GAP2007Essay
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Ben Goertzel
The Good Ancestor Principle and the Singularity
In this brief essay I will present a Singularitarian view on the question posed by Tom Munnecke, inspired by Jonas Salk: What will it mean for us to be “good ancestors” to our descendants?
My response to this question is intimately tied to my general outlook on the future of the human race, which is strongly Singularitarian in tone.
By Singularitarian, I mean: I consider it extremely likely that, sometime during the next century (and more likely than not the first half), we humans will create superhuman artificial general intelligence, and that this event – along with other, correlated technological advances -- will fundamentally alter the landscape of human life.
I find the Good Ancestor Principle to be an interestingly unfamiliar take on the Singularity, in the sense that most of the contemporary ethical discussion surrounding the Singularity seems to focus on the fate of humans post-Singularity. Futurist ethical philosophers are fond of asking: Will it be possible to create superhuman AI systems that respect human life, while they evolve into minds far beyond human comprehension? The Good Ancestor Principle urges a different perspective.
Some Relevant Links
Some of my views on the Singularity and related technological and ethical issues is discussed in the 2004 essay Encouraging a Positive Transcension.
I take these ideas seriously enough that for many years I have been devoting the bulk of my attention to the task of designing and engineering a software system aimed at achieving superhuman artificial general intelligence, the Novamente Cognition Engine
On a lighter note, here is a description of a somewhat surreal recurring dream I have had regarding the topic of working toward the Singularity amidst a society that views this life-pattern with great skepticism.
A "Trivial Solution" to the Problem of Being Good Ancestors
In a sense, the Singularity provides a trivial answer to the question posed by the Good Ancestor Principle.
Namely: Yes, once we know how to create superhuman AI’s, it probably will not be very hard to create superhuman AI’s that will consider us as good creators! After all, a superhuman artificial general intelligence, if well-constructed, will likely be able to modify itself “at will” (the quotes are there because “will” is a folk psychology concept not to be taken seriously, except as a figure of speech). So it won’t really hold us responsible for any of the details of its design anyway. It will merely hold us responsible for its origin.
So, my conclusion is: If it is a reasonably happy superhuman AI, then it will be happy with us for creating it (and giving it the ability to reshape itself at will). Being a good ancestor to a superhuman AI should be easy: build it and give it the power for flexible self-modification!
But What If Humans Survive the Singularity?
On the other hand, let’s suppose we choose to, and succeed at, creating a superhuman AI that is benevolent towards and tolerant of human beings. Then we have the question of whether our human descendants will consider us as good ancestors. This is a wholly different question! Crafting a human society that enables positive human experience in the presence of benevolent superhuman AI’s might seem to be a difficult matter. How will humans retain motivation and passion when they are no longer the “top dogs” on the planet, when they know they are massively inferior to their creations in essentially every respect? But of course, it seems likely that once we can create superhuman AI, then with the help of that AI, we will be able to figure out how to tweak the human brain via some appropriate technology, to cause its motivational system to provide happiness in the post-Singularity social context.
(Of course, some folks might have ethical quibbles with this kind of motivational-system re-engineering. But, after a little re-engineering, these ethical quibbles will quickly go away. (Just kidding!))
The Grand Conclusion
So the conclusion is clear. There are two ways to be a good ancestor to our post-Singularity descendants:
- Create superhuman AI systems with flexible self-modification capability
- Do the above, in such a way that these AI systems are benevolent to remaining humans, and that the humans have been neurologically tweaked to enjoy this situation
So, being a good ancestor is thus reducible to the minor technical problem of creating a benevolent Singularity. QED.
David Brin
The Devil's Dichotomy
Are you frustrated with the level of discourse – with today’s public conversation about matters political, cultural or scientific? Whether it's vital or picayune, isn't the trend to frame everything in stark, oversimplified terms? In black-and-white. Left versus right. Us against them.
Oh, one can see why humans do this; nothing is more natural than taking sides! Anyway, aren’t stark sides often valid? Many feel justified viewing “culture war,” or the campaign against terror, global warming, abortion, intelligent-design or globalization in simple terms. Good and evil.
Yet, pause. Isn’t that whole approach a bit retro? Twentieth Century? Unworthy of third millennium minds?
Oversimplification doesn't just mean a loss of nuance; all too often, it distorts ideas beyond recognition, pushes us to make poor choices, and cheapens discussion. Each "side" of a conflict becomes a caricature, a straw man, in the eyes of the other. Shouting past each other, we empower the most radical elements of our own side (helping drive the process further) and deny ourselves the benefits of criticism. (Even if your foe is 90% wrong, doesn’t that leave 10% that your own side might do well to learn from, perhaps getting even better along the way?)
Above all, by elevating conflict into virtue and undermining the possibility of compromise, don’t we hurt our own civilization’s ability to innovate, negotiate, adapt, and move on? Given the rapid pace of change, thoughtful debate about difficult issues is critical. The problems we now and will soon face are among the most challenging ever to confront the human species.
If we had a universal foe, who wanted to ensure our failure, wouldn’t he inflict on us exactly this cursed habit? A habit of clinging to the Devil’s Dichotomies.
A Collection of Essays
Hence a proposed collection of essays, featuring contributions from some of the most agile, sagacious and persuasive voices of our time. We invite you to ponder this question:
"What oversimplifying, either/or choice most infuriates you?"
In an age of complexity, is there one issue where you feel progress and solutions have been bollixed, stymied and thwarted by a grotesque, oversimplifying "choice" between two dismal sides? What discussion, critical to our civilization's survival or advancement, has been crippled by a black-white rhetorical bludgeon? (Of course, in some quarrels, one side is provably wrong! Feel free to mention some. But we’re more interested in rigid stand-offs where both sides could learn from each other - or else both sides are missing some important neglected dimension.)
While some writers dial in on specific topics that need fresh perspective, we also hope to see others examine this phenomenon at its roots. Is an entertainment-oriented "gladiatorial" media at fault? Are dichotomies rooted in human nature, philosophy or fashion? Who benefits and who loses? Does the rise of blogging, podcasts, and other forms of Internet-based "citizen media" make the situation worse? More visible? Offer hope?
Is it time to aggressively push for nuance? To militantly promote reasonableness? Join us in helping to expose THE DEVIL'S DICHOTOMY. Contact David Brin or Jamais Cascio for more information.
David Ellerman
Adjoints and Emergence
A certain mathematical notion of category theory, an adjunction or pair of adjoint functors, was introduced 50 years ago and has steadily grown in importance. Today many see the concept of an adjunction as being of foundational importance as the conceptual lens to pick out what is important throughout mathematics. Here are some testimonials:
- “[It] captures an important mathematical phenomenon that is invisible without the lens of category theory. Indeed, I will make the admittedly provocative claim that adjointness is a concept of fundamental logical and mathematical importance that is not captured elsewhere in mathematics.”
- “The isolation and explication of the notion of adjointness is perhaps the most profound contribution that category theory has made to the history of general mathematical ideas.” “Nowadays, every user of category theory agrees that [adjunction] is the concept which justifies the fundamental position of the subject in mathematics.”
Since the notion of an adjunction seems to have such an important role in mathematics itself, it is natural to expect that it would have important empirical applications. But since the notion is so highly abstract, it is not clear how to apply it empirically—at least in the way that, say, arithmetic might be applied. But within the last couple of years, a new treatment of adjoints has been developed, and the approach suggests that the conceptual structure of an adjunction might indeed provide an abstract model for a number of quite important empirical structures.
In brief, an adjunction provides a structure to show how emergence might take place—how one domain or system might be structured to achieve a certain type of autonomy from its environment so that it may exhibit a new level of activities. There is a significant overlap with Robert Rosen’s notion of an anticipatory system, and ideas that figured prominently in the work of Jonas Salk, such as biological evolution and the immune system, are natural examples.
My goal is to briefly describe the ideas in a non-mathematical way and to outline some of the applications. Think of two domains where things in the first domain (the sending domain) can affect, cause, or determine certain effects in the second domain (the receiving domain). Just to fix ideas, one might think of the sending domain as the environment and the receiving domain as a particular system or organism. The effects or messages are transmitted through specific determinations from some sending thing to some receiving thing. We might fix the sender and then consider all possible determinations to receiving things in the receiving domain, e.g., all signals that come to an organism from the environment. An adjunction arises when the receiving domain has a universal internal model of all such determinations from the given sender.
There is a fixed canonical relationship—the receiving universal determination—between the sender and the internal model of the sender’s effects within the receiving domain. Instead of the direct determination from sender to receiver, any specific external determination can then be equivalently transmitted over the canonical receiving universal connection to the internal model followed by an internal determination from the universal model to the particular receiver.
An adjunction is symmetrical so that if we fix the receiver, then there is a universal model internal to the sending domain and a canonical connection to the receiver so that all the external determinations can be re-routed as an internal determination in the sending domain followed by the canonical connection. The association of each given sender or receiver with its universal model within the other domain gives the “pair of adjoint functors” that make up an adjunction.
We will focus on the receiving side pictured above. The following table outlines a number of applications of this conceptual scheme.
| Application | Sender | Receiver | Universal internal model | Action through receiving universal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selectionist evolution (Darwin) | Environment | Adapting organism | Population of variants | Selection of fit variants which reproduce more |
| Immune system (Niels Jerne) | Antigens | Adapting antibody | Population of variant antibodies (low conc.) | Antigen ‘selects’ its antibodies which multiply |
| Perception (Gerald Edelman) | External signal | Perceiving organism | Brain image circuits at low amplitude | Signal resonates with a circuit which amplifies |
| Child language learning (Chomsky) | Linguistic experience | Learning child | Universal language faculty | Experience determines how language faculty ‘unfolds’ |
Selectionist vs. Instructionist
At least in the first three cases, the determination through the universal is commonly called “selectionist” while the direct external determination is called “instructionist.” The characteristic difference is that in each case the receiving domain (in spite of the receiving role) takes on the active role of generating the universal internal model to internalize the specific determination. With the internal universal model (with only the fixed canonical connection to the sending domain), the receiving side gains a measure of autonomy or independence of direct control from the sending side. New types of activity emerge. In particular, the construction of an internal model of the environment allows an organism to model the past and future, and thus to act in an anticipatory manner as in Rosen’s theory.
My general thesis is that this conceptual scheme of an adjunction occurs throughout the natural and human world (not just throughout mathematics)—in each case allowing a more autonomous activity to emerge from a lower level through the internalization of a universal model of interaction with the lower level.
The conceptual scheme might also be usefully applied to contrast two fundamentally different types of human interaction: 1) one person (sender) uses carrots and sticks to externally motivate or “determine” the activity of another person (receiver)—a “transaction” with the receiver, or 2) the sender only acts indirectly through the receiver’s “universal internal world” (of meanings and motivations) so that the specific determination is internal to the receiver and thus is a “transformation” of the “receiving” person. The following table gives two examples.
| Application | Sender | Receiver | Universal internal model | Action through receiving universal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active learning (Socrates to John Dewey) | Teacher (or Socratic midwife) | Learning person | Learner’s own world of meanings and motivations | Teacher indirectly catalyzes or enables internal learning |
| Autonomy-respecting help | Helper | Doer | Doer’s own world of meanings and motivations | Helper indirectly catalyzes or enables internal processes of doer |
An number of important themes emerge directly from this model. Firstly, on the sender’s side, any help that is going to be consistent with the autonomy and internal transformation of the doers (or “helpees”) must take the indirect form, not the direct form of externally motivating the doers with carrots and sticks. Secondly, on the receiving side, the key to the emergent new level of activity was the construction of the internal universal model which involves the continuing generation of diversity, not the freezing of change by those who are on top of a low hill in the adaptive landscape.
Heather Wood Ion
Are We Being Good Ancestors?
Tom has asked me to comment on what Jonas Salk meant when he said that the most important question we must ask ourselves is “Are we being good ancestors?” Jonas viewed this question as the key to his evolutionary philosophy. Bill Moyers named this philosophy “The Science of Hope.”
While evolution is too constant a theme in Salk’s thought to be summarized easily, his statement in Survival of the Wisest gives us a summary 'As a process, evolution seems to be Nature’ s way of finding means for extending the persistence of life on earth. This involves the elaboration of increasingly complex mechanisms for problem-solving and adaptation. The ability of the human mind to solve the problem of survival is part of this process.' In terms of his biological thinking, he emphasized that it is the context, or environment of life, which evokes its potential, and he constantly wrote of our need to understand co-evolution and the mutuality of evocation and potential. Since man is able to exercise learned behaviors, Jonas was constantly seeking ways to describe what he called metabiology. The simplest way to talk about it is in terms of the 'transcendence of biology by consciousness.' However, he turned to the students of the brain, like Edelman, to explain the relationships of neurobiology to our capacities for awareness. He would have been fascinated by the work currently going on at the Salk, regarding communication systems and feedback differences between healthy cells and cancerous cells.
Gerald Edelman, like Salk, has written eloquently about time, as related to consciousness. To quote from Edelman’s Wider than the Sky, p. 144 'In all of these processes, primary consciousness is continually related to temporal change. It has a diachronic structure and is necessarily historical.' Primary consciousness is, however, tied only to successive intervals of present time—the remembered present. The lag of up to five hundred milliseconds that is found between intended action, neural response, and conscious awareness is not a paradox if one understands the relationship between nonconscious automaticity and conscious planning. Consciousness is not involved in automatic motor processes (except during the learning leading to automaticity), but instead is related to planning and to the creation of new combinations of already automatic routines.”
Planning and creation are two themes critical to the evolutionary philosophy Salk presents, and both are related to his concerns with purpose. By seeing evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, Salk introduced immediately the idea that since we are conscious of the continuum of evolution, we can engage in the process both consciously and intentionally. Throughout his writing the themes of 'creativity and choice resonate at every level,' so that we must create as artists the worlds we desire, and take responsibility for the choices made manifest in that creation.
'Complexity must have begun with the tendency toward complementary pairing. It then proceeded toward the pairing of minds, the pairing of asymmetrical elements to establish balance,' Jonas wrote in his book Anatomy of Reality. Our needs are satisfied not by our existence alone, but through relationships that are mutually reinforcing. Since each individual exists in relationship to others, and since we live in groups, 'how do we apply a concept of mutuality to organizations, institutions, to society?'
If our human uniqueness consists in our mental capacity to synthesize perspectives, we can change our relationships through responsible choice. We can design our future in terms of the effects we wish to cause, or the purposes we wish to serve. Without question, Jonas Salk’s astonishing collaboration with Louis Kahn, and the subsequent architects of the addition to Kahn’s original design, have to do with this passionate commitment to design according to purpose, and evocation of potential from the environment, with the highest human calling being a uniting of art and science, a creativity which is fully conscious of potentials as well as of plan.
Jonas would have been delighted by the description in “The Evolving Self” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi “Perhaps the most urgent task facing us is to create a new educational curriculum that will make each child aware, from the first grade on, that life in the universe is interdependent. It should be an education that trains the mind to perceive the network of causes and effects in which our actions are embedded, and trains the emotions and the imagination to respond appropriately to the consequences of those actions.” P. 275 Both Man Unfolding and A Way of Thinking (unpublished updated version of Man Unfolding) discuss both explicitly and implicitly Jonas’s concern for a new educational system, a new way to unfold the potential in each human life through a mutually enhancing relationship with our experience and our environments, serving a purpose transcendent of ourselves and our own time.
The potentials of living systems are in Salk’s view limited only by the fact that we depend upon the sun, and that the earth itself is a closed system. However, 'he was constantly frustrated by our lack of awareness of our potentials as a species, and as conscious beings.' At a party in 1994 the parents of two teenagers asked Jonas what advice he would give them as parents and as individuals in living more conscious lives. He replied 'When making every decision, no matter how small, ask your selves how will this choice affect my children’s children.' Perhaps as well known as his phrase ‘are we being good ancestors?’ is his question 'What effect do you wish to cause? What effect is implicit in your choices?' When he said in that comment “no matter how small” he meant not only our choices of what we consume and how we live but also of what we allow or choose as stimulation, of what we choose as the quality of the lives we live. This attention to all of our levels of choices was critical in relation to Jonas’s views on preparedness and planning—we must prepare ourselves for all eventualities, or our experiences and environments can only evoke what exists within us as potential. If we spend our time with negative thoughts or negative friends or toxic entertainment, Jonas would say we are choosing devolution not evolution, and we must exert great care and awareness about the kinds of stimulation we allow to influence our children.
Creating an Epidemic of Health
Jonas saw great danger in our failures to focus on the positive, on health-creating aspects of mind. Always the optimist, he felt that if we did focus on the positive, then it would be possible to create an epidemic of health. This would depend on a change to an understanding of health as wholeness, and of how the health of mind-effects is as critical as the health of physical effects. He was fascinated by the work being done on memes, and hoped that it might be enhanced by reflections and contributions by epidemiologists. As a physician, Jonas would begin any intervention with the question “What makes your heart leap?” for he felt that true health begins with an understanding of our individual purpose and how to make that manifest by our actions.
He saw a lack of attention toward wisdom, toward the long-view as part of the self-destructive potentials of our species. 'He defined wisdom as the capacity to make retrospective judgments prospectively.' In the final diary volume written just before his death, Jonas wrote 'If we are to survive, if it will be that the wisest survive, then it becomes of first importance to address the question as to the sufficiency of wisdom that exists, of operative wisdom, to make it possible for us to resist and to persist in the face of the insufficiency of wisdom from which we now seem to be suffering.' 15 May, 1995, p. 1. and 'I can now see the importance of looking ahead and of looking back from the future that we may then participate in guiding the evolutionary process intuitively, keeping reasoning by our side.' P. 4 He wrote 28 May 1995, p. 5 'The necessity is clear. We need an invisible prophet. One who makes things happen. One who anticipates the future and out of whose dreams reality is made.'
When Jonas spoke of wisdom he wrote in Anatomy of Reality p. 114 'In the realm of human consciousness the highest and most sophisticated form of self-regulation is based on our ability to see ahead. It requires a knowledge of self and the cosmos and of self in the cosmos. The evolutionary need is to increase our breadth of consciousness as human beings, to expand our range of choice for the wisest alternatives. The human capacity to anticipate and select will be the means whereby the future of human evolution will be determined.'
I have not tried to outline the immunological basis for Jonas’s thinking, or his discussions of nonlinear dynamical systems. He was fascinated by the cross-fertilization from one scientific perspective to another, and especially by the relationships between physics, biology and communication theories. For instance, Jonas started using the word proprioceptive to mean a sensation of our place in the world as well as our agency upon the world, connecting his thoughts at once to Howard Rheinbold and Merleau-oPonty on the Phenomenology of Perception. He used words like convergence and evocation always from the perspective of his biology, but always to imply the philosophic questions he was raising.
Some other Questions from Jonas Salk:
- What are the patterns of evolutionary success?
- What are the necessary and sufficient conditions known to induce human resilience and transcendence of adversity?
- What are the critical moments in the development of mind, memory, and consciousness?
- How is purpose learned, shared, applied?
- What is the dynamic action of mind upon functional fitness?
- What are the critical transition points, or rites of passage, as mind expands from self-awareness to metabiological and universal awareness?
- What is the nurture necessary to awareness, to wisdom, to responsibility?
- What are the symbols and fuels of this nurture?
-What is the language evocative of mutual and empathic responsibility?
- What commonalities of language in human diversity are necessary to the expression of shared purpose, and universal mind?
- What are the indicators of wisdom?
- What are the critical points in the nurture and evocation of wisdom?
- What do we know and how can we influence mutual transformation?
- What is the simplest means of experiencing concordance? Convergence?
- How can we learn to see ourselves and our own needs retrospectively?
- What can be the role of human ritual, symbol, tradition, and pattern-seeking in transcending our own time in order to serve an unknown future time?
- What must we do to evoke the greatest potential for good from ourselves, from others, from future generations?
The Science of Hope
The crux of this approach, of the science of hope, is openness—experimentation, inquiry, adventure for the purpose of transformation. For Jonas, that transformation must be scalable; it must go from our own health and our own lives through our families and communities to the species and the planet. If we are to design a co-evolution of mutually beneficial self-interest in which we acknowledge our interdependence and choose to sustain our shared purpose over time, then we must use connected responsibility to expand our capacities and our opportunities.
Gary Gunderson, on the basis of The Survival of the Wisest, has written of the Leading Causes of Life. He defines them as connection, coherence, agency, blessing ( a sense of honor for generations before and after) and hope. Jonas would fully concur with these as the five leading causes of life, but he would immediately expand on the idea by saying that these are in dynamic, asymmetric relationships with each other, and the whole will always be greater than the sum of these parts. However, he would urge us all to adopt the vocabulary of life.
Let me end by reminding you that Jonas’ science of hope outlines a process. He would call it the logic in the magic. We can become the agents of conscious evolution as we apply our sense of responsibility for the future to present needs. We seek concordance and resonance in our creativity. Survival of the wisest depends upon whether we use our tools as good ancestors of the future. Jonas wrote: “Only a few are needed to visualize and to initiate a process that would become self-organizing, self-propelling, and self-propagating, as is characteristic of evolutionary processes.”
Always the practical dreamer, Jonas ended each day with this sentence: “I have to go to sleep now, I have to be ready for the adventures of tomorrow.”
Judith Rosen
The Concepts of Optimality and Anticipation in Generating Predictive Models: Planning For the Future
As described in the workshop materials: Jonas Salk asked, "Are we being good ancestors?" In a similar vein, not very long ago Robert M. Hutchins surveyed the same problems and concerns and asked: "What should we do now?"
Both of these questions express concerns about the future; not only for the welfare of humanity but for posterity and for the continuation of life on Earth. Both of these questions, therefore, involve concepts of optimality as well as asking how to plan now in order to achieve the most optimal future possible. In other words, it isn't enough simply to plan for the future with good intentions-- the plan, itself, must be one which will be able to realize the most optimal outcome for the future. Salk's question specifically points to the human perspective as the vantage point from which to decide what optimality will mean. However, it has become obvious over time that the health and welfare of humanity is inextricably linked to (and dependent on) that of our local and global environment; ultimately, the planet we call Earth. Clearly, constructing a plan that will optimize our potential future welfare is not going to be simple. Or easy. We will want to know, before we implement anything, that our plan will actually achieve the outcomes we envision. In order to do that, we must be able to predict, with a high level of accuracy, what the future outcomes of our present choices will be. How shall we do that? And can science, at its present level of development, help us in this task? What we are proposing to do is to build models that can predict outcomes of interactive behaviors between multiple species of organisms in ecosystems at local, regional, and global levels, over time. Yet, science currently still has a purely reactive paradigm at its foundations, a machine as the model for all natural systems, and a rather sketchy understanding of time which is generally described as a linear progression that expands in one direction, only.
The good news, in my view, is that science is on the verge of a comprehensive and fairly radical overhaul. There have been a few people, within science, who have analyzed what is wrong at the foundations-- either incomplete or incorrect. My father, Robert Rosen, was one of those people, and he left an extensive body of work detailing some of what needs changing (and why) as well as what the larger, expanded paradigm must include. In order for science, as an investigative discipline, to be more generally applicable to complex systems and biological (living) systems it must look beyond the machine and the relative simplicity that the mechanistic model of the universe invokes, including the purely reactive paradigm (of causality) and a linear, unidirectional view of time that go along with it.
What is an "anticipatory system"?
All living organisms are examples of an anticipatory system. This is true, regardless of the evolutionary development of various organism species. Life, as a pattern of behavior, is easily recognizable by us, no matter how exotic or strange some new species we discover might seem in comparison to ourselves or other species we are already familiar with. It's a rather surprising fact, really. How are we doing it? Why are we able to recognize this quality or capacity of "life" when science has yet to develop a credible definition or basic understanding of what life is? It turns out that the patterns of behavior exhibited by all living organisms are the same, regardless of species: patterns based on functional constraints, patterns based on some internal definition of optimality (i.e.; health), patterns which invoke multiple scales of time concurrently (time which appears to be cyclical, rather than linear): Patterns which are "Anticipatory". Only in organisms do we see the pattern where current changes in an individual system's behavior are motivated by changes in themselves or their environment that have yet to come into being. It isn't that organisms are psychic! Rather, it is that living systems are somehow capable of predicting cyclical changes, and of doing so at a systemic (unconscious) level.
Robert Rosen's (scientific) explanation for this capability was to suggest that organisms must have information encoded into their organization which can act as a set of predictive models of self, of environment, and of the interactive relations between the two, over time. In this way, even single cellular organisms exhibit behaviors that are characteristically model-based. Since human beings are living organisms, it behooves us to learn the lessons that nature has the power to teach us-- before we embark on out task of model-building in order to solve problems that we can naturally "see" looming ahead of us in time, but that science was never able to predict. I believe that the work I inherited from my father can help us as we try to make progress on this critical task and I will do whatever I can to make that work available, accessible, and to generate applications based on it that will be fruitful for all of us.
Interestingly, Robert Rosen knew both Jonas Salk and Robert Hutchins. He worked with both men over the course of his career in Theoretical Biology and BioPhysics, and enjoyed those experiences enormously. I know he considered Salk a friend as well as a colleague, and while I'm not certain how close his personal relationship with Robert Hutchins became, I do know that my father respected and liked both men a great deal. It was while working with Hutchins, as a Visiting Scholar invited to spend a year at Hutchins' Center For The Study of Democratic Institutions (in 1971-72), that my father developed some of the most important aspects of his work on the foundations of (relational) complexity/complex systems and on the nature and fundamental behavior of living systems. Among these is the realization that living systems are not just complex, they are also anticipatory.
Key concepts for discussion:
Relations (and how they differ causally from material particles); Causality; Complexity (in the Rosennean sense); Reactive vs Interactive; Optimality; Subjectivity vs Objectivity (the myth of "Objectivity"); the difference between Data and Information; Entailment; and The Modeling Relation.
Michael Strong
Sustainability in a Bright Green Future
"How do we create a value system to insure that the future can look back at us as good ancestors?" is the wrong question. Sustainability advocates are trying to create a new value system, based on ecological sustainability, and they are trying to evangelize to others that they, too, should accept the growing sustainability value system. There is nothing wrong with trying to do this; the sustainability movement is slowing the pace of environmental degradation and paving the way for innovative technologies that could have a very positive impact. At the same time, it is important to realize that “creating a value system” is not going to result in environmentally sustainability.
Instead, we should focus on creating property rights solutions to tragedy of the commons problems. It was institutions, not value systems, that enabled indigenous peoples to manage their environmental resources sustainably. For example, the Alaskan Tlingits managed their salmon fisheries by means of a system of property rights:
House or family groups controlled access to locations where the sockeye could be caught, while the clan determined the fishing locations. Each group had exclusive rights to its fishing locations. When an outsider infringed on a location, the trespasser was required to compensate the owners or potentially face violent consequences.[1]
Only in small tribes is it possible to “manage” environmental commons by norms alone.
A Question of Scale
In the tribal context in which we evolved, it made sense to influence others by means of persuasion and criticism. In a tribe of 150 who shared a common culture and who lived their entire lives together, such criticism was an effective force for constraining behavior. But praise and blame, our natural tools for socializing each other, are no longer adequate tools as our communities become larger than the evolutionary tribe. The Tlingit population of southeastern Alaska was about 15,000 at the time of contact with the white man. The “value system” of their original culture had most likely been an inadequate means of managing the salmon fisheries for many thousands of years. Formal property rights, now enforced by law throughout most of the world, are an essential pre-requisite to the large scale, complex societies in which we now live. These property rights originated in tribal customs, but have since been institutionalized through our current system of legal titles, courts, and policing.
To understand the power of institutions, consider the Alaskan halibut fisheries, where by 1994 regulators had reduced the season had been reduced from ten months to 48 hours:
"crews went out for 48 consecutive hours, working through the night and - at times - in dangerous weather conditions. Boats and lives were lost. With no time to waste, crews wouldn't bother struggling with tangled long-lines. They would simply cut them loose and cast new ones, even though the old lines continued to lure and kill fish (a destructive process known as "ghost fishing"). There was no time to sort each haul either, so undersized halibut and other species that would normally be released were torn apart and thrown overboard dead or dying. "Bycatch," as these innocent victims are called, is always an environmental cost of fishing, but this cost escalated significantly during the 48-hour season.[2]
Millions of tons of fish were simply left in the water to rot, the sort of sickeningly wasteful behavior reminiscent of the massive buffalo slaughter of the 19th century.
The Role of Property Rights
This wasteful behavior was not caused by “western civilization,” or “capitalist value system.” It was caused by a lack of property rights in the halibut fishery. In 1995, a system of property rights in the halibut fisheries was created based on “Individual Transferable Quotas” (ITQ) whereby a total limit of 37 million pounds of halibut to be caught each season was allocated among existing fisherman. Immediately after the ITQ system was implemented the insanity of the halibut fisheries came to an end. The fishermen’s behavior did not change because they had a new “value system.” It changed because they faced sensible incentives. After the ITQ system was passed, the halibut season once again extended to months and fishermen settled into less wasteful practices.
Environmental degradation is a result of the fact that property rights solutions have not been created rapidly enough to keep pace with economic and population growth. In Capitalism 3.0, Peter Barnes proposes a comprehensive system of environmental trusts, including environmental trusts for forests, rivers, lakes, aquifers, the deep ocean, and the global atmosphere, that would act as a new “operating system” for capitalism. “Habitat trusts” could provide property rights protection to specific organisms through functional property rights that, say, protected the functional features of salmon spawning streams that ran through the conventional property rights of farmers and ranchers. Trusts would charger user fees where appropriate and sue to protect their rights as needed. If trustees failed to uphold their responsibilities, they could be sued or removed from authority (whereas governments cannot be held so directly accountable). The trusts would serve as a non-commercial property rights solution to all problems in the environmental commons. Prices would then reflect the full environmental cost of products sold.
Just as the Tlingits managed their salmon fisheries sustainably by means of new institutions, we will manage all global resources sustainably by means of Barnes’ environmental trusts together with more conventional property rights solutions. Creating these institutions, especially across international boundaries, will be a challenge and it may be that, say, with respect to the global atmospheric commons a uniform carbon tax is easier to implement in the near term. But with respect to most environmental problems, we can begin to transfer land and water assets into trusts immediately. With respect to environmental sustainability, the only value system required to become good ancestors is for us to value cooperation across partisan and international boundaries to complete the transition to a new operating system for capitalism based on property rights solutions.
Jamais Cascio
The Open Future
The future is not written in stone, but neither is it unbounded. Our actions, our choices shape the options we'll have in the days and years to come. We can, with all too little difficulty, make decisions that call into being an inescapable chain of events. But if we try, we can also make decisions that expand our opportunities, and push out the boundaries of tomorrow.
We are far better served as a global civilization by actions and ideas that increase our ability to respond effectively, knowledgably, and sustainably to challenges that arise. In particular, I've focused on the value of openness as a means of worldchanging transformation: open as in free, transparent and diverse; open as in participatory and collaborative; open as in broadly accessible; and open as in choice and flexibility, as with the kind of future worth building -- the open future.
Creating an open future requires foresight, to be sure, but it also requires that we embrace a way of looking at the world that emphasizes responsibility, caution and (perhaps paradoxically) a willingness to experiment. It requires that we recognize that the status quo is contingent, and that we can never be in full control of our environment. Even the most powerful among us live at the sufferance of the universe.
The tools that we depend upon to enable effective, knowledgeable and sustainable responses are neither surprising nor obscure: information about the planet, its people and its systems; collaboration and cooperation among the world's citizens; access to the means by which we expand our knowledge, feed our people, and cure our illnesses. Actions taken to restrict information, hinder collaboration, and centralize power in the hands of the few will, almost invariably, cut off our options. Actions we take that expand what we know, how well we work together, and how readily the people of the world can build their future, conversely, almost invariably increase the options we have for a better tomorrow.
A Handful of Profound Dilemmas
As a planet, we face a handful of truly profound dilemmas taking shape in the first part of this century. It's no exaggeration to say that the decisions we make about how to handle these dilemmas will make the difference between a flourishing of global civilization and a fate akin to extinction. And while there is a small variety of world-ending challenges that could emerge at any moment -- from an asteroid impact to a naturally-emerging pandemic -- the key dilemmas of this century are entirely in our hands.
- The first, and most certain, is the threat from global climate disruption. The more we learn about the changes now taking place in our planet's climate systems, the greater the challenge appears. We are unaccustomed to thinking about slow-moving problems with long lag times between actions and reactions; there is a real risk that the first serious efforts to cut carbon emissions will coincide with an acceleration of problems arising from decades-old changes to the atmosphere. Successful response to this challenge will require us to think in terms of big systems and long cycles far outside our every day experience.
- The second, and as yet still incipient, is the impact of molecular nanotechnology. I've followed the development of this discipline for well over a decade, and our understanding of how self-replicating molecular engineering could be built is moving at a startlingly rapid pace. This may seem like an obscure concern, and it's true that molecular nanotechnology is not nearly as immediate an issue as the other two challenges. But molecular nanotech is an enabling technology that can create enormous differences in economic, technological and military power between the haves and have-nots. I don't fear a bolt-from-the-blue catastrophe like "grey goo" nearly as much as I worry about the race among nations to be the first to wield this technology -- and there's no reason why focused work in developing nations can't come up with the necessary engineering breakthroughs. Students of political history know that periods where the balance of power shifts are often the most violent and dangerous.
- The third, and most painful, is the growing difference between the hyperdeveloped and the most poverty-stricken parts of the world. It's not simply the moral crisis that a fraction of the planet swims in abundance while a larger fraction drowns in misery; the greater the number of people who take desperate measures for survival, the greater the number of societies rendered powerless by the status quo, the harder it will be to navigate the other global problems successfully. Starving people do not have the luxury of being thoughtful planetary guardians; weakened societies will not hesitate to take advantage of the immediate power arising from a new technological paradigm. To be blunt: unless we solve the problem of global poverty, we will not be able to solve the other two world-ending challenges.
The Role of Technology
It's clear that the steps necessary to meet each challenge can enable better solutions for the rest. The innovations in technology and lifestyle required to avoid climate disaster could dramatically reduce the resource competition that drives a significant part of the global zero-sum political game, scaling back both the threat of conflict over nanotechnologies and enabling the kinds of energy and agricultural infrastructure that can lift up poverty-stricken societies. The emergence of a responsible model for molecular manufacturing could enable multiple orders-of-magnitude leaps in efficiency of production and energy use, even while enabling the poorest societies to start building a universally high quality of life. And the efforts needed to solve problems of famine, unclean water, disease and privation will shape the course of research in energy and material technologies; the more we grapple with global poverty, the more we'll see the potential for solutions emerging from our technological choices.
Across all of these issues, the fundamental tools of information, collaboration and access will be our best hope for turning world-ending problems into world-changing solutions. If we're willing to try, we can create a future that's knowledgeable, democratic and sustainable -- a future that's open. Open as in transparent. Open as in participatory. Open as in available to all. Open as in filled with an abundance of options. There are few other choices that see us through the century.
We can have an open future, or we might have no future at all.
John Smart
Not Your Grandfather’s Evolution
Some futurists propose we are entering an era where we are beginning to control or direct evolution, but I feel this is an overstatement, and potentially confusing. It is true biological science is reaching a state where we can institute directed changes in our genetics, but we can do so only because our memetic (ideational) culture has become so advanced in recent decades. It is helpful to realize that making changes in our genes, while promising to increase human biological health (by repairing cases of biological failure, not by increasing our biological complexity) is also becoming increasingly irrelevant to the future of the planet and of human culture, because the leading edge of evolutionary development is memetics (ideas) and now even more so, technetics (increasingly autonomous technologies and their algorithms). I’ve written a little on the Performance Limitations on 21st Century Biological Systems as a substrate for complexity development at my personal website, AccelerationWatch.com.
The evolutionary features of the leading edge of change always seem to remain largely unpredictable by us, a priori. We are certainly learning much about the mechanisms of evolution in (older, slower, simpler) genetic systems, but we know little about them in the more rapidly evolving/learning systems mentioned above. Bob Aunger’s Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, 2001 is a good read in regard to what we know of the evolutionary development of ideas. Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is Near and Jim Gardner’s Biocosm are helpful early efforts at understanding the evolutionary development of technology.
Like consciousness at the edge, in which “free will” seems to be an evolutionary process, from the self’s perspective, in humans and their successors, evolution at the leading edge of complexity must remain fundamentally unpredictable to the self and its community. We can’t know in advance the results of our evolutionary projects, theories, technologies, or life choices, so we do well to seek the wisest council we can before we choose, and be ready to reevaluate and adapt as conditions change.
Developmental change, on the other hand, is increasingly predictable as we go forward, the more we understand the universe from a developmental perspective. I think that’s a very promising insight, as developmental trajectories and cycles appear to be the “cage of constraint” within which all evolutionary change must occur. Thus the better we get at understanding developmental change, the more focused our evolutionary efforts and bets can be come. I’ve written a little on the dynamics of universal development at my personal website, and am writing more on it in my forthcoming book.
Towards a Positive Singularity
For me, taking an integral approach to accelerating change is a very important way forward. I talk about an “integral singularity.” Ken Wilber’s concepts (A Brief History of Everything, 2001) on integral knowledge and process are a helpful start here, but I’ve added my own as well. I’m writing about how to be an “integral futurist.”
With regard to growing power of individuals and societies to create catastrophe, there is a growing power to create immunity and interdependence. I find immunity to be one of the least understood of complex systems, yet it is foundational to complexity. You can’t point out any complex system without recognizing that it only became so through a vastly powerful, and mostly hidden, concomitant immune system, protecting the emergence of that complexity.
As the destructive power of individuals continues to advance, I think we are going to start taking biological, cultural, and technological immune systems much more seriously, and learn how to maximize their effectiveness. I believe that, and integral approaches, are two of the ways we can make the most positive-sum singularity possible in coming decades.
Anticipating a Better Future
This seems a very promising way forward. For me, the new science of astrobiology, with its highly integrative, multidisciplinary approach (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, evolutionary biology, theories of cultural an technological evolutionary development, SETI technology, cosmology) holds great promise for providing us with this positive vision.
I believe we are going to discover we exist in a “biofelicitous” universe, unreasonably friendly to the emergence of life, intelligence, and technology, and that there is a direction that this intelligence development takes, into inner space, rather than outer space.
I think that SETI will give us external validation of these theories, and that such validation will be very helpful to providing a larger meaning, purpose, and teleology to the development of life here on Earth. I believe Teilhard de Chardin got it right when he said our universe is engaged in a process of “cosmic embryogenesis,” and I think Ed Harrison, Bela Balasz, Jim Gardner, and others who speculate our local intelligence will play a role in future universal replication or transcendence are essentially correct.
Networking those who are advancing the science in this area, and exposing these ideas to greater professional critique is an aim of the research arm of our nonprofit, and the book I am writing this year.
If any of you would like to be attributed advance reviewers of the chapters for this, just let me know. I’d love to have more careful generalists read the draft and provide any comments or edits they wish prior to publication.
The Way Forward Machine
I think each of us can create positive change in the way that best fits our passions and interests. Philanthropy will certainly play a great and leading role, and enabling a more networked, small scale philanthropy (philanthropy of the masses) will be a great force for good.
The most striking and positive statistic I recall from a 2006 GBN study on the future of philanthropy noted that remittances from expatriate individuals (foreign permanent residents, guest workers, illegal immigrants, etc.) was responsible for a greater revenue stream into Latin America than all foreign direct investment (corporations) and government aid (World Bank, USAID, etc.) combined. For really poor countries like Haiti, these bottom up remittances are five times more than the top down, plutocratic money that comes in from corporations and governments.
Truly we’ve entered the Network Age, but it’s still only just beginning. We don’t yet have global connectivity, or mass micropayments, or even the easy ability to wire money wirelessly everywhere. We don’t yet have true global transparency, or a metaverse (see http://metaverseroadmap.org) for an outline of the coming global virtual community space, a contract research project our nonprofit engaged in last year), but we are fast enabling these and many other developments of the coming Noosphere.
It’s a truly exciting time to be alive.
I look forward to meeting you all and learning from you, and my thanks to Tom for organizing what I’m sure will be a special and productive event.
Frederick Turner
The Beauty of Strange Attractors, Ideas Toward a Philanthropic Teleology
What must be true for uplift—deliberate action toward a better future--to be possible?
If there is only one future—i.e. if a single future is uniquely determined or fated or ordained—then there is no practical point even considering uplift, because we have no choice in the matter, and are going to act according to our fate anyway.
If there are an infinite number of possible futures—i.e. if every possible choice we could make will be made along one timeline or other--again, there is little point in discussions of philanthropic policy, since every outcome of the conversation will come true and none will be excluded.
If there are a limited number of futures, but they are random in outcome—i.e. they have no relation to our intentions and plans (or what we believe are our intentions and plans)—again, discussion is useless, decisions are empty, and action leading to intended results is impossible.
If there will be no change in the future, time will have stopped (since time is both marked by and constituted by change), and again discussion, decision, and action are useless.
Deliberate action toward a better future is possible only if there is a limited set of possible futures, if they involve change, if they bear a reasonable relation to our choices, if we are indeed able to choose, and if deliberation can affect our choices.
In other words, time is branchy, and we can and do choose certain branches over others; the past is the unbranched basis of choice, the future is the branches, and the present is the fork or branchpoint.
Who is “we”?
Any entity that is capable of using the past to predict possible futures, and taking a course of action to bring about certain future results and not others. By this definition all living organisms are included in this category of future-choosers. Immune system archiving, reproduction, sensorimotor systems, and central nervous system memory are all ways of choosing a future on the basis of past information.
For what reason does a person, organism or species choose a future?
Meaningful (nonrandom) choice comes with a bias toward a particular kind of outcome, ranging from survival of the individual organism, through survival of the lineage and species, to survival of the information constituting the organism’s archive, and survival of policies valued by the consensus of the archive. Evolution tends to bring about an increasingly general, metaphorical, and abstract meaning for “survival”. Increasingly we find futures based on more literal kinds of survival (material and individual ) being sacrificed for more metaphorical kinds, such as reproductive and ideological. The final choice is usually aimed as combining as many kinds of survival as possible, but sometimes it comes down to a choice between higher and lower kinds of survival. The deciduous tree sacrifices its leaves to preserve its xylem and phloem; the mother bird sacrifices her life for her offspring; the trader or student sacrifices his goods to get information; the soldier sacrifices his life for his country; Abraham is prepared to sacrifice his only son for his God.
What makes one kind of survival “higher” than another?
To put this question more explicitly, what makes the more metaphorical and abstract kinds of survival (patterns of DNA as opposed to actual molecules; species gene pools of sexually interbreeding DNA as opposed to clones; nations as opposed to tribes; religious convictions as opposed to nations; ethical or artistic principles as opposed to religious convictions; etc) better than their predecessors? The answer is that the higher kinds of survival offer more branchiness and can inhabit more timelines simultaneously, braiding them into one, than can the lower kinds. Indeed, the higher choices can often serve the lower motives better than the lower ones can serve themselves; self-sacrificing sexual species can outbreed asexual budding reproducers, ideologically-addicted humanity can produce more biomass than reproductive specialists like rabbits, idealistic civilizations can get richer than materialistic ones, etc.
From this consideration we can get a working definition of uplift as the choice of the richest multi-choice future world and the emergence of higher kinds of survival.
What guidance do we get for this work?
Milan Kundera complained that since we can’t rehearse the future beforehand and see how things turn out, we can’t be truly free to choose. Clearly the arts are major forms of rehearsal, depicting as they do coherent scenarios for how the world might be. But artists all report a strange phenomenon, called “inspiration”, “the Muse”, “the Holy Spirit”, etc. They claim with great unanimity that the script for the rehearsal doesn’t originate with them personally, but is somehow dictated to them from somewhere else. The same goes for oracles, shamans, and so on, and even for scientists, who always say that their best ideas ”come to them,” or philosophers and prophets like Socrates or Samuel, who hear a still small inner voice. Can the futures inform the present? Can the descendants tell their ancestors how to be good ancestors? Similarly, great saints, religious visionaries, and original ethicists are able to inject new moral biases (know thyself, love thy neighbor, do not enslave others, women are equal to men, freedom is the highest good) into the culture.
How does anticipation work?
If anticipation is anything more than random fantasy, it implies some kind of foreknowledge, or retrocausality. There is a push from the past (unselfishness worked before—maybe it will work again), but there seems also to be a pull from the future, a sort of skyhook. What constitutes “work” seems to be given by the future in which it has started to work, and its predecessors cannot be trusted to know what will work in the future. No amoeba would find convincing the argument that wildly shuffling your genes in sexual intercourse to produce new individuals could possibly further real survival.
But retrocausality seems to involve a horrible mass of paradoxes, that have been investigated by works of art as varied as Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, Back to the Future, and Terminator. Any time machine by which we can murder our own infant grandfather is problematic. We must look for a conception of anticipation that either avoids the paradoxes, or accepts and absorbs them as constitutive of time and demonstrable in history. Three theories of retrocausality suggest themselves, which I shall call the strong, medium, and weak theory.
What is strong retrocausality?
Wormhole time machines might be possible if they ruled out temporal paradoxes. Perhaps they might be able to send back information, if there is a virtual feedback system. Tom’s thought experiment of a “caser”, by analogy with the laser that reflects light back and forth until it becomes coherent, essentially reflects information back and forth between two times until the causal chain is non-paradoxical. One implication of such a process is that whatever message does get sent back in time will be highly ambiguous, metaphorical, and fictive in nature—poetry, parables, riddles rather than winning horses or stock market prices. In other words, they would be exactly like the oracles, prophecies, religious parables, “inner voices”, myths, poems, koans and suchlike that history is peppered with, and that have often made huge slow cumulative changes in history itself without any explicit paradox.
What is medium retrocausality?
Every nonlinear dynamical system that has been driven to the chaotic regime actually possesses a strange attractor in its mathematical phase space that pre-existed the actual events of the process itself. The first globular star cluster conformed to the Lorenz attractor: the first dripping faucet did too—the attractor was waiting around in some kind of Platonic realm for an actual physical embodiment that was close enough to get sucked into its general basin of attraction. There are many old attractors, named by Lorenz, Henon, Mandelbrot, etc; but there are also more recent attractors, such as the falcon or dahlia or streptococcus attractors, for which their respective genomes and proteomes are the recipe. Evolution proceeds in jumps because a new species must climb the lip of the old basin of attraction before slipping quickly down into the new. Each sexually-reproduced individual has a unique new attractor, and so does each thought, sensation and memory in the Hebbian-potentiated neural circuitry firing in the brain. Yet those attractors did have a sort of abstract existence before their embodiment, as did the Lorenz attractor.
So there are certainly forms or archetypes that seem to draw whirlpools, embryos, and ideas into their mature configurations. Are there ways we can in the present invite beneficial attractors to make their first home in a suitably prepared system? Are “values” actually recipes for such processes? The yeasts (in Jesus’ metaphor) that make a loaf a loaf? Is the evolutionary iterative cycle of mutation-selection-heredity such a recipe on the grand scale?
More practically, one could argue that such social systems as common law/adversarial trial/appellate review/precedent also constitutes such a recipe.Or observation/ scientific hypothesis/ experiment/ published theory/ scientific challenge/ professional review. Or free market/ legal property rights/ contract/ interest/ risk quantification/ insurance. Or democratic vote/ representation/ separation of powers/ federal polycentricity/ free press/ habeas corpus/ constitutional amendment. Out of the first we get the emergent property of justice; out of the second we get scientific knowledge; out of the third we get the great boon of prices; out of the fourth, life in a free nation. Arguably, too, artworks themselves are seeds that invite new emergent properties to take up residence in the world.
What is weak retrocausality?
This is so pervasive that we do not notice it. Every time we decide to act we choose a future. Just to exist alive and conscious is to sit in that slow reealtime time machine that carries us into the future at exactly one minute per minute. But to decide to act is to speed up the machine and change its direction. The choice of an action not only determines the future, in the sense of making it happen, it also determines the future in the sense that it identifies it and knows it. Knows it at least to some extent: we recognize the difference between acts whose results are predictable and those that have unexpected consequences—the latter are those that get us into tangled nonlinear feedback systems. The everyday time machine of choice includes retrocausality, in that the future result we choose affects our actions as their Final Cause (in Aristotle’s terminology). Intentionality is fundamentally a time loop. The normal default temporal size of that time loop is three seconds—short-term echoic memeory--but we can extend it by all sorts of part-biological, part-technological aids (writing, e.g.).
Decision-making is itself a “caser”-like feedback between the chosen goal and the present means to it, end and means revising each other according to our projected and actual entry into those means. This is the meaning of the psychological term “reflection.” This work uses an astonishing amount of neural processing power—the brain is essentially a time-machine—and is the only coherent explanation for the fact that the number of possible brain states in a single brain (ie its scope) is about 10 to the 10,000,000 power larger than the number of particles in the universe. On the collective level, markets create loops of transactions that multiply this huge volume of exchanges many times more; “utility” is our vague term for the attractor of such a process.
Mark Frazier
Microvouchers: Catalyzing a sustainable future for grassroots initiatives
Microvouchers can serve as a catalyst to spread useful skills at grassroots levels and to spark enabling reforms around the world that will help self-organizing initiatives prosper.
In current practice, Microvouchers are coupons that give residents free/discounted access to online learning and other resources through local cybercafes and Internet centers. Thousands of residents in Asian villages over the past 12 months have used Microvouchers in Openworld-conceived projects to build skills, access health care resources, and find telework projects in rapidly-growing eBay-style markets. Future Microvoucher systems based on online currencies have potential to reach tens, or hundreds, of millions around the world as the reach of Internet expands.
As Microvoucher proponents anticipate a global rollout, it will be good to consider ways for voucher donations to reward community removal of burdens on self-organizing ventures. A promising approach will be for donors to pool Microvoucher offers as "challenge grants" for exemplary localities to fast-track introduction of needed reforms in demonstration areas. Entrepreneur- and investor-friendly climates can demonstrated in "free zone" areas that deeply reduce regulatory, land titling, and other constraints that today deter business and self-help initiatives.
Donors can give further rewards for localities that take a further step to foster sustainable civil society ventures. Enriched bundles of Microvouchers can be offered to communities where social ventures and Microvoucher funds are vested as stakeholders in land development partnerships with the private sector. Sustainability for these social ventures can be assured through municipal or other public sector conveyance of attractive sites as "land grant" endowments. Land value gains of 5x-20x regularly are found in privately developed free zones around the world as diaspora and other investors gain confidence in their market-friendly environments.
In the coming decade, sustainable Microvoucher systems can spread around the world. This can help millions now at the "base of the pyramid" to gain language and business skills and to find work in actual and online free markets. Thousands of self-organizing social ventures could become stakeholders in what are initially small- and mid-size free economic zones. In some cases, Microvoucher-planted seeds of liberalizing reform could scale. This could lead over time the emergence of a new generation of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai-style "World Cities," with asset endowments creating funds for global as well as local good causes.
[Note: the ideas here are expanded on in the "Catalyzing Sustainable Nonprofits" whitepaper downloadable from http://www.openworld.com.]
Engaging Global Talent for Good Causes
How a Growing Problem in Online Markets Can Produce Benefits for Civil Society
E-Bay's revolutionary feedback system for building trust is spreading to online markets for services, in ways that provide a new resource that can be tapped by local and global social ventures.
Scores of "telework" markets have already attracted more than 500,000 service providers around the world who are seeking to win projects and earn internationally-visible reputations. Yet jobseekers and small/new entrepreneurs pouring into these rapidly-growing markets face a growing problem. "Race to the bottom" price competition will become intense as communication advances bring tens of millions of new competitors into these reverse-auction markets.
In response, philanthropies and others interested in building foundations for a free and properous future can offer online jobseekers around the world a systematic new way to build project-based reputations, by linking them to international and local good causes for an agreed period of service.
A new clearinghouse or matchmaking system launched for these ends can prepare foundations for a trust-building "extended order," in Hayek's terms, for individuals to succeed in open world markets. Participants would have opportunities, regardless of location, to experience a transnational ethos of giving, interact with honest systems of governance and dispute resolution in fast-growing global online marketplaces, and earn reputations based on their good works that they can carry subsequently into online markets.
Their service contributions can include a range of practical transcription, translation/localization, research, and other engagements that spread understanding of future-binding ideas as well as of methods for building successful businesses and social ventures. Other, more enduring service contributions may include helping to develop open source software components that enable communities to apply turnkey "eGovernment" systems that streamline licensing, titling, and approval processes for entrepreneurs and instill investor confidence.
Such actions can improve prospects for trust, civility, and prosperity to emerge over time in areas of the world that seek opportunity and growth yet increasingly resist externally-imposed reforms.
A Trans-species form of consilience?
What if we -- as a curious and forward-looking group of Homo Erectus --were gathering about 100,000 years ago to explore the "Good Ancestor principle"?
Chances are that we would have spent time considering how to be good ancestors to our direct descendants, rather than to the future wellbeing of our emerging rivals, the Neanderthals and homo sapiens.
Homo sapiens who considering the same challenge may soon be in a similar position. If Ray Kurzeil is right, our flesh and blood descendants may soon branch off into myriad human-machine hybrids. Genetic engineering could give rise to new species with intelligence.
We may find ourselves around three decades hence in same spot as Homo Erectus. We will need to choose then whether to be a good ancestor in a narrow or in an inclusive sense, extending beyond our biological descendants.
If we opt for an inclusive vision of being good ancestors, what will be the most reproductively-successful path we can pursue?
It may be to map a trans-species set of positive-sum memes and values (qualities of spirit) capable of earning the respect of other self-aware species as they evolve.
E.O Wilson and others have suggested that human evolution entered a "magic circle" of consilience when language emerged. A this point physical assemblies (genes) enjoyed greater success than others because they built carriers able to spawn memes (ideas) that helped the genes survive and multiply.
This coevolutionary advantage from mutually reinforcing genes and memes, however, is still grounded in the reproductive success of a particular species.
Perhaps we are ready, as "good ancestors", to create awareness of another magic circle that is not bound to propagating a particular species' genes.
This form of consilience would enhance the reproductive success of certain (species-transcending) memes when they interact with certain (species-transcending) qualities of spirit.
The task of finding such common ground may not be so daunting as in earlier ages. We are at a juncture where virtual realms make it possible to find positive-sum common ground through simulations and live interactions under varying sets of (potentially generalizable) local rules.
This process of anticipating the future can lead us to better discern the patterns of interaction in a species-independent form of consilience -- not in terms of producing a particular substantive resource ownership pattern, but in terms of process rules (adverbs) that generate positive sum benefits while avoiding harm among formal equals.
In this way, we might increase the odds of our continuing to thrive as a species, by working to propagate a (universally attractive) consilience based on value-preserving transformations. This could win trust and allies if and when evolution gives birth to malign competitors.
Creating a common vocabulary that establishes such trans-species trust may be our surest way to evolutionary success and to being seen as good ancestors.
Mihai Nadin
Anticipation As An Attractor
Notes from an optimist interested in what we have to do not what we want to celebrate.
The past has never been more irrelevant to the present—never mind the many possible futures—than today. If this startling assertion does not irk you enough, here is the corollary: The past will become even more irrelevant as humankind advances towards a pragmatic framework of a fundamentally new condition: from continuity and the expectation of permanence (embodied in what we do) to discontinuity and the never-ending excitement of transience (expressed in ways of doing things no longer related to the past). As humankind reaches the highest scale of integration and interaction—usually identified as global economy—this dynamics is an expression of necessity, not of choice. In our days, the preservation of the species entails a productive impetus that results in the highest efficiency—output compared with what it takes to obtain it—ever achieved. At this final scale, at which the nation-state and the associated functions of societal organization become obsolete (whether in the form of welfare programs, permanent treaties, or the UN Charter), humankind faces new challenges. Extreme individual self-determination is associated with the consequences of procreation and nurturing under circumstances resulting from the effective dissolution of family as we know it. In the so-called modern societies (imitated by those not yet reaching their level of prosperity), the preservation pressure increased to levels never experienced in the past. They already “import” the young and the capable from poor countries, because otherwise the pyramid game would break down under the heavy burden of benefits promised opportunistically without any understanding of the demographic equation.
Paradoxically, the more successful the Western world continues to be in terms of facilitating access to prosperity, the deeper the disconnect between the individuals who make it up and their sense of belonging to a whole that transcends their individual drives (including that of power). The data available(See William J. Baumol and Alan S. Binder, Economic Principles and Policy, 2004, p. 492; Amitava Mukerjee, Hunger. Theory, Perspectives and Reality, 2004; Key Indicators of Labour, International Labor Organization, 2006.) informs our understanding of the process: Pretty soon, given the technologically determined rate of productivity increase, 20% of the world population will be able to cover the needs, and in many cases the expectations, of the remaining 80%. Survival is guaranteed, even for the poorest countries on the face of the earth, and even access to relative indulgence is on the horizon—under miserable living conditions, television dominates the life of illiterates and unproductive men and women living at the mercy of various kinds of charities. All the while, coherence is rapidly decreasing. The sense of future, as a defining moment in the awareness of individuals involved in communities, melts into the immediateness of existence—in New York or Paris or Berlin or London as much as in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, or in the refugee camps all over the African and Asian continents. More and more, the world is made up of egotistic entities able to function despite the lack of a community of shared interests and responsibilities. Fanaticism, religious or social or political, is only an expression of this egotism in action. Religion as well as science—both subject to faster cycles of renewal—morality, the law, the arts, and education succumb to the same pressure of ME and NOW that are replacing US and FUTURE.
Humankind is in the process of transferring to all kinds of machines (i.e., programs, for all practical purposes), which tick according to their own rhythms (and not that of human existence), the vast majority of activities that in the past involved direct forms of work and human interactions. New activities are essentially human-less. In the name of concern for the human being—in areas of health, access to education, social services, for example—human beings can no longer afford to pay for human performance. Automation, which looks like the result of scientific and technological passion for more knowledge, is actually the expression of a necessity grounded in competitive pressure: the cheapest replacement of the human being, which is subject to ever longer cycles of expensive maintenance. The process is still only at the beginning—we have already become our own secretaries and telephone operators, thanks to labor-saving technology that promises to make us more productive, and thus more competitive. But to ignore it, or to present it, as the industry does, as a beautiful accomplishment means to miss the chance of understanding, of becoming engaged, in the process of change, instead of being only subject to it. Better communication is a grandiose self-delusion in which we indulge, still in awe of accessing everything there is, including things we never needed, and which will be obsolete even before we realize their potential. Become a “player” in the MMOG (massively multi-online games) that are becoming the medium of choice for conducting real or future battles, healing disease, advancing political agendas, and educating through entertainment (“edutainment”). Have you ever used a Newton™? As was the case for the Xbox, Play Station and Wii, there is already a futures market in which the iPhone (who owns the name, by the way?) is traded well over its price. Wait 6 months, sign a “nuptial agreement” for 2 years—no marriage today takes place under more protective circumstances; if it did, we would not have the rate of divorce we have today (and more singles than married couples, which would translate, I guess, into more non-users than users of cellular telephony).
It was, nevertheless, through practical creative experiences (from work to making art and enjoying) that throughout history the human being realized what space and time are. Creativity is anticipatory. According to our bio-physical condition, we humans constituted the sense of future as a contract among, not as a reaction-guided understanding of time. And it is through the new condition of practical experiences, entrusted upon artifacts that mimic and replace the human being, that this defining matrix ceases to be formative of our sense of distance and future, and thus of our responsibility as ancestors.
While this is happening, it is not only needs, corresponding to the preservation of the individual, that are met. Ever higher expectations, by far transcending the needs, are adopted in civil society, as an expression of human progress, as it panders to opportunistic tendencies. The right to affluence and deviation, in various forms, often defines the difference between those, still few, who have and impose their sense of righteousness, and those who, as a majority, or as protected minorities, expect help and affirm their right to choose. In this respect, it is justified to address the anticipatory model of Uplift—“being pulled by expectations of a better future, rather than being driven exclusively by the problem-solving model”—provided that its terms are well defined. But to give meaning to this well-intended model, we need to address anticipation with maximum rigor. Robert Rosen is well known for attempting such a level of rigor; my own modest work could not be justified independent of expectations of rigor. The construct we call anticipation makes sense only if related to the broader perspective of science. Deterministic reductionism, expressed in the machine model, and to the non-deterministic understanding of complexity, as the underlying factor of change, need to be understood in their unity not as reciprocally exclusive..
Anticipation in Society At Large
Anticipation within a relatively unchanging reality—the reality of human interactions in previous pragmatic frameworks—is a matter of the individual’s performance in a context of interaction and cooperation. To deviate entailed risk not only to individuals, but also to the community they interacted with. In our new context, of extreme competitive nature, anticipation still underlies individual performance (think of the new role of “stars”—from champion athletes to actors to politicians to star scientists), but it becomes critical as it pertains to society at large. It is at this scale that we face the consequences of:
- changes in the environment;
- extreme events corresponding to the dynamics of nature (such as earthquakes, tidal waves, floods) and of human beings (terrorist attacks, or failed large-scale projects carried out because we can, not because we should, that is, due to a missing sense of time and thus of consequences—the Aswan Dam and the dikes in New Orleans are examples);
- the breakdown of family, community, society;
- the failure of a model of democracy focused on leveling and on equal access to mediocrity;
- the end of politics, supplanted by the economic model of competing interests of public entities calling themselves “parties” while in reality representing the selfish interests of their own members;
- the aging of humankind and of all the consequences, well beyond what we want to concede, that this entails.
For all practical purposes, Jonas Salk’s question: “Are we being good ancestors?” is rhetorical at best, while historically it is of extreme significance since it pertains to our past. As we get closer to the next historic bifurcation (the last was described by Norbert Wiener as the “new industrial revolution” The Human Use of Human Beings: “The industrial revolution is a two-edged sword. It may be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough to enter a period in which such benefit is possible. It may also be used to destroy humanity; and it can go very far in that direction.”), the stability of the global system is challenged by many perturbations.
Our almost exclusive choice—and I don’t mean to negate the role of free choice within a dynamics of change determined by global forces—is to understand the forces at work, and to act in ways that do not result in additional disturbance—and in our own self-destruction. The equation of population change is close to a provisional balance; after that, even without taking into consideration the very prolific Muslim population, or the consequences of the AIDS epidemics, the numbers look rather ominous. Anticipation as an attractor corresponds to a dynamic systems perspective. It is the necessary value towards which it tends. Each bifurcation brings it closer to the “strange attractor” that seems to affect the entire process. Before the dynamic system of human existence on this planet is reset, as dynamic systems get reset once the bifurcations get closer and closer and eventually hit the “chaos wall,” we have to make the effort to understand that behind faster cycles of change (and innovation), behind the new science of the circumstantial, behind the adverse reaction to religion and alternative descriptions of the world as we experience it, there is the reality of a species that, in its meliorist euphoria, has reached another form of decadence if not degeneration. The aging of population in the Western world is a phenomenon impossible to ignore when addressing the future.
Heinz von Foerster, whose visionary work (think about his Biological Computer Laboratory in 1957 at the University of Illinois) influenced many scientists—I know that Rosen was quite impressed by it—answered the question we shall debate with an ethical imperative: “Always act as to increase the number of choices.” Since for me anticipation is a realization from the present to the future, represented by the space of possibilities, I would reformulate the ethical imperative as: Recognize, acknowledge, and multiply the space of possibilities; those who come after us will make choices different from ours—including the choice of finding us, as past, irrelevant. We will never find out if they considered us good ancestors. But they might be touched by the thought that at least we asked the question.
T. Clark Durant
John Rawls vs. Jonas Salk
The Good Ancestor Principle (hereafter, the Principle) bears a passing resemblance to the Veil of Ignorance construct (hereafter, the Veil) proposed by political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls discusses the Veil most thoroughly in The Theory of Justice, which was published in 1970. The Veil is meant to be a useful fiction. The fiction is of a group of individuals choosing the rule-structure of their society from a position where they are ignorant of what their wealth, health, profession, religion, beliefs, etc. will be. This fiction is meant to be useful to organize our thoughts about the rule-structure of a just society.
The Veil asks us to see ourselves through the eyes of our hypothetically disinterested selves. This perspective is meant to provide a measure of institutions in the here and now. The Veil is supposed to generate a measuring stick on which we all agree. Agreement upon the measure of the good is supposed to be necessary and sufficient, or just necessary, or anyway just sufficient to move us toward the good. Or so the story goes.
We could hope that the Principle would generate a measuring stick as well. We could make the Principle say something like what the Veil says: “The Principle asks us to see ourselves through the eyes of our hypothetical descendants. This perspective is meant to provide a measure of institutions in the here and now.”
But this take might miss much of the moral pull of the Principle. The Principle does not run on stylized and abstracted arguments. Instead, it runs on concrete relationships: my father and I, my granddaughter and her favorite author, your nephew and his grandson, his mentor and his student’s student. The Principle does not derive its force from agreement, or unity of vision. Many actors can live out variations on the Principle in parallel.
The Principle in Parallel
The fact that the Principle works in parallel suggests that the moral thrust of any of its particular instances is less important than the pull of getting more of its instances online. I imagine the point is not to figure out what follows (logically, philosophically, politically, argumentatively) from the Principle, but rather to get a greater proportion of the world’s people to be secure, healthy, and wealthy enough to live for the relationships that the Principle anticipates and presupposes.
As I understand it, this is what motivates interest in frameworks that enable massive parallel application of the Principle. The enterprise is helping those whose lives would otherwise be solitary, nasty, brutish and short become connected, healthy, wealth, and wise.
My particular concern is with making it less worthwhile for some political elites to predate upon their own people rather than let them flourish. I am working on an electoral framework that makes constitutional governance adaptable and self-enforcing, even in ethnically divided societies. I am also interested in lengthening the time horizon that elected politicians take into account beyond the next election to two or three elections out. Four would be utopian!
Vernor Vinge
Before "Nature red in tooth and claw"
The notion of evolution has frightening undertones. The benevolent view of Mother Nature in many children's nature films often seems a thin facade over an unending story of pain and death and betrayal. For many, the basic idea behind evolution is that one creature succeeds at the expense of another, and that death without offspring is the price of failure. In the human realm, this is often the explanation for the most egregious personal and national behavior.
This view percolates even into our humor. When someone commits an extreme folly and is fatally thumped for it, we sometimes say, "Hey, just think of it as evolution in action." In fact, these views of evolution are very limited ones. At best they capture one small aspect of the enormous field of emergent phenomena. They miss a paradigm for evolution that predates Lord Tennyson's "bloody in tooth and claw" by thousands of million years. And they miss a paradigm that has appeared in just the last three centuries, one that may become spectacularly central to our world.
Long before humankind, before the higher animals and even the lower ones, there were humbler creatures ... the bacteria. These are far too small to see, smaller than even the single-celled eukaryotes like amoebas and paramecia. When most people think of bacteria at all, they think of rot and disease. More dispassionately, people think of bacteria as utterly primitive: "they don't have sex", "they don't have external organization", "they don't have cellular nuclei". Certainly, I am happy to be a human and not a bacterium! And yet, in the bacteria we have a novelty and a power that are awesome. At the same time most folk proclaim the bacteria's primitive nature, they also complain of the bacteria's ability to evolve around our antibiotics. (And alas, this ability is so effective that what was in the 1950s and 1960s a medical inconvenience is becoming an intense struggle to sustain our antibiotic advantage, to avoid what Science magazine has called the "post anti-microbial era".)
Exchanging Genetic Material
The bacteria have a different paradigm for evolution than the one we naively see in the murderous behavior of metazoans. The bacteria do not have sex as we know it, but they do have something much more efficient: the ability to exchange genetic material among themselves -- across an immensely broad range of bacterial types. Bacteria compete and consume one another, but just as often both losers and winners contribute genetic information to later solutions. Though bacteria are correctly called a Kingdom of Life, the boundary between their "species" is nearly invisible. One might better regard their Kingdom as a library, containing some 4000 million years of solutions. Some of the solutions have not been dominant for a very long time. The strictly anaerobic bacteria were driven from the open surface almost 2000 million years ago, when free oxygen poisoned their atmosphere. The thermophilic bacteria survive in near-boiling water. Millions of less successful (or currently unsuccessful) solutions hide in niches around the planet.
The Kingdom's Library has some very musty, unlit corners, but the lore is not forgotten: the Kingdom is a vast search and retrieval engine, creating new solutions from the bacteria's ability for direct transfer of genetic information. This is the engine which we with our tiny computers and laboratories are up against when we talk airily of "acquired antibiotic resistance". For the bacteria, evolution is a competition in which little is ever lost, and yet solutions are found. (I recommend the books of Lynn Margulis for a knowledgeable discussion of this point of view. Margulis is a world-class microbiologist whose writing is both clear and eloquent.)
A Sense of Self
For the most part, we metazoans have a strong sense of self. More, we have a very strong sense of boundary -- where our Self ends and the Otherness begins. It is this sense of self and of boundary that makes the process of evolution so unpleasant to many. The bacterial Kingdom continues today. It has been stable for a very long time, and will probably be so for a long time to come. It has its limits, ones it seems unlikely ever to transcend. Nevertheless, I find some comfort in it as an alternative to the conflict and pain and death we see in evolution among the metazoans. And many of of the bacteria's good features I see reflected in a second paradigm, one that has risen only in the last few centuries: the paradigm of the human business corporation.
Corporations do compete. Some win and some lose (not always for reasons that any sensible person would relate to quality!), and eventually things change, often in a very big way. Unlike bacteria, corporations exist across an immense range of sizes and can be hierachical. As such, they have a capacity for complexity that does not exist in the bacterial model. And yet, like bacteria, their competition is mainly a matter of knowledge, and knowledge need never be lost. Very few participants actually die in their competition: the knowledge and insight of the losers can often continue. As with the bacterial paradigm, the corporate model maintains only low thresholds between Selves. Very much unlike the bacterial paradigm, the corporate one admits of constant change (up and down) in the size of the Self.
At present, the notion of corporations as living creatures is a whimsy or a legal contrivance (or a grim, Hobbesian excuse for tyranny), but we are entering an era where the model may be one to look at in a very practical sense. Our computers are becoming more and more powerful. I have argued elsewhere that computers will probably attain superhuman power within the next thirty years. At the same time, we are networking computers into a worldwide system. We humans are part of that system, the dominant and most important feature in its success.
A Post-Human Future
But what will the world be like when the machines move beyond our grasp and we enter the Post-Human era? In a sense that is beyond human knowing, since the major players will be as gods compared to us. Yet we see hints of what might come by considering our past, and that is why many people are frightened of the Post-Human era: they reason by analogy with our human treatment of the dumb animals -- and from that they have much to fear. Instead, I think the other paradigms for competition and evolution will be much more appropriate in the Post-Human era.
Imagine a worldwide, distributed reasoning system in which there are thousands of millions of nodes, many of superhuman power. Some will have knowable identity -- say the ones that are currently separated by low bandwidth links from the rest -- but these separations are constantly changing, as are the identities themselves. With lower thresholds between Self and Others, the bacterial paradigm returns. Competition is not for life and death, but is more a sharing in which the losers continue to participate.
And as with the corporate paradigm, this new situation is one in which very large organisms can come into existence, can work for a time at some extremely complex problem -- and then may find it more efficient to break down into smaller souls (perhaps of merely human size) to work on tasks involving greater mobility or more restricted communication resources. This is a world that is fightening still, since its nature undermines what is for most of us the bedrock of our existence, the notion of persistent self. But it need not be a cruel world, and it need not be one of cold extinction. It may in fact be the transcendent nature dreamed of by many brands of philosopher throughout history.
