It may be hard to believe, but there once was a time when Neoliberal Globalized Corporate Capitalism (NGCC) wasn't the only economic model around--and even a time when NGCC didn't even exist! Our current era may seem like the "end of history" to some observers, but the fact of the matter is that economics isn't an end in and of itself, but a means to the end of material comfort and prosperity. When the social, technological, and environmental rules change, economic models change, too, taking advantage of new ways to achieve this goal.
The three possible economic models I suggested last week, and explore in a bit more detail below, should be considered speculations on what the world will look like in the coming decades as the emerging changes to environment, society, and technology take hold. As before, I look forward to hearing your suggestions and alternatives.
One note before I start: if you've read my stuff over the years, you might be surprised that none of the three future economic models are explicitly sustainability-focused. That's because they all are--that is, environmental sustainability is intrinsic to all three of these models, as it will be intrinsic to whatever economic structures function successfully this century. As the next few decades unfold, any economic behavior that doesn't take sustainability into account will fail.
These items are written in scenario form: call it the "anticipatory future."
Resilience Economics
Resilience Economics employs a mix of regulations and norms (i.e., non-regulated but expected behavior) to shift standard business processes away from a focus on efficiency towards a focus on flexibility.
Resilience Economics (RE) emerged out of the realization that Neoliberal Globalized Corporate Capitalism made money hand-over-fist when everything was working right, but was like a rapidly-spinning top--seemingly stable, but if it hit too rough a patch, it went wildly out of control. The RE world, conversely, is less-lucrative during growth periods, but weathers downturns so well that most folks don't even notice when "recessions" hit.
Proponents of NGCC dismissed RE as unable to compete with the 20th century way of making money, and that appeared to be correct up until the Great Retreat of 2017 hit, the downturn that made the 2008-2010 recession pale in comparison. Ironically, most folks figure that it was because we didn't fix the problems in the first real 21st century recession, just offered bailouts and slaps on the wrist, that we got hit by the Great Retreat a decade later.
Three key characteristics of Resilience Economics shape the way we live:
Polyculture markets means that no one economic (or financial) institution ever gets "too big to fail," or so big that it distorts markets the way WalMart used to. This was probably the most politically controversial set of rule changes, but the least visible for most everyday people.
Transactional Transparency upset some politicians and executives, too, but really worked to smooth out markets. All along, economists said that capitalism depends on transparent markets, where buyers and sellers know all the relevant details, but that was always the one aspect of capitalism that most "capitalists" ignored.
Collaborative Flexibility, aka the "Lego Economy." The result of the previous two characteristics, really. Lots of small companies, individual entrepreneurs, even part-time workers able to come together as necessary for big projects.
Is it perfect? No. It's noticeably less efficient than the 20th century model, and a lot of older folks say that they don't feel as "rich" as they did a few decades ago, but it's hard to say how much of that is from RE, and how much is just that we're all trying to deal with adapting to a global environmental crisis.
Just-in-Time Socialism
Just-in-Time Socialism takes advantage of the increased power of digital information systems to provide much more effective demand projection and cost transparency, using just-in-time production and delivery systems to make an evolved form of socialism work.
While the U.S. went for Resilience Economics in the wake of the Great Retreat, Japan took a different path. Two developments allowed Japan to try something radical--well, two developments plus a population already accustomed to heavy automation and a fledgling government desperate to push Japan in a new direction.
Of the two new technologies, the most visibly critical was the development of the Aoki-Marr Prediction Demand AI in 2016. By watching consumption patterns but also tracking demographic, culture, and design changes, Aoki-Marr could predict consumer demand up to a year in advance far better than any brand strategist or B-school graduate. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough to make Aoki and Marr very, very rich. After the Great Retreat, Aoki and Marr offered the code to governments around the world; Japan was one of a handful that took them up on it. Only Japan has stuck with it, although the model's success there is causing some states to reconsider.
The other technology key to the success of Just-in-Time Socialism was ultra-rapid 3D printing, bordering on nano-manufacturing. This gave the Japanese government the means to start undertaking production across a wide array of markets without having to nationalize industries. More importantly, it allowed for extremely flexible manufacturing: the Demand Prediction AI could spot an emerging trend and get new products to market with remarkable speed.
Critics say that Japan is lucky, because it has a shrinking population. Most folks still work in traditional jobs, but many of these companies are subsidized by the government. The rate at which the just-in-time production system is pushing people out of jobs matches the rate at which the population as a whole is declining. Young people have even fewer reasons to be ambitious--but Japan, as a whole, is pretty happy with the situation.
Robonomics
Robonomics has digital systems doing much of the work, supporting a version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, a life of indolence, or even a regular job, one that may pay much more than now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn't want the work.
The U.S. slowed down, Japan took control, and Europe... well, Europe got wired. Or got weird, depending on your perspective.
On the surface, you still have the same kinds of big companies, same kinds of consumption patterns, same kinds of advertising that you did a few decades earlier. But the twist is that almost nobody works--maybe about 25% of the population engages in income-generating employment, and at least half of that consists of educators, bureaucrats, and the self-employed. Manufacturing, transportation, and most basic services are done with robots, semi-autonomous systems that nobody even pretends have real intelligence, but work well enough to keep the economy humming. Personal service jobs remain in human hands, but those are often performed by recent immigrants, trying to earn the right to a BIG Card.
BIG: Basic Income Guarantee, a ticket to a happy life of reading, travel, playing World of Starcraft II, raising kids, or whatever, all on society's dime. It would have seemed crazy to us at the beginning of the century, but it actually works. In the aftermath of the Great Retreat, unemployment levels were outrageously high, and there were no signs that the reconstituted corporations were going to be able to employ even a fraction of the people looking for jobs. It was the "Uncanny Compromise" (it sounds better in the original French) that solved the problem: the corporations paid huge tax rates instead of payrolls, and everyone got to live moderately-comfortable lives.
It turned out that the percentage of folks driven to start companies or invent new things remained more-or-less consistent--the people who were only looking to make piles of money, so moved away, were made up for by the people who had good ideas but had to spend too much time simply getting by to make them real.
Government employs a good fraction of people, some to keep things going, but quite a few as Climate Mitigation First Responders, dealing with building sea walls, restoring wetlands, installing air conditioning, and the like. These folks are nearly always recent graduates, instilled with a sense of obligation to a society that keeps them fed and happy.
The big problem, though, is that everybody wants in. The EU borders are effectively closed to migration (with a few humanitarian exceptions, and basic "keep the population steady" immigration), patrolled by drones and the military. Every year, at least a hundred people are killed trying to get in. It's like the ultimate gated community, and nobody here likes it--but nobody has been able to figure out another solution.
Some or all of these scenarios may seem unbelievable to you. That's good--tell me why, and what you think will happen instead. And what's happening in the rest of the world?
Here are some useful basics. The scenarios are set roughly in 2030, so the world has had time to get over the Great Retreat. The environment is worse, but not catastrophic. No Singularity is on the horizon, but semi-autonomous AI are commonplace. The Great Retreat hastened the end of the fossil fuel era, now moving swiftly to electric vehicles (with biofuels as the transition in many places).
So... what's happening in China in this world? They're no longer the manufacturing powerhouse they once were--have they gone RE, JiT Socialist, or Robonomic? Or have they tried to stick with traditional NGCC? What's happening in India? In South Africa? In Brazil? In the Middle East?
Time to strap on the Futurist Cap for some serious speculation.
Although it's easy to think otherwise, the structure of the modern global economy is not terribly old, arguably dating back to the collapse of the gold standard in 1971, or the post-World War II "Bretton Woods" conference in 1944. Earlier versions of what we would nonetheless still call "capitalism" had very different degrees (and kinds) of government intervention, roles for labor and capital, even rules about currencies. Add to that the mention more extreme variants such as socialism and communism, corporatism (fascism), and the sundry experiments in anarchism, and you have quite a menagerie of all-but-extinct economic models.
The social and economic structures underpinning the modern world are constantly evolving, and there will very likely soon come a point--probably in the next generation or so, if history is a guide--that we no longer see the socioeconomic world as belonging to the same "species" as back at the beginning of the 21st century. Instead, we'll probably see a period of experimentation with diverse economic forms; indeed, the mid-21st century could well be a truly exciting time for wonkery.
Speaking as a social futurist, not an economist, the three emerging conditions that ride high on my list of potential breaking points for the modern economy are as follows:
Brittle Strength: The current global economy seems to exaggerate booms and busts, and the ongoing consolidation of corporate actors into "too big to fail" entities means that when busts happen--and they do--the system tends towards failure rather than "soft landing." It's getting harder and harder for governments to step in and serve as safety nets to prevent total collapse; the current economic downturn may well be the last one the system can stand.
Griefer Economics: Information is power, especially when it comes to finance, and the increasing use of ultra-fast computers to manipulate markets (and drive out "weaker" competitors) is moving us into a world where market position isn't determined by having the best offering, but by having the best tool. Rules are gamed, opponents are beaten before they even know they're playing, and it all feels very much like living on a PvP online game server where the referees have all gone home.
Robots Stole My Job!: Think you can't be replaced by a machine? Think again. Robots are becoming more dextrous, able to do a growing number of tasks requiring precision and strength, and computer systems are becoming smarter, able to tackle jobs needing pattern-matching and creative skills. Humans are still cheaper, for now, but this puts downward pressure on wages--and the old rule that new technology opens up entirely new fields of human labor won't hold true forever. Smarter, more capable machines will snap up those jobs, too.
All exaggerations, to be sure, but indicative of where trends seem to be heading. All are issues that could, over the next decade, explode in a way that pushes us to try innovative economic and social models. So what might those new models look like?
Here are some examples, each a counter to a particular issue:
Resilience Economics: The closest of the three to the current model, Resilience Economics employs a mix of regulations and norms (i.e., non-regulated but expected behavior) to shift standard business processes away from a focus on efficiency towards a focus on flexibility. I previously explored this concept a bit in this post at my main blog.
Pro: Weathers economic cycles well. Con: Less profitable than current model when current model is working well.
Just-In-Time Socialism: This economic model takes advantage of the increased power of digital information systems to provide much more effective demand projection and cost transparency, using just-in-time production and delivery systems to make an evolved form of socialism work. This would be a heavily top-down model, but would theoretically do away with many of the misfeatures that caused 20th century communism to fail.
Pro: Better equity and transparency. Con: Still a brittle system, when it fails will fail hard.
Robonomics: If robots and digital systems can do everything, let them--but let human society skim value from the result. This becomes a technologically-driven version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, or even a life of indolence. Or they can get one of the remaining human jobs, jobs that may pay much more than they do now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn't want the work.
Pro: This is what we all want, ultimately. C'mon, admit it. Con: Hard to implement in one country/region without very strong migration controls.
I'll explore each of these in more detail next week. For now, I welcome suggestions as to what other new economic systems we might have in store for us over the next decade or three.
Picture Credits: Money, courtesy Jamais Cascio, Creative-Commons Licensed Robot Worker, courtesy Jamais Cascio, Creative-Commons Licensed
You might not have heard of "stem rust," a fungus that attacks wheat and can wipe out entire fields of grain. It's been around for centuries, and was responsible for wiping out 40% of the U.S. wheat crop in 1954; since the late 1960s, however, the fungus has been kept under control by rust-resistant varieties of wheat in use around the world. It's been kept under control so well, in fact, that when a new variety of black stem rust emerged in Uganda in the late 1990s, nobody was prepared to counter it.
This new variant wheat rust, "Ug99," isn't stopped by the common form of blight-resistant wheat. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT, tracks the progression of blights like Ug99, but its resources have declined as the world grew complacent. CIMMYT estimated in 2007 that it would take five to eight years, at least, to develop and distribute a variety of wheat that could stand up to the new fungus.
It's now a race. Ug99 has now made its way out of Africa, into the Middle East and South Asia. It's already hit Iran, and is now starting to show up in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It turns out that Pakistan is the world's sixth-largest producer of wheat; India (almost certain to start seeing Ug99 outbreaks soon) is second only to China. In short, these are heavily wheat-dependent regions seeing the very real possibility of a near-term collapse in wheat production.
In Afghanistan, the crisis takes on a political hue, as wheat production has been at the forefront of alternative crops for former opium poppy growers. If wheat production collapses there, not only is there a prospect of famine, but there's a very high likelihood that the farmers will return to growing poppies--which would provide, in turn, a surge in one of the streams of funding for the Taliban.
If Ug99 makes it to China--and there's no reason why it won't--then the prospect looms of an unprecedented famine. And since fungi are easily blown about by storms, it's very likely that the U.S. would start to see Ug99 wheat blight by early in the next decade. Nearly all of the top ten wheat producing nations could see Ug99 outbreaks over the course of the next few years. If the development of Ug99-resistant wheat takes longer than expected, the world faces the staggering possibility of a global famine.
So here's where Bill Gates steps in.
In 2008, the Gates Foundation donated $26.8 million dollars to the Durable Rust Resistance project, a multinational effort to track the spread of stem rust, and to quickly develop resistant strains of wheat. Cornell University coordinates these efforts, and the project is now starting to see results. Earlier this year, researchers found a gene complex that seems to kill Ug99.
In a year of frenzied international breeding programmes, CIMMYT and national labs cross-bred a wheat variety called Kingbird - which carries the new gene complex - with high-yielding varieties of wheat adapted for different regions, and tested the results against Ug99 in infected regions of Africa. Besides resisting Ug99, says Singh, the new breeds yield more grain than the varieties that farmers now grow.
It's only a single gene complex--the current variety of wheat (resistant to other forms of rust) combine three different sets of rust-resistance genes--so the potential for the rust to evolve a resistance to the resistance is great. Still, it's a fast start for the project.
$27 million is a paltry sum, on a global scale, yet it could well prove decisive. The Durable Rust Resistance project is our current best hope for getting Ug99-resistant strains of wheat to farmers around the world in time to avoid disaster. If we're successful, we'll all have Bill Gates to thank.
Images: Stem_rust_close_up.jpg, photo by Yue Jin, U.S. Department of Agriculture, public domain Bill_Gates_World_Economic_Forum_2007.jpg, photo by Severin Nowacki, copyright World Economic Forum, licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 2.0
I don't mean legal guidelines, per se, although it's likely that the era of defendants being convicted on the basis of photos or videos will be drawing to a close soon. I mean the rules that we use in our day to day lives to grapple with the flood of information, online and off, or the common sense heuristics we go by to avoid being lied to. In a world of easy manipulation of images, it pays not to be too credulous.
Here's a draft of five rules for the photo-fakery era. I welcome suggestions, corrections, and updates:
A single photograph is evidence of nothing. No matter how much you want to believe (in aliens, in Apple iPads, or in foreign-born U.S. Presidents), a single image is no better than a nicely-illustrated urban myth. This doesn't mean that it's a lie, only that you should trust the image no more than you'd trust someone just describing it in words.
Multiple images from the same source is no better. Anyone who can fake a single photo can fake a series of photos.
Just as with photos, a single video or source of video should be regarded with extreme skepticism. It's getting easy to do professional-level composites with inexpensive or free video tools that run on even modest laptops. It's not yet as easy as working with Photoshop or the GIMP, but that goal gets closer with each passing year. Moreover, the relatively low-resolution video images typical of even new cameraphones make some kinds of hacks simpler, especially when shown via Flash video. If you can't clearly read a speaker's lips, changing what they have to say becomes a matter of a small edit of the soundtrack. This is something of an artifact of the technology of the moment, however; as HD becomes more prevalent, along with 4G or faster upload speeds, it should temporarily get harder to hack video.
Conversely, the more sources, the more believable. This comes down to human behavior--when you have lots of people involved in a hoax, the faster it will be revealed. As Benjamin Franklin said, "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." Even well-disciplined cadres and true believers tell their friends and spouses; the less-well-disciplined will brag on Facebook.
With technology as well as people, the more diversity of sources, the more believable. If there's video of, say, a UFO, there should be photos, too. With consistent GPS tags. And people Twittering about seeing it. And mobile phone records of a burst of phone calls in the area as people call to say "you wouldn't believe what I'm looking at right now!"
Realistically, you won't always have situations where a wide array of sources and materials will be readily available for a given item or moment. So ask yourself: is the person (or group, or TV network) showing you the images or video trying to get you to do or believe something that's in their interest? Or, more bluntly, is there a reason why the person (etc.) might want to fool you?
Nowhere is this more important than with politics.
If you're annoyed by the "birther" churn, get used it--this kind of political hack is here to stay. It's easy and effective. Cheap digital tools make the work of faking official documents, "candid" images, and behind-the-scenes videos readily possible, even for rough amateurs.
Moreover, the hacks don't have to convince skeptics--they only need to strengthen believers. Faked materials just need to be convincing enough to cause doubt in the minds of people already inclined to believe a lie. For people trying to undermine political opponents, uncertainty is both easy and useful. Imagine if the hoax Obama birth certificate had been produced in October of 2008, instead of August of 2009: it's all too likely that the chaos surrounding the document could have cut his percentage in closely-contested states.
Would it have been enough to throw the election? Possibly, possibly not. We'll likely have parallel cases to study in the U.S. in next year's Congressional election, and almost certainly in the Presidential election in 2012. Don't be surprised to see similar political hacks showing up during elections elsewhere in the Internet-dense parts of the world. Our ability to evaluate what we see and read will be put to the test, time and again.
In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.
"High-frequency trading" (HFT) has gone from a financial industry dark art to newspaper and blog headline-fodder over the last few days, and for good reason. The practice, which relies on networked computers to execute billions of micro-scale transactions in order to sniff out prices and beat out slower traders, has all of the earmarks of a Very Bad Thing, Indeed: exploitation of pre-computerized trading rules; possible out-and-out illegal activity ("front-running"); and systems operating too fast for any human to oversee, let alone counter. The mega-scale financial services companies love HFT, as it results in huge aggregate profits and drives out competitors. Nonetheless, there are signs that we'll soon see changes to the rules that will make HFT far less lucrative, and possibly ban it entirely.
But when I first started hearing about HFT and the market distortions it seems to produce, what came to mind for me wasn't the implication for high finance, but the implications for the military--and, ultimately, to all of our security.
HFT systems were designed to operate in an environment where even the lowliest day-traders had access to powerful computers and high-bandwidth connections. That is, the competition for HFT isn't just the human making buy and sell decisions, but the computerized system augmenting that trader: popping up alerts, executing buy and sell orders based on pre-arranged triggers, and gradually reducing the number of decisions the human operating needs to make over the course of a trading session. It's an arms race, of sorts, and one that wasn't anywhere near ending.
Soon, thousands of orders began flooding the markets as high-frequency software went into high gear. Automatic programs began issuing and canceling tiny orders within milliseconds to determine how much the slower traders were willing to pay. The high-frequency computers quickly determined that some investors' upper limit was $26.40. The price shot to $26.39, and high-frequency programs began offering to sell hundreds of thousands of shares.
How long, do you imagine, it would be before traders would be using systems that could identify that HFT price sniffing was underway, and adjust limits accordingly? Of course, that doesn't solve the problem; it just takes human decision-making more and more out of the loop.
So here's where the parallel to military systems becomes clear. Right now, the tactical awareness and decision-making used by military robots and computers operates, by and large, at human speeds. It may seem like a split-second decision has to be made when a Reaper identifies a potential target and transmits that data via satellite to controllers in the US, who then have to decide whether or not to pull the trigger, but from a computer's point of view, that decision-making period--perhaps taking as much as a minute--means millions of cycles of just doing nothing, waiting for the human minds to act.
But that situation--humans on one side, humans + computer/robot systems on the other--won't last. And when both sides of a conflict have digitally-augmented combat systems, the side that keeps humans too much in the loop is at a distinct tactical disadvantage. We could easily find ourselves giving our military robots the power to make the kill decision not because we think it's wise, but because that may be the only guarantee that they can act in time.
This isn't a "computers are taking over" fear, or an "unfriendly AI" fear--these systems could barely be called artificial intelligence. And that's precisely the problem. We're increasingly giving autonomy to computerized systems that lack anything other than simplistic algorithms for decision-making. A functionally autonomous high-frequency trading system executes what it's been programmed to execute, without any awareness of the larger economy or even what's happening off the trading floor that may be driving prices; an autonomous military system would fire a shot based on the rules its been given, but without any sense of context or tactics, let alone ethics.
As we change financial rules to reduce the effect of HFT on prices and trading, we might take a moment to think about the bigger picture. What other systems are we going to give autonomy without intelligence?
I have to admit it: I'm not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept. I do understand its utility, and I can certainly see why some companies, such as Google and Sun/Oracle, might be excited by it. But the cloud model strikes me as terribly non-resilient: Wonderful when it works but disastrous when it fails--and recent headlines demonstrate quite clearly just how brittle cloud computing may be.
(If you're still not quite sure what "cloud computing" is, Wikipedia has a rather detailed discussion of its particulars, but in short: cloud computing is a system in which computing resources are provided "as a service" over the Internet to users who do not need to have control over the technology infrastructure, or even a firm grasp of how it works. The most commonly-used example of cloud computing is probably Google Docs, offering a relatively full-fledged office suite via a Web browser.)
Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services. All well and good, but it requires a great deal of centralization to function properly--and here's where trouble sets in.
You couldn't have spent more than a few seconds online over the past few days and not have heard about Amazon remotely deleting copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of people who had purchased them. It turned out that the publisher selling this Kindle version didn't have US rights (the copyright on the books has expired in most countries, but not in the US), and the current rights holder demanded that Amazon do something about it. Since Amazon is in constant communication with the millions of Kindles out there, they did what any centralized provider of a service could do--they zapped the infringing copies not just from the storefront, but from any Kindle on which they could be found.
Now, the Kindle is not a cloud computing system, but the Amazon-Whispernet-Kindle infrastructure mirrors many cloud features. More importantly, this incident is indicative of what kinds of trouble can emerge when we reframe "content" as "service." As numerous pundits have noted, the physical book analogy would be Amazon breaking into your home and taking away a book you'd purchased (leaving you a refund on your desk, of course). But a Kindle book isn't a physical book--it's a service, one that (as the Kindle license makes clear) you don't really own.
As Farhad Manjoo notes in Slate, there's plenty of precedence for courts to order the removal (or even bricking) of devices attached to centralized services when there seems to be an infringement of some kind.
At least with the Kindle, you can make a backup of your downloaded files; if the Kindle was truly a cloud device, where the book file itself lived online, you may not even have that option. In either case, since Kindle books (even free ones) are wrapped in DRM, you can't legally read them on anything else anyway. And all of this points to the real risk: when your work is treated not as content but as a service, and is subject to centralized control, it can be altered or deleted at any time. For legal reasons, for "local standards" reasons, by mistake, by malice, or simply when the system owner decides to discontinue that service.
Centralized systems like this run counter to principles of system resilience. The premise of a resilience strategy is that failure happens, and that the precise mode of failure can't necessarily be predicted. Resilience demands that we prepare for unexpected problems so as to minimize actual disruption--minimize in terms of time, but particularly in terms of how widespread the disruption may be.
Resilience design principles include: Diversity (or avoidance of monocultures); Redundancy; Decentralization; Transparency; Collaboration; Graceful Failure; Flexibility; Openness; and Foresight. It's easy to see how cloud computing can run afoul of many of these principles.
Centralization is in many ways the worst part. It's the core of the cloud computing model, and anything that takes down the centralized service--network failures, massive malware hit, denial-of-service attack, and so forth--affects everyone who uses that service. When the documents and the tools both live in the cloud, there's no way for someone to continue working in this failure state. If users don't (or can't) have their own personal backups, and don't (or can't) have other tools with which to access their backups, they're stuck.
The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare. For an individual, a crashed laptop and a crashed cloud may be initially indistinguishable, but the former only afflicts one person and one point of access to information. If a cloud system locks up--or if a legal decision, change in ownership, or service provider whim alters the rules unilaterally--potentially millions of people will lose access.
For me, a resilient cloud would be one where the data lives simultaneously online and in local storage, and is in a format that can easily be read (and edited) by both cloud software and local applications. Simply put, it's a retreat from thinking of content as a service. This isn't where the computing world is heading, however, and as we've seen in the last few days, we may well be giving up more than we think for cloud convenience.
Clay Shirky recently described revolutions as situations in which "...the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place." He was talking about newspapers, but the insight can apply much more broadly. Advertising, for example, seems to be going through its own revolution, with existing models falling to tatters without a clear successor waiting in the wings. Education is another example, and some would argue that a similar process is underway in the realm of international power and politics.
Shirky's observation came to mind while watching a recording of Bruce Sterling's closing keynote for the ReBoot conference last month. Late in the talk, Bruce tosses out this line: "Objects are print-outs." He goes on to discuss how to rethink one's relationship with material possessions in an increasingly precarious world, but the "objects are print-outs" line stuck with me. It encapsulates not just an attitude towards material possessions, but--in one pithy phrase--one possible shape of the next economy.
Fab This
Take a design for a simple product--an engine part, for example, or a piece of silverware, and feed it into a computer. Press "print." Out pops (for a sufficiently wide definition of "pops") a physical duplicate, made out of materials plastic, ceramic, metal -- even sugar. Press "print" again, and out comes another copy--or feed in a new design, for the next necessary object.
It may sound like a scene from a low-rent version of Star Trek, but it's real, and it's happening with increasing frequency. This process goes by a few names, but it's most commonly known as "3D Printing" (the older name, "rapid prototyping," no longer captures the range of uses, while the other alternative name, "fabbing," is a little too cyberpunk for the moment). While the process has been around since the mid-1980s, the cost of 3D printers has been dropping quickly, and now range to well under $10,000. If that still sounds like a lot of money, you're right--but don't forget, it was when laser printers dropped to this price range in the mid-1980s that the desktop publishing revolution kicked off.
Right now, most 3D printing is limited to single-material objects (as designer Sven Johnson noted on Twitter, we're now starting to see two-material 3D printers). Most systems use (often proprietary) plastics, but a few use metal "toner." The latter is turned solid by a variety of high-tech means, from sintering with lasers (for simple objects) to using high-energy electron beams to melt the metal into dense, high-strength parts.
On the near horizon, however, are systems that would allow for multiple material inputs, and those that allow the use of electroactive and electronic polymers. Although plastic electronics fall way behind traditional silicon processors when it comes to speed, they're moving into the "just good enough" category, raising the tantalizing possibility of being able to print out basic electronic products--sensors, RFID-type tags, even simple communication devices--by the middle of the next decade. And as the 3D printing systems become more sophisticated, moving closer to the realm of molecular-scale manufacturing, the potential for even more complex and powerful products available at the touch of the "print" button becomes ever greater.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Technology
A sign of just how close we are coming to the "desktop manufacturing" revolution is word that comedian Jay Leno--a collector of vintage motorcycles and cars--now uses a 3D printer to produce replacement parts for his classic vehicles.
Any antique car part can be reproduced with these machines==pieces of trim, elaborately etched and even scrolled door handles. If you have an original, you can copy it. Or you can design a replacement on the computer, and the 3D printer makes it for you. [...] If you have a part that’s worn away, or has lost a big chunk of metal, you can fill in that missing link on the computer. Then you make the part in plastic and have a machinist make a copy based on that example. Or you can do what we do—input that program into a Fadal CNC machine; it reads the dimensions and replicates an exact metal copy.
To be sure, the gear that Leno employs remains out of the price range of most of us. But it's near-certain that the cost of 3D printing will continue to plummet.
One reason why is the startlingly rapid development of the RepRap project, the open-source "replicating rapid-prototyping" system being devised at Bath University in the UK. For now, it's designed to print only polymers, but is coming close to its initial goal of being able to produce all of the plastic components of another RepRap device. The greater goal, of being able to print out all of the components of a RepRap (that is, to make it truly replicating), is still in the distance, but will probably come sooner than expected. In the meantime, the current RepRap design is just getting more precise, and more powerful.
A New Economy?
Technologies that shift production from being atom-dominated to being bit-dominated tend to follow similar trajectories. With both laser printers and, later, CD/DVD burners, the first wave of "creative destruction" came when the prices dropped to the level where the devices were affordable by small businesses; the second, bigger wave came when the prices dropped to a level affordable by general households. Now, laser printers and CD/DVD burners are just about free in a box of cereal--and, for many of us, the production and consumption of text documents and music has moved to entirely digital formats.
If 3D printing follows a similar trajectory, we may not be likely to see a massive shift to entirely digital "products" any time soon, but we could well see a shift to more local--even desktop--production. There's no guarantee, of course, that 3D printing system prices will crash in the exact same way as laser printers, or that individual households will decide that desktop manufacturing is appealing. Local manufacturing seems a good bet, however, for a variety of reasons. There's a particularly strong sustainability argument around local manufacturing, from the rising tide of "localism" philosophies (from food to media), to the ability of 3D printing to extend the useful life of manufactured goods by making new parts (as Jay Leno does for his vintage cars). The sustainability argument will become especially powerful once cheap overseas-produced goods reflect rising costs for fuel and carbon. And local manufacturing via 3D printing, even if limited to simple consumer items, has the potential to disrupt incumbent manufacturing, shipping, and retail industries.
If we do see 3D printing follow the footsteps of laser printing, however, the results could be profound. Desktop manufacturing offers the potential for the ultimate "maker" culture, where commercial products are bought off of iTunes-like online stores and printed at home, while eager hardware hackers play with design tools and open-source hardware systems to make entirely new material goods. Lurking in the background, of course, is the potential for design piracy -- what one writer termed "napster fabbing," back in the era when Napster was scary.
If we're lucky, this could happen slowly and gradually, allowing the new economic models time to solidify and new institutions to emerge; if we're less lucky, it could happen abruptly, and with great resistance on the part of those industries most under attack, so that the new systems aren't yet ready by the time the old system collapses. The first would obviously be an easier transition than the second. Any bets on which one is more likely?
The End of Days
This doesn't mean that Wal-Mart will go away any time soon, but it does mean a pretty big shift in the relationship between individuals and their material world. Most notably, it would open up the possibility that the kinds of personalized products now available to those with the right money and know-how may soon be available to everyday people. Thinking of this simply as traditional manufacturing moved from the factory to the neighborhood (or the home office) misses the larger revolution. This isn't just desktop production (figuratively or literally), it's democratized production. It will have its own intrinsic dilemmas, from liability to spam, but it will pose a powerful challenge to the status quo.
As I wrote recently about other kinds of personal augmentation technologies,
Humans won’t be taken out of the loop—in fact, many, many more humans will have the capacity to do something that was once limited to a hermetic priesthood. [This technology] decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
We're seeing this pattern again and again. New technologies, and the new behaviors they engender, trigger unexpected shifts in how we relate to each other. The trajectory of what we can do in concert with our tools is just getting steeper. Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century--in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.
Images:
Bruce Sterling - screen capture from his talk
RepRap - courtesy RepRap
Charlie Caplin - screen capture from Modern Times
(My thanks to C. Sven Johnson for his comments and suggestions.)
In its efforts to stop its citizens from engaging in behaviors that it doesn't like, the Chinese government has decided to require the adoption of "Green Dam," a form of censorware. Green Dam has significant known flaws--not the least of which being gaping security holes allowing the easy seizure of control of the PC by a remote hacker. Security experts examining the code were able to swiftly assemble a Web page that would crash any Green Dam-hobbled browser, and described (but did not make available) similar code that could completely take control of a PC running Green Dam.
Updates to the Green Dam software have failed to deal with these flaws; security reviewers have noted that many of the security holes come from bad programming practices (using deprecated code, not stopping buffer overruns, and the like), so the software likely contains even more security problems than the reviewers found after a few hours of testing.
If these flaws aren't fixed quickly, China may well have crippled its own burgeoning digital economy, and certainly will have left itself open to overwhelming "cyber-attacks" from those opposed to the Chinese government. If Beijing requires the use of Green Dam in official computers, or those used by key infrastructure systems, the impact of this gaping security hole could be shocking.
But even without the security holes, by blocking a wide array of terms and phrases, and even trying to stop pornography by filtering any image with "large amounts" of "skin tone" colors, the Green Dam software will have perverse effects on behavior. As we've seen with every censorware implementation, non-pornographic sites can get swept up in the fight to Protect the Children, usually health information providers. Perhaps more problematic for the Chinese government, such a ham-fisted effort to censor all computer use is certain to lead to widespread efforts to disable, work-around, or otherwise ignore the software--in short, undermining perceptions of government legitimacy.
This move by China's government has all the trappings of a social auto-immune disorder.
Back in September 2007, I wrote about this metaphor for understanding unintended consequences over at Open the Future. We see, time and again, efforts undertaken to protect the social body from some kind of feared harm instead resulting in real damage to society. It struck me that there was a strong parallel to medical auto-immune disorders, where the body's own immune system goes on the attack against the body itself. A minor but familiar example of a social auto-immune disorder is the "security theater" in airports, such as having to remove shoes, dump liquids, and the like. Security experts such as Bruce Schneier see such measures as having dubious value in actually preventing a terrorist attack, while having a measurable, and significant, economic cost.
The problem with social auto-immune disorders is that because they're responses to perceived systemic threats, it can be very difficult for more thoughtful leadership to scale back the reaction. Any successful attack subsequent to the scaling back of an overreaction--no matter how unrelated to the attempted defense--would be seen as evidence that the initial overreaction was correct. The more thoughtful leadership would be vilified by political rivals, whether on the pages of national newspapers or in Party meetings. Thus, bad decisions, with clearly harmful results, can become institutionalized.
If the impact of the Green Dam censorware on China's technological backbone is as bad as it could be, China may well have just given up any pretense at global leadership this century.
The emergence of Twitter as a heroic enabling technology for the pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran this past week has been a thrilling reminder of the power of distributed communication tools. I'm impressed at how useful this simple application has been shown to be, and at the clever hacks the Iran-based commentators have employed to stay online. As so many tech pundits have said, this has been a golden moment for social networking technologies.
And, I have to admit, it's scared the hell out of me.
Not because I have any sympathy for Iran's government, I should hasten to say, or because I see any threat coming from this particular use of Twitter. It scares me because of how close it aligns with something I noted in my talk at Mobile Monday in Amsterdam earlier this month, an observation that happened almost by accident.
In noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide. The audience was understandably stunned by the question, and after a few seconds someone shouted, "No!" I could only hope that the anonymous reply was right, but I don't think he was.
Consider, for a moment, what we're seeing happening in Iran: mass-action coordinated, at least in part, through Twitter; traditional media in Iran having lost any legitimacy for the angry populace, alternative media--like Twitter--increasingly becoming the sole source of information; and a growing sense of persecution and crisis, abetted by the limited streams of rumor-heavy news. Let me again emphasize that I don't think that what's happening in Iran is a misuse of social media; what I do think is that the same kinds of dynamics that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far darker.
the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter];
the use of a completely new style of communication;
the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists;
a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and
a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience.
All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well.
It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too.
This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy.
What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.
At the end of my brief exploration on this idea at Mobile Monday, I asked--in a bit of gallows humor--what the hashtag would be for something like genocide. The audience's nervous laughter reflected my own recognition that this wasn't an entirely rhetorical question. I'm sad to say that we're almost certain to get an answer, probably far sooner than we'd like.
This matters not because now you'll always know which way is North with the iPhone, or even because you can make a quick-and-dirty metal detector with it. It matters because it finally opens up the iPhone to real augmented reality. In that august position, it joins the ranks of a handful of other smartphones, including (in particular) the Android G1 and the Nokia N97.
Augmented reality (AR) technologies offer the ability to layer data--including images--over our perceptions of the physical world. While science fiction versions of AR usually involves high-tech eyewear, real-world AR is moving swiftly from the labs to the users via advanced smartphones. These handhelds offer everything a basic AR setup needs: a good display; a camera to see the world; and location-awareness.
That last one is important, and the compass/magnetometer in new iPhone 3G S will finally bring the Apple line up to snuff. Now the handheld can know which direction it's being pointed--and when combined with location information through A-GPS, the iPhone will (with the right software) be able to recognize what it's looking at, adding tags, notes, and directions as necessary.
For a glimpse of what that would mean, readers with G1s should check out the SkyMap app, available for free from the Android Market. SkyMap provides a real-time map of constellations and planets, showing you the relevant names and information when pointed at the sky. You can even tell it to search for a celestial body, and it will point you toward where Mars (for example) is at this moment. Casual astronomy buffs no doubt get a kick out of this app, but think about where this is heading.
How long until there's a StarbucksMap app, something that will know where you are and be able to point you to the nearest coffee shop? (Which, admittedly, is probably within a few hundred meters from wherever you are.) Any of the various location applications that have heretofore relied on giving you an overhead view of a map with some relevant thumbtack icons can now offer you "first person shooter" directions.
Imagine the potential for social networking, even dating, apps.
And imagine the games that are possible with this technology. That's actually been something of a sad surprise for me, as a G1 user: the potential for immersive, AR-style games is so great, but there's been little activity on that front. I hope that the new iPhone will push this field forward.
But here's the fun bit of speculation: imagine how this changes behavior. We already have problems with people walking around looking down at their phones, usually texting. If you're using your smartphone as an AR device, however, you're likely to be holding it up in front of you. While walking around. Less likely to run into walls or out into traffic, sure--but taking up a bit more personal space, and much more likely to drop the phone while being jostled in crowds.
Might be time to start up an iPhone leash business.
Resilience Economics employs a mix of regulations and norms (i.e., non-regulated but expected behavior) to shift standard business processes away from a focus on efficiency towards a focus on flexibility.
Just-in-Time Socialism takes advantage of the increased power of digital information systems to provide much more effective demand projection and cost transparency, using just-in-time production and delivery systems to make an evolved form of socialism work.
Robonomics has digital systems doing much of the work, supporting a version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, a life of indolence, or even a regular job, one that may pay much more than now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn't want the work.
Although it's easy to think otherwise, the structure of the modern global economy is not terribly old, arguably dating back to the collapse of the 
Here are some examples, each a counter to a particular issue:
So here's where Bill Gates steps in.
"High-frequency trading" (HFT) has gone from a 
So here's where the parallel to military systems becomes clear. Right now, the tactical awareness and decision-making used by military robots and computers operates, by and large, at human speeds. It may seem like a split-second decision has to be made when a 
Shirky's observation came to mind while watching a recording of 
This doesn't mean that Wal-Mart will go away any time soon, but it does mean a pretty big shift in the relationship between individuals and their material world. Most notably, it would open up the possibility that the kinds of personalized products now available to those with the right money and know-how may soon be available to everyday people. Thinking of this simply as traditional manufacturing moved from the factory to the neighborhood (or the home office) misses the larger revolution. This isn't just desktop production (figuratively or literally), it's democratized production. It will have its own intrinsic dilemmas, from 
In its efforts to stop its citizens from engaging in behaviors that it doesn't like, the Chinese government has decided to 
But even without the security holes, by blocking a wide array of terms and phrases, and even trying to stop pornography by filtering any image with "large amounts" of "skin tone" colors, the Green Dam software will have perverse effects on behavior. As we've seen with every censorware implementation, non-pornographic sites can get swept up in the fight to Protect the Children, usually health information providers. Perhaps more problematic for the Chinese government, such a ham-fisted effort to censor all computer use is certain to lead to widespread efforts to disable, work-around, or otherwise ignore the software--in short, undermining perceptions of government legitimacy.
(The concept apparently has some conceptual value. Earlier this month, in a bit of parallel thinking, the 
The emergence of Twitter as a heroic enabling technology for the pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran this past week has been a thrilling reminder of the power of distributed communication tools. I'm impressed at how useful this simple application has been shown to be, and at the clever hacks the Iran-based commentators have employed to stay online. As so many tech pundits have said, this has been a golden moment for social networking technologies.
Consider, for a moment, what we're seeing happening in Iran: mass-action coordinated, at least in part, through Twitter; traditional media in Iran having lost any legitimacy for the angry populace, alternative media--like Twitter--increasingly becoming the sole source of information; and a growing sense of persecution and crisis, abetted by the limited streams of rumor-heavy news. Let me again emphasize that I don't think that what's happening in Iran is a misuse of social media; what I do think is that the same kinds of dynamics that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far darker.
This matters not because now you'll always know which way is North with the iPhone, or even because you can make a quick-and-dirty metal detector with it. It matters because it finally opens up the iPhone to real augmented reality. In that august position, it joins the ranks of a handful of other smartphones, including (in particular) the Android G1 and the Nokia N97.
For a glimpse of what that would mean, readers with G1s should check out the 
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