Long Now

One reason lots of people don't want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant. The commonest shorthand term for the runaway acceleration of technology is "the Singularity"--a concept introduced by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1984. The term has been enthusiastically embraced by technology historians, futurists, extropians, and various trans-humanists and post-humanists, who have generated variants such as "the techno-rapture," "the Spike," etc. It takes a science fiction writer to critique a science fiction idea. Along with being one of America's leading science fiction writers and technology journalists, Bruce Sterling is a celebrated speaker armed with lethal wit. His books include _The Zenith Angle_ (just out), _Hacker Crackdown_ , _Holy Fire_ , _Distraction_ , _Mirrorshades_ (cyberpunk compendium), _Schismatrix_ , _The Difference Engine_ (with William Gibson), _Tomorrow Now_ , and _Islands in the Net_. The Seminar About Long-term Thinking on June 10-11 was Bruce Sterling examining "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole." He treated the subject of hyper-acceleration of technology as a genuine threat worth alleviating and as a fond fantasy worth cruel dismemberment. Sterling noted that the first stating of the Singularity metaphor and threat came from John Von Neuman in the 1950s in conversation with Stan Ulam--"the rate of change in technology accelerates until it is mind-boggling and beyond social control or even comprehension." But it was science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who first published the idea, in novels and a lecture in the early 1980s, and it was based on the expectation of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence. Vinge wrote: "I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030." Vinge was not thrilled at the prospect. The world-changing event would happen relatively soon, it would be sudden, and it would be irrevocable. "It's an end-of-history notion," Sterling drawled, "and like most end-of-history notions, it is showing its age." It's almost 2005, and the world is still intelligible. Computer networks have accelerated wildly, but water networks haven't--in fact we're facing a shortage of water. The Singularity feels like a 90s dot-com bubble idea now--it has no business model. "Like most paradoxes it is a problem of definitional systems involving sci-fi handwaving around this magic term 'intelligence.' If you fail to define your terms, it is very easy to divide by zero and reach infinite exponential speed." It was catnip for the intelligentsia: "Wow, if we smart guys were more like we already are, we'd be godlike." Can we find any previous Singularity-like events in history? Sterling identified three--the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. The bomb was sudden and world changing and hopeful--a new era! LSD does FEEL like it's world changing. Viruses proliferate exponentially on the net. LSD is pretty much gone now. Mr. Atom turned out to be not our friend and has blended in with other tools and problems. Singularity proponents, Sterling observed, are organized pretty much like virus writers--loose association, passionate focus, but basically gentle. (They'd be easily rounded up.) "They don't have to work very hard because they are mesmerized by the autocatalyzing cascade effect. 'Never mind motivating voters, raising funds, or persuading the press; we've got a mathematician's smooth line on a 2D graph! Why bother, since pretty soon we'll be SUPERHUMAN. It's bound to happen to us because we are EARLY ADAPTERS.'" Vernor Vinge wrote: "For me, superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed." Said Sterling, "A glut of technical riches never properly absorbed sounds like a great description of the current historical epoch." Sterling listed five kinds of kinds of reactions to the Singularity. 1) Don't know and don't care (most people). 2) The superbian transhumanists. 3) The passive singularitatians--the Rapture of the Nerds. 4) The terrified handflapping apocalypse millennialists (a dwindling group, too modish to stay scared of the same apocalypse for long). 5) The Singularity resistance--Bill Joy killjoys who favor selective relinquishment. Sterling turned out to be a fellow traveler of the Resistance: "Human cognition becoming industrialized is something I actually worry about." Vinge did a great thing, said Sterling. The Singularity has proved to be a rich idea. "In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That's why we are science fiction writers, not scientists." Suppose some kind of Singularity does come about. Even though it is formally unthinkable to characterize post-Singularity reality, Sterling proposed you could probably be sure of some things. The people there wouldn't feel like they are "post"-anything. For them, most things would be banal. There wouldn't be one Singularity but different ones on different schedules, and they would keep on coming. It would be messy. Death would continue as the great leveler. Suppose humanity elected to slow down an approaching Singularity to a manageable pace, what could we actually do? How do you stop a runaway technology? --You could reverse the order of scientific prestige from honoring the most dangerous new science (such as nuclear physics) to honoring the most responsible restraint--a Relinquishment Nobel. It would be scientific self-regulation. --You could destroy scientific prestige through commercialization. Scientists diminish into mercenaries--"put-upon Dilberts and top-secret mandarins." It would still be dangerous, though. --Have a few cities leveled by a Singularity technology and you could bounce into world government with intense surveillance and severe repression of suspect technologies and technologists. Most societies are already anti-science; this would fulfill their world view. "You can run but you can't hide! You will be brought to justice or justice will be brought to you! Into the steel cage, Mr. Singularity. Into Guantanamo till you tell us who your friends are. Then they join you in there." Or maybe it's not that fierce, and it's all done by benevolent non-governmental organizations. Sterling concluded: "It does come down to a better way to engage with the passage of time. The loss of the future is becoming acute. The most effective political actors on the planet right now are guys who want to blow themselves up--they really DON'T want to get out of bed in the morning and face another day. People need a motivating vision of what comes next and the awareness that more will happen after that, that the future is a process not a destination. The future is a verb, not a noun. Our minds may reach the ends of their tethers, but we'll never stop futuring."

### Maps and time David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated lecture, "Mapping Time" is not just about maps. It is the future of data and knowledge handling. People literally gasp at the things Rumsey shows can be done. I love it when techies, artists, and historians all gasp at the same time. That happened with David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated Seminar About Long-term Thinking on May 13-14, "Mapping Time." Once an artist, long a real estate success, now one of the world's leading historic map collectors and THE leading online map innovator, David Rumsey gives an exceptionally deft graphic talk. Complex and elegant things kept happening with his images, always on cue with never a hesitation or false move. I've never seen a tighter weaving of ideas, words, and persuasive images. You can find everything he talked about and more at his website: [http://www.davidrumsey.com](http://www.davidrumsey.com/) Maps define worlds, Rumsey said. Compare the Spanish and British maps of the years of discovery in the New World. Because the Spanish maps and charts were kept as state secrets, their voluminous naming of rivers and mountains and so on didn't last. The British proudly published all their discovery maps as a proof of ownership. Their names are the ones that still adorn the land. The combination of the Web and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has utterly transformed the world of maps. When Rumsey contemplated donating his collection of historic maps to a library or museum, he learned that they would be hidden carefully away in some vault, and almost no one would see them. So instead he put the collection online--inventing new super-high-resolution imaging systems and new browsers that could read the multi-gigabyte images. His site now gets two million visitors a year. Stanford's excellent map library gets six thousand users a year. Nothing shows the value of high resolution as well as maps, said Rumsey. For example, he was able to take the 110 separate sheets of a bird's-eye view of late 19th Century St. Louis and in a "digital knitting project" connect them all into one vast, beautiful image. There are two TERAbytes of data on his website. Because the files are too large to download, he invented browsers that can explore and compare them. It's the comparison tools that are shocking. Thanks to GIS, Rumsey can take old somewhat incorrect maps and "geo-rectify" them, using "rubber-sheeting" software tools he developed, so that the old maps can overlay perfectly on current precisely accurate maps. He demonstrated with four maps and an aerial photo of the San Francisco waterfront area where he was giving the talk. Starting with the old map, he faded up through the sequence of maps to the present, and you saw the city build in exquisite detail. Then he popped the four maps into four separate windows and scrolled them all in synch. Take Lewis and Clark's hand-drawn maps of the Missouri River from 1805. Once geo-rectified, you can use them for navigating now, GPS in hand. Tim O'Reilly commented, "This means that old maps are no longer 'wrong.' The past is not a mistake. You can add new information to an old document in a way that keeps it perpetually valuable." Rumsey demo-ed some other features of his site, such as his way of empowering serendipity by providing a "ticker"--a crawl of random images from his collections (and now other collections, including art) scrolling along the bottom of the screen. Click on anything enticing, and off you go to explore it. He said that getting totally covered by Google was essential--"Google is the ultimate catalog." Once fully linked on Google, his traffic took off from 2,000 visitors a day to 7,000. Then Rumsey showed what happens when you "drape" his maps over a raised-relief topological version of the landscape. You can view it obliquely. You can fly through it! As you fly through it, you can flick from one historic version of the landscape to another! This is where the gasps took over. To my mind, Rumsey's dynamic layering tools for visual data are new tool of thought, one that will become common. They are a compelling new way to think in time. All of Rumsey's maps can be perused totally for free. We asked him how much it costs to run his incredible operation. He said it's maybe 3 or 400K a year. Where does the money come from? From him. David Rumsey is one of the most impressive just-do-it philanthropists I've ever met. He is having more fun with his money and his time and the world than just about anyone.

### Mega gardening Big as life and twice as opinionated, the renowned preservation biologist Daniel Janzen spoke for The Long Now on Friday, April 9, 2005. His perspective on preservation may be jarring to some: "It's ALL Gardening". Dan Janzen is most widely known for his heroic efforts helping set all of Costa Rica on a preservation path, ensuring that the mega-diverse nation continues indefinitely as a haven for science and eco-tourism. His particular focus, Guanacaste Conservation Area, was recently declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. His ongoing work there in field taxonomy and innovative preservation practices led to his receiving the Crafoord Prize (1984), the Kyoto Prize (1997), and the Albert Einstein Science Prize (2002). Professor Janzen teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

### Asteroid threat report Schweickart filled the hall with some 240 at the Presidio Officers Club and gave a dazzling lecture. He left the next day for Washington DC to lobby Congress to apply its will to making the Earth safe for the very long term. "For life to survive in planetary systems," said Schweickart, "it has to figure out how to deal with massive asteroid impacts. Who knows how many advanced life forms in the universe have failed or passed that test. Humanity is just now on that cusp. We have the knowledge and the ability---if not yet the will---to prevent future large-scale extinction events from asteroids." Data-rich, graphics-rich, and huge in conceptual scale, it was the most long-now Seminar yet---"The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years." Impact craters everywhere---Moon, Mercury, Mars; even asteroids have craters from other asteroids. (And occasional comets---1% of the source of impacts is from comets, as we saw very recently when a fragmented comet carpet-bombed Jupiter.) "How many asteroids are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Pick a number. But if it doesn't have at least nine zeroes after it, it's wrong." Rusty's presentation was full of lore. Most asteroids are stone, but they are light---they absorb impact like Styrofoam. There are 100,000 shooting stars every night on Earth---small asteroids. Meteorites are COLD when they land, not hot (the deep cold of space is preserved, while the air-friction hot surface ablates away.) Air bursts from large asteroids cause more damage than ground strikes, and ocean impacts can cause tremendously destructive tsunamis. With really large impacts, the planets exchange material---Mars rocks on Earth, Earth rocks on Mars. When the last major-extinction impact occurred in Yucatan 65 million years ago, 10% of the stupendous blast debris exploded clear away from the Earth, while the other 90% rained down incandescent with re-entry all over the Earth for 90 minutes of burning sky---everything flammable on Earth burned up, and one meter of the oceans boiled off. (That was a 10-kilometer asteroid; when a 200-kilometer asteroid hits, it boils off the whole oceans). Then there was no sunlight for several years. 65% of all species on Earth ceased to exist, including the super-dominant dinosaurs. They failed the asteroid test. Rusty showed a diagram with all important asteroid data in it. The power-law distribution (many small, few large) is so perfect you can directly correlate frequency of impact with size of asteroid and energy released in megatons and the damage that would result. (Calibration: the largest nuclear weapon tested was a Soviet bomb of 58 megatons---6,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb. The 1908 air-burst of an asteroid over Tunguska, Siberia, made an 11-megaton explosion that flattened 2,100 square kilometers of forest.) "The asteroid threat over the next 100,000 years is right there in the chart," said Rusty. In the next hundred millennia: * There's a 10% chance of an asteroid causing planet-scale damage with 100,000 megatons of energy released. * There's a 50-50 chance of a 500-meter asteroid that could destroy an area the size of Texas with a 6,000 megaton explosion---100 times the USSR's biggest bomb. * There will be about TEN 200-meter asteroid impacts, good for 400 megatons. * There will be about A HUNDRED 70-meter-diameter asteroids, each causing 15 megatons of damage (i.e. worse than the Tunguska explosion, which would have wiped out all of London if it had hit there instead of the remote wilderness). NASA's Space Guard program has been looking for PHA's---Potentially Hazardous Asteroids---that are 1 kilometer or more in diameter. There are about 1,100 of them---700 have been detected and tracked and found innocent of threat; that leaves some 400 still unknown. Since asteroids orbit with the Earth around the Sun, any collision path is gradually convergent. Advance knowledge of collision with a very large asteroid can range from 40 years to 2 years, with the kind of attention now being paid. Extreme case: "1950DA" is an asteroid that has been tracked since 1950. Its orbit is so precisely known that we can forecast there is a 1-in-300 chance it will collide with Earth on March 16, 2880---876 years from this month. Orbital mechanics are destiny. One of the sponsors of the SALT series, Leighton Read, noted that the asteroid threat is a rare instance where we really CAN predict the future, a very long way out and in great detail, at least statistically. Furthermore, this is a rare instance where we really can do something about the future. Threatening asteroids can not only be detected, they can be deflected. Rusty said there are two main approaches to deflection---sudden impulse (like a nuclear explosion), and slow, guided redirection. He favors the second, and lead-authored an article in last November's SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on the design and use of an "asteroid tugboat." He noted that some of those favoring nuclear deflectors have an agenda of weaponizing space and see this as a dual-use back door to something now thoroughly forbidden by treaties. Rusty heads the B612 Foundation (named for the Little Prince's asteroid), which is lobbying to add asteroid deflection to NASA's Prometheus mission to Jupiter's icy moons, planned for around 2015. The tugboat would have an ion or plasma drive (highly efficient) powered by a nuclear reactor. Asteroids spin, and they are extremely massive. Moving them where you want is tricky. The evening before the talk, Danny Hillis jarred Rusty by suggesting a "tractor beam"---use the gravitational attraction between the tug and the asteroid to "pull" the spinning asteroid without have to touch it. It turned out that one of Rusty's colleagues had come up with exactly the same idea several weeks ago. To make an asteroid miss the Earth, all you have to do is add or subtract 40 seconds from a 2-year orbit---1/200th of a mph of a rock traveling at some 66,000 mph. Big rock, though.

### Long-term policy analysis Dewar is head of RAND’s Pardee Center on very long-term policy—35 to 200 years For over half a century the RAND Corporation has influenced national policy and invented major intellectual tools. Packet switching (Paul Baran) came from RAND; so did scenario planning (Herman Kahn); so does the current understanding of “net warfare” (John Arquilla). For all of its power, RAND’s thinkers are seldom heard in public. Three years ago RAND set out to engage serious long-term thinking. A RAND alum funded the Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition, with the charge “to improve our ability to think about the longer-range future–from 35 to as far as 200 years ahead.” Selected to run the new center was 22-year-RAND-veteran James Dewar. Jim Dewar from RAND laid out a persuasive case for long-term thinking and planning at the Seminar last Thursday. Examples of successful long-term planning include: * The US Constitution * Panama Canal * Transcontinental railroad in the US * Marshall Plan * Bismarck’s unification of Germany * George Kennan’s policy of “containment” of the USSR * US Social Security plan—cemented in place with a card for every citizen, by clever Roosevelt * FCC wisely helping the US phone system connect to computers * Leighton Read noted that all these examples emerged from traumatic conditions. As for an example of “getting it right about getting it wrong,” Dewar cited Keynes’s 1919 book, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_ , about how taking revenge on the defeated Germans would lead to another war. It did. The next time, the Allies took Keynes’s advice, and that was the Marshall Plan. Historian David Lowenthal, a guest at the seminar, observed that no publisher would take Keynes’s book, so he published it himself, and made $2 million on it. Unpacking the idea of Long-Term Policy Analysis (LPTA), Dewar stated that “long-term” means “characterized by deep uncertainty”—typically including uncertainty at the systemic level (structure), uncertainty about likelihood of which way events might go, uncertainty about the migration of values, and uncertainty about what are proper goals. Leighton Read suggested we should build a detailed taxonomy of the various kinds of uncertainties about the future. Dewar observed that one of the greatest difficulties of doing long-term policy analysis is GETTING THE ATTENTION of policy makers. Peter Schwartz recalled that at Royal Dutch/Shell he had extensive profiles on all the managing directors of Shell—his direct customers for scenario planning—so he could tailor the work to their interests. Both Dewar and David Lowenthal noted that policy makers find it much easier to take on known, existing problems that to work on emerging problems that are not defined yet. They’re great at “pound of cure,” terrible at “ounce of prevention.” That’s what long-term policy analysis has to fix. Dewar showed slides of a technique his center at RAND is developing to run models using thousands of scenarios, but what he was showing seemed incomprehensible, so the seminar group challenged it strongly. This was tremendously helpful for the lecture the following evening, where Dewar made the same slides very compelling by spelling out a case—involving the tradeoffs of various forms of taxing polluters against joint gains in economic growth AND “decoupling” that growth from environmental harm.

George Dyson, a historian of science and technology, dives into the evolution of computing and its future implications. He discusses the balance between digital and analog preservation, highlighting the role of archivists. The conversation touches on computing’s historical ties to bomb development and long-term predictions about the universe's expansion. Dyson shares personal anecdotes that connect ancient kayaking techniques to modern tech, emphasizing the cyclical nature of innovation and the partnership between computing and biology.

### The art of the really long view For such a weighty subject there was a lot of guffawing going on in the Seminar Thursday night. The topic was "The Art of the Really Long View." Peter Schwartz chatted through his slides for tonight's lecture, then the discussion waded in. Present were Danny Hillis, Leighton Read, Angie Thieriot, Ryan Phelan, David Rumsey, Eric Greenberg, Kevin Kelly, Anders Hove, Schwartz, and me. The event was very well audio and video taped, so we can link you to a fuller version later. For now, here's a few of my notes. Much of discussion circled around Schwartz's assertion that the most durable and influential of human artifacts are IDEAS. And a distinction worth drawing is between POWERFUL ideas and GOOD ideas. Not all powerful ideas turn out to be good, in the long run. For example, Schwartz proposed that monotheism has been an extremely powerful idea, dominating all kinds of human activity for millennia, but its overall goodness is increasingly questionable. Or take the powerful idea of Communism and the powerful idea of Capitalism. Looking at them when both were being touted as world solutions around, say, 1890, how would you distinguish which one was likelier to play out as good? Most of us, then, would probably have given the nod to Communism, particularly in light of robber-baron excesses in the US, etc. Danny Hillis proposed that bad powerful ideas are essentially collective hallucinations which mask reality, whereas good powerful ideas have built into them all kinds of reality checks. So Capitalism---expressed as markets---has prevailed so far because it is an emergent, distributed, out-of-control feedback system. Some notable quotes (among many): > "The future is the ONLY thing we can do anything about." --Hillis > "Denial is a special case of optimism." --Leighton Read. Revisiting Long Now's frequent chant that multiplying options is the great good to do for future generations, we examined the idea of "toxic choice"---for instance the stupefying multiplicity of choices in a supermarket or department store that make you long for a good boutique. "But lots of boutiques," said Ryan Phelan. "I've got it! " said Read, "We'll have two big toxic choice emporiums, connected by a bunch of boutiques! I think we've just invented the mall." Contemplating work to be done, Schwartz said: "We know it would be a good idea to have the rule of law extended to include ecological systems, but we haven't figured out how to make that a powerful idea yet."

In this podcast, Brian Eno, a pioneer in ambient music, discusses the importance of long-term thinking and planning. He explores the impact of music on time perception, the societal shift towards short-term thinking, and the need for individuals to address long-term societal issues. Eno advocates for embracing the 'long now' to shape a better future and discusses the complexities of planning monumental projects over millennia like atomic waste disposal.