In today's catastrophic risks and resilience seminar, perhaps the most disturbing presentation was by J. Storrs (Josh) Hall, who gave a talk on “The Weather Machine: Nano-enabled Climate Control for the Earth.”

Josh offered a simple proposition: once molecular manufacturing is achieved, it should not be difficult to create a design so a nanofactory can produce a tiny transparent balloon fitted with GPS and radio (for sending data and receiving instructions) and a simple set of thrusters to maintain location and to control altitude.

So far, so good. But there are a few additions to this balloon that make its impacts pretty wild: first, it includes a mirror to be used either for reflecting sunlight back into space or directing it to a solar energy collector on earth; second, the mirror can be turned as instructed; and third, because the balloon is made by a nanofactory, as many of them as desired can produced and put into operation in a very short time.

Basic calculations suggest that, in maybe a week or less, ten million tons of raw materials could produce enough balloons to cover the entire earth at twenty miles altitude. That may sound like a lot of material, but in fact it's about the same amount that goes into building 100 miles of a modern highway—so it's well within reach of even a small nation to acquire the materials if they have the hardware and software and a desire to control the weather of the earth.

Shifting mirrors inside balloons to make some areas warmer and others colder, to make some wetter and some drier gives at least rudimentary power for Josh's "Nano-enabled Climate Control for the Earth." These balloons may well be helpful in slowing, stopping, or even reversing the trend of global warming, as long as we recognize the very real danger of unforeseen, unintended, and possibly irreversible consequence.

Of course, having the means to control weather also allows controlling agricultural production, by improving or degrading climate conditions in growing areas. That implies using the balloons as a form of friendship or for hostile intent—not to mention that aiming a set of mirrors at a city could instantly annihilate it. 

However the capability is used, if the simple manufacture and deployment of a basically low-tech thing like a bunch of balloons can provide enough power to totally dominate the earth, then it seems we're only beginning to understand the implications of advanced nanotechnology.

Before my readers conclude that I’ve completely lost it over Obama I figured it’s time I say something a bit more critical about the situation in the U.S. and the incoming administration.

Barack Obama, as so many people are willing to acknowledge, is about to assume the presidency at a very difficult time. He’s got his work cut out for him and the expectation that he’ll play the miracle worker will most assuredly be dashed. Before we know it it’ll be politics as usual in Washington; the honeymoon will eventually come to an end.

Eleven weeks before he takes the reigns, Obama’s effectiveness and the amount of power he’ll be able to exert remains an open question. I’m reminded of the excitement over Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 and the expectations placed on him as a Rhodes Scholar. He was supposed to transform the White House and re-invigorate America. Clinton was never able to deliver on all the hype and hope; politics simply got in the way of all the excitement.

So, what makes us think that Obama, despite all his charisma and apparent political acumen, will be any more successful than previous presidents? It’s the same United States, after all, with the same institutions, petty politics, and entrenched two-party flavor.

Moreover, Obama hasn’t given any real indication that he’ll be anything other than a traditionally moderate Democratic president. Obama may have paved through some unprecedented political inroads on election night, but the popular ranking between himself and John McCain was shockingly narrow. Obama’s mandate is not as flamingly progressive as many have made it out to be. To go beyond it would not only be political suicide in a stubbornly conservative country, it would run contrary to his rather vanilla election promises.

Many Americans, I’m afraid, have confused his campaigning messages of “hope” and “yes we can” with that of actual progressive politics.

This is also an issue of relativity. Bush’s administration was so brazenly conservative, backward and hawkish that even a centrist administration will appear liberal by comparison. Republican accusations that Obama is running on a socialist platform will seem rather farcical in short order.

All this said, Obama does appear ready to re-invigorate some crucial areas like scientific research and the development of key technologies. He also looks poised to make the environment an important issue again.

Consequently, it looks like Obama will be engaged more in correcting the damage done by the previous administration than by introducing unprecedented reforms.

In terms of the economy, like the Democratic president before him, Obama has inherited an America in recession. As a result, his spending options will be severely constrained. Democrats may have firm control of both houses of Congress, but it will still be difficult for them to make due on a number of election promises.

Pulling back on George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich won’t be a problem, but introducing a new health care program may prove to be more difficult. Over 50 million Americans currently lack medical coverage; the cost to implement and cover this segment will be significant – even if it will be an insurance-based system supported by federal subsidies.

From a social perspective, the election of a black president hardly means that racism is over in the United States. Yes, it means a lot in terms of how far race relations have come in that country, but the reality is that the U.S. is still a country of privilege for whites. It will still be a long while before there is economic and social parity in that country – if ever.

As for foreign relations, it is here, I fear, that Obama will encounter the most trouble. And not because he’s inexperienced or because he has flawed policies (which in some cases he does), but because of the volatile geopolitical climate that has taken hold. There is simply too much happening in the world that is simply outside of his control; the level of complexity is daunting. Before he knows it, Obama will be spinning plates.

Obama plans to pull troops from Iraq by 2010. It is unclear as to how smoothly that transition will go, how the Iraqi regime will fare without U.S. help, and how Middle Eastern relations will change after the departure of American troops.

At the same time, Obama is touting the same kind of ‘war on terror’ rhetoric that was characteristic of the Bush administration. This may have been a political decision, but he has gone on the record of saying that he will continue to support American attacks on Pakistani territory without Islamabad’s permission. He also plans on increasing troop strength and the level of engagement in Afghanistan (a decision that will have a significant impact on Canadian and other coalition forces).

There’s also the issue of Iran and its efforts to build the bomb. The extent to which Obama will work to prevent this from happening and to protect Israel from a potential nuclear-armed foe is unclear.

And then there’s Russia and their recent efforts to re-enter the world stage as a significant geopolitical player. This is a story that’s far from over, particularly as the United States works to maintain a presence in the Caucasus region.

Looking to the future, it’s also possible that at some point during Obama’s tenure that an unforeseen catastrophe or global incident may occur (such as another 9/11 type event or a pandemic). Such a turn of events would come to characterize the administration and challenge it in terms of its potentially unprecedented scale. Hopefully nothing of the sort will happen. 

My feeling, though, is that Obama would rise to the challenge. He would, at the very least, assume a leadership position unlike George W. Bush before him and guide his people through any potential turmoil.

Indeed, given the fiasco that was the Bush administration, Americans will likely have more patience and understanding for Obama than for other incoming presidents. They’re likely going to cut him some slack and recognize the difficult challenges that lie ahead.

As far as many Americans are concerned, it’s more about intention at this point than results. They finally have a president at the helm that they don’t need to be embarrassed about. Someone who, at the very least, is ready to set things right.

Do the current economic slowdown, the dwindling of fossil fuels, and the looming disasters of climate change mean we should aspire to a new steady state economic model, instead of the growth-based economics of the past? Or do emerging technologies like nanotechnology offer a third alternative, a growing and sustainable economy?

Which analogy is most apt for humanity in relation to our Earthly home:

1. Alice rapidly growing too large for her house?
2. Villagers destroying the environment of Easter Island?
3. Crowded Europeans fleeing for the wide-open spaces of America?
4. Animals out-populating a grazing or hunting range and starving back to a sustainable level?

Numbers 1 and 3 seem to offer hope for a non-disastrous solution, assuming that we can develop technologies and polities that will allow large numbers of humans to live off-Earth peacefully and sustainably.

Numbers 2 and 4 are bleaker, obviously, but given current trends—as shown below—we can be forgiven for not feeling entirely optimistic. [Click here for a larger image and click here for the accompanying article.]

We should not wait for advanced nanotechnology to reach the point where molecular manufacturing can assist us in managing the dangerous implications of these upward curves; the situation is too dire for complacency. But while we must not delay acting, we also should emphasize the urgent need for increased funding of nanotechnology research and development.

Any new technology that promises as much power for good as molecular manufacturing should be welcomed and encouraged, assuming that we act simultaneously to limit its potential for damage.

Though I share in the jubilation at Obama’s election, I find I’m also a bit guarded. Holding back, as if afraid to get “fooled again” by the promise of new leadership.

To be sure, it’s going to feel good and be good for America to have a potential world leader as our president - someone who, instead of bringing himself down to the level of the least common denominator, actually demands that we raise ourselves to his level of discourse and sophistication. Friends are asking me what words like “bipartisanship” mean - a sure sign that they are actually, finally interested in how government functions and what it is Obama might do to change it.

But I’ve also got the nagging sense that too many of us are still hoping and waiting for what Obama’s going to do. As if the president somehow enacts policies or spends money in a way that makes everything better. This is not what a president does. Yes, there are certainly public works programs Obama can promote, to rebuild highways or develop alternative energy technologies while giving jobs to more Americans. These are potentially great top-down stimuli for a failed economy and neglected infrastructure - but they do not rebuild a society ravaged by runaway deregulated capitalism and military misadventure.

That part is up to us. And in this sense, we must take Obama at his word: the moment is now, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The election of Obama is itself a cue. It’s a cue that America can elect a smart, capable, and caring person as its leader. That we are capable of transcending the logic of short-term self-interest, fear, and even racism. And if we are capable of doing this, it means we are better than we act most of the time. This moment is the bang of the starter’s pistol - an awakening, an opportunity.

When there’s a big blackout in New York, especially during the summer, some people take it as a “cue” to start looting. It’s not that the blackout itself makes it significantly to break down store fronts; it’s not that the police are so very busy with the blackout. The lights going out is a cue to behave differently - to release the hidden potential for vandalism and long-repressed rage.

Likewise, the election of a black man to the presidency is a cue that something has changed. As my friend, Ari Wallach explained to me on my new radio show last night, it’s a kind of “shock and awe.” There’s a thoughtful, progressive and black president-elect on the cover of the New York Post. The cognitive dissonance this generates is an opportunity to reprogram. It’s what advertisers and social programmers try to do in pretty much every communication they make. It’s as big a disconnect and reconnect as 9-11 was, only constructive instead of destructive. A narrative is broken; another is born.

But this new narrative is not the story of how we are led by some new person. It’s the story of how we lead ourselves. It’s about how we accept the cue to act.

Everyone I know in my own circles is obsessed with creating the next big Internet phenomenon or organization to marshall all this energy and help people do their own bottom-up activities. I’ve been invited to a few dozen meetings already for such projects, and I’m happy to see everyone so enthused. But if everyone wants to do the “meta” job of creating a brand or utility through which activism happens, then there will be no one left to do the actual organizing.

No, the opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions.

My faith in the change we need will be strengthened by my own and others initiative. Obama can inspire us, and even remove some of the obsolete regulations preventing progressive activities from taking hold. His ability to lead us out of this mire into a brighter future will be limited, however, by our own capacity to engage.

Obama’s going to be busy for while, anyway. Two wars, a dozen failed federal agencies, and a banking industry that needs to be dismantled are going to take up a lot of his time and energy. While he attends to mitigating the damage of past failures, it is we who need to build a new society based on the values we share but have closeted during these decades of institutionalized self interest.

How? Where? Just go out the door and look around. There’s opportunities literally everywhere. If we do get fooled again, it will only be because we have fooled ourselves.

Playing fantasy politics — as opposed to fantasy football — is a mug’s game. However, for what it’s worth (not much), and speaking for those of us who aren’t Americans, here’s my top ten list of things I’d like see from the Obama administration in the first 100 days, and consider to be not-totally-impossible:

1. Shut down Gitmo. Try any of the inmates who face outstanding changes in front of a civilian court. Release (and if necessary, pay compensation to) those who are categorically not guilty of anything and who were swept up by mistake. Grant political asylum to the Chinese muslims and any others who are (a) not accused of anything and (b) can’t return to their homes for fear of persecution.

2. The whole torture thing? You know what needs to be done, and there’s a lot of it — from reverting US interrogation practices to pre-2000 norms, to identifying those who ordered harsh measures and determining whether grounds exist for prosecution, to seeking and compensating the victims of torture. Oh, and end extraordinary rendition and wiretapping without warrants.

3. Dismantle the DHS — it is an out of control bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster. Separate divisions can go back to doing what they did before they were stitched together. Leave in place communications channels between such divisions so they can share data, but destroy the unitary chain of command. You don’t need a Gestapo.

4. Ratify the Kyoto Treaty, and/or put the wheels in motion to participate in international talks aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

5. Start a public Congressional enquiry into the systematic injection of politically partisan appointees in the civil service and judiciary over the past 8 years, with specific reference to politically biased prosecutors and judges, administrators in scientific agencies (NASA, NIH, Environment, and others), and election officers.

6. Find three young, energetic, liberal supreme court justices to replace the elderly, terminally ill supreme court justices who are going to retire as soon as they can do so without handing the supreme court to Scalia on a plate.

7. Start a public Congressional enquiry into election practices, with the objective of moving towards a bill (or if necessary draft constitutional amendment) setting out acceptable standards for the conduct of elections.

8. Start a public enquiry into the misuse of intelligence agency resources in the run-up to 9/11 and the conduct of the war on terrorism since 9/11. Remit to include the allegations of collusion between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaida, and the embarrassing question of why the USA has been unable to find Osama bin Laden for the past seven years.

9. Start talking to the Russians about (a) gas and oil security (this includes South Ossetia), (b) Ballistic Missile Defense (and their allergy to it), (c) NATO expansion, and (d) any other grievances that must be aired in order to stop Cold War 2.0 from escalating. One cold war was quite enough, thank you (I still remember the nightmares).

10. Start talking to the whole of the G11 — no, leaving Spain (the world’s 8th largest economy) out in the cold because Dubya is having a snit at the socialist PM is not acceptable — about a global plan for rebooting the planetary economy without overheating the money markets or triggering further energy spikes. An exercise in multilateralism and soft power that will (a) achieve something useful and (b) start to convince the rest of the world that sanity has resumed.

This is just the top of the list, and reflects stuff I would hope to see in the first hundred days of a new administration. Other jobs (healthcare reform, for example) will take years, so I’ve left them out. Frankly, if Obama does all ten of these things I will be overjoyed. If he does just three or four of them, I’ll be nodding along and satisfied. But they all need doing, and they’re merely the start of an awfully big job.

PS: This is, I hope, my last posting on the topic of American politics for a long while, unless something extraordinary (good or bad) happens in the next couple of months. Just blowing off steam here after several years of bottling stuff up.

A mere one day after the election, a number of Republicans are encouraging Sarah Palin to prepare for the 2012 presidential run. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to call her “The next Ronald Reagan.”

This is a clear indication that there are some deep and underlying problems within the party—something that’s particularly revealing considering what just transpired in the recently concluded election.

The party itself is a pale imitation of what it used to be. Modern Republicanism has regressed to petty populism—it’s now all about apple pie, Joe six-pack and anti-intellectual sentiment. Sure, it can be a great way to get elected, but as we’ve seen time and time again, it’s no way to run a country (actually, given the GOP defeat, it’s not even a good way to run an election any more—though it was disturbingly close).

Another problem is that the GOP keeps looking at the rear view mirror; post-election punditry from the Republicans have been filled with calls for a return to good ‘ol fashion Reaganism. Well, Reagan’s coalition was built on the issues of crime, welfare, taxes and the Cold War. These are now old battles and and old ways of thinking about how to mobilize the electorate.

A number of Republicans have clearly not learned from their defeat in this election about where the party needs to go (in terms of reform and modernization) and how they need to speak to the needs and pains of the American people; it’s quickly becoming the party of the previous century. The Democrats, meanwhile, are looking to become the first true administration of the 21st Century.

As an example, the GOP must catch up to Democrats in online organizing and fundraising - a shortcoming made clear in this election. “The Republican Party is teetering on the brink of irrelevancy,” argues Professor Lawrence R. Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “This is about as close to a repudiation as you can get.”

Negative reactions to recent dissent from within the party further reinforces the notion that the Republicans are uninterested in doing any soul searching; columnist Kathleen Parker has been drowning in hate mail on account of her criticisms of Sarah Palin, Chris Buckley, the son of the late William F. Buckley Jr., lost his position at the National Review, and Colin Powell is most certainly now persona non grata among the Republicans.

Mind you, not all Republicans feel this way, of course. There are already calls for reform in some quarters. At any rate, they’ve got lots of work to do. The only question is: in which direction will they take the party?

Boy, Marshall sure stirred the pot at the Singularity Summit this weekend. Apparently you are allowed to opine that super-robots will either bring us a perfect world free from want, or possibly wipe us off the map. But if you suggest that we might need social policies to ensure our economic welfare when robots take most of the jobs then you are a socialist throwback unaware that free markets have always solved the structural unemployment problems of the past.

Take for instance Jason Pratt who points out the foolishness of previous Progressive-era social policies, like “the 40-hour workweek, the income tax, Social Security, and child labor laws (including truancy laws.).” Policies like those were unnecessary restrictions on the free market :

Child labor would have gone the way of the dodo bird anyway (no parent *wants* to send their child to dangerous factory work, and only economic growth can deliver us out of that scenario). We restricted child labor to enforce adult labor, and now we are faced with robot labor. So Marshall wants to restrict adult labor (a shorter workweek), and provide for unemployment (longer unemployment benefits.) A rehash of the Progressive movement.

Crazy talk! Apparently unfazed by the sudden collapse of the neo-liberal capitalist model, and the public criticism/self-criticism sessions that have the Friedmanites publicly recanting in every fora in which they can still get a hearing (Fox News not counting), Mr. Pratt insists

Some people (young people for example) love to work 80 or 100 hours a week...Let’s let the chips fall where they may this time. A creative, vibrant economy is critical to solving this global challenge. Anything we do via government to “soften the blow” is likely to make the next challenge even harder to solve.

Now that’s a “crack of a future dawn” Singularitarian utopia we can all get behind: 100 hour work weeks, no unemployment benefits, and your kids working right alongside you. Think of it as a family-friendly S^ vision.

Kevin Dick’s (and no, I did not make up Mr. Pratt and Mr. Dick’s names, just as Marshall’s name really is Mr. Brain) summary of the Singularity Summit events loved all the “Yes we can built it and the gods will come” enthusiasm but had two big complaints. First Vernor Vinge, namer of the Singularity idea, opened the meeting with an interview in which he propounded the “glaringly erroneous” idea that

as humans outsource their cognition to machines, the number of jobs suitable for humans will narrow. Economic history contradicts this theory.

Mr. Dick could also add computer scientist Hans Moravec to his tut-tut list, since Moravec proposed in Robot that we should expand Social Security to cover all humans after robots take all the jobs. Of Marshall Brain, who is a computer scientist, founder of the HowStuffWorks website that he just sold for an eye-popping $250 million, and author of pieces like ”How an Economic Depression Works” Mr. Dick opines

It’s not a good idea to discuss the economic implications of AI and robotics when you don’t understand anything about economics.

Yo, fellow meatbag, isn’t this the conference about the idea that greater than human intelligence will be such a profound rupture with all human history that we can’t predict the outcome? So that Singularity idea applies to everything except the magical capability of the market to find ways for human beings to compete in labor markets with super-capable robots, which you think is easily extrapolable from the migration of human peasants into human industrial jobs and then into shuffling meaningless numbers through computers with human fingers? What exactly are the jobs you imagine humans doing better than robots and AI in the Singularity future?

Patri Friedman chimes in with the dismissive comment

Marshall Brain’s (talk) was full of zero-sum thinking, and contained claims trivially refuted by Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage…

I guess that means, as Anders Sandberg has pointed out, that even though the supposed Singularity-level AIs are supposed to be as much smarter than us as we are to ants, that we will somehow figure out a way to do and trade something with AIs that they want. Like we do with ants.

But wait. Mr. Friedman also foresees a solution to human unemployment in the rapid AI ascension to godlikeness:

5 years after robots can do chores around the house, they won’t want to anymore! A robot smart enough to be helpful will be smart enough to demand an income and to spend that income on getting smarter.

Ah, finally an argument for libertopian policy that takes Singularitarianism seriously. We won’t need public policies for a structurally unemployed world because all our toasters and ovens will become so smart that they will stop working for carbon-based life forms, and we will be back to hiring human cooks to hold our bread over open fires. So we get full employment, so long as Skynet lets us live. Lovely.

Laudably S^ Summit reviewer “retired urologist” seems to get it in his summary of Marshall’s argument:

Left to free-market policies, there will be a marked redistribution of wealth, with concentration at the top. He encourages social and governmental plans now to address this inequity. Interestingly, given the same information, Peter Diamandis, of the X-Prize Foundation, draws the opposite conclusion. He feels that wealth concentration in a relative few hands makes for more efficient philanthropy and drives innovations in technology...Democrats versus Republicans.

OK, you could put a partisan gloss on the observation that the unfettered free market certainly will or probably won’t provide universal economic welfare for all after the Singularity. Then again this is an election year in which the party that started nationalizing the banks and calling for the nationalization of home mortgages is accusing the party that wants a slightly more progressive income tax of being “socialist.” We’re all Mensheviks this year, and the free market fundamentalists aren’t even Republicans any more, they’re just in deep denial.

Here’s a little testable prediction about whether the AI/automation-induced structural unemployment thesis is correct or not. When we start to come out of this casino capitalism-induced global depression, sometime in the next one to five years, watch to see if the number of new jobs created is as anemic as it was in the 2002-2005 recovery from the 2000-2001 dot.com bust. If so, it is a clue that we are in fact slowly shifting toward an economy in which investments in automation and IT are more profitable than investments in human jobs.

Then again, the market fundamentalists are sure to simply insist in 2012 that we are all still living under socialism, and that if we just removed all regulation, social welfare and taxes we would see unemployment eliminated.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union one could still find Communists who insisted real Communism had not yet been tried, and of course one can still find flat earthers, young earth creationists and all manner of delusional true believers. I’m a sociologist so I expect and celebrate willfull irrationality, especially around an idea like the Singularity which stirs up so many millennial passions. But just as Superman can probably beat up Spiderman, doesn’t the godlike AI trump the godlike invisible hand?

You've probably heard the dictum that most people expect too much change in the short term and too little change in the long term. That has been true generally, I think, and it may be why we hear complaints about 'No flying cars yet!' and so on. 

But if too many people are looking for short term exaggerated change, and if they aren't fully comprehending the extreme changes that can occur over the long term, I'm also concerned that the middle range is badly underrated and could catch us by surprise.

Let's call the short term from one to five years. It's almost certain we won't have flying cars by then, or a colony on Mars, or a pill we can take to cure all diseases. Of course, we might be well on the way to having online access everywhere all the time, and that could be quite useful, but it's unlikely that people will see anything within the next five years that will knock their socks off.

How about the long term? Let's call that from 50 to 100 years. How much technological, social, and political change should we expect to see in that time frame? Given the vast differences in the world today—in all three of those realms—as compared to the lives of people from early in the last century, it seems beyond argument that enormous changes are in store. 

By the end of this century, if not before, many millions or even billions of people will spend much of their lives in nearly indistinguishable virtual realities. Fully developed biotechnology and genetic engineering will allow the creation of tailored plants, animals, chimeras, and whole biomes. Advanced nanotechnology, well beyond early generation molecular manufacturing, will completely revolutionize our infrastructures for living, working, traveling, and creating energy on earth and in space. 

All of that is dependent, however, on our ability to get safely past the formidable barrier of the mid-range.

What happens during the period from five to twenty years from now is very likely to determine whether the remainder of this century will be one of unparalleled abundance, of devastating war and destruction, of warming-induced ecological collapse and mass deaths, or perhaps some miserable but survivable combination thereof.

We can illustrate the challenge with this simple chart where we see an early period, the near-term, with somewhat evenly matched levels of existential danger and our capacities to adequately manage and avert the worst of those dangers. So far, so good.

Over the long term, our human (and posthuman?) civilizations may be able to acquire enough capacity from growth of technological aids and scientific know-how that we can dependably stay ahead of the greatest dangers.

But it is in that mid-range period, as we rapidly develop powerful new technologies, and as we have to grapple simultaneously with huge new problems—caused by sea level rise, species depletion, mass human refugee migrations, crop failures and famines, state failures, pandemics, and more—that is when we will reach the test of whether we are fit enough, mature enough, and wise enough to make the right decisions.

And the time to begin making those decisions is now, not when the barrage of problems is upon us, but today.

A good start would be to make a thorough examination of all the issues raised by exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing. CRN urges every large corporation, every big NGO, and every government body to undertake their own evaluation of the mid-term risks and rewards they may face, especially in the context of advanced nanotechnology, which will have deep and lasting effects on all of us. 

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, have friends or loved ones who do, or simply enjoy the various products and services to be found around these parts, take heed:
When the Big One hits, it won’t be pretty.

The US Geological Survey has put out a set of videos showing the shaking associated with a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault. There hasn’t been a big one on the Hayward Fault in over 300 years, and it’s overdue for a serious seismic event. The USGS videos cover quakes measuring 6.8, 7.0, and 7.2, with epicenters ranging from Fremont in the south to the San Pablo Bay in the north.

Short version: if you live in the Berkeley hills… well, it’s not pretty. No place is truly safe—Santa Cruz seems to come out okay—but some places are likely to be flattened, regardless of the precise epicenter. (It’s worth noting that the location of the epicenter does not correlate to the worst damage—in fact, a quake hitting at the Fremont location is actually worse for more of the East Bay than one centered in Oakland.)

Steve Jones, head of the department of genetics, evolution and environment at the University College London, says the forces driving evolution, such as natural selection and genetic mutation, “no longer play an important role in our lives.”

Consequently, says Jones, the people living one million years from now—assuming humans will still be around—will resemble modern-day humans; he thinks that humans have stopped evolving.

He basically argues that the mechanisms that drive ongoing variation are now absent in modern life, a factor that he believes has halted evolution.

I think Jones is a bit off the mark, here. Evolution and genetics are more than just adaptation to changing environments and stressors. His analysis fails to take a number of factors into account, including:

Genetic drift

Also known as genetic randomness, this genetic process involves the accumulation of random events that slightly change the makeup of a gene pool, but are compounded and re-enforced over time. Genetic drift arises from the statistical effect of sampling errors during reproduction across the overall population. 

Jones dismisses this possibility on account of the large and interlinked global population—a consequence that prevents small populations of people from evolving in isolation. It’s conceivable, though, that genetic drift (in conjunction with other genetic mechanisms) will slightly alter human morphology given long enough time frames. Moreover, as the number of people increases, so too do the number of mutations generated by random chance.

Vestigiality

All morphological and psychological characteristics must have their genetic integrity re-enforced over time through the process of natural selection; environmental pressures continually justify a trait’s presence and integrity within the genome. A physical trait that is no longer important to a species’ survival will start to lose its informational integrity over time, leading to diminished function and eventual disappearance.

Given Jones’s suggestion that selectional pressures have stopped for humans, it’s likely that many of our unnecessary characteristics will slowly fade away. What Jones doesn’t account for, however, is that this will result in morphological alterations. 

Sexual selection

Not all evolutionary changes are brought about by seemingly rational environmental pressures. Sexual selection and competition for mates has led to some bizarre and often nonsensical changes to species (think of the male peacock’s tail feathers, for example).

Humans are still very much in the business of competing for and selecting mates. Again, given long enough time frames, and given inevitable changes in perceptions of human beauty and fitness, this could lead to changes within human morphology and psychology.

Gene expression

The human genome is not a stand-alone document—it needs environmental stimulai to inform it as to how it should express itself. Because humans live in a diverse set of environments, and because we are all raised in unique settings, our minds and bodies are moulded accordingly (this is why identical twins separated at birth are not 100% identical and why clones will be even less identical).

Given the potential for even greater environmental diversity in the future (i.e. barren desert wastelands brought about by global warming...I’m only half-joking), it’s not unrealistic to think that our genes—even if they collectively remain somewhat static—will express the human species with some variation.

Look at the difference, for example, in height over the past few generations. And imagine the kinds of bodies that our genes would express in a different gravitational environments like Mars or space itself. 

...and last but certainly not least:

Self-guided evolution

Darwinian natural selection is giving way to self-guided evolution. The human species will soon have a host of transformative technologies in its possession that will allow us to modify our bodies as we see fit. 

Some of the key technologies in this area will include genomics (and other biotechnologies like regenerative medicine), molecular nanotechnology, information technologies (like the integration of AI), and advances in cognitive science. This will lead to the so-called posthuman, which could be anything from cyborgs and genetically enhanced humans through to uploaded consciousness streams. 

And if anything, humans are evolving faster than ever—even without the aid of technology.

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Nick and Milan on anthropic principle in new collection

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October 14, 2008

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The Death of the Market Cult

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October 13, 2008

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Future Bioethics

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October 13, 2008

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CALL FOR PAPERS: H+, Cognitive Enhancement and AI

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October 09, 2008

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Involved with a bot, sexually or romantically?

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October 09, 2008

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Mike Treder shares “bottom up” development strategy in Greece

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October 09, 2008

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Zardoz: Ur-Man v. Posthuman Head

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October 09, 2008

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Silke Fauve

Longevity Dividend Through Anti-Aging, Not “Entitlement Reform”

by Silke Fauve

Ethical Technology October 08, 2008

A study published in this week’s Nature magazine reveals that the likelihood that a senior citizen will be so disabled that they require high-cost nursing and medical care is fairly constant up till age 100. In other words, increased longevity will not drive up costs related to disability and dependency. But with progress supporting healthy aging with longevity therapies seniors could live even healthier and more able lives. Silke Fauve considers the demographic and economic arguments against increasing longevity.

Phillip Longman writes in “The Global Baby Bust,” that the human population is aging at an unprecedented rate while the birth rate is falling in most of the world, resulting in an increasing imbalance of producers (working adults) and dependents (most significantly, the elderly). This imbalance threatens government budgets.

But are economic challenges the only ones created by this shift in demographics? Individuals’ most deeply held values inform their actions in times of crisis, and the same can be said of a nation or of the human species. Recent statements made by policy makers expose values that are incompatible with compassion and caring.  How will value-laden choices made by policy makers, in response to global graying, affect social and ethical progress?

Demography plays a starring role in charting the future, but as a 1999 report published by the National Academy on an Aging Society concludes, “Demography is not destiny.” The report explains that

population projections change as the assumptions on which they are based change,” stressing the dynamic interaction of demographics with other relevant factors such as “economic growth, changes in people’s expectations and behavior, and changes in public policies.

Co-factors aside, population statistics paint a big picture of many interrelated patterns of behaviors and characteristics, allowing corrective and proactive adjustments to be made on both the individual and policy levels.

That is the good news. Unfortunately, when an unfamiliar picture emerges, its potential to undermine economic and social stability can provoke a reaction, which, if not countered with a creative response grounded in respect for persons, will result in unethical, undemocratic, and inhumane policy decisions that limit human potential. In response to shifting aging demographics, ethical policy makers should take care to make decisions grounded in respect for persons. Choosing the ethically sound course of action will foster, rather than limit, the growth of human capacities.

Loss of respect for persons is frequently a result of allowing abstractions to become more “real” than the human beings they represent.  An individual is often defined by the generalizations made about a particular category: the “feeble senior,” an “unproductive retiree.” Instead of manipulating abstractions without considering the needs of the actual human beings affected by program and entitlement changes, policy makers should make decisions that empower aged individuals to participate meaningfully in life to whatever degree their health permits.  Of course, that position presupposes a Kantian view of human value: that people’s worth exists independently of what they do or produce for the benefit of others. 

Clearly, this is not the view held by Alan Greenspan, who, in 1983 at a meeting of the Health Insurance Association of America, questioned whether the money spent annually on the “5 to 6 percent of Medicare enrollees who die within the year” was justifiable.1 In 1984, Richard Lamm, then governor of Colorado, reportedly echoed Greenspan’s sentiment with a less diplomatic “older persons have a duty to die and get out of the way.”2 Sadly, these remarks and many others subsequently made in the anti-aged campaign reveal a fundamental disrespect--more accurately, a disdain--for elders despite the lip service traditionally paid to them as repositories of wisdom.  Continuing in that vein, today’s jealous guardians of the public dollar, at the expense of their own humanity, are making pariahs of the most richly experienced and underrated segment of the population.

Fortunately, the same demographic panorama that has inspired loathing of elders in people of limited vision has revealed life-affirming possibilities to humanistic leaders, scientists, and scholars.  Rather than proposing discriminatory policies and entitlement changes that would strip elders of their human rights and abandon them to a steep, unassisted decline to their death, these tireless humanists are seeking solutions that will enable all people to enjoy additional healthy years of productivity. 

One prolific writer and visionary, theoretical biologist Aubrey de Grey, argues that a dramatically extended human life span will eliminate age-related frailty and the concept of retirement altogether.  In “Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now,” he explains that

those who get first generation therapies only just in time will in fact be unlikely to live more than 20-30 years more than their parents, because they will spend many frail years with a short remaining life expectancy...whereas those only a little younger will never get that frail and will spend rather few years even in biological middle age.

His ideas may have sounded like science fiction a decade ago, but de Grey points out that even conservative bioethicist Leon Kass has acknowledged that “modest success [in scientific research] tends to place the bit between our teeth and can often result in advances far exceeding our expectations.”

It would be impossible to imagine anyone preferring a future in which persons over the age of 65 were discarded as easily as a half-eaten ham sandwich to one in which age 65 marked the beginning of an exciting new career or friendship--if those working to eliminate Social Security, ration health care, and redefine the “natural” life span hadn’t already expressed their preferences and demonstrated their own limited capacities.  Human caring and longing for actualization will triumph over their pitiful grasping for illusory security.  The choice is crystal clear. 

Endnotes

1.  James H. Schulz and Robert H. Binstock, Aging Nation: The Economics and Politics of Growing Older in America, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 187.
2. Ibid.

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Charlie Stross

The bumpy ride hits toytown

by Charlie Stross

Charlie's Diary October 07, 2008

Okay, hang onto your hats. We’re clearly in for a bumpy ride over the next couple of years; even discounting the worst-case scenarios (I’m a happy pessimist: I always need something to worry about) it looks like we’re in for a recession that will be at least as bad as the 1990-92 one, and possibly much worse. 

Now is the time to go long on Baked Beans and short Hummers; I’d love to see an index of the price of second-hand Herman Miller Aeron chairs (personal experience last week suggests they’re sliding — there’s a glut on eBay).

But this isn’t 1990-92, nor yet 1929-39, much less 1872-73. this isn’t just going to be the first recession of the 21st century — it’s going to be the first recession of the internet age.

(I’m going to stipulate that the dot-com crash in 2000 doesn’t count as the damage was specific to the IT and telecommunications industry; it didn’t affect society at large — growth overall took a dent and there were a lot of windbags with MCSEs looking for what jobs there were, but you didn’t see banks going bust or governments panicking.)

The conventional wisdom has it that if there’s one thing the internet does to the wider economy, it can be summed up in one word: disintermediation. Back in the dim and distant prehistory of the 1980s, we used to buy our daily bread, or Armani suits, or whatever, from retailers. The retailers in turn were fed by a supply chain of wholesalers who were plugged into distribution channels which ran all the way back to the factory doors where manufactured or farmed stuff was put together and slung at the public. But the internet lets end-users plug into the same computerized ordering systems that used to be the privilege of the wholesaler. We’ve gotten awfully good at agile distribution, just-in-time manufacturing, business-to-business networking and outsourcing and a bunch of other -ings that only make sense if you have a responsive, high bandwidth communications network.

One one level, the systems we depend on are far more fragile than they used to be. Instead of the supply chain being a pipe with stuff flowing through it in regular quantities, goods tend to be ordered, built, and despatched like network packets, as and when they’re wanted. This sort of system has very little overhead and is highly efficient, but it’s prone to catastrophic breakdown; visualize a car factory that has outsourced all its components and simply does final assembly and customization, and the hole it falls down if the steering wheel supplier suddenly goes bust.

On another level, the whole agile logistics thing works in our favour; our hypothetical car factory can in principle zap the CAD blueprints for the steering wheel molds and tooling over to another factory somewhere, whereupon they can be up and pumping out units within a couple of days. Assuming they own the IP that went into the blueprints for their steering wheel, of course ...

... and assuming anybody is still buying cars.

We’ve never actually seen a true global recession in a Web 2.0 world. What’s it going to look like? How is it going to differ from a recession in a pre-internet world?  Is it going to accelerate the hollowing-out of the retail high street as economy-conscious shoppers increasingly move to online shopping and comparison systems like Froogle? Are we going to see homeless folks not only living in their cars but telecommuting from them, using pay-as-you-go 3G cellular modems, cheap-ass Netbooks, and rented phone numbers to give the appearance of still having a meatspace office? Is the increasing performance curve of consumer electronics going to give way to a deflationary price war as embattled producers try to hold on to market share as Moore’s Law cuts the ground away from beneath their feet?

What have I missed?

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Marshall Brain

How the Keating scandal worked

by Marshall Brain

BrainStuff October 07, 2008

In the 1980s, the savings and loan meltdown produced a number of amazing stories of greed and fraud. The Keating scandal, involving Lincoln Savings and Loan, was one of the biggest. 

Produced by the Obama campaign, this video gives one perspective on how the Keating scandal worked:

Here are two fact checking articles on the topic:

1) Fact Check: Did McCain intervene on behalf of Charles Keating?

2) Breaking down the facts on McCain’s role in the Keating Five scandal

In 2000, Slate looked at the Keating scandal and provided this compact summary of the case. It is much less damning, although it makes many of the same points:

Is John McCain a Crook?
In particular:

The Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Keating Five began in November 1990, and committee Special Counsel Robert Bennett recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation. They were not. McCain believes Democrats on the committee blocked Bennett’s recommendation because he was the lone Keating Five Republican.

In February 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found McCain and Glenn to be the least blameworthy of the five senators. (McCain and Glenn attended the meetings but did nothing else to influence the regulators.) McCain was guilty of nothing more than “poor judgment,” the committee said, and declared his actions were not “improper nor attended with gross negligence.” McCain considered the committee’s judgment to be “full exoneration,” and he contributed $112,000 (the amount raised for him by Keating) to the U.S. Treasury.

In 2007, the Arizona Republic provided this summary of the Keating scandal:

McCain Profile: The Keating Five

According to the article:

It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating’s American Continental Corp.

As federal auditors examined Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He had spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.

One of his first stops was Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.

The state’s senior senator was one of Keating’s most loyal friends in Congress, and for good reason. Keating had given thousands of dollars to DeConcini’s campaigns. At one point, DeConcini even pushed Keating for ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating owned a luxurious vacation home.

Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with regulators to deliver a message: Get off Lincoln’s back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting with five senators and the regulators. One of them was McCain.

It also echoes most of the points in the video, including:

But McCain made a critical error.

He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain’s wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

See also: HSW: The Keating Five

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Jamais Cascio

All distant problems are not created equally

by Jamais Cascio

Open the Future October 07, 2008

By definition, distant (long-term) problems are those that show their real impact at some point in the not-near future; arbitrarily, we can say five or more years, but many of them won’t have significant effects for decades. Our habit, and the institutions we’ve built, tend to look at long-term problems as more-or-less identical: Something big will happen later. For the most part, we simply wait until the long-term becomes the near-term before we act. 

This practice can be effective for some distant problems: Let’s call them “long-run problems.” With a long-run problem, a solution can be applied any time between now and when the problem manifests; the “solution window,” if you will, is open up to the moment of the problem. While the costs will vary, it’s possible for a solution applied at any time to work. It doesn’t hurt to plan ahead, but taking action now instead of waiting until the problem looms closer isn’t necessarily the best strategy. Sometimes, the environment changes enough that the problem is moot; sometimes, a new solution (costing much less) becomes available. By and large, long-run problems can be addressed with common-sense solutions.

Here’s a simple example of a long-run problem: You’re driving a car in a straight line, and the map indicates a cliff in the distance. You can change direction now, or you can change direction as the cliff looms, and either way you avoid the cliff. If you know that there’s a turn-off ahead, you may keep driving towards the cliff until you get to your preferred exit.

The practice of waiting until the long-term becomes the near-term is less effective, however, for the other kind of distant problem: Let’s call them “long-lag problems.” With long-lag problems, there’s a significant distance between cause and effect, for both the problem and any attempted solution. The available time to head-off the problem doesn’t stretch from now until when the problem manifests; the “solution window” may be considerably briefer. Such problems can be harder to comprehend, since the connection between cause and effect may be subtle, or the lag time simply too enormous. Common-sense answers won’t likely work.

A simple, generic example of a long-lag problem is difficult to construct, since we don’t tend to recognize them in our day-to-day lives. Events that may have been set in motion years ago can simply seem like accidents or coincidences, or even assigned a false proximate trigger in order for them to “make sense.”

But a real-world example of a long-lag problem should make the concept clear.

Global warming is, for me, the canonical example of a long-lag problem, as geophysical systems don’t operate on human cause-and-effect time frames. Because of atmospheric and ocean heat cycles (the “thermal inertia” I keep going on about), we’re now facing the climate impacts of carbon pumped into the atmosphere decades ago. Similarly, if we were to stop emitting any greenhouse gases right this very second, we’d still see another two to three decades of warming, with all of the corresponding problems. If we’re still three degrees below a climate disaster point, but have another two degrees of warming left because of thermal inertia regardless of what we do, we can’t wait until we’ve increased to just below three degrees to act. If we do, we’re hosed.

With long-lag problems, you simply can’t wait until the problem is imminent before you act. You have to act long in advance in order to solve the problem. In other words, the solution window closes long before the problem hits.

We have a number of institutions, from government to religions to community organizations, with the potential to deal with long-run problems. We may not do well with them individually, but as a civilization, we’ve developed decent tools. However, we don’t have many—perhaps any—institutions with the inherent potential to deal with long-lag problems. Moreover, too many people think all long-term problems are long-run