Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Listen to the audio of Jesse Schell’s “Visions of the Gamepocalypse” (downloads tab)

Gaming the World

In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of “gamepocalypse—where every second of your life you’re playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked.

The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiosity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom.

Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors, because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our predictions are right or wrong….

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

Visions of the Gamepocalypse

In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of “gamepocalypse—where every second of your life you’re playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked.

The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiousity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom.

Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors, because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our predictions are right or wrong….

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

Jeff Rothenberg once said “Digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first.”  This is basis of an interesting debate between New York Times writer Jeffrey Rosen who recently published “The End of Forgetting,” and Scott Rosenberg’s rebuttal on his blog. (Excerpt from Rosenberg below)

But Rosen is too busy hatching plans for “expire dates” on social-network postings and other artificial-forgetting schemes to give his head the Janus-turn his subject demands. The idea that the Web has a long memory is hardly new (here’s J.D. Lasica’s piece on how “The Web Never Forgets” from 1998). But there is a flipside to this notion: Information online can be fragile and fleeting, as well. There is an entropic quality to everything that is shared online. Data gets lost; servers die; databases are corrupted; formats fall into disuse; storage media deteriorate; backups fail.

Rosen’s piece along with new projects such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere project are reactions to a feeling that we are losing privacy in the digital age.  These reactions have an unfortunate side effect however – if we encrypt or auto delete our data, we will lose it forever.

Privacy and security concerns generally have a short half life.  While you might not want your drunk college photos to be a part of a future employers decision making criteria, you will certainly lament losing all your chilhood photos by the time you are 60.  If we lost the treasure trove of human to human interactions that is now being recorded on the web it would truly be a tragedy.  Imagine how much more we would know about ancient Rome, Egypt, or the Mayan culture if we could sift through their Facebook logs…

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

At a recent Long Now seminar, Ed Moses mentioned in passing that we now produce enough bullets each year to kill every person on the planet — twice. We are a violent species; we hunt, we organize in gangs, we go to war. Today the U.S. is prosecuting two wars, and there are hotspots around the world from Darfur to Mexico.

At the same time, global defense spending is rising by 8% a year. We face unquantifiable threats from nuclear, biological, and robot weapons. And, of course, there will almost certainly be new conflicts over food, water, and other resources.

And yet –

Over the long term, it’s possible that war may actually be on the decline. The UN defines a “major war” as an armed conflict which causes more than 1,000 violent deaths a year. Just ten years ago, the world had fifteen major ongoing wars. Today there are seven.

In fact, Steven Pinker has argued that if you’re a young man (the group most likely to bear the burden of soldiering), your chances of dying in an armed conflict are lower than at any time in history: “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” His essay is a few years old, but it’s worth reading if you haven’t seen it before: A history of violence.

Here are some other recent news stories and opinion pieces about the future of war (somewhat U.S.-centric, as the U.S. accounts for nearly half of global military spending, and most “advances” are taking place here):

1. Money and the military:

• Top 10 military spending nations
• Report proposes downsized military
• China’s 2010 military spending 1.5 times larger than defense budget
• The purchasing power of peace

2. Ironically, even as we eliminate nuclear warheads:

• U.S. plans to increase nuclear spending

3. High-tech combat:

• The transformation of American warfare: fighting wars with robots
• War of the machines
• This is the future of war
• U.S. engaging in virtual cyber-war

4. War, what is it good for:

• Seven reasons why we can’t stop making war

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

Radoslav Zilinsky’s 2007 artwork “The World”

A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages.  Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky’s site.  (Found via Coolvibe.)

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Watch the video of Frank Gavin’s “Five Ways to Use History Well”

Long Quotes: Quotes related to long-term thinking. A new series. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
– Stanislaw Lec

The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.

Huge text and speech corpora of varying degrees of structure already exist for many of the most widely spoken languages in the world—English is probably the most extensively documented, followed by other majority languages like Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Given some degree of access to these corpora (though many are not publicly accessible), research, education and preservation efforts in the ten languages which represent 50% of the world’s speakers (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese) can be relatively well-resourced.

But what about the other half of the world? The next 290 most widely spoken languages account for another 45% of the population, and the remaining 6,500 or so are spoken by only 5%–this latter group representing the “long tail” of human languages:

Equal documentation of all the world’s languages is an enormous challenge, especially in light of the tremendous quantity and diversity represented by the long tail. The Parallel Speech Corpus Project will take a first step toward universal documentation of all human languages, with the goal of providing documentation of the top 300 and providing a model that can then be extended out to the long tail. Eventually, researchers, educators and engineers alike should have access to every living human language, creating new opportunities for expanding knowledge and technology alike and helping to preserve our threatened diversity.

This project is made possible through the support and sponsorship of speech technology expert James Baker and will be developed in partnership with his ALLOW initiative. We will be putting out a call for volunteers soon. In the meantime, please contact rosetta@longnow.org with questions or suggestions.

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Not only does this amazing stop-motion film document a huge swath of history (all of it, really) – it looks like it took a huge swath of history to make.  Thousands of photographs of graffiti evolving and interacting with its environment depict the development of life in the universe to create “Big Bang Big Boom: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life… and how it could probably end.”

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If this theme piques your interest, by the way, you might want to check out one of our upcoming Seminars About Long-term Thinking featuring Martin Rees: “Life’s Future in the Cosmos.”

Long Quotes: Quotes related to long-term thinking. A new series. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.

“The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’”
– Jonas Salk

“The malaria parasite has been responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age” is the quote that jumped off the page in a recent article by Sonia Shah in the Wall Street Journal.

Entitled “The Tenacious Buzz of Malaria” the article places malaria in a long term perspective:

Malaria has shaped our trade and settlement patterns, and our demographics. Today, it sickens 300 million every year, and kills nearly 1 million, despite the fact that we’ve known how to cure it (with parasite-killing drugs) and prevent it (by avoiding mosquito bites) for over a century. And even as the fight against malaria gains momentum, research reveals that malaria’s tentacles continue to dig ever deeper.

Part of malaria’s wicked genius is that since ancient times, it has fooled us into thinking it is a trivial problem, easily solved. Diseases such as yellow fever, or plague, or polio, have always filled us with dread. But not malaria. Almost all of our attempts to squelch it, from thousands of years ago to today, have treated the disease as a weak foe, allowing malaria to flourish, nearly unchecked, to this day.

From low tech solutions like bed nets to high tech lasers that shoot mosquitoes in mid air, and many international programs against malaria and the development of a vaccine, humans continue to work to fight the disease. But as the article states, “We’ve all been underestimating malaria for millennia.”

Sonia Shah is the author of a newly published book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years.

Photo credit: James Gathany, CDC

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Listen to the audio of Frank Gavin’s “Five Ways to Use History Well” (downloads tab)

The European Space Agency has released an amazing new image of our universe, created by the recently launched Planck mission.  The image above comes from Planck’s first detailed survey of the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s “first light.”

It is the light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.

Before that time, scientists say, the cosmos would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the Universe would have been opaque.

Planck is funded to create four of these surveys, each more precise than the last:

“We know that eventually as the data get better and better, what you end up getting to are the limitations of what you know about the instrument,” explained Professor Jaffe.

“And so, by running Planck for longer we can learn a lot more about the instrument itself and thereby remove a lot of the contaminating effects that are just because of the way it produces its noise.”

(BBC via Brian Eno)

History-savvy Policy

Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certainty, and simple explanations. Meanwhile historians revel in nuance, distrust simple explanations and also distrust power and those who seek it. Thus historians keep themselves irrelevant, and policy makers keep their process ignorant.

Gavin proposed five key concepts from history that can inform understanding and improve policy dramatically…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking presents Martin Rees on “Life’s Future in the Cosmos “ Monday August 2, 02010 at 7:30 pm at The Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland Long Now Members can reserve 1 seat, join today! or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
President of the Royal Society, England’s Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees brings a lifetime of cosmological inquiry to a crucial question: What if human success on Earth determines life’s success in the universe?

He thinks that civilization’s chances of getting out of this century intact are about 50-50. He is hopeful that extraterrestrial life already exists, but there’s no sign of it yet. But even if we are now alone, he notes that we may not even be the halfway stage of evolution. There is huge scope for post-human evolution, so that “it will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

Appropriately, Rees’s Long Now talk will be at the Chabot Space & Science Center in the hills above Oakland, in the planetarium.

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Boulding’s long-present anticipated our Long Now. It is a reminder that the core concept of being in the middle of history, rather than it’s beginning or end is a useful concept at multiple time frames, whether very long or very short.

“A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes. You can see how difficult it has been to create these bodies and new ways and how in many ways we are slipping backward; but in other ways we are not. I take comfort to know that super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire).”

- Elise Boulding Interviewed by Julian Portilla — 2003

(forwarded to me by Stuart Silverstone)

Dr. Laura Welcher and Dr. Kurt Bollacker of Long Now will be speaking at this year’s Wikimania conference in Gdansk Poland over the weekend of July 9 – 11, 02010 on the creation of a new Language Commons Wiki.

Wikimania is a conference for users of the wiki projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia Foundation projects, other wikis, open source software, and free content.

Attendance is €15 per day, or €40 for all three days and you can register here.

If you have questions, you can contact Wikimania directly through this page.

Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica” in collaboration with Long Now has created a new category just for us called Long Now Locations.

The Long Now Locations serve as a compendium and ongoing collection of objects and places that exhibit long-term thinking, intended or not. Along with the character of Atlas Obscura, many of the Long Now Locations are also mysterious and curious in nature.

Ranging from items that were created with a long-term mindset and intention, as were the Oak Beams at New College Oxford, to items that accidentally survived and now serve as long-term examples, telling a story and giving important information regarding past civilizations and their knowledge and capabilities, like the Antikythera Mechanism.

We encourage Long Now supporters to explore the Long Now Locations collection and add your own experiences with places and items of long-term nature, and maybe even some examples of poor long-term thought or planning. Sign up with an Atlas Obscura to start contributing your stories.

Obscura Day 02010

In addition to Long Now Locations, on Saturday March 20 02010, Long Now collaborated with Atlas Obscura on the first, of what we hope will be many an Obscura Day. Taking part in a day of 80 events, expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in 20 countries worldwide, Long Now’s Museum & Store opened our doors to over 80 Obscura Day explorers for an evening of merry-making and conversation around the Long Now and the 10,000 Year Clock.

After exploring the Musee Mechanique alongside owner Dan Zelinsky, the San Francisco Obscura Day party roved down along the historic Aquatic Park and over into Fort Mason where an after-party was held at the Long Now Museum & Store to close Obscura Day’s world-wide events and festivities.

image courtesy of michaelz1 on flickr

Long Now and Atlas Obscura staff and guests gathered to mingle around prototypes of the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now. Amongst the Orrery, Chime Generator, and Tungsten Bobs. Alexander Rose, Executive Director of Long Now and Project Manager/Designer of the 10,000 Year Clock, gave an introduction to the clocks various prototypes. Clock engineers, Greg Staples and Paolo Salvagione were also in attendance to answer questions and give demonstrations of the various prototypes.

Here is a wonderful video and summary on the day from Atlas Obscura:

Obscura Day 2010 from Dylan D. Thuras on Vimeo.

The day started with folks hiking out to an abandoned railroad tunnel Australia to see bioluminescent glow worms, and ended some 30 hours later with San Francisco obscuraphiles watching an amazing demonstration of parts of the 10,000-Year Clock at the Long Now Foundation. In between, we walked the lost River Fleet in London, visited amazing anatomical museums in Paris, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, toured the world’s largest treehouse in Tennessee, circumnavigated one of the largest holes in the world in Butte, made shiny mud balls in Albuquerque, and photographed an unbuilt suburb in the Mojave desert.

Want to be updated on future Atlas Obscura events and tours? Sign up here.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking presents Jesse Schell on “Visions of the Gamepocalypse” Tuesday July 27, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Novellus Theater in San Francisco Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
Games perpetually revolutionize computer use toward denser interaction with the human mind. To do that, they perpetually revolutionize themselves. Understanding the next frontiers of the genre is one way to understand where society is going.

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