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

The sun moves around in the sky, in many places casting its life-giving rays on different spots throughout the day. A plant that could move to the nearest sunny spot would have an advantage over ordinary plants that are stuck in one place. But plants have it rough. Unlike people, they can’t pull up roots and relocate somewhere else.

Ambulatory plants that simply walk over to the nearest sunny spot would outcomplete regular plants, eventually becoming rulers of the plant kingdom. Unfortunately, it all seems a bit unlikely. Except for some interesting exceptions like species of Tillandsia (the so-called “air plants,” which are discussed below), plants need their roots. And roots are, well, rooted in place. However, while the vast majority of plants do need roots, they don’t need them every minute. As everyone who has experienced the concept of cut flowers in a vase of water knows, plants can go for quite some time without roots. And roots can do fine without the rest of the plant for a considerable time as well – just check your fridge, pantry, or grocery store for an assortment of potatos, carrots, etc., which do just that. In nature, in fact, many plants over-winter with just the underground roots alive all winter long, then grow new above-ground parts come Spring. The trick, then, is to build a plant that can separate temporarily at the base. The above-ground part then wanders off in search of maximum sunlight. As evening approaches, the plant literally returns to its roots, reattaches, and spends the night with its above-ground and below-ground sections in metabolic union.

It is unclear if such a plant variety would ever evolve spontaneously. However, genetic engineering should be able to do it at some point. Moving short distances would be feasible for plants based on their current capabilities – many plants can and do change in shape fast enough over the course of a day already. Flowers open and close, leaves move around, etc. For example the immature flower heads of the sunflower face the sun, tracking it as it crosses the sky over the course of the day. Engineering a plant that can detach at the base, walk off looking for sun, return in the evening and reattach until morning presents a number of varied challenges, all of which must be solved before it can work, including a detachment and reattachment mechanism, a slow but real walking capability, and the sensory capacity to find its way back to its roots. Yet there seems no fundamental reason why it could not be done.

Once such plants are on the march, additional genetic changes will be possible. Plants need not return to their own roots, but could instead return to the roots of another plant, perhaps even of a different species. Animals looking for a nutritious drink might try to suck juice from the exposed detachment point of the roots after the top of the plant has wandered off for the day in search of sun. Plants could evolve or be further engineered to allow animals to suck for juice only if they fertilize the plant as a down payment, by urinating at the base! Plants that can walk around would be strongly motivated (in an evolutionary sense) to develop better sensory systems and faster movements to compete with other plants. Such capabilities are normally associated with animals, not plants, so these plants of the future, as they evolve, would tend to increasingly blur the line between plants and animals. A world with walking plants would be different indeed!

Another strategy for adding walking plants to the biosphere would start with plants like Tillandsia, the air plants, which either do not have roots at all or have small ones used only to hold them in place. The genetic engineering complexities of a detachment/reattachment mechanism and a homing mechanism for finding roots earlier left behind would be unnecessary, simplifying the problem greatly. However as for soil-rooted plants. creating the capacity for locomotion would still be a challenge. Tillandsia plants absorb water and nutrients through their leaves, so an ambulatory version would have considerable advantages. They could walk around (and climb around, since they typically live on trees), looking for sun, taking a dip when thirsty, and loading up on compost (or, predator-like, trimming leaves off of other plants) to absorb nutrients from. Perhaps ambulatory descendants of the Tillandsia genus will one day rule the Earth.

Next time: Plants with Mirror Molecules

My book “STRUCTURE OF THE GLOBAL CATASTROPHE Risks of human extinction in the XXI century” is now available through Lulu http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/structure-of-the-globa.....y/11727068 But it also available free on scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/6250354/STRUCTURE-OF-THE-GLOBAL-CA.....I-century- This book is intended to be complete up to date source book on information about existential risks.

All organisms are at least a little “alternamorphic”: their form depends on the environment they grew in. A plant may be bigger under optimal conditions, smaller or even stunted under poor ones. A single cell may be bigger after a meal. A human may be darker or lighter depending on degree of sun exposure. Perhaps more interestingly, some kinds of grasshoppers, when crowded, change strikingly in appearance, becoming…locusts which gather in huge, hungry, migrating clowds, leaving devastated farmland in their paths. These are the locusts swarms of biblical fame.

If properly endowed by natural evolution or genetic engineering, plants could turn the concept of alternamorphism to their advantage in many interesting ways. For example, consider the humble corn (zea mays) plant. It is a staple of the world food supply but is not particularly easy to grow successfully in one’s garden, as many an inexperienced gardener can attest. Now imagine a new kind of corn plant that, after bearing its ear of corn, alternamorphically either dies or sinks a taproot that lasts the winter and then, in its second spring, sends up a new shoot that grows more slowly than before, but more sturdily. That grows, in fact, without producing any ear of corn that year but rather is built to last the following winter, so that it can build on that growth with further development in its third spring – eventually turning into a large corn tree that produces dozens of ears every year, and with far less work than farming an equivalently productive corn patch.

But what would determine which alternative the corn plant chooses, dying off as happens now, or beginning the process of turning into a corn tree? A reasonable genetic code for this would be to opt for the tree strategy if the ear is destroyed early in its development or fails to develop properly for whatever reason. In that case it makes sense for the corn plant to devote its energy to something else, such as trying to grow into a tree. Indeed, any excess of vitality would be a good reason to pursue the tree strategy, even if the initial ear is growing well. Perhaps the corn plant is simply experiencing highly favorable growth conditions and has the werewithal to both produce an ear, and grow the required large taproot. Similarly, any annual crop or other plant could potentially alternamorphically become a tree. Farmers and gardeners would be delighted. On the other hand, hundred foot ragweed trees would be bad news for many an allergy sufferer. Alternamorphic trees are just a start. The reader may enjoy dreaming up other kinds of alternamorphisms. In a number of years it may be possible to actually create these in a do-it-yourself basement bio lab.

Black salad grows faster, looks funny. Most plants are green, and most people can appreciate the healthy green glow of a vigorous plant. Would you say that plants like green light? Not so – green plants are green because they reflect green light, while absorbing red and blue. Consequently the green light goes into the eyes of the viewers, who thus see plants as green. By reflecting green light, plants are rejecting it. They use light that they absorb as solar energy, powering a process that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it, ultimately, into plant contents using a process known a photosynthesis. Perhaps weirdly, it now appears that photosynthesis, the biological process that terraformed the Earth in the distant past, creating and now maintaining at 21% the oxygen in the atmosphere so necessary for human life, uses the esoteric physics phenomenon known as quantum entanglement to do its work. A green color may be a sign of health, but it is also a sign of inefficiency. If the could only absorb and use green light better, it would be using solar energy more effectively and could grow faster, for either its own or human purposes. If a plant absorbed and used all light falling upon it, it would be black, not green, because black is what we see when all colors are absorbed and not reflected into our eyes.

If black plants would be better, then what are the prospects for mountains, plains, and rolling hills of deep black instead of striking green? Plants absorb light using special pigments which begin the solar energy harvesting process. Well-known and prevalent pigments are chlorophyll, of which there are several varieties named chlorophyll a, b, c, c1, c2, and others. Different chlorophylls (chloro- from a Greek word for green, -phyll from the Greek for leaf) are of varying shade depending on the type. However there are also other pigments useful for photosynthesis. Various xanthophylls (xantho- from the Greek for yellow) are also used. Carotenes, which make carrots orange, are another. There are hundreds of them. Opsins (ops- from the Greek for sight, as in ‘optical,’ and -in which indicates a biochemical substance) are not only used for sight in the human eye (namely rhodopsin, rhodo- for rose-colored, also named “visual purple”), but for photosynthesis (using bacteriorhodopsin, a misnomer since the organisms using it are archaea, not bacteria). Bacteriorhodopsin preferentially absorbs green light and reflects red and blue, thus appearing reddish-blue (that is, “purple”). Bacteriochlorophylls are related to chlorophylls and can be greenish or purplish. Phycobilins are used in photosynthesis in certain microorganisms and come in a variety of colors, from red to blue. Phycocyanins are another category of pigment used in photosynthesis (cyan meaning blue-green). Phycoerythrins too, which are red (-eryth from Greek and meaning red, as in erythrocytes – red blood cells).

Even invisible light is important. The water-dwelling microorganism Acaryochloris marina contains chlorophyll d, which is particularly good at absorbing infrared light for photosynthesis. On the other hand, some plants reflect infrared light. But they could reflect more, enough to actually change the world’s climate significantly. It seems that leaf hairs can help reflect infrared while allowing visible light through for photosynthesis. By breeding plants with leaves that are quite hairy, more infrared could be reflected back into space, with a cooling effect on the climate. Extra hairy soy varieties have already been bred such that if they and other crops similarly bred were grown extensively enough in temperate regions, the average temperature of those regions would decrease by about 2 degrees F. It is a tough call which would be better, crops with pigments that use infrared light for photosynthesis, or crops that reflect as much of it as possible away from the Earth.

Be that as it may, a plethora of pigments exist to support photosynthesis and there seems no intrinsic reason why a plant could not eventually evolve naturally or be genetically engineered to mix and match the pigments so as to absorb and use nearly all light. Such plants would potentially have an evolutionary advantage over other plants that waste resources by taking the trouble to grow leaves and then not use all the light that falls upon them. Thus future plants that solve this problem would tend to take over, both in nature and in agriculture. Though the real action would be at the biomolecular level, visually such plants would be near-black, not green. Would black salad taste better than green? Only a future taste test will resolve this important question!

Next time: Alternamorphs: plants with options.

References

“Perhaps weirdly, it now appears that photosynthesis…uses the esoteric physics phenomenon known as quantum entanglement to do its work.” M. Sarovar, A. Ishizaki, G. R. Fleming and K. B. Whaley, Quantum entanglement in photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes, Nature Physics, vol. 6, pp. 462-467, 2010, executive summary at http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/05/10/untangl.....anglement/.

“Acaryochloris marina uses chlorophyll d, which absorbs infrared light for photosynthesis”: R. Mohr, B. Vosz, M. Schliep, T. Kurz, I. Maldener, D. G. Adams, A. D. Larkum, M. Chen, and W. R. Hess, A new chlorophyll d-containing cyanobacterium: evidence for niche adaptation in the genus Acaryochloris, The ISME Journal (27 May 2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2010.67.

“Extra hairy soy varieties have already been bred such that…the average temperature of those regions would decrease by about 2 degrees F.” C. E. Doughty, A. McMillan and M. Goulden, Climate Management Through Agricultural Albedo Manipulation, Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (2007), vol. 88, no. 52, Fall Meeting Supplement, Abstract GC52A-10, http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/fm07-sessions/fm07_GC52A.html. See also: Super-hairy plants could battle global warming, New Scientist, issue 2637, Jan. 9, 2008, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726370.700-superhair.....rming.html.

Posted by Dr. Denise L Herzing and Dr. Lori Marino, Human-Nonhuman Relationship Board

Over the millennia humans and the rest of nature have coexisted in various relationships. However the intimate and interdependent nature of our relationship with other beings on the planet has been recently brought to light by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This ongoing environmental disaster is a prime example of “profit over principle” regarding non-human life. This spill threatens not only the reproductive viability of all flora and fauna in the affected ecosystems but also complex and sensitive non-human cultures like those we now recognize in dolphins and whales.

Although science has, for decades, documented the links and interdependence of ecosystems and species, the ethical dilemma now facing humans is at a critical level. For too long have we not recognized the true cost of our life styles and priorities of profit over the health of the planet and the nonhuman beings we share it with. If ever the time, this is a wake up call for humanity and a call to action. If humanity is to survive we need to make an urgent and long-term commitment to the health of the planet. The oceans, our food sources and the very oxygen we breathe may be dependent on our choices in the next 10 years.

And humanity’s survival is inextricably linked to that of the other beings we share this planet with. We need a new ethic.

Many oceanographers and marine biologist have, for a decade, sent out the message that the oceans are in trouble. Human impacts of over-fishing, pollution, and habitat destruction are threatening the very cycles of our existence. In the recent catastrophe in the Gulf, one corporation’s neglectful oversight and push for profit has set the stage for a century of clean up and impact, the implications of which we can only begin to imagine.

Current and reported estimates of stranded dolphins are at fifty-five. However, these are dolphins visibly stranded on beaches. Recent aerial footage, on YouTube, by John Wathen shows a much greater and serious threat. Offshore, in the “no fly zone” hundreds of dolphins and whales have been observed in the oil slick. Some floating belly up and dead, others struggling to breathe in the toxic fumes. Others exhibit “drunken dolphin syndrome” characterized by floating in an almost stupefied state on the surface of the water. These highly visible effects are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the spill’s impact on the long term health and viability of the Gulf’s dolphin and whale populations, not to mention the suffering incurred by each individual dolphin as he or she tries to cope with this crisis.

Known direct and indirect effects of oil spills on dolphins and whales depend on the species but include, toxicity that can cause organ dysfunction and neurological impairment, damaged airways and lungs, gastrointestinal ulceration and hemorrhaging, eye and skin lesions, decreased body mass due to limited prey, and, the pervasive long term behavioral, immunological, and metabolic impacts of stress. Recent reports substantiate that many dolphins and whales in the Gulf are undergoing tremendous stress, shock and suffering from many of the above effects. The impact to newborns and young calves is clearly devastating.

After the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in 1989 two pods of orcas (killer whales) were tracked. It was found that one third of the whales in one pod and 40 percent of the whales in the other pod had disappeared, with one pod never recovering its numbers. There is still some debate about the number of missing whales directly impacted by the oil though it is fair to say that losses of this magnitude are uncommon and do serious damage to orca societies.

Yes, orca societies. Years of field research has led to the conclusion by a growing number of scientists that many dolphin and whale species, including sperm whales, humpback whales, orcas, and bottlenose dolphins possess sophisticated cultures, that is, learned behavioral traditions passed on from one generation to the next. These cultures are not only unique to each group but are critically important for survival. Therefore, not only do environmental catastrophes such as the Gulf oil spill result in individual suffering and loss of life but they contribute to the permanent destruction of entire oceanic cultures. These complex learned traditions cannot be replicated after they are gone and this makes them invaluable.

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which acknowledges basic rights to life, liberty, and freedom of cultural expression. We recognize these foundational rights for humans as we are sentient, complex beings. It is abundantly clear that our actions have violated these same rights for other sentient, complex and cultural beings in the oceans – the dolphins and whales. We should use this tragedy as an opportunity to formally recognize societal and legal rights for them so that their lives and their unique cultures are better protected in the future.

Recently, there was a meeting of scientists, philosophers, legal experts and dolphin and whale advocates in Helsinki, Finland, who drafted a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans a global call for basic rights for dolphins and whales. You can read more about this effort and become a signatory here: http://cetaceanconservation.com.au/cetaceanrights/. Given the destruction of dolphin and whale lives and cultures caused by the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf, we think this is one of the ways we can commit ourselves to working towards a future that will be a lifeboat for humans, dolphins and whales, and the rest of nature.

Ever eat pumpkin or other winter squash seeds? They are both delicious and nutritious, roasted or just placed raw into foods before cooking. You can buy pumpkin seeds in small snack bags. The problem for many people is the coverings, which are challenging to bite off because there are so many of them, as the seeds may seem relatively small. Genetic engineering to increase the seed size could solve that problem, since genetic engineering of size is probably easier than a lot of other generic engineering goals. Instead of a pumpkin with a couple hundred or so small seeds, it could grow 5-10 large seeds. Or just one, as big as an avocado seed but a lot better tasting… delicious. Speaking of seed size as a critical factor, sunflower seeds present a similar situation. You can get packages of them in the supermarket as a snack, but the ones with the seeds still in their shells seem less popular because they are harder to eat. You have to tediously bite off the shells to get to the seed inside. They taste good once you get them out though. And you get a lot of hand and mouth activity per seed, slowing down the intake of calories and making them a nutritious and satisfying snack for dieters. Yet the sunflower seed market would almost certainly grow dramatically if the seeds were 10x larger or more. Imagine eating an enormous sunflower seed the size of an egg…hefting its weight in the palm of your hand…cracking off its shell to reveal the rich, tasty meat within…and finally sinking your teeth into it to savor its nutritious and distinctive flavor! Hmm. A future sunflower could produce a seed like that, if it wasn’t spending its energy growing dozens and dozens of smaller seeds instead, like current sunflowers.

Fruits form a ready target for genetic engineers. Fruit is healthy and has near-universal appeal. Even people who have never eaten fruit in their lives rapidly develop a taste for it (who are these people, you ask? “Babies are puzzled by fruit… . But within a day or two practically all of them decide they love it.” – Baby and child care icon Dr. Spock). To plant the seeds of some ideas for such babies and others who will become the next generation of genetic engineers, consider the following possibilities.

• Fruit transgenic hybrids that taste like apple and pear at the same time (pearapples?), or perhaps peach and cherry (peacherries?) together instead. Watermelons that taste like nectarines (nectarmelons). And so on and so forth. If you can dream up the flavor, size and texture, it will be possible.
• Fruit with calorie-free sweetness, instead of high sugar content. They could be engineered to contain aspartame (“Nutrasweet”), sucralose (“Splenda”), cyclamate, or benzoic sulfimide (saccharin) instead (or all four). This would taste good while lowering the caloric content of the fruit (and thus the metabolic cost to the plant of growing the fruit, so it could afford to grow more or bigger fruits).
• Fruit with a high alcohol content, enough to enhance the taste but not intoxicate those eating it. Fruit with M&M-sized lumps of chocolate in them. Fruit containing a little brandy and a chocolate lump or two, and at a price anyone could afford (or grow).
• Fruit that tastes like ice cream…whoops, not necessary, it already exists! Some varieties of durian fruit are likened to  ice cream or custard. Others are quite strong in odor. Banned from the premises of some hotels, it is reputed to be the only fruit that tigers eat. Surely if nature can conjure something as remarkable as this heavy fruit, covered with spikes, genetic engineers could cook up the things in this list.
• Fruit with intense flavor. People love flavorful foods and some fruits are mild, currently, though some are quite strong (citrus, for example).

Next time: Black Salad Grows Better, Looks Funny

References

“Babies are puzzled by fruit…the first time they have it. But within a day or two practically all of them decide they love it”: B. Spock and M. B. Rothenberg, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, revised edition, 1985, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-73965-4.

I’m working on this project with Institute for the Future – calling on voices everywhere for ideas to improve the future of global health. It would be great to get some visionary Lifeboat ideas entered!

INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE ANNOUNCES BODYSHOCK:
CALL FOR ENTRIES ON IDEAS TO TRANSFORM LIFESTYLES AND THE HUMAN BODY TO IMPROVE HEALTH IN THE NEXT DECADE

“What can YOU envision to improve and reinvent health and well-being for the future?” Anyone can enter, anyone can vote, anyone can change the future of global health.

With obesity, diabetes, and chronic disease rampaging populations around the world, Institute for the Future (IFTF) is turning up the volume on global well-being. Launching today, IFTF’s BodyShock is the first annual competition with an urgent challenge to recruit crowdsourced designs and solutions for better health–to remake the future by rebooting the present.

BodyShock calls upon the public to consider innovative ways to improve individual and collective health over the next 3-10 years by transforming our bodies and lifestyles. Video or graphical entries illustrating new ideas, designs, products, technologies, and concepts, will be accepted from people around the world until September 1, 2010. Up to five winners will be flown to Palo Alto, California on October 8 to present their ideas and be connected to other innovative thinkers to help bring these ideas to life. The grand prize winner will receive the IFTF Roy Amara Prize of $3,000.

“Health doesn’t happen all at once; it’s a consequence of years of choices for our bodies and lifestyles–some large and some small. BodyShock is intended to spark new ideas to help us find our way back to health,” said Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired, author of The Decision Tree, and a member of the Health Advisory Board that will be judging the BodyShock contest in addition to votes from the public.

“BodyShock is a fantastic initiative. Global collaboration and participation from all voices can produce a true revolution,” said Linda Avey, founder of Brainstorm Research Foundation and another Advisor to BodyShock.

Entries may come from anyone anywhere and can include, but are not limited to, the following: Life extension, DIY Bio, Diabetic teenagers, Developing countries, Green health, Augmented reality, Self-tracking, and Pervasive games. Participants are challenged to use IFTF’s Health Horizons forecasts for the next decade of health and health care as inspiration, and design a solution for a problem that will be widespread in 3-10 years, using technologies that will become mainstream.

“Think ‘artifacts from the future’–simple, non-obvious, high-impact solutions that don’t exist yet, will be among the concepts we’re looking to the public to introduce,” said Rod Falcon, director of the Health Horizons Program at IFTF.

BodyShock’s grand prize, the Roy Amara Prize, is named for IFTF’s long-time president Roy Amara (1925-2000) and is part of a larger program of social impact projects at IFTF honoring his legacy, known as The Roy Amara Fund for Participatory Foresight, the Fund uses participatory tools to translate foresight research into concrete actions that address future social challenges.

PANEL OF COMPETITION JUDGES

Joanne Andreadis
Lead of Innovation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Linda Avey
Founder, Brainstorm Research Foundation

Jason Bobe
Director of Community, Personal Genome Project
Founder, DIYBio.org

Alexandra Carmichael
Co-founder, CureTogether
Director, Quantified Self

Ted Eytan, MD
Kaiser Permanente, The Permanente Federation

Rod Falcon
Director, Health Horizons Program

Peter Friess
President, Tech Museum of Innovation

Thomas Goetz
Executive Editor, WIRED Magazine
Author, The Decision Tree

Natalie Hodge,MD FAAP
Chief Health Officer, Personal Medicine International

Ellen Marram
Board of Trustees, Institute for the Future
President, Barnegat Group LLC

Kristi Miller Durazo
Senior Strategy Advisor, American Heart Association

David Rosenman
Director, Innovation Curriculum
Center for Innovation at Mayo Clinic

Amy Tenderich
Board Member, Journal of Participatory Medicine
Blogger, DiabetesMine.com

DETAILS

WHAT:
An online competition for visual design ideas to improve global health over the next 3-10 years by transforming our bodies and lifestyles. Anyone can enter, anyone can vote, anyone can change the future of health.

WHEN:
Launch – Friday, June 18,2010

Deadline for entries -Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Winners announced -Thursday, September 23, 2010

BodyShock Winners Celebration at IFTF – 6 – 9 p.m. Friday, October 8, 2010 – FREE and open to the public

WHERE:

http://www.bodyshockthefuture.org

(and 124 University Ave, 2ndFloor, Palo Alto, CA)

Beans use a biological strategy that may be only beginning to play out. This strategy may ultimately change the biosphere radically, enabling considerably more living biomass and thus increasing the profusion and exuberance of life. The strategy is nitrogen fixation, which is the ability of a few plants (notably beans) to get their nitrogen directly from the air. The vast majority of plant life relies for nitrogen on decaying vegetable matter, lightning strikes whose concentrated heat forces nitrogen in the air to combine with oxygen to put it into bioavailable form, and other processes not under the plant’s control. In the ocean, however, some species of cyanobacteria (“blue bacteria,” commonly if problematically called “blue-green algae” since algae are plants, and cyanobacteria are technically not) can fix nitrogen from the air. Beans (more generally, legumes) do not actually fix nitrogen themselves but instead rely on bacteria that they shelter in root nodules.

Once the idea of fixing one’s own nitrogen directly from the air takes hold in the plant kingdom, nitrogen need never be a bottleneck again. Then the Earth will be able to support a thicker, heavier, and more diverse blanket of vegetation. Since the animal kingdom ultimately depends on plants, the Earth will also then support more animal life (and potentially human life) as well. Fertilizer manufacturers may have one less component to worry about including in their products, but on the other hand might find less demand for their products. You might not have thought of beans as the vanguard of a new paradigm of domination among plants. But beans and many thousands of species of their descendants might take over the plant world analogously to how flowering plants began their ascendancy starting more than 100 million years ago.

At least they’ll taste good. The idea of beans as masters of the Earth may be tough to swallow if you’re not crazy about bean dishes. But maybe genetic engineering will change your mind and those of future generations. Genetically engineered crops will become increasingly important, accepted and desired, because there is little chance of stemming the coming tide of crop plants engineered to produce new and delicious foods at reasonable cost. Flavorings are metabolically cheap for plants to produce compared to soil fertility-draining and solar energy-intensive metabolic products like oils, proteins, and carbohydrates. Thus, there is no downside to major changes and improvements in plant product flavors. And it is relatively easy to do compared to some of the genetic engineering goals mentioned earlier. Even old-fashioned selective breeding, the “low tech” approach to genetic engineering, has produced such familiar taste-enhanced foods as sweet corn that is much sweeter than the corn eaten a couple of generations ago. Take beans, for instance (please don’t tire of my discussing them – as future monarchs of the plant kingdom, they are entitled to some respect!). They are already a nutritious protein source, like meat but with less fat. Yet they don’t taste as good as meat to many people. There is no reason they can’t be engineered to taste like small chicken nuggets. Processed fungus mycelium (i.e., roots), sold in grocery stores, taste like chicken already. Try it if you don’t believe it. Yum!. We could make chickpeas that taste like chicken, and rename them “chickenpeas.” But why stop there? Potatoes with small hamburgers in the middle sound good (let’s call them “hamburgatoes”), and there is no reason they can’t be grown once genetic engineering gets a little further along. Carrots are crunchy, as are potato chips. So why not grow carrots that taste like potato chips? Or like Cheetos or other crunchy, cheese-flavored snacks. Kids would want to eat more veggies, and carrot sales would skyrocket.

Speaking of cheese flavor, consider the pits of avocados. They are so large that it seems a waste to just throw them out, as we do now. Avocados already contain lots of fats in the edible part, as cheeses do, so genetic engineering to put more fats in the pit would help make them edible and even taste like a hard cheese, say romano or parmesan. Then grate the pit it on food to taste! Avocado pits are a specialty item of course, but just a start.

Next time: New Plant Paradigms (Part III: Giant seeds taste better)

Predatory plants will probably not trot over to attack us as we amble to our cars any time soon, John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel Day of the Triffids notwithstanding. And yet, truth may well turn out to be stranger than fiction, if we only wait. In the case of plants coming out of genetic engineering labs that wait might perhaps be 10 years – or less. In the case of mother nature, radically new tricks might require waits of 10 million or 100 million years – or more.

Spore Storm. Anthrax bacteria can kill quickly, overwhelming an animal’s natural defenses by multiplying and secreting toxins. The toxins build up in the body and they, not the organisms themselves, are what ultimately cause death. Once dead, the animal host is no longer a suitable source of food, shelter, and oxygen for the anthrax. Now something interesting happens. Some of the anthrax bacteria succeed in growing, inside their bodies, a tough cover encapsulating their genes and certain other cell components. This is called an endospore, and is capable of withstanding environmental conditions for long periods of time – several decades has been documented. When conditions finally become favorable (e.g. it is eaten by a host animal), it comes back to life, attempts to grow and divide, infects the new host, and the cycle begins anew.

Many terms derived from “spore” exist, from aeciospores to zygospores, and endospores are just one kind. Some plants reproduce via spores, ferns for example. Spores do nothing until conditions for growth are promising. Then they spring into action. Plant spores sprout into baby plants called sporelings (spores become sporelings, like seeds become seedlings). The sporelings eventually become full grown plants if all goes well. However, many familiar plants produce seeds, not spores. Seeds are much bigger and carry much more nutrition, used to give a baby plant a good start, or perhaps sustain an animal that eats it. Spores, on the other hand, are microscopic.

Oaks produce acorns, which are large seeds, not microscopic spores. But even the mightiest oak, like a tiny blade of grass, is missing a big opportunity. That is the opportunity for each cell in each leaf to create an endospore, instead of uselessly falling to the ground to rot when the leaf gets old or winter approaches. In the future, by natural accident or human design, some plant may become the first to grab that opportunity, and things may never be the same again. Instead of dropping their leaves, these plants will release a dust storm as each leaf transforms into millions upon millions of endospores, blowing in the wind. These endospores will eventually land and try to start a new plant, in the spring in temperate climates or any time in warmer conditions. Such spore-producing plants could continue to also produce seeds as they always have, but rather than waste their spent leaves along with an additional opportunity to propagate, they will instead much more efficient convert those leaves into quantities of endospores. This will give them an advantage over traditional plants, out-competing them and eventually dominating the earth, just as flowering plants have come to dominate since they first evolved at least 140 million years ago. Let us hope these superplants make useful crops. That way their domination will be useful to us.

Next Time: A Return to Roots

The existential risk reduction career network is a career network for those interested in getting a relatively well-paid job and donating substantial amounts (relative to income) to non-profit organizations focused on the reduction of existential risks, in the vein of SIAI, FHI, and the Lifeboat Foundation.

The aim is to foster a community of donors, and to allow donors and potential donors to give each other advice, particularly regarding the pros and cons of various careers, and for networking with like-minded others within industries. For example, someone already working in a large corporation could give a prospective donor advice about how to apply for a job.

Over time, it is hoped that the network will grow to a relatively large size, and that donations to existential risk-reduction from the network will make up a substantial fraction of funding for the beneficiary organizations.

In isolation, individuals may feel like existential risk is too large a problem to make a dent in, but collectively, we can make a huge difference. If you are interested in helping us make a difference, then please check out the network and request an invitation.

Please feel free to contact the organizers at contact@xrisknetwork.com with any comments or questions.

The RPG Eclipse Phase includes the “Singularity Foundation” and “Lifeboat Institute” as player factions. Learn more about this game!

P.S. In case you don’t know, there is a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Eclipse Phase is a roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy and horror.

An “eclipse phase” is the period between when a cell is infected by a virus and when the virus appears within the cell and transforms it. During this period, the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is.

Players take part in a cross-faction secret network dubbed Firewall that is dedicated to counteracting “existential risks” — threats to the existence of transhumanity, whether they be biowar plagues, self-replicating nanoswarms, nuclear proliferation, terrorists with WMDs, net-breaking computer attacks, rogue AIs, alien encounters, or anything else that could drive an already decimated transhumanity to extinction.

This year, the Singularity Summit 2010 (SS10) will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, California, in a 1100-seat ballroom on August 14-15.

Our speakers will include Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near; James Randi, magician-skeptic and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation; Terry Sejnowski, computational neuroscientist; Irene Pepperberg, pioneering researcher in animal intelligence; David Hanson, creator of the world’s most realistic human-like robots; and many more.  In all, the conference will include over twenty speakers, including many scientists presenting on their latest cutting-edge research in topics like intelligence enhancement and regenerative medicine.

A variety of discounts are available for those wanting to attend the conference for less.  If you register by midnight PST on Thursday, July 1st, you can register for $485, which is $200 less than the cost of a ticket at the door ($685). Registration before August 1st is $585, and from August 1st until the conference the price is $685.  The sooner you register, the more you save.

Additional discounts are available for students, $1,000+ SIAI donors, and attendees who refer others who pay full price (no student referrals).  Students receive $100 off whatever the current price is, and attendees gain a $100 discount per non-student referral.  These discounts are stackable, so a student who refers four non-students who pay full price before the end of June can attend for free.  You can ask us more about discounts at main@singularitysummit.com. Your Singularity Summit ticket is a tax-deductible donation to SIAI, almost all of which goes to support our ongoing research and academic work.

If you’ve been to a Singularity Summit before, you’ll know that the attendees are among the smartest and most ambitious people you’ll ever meet. Scientists, engineers, writers, reporters, philosophers, tech policy specialists, and entrepreneurs all join to discuss the most important questions of our time.

The full list of speakers is here: http://www.singularitysummit.com/program You can register here: https://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/ The logistics page is here: http://www.singularitysummit.com/logistics A press release is here: http://www.singularitysummit.com/media

We hope to see you in San Francisco this August for an exciting conference!

If collective intelligence enhances the chance of survival, then we need as much of it as possible…

The Web (called at times The World-Wide Web, WWW, W3, cyberspace, and the information superhighway) is the most recent in a series of communications revolutions. Stretching back through television, radio, telephone (and its precursor the telegraph), newspapers, the printing press, the invention of writing, and the evolution of human speech, these innovations revolutionized society, and made us better informed and, hopefully, smarter.

Genesis of the Web. More than its precursor communications revolutions, the Web brings to fruition a long-standing dream of information connectedness. According to Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee et al. in 1994, “The Word-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge”. The Web has “overflowed this original goal to become a vast sea” (as put by Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin). Sir Tim was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 in recognition. But the dream has a storied history predating Berners-Lee, who created the Web at CERN, the Swiss birthplace not only of the Web but also of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator (“atom smasher”).

Earlier visionaries foresaw the potential for general, customized access to the vastness of the world’s information. In the 1960s Doug Engelbart built the first hypertext system, in which text contains links to other texts – the hyperlink idea that makes the Web possible. As for clicking those links? Well, Engelbart also invented the mouse! On his first day back to work after becoming engaged in 1950 he had an initial epiphany in which he visualized his career as a “long, long hallway, …almost featureless.” Over a period of months he pondered this apparently unnerving realization until his final epiphany: “What if I could contribute something significant to how humanity could cope better with complex sorts of problems? … BANGO!” But how? Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As we may think” became a key piece in the solution to that puzzle. Engelbart got to work and never stopped.

Working independently of Engelbart, in 1965 Ted Nelson, then a professor at Vassar College in New York state, coined the term hypertext (with a hyphen – “hyper-text”). A colorful character, Nelson is reputed to have also coined the term “teledildonics.” His Xanadu project embodied his universe of documents, or “docuverse” vision, in which “The World Wide Web is what we were trying to prevent”. Yet his ideas are present in the Web, for example the concept of “transclusion,” which describes the “hot-linking” of images into html format text pages. As with Engelbart, Nelson was deeply influenced by Vannevar Bush’s article “As we may think,” which he reprinted in his own book on his ideas, “Literary Machines.”

Often credited as the inspiration for the developments leading to the Web by those unaware of Paul Otlet’s work (see below) is a device Vannevar Bush conceived in his “As we may think” article. (A descendant of sea captains, Bush also wrote “It is earlier than we think”.) He called this hypothetical device the memex. (‘Memex’ is often described as either from MEMory and indEX, or MEMory and EXtender though in the article itself Bush states, “It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, ‘memex’ will do.”) A memex would serve as a repository for all of the written materials including books, notes, and other things that one might accumulate over a lifetime, stored on microfilm (to save space – no flash memory, DVDs, etc. in those days!). Levers and screens would enable one to easily find, skim, and read anything stored in the memex. Bush wrote, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.” Sound like Wikipedia? A memex will probably never be built and, born in 1890, he died in 1974, too soon to use Wikipedia (or even its forerunner Webopedia, once pioneering but now just a stodgy, out-of-date also-ran).

The milieu that inspired the “associative trails” of hypertext (and the Web’s hypermedia, which generalizes hypertext with links to and from images and other media besides just text) was the birth of the general-purpose (technically, “Turing complete”) electronic computer: the first was nicknamed “Baby.” More soberly called the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), it went live in June, 1948. But excitement had been building. Other general purpose computers already existed. The famed ENIAC appeared in 1945, but was not fully electronic (it was programmed by flipping switches and connecting wires). The Z3 ran in 1941 (it was not electronic at all, relying on electrically driven mechanical parts). The storied Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage in the preceding century was general purpose yet fully mechanical. Its construction was sadly never completed due to lack of funds, yet programs were nevertheless written for it in 1842-3 by Ada Lovelace (more precisely, Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace), who thus became recognized as the first computer programmer.

Yet before Berners-Lee, before Engelbart, before Nelson, before Bush and the computer revolution ’40s, there was Paul Otlet. Born in 1868 in Brussels, Belgium, to a wealthy family, his mother died when he was three. Despite this hardship he ultimately developed many of the ideas that make the Web a unique and indispensible part of the modern world – but using paper cards instead of computers. His favored unit of knowledge was a passage short enough to be stored on a a single 3×5 index card. His dream became to put the world’s knowledge onto these cards and use the resultant card collection as a tool for the betterment of humankind. As he wrote in 1892, he envisioned a “systematic and very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge” which “would have enormous advantages” such as, for example, “the creation of a kind of artificial brain by means of cards”. Starting in 1895 this was implemented as the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, soon answering questions by mail by sending copies of cards for a fee. Ultimately a collection of over 15 million such cards were housed in what was named the “Mundaneum” in Brussels. Closed in 1934, its remnants still exist (see http://www.mundaneum.be/).

From wikipedia to wikiwikipedia. The Web is a giant, quality-uncontrolled, disorganized mass of information, but wikipedia is just the opposite – organized, quality-checked, and much smaller (though large for a reference work). It is no surprise therefore that wikipedia is one of the best-known and important sites on the Web. Together, they complement one another and vindicate the dreams of visionaries from Paul Otlet on.

But wikipedia can make a quantum leap: it can become wikiwikipedia. Wikiwikipedia is designed to recognize and build on the basic fact that wikipedia users often seek information in context. For example, most readers of the wikipedia article on computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers are not interested in reading the article from start to finish. Their interest has a specific slant – a context – that varies from one reader to the next and even, for the same reader, from one access to the next. If that slant is the history of computers, they can find some information in the computers article if they spend (i.e., waste) time looking for it. Worse, if that slant is the future of computers, as of this writing they can waste time looking, but find nothing.

What is needed is to supplement the current set of articles labeled with single subjects with articles labeled with any two subjects (hence “wikiwikipedia”). If there are 4 million single-subject articles, there would then be 4 million x 4 million double-subject articles (that’s 16 trillion!). While most of these would be stubs generated on the fly upon request, any of them could be edited just like ordinary single-subject articles. The result: a burgeoning, vibrant community of encyclopedia contributors to augment the current one, which is moving slowly but inexorably toward ossification and sclerosis. More importantly, wikiwikipedia will be a home for the “information-seeking majority,” the many of us who often seek not just general information, but information in a customized context.

Wikiwikiwikipedia. Providing users with information in context is a start, but tailoring information to the specific need of a user at a specific moment requires true customization. Taken to its natural conclusion, this requires a system that dialogues with its user, answering a question, receiving a followup question, answering that one, and so on, to efficiently transfer knowledge from system to user. What unit of information should such a system use as the coin of its realm? Like chiseled inscriptions on flat animal bones used for divination, that proved the Shang dynasty of over 3,000 years ago really existed, to Otlet’s 3×5 index cards, the information unit is the sentence-length passage. Similarly, tutors interact with their pupils in a highly interactive manner, frequently using sentence-length passages. Historically, the Socratic method also often relies on sentence-length passages. The sentence is a natural unit of knowledge. If the future of wikipedia is wikiwikipedia, then let the future of wikiwikipedia be this: a user interface that extends the current wikipedia-style interface by permitting a user to request a highly interactive dialogue. In this efficient knowledge transferring dialogue session, the user asks questions and each answer is intelligently chosen to be the best possible sentence-length passage from the wikiwikipedia body of knowledge – wikiwikiwikipedia.

References

According to Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee…: (1) Information Management: A Proposal, CERN, 1989, Http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html; (2) Welcome to info.cern.ch, the website of the world’s first-ever web server, http://info.cern.ch/.

“The Word-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be pool of human knowledge”: T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, A. Luotonen, H. F. Nielsen, and A. Secret, The World-Wide Web, Communications of the ACM, vol. 37, no. 8, Aug. 1994, pp. 907-912.

“overflowed this original goal to become a vast sea”: N. Montfort and N. Wardrip-Fruin, “54. [Introduction] The World-Wide Web,” in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader, MIT Press, 2003, p. 791. ISBN 0-262-23227-8.

“In the 1960s Doug Englebart built the first hypertext system”: called NLS, it grew out of D. C. Englebart, Augmenting human intellet: a conceptual framework, SRI Summary Report AFOSR-322, SRI Project No. 3578, October 1962, http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html.

“Well, Englebart also invented the mouse!” See images at http://images.iop.org/objects/ccr/cern/40/10/24/cernbooks2_12-00.jpg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firstmouseunderside.jpg.

“On his first day back to work after becoming engaged in 1950″ and following quotes: Q&A with Douglas Engelbart, Back Door, vol. 2, Issue 4, p. 108, http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0204%2F61c04%2F61c04.asp. See also various other sources, such as: Engelbart on the epiphany: “Bingo: it just occurred to me,” chapter in V. Landau and E. Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart, NextPress, 2nd ed., 2009, ISBN 978-0615308906.

“Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article ‘As we may think.’” July, 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/.

“It is earlier than we think”: chapter IX of V. Bush, Science is Not Enough, Morrow, 1967.

“Ted Nelson, then a professor at Vassar College…coined the term hypertext”: L. Wedeles, Prof. Nelson talk analyzes P.R.I.D.E, Vassar Miscellany News, Feb. 3, 1965, http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/MiscNews_Feb65.html. See also, Did Ted Nelson first use the word “hypertext” at Vassar Colege” What is Vassar’s claim? Http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/Ted_sed.html.

“His Xanadu project”: home page at http://www.xanadu.com.au/.

“The World Wide Web is what we were trying to prevent…”: S. Ditlea, Xanadu’s creator at 60: still visionary, still cantankerous, New York Times On the Web, June 21, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/062297nelson.html.

“Literary Machines.” Ted Nelson, Mindful Press, numerous editions 1980-1993.

“The storied Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage…”: see e.g. C. Babbage, Of the Analytical Engine, chap. 8 in Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 1864, http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/lpae.html.

“…yet programs were nevertheless written for it in 1842-3 by Ada Lovelace”: English Translation with Notes by the Translator, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, of L. F. Menabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, October, 1842, No. 82; http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html.

“As he wrote in 1892…”: P. Otlet, Something about bibliography, chap. 1 in W. B. Rayward (ed. and translator), International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays of Paul Otlet, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1990, pp. 11-24, http://www.archive.org/stream/internationalorg00otle/interna.....e_djvu.txt.

In the lunch time I am existing virtually in the hall of the summit as a face on the Skype account – i didn’t get a visa and stay in Moscow. But ironically my situation is resembling what I an speaking about: about the risk of remote AI which is created by aliens million light years from Earth and sent via radio signals. The main difference is that they communicate one way, and I have duplex mode.

This is my video presentation on YouTube:
Risks of SETI, for Humanity+ 2010 summit

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
—Alan Turing

As a programmer, I look at events like the H+ Conference this weekend in a particular way. I see all of their problems as software: not just the code for AI and friendly AI, but also that for DNA manipulation. It seems that the biggest challenge for the futurist movement is to focus less on writing English and more on getting the programmers working together productively.

I start the AI chapter of my book with the following question: Imagine 1,000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people working on one encyclopedia? Which one will be the best? This sounds like a silly analogy when described in the context of an encyclopedia, but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research today.

Today, the research community has not adopted free software and shared codebases sufficiently. For example, I believe there are more than enough PhDs today working on computer vision, but there are 200+ different codebases plus countless proprietary ones. Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass.

Some think that these problems are so hard that it isn’t a matter of writing code, it is a matter of coming up with the breakthroughs on a chalkboard. But people can generally agree at a high level how the software for solving many problems will work. There has been code for doing OCR and neural networks and much more kicking around for years. The biggest challenge right now is getting people together to hash out the details, which is a lot closer to Wikipedia than it first appears. Software advances in a steady, stepwise fashion, which is why we need free software licenses: to incorporate all the incremental advancements that each scientist is making. Advances must eventually be expressed in software (and data) so it can be executed by a computer. Even if you believe we need certain scientific breakthroughs, it should be clear that things like robust computer vision are complicated enough that you would want 100s of people working together on the vision pipeline. So, while we are waiting for those breakthroughs, let’s get 100 people together!

There is an additional problem: that C/C++ have not been retired. These languages make it hard for programmers to work together, even if they wanted to. There are all sorts of taxes on time, from learning the archane rules about these ungainly languages, to the fact that libraries often use their own string classes, synchronization primitives, error handling schemes, etc. In many cases, it is easier to write a specialized and custom computer vision library in C/C++ than to integrate something like OpenCV which does everything by itself down to the Matrix class. The pieces for building your own computer vision library (graphics, i/o, math, etc.) are in good shape, but the computer vision is not, so that we haven’t moved beyond that stage! Another problem with C/C++ is that they do not have garbage collection which is necessary but insufficient for reliable code.

A SciPy-based computational fluid dynamic (CFD) visualization of a combustion chamber.

I think scientific programmers should move to Python and build on SciPy. Python is a modern free language, and has quietly built up an extremely complete set of libraries for everything from gaming to scientific computing. Specifically, its SciPy library with various scikit extensions are a solid baseline patiently waiting for more people to work on all sorts of futuristic problems. (It is true that Python and SciPy both have issues. One of Python’s biggest issues is that the default implementation is interpreted, but there are several workarounds being built [Cython, PyPy, Unladen Swallow, and others]. SciPy’s biggest challenge is how to be expansive without being duplicative. It is massively easier to merge English articles in Wikipedia that discuss the same topics than to do this equivalent in code. We need to share data in addition to code, but we need to share code first.)

Some think the singularity is a hardware problem, and won’t be solved for a number of years. I believe the benefits inherent in the singularity will happen as soon as our software becomes “smart” and we don’t need to wait for any further Moore’s law progress for that to happen. In fact, we could have built intelligent machines and cured cancer years ago. The problems right now are much more social than technical.

1. 1. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

—Alan Turing

Perhaps you think I’m crazy or naive to pose this question. But more and more the past few months I’ve begun to wonder if there is a possibility here that this idea may not be too far off the mark.

Not because of some half-baked theory about a global conspiracy or anything of the sort but simply based upon the behavior of many multinational corporations recently and the effects this behavior is having upon people everywhere.

Again, you may disagree but my perspective on these financial giants is that they are essentially predatory in nature and that their prey is any dollar in commerce that they can possibly absorb. The problem is that for anyone in the modern or even quasi-modern world money is nearly as essential as plasma when it comes to our well-being.

It has been clearly demonstrated again and again – all over the world – that when a population has become sufficiently destitute that the survival of the individual is actually threatened violence inevitably occurs. On a large enough scale this sort of violence can erupt into civil war and wars, as we all know too well can spread like a virus across borders, even oceans.

Until fairly recently, corporations were not big enough, powerful enough or sufficiently meshed with our government to push the US population to a point of violence and perhaps we’re not there yet, but between the bank bailout, the housing crisis, the bailouts of the automakers, the subsidies to the big oil companies and ten thousand other government gifts that are coming straight from the taxpayer I fear we are getting ever closer to the brink.

Who knows – it might just take one little thing – like that new one dollar charge many stores have suddenly begun instituting for any purchase using an ATM or credit card – to push us over the edge.

The last time I got hit with one of these dollar charges I thought about the ostensible reason for this – that the credit card company is now charging the merchant more per transaction so the merchant is passing that cost on to you – however this isn’t the whole story. The merchant is actually charging you more than the transaction costs him and even if this is a violation of either the law or the terms and services agreement between the card company and the merchant, the credit card company looks the other way because they are securing a bigger transaction because of what the merchant is doing thus increasing their profits even further.

Death by big blows or a thousand cuts – the question is will we be forced to do something about it before the big corporations eat us alive?

Existential Threats

King Louis XVI’s entry in his personal diary for that fateful day of July 14, 1789 suggests that nothing important had happened. He did not know that the events of the day-the attack upon the Bastille-meant that the revolution was under way, and that the world as he knew it was essentially over. Fast forward to June, 2010: a self-replicating biological organism (mycoplasma mycoides bacterium transformed) has been created in a laboratory by J. Craig Venter and his team. Yes, the revolution has begun. Indeed, the preliminaries have been going on for several years; it’s just that … um, well, have we been wide awake?

Ray Kurzweil’s singularity might be 25 years into the future, but sooner, a few years from now, we’ll have an interactive global network that some refer to as ‘global brain.’ Web3. I imagine no one knows exactly what will come out of all this, but I expect that we’ll find that the whole will be more than and different from the sum of the parts. Remember Complexity Theory. How about the ‘butterfly effect?’ Chaos Theory. And much more not explainable by theories presently known. I expect surprises, to say the least.

I am a retired psychiatrist, not a scientist. We each have a role to enact in this drama/comedy that we call life, and yes, our lives have meaning. Meaning! For me life is not a series of random events or events brought about by ‘them,’ but rather an unfolding drama/comedy with an infinite number of possible outcomes. We don’t know its origins or its drivers. Do we even know where our visions comes from?

So, what is my vision and what do I want? How clearly do I visualize what I want? Am I passionate about what I want or simply lukewarm? How much am I prepared to risk in pursuit of what I want? Do I reach out for what I want directly or do I get what I want indirectly by trying to serve two masters, so to speak? If the former I practice psychological responsibility, if the latter I do not. An important distinction. The latter situation suggests unresolved dilemma, common enough. Who among us can claim to be without?

As we go through life there are times when we conceal from others and to some extent from ourselves exactly what it is that we want, hoping that what we want will come to pass without us clarifying openly what we stand for. One basic premise I like is that actions speak louder than words and therefore by our actions in our personal lives directly or indirectly we bring to pass what we bottom line want.

Does that include what I fear? Certainly it might if deep within me I am psychologically engineering an event that frightens me. If what I fear is what I secretly bring about. Any one among us might surreptitiously arrange drama so as to inspire or provoke others in ways that conceal our personal responsibility. All this is pertinent and practical as will become obvious in the coming years.

We grew up in 20th century households or in families where we and other family members lived by 20th century worldviews, and so around the world 20th century thinking still prevails. Values have much to do with internalized learned relationships to limited and limiting aspects of the universe. In the midst of change we can transcend these. I wonder if by mid-century people will talk of the BP oil spill as the death throes of a dinosaur heralding the end of an age. I don’t know, but I imagine that we’re entering a phase of transition-a hiatus-in which we see our age fading away from us and a new age approaching. But the new has yet to consolidate. A dilemma. If we embrace the as yet ethereal new we risk losing our roots and all that we value; if we cling to the old we risk seeing the ship leave without us.

We are crew-and not necessarily volunteers-on a vessel bound for the Great Unknown. Like all such voyages taken historically this one is not without its perils. When established national boundaries become more porous, when old fashioned foreign policy fails, when the ‘old guard’ feels threatened beyond what it will tolerate, what then? Will we regress into authoritarianism, will we demand a neo-fascist state so as to feel secure? Or will we climb aboard the new? Yes, we can climb aboard even if we’re afraid. To be sure we’ll grumble, and some will talk of mutiny. A sense of loss is to be expected. We all feel a sense of loss when radical change happens in our personal lives, even when the change is for the better. I am aware of this in my own life, I clarify meaning in life. There are risks either way. Such is life.

But change is also adventure: I am old enough to remember the days of the ocean liners and how our eyes lit up and our hearts rose up joyfully as we stood on deck departing into the vision, waving to those left behind. Indeed we do this multiple times in our lives as we move from infancy to old age and finally towards death. And like good psychotherapy, the coming change will be both confronting and rewarding. Future generations are of us and we are of them; we cannot be separated.

What a time to be alive!

Wendy McElroy brings an important issue to our attention — the increasing criminalization of filming / recording on-duty police officers.

The techno-progressive angle on this would have to take sousveillance into consideration.  If our only response to a surveillance state is to observe “from the bottom” (as, for example, Steve Mann would have it), and if that response is made illegal, it seems that the next set of possible steps forward could include more entrenched recording of all personal interaction.

Already we have a cyborg model for this — “eyeborgs” Rob Spence and Neil Harbisson.  So where next?

Resources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section3b.t-3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann

http://eyeborgproject.com/

http://jointchiefs.blogspot.com/2010/06/camera-as-gun-drop-shooter.html

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Harbisson

It’s easy to think of people from the underdeveloped world as quite different from ourselves. After all, there’s little to convince us otherwise. National Geographic Specials, video clips on the Nightly News, photos in every major newspaper – all depicting a culture and lifestyle that’s hard for us to imagine let alone relate to. Yes – they seem very different; or perhaps not. Consider this story related to me by a friend.

Ray was a pioneer in software. He sold his company some time ago for a considerable amount of money. After this – during his quasi-retirement he got involved in coordinating medical relief missions to some of the most impoverished places on the planet, places such as Timbuktu in Africa.

The missions were simple – come to a place like Timbuktu and set up medical clinics, provide basic medicines and health care training and generally try and improve the health prospects of native peoples wherever he went.

Upon arriving in Timbuktu, Ray observed that their system of commerce was incredibly simple. Basically they had two items that were in commerce – goats and charcoal.

According to Ray they had no established currency – they traded goats for charcoal, charcoal for goats or labor in exchange for either charcoal or goats. That was basically it.

Ray told me that after setting up the clinic and training people they also installed solar generators for the purpose of providing power for satellite phones that they left in several villages in the region.

They had anticipated that the natives, when faced with an emergency or if they needed additional medicines or supplies would use the satellite phones to communicate these needs however this isn’t what ended up happening…

Two years after his initial visit to Timbuktu, Ray went back to check on the clinics that they had set up and to make certain that the people there had the medicines and other supplies that they required.

Upon arriving at the same village he had visited before Ray was surprised to note that in the short period of only two years since his previous visit things had changed dramatically – things that had not changed for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years.

Principally, the change was to the commerce in Timbuktu. No longer were goats and charcoal the principal unit of currency. They had been replaced by a single unified currency – satellite phone minutes!

Instead of using the satellite phones to call Ray’s organization, the natives of Timbuktu had figured out how to use the phones to call out to neighboring villages. This enabled more active commerce between the villages – the natives could now engage in business miles from home – coordinating trade between villages, calling for labor when needed or exchanging excess charcoal for goats on a broader scale for example.

Of course their use of these phones wasn’t limited strictly to commerce – just like you and I, they also used these phones to find out what was happening in other places – who was getting married, who was sick or injured or simply to communicate with people from other places that were too far away to conveniently visit.

In other words, a civilization that had previously existed in a way that we would consider highly primitive had leapfrogged thousands of years of technological and cultural development and within the briefest of moments had adapted their lives to a technology that is among the most advanced of any broadly distributed in the modern world.

It’s a powerful reminder that in spite of our belief that primitive cultures are vastly different from us the truth is that basic human needs, when enabled by technology, are very much the same no matter where in the world or how advanced the civilization.

Perhaps we are not so different after all?
Timbuktu

Kepler Space University was a participant in the ISDC-2010 at Chicago, May 27-30, 2010 with a PhD Commencement and nine presentations.

Read KSC Scores at ISDC.

Bob Krone, Ph.D., Provost
www.keplerspaceuniversity.org