Average city futures

(Attention conservation notice: this is a bit of a ramble).

My local (and rather good) listings mag Venue just ran a six page feature on what the future might be like for the Bristol-Bath region. Got me thinking again about how to approach such a question. I guess I didn’t think the actual feature (not online) was that good, though it was certainly readable. That’s not surprising or interesting in itself – I’ve had a two year immersion in the subject while the feature was a week’s work, I’m guessing.

A question then: how to do better? I’m not sure I can, but I can think how one could start to go about it. One thing which struck me was that the whole thing needs a clear global framing for local issues. This is interesting because it is such a hard thing to achieve the connection between these levels. This was local journalism, so the piece had to be about transport, jobs, and so on in the city. And that is the level at which actual futures will be experienced, too. The global framing was there, but mainly restricted to climate change/oil shock – the overridingly important issue for Venue, rightly in my view – and a bit about food.

What more can one say? One thought I’ve come back to a few times in the last few months is that cities the size of Bristol – a bit under a half a million – are incredibly important. Everyone knows the majority of the world is now urban, and the proportion of city dwellers will probably go up to 70 per cent in the next decades. Less widely noted is that at least half of those people live in medium-sized cities of half a million people or less. So cities like this are the future, for a big slice of humanity. They are also pretty diverse, and may well get more so. But it is interesting to think what resources a city this size can bring to bear to help think about its future – and what it can learn from other cities of similar size with different histories, resources, politics, and propensities to experiment.

This one I’m living in seems well placed in some ways in terms of adaptability and inventiveness. Two universities, and lots of other organisations (the Soil Association gets mentioned a lot at this point, but I am not a fan – though it is certainly true that quite a few people in Bristol think about where their food comes from, though I imagine still a minority). There are disadvantages – the mass of old housing stock is one shared with most other British cities, as is flaky infrastructure like a sclerotic transport network (and London-Bristol trains still run on diesel!) The limitations of a feature, even a long one, also make it difficult to get into the discussions which will really matter – how to get necessary projects started, and how to move them toward scale up.

A case-study here which is not, as yet, auspicious, is the Refit West scheme to insulate and otherwise render less huge the carbon footprints of old Bristolian houses (like our lovely, drafty, 1870s Victorian pile). This scheme is being set up by Forum for the Future, as part of their larger Sustainable Bristol City Region project – which oddly Venue doesn’t seem to know about. Back in March they were saying there would be ten pilot homes give a low-carbon makeover in the Summer, and a scale-up to 1,000 by the end of 2011. Well, maybe, but as someone who would be happy to be one of the ten, I can say that they haven’t managed to get started yet. Finance seems to be a stumbling block, but there is also the problem of finding the best way to get people signed up and provide information about the menu of possibilities for their property, and the best choices.

I am intrigued by the way this is going beyond my interest in having a cosier home (in fact we are notoriously insensitive to cold in our house, visitors say, so heating bills are not that huge – a warning for anyone thinking of dropping by). What is also tantalising is watching a process in embryo which at the moment is very far from straightforward, gets a bit technical by the sound of it, and calls for quite a lot of thought and commitment. But the target (that 1,000 homes round here not to mention the government’s quite fantastical target of 7 million homes retrofitted by 2020) obviously means it has to get pretty simple for the average punter.

So here’s the thing. This is an obvious, urgent need. No (or not much) fancy new technology is needed for most of the benefits to be realised. And it has to be addressed by a quite subtle bootstrapping process which simultaneously builds conviction, commitment, and capacity to actually stick stuff into houses in ways people can live with, financially and practically, and tell everyone else are worthwhile. All of that will be easier when energy prices have doubled or tripled, but we really need to start now. A city this size still strikes me as a promising place to figure all this out. There are enough sympathetic homeowners, perhaps, to get started, plenty of wider networks to spread the word, contractors who can be encouraged to get into the business, and lots and lots of houses to benefit from the scheme if it achieves take-off. But it doesn’t really seem to be happening… Don’t know if the problem is lack of pump-priming funds, the need to have some demonstrators in place to convince others to sign up, or difficulty working out what a self-propagating scheme would look like. Getting people to spend money on something they already own (or are paying for) is a hard sell.

Oh, and incidentally, the Paris-emulating bike-rent scheme seems to be a bit of a joke in Bristol as well. It seems 140 people have signed up to use the shiny new city bikes, which exist in small numbers in a tiny set of locations. And this is the second greenest (this year) city in the UK which has ambitions to be a cycling mecca as well… Maybe the best future strategy is to start as many schemes as possible as most will stall? Or perhaps this is an example of failing to learn from other cities who have made this kind of thing work.

Near future fiction

I’ve banged on before about the supposed problem of imaging plausible (and non-horrid) futures in fiction. I had forgotten about the related debate about “mundane” SF – the ironic tag for stories about futures which only contain science which does not go beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable to imagine.

The constraints, as defined a few years ago by Geoff Ryman in the Mundane Manifesto, include no faster than light drive, no alien contact, no AI or time travel (and no singularity, needless to say). So the future occurs on this planet, and involves people solving, or failing to solve, recognisable problems with plausible means.There was a special issue of Interzone, but no anthology as far as I know – mundane SF not sounding obviously saleable!

Now however there’s a whole book somewhat in this vein. The concept is a bit different, as it is more about bringing in real science and was produced by writers invited to discuss scientific possibilities with researchers and then imagine what might come next. There’s a useful little preview here. The cast is stellar.

I’ve ordered it – here’s hoping it is as well-stuffed with ideas as the volume of microfictions collected in Futures from Nature, but the authors have been able to take advantage of a little more space. First, though, have to finish reading Richard Powers Generosity, which is definitely near future fiction, and classy with it.

Future shock revisited

Wanted to go to a local screening last night, but indoors with ‘flu or some viral relative – so obviously I looked for the main attraction on YouTube, and of course it is there: Future Shock (1972), in five jerky parts.

It is a pretty fair attempt to convey the themes of the book on film. Much added value from the commentary voiced by Orson Welles in his portentious prime. The effect is slightly undermined by the fact that, on screen, wreathed in cigar smoke and solidly handsome, he never looks even slightly shocked himself.

Anyhow, here’s part one in all it’s glory.

Where no (transhu)man has gone before…

Writing about the singularity – the technologically transcendent kind, not the black hole kind – is OK when it is arguing about whether it will happen, and when. But science fiction writers  want to write about what happens afterwards (of course!). This is liable to make no sense – that is the whole point of calling the putative exponential explosion in intelligence which leads to a new order the singularity.

So, seeking some recommendable stories for one of the “further reading” bits of the Guide, I’ve been pondering attempts to deal with this. They seem to fall into a few classes.

You can write about the people left behind –much the same as writing about those Left Behind after judgment day, or survivors of any garden variety apocalypse. Those left behind after a singularity are still liable to run across magical things happening now and again, but basically get on with their mundane business as best they can like any other people-in-a-novel.

You can write through the singularity, as it were, and (usually) end up not making much sense. Naming no names, this does happen, and while it reinforces the point above, does not reinforce it any more with repeats of the same experience. They are merely dull to read. So, for me, are all the stories where this is just the cue to descend into fantasy. Yes, I know what wise old Arthur said about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, but it tends to be fantasy of a peculiarly undisciplined kind. Fantasy which works (hardly any of it, for me, but I daresay that is my problem) needs rules. After the big S, there aren’t any (are there? I guess laws of physics apply, but any science fiction  writer with the multiverse at their disposal can easily change them).

More subtly, in some ways, you can write through the singularity and pretend it makes no real difference to the people you started with. This is often because they are now simulacra in some artificial world, and can be reproduced so perfectly they are indistinguishable from their pre-singularity selves. This also seems kind of pointless, in narrative terms, as the main fresh possibility it opens up is whether the characters in question realise they are now inside a simulation, and whether they care/what they try and do about it. (A suitably chilling early answer to that question was Harlan Ellison’s classic I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The hapless characters who do the bidding of Ellisons’ all-powerful, human-hating supercomputer aren’t actually inside a simulation, but their situation has many of the same qualities. It is a kind of pre-emptive response to Frank Tipler’s vision of heaven being located at the Omega Point. There are copies around on the web if you haven’t read it…  but the author is, er, keen on defending his copyright.)

Or, you can have your characters live through the singularity, and take advantage of lots of bizarre and fantastic possibilities, but retain essentially the same personalities and temperaments they had before. This, I think, is what Charles Stross does in Accelerando. His people get incarnated inside machines, killed and reborn, travel through the galaxy in miniaturised computers, and comment on all these things. But they don’t really change, in their essentials. This is a bit of a cheat, but a necessary one to avoid the main trap of loss of sense. It still has the problem that, once no-one need ever die and can essentially have anything they want if they play their cards write it gets harder to care about the contingencies of their story – a danger Stross was presumably aware of when he called the singularity the equivalent of pixie dust.

There is a final variant, a kind of left behind, which I quite like. This involves the advent of self-amplifying artificial intelligences which grow so clever and powerful, so fast, their newly-created virtual worlds immediately interest them far more than any interaction they could possibly have with their human progenitors. They essentially disappear, rather like stuff going on behind the event horizon of the other kind of singularity.

A nice example is a story I just came across by the Bristol writer Gareth Powell. The title story of his collection The Last Reef, depicts people having unpredictable encounters with reefs – the accumulated detritus from nodes of a bootstrapped artificial intelligence network which has left such remnants lying around the solar system. Some harbour weird but useful technologies they made along the way, which scavengers can try and work out. One, encountered on Mars, is still open to human interaction, but absolutely anything can happen. It turns into a characters-saved-inside-a-simulation story after a bit, but the image of the artificial reef is a striking one.

Don’t know if this inventory is exhaustive, but so far it seems to confirm that an actual vision of the singularity is an impossibility. All you can do is make meta-statements like Damian Broderick’s: “By the end of the twenty-first century, there might well be no humans (as we recognize ourselves) left on the planet – but, paradoxically, nobody alive then will complain about that, any more than we bewail the loss of Neanderthals.”

Like he says, this assumes no-one like us is left behind, so rules out the other post-S narratives too. It also seems a bit hard on the Neanderthals, a sub-species whose loss some people, at least, do bewail, and who it would be good to know more about. But still, you get the point. And in time, if we are in some way recognised – even, maybe on a good day, venerated – as worthy ancestors, our actual lives might seem as curious to those to come as, say, meercats seem to us. Cute, amusing, worth a well-made documentary every now and again but not, you know, especially relevant to our own culture.

As I say, doubtless not exhaustive. What have I missed?

information roundabout

I was dubious about Twitter (140 characters too like txt mssgng, which I can’t stand to use at all), but after 24 hrs am now convinced it’s useful…

item, some guy I’d not heard of following me (why? no matter), so check him out: oh look, he’s following Fred Spier, whose 1996 book on Big History I have here somewhere – and Spier himself tweets that a) he has another book out next year, and b) the Club of Rome had a meeting in Amsterdam in Oct. They made a declaration, too. I’d missed that, but am reading it now…

Also impressed that Fred’s books are 113 and 280 pages, respectively. Mine seems to be getting longer. I foresee cuts when it all gets to the publisher, which makes me feel inefficient, but couldn’t find an another way of getting this one done.

optimism in depth

Just discovered that this enterprising chap is writing a book about the future which I’m relieved to note won’t be out until 2011…  and blogging the while.

I would just add his notes on his journeyings for research to the blogroll, but worth highlighting here too as there is lots of interesting stuff to read along the way.

Smil in full flow

admiration for Vaclav Smil’s command of a range of disciplines, sources and statistics tends to break out here quite regularly.

I’ve just renewed it by watching this discussion from the recent Perimeter Institute Conference with the – also admirable – Andy Revkin.

you can see it all here

Be patient with the opening sponsors’ roll and you get to a compelling exposition of where we are, where we might be going and whether there is hope (a qualified yes!).

50 more years?

Cheerleaders for life extension which avoids extended decrepitude always make good copy. Here’s some. On one hand it reads as a pretty lazy example of journalism by press release (and from the BBC, too). On the other, it is representative of one line of development which is tempting to buy in to – replacement joints and home grown organs.

Read on, and the level of ambition is some way ahead of the technology. The aims are ungainsayable. More durable hip replacements and the like are an obvious goal when some folks now need a second artificial joint because they live so long that the first one wears out. Removing cell surface antigens from organically grown heart valves or skin grafts is also a plausible and desirable route to follow.

These two lines of inquiry mean, apparently, that “most of the body parts that flounder with age could be upgraded”. Aside from the odd image of a body part floundering, this is quite a big claim to make on the basis of a couple of joints and a few heart valves, but we want to believe it so no sceptics are asked for quotes. That would be too much like hard work/real journalism perhaps…

The piece does say, though, that to replace all donor tissue will take 30 to 50 years. I’ll be a centenarian myself by then but I’m not worried. The singularity is due somewhat before then, isn’t it?

Smoke, mirrors and carbon?

I have a bit of a problem with climate change. I am trying not to give too much weight to technology as an influence on possible futures. And especially when thinking about global change I am convinced that social technologies, as it were, will be as important as anything deriving from natural sciences or engineering in fashioning a response which is on the right scale. The problem is finding them harder to write about. Geo-engineering is so much more fun to think about than cap and trade. I am reasonably sure, for example, that some carefully contrived market will be needed to drive technological deployment in the right direction. But how to contrive that? Part of the problem may simply be my own economic illiteracy. But the stuff does really seem pretty mysterious.

Item: a talk in Bristol the other night from Graciela Chichilnisky, who takes credit for the carbon market built into the Kyoto Protocol. She is an extremely interesting woman, if not quite as good at explaining stuff as she seems to think. This may be deliberate – she is also obviously a wily politician, and does a good line in not quite hearing the question properly when taxed with something she has said which is arguably incorrect. But I left pleased that someone so smart, committed and optimistic is still deeply involved in the discussion in the run up to the Copenhagen meeting which will have to agree how to follow Kyoto. However, she left us with copies of her piece last week in Time magazine which explains how to break negotiating deadlock between the US and China over limiting the latter’s emissions. The crucial paragraph says:

“In the agreement — think of it as a financial trade — the U.S. would buy an option to require China to lower its emissions below a certain agreed level. At the same time, Beijing would take out what amounts to an insurance policy to establish a minimum amount that Washington would pay Beijing if or when the U.S. exercised its option. The cost of Beijing’s insurance policy and the cost to the U.S. of exercising its option on China’s emissions levels would be set at roughly the same price.”

I so don’t understand how that works. It might as well say, “smoke here”, and “mirrrors over here”. Can anyone point to a place where these things are explained intelligibly? Carbon futures for dummies: that kind of thing.

Biophilia or videophilia?

Anyone writing about the future has to try and become conscious of their prejudices when evaluating weak data. I’ve stumbled slightly over one of mine when writing about biodiversity and enjoyment of wildlife. The strongest argument that we need to relate to lots of other creatures is Ed Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis. I’ve always been suspicious of this on the grounds that a) it amounts to saying that everyone else is really, at heart, like Ed Wilson and wants to be friends with the animals – or ants in his case – and b) it seems a crude use of the argument from the environment of evolutionary adaptation, that all-purpose explainer.

So, already believing that a liking for “nature” is as much culturally learnt as instinctual, I was much taken with the findings reported by Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois in 2006 that visits to national parks in the USA have gone down by a quarter in the last two decades, and continue to decline by around one per cent a year. Two years later the trend was confirmed in a broader study which looked at other nature-based recreations in the USA, and also included data from Japan and Spain. The data suggest that the time spent visiting national parks is being taken up by playing video games, surfing the net and watching movies – videophilia is displacing biophilia, as they put it. It seemed to fit. City folks (that’s me) don’t see wildlife much except on TV, and don’t miss  what they don’t know.

My perspicacious editor queried this, pointing out that the US is not necessarily representative, nor pointing the way the rest of the world is heading. And it turns out – courtesy of a paper highlighted in a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review – that the finding isn’t actually that robust. A 2009 paper in PLOS Biology reports that a survey of 280 protected areas in 20 countries showed a decline in visits in the US and Japan, but a general increase elsewhere.

So perhaps conservationists can take heart – they still have a large constituency who crave the pleasures of a landscape with at least some flora and fauna. I think my prejudice remains more or less intact though. Even if this is true, it is not obvious how it relates to biodiversity on a global scale. Put aside the fact that, for all I know, train-spotting is as satisfying as bird watching. Even if it is not,  our biophilic needs might be met rather simply. I have been in a tropical forest and found it impressive, but I don’t feel desperate to go back. I’ve been on a boat ride which afforded a glimpse of a (rather small) whale, which was nice. But I’m pretty content with my thrice weekly run round the park, watching the insect life in my small garden, and occasional trips to the English countryside and (better) coastline. Maybe I’m an unwitting sufferer from what the US journalist Richard Louv rather fancifully, if rather wonderfully, dubbed “nature deficit disorder”. But I am an urban creature, and happy to be so.