Don’t focus on probability. Focus on consequences. Black Swans will come. Prepare against the negative ones; be ready to soar with the positive ones.

Pay attentive heed to tradition and old people— they have experienced more Black Swans.

PS… All of the SALT speakers perform for free. Taleb added the further generosity of insisting on paying for his travel and lodging. Extra thanks to him for that.

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Wired and Reuters are reporting on the latest work by Craig Venter published in Science this week. Venter’s synthetic life program completed the second of three steps in creating a synthetic organism.

“We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute where scientists performed the study, on Thursday during a teleconference. “What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell.”

Venter will be speaking on Monday, February 25th as part of our Seminars About Long-term Thinking series.

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Rules of Forecasting

Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster’s job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the “cone of uncertainty” on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future— next decade has more surprises in store than next week.)

Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further. You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed. Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

Rule: Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in “S” curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

“Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time.” He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005. In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished.

Rule: Look for indicators- things that don’t fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway. A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations.

Rule: Look back twice as far. Every decade lately there’s a new technology that sets the landscape. In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers. In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web. In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff. The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other.

Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people’s. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that.

Rule: Be indifferent. Don’t confuse the desired with the likely. Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years.

Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often.

Rule: Embrace uncertainty.

Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco. The handwritten note on the jar read, “If you fear change, leave it in here.”

PS… You can find different rules and a more strait-laced presentation by Saffo in his recent Harvard Business Review article, “Six Rules for Effective Forecasting,” here.

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Denise Caruso wrote a nice article on a possible trend in longer term giving in last week New York Times. It dove tails well into the Katherine Fulton’s seminar on the “New Philanthropy” (with Larry Brilliant and Richard Rockefeller). It seems to be part of a multi-decade pendulum of sorts in the trends of non-profit giving. Long-term vs project based support goes in and out of fashion. I suspect it has to do with how well the government is funding issues people care about, and what scandals have occurred in recent public memory around non-profits mis-managing funds.

“The reason the nonprofit sector exists at all is because it can fund and invest in social issues that the for-profit market can’t touch because they can’t be measured,”… said Paul Shoemaker. “The nonprofit ‘market’ is not designed to be efficient in that way. Yet we’re applying the same efficiency metrics to both sectors.”

As a consequence, when foundations switched to project-based accounting, they forced grantees to sacrifice long-term effectiveness for short-term efficiency, Ms. Enright said. Nonprofits could no longer afford to focus on important strategic activities like advocacy or working for social change, which require “deep resources and the ability to change tactics overnight if the situation demands it,” she said.

Based on its data, the Center for Effective Philanthropy concluded that the present situation was limiting the effectiveness of those charitable dollars. After surveying nearly 20,000 grantees of 163 foundations and interviewing 79 foundation chief executives and 26 leaders of nonprofits, it recommended that to maximize the impact on grant recipients, foundations “should make larger, longer-term operating grants” of unrestricted funds that can be used to support the organization and its overall mission, not just specific projects or programs.

Their findings echo the experiences of a handful of foundations at the vanguard of the movement to provide more operating support to charities over the last 10 years. They include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Philadelphia Foundation, the Whitman Institute and organizations like Social Venture Partners.

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