Long Now

### Beyond Audacious Pursuing the idea of “revolution through competition” via huge-purse prizes was inspired for Peter Diamandis by reading about the Orteig Prize. In 1927 $25,000 was offered to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 in the competition. A 25-year-old named Lindbergh won the prize. Within 18 months air passengers had multiplied 30-fold from 6,000 to 180,000, the number of aircraft increased four-fold, and aviation stocks soared. A lifelong space nut, Diamandis created out of thin air the Ansari X Prize. $10 million would go to the first team to make a 3-person reusable space vehicle that could reach 100 kilometers in altitude twice in two weeks. From 7 countries 26 teams competed, spending $100 million on the project. The success in 2004 of SpaceShipOne (now in the Smithsonian) launched a space tourism industry. With the help of Google, the X Prize became a foundation to generate a series of competitions for “audacious and achievable goals.” The attributes for a good Prize competition are: very large cash prize; clear objective and simple rules; a defined problem rather than defined solution; a target that had become stuck; something that attracts maverick thinkers; something whose success will change people’s sense of what is possible. Currently operative X Prizes include one for extremely cheap genome sequencing and one for a race of 100-mile-per-gallon cars. An example of how the prize process is learning is the Google Lunar X Prize to launch, land, and operate a rover on the Moon’s surface. Diamandis wants the event to have time duration, not just be a flash in the pan, because duration is what persuades people that something new is real. And he wants more mechanisms that help create an industry in the wake of the event. Thus the $30 million purse for this prize will be divided—$20 million to the first-place winner, $5 million to second place, and $5 million each for bonus goals such as photographing man-made objects on the Moon, surviving a lunar night, and detecting ice in a crater. So far the race has 15 registered teams competing. X Prizes in the past have been for goals that could be achieved in a 3 to 8 year time frame. Now Diamandis wants to reach further in time and further into the realm of the seemingly impossible. He noted that only a short while ago a number of things were understood by everybody to be impossible: heavier-than-air flight; instant communications at a distance; transplanting a heart; space travel; cloning of a mammal; eradicating smallpox. What things are in that category now? And what would it take to get things moving in their direction? Diamandis calls them Mega-X Prizes. They would have a purse of $100 million to $1 billion. (Not implausible; there are 1,200 billionaires in the world now.) As an example of how the economics could make sense, Diamandis points out that the current cost of AIDS is $80 billion a year, $800 billion a decade. A successful $1 billion X Prize for a cure for AIDS would be a hugely efficient economic event as well as a massive humanitarian breakthrough. To conclude the evening, Diamandis offered the audience a list of 35 potential Mega-X Prize goals. Circle your top three choices, he said, and we’ll tally the results. Rather than tell you what that particular audience chose, I’ll pass on the list to you. What are your top three choices? What would you add to the list?… * First (private) Human on Mars * Faster-than-light Communications * Organ Replacement * First Baby Born off Earth * Babelfish - Instant universal translator * Flying cars * Artificial Intelligence: Build a machine that passes the Turing Test * Self-replicating (non-biological) machines * Longevity: Double the length of the healthy human lifespan * Cancer: Be able to detect any cancer at the 100-cell stage and Zap-it * Predict Earth Quakes with >1 hour / >1 day notice * Cure for AIDS * Identify extra-solar life-bearing planet: Any type of replicating life from, single cell or greater * SETI - Proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence * NY to Paris in 30 min * Private, fully-reusable, Orbital Spaceship * Human to orbit for 1 day * Download brain to a computer with all memory intact * Brain to brain communication that are more than 10x the speed of audio conversations * Develop real-time collective consciousness for a group of over 100 people * Eradicate Hunger for > 90% of the human population * Eradicate poverty for > 90% of the human population * Carbon Sequestration: Create an economic device to extract/sequester carbon from the atmosphere * Create an AI that can engage and educate children to their highest potential * Develop a teaching system that allows an increase learning rates by an order of magnitude.

### _Anathem_ book launch Neal Stephenson's nearly thousand page tome [_Anathem_](https://longnow.org/anathem/) was inspired in part by Long Now's [10,000 Year Clock](https://longnow.org/projects/clock/) project, and so a collaboration on the launch event was a natural fit. With over 900 in attendance the evening began with a performance of the [elaborate math based chanting](https://longnow.org/shop/longnow-merch/) created for the book by composer David Stutz. Neal Stephenson then took the stage to read the first few pages of _Anathem_ , and afterward he was joined on stage by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis for a discussion about the book and Long Now. Stephenson has been a friend of Long Now since its inception, even contributing some [early ideas](https://longnow.org/clock/other-ideas/) for the Clock itself. He has travelled to both Clock sites with Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose to get as much back story on the project as possible. _Anathem_ takes place in another literary world entirely, but Stephenson does use much of the actual mechanisms that we have designed, and spins out a world in which 10,000 year clocks are not just an idea, but part of the civilizational fabric. Long Now's primary reason for building a monument scale icon to long-term thinking has always been to inspire new myths. Having one of the first of those myths created by Stephenson has not only been an honor, but a real instruction in how such a world might play out. The evening also included a demonstration of "shovel-fu" a new martial arts form invented within the pages of _Anathem_ , as well as a mathematical chanting exercise run by David Stutz at the end of the night. You can read more about the connections between _Anathem_ and Long Now on [our site.](https://longnow.org/anathem/)

### Bot-dominated Reality [Daniel Suarez, originally published as Leinad Zaurus, delivered a talk on the themes developed in his (originally self published) book __Daemon__. The book is now scheduled to be released in hard cover in January 02009 by Dutton.] Forget about HAL-like robots enslaving humankind a few decades from now, the takeover is already underway. The agents of this unwelcome revolution aren't strong AIs, but "bots"- autonomous programs that have insinuated themselves into the Internet and thus into every corner of our lives. Apply for a mortgage lately? A bot determined your FICA score and thus whether you got the loan. Call 411? A bot gave you the number and connected the call. Highway-bots collect your tolls, read your license plate and report you if you have an outstanding violation. Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010. We are visible to bots even when we are not at our computers. Next time you are on a downtown street, contemplate the bot-controlled video cameras watching you, or the bots tracking your cellphone and sniffing at your Bluetooth-enabled gizmos. We walk through a gauntlet of bot-controlled sensors every time we step into a public space and the sensors are proliferating. Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don't need to be smart to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Internet and the complex of processing, storage and sensors linked to it is growing exponentially, creating a vast new ecology for bots to roam in. Bots aren't evolving on their own -- yet. Left unchecked, bots will trap the human race because the automation they enable will make it possible for a few people to run humanity while the rest of us are unable to make decisions of any consequence. Bots are thus vectors for despotism, with the potential to create a world where only a small group of people understand how society works. In the worst case, the controls over bots disappear -- for example, the only person who knows the password to a corporate bot dies- and the bots become autonomous. We are in a Darwinian struggle with narrow AI, and so far at least the bots are winning. But there is a solution: build a new Internet hard-coded with democratic values. Start with an encrypted Darknet into which only verifiably human users can enter. Create augmented reality tools to identify bots in the physical world. Enlist the aid of a few tame bots to help forge a symbiotic relationship with narrow AI. Stir in some luck, and perhaps we can avoid the fate of the Sorcerer's Apprentice who rashly enchants a broom to do his tedious chores and ends up terrorized by his imperfect creations. We had better succeed, for unlike the fable, there is no Master Sorcerer ready to return to break the spell and save us from our folly.

### Stone Ink Gallery Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past. Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, "because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos." But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn't work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called "carbon transfer print." It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone--the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany--and the black ink is carbon. On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years. He said that making one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000, and only ten artisans in the world have the skill, at locations in Toronto, Seattle, and Cornwall. Superb images can be made on porcelain (or Clock chamber walls), but Burtynsky prefers archival watercolor paper, because the ink bonds deep into the paper, and in the event of temperature changes, the ink and paper would expand and contract together. The rest of the presentation was of beautiful and evocative photographs from three demonstration exhibits for the proposed gallery--"Museum of the Mundane" by Vid Ingelvics; "Observations from a Blue Planet" by Marcus Schubert; and "In the Wake of Progress" by Burtynsky himself. A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: "That's a whole railroad train." Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China's Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo's marble quarry at Carrera, still working. "This is the sublime of our time," said Burtynsky, "shown straight on, for contemplation." Indeed worth studying for centuries.

### Becoming a Benign Dominant To track how humans became Earth's dominant animal, Ehrlich began with a photo of a tarsier in a tree. The little primate had a predator's binocular vision and an insect-grabber's fingers. When (possibly) climate change drove some primates out of the trees, they developed a two-legged stance to get around on the savanna. Then the brain swoll up, and the first major dominance tool emerged--language with syntax. About 2.5 million years ago, the beginnings of human culture became evident with stone tools. "We don't have a Darwin of cultural evolution yet," said Ehrlich. He defined cultural evolution as everything we pass on in a non-genetic way. Human culture developed slowly-the stone tools little changed from millennium to millennium, but it accelerated. There was a big leap about 50,000 years ago, after which culture took over human evolution--our brain hasn't changed in size since then. With agriculture's food surplus, specialization took off. Inuits that Ehrlich once studied had a culture that was totally shared; everyone knew how everything was done. In high civilization, no one grasps a millionth of current cultural knowledge. Physicists can't build a TV set. Writing freed culture from the limitations of memory, and burning old solar energy (coal and oil) empowered vast global population growth. Our dominance was complete. Ehrlich regretted that we followed the competitive practices of chimps instead of bonobos, who resolve all their disputes with genital rubbing. "The human economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Earth's natural systems," said Ehrlich, and when our dominance threatens the ecosystem services we depend on, we have to understand the workings of the cultural evolution that gave us that dominance. The current two greatest threats that Ehrlich sees are climate change (10 percent chance of civilization ending, and rising) and chemical toxification of the biosphere. "Every cubic centimeter of the biosphere has been modified by human activity." The main climate threat he sees is not rising sea levels ("You can outwalk that one") but the melting of the snowpack that drives the world's hydraulic civilizations-- California agriculture totally dependent on the Sierra snowpack, the Andes running much of Latin America, the Himalayan snows in charge of Southeast Asia. With climate in flux, Ehrlich said, we may be facing a millennium of constant change. Already we see the outbreak of resource wars over water and oil. He noted with satisfaction that human population appears to be leveling off at 9 to 10 billion in this century, though the remaining increase puts enormous pressure on ecosystem services. He's not worried about depopulation problems, because "population can always be increased by unskilled laborers who love their work." The major hopeful element he sees is that cultural evolution can move very quickly at times. The Soviet Union disappeared overnight. The liberation of women is a profound cultural shift that occurs in decades. Facing dire times, we need to understand how cultural evolution works in order to shift our dominance away from malignant and toward the benign. In the Q & A, Ehrlich described work he's been doing on cultural evolution. He and a graduate student in her fifties at Stanford have been studying the progress of Polynesian canoe practices as their population fanned out across the Pacific. What was more conserved, they wondered, practical matters or decoration? Did the shape of a canoe paddle change constantly, driven by the survival pressure of greater efficiency, or did the carving and paint on the paddles change more, driven by the cultural need of each group to distinguish itself from the others. Practical won. Once a paddle shape proved really effective, it became a cultural constant.

### Making Money WITH the Poor When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all American universities were found in Washington, DC. That's how it was in Bangladesh, where everything of importance was centralized in the capital city, Dacca. He later realized that Bangladesh was not unique; in most developing countries, the infrastructure is concentrated in one or two cities, leaving the rural areas almost blank. As he acquired degrees and experience in finance, he realized that this centralization is not only a mark of poorer countries, it is probably a cause of their poverty. Quadir presented this broad outline of development in order to give context for his belief that technology can alleviate poverty. He reminded us that 500 years ago, when the western countries were still "developing" their own societies, their political systems were no better, and often worse, than the instable corrupt regimes of many developing countries today. England had a series of kings who were impeached, arrested, ousted, or beheaded for their crimes. It was only after citizens were empowered by economic markets did the balance of power shift from the central king to decentralized citizens. All steps that devolve power away from a central authority -- including laws, trade, and education -- will raise democracy. In Quadir's view, it's not that centralization per se creates poverty. Poverty is the natural beginning state of all societies, east or west. Rather, decentralization is the engine that removes poverty and brings wealth. To the degree that infrastructure, education, and trade can be decentralized, wealth will rise in proportion. To the degree that infrastructure, education and trade are centralized, poverty will remain. Whereas many of us in the west, particularly the digital west, agree with this intuitively, we act contrary to this observation when we give large-scale aid to poor countries. As Quadir's colleague William Easterly argues in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth, the billions and billions of dollars spent on aid for developing countries has not only *not* helped, it has set them back decades. Aid, as we know it, kills development. This harm occurs because almost all previous aid has funneled through a central government or semi-governmental organizations and that official route tightens centrality. Even if the governments were saintly, and they are definitely not, the scale of money flowing through these centralizing nodes prohibits the distribution of resources, infrastructure, trade, and education. The more aid that arrives, the less development can actually happen. Technology is the escape from this quandary. Quadir came to see that "technologies that connect" could liberate productivity. He matched his experience in Bangladesh as a 13-year-old boy having to walk 10 kilometers to get medicine, only to find out the medicine man he sought was not home, and then walking back empty handed, having wasted a day -- all because there was no connection between his home and the pharmacist. Many years later in New York he wasted a day at work when there was no electricity to run phones or computers. Productivity required connectivity. If connectivity could be decentralized then it would lead to increased wealth. Quadir settled on the cell phone as a way to decentralized connectivity. In the early 1990s cell phones were big, dumb, and very expensive. Calls were $3 per minute. Only the rich could afford them. But he wanted the poorest people in the world to get them. How would this be possible? First, he believed in Moore's Law: that the phones would decrease in price and increase in power every year. That seemed inevitable to him. He said he could see "micro-chips marching toward the poor." He was right about that. Second, he piggybacked his hopes on a remarkable invention of another Bangladeshi, Mohammad Yunus, who developed micro-financing (and later won a Nobel prize for this invention). In Yunus' scheme a woman who owned virtually nothing could get a loan of $200 to purchase a cow. She would then sell the surplus milk of the cow to pay back the loan, earn both milk and an income for her family, and maybe buy another cow. Ordinarily, no bank would have lent her this trifling amount because she had no collateral, no education, and the costs of overseeing such a small loan with small gains, would have been prohibitive. Grameen Bank, Yunus' creation, discovered that these illiterate peasants were actually more likely to repay these small loans, and were very happy to pay good interest rates, and so that in aggregate, these micro-loans were more profitable than loaning to large industrial players. Quadir proceeded to ask, what if the women could rent a cell phone instead of a cow? Grameen Bank could make a micro-loan to the poor for the purchase a cell phone, which they then could sell/rent minutes to the rest of the village. The enterprising phone-renter would benefit and more importantly, the entire village would benefit from the connectivity. It did not really matter if the minutes were expensive, because when you have no connection, you are willing to pay dearly for it. Quadir started off his GrameenPhone with 5 cell towers, and eventually GrameenPhone erected 5,000 towers. In 1993 when Quadir began, Bangladesh had one of the lowest penetrations of telephones on the planet -- only one phone for every 500 people. GrameenPhone project unleashed 25 million phones. Today there are 100 times as many phones, or one per 5 people. Just as Quadir had envisioned, this decentralized connectivity has increased productivity. Without connectivity people waste a lot more time on economic errands. With cell connectivity farmers maximize their profits by getting real-time prices at distant markets; shepherds can call a vet, or order medicine. One study concluded that the total lifetime cost of an additional phone (including the cell tower and switching gear) was about $2,000, but that each phone enabled $50,000 of increased productivity. And surprisingly, the poorer the country to begin with, the greater the increase in wealth from connectivity. A lot of myths cloud the good intentions of developmental aid, Quadir says. Myths such as: poor countries have no resources, or that the poor don't have discretionary spending, or aren't concerned with brands, or aren't good credit risks, and so on. All these assumptions have been proven untrue over and over again, and especially so with GrameenPhone. The chief myth it dispelled was that government needs to subsidize technological development, when in fact there is good money to be made enabling the productivity of the poor. As Quadir says, "You don't make money on the poor, but with the poor." At dinner I asked Iqbal what he would have done differently with GrameenPhone. He replied, "Kept more shares." Quadir is now searching for other technologies to decentralize, and thereby become a tool to erase poverty. He is director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, which has been funded with $50 million. He is investigating whether energy can also be dethroned from its current mode of extremely centralized generation. Only 10% of the electricity produced at its source remains at the end of the wires as they reach homes and factories. Perhaps there are ways to decentralize its generation, which would trigger connections at the local level, and in his scheme, elevate wealth and democracy. If it worked, decentralized energy might also work in rich countries, increasing wealth and democracy in our part of the world as well. Throughout his talk, Quadir reiterated: "To raise productivity (and wealth), raise connectivity. It's that simple."

### Past vs. Future In what turned out to be a riveting evening, historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz fire-hosed each other with enough ideas, frames of reference, ripostes, and eloquences to lead to a clear conceptual divergence. At the same time, the two were discovering, live in front of an audience, new ways they might work together on future projects. Ferguson began by pointing out that while we face many futures, there is only one past, and its residents outnumber us--- only 6 percent of all humans are now alive. Historians, he said, "commune with the dead. We re-enact their thoughts, in their context and ours." Historians look for rough regularities, such as he found in his analysis of the wars and hatred played out in the 20th Century. In his book, _The War of the World_ , he describes how the combination of economic volatility, ethnic conflict, and failing empire always led to spirals of lethal violence. The advance of science and technology has not eliminated the possibility of violence but may have made it more powerful than ever. The three causes are still in play. "Our job is to keep them from coinciding again." Ferguson ended with a critique of Schwartz's book on scenario planning, _The Art of the Long View_ , which he thought showed signs of "heuristic bias." When Schwartz asked Ferguson to expand on that idea, Ferguson pointed out there was a whole chapter in the book about "The Global Teenager," which seemed spurious. It merely reflected Schwartz's personal experience: "You were a teenager when teenagers mattered. " Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that "great events should have great causes." Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with "counter-factual history" helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to "think about what didn't happen." The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past. In Schwartz's opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled _The Case for Optimism_ were derailed by reading Ferguson's _The War of the World_. He's been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. "You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends." Schwartz characterized Ferguson's view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. For Schwartz, the second half of the 20th Century showed an upside momentum, with a fraction of the violent deaths---5% of humans killed violently in the first half, 0.2 % in the second half. The Cold War ended quietly. Women were liberated. China took off. Prosperity accelerated. Everything from Wikipedia to cellphones empowered the grassroots. In response, Ferguson noted Schwartz's "faith in technology" and proposed it reflected his training as an engineer. "Aren't you like the pre-1914 people who said that war was impossible because of all the new technology and commerce?" Schwartz agreed that the parallel is worrying. Ferguson said, "I think our difference is that I'm a pessimist and you're an optimist. You're Pangloss and I'm Cassandra." Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, "It would be churlish not to be an optimist." Ferguson said, "That would make me skeptical about technology. The world leader in science and technology in 1940 was Nazi Germany." Questions from the audience ended with one asking whether optimism or pessimism was a more useful way to think about the future. Schwartz said, "Optimism lets you imagine how you can overcome problems, and those possibilities motivate change." Ferguson said, "You must always focus on worst-case scenarios, and history will teach them to you."

### Decoding and recoding life To really read DNA accurately and understand it thoroughly, you need to be able to write it from scratch and make it live, Venter explained. His sequencing the first diploid human genome (with the genes from both parents) last year showed there is much more genetic variation between humans than first thought. His current goal is to fully sequence 10,000 humans and bring the price for each sequence down to $1,000. With that data, his says, "We'll begin to really learn what's nature and what's nurture." "Microbes make up one half of the Earth's biomass." Venter's shotgun sequencing of open-ocean microbial samples revealed that every milliliter of ocean has one million bacteria and archaea and ten million viruses even in supposedly barren waters. Taking samples on a round-the-world sailing trip showed that every 200 miles the genes in the microbes are 85% different. "Microbes dominate evolutionary diversity," Venter said. Some 50,000 major gene families have been discovered. Humans and other complex animals have a small fraction of that in our own genes, but the "microbiome" of our onboard microbes carry the full richness. Only 1/10th of the cells in a human are human; the rest are microbes. There are 1,000 species in our mouths, another 1,000 in our guts, another 500 on our skins, and those with vaginas have yet another 500 species. Analysis has shown that a tenth of the chemicals used in our body come to us via our gut microbes. "We are what we feed our bacteria and what they give us." In an effort to determine what is the minimum gene set for life, Venter's team took a 500-gene bacteria and began knocking out genes. They got the viable set down to 400 and realized that the only way they are going to understand the complexity is by mimicking it. They would need to synthesize a working genome artificially, first on a computer and then with assembled base pairs and "boot it up" in a living cell, making a new, unique species. They devised techniques that repaired errors during synthesis, and they demonstrated that a genome from one kind of bacteria could be implanted in another and come to life there, changing one species into another. "It was true identity theft." "This software builds its own hardware," Venter marveled. He emphasized that synthetic biology does not re-do Genesis, but it does offer a kind of Cambrian explosion, building on 3.5 billion years of evolution to go in an infinity of possible directions. The range of possibilities is indicated by an existing organism that can take 1.75 million rads of radioactivity in 24 hours, which explodes its genome. It can reassemble the shattered genome and live on. It can go dormant for millions of years, and live on. That means life may already have migrated between planets. Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he's working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a "4th generation biofuel," where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors. "Ten million genes are the design components of the future," Venter concluded. "With combinatorial genomics and casette-based construction, we can make millions of genomes per day." During the Q & A I asked Venter why he spends so much of his time speaking in public, 150 talks a year. He said he sees that as part of his scientific work, to prepare the public for the big changes coming. He wants to avoid repeating the mistakes made with genetically modified crops (GMOs), where there was insufficient transparency and regulation, and irrational opposition by environmentalists, which crippled a crucial field. The public should feel it is included in every stage of genetic science and emerging biotechnology.

### Dispatches from Extremistan A "black swan," Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event. Examples: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events. Part of the problem is that we ignore the "silent evidence" of the nonobserved and nonobservable. We compute probability from the success of survivors. No one writes or reads a book titled "How I Lost a Million Dollars." Another problem is that we revise our own predictions and intentions unconsciously to match what actually happens. We disguise having been wrong by pretending we were right. This is "confirmation bias." There are TWO kinds of randomness, two realms in which events happen… Mediocristan is dominated by the average-- one new observation won't change much. If you are measuring the weight of a large sample of humans, adding the heaviest person in the world won't change the result, whereas measuring the average wealth of a large sample of humans would be transformed by adding the wealthiest person. Mediocristan is the realm of the Law of Large Numbers and of the Gaussian Bell Curve. Extremistan is dominated by extremes. Every year 16,000 novels are published in English. A handful of best-sellers absolutely dominate. This is the realm of the power-law curve and the Long Tail. Extremistan defies prediction. You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that's all you can say. Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that the main dynamic of Mediocristan is energy, and the main dynamic of Extremistan is information. Anything social is Extremistan. Thus there are two kinds of experts. A souffle chef really is an expert and can be trusted. An economist is a pseudo-expert. "Never take advice from someone wearing a tie." All you get from a Council of Economic Advisors is an illusion of control. Stock market analysts have proved to be worse than nothing. Don't focus on probability. Focus on consequences. Black Swans will come. Prepare against the negative ones; be ready to soar with the positive ones. Pay attentive heed to tradition and old people-- they have experienced more Black Swans. PS… All of the SALT speakers perform for free. Taleb added the further generosity of insisting on paying for his travel and lodging. Extra thanks to him for that.

Paul Saffo, a forecaster and technology historian known for mapping long-term tech change, offers a playful take on uncertainty. He talks about the cone of uncertainty, wild cards and science fiction as idea seeds. He explains S-curves, looks for odd indicators like Roomba behavior, and recounts the DARPA robot car inflection that signaled rapid change.