Paul Saffo -- Embracing Uncertainty

Mr. Saffo is a forecaster. How to spot the future coming.

"The difference between a forecast and reality is that a forecast must be believable and internally consistent"

wildcards make for better forecasting. For example, predicting that a movie star will become the next governor. He also says it helps to be a smart alec. His "movie star" prediction was a smart alec-y response which proved to be a true prediction. If you are pessimistic, appy the Lilly Tomlin rule.

Mr. Saffo is a big believer in the S-curve. 20 years of slow growth before you hit the inflection point. Implications: when people say things are just around the corner, they are 10-20 years out (we are still at the flat part of the S). When people say it will never happen, it is imminent (they haven't seen it take off in 20 years of effort, so have given up hope. 20 years is the time to inflection).

"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance!"

Next insight-- The future has arrived, but is unevenly distributed. Look for the small anomolies. These are the prodromal signs of change. Look back twice as far as you plan on looking ahead.

We fail our way into the future. Silicon valley is not build on the spires of achievement, but on the rubble of failure.

And he makes a prediction. The robots are coming.

Anomolies:

1. DARPA grand challenge. First one, only 4/20 make it out of the starting gate. Next one, 18 mo later, all but 4 finish.
   
2. Roomba. Not only do people buy them, they name them and take them to visit friends houses.
   
3. Another DARPA grand challenge, city driving. The robots all drove well, on the same day as California had a 100+ car pileup on the freeway.
   

The trend: changes in computation. The mircoprocessor put a computer on the desktop, and the device was a processor. Optical lasers/fiber optics allowed fast/big bandwith internet and the device became a connection. Now we have cheap sensors (tennis shoes reporting your pace !?!) which give the computer senses. Add wheels and we will have robots.


He called to someone in the audience to illustrate one of his points. They gave the wrong answer. He said "Next time I am going to use a planted response."

kurzweilon the Singularity part I

Dear Colleagues,

I listened to Kurzweil's talk on the Singularity this morning. It presented some great follow-ups to ideas from my last seminar. The talk is available here:

http://download.fora.tv/rss_media/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2005-09-23-kurzweil.mp3

Kurzweil's big insight is the power of exponential growth, or rather that we are living in the elbow of the hockey stick. Plot the history of life on a log-log scale, with key dates being: origin of life, Cambrian explosion, mammals, humans, stone tools, agriculture/cities, machines (industrial rev), computers,... and you get a straight line. Plot it on a linear chart, and everything that has happened is happening right now.

The current rate of change supports my claim that we are at the beginning of a whole new age.

The driving force is that life (and technology) are autocatalitic systems. The current stage powers the development of the next stage.

Shifting stages also requires/implies shifing paradigms. The most powerful example he gave is the shift from drug discovery to drug design. In drug discovery, you find a compound which seems to have the desired effect. This explains almost all current medicines. It also explains why they are so crude and have so many undesired side effects.

The drug design paradigm works by finding a known biological mechanism and working with it. We discussed life extension in the seminar. Olga reminded us that calorie restriction was a proven, if unpleasant, way to increase lifespan by 20%. Kurzweil mentioned a drug which works by RNA interference to block a key insulin related pathway. Since it is based on RNA interference, it does not need to get into the cell nucleous, only into the cell. In mice, the drug reproduces the bilogical benefits of calorie restriction even though the mice eat normally (or actually more than normally).

Now that is only one example, and one that might fail. It is near imposible to predict the path of any one specific particle/idea/approach, the overal system is too complex. But, as in thermodynamics, even though the path of any one molecule is random, the path of the whole system is easy to see. Things are heating up.

A final key point which we all should consider closely when planning our projects. A successful project will be aimed at what is possible/expected when it is complete, not the world as it is today. Old example: sequencing the human genome. Venture knew that exponential growth in technology would make it possible in 15 years. Ten years into the project the doubters were still laughing at him, as only 2% had been sequenced. But it is the last few doublings which gets you the remaining 98%, and as we all know, the genome was sequenced in time.

Cheers,

+glenn

The decline of diffidence

Thoughts on Rick Salutin's editorial in the Toronto Star

I paraphrase him:
The last year has seen a collapse of respect for the conventional repositories of authority and respect. Arab Spring --> government. The West --> big business & finance.

And the big reason for the change:

But there were other factors in the decline of authority. I doubt it has ever shocked people to learn that their era’s main deciders were incompetent. But someone had to do it and you hoped for the best. What’s often been lacking is a sense that there are other plausible ways to reach decisions. That sense of an alternative way to run things is what the Internet may have implanted.

The power of authority diminishes when you can hear credible, contesting voices. Print tends to be monotonal and univocal, unlike the oral tradition that preceded it. But the Internet, though it often lacks actual speech, is oral in the sense of interactive, like a Socratic dialogue. In oral mode, less is often more because speech is so laden with gesture, tone etc.; even something as short as a tweet can suffice. That too diminishes normal authority, which likes to rumble on.

I put this in the context of the third industrial revolution. Communication in the first was print. In the second it was the telephone. In the third it is the internet.