July 03 2008 / by Alvis Category: Economics Year: General Rating: 6 Hot
Are we due for a massive cyclical U.S. crisis that finally
spurs institutional change? A regular revolution not tied to the
accelerating curves driving so much growth and innovation?
In large nations big spurts of institutional change tend to
occur every four generations (roughly every 88 years, 1 generation
= 22 years) when economic resources trapped by out-dated,
inefficient systems are shifted over to efficient new systems once
societies reach a cyclical tipping point for change. Generational theorists Strauss and Howe
call this tipping point a fourth
turning, a point in time where social power shifts to the
generations too young to have witnessed the previous correction.
They liken this pattern to a forest growth cycle: 1) new saplings
take root, 2) the forest grows tall, 3) dead branches fall and
choke off new species, 4) lightning strikes, the brambles burn and
new saplings are free to grow—repeat.
As seen widely in biology, this sort of change is called
Punctuated
Equilibrium, which contrasts with the gradual evolution that
many scientists intuitively believed to be true but ultimately was
not supported by research nor the fossil record. Similarly, the
historical record shows that the United States has regularly
experienced punctuated social crises, aka fourth turnings,
stretching all the way back to its roots in England. And just like
all of the scientists that deny punctuated evolution/development,
there is a huge % of the population that does not intuitively
believe another fourth turning will occur because they have not
encountered the historical evidence and are used to a relatively
stable socio-economic situation. (Ironically, this blindness seems
to be built into the very fabric of our social system and may
result in more efficient growth when looked at from the broader
context of inter-meshed life systems on our planet.)
Like it or not, cyclical crises pegged to
human generations are real and
should be considered when evaluating the future, right
alongside accelerating change. So the questions we need to ask are
1) “When will the next fourth turning begin?”, 2) “Are there any
dynamics that might break or trump the pattern of punctuated
national change every 88 years?”
A Likely Fourth Turning Scenario
79 years ago, on October 24, 1929, the Great Wall
Street Crash sparked the Great Depression and the last U.S.
fourth
turning. What followed was the New Deal Era, WWII, the transformation of most U.S. socio-economic
sectors and ultimately the birth of what we now refer to as “The
American Dream”.
79 years later the U.S. economy is facing a variety of problems
that could spark a down-turn and a new fourth turning. (cont.)
June 25 2008 / by Alvis Category: The Web Year: General Rating: 5 Hot
Google’s Vint Cerf, the man
that many refer to as the father of the internet, says that
widening bandwidth and data transfer speeds will soon allow video
downloading to rival, then replace, video streaming as the primary
mode of online video consumption.
“What I’m foreseeing frankly is that video will be used in
download mode more than it will be used in streaming mode as time
goes on,” predicts Cerf, “A gigabit per second would let you
download an hour’s worth of video in 16 seconds, kind of like what
happens with iPod where you can download music faster than you
could listen to it.”
“I anticipate that a lot of video that people will watch will
have been downloaded and then played back whenever they want it,
sort of Tivo style,” says Cerf.
What will this all mean for the consumer and Cerf’s behemoth
employer? (cont.)
June 17 2008 / by Alvis Category: Culture Year: 2020 Rating: 6 Hot
How smart will humans become as change accelerates through
2020?
Futurists and sci-fi authors often present scenarios in which
humans interact with discrete artificial intelligence (like a robot
or software program that talks to us), but far less frequently
offer visions of
runaway human intelligence enhancement (people made smarter by
advances in communication, science & technology) and the
resulting cultural and behavioral changes. The most interesting of
these I’ve encountered include the rapid-time expanding-shrinking
problem-solving networks in Vinge’s Rainbows End,
Stephenson’s Metaverse idea,
Hesse’s Glass Bead
Game concept, Cascio’s participatory
Panopticon, the increasingly
smart mobs envisioned by Howard Rheingold, some of examples
listed in the ASF’s Metaverse Roadmap, and
what Richard Florida calls The Rise of the Creative Class .
But though each of these are important visions in their own right,
I remain a bit surprised at the overall lack of speculation re:
what it might be like for humans to gradually bootstrap their
intelligence over the coming years.
Given the deluge of brain-enhancing, capability-extending new
technologies and ideas soon to be made widely available and
affordable, it’d be great to see more thinkers, writers, and
bloggers venture into the territory of plausible near-term culture
and Intelligence
Amplification (IA). Supported by a large body of consistent,
powerful growth trends and near-term predictions (check them out on
the Future
Scanner), a wide range of social scenarios could be generated,
many of which would be interesting, entertaining and ultimately
valuable to people working to navigate the future (aka, everyone).
In particular, I’d love to see/read simulations in which the most
plausible near-term intelligence enhancing technologies and
software are combined into believable slice-of-life vignettes.
What follows is a list of some powerful trends and technologies
(some broad, some specific, many related to information and
communication) that forward-thinkers might consider when developing
scenarios for how human culture and social cognition will change as
we approach 2020:
GROWING GLOBAL INFORMATION: The
amount of preserved digital data is
growing exponentially as we capture more information about
everything around us.
EVOLVING SOCIAL MEDIA: New
media structures on a wider and more fluid web are evolving to
better organize and process data. Portals like Wikipedia, Digg, Facebook, Medium, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Predictify are just the first
in a long wave of innovation that promises to convert massive
information into knowledge more efficiently.
VIDEO-to-VIDEO CHAT: Expect most cell phones to enable
video-to-video chat by 2012 or so. (cont.)
June 12 2008 / by Alvis Category: Economics Year: General Rating: 2
I’ve been digging futurist David Houle’s new short video
collection on YouTube, mostly because he succeeds at succinctly
describing a variety of more or less complex forces. These are
useful clips that I can show folks like my mom to help convey
certain tricky concepts, much like the great acceleration primer
that Jack
Uldrich recently
posted.
In particular, I found compelling Houle’s three 1-minute videos
on the forces driving what he calls the Shift Age. Not only do they
serve as a basic roadmap to the change ahead of us, they nicely
convey the transformation of consciousness that will accompany this
shift.
Houle’s first video describes a trend that he labels the “Flow
to Global” which focuses on the notion that we are “beginning to
develop a global conscience” and that “everything is reorganizing
around global[ism]”.
Houle’s second post addresses the “Flow to the Individual”, an
increase in choice that makes us “much more powerful as individuals
than at any other time in human history”.
June 11 2008 / by Alvis Category: The Web Year: General Rating: 5 Hot
Jamais Cascio at Open the Future is on to
something big with a new concept he calls the
Participatory Decepticon, the yang to the yin that is the
Participatory
Panopticon. The general idea is that we’re beginning to see
instances of modified/corrupted video content that can greatly
benefit the deceiver via a spike of monetizable attention.
“Such a deception wouldn’t stand for very long, but would almost
certainly last long enough set off a wave of furious blog posts and
mainstream media attention,” argues Cascio, citing political videos
as an example.
Having been burned by fake news like the
iphone face-to-face talk photos and having seen many a critical
thinker hoodwinked by
April Fool’s blog posts I certainly agree that this Decepticon
is in its nascency. The corruption, camoflaging, variation seems to
indicate a new type of evolutionary internet-based
memetic/temetic/content mechanism at work. The fact that deliberate
content “mutation” has economic upside, as seen in the increase of
April Fool’s spoofs, indicates that more brains will take advantage
of the opportunity, especially as the value of human attention
continues to rise. Thus, certain deceptive content packets will
replicate and proliferate much more quickly thanks to the fluid
content economy enable by the internet .
If we view memes and temes as more or less alive, as
Susan Blackmore (one of the most important minds in information
theory right now) argues and I tend to concur, then what’s
happening is these little virtual organisms (in concert with
humans, for now) are developing new survival and reproduction
strategies.
At the same time, humans are benefiting from the increasingly
rapid release of content variations. – Yes, there is a silver
lining. (cont.)
June 10 2008 / by Alvis Category: Social Media Year: General Rating: 6 Hot
Alvis Brigis is a former reality television producer and
story editor whose credits include Motormouth (VH1), The Simple
Life 2 (FOX), Making the Band 3 (MTV), and House of Boateng
(Sundance). This is Part 2 of a series envisioning the future of
the genre.
As I discussed in my last post on
future tv programming that incorporates virtual worlds, reality
TV is one of the many art forms due to experience incredible change
as we enter the acceleration era. The genre is particularly
well-suited to respond to new technology because it that was
recently enabled by dropping technology costs and responds quickly
to market forces.
That being the case, I’d like to explore just how BIG reality programming can get considering the
proliferation of high-quality digital recording devices like the
iPhone (the new better 3G version will start at just $199), the
rise of social media media structures (YouTube, Digg, MemeBox), the
advent of online participatory editing, the near-term potential of
3G and
WiMax communication webs, new camera POV possibilities such as
aerial micro-drones, and the steady progress we are making in
digital storage and battery life/weight.
Ultimately, these are the same technologies that will enable
widespread life-logging, surveillance and an emerging participatory
panopticon. But along the way they will make for some kick-ass,
ground-breaking reality television.
Here’s my Top 10 list of future MASSIVE reality TV shows that I’d love to kill some
precious time watching:
1. THE PROTEST: The world’s
largest and most dramatic political protests are examined
inside-out as real-time footage captured on handhelds and by aerial
drones is crowd-sourced and quickly edited online. As viewers watch
the most popular cuts they can click on a frame to directly access
the live feeds of their favorite broadcasters.
2. MANHUNT: 10 professional
soldiers, law enforcement agents, and reformed criminals stage a
fictional prison break then attempt to elude a public manhunt on
10,000 acres in rural Montana. Watch from afar or come test your
tracking skills for a shot at $1,000,000.
3. THE REAL WAR: A reality show
that actually makes a difference in the lives of the persecuted
masses, The Real War brings transprency and accountability conflict
situations in unstable regions. Sponsored by the UN and private
donors, the program is edited by a panel of international
observers. (cont.)
“Earth now has three replicators – genes (the basis of life),
memes (the basis of human culture) and temes (the basis of
technology),” asserts Blackmore, “I argue that the information
copied by books, phones, computers and the Internet is the
beginning of this third replicator and consequent new evolutionary
process.”
The concept is important because it bridges the gap between
ideas and technology and lays the foundation for more formalized
understanding of what technology is and how it operates.
Here’s her recent TED presentation on
the topic:
What’s the future significance? Blackmore happens to think that
as we automate temetic processes we could be creating a
computational system that ultimately usurps us.
“At the moment temes still need us, but if teme machines became
self-replicating then we humans would be redundant and they could
carry on without us. ... If anything of our civilisation is to
survive then either we have to ensure that climate change and
environmental degradation do not kill us off, or self-replicating
teme machines must appear before this happens.”
June 09 2008 / by Alvis Category: Social Media Year: General Rating: 5 Hot
When exploring the possible futures ahead of us one sooner or
later encounters The
Singularity memeplex, a concept with multiple meanings that
people now generally associate with exponentialist Ray Kurzweil’s
definition, “technological change so rapid and profound it
represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”. He and others
argue this will come about as the result of human-trumping or
super-human-enabling artificial intelligence that fundamentally
transforms our system and ourselves.
While the notion of a big-ass capital-S singularity is a very
important concept, especially for future interested noobs
attempting to comprehend the general ramifications of runaway
technology growth, I agree with the likes of
Eliezer Yudkowsky that it’s become a most un-scientific mash-up
of several different schools of little-s singularity thought,
something he appropriately calls “Singularity paste”.
The result is a huggable yet identity-torn memetic Frankenstein
far more reminiscent of spirituality structures than of the
scientific method which fundamentally violates the cardinal
commandment of rigorous futures studies: Thou shalt not worship
one single future, but the myriad possible futures ahead of
us. (Note the plural. There’s solid reasoning behind it.)
Thus, it should come as absolutely no surprise when blogs like
Wired Science label the Singularity a faith,
thinkers such as Ted Modis call it a myth,
and sci-fi authors including Warren Ellis dub it a religion.
Such competent voices are being forced into adopting a contrary
position to a Big-S singularity because it’s difficult for them to
find the logical middle ground that they would naturally occupy.
(cont.)
June 07 2008 / by Alvis Category: Business & Work Year: 2018 Rating: 2
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has joined
the ranks of those predicting the near-term demise of print
media.
In a recent Washington Post interview (see below), Ballmer
forecasts that, “In the next 10 the whole world of media,
communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down,
in my opinion.”
“There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not
delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers,
magazines that are delivered in paper form – everything get
delivered in electronic form,” he claims.
The reasoning behind this vision is rooted Ballmer’s belief that
“advertising, community and content [will] all kind of blend”,
resulting in a world in which we’re “going to have incredible
pieces of software that run out in the internet that know all about
the publishers that want to sell ads, all about the advertisers
that want to buy ads and all about the users who want to consume
content and advertising; and it sort of algorithmically puts them
together … and it gets smarter and smarter at delivering the right
ad at the right place at the right time. That’s a big business, we
think.”
Personally, I am in full agreement with this scenario, though I
do think that while they will seriously dwindle, some forms of
traditional print will still be around in 2018. But I think Ballmer
is spot-on in his argument that
newspapers and magazines will certainly be hard pressed to
continue their traditional existence(s).
Generational theorists 
