Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Redrawing the globe with the city at its heart

Very sincere thanks to @polgrim for flagging up this excellent article at ForeignPolicy.com. It’s like a heaped plate of geopolitical and socioeconomic Zeitgeist, full of favourite Futurismic riffs like the decline of the nation-state, the weakening of the “first-world” West, the shift toward urban living and the possibilities – good and bad – of rethinking the way we approach these things.

Be sure to read the whole thing (it’ll probably take you maybe twenty minutes max, and it’s worth every second), but here’s a chunk that made my brain chime like a temple bell:

Accelerating this shift toward new regional centers of gravity are port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai, the Venices of the 21st century: “free zones” where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Dubai’s recent real-estate overreach notwithstanding, emerging city-states along the Persian Gulf are investing at breakneck speed in efficient downtown business districts, offering fast service and tax incentives to relocate. Look for them to use sovereign wealth funds to acquire the latest technology from the West, buy up tracts of agricultural land in Africa to grow their food, and protect their investments through private armies and intelligence services.

Alliances of these agile cities are already forming, reminiscent of that trading and military powerhouse of the late Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League along the Baltic Sea. Already, Hamburg and Dubai have forged a partnership to boost shipping links and life-sciences research, while Abu Dhabi and Singapore have developed into a new commercial axis. No one is waiting for permission from Washington to make deals. New pairings among global cities follow the markets: Witness the new Doha to Sao Paulo direct flight on Qatar Airways or the Buenos Aires to Johannesburg route on South African Airways. When traffic between New York and Dubai dried up due to the financial crisis, Emirates airlines rerouted its sleek Airbus A380 planes to Toronto, whose banking system survived the economic shake-up in better shape.

And another:

Consider how aggressively Chinese cities have now begun to bypass Beijing as they send delegates en masse to conferences and fairs where they can attract foreign investment. By 2025, China is expected to have 15 supercities with an average population of 25 million (Europe will have none). Many will try to emulate Hong Kong, which though once again a Chinese city rather than a British protectorate, still largely defines itself through its differences with the mainland. What if all China’s supercities start acting that way? Or what if other areas of the country begin to demand the same privileges as Dalian, the northeastern tech center that has become among China’s most liberal enclaves? Will Beijing really run China then? Or will we return to a fuzzier modern version of the “Warring States” period of Chinese history, in which many poles of power competed in ever-shifting alliances?

Centralised governance is done; stick a fork in it. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold… but “mere anarchy” might not be the horror that Yeats expected it to be. We’re adaptable critters, us humans; we’d do well to remember that.

Blog

SciFi Strange: online short sf ‘dream anthology’ curated by Jason Sanford

1 Comment

Subgenres proliferate in fecundity, their fuzzy edges perpetually osmosing* into one another. Or something like that, anyway… however you want to look at, Jason Sanford’s trying to describe and categorise an identifiable strand of modern science fiction short stories:

SciFi Strange isn’t a label. It isn’t a definition.  Instead, it’s an attempt to describe the science fiction being created by some of today’s most exciting writers. These stories combine the literary standards and cultural understandings of the New Wave movement with the basic strangeness and sensawunda from the golden age of science fiction–all seen through the lens of today’s multicultural world, where diversity and difference are the norm even as basic human values and needs still bind us together.

SciFi Strange also flirts with the boundaries of what is scientifically–and therefore realistically–possible, without being bounded by the rigid frames of the world as we know it today.

(Which may be why no Futurismic stories made the cut. Sad face… 🙁 )

But don’t call SciFi Strange fantasy. This is pure science fiction. It’s merely an updated version of the literature of ideas. A science fiction for a world where the frontiers of scientific possibility are almost philosophical in nature.

However you define it, Sanford’s got a great list of stories by some interesting authors rounded up on that page: fourteen tales, all free to read on the web or download as a PDF, from some of the most reputable publications (dead-tree and digital) in the business. Should keep you busy for the rest of the weekend, eh? 🙂

[ * Not sure is this is the correct way to conjugate osmosis as a verb, but by hell, it should be. ]

Blog

Destroying the chrysalis of your online childhood

1 Comment

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has suggested that in the near future every person might be entitled to change their name on reaching adulthood, in order that they can live unhindered by the online record of their youthful indiscretions. Now, Eric Schmidt is almost certainly a much smarter man than I am… but that idea is clearly batshit nuts, especially coming from a Google bigwig.

I mean, think about it – most people use pseudonyms and handles online as it is. How many names and identities will you be allowed to abandon? One? Some? All? And as the vigilante efforts of Anonymous prove time and time again, even folk making a big effort to conceal their identity can have it exposed against their will. If Schmidt is implying (as he seems to be – it’s hard to tell from such a throwaway comment, to be fair) that the digital record would remain after this identity disconnection, how exactly would you prevent people from doing a combination of internet sleuthing and good old-fashioned meatspace gumshoe work in order to connect xCrazyLarry1989x to Lawrence Michaels, aspiring tort lawyer and gubernatorial candidate for his local Chamber of Commerce?

Given the way web technology keeps advancing, it may not even be much of an effort. Hell, Google itself offers a neat little app called Goggles that can identify famous faces and objects by comparing them to archived images on the web (as for values of ‘famous’, John Scalzi is apparently famous enough for this to work); given the sheer number of photos on the Facebook profiles of most young people, how are you going to prevent someone using this sort of image search and linking your newly-renamed Adult Person to the child they were?

Simple answer: you’re not. If what Schmidt actually means is that there’ll be some sort of legally-enshrined disconnect between an adult and their behaviour before adulthood, then maybe it’s not quite such a crazy suggestion… but it’s still pretty crazy. Personally, I tend to agree with Stowe Boyd and others: I think we underestimate the common sense kids apply to social media based on the high-profile idiocy of a tiny minority, and I think we overestimate the impact that youthful (or even not so youthful) indiscretions in the digital fossil record will have on how the people who left them behind will be viewed. As a crude numbers-from-the-air example: if one in five kids is pictured somewhere on the web taking a hit from a bong, is society more likely to (a) refuse to employ 1/5 of the population, or (b) figure that kids smoking weed really isn’t such a big deal?

Trouble is, we keep applying the social mores of today to the society of a decade hence. Think about how different the world felt just five years ago; attitudes change fast. By the time the internet’s knowledge of our past is sufficient to be causing problems for the majority of people, my bet is that we’ll be worrying about something else entirely. Or, to put it another way: when you have evidence that pretty much everyone has been a little bit naughty at some point in their lives, your assessment of how much naughtiness is forgivable will shift accordingly. Transgression is implicitly assessed against a baseline of ‘normality’; a searchable childhood for everyone will move that baseline. In fact, I’d even go so far as to suggest it’ll be the people with squeaky-clean pasts who end up looking the most suspicious…

Blog

Probabilistic processing: the analogue computer waits in the wings

1 Comment

Digital processing has the advantage of versatility – the utter ubiquity of computer technology is a testament to that. But digital logic has to use lots of bits to represent large ranges of values; perhaps some applications – spam filtering, for instance, or pattern analysis – would run better and faster on a system that allowed for analogue values “in the raw”, so to speak?

Lyric’s innovation is to use analogue signals instead of digital ones, to allow probabilities to be encoded directly as voltages. Their probability gates represent zero probability as 0 V, and certainty as VDD. But unlike digital logic, for which these are the only options, Lyric’s technology allows probabilities between 0 and 1 to use voltages between 0 and VDD. Each probabilistic bit (“pbit”) stores not an exact value, but rather, the probability that the value is 1. The technology allows a resolution of about 8 bits; that is, they can discriminate between about 28 = 256 different values (different probabilities) between 0 and VDD.

By creating circuits that can operate directly on probabilities, much of the extra complexity of digital circuits can be eliminated. Probabilistic processors can perform useful computations with just a handful of pbits, with a drastic reduction in the number of transistors and circuit complexity as a result.

This could so easily be an excerpt from a Rudy Rucker story… or a Neal Stephenson novel, for that matter.

Blog

Transhumanist science clash! Kurzweil vs. Myers

10 Comments

Say what you will about transhumanism, but one thing’s for certain: it really polarises opinion, and nowhere more so than in the halls of academia and scientific research. Observe: Wired/Gizmodo had a chat with Singularitarian-in-chief Ray Kurzweil, who restated his theory (considered unrealistically optimistic by some transhumanists) that we’ll be able to reverse-engineer the human brain and simulate it with computers within a decade or so.

Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

Now enter PZ Myers, prominent atheism advocate (I like to think of him as “Dawkins’ Bulldog”, though I’m not sure Dawkins really needs a bulldog in the way that Darwin did) and vigorous debunker of fringe science. Broad claims in the Kurzweil vein are like a red rag to Myers, especially on his home turf of genetic biology, and he’s not afraid of mixing in a little ad hominem disparagement with his rejoinders, either:

Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It’s design is not encoded in the genome: what’s in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn’t even aware of the magnitude of that problem.

[…]

To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it’s the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn’t even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

Now, I’m not taking sides here*; I don’t know enough computer science or evolutionary biology to cut into either interpretation. But a high-minded slapfight like this is always of interest, because it highlights just how seriously some very intelligent people take the issue. Kurzweil has more than a tinge of the evangelist about him, which is (I suspect) a large part of what bothers Myers about him, but there’s obviously something powerful about the idea (the meme?) of transhumanism/singularitarianism that he feels makes it worth fighting.

Ideas that get people arguing are important ideas. I consider myself a fellow traveller of transhumanism for this very reason; the ways we imagine tomorrow says a lot about where we are today, and vice versa. There’s a lot to learn by listening to both sides, I think.

[ * Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve got marks on my ass from sitting on the fence. That’s just how I roll, baby; you want clenched-fist advocacy of anything but the right to think for yourself, you’re gonna need to read a different blog. ]