Long Now

## Doing Good Better [](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/lomborghaiti.jpg) **Lomborg opened with a photo from Haiti** , showing a young girl dressed for school wading through the muck and garbage of a slum, with pigs in the muck right behind her. Lomborg was just back from working with the government of Haiti and the Canadian Development Agency to prioritize aid projects there. He sympathized that when people see that photo they instantly want to donate to urban sanitation in Haiti, but that is not the most effective good that can be done for the girl. There is a limited amount of aid money that can be spent in Haiti, and in the world. (Total world aid is $200 billion a year.) It helps to look at what are the greatest multiples of good you can get for each dollar spent—the benefit-cost ratio (BCR). For urban sanitation, when you do the math on the costs of building and maintaining pit latrines and compare it with the benefits (measured in dollars) of deaths and diseases avoided, of productivity and education gains, etc., for each dollar spent, you get only about 77 cents of benefit. How does that benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of less than 1 compare with other forms of aid such as, say, cleaner cook stoves? Indoor air pollution from traditional cooking kills 4.3 million people a year in the developing world. According to Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus colleagues, when you substitute cleaner fuel, you get a BCR of 15—each dollar spent yields $15 of benefit, with drastically fewer deaths, and a far better home to grow up in. Not all problems have such direct solutions though. Poverty is hard to fix directly, and so is corrupt government, but working in areas that do have known solutions can affect them indirectly. Better education helps everything, and the form of education that has far the highest yield is tripling preschool in Africa (BCR = 33!). But what helps education more than anything is making sure that there’s good nutrition for infants up to two years old, which gives them better brains, making them better and happier students (BCR = 45), and follow-up research shows that they have far better lives. The worst infectious disease that can be treated easily is tuberculosis, which kills 1.5 million people a year. Good treatment gives a huge BCR of 43. From 1995 to 2010, 37 million lives were saved with ever-improving TB treatment. And so it goes across the spectrum of aid. Lomborg noted that the way the $200 billion of annual aid is currently spent gives a BCR of about 7. That’s $1.4 trillion of good. But if spent for highest effectiveness, it could give a BCR of 32--- $6.4 trillion of good, an extra $5 trillion of benefit each year. Returning to the young girl in Haiti, Lomborg said that prioritizing aid intelligently would focus on helping provide her with: better nutrition; better school; better health; safer births; higher income; less violence in her society; less air pollution in her home; more energy; and more rights as a person. The photo evokes none of those things. Her life would.

## Toward agile government Pahlka quoted: “Efficiency in government is a matter of social justice.” (Mayor John Norquist) It is at the often maddening interface with government that the inefficiency and injustice play out. Two examples (both now fixed)… At the Veterans Affairs website, you needed to fill out the application for health benefits, but the file wouldn’t even open unless you had a particular version of Internet Explorer and a particular version of Adobe Reader. Nothing else worked. In California, the online application for food stamps is 50 screens long and takes 50 minutes to complete. How did such grotesquely bad software design become the norm? Pahlka points to laws such as the “comically misnamed” Paperwork Reduction Act of 01980, which requires six months to get any public form approved, and the 775-page Federal Acquisition Regulation book, which requires that all software be vastly over-specified in advance. “That’s not how good software is built!” Pahlka said. “Good software is user-centered, iterative, and data driven.” You build small at first, try it on users, observe what doesn’t work, fix it, build afresh, try it again, and so on persistently until you’ve got something that really works—and is easy to keep updating as needed. Pahlka’s organization, Code for America, did that with the 50-minute California food stamp application and pared the whole process down to 8 minutes. These are not small matters. 19% of the US gross national product is spent on social programs—social security, medicare, food assistance, housing assistance, unemployment, etc. Frustration with those systems makes people want to just blow the whole thing up. Pahlka quotes Tom Steinberg (mySociety founder): “You can no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda.” Government drastically needs more tech talent, Pahlka urged, and the user-centered iterative approach could have a broader effect: “It's not so much that we need new laws to govern technology,” she said. “It's that we need better tech practices that teaches how to make better laws. The status quo isn’t worth fighting for. Fight for something better, something we haven’t seen yet, something you have to invent.” She concluded: “Decisions are made by those who show up.”

## Inventing toward delight Humanity has been inventing toward delight for a long time. Johnson began with a slide of shell beads found in Morocco that indicate human interest in personal adornment going back 80,000 years. He showed 50,000-year-old bone flutes found in modern Slovenia that were tuned to musical intervals we would still recognize. Beads and flutes had nothing to do with survival. They were art, conforming to Brian Eno’s definition: “Art is everything you don’t have to do.” It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is one of the prime movers of history—of globalization, innovation, and democratization. Consider spices, a seemingly trivial ornament to food. In the Babylon of 1700 BCE—3,700 years ago—there were cloves that came all the way from Indonesia, 5,000 miles away. Importing eastern spices become so essential that eventually the trade routes defined the map of Islam. Another story from Islamic history: when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities around 800 CE, its “House of Wisdom” produced a remarkable text titled “The Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines years ahead of anything in Europe—clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively programmable. Everything in the book was neither tool nor weapon: _they were all toys_. Consider what happened when cotton arrived in London from India in the late 1600s. Besides being more comfortable than itchy British wool, cotton fabric (called calico) could easily be dyed and patterned, and the democratization of fashion took off, along with a massive global trade in cotton and cotton goods. Soon there was an annual new look to keep up with. And steam-powered looms drove the Industrial Revolution, including the original invention of programmable machinery for Jacquard looms. Consider the role of public spaces designed for leisure—taverns, coffee shops, parks. Political movements from the American Revolution (Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern) to Gay Rights (Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles) were fomented in bars. Whole genres of business and finance came out of the coffee shops of London. And once “Nature” was invented by Romantics in the late 1800s, nature-like parks in cities brought delight to urban life, and wilderness became something to protect. Play invites us to invent freely.

### Future now **“The present and the future** now coexist at the same time,” Coupland began. “It’s why time doesn’t feel like time any more. We’re inside the future.” He wondered if the constant acceleration of acceleration that we experience might lead to some kind of “collective cracking point” for humanity. As an installation artist Coupland said he was highly impressed by the short truisms of the New York artist Jenny Holzer, such as “MUCH WAS DECIDED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.” And so he began a “slogan project” of sayings that “make perfect sense now but would make no sense if you saw them 20 years ago.” Examples included: I MISS MY PRE-INTERNET BRAIN HOARD ANYTHING YOU CAN’T DOWNLOAD LIVES ARE NO LONGER FEELING LIKE STORIES (“I call this process ‘de-narration.’”) WE’VE NEVER BEEN SMARTER. WE’VE NEVER FELT STUPIDER. THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE MEANS YOU WANT SOMETHING DEMOCRACY SEEMS INADEQUATE TO DEAL WITH THE PRESENT For an installation in Shanghai, Coupland created some “slogans for the 22d Century:” MONEY WAS OVERRATED ANYWAY DON’T MENTION THE CLOUD YOUR BORDER IS YOUR BRAND Coupland ended with what he considers the three leading questions of our time: “Does the need to be remembered eclipse the right to be forgotten?” “Will the internet favor the individual over the group?” “Will the internet favor secularity or religion?” At the end of the evening, Coupland looked at the camera and said, “Hello posterity. What are we doing right now that is scaring the crap out of you?”

### The Brain’s Now Our perception of time raises all sorts of questions, Eagleman began. “Why does time seem to slow down when you’re scared? And why does it seem to speed up as you get older?” With an onscreen demonstration, Eagleman showed that “Time is actively constructed by the brain.“ His research has shown that there’s at least a 1/10-of-a-second lag between physical time and our subjective time, and the brain doesn’t guess ahead, _it fills in behind_. “Our perception of an event depends on what happens next.” In whole-body terms, we live a half-second in the past, which means that something which kills you quickly (like a sniper bullet to the head), you’ll never notice. In order to manage a realistic sense of causality, the brain has to calibrate the rate of different signals coming into it. When that system malfunctions, you can get “credit misattribution”—the sense that “I didn’t do that!” It may explain why some schizophrenics think that their normal internal conversation is voices coming from somewhere else, and it might be curable by training their brain to manage signal lags better. Is “now” expandable? Why do you seem to experience time in slow motion in a sudden emergency, like an accident? Eagleman’s (terrifying) experiments show that in fact you don’t perceive more densely, the amygdala cuts in and _records the experience_ more densely, so when the brain looks back at that dense record, it thinks that time must have subjectively slowed down, but it didn’t. “Time and memory are inseparable.” This also explains why time seems to speed up as you age. A child experiences endless novelty, and each summer feels like it lasted forever. But you learn to automatize everything as you age, and novelty is reduced accordingly, apparently speeding time up. All you have to do to feel like you‘re living longer, with a life as rich as a child’s, is to never stop introducing novelty in your life.

### Coherent cities What holds a city together? Rose noted that the earliest cities were built around a temple and the spirituality it embodied. As the early communities became larger and more diverse and complex, their economic activity intensified. To be effective in trade they had to specialize, monetizing their regional opportunities. One city became known for shipping, another for serving caravans. One as a source of metal, another as a source of grain. To cope with their growing complexity the cities had to develop varying control systems for everything—irrigation, food storage, accounting, building codes. The Code of Hammurabi was written in 1754 BCE explicitly “to further the well-being of mankind.” (One of its building-code provisions declared, “If your building falls down and kills somebody, we kill you.”) Modern cities need to create their own “circular economy,” Rose stressed, not just of services and goods, but of greener waste treatment, of water recycling, of food creation (such as“vertical gardens”,) and especially of what he called "communities of opportunity”—where low-income groups such as immigrants get a chance to create prosperity for themselves and the city. In his own many real-estate projects, Rose focusses on increasing urban density with low-income housing in combination with improved mass transit, local parks, better schools, and the greenest of building standards. But for such innovations to be copied, he pointed out, they have to be profitable. Cities are systems, Rose concluded: “When a system is optimized, then all of its components do well. Cities that focus on the optimization of the whole for everybody are the ones that thrive the best.”

### Quantum Computer Reality The 15th-century Renaissance was triggered, Lloyd began, by a flood of new information which changed how people thought about everything, and the same thing is happening now. All of us have had to shift, just in the last couple decades, from hungry hunters and gatherers of information to overwhelmed information filter-feeders. Information is physical. A bit can be represented by an electron _here_ to signify 0, and _there_ to signify 1. Information processing is moving electrons from here to there. But for a “qubit" in a quantum computer, an electron is both _here_ and _there_ at the same time, thanks to "wave-particle duality.” Thus with “quantum parallelism” you can do massively more computation than in classical computers. It’s like the difference between the simple notes of plainsong and all that a symphony can do—a huge multitude of instruments interacting simultaneously, playing arrays of sharps and flats and complex chords. Quantum computers can solve important problems like enormous equations and factoring--cracking formerly uncrackable public-key cryptography, the basis of all online commerce. With their ability to do “oodles of things at once," quantum computers can also simulate the behavior of larger quantum systems, opening new frontiers of science, as Richard Feynman pointed out in the 1980s. Simple quantum computers have been built since 1995, by Lloyd and ever more others. Mechanisms tried so far include: electrons within electric fields; nuclear spin (clockwise and counter); atoms in ground state and excited state simultaneously; photons polarized both horizontally and vertically; and super-conducting loops going clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time; and many more. To get the qubits to perform operations—to compute—you can use an optical lattice or atoms in whole molecules or integrated circuits, and more to come. The more qubits, the more interesting the computation. Starting with 2 qubits back in 1996, some systems are now up to several dozen qubits. Over the next 5-10 years we should go from 50 qubits to 5,000 qubits, first in special-purpose systems but eventually in general-purpose computers. Lloyd added, “And there’s also the fascinating field of using funky quantum effects such as coherence and entanglement to make much more accurate sensors, imagers, and detectors.” Like, a hundred thousand to a million times more accurate. GPS could locate things to the nearest micron instead of the nearest meter. Even with small quantum computers we will be able to expand the capability of machine learning by sifting vast collections of data to detect patterns and move on from supervised-learning (“That squiggle is a 7”) toward unsupervised-learning—systems that learn to learn. The universe is a quantum computer, Lloyd concluded. Biological life is all about extracting meaningful information from a sea of bits. For instance, photosynthesis uses quantum mechanics in a very sophisticated way to increase its efficiency. Human life is expanding on what life has always been—an exercise in machine learning.

## Digital is just getting started In Kevin Kelly’s view, a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress. Artificial smartnesses, for example, will be added to everything, all quite different from human intelligence and from each other. We will tap into them like we do into electricity to become cyber-centaurs -- co-dependent humans and AIs. All of us will need to perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game. Every possible display surface will become a display, and study its watchers. Everything we encounter, “if it cannot interact, it is broken.” Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will become the next platform after smartphones, conveying a profound sense of experience (and shared experience), transforming education (“it burns different circuits in your brain”), and making us intimately trackable. “Everything that can be tracked will be tracked,” and people will go along with it because “vanity trumps privacy,” as already proved on Facebook. “Wherever attention flows, money will follow.” Access replaces ownership for suppliers as well as consumers. Uber owns no cars; AirBnB owns no real estate. On-demand rules. Sharing rules. Unbundling rules. Makers multiply. “In thirty years the city will look like it does now. We will have rearranged the flows, not the atoms. We will have a different idea of what a city is, and who we are, and how we relate to other people.” In the Q&A;, Kelly was asked what worried him. “Cyberwar,” he said. “We have no rules. Is it okay to take out an adversary’s banking system? Disasters may have to occur before we get rules. We’re at the point that any other civilization in the galaxy would have a world government. I have no idea how to do that.” Kelly concluded: “We are at the beginning of the beginning—the first hour of day one. There have never been more opportunities. The greatest products of the next 25 years have not been invented yet.” “You are not late.”

Author Brian Christian discusses applying computer algorithms to human decision-making, including optimal stopping in apartment hunting, romantic pursuits, strategic voting, AI ethics, and interdisciplinary collaborations.

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