Stewart Brand (left) with Ben Novak, the scientist working on reviving the passenger pigeon.

“Reviving Extinct Species”

Tuesday May 21st, 02013 at the SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco

From promoting the publication of NASA’s first satellite images of the whole Earth to co-founding The Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand has always sought to simultaneously humble and empower. Our planet, seen for the first time against the vastness of space, suddenly seemed finite and precious. Our society’s moment placed within The Long Now – the history and future of civilization – becomes tenuous and ephemeral. But, given this expanded awareness and “access to tools,” the biosphere and society’s lasting legacy are ours to sustain and cultivate.

It is difficult to give a cursory list of the projects that Stewart Brand has instigated over the years. Some of his notable accomplishments include founding the “Whole Earth Catalog”, starting the Hackers Conference, co-founding the first online community (The WELL), and co-founding The Long Now Foundation. On top of all of this, he has found the time to write several books, including: The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, The Media Lab, and Whole Earth Discipline.

In this talk, Stewart Brand will discuss his newest project, Revive & Restore, which is seeking to de-extinct species with the help of genetic technologies. Over the past two years, Brand has been busy convening meetings that brought together the leading scholars working on the science of de-exintction, which culminated in March’s TEDx DeExtinction conference. Through these conferences, Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan have mapped a set of questions to determine whether a species should be brought back from de-exinction. The common ground for the top candidate species are that humans were partially (if not largely) responsible for making them going extinct, and that these species were keystone species, or species that somehow played an integral and mutually beneficial role in the ecosystems they called home. In this sense, Revive and Restore is a natural complement to conservation movements that seek to rehabilitate ecosystems that have declined with the rise of the anthropocene.

One of the first direct de-extinction efforts of Revive & Restore (a project of The Long Now Foundation) is to bring back the passenger pigeon. This iconic bird numbered in the billions in the 19th century, only to have the last specimen die in captivity in 01914. Revive & Restore has hired Ben Novak, a self-proclaimed passenger pigeon fanatic, to sequence the genome of the passenger pigeon and its closing living relative, the band-tailed pigeon. With the help of a loose consortium of genetic scientists, Stewart hopes that the passenger pigeon will successfully be brought back and re-wilded in America, allowing it to revitalize the forest it once called home. Although the genetic technology behind Revive & Restore is moving quite fast, the process of re-wilding will take generations–one of the reasons that the project is under the auspices of The Long Now Foundation. For example – since Woolly Mammoths take about 20 years to reach sexual maturity, even after scientists clone an individual (which may itself take many years), it would still be hundreds of years before re-wilded herds roam the tundra.

Come join us at the new SFJAZZ Center on May 21st to learn about de-extinction from the front lines of this new science. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page. If you are a member, please check your email for special ticketing instructions.

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

Beyond Digital

Wednesday April 17, 02013 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Negroponte Seminar page for Members.

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

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A world of convergence – a summary by Stewart Brand

In education, Negroponte explained, there’s a fundamental distinction between “instructionism” and “constructionism.” “Constructionism is learning by discovery, by doing, by making. Instructionism is learning by being told.” Negroponte’s lifelong friend Seymour Papert noted early on that debugging computer code is a form of “learning about learning” and taught it to young children.

Thus in 2000 when Negroponte left the Media Lab he had founded in 1985, he set out upon the ultimate constructionist project, called “One Laptop per Child.” His target is the world’s 100 million kids who are not in school because no school is available. Three million of his laptops and tablets are now loose in the world. One experiment in an Ethiopian village showed that illiterate kids can take unexplained tablets, figure them out on their own, and begin to learn to read and even program.

In the “markets versus mission” perspective, Negroponte praised working through nonprofits because they are clearer and it is easier to partner widely with people and other organizations. He added that “start-up businesses are sucking people out of big thinking. So many minds that used to think big are now thinking small because their VCs tell them to ‘focus.’”

As the world goes digital, Negroponte noted, you see pathologies of left over “atoms thinking.” Thus newspapers imagine that paper is part of their essence, telecoms imagine that distance should cost more, and nations imagine that their physical boundaries matter. “Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet,” Negroponte said. “Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.” He predicted that the world is well on the way to having one language, English.

Negroponte reflected on a recent visit to a start-up called Modern Meadow, where they print meat. “You get just the steak—no hooves and ears involved, using one percent of the water and half a percent of the land needed to get the steak from a cow.” In every field we obsess on the distinction between synthetic and natural, but in a hundred years “there will be no difference between them.”

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Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Stewart Brand on “Reviving Extinct Species”

TICKETS

Tuesday May 21, 02013 at 7:30pm SFJAZZ Center

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15

About this Seminar:

Death is still forever, but extinction may not be—at least for creatures that humans drove extinct in the last 10,000 years. Woolly mammoths might once again nurture their young in northern snows. Passenger pigeon flocks could return to America’s eastern forest. The great auk may resume fishing the coasts of the northern Atlantic.

New genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils (no dinosaurs), and then, it is hoped, the genes unique to the extinct animal can be brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative of the extinct species. For woolly mammoths, it’s the Asian elephant; for passenger pigeons, the band-tailed pigeon; for great auks, the razorbill. Other plausible candidates are the ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet, Eskimo curlew, thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), dodo, Xerces blue butterfly, saber-toothed cat, Steller’s sea cow, cave bear, giant ground sloth, etc.

The Long Now Foundation has taken “de-extinction” on as a project called “Revive & Restore,” led by Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand. They organized a series of conferences of the relevant molecular biologists and conservation biologists culminating in TEDxDeExtinction, held at National Geographic in March. They hired a young scientist, Ben Novak, to work full time on reviving the passenger pigeon. He is now at UC Santa Cruz working in the lab of ancient-DNA expert Beth Shapiro.

This talk summarizes the progress of current de-extinction projects (Europe’s aurochs, Spain’s bucardo, Australia’s gastric brooding frog, America’s passenger pigeon) and some “ancient ecosystem revival” projects—Pleistocene Park in Siberia, the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, and Makauwahi Cave in Kaua’i. De-extinction has been described as a “game changer” for conservation. How might that play out for the best, and how might it go astray?

In an era of “anthropocene ecology,” is it now possible to repair some of the deepest damage we have caused in the past?

“Beyond Digital”

Wednesday April 17, 02012 at the Marines’ Memorial Theater, San Francisco

Nicholas Negroponte has made a name for himself not just by predicting the future, but by creating it. He co-founded and, for 15 years, directed the MIT Media Lab, which has become the premier academic incubator for advanced technologies research in fields like mesh networks, personalized robotics, and human computer interaction.

During his time at MIT, Negroponte was the first investor in Wired Magazine, for which he authored a series of contributions that eventually became the book “Being Digital”. Collectively, these writings offered a glimpse into the world we now occupy–complete with ubiquitous wireless data, touch screens, e-books and personalized news.

One of Negroponte’s intellectual themes is the evolution and measures of education. He favors an educational approach that teaches children to “learn learning” and to become passionate about topics that interest them, believing that the current model is outdated, alienating and stifling to natural curiosity. This vision led him to leave the Media Lab to found “One Laptop Per Child”. The reasoning behind the project stemmed from one of Negroponte’s mantras:

“When I wake up in the morning, I ask myself one question, and that question is: Will normal market forces do what I am doing today? And if the answer is yes, stop.”

Ten years ago, laptops were not dropping in price. As Intel increased processing speeds, Windows increased their processing requirements, which kept the price of a basic laptop near $1,000 and the digital divide insurmountable for many.

Negroponte’s mission was to create a $100 laptop that could be given to children in poor countries with struggling education systems to allow for a new type of educational boost. Ten years later, he has distributed 2.5 million computers across the world, and cheap computers have become an established norm.

It will take many years to fully determine the effect of these 2.5 million laptops, but Negroponte’s work has been a major driver in the narrowing of the digital divide.

His vision of low-cost laptops proliferating across the developing world is just one example of the kind of long-view thinking that has made Negroponte an effective leader, mover and shaker in the world of technology and access to it. Another might be the eponymous Negroponte switch, which he describes (and extrapolates upon) below.

Negroponte’s last column for WIRED, written in 1998, was entitled “Beyond Digital”. On April 19th at Marines’ Memorial Theater he resurrects this title to give us a glimpse of the possibilities that lie ahead. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page. If you are a member, please check your email for special ticketing instructions.

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.

“No Time Is There”— The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up

Tuesday March 19, 02013 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Dyson Seminar page for Members.

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

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The digital big bang – a summary by Stewart Brand

When the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size. “That’s just half a second of MP3 audio now,” said Dyson. The place was the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The builder was engineer Julian Bigelow. The instigator was mathematician John von Neumann. The purpose was to design hydrogen bombs.

Bigelow had helped develop signal processing and feedback (cybernetics) with Norbert Wiener. Von Neumann was applying ideas from Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, along with his own. They were inventing and/or gates, addresses, shift registers, rapid-access memory, stored programs, a serial architecture—all the basics of the modern computer world, all without thought of patents. While recuperating from brain surgery, Stanislaw Ulam invented the Monte Carlo method of analysis as a shortcut to understanding solitaire. Shortly Von Neumann’s wife Klári was employing it to model the behavior of neutrons in a fission explosion. By 1953, Nils Barricelli was modeling life itself in the machine—virtual digital beings competed and evolved freely in their 5-kilobyte world.

“In the few years they ran that machine, from 1951 to 1957, they worked on the most difficult problems of their time, five main problems that are on very different time scales—26 orders of magnitude in time—from the lifetime of a neutron in a bomb’s chain reaction measured in billionths of a second, to the behavior of shock waves on the scale of seconds, to weather prediction on a scale of days, to biological evolution on the scale of centuries, to the evolution of stars and galaxies over billions of years. And our lives, measured in days and years, is right in the middle of the scale of time. I still haven’t figured that out.”

Julian Bigelow was frustrated that the serial, address-constrained, clock-driven architecture of computers became standard because it is so inefficient. He thought that templates (recognition devices) would work better than addresses. The machine he had built for von Neumann ran on sequences rather than a clock. In 1999 Bigelow told George Dyson, “Sequence is different from time. No time is there.” That’s why the digital world keeps accelerating in relation to our analog world, which is based on time, and why from the perspective of the computational world, our world keeps slowing down.

The acceleration is reflected in the self-replication of computers, Dyson noted: “By now five or six trillion transistors per second are being added to the digital universe, and they’re all connected.” Dyson is a kayak builder, emulating the wood-scarce Arctic natives to work with minimum frame inside a skin craft. But in the tropics, where there is a surplus of wood, natives make dugout canoes, formed by removing wood. “We’re now surrounded by so much information,” Dyson concluded, “we have to become dugout canoe builders. The buzzword of last year was ‘big data.’ Here’s my definition of the situation: Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of throwing it away.”

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The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Nicholas Negroponte presents “Beyond Digital”

TICKETS

Wednesday, April 17 02013 at 7:30pm Marine’s Memorial Theater

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15

About this Seminar:

It’s far easier to predict the future when you are helping make and distribute it. Nicholas Negroponte exemplifies this with his notable accomplishments, including founding the MIT Media Lab, being the first investor in WIRED magazine, and founding the One Laptop Per Child program.

His 01995 book “Being Digital” gave a glimpse into the world we now occupy–complete with wireless, touch screens, ebooks and personalized news. In this talk, “Beyond Digital”, Negroponte will once again give us a glimpse of the possibilities that lie ahead.

“No Time Is There— The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up”

Tuesday March 19, 02013 at the Herbst Theater, San Francisco

Photo: Joe Pugliese

George Dyson grew up playing with spare parts from some of the world’s earliest computers at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. His father, Freeman Dyson, was one of the original collaborators with John von Neumann and Alan Turing in building these computers, which gave him an early glimpse into the functioning and future of digital technologies. After realizing that computers were going to, in his words, “take over the world”, Dyson built a treehouse in Vancouver to research and build upon indigenous kayak designs. While working in the wilderness, Dyson learned to track the signs of living creatures, but eventually started noticing similar clues in the digital world. The trail he found led him back to civilization, where he began studying the emergence of life-like systems within computers. By now, organic metaphors have saturated the digital landscape, but Dyson formulated, supported and propagated these metaphors well before they’d entered the mainstream.

Often called “an historian among futurists”, George Dyson’s scholarship carefully digs into the recent past to understand what lies before us. His first book, Darwin Among The Machines, gives a prehistory of computing, charting the characters that brought the computer into existence. His most recent book, Turing’s Cathedral, is the culmination of years of deep research into his childhood home, The Institute for Advanced Study. Dyson picks up where he left off in Darwin Among the Machines to examine the culture, structures, decisions, and people that led to the first computers and atomic weapons. Not merely history, Dyson explores what computers actually do when we’re using them and even while we aren’t:

We have created this expanding computational universe, and it’s open to the evolution of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than doubling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t consume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is filling up with. From the human perspective, computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction. While they’re waiting for us to come up with instructions, more and more computation is happening without us, as computers write instructions for each other. And as Turing showed mathematically, this space can’t be supervised. As the digital universe expands, so does this wild, undomesticated side.

Photo: John von Neumann and J. Robert Oppenheimer in front of MANIAC, the computer that was built at the Institute for Advanced Study during Dyson’s childhood. Photo Credit.

When we turned on the first computer, we turned on a universe—a computational universe. In this universe, numbers are not merely descriptors, but also actors. They send instructions to other packets of numbers that generate more numbers, ad infinitum:

Like our own universe at the beginning, it’s more exploding than expanding. We’re all so immersed in it that it’s hard to perceive … You can’t predict how software will behave by inspecting it. The only way you can tell is to actually run it. And this fundamental unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives—not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things. This is why the digital universe will never be a national park; it will always be an undomesticated, unpredictable wilderness. And that should be reassuring to us.

George Dyson will discuss the digital universe and how it affects our notions of time on March 19th at the Herbst Theatre on Van Ness. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page. If you are a member, please check your email for special ticketing instructions.

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 Makers Revolution

Tuesday February 19, 02013 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Anderson Seminar page for Members.

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

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Desktop manufacturing changes world – a summary by Stewart Brand

We’re now entering the third industrial revolution, Anderson said. The first one, which began with the spinning jenny in 1776, doubled the human life span and set population soaring. From the demographic perspective, “it’s as if nothing happened before the Industrial Revolution.”

The next revolution was digital. Formerly industrial processes like printing were democratized with desktop publishing. The “cognitive surplus” of formerly passive consumers was released into an endless variety of personal creativity. Then distribution was democratized by the Web, which is “scale agnostic and credentials agnostic.” Anyone can potentially reach 7 billion people.

The third revolution is digital manufacturing, which combines the gains of the first two revolutions. Factory robots, which anyone can hire, have become general purpose and extremely fast. They allow “lights-out manufacturing,” that goes all night and all weekend.

“This will reverse the arrow of globalization,” Anderson said. “The centuries of quest for cheaper labor is over. Labor arbitrage no longer drives trade.” The advantages of speed and flexibility give the advantage to “locavore” manufacturing because “Closer is faster.” Innovation is released from the dead weight of large-batch commitments. Designers now can sit next to the robots building their designs and make adjustments in real time.

Thus the Makers Movement. Since 2006, Maker Faires, Hackerspaces, and TechShops (equipped with laser cutters, 3D printers, and CAD design software) have proliferated in the US and around the world. Anderson said he got chills when, with the free CAD program Autodesk 123D, he finished designing an object and moused up to click the button that used to say “Print.” This one said “Make.” A 3D printer commenced building his design.

Playing with Minecraft, “kids are becoming fluent in polygons.” With programs like 123D Catch you can take a series of photos with your iPhone of any object, and the software will create a computer model of it. “There is no copyright on physical stuff,” Anderson pointed out. The slogan that liberated music was “Rip. Mix. Burn.” The new slogan is “Rip. Mod. Make.”

I asked Anderson, “But isn’t this Makers thing kind of trivial, just trailing-edge innovation?” “That’s why it’s so powerful,” Anderson said. “Remember how trivial the first personal computers seemed?”

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The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

George Dyson on “‘No Time Is There’ — The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up”

TICKETS

Tuesday March 19, 02013 at 7:30pm Herbst Theatre on Van Ness Ave. San Francisco, California

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! & General Tickets $15

About this Seminar:

When thinking about the future, it is easy to forget to look behind you. Enter George Dyson, “an historian among futurists”, who does deep research into the history of computing to understand the trends that will bring us into the future.

One of his persistent themes is taking the “digital universe” metaphor seriously. When we turned on the first computers, we created a computational universe, a universe that is now growing by 5 trillion bits of storage per second. This universe is not merely expanding–it is exploding, and we need to understand computer time as well as we understand human time.

This talk is in partnership with General Assembly and we would like to extend a special welcome to their members.

“The Makers Revolution”

Tuesday February 19, 02013 at the Lam Research Theater at YBCA, San Francisco

Long Now emeritus board member Chris Anderson originally earned his marks in publishing, starting as an editor of Science, Nature, and The Economist before taking the helm of Wired magazine. It was at Wired that Anderson became an unofficial evangelist of the Maker’s movement, becoming so deeply involved that he recently quit his day job as Editor to join a 22-year-old from Tijuana in running a “Makers” firm, 3D Robotics. Anderson’s current prognosis for the future focuses on how the Maker’s movement will change the world of objects that surround us:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

Anderson’s book THE LONG TAIL chronicled how the web revolutionized and democratized content distribution. For most of history, to publish content one required a factory, complete with the bureaucratic systems that surround such institutions. When the first desktop laser printer became accessible, it created a new wave of self publishing. Nearly thirty years later, all we need to do is click a “publish” button in WordPress. Anderson’s new book MAKERS shows how the same thing is happening to manufacturing, with even wider consequences for the world:

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

It all started when Anderson wanted to find some new science projects to work on with his kids. He bought a 3d printer (check out the demo below) and found a series of projects that were kid-friendly. Although his kids often quickly lost interest in the various projects he started, Anderson realized that technologies like 3D printers were more than just hobbyist niches. They were the beginnings of a system that has the power to disrupt established systems of manufacturing. MAKERS shows how new systems of funding (kickstarter, crowdfunding), open-sourced design communities (thingiverse.com), and new manufacturing technologies (3d printers, laser cutters, web-integrated small-batch factories) together allow for the radical democratization of manufacturing:

The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

Chris Anderson will discuss the coming “Maker’s Revolution” and how it will affect our systems of manufacturing on February 19th at the Lam Research Theater at YBCA. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page. This talk is in partnership with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and we would like to extend a special welcome to the YBCA:YOU members. We would also like to welcome members of General Assembly. Check your email for special ticketing instructions.