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

As you might know (especially if you've read my bio), I went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, receiving a double-BA in History (with a focus on 20th century revolutionary movements) and Anthropology (with a focus on human evolution). UCSC was a terrific place to get an education, due to (at the time) its use of narrative evaluations rather than letter grades, the deep commitment on the part of the faculty to undergraduate education, and its general spirit of enlightened experimentation. Although UC Santa Cruz has changed over the 22 years since I left, I still have real affection for the place.

So when UCSC contacted me about speaking at an upcoming event, I jumped at the opportunity to give something back.

On Saturday, April 17, I'll be one of the three featured speakers at what they're calling the "Intellectual Forum," part of the 2010 Reunion Weekend "Day by the Bay."

What does the future look like?

Three UCSC alumni explore the next generation of communities, work and health care, offering fascinating insights into the way we’ll live our lives:

Jamais Cascio (Cowell, anthropology and history ’88)
Writer, leader, and visionary, Jamais will share scenarios of the future that cross the boundaries of technology, the environment, and society. Research Fellow, Institute For The Future. Named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 global thinkers and a "moral guide to the future."

Shannon Brownlee (College Eight, biology ’79)
Nationally known writer and essayist whose book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer was named the best economics book of 2007 by the New York Times.

David Bank (Oakes, politics ’82)
Vice President, Civic Ventures. A veteran journalist, Bank was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for nine years, covering Silicon Valley and the software industry. His book, Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft (Free Press) was named one of the "Best Business Books of 2001" by the Harvard Business Review

The event is free, although you'll need to register. And don't blame me for what they're calling it.

On Monday, April 19 (yeah, just two days after the UCSC thing), I'll be speaking at Social Business Edge in New York City, a new (and hopefully recurring) event looking at the intersection of business innovation and social media.

Certainly what is going on today is more than just social media marketing, limited to marketing and community outreach efforts. Some of the leading thinkers in this area believe that we are at the start of something much larger than a retake on marketing. We are seeing a rethinking of work, collaboration, and the role of management in a changing world, where the principles and tools of the web are transforming society, media, and business. The mainstays of business theory — like innovation, competitive advantage, marketing, production, and strategic planning — need to be reconsidered and rebalanced in the context of a changing world. The rise of the real-time, social web has become one of the critical factors in this new century, along with a radically changed global economic climate, an accelerating need for sustainable business practices, and a political context demanding increased openness in business.

Assembled (and hosted) by my friend Stowe Boyd, Social Business Edge includes a pretty good variety of speakers. Stowe has decided to do this in something of a "talk show" format, so use of powerpoints will be limited, and the presentations will be more conversational than formal.

The event isn't free, but it is pretty reasonably priced for something like this. If you're in the area, and are interested in the future of social media, I think you'll find this quite valuable. Hope to see you there!

I spent the last three days at the Kennedy Space Center, for the inaugural meeting of the LAUNCH organization. We talked water, and saw some pretty interesting -- and occasionally remarkable -- innovations and proposals. I'll have more to say about them in a bit, but for now...

I grew up a space geek (and dinosaur geek, etc.), so the visit to KSC was a welcome reminder of those feelings. We didn't just get the basic tour; we actually got some behind-the-scenes stuff that was just amazing (and, because the shuttle program is ending soon, won't be replicable for much longer). We got to go into the shuttle processing facility, where one of the shuttles (in this case, Endeavor) gets cleaned and fixed and otherwise readied for an upcoming launch. This meant walking around beneath the shuttle, right below the heat-resistant tiles (and occasionally spotting when one of them needed to be replaced).

The photomontage at right was taken of the shuttle Discovery, set to launch in the next few weeks; I took the pictures while we were parked in the blast zone, where flames from the engines go in the initial moments of take-off. Anything in this zone would be instantly incinerated -- and even the fencing a few hundred yards behind us was bent and blackened.

(You can see all of the pictures I've made public at this link on Flickr.)

Even the normal tour items were pretty amazing -- the Saturn V rocket engines, the actual Apollo mission control consoles, and a piece of the Moon.

That you can touch.

And I did.

As astounding as it all was, there was a subtle melancholy there, as well. The Constellation program to return to the Moon was canceled in the most recent NASA budget (with the money redirected to more robotic missions and long-range research, so I'm actually in full approval), and the engineers we spoke to all made a point of mentioning it unhappily.

But beyond that was the recognition that the massive rockets and space-stations programs are the apotheosis of 20th century engineering. These are artifacts of yesterday's version of tomorrow, the mechanistic urge on an unthinkable scale. And such remarkable, complex systems are ultimately tied to a worldview and process that celebrates the centralized and the controlled in an era that is increasingly neither.

The future of human civilization, in the end, lies in space. But getting there, and staying there, will look nothing like the heady visions of Apollo.

A Survival Guide to Geoengineering, my essay for Momentum, the journal of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, is now available online and via PDF. It's an exploration of what would be necessary to reduce the risks associated with geoengineering, if (or, sadly, when) it gets deployed. This essay served as the basis of the talk I gave at the State of Green Business Forum last month.

The first part of the essay is a recap of the main issues around geoengineering -- the kinds of proposals out there, the uncertainties involved, and the political dilemmas. But the real focus is the list of five key steps that I believe to be mandatory to steer us away from the worst potential results of geoengineering:

• Transparency
• Ongoing international advisory group
• A bottom-up "Ecoscientists without Borders"
• Clear mechanisms for resolving disputes
• Ban (with teeth) on non-state projects

Interestingly, when I gave the talk in February going over these ideas, the last is the one that I got the most push-back on. I suspect that, once real mechanisms for monitoring and managing global climate systems are in place, non-state projects could be useful and warranted. For now, however, it seems clear that non-state groups acting independently are more likely to lead to inter-state disputes than any persistent moderation of temperatures or carbon.

My latest Fast Company piece went up last night, in commemoration of World Water Day 2010. This was the perfect opportunity to talk a bit about my time at the LAUNCH inaugural event, which focused on -- surprise -- water. In the essay, I talk a bit about three of the ten innovative ideas we got a chance to explore at the LAUNCH meeting. Here's one:

Dutyion Root Hydration System, a mouthful of a name for something that's actually pretty remarkable. The system takes a specialized form of hydrophilic plastic and converts it into heavy-duty tubes suitable for below-ground irrigation. If you run saltwater (or similarly brackish/unusable water) through the tubes, the plastic wicks the water out as vapor, permeating it into the soil, which can then support many kinds of food crops and trees. That is, this plastic would let you irrigate orchards and farmland with sea water.

There are still plenty of questions, most critically about how long the plastic lasts and how to bring down production cost (it's not cheap, at present), but the utility of something like would be enormous. Test uses in the Middle East have already shown quite a bit of promise; one use that could be of particular value would be to maintain trees to fight desertification.

This was actually the first item we talked about at LAUNCH, and it really set the tone for the meeting. A technology in the early stages of development, with some good test results already available, and with incredible potential for transforming the landscape. The pilot projects really underscore just how powerful this kind of tech might be: rows of fruit trees growing in the sands of Abu Dhabi, watered only by seawater pumped from the Gulf through the dutyion tubes. As I say at the end of the Fast Company post:

On this World Water Day, 2010, it's hard not to feel a bit of hope for the future.

This month has proven to be hellaciously swamped, but that's no excuse for disappearing like that.

I'm still on the hellaciously swamped clock until the end of April, however. One of the things on my checklist is a very short trip to NYC to speak at the Social Business Edge conference. My topic:

Soylent Twitter: Why the Future is Made of People

Now to figure out what that means...

If you can't make it to NYC, you can still follow the livestream of the Social Business Edge conference here. It's a good set of speakers, and I'm really looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say.

I've also been asked to speak at the Activate Summit 2010, in London. It's put on by The Guardian, and looks to be an effort to put together a UK-based TED-type event. It's definitely a TED-class set of speakers on the roster this time around, so it should be quite fun.

It turns out that I was in NYC a bit over a week ago, filming an interview for "Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible," a show on the Science Channel in the US, and ITV in the UK. My bits won't run until the Summer. It seems to be broadly similar to the "That's Impossible" show I popped up in last year, only this one is hosted by an honest-to-goodness scientist: Michio Kaku.

While Dr. Kaku didn't conduct the interview, he was there for it, and he and I had an informal lunch afterwards. Let me say, talking about the Fermi Paradox, the origins of the universe, and boiling spacetime(!) with one of the leading thinkers in string theory was pretty damn cool.

Talks My talk at UC Santa Cruz went well. Video may be available at some point.

My talk at Social Business Edge went very well -- I'll have video as soon as it's available.

2010-04-19 21:35:15: @cascio just said like five excellent things in 2 sentences and i can't keep up. #sbenyc #smartpeoplerule via randomdeanna (Deanna Zandt)

IFTF Ten-Year Forecast meeting starts tomorrow evening.

I speak at LIFT10 in less than two weeks, and have been asked to speak at Activate2010 in London on July 1.

Fast Company Earth Day post at Fast Company: "Earth Day 2020" -- a set of four scenarios of what we might be doing in 10 years... Scenario #2: "Signs of Desperation"
Unlike scenario #1, in this world the signals of looming environmental chaos are unmistakeable, and the sense of desperation is palpable. Unfortunately, what results is even greater political and social friction, as the dynamic changes swiftly from denial to blame. There are more Congressional hearings on the role that energy and transportation companies played in suppressing debate about the climate than there are hearings to figure out what to do. Environmental scientists are regularly attacked by TV pundits for not doing enough to make people believe that a crisis was at hand. Advocates for a wide variety of quick-response schemes come out of the woodwork, trying to take advantage of a fearful society.

Also, Futures Thinking: A Bibliography at Fast Company.

Other Articles "Bouncing Back: Building a Resilient Tomorrow," for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, International Relations and Security Network. At the core of the resilience concept is a simple argument: Failure happens, so we need to be ready. Yet strategies that depend upon complete, ongoing success – and that collapse under pressure – are distressingly common. We saw it in Iraq war planning that paid insufficient attention to the potential for post-war instability and in financial models that assumed that home prices only go up; we see it now in environmental arguments that assert that our only option is an immediate, complete cessation of carbon emissions. This way of thinking – call it the “aspirational” model – has us ask one big question: “What can we do to maximize our results?” When everything works as desired, this approach can be quite efficient and sometimes enormously successful.

But what if things don’t go as planned?

"The Potential and Risks of Geoengineering," for The Futurist (World Future Society) -- part of the "20 Forecasts for the Next 25 Years" series.

It’s hard to exaggerate the sheer complexity of the situation. If the great obstacle to our continued survival and prosperity as a species were “just” global warming, achieving success would be tricky but doable. The challenge we face is global warming plus resource collapse plus pandemic disease plus post-hegemonic disorder plus the myriad other issues.

Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism.

(Some of the essay might sound familiar; I was encouraged to go ahead and re-use bits to streamline the process of writing it.)

...whew...

My talk from Social Business Edge is embedded below (Flash required).

About a minute of set-up, but then I get going. No slides.

Some nice phrases pop up here: "continuous partial attention means continuous partial empathy" is probably my favorite.

Last week, Kyle Vandercamp, an atmospheric scientist, blew the whistle on a rogue geoengineering project funded by billionaire Harrison Wyld. Vandercamp was a senior scientist at the Bluebird Lab, and managed to get ahold of some pretty damning documents laying out the extent of what the Bluebird project intends to do.

In short, Bluebird was supposed to be a research project looking at what geoengineering would entail, but Vandercamp says that they're actually looking at a near-term full-scale deployment.

Here's the Bluebird website, which apparently had to go public early because of Vandercamp's leak. This is their promo video:

Stop Bluebird is a web-driven campaign to push back against this geoengineering experiment. Documentary filmmaker Juanita Monte is helping to organize this effort, so the campaign is pretty video-focused.

Here's Monte's video summary of what just happened:

Here's Vandercamp's website, as well as the Stop Bluebird website.

Or, maybe not.

Bluebird is actually an "alternate reality game," put together by the Australian Broadcasting Company. Here's the home page for the game.

I'm pleased to say that the producers of Bluebird contacted me last year to serve as an advisor for the game, and they even had me write a few pieces for the project. If the script for the official Bluebird video above sounds familiar, it should -- I wrote it. (Ken Caldeira was another advisor, so I feel pretty confident about the science of the game.)

As with any near-term science fiction, events kept catching up with the alternate reality we were trying to create. I think the folks at ABC struck a good balance, though, and I like the storyline that they've constructed (and trust me -- what's available now is just the beginning).

It's a web-based ARG, so you don't have to be based in Australia to play. Give it a shot -- and let me know what you think!

WE'VE GOT THIS

Annalee Newitz at io9.com asked me to contribute something to their "Posthumanity Week" series, and -- despite being in the middle of a conference a couple thousand miles from home -- agreed. My piece went live today under the title "Your Posthumanism is Boring Me."

"Posthuman" is a term with more weight than meaning; it's used variously to describe people with altered genomes, people with implanted machinery, people with lifespans measured in millennia, and a whole host of descriptors that ultimately boil down to "not us, not now." Enthusiasts and critics alike embrace the term precisely because it advances the argument that the Augmented is the Other - and either an aspiration or a nightmare, as a result. It doesn't illuminate, it disturbs.

But as augmentations move from the pages of a science fiction story to the pages of a catalog, something interesting happens: they lose their power to disturb. They're no longer the advance forces of the techpocalypse, they're the latest manifestation of the fashionable, the ubiquitous, and the banal. They're normal. They're human.

I've done variations of this rant before, but I think it's a pretty important concept. It serves us little good to think of plausible future changes solely in the present-day context. To really understand their impact, we have to imagine their role in a world that actually sees them as boring.

(And, as I said to Annalee, holy crap that's a big picture of me they're using as an illustration for the piece.)

Watch live streaming video from liftconference at livestream.com

(My original title was "Wired for Anticipation," hence the video title.)

Video quality is iffy, and the audio isn't sync'd well, so be warned.

(This is the original Ethical Futurism piece I wrote for Futurismic in 2006; I intend to update and build on it, but I wanted to make sure the original could be found in its entirety here.)

What does it mean to be an “ethical futurist?”

I don’t mean just the basics of being an ethical human being, or even the particular ethical guidelines one might see for any kind of professional — disclosure of conflicts of interest, for example, or honesty in transactions. I mean the ethical conventions that would be essentially unique to futurists. What kinds of rules should apply to those of us who make a living (or a life’s goal) out of thinking about what may come?

Futurists — including scenario planners, trend-spotters, foresight specialists, paradigm engineers, and the myriad other labels we use — have something of an odd professional role. We are akin to reporters, but we’re reporters of events that have not yet happened — and may not happen. We are analysts, but analysts of possibilities, not histories. We’re science fiction storytellers, but the stories we tell are less for entertainment than for enlightenment. And, much to our surprise, we may be much more influential than we expect.

It’s not that no futurists have considered ethical issues before. Foresight professionals regularly grapple with the question of what kinds of ethical guidelines should govern futurism, in mailing lists, organizational debates, and academic papers. But — to my surprise — neither of the two main professional organizations for futurists, the World Future Society and the Association of Professional Futurists, have any lists, documents or debates on the subject available to the public. This doesn’t mean that futurists are inclined to behave unethically or amorally, but simply that there seems to be no overarching set of principles for the field, at least none open to the broader community in which futurists act.

As I gave this some thought, it struck me that futurists are not alone in thinking about tomorrow professionally. Most business consultant types also concern themselves with what may come, with the results of corporate decisions and organizational choices. But the difference between that sort of business consulting and foresight consulting comes down to the difference between outcomes and consequences. Outcomes are the (immediate or longer-term) results of actions; consequences are how those actions connect to the choices and actions of others, and to the larger context of society, the environment, and the future itself.

As I see it, then, where business professionals are responsible to the client and their various stakeholders, foresight professionals are responsible to the future.

Here’s what I think that means:

It means that the first duty of an ethical futurist is to act in the interests of the stakeholders yet to come — those who would suffer harm in the future from choices made in the present. This harm could come (in my view) in the form of fewer options or possibilities for development, less ecological diversity and environmental stability, and greater risks to the health and well-being of people and other species on the planet. Futurists, as those people who have chosen to become navigators for society — responsible for watching the path ahead — have a particular responsibility for safeguard that path, and to ensure that the people making strategic choices about actions and policies have the opportunity to do so wisely.

From this, I would argue for the following set of ethical guidelines:

An ethical futurist has a responsibility not to let the desires of a client (or audience, or collaborator) for a particular outcome blind him or her to the consequences of that goal, and will always informs the client of both the risks and rewards.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to understand, as fully as possible, the range of issues and systems connected to the question under consideration, to avoid missing critical potential consequences.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to acknowledge and make her or his client (audience, collaborators) cognizant of the uncertainty of forecasts, and to explain why some outcomes and consequences are more or less likely than others.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to offer unbiased analysis, based on an honest appraisal of sources, with as much transparency of process as possible.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to recognize the difference between short-term results and long-term processes, and to always keep an eye on the more distant possibilities.

Futurists perform a quirky, but necessary, task in modern society: we function as the long-range scanners for a species evolved to pay close attention to short-range horizons. Some neurophysiologists argue that this comes from the simple act of throwing an object to hit a moving target. Chimpanzees and bonobos, even with DNA 98% identical to our own, are simply unable to do so, while most humans can (at least with a bit of experience). It turns out that the same cognitive structures that let us understand where a moving target will be may also help us recognize the broader relationship between action and result — or, more simply, how “if” becomes “then.”

I’m not sure how many futurists recognize the weight of responsibility that rests on their shoulders; this is an occupation in which attention-deficit disorder is something of a professional requirement. But when we do our jobs well, we can play a pretty damn important role in shaping the course of human history. It’s incumbent upon us, then, to do our jobs with a sense of purpose and ethics.