The Gonzo Futurist Manifesto

I just saw this on Warren Ellis's blog, and had to repost. I've including author Justin Pickard's summary verbatim below. Still in the process of digesting this piece, of incorporating it into my gestalt, but then blend of Bruce Sterling, John Boyd, High Orthodox STS jargon (post-normal, actant), and most importantly the attitude that YOU can make a difference in an era of rapid change and complexity by being spiky, by drawing from sources ranging from fringe scifi fandom to academia to The Economist to locate patterns in the random streams of data coming at us is deeply appealing. Friends, comrades, and citizens of the future, hang loose and get strange.

ACTION AND DECISION-MAKING FOR THE PROFESSIONAL WEIRDO

In 1991, Bruce Sterling gave a speech in San Jose. Extolling the strengths and virtues of the power weirdo, he urged the audience to avoid the spring-loaded bear-trap of mediocrity:

You don’t get there by acculturating. Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a puffer fish.
(Sterling, 1991)

With an idiosyncratic outlook and skill set, the power weirdo — and its subset, the gonzo futurist — is particularly well-placed to deal with a turbulent decade. With an eye on the road ahead, she can meet or dodge situations as they arise, charting a clear course through the VUCA battlefields of a turboparalytic world. One thing we can say: in 5-10 years time, ours will be a world of ubiquitous computing (in some form). When sensors are everyone, and the ‘big data’ of the post-normal threatens to bury us all in a torrent of noise, finely tuned sense-making capabilities may prove to be your greatest asset. For futurist Scott Smith, ‘warehousing massive amounts of data is simply an exercise in hoarding if we can’t see, contextualize, and use the patterns in the noise.’ (Smith, 2011) The pattern analyst is less likely to find her job outsourced or automated, but, to effectively lever the patterns in the noise, we have to be able distinguish between real patterns and the faces in the clouds.

We need pattern recognition. Pattern Recognition. The protagonist of William Gibson’s 2003 novel of the same name, Cayce Pollard, though something of a ‘self-facilitating media node’, provides a model for the gonzo futurist. For Cayce, the lived experience of 9/11 flipped a switch somewhere, hyper-sensitising her to the aesthetics of corporate branding. By the time the story begins, she’s found a niche as a coolhunter and creative consultant, exploiting her body’s physical, pre-cognitive reaction to logos (the bad ones induce nausea and panic).

Dorotea removes an eleven-inch square of art board from the envelope. Holding it at the upper corners, between the tips of perfectly manicured forefingers, she displays it to Cayce. (…) There is a drawing there, a sort of scribble in thick black Japanese brush, a medium she knows to be the in-house hallmark of Herr Heinzi himself. To Cayce, it most resembles a syncopated sperm, as rendered by the American underground cartoonist Rick Griffin, circa 1967. She knows almost immediately that it does not, by the opaque standards of her inner radar, work. She has no way of knowing how she knows.
(Gibson, 2003)

Though Cayce’s ‘base’ of domain-specific knowledge is both wide and deep — note the reference to Rick Griffin — she has no way of knowing how she knows. She’s aware of an ‘inner radar,’ but, as something separate from her conscious mind, has no idea how it works. Though Cayce leverages her capacities as a source of income, her role of sensitive-slash-coolhunter is more bodily disposition than career. Unpicking the details and implications of Gibson’s novel, literary theorist Lauren Berlant describes how Cayce’s disposition allows her ‘to ride the wave of the moment, to make her situation what it is, a thing to live through, be embedded in, and feel out’. Sounds a bit gonzo, doesn’t it?
Lacking Cayce’s near-supernatural capabilities, our gonzo futurist needs a prosthetic substitute; some kind of cognitive aikido. This would be a general framework that would allow her to easily grok the dynamics of the post-normal world, and identify the key sites and tipping points for action. To my knowledge, the closest currently existing equivalent is the OODA loop. Originally devised by US military strategist John Boyd, the OODA loop is a rolling heuristic cycle, a structure for those who need to make quick decisions under pressure. OODA. Observe, orient, decide, act.
The gonzo futurist is a super-empowered hopeful individual. She may have been a ‘graduate with no future’ (Mason, 2011), or the victim of public sector cuts, but has since grieved and moved on. She plays, tests, and play tests; making the best of the tools and technologies at her disposal. Comfortable calling on (and being called on by) her friends, peers, and tribe, her sense-making skills are social and connected. Her thinking may, occasionally, ‘be located inside the brains of other people.’ (Wheeler, 2011)

The gonzo futurist is a ‘deep generalist’ (Cascio, 2011) and ‘analytical polyglot’ (Smith, 2011). She has an ‘almost supernatural awareness of impacts and implications … [is] ready to adapt when necessary, building long-lasting systems when possible.’ (Cascio, 2011) Like Cayce Pollard, she is a ‘woman of affect, not of feeling (…) [an] empress of the amygdala.’ (Berlant)
The gonzo futurist is resilient. She works smart, not hard. She has one eye on the ‘adjacent possible’, switches codes, and contributes to the commons. She may be privileged, but has no time for competition, alpha male dick-waving, or beggar-thy-neighbour. Her success does not come at your expense.

Bombarded by stimuli, the gonzo futurist is an OODA cyborg. Observe, orient, decide, act.

Justin Pickard is a self-described ‘gonzo futurist’, freelance researcher, and associate at London-based design practice Superflux.  You can find him on Twitter @justinpickard.
And this is the direct link to A GONZO FUTURIST MANIFESTO.

Foresight: A Brief Literature Review

Several of my projects these days are centering on foresight, the process of looking at the future and doing something other than burying your head in the sand or screaming and throwing your feces. Foresight is not about predicting the future, because that’s impossible. Rather, it’s about cultivating a holistic and adaptive worldview so that when the inevitably unexpected happens, you don’t freeze on the tracks and get run down by the Future. Foresight is definitely more of an art than a science, but a lot of smart people have been writing on it for several decades. These are some of the articles I’ve found particularly useful.

Ron Bradfield, George Wright, George Burt, George Cairns, Kees Van Der Heijden. The origins and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning.
The authors trace out the history of various foresight techniques, from RAND, to Shell Oil, to the La Prospective school. They trace out the major features of the probabilistic modified trends and intuitive logics techniques, the two major schools of practice, and bring some clarity to the confused world of scenario planning. A key starting point for any foresight scholar.

James Oglivy. Future studies and the human sciences
Oglivy develops a broad philosophical justification for futurism as crafting normative scenarios. Slicing through almost every human discipline-anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology-he notes a semiotic turn. Rather than following the physical sciences in discovering the laws of human activity, post-modernists have turned away from trying to discover truths towards interpretation meaning, and how meaning matters. The role of the futurist is to make the future meaningful in a positive and useful way, to deconstruct both status quo futures and dystopian visions, and give voice to the desires of the public for a better tomorrow.

Cynthia Selin. Professional dreamers: The past in the future of scenario planning.
The founding document of scenario planning is The Gentle Art of Re-Perceiving by Pierre Wack. Wack was a Shell Oil executive, futurist, and mystic, who developed the technique of scenarios to allow his fellow executives to see beyond their narrow disciplinary boundaries and approach problems from a fresh perspective. Wack’s aim was organizational learning, and so when developing scenarios we should keep in mind the organizations that we are trying to change. Scenario planning today has deviated from Wack, as most scenario practitioners are independent contractors, lacking Wack’s deep understanding of the field as well as his reflexive orientation. But even if we cannot follow directly in Wack’s footsteps at all times, he represents an aspirational goal.

Cynthia Selin. Trust and the illusive force of scenarios.
What makes a scenario ‘good’? It’s definitely more of an art than a science, and in this article Selin argues that an effective scenario must be both provocative and trustworthy. Yet, the traditional metrics of trust: past performance, adherence to best practices, an overwhelming weight of evidence, do not apply to scenarios. Scenario making is a rhetorical art, where the practitioner must foster trust among all participants, and use metaphor and narrative to bridge the gap between the familiar present and the uncertain future.

Ronald Bradfield. Cognitive barriers in the scenario development process.
This article attempts to bridge cognitive psychology and scenario planning by exploring the cognitive aspects of how scenarios work and do not work. Human beings are lousy thinkers, and we tend to devolve to variety of heuristics rather than in engaging in proper analysis. The key finding are that a group engaged in scenario planning draws upon ready-made scripts from the media (news, fiction, science), and that they reach a transition point where they close on a concept, and can no longer be influenced. While I’m not qualified to vouch for the quality of the cognitive psychology, foresight needs more analytic articles like this one.

EDIT: And thanks to Cynthia Selin for pointing me to these articles in the first place. There's a reason you ask the experts.

Science Fiction Prototyping: A Preliminary Assessment.

This is day 2 of the EMERGE event write-up, and my reflections on the workshop, Science Fiction Prototyping with Brian David Johnson, Intel futurist and director of The Tomorrow Project.

I believe that science fiction can be an incredibly powerful tool for shaping public perceptions towards emerging technology. Governance involves assessing risks and policies and making decisions between options, but how can we assess an emerging technology when such basic information as costs, benefits, and consequences are unknown and perhaps fundamentally unknowable? One of the major findings of STS is that supposedly value-neutral methods like cost-benefit analysis and linear extrapolation of trends in fact contain large implicit biases towards certain kinds of ‘valid knowledge’ and ‘rational outcomes’, and more-over, these methods fail to deal with major uncertainties, whether they’re Black Swan events like the collapse of the Soviet Union, or more subtle systemic shifts, like the rise of cellphones and social media in politics.

But the real strength of science-fiction is its broad appeal. Very few people read the white papers produced by bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was shut down in 1995 by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” Congress, and the public engagement efforts like EU’s Café Scientique are considered blockbuster successes if they reach tens of thousands of people. Popular science-fiction, whether in film, game, of print form, reaches billions of people world-wide. My own work on nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the space race has shown the critical role that science-fiction stories have played in framing the policy debate.

People are narrative thinkers; they naturally organize their world into stories, and understand when a story makes sense, and when it does not. By combining realistic characters and social milieus with novel technology, science fiction can engage multiple ways of thinking, and draw out underlying values and sites of conflict and confusion. There are no barriers to participation, anybody with a pen and paper can write, anybody with an internet connection can publish. Science fiction is technology assessment for the rest of us.

But all of the above are just my idiosyncratic and scattered jottings towards some sort of coherent foresight methodology, which is why I was really excited to see how the professionals did it. I’d read Brian Johnson’s book previously, and my impression was the he was on to something, but he hadn’t bothered to write it down.

The first day, Brian delivered a lecture on science fiction prototyping and how to do it. The key points were:
A) The minimalist vision of the future is wrong, because it looks like a prison
B) People like clutter, houses are hairy, look at what makes people comfortable
C) The extremes are what makes a story interesting
As we broke up the day, he instructed us to think about what kind of story we wanted to tell, and gave us the 5 Step Plan for science fiction prototyping.




This is the diagram in the book, and you’ll note that it’s incredibly skeletal and linear. The abbreviated plan for Scenario Development has 8 steps, and requires that you examine both your own biases and purposes, and pretty much every shaping external force in the world. Science-fiction prototyping asks that you dive write in.

The actual process of science-fiction prototyping only sort of matches the diagram above. This is what I experienced in the process of making my prototype.



I want to make some notes here on what worked and didn’t.

The envisioning process depends on the information you have access to: What you know about science and technology, your own life experiences and beliefs, and any materials provided by the organizers. At EMERGE, despite the disparate disciplinary backgrounds of the workshop participants, we were all academics interested in the future, and we had all had the same full day of presentations and lectures.

Pitching and dialog are definitely learned skills, and different people have very different levels of aptitude at them. Some people can’t express a story concisely, others dominate the discussion, and some are simply boring and unknowledgeable. We worked in groups of between three and five people, which allowed everybody to participate in the dialoging process. Unsurprisingly, Brian David Johnson was far better at these tasks than the rest of us. Just a few minutes with Brian could clarify the key issues at in the prototype, and the best way to bring them to the forefront.

Development, the part where you write, draw, film, or otherwise produce the prototype itself, appears to be inherently time-consuming and isolating. Everybody (except for a group working on a comic, which had a clear division of labor), retreated to their laptops to write their own stories. Most people had full outlines, but writing fiction is hard; one manuscript page an hour is a very optimistic rate. Judging from my previous writing workshops, it can take up to a month for an amateur writer to get a 3000 word story into some kind of readable form. The single day we had allocated simply wasn’t enough.

Finally, prototypes are useless unless you bring them out into the real world somehow. In our report out, we pitched the prototypes to the rest of the group, who then asked questions, and tried to nail the prototype down to its essential core. By this point, it was late in the day, we were tired and hungry, and the quality of the discussion suffered. A second pitch attempt with a completed draft is important, but in our case, we could have used more structure and time for the reporting out.

The biggest impression that I got from the workshop was that there’s a lot to science fiction prototyping that isn’t in the book. The relies on tacit knowledge about science, technology, people, institutions, narrative structures, the creative process, and proper presenting and critiquing skills. There’s nothing wrong with tacit knowledge; indeed, the world would collapse without it. The problem with relying on tactic knowledge for foresight is that your visions are going to be infected with unexamined biases, and may confirm what you want to know rather than challenge and transform your vision of the future. The only check against this bias is the skill of the other participants in the process.

Making the tactic knowledge that goes into science fiction prototyping explicit would make for stronger prototypes. This diagram has just some of the invisible entities that surround the prototyping framework.



Science fiction prototyping is definitely useful, but there are many questions which should be answered before I’d be willing to fully trust it as a foresight methodology.

Some questions are procedural: What is the best preparation before going into the prototyping process? How should information and questions be framed so that non-practitioners find it productive? How can you train people to pitch and critique ideas more effectively? Is there a way to develop the prototype that is faster than writing a whole story around it? How can the constructive process of dialog continue throughout the development cycle? How can individual communicate a prototype to a group in an impactful way?

Other questions are related to the core concepts of science-fiction prototyping, and are harder to resolve: What is the proper way to develop the technology through the course of the story, is it a character, a prop, or something else? How does an author recognize their biases and blind spots? How can science-fiction prototyping be used to prompt reflexive deliberation on the future? What does the dialog involved in prototyping imply for the authorship of the work, and the origins of its ideas? Does one need to make science fiction prototypes to find them useful, or is consumption of the right kind of science-fiction adequate for foresight?

I don’t have good answers for these questions now, but I hope that over the course of the next few months, I can finish my own prototype and resolve some of these theoretical and procedural questions. And any thoughts my loyal readers have on this would be very welcome.

Ten Books for the Future

“The problem is that science-fiction writers have stopped writing new futures and just started rehashing the past.” "No, the problem is that scientists and engineers have stopped doing exciting things." As I understand it, Michael Crow and Neal Stephenson had an exchange like this at a Future Tense conference about a year ago. I might not have the wording down right, but I agree with the sentiment entirely. Our leaders are drifting aimlessly towards a future of debt so large that money loses all meaning, paranoid overreactions to boogeymen like ‘international terrorists’ and ‘internet pedophiles’, a decaying industrial infrastructure on which we are all reliant, and an increasingly autonomous culture of radical novelty, self-expression, and technological change. But hey, they’re politicians. What do you expect, some kind of vision thing?

The problem is that one vital place where we as a culture might look towards some sense of futurity, science-fiction, has become increasing generic, old-fashioned, and basically nostalgic rather than forward thinking. Disney, which is a good indication of the cultural pulse of America, is stellar example as the original Space Age, techno-utopian Tomorrowland was revamped into a Jules Vernian steampunk nostalgia trip.

With all that in mind, I’d like to put together a bibliography for the people looking to use science-fiction to influence the future. I’m a science-fiction fan, a science policy scholar, and history buff, and this is my idiosyncratic list of 10 books that everybody should read if they want to understand Science, The Future, and how we’re going to get there.

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl

How can I even describe this book? The Windup Girl won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the John W. Campbell Award. It’d be easier to list best-SF-novel awards it didn’t get. Set in a Thailand teetering on the brink of collapse, Bacigalupi paints a picture of a world where the oil has run out, global trade has collapsed, science has stalled, and the horsemen of plague, famine, war, and climate threaten to smash what little remains. Global warming has permanently altered the climate. Agriculture remains barely one step ahead of rogue genetic plagues unleashed decades ago, and only the fading expertise of big Midwest biotech consortiums keep the world fed. Yet giving into the Calorie Men means giving up national autonomy, something which proud Thailand will never accept. The novel follows a complex cast of characters, Thai environmental police officers, an agent for the biotech concerns looking to loot a hidden seed bank of its genetic riches, a Malaysian exile seeking to rebuild his fortune by any means necessary, and the titular Windup Girl, an abandoned genetically modified “New Person” forced into sex slavery. Even in a world on the brink of collapse, people still want what they’ve always wanted: Money, power, ideological success, or love. But at the end of the day, the Future is going to be born, whether we like it’s shape or not, and new beasts will live in the ruins of our cities.

When I read The Windup Girl, I couldn’t stop shaking. I could smell the elephant shit, feel the desperation, know the inexorable trajectory of our technological crimes against nature. I’m afraid that The Windup Girl is going to be our future, and that’s why you have to read it.

Bruce Sterling - Distraction.

I’m holding myself to one book per author, and picking the right Sterling is no easy task. But I choose Distraction because A) it’s about a political operative trying to fix a white elephant scientific installation (A giant airtight dome and bioengineering laboratory in East Texas) and wandering into something far deeper, and B) even after a decade, it still smells like The Future to me. American politics has become an absurd carnival, invisible networks of dissidents do strange and terrible things to corrupt financial institutions, pretty much everybody is broke, but if you have money you can live like a king. And if you don’t, life is Burning Man! And somehow, in the midst of all these brilliant fragments of futurity, Sterling manages to tell a story about the American Soul, about what we need from our leaders, and about how science is remaking the world.

Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

The New Republic is an interstellar empire that Bismarck would love: Obedient peasants, heroic soldiers, honorable aristocrats, and none of that nasty disruptive technology; nothing more complex than telegraphs and nuclear powered steam engines, and they’re willing to do anything to keep it that way. So when an interstellar fleet of post-humans arrives over one of the New Republic’s colonies and begins dropping cellphones and nanoreplicator cornucopias from the sky, it ranks as a major breech of national security. But in this universe, God (or at least a super-human AI that use time-travel in its computation) is watching, and it doesn’t want the regressive militaristic morons of the New Republic to do anything too stupid. Which is why two interstellar spies, one working for the UN and the other working for the Eschaton, have to figure out what’s going on and stop it before the Big E decides to clean up the whole mess by plowing a comet made of anti-matter into the planet. Power, politics, panopticons, the terrorizing liberation of a true post-scarcity economy, and some of the most kickass and realistic space combat combine to make this my favorite book about The Singularity and what it might mean to you.

James C. Scott - Seeing Like a State

What does a state require to govern? What does the process of being governed entail? Before a state can rule, it must be render its subjects visible and record them with maps and censuses. Scott explores an ideology he calls high modernism, which aims not just to record things, but to change them to make them more visible, more legible, and more controllable by a central authority. But from the sterile new cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh, to mono-cropped farms, to Soviet industry and Tanzanian rural development, the modernist ideology that tries to render everything down to single-function units inevitably distorts and damages the subtle and complex fabric of society. The more heavily anything is planned, the more it is sustained by the informal sector. Scott’s reminds us to reflect on our own work and ask: what are we making visible? What is being obscured? What necessary stories are not being told?

Neal Stephenson – Diamond Age

Some people think this book is about the social implications of nanotechnology. These people are wrong, or at least they’re missing what I think are the most interesting parts of the book, which are about how we create identity in a globalized world. The Neo-Victorian aesthetic, the rituals of the Pacific Northwest Software Khans, and even the Primer-educated Mouse Army are all different attempts to craft personal and group identities in an era when borders have melted and the means of production have become entirely disassociated from human hands. Once the making of things becomes effortless, all that’s left is the making of stories; what kind of stories do you want to tell?

Neil Sheehan - A Bright Shining Lie

Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, but some parts of history are more fruitful than others. The Vietnam War was the high water mark of American power and faith in the wisdom of our politicians. It’s where the American Dream turned sour, and we still suffer from the cultural wounds. The Vietnam War is like a fractal of horror and unintended consequences. Every level echoes the lies, short-sightedness, and bad decision-making of every other level, from the grunts fighting at Khe Sanh to the generals and presidents running the war from Washington D.C. A Bright Shining Lie covers every level of that war, following the career of John Paul Vann from his role as a lowly military advisor at the disastrous battle of Ap Bac to his madcap triumph as the absolute military authority in I Corps during the 1972 Easter Offensive. The corruption of the war is mirrored by Vann’s personal fall, the national quagmire become ones man quixotic quest to save a foreign nation. If you were to read just one book about America after 1950, this would be it. Vann makes Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now look like an amateur at going Up River and Never Coming Back.

China Mieville - The Scar

China Mieville writes about monsters: ambitious, fearful, oppressed, misguided, occasionally generous or brave monsters that have beetle heads, immense wings, chlorophyll for blood, mechanical parts, or sorcerous talents. In other words, people just like us. His richly imagined stories put a Socialist and Anarchist spin on the fantasy tropes, and in The Scar, an exiled translator is kidnapped by the exotic city of Armada, built on the backs of ancient ships from 1000 nations and ruled by brutal pirates. The diversity of the races, the novelty and depth of the world building, and they way that ordinary concerns are filtered through the lens of pulp adventure simply has to be read to be appreciated. I can’t think of any other author who deals as well with ideas of social justice, imperialism, absolute power, or what a single person can do in the face of History.

Peter F Hamilton – Fallen Dragon

These days, Peter F Hamilton is known for writing incredibly long space operas. But before he got on the six-book series kick, he wrote this philosophical military-SF novel that follows a space marine from his privileged upbringing on the sole successful interstellar colony to being a foot-soldier for “asset-realization raids” (aka, Interstellar Corporate Piracy backed up with powered armor and orbital lasers), to attempting to retrieve his own broken past in a desperate battle against his corporate masters and a native insurgency. Hamilton invites us to consider the economics of spaceflight while at the same time exulting in the joys of exploration. The planets of the novel inspire reflection: the tired homeworld of Earth, the blank slate of Amethi, the tropical freedom of Thallspring reproducing the failures that came before, and the post-human threat of Santo Chico. Hamilton doesn’t hammer this point home, but the novel also has many interesting reflections on how governments and corporations interact, and how people might modify themselves to wield power or achieve liberty over generation through cloning, brain transplants, cybernetic links, and even more exotic modifications.

Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths

In early 21^st century Thailand, a 200 foot stone monolith appears in the jungle, it’s arrival heralded by a destructive blast of freezing air. The monolith is a monument to the victory of a warlord named Kuin, celebrating a battle 16 years in the future. Soon, Kuin monoliths are landing in major cities, killing millions, shattering nations, and sending the world towards a global holocaust. But as the years march on, the identity of “Kuin” and the means by which he launches his weapons remain unknown. The main character is drawn into a battle by scientists, philosophers, and unclassifiable ordinary people to save the world from destruction at the hands of duped Kuin cultists, seeking any surety they can find, even in the destruction of their lives, and the mysterious conspiracy behind the attack. An amazing journey into the relationship between the present and the future, the mutability of tomorrow, and the power of belief.

Bruno Latour - Science in Action

Sometimes, when you need theory, you just have to turn to a Frenchman. By and large, nobody in politics actually understands what science is, how it works, or the kinds of questions that it can answer. Latour uses a combination of lab ethnography and Actor-Network Theory to explain how facts gain their facticity, the characteristic of being accepted as true by the broader community. Inscriptions, networks of people, things, and ideas, and conflicts between the durable and the transient all serve to distinguish the uncertainty of “science-in-the-making” from the absolutely truth of “ready-made-science.” Science in Action is a dense book, but if you read it closely, it will explode your conception of scientific knowledge and replace it with a much more powerful and flexible framework. If you want science-fiction to be more than gadget fetishism, you’ll need an epistemological account like Science in Action.

EMERGE Impressions Day 3

The curse of grad school is that there’s always something else to do. I was finally able to grab a moment from the endless treadmill of readings to write up the rest of the EMERGE conference. Day 3 was a combination of keynote addresses and report-outs from the working groups. By and large, the keynotes were more interesting, so I’m going to focus on the keynotes and my responses. As it turns out, creating interesting design fictions in 24 hours is hard.

I arrive at Neeb Hall at the blessedly late hour of 9:30, coffee in hand. Neeb is the singlest biggest auditorium on campus, and it is nearly full. Fortunately, I manage to grab a seat in the front by my friend John Carter McKnight. M83’s Midnight City is playing, and fades out as Joel Garreau introduces the conference. The perfect song to start the day; if Midnight City doesn’t get you pumped up, you may in fact be clinically dead.

M83 | Midnight City from DIVISION on Vimeo.

First up is ASU President Michael Crow. He opens with a simple question, “Are you happy with the trajectory of our country?” *Crickets*. Out of 500+ scientists, artists, designers, futurists, and civilians, not a single person is happy or optimistic. Crow explains his philosophy: we are trapped by ossified bureaucracies, and particularly our institutions of knowledge production have become routinized and solidified around disciplinary silos. The Generic State University is full of uninterested students not learning from boring professors.
ASU aims to fix that, finding emergent ways of organizing genius. Since Crow’s arrival, he’s shattered departments and reorganized them around knowledge enterprises (the Biodesign Institute, the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Games for Learning) and big questions like the Origins of Everything or Sustainability. The idea is to dump ‘valueless engagement’ and re-center Exploration as the core value of the university. “The only way to discover where we want to go is to intensely imagine.”
Michael Crow is a polarizing figure, and from my position as somebody who’s at ASU very much because of what he is trying to do, I think that you have to give his reforms mixed reviews. There are lots of corpses of interdisciplinary collaborations littered across the campus, and there are still plenty of uninterested students and boring professors. On the other hand, he has attracted a solid core of really amazing scholars, and at least he’s trying to engage with the future of higher education, rather than just aiming to maintain his stats. I am continually astounded that somebody gave Michael Crow a major university, but I would also follow him to the gates of hell.

Next, Neal Stephenson. Neal is chairing the first panel, but he offers his thoughts on visioning the future, although not before first noting that “I hope I’m not old, ossified, etc. I don’t want Crow to dynamite me and terraform the rubble,” a line which gets major laughs. Being dynamited by Crow will be theme throughout the day. For Neal, visioning implies an internally coherent picture, not just a random grab-bag of ideas. He writes fiction because it’s really cheap. The big problem that Neal is grappling with (and one that he, ASU, and myself are working on) are how to effectively transform imagination into innovation. “Somebody from 1900 would not understand 1968. Somebody from 1968 would get 2012. Somewhere along the line, we lost the ability to effectively imagine and envision the future.” Of course, Neal is not a big fan of futurism as a practice, “Future is my new F-word.” But the man who brought us Snow Crash and Diamond Age is looking for the next big scientific breakthough.
I do have some doubts about Neal’s conception here. Isn’t the big change between 1900 and 1968 the rate of technological change, rather than any new technology (cars, airplanes, computers, rockets, nuclear power) in and of itself? Alvin Toffler talked about the problems surrounding rate of change in the classic Future Shock, but at this point, I think that the group of neotenic (change-seeking) individuals is large enough, organized enough, and influential enough that future shock isn’t what it once was. For some people, even The Singularity wouldn’t be a surprise.

Do we/can we have a coherent vision of the *present,* let alone the future?#emerge2012asu

— John Carter McKnight (@john_carter) March 3, 2012

Follow Neal is Stewart Brand, gnomic member of the original Merry Pranksters and the environmental movement, and the inspiration behind the Whole Earth Catalog, the Blue Marble photo, and the Long Now Foundation. Brand uses his perspective of over 40 years as an environmentalist to speak out against “Earth National Park” and the idea that any interference by man in nature is a violation. For him, a survival future involves a gardening mentality, and science helps with that. Demographically, the future is new cities full of young people in the Global South, and they won’t much care what old white people in Brussels and Washington DC have to say to them. Brand might be living proof of SMBC’s Law of Futurology (his current project is bringing back the passenger pigeon), but he is as always an engaging and controversial speaker.

From @merlyna at #emerge2012asu: “I’m interested in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.”

— ryanwyatt (@ryanwyatt) March 3, 2012

Corner Convenience from hellofosta on Vimeo.

Corner Convenience is probably the stand-out product of the workshops, as an attempt to imagine the everyday materiality of new foods, forms of entertainment, and ways of paying for things in the very humdrum location of the convenience store. Two words: Panda Jerky.

Sherry Turkle is next. She’s the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and an MIT professor, but for all her standing in the digital humanities, she holds a strong conviction that virtuality damages something important about our humanity, and that we are replacing complexity with technological oversimplification. She’s an elegant speaker, but not a very good presenter, and my final thought was that Turkle is a digital bioconservative, the equivalent of Leon Kass who is disgusted by social change, cannot explain why, and so elevates disgust to a moral principle.

At this moment, it turns out that not only am I sitting next to John Carter, but @buildcyberworld (she of the Brad Allenby==Cave Johnson quote) is right behind me. Live tweeting events is weird.

Bruce Mau, the next presenter, knocked it out of the park. Bruce is a true design guru. He’s the force behind ASU’s web design, which is ahead of 90% of most university web design (think I’m kidding? Check out the rest and report back), a 1000-year plan for Mecca, and fixing the future in general. It’s hard to pin down Bruce Mau, but he is highly quotable.

"When you turn off design, you design for failure." Mau, a simple explanation for why things are falling apart #emerge2012asu

— Michael Burnam-Fink (@mburnamfink) March 3, 2012

Mau, "We can't sacrifice our way back to a world we can accept. We have to progress to an AWESOME BEAUTIFUL FUTURE." #emerge2012asu

— Michael Burnam-Fink (@mburnamfink) March 3, 2012

And closing the day is Bruce Sterling. Bruce remarks that “The telepathic monkey is weirdly melancholic. Science-fiction has been doing telepathic monkeys for so long that to see one in the flesh is a little dull. Nobody’s everyday life is weird and wonderous.

@bruces: It's a historical privilege to be around technical innovation when it's weird and wonderful #emerge2012asu

— Karen Tanenbaum (@ktanenbaum) March 3, 2012

But technology is provisional, and wonder is a beautiful frame of mind that should probably be reserved for the eternal and universal.

Bruce finishes by saying, “Summing up what’s happened here is impossible, but I can demo it.” And launches into a truly weird piece of performance art where he puts on his telepathic brain-reading gloves (bought at the Corner Convenience store) and summons up an augmented reality interface to 3D print up some improvements to his house, and finally help him learn Spanish through old Mexican comedies.

“I connected to a human moment, I understood the joke. Learning in context is the victory condition.” I cannot disagree with Bruce here.

I took a short break for dinner, and to tour some of the art exhibits with Marci, including RC helicopter minigolf and an Intel exhibit on steampunk superheroes, followed by the Immerge Light/Music/Art festival.

Immerge was a truly weird event, a collection of digital art installations set on a highly abstracted concrete plaza by the ASU art museum. Waiting for it to start, I amused myself playing with an interactive video/music display hacked together out of a Kinect sensor and an iMac. Playing this instrument with no keys or strings or tactical feedback was really strange. You danced like a maniac in an attempt to elicit music. It was like the humans were entertaining the robots.

At a few minutes past 7:00, thunder rolled, and a projected waterfall rolled down the side of the music hall. Fractal trees grew on pink stucco walls, and the edges of the ASU art museum were picked out in lights. Dancers costumed in electro-luminescent body-suits, and armed with Fresnel lenses and half-globes that displayed strange images (iPads in a handheld casing) moved through the crowd, scanning trees and onlookers. It was like a visitation from some post-human Phoenix, a lush jungle city of beautiful glowing scientists collecting strange aesthetic data on the past.

With the conference a week gone, can I answer the question “what was EMERGE?” It was tons of fun, it was provocative, it was the kind of thing that could only happen at ASU. Did we make the future? Probably not, but hopefully a few more minds were engaged with the future, and a few durable ideas will come out of it. EMERGE was an oasis of optimism and creativity in a desert of bleak short-sightedness.

As Joel Garreau said at the start of the day, “The difference is that at ASU, scientists and arm wavers drink with each other.”

EMERGE Impressions Day 1

I just got out of EMERGE, a design futures event put on by ASU that brought together artists, scientists, writers, hackers, designers, futurists and other maniacs to reflect on what kind of future(s) we want to live in, and then over the course of three days, try and make those futures by any and all available means. I was an ethnographer for that event, which means that it's my job to translate the ephemeral lived experience of attending EMERGE into recorded data. This is my first draft.

Fischerspooner - Emerge from Jon Kane on Vimeo.

0900 3-1-2012
I'm sitting in the cavernous Stauffer Flex Space, balancing a large black notebook, iPad, and coffee. Our rows of black chairs are dwarfed by the height of the hall, strange and hulking objects are shrouded in shadows along the walls. The conference organizers mingle in the space between the front row and the minimalist dais. I can see Bruce Sterling. The attendees are settling into their seats; My fingers poised in anticipation, ready to take notes and live tweet the event.

Cynthia Selin gets up and introduces the conference. Our goal is foresight through design and story-telling to achieve a more sustainable and equitable future. "Stop being a passive consumer of technology and make the future."

13 ASU researchers take the stage to present their research. Topics include: sustainability and interest in K-8 education; biological computer chips that scan antibodies in the blood to diagnosis a full spectrum of diseases; algae into oil, plastic, and everything else; telekinetic cyborg-monkeys; DARPA's transhuman super-soldier program; video games that enable socially transformative and empowering play; social networks that reflexively aim to minimize ecological impact; democratically governing technology; and sensor networks that autonomously seek meaningful knowledge. Bruce Sterling pronounces the morning "The weirdest set of presentations I've ever seen."

I'm listening to a speaker who sounds like a cross between the Borg and Cave Johnson from Portal. Life is good. #emerge2012asu

— Katja (@buildcyberworld) March 1, 2012

1210 3-1-2012
Bruce Sterling takes the stage. After a brief introduction on multidisciplinary, and how scientists and artists talk past each other, asking "What is here that I can use/be entertained by?" rather than "What is actually going on here?" He launches into what he thinks about design fiction. Design fiction is a diagetic prototype. It's a way to use our love of gadgets and our ability to discuss objects/services to move avoid ideological debates. Design fiction is a hack to avoid political paralysis.

Most objects in history have been imaginary, but in the past only elites like Big Auto and AT&T could really do exploratory prototyping like concept cars or Disney EPCOT. In a networked society, prototypes are accessible to anybody, they are public. Design fictions crystallize techno-social potentials by showing them in a human context.

Sterling branches off to science-fiction for a moment. Writing scifi about a phenomenon classifies that phenomenon as scifi. The fact that we think of it as scifi is burdenson (like those telekinetic cyborg monkeys, the DARPA super-soldiers, and the practice of what actually happens in those labs). The big question in science-fiction is now "Does the girl kiss the vampire?" because Paranormal Romance sells book. The demands of the publishing industry have pulled the genre's teeth.

Back to art, design, and science. All our creative disciplines use the same hardware now. Boundaries are corroded. We're spread all over the landscape. Everything is awesome, nothing is interesting, but we can prevail. The idea is to turn speculation into coherent traces, to make it approachable. EMERGE is something that no scifi movie could make happen.

If you know what to call what you're doing, you're not doing real fieldwork now.@bruces#emerge2012asu

— John Carter McKnight (@john_carter) March 1, 2012

Maria Bezaitis takes the stage. She's a senior ethnographer at Intel. Intel actually has quite a lot of ethnographers because they want to know how people use their chips so that they can keep selling them over deep time. But understanding people isn't enough, because the big actors are all hybrids now ((shades of Latour's monsters, cyborgs, and post-humans)). Corporations have invented people, and they are ugly. We need to figure out what our point-of-view on people is, we need to make it explicit, so that we can get something beyond the standard Facebook/Google/Gamer/User.

According to Maria, Big Data is going to dominate the future. Digitization is well into the process of disappearing our things into the cloud. Digital objects are mobile narrative devices. We all make things now, the digital traces that are left behind whenever we interact with a computer, but we do not yet know who owns these traces. The entrepreneurs of the future will need this data, it is the core input to their economy. Thinking in terms of data privacy or piracy is wrong; it boxes up data and perpetuates monopolies. We need to move forward.

I agree with Maria entirely about the future of information. It's just that I don't know anybody who is ready for a world where our digital traces have become an autonomous persona that is essentially beyond our grasp, because as the product of many interactions and systems, it is too rich and full to be deleted, even by us. We like the State/Police having a monopoly on privacy, because mostly they use that monopoly responsibly, and when they don't the ACLU knows where to find them. Corporations like monopolies on their IP because it allows them to make money and stay in business. If both of these concepts are obsolete, we are in for a fundamentally strange and terrifying future.

"Prototypes are very disruptive because they are easily appropriable."
— Maria Bezaitis

1500 3-1-2012
Brian David Johnson, the leader of the workshop on Science Fiction Prototyping is late to the conference because he is arriving from Seoul via Portland. I have voluenteered to pick him up since A) I have a fast car, B) I want to interview him before the workshop, C) I cannot very well ethnograph a workshop that is not taking place. So while the rest of the group is touring an Intel exhibit on steampunk futures, I am navigating the Ballardian labyrinth of the Sky Harbor access roads, weaving and forth between the monumental plinths of the terminals and horrid American sedans and SUVs driven by semi-senile senior citizens. I tell Johnson as much on the phone as he retrieves his luggage. "That Ballard reference--this is going to be the start of an interesting friendship." Indeed.

The workshop and day 3 of the conference deserve their own posts, so I will not include them here. Let it just be known that they were awesome, and I now need to finish my story about a neuropharmaceutical hacker and an investigator from the CDC trying to reach some understanding of trust and the public good in a world where research has outpaced regulation.

And now to sleep, perchance to dream of electric sheep.

Review: The Art of the Long View

I've been calling myself a futurist for the past five years, and for five years, I've been lying. But no longer, because I've read this book, which is every bit as a thought-provoking as Science Fiction for Prototyping proved disappointing. Peter Schwartz is one of the founders of the Global Business Network consulting firm, and honed his skills designing scenarios for Shell Oil in the 1980s. In The Art of the Long View, he makes a strong case for the utility of scenario planning, explains how to develop a proper futurist mindset, and how to create your own scenarios.

Scenario planning is not predicting the future. Rather, it is about challenging the official future, and the assumptions that underlie it. Scenarios force you to examine your unspoken beliefs and values, the evidence supporting them, and how you might react in the future. An organization that includes scenario planning in its process is better able to react to rapidly changing conditions, and less likely to be rendered slowly obsolete through technological change.

Scenario planning is inherently interdisciplinary. A scenario plan has to include technological, economic, cultural, and political factors, as well as individual psychology. Broad areas of knowledge rather than deep and narrow research is better suited at picking up on trends. The ideas and forces that most powerfully influence the future originate on the margins of society, among the dispossessed, the utopian, or the just plain weird. Finally, Schwartz includes a detailed, 8 stage guide to using scenarios in your own organization, with a good balance of theories and examples. Perhaps the ultimate success of scenario planning is that it creates a shared language to talk about the future.

Scenario planning might not be about predicting the future, but a futurist who makes no predictions isn't very useful. The book was published in 1991, and some parts feel oddly anachronistic, like the Japanophilia, the groping towards a 'digital global teenager', and the absence of the War on Terror. On the other hand, he offers three scenarios for the world in 2005: New Empires focused on regional militarism, Market World with multicultural entrepreneurialism, and Change Without Progress, where the wealthy hollow out states, and fear of losing what little remains prevents successful action. Change Without Progress is strikingly similar to the world today, with our 1%ers and 99%ers, paralyzed multinational bodies, and collapsing infrastructure.

Scenario planning is not a strict methodology that automatically produces valid results, it's an attitude towards the future that is based on broad understandings of historical forces and skepticism about the status quo. The results will vary on the quality of the questions you can ask, the data available, and the conversation you foster. But as far as crystal balls go, scenario planning is one of the best.

Innovation, but why?

Ancient peoples worshiped many gods, but modern civilization bows before a single principle: Innovation. As President Obama said in Tuesday's State of the Union address, “In America, innovation doesn't just change our lives. It is how we make our living.” He went on to use the word innovation ten more times, making it the major theme of his speech. Innovation is more than just a word, its influence can be seen in the ways that major institutions, such as business and the military, have re-organized themselves around a state of permanent innovation. In the following, I will examine two paths to this state, and its consequence for the scientific community and society at large.

Carlson traces the development of the corporate research and development lab. The first innovators were inventors, craftsmen who improved devices increment by increment. But as a systemic source of innovation, these small inventors typical of Industrial revolution were hobbled by a lack of capital, and the limitations of human knowledge. While tinkering with existing devices and principles was within the reach of many ambitious craftsmen, truly novel principles and the means to bring advanced technologies to market were out of reach.

Carlson traces the dawn of institutional innovation to the telegraph. As Western Union spread across the country, competing with local firms, railroads, financiers, and anti-trust lawyers, it became apparent that the difference between profit and extinct lay in harnessing the latest in electronics technology, usually by buying patents off of private inventors. Thomas Edison parlayed his success as an inventor into an immense private workshop, however General Electric and its chief scientist, Elihu Thompson, created the modern model of corporate R&D in 1900. Frustrated by the amount of coordination between scattered factories required to build an experimental car, he convinced the GE board to create a permanent lab conducting basic research.

At first, the purpose of the lab was purely defensive, to protect GE products from superior competitors. But as time passed, industrialists realized that new knowledge could be used offensively, to create new markets, to trade with competitors, and to improve public standing. Compared to the 'random genius' of inventors, management preferred scientific innovation because it seemed predictable and controllable. This basic pattern, with the added details of intra-industry collaboration and Federal support of risky technologies, has continued through the 21^st century, although in real terms, large R&D labs have been responsible for surprisingly few breakthroughs, with much of the most creative work coming from smaller companies, a model best demonstrated in biotech and computers, where small start-ups with one piece of very valuable IP are purchased and developed by larger conglomerates.

A second side of institutional innovation is the military, which supports up to half of the basic research conducted in America. War and technology have long been closely intertwined, as brilliant explored by William McNeill in The Pursuit of Power. Perhaps the first noteworthy institutionalization of innovation was the British shipbuilding industry circa 1900, where an “Iron Triangle” of shipyards, admirals, and hawkish liberal politicians pushed steel to its limits with ever more powerful battleships. But it was not until WW1 that innovative warfare had its first chance to shine. Innovation was applied haphazardly, in the form of machine guns, poison gas, aircraft, tanks, submarines and anti-submarine warfare, but there was little coordination between scientists and soldiers. A new weapon would make an initial splash, but quickly add to the stalemate. The war was eventually decided by a German economic collapse.

Many of the scientific institution of WW1 were dismantled in the interwar years, but WW2 was above and beyond a war won by cutting edge science. Radar, operations research, airpower, and of course the atomic bomb were all products of Allied scientific knowledge, while jet fighters and rockets rolled off of Nazi lines at the close of the war. Federally supported labs, and defense companies who sold solely to the government proliferated, too many to name. With an obvious and immediate clash between the Allies and the Soviet Union at hand, neither side disarmed their scientific apparatus. Both sides sought to avoid a qualitative defeat, or worse, technological surprise, investing ever larger sums in military R&D, and leading to the domineering “military-industrial complex” of President Eisenhower's farewell address.

For scientists, these twin processes have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, science has obtained a great deal of funding from industrial and military sources, orders of magnitude more than the pure 'pursuit of truth'. Yet, scientists have lost their autonomy, tied either to market forces or military imperatives. Biomedicine has improved healthcare, but also exponentially increased costs. The process of introducing a new drug is more akin to marketing than science or medicine. Through the military, “Science has known sin,” to paraphrase Oppenheimer's haunting phrase. Where for a period from about 1850 to 1945, the scientist could truly claim to represent a universal humanity, working towards the ends of destruction has permanently damaged scientific prestige and credibility. The values of science are subordinated towards petty, nationalist ends.

For society, pursuit of innovation has lead to the threat of man-made extinction through nuclear war. The process of action-reaction in the arms race brings us ever closer to the brink of annihilation. From the market side, the permanent churning of the basic constituents of society has created an immense dislocation. Skills and jobs can become obsolete in less than a decade. With new-found material wealth came a crass materialism. The objects around us change constantly, their principles of operation becoming ever more opaque. The deep sense of unease pervading American society might be reasonably traced to chronic future shock. Innovation is a god, but it has become Moloch, concerned solely with profit and military might.

So, to return to the State of the Union. I've read it several times, and I feel conflicted. It's a good speech, certainly, and I agree with many of the specific policies he outlines for a continued investment in innovation, yet there is a certain hollowness to it, a failure to grapple with the crux of why we innovate. The main drive to innovate is material, the jobs of the 21^st century should be located in America, yet we don't know that innovation will bring back jobs, at best we know from the lessons of the past that a failure to innovate will mean the loss of more jobs. But the ultimate hollowness came at the end. President Obama made a deliberate callback to the space race, with the phrase “Sputnik moment,” but President Kennedy knew where we were going; the moon, in ten years.

Obama's answer to Kennedy, “I'm not sure how we'll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we'll get there. I know we will.”

That's certainly true. We'll definitely make it to the future the old-fashioned way, by living it, one day at a time. But that's no guarantee that the future will be any place we want to live. Right now, all we have is a notion that America must be wealthier than China. As individuals, as a nation, and as a species, we must decide what is beyond that horizon, and we must build the institutions of governance to take us there.

Thought of the Day

"If we intend to practice anticipatory technology assessment either as inventors or as policy analysts and scholars, we should not approach [The Future] as a surfer would the waves but perhaps as an oceanographer might."
--Sean Hays

"Prediction is very hard, especially about the future."
--Yogi Berra

How should we approach futurism, with data or with intuition? We are (supposedly) serious scholars, and that implies some kind of data. Certainly, our review boards with be happier with dense footnoted and figured papers, but I'm far from certain that data driven research produces better results.

Futurism is not about specific predictions, timelines and events. Instead it is a way of looking at contemporary policy choices, of broadening the framework and implications of our choices. The job of futurist is not to predict, but to scenario build, to give people a sense of what tomorrow is going to look like, and why that vision of tomorrow matters today. I've read a fair amount of futurist work, and I will say that almost anything by Bruce Sterling is more visionary and more true than the best of Kurzweil or Buckminster Fuller.

This is not to say that data isn't important. Futurists have to keep current on the latest scientific advances. Historical analogies are the basic building blocks of futurist construction. But while a rigorous, data driven approach may look impressive, I doubt that the results are any more useful.

We use imagination to explode the present.

Predictions that Work

If you're ever up for a laugh, dig up futurist predictions for the 1930s or 50s, and see what they thought the future would be like. Yet for every atomic rocket car, there are some predictions that were eerily spot on. What are the characteristic of these predictions, vis a vis the ones that don't pan out?

The best predictions of the 21st century were those relating to the computer revolution. Moore's Law, JCR Licklider's papers about the internet (or Intergalactic Computer Network as he referred to it,) and Douglas Englebart's theories about human-computer interfaces. Their ideas were first formulated in the early 1960s, but took until the mid 80s to reach a critical mass of popular use. 20 years out is pretty good for a prediction.

Now, compared to the atomic flying car, to pick one particularly egregious failed futurism, these technologies possessed clear benefits even at early stages of their development, fulfilled a unique need, and had capital costs low enough to be purchased by individuals. As the cost and complexity of a system rises, the number of stakeholder increases, and the odds of a single person derailing the entire endeavor rises. An incomplete nuclear power plant offers little to no benefit. An atomic flying car has to actually work before anyone will buy it. Meanwhile, computers are useful as bulk data processors, and phone lines for communication, long before they become truly interactive.

Of course, the biggest advantage that Licklider and Englebart had was that they made their future. First they envisioned it, then they built it. Scientists have historically been only slightly better at futurism than their lay peers, and no better at the social aspects, but they are the drivers of innovation.

The California Bug

Medical science has yet to isolate the specific germ, spore, or neurofungus that transforms normal earthlings into Californians, but the existence of such a metaphysically virulent organism can and must be inferred through indirect measure. A state populated by a virus-borne colony from the future sounds like just the kind of thing a Californian would believe, but if we calmly inventory California’s contributions to planetary civilization, the mind-virus hypothesis begins to make a frightening kind of sense.
--The California Bug, Howard Rheingold

As a Californian, I'll buy that. California isn't so much a state as a state of mind, and one that is firmly focused on the future. Strike the motherload, make it as a movie star, or build it faster, smaller, sexier in aerospace or silicon valley. A culture requires some sort of mythological wellspring, and CA's can be seen in every raygun gothic gas station, ballardian interchange, or hopeful tech start-up. We Believe in Tomorrow.

The California Dream is similar to, but not the same as the American dream. Hard work and virtue aren't at all necessary in the Golden State. What matters is creativity, vision, and just a slight edge of madness. We don't work hard because we want to make it, or rise above our humble origins, we do so because we must, because we are driven by a primal urge that we do not fully understand.

Where was I going with this? I don't really know. Maybe Science Island, a deliberate organization of people with a clear myth about the Future. We are the carriers of a Mind Virus, find others, infect them, spread the meme.

Visionary Nanofutures: V

In its emergence, nanotechnology is the stuff of science-fiction made real, while science-fictions are the dreams of science. Alone each is amorphous, but together nano and sci-fi set up a mutual interference pattern that results in a visionary quantum collapse. The interactions of scientific innovation and imaginative storytelling create atoms of nanotechnoscientific belief. From these atoms, materials with miraculous properties, a revolution in chemistry, and the universal molecular assembler among others, stakeholders conceive a future which justifies their favored version of nanotechnology. Their “tall and slender tower of reasoning” acts as a scaffolding around which scientists and policymakers design the concrete basis of a nanofuture, and it is from this base that science-fiction authors write the next generation of visions; the cycle repeats itself. Nanovisions can be self-reinforcing, or mutually destructive. If the course of nanotechnology veers away from molecular assembly, Engines of Creation becomes more and more fantastical, and less relevant to contemporary discourse. Conversely, as long as Engines continues to inspire nanotechnologists, molecular assembly will be pursued, even if it is far beyond the current state of the art. Nanotechnology's visionary qualities opens doors for an examination of social and political issues. The future worlds imagined by nanotechnology call into question the failures of our current society; inequality, inefficiency, and the near unshakeable faith in technological progress that defined the 20th century. Most people possess reflexive political opinions on these issues, when questioned, they respond by instinct rather than reasoned consideration. Science-fiction shatters our preconceptions. By changing the context, it frees people to consider what is truly important without overtly threatening their self-image. Though an engineer might openly proclaim that technology is value neutral, and only its applications have moral weight, a science-fictional analysis of nanotechnology permits him to learn that technology cannot be separated from applications; every artifact is political. Because nanotechnology presents such pressing issues of economic competitiveness and national security, yet requires long term commitments, it encourages policymakers to look up from the tactical skirmishing of politics and focus on “that vision thing.” Even if the technical promise of nanotechnology falls through, like so many grandiose visions before, the deep debate it has already stimulated is valuable in and of itself. Speculation is a game, but games prepare us for the test. By prefiguring the course and implications of nanotechnology, visionary nanofictions strengthen society for the stresses of a technological revolution.

Part IV

Thank you very much for staying through this lengthly series. Originally, this was an assignment for Michael Bennett's class on nanotechnology, Molecular Coordinates. I hope that these essays have been interesting and thought provoking, and I am sure that I will return to these themes, particularly interaction of science-fiction and policy making.

Visionary Nanofutures III: Politics of (im)Possibility

Technological development is a human phenomenon carried out by hard working scientists and engineers supported by a social and political framework. Policymakers can govern the rate and course of innovation through direct funding and intellectual property protection, but in a democratic society they are ultimately accountable to the will of the people, which is in large part affected by pop culture. The early years of space exploration are intricately bound up with science-fiction, starting with Jules Verne's Journey from the Earth to the Moon. The British Interplanetary Society, a group of enthusiasts with degree of technical knowledge, “all of them science fiction fans,” designed a workable lunar mission in 1939; their sole intractable problem finding a rocket powerful enough to get the capsule off the ground. In America, widespread support for Kennedy's space program was grounded in popular depictions of space travel, such as the juveniles of Robert Heinlein, the work of artist Charles Bonestell, and the 1950 movie, Destination Moon. “Space boosters amplified these efforts by playing on popular anxieties about the Cold War.” Collier's magazine published a series of articles detailing an unstoppable nuclear bombardment from space. The historical example of space travel provides a guide to modern science policymakers. Nanotechnology cannot succeed if public opinion, swayed by cautionary literature, as exemplified by Michael Cricton's Prey and Bill Joy's essay “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,” turns against it, but conversely favorable depictions in science-fiction will accelerate interest in nanotechnoscience. Books and movies depicting nano-enabled societies in a positive light could assuage a skeptical public (see Wall-E vesus the Terminator saga for an example in robotics.) Fear of nuclear annihilation provided the decisive impetus to the space race, a generalized fear of the future economic stagnation and ecological disaster might serve for nanotechnology. “A clever environmental campaign would explain to the rich how much they are suffering at the hands of old tech... The job at hand is aggressive restoration... Ripping into the previous technological base and rethinking, reinventing, and rebuilding it on every level of society.” Legislative gridlock in Washington, DC and massive public disenchantment with politics is evidence of intellectual bankruptcy in conventional politics. Old political mythologies have lost their credence. The combination of technical and social pressures opens an opportunity for a group of savvy and idealistic politicians to use science-fictional ideas to redefine the American narrative.

Part II-----Part IV

Visionary Nanofutures I: The Oracle

This is the first in a series of five short essays on nanotechnology and science-fiction.

No man can know what tomorrow will bring, but even so human beings are obsessed with catching glimpses of the future. From the Oracle of Delphi to sophisticated stock market prediction algorithms, we seek foresight for profit, peace of mind, or pure curiosity. In ancient times, prophets were able to call upon divine will and supernatural power to lend authority to their claims, but in this age, serious-minded citizens are not convinced by appeals to the ineffable. Methodologies tend to be based on mathematical modeling, as used in The Limits to Growth, a 1972 study on population growth in a finite world, or alternatively in qualitative economic, political, and sociological analysis of the present day. There are problems with both methodologies; mathematical models are vulnerable to extrapolation errors, either using linear models where an exponential would be more appropriate, or erroneous selecting the steepest section of a sigmoid curve as the base for exponential growth. Qualitative analysis, if sufficiently rigorous, provides a better glimpse of the future, but is still limited by contemporary academic paradigms, and is subject to political pressures. A way out of this impasse is imagination; when we go beyond predicting specific issues, we are envisioning a world, a creative and imaginative proposition. In asking questions about the future, we first ask “What is changing?”, and at the dawn of the 21st century, that change is technological. Nanotechnology is one of the new fields that promises to reshape the world, a science of manipulating matter at the atomic level to create substances with wondrous new properties, and artifacts that in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, are “indistinguishable from magic.” Nanotechnology is young, its direction still uncertain, but all agree that its impact will be revolutionary, and requires forward looking ethical and social examination. Discourse on the future of nanotechnology and its ethical and social implications is perforce speculative, and speculation is a dangerous game. Nordmann criticizes the tendency of speculation to “waste the scarce and valuable resource of ethical concern,” but how can work in nanotechnology without speculating? Quantum mechanics teaches that we cannot observe without changing, and when we speculation on nanotechnology, “observing” the future, we affect the development of nanotechnology. The most important speculations are those that stick and stay with us, the ones that we find most “visionary.” Visionary futures are inextricably tied to nanotechnology.

Part II

Political Science Fiction

New York Times columnist David Brooks posted a provocative column on American futurism, optimism, and innovation. He proposes that the quality that makes America unique is an "Eschatological faith in the [that] future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary." But right now due to the sad state of politics, we have lost that faith in the future, that trust in technological progress has moved to China. What we need is a leader (Obama) who can create a national vision of the future, exciting our country to again lead the world.

I agree with Brooks; Americans no longer believe in the future, pessimism and catastrophe are the modern ideologies, and they are poisoning our future. However, the politics of the conventional will not be enough to make this change. We need visionary drive, and Brooks forgets our current visionaries and futurists: science fiction authors. Sci-fi needs to move out of the nerd ghetto, and become part of the national discourse.

Laying out this vision is the hardest challenge that President Obama faces. Even his astounding rhetorical skills may not be up to the task. But if he is going to be that transformative leader that America so desperately needs, he must articulate a national mission. More-so than health care, Afghanistan, and the economy, we have to restore the national engagement with the future

Technosphere/Biosphere

An excellent and imaginative post from Everett.

The upcoming climate/energy crisis is the product of a clash between two competing ecosystems, the biosphere and the technosphere. This is not to say that machine and animal are automatically in opposition, the issue is that the biosphere is unable to react to the technosphere fast enough to maintain equilibrium. Evolution is a process that affects all entities with heredity. The biological process of evolution is an established fact. Evolution in machines is a more radical idea, but one espoused by many STS theorists. To summarize, technologies are built on previous technologies, that is to say they express a heredity. The course of technological development is guided by selection pressures of technical possibility, and the desires of human actors.

The biosphere and technosphere are incompatible, because technical evolution occurs on a time scale orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Without protection, the biosphere will be forced back by technological artifacts that occupy the same macro-niches, in terms of land and resources. The technosphere, areas substantially altered by human technology, now occupies most of the land area of the planet. With its speed enhanced efficiency, without external pressures, it will expand to cover the entire world.

I cannot predict the state of the post-crisis equilibrium. The biosphere will survive, as the rocks and seas that existed before life remain. But as Mike's post postulates, we may see a convergences between biological and technological. Biology will take place on technical substrates rather than physical ones. Genetic technologies will decrease the timescale of biological evolution, perhaps providing a method for the biosphere to compete with the technosphere. Of course, a genetically engineered organism is a technical process, so this is another means by which the biosphere is being rendered obsolete.

Timescales: Expect mankind to become extinct when posthuman evolutionary timescales significantly outpace human evolutionary timescales by an order of 5-10.

Catastrophic Futurism

A brief overview of current futurism shows that most of it is predicated on a notion of catastrophe. Global warming, energy, finance, radical terrorism, the Singularity, all of these concepts have at their core the idea that mankind is held hostage to unpredictable events beyond our control. Taleb's influential Black Swan theory posits infrequent, large scale events as the causal driver of history. There is of course a large degree of validity to this point of view. We undoubtedly do face major problems, but is catastophism a useful futurist model?

Futurism's obsession with the catastrophe has distracted us from the real goal of the discipline. The job of a futurist is not to predict the future, his job is to create the future. If a visionary is right, it is only by accident. Instead of aiming for correctness, we should aim for visionary impact and power. Mankind wants to hope. We must be allowed to dream.

Forget predictive power, these are the axioms we must build on:
1) Which human values are important?
2) What technological means are available?
3) What does a world that embodies our values and means look like?