What are the strategies we can use to deal with unrelenting transparency? Fight it. Accept it. Deceive it.
Last week I said: We live in a world of unrelenting transparency. What can we do about it?
There are three possible strategies--none of them perfect.
Fight to the Last
We could fight every attack upon our privacy, large or small.
This has been the default response by privacy advocates and civil libertarians for some time. Groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pay close attention to the various ways in which privacy rights can be eroded or ignored through the proliferation of digital tools, and do their best to focus attention on emerging problems. While there have been occasional legal victories, these groups have arguably been more effective at educating the public than changing policy.
The problem is, a growing number of the transparency dilemmas come not from straightforward government or corporate policy decisions, but from myriad personal behavior shifts not readily amenable to legal controls. I doubt that many of us would welcome the kind of intrusive state control necessary to fully rein in surreptitious cameraphone use, for example. Moreover, many of the potentially problematic uses are the very uses that many of us find useful, even necessary. We want to be able to capture the surprising and ephemeral. We want to be able to document our lives.
In the end, this is a story of a desperate defense against privacy intrusions, but one where the "attackers" have an increasing technological advantage.
Embrace Change
Conversely, a vocal minority has come to advocate not just the acceptance of greater social and personal transparency, but the furtherance of it. This argument holds that privacy is, if not dead, increasingly moribund, and efforts to shore it up are doomed. Instead, we should strive for greater transparency, in a way that makes us all equally visible. This is sometimes thought of as "symmetric transparency," and ideally includes not just individual citizens, but powerful institutions as well.
Unfortunately, a symmetric-transparency society may be even harder to create than a high-privacy society. We may be able to create a world of ubiquitous documentation of each other--we could probably do so easily, as we're heading that way--but to expand that to the ready documentation of powerful institutions and people would require that those in power agree to giving up a significant chunk of that power. After all, if I can know everything about you, but you can only know a bit about me, I have a clear advantage. Why should I give that up?
There have been cases of those in power giving up or sharing that power without being forced to, but they're few and far between. It's possible that the wave of demands for more corporate financial transparency--and the cases of abuses of power by law enforcement authorities I mentioned last week--could push the notion of symmetric transparency forward. I wouldn't hold my breath, however.
More likely is a world of mutual assured transparency between citizens, but an even greater capacity for institutions of authority to know whatever they want without giving up much in exchange.
Opaque Projector
The last strategy, deception, boils down to this: we may be able to watch each other, but that doesn't mean what we show is real.
Call it "polluting the datastream": introducing false and misleading bits of personal information (about location, about one's history, about interests and work) into the body of public data about you. It could be as targeted as adding lies to your Wikipedia entry (should you have one) or other public bios; it could be as random as putting enough junk info about yourself onto Google-indexed websites and message boards. Many of us do this already, at least to a minor degree: at a recent conference, I asked the audience how many give false date-of-birth info on website sign-ups; over half the audience raised their hands.
The goal here isn't to construct a consistent alternate history for yourself, but to make the public information sufficiently inconsistent that none of it could be considered entirely reliable. Granted, this won't do much about ubiquitous documentation--although there are techniques that can help--it would be very effective in the Justice Scalia example I mentioned last week. If in digging up info about him, they found a dozen sites saying that he had four kids, another half-dozen saying that he was childless, a Wikipedia page saying that his middle name was Mario and an "official" bio saying that it was Luigi (all of the preceding being entirely imaginary, of course), how would they know what to trust?
There's the implicit potential for a world where such obfuscation of facts in the name of privacy becomes not just commonplace, but commercialized. Depending upon the legality, one might start to see companies that provide "data-pollution" services, commodifying opacity. Sifting services, conversely, would offer to identify misinformation and provide "trustable" data about a target. All for a price.
This strategy, too, has its own considerable drawbacks--not the least of which would be the evisceration of the Internet as a semi-reliable source of information. Are we ready to poison the well in the name of protecting our privacy?
An Imperfect World
None of these strategies gives us a clean, workable response to unrelenting transparency. All have serious downsides, and each one offers the potential for a worse situation than before if implementation was incomplete or temporary.
In the end, it's likely that the best we can do, for now, is to do what we have been doing. We can keep a close watch on our own visibility, for example, whether through regular checks of credit scores or through a basic "Google alert" on our names (those of you with names less... unique... than mine might find that one its own kind of challenge). This is hardly a satisfying response, but it's very human. We rarely if ever reach final conclusions about how we integrate technologies into our societies. More often, it's a constant give-and-take, a coevolution that demands compromise and adaptation--and offers the potential to fix mistakes and pull back from extremes.
It comes down to this: fight what you can; accept what you need to; never give up more than you must.
We leave digital footprints everywhere we go, and those footprints are becoming easier and easier to track. Although many of us believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that transparency is generally a good thing for a society, the lack of control over what you reveal about yourself is often troubling. The ease with which abundant personal info can be used for (e.g.) identity theft creates a situation where we have many of the dilemmas of transparency without enough of the benefit.
These dilemmas can emerge in surprising ways. In California last year, a highly-controversial ballot measure, Proposition 8, won a narrow victory. But many activists saw Prop 8 as discriminatory, and decided to learn more about which of their neighbors supported the measure. Campaign finance laws in the U.S. require that donations to candidates and initiatives above a certain amount be listed in public records. Anyone who has seen the rise of map mash-ups over the past few years can guess what happened next: Prop 8 Maps took the federally-required campaign finance information and displayed it using Google Maps. As a result, opponents of the measure could discover who among their neighbors and local businesses cared enough about stopping same-sex marriage that they'd donate a large sum of money to the proposal.
Unsurprisingly, people "outed" by this site -- which simply took public information and made it more readily understood--were outraged, especially after talk of boycotts and harassing phone calls. But there was little that they could do; the makers of the Prop 8 Maps site had done nothing illegal. As digital tools become easier and easier to use, this kind of forced transparency will become more and more commonplace, and not just in the U.S., in the months and years to come.
And it doesn't require the Internet. With the rise of cheap, networked recording devices--aka, cameraphones--we're seeing the emergence of a culture of documentation, where individuals use their cameraphones to record and share unusual and often problematic moments. From events as amusingly scandalous as South Korea's "dog poop girl" to those as shocking and tragic as the New Year's Eve killing by an Oakland transit cop, citizens are using cameraphones to catch misbehavior and make it undeniable. What's particularly notable (although not especially surprising) is the availability of multiple perspectives on the same event, as personal documentation with a cameraphone becomes almost second-nature for many of us.
(Here's a tip for aspiring filmmakers: one way for an audience to see a spectacular event as "real" is for any crowd scenes surrounding the event to include at least 10% of the people there recording the moment with their phones. Disaster or science fiction movies set in the present day that don't include such mass documentation will increasingly look weird and dated.)
Examples of the use of cameraphones to record startling or tragic events have become too numerous to list; it's enough to say that a growing number of metropolitan police departments have begun to offer "cameraphone 911" sites to allow citizens to upload images and videos of crimes. And, as the Oakland event demonstrates, it's just as easy for citizens to document the misbehavior of those in authority, as well.
And then there is the rapid growth of official surveillance systems. In the U.K., police cameras are ubiquitous--I actually saw more surveillance cameras in Manchester last week than I did in Singapore on a trip last November.
We live in a world of unrelenting transparency. What can we do about it?
Some ideas next week.
IMAGES:
"DBase-Banksy" by UnusualImage via Flickr, licensed under CC http://www.flickr.com/photos/unusual_image/2106181265/
"Surveillance in Manchester" by Jamais Cascio via Flickr, licensed under CC http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamais_cascio/3550300758/
Frustratingly for those of us who follow this matter closely, we've known for awhile what needs to be done in order to avoid such disaster: eliminate fossil fuel-based energy production as rapidly as humanly possible, globally; reduce agricultural practices (including the raising of cattle) that add disproportionate levels of greenhouse gases; and make changes to the structure of the global economy, urban systems, food Webs, transportation networks, and energy grids to enable such changes to improve our overall quality of life. A daunting task, to say the least, but well within the capacities of our current technological and economic know-how.
This situation is frustrating because there are few signs that global institutions are ready to undertake this scale of change--and plenty of signs of delay. American readers may be acutely aware of the sluggish pace of change here, but resistance to making necessary alterations of social, technological, and economic systems can be found from Beijing to Berlin. If the most heated claims of climate scientists are true, such delays might one day be considered to have been criminal.
But if shouting louder (and maybe stamping our feet for emphasis) won't make global political and economic leaders act swiftly, what are our options?
We could try to adapt to global warming as we continue to make slow reductions in carbon emissions, knowing that effects like drought, famine, opportunistic pandemic disease, global refugees, resource conflict, and more will still hit us, killing many tens of thousands--perhaps even tens of millions. As such disasters hit, we'll start acting faster; hopefully, the cascading impacts of climate disruption won't become barriers to making the kinds of changes we need.
We could cross our fingers and hope that new "magic bullet" technologies will make a change to a carbon-free economy easy and cheap, and perhaps even remove excess carbon from the atmosphere. It's certainly possible, especially with the potential development of molecular manufacturing. But counting on such developments emerging exactly as we hope, as rapidly as we wish, seems a bit like counting on winning the lottery--it would be lovely if it happened, but it's hardly the basis of sound financial planning.
And both adaptation and magic technologies suffer from the "climate lag" problem. In short, the global climate is a slow system, and doesn't change quickly. Today's warming is the result of greenhouse gas emissions in the 1960s and 1970s, and present-day emissions will continue to warm us for decades to come, even if we stopped emitting any greenhouse gases tomorrow. The longer we wait to act, whether out of political inertia or dreams of magical technologies, the worse the situation will be for at least a generation.
There is another option, one that holds its own set of risks. Geoengineering is the intentional manipulation of global ecosystem patterns in order to trigger a particular change to the environment and climate. Some of the geoengineering proposals are outlandish and expensive, but many are relatively straightforward--if anything operating on a global scale, and likely requiring decades to undertake, could be called straightforward. Geoengineering would be used to slow the rate of global warming-induced climate disruption, allowing us to make the necessary changes to our economies and infrastructure before disaster hits.
To say this proposal is controversial would be a vast understatement. A growing debate includes governments, NGOs, and scientists from all over the world as both advocates and opponents. If geoengineering works, it would suppress global warming and give us the time needed to eliminate carbon emissions. But it's also wildly risky, certain to provoke international tension, and brimming with the potential for unintended consequences.
Most of the debates around geoengineering focus on efforts to directly manage temperatures, particularly through the use of stratospheric injection of sulfates modeled on the effects of massive volcanic eruptions. Global temperatures dropped by half-a-degree Celsius in the months after the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption; a sustained project to introduce sulfates into the stratosphere could keep temperatures down. We even have a decent idea of what kinds of immediate problems this would cause, including damage to the ozone layer and a measurable reduction of solar power efficiency.
However, there is also the potential for as-yet unknown consequences. Some models show sulfate injection altering rainfall patterns, for example, potentially inducing droughts and triggering storms in places that wouldn't necessarily have been hit in a no-geoengineering scenario. It's also entirely possible that we simply still don't know enough about Earth's complex geophysical systems to "engineer" them, and that any attempt to manipulate the climate in this way might cause problems even greater than those coming from global warming.
But the biggest questions about geoengineering aren't technical, they're political. Geoengineering would be global in impact. So who determines whether or not it's used, which technologies to deploy, and what the target temperatures will be? Who decides which unexpected side-effects are bad enough to warrant ending the process? What happens if a nation that claims to see a benefit from warmer temperatures, like Russia already has, demands that geoengineering not go forward, or be sharply limited? And given that the cost of many geoengineering projects would be low enough for a single country to undertake, what happens when a desperate "rogue nation" attempts geoengineering against the wishes of other states?
Ultimately, desperation is a powerful driver. If we start to see faster-than-expected increases in temperature, deadly heat waves and storms, crop failures and drought, the pressure to do something, anything, will be enormous. In such a scenario, we will face a choice between near-certain disaster and unknowable complexity. Let's hope our civilization is up to the challenge.
If I drink a cup of coffee, I perk up, stay awake a bit longer, and (seemingly) think a bit faster. We call this tradition.
If I take a modafinil (Provigil), I perk up, stay awake longer, and (measurably) think a bit faster. We call this cheating.
That seems to be the implication, at least, of a spate of articles popping up over the last year, from Tech Crunch to the New Yorker. People in a variety of attention-dependent industries, such as entrepreneurial business and laboratory science, are starting to use various "cognitive enhancing" drugs--and a dark future inevitably awaits. But is that the only option?
For those of you who haven't been watching this trend, the dilemma is that certain pharmaceuticals intended to treat cognitive and neurological disorders--primarily, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy--and, when used by people without these disorders, provide a kind of cognitive boost. This usually means increased focus and concentration, but it can also mean better spatial reasoning, greater alertness, and improved "clarity" of thinking. As a result, it's apparently becoming increasingly common for people in "knowledge work" professions to take these drugs as a way of improving their performance.
The mainstream debate on this subject seems to boil down to one side arguing that this is the knowledge work equivalent of athletes taking steroids, and the other side arguing that this is little different from using a more powerful computer, getting a better education, or any of the other steps we might take to improve our performance--it just happens to be pharmaceutical in nature.
There's clearly a competitive aspect to this enhancement, and that disturbs many of us. The use of cognitive drugs is driven, at least in part, by a perceived need to keep up with colleagues and rivals. The fear is, how much longer will it be possible for someone to reject the use of these drugs and still maintain competitive parity? If everyone else vying for the promotion uses modafinil to stay awake for 20 hours/day, can you afford not to? Given that the long-term effect of these drugs is still poorly-understood, however, is it at all ethical to allow this kind of "slippery-slope" scenario to come about?
These are troubling questions, but they really just scratch the surface of the dilemma. Even a broad national consensus against using cognitive enhancement drugs may crumble if another country chooses to accept--even encourage--their use. We may face a choice between altering our brain chemistries and falling behind in the global economy.
And with that altered brain chemistry, are we sure that we're not losing something? Many of the cognitive enhancement drugs serve to increase focus and concentration. But "letting your mind wander" is very often an important part of the creative process. The "aha!" experience comes from the brain making connections between superficially unrelated subjects, and identifying a deeper link. How do enhancements that focus our attention affect this process? Is it possible that cognitive drugs enhance one aspect of knowledge work--productivity--while diminishing another--creativity?
Conversely, to what degree is the uproar over modafinil, ritalin, and the like just another example of futurephobia? There's a phrase I sometimes use when talking about this kind of issue: "Technology" is anything invented after you turn 13. That is, we tend to think of new disruptive innovations as being "technology," and hence disruptive, while ignoring older innovations that have become embedded into our larger environment, no matter how much they shape our lives. Is it possible that our reaction to cognitive drugs comes from thinking of them as being technological interference with our lives? To put it another way: would we treat caffeine as casually as we now do if it were introduced today? The implication here is that, as discomfiting as these drugs may be, the longer they stick around, the more we'll start to see them as normal.
As our understanding of the brain continues to improve, the power and diversity of the cognitive modification and enhancement technologies will only grow. It's going to be increasingly difficult for individuals to avoid the question of whether to use these technologies--and harder still for society at large to avoid the question of what happens if we don't.
Images:
Provigil, Jamais Cascio
Brain Map, National Institutes of Health
When the world seems to be falling down all around us, can we afford to spend our time thinking about the future?
In the midst of ongoing wars, accelerating economic collapse, and cascading environmental ruin, it's easy to dismiss futurism as self-indulgence, a superficial pastime devoted to spotting the next hot gizmo or telling us all how some coming development changes everything. What really matters is the here-and-now. Serious people know that thinking about the future is frivolous; anyone (or any business) not focusing laser-like on the problems of today is wasting time and money. Right?
Wrong.
Thinking about the future is fundamentally important to dealing with the challenges of today. In order to confront these problems successfully, we have to think carefully about the implications and results of the steps we might take, not just in the immediate moment, but as conditions continue to evolve. As we've seen time and again, it's all too easy for actions that seem reflexively correct to lead to far greater crises down the road.
Futurism--or, as I prefer to articulate it, structured thinking about the future--is a means of putting both the problems we face today and the solutions we might try in a larger context. It does so in three key ways:
It expands our understanding of the scope of the situation. How do these various problems connect to each other? Are there underlying similarities? How would the outcomes that we fear would arise from problem X affect the course of problem Z? Would the steps we want to take in one arena positively or negatively affect outcomes in another situation?
Now, to be sure, good present-focused analysis will give you much of this, too. And doing this sort of thinking about a problem is far, far better than the "ooh shiny!/ooh scary!" model we seem to reflexively use, especially in major crises. But futurism does more.
It expands our understanding of the horizon of the situation. Not just how does this affect us now, but how would this affect us over time? In parallel, it allows us to think through what happens with different kinds of solutions we may want to use to deal with a problem. What's the potential for undesirable consequences? What kind of conditions result after this "solves" the problem?
You might say, "this isn't futurism, it's simply responsible thinking"--again, sorely lacking in much of our current discourse. But you might notice that conventional analysis that looks at horizon issues (implications, blowback, and the like) rarely gets combined with conventional analysis that looks at scope issues (relationships, reinforcement, interdependencies). Carrying off that kind of combination is hard to do, and especially hard to do well.
That's why few of the discussions of (for example) the current global financial meltdown will include more than a cursory reference to energy (and even there, will almost entirely focus on oil), a glance at demographics (and only in regards to pensions and, in the US, Social Security), or anything at all about climate disruption, migration patterns, and the role of participatory technologies. Yet all of these issues both helped to create the conditions that made the financial panic possible, and will shape both the kinds of responses we can undertake and how well those responses will work.
But futurism has one more, critical, trick up its sleeve:
It expands our understanding of the kind of world we want. By bringing into focus both the scope of connections among issues, and the potential impacts and implications on the horizon, futures thinking allows us to begin to see the path we'd need to take to get to a better world--or, at minimum, the paths we need to avoid in order to forestall a worsening situation. Futurism, structured thinking about the future, clarifies the responsibility and capacity we have to create a tomorrow worth living in.
Heady stuff. And a bit presumptuous, too--how can we think that we can see the future?
We can't. We can only see possibilities. But that's okay. We're not trying to predict what will happen tomorrow; we're trying to understand possible consequences. We're trying to lay out maps of the landscape ahead, in order chart a better course. These maps won't always be accurate--sometimes they'll be completely wrong. But the process of creating the maps will give us a more detailed look and clearer perspective on where we are today. Even being completely wrong has value: figuring out why we were wrong, what we missed, can sometimes be even more illuminating than being right.
There's a rapidly-growing variety of methods available to us, from scenario planning to simulations to futures-mapping to so-called "prediction markets." Perhaps the most exciting is something new: massively-collaborative forecasting. Last year, I had the good fortune to be part of the Institute for the Future's Superstruct project, a "massively-multiplayer forecasting game;" during its six-week run in late 2008, Superstruct brought together over 7,000 people from all over the world to explore what the future could hold. IFTF has just released the first report out from Superstruct.
With all of these tools, the goal is to examine tomorrow to give us a better understanding of how to deal with today.
I've sometimes called futures thinking a "wind-tunnel," a way of testing plans and ideas. Now I think that's a bit limited. Futures thinking is perhaps better understood as an immune system for our civilization. By examining and testing different possible outcomes--potential threats, emerging ideas, exciting opportunities--we strengthen our collective capacity to deal with what really does transpire. Thinking about the future, and doing so in a careful, structured, open and collaborative way, makes us a stronger civilization. Focusing only the challenges of the present may seem imperative, especially when those challenges are massive and frightening. But without a sense of what's next, a capacity for understanding connections and horizons, and a vision of what kind of world we want, our efforts to deal with today's problems will inevitably leave us weakened, vulnerable, and blind to challenges to come.
By ignoring tomorrow, we undermine today.
Satellite image courtesy of NASA
Superstruct images and video courtesy of IFTF
Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com. You can read more of his Fast Company columns right here.
Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans. It should come as no surprise, then, that social Web technologies have a complex relationship with brain function. When these platforms work in concert with our social brains, they can enable persistent relationships or provide emotional/social augmentation. When social web technologies clash with brain function, however, the results can be surprising.
In "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion,", Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang argue that the human brain evolved to very quickly recognize and empathize with physical pain and fear in others, but is much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain, or to acknowledge and celebrate virtue or skill. What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration. This is especially problematic with regards to compassion, as we may find ourselves building insufficient bonds of empathy, critical to communities undergoing stress (and we're seeing a lot of stressed-out communities right now!).
"Damasio's study has extraordinary implications for the human perception of events in a digital communication environment," said media scholar Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC. "Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention." [...]
"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," Immordino-Yang said.
Twitter, social media celebrity of the moment, gets played up in the USC press release, but isn't the sole source of the dilemma. Castells cites television and video games as being problematic, but the real issue are the forms of media where rapid-fire messaging overwhelms the brain's capacity to see consequences. Any kind of rapid interaction, where we absorb a message and then move on to a new one in a very brief amount of time, can result in this social numbness.
Social technologist Linda Stone talks about "continuous partial attention," a condition of modern life where we need to pay ongoing attention to multiple streams of inputs, but can only provide limited degrees of attention to each. Superficially similar to multitasking, the real point of continuous partial attention is that it's continuous--it's not just a workload issue. While we may be able to handle the demands of continuous partial attention for awhile, it eventually becomes exhausting, and even the limited levels of attention suffer.
What Damasio's work suggests to me is that there's a point where an insufficient amount of attention given to a potentially moving encounter means that little or no empathy--compassion or admiration--will result. And while paying attention to another person is important, offering empathy is much more critical. Social numbness simply can't be healthy for a functioning society.
For more than a decade, tech pundits and business consultants have gone on about the "attention economy," arguing that attention has economic value due to its limited availability. It strikes me that this may miss the greater point. From a social perspective, what's limited isn't attention, but consideration. Not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing a message, but understanding its meaning.
It may be worth considering how we'd structure our digital world if the point wasn't just to "pay attention," but to "give consideration."
Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.
The conclusion of the Battlestar Galactica television series a couple of weeks ago left viewers with a decidedly mixed message: a superficial gloss of "ooh, the scary robots are coming!", coupled with a more subtle--and, for me, more important--story about the implications of how we treat that which we create.
You don't have to be a science fiction aficionado to appreciate the importance of the latter narrative. All you need to do is look at this past week's headlines: "ADAM," a robot scientist, making discoveries about genetics; "CB2" ("Child robot with Biomimetic Body") learning to recognize facial expressions and developing social skills; and battlefield robots taking on an increasingly critical role in American military operations. Autonomous and semi-autonomous systems are becoming extraordinarily complex, and our relationship with them differs significantly from how we use other technologies. How we think about them needs to catch up with that.
We've all heard of Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics," a fictional set of ethical guidelines for intelligent machines; what I want to see is a set of guidelines aimed at the people who design those machines. I spoke recently to a group of technologists in the San Francisco Bay Area, and proposed my own "Five Laws of Robotics." These should be considered a draft, not a final statement, but I found in that gathering that they provoked useful debate.
Law #1: Creation Has Consequences
This is the overarching rule, a requirement that the people who design robots (whether scientific, household, or military) have a measure of responsibility for how they work. Not just in the legal sense, but in the ethical sense, too. These aren't just dumb tools to be used or abused, they're systems with an increasing level of autonomy that have to choose appropriate actions based on how they've been programmed (or how they've learned, based on their programming). But they aren't self-aware individuals, so they can't be blamed for mistakes; it all comes down to their creators.
Law #2: Politics Matters
The First Law has a couple of different manifestations. At a broad, social level, the question of consequences comes down to politics--not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of power and norms. The rules embedded into an autonomous or semi-autonomous system come from individual and institutional biases and norms, and while that can't really be avoided, it needs to be acknowledged. We can't pretend that technologies--particularly technologies with a level of individual agency--are completely neutral.
Law #3: It's Your Fault
At a more practical level, the First Law illuminates issues of liability. Complex systems will have unexpected and unintended behaviors. These can be simple, akin to a software bug, but they can be profoundly complicated, the emergent result of combinations of programmed rules and new environments. As we come to depend upon robotic systems for everything from defense to health care to transportation, complex results will become increasingly common--and the designers will be blamed.
Law #4: No Such Thing as a Happy Slave
Would autonomous systems have rights? As long as we think of rights as being something available only to humans, probably not. But as our concept of rights expands, including (in particular) the Great Apes Project's attempt to grant a subset of human rights to our closest relatives, that may change. If a system is complex and autonomous enough that we start to blame it instead of its creators for mistakes, we'll have to take seriously the question of whether it deserves rights, too.
Law #5: Don't Kick the Robot
Finally, we have the issue of empathy. We've known for awhile that people who abuse animals as kids often grow up to abuse other people as adults. As our understanding of how animals feel and think develops, we have an increasingly compelling case for avoiding any kind of animal cruelty. But robots can be built to have reactions to harm and danger that mimic animal behavior; a Pleo dinosaur robot detects that it's being held aloft by its tail, and kicks and screams accordingly. This triggers an empathy response--and is likely to become a standard way for a robot to communicate damage or risk to its human owner.
We may not fully realize just how profound the ongoing introduction of autonomous systems into our day to day lives will prove to be. These aren't just more gadgets, or dumb tools, or background technologies. These are, increasingly, systems that--despite being mechanical, created objects--operate in the same emotional and social-intelligence space as animals and even people.
At the moment, the question of how to treat robots appropriately, and the issue of ethical guidelines for roboticists, may seem relatively minor. That's okay--it's going to take us awhile to work through the right ethical and social models. But we really should have a handle on this before the systems we make decide that they've been kicked around for long enough, and start to kick back.
Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.
What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) one idea stands out: resilience.
Resilience means the capacity of an entity--such as a person, an institution, or a system--to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards. Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient structure would bend, but would be hard to break. The term was once found largely in psychology textbooks and material science research, but the systems design crowd has, over the past few years, enthusiastically adopted the concept.
Designing for resilience takes on particular relevance as we think about what happens after the current economic crisis passes. It's easy, in the midst of a chaotic situation, to focus solely on immediate issues, but periods in which everyone else is grappling with the present are precisely when it's the most critical to think about tomorrow. And while we can't predict exactly what will happen in the future, we can get a pretty good sense of what kinds of drivers will shape it--and how we might influence those drivers.
What would a more resilient world look like? There's no universal "resilience theory" just yet, but some of the principles employed by ecologists and designers thinking about resilient systems give us a hint.
Two factors stand out as core assumptions of a resilience approach: the future is inherently uncertain, so the system needs to be as flexible as possible; and failures happen, so the system needs to be able to identify failures early and not make things worse as a result. These may seem like common-sense notions, but today's global systems work best when everything's running smoothly and predictably. Resilient systems are optimized for rough roads with sudden turns.
Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected loss of components.
A good comparison of the two models can be seen in the contrast between the current electricity grid (centralized, with limited diversity) and the "smart grid" model being debated (decentralized and highly diverse). Today's power grid is brittle, and the combination of a few local failures can make large sections collapse; a smart grid has a wide variety of inputs, from wind farms to home solar to biofuel generators, and its network is designed to handle the churn of local power sources turning on and shutting off.
The recognition that failure happens is the other intrinsic part of a resilience approach. Mistakes, malice, pure coincidence--there's no way to rule out all possible ways in which a given system can stumble. The goal, therefore, should be to make failures easy to spot through widespread adoption of transparency through a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" embrace of openness, and to give the system enough redundancy and slack that it's possible to absorb the failures that get through. If you know that you can't rule out failure, you need to be able to "fail gracefully," in the language of design.
The difference between brittle failure and graceful failure can be seen vividly in how different coastal areas deal with ocean surges (whether from storms or tsunamis). Levees, seawalls, and other "hard barriers" can be completely effective unless breached--but once breached, can (and often will) fail catastrophically. Regions relying on abundant coastal wetlands, mangrove forests, and similar "soft barriers," conversely, are likely to see a bit of flooding, but the mass of the ocean surge will be absorbed and dissipated by the environment.
You don't have to be trying to come up with a new global economic model to appreciate resilience. Increasingly, the concept is taking root in organizations of all types as a strategic guideline, and becoming part of the language of design for everything from software to cities. In some circles, it's starting to replace "sustainability" as an environmental driver.
One reason why the idea of resilience resonates with those of us engaged in foresight work is that, as troubling as it may be to contemplate, the current massive economic downturn is likely to be neither the only nor the biggest crisis we face over the next few decades. The need to shift quickly away from fossil fuels (for both environmental and supply reasons) may be as big a shock as today's "econalypse," and could easily be compounded by accelerating problems caused by global warming. Demographic issues--aging populations, migrants and refugees, and changing regional ethnic make-ups--loom large around the world, notably in China. Pandemics, resource collapse, even radically disruptive technologies all have the potential to cause global shake-ups on the scale of what we see today... and we may see all of these, and more, over the next 20 to 30 years.
It's going to be a bumpy ride--we should be ready.
Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.
I have my doubts about Google's new plan to better target advertising to meet our transient interests. As yet another manifestation of the idea of only showing us the ads we want to see, when we want to see them, it will inevitably stumble over the reality that we often don't use the Internet in ways that fit advertisers' assumptions. Machines get shared, people use multiple browsers, and, increasingly, web users are savvy about being able to block ads, regardless of how targeted they may claim to be.
We're in an arms race with advertisers (and spammers, their less- reputable cousins): As fast as we improve ad-blocking technology, they improve their ability to get past it. This will only get worse as the Web becomes something we carry with us as a constant presence. But what happens when you combine increasingly immersive digital tools and aggressive competition between advertisers and filters? Unintended, and potentially quite unsettling, consequences.
Technologists and futurists call the mashup of digital info and physical space “blended reality.” Apps in development for the iPhone and Google’s Android platform are early indicators that a seamless blending of atoms and bits may soon be available to us. And just beyond that, personal heads-up displays, digital glasses, and other forms of wearable immersive systems, all of which exist in prototype may give us a view of reality seamlessly blending the Internet and the physical world.
Along with the Internet-blended reality, of course, likely comes advertising (and spam and viruses). These can be blocked, but the most effective steps we could take to put a lid on digital junk would ultimately undermine the freedom and innovative potential of the Internet. The more top-down control there is in the digital world, the less spam and malware we'll see -- but we'll also lose the opportunity to do disruptive, creative things. Consider Apple's iPhone App Store: Apple's vetting and remote-disable process may minimize the number of harmful applications, but it also eliminates programs that do things outside of what the iPhone designers intended.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use. This means, unfortunately, that ads, spam, and malware are probably inevitable in a blended-reality world. We're likely to deal with these problems the same way we do now: Good system design to resist malware, and filters to limit the volume of unwanted ads. All useful and necessary, but there's a twist: Filtering systems for blended-reality technologies may allow us to construct our own visions of reality.
Why? A blended-reality interface won't be just a dumb display we carry with us or wear on our faces. In order for it to be able to properly display digital images mixed in with real-world objects, it would need both a camera and sufficient smarts to be able to recognize what it's looking at. Most discussions of blended reality suggest that we'd want the technology to observe the world around us in order to "notice" things we'd find interesting. Connected to the Net and various data sources, such a system would be able to tell us quite a bit about what we're looking at.
With such technology, it's a small step from blocking digital ads to blocking physical ones, too. The camera-enabled blended-reality device could easily include a feature that not only blocks the digital ads we don't want to see, but also billboards, fliers, and maybe even branded clothing.
Of course, all of those blurred-out spaces can get distracting, so we'd want to replace them with alternative images -- perhaps photos pulled from our own online galleries. The substitution doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be enough to not interrupt our attention. In fact, we'd want it to be slightly imperfect, so that we don't mistakenly try to read (or point other people to) something we're blocking.
This may sound appealing, but it has a dark underside. The moment that we can easily display location-aware images on a blended-reality system, people will try to block any images they don't like. Forget ads: Some people will block even slightly suggestive images, or signs proclaiming religious beliefs that they oppose, or newspapers and magazines with arguments they don't like--anything that would upset their custom-built reality. Or maybe anyone. Consider the "Prop 8 Maps" site, mashing up Google Maps and public records of people who donated to support or oppose the 2008 California proposition on gay marriage. Suddenly, you could easily see who around you agreed or disagreed enough with the proposal to put up money.
That's not too hard to imagine. Face recognition technology is progressing quickly, and often relies on the same heuristics that enable the recognition of physical objects. This means that, technologically speaking, it's not too far of a leap from blocking advertisers to blocking out the people who annoy us. With one click, we construct our own realities, ones that don't include the ideas -- and people -- we dislike.
The future is made up of unintended consequences, and this could be a big one. Blended-reality technology is the ultimate expression of the mobile Internet wave. But it looks like the flip side of "show me everything I want to know about the world" is "don't show me anything I don't want to know."
Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.
This has been the default response by privacy advocates and civil libertarians for some time. Groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pay close attention to the various ways in which privacy rights can be eroded or ignored through the proliferation of digital tools, and do their best to focus attention on emerging problems. While there have been occasional legal victories, these groups have arguably been more effective at educating the public than changing policy.
Call it "polluting the datastream": introducing false and misleading bits of personal information (about location, about one's history, about interests and work) into the body of public data about you. It could be as targeted as adding lies to your Wikipedia entry (should you have one) or other public bios; it could be as random as putting enough junk info about yourself onto Google-indexed websites and message boards. Many of us do this already, at least to a minor degree: at a recent conference, I asked the audience how many give false date-of-birth info on website sign-ups; over half the audience raised their hands.
We leave digital footprints everywhere we go, and those footprints are becoming easier and easier to track. Although many of us believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that transparency is generally a good thing for a society, the lack of control over what you reveal about yourself is often troubling. The ease with which abundant personal info can be used for (e.g.) identity theft creates a situation where we have many of the dilemmas of transparency without enough of the benefit.
And then there is the rapid growth of official surveillance systems. In the U.K., police cameras are ubiquitous--I actually saw more surveillance cameras in Manchester last week than I did in Singapore on a trip last November.
We can't. We can only see possibilities. But that's okay. We're not trying to predict what will happen tomorrow; we're trying to understand possible consequences. We're trying to lay out maps of the landscape ahead, in order chart a better course. These maps won't always be accurate--sometimes they'll be completely wrong. But the process of creating the maps will give us a more detailed look and clearer perspective on where we are today. Even being completely wrong has value: figuring out why we were wrong, what we missed, can sometimes be even more illuminating than being right.
Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant 
Resilience means the capacity of an entity--such as a person, an
institution, or a system--to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks,
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards.
Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient
structure would bend, but would be hard to break. The term was once
found largely in 
Two factors stand out as core assumptions of a resilience approach:
the future is inherently uncertain, so the system needs to be as
flexible as possible; and failures happen, so the system needs to be
able to identify failures early and not make things worse as a result.
These may seem like common-sense notions, but today's global systems
work best when everything's running smoothly and predictably.
Resilient systems are optimized for rough roads with sudden turns.
The difference between brittle failure and graceful failure can be
seen vividly in 
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use. This means, unfortunately, that ads, spam, and malware are probably inevitable in a blended-reality world. We're likely to deal with these problems the same way we do now: Good system design to resist malware, and filters to limit the volume of unwanted ads. All useful and necessary, but there's a twist: Filtering systems for blended-reality technologies may allow us to construct our own visions of reality.
This may sound appealing, but it has a dark underside. The moment that we can easily display location-aware images on a blended-reality system, people will try to block any images they don't like. Forget ads: Some people will block even slightly suggestive images, or signs proclaiming religious beliefs that they oppose, or newspapers and magazines with arguments they don't like--anything that would upset their custom-built reality. Or maybe anyone. Consider the "
