The debate over the demographic trends in the United States and other wealthy countries can be described a debate between those who care about our children and those who want more of them.  This is apparent once a little bit of logic is applied to the tales of demographic disaster being hawked by those concerned about declining birth rates and greater longevity.

The basic story is that we are seeing a declining ratio of workers to retirees.  This is supposed to mean that our children and our grandchildren will have an unbearable burden supporting us in our old age.  In the United States the story is that we now have about three workers for each retiree.  In 20 years this ratio is supposed to drop to two.

In countries like Germany and Japan the decline is somewhat greater, since they have lower birth rates and, in the case of Japan, less immigration.  They also have somewhat more rapid gains in longevity.

This basic story has managed to make otherwise sane people seriously fearful about the country and the world’s future.  A quick statistic that should alleviate the fears is that the ratio of workers to retirees in the United States was 5 to 1 back in the 60s, far higher than the current 3 to 1 ratio.

{ Monthly Review | Continue reading }

photo { Gary Lee Boas }

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

{ Clay Shirky | Continue reading }

My Lux Capital partner Larry Bock and I wrote the following Trend Spotting piece highlighting the Top 9 Rise & Falls We See in the Year Ahead:

1. The Rise of Celebrity Science

Nations, cultures, economies all get what they celebrate. Celebrate celebrities and we’ll have another generation of over-consumptive, over-indebted, overweight, underemployed citizenry. But celebrate scientists: thinkers, doers, achievers, explorers, inventors, creators and we stand a shot at restoring the very human capital that led to the rise of what made our nation great. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So I founded the largest-ever celebration of science, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, to inspire and galvanize a force of young scientists keen to invent, explore, discover and create. 1 million participants is a good start, just 299 million to go.

2. The Rise of the IPO

Nearly a decade has passed without a blockbuster set of IPOs. Hints abound that the resurgence of an IPO market is upon us. The rise of secondary markets swapping shares of Facebook and other social-networking darlings prove there is pent-up demand and that capital is ready, willing, and able to once again fund high-flying companies that didn’t exist a few years ago and are the essential companies of tomorrow. Groupon, despite having 500 competitors and being founded only two years ago may be the fastest company in history to get to a billion dollars in revenue.

3. The Rise of the Tablet

The iPad was just the start. Samsung’s Galaxy and a slate of other touch tablets will continue seizing netbook and laptop share. When we get over the buzzword and just start calling the “cloud” the “Internet” again, people will also see that the prophecies of George Gilder and Sun’s Scott McNeely—that the network is the computer—were correct all along.

4. The Rise of Nuclear & EVs

My partners at Lux Capital always tell entrepreneurs to shave with Occam’s Razor: find the simplest solution. In energy it’s nuclear power, and the electrification of everything, including cars. Watch for just-out-of-stealth startups like Kurion that are solving the problem of nuclear waste, and other breakthrough companies that will soon emerge from stealth with high-power energy conversion for electric vehicles and industrial motors. Just like the PC business in the 1980s, picking brands will be tough, but betting on the digital guts inside may make fortunes.

5. The Rise of Surprise

The most exciting things always come from unexpected upside surprises. Watch for not-widely followed areas of science and technology. Metamaterials, graphene, battery breakthroughs, solid-state lighting, augmented reality, computational photography, better energy storage and regenerative medicine are all hot areas that Lux and other VCs are on the hunt for.

6. The Fall of Super-Angels

When barriers to competition are low, expect lots of it. Hundreds of companies are getting funded by so called super angels or micro-VCs, but valuations are in the nosebleed sections. As momentum in sectors like social-networking slows (or gets saturated), some angels’ staying power could wilt as follow-on financing face tougher terms from larger VCs.

7. The Fall of Personal Privacy (& The Rise of Good Behavior?)

Regardless of what privacy advocates say: between diplomacy hackers like WikiLeaks , industrial hackers like the Stuxnet virus, geo-tagging, real-time data, status updates, tweets, check-ins, and phone cams in the hands of everyone-the facts is this: personal privacy has irreparably changed. Tech guru Kevin Kelly made a provocative statement: nobody really knows what any technology will be good for: the real question is what happens when everyone has one? Now compare modern technology as an unblinking eye with Southern gun culture. Some believe Southern gentility arose from a gun culture, where politeness was a survival tactic. If people assume they’re being watched all the time, what affect might it have on ethics and behavior?

8. The Rise of Robotics

From UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), and military drones to autonomous systems in hospitals, factories, and shipping centers: expect robots to do the mundane, the menacing, and the miraculous.

9. The Rise of Risk

The world is more connected, less predictable and more volatile than ever before. Models widely taught in universities that assumed linear cause-and-effect, or even bell-shaped distributions in markets, are proving to contribute to more risky systems and bad decision-making. As John Maynard Keynes said, it’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. Low probability, high consequence events, so-called Black Swans, are on the rise with greater frequency and less predictability. Whether it’s financial crises, weather systems, or geopolitical instability-the best way to deal with risk is to know more things can happen than will and you should expect the unexpected.

{ Josh Wolfe Newsletter, Jan. 14, 2011 }

The Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, has come out with its list of Top Risks for 2011. (…)

1 — The G-Zero:
We are entering the era of G-Zero, a world order in which no country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage to drive an international agenda. The US lacks the resources to continue as primary provider of public goods, and rising powers are too preoccupied with problems at home to welcome the burdens that come with international leadership. As a result, economic efficiency will be reduced and serious conflicts will arise.

2 — Europe:
While the eurozone will undoubtedly remain intact in 2011, the region’s political crises will become increasingly unmanageable. There’s a real concern that core European countries (such as Germany) will become less committed to the peripherals, in turn hurting policy coordination and undermining market confidence in the EU.

3 — Cybersecurity and geopolitics:
In 2011, geopolitics and cybersecurity will collide. Whether attacks are waged for power (state versus state), profit (particularly among state capitalists), or pleasure (from info-anarchists, as in the recent WikiLeaks case), this is a key development to watch. Governments, corporations, and banks are all vulnerable to sudden, radical transparency, and a debilitating attack could be a long-term game changer.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

Screenshot { Disney’s Cinderella, 1950 }

Last week scientists at Harvard medical school reversed the ageing process in elderly mice. Please don’t get excited, unless you’re a mouse that is. The application to humans is a long way off and even if it will one day be possible, there are many issues attendant on a population that has the means to live forever. (…)

Medical intervention once seemed limited to curing us of diseases that kill. In my childhood, diphtheria and scarlet fever still carried people off, I had friends crippled by polio and aunts deformed by rickets. All this seemed the proper field for medical intervention.

We all know what happened next, a great swathe of advances in hygiene and medicine drove the major killers on to the back foot. From a combination of better lifestyle, cleaner cities and the benefits of a free health service, people began living longer.

We hear regularly of the latest treatments for coronary heart disease, breast cancer, kidney failure, and we live in the belief that when we have an unwelcome diagnosis the full force of medical knowledge will be marshalled for our benefit. We have come to expect better. Now we want life to go on forever. (…)

While most of us don’t want to live forever, many of us would enjoy living longer. At the same time we would like the planet to survive as we know it. There is a contradiction in contemplating a world where everyone lives much longer and where the planet’s resources are finite.

Unless we can learn to eat sand we should bear in mind the fates of places like Angkor Wat and Easter Island, places once dense with people and culture now empty ruins.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Remember that billion heartbeat limit that seems to confine all mammals, from shrews to giraffes? It’s a pretty neat correlation, until you ponder the chief exception: Us.

Most mammals our size and weight are already fading away by age twenty or so, when humans are just hitting their stride. By eighty, we’ve had about three billion heartbeats! That’s quite a bonus.

How did we get so lucky?

Biologists figure that our evolving ancestors needed drastically extended lifespans, because humans came to rely on learning rather than instinct to create sophisticated, tool-using societies. That meant children needed a long time to develop. A mere two decades weren’t long enough for a man or woman to amass the knowledge needed for complex culture, let alone pass that wisdom on to new generations. (In fact, chimps and other apes share some of this lifespan bonus, getting about half as many extra heartbeats.)

So evolution rewarded those who found ways to slow the aging process. Almost any trick would have been enlisted, including all the chemical effects that researchers have recently stimulated in mice, through caloric restriction. In other words, we’ve probably already incorporated all the easy stuff! We’re the mammalian Methuselahs and little more will be achieved by asceticism or other drastic life-style adjustments. Good diet and exercise will help you get your eighty years. But to gain a whole lot more lifespan, we’re going to have to get technical.

So what about intervention and repair?

Are your organs failing? Grow new ones, using a culture of your own cells!

Are your arteries clogged? Send tiny nano-robots coursing through your bloodstream, scouring away plaque! Use tuned masers to break the excess intercell linkages that make flesh less flexible over time.

Install little chemical factories to synthesize and secrete the chemicals that your own glands no longer adequately produce. Brace brittle bones with ceramic coatings, stronger than the real thing!

In fact, we are already doing many of these things, in early-primitive versions. So there is no argument over whether such techniques will appear in coming decades, only how far they will take us.

Might enough breakthroughs coalesce at the same time to let us routinely offer everybody triple-digit spans of vigorous health? Or will these complicated interventions only add more digits to the cost of medical care, while struggling vainly against the same age-barrier in a frustrating war of diminishing returns?

I’m sure it will seem that way for the first few decades of the next century… until, perhaps, everything comes together in a rush.

If that happens — if we suddenly find ourselves able to fix old age — there will surely be countless unforeseen consequences… and one outcome that’s absolutely predictable: We’ll start taking that miracle for granted, too.

On the other hand, it may not work as planned. Many scientists suggest that attempts at intervention and repair will ultimately prove futile, because senescence and death are integral parts of our genetic nature. (…)

So far, our sole hope for such a voyage to the far-off future — and a slim one, at that — is something called cryonics, the practice of freezing a terminal patient’s body, after he or she has been declared legally dead. Some of those who sign up for this service take the cheap route of having only their heads prepared and stored in liquid nitrogen, under the assumption that folks in the Thirtieth Century will simply grow fresh bodies on demand. Their logic is expressed with chilling rationality. “The real essence of who I am is the software contained in my brain. My old body — the hardware — is just meat.” (…)

According to some techno-transcendentalists, “growing new bodies” will seem like child’s play in the future. (..)

All right, what if one of them finally works? All too often, we find that solving one problem only leads to others, sometimes even more vexing.

A number of eminent writers like Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and Gregory Benford have speculated on possible consequences, should Mister G. Reaper ever be forced to hang up his scythe and seek other employment. For example, if the Death Barrier comes crashing down, will we be able to keep shoehorning new humans into a world already crowded with earlier generations? Or else, as envisioned by author John Varley, might such a breakthrough demand draconian population-control measures, limiting each person to one direct heir per lifespan?

{ David Brin | Continue reading }

I think we have a 50% chance of achieving medicine capable of getting people to 200 in the decade 2030-2040. Presuming we do indeed do that, the actual achievement of 200 will probably be in the decade 2140-2150 - it will be someone who was about 85-90 at the time that the relevant therapies were developed.

There will be no one technological breakthrough that achieves this. It will be achieved by a combination of regenerative therapies that repair all the different molecular and cellular degenerative components of aging.

{ When Will Life Expectancy Reach 200 Years? Aubrey de Grey and David Brin Disagree in Interview }

To see how far back the immortality fantasy goes, read about Gilgamesh, or the Chinese First Emperor who drank mercury in order to live forever — and died in his forties.

{ David Brin/IEET | Continue reading }

Let’s say you transfer your mind into a computer—not all at once but gradually…

{ Carl Zimmer/Scientific American | Continue reading }

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal’s regular review process. “Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript,” he said, “and these are very trusted people.”

All four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, Dr. Judd added, even though “there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”

But many experts say that is precisely the problem. Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence. Neglecting to take this into account — as conventional social science analyses do — makes many findings look far more significant than they really are, these experts say. (…)

For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.

But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance. (…)

In one experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about a forthcoming article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) purporting to provide strong evidence for the existence of some ESP-like phenomenon. (…)

The controversy isn’t over whether or not ESP exists, mind you; scientists haven’t lost their collective senses, and most of us still take it as self-evident that college students just can’t peer into the future and determine where as-yet-unrevealed porn is going to soon be hidden (as handy as that ability might be). The real question on many people’s minds is: what went wrong? If there’s obviously no such thing as ESP, how could a leading social psychologist publish an article containing a seemingly huge amount of evidence in favor of ESP in the leading social psychology journal, after being peer reviewed by four other psychologists? (…)

Having read the paper pretty closely twice, I really don’t think there’s any single overwhelming flaw in Bem’s paper (actually, in many ways, it’s a nice paper). Instead, there are a lot of little problems that collectively add up to produce a conclusion you just can’t really trust.

Below is a decidedly non-exhaustive list of some of these problems. I’ll warn you now that, unless you care about methodological minutiae, you’ll probably find this very boring reading. But that’s kind of the point: attending to this stuff is so boring that we tend not to do it, with potentially serious consequences.

{ Tal Yarkoni | Continue reading }

Nobel prize nominee Umberto Veronesi raised some controversy a couple of years ago when he stated that he believed humanity was moving towards a bisexual future. The famous oncologist was not just looking to raise havoc. He actually had some good points to make. For example, he cited the scientific fact that the vitality of male reproductive cells has gone down by 50% since the end of World War II.

Based on evidence about the dissociation between sexuality and reproduction, the endless possibilities of artificial fertilization, and the fact that men and women are producing less and less hormones every day, Veronesi predicted that, as sexual interaction will lose its mainly reproductive function, bisexuality will become the norm rather than the exception.

{ Brain Blogger | Continue reading }

Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career. In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the prospects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges. (…)

An existential risk is one where humankind as a whole is imperiled. (…)

We shall use the following four categories to classify existential risks:

Bangs – Earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.

Crunches – The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form.

Shrieks – Some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable.

Whimpers – A posthuman civilization arises but evolves in a direction that leads gradually but irrevocably to either the complete disappearance of the things we value or to a state where those things are realized to only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.

Armed with this taxonomy, we can begin to analyze the most likely scenarios in each category. The definitions will also be clarified as we proceed.

{ Nick Bostrom, Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards, 2002 | Continue reading }

The World in 2036

Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us.

The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation. (…)

Companies that are currently large, debt-laden, listed on an exchange and paying bonuses will be gone. Those that will survive will be the more black swan-resistant—smaller, family-owned, unlisted on exchanges and free of debt. There will be large companies then, but these will be new—and short-lived. (…)

Science will produce smaller and smaller gains in the non-linear domain, in spite of the enormous resources it will consume; instead it will start focusing on what it cannot—and should not—do.

{ Nassim Taleb| Continue reading }

artwork { David Askevold, The Ghost Of Hank Williams, 1979 }

Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.

Among them: If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?

And if entire populations are forced to relocate — as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction — what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { Ten Amazing Uninhabited Islands }

Normally when I interview someone, I give them a business card and maybe the latest issue of New Scientist. Today, I give Tao a bottle of my own pee.

Chemist Tao doesn’t find this odd. Urine, he believes, could help solve the world’s energy problems, powering farms and even office buildings. And he has agreed to use my offering to show me how.

Urine might not pack the punch of rocket fuel, but what it lacks in energy density it makes up for in sheer quantity. It is one of the most abundant waste materials on Earth, with nearly seven billion people producing roughly 10 billion litres of it every day. Add animals into the mix and this quantity is multiplied several times over.

As things stand, this flood of waste poses a problem. Let it run into the water system and it would wipe out entire ecosystems; yet scrubbing it out of waste water costs money and energy. In the US, for instance, waste water treatment plants consume 1.5 per cent of all the electricity the country generates. So wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of being a vast energy consumer, urine could be put to use. (…)

To show me the process in action, Tao and Lan add my urine to the fuel cell. As it flows into the cell, a screen shows the output voltage rising to about 0.6 volts. While this prototype is too small to power a light bulb – its output is about half that of an AA battery – scaling up the cell and connecting several cells together should produce practical amounts of power.

{ NewScientist/Gizmodo | Continue reading }

artwork { Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978 | copper metallic pigment and urine on canvas | Read: Andy Warhol’s Piss Paintings }

1 Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation will be the only path to enlightenment

2 Dolphins should be treated as “Non human Persons”

3 Among the eight circuits of consciousness,  preferred are the “Stellar” rather than “larval” circuits

4 In the future, we will live in houses made out of aerogel, metamaterials, amorphous metal and all of our clothing will be made out of E-textiles

5 All people under the age of thirty will live to be immortal*

* To increase probability of this, never touch anything made of plastic

{ ( We Get Our Dope From Beyond The Sun ) | Continue reading }

photo { Santiago Mostyn | More: Excerpt is the first book released by the 28-year-old Mostyn, who, much like McGinley, creates his work almost as a documentary process achieved by constant traveling. }

What is electricity? It’s moving electrons.

Every living thing moves electrons around, not just in nerves but also in metabolism (oxidize one thing, reduce another).

Is it possible to use this metabolic electricity to communicate with man-made devices? If you could, you might be able to make very sensitive biosensors, or even use bacteria to charge your batteries.

The first question you would need to address is whether you could get the electrons generated by metabolism out to the surface of the cell where they could be captured by a metal electrode.

Several species of bacteria do this naturally. One of the best-studied of these is Shewanella oneidensis, and the reason it needs to move electrons to the surface of the cell is so that it can use metal oxides as electron acceptors when there’s no oxygen around: in effect, these bacteria “breathe” metal.  Lots of applications have been suggested based on this unusual property, including uses in bioremediation.

{ It Takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Lina Scheynius }

Why breasts are the key to the future of regenerative medicine

To be in the company of Chris Calhoun is to encounter breasts, and encounter the damn things anytime, anywhere—including over a plate of spaghetti in a bustling Manhattan restaurant.

On this spring afternoon, the 44-year-old CEO of San Diego-based biotech company Cytori Therapeutics pulls out his laptop, launches a PowerPoint presentation, and there they are: conical and cantaloupy, As through Ds, beige and pink and taupe and tan, more breasts than you might see in a women’s locker room, never mind in the middle of a lunch table.

A passing waiter does a double take at this lively slide show, but Calhoun is oblivious. He’s talking excitedly about how these women’s bodies led him and his team of scientists to a discovery in tissue engineering, a process that could well be one of the most momentous medical advances of the 21st century: the use of stem cells—specifically stem-cell-enriched adipose (fat) tissue—to enhance, heal, and rebuild injured or damaged organs. (…)

Breast augmentation is just one development (so to speak) in the company’s more ambitious plan: to introduce stem cell medicine to the mass market—and not using the ethically fraught kind of stem cells from human embryos. Instead, based on almost a decade of trials that Cytori and its academic partners have performed on cell cultures, lab rodents, and now humans, they believe their engineered flab cells can treat more organs than you find in a French butcher shop. Chronic heart disease? In human studies released in May, the cells improved patients’ aerobic capacity and shrank the size of the infarct (tissue killed by lack of blood). Heart attack? A human clinical trial, also reported in May, found that the cells increased both the blood supply to damaged heart muscle and the volume of blood that the heart pumped. Kidney injury as a result of cancer therapy? In recent rat studies, the cells improved kidney function. Incontinence after prostatectomy? Another recent study reported that, by 12 weeks after injection, the cells had decreased the amount of urine male volunteers were leaking by 89 percent.

If Calhoun and his scientists succeed, they won’t just create more cleavage. They’ll make practical a whole new field, one that medical visionaries have dreamed of for decades: regenerative medicine.

It makes sense to apply Cytori’s technology to enhance breasts instead of, say, repair urinary sphincters as a strategic way to move the patented technology out of rats and into people as soon as possible. Hearts, kidneys, and even sphincters have to work in order for us to survive. But we can live just fine without breast tissue, and, outside of feeding offspring, breasts don’t have to do much. The fact is, the scientific and regulatory hurdles to getting Cytori’s cells into clinical use will be easier to clear for breasts than for other tissue: Breasts simply aren’t as necessary as other organs, so the bar for proving to regulators that the technology works will be lower.

It’s also a booming market. In 2009, women forked over $964 million to plastic surgeons for breast augmentation, which edges out nose jobs as the most commonly performed plastic surgery in the US.

{ Wired | Continue reading | Thanks Steve }

It’s not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares.

But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network–how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.

This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.

Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

related { Many of the most popular applications on the social-networking site Facebook have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. | Wall Street Journal | full story }

image { Polly Morgan, Black Fever, 2010 | taxidermy crow wings, wood, wire }

1. It’s going to get worse
No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic
It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

{ Douglas Coupland’s guide to the next 10 years | The Globe and Mail | Continue reading }

photo { Ali Bosworth }

The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation. Yet our beliefs and assumptions on this subject matter shape decisions in both our personal lives and public policy – decisions that have very real and sometimes unfortunate consequences. It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.

This paper sketches an overview of some recent attempts in this direction, and it offers a brief discussion of four families of scenarios for humanity’s future: extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity. (…)

Predictability does not necessarily fall off with temporal distance. It may be highly unpredictable where a traveler will be one hour after the start of her journey, yet predictable that after five hours she will be at her destination. The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict, being a matter amenable to study by the natural sciences, particularly cosmology (physical eschatology). And for there to be a degree of predictability, it is not necessary that it be possible to identify one specific scenario as what will definitely happen. If there is at least some scenario that can be ruled out, that is also a degree of predictability. (…)

Most differences between our lives and the lives of our hunter-gatherer forebears are ultimately tied to technology, especially if we understand “technology” in its broadest sense, to include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions. In this wide sense we could say that technology is the sum total of instrumentally useful culturally-transmissible information. Language is a technology in this sense, along with tractors, machine guns, sorting algorithms, double-entry bookkeeping, and Robert’s Rules of Order. (…)

Supposing that some perceptive observer in the past had noticed some instance of directionality – be it a technological, cultural, or social trend – the question would have remained whether the detected directionality was a global feature or a mere local pattern. In a cyclical view of history, for example, there can be long stretches of steady cumulative development of technology or other factors. Within a period, there is clear directionality; yet each flood of growth is followed by an ebb of decay, returning things to where they stood at the beginning of the cycle. Strong local directionality is thus compatible with the view that, globally, history moves in circles and never really gets anywhere. If the periodicity is assumed to go on forever, a form of eternal recurrence would follow.

{ Nick Bostrom, The Future of Humanity, 2007 | Continue reading | Related: How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? }

We are about to get a very different kind of Internet, one replete with huge potential and danger. The spread of cloud computing will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real time connection and easier collaboration. Cloud computing will give rise to a cloud culture. (…)

In the world of cloud computing our data — emails, documents, pictures, songs — would be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there for us to access from any device we like: computer, television, games console, handheld and mobile, embedded in our kitchen table, bathroom mirror or car dashboard. We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it.

The most familiar early version of a cloud based service is web mail — Googlemail and hotmail — in which email messages are stored on remote servers which can be accessed from anywhere. Google also provides ways for people to store and then share documents and spreadsheets, so many people can access the same document. Facebook and Twitter are like vast clouds of personal information held in a cloud. Wikipedia is a cloud of self-managed, user generated information. Open source software platforms like Drupal are software clouds which coders can draw down from and add to.

Sharing our programmes and data makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage and software with others should lower the cost. Cloud computing would turn computing power into just another utility that we would access much as we turn on a tap for water.

As computing becomes a utility it will power many more devices, many of them with no user interface, more of them mobile and handheld. The cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using different devices should be able to access the same documents and resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier, especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing becomes easier to use. This should allow far more of what Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist calls “combinatorial innovation” as developers mash-up data from different sources, as many people are doing already with Google maps. It is more sensible not to think of the cloud but clouds taking different shapes and forms.

{ Charles Leadbeater, Cloud Culture: The promise and the threat | Edge | Continue reading }

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

{ We Are What We Choose, Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010, Baccalaureate | Princeston University | Continue reading }