I argue that we should not think of biotechnology solely in terms of sports metaphors.
sports are a peculiar facet of human experience. They are inevitably zero-sum in character. For every winner, there is a loser. Each tournament has only one champion. When an athlete breaks a world record, the previous record-holder's title is eclipsed....In fact, many social phenomena -- particularly those that are studied by economists -- are not zero-sum games. In those cases, zero-sum thinking turns out to be quite counterproductive in attempting to trace out systemic implications.
Another comment on bioethics and the President's council comes from Carl Zimmer.
When our ancestors stood upright and got big brains, Greene argues, these moral intuitions became more elaborate. They probably helped hominids survive, by preventing violence and deception from destroying small bands of hunter-gatherers who depended on each other to find food and raise children. But evolution is not a reliable guide for figuring out how to lead our lives today. Just because moral intuitions may be the product of natural selection doesn't mean they are right or wrong, any more than feathers or tails are right or wrong.
My essay on technologies that perennially disappoint.
- Micropayments
- E-books
- Speech Recognition
- Video Conferencing
- Social Networking Software
- Virtual Classrooms
Thomas Hazlett offers a suggestion for avoiding smut.
During this high political season, you're likely to hear lots more about what lawmakers will do to protect your children. If you can, filter it out.
In this essay, I argue that the means for regulating biotechnology are more dystopian than the ends that may come from the technology.
Will we curb freedom at the level of research, the level of development and marketing, at the level of consumption, or at all three?
Jon Peddie thinks that the PC is finally ready for the family den.
The EPC is clearly going to be the product of the holidays, and it's safe to say that 2004 will be the year of the Entertainment PC—you can tell your grandchildren you were there when it happened.
If you believe that 2004 is the year of the entertainment PC, then you might have believed that he year of the Picturephone was going to be...what...1965?
I think that we will see entertainment PC's come in to full flower when everybody has finally finished copying their old VHS tapes onto DVD's. When you're finally ready to throw out the old VCR, you will be ready to consider an entertainment PC. I think that day is several years out for most people.
Having shrunk the government and produced a Budget Surplus, the Bush Administration is looking for a major initiative to absorb all the excess funds.
Advocates have argued that the moon could be useful in many other ways, as a base for developing technologies, for astronomical observations and for human rehearsals for operating in space. One person consulted by the White House said officials think a renewed push into space would fuel the manufacturing and technology sectors of the economy...
The Department of Heath and Human Services is developing a proposal that would funnel billions of dollars over at least a decade into relatively noncontroversial research into cures for cancer and other diseases. A GOP official said this effort could be "the Republican equivalent of the War on Poverty."
I'm beginning to think that the strategy should be to vote to elect Democrats to Congress, figuring that they will reflexively act to block whatever Bush does, even if it's a government expansion that the Democrats would favor. You'd have to cross your fingers and hope that they don't decide to work with him.
There are actually a lot of potential New, New Things out there. Wireless...nanotech...brother Zack keeps promoting neurotech...
I mean, if the government wants to spend more on scientific research and less on granny-bribing, that would be ok with me. But the more capital the government sucks up, the less will be available to the private sector to develop any of the New, New Things.
Michael Fumento offers a summary, with many links.
Claiming that all of the anti-aging work described here will pan out would be foolish indeed. But claiming that absolutely none will is far more so. In part, that's because lifespan extension is a goal that to many of us has an incredibly high value and offers research institutions and companies awesome financial incentives.
Ray Kurzweil gives his views on the current state of play, particularly a debate between Eric Drexler and Richard Smalley about the feasibility of nanotechnology.
Smalley's argument is of the form that "we don't have 'X' today, therefore 'X' is impossible." I encounter this class of argument repeatedly in the area of artificial intelligence. Critics will cite the limitations of today's systems as proof that such limitations are inherent and can never be overcome. These critics ignore the extensive list of contemporary examples of AI (for example, airplanes and weapons that fly and guide themselves, automated diagnosis of electrocardiograms and blood cell images, automated detection of credit card fraud, automated investment programs that routinely outperform human analysts, telephone-based natural language response systems, and hundreds of others) that represent working systems that are commercially available today that were only research programs a decade ago.
And ultimately, of course, this stuff will all be settled in the lab. I know which way I'm betting.
Another one from the MIT techreview weblog. Simson Garfinkel writes,
It’s bad news for us carbon-based life forms.In the end, there are only four possible futures:
1 - We destroy our technical capacity to bring about The Singularity before it happens. (I don’t think that this will be the case, but a nuclear war might do the trick.)
2 - The Singularity isn’t technically possible --- computers will never get that smart. (I don’t think that this is the case either.)
3 - The Singularity happens, and the computers decide to keep us around out of pity.
4 - The Singularity happens, and within 20-30 years humans simply cease to matter.
When you hear a thought fragment like this from Michael Dell, it could be either profound or worthless.
If you think about the power in the computer and power in the brain, you've got very low bandwidth in the interface between the two. But those are not problems that will be solved quickly. There's ample room for invention.
It just frustrates me to see so much of the effort going into trying to incrementally improve on PDA's. I think that is a huge black hole of misallocated investment.
Thanks to gizmodo for the link. If you read that blog, you will see what I mean about everybody trying to crowd into the handheld market.
Somehow, the visions for the smart home sound kinda dumb. For example,
coffeepot that starts when your alarm clock goes off (after warning you the night before if you forget to fill it). A security camera that e-mails you at work if it detects motion and then lets you see through it and pan around a room remotely. A refrigerator that will scan its own contents to keep a running inventory. A combination oven/refrigerator that can be instructed from a cellphone to start dinner and have it ready when you get home. A microwave that scans the bar codes on frozen pizzas and programs itself with the manufacturer's suggested cooking time. A home theater that plays music and movies off the Net. Remote controls for lights, locks and the thermostat.
They caught on to Aubrey de Grey's nonlinear thinking, but they left out any discussion of the Angry Left group-thinking. The article is here.
With enough money, Mr. de Grey said, it would take about 10 years to find a proven method for taking any 2-year-old mouse, already two-thirds of the way through a normal life, and extending it to five years, the equivalent of 150 years for humans. At that point the war on human aging could begin in earnest.
I ask the question here.
Overall, if events play out over the next quarter century as the technology optimists predict, then GDP will be so astronomical that the costs of Social Security and Medicare will be dwarfed. In such a world we may face difficult philosophical issues, but maintaining material living standards will not be a challenge.
I try to summarize one positive lesson from Pop!tech--the need for nonlinear thinking.
However, the odd thing about nonlinear forecasts is that they can be wildly wrong in the quantity dimension without being far off in the time dimension. Even at 3x growth, demand will catch up to capacity within a few years. One can argue that the telecom industry's mistake was not so much the amount of capacity that they built as the high-leverage way in which it was financed. High leverage only works if you can predict the quantity demanded accurately at a given point in time. High leverage is a good idea in a relatively linear world, but not a good idea in a nonlinear world.
At the Pop!tech conference, I had a chance to ask Gregory Stock his opinion of Leon Kass, who heads the President's commission on bio-ethics. Stock views Kass as a worthy intellectual adversary, who debates biotechnology at a higher level than other conservative critics. Here is a sample quote from Kass's report:
The chapter on better children raised questions about the meaning and limits of parental control and about the character and rearing of children. The chapter on superior performance raised questions about the meaning of excellence and the “humanity” of human activity. The chapter on ageless bodies raised questions about the significance of the “natural” life cycle and lifespan, and their connection to the dynamic character of society and the prospects for its invigorating renewal. And the chapter on happy souls raised questions about the connection between experienced mood or self-esteem and the deeds or experiences that ordinarily are their foundation, as well as the connections between remembering truly and personal identity.
Thanks to Suzanne Fields for the pointer.
UPDATE: By all means, visit brother Zack on this issue. And brother Derek and brother Richard, too.
David Weinberger responded--see the comments also--to my earlier post on the Poptech conference.
It is a stimulating conference, and I will have more to say about it in a future essay. However, I want to talk about a complaint that I have about this year's conference in comparison to the one that I went to in 2000.
Basically, I think that the quality of the conversation was much lower. The audience contributed less to the discussion, and the hallway conversations were not as exciting.
I think that the main problem was poor time management on the part of many speakers. They did not just cut into the Q&A time--I thought that in several cases the speaker ran out of time before he (time management was mostly a male problem) got to his main point! Thus, a speaker would announce a conclusion almost out of context.
A second problem was that audience questions were poor. But I think that this could be blamed in part on the speakers' poor time management--if the main point comes out of left field at the very end, then you have very little time to come up with a good question about it.
Finally, there was the atmosphere of ideological intimidation that Lessig was a part of. I believe that the left and the right both have something to contribute to discussions about technology and the future. But I frequently found myself in small groups where it seemed as though the price of admission to the discussion was an expression of contempt for President Bush. In 2000, I felt in the minority but people were willing to engage with me. Here, I felt that with a few exceptions, such as Weinberger, the majority of the Poptech attendees were not at all interested in what a conservative or libertarian might say.
I am attending the poptech conference in Camden, Maine. I last attended three years ago, and just as I did then I get a sense of a lot of people who know technology and are deeply concerned with the ethical issues associated with technology in the future.
David Weinberger is blogging the conference. A sample entry is here. There are other real-time bloggers, only a couple of which can be found at the poptech web site. I am not doing real time blogging--I do better when I cogitate for a few days and then do an essay.
Once again, as in 2000, I feel that I am with the Bobos--David Brooks' shorthand for Bourgeois Bohemians. Overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly liberal. I was hit with the angry liberal phenomenon on arrival--I shared a ride from the airport in Portland with five angry liberals. With some trepidation, I outed myself as someone who did not go along with their viewpoint. I've been fairly quiet otherwise.
My only moment of discomfort was during Larry Lessig's talk. He put up a video in which George Bush and Tony Blair were made to look silly by making it appear that they were lipsynching some pop love song. He put it up as an example of re-using works for creative purposes, but clearly he expected the audience to enjoy the insult to Bush and Blair, which they did. It was so tasteless that I wanted to squirm--the way I would have felt if he had been talking about people of color using the N-word. His video received raucous applause, and I am sure that no one questioned his taste or ethics in any way.
I think that if someone had done the same thing to, say, Hillary Clinton, I would have stood up and said, "As a conservative who disagrees with Hillary Clinton, I am greatly offended by what you did. It was not in any way essential to your point, it was tasteless, and wrong."
Maybe I should have stood up and called out Larry Lessig, but I was thinking that it was a job for a liberal. But no one said a word.
It was like watching one of those social psychology experiments in which when enough people do something wrong, everyone goes along with it.
The current issue of the American Economic Review contains an article in which the author claims that the 1930's was the most technologically progressive decade of the past century. This led me to muse on parallels between the 1930's and the present.
Today's labor market could be described in terms of progress and displacement. In some sectors, notably manufacturing, productivity is growing faster than demand, creating excess labor. Eventually, workers will find their way to other industries, in which demand is growing faster than productivity (in my article, I suggested home health care as an example). However, this process requires a number of adjustments -- wage changes, worker retraining, worker relocation, etc. -- that take a while to work out. Above all, we no longer have an irrationally exuberant stock market creating the impression that everyone can be productively employed doing business development for a dotcom. People have to find real jobs, which is more difficult.
The prospect of human enhancement through biotechnology is exciting but also unnerving. Here is a review of a book by Susan Greenfield that focuses on the unnerving aspects.
In Baroness Greenfield's vision of the future there is no dividing line between the real and the virtual, and most of our experiences are shaped either by a souped-up version of the internet or by smart drugs. We will rarely have to leave our homes, which will become an extension of our minds and bodies. Entertainment will be on tap to match our moods, while our physical environment, from the view through our windows to the shape of our rooms and the furniture inside them, will have the protean ability to adapt itself to our desires and needs. There will be no cancer or baldness or obesity. Nano-machines inside our bodies will change our appearance at will. Our bodily functions will be monitored and any incipient malfunctions dealt with by clothes that both dispense drugs and have the happy knack of cleaning themselves.
