Relevant History

Bruce Sterling on EFG2WD

Bruce Sterling points out the parallels between the instructions I provide in the "Evil Futurists Guide to World Domination" (henceforth EFG2WD), and religion. Of course he's right. I should have thought of it earlier.

It’s a little odd that Pang doesn’t seem to realize that he is describing religion here. His “evil futurist” is a morally-certain holy prophet with a scripture. Social figures of this sort carry out practically every tactic that Pang describes, and that scheme’s been working grandly for millennia.

But on the upside, this'll be good for another dozen really dense footnotes citing works in the psychology of religion and apocalyptic prophecy literature. Win!

The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination

For a while now, I've been working on a think-piece on what futures would look like if it started now: if instead of starting during the Cold War, in the middle of enthusiasm for social engineering, computer programming, and rationalistic visions of future societies, futures was able to draw on neuroscience and neuroeconomics, behavioral psychology, simulation, and other fields and tools.

One of thing things I've kept coming back to is that, if you take seriously the criticisms or warnings of people like Nassim Taleb on the impossibility of prediction, Philip Tetlock and J. Scott Anderson on the untrustworthiness of expert opinion, Robert Burton on the emotional bases of certainty, Gary Marcus and Daniel Gilbert on the mind, etc., you could end up with a radically skeptical view of the whole enterprise of futures and forecasting. Or, read another way, you end up with a primer for how to be an incredibly successful futurist, even while you're a shameless fraud, and always wrong.

I've finished a draft of the serious article [PDF], so now it's time for the next project: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong. It would be too depressing to write a book-length study, so I'll just post it here.

(This exercise is, by the way, an illustration of Pang's Law, that the power of an idea can be measured by how outrageously-- yet convincingly-- it can be misused. Think of Darwin's ideas morphing into Social Darwinism or being appropriated by the Nazis, or quantum physics being invoked by New Age mystics. And yes, I know Pang's Law will never be as cool as the Nunberg Error, but I do what I can.)

Full essay in the extended post.

The citations are all real. But no, I don't really mean a single word of it. Yet, I wonder....

Futures 2.0

In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes about 10,000 hours to master something-- computer programming, classical violin, tennis, what have you. I've been working as a futurist for almost a decade; I don't know if I've done 10,000 hours of decent work, but I have some feel for how the field works, and what we're good at.

About a year ago-- okay, more like two years ago-- Angela Wilkinson, a friend who runs the scenario planning master classes at the Saïd Business School, invited me to write a think-piece about the field. I took it as an occasion to run a thought experiment: if you were to start with a clean sheet of paper-- if there was no Global Business Network, no IFTF, no organized or professionalized efforts to forecast the future-- what would the field look like? What kinds of problems would it tackle? What kinds of science would it draw on? And how would it try to make its impact felt?

As I got into it, I concluded that a new field would look very different from the one I've worked in for the last decade. This essay (it's a PDF, about 260kb) is a first draft at an effort to explain where I think we could go. Lots of what I talk about will be familiar to my colleagues, and indeed to anyone reasonably well-read; but I think there's utility in synthesis and summary, if only to see connections between literatures and chart one's next steps.

All the usual caveats apply: it's unpublished, it's unfinished, it doesn't reflect the thinking of any of the various institutions I'm associated with, all the errors are mine, there are plenty of things I could have talked about but didn't. But so does the usual invitation to comment on it. I could keep tinkering with it, but at this stage I think it's more useful for me to take a step back, work on some other things, and return to it with fresh eyes.

Angela had in mind something quick, short, and provocative. I definitely missed the first two. Angela, I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.

Demolishing the future

The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence."

Nakagin Capsule Tower, from the New York Times

The building, built in 1972, is now in lousy shape (what a surprise for an architecturally distinctive building employing innovative construction technology), but the author argues that

the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.

Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.

Like lots of twentieth-century architectural movements, the Metabolists were at least as influential for their ideas as their actual buildings. (I remember studying them along with Archigram and Team X in David Brownlee's Art History 481B-- probably the most important class I took in college, given how often I use what I learned in it.) A lot of the more outlandish ideas from this period were never meant to be built-- drawings of walking cities were stimulating reflections on the nature of building in an impermanent world, but totally impractical-- but they made other, more prolific architects think differently about their work and the issues it raises.

Nakagin Capsule Tower, photo by dod: via flickr

In a way, I wonder if there's a useful comparison to be drawn between movements like these, or projects that remain forever on the drawing board but get talked about, and futurists and their work. Most of us don't build things, or write software, or craft strategies; the scenarios we write are intended to be provocations or stimulations (a hedge against them being wrong, which to one degree or another they inevitably are), and at best we have an indirect but positive influence on other people.

Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath....

Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

Nakagin Capsule Tower capsule, photo by pict_u_re via flickr

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

It's amazing how much work and expense goes into making the first example of something modular and standardized.

Of course, the great irony of building and construction standardization is that it hasn't produced a revolution in architecture. If anything, it's made it easier to throw up thousands of neo-Spanish colonial (or American colonial, or frontier, or postmodern-via-Miami Vice) houses in California's Central Valley, outside Phoenix, or in the suburban rings around Atlanta. Kurokawa was right that modularity and flexibility would suit "the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society;" but when married to the reality of real estate development, and the unreality of the mortgage market in the 2000s, the result was kind of architecture very different from what the Metabolists imagined-- a useful reminder for futurists that what we think of as "exogenous" factors often have a bigger impact on the futures we're trying to understand than the factors we do pay attention to.

Ah the future

From GraphJam:

Cass Sunstein on deliberation and extremism

It's conventional wisdom that groups generate ideas and plans more moderate than those of individuals. Groups and discussion encourage compromise, smooth out extremes, and guarantee moderation. It is also one of the unspoken assumptions of facilitation and group-oriented scenario work. Facilitation and scenario-building, the thinking goes, builds a sense of collective spirit by helping groups develop a shared vision of the future.

But Cass Sunstein's new book, Going to Extremes, challenges these assumptions. As Slate's Christopher Caldwell explains in a review,

Going to Extremes... finds that sitting people down to deliberate does not necessarily lead them to compromise or to converge on their mean opinion. They tend to radicalize in the direction of whatever bias they had to begin with. Teams of doctors, deciding collectively, are more likely to support the "extreme" strategy of heroic efforts to save terminally ill patents than the average individual doctor among them. Juries tend to vote, after discussion, for much more "extreme" monetary awards than the average individual juror among them would. Talking things over isn't necessarily wrong. But it doesn't lead reliably to moderation, either....

Much of Sunstein's evidence about how people drift to extremes comes from his studies of groups that already have a bias to begin with. Individual Democrats and Republicans on three-judge panels cast more "extreme" votes when they are in the majority than when they are not. A group of conservative Republicans in Colorado Springs will move sharply rightward when they discuss global warming among themselves, and a group of liberal Democrats from Boulder will move sharply leftward.

These homogeneous groups are not the special cases they would appear. They tell us something about what happens in more heterogeneous groups, too. If you bring the two clashing sides together, they don't find middle ground any more than like-minded people do. Each side digs in. If you give "a set of balanced, substantive readings" to a group that is at loggerheads over abortion or affirmative action, Sunstein shows, each side simply mines the readings for support of its own position. Ideology, it turns out, is not just a matter of opinions or positions—it is a predisposition to receive some kinds of evidence and not others. Compounding the problem, certain kinds of extremist arguments have an "automatic rhetorical advantage" in deliberation. Me, too, but less is harder to rally behind than In for a penny, in for a pound.

The question this raises is whether the facilitation methods that futurists use tend to encourage moderation, or exacerbate this problem. Do scenarios tend to force people to think together, and recognize that complex issues can't be solved through simple means? Or does the intellectual and imaginative freedom that thinking about the future provides encourage groups to project their own extremes?

Add this to the list of insights from psychology-- along with the work of Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahnemann, Philip Tetlock, et al-- that futurists need to consider when thinking about how to improve their work.

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The piece is also an attempt to think more deeply about things we talked about at the conference on tinkering that Anne Balsamo organized last year (and I continued thinking about in other venues).

[To the tune of Elvis Costello, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," from the album The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions (I give it 2 stars).]

Seed Magazine piece

I've got a new short article at Seedmagazine.com, on automated scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge. Sounds fascinating, I know, but it really is a better read than I make it sound.

In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us....

lder AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes — you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn — but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work.

Though I have to give credit where it's due: if it turned out well, it's because it's a great project, and several people were very generous with their time, talking me through its details, and speculating on what the project and this approach to automated scientific discovery could mean for the future of science. I should never be amazed that people are almost always willing to talk about their work and what makes it interesting, but I never fail to be. Remember that when I call you!

Anthony Grafton on graduate school, and the uncertain nature of big decisions

Nothing in it about penis-shaped helicopters, but this Anthony Grafton piece about going to graduate school is pretty good-- the kind of combination of encouragement about the inherent (if quirky) rewards of academic apprenticeship, combined with some (maybe too gentle) warnings about the downside. I particularly like this little "then-and-now" gem:

In the ’60s, as universities expanded around the country and the world, job offers strewed the desks of bright Ph.D. candidates like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. [ed: This is the kind of thing that separates writers like Tony from us mere mortals. I have no idea what it means, but I feel more erudite just reading that reference.] One friend of mine opened an envelope that had been buried under detritus on his desk and discovered that he’d been offered a job two years before and never even answered.

Not very likely to happen these days, but my father (who got his Ph.D. in 1970, and his first tenure-track job three of four years before) confirms that yes, that's what it was like back then.

While Tony advises readers that they shouldn't "jump [into grad school] before you find out exactly what lies below," though I wonder if it's really possible to "find out" what it's like, or what it'll do for (or to) you with anything approaching exactitude.

Of course you should talk to lots of people, but for most prospective students that universe will only include current students and faculty. The students who will be alternately glowing about grad school and their prospects, or will try to give you the scary "real" story. The faculty will be pretty useless as advisors about the realities of grad school: life looks very different at the head of the seminar table.

On the face of it, talking to students and faculty is a pretty logical decision, but the problem is this: odds are, you're not going to get a Ph.D. and then be a professor at the kind of university you aspire to attend. Further, while they're helpful about the day-to-day reality of school, graduate students are going to be useless sources about the long-term effects of going to graduate school-- either in economic or career terms, or in psychological terms. At the same time, other people who could be very informative-- people who've been ABD for 15 years; people who finished their Ph.D.s and then went to Wall Street, the World Bank, or think tanks; students who dropped out before their orals-- are much harder to track down.

So there's an inverse relationship between the availability of experts to consult, and the likelihood that their expertise is actually going to be useful in your own life.

When I was an undergrad (I was one of those nerdy kids who went straight from college to grad school-- actually, I started taking graduate classes as a sophomore), I never thought about talking to people who'd almost finished the programs I was looking at but dropped out, or people who didn't become academics. It turns out, of course, that it would have been far more useful for me to talk to Ph.D.s who'd gone into business. But those people aren't as easy to find as the ones in the faculty lounge or TA offices.

This is actually an example of a bigger problem that people and organizations face when thinking about the future: we tend to confine our research to cases that are relatively easy to find, and look only at successes (successful cases, organizations, or people), and not at failures. Getting a handle on that space-- or at least a more realistic appreciation of the likelihood of the unexpected happening-- is one of the toughest things you can do as a forecaster, or parent, or human. After all, success is what we want, and it's easy to understand; failure is what we want to avoid, and people fail for all sorts of unpredictable reasons. Success if what a strategy or good decision or first-rate school can bring you; failure is what'll happen if you don't get those things. We don't think explore the possibility that we could get those things, execute properly, and still not reach our goal; but that happens all the time. Success, we think, is comprehensible and predictable (and not largely determined by the economic state of universities and how expansive faculty hiring is allowed to be in any given season); failure is random, or something that'll happen to other people. But in reality, we're probably going to end up one of those other people. We're better off if we know that in advance.

And if we know that the definition of "failure" is sometimes as arbitrary as the forces that determine whether it happens to us or not. I can testify that it's possible to have an interesting intellectual life without being an academic (though having a library card does help). As Grafton notes,

Even if you don’t finish, or finish and don’t wind up as a professor, the skills you learn in grad school can be of value in a range of other venues. Some of my most successful former students work as scholars, teachers or writers outside the academy. But as you might expect, few follow this path without some bitterness. And no wonder. A fair number of professors treat students who leave the academy, even after experiencing terrible difficulties, as renegades and wash their hands of them. Be prepared.

Be prepared, indeed.

Richard Posner in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Richard Posner writes in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education (maybe accessible if you don't have a subscription, but probably not) about the current financial crisis, and why experts didn't take early warnings about it seriously.

The financial crisis, when it finally struck the nation full-blown in September 2008, caught the government, the financial community, and the economics profession unawares.

We can get help in understanding the blindness of experts to warning signs from the literature on surprise attacks. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there were many warnings that Japan planned to attack Western possessions in Southeast Asia, and an attack on the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, known to be within range of Japan's large carrier fleet, was a logical measure, on Japan's part, for protecting the eastern flank of its attack on the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and Malaya. The warnings were disregarded because of preconceptions (including the belief that Japan would not attack the United States because it was too weak to have a reasonable chance of prevailing), the cost and difficulty of taking effective defensive measures against an uncertain danger, and the absence of a mechanism for aggregating, sifting, and analyzing warning information flowing in from many sources and for pushing it up to the decision-making level of government.

Similar factors made it difficult to heed the warning signs of the 2008 financial crisis. Preconceptions played an especially large role. It is tempting, indeed irresistible under conditions of uncertainty, to base policy to a degree on theoretical preconceptions, on a worldview, an ideology. But shaped as they are by past experiences, preconceptions can impede reactions to novel challenges. Most economists, and the kind of officials who tend to be appointed by Republican presidents, are heavily invested in the ideology of free markets, which teaches that competitive markets are, on the whole, self-correcting. Those officials and the economists to whom they turn for advice don't like to think of the economy as a kind of epileptic, subject to unpredictable, strange seizures.

Peter Drucker on futurists

Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet, he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the results of changes in values, perception, and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast. (Peter Drucker)

[h/t to Jess]

Great question

From Matt Yglesias:

Brad DeLong observes “In Agatha Christie’s autobiography, she mentioned how she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car - nor so poor that she wouldn’t have servants.”

This kind of thing gets a bit hard to get one’s head around when thinking about the future. What do you think will be the equivalent 100 years from now of Agatha Christie’s car and servants?

(via Marginal Revolution)

Future Sound of London

Very cool.

Forget Herman Kahn and scenarios. This is what futurists should aspire to create. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, the last generation of futurists told the future to you. The next generation will feel the future at you.

Soros profile in FT

Excellent long piece on George Soros and his ideas in the Financial Times. Soros, along with T. H. Huxley, is kind of a hero of mine: someone who's seriously interested in ideas and their consequences, and who's really successful.

Soros’s experiences in 1944 [in Nazi-occupied Budapest] laid the groundwork for the conceptual framework he would spend the rest of his life elaborating and which, he believes, has found its validation in the events of 2008. His core idea is “reflexivity”, which he defines as a “two-way feedback loop, between the participants’ views and the actual state of affairs. People base their decisions not on the actual situation that confronts them, but on their perception or interpretation of the situation. Their decisions make an impact on the situation and changes in the situation are liable to change their perceptions.”

It is, at its root, a case for frequent re-examination of one’s assumptions about the world and for a readiness to spot and exploit moments of cataclysmic change – those times when our perceptions of events and events themselves are likely to interact most fiercely. It is also at odds with the rational expectations economic school, which has been the prevailing orthodoxy in recent decades. That approach assumed that economic players – from people buying homes to bankers buying subprime mortgages for their portfolios – were rational actors making, in aggregate, the best choices for themselves and that free markets were effective mechanisms for balancing supply and demand, setting prices correctly and tending towards equilibrium....

Soros sees the current crisis as a real-life illustration of reflexivity. Markets did not reflect an objective “truth”. Rather, the beliefs of market participants – that house prices would always rise, that an arcane financial instrument based on a subprime mortgage really could merit a triple-A rating – created a new reality. Ultimately, that “super-bubble” was unsustainable, hence the credit crunch of 2007 and the recession and financial crisis of 2008 and beyond....

Soros attributes his effectiveness as an investor to his philosophical views about the contingent nature of human knowledge: “I think that my conceptual framework, which basically emphasises the importance of misconceptions, makes me extremely critical of my own decisions … I know that I am bound to be wrong, and therefore am more likely to correct my own mistakes.”

Soros’s radar for revolution is the second key to his investing style. He looks for “game-changing moments, not incremental ones”, according to Sebastian Mallaby, the Washington Post columnist and author who is writing a history of hedge funds. As examples, Mallaby cites Quantum’s shorting of the pound and Soros’s 1985 “Plaza Accord” bet that the dollar would fall against the yen – his two most famous currency trades – as well as a lesser-known 1973 bet that, as a consequence of the Arab-Israeli war, defence stocks would soar. “It’s not that reflexivity tells you what to do, but it tells you to be on the look-out for turn-around situations,” Mallaby said. “It’s an attitude of mind.”

On the unreliability of expert political judgment

I've been working on a think-piece on the future of futures work. (It's an expansion of questions I started asking in my piece on design and futures.) It's organized around a simple question: If you were to invent a discipline of futures and forecasting today, organized to deal with today's problems, and drawing on current science, what would it look like? Would be it be just like the field today? Would it look for weak signals, produce roadmaps and scenarios, and seek to influence strategy and policy?

I suspect the answer is no. No, I'm confident-- using the term as Robert Burton would warn it should be used-- that the answer is no. Now I'm trying to explain where I think the field will, or ought, to go.

One of the things I'm thinking through is the role of expert knowledge and accountability in futures work. We claim to be experts about a bunch of things, most notably about how to think about the future in ways that can better inform the present. But the work of Philip Tetlock (which I've mentioned before) suggests that claims of expert knowledge, particularly when it comes to dealing with the future, are highly suspect.

Teltock's argument is nicely summarized by Louis Menand in a New Yorker review:

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “ Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

The obvious questions are, how relevant is this work to what we futurists do? And are our current attempts to explain that no, we can't predict the future but our work is still valuable, sufficient in the light of work like Tetlock's?

Thoughts on design + futures

For the last few months, I've been thinking about the relationship between design and futures, and how they could draw on each other. (Of course, I'm hardly alone in this.) During the vacation, I spent some time working on an essay that lays out what I think the biggest opportunities are for collaboration between the two communities, and am posting the first draft here.

ON FUTURES AND DESIGN

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Draft 1.0
4 January 2009

1. Introduction

Over the last few years, a small but significant number of groups have done work at the intersection of design and futures. The Institute for the Future's Jason Tester, English designer John Thackara, American designers Joshua Kauffman and Gwendolyn Floyd (cofounders of Regional), ubiquitous computing researchers Julian Bleeker and Nicholas Nova (organizers of the LIFT conferences), and Danish futurists at the Innovation Lab-- along with many others-- have conducted projects on the future of design, or used design to describe possible futures. The purpose of this essay is to build on this early work, and describe how the relationship between design and futures could be deepened to the benefit of both communities. A closer collaboration, and even more important a hybrid practice that drew on each, would improve product design, profoundly change the way we interact with the future, and create the tools to deal with some of the most critical problems of the 21st century.

I approach this from two directions. First, I describe how design can improve futures. In particular, I argue, research techniques developed by designers-- particularly their close attention to human-device interaction-- could sharpen thinking about, and forecasting of, the future of technology. Second, I describe the contribution futures can make to design. A combination of new technologies and challenges, I contend, are creating an opportunity to design products that can guide people to make better-informed choices about how they can be used, to reinforce behaviors that help users reach long-term goals, and to create a heightened awareness of the future.

This could have profound implications for futures. It would shift the profession from one that communicates through texts, mainly influences leaders and elites, and influences strategic processes, to one that communicates through things, influences large number of people, and informs everyday decision-making. But this is an essential transformation, as it would give us the ability to help solve the critical problems of the 21st century-- problems that, I contend, futures as it currently is practiced is ill-equipped to confront.

NSA, futures, and predicting for the last conflict

Bruce Schneier points to an excellent interview with James Bamford, the journalist who's written three books on the NSA (National Security Agency)-- 1982's The Puzzle Palace, 2001's Body of Secrets, and now The Shadow Factory.

One of the things Bamford is interested in explaining is why the NSA hasn't worked very well in the last few years, and his analysis is striking:

NSA was never designed for what it’s doing. It was designed after World War II to prevent another surprise attack from another nation-state, particularly the Soviet Union. And from 1945 or ’46 until 1990 or ’91, that’s what its mission was. That’s what every piece of equipment, that’s what every person recruited to the agency, was supposed to do, practically — find out when and where and if the Russians were about to launch a nuclear attack. That’s what it spent 50 years being built for. And then all of a sudden the Soviet Union is not around anymore, and NSA’s got a new mission, and part of that is going after terrorists. And it’s just not a good fit. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing, they missed the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, they missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, they missed 9/11. There’s this string of failures because this agency was not really designed to do this. In the movies, they’d be catching terrorists all the time. But this isn’t the movies, this is reality.

The big difference here is that when they were focused on the Soviet Union, the Soviets communicated over dedicated lines. The army communicated over army channels, the navy communicated over navy channels, the diplomats communicated over foreign-office channels. These were all particular channels, particular frequencies, you knew where they were; the main problem was breaking encrypted communications. [The NSA] had listening posts ringing the Soviet Union, they had Russian linguists that were being pumped out from all these schools around the U.S.

Then the Cold War ends and everything changes. Now instead of a huge country that communicated all the time, you have individuals who hop from Kuala Lampur to Nairobi or whatever, from continent to continent, from day to day. They don’t communicate [electronically] all the time — they communicate by meetings. [The NSA was] tapping Bin Laden’s phone for three years and never picked up on any of these terrorist incidents. And the [electronic] communications you do have are not on dedicated channels, they’re mixed in with the world communication network. First you’ve got to find out how to extract that from it, then you’ve got to find people who can understand the language, and then you’ve got to figure out the word code. You can’t use a Cray supercomputer to figure out if somebody’s saying they’re going to have a wedding next week whether it’s really going to be a wedding or a bombing.

It seems to me that futurists may be in a similar state. The NSA needed to look hours or days into the future, using an incredibly specific set of signals, while futurists look years into the future and use a very broad set of signals-- indeed, it seems that almost anything can be a "weak signal," which can either be a sign of healthy curiosity or poor discipline-- but the underlying issues are the same.

Over the past few years I've had some working contact with people from... various institutions in the greater Washington, DC area... and my sense is that 1) they're all really smart and dedicated, and 2) know that they're trained for a different challenge than the one they're now facing. It's a familiar position. The more I've thought about it, the more it strikes me that futurists' practices have evolved in the last forty years to serve a world that is less and less important. This was a world in which small elites-- strategists, CEOs, politicians, people with their hands on nuclear triggers or levers of power-- ran the world (or everyone assumed they did). It was a world in which the future could be considered at particular times-- during strategic reviews or five-year plans. It was a world that we affected through texts, presentations, brainstorming exercises and scenarios.

i have the bad feeling that the world has changed enough to make these old assumptions and practices obsolete. Okay, not completely obsolete: corporate strategy is going to be around for a while, if only because no one has yet come up with anything better. The question is, what's next for the future?

Tom Cruise, sex, money, and the future

A perfectly entertaining fluffy piece on Slate on Tom Cruise and Risky Business takes a sudden turn into actual insight, when it talks about how Cruise and his friends paid for their adventures by cashing in savings bonds given to them by relatives.

("You people have a lot of bonds," observes one of the hookers, dryly.) It is a perfectly calibrated act of rich-kid heedlessness but with the clever subtext that, during a time of runaway inflation (as the '70 were), it makes little sense to save for "the future." This is a word the script of Risky Business never loses a chance to deploy. The hookers say future and mean the shameless score. ("He's got such nice friends. Clean, polite … quick. I think there's a real future here.") The boys say future and mean some far off Valhalla to which they may never be invited. "I don't want to make a mistake," Joel whines to his friend Miles, his Faustian tempter, "and jeopardize my future!" "Joel, let me tell you something," replies Miles. "Every now and then say, 'What the fuck.' 'What the fuck' gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

The '80s did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying "what the fuck" and thereby securing your "future," is simply no longer tenable.

I guess this is why I read Slate. Or why I read at all.

Quote of the day

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Newsweek:

High-frequency data is the problem, because we can't interpret it correctly. Our environment is increasingly complicated, and the data that we choose to single out and interpret isn't always relevant [to the problem we are trying to understand]. You can always find correlations if you look.... So you have the idea that you are charting the world of randomness, but you aren't.

The deceptions of predictability

I've been reading a fair amount about the Bernard Madoff thing-- it's hard not to-- and one of the things that I keep seeing is the argument that the very predictability of Madoff's returns both reassured investors on a psychological level, and should have given them the jitters. From the Guardian:

Michael Markov works for a global technology firm that has developed software that analyses the performance of investment funds. In 2006, on behalf of a client, he put Madoff's figures through the programme and was surprised to find no correlation between his returns and the movement of the market. On a whim, he input the statistics from the Bayou group, a Connecticut hedge fund that had been found to be operating a $450m-pyramid scheme three years ago, and the numbers did partially match.

A mathematician by training, he is baffled. Logic dictates that the better the returns given by a fund manager, the smoother the profits they achieve, the more you should press them to ensure they are what they seem. Due diligence should increase as the stakes do.

"Unfortunately, it's often the reverse. The smoother the numbers, the more people trust."

Fundamentally, humans like predictability. It's reassuring. It's also not the way the world works. (Nassim Taleb would have a field day with this.)

On a completely different note, I also recommend Ron Rosenbaum's piece lamenting the decline of the Jewish gangster, and his replacement with figures like Madoff. Overdrawn, but still entertaining:

[T]he more I read about Bernie Madoff, the more disgusted I am, not just with him but with the whole crowd of country-club suckers he allegedly conned, the phony "gentility" (in every respect) they represent.... What went wrong? If you ask me, the Bernie Madoff scandal was a tragedy of misguided upward mobility—not about Jews and money but about Jews and a sadly imitative notion of status....

What an inversion, a perversion of true Jewish respectability to imitate the most dull-witted of their WASP brethren. I thought Jews were supposed to respect brains, not golf bags. Shows you how wrong stereotypes can be. Or maybe the wisdom of Abbie Hoffman's aphorism: that Jews have to decide "whether to go for the money or to go for broke."

Give me a Jewish gangster any day. They go for both.

Take Meyer Lansky, or rather "Hyman Roth," Lee Strasberg's version of Lansky in The Godfather 2. What is it we like about him? The TV dinner tray! He runs the world's underground financial system, an illicit stock exchange and banking system combined, but what he likes most is the simple life at home in front of the tube with his wife. Sure, he'll enjoy an evening from time to time at one of his luxe Cuban casinos, but country clubs? Please.

On the other hand, this article lays out why the whole affair is pretty unfunny, and how many people and charities have lost vast sums of money.

The futurists' paradox

[A repost from my old Red Herring blog.]

Futurists live with a paradox. On the one hand (as they are the first to admit), it is impossible to predict the future. On the other, it is more important today than ever to try.

In a world that changes slowly, prediction is easy and uninteresting: the future will be much like the present, and the only real uncertainties are natural disasters like famine or drought. In a rapidly-changing world, in contrast, prediction is hard but important. The value of knowing the future, in other words, increases in proportion to its impossibility.

Futurists discovered this problem in the 1960s, when the modern field got its start. At the time, futurists thought that with enough computing power and the right programs, it really would be possible to predict the future, or at least assign statistical probabilities to major events. After a few years, thought two things became clear. You couldn't predict the future. And you didn't need to.

Specific events are impossible to predict because so many nearly-random factors can influence them: call this the "for want of a nail" problem, after the famous line in Shakespeare. History is filled with grand events that turn on some small hinge—a last-minute decision, a missed connection, the failure of reinforcements to arrive in time. The future will be full of them, too.

But even if you couldn't answer fortune teller-level questions, futurists could see the broad outlines of the Future: the world that's shaped by demographics, long-term economic patterns, geopolitics, and culture. Just as the Annales school of historians argued that the longue duree—the grand patterns of history shaped by climate, culture, demographics, and economics—were more important than the short-term world of politics or biography, so now did futurists argue that they could chart the coastline of the future.

Foxes, hedgehogs, and prediction

John Kay, in a review of Philip Tetlock's book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, talking about Isaiah Berlin and expert opinion:

Isaiah Berlin, historian of ideas, made a distinction between the intelligence of the hedgehog – which knows one big thing – and the intelligence of the fox – which knows many little things. Hedgehogs fit what they learn into a world view. Foxes improvise explanations case by case. The world needs both but today it needs fewer hedgehogs and more foxes. Berlin’s terms are used to describe styles of reasoning by the American psychologist Philip Tetlock, who has spent 20 years asking pundits to predict who will win elections, what countries will acquire nuclear weapons or enter the European Union and how the first Gulf war would end. He has tested 30,000 predictions from 300 experts against outcomes.

Mr Tetlock finds that his respondents are not very good. They do better than a chimp who answers at random, but not much, and worse than simple forecasting rules based on extrapolation. But some pundits are better than others. A little knowledge is helpful. Dilettantes – people with the information you will acquire from diligent reading of this newspaper – do much better than undergraduates who based their judgment on a one-page summary of the issues. But experts have little advantage over dilettantes. The reputation of the experts is a guide to which are worth following. But not in the way you might expect. Bad forecasters are consulted more frequently than good ones. The more famous the expert, the worse his prognostications....

Foxes are better at prediction than hedgehogs because they derive information from many sources, adjust their views in line with events and see a range of perspectives on each situation. Hedgehogs have one clear view, seek evidence that confirms that view and have ready explanations for apparent failures of foresight.

But these hedgehog characteristics are exactly those that politicians, journalists and business leaders demand of advisers and commentators. Harry Truman famously sought a one-armed economist, who would never say: “On the one hand, then on the other.” Broadcast media look for snappy soundbites. Corporate executives demand “the elevator pitch” for new ideas. Fund managers want specific forecasts. Business audiences do not want to hear that the world is a complex and uncertain place. But, unfortunately, it is.

(John Kay, "The World Needs More Foxes and Fewer Hedgehogs," Financial Times, 20 June 2006)

Via Mid-Life MBA.

Quote of the day

Believing in the improbable is quickly becoming a survival skill. (Kevin Kelly)

future, quotation

Back at SBS

My day starts in earnest now. I never got back to sleep, so I spent a couple hours doing e-mail and reading, and making sure my various alarms work. (They do.)

I'm meeting someone at 9 (in a couple minutes), then another person at 10.

I actually had quite a good conversation last night at the pub-- we spent a while talking about an article I'm supposed to be writing about the future of futures, and it was one of those drunken states in which you manage to think through a bunch of things all of a sudden. Incredibly, I pretty much remember it all. Usually it's only a plane ride or gigantic amount of coffee that puts me in that state.

conference, England, future, Oxford University

Quote of the day

A Taoist master was asked about the validity of the I-ching as a means for divination. He said, 100% accurate. Then he was asked, well is there ever any chance that the divination will be misinterpreted? Also 100%.

[via Stanford Siver]

[To the tune of Passion Sources, "Sabahiya," from the album "Passion: Sources".]

True things said in jest

Via Michael Anissimov, Pictures for Sad Children's cartoon about the Singularity.

It's not bad, but there's still a hole in my life from the Alien Loves Predator hiatus. Thanks God for the pleasing consistency of Wondermark!

[To the tune of Von Südenfed, "Dear Dead Friends," from the album "Tromatic ReflexxionsTromatic Reflexxions".]

Technorati Tags: future, humor

In Marketplace

I'm interviewed by Cyrus Farivar on NPR's Marketplace today. We talk about how "Predicting the Future is Tricky for Business." Vint Cerf and Esther Dyson are also interviewed.

Incredibly, I don't sound like a total idiot.

Technorati Tags: future, IFTF, media

My European invasion

In the last couple days I've seen several friends from Europe, who were over here for eTech and came north. First, I had lunch with the Innovation Lab's Mads Thimmer; that evening, I got together with Peter Hesseldahl, an author and futurist at Danfoss Universe. In professional years, both are old friends: I first met Mads in 2004 when I spoke at Next 2004, and I met Peter even earlier, when he was at Lego and doing a project with the Institute.

The next day, I gave a talk at an innovation journalism program that brings international journalists (mainly Scandinavian, from what I can tell) to the Bay Area for a few weeks. The program's basic premise is that reporting about technology and innovation plays a role in the development of regional innovation networks-- an interesting claim, and one that dovetails with my observations about the co-evolution of technology reporting and technology marketing in Silicon Valley (something I noticed when I was working on the history of the Macintosh).

Finally, Friday I had an early dinner with Nicolas Nova, a really interesting computer science researcher who's based in Switzerland. He's one of the co-founders of the LIFT conference series, a technology-related event that alternates between Europe and Asia; more recently, he and Julian Bleeker have just started something called the Near Future Laboratory, which is doing some pretty interesting stuff.

I'm fascinated with the European futures scene, and I think it's not just because my contact with it has been wonderfully privileged (they know how to treat their guests). In some ways, the futures world there seems more vibrant than the American-- though it may just be interesting because it's different. The EU seems to be pretty interested in futures work, and there are a number of corporate-sponsored innovation labs there.

They also seem to me to be better at developing multi-institutional networks: American futurists are very good at networking with people other than futurists, but we tend not to work together very much. Partly this reflects the fact that in the U.S. we're all-- or always have the potential to be-- competitors; in Europe, in contrast, the situation is a little different. As one person put it, futures groups in Germany, Spain, England, Finland, and Denmark can work together because the futures market is still pretty national. They can share ideas with less concern that they'll end up enabling their competition.

This ability to cooperate is important because the futures world is both small and pretty atomized, and any efforts to link researchers and institutions together in any meaningful way, and to begin to generate some coordinated (or at least collectively-informed) action is likely to yield some significant benefits.

I'm also starting to think seriously that the whole field of futures as we know it is ripe for a revolution, and that the intellectual tools and institutional models developed by the founding generation of futurists-- a generation that is now retiring or dying off-- will not be useful for much longer. They're certainly not going to be useful for the rest of my professional life.

The challenge is to figure out how to do futures work for a world that's rather different than the world of the 1960s and 1970s; and it seems to me that the Europeans have a better shot than we do of making the next great methodological leap.

Technorati Tags: future

The kind of thing futurists love

One must have an appreciation of the absurd in this business.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Conchita/Lament," from the album "Siesta".]

Technorati Tags: future, humor

Words for futurists to live by

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

[To the tune of Pablo Casals, "Adagio and Allegro in A-flat major, op. 70," from the album "Concert at the White House [Limited Edition] [Japan]".]

And so it begins

For the last year I've been working, first during my day job and more recently in off hours, on an encyclopedia project, the Encyclopedia of the 21st Century.

It's approximately the craziest thing I've ever signed my name to: four volumes, several million words, every one of which will violate a rule of reference publishing so fundamental it's not written down anywhere, but is burned in the heart of every editor.

Encyclopedias are about things that exist, things that have happened, or things that have been believed. In general, encyclopedias aren't about things that haven't yet happened. But this one is.

In a way, while it's been a great project to think about, and it's served as terrific cover for writing to interesting people, it's also seemed a bit abstract. But now, commissioning letter have started going out. It's an exciting moment in a project: it's turning real, but we haven't yet had the big wave of rejections that's normal in this kind of commissioning, nor am I faced with the hard work of actually reading manuscripts and that kind of thing. I should enjoy it while I can.

[To the tune of Eddie Palmieri, "Verdict On Judge Street," from the album "Sueño".]

Technorati Tags: e21, encyclopedia

The dangers of linear extrapolation

Bruce Reed on 2008 presidential candidates:

If Republicans and Democrats maintain their current January pace (12 entries in 22 days), each party will have more than 100 presidential candidates by the Iowa caucuses.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny Group, "San Lorenzo," from the album "Travels (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: politics

Back at work!

I'm in the office today, though no one else is. I think I missed a memo. Still, I got a lot done....

Actually, it is a cool picture.

[To the tune of Elton John, "Funeral for A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding," from the album "Here and There".]

Technorati Tags: future, games, IM

We made the big time

Delta Scan made it into Wonkette!

Human Rights Legislation for Rat-Brained Robot Soldiers, NOW!

While god-crazy American politicians are taking two weeks off to get drunk and IM young boys, our atheistic friends in Britain are looking towards the Future — a future of rat-brained self-aware robotic service workers and soldiers who will likely organize and demand “human” rights by 2056.

Undoubtedly the best media mention involving the Institute's work since Future Now showed up in that YouTube video earlier this year.

Technorati Tags: IFTF, future, Delta Scan, robotics, humor

Looks like we're live...

The Delta Scan is open!

[To the tune of U2, "Until The End Of The World," from the album "Achtung Baby".]

Technorati Tags: future, IFTF, science, technology, UK

Throwing the switch

I spent a good bit of last year working on a project for the British government on the future of science and technology. It was an immense amount of work, but the kind of rare project that seems to make use of everything you already know, and forces you to learn a lot of new stuff. It's also what allowed me to go to England four times last year (okay, the fourth project-related trip was January).

In about an hour, I get to throw the switch on the database that we developed as part of the project, and release it to the general public. This wasn't part of the original plan; but the government ultimately decided that this was worth making more widely available. Good for them. (I don't get to turn it on because of my privileged position on the project; I just happen to be the one with the right administrative access.)

I have the odd feeling that this project is going to have consequences for me far beyond boosting my frequent flyer account and getting me to learn about MySQL; but I don't know what they'll be.

[To the tune of Prince, "Purple Rain," from the album "Ultimate".]

Technorati Tags: future, science, technology, UK, work

My visit to Yahoo

Notes on the Yahoo Design Expo on Future Now; a photset on Flickr.

[To the tune of Derek & The Dominos, "Anyday," from the album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace

But it worked out

I'm back from the Yahoo design expo. It was worth the wait, even if I didn't score any swag, and nearly pulled a Keith Moon on one of the exhibits. Pictures etc., to come.

[To the tune of Gil Evans, "Little Wing," from the album "The British Orchestra".]

Yahoo Design Expo

I'm at Yahoo! corporate HQ this afternoon, taking in a little design expo. I've never actually been to Yahoo! before, so when I got invited, I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience. Plus the expo looks like it could have some cool stuff.

I'm trying to finish up two projects before I got on vacation next week, so it had better be worth my time. I got about four hours' sleep last night, which is the kind of thing I can do only occasionally these days.

The instructions said to get here at 1:30, but no one's here to meet us. Not the most impressive start. But at least I found the coffee machine.

Picture of the day

IMG_1430
via my friend Jason Tester, on Flickr

Hawking on Yahoo Answers

Stephen Hawking has posted a question to Yahoo Answers: "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

What's Colbert going to do with this one? He's got his Hawking impersonation down cold, after all.

[To the tune of U2, "When I Look At The World," from the album "All That You Can't Leave Behind".]

So much for that cool future

Hot off the wire:

Sullen Time-Traveling Teen Reports 23rd Century Sucked (audio)

No word about whether there are personal jet packs in the 23rd century or not.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "I Can't," from the album "Pablo Honey".]

Technorati Tags: humor

In Santa Cruz today

I'm spending much of today in Santa Cruz, which should be pleasant. I'm doing a talk on the end of cyberspace at UCSC, but am going down there a few hours early to sit in one of the college cafes, work on the talk, and generally soak up the ambience. (I just hope I'm not too allergic to patchouli oil.)

I've always liked UCSC: to my mind, it's one of the most beautiful campuses in the world, though also one of the most unusual. It's also got a phenomenal archive on the history of 20th century astronomy.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, Santa Cruz, travel

No one would have imagined...

...that so much Tron stuff could have survived for so long!

I loved that movie when I was in high school. At the time, it seemed like the most brilliant, fully-realized science fiction movie since 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[To the tune of Kronos Quartet, "White Man Sleeps - 1," from the album "Kronos Quartet - Pieces Of Africa".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, movies

J. K. Rowling, futurist

The DVD of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out last week. I haven't bought it yet-- Pride and Prejudice just arrived last week-- but it'll only be a matter of time. I've been a big fan of the series, in part because I suspect eventually some readers are going to start building things in the books.

[To the tune of Elton John, "The One (1996)," from the album "Love Songs".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, science_fiction

Enigmatic, yet futuristic

The future's bright, the future's Orange
via Flickr

From the Zurich airport (and pointed out to me by my colleague Jason).

Google Alerts and keywords of the future

I've been playing around with Google Alerts for the last couple months, after my colleague Mike Liebhold recommended I look at it. I have somewhat the same feeling with it that I had when I first discovered blogs, or got into del.icio.us: the sense of confronting a system that is extremely simple, yet possessing unusual potential.

I set up one to tell me whenever it finds articles that mention "Institute for the Future;" a second for "pervasive computing;" and a third for "Buckminster Fuller." For some reason, I've taken to calling these streams, rather than alerts; the metaphor just seems to fit better.

The first stream ("Institute for the Future"), not surprisingly, is a compendium mainly of technology-related articles in which Paul Saffo is quoted. Not a bad way to track the Institute's public visibility, and occasionally the stream serves up something I wouldn't have found otherwise.

The second stream ("pervasive computing") is mainly industry announcements, usually relating to wearables, with the occasional more substantive article. It's introduced me to a few magazines I'd never heard of before, and a couple useful pieces I wouldn't otherwise have found; but the stream has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than I expected.

With the third, though, something interesting is happening. Obviously the list is picking up articles about Bucky. But there aren't many of those. Far more numerous are the articles that mention Bucky in passing, or mention geodesic domes-- and those articles are all over the map: a review of the new Bruce Mau exhibit, an article on approaches to homeless shelters, a piece about ice sculpture in northern Alaska, an essay on biomimicry and biomechanics, a note on radical critiques of education. References to Bucky get worked into a fairly stunning array of places.

What's going on?

Bucky is both vaguely familiar to a very large number of people, and a passionately interesting figure to a small number of sometimes very strange people. The combination makes the Bucky stream is more like a TV set tuned to a scrambled channel: lots of interesting random stuff, with the occasional bright, distorted image visible for a fraction of a second. It's the sort of quirky combination of appearances that begs for some grand explanation. Looking over it, I can't help but think of social historian Carlo Ginzberg's strange, wonderful book that tried to demonstrate the existence of a secret Euro-Asian witchcraft sect in the late Middle Ages.

It raises a question. Are there terms that you could have Google follow that cross a variety of disciplines or cultures or geographic boundaries? That are connected to a variety of practices or groups that appear to be very different, but actually are connected in some deep way? That, in short, could serve as an early warning system for future trends-- something like a cross between the Naisbitts' work (which draws on content analysis), coolhunting, and del.icio.us?

What words are probes for the future? What keywords point forward rather than back?

Paul Saffo on RFID

Several of us at the Institute seem to have been drawn into the vortex of RFID. Paul Saffo spoke at the RFID Journal Live! conference earlier this week.

[W]hile the benefits that RFID can provide seem close at hand [Saffo said], "most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success." He cautioned against giving up on RFID's potential impact. "Just when people thought MP3 players were dead," he said, "along came the iPod.

"Your business is just at the point where you could bury yourself in RFID issues and that would be a horrible mistake, because you'll miss the big opportunities," Saffo said. "Your business is too small to generate its own lift. The biggest impact on your business is going to come from things utterly outside of it. So pay attention to the things on the outside."

Saffo advised the crowd to concentrate not only on the technology but also on how it will change our lives. "It's not about technology," he said. "You are in the early stages of helping build a real, new kind of media revolution."

Over the next 10 years, he said, RFID, wireless communications and robotics will each play an important role in what he calls the sensor revolution. Saffo said sensors are creating an early phase of "smartifacts," or intelligent artifacts, that are "observing the world on our behalf and increasingly manipulating it on our behalf. This is why I view RFID as a media technology. This is where I think the opportunities are for you."

Paul Saffo on technology, privacy and identity

Paul Saffo had an op-ed piece in this weekend's Washington Post, "A Trail of DNA and Data." The big argument:

The technologies described are already being developed for industrial and medical applications, and the steadily dropping cost and size of such systems will make them affordable and practical police tools well before 2020. The resulting intrusiveness would make today's system of search warrants and wiretaps quaint anachronisms....

The ubiquitous collection and use of biometric information may be inevitable, but the notion that it can deliver reliable, theft-proof evidence of identity is pure science fiction.

Nick Carr's "Does IT Matter?"

Last year (less than a year ago, come to think of it), Nicholas Carr created quite a stir with his Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter." He's now published a book that expands his argument, Does IT Matter? I read it over the long weekend, and will be blogging about it this week at Future Now.

With some luck, I'll figure out a way to work it into my Red Herring blog, too. Must. Keep. Writing.

[To the tune of Robert Goulet, "You've Got a Friend In Me (Wheezy's Version)," from the album Toy Story 2.]