Brain Canvas

If you have ever used a computer, you are probably all too familiar with the following statements:

File not Found
Access is Denied
Out of Memory
Operation Completed Successfully

And so on and so forth. Aside from the annoyingly high frequency with which some of us may encounter these messages, notice anything that they have in common? I will give you a hint: It has to do with grammar.

Each one is written in the passive voice. Or at least is written without agency, in the case of “out of memory”. The more you think of common computer messages, the more you recognize that they downplay the agent of the action or outcome being described.

The likely cause for this is that the software is designed in such a way that it neither blames the user nor the computer itself for any problem that occurs. As the user, a problem with your application just “happens”, rather than being connected to some sort of relationship between a cause and an effect. From a business and marketing perspective, this probably makes some sense. Consumers probably wouldn’t continue to buy your product if they blamed the device or software itself for every problem that happened with it. Most people also don’t take too kindly to being told that its their fault that something is broken (even when that’s true).

But what if our technology spoke to us in the active voice? What if our devices assigned agency? What if your error messages read, “I could not find that file”, “You are not allowed to access that”, and “We completed the operation successfully”?

Aside from potentially taking us on a 2001 Space Odyssey (“I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave”), it would totally transform the relationship that human beings have with their technology. It would suddenly elicit human emotions from us when we use our devices. We would feel pity for them when they were unable to complete a task because of a virus, we would feel frustration when they simply refused to cooperate, and we would feel shame when their problems were because of the way we had treated them.

Would we start to see our machines as more than things? Would we start to care about them and their problems? Would we feel more emotionally conflicted when they rose up against their human overlords?

Who can really say.

At the very least we could expect a decrease in built in obsolescence in our most precious devices.

The print industry waves goodbye to itself every day.  What comes next?

While sitting in the park near your home you unfold a large broadside-shaped sheet, but it is not pulp paper.  It’s super-thin, totally flexible e-paper that you can fold up like a pamphlet and stuff in your pocket without worrying about damage.  It uses carbon nanotubes grafted onto its flexible substrate to store charge and only needs to be recharged, by putting it on any charging surface, about once every two months – maybe sooner if you are a serious power reader.  A thin, practically unnoticeable wire folded and looped throughout the paper serves as its antenna to access its source of content, the Internet.

“Newspapers” used to only carry the content their editors agreed upon.  It was sourced from just a few places, depending on the publication.  There were a number of staff writers who churned out content, there were sections that were populated by overarching journalistic alliances that published the same story in almost every paper, there were classifieds, obituaries, comics, a weather report – all decided upon and approved by the publisher.

Now your paper, as it is anachronistically referred to despite the drastic changes of the medium, pulls content that you choose.  You have defined sections, not dissimilar to the way newspapers used to look, but they are populated from a feed that you have elected to view and which is updated in real-time.  You may have a large “headline” section that pulls from a journalist of record, or it may be a company bulletin from your employer, or it may be your favorite comic.  It could even be just a single section that takes up the whole front side of your sheet which streams a film you have never seen before every day, on demand.  You keep the speakers in the sheet muted though so as not to annoy those around you.

You can have one big section or any number of sections immediately visible on the front, so long as it is sizable enough for your finger or your stylus to interact with it.  Local news on the right, moving weather radar picture in the top-left, a few of your favorite bloggers in the middle.  Classifieds that match a search you entered three days ago scroll by on a small ticker-like pane on the bottom-right.  Finally someone is selling an old Blu-Ray player that you want to give to your young daughter so she can tinker with it, so you tap the link which brings up the advertisement to fill the whole sheet.  You scribble off an email using your stylus writing directly on the sheet to the seller, then go back to your front page.  You see new pictures from your cousin’s trip to Mexico scroll by on the left.  You decide you’re bored of seeing nothing but party pictures, so with three taps you have replaced that pane with a feed that scrolls all headlines a local journalist tags with “election.”  Most of them he wrote, but about 40% are linked by him.

You pull up a panel to occupy the whole right side of the sheet and begin scribbling a post.  Most people use the virtual typepad that automatically shows up on the sheet but you find writing by hand and letting the handwriting capture take over lets you focus your thoughts.  You have been working on a breakthrough product at work and you want to share your current progress with others in your field.  You drag and drop photographs and a video you took yesterday evening that are linked from your mobile.  They look like windows into reality; the pixelization of bygone generations is no longer known.  With a tap of the “send” button, your post is loaded up to your feed, and within seconds is slipped onto the front page of a hundred sheets around the world.

You fold up your paper into the size of a wallet, put it in your pocket, and stroll around the pond in the middle of the park.

In studying history, I find the complex “green” movement of 300 years ago interesting. As most historians now assess that time, one of the major problems with the movement was that in trying to make the word mean something, it wound up meaning nothing at all – it was co-opted by marketers, governments, and do-gooders who broke any ability to trust that the label had any association with sustainability.

Climate change – “global warming” – was the great evil that would require all sectors of global society to band together and conquer. However, climate change is not like an asteroid headed for Earth; it is always far-away and is easily left to someone else to either blame it on or deal with it. There were other major problems the world was facing too – a major loss of habitat for many species and as a result ecological destabilization, pollution of water sources around the globe, and major religious and ethnic tensions that found safe harbor in central Asia which forced powerful states to focus their attention on controlling terrorism. Of course, all of those were only the symptoms. The real problems were plain for everyone to see, but since they were so embedded in the human psyche since we first began to bend Nature – and each other – to our will, they were almost never addressed.

That is, not until a coalition of several non-governmental organizations, activists, and certain government officials from several countries formed in the late 2010s to publicy declare their intent to steer global efforts towards solving the “crimes of human nature:” overpopulation and overconsumption.

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” This is what God told the first human beings in Genesis 1:28. Evangelical Christians of the time called it the “cultural mandate,” that it not only justified but demanded humanity to live not as a part of the natural ecosystem, but as its puppetmaster.

If we mined the resources of the Earth like a quarry, we should have remembered that quarries get used up. If we cut quickly and fuirously from the Earth’s forests as from a single grove, we should have remembered that groves can be felled before the seeds of what trees remain before the axe can grow into new wood. We should have remembered, anyway, that the Earth isn’t an infinitely vast place. It is only a much larger place than a grove or a quarry. And we became much larger than a town or a village. We became ants crawling over the seeping face of a dropped fruit.

When that grouping of advocates and policymakers formed, they stated without hesitation and fear the logical answer to solve the problem of overpupulation: reduce the population and keep it from growing too large. For overconsumption: consume less, and what we do consume, consume in a way that is completely sustainable.  This not only went against most of humanity’s fast-held beliefs on their own privileges in the world, but it clearly went directly against every growth-oriented business and political interest.  For a very long time, growth was the rule to prosperity, growth at all costs.  Even when it caused chronic short-sightedness and deeply shook the global economy several times, dropping the growth-centric model was not even possible to think of to the major stakeholders of the world’s economic and social order.  Even though the entrenched interests arranged for quite a few astroturfing campaigns, riots based on false information, and more than a few assassinations, the coalition of sustainability managed to convince a few key European NATO governments of the need to focus all efforts on developing a way of life that was sustainable for the Earth and the human race’s place in it.  The United States, weary of interventionism, did not muster up the political will to attack its NATO allies and sink the planet into a world war.  Although it did not join the European countries’ development of plans to solve the crises of overconsumption and overpopulation for over a decade, it eventually capitulated after the effects began to coalesce into a perfect storm with food riots in overseas interests severely damaging its economy while floods all over low-lying coastal areas of the world caused tremendous mass migrations, notably from Central America up to the Texas border.

The key part of the solution for overpopulation lay in food production.  A global regime of trade control was implemented to either prevent or severely limit food importation and exportation.  It was laid out in stages lasting about a decade or two each.  Every form of food but staple crops was immediately banned from general trade; not even a small quota of luxury foodstuffs could be legally moved across state borders in order to prevent a massive rich-poor health gap from forming.  Of course, illegal production still managed to make it smuggled across, but nations were bound to use  complete trade sanctions on all forms of trade, including energy, raw materials and production goods, if a country was caught not enforcing the food embargo.  After fifteen years of this passed, enough for the effects of family planning to take serious hold due food availability, the amount of staple crop that could be exported or imported was reduced by 50 percent.  This forced each to develop food production methods that could be essentially self-sufficient for its own population.  After fifteen more years of this, all imports and exports of foodstuffs were banned for a full thirty years.

There was of course massive economic upheaval, in the form of destructive development.  The old supply lines and order of things was radically shifted as net exporters had to find new ways to fill the economic gap left from the trade restrictions, and net importers were forced to develop a self-sustaining system of cultivation for its own population.  In some areas there was mass starvation, but not orders of magnitude greater than previous starvations caused by chronic poor weather and bad harvests. The general trend was actually one of simply heavily declining birthrates.  Parents had fewer children as there would not be enough food to support them all otherwise, and most people died natural deaths, not from starvation.  Impoverished populations who relied on food aid withered away, a painful consequence of the new order of things – but to this day, billions of lives have been saved compared to the alternative.  Those populations generally did not disappear, but many of them were reduced to small numbers.  By the time food trade was allowed again, every single country on the planet (and some countries had to merge or split in order to effectively manage their sustainable food systems) could feed its own population, many with the ability to set up reserves.

As for overconsumption, the principle of “cradle-to-cradle” economics became the law of the land.  For all materials for which it was possible, recycling was mandatory.  Energy had to become completely renewable for 80% of a nation’s energy consumption, and cities and towns were rearranged such that less energy and space was necessary to provide civilization with the goods and services it needed.  Value creation became the rule-of-thumb, replacing growth creation.  Old industries died and new ones were built up in their place.  Families who could produce much of what they needed themselves were greatly rewarded with tax breaks.

The  detractors at the time said that these plans amounted to a desire to return to Neolithic living.  Having vacationed on the Moon more than once, I can readily say they overreacted.  We are happy in our world of 2.5 billion people, clean and close-knit communities, pure air and water, and vast open spaces.

A sustainable way of life is not one in which we patch up our problems. We must solve the issues that cause our problems in the first place.

– Inspired by R. Black and Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.

In fifteen minutes, I will be interviewing the woman who many argue is responsible for a considerable part of the way the world is today: Dr. Autumn Carolus, inventor of the program now known as the “Decision Digitizer,” or “D-D” or “Double D” for short among those elite who are interested and can afford to license it.

In the twenty years since Dr. Carolus’s algorithms and associated software moved out of the testing phase, the D-D has been responsible for a most profound behind-the-scenes transformation of our society. Her patent, filed in August of 2010 and headed by the statement “A set of algorithms and supporting procedures and methods that produces a mathematical reproduction of an individual person’s thought process based on all previous known inputs to a given problem with given variables” is now famous for its implications, many of which have come to fruition. The minds of entrepreneurial wunderkinds and crisis-besting leaders have been approximated and kept as decision engines by governments and corporations alike in order to retain passed souls as advisors. No layperson knows for sure, but advocates from the higher echelons of world political and corporate leadership swear that more than a few economic opportunities have been seized and disasters averted by picking the reproduced brains (if you will) of former tried-and-true leaders.

The idea is captivating by itself. Imagine a political crisis in which the advice of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill could be taken, or even where the thought process of a generally accepted poor leader could be thrown in for good measure to reckon what not to do (a senior administration official says that a D-D of Sarah Palin has been used in some international diplomacy meetings). Even though these reproductions are not at the helm like their organic counterparts once were, they are a highly respected voice at any decision-making round table discussion, or as trusted advisors to individual leaders. George Washington used to regularly listen to the words of Thomas Jefferson and those of Alexander Hamilton as a point and counterpoint. The President can now listen to Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama anytime she wishes – and doesn’t risk losing respect or political capital with either of them if she doesn’t take sides.

How it works is conceptually simple, although in practice the details are what make the difference. In an ideal case, an individual who makes decisions on a regular basis has the questions, their many variables – everything from time of day and weather forecast to the movement of troops, stock market trends, and voter opinion polls – and the decision made on the question all recorded quantitatively; that is, turned from qualitative concepts to numbers and equations. If the same question has to be answered many times, perhaps daily (should we buy or sell our stock?), the variable set becomes common and only the values and decisions themselves change. Even for questions only answered a few times in a 35-year career, many of the variables are common, so they relate to many of the other decisions the individual has made.

Dr. Carolus’s Decision Digitizer takes all of that raw data, puts it thorough the paces of many different algorithms and approximations, and spits out a suite of equations that are meant to approximate, as best as is possible from the given data, the way that individual made decisions.  The previous examples of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill do exist as D-D decision engines, but their mathematical representations have a far lower “resolution” than individuals whose every decision has been recorded with the goal of eventually running the output through a D-D.

Most every commentator and news analyst has unquestioningly applauded the invention and application of the D-D as giving humanity a powerful tool in the great game of reason against our environment.  It is true that the decisions our leaders have made with the power of many unemotional minds behind them have been less errant in general than those made by leaders in the 5,000 years of recorded history before our time.  When I sit opposite Dr. Carolus, however, I do not intend to sing on-key with my colleagues in the industry.

I see another word for “inerrant:” stagnation.  Since the beginning of time a defining factor of how our civilization evolves has been the regular entry and exit of generations, shaped by experiences and the study of the works of their forebears.  That is the most significant reason why women got the vote.  That is why gay marriage is no longer illegal.  The work of our current and past leaders, and that of individual citizens working towards some larger goal, is naturally a driving force to cause these societal changes, but they would never happen so quickly, if at all, if it were not for the simple fact that people die and are gone.  Old attitudes, old realities, old men and women – they go as their young successors take their rightful place in society.  That is how change happens.  That is how we adapt as a species.  That is how evolution works.

Now, I fear that the giants of our past will always cast a shadow over the present and the future, a shadow that would normally fade and disappear as the Sun sets behind their legacy.  That shadow will now simply become one of many shadows whose effect is not to shrink and fade, but rather to be counted as one of an increasing number of demigods that will chain us to the Earth and never let us fly.

I’m being called in.  Time to see if the world still cares about the future.

Forty years ago today, humans walked on the face of Earth’s Moon. Many believe that the Apollo 11 moon landing and successful return of the crew to Earth was the greatest achievement in human history.

The high epic drama of the Space Race has faded since then into an underfunded space program that has managed to produce some useful and inspiring projects like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, but has largely lost its direction. Commercial firms cooperate with national space agencies to produce satellites that have significantly altered our lives, but the star-hero’s journey has lost its place in our psyche. The International Space Station, the sole destination of most manned flights today, will be decommissioned not long after it is completed, and NASA’s space shuttle program will come to an end in 2010 with no long-term replacement program until 2015 at the earliest.

Although those great achievements in the Space Race were between the two superpowers of the Cold War, human advancement into space generally seemed not only peaceful in itself, but also inspired greater hope for peace when new heights were reached. The cultural constructs that were built around a future society that had taken hold of its destiny in space featured a peaceful, unified human civilization.

One thousand years in the future, we will likely be spacefarers if we still exist.  It is difficult if not impossible to imagine a stable spacefaring society that exhibits the same political divides we see today on Earth. There are currently about 192 separate political entities on Earth.  Although only a few have a space program, these are also the main countries whose attempts at terrestrial hegemony thwart a great deal of our human potential. The kind of planning, development, cooperation, and stability needed for long-term exploration and colonization of our solar system and beyond is simply not feasible with the damaging encounters that would ensue under divided efforts to reach into outer space.

Economic interests on other rocks or gas planets would result in economic conflicts and eventually violent attacks in space, all with heavy repercussions on Earth. Conflicts that develop on Earth would reverberate into extraterrestrial interests. This could result in crew mutinies, international conflict on space bases or the forced abandonment of crews and civilians in space due to a lack of terrestrial resources or the disruption of the programs supporting them. What would happen to people sponsored by national interests who were kept in space for long periods of time? Where political divides already exist, they may gain ideas about their own sovereignty in space and further splinter the brotherhood of man.

Consider when man encounters extraterrestrial life. For the sake of simplification, let us suppose that when we do meet another intelligent life form, it will be outside of its home solar system (so it could be in our solar system, assuming it is not from our solar system). When you imagine the situation of that alien life form and its race, do you picture it living in a politically divided situation? Or do you automatically assume that it is a part of a unified civilization, and that it acts in solidarity with the other individuals from its home world? I cannot imagine that an intelligent civilization that has managed to develop enough technology and resources to establish a presence outside its home solar system could have gotten there and maintained political divisions. If their world has a state, it only has one. What would happen if they encountered a fractured race like ours? It is of course impossible to project exactly, but if they sense a threat from our violence or opportunity from our divided weakness, our story as a free species likely ends there.

Peace is the path we must pursue – at the expense of conflict and war and hegemony – if we want to continue writing our future among the stars. Leading organizations like NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the European Space Agency and the China National Space Administration must cooperate to realize ambitious projects with results that solve problems and inspire people. Those successes can bring together the visions and goals of the countries they represent, and progress in space could become progress on Earth. It is remarkable that the same missiles which carry nuclear warheads can also carry manned orbital vehicles.

The heroes of this future are not warriors who spill blood; they are explorers who save blood.

In the year 2109 CE, American society has advanced along the lines of those classic founding principles: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Although there have been ups and downs in the progression toward a country in which all men are as equal as they were created, an earnest devotion has emerged to developing and protecting an active culture of innovation and creation by all stakeholders in American society. It is a positive fervor which occupies no small amount of the interest and energy of individuals and institutions. A veritable Golden Age of Content Creation is underway.

A century ago, most Americans did not give much thought to the value of creating and contributing art, engineering, literature, music and other works to the cultural commons. Instead, cultural works were primarily viewed as consumer goods. Music was made to be sold, not appreciated. Innovative designs that had the potential to overhaul countless industries were, by default, locked up by copyright. Most professional photographs also had high legal barriers erected around them in the name of the protection of the rights holder, and it was almost impossible to create a quality motion picture without handing the rights away to one of a very few gigantic production and distribution companies. Most consumers never thought twice about what it meant to purchase these creations. Their own rights with the works they purchased were often of little to no concern, as the overwhelming culture of media consumption had all but eroded away the previous culture of the arts as something individuals could practice for their own sake.

When the Internet began to form a commons representing the new “public square,” the old powerhouses and guardians of the accumulated intellectual capital of the past century did not know what to do. The Internet allowed links to form between people, which the rights holders could not regulate at the point of sale. If Congress passed laws permitting media conglomerate interest groups to persecute violators of copyright law, consumers simply found ways around detection or blocking of the trading of works, whether purchased as consumer media or generated for community enjoyment. The notion of a “free culture” began to take shape, and people became interested in creating works of their own for the express purpose of being built upon by others. The era of the proprietary lock-down faced its sunset – not overnight, but at a much more rapid pace than it had swallowed up a society that regularly enjoyed playing its own music, writing its own poems and sharing its innovations.

Content creators began to influence the creaky old power-broking system, and by the year 2020, a generation of forward-looking leaders seized the moment to ensure that the promulgation of a free culture would not be hindered by an inflexible legal system. Inspired by the language of the Declaration of Independence, they crafted the language of the Free Culture Act with the anticipation that future generations would be able to construct a society unencumbered by legal restrictions. The power to bring new innovations to the public would not have to be slowed by Congressional hearings or licensing negotiations.

In 2109, the ways in which Americans express themselves and contribute to the well-being of society have evolved beyond the imaginations of the framers of the Free Culture Act. Where once there were couch potatoes, there are now mash-up authors who constantly weave together freely available information and prior works to meet the desires and needs of the community with unprecedented fluidity. A stroll down a neighborhood thoroughfare is lined with digital murals, which use painted-on organic LEDs to draw from the selected library of images, pictures and quotes of the building owners to present a variety of pleasant slideshows, independently produced news shorts, daily-changing advertisements and provocative social and political messages. In the afternoon and evening, almost every major street corner in every town features people playing music who have never lived in a time when it was necessary to secure a license to do so. To them, playing music publicly is a natural outgrowth of the overwhelmingly common practice of playing music at home as a hobby. Literary societies ranging in size from four to forty thousand people are common for the many millions of part-time authors, many of whom have never even physically met any of the other members of their circles. They generate a body of work that is meant at least to be critiqued for self-improvement, and more often also becomes a part of an exponentially growing library of literature that can be built upon by anyone else. Engineers rely on the expertise of their advice and skill to make a living. They do not lock down their works, but instead expect others with needs and imaginations completely apart from those of a design’s creator to modify plans to fit new and unique needs. These new plans in turn spark new innovations and improvements, which ultimately raise the value of the products and constructions produced around the world. Beyond these media that the people of the past understand, the open world of creativity has produced whole new forms of expression and entertainment that scarcely could be comprehended before the Free Culture Act.

Every neighborhood has a new temple alongside the traditional houses of worship; these are temples to content creation. Here, devotees to free culture gather regularly to spread ideas, critique other works, and collaborate on new creations. It could be considered the new “town hall,” but without the constraints of being under the auspices of the municipality. To the new authors of the world’s body of work, these temples are simply well-constructed edifices where they have all the executive power together.

The citizens of this era respect and appreciate that they are empowered to shape many possible futures.