converging on what?

First of occasional notes on new books on futuristic subjects…

One of the common themes in discussions of the singularity is that trends apparently under way in different areas will interact, and reinforce each other. It is not just that computers are getting smaller and faster, cell biology is unravelling how molecules build organisms, or nanotechnologists are fashioning new materials - but that all these things are happening at once.

The idea that this matters makes sense as an elaboration of one view of the history of technology. Different technologies (and different sciences for that matter) often come together to make possible things which would not happen without all of them working at once.

The idea is explored at length in Stanley Schmidt’s 2008 book The Coming Convergence, a future-oriented work which spends most of its time reviewing aspects of the past. Soome the examples are classic case-studies in innovation. Steel frame construction made it possible to build skyscrapers: electric-powered safety elevators made it possible for people to actually use them. X-rays provide images inside the body: computer processing allows a series of X-rays to be built up into a 3-D scan. Solid-state electronics, minaturised with aid from many other technologies used to manufacture microchips, gave the world personal computers. Fibre optic cables - often connected to old-fashioned copper wires at local level - connected them all together. New kinds of software allowed anyone to search and retrieve the files stored on other computers all over the world. And good old electromagnetic waves allowed the whole system to be accessed from a laptop which is free to roam without wires.

So OK: convergence, or perhaps interpenetration, is an important part of the story of most modern technological systems. Can’t decide, though, whether this is a real insight, or a bit banal. Some things enable you to do other things, in unexpected contexts. Different stuff which is around at the same time can get combined in new ways. Creative, sure, and doubtless the combinations that work only seem obvious in hindsight. But does this count as a big idea? Persuasion here not helped by one of Schmidt’s opening examples (World Trade Centre plus fully-fuelled jumbo jet equals atrocity). If his point is that convergence can lead to the unexpected, it is forcefully, if crudely, made.

But insightful? Still not sure. Nor whether this gives any special insight into what the allegedly soon to be with us great convergence of bio/info/nano technologies will look like.

(Second) lives to come

Jeez, not sure how almost a month went since last posting here. Have been writing quite hard, but the point of doing this as well is to feed into the writing - and vice versa - so I am resolved to post more often to help that along.

Which may evoke some more random comments. Like this one. I am intrigued by the great divide between people who are attracted to computer games and such, including online offshoots like Second Life, and those (like me) who aren’t, or at least have not been so far.

One consequence seems to be that there are beginning to be whole worlds which some people understand, some don’t. I guess that describing them to me is bit like me talking to someone who is literate, but has never actually read a book…

I want to find time to explore, partly because of a peek at the National Physical Laboratory’s presence in Second Life, which has a lot of stuff to help people get genned up on nanotechnology. So in a future-oriented book I s’pose it might be cool to add a citation to the right second life Island (is that the right term?) to the further reading type references when I do the nanotechnology bit. Which means I have to look at it first. And then what will happen? Will my life be sucked away by new virtual past-times? I doubt I’m susceptible to that. I am too wedded to the old virtual technologies of print. But it does occur to me one might be able to do things in Second Life, in due course, to help flog a book… Bet the publisher would love that.

Of course - oh the irony - I learnt about this interesting small corner of second life in a lecture, not online, so still need to actually get avatared up and enter the environment proper. Which seems weird, but I’m sure isn’t really.

How quaint this reservation will doubtless seem in years to come.

Decarbonizing - fast or slow?

I am trying to get a clearer fix on the issues of energy and atmosphere – which loom as a crucial chapter for the Rough Guide, and one which will be hard to get to grips with.

This will, as elsewhere, aim at broad brush summary, and one could argue that, amid the near-inexhaustible flow of commentary and analysis, there is consensus about some things.

One is that decarbonising energy supply is a good thing because a) we need to do something about the atmospheric effects of fossil fuels and b) our favorite fossil fuel is not going to last much longer.

Not a problem defending either of those propositions in general, I think. But much harder to navigate through all the disagreements about how much time we may have to deal with either, and which is the most pressing reason for action.

Two examples: Rob Hopkins, author of the new Transition Towns Handbook, is firmly in the peak oil camp. As his foreword writer (Richard Heinberg) puts it: “as fossil fuels go into decline, we will see a century of contraction in consumption levels that could cause the global economy to implode, undermining the survival prospects for the next generation.” Hopkins concurs, and thinks this will happen soon.

Putting aside the fact that this dramatic sound bite lumps fossil fuels together, there is clearly something in the peak oil argument. And Hopkins argues, essentially, that it is tactically useful because it persuades people of the urgency of the situation more effectively than just talking about climate change. “It has been my experience… that peak oil… can do more to engage and involve people and communities than climate change.”

Other example. Vaclav Smil, who seems to offer judicious reviews of more topics than any one academic can usually manage, calls peak oil warnings the product of an “apocalyptic cult”. More temperately, in Energy at the Crossroads, he argues that “the timing of oil’s global demise depends not only on the unknown quantity of ultimately recoverable crude oil resources (which has been, so far, repeatedly underestimated) but also on the future demand whose growth they have usually exaggerated and that is determined by a complex interplay of energy substitutions, technical advances, government policies, and environmental considerations.”

And in any case his long historical view is strikingly optimistic because:
“whatever the actual course of future oil extraction may be, there is no reason - historical, economical, or technical - to interpret the demise of today’s [2003] cheap oil as a harbinger of unmanageable civilizational difficulties. Energy transitions have been among the most important processes of technical evolution: they were driving our inventiveness, shaping the modern industrial, and postindustrial, civilization, and leaving their deep imprints on the structure and productivity of economies as well as on the organization and welfare of societies. …”

there are local and sectoral costs and problems, but

“historical perspectives show that every one of these transitions - from biomass fuels to coal, from coal to oil, from oil to natural gas, from direct use of fuels to electricity - has brought tremendous benefits to society as a whole. So far, every one of these transitions has been accomplished not only without damaging global economic performance, but with eleavating economies and societies to new levels of productivity and affluence, and with improving quality of the environment. Se even if we were too experience an early global decline of conventional oil production we should see this as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe. Energy transitions have always presented astounding benefits for producers of new supplies, and historical experience also makes it clear that from a consumer’s perspective there is nothing to be feared about the end of an energy era”.

In the end, his position is not too far from Hopkins, because he sees biospheric considerations as paramount, and accepts that atmospheric CO2 must be stabilised. It would be fair to say that he sounds less urgent about it all though – or maybe just realistic. Serious energy transitions take decades, maybe generations.

This seems persuasive, but might it just leave one reassured about peak oil but more worried about climate?

optimism again

an interesting reflection on optimism here at worldchanging.com

not going to summarise, except to say that the argument is political,

and in itself optimistic, (I think).

business as usual

The Guardian, slightly surprisingly, finds a whole news page today for a report from the Chartered Institute of Management on, less surprisingly, “Management Futures”.  More people will work from home, apparently.

Download the thing, and you will find it is pretty slight (though there is a full “environmental scanning” report which you may have in May, for a mere £200.) The bits available now give no hint about methods, contain virtually no numbers - not even virtual numbers - and are in bite-sized chunks, which look more or less randomly assembled.

This is especially so for the less probable scenarios they run through. The environment (as opposed to the business environment) gets a single mention. Admittedly the horizon is only ten years, but was there really no further discussion of climate change? And the actual disaster mentioned, oddly, is an earthquake in Tokyo. Doubtless that would be bad for business, but other risks might need considering too, one feels.

I did like this one, though:

“A major terrorist attack wipes out  infrastructures and hubs of business travel like Heathrow and JFK in several Western countries simultaneously. Global business slows down considerably as business travel jams”.

Scary, eh?

deju vu

A double dose of deja vu today on the futures front.

Living in Bristol allowed a drop in on the launch of Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook (available from Green Books). He’s an impressive chap - good communicator, persuasive, and has synthesised a lot of information about peak oil, climate change and what people could actually do about them if they want to. The book is a result of the Transition Towns movement, which he began in Ireland a few years ago and is now spreading as a grassroots thing allowing people to work optimistically for a different future.

Deju vu comes in because it all sounds a lot like stuff I was hearing 30 years ago, the days of the long defunct Undercurrents magazine, when we lived in Manchester. And then as now the chance of it making much of an impression on a large city seemed remote.

We’ll see. Transition Towns has obviously made a difference in quite a few small places (Totnes is the exemplar – I imagine it as full of old hippies, though I’ve not been down there at all recently). The big cities on the list so far are Nottingham, a small part of London (Brixton!) and Bristol, which has 400,000 people, a carbon footprint which belies it’s somewhat Green reputation, and a vast airbus plant which is celebrating its new mega contract to build wings for a fleet of airborne fuel tankers for the US airforce. So a bit of a way to go before they join the transition. Still, Transition Bristol have planted lots of fruit trees, and every movement for change has to start somewhere. I may join in next year with a tree of my own.

The whole thing is positive in outlook, optimistic and energising, and committed to the idea that the transition means a better (more fulfilling etc) life. Skimming the book, though, gives the impression that it is small town stuff, not in any pejorative sense, but just that the people involved don’t really like living in cities. This isn’t on a par with James “Long Emergency” Kunstler’s loathing of the suburbs, but it is still there I think. Me, I’m a city boy, deeply committed to the existing division of labour, and anything remotely approaching self-sufficiency strikes me as wrist-slashingly tedious, I’m afraid.

And the other bit of déjà vu? It is this flying car, a “prototype” on show at the New York Motor Show which will allegedly be in production by 2010. Yeah, right. Interesting how the old techno-fantasies never die, they just keep on getting recycled so that Retro-Futures websites end up looking like the news pages. Expect to see the jetpack on MSN any day. Presumably if Transition Towns people ever met the designers of the AirCar there would be a slight communication problem?

Futures galore

Seems to be a small burst of future-related speculation, rising above the usual background level, at the moment.

Some is good old-fashioned feelgood technophilia. Michio Kaku has a new TV series airing in the US – which is being elucidated helpfully on the Panopticon blog.

It isn’t around in the UK yet, but judging from the lavishly designed Discovery Channel website and Panopticon’s commentary it goes beyond even his Visions (old book, more recent TV series), in high-tech optimism about a future which realises science fiction dreams using technology Kaku really believes will happen. Nothing tentative here:
“What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow.” Wow…

Kaku’s exuberance is beguiling, but there’s a more sober taking stock of 21st century technical challenges which was launched at the AAAS last week by the US National Academy of Engineering
These concern such worthy, and necessary goals as securing cyberspace, preventing nuclear terror, and ensuring access to clean water, but good old Ray Kurzweil – I assume – managed to get “reverse engineering the brain” on the list as well. So good luck with that. They are all attracting some intereting comments though.

Rather different stuff going on at FACT gallery in Liverpool, and on its website.
They have an art exhibitions on show now about bioengineering: sk-interface – curated by the Jens Hauser (an interesting but somewhat theoretically inclined chap judging by a talk I heard him give at the RCA in London last week). Exhibition looks great though, and is first of a series which runs up to the end of the Summer and are all geared to provoking thoughts about possible futures. The British Association meet in Liverpool in September, just in time to miss all of this, which is a pity. The FACT website has a blog and records of some community discussions, but these are fairly quiet so far. May be worth watching how they develop as the subsequent exhibits are rolled out.

No smart way to sum all this up, except to say that the future does seem to keep cropping up. Now why is that?

Two dimensional optimism

A rather nice sub-division of optimism in a vintage tome on The Image of the Future by one Fred Polak.

Any society, he argues is characterised by a particular image of the future, which defines it srelation with events to come. And optimism-pessimism here can be mapped in two dimensions - essence-optimism (or its obverse), and influence-optimism.

You get the idea. Essence optimism is for those societies where paradise is pre-ordained and we just get on with stuff until it arrives - probably in the after life. Divine harmony rules. Influence pessimism is then neither here or there, as the outcome will be fine. At another extreme is essence pessimism allied with influence pessimism - the view that the universe is basically chaotic, if not actually malevolent, indifferent to human striving, and all we can do is resign ourselves to our fate. (Original sin fits in here).

The dynamics are more interesting in the various combinations of essence pessimism and influence optimism. Existing reality sucks, but things might get better - either by making better arrangements with higher powers or by dint of our own effort (say, prayer or work). One option here highlights eschatology, the other utopia, though the two need not be mutually exclusive.

Quite interesting, this magisterial game of classifying all known cultures into a simple scheme. More difficult, perhaps, to place contemporary currents of thought in this grid, though the author - in a work originally written in Holland in the 1950s, seems convinced that Western culture had lost its influence optimism. Haven’t got far enough into this long, scholarly work yet to understand in detail why he believed that.

You can download the whole thing from this link at the futurefeeder blog.

Archaeologies of the Future

Fredric Jameson has registered faintly on my radar for years, but I’ve never followed his trajectory. But a title like Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions demanded a look as I tick off titles with the f-word in them.

It’s an undeniably impressive piece of work, which would demand deep study to deal with properly. Full of stimulation, occasional obscurity, and provocative comments on significant SF authors. My immediate, probably superficial, reaction is that putative future readers of a Rough Guide to the Future probably don’t require a summary of his amazingly erudite history of utopias. But a couple of the key chapters/essays yield interesting points I do want to explore.

Boiling these down so far that all that is left is a sticky residue, they seem to be that
a) utopias are inherently political because they keep alive the idea that things (the social order) could be different than they are – we have not reached the end of history. Interesting because it underlines that the future, and the present read as a precursor of the future which will become real, is political.

and b) science fiction’s alleged efforts to imagine the future succeed only in demonstrating that we cannot really imagine anything radically different from past or present because they all basically depict societies which are composed of recognisable elements of the one the author lived in at the time of writing, or has studied, albeit not usually dominant elements. This sounds pretty similar to the plausible argument that SF is supposedly preoccupied with aliens but constitutively incapable of depicting convincing aliens because we cannot imagine them – they are always somewhat like creatures or entities we already know about, and could not be otherwise. If they were not they could not be described at all. You can of course generalise the argument to ideas and entities of all kinds. Nothing new under the Sun…

That reduction of Prof J seems to produce a contradiction, but I take it from passages like the following…

“Perhaps… we need to develop an anxiety about losing the future which is analagous to Orwell’s anxiety about the loss of the past and of memory and childhood”

He points up beautifully how Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time is built around the tension of time-travellers from a more liberated future desparately worried about the politics of the novel’s present obliterating their particular history.

Elsewhere he puts it a little less pithily, but still quotably…

“the most characteristic SF does not attempt to imagine the “real” future of our social system. Rather its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.”

And we need the simplification, or artificial coherence, of fiction to do this because… “ It is this present moment – unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises are untotalisable and hence unimaginable and also because it is occluded by our private fantasies as well as of the proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence – that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF is offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered”.

I’m still trying to unpack this formulation, and not sure I entirely agree, but there is something here which is important, I reckon, and it does seem to be one of the ideas at the heart of the book.

It would be good to spent more time with Archaeologies, and the two volumes which precede it in Jameson’s trilogy on modernity, politics and culture, but I don’t have a couple of months to spare just now. Anybody read him more closely?

prediction that works?

“as long as consumers don’t cotton on to the fact that the oil supply they depend on is in permanent decline and prudently decide to wean themselves off it, the crossover between supply and demand could trigger many lucrative years of high oil prices”

S. Shah, Crude: The Story of Oil, Allen and Unwin, Sydney (2005)

another quote from Richard Slaughter…

and today on the BBC:

“The Anglo-Dutch oil firm Royal Dutch Shell has reported annual profits of $27.56bn (£13.9bn), a record for a UK-listed company.
Much of the rise in profits has been attributed to rising oil prices, which currently stand at about $91 a barrel compared with $57 this time last year.
But there is concern among analysts that Shell has delayed publishing figures showing its oil reserves.”

Wonder where Shah invests any spare cash?