Provocative Future

Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics

2011-12-09T23:37:00.000-05:00

In this TED Talk given back in 2005, Yochai Benkler talked about how the development of "social production" is the long term shift caused by the Internet. Examples of this include

Linux - note that 70% of critical web servers are controlled by Linux
Wikipedia (of course)
Google - in the sense that they have esentially outsourced the decision of what is relevant to the web community as a whole in its page rank algorithm.
Seti@home - which was for a time the most powerful supercomputer cluster in the world

Why is this happening? Yochai says that for the first time in history, the capital for generating and distributing information is cheaply available to everyone. Previously it was too expensive to have decentralized production. What we're seeing now is the emergence of social sharing and exchange that in some contexts it is more efficient than markets or firms. It is sustainable and growing fast.

Yochai also makes the amusing observation that money is not the greatest motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you do not increase the chances of being invited back. If the dinner example is not obvious, think of sex.

The biggest disagreement I have with his view is that this is not the first time this is happening. Open source collaboration is in fact the fundamental operating model of the scientific method. Applied science and engineering is often done for economic profit and protected by patents. Basic research however is freely shared with everyone, and done more for social status and personal enjoyment than to achieve large monetary gains.

Developeronomics and the Rise of the Internet and Software

2011-12-09T22:09:00.000-05:00

There was an interesting article recently in Forbes titled The Rise of Developeronomics by Venkatesh Rao. It talks about software developers and how important it is for companies to hire and hold on to the best ones. One interesting claim is that good software developers are not just somewhat better than the average developer, they are often 10x better than the average one, and can make a very big difference to a company.

The most interesting quote, however, is how the development of software has been changing much of the economy, especially once the Internet was developed:

Speaking of history, let’s put all this in perspective for non-software-industry types who still don’t understand just how epochal the birth of the software industry is for the rest of the economy.

As Alan Kay, a major pioneer of today’s software-eaten planet, pointed out recently, the Internet doesn’t have stop, shut down, or rewind buttons. Once it was turned on,history was essentially rebooted. Software began eating away at the pre-software layers of civilization on the planet, and depositing software-infused layers instead.

One of these days, we’ll recognize the enormous significance of what’s going on and replace the BC/AD distinction with BI/AI (Before Internet/After Internet), with January 1, Year 0 reset to October 29, 1969, the day the Internet was turned on (if you want to start right, 2012 is actually Year 43, AI).

And yes, this time, there will be a Year 0, if programmers have anything to do with it.

This type of argument suggests that the technological singularity is happening now, and we're living in the middle of it. It's taking a few decades, but that's a blink of the eye if you take a longer term historical perspective.

Mental Enhancement Drugs

2011-11-11T21:14:00.000-05:00

"The bottom line is that cognitive-enhancing pills are a reality and people are using them. " That quote came from an article titled The Dope on Mental Enhancement in New Scientist magazine. According to the article, a recent survey showed that 38% of the people responding have already tried various mental enhancement drugs ( well, actually the numbers would have been much higher if they were honest and included caffeine in the list of such drugs). Such drugs are a reality now, they benefit people and society when properly used, and I'm sure that the mental enhancing drugs in the research pipeline are much more effective than the ones currently available. Adjusting to this will take some shifts in cultural attitudes though.

David Korten message to the Occupy Wall Street movement

2011-10-14T23:09:00.000-04:00

David Korten, an economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard Business School, was asked why the Occupy Wall Street movement is striking such a strong chord with such a broad base of our society. He replied with some verysobering words "The problem is deeply structural. There's not going to be an economic recovery, and the politicians are not going to take the actions that are necessary. The leadership is only going to come from the people". To the protesters he would like to say "The future depends on you. Have the courage, the world is watching"

He also points out that the income of the middle class has been declining for some time. We should note that this has been masked for the last two decades by the rise of two income families and a huge increase in personal debt. These coping mechanisms have reached their limit though, which suggests that we are not going to return to the way things used to be. Perhaps some people are beginning to realize this. For others, this goes against their economic ideology and that makes it very hard to accept.

Let's End the Hero Worship of Steve Jobs

2011-10-09T21:03:00.000-04:00

Roles models can be a good thing to have. Hero worship can be problematic though. Now that the hero worship of Steve Jobs has died down, let me offer a different perspective. In reality, Steve Jobs sometimes acted like a jerk in his personal life, he abused and mistreated his fellow employees, and he has no public record of ever donating any of his massive wealth to charity. He didn’t invent much of what Apple is known for. The mouse, graphic interface, MP3 song player, smart phone, and tablet computer were all first introduced by other companies. Steve Jobs – no, make that the engineers at Apple, took those innovations and produced better versions of them. Steve Jobs never embraced the open source movement, and Apple remains one of the prime examples of complete corporate control over anything having to do with their products.

As far as Steve Jobs changing the world – really? In any way that qualifies as important? When the long term history of the computer industry is written, his impact will be much small than someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and then refused to patent it so that it could be more widely shared in an open manner by everyone. Or what about another serious role model who recently died, Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. She was personally responsible for starting major environmental and women’s rights movements in Africa, movements that have been causing major improvements in the lives of people all over Africa. When CEOs become more idolized then these people, you again have to question the priorities of our culture.

The fact that Steve Jobs’ death was announced by Apple Corp., and not by his family or friends, should be something that strikes people as strange and a little sad.

The History of Same Sex Marriage Support

2011-03-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

I've read various predictions that the majority of Americans will finally approve of same sex marrige sometime before 2020, with the year varying depending on who was making the prediction. To my surprise and delight, I found that the crossover has apparently already happened. The majority of Americans today now support same sex marriage. The following chart on the legality of same sex marriage is from the 2010 edition of the General Social Survey. Andrew Sullivan calls it "one of the most successful political, social and cultural movements in history".

Radical Transparency

2011-01-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

I attended a small public discussion about WikiLeaks and the benefits of transparency. Many of the people hadn't previously given these topics much thought, but once the discussion got going they really got into the topic. One person expressed a concern that our government might be at a disadvantage because it was so open compared to the governments in some other countries. But the following counter argument was made.

In economics, it is generally agreed that the more information people have, the better decisions they make and the more efficiently the economy runs. That's why there are laws requiring a certain degree of financial disclosure by all public corporations, and that's why processed food packages must contain a list of ingredients and the fat and calorie content. More information results in a better decisions and a better running economy.

The same thing applies to a democratic / representative government. The more information people have, the better they are at electing representatives or demanding that poor policies be corrected. Our openness is not a vulnerability, but a strength.

One person objected, "Didn't WikiLeaks just publish a list of our greatest vulnerabilities to terrorism? That surely didn't make us stronger." Another person quickly stated that if such a list was indeed published (and we're not sure it was), the terrorist organizations almost certainly were aware of these vulnerabilities long ago. It was only for the American public that this was new news. This news also shed light on the fact that very little was done to increase the security in these areas since 9/11, which will hopefully generate enough public outcry for something to be done. Openness is a strength.

There was general agreement that WikiLeaks should not be viewed as a single unique event, but an example of what will become very common from now on thanks for the ability to share information on the Internet. This brought up the idea of Radical Transparency. The term was originally developed to describe the idea of complete transparency on the environmental impact of products, so that people could make more informed and responsible choices about what to purchase. This can easily be extended to the social impact of the way the products are produced and distributed, as well as to the other policies of the company producing the products. This is being implemented in a haphazard way now as various groups attempt to spread information about operations at various companies in order to influence people's purchasing decisions. To date it seems to have some real but limited impact on reducing some of the worst practices on environmental destruction or abusive child labor practices in foreign countries. I can see this movement as an alternative to government regulations, one which is considerably more effective in the global economy where individual governments have limited jurisdiction. If only it became a more organized movement...

Thoughts on the Evolution of Life on Earth

2010-11-24T08:05:00.000-05:00

I recently attended a book discussion of "Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins. The book is an excellent discussion of the evolutionary history of life on earth and how different species are related. As the discussion developed, several people repeated the theme brought up in the book that humankind is NOT in any reasonable sense the "culmination of the evolutionary process".

Part of the argument for this is that evolution is not directed towards a specific goal. If you were to replay the tape of evolution starting with just minor changes, it is very unlikely that it would end up producing the human race again. We are a somewhat random production of evolution. There is a good argument that evolution would have probably produced some sort of intelligent creatures at some point. After all, it also produced dolphins, parrots, and squids - three other species that show some signs of developing reasonable intelligence. Whether it would have produced any species that had the physical ability to grow much larger brains, plus the physical dexterity to manipulate tools easily, and that lived in an ecological niche that was suitable for developing advanced societies similar to humans is an open question. Perhaps most species that evolve some advanced intelligence end up limited by physical factors from taking that next step of creating advanced technological societies (?)

It occurred to me that we are not the "culmination of the evolutionary process" in a different sense though. Life has been evolving on Earth for maybe 3.5 billion years. We are probably only somewhere near the midpoint in the history of life on Earth. In fact, since evolution appears to be speeding up (both biologically as well as culturally), we are probably still early in the "story of events" in the evolutionary development of life on Earth.

This is something to think about that perhaps makes you a little more excited and humble at the same time. It's also an excellent example of what some people refer to as the "feelings of awe and spiritual wonder" produced by a fuller scientific understanding of the universe around us and our place in it.

Just How Inefficient is Our Society?

2010-10-25T23:09:00.000-04:00

I was listening to a conversation about efficiency in the U.S. economy the other day. It’s actually amazing how far below our actual capabilities we are right now when you stop and think about it. I’m thinking in terms of fully utilizing our human resources.

I recently spent 11 months unemployed. I went from being an experienced and productive computer engineer to someone who produced zero net contribution to our economy for those months. I worked hard every day, but that effort was devoted to my job search routine, filling out job applications, preparing for interviews, etc. (I also did volunteer work and spent more time with my family, but I’m not counting that here.) Fortunately I have a job that allows me to be productive again, but when I look back at that time I spent unemployed I shake my head at the waste of time and effort that could have been put to much better use.

Today we have about 10% of our workforce in this situation – representing maybe a 10% waste in our productivity. It’s hard to estimate what portion of the potential workforce is not counted in that number because they have given up or see no opportunity for a meaningful job. Some people estimate that the real number when these people are taken into account is closer to 20%. Then add a few percent more cover the people currently in prison. We can argue about adding the number of people in the military to this amount too, but that’s a relatively small number compared to other factors.

The next big factor, and potentially the biggest factor of all, is the number of people underemployed. These are people who are working at jobs that, for whatever reason, do not allow them to fully contribute to society what they are capable of. By the time you add all these factors in, our human workforce as a group is almost certainly contributing less than half of what they are capable of.

You could spend considerable time debating what portion of this is due to personal choices, cultural factors, or inefficiencies in the market. I don’t know the correct answer here. I’m sure of two things though: (1) We as a society are doing a fraction of what we are capable of and there’s room for considerable improvement, and (2) we are in a situation where there’s a considerable need for that extra human potential to solve a growing list of problems.

Positive Feedback is Making the Stock Market Increasingly Unstable

2010-10-07T22:11:00.000-04:00

On May 6th 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the NY Stock Exchange dropped by 1,000 points in a matter a minutes in an event than has become known as the “Flash Crash”. Fortunately for people invested in the market, the Dow regained most of that loss very quickly. This was an unprecedented case, and a warning – how could the stock market change so much so quickly?

It turns out that the flash crash was caused by a single large stock trade, and the series of high frequency computer trades that quickly followed. This should be taken as a very serious warning of how unstable the market has become.

Stock markets are inherently unstable because of positive feedback. Positive feedback is a basic phenomena in control theory in which parts of a system function to increase the size of any change in either the positive or negative direction (negative feedback works to reduce or dampen any change). The market is full of positive feedback loops . Increasing stock prices attract more investors which produces even greater increases in stock prices. Falling stock prices scare away investors which causes even greater reductions in stock prices.

It is a basic principle of control theory that when positive feedback becomes large enough, the system becomes very unstable and begins to experience wild oscillations. The loud squealing you sometimes hear when there is too much feedback in a sound system with a microphone is closely related to this.

Unfortunately, the amount of positive feedback in the stock market is increasing in size and speed each year, being driven mainly by very high speed computer trading. There was a recent story about a new transatlantic cable being laid between England and the US primarily to allow faster computer trading on the NY stock exchange by firms in London. The current cables have a 65 millisecond delay, and the new cables will reduce the delay to under 60 milliseconds. I’ll save the commentary about the tremendous amount of waste in physical resources and intellectual talent that is going into this for another time. For now, I’ll just point to it as an example of the increasing speed and strength of the positive feedback effecting stock markets, bringing them ever closer to the point of wild instability.

Relativity Denial Returns

2010-09-11T23:36:00.000-04:00

When I was much younger, I recall that refuting the Theory of Relativity was a favorite pastime of various crackpots and clowns. The Nazis even derided it by referred to it as foolish “jewish science” and obviously inferior to proper “aryan science”. (Einstein was a Jewish German if you didn’t know). In reality, most aspects of Relativity have been experimentally confirmed, some in extreme detail. The current GPS system even has to take into account the effect of relativity in order to achieve the accuracy it does.

In more recent years, the attention of the crackpots seems to have become focused on refuting evolution and more recently global climate change. Have people given up battling against the Theory of Relativity?

Thanks to a recent article on Talking Points Memo, I found out that the answer is a definite “no”. Conservapedia (the alternative to the reality based and thus liberally biased Wikipedia) has a detailed article on Relativity. It’s initial criticism states that “…unlike most of physics, the theories of relativity consist of complex mathematical equations relying on several hypotheses.”

It gets worse. It’s accompanying article Counterexamples to Relativity describes Relativity as “heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world”. It states that Relativity denies action at a distance, which clearly contradict the miracles that Jesus performed according to the Bible, so Relativity must be wrong.

The closing arguments in the original Conservapedia article include the following whopper of a paragraph:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion. As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments. Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common. Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

Relativity denialism appears to be more alive and well than I thought, and the battle against science continues. By the way, the main contributor to the Conservapedia articles on Relativity was Andy Schlafly, son of the right wing activist Phylis Schlafly.

BP's "Top Kill" Effort Fails - This Could Be Big

2010-05-29T21:27:00.001-04:00

This could be really big.

I just heard the word that BP's best hope at stopping the oil flow, the "Top Kill" method, has failed. I wonder about the long term consequences now. I think it is misleading to think of this as a "spill", it's way beyond that. There is now a real possibility that the flow of oil could continue for years until most of the oil in that entire oil field has been emptied out into the gulf. People who have depended on catching fish and shrimp for generations in that area now say it is unlikely that they will be able to go back and resume their livelihoods at anytime during the rest of their lives. These are some of the same people hit hard by Katrina. And this is predicted to be another bad year for hurricanes. My heart goes out to these people.

What to do about BP? Traditional fines don't seem adequate in this case. I would support a permanent ban on BP doing any more offshore drilling off the coast of the U.S. They have demonstrated that they are not capable of doing this safely. That would make the rest of the industry think more seriously about safety. What if in the end it becomes apparent that no "for profit" corporation can drill for oil with adequate safety in water that is a mile deep or more? That is a real possibility that we must be prepared to accept.

There is an argument that BP is not a "bad company", it is just doing what all companies are chartered to do under the current system - maximize their short term profits. In this argument, there are no bad or good companies, there are just companies that do what companies are designed to do. Don't expect anything else to happen when we have set up the system to produce these results.

What is the long term impact of this? Instead of thinking about this as "Obama's Katrina", perhaps it is better to think about it as "Obama's 9/11". It's an unexpected event that could end up defining his presidency and shaping his policy focus in unexpected ways. This could have implications to national policy related to energy, the environment, and possibly to the way corporations are chartered and regulated. This could be big.

The End of Democracy As We Know It? - Part 1

2010-01-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent some time reading and thinking about the recent Supreme Court Decision involving Citizens United. I’m not one to typically give in to rash statements, but this does seem to put in place the mechanism for the almost complete control of our government by wealthy corporations. We already have a situation where Rupert Murdoch and his FOX network effectively set much of the strategy for the Republican Party. Alumni from Goldman Sachs have a dominating influence on Obama’s financial policy. And both parties are heavily influenced by corporate donations and lobbyist. This ruling enables the takeover to be complete.

The first shoe to drop was the end of the Fairness Doctrine. This Supreme Court decision was the other shoe. I don’t claim that corporations will completely decide who will win elections. Rather, in practice they will have more like a veto power over candidates they don’t like thanks to the ability to unleash tremendous negative advertising campaigns, and a similar veto power over legislation they don’t like. Special interest will now be in a position to effectively prevent any change that will negatively impact them, regardless of the long term benefits to society as a whole. The long term impacts of this are quite substantial as we enter a period of rapid changes in the global society.

If that isn’t troubling enough, consider this: The ruling apparently applies to foreign based corporations too. There’s some uncertainty over this, but my understanding is that foreign corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money to influence American elections just like US based corporations.

What can be done to fix this situation? There is a lot of focus on creating a new constitutional amendment that will explicitly state that corporations are not people and do not share in the same rights as people. I fear this is a misguided effort to focus on. First, it will take many years and has only a small chance of actually passing in the end. More importantly though, I don’t think it will actually cause the changes people are hoping for. It is my understanding that the Supreme Court decision is not based on the view that corporations are people. Instead, it is based on the argument that people have the right to organize in groups and speak out on political issues, whether those groups are non-profit organizations, labor unions, or corporations.

The real problem here, and the one we need to address to fix things, is that concentrations of money can have a significant influence on our government process. The idea that very wealthy individuals can exercise excessive influence on our government is also a problem that tends to get overlooked. I’ll give some thoughts on possible ways to address this in my next post.

Economic Recovery or Continued Addiction?

2009-12-28T06:08:00.004-05:00

I recently came across a commentary written by Brian McLaren about the concept of economic recovery. He brings up some interesting questions about what we mean by the term “recovery”. When a drug addict hits rock bottom and starts on the path to recovery, we usually mean that this person is reforming their ways, learning from their past mistakes and moving forward to a better life without their former addiction. We don’t mean that they are trying to reestablish their more tolerable state of drug dependency similar to what they were experiencing a few months before hitting rock bottom.

Yet when we talk about economic recovery, there is disappointingly little talk in the national media about learning from our past mistakes and moving forward to a better life without the former addiction to the illusory phantom wealth from complex risky financial mechanisms, excessive debt,and unsustainable speculative bubbles. Instead, the goal of economic recovery seems to be to return to how things were a few years ago before the bubble bursts, plus or minus a few minor regulation changes. It has become a call to get back to our former addictive economic high without addressing the root problems with our addictions, with the hope that we won’t end up back in the gutter again next time. Brian McLaren goes on to discuss some of the addictions we need to face and recover from: material greed, weapons, carbon fuels, quick and easy answers, etc. This struck me as an interesting way to frame these discussions in the national debate.

A Green 2010 Conference and the Status of the Green Economy

2009-12-08T06:40:00.000-05:00

I recently attended the “Green 2010” conference at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook NY. It was the latest in a series of regular conferences dealing with the status of the “Green Economy” in upstate New York. The conference as a whole shed some interesting light on the current status of green jobs, education, and attitudes that probably apply across much of the nation.

The first observation was that the conference was well attended – a sellout crowd of about 150 people by my estimate. The crowd consisted of a wide spectrum of ages, from high school students to senior citizens. Certainly there was a strong interest in the green economy, which should not come as a surprise given the current state of the rest of the economy in upstate NY. There were several non-profit organizations trying their best to bring green jobs, and solar technology in particular, into the area. Given that there are many groups trying to do the same thing all across the country, you have to wonder how much any given area can rely on this as a big driver of future growth in their local economy. While the dream of becoming a national center for green technology is not realistic in most cases, it can be argued that the transformation to a non-carbon economy will have such a pervasive impact on society in the next few decades that there will be plenty of work to go around. The goal is to not be left out entirely.

There was a good deal of progress in education and training for green technology jobs in the community colleges and local trade school institutions. Unfortunately, even the people running these programs had to admit that at this time there were very few jobs available for the graduates of such programs. The region already has more people trained to install solar panels than the job market can support.

Clearly the most discouraging comments had to do with environmental education in general. Everyone was used to hearing that students in America were falling well behind other advanced countries in terms of math and science education. I terms of knowledge about the environment though, we are falling behind many thirds world countries too. I’m talking about very basic knowledge here – such as explaining the steps necessary for water in the ocean to end up falling as rain on the land. The majority of American grade school students could not answer this properly. Worse yet, the racial gap within American society on this topic seemed to be even bigger than with other subjects. White and Asian groups did comparatively well, but black and Hispanic groups really struggled. This racial difference even showed up in graduate studies. Based on the lack of minorities getting PhDs in environmental studies, this seemed to be one of the most segregated of all major subjects in our universities. Indeed, I took a quick informal look around at the conference attendees and found two African Americans, no Hispanics, and no Asians. The excellent work of Van Jones notwithstanding, environmental issues often seem to remain a narrow and almost cliquish concern of the white middle and upper classes. There is much work to been done.

What Are Our New Big Mega-Projects?

2009-12-02T07:12:00.003-05:00

A recent article in the NY times commented on the lack of any big mega-projects being undertaken. The article points out that in the past we had “The Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad.. the Hoover Dam, the Interstate System, the subway networks in San Francisco and Washington, the Big Dig in Boston ... and the list abruptly stops. For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way.” Such big projects, the article suggests, can have transformative effects and create significant long term improvement for the economy.

Ok, an interesting observation. But do we really have no big mega-projects under development at this time? Or are the current really big projects just somewhat different than those of the past? I would argue that the biggest development project for the last decade was the build-out of the Internet. This required enormous investments in effort and money, generated significant wealth, and is having an incredibly transformative effect on our economy and our society. I will argue that the long term transformative impact of the Internet and related technologies will transform society much greater than the transcontinental railroad or the interstate highway system. It was government funded, at least at the beginning, though private funds have taken over the still on-going build-out. The current focus now seems to be shifting to the phase of integrating the rest of our communication and business structures into the Internet infrastructure. This is also different form the past mega-projects in that it is global in scope.

What other major mega-projects are now underway? It could be argued that transforming our health care system is one such project. This also suggests another big scientific mega-project that we are in the middle of – understanding and learning how to manipulate genomes. Understanding how DNA operates and controls living organisms, and how to manipulate it is certainly a major effort that will eventually have long lasting economic and social transformative effects on our society.

If we want to focus on more physical projects though, the biggest mega-project we have just started is clearly the transformation of our energy system away from a fossil fuel based system to one that is based on less carbon intensive and more renewable fuels and overall greatly improved efficiency. Government has an important role to play in this, but like the Internet, private funding will eventually have to provide most of the funding. I’d like to think of this as the great physical mega-project of the next 20 years for our society. Its effect on the economy and our society are likely to be profound. It's something we can rally around that should be generating much more enthusiasm and pride than a comparatively limited project like the transcontinental railroad ever could.

Difference Between Capitalism and Free Markets

2009-12-01T06:30:00.003-05:00

When people discuss the characteristics and possible reforms of capitalism and free markets, they have a tendency to use these two terms interchangeably. In reality the two are quite different things. Let me explain.

Capitalism is defined as a system of ownership of the means of production, specifically the non-labor means of production, which includes factories, tools, equipment, etc. In a capitalistic organization, these means of production are privately owned. Labor is paid a wage for their efforts, and any profits go to the owners of the capital.

A free market system is simply defined as one in which everyone is able to freely sell their goods and services with prices determined by supply and demand.

It is possible to have capitalism without a free market in specific situations. Examples include organizations that have an effective monopoly on a market – they can prevent competition from entering the market and can set prices to maximize their own profits instead of being restricted by supply and demand. Another example is the awarding of government no-bid contracts to capitalistic organizations.

It is also possible to have a free market that does not involve capitalism. Examples include the traditional farmers market or co-ops competing with each other. In both cases, the clear distinction between owners and workers that is characteristic of capitalism is gone, yet there is still a free market competition that sets prices based on supply and demand.

It’s important to keep these distinctions in mind when discussing future economic possibilities. It is possible to reform some of the major problems of capitalism while maintaining the benefits of a healthy free market, and vice versa.

Placing Palin's Book in the Appropriate Section

2009-11-30T06:54:00.006-05:00

A friend of mine "went Rogue" in a local book store recently, and as a public service decided to re-shelve Sarah Palin's book into what they thought was the more appropriate fiction section. I wonder if this is a fad that has been happening (or will now start happening) elsewhere around the country?

While not exactly consistent with supporting more rational civil discussions, I can see such acts happening as the frustration grows within the progressive community. Think of it as a very modest little left wing version of the "tea party" movement.

Living In Ordinary Times?

2009-11-17T06:41:00.002-05:00

I attended Catholic Mass while visiting family members this weekend, and I was intrigued by the following statement from the pulpit: “this is the 33rd Sunday in ordinary time”. The phrase ordinary time as used here refers to a particular segment of the church calendar year (i.e. It’s not advent, lent, etc.). But it raised the bigger question about whether we’re living in "ordinary times” in a larger historical sense. Would we classify the last 6 months as an extraordinary time in history, or as more of an unremarkable ordinary time? Have we lived through a temporary lull this summer between recent storms of change, and what will come next? Perhaps. How would you classify the last half of this decade?

The people I discussed this with typically thought we were living in extraordinary times in general, and have been doing so for their entire life. That led to the humorous observation that we often believe an extraordinary period of human history began roughly at the time of our own birth. Such is human nature.

This is characteristic of exponential rates of change. The most recent period of history will always seem to be experiencing much more substantial rates of change than previous times, and will therefore seem to be an extraordinary time. Make no mistake about it; we are living in a time of exponential growth, exponential rates of scientific and technological development, and perhaps exponential rates of social change as well. We are living in an extraordinary time. There is an important aspect of exponential curves that we cannot forget though. If they continue, the rate of change in the coming decades will be even greater than it is today. There is every reason to believe that this in fact will happen. So while we are living in extraordinary times compared to previous history, it is likely that the historical impact of the coming decades will be even more significant than what we’re experiencing now.

Signs of Changes in Economic Attitudes?

2009-10-09T14:40:00.001-04:00

During a recent meeting with some friends, the topic of discussion turned to economic reform. We discussed our disappointment that very little has happened in terms of economic reforms as a result of this past year's economic meltdown. In fact, some of us were wondering if this is a topic that we could legitimately express anger over. Fortunately, I'm beginning to see some indication that the momentum is finally starting to build for economic reform.

Yesterday morning I received an invitation to a major conference on Building the New Economy in Washington DC sponsored by The Campaign for America's Future. As appropriate for a conference dealing with economic transformation, registration is completely free and open to everyone. I plan to go.

While an important aspect of economic reform deals with changes to regulations, the other important aspect deals with changes to our cultural attitudes and behavior. I recently came across two optimistic examples of such changes in Good Magazine. The first is a student movement for MBAs at the Harvard Business School to take a pledge to "serve the greater good" and to "act with utmost integrity". More than 50% of the graduating class has taken the oath. The second interesting bit of news that caught my eye was a project at Google that involved employees submitting ideas to change the world and help as many people as possible. Five winning ideas will be selected and Google will spend $10 million to make them real. Are these an indication of a larger transformation happening in our society? We can hope so.

On The Future of American Football

2009-09-20T22:31:00.003-04:00

I caught part of a football game on TV for the first time this year. I didn't personally know anybody on either team, and the outcome didn't impact my personal life one way or another, so I had no interest in who won the game.

Now that I've demonstrated that I'm not a good example of the proper American sports fan, let me mention why I find football very disappointing. It has the potential to enable a great deal of creativity and excitement in the games, with both teams regularly scoring above 75 points. Instead, it often seems that it has advanced only marginally from the days of Knute Rockne and the Fighting Irish in the 1920's. If coaches were REALLY serious about exploring some innovative ways to win, this is what I would expect to see in American football:

1) The last play of the first half should ALWAYS be a long pass into the endzone, or a field goal attempt. The only excuse for not doing this is sheer laziness. There are currently too many overpaid lazy coaches in the NFL for my taste.

2) A ball carrier should never run out of bounds, or allow himself to be easily pushed out of bounds, unless he is trying to stop the clock.

3) A center should always hike the ball when the defense jumps offsides. This should be basic fundamentals that every team does starting in high school.

4) Teams should go for it more on 4th down.

5) All punts should be towards a sideline. If someone on the opposing team caches a punt and starts to run it back, the punter failed his job.

6) No huddle offense with a quick snap and a shot-gun formation should be the norm. This business of giving the defense time to check out the offensive formation and get organized is just silly.

7) Rugby players have clearly shown that you can do multiple laterals per play reliably after some practice. It should be common in football to see multiple laterals per play.

8) Runs into the middle of the line should be very rare. Why do coaches still insist on running plays into where the greatest concentration of defensive players are? Makes no sense to me.

9) Most plays should be designed to score a touchdown when properly executed. If a play is only designed to get 5-10 yards, it seems that the coaching staff only did half their planning job.

10) Get rid of the damn nets behind the goal posts. Let fans keep any balls that go into the stands. It means a lot to the fans with the worst seats in the stadium, and trying to claim that it's too expensive for NFL teams to loose a dozen or so footballs per game is basically treating the fans like they're complete idiots who will believe absolutely any lie you tell them.

11) Fans need to form unions to prevent team and stadium owners from treating them as poorly as they do. There's no excuse for owners to abuse loyal fans so badly, or to tolerate lazy coaching staffs that refuse to bring the game into the 21st century, and there's no excuse for fans to accept this. When I see the first attempt by sports fans to form their own union, then maybe I'll regain some interest in football again.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it :-)
Mike Ignatowski

Sports News from Boston

2009-08-03T15:51:00.002-04:00

One of the side benefits of our family’s annual vacation in Maine is that we end up getting a copy of the Boston Globe to read at the cottage each morning. One of the big stories out of Boston this past week is that two of their top baseball players, Manny Ramírez and David Ortiz, had tested positive for using illegal performance enhancing drugs in 2003. This was shortly before their big 2004 season when they won the world series for the first time since the pre-Babe Ruth period.

Perhaps the only surprising thing about this story is that people were surprised by it. Historically, baseball players have had their homerun production start to fall off mid-career. When their homerun count suddenly shoots up in mid-career, I’m afraid that the introduction of performance enhancing drugs has to be the standard assumption. The benefits of improved drugs, and the financial incentive to use them continue to grow each year. Presumably so does the ability to hide them from various tests. Many experts claim that it will someday be revealed that the past Olympics in Beijing were the first ones in which genetically modified athletes competed. Tiger Woods had Lasik eye surgery a few years ago which improved his eye sight to better than 20/20. Is he the first surgically modified professional golfer?

The logical conclusion of this trend, as I stated before, is the end of many professional sports as we know them within the coming decade. They will still be around in some form – they are a big business. But athletes who have not been chemically, genetically, or surgically modified are becoming ever more uncompetitive.

By the way, the initial reaction by the Boston Red Sox to the latest drug scandal was - to fire two security guards. I can’t make this stuff up.

Effects of Technology on the Events in Iran

2009-06-21T20:31:00.004-04:00

A very interesting question that many people are watching closely "How will the internet and modern technology change the course of what happens in Iran?" More and more videos of the street marches and the violence are appearing on YouTube. One of the most famous has become the video of a young girl named "Neda" dying on the street after being shot by a sniper. This generates anger in the population, not fear. Modern communication technology is so far being used more successfully to organize than to control.

As Radley Balko writes on his blog:

Government has been murdering its own citizens for as long as we’ve had government, particularly when the people begin to pose a threat to those in power. The difference is that now, the entire world is watching. Iran’s brutality is on display for everyone to see, archived for history, in a way that we didn’t have even in Tiananmen, and haven’t had for most of human history. That, at least, is progress.

Has the methodology of political movements around the world undergone a major change?

Rapid Change in the Auto Industry (of all places)

2009-06-04T08:02:00.001-04:00

Change is accelerating. The automobile industry, which generally does not come to mind when you think about rapid change, is suddenly at the forefront of a revolution. In a short Newsweek article last month about the auto industry, it was predicted that “We are on the cusp of a period of technical innovation like the automobile industry has never seen... There will be more change in the next five to 10 years than there was in the last 100.” On the technical front, much of that discussion had to do with the change to an all electric drive chain, with a small gasoline engine just to recharge the battery. The fuel efficiency for such cars can approach 100 mpg. Interestingly, the Prius-style gas/electric hybrid, which is at the cutting edge of technology today, will be nothing more than a temporary phase soon to become obsolete according to this prediction.

This past Monday, another dramatic change rocked the auto world. I don't think most people fully appreciated how significant this event was, unless perhaps you live in the Detroit area. The 100+ year old General Motors company officially went bankrupt. The relatively new dotcom upstart Cisco replaces GM it in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Welcome to the 21st century.

The IBM / Syracuse / NY State Green Data Center, and the Interesting Trends it Illustrates

2009-06-01T09:16:00.004-04:00

On May 29th, IBM Syracuse University, and New York State announced an agreement to build a new energy efficient computer center on the Syracuse University Campus. Through an interesting combination of techniques, this center will use about 50% less power than typical computer data centers, making it one of the most efficient computer centers in the world. Some of the key techniques used include:

On-site electrical co-generation system that will use natural gas-fueled microturbine engines to generate all electricity for the center and provide cooling for the computer servers.
IBM's latest energy-efficient computers
Use of chilled water coolers to directly remove heat from the computers much more efficiently than trying to chill the entire computer data center.
Using waste heat from the electrical generation system to provide heat and cooling for both the data center and nearby buildings.

Beyond the technical issues, there are some interesting observations about the future trends that this illustrates.

(1) It is yet another example of the significant improvements in efficiency that are possible in our systems. Typical of such examples, it requires a “systems approach” that focuses on efficiency from the very beginning of the design.

(2) It is yet another example of how innovation is often best produced by a hybrid combination of corporate / educational / government organizations working together. (The original development of the Internet itself is another example of such such an alliance.) Reliance on a complete “free market” approach to innovation is based more on promoting an ideology than examining the actual historical data about what works the best.

(3) This is an interesting result in terms of the benefits of distributed power generation. Power generation systems must be big enough to achieve reasonable economies of scale. Yet they should be local enough so that power distribution losses are minimized, and so that the “waste heat” produced can be utilized for other purposes in the community.

(4) Timing - the announcement was made in May 2009, and the data center is expected to be completed by the end of 2009. This is an interesting result in terms of “right sizing” projects. Very large power generation stations can take many years to complete and bring on line. Nuclear power plants can often take 10-12 years. The ability to bring new technology and techniques on line very quickly is a major reason why modest sized projects are likely to be a major trend. Since technology change is accelerating, the ability to exploit new technology quickly will become an increasingly important factor.

Making Higher Education Sustainable

2009-05-19T22:21:00.003-04:00

Among the many things I expect to see undergo a significant change in the next decade or so is higher education. Our universities are actually based on a model that was developed in the middle ages. At that time, any subject being studied would undergo little change during your lifetime. Considering your education "complete" after a few years of intense study was realistic in the middle ages, but it's far from realistic now.

A university education was once considered common only for people from very well off families. Now it's a necessity to achieve even a middle class lifestyle. Yet the costs are often still structured to be unaffordable to all but those students from wealthy families. And the costs continue to rise at an alarming rate.

Something has to change - the current situation is unsustainable. Education must be restructured to be available throughout an adult's life at affordable rates. Like it or not, technology will need to have an impact on the way classes are taught in order to achieve this.

I'm glad to report that this change is actually starting to happen. The Christian Science Monitor has a wonderful article on the movement to OpenCourseWare, universities putting their course content online for free. The movement started in 2003 when MIT put 500 courses online. Now they have over 1800 online courses, all available for free (You still need to pay ~$45,000 a year to get an official MIT degree though). More than 200 colleges and universities have followed suite and offer course contents online. These are early developments that will likely radically change higher education by the time this finishes playing out.

First Impressions of WolframAlpha

2009-05-19T08:14:00.004-04:00

WolframAlpha came finally came online a few days ago (you can try it at www.wolframalpha.com). It is touted by some as the most serious competitor for Google, and possibly its eventual replacement. The major advancement in WolframAlpha is it's ability to actually gather data available on the web and answer questions, as opposed to just supplying you with links that may contain the answer to your questions. Of course if this is successful, nobody expects Google to sit passively by and loose market share. Google will undoubtedly come out with its own capabilities similar to WolframAlpha in the near future. We are on the verge of the next major revolution in making the knowledge on the web more accessible and useful to people, spurred on by the competition between WolframAlpha and Google.

I spent some time test driving WolframAlpha recently, and here are my first impressions.

My first test was to try to get a table of life expectancy listed by nation. I typed in “life expectancy by nation” and hit enter. WolframAlpha gave me a list of possible data, and the very first item was exactly the type of table I was looking for. Score one for WolframAlpha. (The United States was number 50 on the rankings by the way, in spite of the fact that we spend far more than any other nation on health care. Those of you involved in promoting health care reform probably already knew that.) Another great feature at the bottom of the data was a little link that points you to the source of the information. This is actually a critical feature for anyone expecting to use WolframAlpha for serious research. Score two for WolframAlpha.

As a second test, I tried to get a table of the carbon footprint of each nation. I typed in “carbon footprint by nation” and the response was “WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input.” I tried to simplify the query and just typed in “carbon footprint”, but still got the same response. Oh my, it seems there is a lot of work to do still.

To be fair, WolframAlpha is described as “an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come.” Clearly this is a major advance over the current Google search capabilities which will eventually change the way we use the web to gather data, but it is clearly also early in a long development process.

Unfortunately the creator of WolframAlpha, Stephen Wolfram, has left us all with a difficult problem to wrestle with. Somehow the phrase “I'm going to WolframAlpha that” just doesn't quite work. They will have to come up with a better verb if this is to enter the popular lexicon and replace "googling a question".

Swine Flue Conspiracy Theories and Their Consequences

2009-04-30T18:49:00.003-04:00

And so the conspiracy theories about the swine flu begin. One example is this YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBeKB7aKzOs that claims at a minimum that the company Novavax, which claims it could produce a swine flu vaccine in as little as 12 weeks, is hyping the dangers of the swine flu just to boost its stock. The stock (NVAX) has risen by over 300% in the past week.

But the YouTube video goes on to make the charge that people associated with the company deliberately created the swine flu through genetic engineer and released it for personal profit. In cases like this I prefer to stick with the old maxim “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. It has served me well in the past. Such evidence is certainly not available at this time. Nevertheless, this conspiracy theory will no doubt spread wider than the actual flu before this is over.

It does raise an interesting question though. With so many companies involved in genetic engineering, it is certainly possible that the first mass epidemic from a genetically engineered disease won't come from a terrorist group pursuing some political cause, it may instead come from a company pursuing financial gain. Is this really such an extraordinary claim? Given the carnage caused to the world economy by a small group of executives pursuing large personal financial gains, I find it hard to dismiss such an idea by simply waving your hands and saying “nobody would act that irresponsibly”. If anything, it could be argued that the extraordinary claim is that this would never happen given the tremendous financial windfall that could occur to any company with the right vaccine or antibiotic to combat a major outbreak. Perhaps this episode will be the beginning of a wake-up call about the need to bring genetic engineering under some stricter controls, and to admit that it is just one of those things that is not appropriate for open pursuit in a lightly regulated free market.

Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web

2009-04-23T17:03:00.003-04:00

I just watched a TED Talk by Tim Burners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. His main point was that the current Web was mainly a collection of linked documents, and what we need to do next is transform it into a collection of linked data. Once a major portion of our data becomes freely available on the web, it will start generating major social benefits.

Tim mentions two items that resonated with me. First, ALL government data should be freely available on the Web. After all, we paid for it, and we should rightly claim free access to it. (There may be some exceptions, such as personal data of government employees, but this is a relatively small portion of the government data). It seems to me that in a truly free open society, the "Freedom of Information" act should become almost obsolete since everything that it would have been used for in the past is now readily available. That would be a wonderful principle for the Obama administration to follow.

The second issue is medical data. Three years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We caught it early and now I'm cured, but it is a much more common problem than many people realize. One thing that really surprised me is that I was not asked to fill out any survey on my lifestyle or exposure to various chemicals. It would seem to me that such detailed background data should be collected about everyone who has a major disease and made available to researchers looking for common links. This is just one example of data that should be on the web. In this case it has potential for major health benefits if links can be established to various things that increase the risk of a disease.

There are two interesting items that Tim Berners-Lee did not mention about the future of the web. First, it is establishing new business models. Old ones, such as newspapers and the music recording industry are having to make substantial changes to survive. Significant new developments, specifically the open source software movement and Wikipedia could not have been predicted by any business model analysis before they happened. Yet they are becoming increasingly important.

The second unforeseen development is the use of the web for organizing mass social movements. Moveon.org and various other political movements are examples of this. Allowing groups of people to come together and organize in ways that were previously impractical may be one of the most profound impacts of the web in the long run.

The Key Assets of Our Society

2009-03-19T06:46:00.004-04:00

Dmitry Orlov wrote an interesting comparison of how much better the former USSR was prepared for a financial collapse than the current USA is. In short, much of the USSR was already functioning closer to a subsistence economy, with people making due with what could be supplied locally instead of relying almost completely on a complex interconnected national economy. Additionally, the USSR had large oil supplies that could be exported to relatively rich and financially stable neighboring countries in order to help finance its recovery recovery. As the USA undergoes a financial crisis, it doesn't have that luxury of unaffected rich stable neighboring economies to help pull it out.

While this report paints a rather pessimistic picture, I think the author misses some fundamental differences between the former USSR and the current USA. First and foremost, we have a collection of what is probably the largest, most creative, best educated, and most motivated group of civic and entrepreneurial leaders that ever existed. We have a culture that enables and even encourages a massive grass roots campaign to rebuild a new and revitalized economy. We have communications systems that enables rapid organizing and sharing of information on a level that is order of magnitudes greater than anything we had in the past . Nothing like this ever existed in the former USSR, or it could be argued anywhere else at any other time in history. Finally, though our leadership in Washington cannot act as a messiah to deliver us from all our problems, we are fortunate at this critical time to have some of the best new leadership for responding to these new problems that we've had in many decades.

Van Jones, a Yale educated lawyer and social activists, has been leading a grass roots drive to spur an economic rebuilding based on environmentally sustainable green jobs for many years now. When he was first asked if there would be a role for him in the Obama administration, he just laughed at the absurdity of the thought of himself being in a formal government position. Earlier this month he was officially appointed as a Special Advisor at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. This is an example of why there is some long term hope for building a new revitalized economy despite the prevailing short term pessimism.

The Great Disruption is Here

2009-03-10T07:14:00.002-04:00

In what could be a landmark description of what is happening, Thomas Friedman wrote a fascinating column on March 7th in which he speculates on the question:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

While this is certainly not a new theme, to see it so well expressed in a national newspaper op-ed represents a major step forward in our culture's attitude about the current situation in our society. It may be a key part of a growing rallying cry around the need for dramatic social change. He goes on to quote a number of experts, including Paul Gilding, an Australian environmental business expert, who coined a term for this period as “The Great Disruption.”

Thomas Friedman finishes by saying that both he and Paul Gilding are somewhat optimistic about our future given the changes that are starting to happen. As Gilding says, “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history.” I'll add that in terms of a great transformation starting in 2008, let's not forget the single biggest transformative event of all that year, the November elections.

Pew Research on Evolution and Religion

2009-02-16T09:10:00.001-05:00

The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life recently published an interesting article on the public attitudes towards evolution among various religious groups. Interestingly, the religion with the greatest acceptance of evolution was Buddhism at 81%. Unitarian Universalism was not listed in the groups of religions, but I suspect they may be even higher because of the emphasis they put on science and reason. The lowest group listed? Jehovah's Witnesses at 8%. The article also listed a number of other useful links to related resources.

People often ask "Is evolution a theory or a fact?" It's confusing because it's actually both. It is considered to be an observed fact from the fossil evidence that life started out as a comparatively small number of simpler forms, and over time gradually evolved into a larger number of forms including some of which are very complex. There have now been a number of cases where the evolution of new species in nature have actually been observed over the course of many decades.

However, the explanation of how this happens, natural selection operating on random genetic changes, is the theory part of evolution. This theory is very well supported by the evidence and is about as well confirmed as the theory of gravity. Yet it continues to generate a great deal of conflict in the public sector because of it's theological implications. Unfortunately, I don't see this conflict being reduced anytime in the near future. According to the Pew research, only 48% of the US population accepts evolution as the most likely explanation of the origins of life on earth. Other polls suggest that this number has actually been declining over the last two decades or so. This is an indication of how much trouble people will have adjusting to the rapidly changing understanding of the world brought on by the exponential growth in scientific knowledge and technology.

Are we really any poorer now? - part 2

2009-02-14T19:50:00.003-05:00

In my previous append, I talked about how relationships and trust are an important part of the economy. These are things of value - economic assets just as real as factories and tools. Many of these relationships are formalized in our financial institutions, and their breakdown is directly related to the breakdown of these relationships in our economy.

Another vitally important asset in society is the attitude of people. Do people have confidence in their ability, and confidence that putting in some hard work will pay off? Or is a sense of despair and hopelessness prevalent? The general public attitude can have a tremendous impact on economic well being and growth. But attitude is something that must be built up over time. When it is damaged, as it seems to be now, it takes time to mend.

I don't want to leave this topic with the implication that our society and economy are falling apart. That would be falling into the trap of viewing all value in monetary terms. In reality many of the other components of our society are still doing quite well. I'm not aware of any data showing a significant decline in relationships between families and friends, or in the strength of churches or other civic organizations. Non-profit donations are down, and that will hurt many of them, but for the most part our non-profit infrastructure continues to do good work. Our health care and education sectors are holding together and most people still have access to them. Looking around where I live, I still have the impression that our communities are still strong and providing many of the non-monetary benefits that they were doing last time this year. If anything, for many people the hope and trust in government has increased considerably since last year. Many things of value in our society have been little impacted by the current economic slowdown.

Are we really any poorer now?

2009-01-06T07:15:00.003-05:00

There is a painfully obvious agreement that our economy is not as good as it was 6 months ago. But from a high level, you might ask how could that be? We still have the same number of factories, the same number of farms, the same number of hospitals, the same roads, water systems, and electrical systems. We still have roughly the same number of people with the same skills and know-how. And we have almost the same amount of natural resources. There has been a slight ongoing decline in nonrenewable resources, with oil being the prime example, but that is unrelated to the current sudden decline in the economy in the last 6 months. So how can our economy be poorer in any real tangible way?

For any economy to function, what’s needed besides all the above artifacts is a set of organized relationships between the different parts of the economy. Because of a high degree of specialization, no parts of the economy are self sufficient. They all depend on a set of trusting relationships with other parts of the economy to function. The other important aspect of the economy is that it is full of time delays. A factory worker may go to work on a daily basis knowing that he won’t get paid for his effort until the end of the month. A farmer who plants a field knows that it will be several months before any crops can be harvested. When a new business is started or construction on a new factory is begun, it can often take a few years before the effort generates any profit. Investments in research can sometimes take more than a decade to pay off. In all these cases, there is a set of relationships and trust with the rest of the economy that there will be a future payback for the investment and work done today.

So yes, the economy really is not as good as it was 6 months ago, and we are really poorer. What we lost was the set of organize relationships and trust between different parts of the economy. We lost trust in many of the large institutions, and we lost trust that there will be a worthwhile future payback for current investment and efforts. Though not as tangible as physical factories and infrastructure, trusting relationships are a painfully obvious key component of a healthy functioning economy. One of the fallouts of the current economic crisis is that the vital role of relationships will be viewed with more respect from now on.

Will the Economic Bailouts Fail?

2008-12-03T07:13:00.003-05:00

The economic bailout

Doug Muder pointed out that if you add up all of the recent economic bailout packages for our nation, including loans, guarantees, and direct investments, you wind up with something in the $5-$10 trillion range. To get a good perspective of what we just did, keep in mind that the total federal debt run up from the beginning of our nation to the end of the Clinton administration was about $5.7 trillion. Look at what we’ve added to that in just the last 2 months. It's hard to comprehend the enormity of what just happened.

Admittedly we may not have to pay all of this economic bailout package. Hopefully we won’t have to pay out on most of the loan guarantees, and hopefully we can get back most of the value of our direct investments at some point. It’s a big risk we’re taking to boost the economy. Unfortunately, it looks uncomfortably like a gambler who’s deep in the hole with debts he can’t pay off, deciding to “doubling up” on his bets in a desperate attempt to get out of the hole by placing ever larger bets. The desperate gambler adopts this approach because he doesn’t know what else to do. The end result is usually very very tragic.

The real concern I have is that this bailout package, as huge as it is, won’t work. It does little to address the fundamental problems in the economy. We will still have an enormous trade deficit with the rest of the world. We will still be spending more than we earn. Our dependency on foreign oil will still be increasing. We will still have an enormous obligation to social security and Medicare payments in the coming years that we can’t afford. Our manufacturing base will still be in decline. And the unsustainable federal deficit will not only still be there, it will be made considerably worse.

Our family has run up our own personal debt in the last few years. A major chunk of that is from investing in our children’s education. It’s an investment that we expect will pay off in a major way in the future with increased earning potential and quality of life. I don’t mind our nation also incurring a temporary increase in debt to invest in a major economic stimulus package if it really enables increase economic well being in the future. This would include investing in our infrastructure, reducing our dependency on foreign oil, other research and development, helping new business start or current ones expand. I don’t see any of that happening with the economic bailout package. There seems to be no focus on investing to improve our economy in the future. I’m afraid that we’ll see little long term benefit from the enormous gamble we’re taking. And like the desperate gambler deep in the hole, the end result will not be pleasant.

Growing Conflict Between Science and Fundamentalist Religion

2008-10-25T19:41:00.003-04:00

There may be little or no conflict between science and some religions. I'm a member of a local Unitarian Universalists congregation and I personally don't see any conflict between the teaching of that religion and science. However, there are some real and undeniable conflicts between science and some of the more fundamentalist religions. The conflict over accepting the facts of evolution is one of the more well known examples. But this is just a warm-up to the new conflicts starting to surface regarding the mind and morals.

Before Darwin, the existence of complex living things was one of the best arguments for the existence of a supernatural creator that directly intervened in the world. Once evolution was understood, we now know that complex life can be explained without the need of such a supernatural creator. This argument has been replaced by the existence of the conscious intelligent human mind in general, and our moral system in particular, as the remaining best argument for the existence of a supernatural creator. As we understand more and more about the physical basis for how the mind operates, this has generated a growing backlash by religious fundamentalists who assert that the mind is some sort supernatural thing separate from the physical brain. A good summary of this movement was recently provided in an article in New Scientist Magazine titled Creationists declare war over the brain

Going beyond the basis for consciousness, there is a large amount of progress being made in the last few decades understanding how human morals can naturally arise and how many of our moral "feelings" actually have their basis in our physical brains and were produced by evolutionary processes. Progressive religions will be able to deal with this just as they came to terms with evolution. But it is even more damaging to the claims of fundamentalist religions than evolution itself, and they would probably be fighting against this even stronger than evolution if they fully understood the scientific progress being made in this area. I expect that it will be only a mater of time before the science vs. fundamentalist religion conflicts shifts to focus on the natural basis of consciousness and morals.

$700B Bailout Doesn't Solve Our Real Problems

2008-10-05T22:45:00.001-04:00

I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about the current economic turmoil. I’ve stated in several past appends that the economy was in deep trouble in the near future, and we are as a nation technically bankrupt by any reasonable accounting standard. Now it appears that this view was not far off the mark.

The $700 billion bailout package passed by Congress last week was certainly much better than the original plan which actually prohibited any oversight on how that money was to be spent. Given some time, I expect an even better plan could have been created than the one that was passed. How much better, and would the delay have caused more harm than good? These are questions I am not qualified to answer. But there is a key concern that I do have about the package – namely that it won’t fix the problem.

The fundamental basis for the current problem is that too many people have mortgages larger than they can afford. The package does nothing to resolve that problem in any way. We also have a major problem with the federal deficit. Not only is that not resolved, but it is potentially made much worse. We have a global military operation that is vastly overstretched and financially unsustainable. Again, nothing is done to address that portion of the problem. But given that this is the middle of a heated election campaign season, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The one bright spot is that the economic tax incentives for some renewable energy will be renewed by the new plan. They were set to expire at the end of this year. This is a really important issue for our long term economic health, so it’s at least a small bright spot in a plan that otherwise falls far short of addressing the real problems in the economy.

Preaching Politics form Church Pulpits

2008-09-14T20:36:00.003-04:00

I’ll argue that one of the greatest innovations in government that made America so successful was the notion of separation of church and state. In our current version of that, religious organizations can get involved in promoting causes, but should stay out of party politics and elections. This may be challenged soon.

The socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to endorse political candidates from their pulpits Sept. 28, in defiance of IRS rules. Click here for an article on this.

Personally I think partisan political campaigning from the pulpit would be an absolute disaster for both religions and our political process. Democracy is supposed to be about building consensus through debate, discussions, and compromise. Admittedly it doesn't always work quite that way, and we suffer whenever such failures occur. But if religious leaders start routinely preaching that it is immoral and a sin to vote for a specific candidate, and that it is your moral duty to support some other one, than rational debate, discussion, and compromise get thrown out the window. Who would want to support listening to and compromising with "evil"? A more preferred view would be to do everything possible to defeat "evil", with the ends justifying the means in such an important struggle. Such extreme demonization of people in the political process is where I think this will quickly lead.

I also think that political parties and lobbying groups would start putting considerably more pressure on religious organizations to support them, with funds flowing to those who are willing to adjust their stances to match those of the political parties. Congregations would become scenes of bitter disputes and end up highly polarized, and in the end many would become branches of other political organizations. Are you worried about corporations controlling the government? Then you should be really scared about giving them the motivation to start controlling religions too. It's not a good circumstance for promoting the spiritual development of the membership of religious congregations.

Someone once said that when it comes to politics, religions work best when they are "outside forces" acting as checks and balances and providing independent moral direction to the political process. I completely agree. I think the historical record supports this too.

Keep in mind that religious leaders are free under law to say anything they want, including from the pulpit. It's just that if they want to keep the tax breaks of a non-profit non-political group they need to follow the tax rules.

I am getting concerned that there could be a major movement to change this though, especially after watching how religious groups influenced the selection of Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidates recently. I would hope that there would be a strong backlash against this from many religious and secular organizations.

Obama's Speach Condensed

2008-08-29T11:56:00.002-04:00

I had somewhat mixed feelings about Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. To be realistic, it was almost impossible to live up to the hype and expectations that arose leading up to the speech. The speech did contain some very good and moving lines. But sometimes they seemed to get buried inside a more standard partisan political speech.

So here is my condensed version of the speech, focusing on the key lines that seemed to be the most inspirational about the need for a change and our moment in history. This is after all one of the most historically significant elections in our nation's history. Let's keep that in mind. The following are all direct words from Obama's speech - with sections of intervening text removed. Do you like it better?

It is that promise that's always set this country apart, that through hard work and sacrifice each of us can pursue our individual dreams, but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams, as well.

That's why I stand here tonight. Because for 232 years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women -- students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors -- found the courage to keep it alive.

We meet at one of those defining moments, a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.

America, now is not the time for small plans.

I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me; it's about you.

It's about you.

For 18 long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said, "Enough," to the politics of the past. You understand that, in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same, old politics with the same, old players and expect a different result.

You have shown what history teaches us, that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.

Change happens -- change happens because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.

I believe that, as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming, because I've seen it, because I've lived it.

America, we cannot turn back... not with so much work to be done.

America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Falling Behind China's Energy Policy

2008-08-22T20:32:00.004-04:00

While China and the Olympics is on everyone's mind, here is an interesting set of comments on China's environmental policies from Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy Corp.

China, he said, already leads the world in manufacturing solar energy panels. Next year the country will become the world's top manufacturer of wind turbines. Rogers said China is creating the technology and developing "the creativity and the brain power to blow by the United States" on green energy. And it is creating jobs for its future. “They are making it happen while we are still talking about it...It’s time the United States and its leaders — including the two presidential candidates — face the fact that this country can no longer claim to be a leader on global-warming and clean-energy issues."

When you add up the cost of what the United States squandered by its decisions in the last decade or so, don't forget to include this.

Economics of the Singularity from IEEE Spectrum

2008-06-24T00:08:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned, the article that I found most fascinating in the IEEE Spectrum issue on the Singularity was the “Economics of the Singularity” by Robin Hanson, in part because I was unfamiliar with this take on the singularity issues.

He argues that we can “…view past history as a series of abrupt, seemingly unheralded transitions from one economic era to another, transitions marked by the sudden and drastic increase in the rate of economic growth.” In some sense there have already been multiple singularities on the earth. The rise of human society, the industrial revolution, the current technological revolution we are in the middle of are examples Hanson gives. Perhaps it is better to change our terminology and call these “the great transitions” or perhaps “the phase transitions” rather than the singularity. Nevertheless, we are still talking about changes as profound as the singularity.

Robin Hanson points out that when humans were basically at the hunter gather stage of social development, we were doubling in population about every 250,000 years. When the agricultural revolution happened roughly 10,000 years ago, human society started doubling every 900 years. With the advent of the industrial revolution, our overall human economy started growing even faster eventually approaching the current 15 year doubling rate. If there is another major “transition” as the result of the technological revolution reaching a suitably advanced stage, extrapolating from the past suggest that the world economic output would start doubling in somewhere from a week to a month.

Obviously doubling the world’s economic output every month seems absurd on multiple levels. After two years it would have increase by a factor of 16 million. We are currently consuming many of our renewable and non-renewable resources at rates that are not sustainable. We could not increase their consumptions by 2x or 4x, let alone 16 million times. Obviously the economic output would be completely dominated by activity that did not require substantial physical resources – such as the development of software, information, music, education, art, etc. If people are exceeding wealthy compared to today, they still could not buy all the oil or beachfront property they want. If the access to limited natural resources is controlled by market forces, then in such a wealthy economy the relative cost of any limited natural resources would climb to astronomical heights. And of course it is exceedingly hard to imagine how human society could possibly adjust to the rate of change implied by a one month doubling period.

But my point is not that predicting a major change in the economic growth rate is nonsensical. Rather it is that such a change has consequences so profound that it is hard to imagine the implications. And a truly profound transition does not require a new extreme growth rate of doubling each month. I suspect that a world economy that starts doubling in anything under 5 years very quickly leads us into a world that is profoundly different from what you could envision just by extrapolating current trends. Such a transition seems entirely plausible in the next few decades given the exponential growth rate in computer and biological technologies.

IEEE Spectrum issue on the Singularity

2008-06-21T17:26:00.002-04:00

I finally spent some time reading through the IEEE Spectrum special issue on the Singularity. I won’t attempt to define the Singularity and the many different versions of it, Wikipedia has some good background if you’re interested. Here are some initial thoughts about the articles in the IEEE special issue.

My first impression was that there was a great deal of skepticism and criticism about the concept of the Singularity among many of the authors. But they tended to focus their scorn on the issues of immortality, uploading your mind to a computer, and uncontrollable runaway artificial intelligence. I’ve concluded that these topics are just emotional distractions of some of the real key issues.

I prefer to define the singularity as “that future period beyond which you cannot make any accurate predictions about what society will be like because the technological and social changes will have become so profound”. Looking at the explosive rate in computer and biological technology, and the profound changes that peak oil/water/resources will usher in, it is indeed impractical to make any predictions about what society will be like beyond about 2050. This fits in well with Ray Kurzwiel’s 2045 date for the Singularity.

Although I consider the IPCC reports on climate change to be some of the most significant and well researched scientific documents of our time, I sometimes wonder if their climate predictions for 2100 are essentially meaningless. Yes, they state that these are predictions of what will happen if nothing changes (or if change follows certain scenarios). And yes, it’s important that they try to make the case for the importance of the long term impact of climate change. However, there will be such profound technological and social changes in the next 2 to 4 decades that trying to project what will really happen beyond about 2050 has so much uncertainty as to be almost meaningless. I suspect that many of the scientist involved had the same concerns, but couldn’t think of any alternative approach that still illustrated the long term dangers of climate change.

The article that I found most fascinating was the “Economics of the Singularity” by Robin Hanson, in part because I was unfamiliar with this take on the singularity issues. More on that one later…

The Singularity on IEEE and Andrew Sullivan

2008-06-08T17:21:00.002-04:00

The singularity, to oversimplify it somewhat, is the concept that science and technology are achieving such rapid exponential growth that there will come a time in the next few decades where this growth achieves such runaway speed that very little about what society is like beyond that point can be predicted. I discuss this and related topics in a little more detail in my presentation Sustainability or Apocalypse. Ray Kurzweil is one of the more famous authors to write about this. His most recent book is The Singularity is Near – by which he means around 2045.

The subject of the singularity has long been an esoteric topic of the futurist community, but lately it has been achieving some great public exposure. The IEEE Spectrum magazine, which is well respected for its covering of technology issues, has devoted the entire June 2008 issue to the Singularity. It is available online here. I started reading it recently and will comment on it in the coming days. There are now plans to make Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near into a movie. And the most recent appearance of the singularity in the popular press has been on Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish, which is one of the most read political blogs on the web.

I have set up “Google Alerts” for both Singularity and Raymond Kurzweil, and there has been a definite increase in the frequency of references to these two topic across the web. By the way, “Google Alerts” are a great way to watch for new developments in any topic of interest. I highly recommend them.

The TED talks and Al Gore

2008-06-05T22:40:00.003-04:00

I'd like to recommend to everyone that they check out the collection of inspiring talks at TED, which stands for Technology, Environment, and Design. TED is an annual conference started in 1984. The best talks are now available online here.

As an example, here are some quotes I copied down from Al Gore's talk on optimism and climate change

Those of us who are alive today, especially those of us in the United States, have to understand that History has presented us with a choice... we have to find a way to create a sense of generational mission... we are the generation, about which 1000 years from now, poets and singers will celebrate by saying "they were the one that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future".

Science is a way of life

2008-06-03T12:02:00.003-04:00

I have a degree in science as do some of my friends, and I've noticed when talking to non-scientist that we seem to "think differently" then they do at times. It's not a situation where we simply know more background facts than the other person and so come to different conclusions. It sometimes seems to be a more fundamentally different way we approach problems, evaluate evidence and reach conclusions. And I believe that it's due to the training we have in science (and math) that we integrated into our lives.

Part of this is employing a healthy dose of skepticism, part is knowing that there can be a big difference between what we want to be true and what really is true, and part of this is knowing that the facts can sometimes point to one true answer (or at least firmly eliminate some options) and that everything is not just "a matter of opinion".

It is interesting to note that at no time do I consciously decide to "look at something from a scientific perspective". It's something that is so integrated into my way of thinking that it applies to almost everything I do. Believe me, the way I evaluate which clothes to buy in a store can drive my artistic wife up the wall :-)

With that in mind, I read an interesting Op-Ed by Brian Greene in the NY Times today (He is the author of “The Elegant Universe”). In the article he comments that:

It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances.

He further explains:

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

It's disappointing, and a failure of science education that this feeling is not more widely shared. The full op-ed is available here.

Ben Stein's view on what science leads to

2008-05-03T21:10:00.006-04:00

Ben Stein is the producer and main actor in the movie "Expelled", which is a propaganda piece promoting intelligent design. Ben is a well educated and seemingly intelligent person, so his production of this movie is disappointing enough, but even more depressing is the following quote from him during an interview on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

"When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you."

I listened to the actual interview to see if really was as bad as it sounds, and it was. There was an additional jewel not mentioned in the above quote. He talked about the need to promote the teaching of alternative religious based theories of how life began, the origin of different species, and what keeps the planets in their orbits. Planets in their orbits?

We are facing an exponential growth in science and technology that is much bigger than what we experienced in the last century, and yet there are people who are still having trouble accepting the radical scientific advances from Isaac Newton in the 1600's. Ben Stein is not alone in this. This suggest a growing (exponentially growing?) cultural gap within society about understanding and accepting the scientific advances in the coming years. My hunch is that our advancing knowledge of how the human mind works and the nature of our moral instincts will be the next big new area of controversy.

By the way, the interview of Ben Stein is at http://tbn.org/video_portal/ . Click on "Behind the Scenes" and look for the April 21st show. It's a 30 minute video, mostly promoting Ben's movie. The above quote is near the end.

The top 6 largest banks

2008-04-30T16:18:00.003-04:00

According to results compiled by the Boston Consulting Group, the top 6 largest banks in the world are now (in order):

Commercial Bank of China
China Construction Bank
HSBC of Britain
Bank of China
Bank of America
Citigroup of the United States

These results were for end of 2007. The values of the American banks have fallen since then. Say goodbye to the 20th century (and with it the American empire) and hello to the the 21st.

Updated "Sustainability or Apocalypse" Presentation

2008-04-25T09:00:00.004-04:00

I had a chance to present an updated version of my Sustainability or Apocalypse talk at the SUNY New Paltz campus to a group of about 30 people Thursday evening. The presentation was followed by an enthusiastic audience comment period. The copy of the new updated and expanded charts is available on the link in the right hand column. The basic premise of the presentation is:

The rate of technological and social change this century will be even greater than in the past century, and many of our current social structures are not set up to deal with this.
We will also be facing a “perfect storm” of problems in the next few decades, both nationally and as a global society
These will be the some of the most important decades in the history of humankind, with some very big long term effects from the choices we make
We could usher in a era of sustainability or major turmoil. The outcome is not predetermined, but will depend on preparations we make to handle moments of opportunity and the vision we promote about what is possible and desirable.

Take a look and feel free to post your comments below. I am very interested in any feedback on how to improve this presenation.

The Collapse of American Power

2008-04-16T19:07:00.003-04:00

In a recent column Paul Craig Roberts points out that

In his famous book, The Collapse of British Power (1972), Correlli Barnett reports that in the opening days of World War II Great Britain only had enough gold and foreign exchange to finance war expenditures for a few months. The British turned to the Americans to finance their ability to wage war. Barnett writes that this dependency signaled the end of British power.

The comparison to modern times is obvious. The United States had no money to finance the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and borrowed the entire amount, mainly from China and Japan. Historians may very well look back at this moment in our history as signaling the end of the American empire.

As I mentioned before, an organization is technically bankrupt when it is deep in debt and there is no foreseeable way it can ever pay off those debts. Paul Craig Roberts goes on to say

Moreover, the GAO report pointed out that the accrued liabilities of the federal government "totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007." No funds have been set aside against this mind boggling liability.

The US "superpower" cannot even finance its own domestic operations, much less its gratuitous wars except via the kindness of foreigners to lend it money that cannot be repaid.

The US will never repay the loans... The dollar is failing in its role as reserve currency and will soon be abandoned. When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, the US will no longer be able to pay its bills by borrowing more from foreigners.

By the way if you don't know who Paul Craig Roberts is, you might be tempted to think he is some sort of left wing "doom and gloom" radical who doesn't really know what he is talking about. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. Scarry, isn't it?

State of the Planet 08

2008-04-04T17:57:00.003-04:00

I recently attended the State of the Planet conference at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. It's a conference put on every other year by Jeff Sachs and the Earth Institute. Videos from this year's presentations are available here.

Two years ago I went to this conference for the fist time. The focus that year was on sustainable development, and I have to say that the overall tone was rather depressing. In terms of achieving anything remotely resembling a sustainable society, the overall conclusion from most presenters was that we weren't even close.

This year's conference was much more optimistic. Here are some of the interesting points that were made:

"We're in a process of heading towards a new global society. Yet our institutions and mindset is not ready for this. Much of the rest of the world is further along than we are at coming to grips with this."
Greening of the world' infrastructure will become a trillion dollar industry. But timing is important. Business needs to move ahead aggressively on this. There was confidence that the private sector will lead in adaptation in the 21st century, but government has an important role to play as a partner.
Kenya moved from civil war to a negotiated settlement in a few short weeks. There should be a real sense of optimism after seeing that such things are possible.
Big business has much power to effect the world's problems. We need to ask them what they have done with that influence and power?
We also need to ask the churches the same thing. Religions organizations have failed when they took sides based on identity politics. When they talk about "my people", they need to be talking about all of humankind.

Other signs of progress - we are actually succeeding when there is political will to change things for the better.

The Millennium Development Goals call for cutting poverty in half between 2000 and 2015. We are actually likely to reach that goal in all areas except sub-Saharan Africa.
20 years ago there were 20 million refugees. Now there are 10 million.
In 1989 there were 10 genocides unfolding in the world. Today there are one or two.
There used to be 10 to 20 military coups per year in the world. Now there are typically 3 or 4.
There is 50% less warfare today than in 1989

One nagging thought that occurred to me during the conference was that they were literally flying in people from around the world to give 20 minute presentations on environmental responsibility. This problem was also noted by Jeff Sachs at the end. He talked about the possibility that this may be the last of these conferences they hold in this form. The next one in two years may be in the form of a globally connected broadband video conference connecting cities all around the world. Such an approach will obviously take some experimentation before they get it right, but I can't think of a better conference to take such a bold step and start developing the techniques to hold such a conference on a global scale while minimizing the number of miles traveled. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Star Wars civilizations ruled by Stone Age emotions

2008-04-04T17:23:00.003-04:00

E.O. Wilson is a famous biologist who has been making news for his recent efforts to bring attention to the critical nature of the environmental problems we are currently facing. I recently heard a quote from him that has been getting more attention than I was aware. The line below marked in bold sums up the current state of humankind nicely. I included the surrounding context, which came from a May 2007 article in Vanity Fair by E.O. Wilson titled Problems Without Borders.

...in rising to power, beginning with the invention of agriculture a scant 10 millennia ago, we carried along with us the heavy baggage of ancient primate instincts. Today, as a result, we live in Star Wars civilizations ruled by Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

We haven't really figured out yet, as a species, what we are, where we are going, and what we will be when we get there. But at least we have discovered that we are fast ruining the global environment. The scientific evidence for that conclusion is now massive and compelling.... The bottom line is that we have created a real mess. In order to avoid wrecking our planetary home, we have to settle down and together devise the means to achieve sustainable development while preserving our biosphere. The good news is that the same thing that has gotten us into trouble—those brains of ours—can get us out. We're smart. We can do it."

More obscene behavior in Washington

2008-03-09T20:54:00.003-04:00

I would normally object to posting of obscene material to this blog, but this hit me emotionally today in a way that I felt compelled to say something about. And for those of you who think that “obscene” is not the right word for this, I would agree only to the extent that “obscene” is not really a strong enough word.

What am I talking about? At one of the early presidential debates, Joe Biden repeated some folk wisdom his father told him. He roughly said “Don’t tell me what you claim your values are, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your real values are”.

The new U.S. military spending proposal for Fiscal Year 2008 for the "regular" military budget, is $499 billion. This does not include the costs of the current occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. A proposed supplemental appropriation to pay for these adds $141.7 billion bringing the total to $647.2 billion. Note that this does not include debt payment for past wars, military pensions, Veterans benefits, etc.

In years past, the U.S. military budget was greater than the military budgets of all our potential enemies combined. The new proposed U.S. military spending for FY 2008 is now larger than military spending by ALL of the other nations in the world combined.

This spending spree comes at a time when America's main enemy is not a rival superpower like the Soviet Union, but a network of terrorist groups. Yet the budget includes items like the SSN-774 Virginia attack submarine ($2.7 billion), the Trident D-5 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile ($1.2 billion), and Ballistic Missile Defense ($10.8 billion).

The FY 2008 military budget proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.

The FY 2008 military budget is over 120 times higher than the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.

The military spending is more than the combined totals of spending on education, environmental protection, administration of justice, veteran's benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development.

As the poverty rate continues to climb, the FY 2008 budget proposes cuts of $13 billion in non-military related discretionary spending, including cuts of $1.4 billion from the Community Development Block Grant; $436 million from Head Start; $1.1 billion from the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program; $669 million from Special Education; and $111 million from the Child Care and Development Block Grant.

For full details on this, see:

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0210-26.htm

I'm at a loss for words at the moment. The only one that comes to mind in "obscene", or possibly a gut wrenching primal scream. History shows that the greater an empire overextends itself, the greater the crash will be when it falls. I see no evidence that we are willing to start pulling back yet, or that there is even an acknowledgement that we are seriously overextended. Special interest groups seem to have ever increasing control over our budget process.

Mike Ignatowski

Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century

2008-02-15T23:28:00.003-05:00

The National Academy of Engineering sponsored a study to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century. Now their conclusions are revealed on this Web site: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/default.aspx

A list of them is included below. At first glance, they seem to be very close to the mark. The only change I can think of after an initial read is to perhaps expand “Prevent Nuclear Terror” to “Prevent Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Terror”. One of the biggest parts of that is the ability to quickly and easily detect chemical and biological agents in the environment.

This list of grand challenges for engineering is such a fascinating topic that it certainly deserves more study, and more posts in the very near future. More later…

The Great Challenges

Make solar energy economical
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Sustainability - the common thread among voter's priorities

2008-02-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

We had a great informal discussion among friends recently to discuss our thoughts on the upcoming super Tuesday primaries. We started out by going around the room and letting each person talk about what issues were most important to them. This is a great way to proceed by the way, since talking about issues avoids anyone pushing someone's hot button by insulting their favorite candidate.

People brought up a wide variety of the regular issues, but I noticed one common theme as I listened to them - and that was sustainability. Although they didn't use that word, what people really seemed to consider important was to have a sustainable environment, a sustainable energy policy, a sustainable economy, a sustainable health care system, and a sustainable foreign policy. In each case I listed above, our current system is nowhere near being sustainable. For some cases in particular including our economy and energy policy, things are beginning to fall apart as I write. Sustainability is not a key word on the campaign trail this season, but it's a key aspect of what our priorities really are.

By the way, in the straw poll at the end of the discussion the overwhelming winner was Dennis Kucinich. When we restricted votes to the candidates still in the campaign, the clear winner was Obama.

Regulating Power Usage in the Very Near Future

2008-01-12T23:20:00.000-05:00

An article in the NY Times on Jan 11th talked about a proposal in California that would allow state regulators to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, changing the temperature settings through a radio signal in all new of substantially modified houses and buildings. This would allow them to reduce the electricity demands during peak periods if it was necessary to avoid rolling blackouts. Customers could override the utilities' suggested temperature settings, but in emergencies the utilities could override the customers' wishes. The proposal is expected to be approved next month.

As you might expect, there has been a strong negative reaction to this. "Shades of 1984" was a common theme, thought the novel "1984" was mainly about thought control, not temperature control. Much of the negative reaction was predictable and understandable. It is troublesome to see aspects of denial of the power problem in some of the attitudes though. The situation is serious, and is likely to get worse each coming year. Some sort of change in the way people use electrical power is absolutely required, one way or another.

A compromise that is much more acceptable to most people is surely possible. It is likely to take both a carrot and stick approach. The carrot - significant discounts to people who voluntarily sign up for such control in emergencies. This could apply to old as well as new houses. The stick - a substantial increase in the price of electricity during critical peak periods for people who do not participate. The stick may have to be substantial, perhaps a 10x increase in the price of electricity during those peak periods. If rolling blackouts still do happen, there will be a tendency to blame those not participating with the program, generating strong social pressure for people to behave responsibly and voluntarily accept the carrot part of the deal.

Yes, this is not the way things worked as we were growing up. But yes, it is something we can and will get used to.

The Economic Legacy of the Last 7 Years

2008-01-07T20:11:00.000-05:00

Sorry if the following post is a bit of a downer, but after listening to the Republican debate recently, I'm convinced that many of us are living in deep denial.

If you're interested in lower taxes, you should also be interested in the "tax burden". In reality we eventually have to pay, one way or another, for whatever our government spends. This is our long term "tax burden". If you think that by keeping our current taxes low you somehow reduce our overall tax burden then you're just fooling yourself. In reality we're just shifting around our payment schedule. We still have to pay for whatever our government spends. If we don't do it now, then we'll also have to pay for all the interest on the debt we're running up. The claims that the Bush administration has been keeping our taxes low is extremely disingenuous. In reality, our tax burden has sky rocketed during the last several years because of a lack of responsibility by both the President and our Congress.

To quote the conservative columnists Andrew Sullivan:

The proud irresponsibility is the most striking thing - the obliviousness to the future, to the debt the next generation will carry, to the huge increase in the power of government over people's lives that Bush has engineered. Joe Stiglitz is surely right: The economic effects of Bush's presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America's being displaced from its position as the world's richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

Got that? OK. But now it gets worse...

Beyond the tax burden of paying for what we have already spent, there is the "fiscal exposure" of paying for what we have committed to spend in the future on such things as medicare, social security, benefits to wounded solders, etc. This is where things get really scary.

Now quoting David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the GAO: (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan for this quote)

"If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and there would be talk about whether the company's management and directors needed a major shake-up."

"The federal government's fiscal exposures totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007, up more than $2 trillion from September 30, 2006, and an increase of more than $32 trillion from about $20 trillion as of September 30, 2000... This translates into a current burden of about $175,000 per American or approximately $455,000 per American household."

There you go folks, the economic legacy of the policies followed by the last 7 years of our national government is an additional bill for $32 trillion. As the main source of income for my family of four, my personal share of that bill is $455,000. When Alan Greenspan retired from the Federal Reserve, he lamented at the lack of willingness of our political leaders to address the coming tsunami. For all practical purposes, we are as a nation technically bankrupt and living in denial about it.

10th Anniversary of Blogging

2007-12-24T07:55:00.000-05:00

There was a short piece this morning on NPR radio celebrating the 10th anniversary of blogging. The series will continue all week. Ten years ago the term weblog was first coined, which was shortened into blog. It is estimated that there are now about 100 million active blogs, with another 100,000 added per day. There are also an estimated 200 million blogs that have been started and abandoned by users that experimented with them for a while.

This is an excellent example of the increased rate of change now happening. Ten years ago people only a very small portion of people knew what the term blog meant. In one short decade it has become a pervasive aspect of our society, along with its other variations of user generated content sites. Who could have predicted the arrival of MySpace, FaceBook, or Youtube ten years ago? Or that the US Senate would change hands because of a Macaca moment?

It's very hard to predict what the next ten years will bring in this area, since the rate of change keeps increasing. Two thoughts on its general characteristics though:

1) There will be more personal information being made available by people on the web. This will not trigger the fear of loss of privacy that you might expect, because it will be information that is controlled by the individual.

2) There will be a growth in the ability to establish one's reputation, or check on people's reputation. This is an absolutely vital part of the functioning of humankind's off-line society, and is desperately needed as part of the on-line society in order to sort through the unlimited amount of content available on the web.

By the way, the most popular blog in the world? It is run by Xu Jinglei in China according to a Wikipedia entry. Yet another sign of the times.

Positive Trends on the Death Penalty

2007-12-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

One of the clear future trends that leaves me with an optimistic view that civilization is slowly but surely advancing and leaving its more barbaric past behind is the gradual abolition of the death penalty around the world. This is the news from the NY Times yesterday:

The United Nations General Assembly voted on Tuesday for a global moratorium on the death penalty. The resolution was nonbinding; its symbolic weight made barely a ripple in the news ocean of the United States, where governments’ right to kill a killer is enshrined in law and custom. But for those who have been trying to move the world away from lethal revenge as government policy, this was a milestone. The resolution failed repeatedly in the 1990s, but this time the vote was 104 to 54, with 29 nations abstaining. Progress has come in Europe and Africa. Nations like Senegal, Burundi, Gabon — even Rwanda, shamed by genocide — have decided to reject the death penalty, as official barbarism.

Wow, 104 to 54 - that's a rather lopsided victory after a long string of past defeats. Of course, the news was not entirely positive. Some nations still have a way to go.

The United States, as usual, lined up on the other side, with Iran, China, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq.

But we'll get there. The state of New Jersey just set a fine example and outlawed the death penalty in their state. Other states will follow in the coming years. Thanks to Senegal, Burundi, Gabon, and Rwanda for also setting fine examples that the United States can someday aspire to follow. It's just sad that we no longer find our country in a leadership position on so many important trends.

Science Debate 2008

2007-12-16T20:27:00.001-05:00

One of the most interesting presidential debates I can think of, and in many ways one of the most telling and important, would be one devoted to science. It's very clear that scientific issues will be in the forefront of the topics the next president will have to deal with. That's why I was glad to sign up as a supporter of the Science Debate 2008 movement. To quote from their website:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

I can't imagine a more interesting and unpredictable presidential debate.

The Future of Technology roundable at the Philoctetes Center

2007-12-16T11:49:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure of attending a roundtable discussion on “The Future of Technology” at the Philoctetes Center in NY City this weekend. It was not a comprehensive overview of technology issues, but there were some thought provoking discussions. Here is a summary of some things I found interesting:

PlayStation-3 is essentially a supercomputer in a box. We will soon have a supercomputer in a packet, coupled with pervasive access to everything from everywhere. We will be able to set up real time video monitors that call for help when an elderly person falls, or when someone in a pool seems to be drowning.

Another development is that everything about you will become more available to everyone. You will become more of a public persona, no longer the private individual the way you used to know it. One of the great urges of culture is to spread your virtual genes around, your name, thoughts, opinions, memes… This is already happening with FaceBook and MySpace. This is not generating a fear of the loss of privacy because the key aspect of these is that people have control over what information about themselves is made available.

Internet culture is a form of an extended childhood for adults. It goes back to the very early childhood phase dominated by fantasy and imagination, before the discovery of limits.

The human social contract was discussed in detail as something that can trump and control the exploitation of new technology. Unfortunately the social contract is not evolving fast enough to always keep up with changing technology. It is often difficult to figure out how to apply social norms (and formal laws) to new technology. They are adopting though. An example was given about a fraud suite pending in court for something that happened in the 2nd Life virtual world. This was viewed as something completely natural and reasonable by the panel. Another example of a development that the social contract will have trouble adjusting to - in 20-30 years it will become standard to know your genome and understand much about it.

Some aspects of technology use bring out the good and bad in people. Blog comments tend to bring out the worse in many people, for example. 50% of them seem to be just cruel personal attacks. The important thing in controlling poor behavior, and in judging the value of content, is the idea of “reputation”. We need a better way to establish and communicate online reputations. Anything with anonymous sources tends to be problematic.

While many of the poor behavior discussed has its roots outside of the online technology, the internet has lowered the barrier to creating fraud and deception on a massive scale.

Our physical metabolism craves sugar and fats, but you can get sick when you have an unlimited supply available and you don’t learn to restrict yourself. In the same way, our mental metabolism seems to have certain cravings that can be supplied in unlimited amounts online or in electronic games, and we can become psychologically sick when we don’t restrict our consumption of these. Additionally, the fact that you can tailor you online world to feed your phobias and prejudices is creating additional problems.

George Mitchell's Report and Denial About Professional Sports

2007-12-16T10:19:00.000-05:00

So George Mitchell’s report on steroid use came out a few days ago. Is anyone really surprised that it concluded that steroid use was fairly pervasive in professional baseball? Some people were calling this report a major step forward in the effort to end the problem of steroid use. I think these people are living in denial. The report also stated that hundreds of thousands of high school athletes are now using steroids. There’s no way that we’re on the road to ending the problems with drug enhanced athletics, nor do I think we ever can be. If you somehow eliminate steroids, the race will be on to find a better replacement. Indeed, such efforts have been ongoing for years already. It’s an arms race where the offense (new drug manufactures) will always have the major advantage.

This is an example of a much large issue – advancements in technology tend to make old business models obsolete. The old businesses struggle to maintain their old way of making profits by increase rules and regulations. The music recording industry is a fine example of this. Technology has made their business model of the $15 music CD obsolete. In a recent legal argument, the recording industry made the incredible claim that taking a CD that you bought and own, and making a backup copy of it on your computer was an illegal act of theft. They can apparently do just fine by selling recordings of songs online for 99 cents, but their struggle to maintain their old business model has reached the level of absurdity now.

So getting back to sports. Any professional sport where strength, speed, or endurance plays a dominant factor is facing an increasingly obsolete business model due to the increasing dominance of performance enhancing drugs. Sorry to say it, but the days of professional sports as we knew them are coming to a close.

There were many people expressing strong emotional disappointment at the number of players listed in Mitchell’s report as having used performance enhancing drugs. “People looked up to these athletes as heroes and role models”. Actually, that is perhaps the much bigger problem that we have to come to grips with. The unhealthy obsession with professional sports in our society is leaving people in denial about the true nature of the business and the people engaged in it.

Peak Oil and this year's heating bills

2007-12-13T08:35:00.000-05:00

Al Gore recently gave a moving speech when he accepted the Nobel prize that was very worthy of the occasion (click here to read a transcript). While I believe that climate change is ultimately the chief moral challange for our generation, I have commented in previous posts that the peak oil phenomena will likely superseed it in the public's mind in a few years.

Well, that may actually happen this winter. I just paid for my first fuel oil tank fill-up for the winter here in the north-east part of the country - almost $900, ouch! These fuel oil costs are going to hit many people like a 2x4 across the forehead. For some unfortunate families, it will be hitting them about the same time that a substantial increases in their mortgage payments happen. Energy conservation will be pushed to the forefront of public concern. The bright side of this is that whatever the motivation, this will drive energy conservation measures that will reduce our overall carbon footprint.

Many people who criticise any attempt at responding to climate change often claim that the cost are unaffordable. In reality, most of the important first steps actually result in a net economic benefit. This will become painfully clear this winter as people are forced to deal with the escaliting heating bills. And hopefully people will realize that this is not a one year phenomena. It is the only one step near the beginning of the long term trend.

The question of extraterrestrial life - It may be resolved sooner than you think

2007-11-28T21:26:00.000-05:00

One of the important questions that we will almost certainly answer this century, one way or another, is the question about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Actually, we might answer that in the next 10 months or so.

It turns out that there is a tremendous amount of life existing below the surface of the Earth. By some estimates the total mass of living organisms below the surface is as much if not more of the total mass of living organisms above the surface. When you look at another planet such as Mars where the surface conditions are rather harsh, many scientists believe that life is much more likely to exist below the surface of Mars than on its surface. This would also be consistent with surface life developing during a milder Mars climate billions of years ago, then spreading underground and surviving there as much of the Martian atmosphere slowly leaked away into space over the course of billions of years.

If everything goes as planed, in about ten months the most advanced generation yet of spacecraft will land on Mars to look for life. NASA's Phoenix Mission will land on the northern plains and dig three-feet into the soil and ice looking for evidence of microbial life. Should it find any, and some experts think it is likely, then a tremendous set of questions open up. Could this Martian life have come from Earth, or visa-versa? We know that meteor impacts on each planet occasionally jettison rocks into space that eventually crash into the other planet. Or is it based on a chemistry that is total different from any life on Earth? Either way, the discovery of the first extraterrestrial life will put us at the dawn of a major new scientific journey that will eventually tell us much more about our place in the grand scheme of things in the universe.

For an interesting discussion of this topic and its possible consequences, check out this article on Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited

The Rise of Large Private Armies - Part 2

2007-11-27T11:14:00.001-05:00

I intended to post more optimistic views, but I received some comments on my previous post on the rise of large private armies and first wanted to follow up on that. We should all be aware that the legal rules have been set in place to establish marshal law when then next major terrorist attack or natural disaster occurs (are you living in denial about this?). If you want to know what marshal law would be like, just consider the situation where our normal civil liberties already don't apply and security is considered paramount. I'm talking about customs at large airports. A growing number of reports have documented almost unbelievably harsh treatment from the security personal hired to do this work. For example, consider the case of some big-name Finnish musicians traveling to Minnesota for a music tour. One is allegedly the "Bruce Springsteen" of Finland. They've done nothing wrong. But this is what they get at the airport according to a report posted by Andrew Sullivan:

Immigration agents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport subjected them to more than two hours of interrogation that the musicians considered so harsh and demeaning that they filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki.

"It was almost three hours of screaming, door-slamming and accusations, according to the report I received," said Marianne Wargelin, honorary Finnish consul for the Dakotas and most of Minnesota, which has the second largest Finnish-American population in the nation...

"They threatened us with severe punishments if we talk to each other," according to the complaint signed by musicians Ninni Poijärvi and Mika Kuokkanen, "Through the walls, I can hear officers yelling, screaming. They ask about the purpose of our trip -- except we are only allowed to give yes-or-no answers. I try to talk about our plans to meet with Finnish-American folk musicians. Nobody listens. They interrupt me constantly and they yell, 'You are a liar!"'

It's no wonder that American has earned the reputation of one of the most unfriendly places to visit by foreign travelers. Tourist and business travel are down sharply, as Fareed Zakaria discussed in a recent Newsweek article. This should be very disturbing and somewhat scary. This is not the America I grew up in! But Americans have a long history for not putting up with this type of outrageous behavior for long. I thank both Andrew Sullivan and Fareed Zakaria for publicising this matter while it's still easy to do something about it before it spreads during moments of fear.

Barry Bonds Indictment - more of a beginning than an end

2007-11-17T23:19:00.000-05:00

On the News Hour last evening, Brooks and Shields were discussing the recent indictment of Barry Bonds for lying to a Congressional committee about his steroid use. One of the commentators, David Brooks, said "it will lead to the end of the steroid era [in baseball]". Ha, I thought, that couldn't be further from the truth. As I've said before, the increasing and pervasive use of performance enhancing drugs will bring an end to professional and Olympic sports as we know them today. Barry Bonds is just the beginning. The lesson other athletes have learned is that performance enhancing drugs can produce major benefits, but you just need do it in a way that won't be caught.

The tour de France bicycle race has been plagued by doping scandals for many years. The 2006 winner Floyd Landis was found guilty of doping and was stripped of his title. This year (2007) rider Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for blood doping after winning one of the time trials and was disqualified. And Michael Rasmussen of Denmark, who was leading the race at the time, was removed from the race for missing random drug tests.

In the most recent of a long list of Olympic doping scandals, sprinter Marion Jones admitted to the use of banned drugs and voluntarily returned her gold medals from the 2000 Sydney Olympics ( showing some integrity on her part). Normally those gold medals would now be awarded to the 2nd place finisher. But to illustrate just how bad things have become, the International Olympic Committee is considering the unusual step of leaving the gold medal for the 200m sprint unawarded to anyone. It turns out that the 2nd place finisher, Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou was caught up in a doping scandal at the 2004 Athens Games.

The performance benefits are so great that people are risking their entire careers by using these drugs. And as new designer drugs are becoming available that are much harder to detect, I'm afraid that it will become almost impossible for an athlete to remain competitive at the highest levels without taking them. And we are only a decade or so away from the introduction of genetically modified athletes.

The Rise of Large Private Armies

2007-10-27T10:20:00.000-04:00

I recently listened to a very disturbing discussion on NPR radio about the growth of the private security forces being used in Iraq. The interview was with Jeremy Scahill, author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. This is partly a story about Blackwater, but it goes well beyond that.

There are now over 40,000 private security forces in Iraq, over 180,000 if you include people hired by the U.S. to do non-security work (cooking, cleaning...). That's more than the total number of military troops we have there. Blackwater is providing security for all our diplomats and top military officials. Even General Petraeus has become dependent on Blackwater to provide his own personal security. But Iraq is just the beginning. There are plans to pay these private security forces in the "drug wars" in South America, and Blackwater is lobbying to get the contract to guard the boarder with Mexico. The amount of money they stand to receive from these contracts is substantially more than the billions they're currently getting paid for the work in Iraq.

Blackwater, the largest and most infamous of these private security forces, has been in the news recently for its excessive use of force and careless killing of civilians in Iraq. It has really become a private "army for hire", with enough capability to take on the militaries of some small countries already. And they're growing considerably in size, fire power, intelligence gathering capabilities, and influence. . While they are currently being hired mainly by the U.S. government, in principle they could be hired by any government or corporation with enough money and the motivation. These companies have no oversight by the U.S. military or apparently any other U.S. laws when operating overseas. Unlike the U.S. military, they're not subject to control by an elected official, international treaties (such as the Geneva Conventions), or often even by a board of directors. Blackwater is a privately-held company and does not publish much information about internal affairs.

But the most troubling possibility is that they can become an "army for hire" for use within the U.S. boarders. There are many legal restrictions about deploying the U.S. military again U.S. citizens on American soil. These restrictions do not apply for private security firms. Black water was already hired to provide security in several states after hurricane Katrina - a dry run for future projects. Imagine a future president that decided to hire Blackwater to provide security for all Federal property during a major protest demonstration in Washington D.C. that over 100,000 people were expected to attend. Imagine if these security operations included gathering intelligence on all the groups that were potentially involved. And imagine if the orders were given to break up the demonstration because of some perceived danger after it started? If this doesn't frighten you, then you probably don't fully appreciate what could happen. (Of course people who consider "obedience and respect for authority" to be among their most valued moral principles may find this scenario appealing.)

You may think that we can control and rein in such private security firms if they get too out of control at some point, so why worry now? But this may be next to impossible once they get too large with too much political influence and the money to buy even more, plus more extensive intelligence capabilities to collect damaging info on any perceived opponent, and once they start to be considered indispensable because of the security they are providing for top government officials. They are already considered indispensable to our oversees military and diplomatic operations.

An economic market has some great features, but there are some situations where it does not work at all. One of these is privatizing our military and intelligence operations. A key component of any sovereign government is a monopoly on the use of force and violence within its boarders, and for very good reasons. If private individuals or companies are able to assemble (or hire) their own military and intelligence forces with enough capabilities to rival those of small countries, we will enter a dangerous new era that will undoubtedly have many painful lessons to teach us. This is one dark side of future possibilities that is not getting nearly the attention it deserves.

The Future Has Just Arrived

2007-10-23T08:25:00.000-04:00

The Peak Oil phenomena has been predicted for a while now, and is expected to mark a major turning point in the history of our industrial society. Well, according to a new report just released by the German-based Energy Watch Group, Peak Oil has already occurred - in 2006. World oil production will begin to fall from this point on for the rest of humankind's existence on this planet. And the fall in production is expected to be a rather rapid 7% a year. This report is more pessimistic than others because it relies on actual production numbers, rather than estimates of the oil in left in the ground (which can be inflated for political and business reasons). Meanwhile, the demand for oil will attempt to keep rising as China and India grow their consumption rates. This report is certainly consist ant with the price of oil reaching a new peak of over $90 a barrel last week.

In addition to this news, the effects of climate change are hitting earlier than expected in the United States. Massive wild fires are devastating parts of southern California and severe draught conditions are causing major problems with Atlanta. Recent measurements of the Artic sea ice shows that it has been melting much faster than even the worst case predictions.

Add to that the chain of major economic instabilities now hitting the market in the technically bankrupt U.S. economy (see my post on Sept 2nd) .

People have been talking about these future problems for a while now. Well, it's official, the future is now here. Prepare for an increasingly exciting ride from now on.

Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress seem to be unable to rally enough support and determination to make any major progress or for the most part provide any compelling vision. And the Republican presidential candidates are just arguing about who is the most conservative.

Will You Marry a Robot?

2007-10-19T14:53:00.000-04:00

I couldn't pass up commenting on this article by Roland Piquepaille. It seems that David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher, will publish a book in November titled “Love and Sex with Robots.” Levy claims that within a few decades, we will be able to produce robots that are so human like in their appearance, functionality, and in their expression of human-like emotions, that many people will be falling in love with them, having sex with them, and even marrying them.

I suspect that people will consider this possibility either very interesting, very disturbing, or both. Is it realistic? People do have a strong tendency to mistakenly project humans qualities into non-human things and develop emotional attachments to them. Consider how common it is for people to treat pets as if they were cute little human children. Admittedly pets are emotional beings that people can develop relationships with, but all too often people mistakenly project too many human characteristics on them. It seems like a natural tendency we have.

People claim they "fall in love with their cars" all the time. (Personally, I have enough trouble developing relationships with humans. I never understood how people can develop strong emotional attachments to a hunk of rusting metal that you will discard in a few years, but I digress...) I think it's only a matter of time before people develop emotional attachments to computer controlled mobile objects (i.e. robots). Sexual activity with them could happen well before this. The market for this is potentially huge.

Is this a good or bad thing for society? I've heard that there is a declining trend in some Muslim communities for men to marry. They instead "marry their television", which is a slang expression for turning their attention to the newly available porn available on satellite TVs. This also suggest that adult version of online virtual reality ( "2nd Life", or other big multiplayer games) is a huge market just waiting to be tapped. The potential for addiction is great here, and the impact on the ability to develop relations with real humans is something to be concerned about.

So computer related sex - yes, it will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated than today's online porn. Computer marriage? No. Marriage is a different type of thing. It is a commitment on a deeper emotional level between humans with all their idiosyncrasies and faults. It is a commitment to share finances, goals, emotional support, sacrifices, physical support in case of accident or illness, and to grow old together. This is not the relationship you have with non-human things. I'm not sure I want to sacrifice to meet my robot's needs, which is a fundamental aspect of marriage. I expect the preferred relationship with robots will be more like a friendly servant - potentially one with "side" benefits.

Nobel Prize and Climate Change

2007-10-13T22:35:00.000-04:00

I couldn't be more pleased that Al Gore was just awarded the Nobel Peace prize this year. President Bush, for all his faults, had the decency to say that he was pleased that Gore had won the award. That was more than can be said for some other right wing commentators with less integrity and class who appear to still view this as an ideological struggle. Such politically motivated denial will go down as a sad chapter when the future history text books write about this time.

Global climate change will continue to grow as one of the key issues facing humankind in the coming decades. It's not a political or ideological issue, at least it shouldn't be. The scientific support for this is overwhelming and continues to grow each year. Yes there is some uncertainty, but remember that uncertainty cuts both ways. The official projections from the IPCC panel tries to project a middle ground. That means there is a 50% chance that the results will be worse than these projections.

A recent posting at the Daily KOS does a good job of reminding everyone of this, and points out that the most recent data on decreases in sea ice in the Artic is actually showing changes much more severe than the best official predicted changes. So yes, in this aspect of climate change the data clearly shows the best scientific projections were wrong. They were much too opptimistic.

Pope to make climate action a moral obligation

2007-09-25T08:04:00.000-04:00

Many aspects of the climate change issue cannot be handled well by traditional market forces and politics. The people effected most are 1) people in poor countries, and 2) future generations, neither of whom have any market impact for the next quarter, or vote in current U.S. elections. Thus it's important to see other organizations, and in particular religions stepping up to the plate on this.

When Benedict XVI was first elected to his position as the new Pope, there was a concern that he would turn the Catholic Church in a very conservative direction. The fact that the announcement below is coming from what most people view as a very conservative Pope makes it all the more surprising and important as a milestone in the changing views on sustainable development and climate change.

The Pope is expected to use his first address to the United Nations to deliver a powerful warning over climate change in a move to adopt protection of the environment as a "moral" cause for the Catholic Church and its billion-strong following. The New York speech is likely to contain an appeal for sustainable development, and it will follow an unprecedented Encyclical (a message to the wider church) on the subject... It will act as the centerpiece of a US visit scheduled for next April.... and round off an environmental blitz at the Vatican, in which the Pope has personally led moves to emphasize green issues based on the belief that climate change is affecting the poorest people on the planet, and the principle that believers have a duty to "protect creation".

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Catholic Church in the UK, said last night: "This is a crucial issue both today and for all future generations. We are the stewards of creation and we need to take that responsibility seriously and co-operate to care for the created world."

A Papal tour of America will be particularly potent during election year in
the US, where Catholics number around 73 million [emphasis added]

( from http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2987811.ece )

An Insightful Bush Quote

2007-09-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

In his nationally televised speech this week, President Bush actually said something very insightful.

"In the life of all free nations, there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment."

I couldn't agree more. However, I suspect that he an I interpret this in different ways. We are now in a period where we have to make a fundamental choice about our future direction. Do we want to continue with the policies of attempting to establish military domination over the world? Or do we want to change to a policy of investing considerable effort into building a peaceful, cooperative world community? Depending on which road we decide to take, our future will be very different. This fundamental choice will reveal much about our character as a people. I only wish the politicians, news organizations, and religious leaders would talk more about it.

One of my favorite groups that are talking about it are the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and their promotion of a Global Marshal Plan. The other group is based around the Great Turning initiatives of David Korten and Joanna Macy. More on these later.

A Bankrupt Nation?

2007-09-02T18:42:00.000-04:00

I didn't intend for this to be a purely negative blog, but since I'm on the subject of the collapsing American Empire, I couldn't resist comment on the recent article by Robert Freeman titled The Frightening Future in the Market Meltdown . He makes the following points:

When Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, the cumulative national debt stood at $1 trillion. Today, it approaches $9 trillion
In 1975, personal household debt amounted to only 61% of disposable income. Today it stands at over 135%.
Consumers have expanded mortgage debt by over $11 trillion since 2001, using mortgage equity withdrawals to purchase life styles far beyond what their incomes alone could support.
The annual trade deficit that stood at $377 billion in 2000 now exceeds $800 billion.
Over the past six years, this trade deficit has added a cumulative $3 trillion of debt to the economy.
Adding up the national debt, consumer debt, and trade debt gives an increase in debt over the past six years comes to $17 trillion. (Note that any economy that borrows $17 trillion in six years can be made to look good, at least for a while. The problem is when the bills come due. )
Lawrence Kotlikoff, writing for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revealed last year that the U.S. actually faces $65 trillion in “unfunded liabilities,” debts it has committed to pay but for which there is no identified source of funding.

Here's a definition (from Wikipedia)

Bankruptcy - a legally declared inability or impairment of ability of an individual or organizations to pay their creditors.

It's hard to see how the U.S. can pay these obligations under any reasonable scenario. We currently have to borrow $2.5 billion every day from the rest of the world just to keep afloat, sinking further and further into debt with no improvement in the situation in sight. Based on the above data, we appear to be, by any reasonable definition, a bankrupt nation waiting for the bills to come due. Where is this argument wrong?

Overshoot and Crash - U.S. Empire and the Middle East

2007-08-31T10:44:00.000-04:00

It is a well known phenomena in the study of nature that when a system grows beyond a sustainable level, it will eventually decline. And the farther it overshoots that sustainable level, the more dramatic the decline, or in some cases "crash" will eventually be. One of the best illustrations of this is a population of animals that grows beyond what the local food supply can support. The population will eventually decline to more sustainable levels, and the greater the population overshoot, the more dramatic the die-off will be.

This brings us to the history of empires. They inevitably grow to overshoot what the base can sustain in terms of economic and human costs, followed by a decline. Whether they gradually shrink to more sustainable levels, or dramatically crash to a shadow of their former selves depends on how far they overshoot their sustainable level, and how long they manage to deny reality before starting to make the necessary draw backs.

In the case of the American empire, we now have over 700 military bases in other countries around the world. With the cost of the Iraq war likely to exceed $1 trillion, it seems likely that we have significantly overshot what we can sustain and are headed for a decline from our current state. Whether this will be a gradual orderly roll-back or a more dramatic crash depends on whether we continue with a policy of attempting to militarily dominate the world, or realize the folly of this effort and start to change our approach. Unfortunately, it looks like we may be on a path to push our military overcommitment even farther beyond the limits of sustainability. Consider the following news from the experts at Informed Comment Global Affairs

"...[from Cheney's 2002 speech referring to the campaign to drum up support for the Iraq war beginning in Sept 2002] After all "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

If you don't look forward to ruinous future for America, it's hard to think of a scarier scenario for the final months of the Cheney/Bush administration.

Where Will Major Water Shortages Hit the US First?

2007-08-19T20:24:00.000-04:00

As our population and consumption rates continue to grow, we are face shortage of a number of natural resources within the next decade or two. Oil is one of the most talked about, as I mentioned elsewhere, but one that may cause major problems even sooner is water. Oil can be economically shipped from the other side of the world, and there are alternatives to oil for many of its present uses. These things are not true for water.

The area of America that will face severe water shortages first is in the south west. A recent report described the situation as follows:

The news coming from the Southern Nevada Water Authority Thursday about the valley's future water supply is worrisome. Unless we act quickly, there will be no water for hundreds of thousands of Las Vegas Valley residents in just three years…SNWA data shows drought conditions getting worse, not better
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=6943263

The article goes on to describe costly project needed to bring in water to Las Vegas from elsewhere, as well as stating the need for some more conservation. Nowhere does it mention the obvious fact here – it does not make sense to construct a large city in the middle of the desert where there are very limited water supplies. This is yet another good example demonstrating that normal market forces are not good at making long term plans for dealing with limited resources. More on that in a future append.

Another Report that we have already passed “Peak Oil”

2007-08-15T16:10:00.000-04:00

According to a recent report ( details at http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0806/p15s01-wmgn.htm )

The world output of oil actually already peaked in May 2005 at 74.2 million barrels a day, says Matthew Simmons, chairman of Houston-based Simmons & Company International, an investment banking firm for the energy industry…. Since then, production has fallen about 1 million barrels a day (MB/D). If that trend continues, the results for the world economy will be “so real, so devastating” that peak oil concerns will overwhelm slower-moving global warming in grabbing world attention.
Last Tuesday, the price of oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange set a record, rising as high as $78.40. That exceeded the previous high of $77.03 set in July 2006 at the onset of Israel’s war in Lebanon.
Oil shortages, warns Simmons, could lead to war.

"Could lead to war??" How about "Have already lead to war." The desire to have large permanent military bases in the Middle East to exercise more long term control over that area was likely one of the key motivating factors for the start of the Iraq war in 2003. I'm afraid that armed conflict over oil will be part of mankind's fate for the foreseeable future.

The Noisy Restaurant

2007-08-11T07:56:00.000-04:00

Humans have a great ability to pick out a conversation and understand it in a noisy environment, such as at a restaurant or a party. Computer speech recognition is gradually getting this ability too. I recently read about a new development in computer speech recognition that allows it to listen to multiple conversations in a noisy environment and actually understand what was happening in each of those multiple conversations. Why not? Once it can understand one conversation in a noisy environment, it makes sense that duplicating some hardware should allow it to understand multiple conversations.

This brings some interesting situations to mind. Imagine a robot waitress (waiter? what's the correct term for something without a gender - waitred?) taking orders at a table. Instead of taking turns giving their order, each person could speak up simultaneously and announce their orders all at the same time. It would take some getting used to, but it's fun to think about.

That leads to the question of what other capabilities such a robot waitress could have that don't necessarily mimic human capabilities exactly. For example, arms that are more flexible and extendable with additional joints for placing food dishes directly in front of people on crowded tables. How about the ability to see in all directions (360 degrees) at the same time to better keep track of all the customers at different tables? No need to limit it to two eyes. Science fiction films too often portray robots with physical characteristics similar to humans, but that just shows a lack of imagination.

Addendum: Here's an even stranger one that might be a little hard to grasp at first - there's no need for each of the robot waitresses to have a "separate mind". They could all share the same mind, linked to their bodies by radio communication. Then you can grab the attention of any robot waitress walking by, and they will be able to respond to you with exactly the same familiarity as the original physical robot that greeted you when you first sat down.

The Demise of Professional Sports

2007-07-25T18:59:00.000-04:00

Some people have predicted that professional sports as we know them have at most a decade left to exist. It turns out that they may have been too optimistic.

The reason behind this prediction is that the use of performance enhancing drugs will become more and more widespread. Already new designer drugs are appearing faster than they can devise tests for them. And within a decade genetic engineering will produce dramatic athletic improvements while being essentially impossible to detect.

If you look at the news today from the Tour de France, I currently count three teams that have pulled out due to illegal drug use, and the current leader, Michael Rasmussen was just disqualified. The race is becoming a contest of who has the best chemist, with the chances of winning without the aid of performance enhancing drugs growing dimmer each year. The Tour de France, as we knew it, is just about over.

And in baseball, Barry Bonds is about to break the all time home run record with what clearly seems to be the aid of performance enhancing drugs, rendering that record almost meaningless. Before long it will become routine for someone to hit over 100 home runs in a year.

Try to imagine football with 300 pound quarterbacks and linemen routine exceeding 500 pounds. Where is this all going?

Perhaps the basic contradiction at the heart of professional (something done for money) sport (something done solely for fun) will reach a point where it cannot be overcome or hidden behind a fantasy any longer.

More Indication that the Housing Bubble is About to Burst?

2007-06-30T22:47:00.001-04:00

In a recent posting by Dean Baker at Alternet.org, he noted the following information:

The inventory of unsold homes climbed to 4.4 million in May, yet another record.
House prices are down by 4.9 percent in the Boston area and by 6 percent in San Diego.
Foreclosure rates are soaring.

Dean Baker goes on to state that house prices will not collapse to nothing like the most ridiculous of the Internet stocks, but homes in the most-inflated markets could lose 30 to 50 percent (in real terms) from their bubble peaks.

As I stated in a previous post, The U.S. economy has been operating in an unsustainable mode for some time now, and many experts have been predicting a serious "correction" for some time in the future. One of the main problems is the housing bubble. This could burst at any time, sending many overextended American families, and the American economy in general into deep financial trouble.

End of an Era?

2007-05-20T23:58:00.000-04:00

Let's see, Wolfowitz just resigned. Jerry Falwell died. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is about to resign. Toni Blair announced that he will be leaving office. The military is just about in an open revolt against the administration policies.

Sounds like the beginning of an end of an era to me.

Priorities for NASA and others

2007-05-18T07:31:00.002-04:00

In a recent article in Wired Magazine (June 2007) by Gregg Easterbrook proposed the following set of rational priorities for NASA, in descending order of importance:

Conduct research, particularly environmental research, on the Earth, the Sun, and Venus (the most Earth like planet)
Locate asteroids and comets that might strike Earth, and devise a practical means for deflecting them
Increase humanity's store of knowledge by studying the distant universe
Figure our a way to replace today's chemical rockets with a much cheaper way to reach Earth orbit.

Sounds like a very rational set of priorities to me. But here, according to the article, are NASA's current priorities:

Maintain a pointless space station
Build a pointless "Motel 6" on the moon.
Increase humanity's store of knowledge by studying the distant universe
Keep money flowing to favored aerospace contractors and congressional districts

That's only 1 for 4 in getting the right priorities, and the two most important ones are missing. One of the key aspects of leadership is the ability to set the right priorities, since you can never do everything you want. One of the key failures of the current national administration, as illustrated in the above lists, is the inability to properly set a reasonable set of rational priorities.

With that in mind, I can't help adding my own following list of what our national priorities should be in terms of addressing the biggest threats from rogue states and terrorists groups:

Al-Queda
North Korea
Islamic revolution in a nuclear armed Pakistan
The "loose nukes problem" in Russia
Iran
Iraq

Guess where the vast majority of our effort and resources is focused? Talk about a good illustration of the problems that arise from not setting reasonable rational priorities...

More Evidence of a Major Cultural Shift on Climate Change

2007-04-11T09:47:00.000-04:00

Just another sign that we have passed the tipping point on public attitudes towards climate change. Here are some excerpts from a recent debate between John Kerry and Newt Gingrich. It was advertised as a "smack-down and a prizefight" over climate change, but it turned out to be something quite different. Wow....read Gingrich's words carefully and slowely. We really are winning.

[Kerry to Gingrich ] "what would you say to Senator [Jim] Inhofe [R-Okla.] and to others in the Senate who are resisting even the science?"

Gingrich didn't hesitate. "My message," he said, "is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere." The pro-Kerry crowd applauded.

"And do it urgently?" the senator pressed.

"And do it urgently, yeah," the former speaker replied. "I think there has to be, if you will, a green conservatism," he added.

Kerry didn't know quite what to do with his agreeable opponent.....

Full article is here

The Great Turning Conference

2007-04-02T22:07:00.000-04:00

I just returned from a wonderful three day “leadership conference” about “Navigating the Great Turning” in Columbus Ohio (http://www.greatturninggathering.org/ ). The conference featured David Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and David Cobb, the 2004 presidential candidate of the Green Party of the United States.

Many of the themes in the conference were based on Korten’s book The Great Turning, which made a big impression on my when I read it several months ago (for more information see http://thegreatturning.net/ ). In the book, Korten promotes the theme that the paradigm of Empire, which has dominated much of the world’s stage for 5,000+ years is no longer sustainable (if it ever was) and is collapsing. With some effort, it is being replaced by a paradigm of increased partnership relations in what Kortin refers to as the Earth Community. However, it is also possible that the collapsing Empire could be replaced by an increasingly brutal fight for dominance over other groups and access to the remaining resources. It was the goal of the conference to promote the vision of Earth Community partnerships as the alternative to the vision of Empire, and to help give people the tools and encouragement to work towards this more optimistic partnership vision of the future.

Many of these themes are contained in my presentation linked to on the right hand column of this blog (see Sustainability or Apocalypse). This analysis of events and vision of the future resonated with me personally, and with many of the religious groups represented at the conference. I would like to note that Unitarian Universalists dominated the religious representation there, in large part because they were co-sponsors of the conference. I will post more thoughts and insights from the discussions at the conference later. In the mean time, I added a link to the “Great Turning” web site to the list of links on the right column of this blog.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's Views

2007-03-17T21:32:00.000-04:00

There are many arguments that what we do in the next few decades will strongly impact the longer term future of humanity. See my presentation on Sustainability or Apocalypse. But there may also be a much shorter range critical period that we need to be concerned about.

"If we can get through the next 20 months, there is some hope for America recovering and moving forward as a positive force in the world. However, if the war in Iraq expands to other areas of the region, especially to Iran, we could be involved in a 20 year conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and possibly Pakistan. And that will be the end of American global supremacy."

The above quote is a rough paraphrase of the comments from Zbigniew Brzezinski on The Daily Show March 14, 2007

These comments appear near the end of the segment.

Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice 'Has Reached Tipping-Point'

2007-03-17T17:49:00.000-04:00

There are multiple "tipping points" in climate change - points at which comparatively rapid change starts to occur from which it is hard to recover and return to the original climate state. Some of the tipping points are expected to be reached in a decade or two if we do nothing. This one, however, may be imminent.

A catastrophic collapse of the Arctic sea ice could lead to radical climate changes in the northern hemisphere according to scientists who warn that the rapid melting is at a "tipping point" beyond which it may not recover.

See the full article at: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0316-04.htm

The Overextended U. S. Economy and Bankruptcy

2007-03-17T16:15:00.000-04:00

On a more general note about the U.S. economy being overextended, here is another article from last year .

The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank. A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve. Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt.

"To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked….

.

The full article is available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/07/14/cnusa14.xml

Many of these arguments sound very convincing when you look at the data they point to. However, the one concern is that people have been predicting a “major correction” for some time now, often predicting in the past that it would have already happened by this point time. Is there something fundamentally wrong with their analysis, or just with their timing?

Housing Bubble About to Burst?

2007-03-17T15:08:00.000-04:00

The U.S. economy has been operating in an unsustainable mode for some time now, and many experts have been predicting a serious "correction" for some time in the future. One of the multiple problems ( huge budget deficit, trade deficit, etc.) is the housing bubble. This could burst at any time, sending many overextended American families into deep financial trouble.

There was a recent article quoting financial expert Jim Rogers about this. Excerpts:

...investment guru Jim Rogers stepped into the U.S. subprime fray on Wednesday, predicting a real estate crash that would trigger defaults and spread contagion to emerging markets.

"You can't believe how bad it's going to get before it gets any better," the prominent U.S. fund manager told Reuters by telephone from New York.

"It's going to be a disaster for many people who don't have a clue about what happens when a real estate bubble pops.

See the full article at: http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USL1470530620070314

Recording Your Life

2007-03-01T00:55:00.000-05:00

In New Jersey last fall, 16 year old Matt Leclair started objecting when one of his public school teachers promoted his fundamentalistic religious beliefs during class. When the teacher denied to the principle that he did that, Matt took out a recording he secretely made in class that clearly showed the teacher doing what Matt claimed. The school took immediate action to make sure this would never happen again - they banned students from recording in class again. (To be fair I believe they also told the teacher not to make such religions statements again too).

Thanks to rapidly developing technology it's going to be possible to record more and more aspects of everyone's daily life, so get used to it. The school was a little naive to think they could actually ban such recordings. Students can now by a mini MP3 player that can also be used as a tape recorder. These things are so small that it's impossible to prevent students from bringing them into school and recording what happens without conducting exhaustive strip searches each morning. And the technology gets better each year.

Did You Know? - the video

2007-03-01T00:18:00.000-05:00

There is a great little video making the rounds about the exponential rate of change we are living through titled "Did you know?" http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv

It was based on a presentation about the future of education created by Karl Fisch, a high school teacher in Colorado. It contains some of the predictions about future computer power that were made by Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Singularity is Near", as well as some comments about the growth of China and India. Besides a lot of intriguing facts, it is accompanied by a wonderful instrumental musical selection that becomes strangely haunting after listening for a while.

You can find our more information about this video and Karl Fisch on his blog at http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html
He's an interesting character, and his blog contains a lot of good commentary on our educational system.

Is Peak Oil Here Already?

2007-02-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

"In the next year or two the issue of peak oil may replace global warming as what we're worried about and talking about."

This prediction was recently made by Matt Simmons, Chairman of Simmons and Co. International, an independent investment bank specializing in the energy industry. Matt recently made an interesting claim that we are already at world wide peak oil production. Oil production in the future may be flat for a while and then start an inevitable decline. With demand for oil still accelerating, this will drive oil prices substantially higher, possibly reaching $300 per barrel at some point

He expects big changes in society, and if we make these changes right we'll get through this change alright. You can see Matt Simmons talk about this here.

Additional speeches from Matt Simmons are available here. Another interesting link on peak oil can be found here.

The Prospect for Change in the Coming Century

2007-02-01T22:43:00.000-05:00

The 20th century started with no automobile or air travel to speak of, or without at theory of atoms. Teddy Roosevelt had not yet started pushing the modern conservation movement and building out our national park system. The 20th century ended with supercomputers communicating over the internet, genetic engineering, nuclear power, space shuttles flights, studies of planets in other solar systems, and extensive studies of the changes to Earth’s climate that we were causing.

Will that be the greatest century of change in the history of humanity? Is the path that civilization is on represented by what is called an “S curve” that looks like the curve below?

Remarkable as this century of change is, all indications are that the coming century will introduce even greater changes. And more surprisingly, this amount of change could take place in just the first 50 or 60 years of the 21st century. In other words, the rate of change is actually accelerating, and the path of civilization will look more like the exponential curve here.

An Introduction to an Interesting Journey

2007-01-13T23:57:00.000-05:00

Let me introduce myself and this blog. I work at a major computer firm projecting the future direction of technology developments. My interest in studies of the future dates back to at least my college years when I took a senior seminar on the topic. Lately I have been convinced that we are entering a fascinating period of significant change in both our technological capabilities and social structures. The consequences of which can be very beneficial, or very disruptive (or both), but they will likely be profound. This blog is an attempt to summarize the thoughts of others and myself on some of the more interesting and provocative outlooks for the next 10 to 50 years, and to explore some of the ways that we can help determine which of multiple paths humankind will follow. It promises to be a very interesting journey.