Alternative afterlives

The cover of Sum (U.S. edition)

While in London last week, I was given a new book which came with a glowing recommendation: Sum by David Eagleman. I got through it in a few short train journeys, and it's an astonishing read.

Written mostly in the second person ("You find yourself in a great padded compound...") like a choose-your-own adventure or role playing gamebook, it consists of forty short stories or thought experiments -- the genre is neither one nor the other, but both -- each embodying a different cosmic dénouement. That is, in the same way that storytellers sometimes propose a series of alternative endings for a narrative, this collection does that for life itself, by offering alternative afterlives. If this concept strikes you as self-important, dull, or contrived, as an experience, it was none of those things for me, and indeed such a misapprehension provides all the more reason to get hold of a copy. Also, if (like me) you are fascinated by Matters of Ultimate Concern but left cold by most traditional, religious and institutional responses to such mysteries, it is an outstanding read, by turns funny and moving, playful and profound, and important without being self-important.

I'll leave it to you to find examples, if you want them, so I can focus here on the approach and tone of the book. It's highly original, and yet reminiscent of such diverse sources as the magical-realist thought experiments of Jorge Luis Borges, the now-light, now-dark cosmic wit of Neil Gaiman or Douglas Adams, and the philosophical vision, schematic-yet-personal, of Jim Carse's Finite and Infinite Games. In the stories there are shades of The Twilight Zone, The Truman Show, The Matrix, and more -- but I fear that merely to list such references does a disservice to the author, perhaps through too many comparisons conveying an impression of work that is excessively referential and diffuse, when in fact it has a beautiful, focused sense of its own agenda and voice. What Sum has in common with the above may be certain of its themes, and especially its willingness to engage in imaginative, big-picture speculation with a sensibility that encompasses or synthesises both the ironic and the romantic, both good humour and deep seriousness.

In intent, perhaps most of all the book reminded me of the late, great psychonaut Terence McKenna, many of whose theories (Timewave Zero, psychedelic mushrooms as alien intelligences, etc) appear to have been designed not necessarily to convince his audience of their truth as such, but rather to prove how outlandish the various ideas are that it is not only possible, but also (given how little we truly know about the universe) plausible to believe. As John Lennon put it, "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

And I learned today (via a blog entry at Amazon) that this is a theme which Eagleman -- a neuroscientist -- intends to take up in his next book, Why I Am A Possibilian. The notion of Possibilism (Possibilitarianism?) seems to me to provide an amusing and much-needed counter-meme to the narrow faux certainty of Singularitarianism, and I shall look forward to the follow up with great interest.

Meanwhile, I urge regular readers of this blog -- in all likelihood, veteran Possibilians themselves -- to seek out Sum wherever you can find it. Like any well-wrought set of future scenarios, each story (hypothetical outcome) can be read as entirely consistent with what is known, or believed, about the past and present so far, while simply positing different next steps. And, like the artful exploration of alternative futures, the juxtaposition of these many alternative afterlives evokes a sense of possibility space in multiple dimensions which makes it far more than merely the sum of its parts.

Related posts:
> Kurzweil's dangerous idea
> On the scalability of small opportunities

(Thanks, Brian!)

Design led futures

MARK: a digital feedback "biomarker" to manifest internal bodily processes
Image by Michael Fyfe for Kardia Project, Design-Led Futures 02007
(see Kardia workbook, pp. 132-154)

A fabric-based, personalised interface for music collections
Image by Dan Scudder for Stitch Project, Design Led Futures 02007
(see Stitch workbook, pp. 17-25)

X-POSE: diagnostic imaging plaster for user-friendly sports medicine
Image by William Carlson for Velvet Project, Design Led Futures 02007
(see Velvet workbook, pp. 47-56)

Each year, students in the School of Design at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, have an opportunity to apply their design training to dreaming up future product lines for a partner company.

The Design Led Futures (DLF) program was established at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design in 2004. ... The DLF program offers companies visions of the future. It explores possible scenarios for ten years into the future. It attempts to expand the range of possibilities that a company can see by challenging what the company currently does. It entices companies to take risks by offering believable future scenarios. Partner companies have included Fisher & Paykel and Methven from New Zealand, and currently DLF is working with Nike.

Companies have seen DLF as an opportunity to develop visions of the future with two main purposes in mind. The partners do not expect to develop intellectual property out of the projects. Rather, they use them to challenge their own teams into thinking beyond their comfort zone. Secondly, the concepts proposed by DLF are used by companies as promotional tools. The concepts serve the same function as 'concept cars'. They are not intended to go into production, but they help companies create an image of themselves for the public. This is useful in the sense that the company can express a sense of innovation without necessarily producing the concepts.

~Edgar Rodríguez Ramírez, Ross Stevens, and Simon Fraser, 02007, "Design-Led Futures: Emotional and Behavioral Response to Radical Future Concepts" [pdf], paper presented at Connecting '07, the World Design Congress, San Francisco

In March last year, Pantopicon's Nik Baerten succinctly described the three projects DLF had produced up to that point (a post reproduced at experience design consultancy Experientia):

• Domestic Bliss: students were required to create a new understanding of the role that appliances (such as fridges, washing machines and cookers) might play in the architecture and culture of the home [link; set in 02014; working with appliance company Fisher & Paykel]


• Inside-Out: project on the theme of outdoor living and the role that appliances might play in making this possible and pleasurable [link; set in 02016; again with Fisher & Paykel]


• Energising Water: project to explore and create a new understanding of the base material of water by creatively applying existing or new, specifically developed technologies [link; set in 02015; partnering with Methven, a shower and tapware manufacturer]

Each of these resulted in a string of Flash-animation presentations (reachable via the project links above) describing a series of hypothetical product lines. There's a lot of content in total, and it's well worth exploring.

However, I want to highlight the most recent project completed through DLF, a collaboration with the sports-brand giant, Nike. The 02007 cohort's collective output has its own self-contained website, hello_cybernetics, which at the time of writing seems to have received startlingly little attention online.

The three sets of design concepts offered up for Nike's future are called Stitch (based on digitally-responsive fabrics), Velvet (based on projecting images on the body), and Kardia (which, I'm delighted to see, goes way beyond the usual ten-year horizon to a post-Singularity vision for the brand, as far as 02087). Each project has a short introductory film wherein the product concepts are shown off and explained, and a downloadable (pdf) "workbook" (presentation booklet of sorts) is also available for each of the three. The production values are great, and some of the ideas are quite ingenious. (Images at the top of this post come from the workbook documents for which I couldn't find separate URLs, because they're linked from a Flash page.)

I very much like the fact that the students seem to have seized the opportunity to elaborate their personal ideals for what the brand could become, which importantly, allows room to deviate from the corporate vision. This makes it a particularly interesting case of inerweaving commercial and educational agendas; it's certainly far more enlightened than simply using trainee designers as a low-cost source of labour, toiling to legitimate the conceptual confines of an Official Future. And it makes learning possible on both sides of the partnership. From the Design-Led Futures initiative's website:

On the one hand, we want to empower students. As course coordinator Ross Stevens says, "If we cannot demonstrate to students that they can initiate meaningful change – then, as educators, we have failed".

On the other hand, we want to help industry to harness this creative energy and direct it into commercially successful business infrastructures and outcomes. In this respect, we are committed to an active leadership role – one of collaboratively developing industry, rather than the traditional role of simply serving industry by following its directives.

On his profile page, Stevens adds:

I personally believe that design fills a unique role here, first by generating creative, diverse and challenging possibilities, and then making these visible and tangible to others outside of the design profession. Through this process, a broader debate is created that draws people with different skills and perspectives together to create answers that are economically, socially and ecologically considered.

Resonant sentiments.

Overall I'm impressed by what strongly comes across as a highly resourced, pedagogically thoughtful, and institutionally well-connected program. For an initiative named "Design Led Futures", of course, from my point of view it would be great to see a deeper awareness of the futures dimension -- concepts and methods from the futures field that could be extremely useful in this setting -- and there are other aspects of the program that I'd like to look at more closely another time (such as its organisers' research on emotional engagement through future artifacts). But for now, it's great to have found another active player at the intersection of futures and design practice.

Check it out.

Related posts:
> Future-jamming 101
> Object-oriented futuring
> Greener Gadgets
> London after the rain
> The MacGuffin Library

Historical preenactment

An emerging trend?

Artwork by Aaron Diaz | via preenactment.org

At Burning Man this year I was intrigued to see in the schedule a theme camp called "Time Colony", featuring some sort of collective named The Historical Preenactment Society.

Now, historical re-enactments have long smacked to me of the thoroughly bizarre. It could be a result of exposure at an early age to Monty Python (see for example the unforgettable Reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor, by the Batley Townswomen's Guild). Pre-enactment, however, while no less bizarre, is admittedly something of a preoccupation of mine (exhibit A, exhibit B).

My search for Time Colony around the advertised intersection was a bust, because (I later found out) the camp had been relocated at the last minute, so I missed their scheduled events. When I did eventually find it, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of one Nick Ernst, the camp's affable coordinator who in real life is an undergraduate student in maths and physics at UC Santa Cruz. Nick told me all about what they had been up to. He's just recently posted a description of their efforts at his blog...

The cyborg leader made to untie the robot at that point. Someone in the audience held up a gun and fired twice. The robot and cyborg leader fell. After a silence, a cyborg yelled "Murder! Double Murder!" And fighting ensued.
Everyone stopped for the end narration: The audience member who had shot the cyborg and robot was charged with two accounts of murder in the first degree. The robot was thus recognized as an entity with the right to life, and so this tragic event spurred a big step forward in the fight for robot rights.

This was, as far as Nick knows, the first instance of future performance to travel under the name of "historical preenactment". The concept for the Historical Preenactment Society was borrowed, he explains, from Dresden Codak, a webcomic by Aaron Diaz that will thrill anyone equally interested in manga-style artwork and The Kurzweilian Singularity. (Check out the comic's instalments featuring the Society's first and second mentions, but note they're both part of a longer story that starts here.) Nick has also set up a Facebook group for his version of the Society (296 members and counting -- and there are four or five other chapters, too). Meanwhile, someone else has (independently?) created a website for Society activities, the first instance of which is apparently a concerted group involvement in Superstruct, the massively multiplayer forecasting game set in 02019, which is currently underway. The entrepreneurial artist Diaz has also put HPS t-shirts on sale here.

While we eagerly await news of the group's next intervention, here's another bit of gleefully anachronistic entertainment, sent to me today by Zander Rose at the Long Now because "it reminded me of your projects but in reverse": Tweet Capsule is a twitter feed by Amos, "time twittering" from exactly 100 years ago with Blackadderesque snarkiness.  For instance, 6 October 01908:

Happy Birthday Carole Lombard! She turns 0 today!
http://tr.im/carole

Related posts:
> Humans have 23 years to go
> In memoriam
> Experiential scenarios on video
> My first Burn

Second Nature

This week, while searching for visualisations of future cityscapes, I encountered for the first time the work of American artist Mary Mattingly. Mattingly produces astonishingly beautiful images that moodily, and seamlessly, blend landscape photography with future-inflected human subjects and dwellings. Her website is replete with these gorgeous shots, some of my favourites shown above. Most appear to be part of a strand she calls Second Nature; "a name that articulates a point in time of my ongoing work. This work continues, through photography, sculpture, video and podcasting."

The last of the images above, "The New Mobility of Home" (02004), was featured in an exhibition called "Ecotopia" at the International Center of Photography last year, which I came across via this Scientific American blog post referring to "surrealist depictions of a semi-post-apocalyptic future". That post links to a New York Magazine article and a review in the New York Times (check out the audio slideshow). From the Times piece:

"Ecotopia" might be described as "An Inconvenient Truth" in exhibition form. It is a tale of beauty and devastation told by nearly 40 photojournalists and artists. Their viewpoints vary, as do their subjects and forms, but you rarely escape a sense of nature's vast, incalculable richness or of photography's ability to do it justice. There may be no greater meeting of subject and medium.

Interesting to see Mattingly's work drafted here under the rubric "photography", which doesn't quite seem to do it justice. From an interview with Mattingly transcribed at her website::

In my artwork I will use any medium to realize an idea, however, I usually finalize a piece through photography, video, or sculpture because these mediums, to me, allow for a direct translation of reality or of a created real-space and because they either represent the world around us or sit in the world around us, they carry a truth. Photography and video have an inherent honesty – we continue to want to believe what looks believable. Manipulating "reality" within these mediums to create futuristic scenes allows for the ability to provide latent meaning. Indelible, purposeful and fantastic.

In a sense, the narrow, documentary connotation of the label and practice of photography, conventionally understood, are part of where these plausible-yet-fantastic vignettes draw their strength. The visual codes of photorealism are belied by seemingly impossible (futuristic) subject matter.

Asked about these futuristic themes, she elaborates:

My work has always been an interleaving of the past, present and future, understanding that the future is imminent and immanent. I have always practiced some form of future scenario-planning, and have always been environmentally and politically concerned in my life and art. Out of everything that interests me, some things tend to frighten me, and the things that frighten me tend to eat away at me. It is those things I usually end up making work about.
[...]
Kurzweil states that, with the exponential acceleration of development in technology and so-called progress, the human condition will reach a point when we can no longer process our environment from our present perspective as the accelerating speed of growth outpaces our faculties. However, Bertrand Russell made an excellent point, saying that if the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream.
[...]
Kurzweil is predicting singularity as a future happening, but as far as I can tell, it is already here and will continue to grow.

The prolific Mattingly's labyrinthine website is intriguing to explore, and contains detailed photographic records as well as written (esoteric, theorist-sprinkled) statements for her varied, and frequently interwoven, projects, as well as critics' responses. She fearlessly develops a wide-ranging and idiosyncratic vocabulary -- conceptual, visual and verbal -- with projects including a Spatial Lexicon (a "Dictionary for functioning in a New Space"), New Time (a proposed "universal time scale without confusion"), and the Waterpod™ (billed as "a completely sustainable, navigable living space"). She also has a statement specifically addressing The (Kurzweil) Singularity, including this observation:

When people are imbedded with different forms of technology, from the wireless to the plastic to the drug, and when we procreate solely outside of the body, we just continue the abstraction from nature and person that began before the Greeks invented the cosmos.

Of all the work I've seen at her site, aside from the images above, I especially like the Wearable Home, designed for nomads, including a substantial future cohort of environmental refugees -- and downloadable patterns for producing your own.


Altogether, there's an interesting mixture of deadly seriousness and playful irony in this body of work, which from my point of view is highly appealing. With a freewheeling combination of lyricism, tragedy, hopefulness and wry comedy, it's hard to peg Mattingly down. Such are the tightropes the futurist needs to walk, and she does so with skill and grace.

Which brings to mind the words of my mentor, Jim Dator:

Should I be optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
I believe the answer is: neither. I should be aware and active.

Kurzweil's dangerous idea

Last Saturday, 13 May 02006, was the Singularity Summit at Stanford University, featuring such luminaries as Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Eric Drexler, and others. The Singularity is a rather fascinating concept pioneered by mathematician John von Neumann, popularised by Vernor Vinge in a famous 1993 paper and made famous in the last couple of books by Kurzweil. It is a hypothetical technological event or scenario in the not too distant future in which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. In mathematics a singularity is defined as "a point where a mathematical function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved". Applied to historical change, then, it's a sort of metaphor for the experience of scaling the dizzying heights of the curve of accelerating change, which amounts to an historical discontinuity -- an event so sudden and far-reaching that it's virtually unimaginable what things on the other side look like.

None of the speakers at the Stanford Summit that I can recall provided examples of previous singularity-like events. However, sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, in a very entertaining presentation for the Long Now Foundation in 02004, cited three historical instances that provided a foretaste of singularitarian discontinuity: the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. These were world-reinventing phenomena. Proponents of The (upcoming technological) Singularity claim it would be the mother of them all, bringing a transformation tantamount to an end to human limits, including death.

Now, some futurists use the concept of "wild cards" (high-impact, low probability events) to think about possible large scale changes. This can be a useful way to provoke thinking about sudden events that defy the assumptions and practices which collectively constitute "business as usual". A straightforward example of a wild card is the natural disaster -- tsunami, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. But the technological Singularity is not a wild card scenario in this sense. Yes, it is characterised by its advocates (of which Kurzweil is the chief prophet) as an extremely high impact event, but also one with high probability attached -- actually, they say, it's inevitable. Here is a cause for concern about the idea of The Singularity, or rather the way it is presented in some quarters.

John Brockman's 1 January 02006 Huffington Post article supplies a range of prominent inellectuals' responses to "The Edge" annual question, which was simply, "What is your Dangerous Idea?" The intention was to elicit from respondents their main thoughts that that could be considered dangerous not because they might be false -- but because they might be true. Kurzweil's answer was "The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion." (There are lots of other interesting responses on very different themes - take a look.)

I like this suggestion. Radical life extension and expansion is most certainly a possibility worthy of careful consideration. Much public discussion coasts uneasily on a tissue of assumptions vulnerable to periodic disruption by unforeseen events. In light of current worries about funding the pensions of baby boomers on the verge of retirement, for instance, think how this challenge would be shifted by a series major medical breakthroughs extending their life expectancy. Many current problems would look very different today if they had been thought about carefully much earlier, when they were still just distant possibilities on the horizon. Our political debates have not yet evolved to expect the unexpected, but opinions about the future found in mainstream discussion, based on the need to seem reasonable, are so often wrong that it behooves us to entertain much more outlandish, radical, and yes, dangerous ideas. (Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick: "History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.") This rhymes with futurist Jim Dator's Second Law: "Any useful idea about the futures should appear to be ridiculous."

I no longer find the Kurzweilian outlook ridiculous -- though until quite recently I suppose I did. The idea of a technological singularity appeared somehow absurd to me, until I read and heard more about it and realized I had not been taking the acceleration of change in computing power seriously enough. (When change is accelerating, more happens during a short period late in the process than a long period early on.) I think the singularitarian views of Kurzweil and friends, not despite but because of their extremism, can be highly useful as a provocation and an example of the surprising or apparently ridiculous ideas that can become plausible in circumstances of extremely rapid change: twenty or thirty more years of Moore's law, exponential growth in computing power, and we could expect a lot of things to look different. I applaud singularitarians for challenging us to take accelerating change seriously. There are other, very big doubts I have about this line of thinking -- for instance, I am not convinced that other systems, such as ecological ones, will necessarily continue to support smooth sailing up the curve of computational speed for that period of time -- but we can focus on those concerns another time.

What troubles me is the posited inevitability of the Singularity; and the messianic end-of-days character with which it seems to be imbued. The idea has been described as "the rapture of the nerds", a comical name, but one with a disturbing grain of truth about it -- and the problem is right there in the label "singularity" ... it's a singular, exclusive, totalising conception of the future of humanity and the world, with a distinctly religious, eschatological air about it. In this light, it's a discourse that brooks no dissent; for the corollary message of inevitability is: get on board or get out of the way -- there's nothing else you can do. This notion of inevitability -- applied to *any* scenario that results from human decisions and behaviours, unlike a volcanic eruption -- truly is a dangerous idea. The danger is that people make it inevitable by accepting it as such; and to that extent they forego, or fail to recognise, the need and opportunity to imagine and pursue their preferred alternatives. We make and set these trends in motion, and then disown responsibility for them as if they were acts of God. This is highly suspect from a political as well as philosophical perspective.

Let's be clear: this is not an argument, luddite-style, against the "contents" of The Singularity scenario as undesirable (to the extent that such contents can actually be discerned, amid all the fluff and excitement). Perhaps it would be a desirable future, even a magnificent one, at least for some. Nor is it an argument that The Singularity can't or won't happen. Perhaps it will. But these are the wrong questions. Who's making these changes occur? Who wants it to happen, and why? What might we do or refrain from doing, individually and collectively, to make the things we'd like to see happen, and avoid or mitigate the things we don't? The implications of these possibilities for our action was not the focus of this particular event, but it absolutely should be. Otherwise, what's the point?

The argument I'm trying to make is that some proponents of The Singularity appear to be preparing themselves, and as many of the rest of us as possible, for The One True Future, and proselytising for recruits. Especially if their enthusiasm springs from a perception that stronger-than-human-AI would be an unqualified good, those people advertising its inevitability are, wittingly or not, colonising the future for us -- ensuring that debates on these other issues (that scenario's preferability and probability) are framed in terms that marginalise dissenting views. They place this human process beyond the scope of any discussion of preferences or values. Hence the Singularity Summit, while extremely well organised, well attended, and thought provoking -- all of which made being there more than worthwhile -- felt largely like a rally of the faithful. Two sceptical voices were featured in the program, Douglas Hofstadter and Bill McKibben, yet neither of whom made the point forcefully enough that I think most needs to be made. History is a human story, which ought to be written collaboratively and carefully, and the Singularitarian who treats that favourite scenario as a fait accompli is either naively or deviously denying the responsibility to consider our other possible paths.

That's why I'm a Singularity Sceptic.