Cameron Confidential

Moving house to Wordpress!

2012-01-28T13:37:00.002-05:00

From now on, check for my posts at:

nigelcameron.wordpress.com (which will soon be reachable at nigelcameron.org (general tech/values/policy)

values2value.wordpress.com (CSR-related posts)

and when inspiration of another sort strikes:

anotherreport.wordpress.com

Content and the Future of Knowledge: How to Win

2011-12-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

Content and the Future of Knowledge: How to Win

APA CONTENT SUMMIT, London, November 23rd, 2011

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

Talking about the future always seems too easy or too hard. Anyone can speculate. No-one actually knows. So what’s the point?

If talk is cheap, isn’t this the cheapest? We all know of “futurists” who have discredited themselves sounding like Nostradamus. If we can’t even predict the markets from one week to the next, what price longer-term shifts in culture, technology, and business?

In practical terms, there are two poles to the futures discussion: futurists who pontificate, and cannier leaders who engage in scenario planning. The former may get it very wrong (remember the “paperless office”?) The latter tend to cover their backs by imagining the obvious and making sure all possibilities have been sketched out.

I once took part in a scenario planning project run by the U.S. government called Project Horizon (the report is out there somewhere on the internet). They pulled in Booz Allen to run the process, and top officials from many federal agencies as well as a smattering of outsiders (like me). Five detailed global scenarios were articulated, and after a couple of years of interviews and meetings some core conclusions reached that would fit them all. For a generation and more, governments and major corporations have used scenario planning – pioneered in the oil industry - to guide their long-term decisions. It can be a clumsy process, but captures the insights of “futurists” and other smart thinkers and turns it into usable intelligence to drive decision-making. So what’s ahead for branded content?

First let me sketch five keys to thinking about the future.

1. Change is exponential; don’t ever forget Moore’s Law, which is helping drive it. Gordon Moore, who founded Intel, famously predicted the extraordinary pace of change. He spoke originally of the number of components that could be fitted into integrated circuits as doubling every year. The "law" has evolved into a prediction and observation that every 18 months or so chips would double in power and halve in price; it has proved remarkably accurate and explains why our computers keep getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. What this means is that while the impact may not be as dramatic (there are other factors driving/slowing change than the chip) the pace keeps getting faster. Perhaps annual industry conferences should cease to be annual and, every year, take place after a shorter interval to catch the increasing pace of change.

2. As we think about the future we must avoid at all costs the danger of groupthink – in which everyone essentially agrees with each other. Think Wall Street, 2008. There are no guarantees where change is concerned, but one way to future-proof your business is to make sure that in every planning meeting there is an outlier in the room; someone who just doesn’t agree with everyone else; someone who keeps challenging the assumptions of the group. This does not make for easy process. But it makes for good process. And is unavoidable if the future is in view.

3. We need to think in contexts in which disciplines, perspectives, and styles are mixed; that is, whatever the particular issue we deal with, near term or longer term, our perspectives and decisions will always be improved if we involve people with a variety of expertise and outlook - if you have experience in project management you will be aware of how important this is; but it is a lot more important where the future is concerned.

4. Whether in the formal sense of strategic planning or more ad hoc brainstorming, the future process must be iterative. And (my point about the exponential nature of change) the iterations need to be increasingly frequent.

5. Behind every problem, every issue, lies a question. Get the question wrong and it is pretty much guaranteed you will get the answer wrong, however hard you work at it. The policy institute that I direct, the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, has for its strapline, “Asking Tomorrow’s Questions.” It may not seem obvious, but getting the question right is in fact more significant than how we work on the answer. For example, when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, America – and much of the rest of the world – was enthralled. Interest in space travel is now negligible. How do we account for that? It’s quite simple: the reason everyone was fascinated by the moonshot was not out of interest in space as such, but because it came to symbolize the future. Now, the moonshot as NASA’s great emblem means the opposite. Unless you are 42 you weren’t even born then! The moonshot is the past. If you are excited about the future, you buy an iPad. As we probe the future, we do have to get the question right first. That’s why the “content” idea is important. The issue isn’t magazines. It’s the stuff that goes inside.

That having been said, what does the future hold for branded content? Three underlying principles seem very plain to me. Three huge forces are a work reshaping the landscape.

1. The future is mobile. I met someone the other day who explained that she has an old desktop PC at home, a heavy ageing laptop to carry around, and was wondering about getting a netbook or tablet to use as well. I gently explained she should throw out both the dinosaurs and spend what she thought was an amazingly small sum on a new lightweight item, probably a netbook, given her needs. Point is: we are on the move all the time; we desire to communicate and be informed as we are on the move; and while our smartphones have yet to merge with netbooks and tablets, we know they will. I’m not quite sure how. But I’m confident that in three or four years we shall carry only one device, which will be small enough to use as a phone, and in some clever way expand so we have a full keyboard for easy typing and a full screen for easy viewing. There will be no “PCs” on desks, and I am surprised how many of them are still there. Cloud-based storage is already highly effective where access is sufficiently high-speed. The device in your hand is merely an access-point. Mobile is driving everything – including driving content off paper and into digital.

2. The future is global. The spread of the internet, and especially mobile access, is best compared to a forest-fire. It took decades for landline telephones to spread even around the wealthier parts of the world. Already most Africans have mobile phones; tens of millions of them do not yet have electricity in their homes. They already use their phones for mobile banking more than people in the “west.” And this despite the fact that few have “smartphones” like the Android and Blackberry and iPhone. But cheap versions, especially Android-based, will soon sweep the continent. Point is: Hundreds of millions of consumers are already accessing the global knowledge network we call the internet using mobile devices. Many of them will never have anything else. And the newly-connected global community will benefit enormously from advances in translation technology, which already means you can chat with someone who speaks another language and will soon (five years?) make that routine. This will have enormous impacts on everything from the nature of governments in the “nation-state” system basically established in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia, to the workings of the United Nations and its agencies, to – yes – the future of global brands. The establishment of global brands has been a hallmark of 20^th century (primarily American) business. How to retain control of brands is emerging as a huge question as consumers get savvier and more connected. My own view is that Facebook will be over (well, like Myspace) in five years. But there will be powerful successors. How will it be if Brand X has a Facebook-type, crowd-sourced, consumerist group with, say, 2.5 billion members across every global market? I assume someone in Brand HQ is thinking hard about this. Because the game is about to change big-time.

3. The future is social. Companies big and small have been rather desperately seeking to get into “social” with Facebook pages and Like buttons and seeking integration with their product line. My view is that they have hardly begun to work through what this will soon mean. More to the point, how does it relate to branded content?

This is where it gets really interesting. Because the most powerful content-related force out there is best described as reciprocal curation. The future of global knowledge is curation by “friends” or, in Twitter terms, the people you follow; for whom you curate in turn. That is, everyone reads and reflects and assesses and then shares what they read and think with everyone else who happens to be interested. I discuss this phenomenon, which seems to me the central value (and value adder) of the internet, elsewhere. Its significance for branded content becomes clear when we consider the content models currently out there.

As we know, there are basically two others. Paywall and click-through ads. The old-tyme print media has begun to fall back behind paywalls. Search has been powered by click-through. Those two explain the business models of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Google, plus all the lesser players. But these models are flawed. The number paying for journalism and magazine content through paywalls is very small. The exceptions (e.g., Wall Street Journal) are highly specialized and handling high-value intelligence. In general, these efforts have failed. We know the core reason: internet users have learned bad habits; we expect “free.” There remain options, for example using micropayments, that may give “paywall” thinking a future. But it is unlikely to be widespread.

Meanwhile, the click-through ad model is also under stress. Google has grasped around half the web-based advertizing for the simple reason that it dominates search. But it is very hard to believe that this will last. Its algorithms may be smart, but there are other players out there where smart people also work. In five years, perhaps sooner, search (like Facebook-style social) will be seen as a utility. Utilities do not make “economic profit;” do not IPO at vast multi-billion sums. There are fluid markets coming in both social and search, and - this is the key - they will favour branded content.

Which brings us back to its future. Because the news – in the longer term – looks good.

First, effectively all content will migrate to digital; some will also be available in print, though I suspect, in the long term, not much. A digital option for whatever content is presently only in print format will be very rapid. Second, as we noted, curation at all levels will be increasingly crowd-sourced, whether through primitive Like buttons or the far more sophisticated system of reciprocal curation that has evolved at Twitter. Paywalls of all kinds will be abandoned except in areas where intelligence is of high value (even there, the pressure will be great). Click-through will wilt as a funding model for content aggregators as search becomes a utility. It will be the subtler marketing effort of “free” branded content that will triumph. If, that is, it attains an excellence that will survive the scrutiny of an open market in crowd-sourced curation. So there will be a race to the top, driven by the global, mobile, social marketplace for consumers – and for ideas.

Excellence will be the key. A market for content in which there are editors by the billion will be unforgiving. But to the winners, the spoils will be very great. In world increasingly literate and engaged, in which ideas and their expression flow freely and competitively, the content market is set to drive brands as it never has before.

The Wrong Stuff: NASA, Amtrak, and why the answer really is 42

2011-12-27T22:03:00.002-05:00

The Wrong Stuff: NASA, Amtrak, and why the answer really is 42

In my last commentary, I argued that the single greatest risk factor on the planet was the divergence in "corporate culture" between two rather small plots of U.S. real estate: Washington, DC, and Silicon Valley. Two communities bound together by their deeply geographical identity, a disdain for one another, and hubris off the charts. They just happen to be the two most consequent communities in the Solar System. What happens in Mexico stays in Mexico (unless, that is, it involves the cartels). What happens in SV and DC sends seismic shocks through the crust of the 3rd rock from the sun.

It may seem unfair to put Amtrak and NASA in the same sentence. But they just happen to be transportation organizations funded by the federal government. Amtrak, home of the slowest fast train on the planet (the, ahem, surely, ironically named Acela),respectfully engages technology that has changed little since Stevenson's day: Rails, carriages, and an engine to pull the latter over the former. The only major variant in railroadland worldwide is the Maglev, now embraced by China: magnetic levitation in an electric version of the reversed vacuum cleaner that enables hovercraft to be ships that rarely touch the water. (Point to note: so much of our 21st century excitement is in response to advances in essentially 19th century tech. The telephone and the typewriter have been hybridized to produce mobile devices; their functionality derives from extra bandwidth more than any other factor. QWERTY rules. That's why Siri is so significant; it's actually new. But we digress.) My point is not to argue that we need vast investment, federal and private, in a U.S.-wide 21st century railroad system. Ca va sans dire. And maybe the Chinese should run the engineering. (DC-NYC in one hour; DC/NYC-LA/SF in 10?)

NASA's core problem is that it is starting to look more and more like Amtrak. At one level that is ridiculous. Not only have its engineers performed feats of utter brilliance that even now seem way beyond the best of the brightest a whole generation later in China and India and for that matter Europe. But as budgets are cut to the quick and the body politic on both sides of the aisle seems hardly to be dominated by visionaries, it can't be easy to run the agency whose signature achievement happened before everyone under 42 was born (and everyone under 60 could vote). It is not that the agency has lacked visionaries and plans. But how do you top the trip to the moon? Plainly, with the lunar base that everyone over 42 read about when we were kids; and the manned missions to Mars and beyond that the sci-fi writers convinced us would come next and that space engineers have been champing at the budget to get on with ever since.

So what's the problem? Well, cash, branding, the federal mindset, and now: Space-X and the ubiquitous Richard Branson (whose hand I once shook and on one of whose airplanes I am currently writing) are making it hard to argue for $18bn a year for a mission that's plainly been derailed (to resort to an Amtrak metaphor). Trips to earth-orbit space may well become utilities, in private hands. The mystique of escaping earth's pull has folded. And NASA looks like your grandparents' idea of the right stuff. I mean, look at the logo. Look at the tagline. $18 bn for that?

NASA peeps tend to look back to their great days, and believe that after JFK's speech and the vast excitement generated by the Moon mission the key is still space. People back then really, really wanted to go into space. Why don't they want to now? We seem to have flipped; our cosmos is now micro not macro. The most advanced technology and the hottest draw for engineers is the iPhone, a machine for games and music and chat; a private, personal universe. Reality has become social and virtual. How lame is it to want to be an astronaut? My suspicion is it's way down there with becoming an engineer on the railroad; which is what we all wanted in the 50s and 60s before we decided to shift allegiance from Casey Jones to Neil Armstrong.

However: the excitement of the 60s had little to do with the Moon. It had everything to do with the future. Our iconic embodiment was The Jetsons, the cartoon TV show that brilliantly captured the vision of a tech-enabled world. It seems never have occurred to the Jetson generation that handheld devices would drive the future. Or that in 50 years we would have forgotten the Moon, abandoned the planets, with our space policy focused on a job-sharing dealie with the post-Soviets on an orbiting Bed and Breakfast.

It was the future that grabbed us back then. That place which draws us like a siren. Which we shape with every choice we make. Which at that point was brilliantly grasped by JFK, our best speech-maker in a century. Which sufficiently grasped the American psyche that, across administrations and congresses, it actually happened. 42 years ago.

So what's NASA to do? For one thing, let's give its engineers first shot at the Great American Railroad Project, before we outsource to Beijing. Which somewhat illustrates my point. NASAdoes a lot more than space travel (no bad thing, since we aren't doing much of that at all). It employs and contracts with the world's greatest network of engineering whizzes. .

But back to the future. NASA's glory days were in an America escaping the vicissitudes of wartime restrictions and rejoicing in normality plus refrigerators and TVs. Everyone was worried about the Soviets, yet confident in gung-ho can-do right-stuff solutions and yearning for a tomorrow that seemed bright with technology. That future meant space. But space as subset. NASA isn't the National Aeronautical and Space Administration at all. It's the National Future Agency which, time was, dabbled in space, and will do again. We aren't from the Moon. We happened to go there back in 1969, way past. At root, if we are NASA, we are from the future.

That's why the fixation with the Moon landing has been slowly doing something terrible to the agency's image, turning it into a museum of the past. America at its best has always been defined by the future. NASA has the future at its feet. There is certainly no serious competition from any other agency within the federal government.

We are aching for visionary, future-oriented, federal leadership, to engage with transportation systems terrestrial and inter-planetary. Our railways are a joke to anyone who has traveled in Europe, let alone Asia; and as someone recently pointed out (cruelly though not inaccurately) the story of our space program makes perfect sense - if you read it backwards: now we have no human-lift capacity; then we have capacity and use it for earth orbit; then we go to the moon.

How about the tagline, "We're from the Future"? How about a steady, grandiose, exposition (fromNASA grandees, celebs, pols, anyone who can be got on board) of the narrative of the future, its potentials, its choices, its closeness. How about engaging with Disney and MTV and gamers and sci-fi writers to mash-up a future for America that hits our imagination out of the park?

And so we return to a theme we have explored already. The long term (which is the term of "real life") versus the short (of politics and big biz). Unless America can mount the long term and stay in the saddle, there is not much else to say. Yet that will take leadership, which is why this discussion of federal investments in transportation goes well beyond the organizations in our gunsights.

NASA's ambiguous achievement, in the eyes of America, has been to celebrate the 42-year-old past, and turn the future into a complex airplane they actually decided to call the Shuttle; utility space transportation, aptly named. Meanwhile, on the railroad front, don't forget who started it. Railroad pioneer Stevenson was a visionary. When he built his little steam engine and sent it off down its track at 29 mph he inaugurated a new age that drove the industrial revolution, led to the rise of the west, and now to the rise of the locomotively-driven east. But he was not interested in utility transportation. I'm sure we all remember the name of his locomotive, which set the pattern for 150 years of rail transportation. He didn't call it the Shuttle. He called it the Rocket.

Transcendent Texting, Mutual Curation, and Twitter as Tomorrow

2011-11-06T22:53:00.002-05:00

Transcendent Texting, Mutual Curation, and Twitter as Tomorrow

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

President and CEO, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

Flying again, and when the best movie offering is Planet of the Apes and its prequel, the mind turns to higher things. Though the aping gaping is not without worth. It’s a genre of awful movies that focus the human question rather well. What is this human thing, and how shall we who embrace its most visionary grasp of the future, our technological achievements, aspirations, and fears – how shall we best serve out our time as member of Homo sapiens sapiens, and those members of said species who find ourselves cast as its thought leaders? Because, as we have said before, it’s all about the human question; what it means, at the end of the day, to be one of us. Technology is, finally, anthropology, and not the other way around. Planet of the Apes. Not of the Apps.

Not quite all smart people are yet denizens of Twitter. And it still comes in for high-blown denunciations from Great Persons who have never used it. But I ventured to suggest the other day (in a tweet, of course) that it is now an open question whether anyone can be a paid-up member of the commentariat in 2011 without a Twitter handle. Because while it is presently used for a score of different purposes (from chat-chat among friends to crass marketing efforts to smart customer service to newsgathering that beats any other source) at its core it offers two interlocking experiences which deliver value so great it is hard to measure.

First is, as it were, research. Let’s be personal here. I follow 300-400 people, a spread across the half-dozen fields of interest that attract and distract my attention: tech/futures, policy/politics, high culture, publishing, aspects of business/finance, and arcana like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party - twin pillars of a generating #exopolitics, on which more anon. Point is: I have 400 researchers, key thinkers and doers and scanners of every possible horizon, who funnel their best finds and their smartest comments to me: every day, all the time, and for no cost. The value added to my thinking is so immense I find it impossible to think of reverting to other modalities of gathering intelligence and intelligent commentary. The term of art for the vast Twitter output is the “firehose,” and the cap fits. Each and every day, my 400 picked, diligent, smart researchers and commenters send thousands of items my way, their firehoses of news and ideas and assessments trained on me from the directions of my choosing. These curators include some of the leading thinkers on Planet Earth; lesser mortals whose comments are as sharp as they are often amusing; diligent scanners of literature (some in many languages); and representatives of classes of person whose importance is very great to the culture that is evolving around us (nerds, journos, pols, entrepreneurs, even a semi-celeb or two) – evolving in a manner best described (for devotees of evolutionary theory) as rapidly punctuated equilibria, with a heavy dose of Lamarckianism (poor dear loveable Lamarck, once sent to the Gulag in the show-trial oldstyle Commie way in which science tends to proceed, has had something of a rehab thanks to epigenetics and whatnot; which reminds me of Arthur Koestler and The Case of the Midwife Toad – it would be interesting to find out if anyone who reads C-PET’s modest garden hose has read that . . .handy reading for members of the Campaign Against Groupthink). So, first, Twitter is a tool for research which aside from various technical apps – like the spread of disease – gives me daily 100x what I could ever get from a research staff. And it comes pre-curated by people of whatever level of skill and judgment I choose.

Second, Twitter as cocktail party. 24/7. This vast research staff is also quaffing cocktails and engaged in constant chit-chat. One limitation on “firehose” language lies precisely here. In some respects it’s more like a game of enhanced frisbee. Person A passes to B - we can all see; B then adds some comment (expert, snark, both . . .) and on to C. Hey, who’s C? I take a look. C is fascinating; gets added to my staff of researchers and advisers forthwith. Not sure I agree with B, so I push back and offer a comment. And I thank A for sharing something important. Who can tell what A will do? A often responds, and we exchange. B passes on my comment (very common on Twitter, whether it’s complimentary or not) to his/her followers. C wonders who I am who now follows him/her and may decide to follow back. On it flows. And as we travel and write I end up meeting B or C or A (met a Tweep for the first time today at an airport, by arrangement), or on the phone (happened a couple days ago), or for lunch (recently): knowledge drives relationships and relationships drive knowledge. And the potent digital fruit is served up: when VR meets IRL. The juncture of the digital and the analog; ideas and persons in fission.

What to make of this? Three things, for a start.

1. The remarkable power of what I am terming “mutual curation.” If all the smart people I can find start talking to me about the things that most interest them and most interest me, my knowledge will grow exponentially. If the only price I pay is to share what most interests me in return, we have the rudiments of Adam Smith in the realm of knowledge: We each pursue our interests; we all gain.

2. Simplicity can lead to extraordinary complexity; in this case, barely through design and largely serendipitously. This global knowledge generator is at root a system for broadcasting text messages. While a thousand apps have sprung up to add third-party smarts and explore third-party profit, the core simplicity remains. Its power is immeasurable; The Princes of Serendip have won the lottery.

3. I remarked in an earlier commentary that of all the “social media” tools Twitter stands out as the pathway to tomorrow. I’m not enamored of the thought of “one great inter-connected world brain,” language proposed by the editors of a National Science Foundation volume a decade back. But the capacity of my brain to tap into the best and the brightest, and offer what I, Nigel, have to offer in return, is beyond remarkable. This, here, is the Yellow Brick Road. It’s no more possible to conjure up our lives tomorrow than to enable an unborn child to come to terms with kindergarten. But analogy is our friend, and it’s all we have. Think Twitter on steroids and we begin to grasp the key to the 21^st century’s enormous knowledge ramp-up through mutual curation. Twitter is not yet another photo-sharing app. Mass-texting just discovered transcendence. It’s both unique and, potentially, omnipotent.

Why does this matter quite so much? Because it addresses the fundamental question faced by human minds (and for that matter machine minds) in Century 21: how to move from essentially indefinite mounds of data to understanding, to wisdom, to judgment, and finally to choices.

What Twitter has demonstrated is mutual curation as both the answer and attainable; and while AIs will play ever larger parts in our lives, Twitter demonstrates the power of curation by networks of persons. Twitter itself and the Twitter-like entities that will follow are less “social media” (I dislike that category for several reasons) than mutual knowledge engines. What follows will be multilayered and vast - driven by every internet-user on Planet Earth who is not fixated with gaming, which will have its own role in defining tomorrow, or lolcats, about which I am less sure.

Follow my tweets, if you like, at @nigelcameron.

Contacting the Future: two efforts in NYC

2011-10-22T08:40:00.004-04:00

I rather like going to conferences in pairs. Something about parallax. Seeing through two eyes; a 3-D on the material that can give insights unplanned by either set of planners. I went to three in a week last summer, and here's what resulted: http://c-pet.org/?q=node/30.

Still digesting this week's pair of offerings, but some preliminary reflections as the mulling spices get to work.

Last weekend was the Singularity Summit, second I think in NYC of the series initiated by the Ray-Kurzweil-inspired Institute that essentially serves as curator of his vision of an AI-invested future. His own view is that AI will take over rather soon and be rather benign. One virtue of these events is that some of his colleagues are less convinced of the latter. Some also differ on the former, including somewhat intriguingly PayPal founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who regularly participates and is said to be the chief funder (I do admire his funding of outlier causes sea-steading is another). I love these events and attend when I can as they offer a platform to some of the smartest thinkers about tomorrow - unabashed by the general academic tendency to qualify everything to death and be embarrassed to ask Big Questions. I think SI is too read to offer Big Answers, but at least we get to have a little conversation.

But it's only a little. If there's a problem with their events, it's a highly amusing one. For harbingers of tomorrow, they manage to convene conferences that, qua conferences, are total retro. As I tweeted at the time: Event planning is weak (endless lines meant we started 30m late - anyone able to use Microsoft Project out there in Singularityland, if simpler approaches fail?), an over-stuffed agenda (almost any one speaker would be good for 4x the time allotted), and weak moderating (which meant we soon got later still) - facilities simply too small for the catering. Social media, before, during and after, close to non-existent. Process, knowledge management, from the dark ages: lecture, questions, lecture questions, oops gotta cut short the coffee break . . . ); networking time/opportunities close to zero. http://www.singularitysummit.com/program

Now to Contact. http://contactcon.com/

This was definitely a new economy event! An unconference, in the patois, hosted by Doug Rushkoff and my friend Venessa Miemis. Various phases: Short opening idea pitches, breakouts led by people who had offered, milling around dozens of startups and other initiatives, on and on. Then a wrapup, and two parties. Great food options during the day. A neat review/summary by Peter Vander Auwera (@petervan) at http://petervan.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/contactcon-conference-the-cry-for-freedom/.

Observations? As with the SS, the facilities were overcrowded - a good problem, perhaps, but a problem. An English idiom perhaps captures the program: they had over-egged the pudding. Too much, too many, all rather breathless and too jampacked to get enough of a sense of the whole (for both events: consider a 50% reduction in everything programmed). Contact grasps as SI does not that process, knowledge management, relationships are at the heart of things. Getting there from here is not easy. And the parties offered at the end show something of the problem. The closing party at the event location was sparse (most people had gone home) and having beer only (ouch) and served upstairs (odd) hardly helped (OK: C-PET events close with seriously nice wine, and I go round with the bottles). The afterparty may have been glorious, but I only stopped by long enough to discover the music was much too loud for conversation. Ahem.

I''d be interested to know - speaking of knowledge networks - how many people actualltyb attended both events, here in NYC, a few days apart (and anyone travel on to the Open Science conf on the other coast this weekend? I'm tracking it in Twitterland). The ideas at SS were big, some of them huge, intellectuals performing. The focus at Contact was digital, activist, and much of it start-up/funding-oriented.

Now, if we could bring these two into alignment and get the "new economy" style fine-tuned with big ideas to power it . . . that would be even more interesting. Not suggesting Contact and SI merge. Oh no, the pluritude of denominations when it comes to tech and the future is a fine thing. But it would be interesting to get each to study the other, learn, mutually engage, and perhaps even correlate new time around. #SS11 + #Contactcon = ?

Oh yes, well, C-PET is working in that space. In Washington, where (sorry, peeps) the discussion really needs to be happening.

Steve Jobs dies; a generation ends

2011-10-06T09:16:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs dies; a generation ends

I never met Steve Jobs. Never even tried. I now regret it, of course. Even to shake a hand and chat for five minutes offers a connection unmediated by the various departments of the press. And I have done that with all kinds of people. But he’s gone, and he’s gone younger than I am, and my mortality and admiration and strategic sense are intermingled in a manner I find disturbing. I don’t think there was anyone who in such a practical way grasped the future – the near future, but the future – and found out how to monetize it using his own imagination and the marvelous skills of those he drew to him. Who else has leaped ahead of the focus group and been glad of it? Who else has produced packaging –packaging! – you feel you must be an aesthetic criminal to discard?

A second generation begins today, October 6. The “digital revolution” that the naive ones of the earth believe has happened and that has just started to find traction – the digital revolution is now into Phase II, post-Jobs, an exploration of the middle distance (10-15 years, which will always be our benchmark) as we contemplate our current competencies and what they will in due time entail. But it is indeed today. There is no comparable starting-point. And while the prophets among us tend increasingly to say we are going to live forever, or close to it, the death of the digital generation’s greatest man at 56 brings us back to the benchmark of human mortality. A mortality he discussed, as few do today, even as he prepared the way for those he knew would live on into a distant future denied to him by the interaction of his pancreas (what’s a pancreas? he once asked) and something called cancer that, despite all our efforts, remains a disease we can do surprisingly little about.

What better way to frame what lies ahead? We shall not become immortal (sorry, Ray). Our lives may indeed extend longer, perhaps much longer. Let’s learn from the example of the iconic figure of our Moore’s-Law driven technological times, who learned of his own mortality and dared speak of it – as he prepared us for immortal Siri and the challenging marvels that will lie ahead.

So, be thankful for a man who broke every mold. And let’s embrace our frail humanity as we also engage the extraordinary prospects for which he helped prepare us.

A PLANETARY INITIATIVE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

2011-10-03T12:31:00.001-04:00

BUILDING GLOBAL ALIGNMENT: A PLANETARY INITIATIVE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FORDEVELOPMENT.

THE UNESCO HIGH PANEL

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

I am just back from Paris, where I joined in part of ameeting of a high-level body convened to address one of the most pressingissues on the planet: how best to engage emerging developments in science andtechnology for the benefit of developing nations and poor people.

Since the rich/poor divide keeps getting wider, it is not clearthat S and T will somehow automatically bring the planet into greater harmony.There has been handwringing over the “nano divide,” and recognition thatdespite global access to the internet the compounding effects of emergingtechnologies in the most developed parts of the world will inevitably leavebehind the rest. Alongside that, the emergence of terror as a global threat anddeepening awareness of the power of asymmetry has brought about deeperawareness across the political spectrum that development is a security issue aswell as one of humanity; that “ungovernable areas” are substantially theproduct of sustained poverty and development failure; that the wealthier partsof the planet will be yet better off if the poorer cease to be so poor. That is,economic development, long a nonpartisan goal, is emerging as one of evengreater importance to the global community.

This clutch of questions is complex. Economic initiative ispassing eastward to China and other rapidly-growing Asian economies. The openingkeynote at the Technology Policy Institute’s excellent Aspen Conference lastmonth opined that by 2020 China would surpass the GDP of the United States, andhighly significant re-rankings would be established in relation the present G7and emerging powers like Brazil. Meanwhile, the current crisis in the publicfinances of the west, the crisis in banking, and associated economic woes, havecome at a particularly bad time. The world order established at Bretton Woods –which sounds like a chateau in France but is actually a large house on theoutskirts of Washington – is in free-fall. The push to replace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency gained quitea fillip with the internal arm-wrestling (and to outsiders heedlessbrinkmanship) over the U.S. debt ceiling; and the dyspeptic state of theEurozone and other European economies in the wake of the Icelandic collapse.Add Ireland’s astonishing demise, the deep and still developing crisis in thesouthern European economies, and the role of the banks. The Economist, thatbulwark of sweet reasonableness that remains the bellwether of the economicorder that the New Yorker is to the cultural, reads as close to apocalyptic asit has perhaps ever has.

In parallel, we have a deep and deepening crisis in the capacityof the United States to maintain its innovative edge – and this despitesplendid conferences hosted by such eminent institutions as TPI and Brookings,the efforts in Washington of the Task Force on American Innovation, speeches bythe president, and even the efforts of C-PET in our roundtable series. Aconstant theme of our roundtables has been the bleakness of the current pictureand the deep inadequacy of the bromides being offered to assuage it. “Thequestion for America,” a leading investor stated at C-PET, “is whether we wantto become a second-rate nation, or a third-rate.” Or as Peter Thiel, leadingfunder of PayPal and Facebook (and also, note, of the Ray Kurzweil-associatedSingularity Institute), proposed at the TPI event, U.S. science and technologyhas not been especially innovative for a long time. We went to the moon, andsince then what he charmingly called “the computer industry” has done well.There’s not been much else. Quite the bucket of cold water for the nation thatdeeply prides itself as the taproot of global innovation.

One of the planet’s most undervalued stocks is UNESCO, theUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Based inParis, it was boycotted by the United States for many years because of bias and(remember when?) Soviet influence; but George W. Bush rejoined, and since theearly 2000s we have been reconnected with this remarkable global network. Itsmission and identity are perhaps best expressed in its iconic foundingstatement: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of menthat the defenses of peace must be constructed.” That statement, from the1940s, has peculiar application to the work of the High Panel on Science andTechnology for Development that I attended a few days ago.

It has been a privilege to serve as Chair of the Social andHuman Sciences (SHS) Committee of the United States National Commission forUNESCO, the advisory committee on UNESCO affairs at the Department of State. Akey feature of the panel is that it spans two UNESCO sectors – NaturalSciences, and Social and Human Sciences (SHS). Since SHS includes not onlysocial science and the humanities, but the ethics of science and technology,and human rights, this cross-sectoral identity is both apt and powerful. As Ihave argued more than once, leadership in the 21^st century will comefrom those who span sectors and silos; who without loss of the deep expertisethat we find within them can build knowledge networks across them and between;who can engage thinkers and ideas that may initially seem to have little incommon to achieve great common ends. As Moore’s Law, globalization, and otherforces drive us forward faster every year, that truth becomes more relevant andmore vital. This collaboration across the sectors, and between their respectiveAssistant Directors-General, Pilar Alvarez and Gretchen Kalonji, is much to becommended and should be a model for future efforts.

We have all sat through pro forma speeches by ImportantPeople opening events and welcoming participants. UNESCO Director-General IrinaBokova, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting in Washington, opened theSeptember 16 event of the High Panel with eloquence and content. Science, sheargued, should drive development for all. A new humanism is on the horizon.“Innovation should not outstrip human dignity.” The task of the Panel is toaddress inter-disciplinary challenges and to work for capacity-building – whichwould in turn lead to innovation.

The Panel itself consists of global science leaders – suchas Susan Avery, of Woods Hole near Boston, the world’s largest privateoceanographic institute (and also a member of the U.S. National Commission) –together with some from the Social and Human Sciences. Many are distinguishedespecially by their experience in networking and organizing others, such asAhmadou Ndiaye, a Senegalese who heads the developing Pan-African University,and Olive Shisana, chief of the South African Human Science Research Council(which once awarded me a fellowship, as I was pleased to share with her afterthe meeting) and a leading figure at the interface of global health (ex-WHO)and the social sciences. Vijay Chandru, with MIT and Stanford affiliations,leads the Indian biotech industry network. He interested me not least byaddressing the impact of Moore’s Law on the human genome project, another areawhere C-PET is active.

UNESCO faces a remarkable opportunity – to rebuild its 1940sbrand through a series of panels of this kind, taking interdisciplinaryinitiatives with global strategic impact that not only address plain challenges(such as that of global poverty which we all acknowledge) but also to helpshape the global agenda. We are shifting from the old-line United Nationsinstitutions to a new world of BRICS and G-7, 8, whatever, in which traditionalinstitutions have less grip every day and emerging networks have more. Thecombination of its nonpartisan and apolitical stance, and its embrace of“educational, scientific and cultural” questions, positions UNESCO uniquely –for fresh branding and extraordinary influence for good in the years to come.

But the opportunity needs to be grasped. Key members such asthe United States must continue and grow their efforts in support, not least inchanneling extra-budgetary funding to visionary initiatives and encouragingparticipation from leading private sector players including leaders in thetechnology industry. As a bridge between nations at that point which isbecoming more and more central – the interface of science, technology, andsociety – it is uniquely well-placed.

So we shall watch the work of the High Panel with growinginterest.

Nigel Cameron isPresident and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) inWashington, DC, and a commissioner of the United States National Commission forUNESCO. He writes in his personal capacity

Permission granted toreproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

2011-09-08T19:05:00.001-04:00

How to bridge the Continental Divide; moving Camp David tothe Valley; please, pols, start Asking Tomorrow’s Questions – and call me

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

An earlier, more visionary NASA, thank goodness, sent probesinto deep space. Some of them continue to ping us from far beyond the domesticreaches of the Solar System. But even they have not penetrated as far fromWashington as I did last month. I made it all the way to the West Coast.

It is not simply an issue of littorals, or oceans, or theperspectives which follow from occidental or oriental orientation, or even (I’msure someone out on the PC frontier is using this) occidentation. Though one VCI met did note that he looked out on the Pacific; and averred that Washingtonwas really a European city. More common is general-purpose Valley-style eyeball-rolling.And when it comes to “corporate culture” – my base category when I think aboutthe Valley and its polar complement, the District – we know there’s a lot moreto the jewel of the east coast than the magnificently monumented malarial marshthat’s home to the ultimate nonprofit. Some place called NYC, for example, seemsto be a displaced slice of California (now that would be a neat way of keepingit at 50 when we admit DC or Puerto Rico or the Islamic Republic of Afghanistanor whoever is up next). It’s no surprise that someone, somewhere ensured thatNYC’s connection with the District would be something called Acela, famed asthe world’s slowest fast train. No one has been in any rush to integrate theBig Apple with the midsized federal raspberry.

Point here, aside from offering generally snarky commentswhere I think they are due, is that the Valley and the District are far furtherapart than 3,000 miles and a relatively serious mountain range. It’s hard toimagine two more distinctive, consistent, and contrary cultures within theUnited States, the West, the English-speaking peoples, OECD, or whatever highcategory we prefer for “us.” Indeed, it goes beyond “us.” If you are a denizenof DC, the Starbucks on Sand Hill Road is the restaurant at the end of theuniverse.

Let me underline this with three particulars. There areothers that could be engaged. But these work and they make the point. It is aterrible point.

First is the creativeimperative. In the Valley, they think of themselves as visionaries.Tomorrow is theirs; and their confidence in innovative products and servicesdepends in no small measure on their belief that the future is not simplyinfluencing their thinking (we are, as it were, all futurists now, at least inthese zip codes - if friends in DC will now forgive me a Keynesian allusion)but it will in turn be shaped by their personal and corporate vision. Thefuture is both their study and their creature. They have the kind of symbiosiswith tomorrow that the District has with yesterday. So creativity, risk, and a longentrepreneurial arc, are their stock in trade.

In the District, a community of generally smart andcommitted persons, the “corporate culture” could hardly be more different.Pretty much whatever our politics, our client (sorry) lies in the past.Maintaining the programs of the Great Society? Returning to the vision of theFounders? Addressing as #1 priority the debt mountain we have built? Each ofthese is meritorious, and wherever our political lines lie for most of us eachof them features. Point is not that they are misplaced priorities. It is simplythat they hail from yesteryear. Left and right are stumbling into the future astheir gaze is fixed on the past.

Second, as a result, thenature of the commitment to the future. Part of the problem with theValley, and one of its clear commonalities with the District, lies in itsinnocent confidence in the future. For the Valley this takes the form of awondrous hopefulness, the kind that is required if great capital sums are to beengaged in start-ups small and large in the knowledge that most will fail andthe confidence that some will succeed big-time. The District is a naïf ofanother kind. The confidence is there, but it is one of presumption. Americacannot fail; therefore, America cannot fail. Innovation, as has been said, isan ATM. While speechmakers come and go on all sides, and they include someseriously serious people, speeches come cheap. News, guys, on both coasts.America can fail. And it’s looking increasingly likely that America will. Andthe reason, the core reason, the axis around which all other reasons turn, liesin the failure of alignment and interconnection between these two vastlyseparated entities. But we shall come back to that.

Third, a shared myopia.Self-confidence and disdain are among the several shared qualities of these twocosmically separated polities. They both think they are too good for the other,have no special need of the other, are bored by the other. Go to one of thoseuncommon conferences on policy in the Valley, and likely as not someonemid-level (aka not really that important) will fly in from DC. Which neatlyreinforces the local view. I well recall one where said mid-level panjandruminsisted at the last minute on re-arranging his appearance as events in (hushedtones) DC required his attendance (I ended up missing his speech as a result).And vice versa. Techworld has its representatives in the District. Some of themare my friends. Mostly they are District hires; native guides; sherpas who knowthe Hill and the agencies and – get this – have remarkably little buy-in to thevalues that vivify the Valley. They are short-termers who understand“language,” hired guns, creatures of the deadline short-term cycles of what wasone Long-Term Nation; of an exceptionalism inverted in high parody. Harbingersof a perverse apocalypse in which an entirely perverse deity rewards those whoconsider 12 months to be long-term. “Myboard has made it clear to me,” declared –in private, to me - one tech tradeassociation chief recently, “that my focus needs to be on the short-term.” Nowthere’s a suicide note for America. Moore’s Law, aka exponential change, akadisruptive innovation, requires with mathematical solidity that the future bescoped and engaged more each year.Back in 1800, what did it matter? In September 2011, the stakes are beyondcalculation.

I think I once described the relationship between theDistrict and the Valley as a suicide pact. Their fundamental agreement is thatthey are not much interested in the other. But of course it’s worse. It’s agame of Russian roulette, in which we are intent on firing every chamber. We’replaying chicken with our children. We are absolutely ensuring, ensuring, thedestruction of America, by the reciprocal delusion that the Sand Hills RoadStarbucks, and the Rayburn Cafeteria, occupy complementary universes. Yet theydo not. From Ushant to Scilly (if you are into sea-shanties) is, we are told,35 leagues. From the Valley to the District is an immeasurable span. Yet it isone of the two most consequent axes on this particular planet. (The other, ofcourse, is DC-Beijing. How we shall ever address that without first bringingthe Valley and the District into alignment? Who is asking that question, whichneeds to move fast beyond the rhetorical, in either of these zipcodal U.S.entities?)

What am I after? I wrote some time back about the need forevery pol to spend two weeks a year at tech conferences. Please, please. 10days, sans BlackBerry and staff. And the Valley guys? Well maybe if someoneturned the Rayburn Cafeteria, recently refurbished into smart 1950s railroadcafé format (sigh), into a meeting place for peeps rather than tables, the SandHills guys might stop by. But what about this. If the pols commit to the westcoast conferences, what about having the VCs and their entourage each plan tobe in DC and hang a little? See, I’m being practical. A mutual transfusion of culturalblood from these highly diverse species – located as if in different genera –is a key, indeed the key, to U.S. success, global effectiveness, the triumph oftechnologies in a culture still shaped around human values –the future of anation that has no deep wish to learn Mandarin.

The President, whom his supporters and critics need to allowinherited and is seeking to manage an economic and employment crisis withoutparallel in our generation, has addressed Congress and the nation. For somereason, no-one asked me what he should say. There is surely no simpleprescription, no bromide for the hour, no recitation of one ideology or another– although there are plenty of obvious answers that have failed.

How about this for some talkers? Three key opportunitiesstand out, and had they called me, they would each have featured high on mylist.

First, “I’m moving Camp David to Silicon Valley, and willspend at least one week a month of my presidency there. This is not merelysymbolic. I commit that three nights a week, every week, when I am out there inthe Valley, I will invite its brightest and best to dinner. On condition theywill each spend one week a month in DC.”

Second, “I am adding to my cabinet not only the federal CTO,whose status there was discussed during the campaign, but the federal CIO andof course my science advisor; and instructing every cabinet secretary toappoint an under-secretary for the future, who will work hand in glove withthese three cabinet-level officials and have wide influence over all aspects offederal policy.”

Third, “I am tasking a bipartisan panel chaired by Norm Augustineand co-chaired by the President of the National Academies and the President ofthe AAAS and the President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents; andincluding both President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush: to make recommendations within 2 months as tohow the U.S. lead in science and technology can be both maintained andadvanced, with a view to making us the most competitive nation in the OECDwithin five years. I shall invite members of Congress to sign a bipartisanContract with the Future to join us in ensuring that their recommendations areimplemented in their entirety.”

Those among you who know C-PET will understand that suchproposals do not assume a naïve idea of S and T as the solution to all humanproblems, or a desire of endless U.S. global hegemony. They represent anassumption that the human dimensions of emerging technologies will never beproperly addressed if we do not ramp up our grasp of the significance of theirimplications at least tenfold. And an assumption that the historic role of theUnited States as a beacon of freedom and innovation will be best served in the21^st century by an alignment of these two: this nation as the focalpoint of tech/human solutions.

For that is the central question. Technology runs up theMoore’s Law curve. We stay humans (sorry, transhumanists, we do) and need tobenefit in a market economy in which tech has enabled not destroyed jobs, andempowered not zombied human dignity. We need a hotline from the Valley to theDistrict. My sense is clear: one of the two greatest risk issues facing theglobe is the lack of alignment of the D and the V. (The other, as we noted, isthat of the D, empowered or unempowered by the V, and Beijing.)

What we gonna do about it? Obama? Boehner? Perry? Bachmann?Romney? Huntsman? Call me. Then we can sort this out and move on to somethingelse. Oh yes, like getting NASA moving again.

Permission to circulate/republish in full and with attribution.

On Culture, the Future, and Biz

2011-06-08T01:11:00.004-04:00

I have spent the past few days in Sydney, Australia, as the guest of the finance company AMP whose offices dominate the skyline here along the Harbour, overlooking those two icons of this great city - the Opera House, and the Bridge. I'm here along with a score of others from the worlds of social media, futurism, business re-engineering, and such locations. And why? Because AMP for some time has decided to devote a week and a good deal of moolah, once every two years, to an ideafest. A little Aspen, as it were, inside the offices and culture of a very successful major company, drawing hundreds of its executives and board members and clients into an intensive series of thinkfests. They are still in progress.

As are dinners, lunches, assorted engagements inside and outside the company. Tomorrow some of us go off to Melbourne to present a mini version to another segment of the organization.

So what's afoot? Someone here has a rather smart idea: that actually bringing together ideas people and those who run a forward-looking corporation will bring some very smart new ideas, incarnated in the idea-brokers who present them, into the bloodstream - at a time when the speed of change, the future, innovation, form the subtext of every conversation among savvy business leaders.

Take a look at the program. The videos are popping up as speeches are given (mine is here: http://www.amplifyfestival.com.au/artists/detail/nigel-cameron). Reflect on how your own organization handles ideas - whether its focus is using retreads when they are already widely accepted in the culture, or its interest is on the edge; the cutting edge; the cusp of tomorrow.

More soon. . . . .

Where the Past meets the Future: Life in the Cosmic Kink

2011-04-25T15:23:00.002-04:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

"Depend upon it, sir," quoth the inimitable dictionographer and wit Samuel Johnson, "when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

I've just been to the movies, or as near as I get to the movies since we launched C-PET three years ago. I'm flying back from Europe, mercifully upgraded, and before turning my attention to this think-piece viewed Inside Job, which despite its occasional tendencies to ape the Michael Moore school of cinematography gives not too bad a layman's-eye-view of the Wall Street collapse, its precursors and sequelae. At least, over dinner with a fair splash of a not-bad Hermitage that was my take. So on my mind now, aside from wishing I could be Roger Ebert and do nothing else than watch movies and write about them, are such trivia as systemic risk, the eternal struggle of the short versus the long term, the anemic quality of what passes as leadership in both corporate and government sectors (sorry, guys), and what we might designate the Ivy League Perplex, or Cameron's Law of Destructive Compacted Intellect: the more people who get involved in an enterprise and the smarter they are the less they seem able to avoid Groupthink 101. Just look at the rows of bankers lined up like coconuts at a shy during those Congressional hearings. Never, perhaps, has so much been unanticipated by so few to the detriment of so many.

Before we move on, two reflections. First, I'm all for regulation when we need it, and even more for self-regulation when we don't, but neither of them is worth a cent unless we realize that Groupthink is Public Enemy #1 - if our goal is to build, ahem, sustainable value. What a surprise: the same elites spawn regulators and regulatees, and - even without the revolving doors that any sane, market-oriented, janitor would long since have jammed shut - elites are characterized by a general inability to harbor simultaneously two or more seriously conflicting ideas (Thomas Kuhn again comes to mind). And second: as the Japanese imbroglio has reminded us with sober force, what can go wrong will go wrong, and all the wishful thinking in the cosmos will not avail to prevent it. It seems that in 1896 there was a tsunami in the same region that was all of two feet different in height (at a point where they both reached well over 100 feet). They knew this when they built their Maginot Line of sea walls and installed their backup generators at ground level and all the rest. Catastrophic risks tend to be larger than they appear.

Back to my trip. Two key reasons for it. First, a visit to UNESCO HQ in Paris. UNESCO is a greatly undervalued stock in the human enterprise, a core opportunity for nonpartisan foreign policy for the United States, a meeting-point for the many global communities in science and the arts and culture and the social sciences and humanities and ethics . . .. Like it or not, we are now into a grand planetary effort on nearly all levels, in the context of deep disciplinary convergence. And they converge elegantly in Rue Miollis and Place Fontenoy. I was privileged to spend time with some of the smartest and most committed of people. The decision of George W. Bush that the United States should rejoin UNESCO was a surprise to pretty much everyone. I hope we are making the most of it to leverage the global conversation; not least about the dramatic impacts that emerging technologies will have in constantly reshaping the conditions for life on our planet.

Thence to London, meeting with a C-PET partner, an entrepreneur with far-sighted investments in core tech areas - because we need partners in this effort, both individuals and corporations, so we can scale. In Washington, private and corporate funding is directed to two standard ends: short-term policy impacts, and long-term ideology. Both are explicable and important. Taken together, they are proving disastrous. C-PET is neither ideological nor partisan, and is defiantly long-term in our thinking; quite unWashingtonian, indeed. So back to the theme of sustainable value. We need partners who are out for the long term, who get it, and who want Washington to get it - before it's too late. (Seriously, call me. 202 607 3803.)

Point is that we shall need to leverage all possible resources, with global institutions and innovative leaders in the business community taking the initiative, if we are to get policy leaders to focus on the great unmentionable; the cliché in every room; that f-word; the future.

Advocates of the future confront three related tendencies.

The first we know well, the tyranny of tomorrow. The next election, the next vote, the next donor call: all powerful determinants of the decision-making machine. What is it, as we might ask, that concentrates our minds? Tomorrow, or the day after?

Second, the twin problems of risk and groupthink; and a very general tendency among us to discount future risk if to count it at full value has a high present cost (there's a technical term for this: wishful thinking). Sad to say, the Wall Street example is especially telling here, as not only our elite financial institutions but both self-regulation (the ratings agencies) and non-self-regulation (the many responsible agencies) almost universally failed to anticipate something that with hindsight seems blindingly obvious. Bundling highly dubious loans into AAA securities and incentivising everyone in the system with short-term rewards looks as screwed-up a proposition as could be devised. Some sadly similar approaches seem to be emerging from the Fukushima story. Partly for this reason at C-PET we have a principle ofcultivating outliers. "All articulate voices round the table, all the time." On any issue, the smart deniers of conventional wisdom are the most valuable people in the room, precisely because they are the most uncomfortable to be with - and to reason with. Not because we feel a need to cater to minorities, or to be nice to crazies. But because their critique brings value into the knowledge network that is unobtainable in any other way.

Third, something more basic that contributes to both of the above. There is a widespread human tendency, with which we are all of us familiar, that can be simply expressed as the "kink" in the curve where the past meets the future The exponential line of human technological progress, long driven by information and for the past generation by the power of the chip, is kinked. It is kinked, inevitably, at the present. We look back and see it rising inexorably and constantly faster. We look ahead and (admit it) see it leveling off. There are many telling examples around us, not least the current valuations being placed on hot digital properties like Google and Facebook. I spent some time last fall at UBS in Switzerland - their executive development center at Wolfsberg - and gave a workshop on this very issue. We look back seven years and there was no Facebook. The idea that if we look forward seven years, or five, there may be no Facebook - or that the brand may continue but essentially as a commodity service lacking the capacity for economic profit - is unthinkable to most of us (though it was eloquently put last August at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Summit by a smart iconoclastic analyst).

And why? Because the entire principle here is one of knowledge-driven disruption, at an exponential pace; not of the establishment of new, stable, corporate technology-based empires in the stead of the displaced old. Indeed, the point is broader. For most people, the "digital revolution" has happened; and it has bequeathed us Blackberries and iPads. Yet the revolution has barely begun. As if shielding our eyes from too bright a light, we cope with the Future Shock of which Alvin Toffler warned us (prophetically but as it turned out much too soon) by squinting. The curve has a kink. And it just happens to be today.

So back to Dr. Johnson. The sum of all fears does not lie in the next donor call, or vote, or even the next election. It lies beyond. 10+ years offers a good rule of thumb. That's when current trends in technology, innovation, values, policy, risk will have delivered dramatic changes to our landscape, whether or not we are looking ahead. Will the explosion in field after field have brought about results that we would now regret? Robots that take away much of the market for unskilled labor? Devices that turn our children, and ourselves, into cyborgian zombies? Retail-level biotechnology that leaves every high schooler a potential bioweapons manufacturer? A world in which governments and corporations and leakers have ended our ability to keep data private? All serious possibilities, and most of them outcomes we would deplore. Will the United States be a second or third tier nation - as policies adverse to innovative research and development keep pushing us down the global pecking order and disenabling the creative enterprise to which we have become habituated? Or can we anticipate, mitigate, consider, and even plan?

Only if these and so many other possibilities concentrate our minds wonderfully, which is not going to happen until we de-kink the present and prepare for a future defined by exponential change.

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

___________________________________________________________

SXSW, NXNE, and the new Fundamentalism; A perspective from the analog polis of a digital people

2011-03-21T23:05:00.002-04:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

Pretty much all of hip and would-be hip America has been lolling, partying, festooning, and tweeting in an alternate universe these past days. Woodstock for the geeks? Neverland of the digerati? Or (ouch) a retreat into a new Century 21 Fundamentalism, a bolt-hole from the realtime world into a might-have-been America?

In case you didn't know, it's called South by Southwest, or SXSW (which looks like something from the NYSE, but this proleptic and cabalistic stock is not yet traded), or South By, as say the cognoscenti. I suppose it might also be Burning Man. And there's a different sense in which it could be TED. There are (ahem) various denominations. These camp meetings (ouch, sorry, please, don't hit me) of the techno-Fundamentalists are anchor-points of an emerging, intricate, alternative world, a digi-religion, a hip-technological complex that offers hope to those who choose to flee the real world of (deep breath) K Street and approps committees and the Tea Party (TP had the support of 41% of the electorate in November) and the West Wing and deficits and sinophobia and donorphilia and the dire electoral cycle. An alternative world to federal Washington, and the space-time continuum.

Because America qua democracy, qua waning global superpower, is defiantly NXNE. Beltway America. Agency America. 202 and 20002 America. A vast, well-meaning, bureaucratic, Fordist, clunking, machine; swamping the bright and visionary minds who pepper its lumpen molasses, as it sullenly subsides back into the malarial swamp on which it was once built by the idealists of a teenage nation whose premature aging has driven its smart (but perhaps less smart than they think) minds to seek solace in a religion of disengagement. In a mythical America, convened far from the madding crowd's ignoble electoral strife. A theme park, a Westworld (remember the Yul Brinner classic?), a place that multiverse theory says must exist but that for all present purposes is less a wormhole to nirvana than a sinkhole from reality.

Because America is going down. Steve Burrill, doyen of biotech investors (and, full disclosure, member of C-PET's Board of Directors) stated unambiguously at a recent Innovation Roundtable that America has a choice: whether to become a second tier nation, or a third tier. Quite apart from current efforts to slash federal R and D budgets by a Congress newly cognizant of its fiscal responsibilities, there are deep-seated structural disabilities that the world's leading nation has chosen to impose on itself in order to ensure that "world's leading nation" is a title it will before long shed. The conquest of America is no achievement of hell-bent fascists or the bakelite apparachiks of Soviet glory days - back when the IGB (how many at SXSW know that acronym?) was a perilous thin red line and much depended on nuclear bluster and troopships rushing the Atlantic like a football field. No: it is a terrible self-conquest, half-witting, coated in irony and insouciance as well as plain dumb pig-ignorance of where our interest really lies. A self-conquest whose outcome is self-immolation. The triumph of means over ends. As if Pizarro had been an Inca.

But why has digital America decided to give the federal capital and all for which it stands so wide a berth? It is not my point that the Washington Convention Center and its satellite hotels here in the Beltway are where South By and its cognates should assemble, though that would not be entirely bad. The avoidance of NXNE is at a more visceral, strategic, fundamental level, and its implications run far from the epiphenomena of event location. The digital tribes simply don't see Washington as their capital.

Question is, what to do? And answer is, o digerati, think Washington. Swarm Washington. Invest (old meaning; lay siege to) Washington. Work with assiduous focus and strategic resilience to change Washington. Task yourself, techno-America, with this challenge, do-or-die: Transform the political culture of this city, perhaps the most geographical center of power on the planet, into the SXSW of government. And understand that we truly need a Kulturkampf in which the future becomes the lobbyist for America; a struggle for the corporate culture of our political life here in an analog polis blinded by the present to its digitally-driven future.

Back to my theme. Where is techno-corporate America's plan, in parallel with their 10-year plans to build markets in China, to turn Washington into a political capital fit to sustain America's leadership role as Century 21 moves deep into its second decade? Why are the SXSWers not focused NXNE?

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

On the Innovation of DC: Washington's Witching Word in Century 21

2011-03-04T19:26:00.004-05:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

These past weeks, C-PET's Network on Innovation has been hosting conversations at the fateful meeting-point of past and future - and the witching word of Century 21. The I-word. The word that, at the end of the day, will open or close America's future.

Meantime, Washington has been both enthusing about it - and seeking perversely to slash federal R and D spending.

C-PET's Roundtables bring together the best and the brightest. Last up: Mark Heeson (National Venture Capital Association), Julia Spicer (Mid-Atlantic Venture Association), Mike Roco (National Science Foundation), and Steve Burrill (Burrill Life Sciences): a brains trust if ever there was one. Its focus was specifically on Innovation and Risk, and it was co-hosted by the Intel-led Task Force on American Innovation. We followed it up with a teleconference with Norm Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin as well as the lead author of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, the National Academies' plea for America to get real about science, technology, the future - and jobs (read more on that plea here). The Roundtable panelists made it plain that venture funding, federal, and corporate R and D were all being squeezed. What's more, venture is now following entrepreneurs round the world; American investment dollars have no necessary relation to American jobs. One panelist's question is whether America wants to be a second- or third-tier nation. As on a previous occasion, the specter held out was that of Britain. The global superpower until a little over a half-century ago. But now? Well . . . .

While various views can legitimately be taken of the need to cut federal expenditures, Washington's inability to distinguish investment focused on science and technology from other claims on the public purse is depressing. But let's make a virtue of necessity (Chaucer's version of a more recent DC formulation: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste).

While current year cuts would prove highly disruptive, the absolute sums involved are not the core question. There's wide agreement that a range of strategic factors - like the remarkably high levels of U.S. corporate taxation and visa/immigration issues - are governors of our capacity to exercise technological leadership in the coming generation. And I have argued that we need to consider a series of shifts to get us on the path most of us want: such as ditching academic tenure (through an appropriations rider?) as way to open up convergent approaches to science and technology as well as undercutting the seniority machine; and throwing a big slice of our federal R and D spend (25% initially, off the top of every current budget?) to a new agency based in the Valley and run by entrepreneurs of appropriate age and experience. A modest proposal, or two, could reframe the discussion. That is; innovation is about thinking in innovative ways - in a political culture that shifts its policy focus but remains consensus-driven in its commitment to the short term and acceptance of truckloads of legacy institutional assumptions. While we could discuss whether it makes sense to maintain the agencies that were a good fit for the post-War world, my sense is that developing new institutional structures apt for tomorrow (like the Valley R and D Nexus) and siphoning resources into them offers the way ahead.

With a serious shot of high-caffeine imagination there are many innovative initiatives that could turn this tired and graying culture into a refurbished world-beater in the emerging world of new economies.

Yet the facts are sobering; not least, the factoids. Latest: South Korea plans to have 100% household broadband access by the end of next year; and - wait for it - the average speed of household access will be 200 times that of the average U.S. household. Pause for deep breaths. For those with short memories: in 1960, South Korea was behind the Democratic Republic of Congo in per capita GDP, and had little over half that of Zimbabwe; and the economy of North Korea was growing faster. The point of historical comparison is to underline the significance of trends, which produce massive reordering of the placement of nations. And, of course, to note - plaintively and persistently - the impact of compounding factors, chiefly Moore's Law and (in respect of capital markets and entrepreneurial geography, especially) globalization. I was in elementary school in 1960, when Zimbabwe was riding high and South Korea being economically overhauled by the North. Our grandchildren will not need to wait around for 50 years so long to see our current set of tectonic shifts worked out. We are hand-over-fist unmaking our legacy for their world as we stop our ears and blind our eyes to every single trend out there.

But this nation was founded on innovative ideas. Many of the smartest and most visionary of humans ride the DC metro and clog the Beltway. Despite their long neglect of Washington, our most inventive corporations have begun to take more seriously its place as the switching point of the future of America, and they are now freshly alerted to the import of a body politic that seems not to grasp the distinction of investment and mere spend - and longer term as the only term that finally matters.

For at the heart this is all about mindset. Innovation as the word from the future, the elixir, the witching word. It's why in this nation built on ideas we have to keep thinking about what it means and entails - which is what C-PET's Network on Innovation is here to do.

As Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote: "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it."

Let’s Engineer the Future:

2011-01-23T11:27:00.002-05:00

A New Year’s Manifesto for Washington (and the rest of Homo sapiens) from C-PET

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

It’s cold in DC. A bad winter. The shadow of an assassin. Resurgent partisanship. Fresh angst about China, as its leader comes calling. And threats to spending, not least in science and technology research. What do to?

Well, for a nation founded on ideas, whose history has included many of the best thinkers to be birthed on planet earth, we seem remarkably devoid of them. I can’t count the number of meetings I have had with policy leaders in which they actually tell me they are cynical. That nothing is really going to change. That, in a phrase more than one has used, I “need not to be naïve.” That because there is no new money (and may be less old money) there’s nothing new we can do. And on it goes.

At C-PET we believe in ideas, and the extraordinary power of a dynamic, growing, knowledge network. Transforming, disruptive power. Power not just to provide solutions, but to find out what lies back of presenting problems. Not just to engage in controversy but to reconfigure it. Not just to help prepare for what comes next, but decisively to engage its direction. Frame the questions, we say at C-PET, and you will shape the future. This is not to be naïve. But it is to recognize that the cynicism that so readily pervades our political culture has itself become the #1 barrier to the strategic action by which alone America’s future will be determined - and America’s capacity for global greatness and global good sustained.

Note to our many friends around the world, and in the diplomatic and IGO and NGO communities in DC who are partners in our knowledge network: I think we agree that there are few on the planet who will benefit if a cynical, short-term, disconnect from the future shapes Washington DC in the second decade of century 21. I think we are agreed that a failing America will be a flailing America, defensive and protectionist and suspicious – just about the worst news for the global community. I think we are agreed that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage – if every nation does what it’s best at, all nations benefit – enables America as chief global competitor as well as chief global citizen; there need be no zero sum in this game.

I have written in recent weeks of what the data explosion and new warp-speed of change mean for “expertise” (a word that sounds increasingly dated in the knowledge world) and leadership (that baseline in change times that for . Both have become a lot more interesting; complex; and of course threatening to those who man (and they usual do indeed man) the silos of tradition where power is locked down, and knowledge locked in.

As we know, harbingers of such paradigmatic change are not unique to our time, even if the pace of change is. John Ruskin, the great Victorian social and literary critic (think H. L. Mencken), wrote in the mid-19^th century, when the revolution in science and religion was transforming his world, that he could hear the chink of the geologists’ hammers at every cadence of the Bible verses. For us, aptly enough, it is visual not auditory: each time we think technology, century 21, asymmetry, we don’t hear chinks, we see near-subliminal visions of that inexorably rising graph of Moore’s Law, penetrating with unimpeded exponential impact through a generation past, and setting its curvilinear path to a future beyond our imaginings. We face change quite literally beyond belief. And the question is not whether we wish it. As Wired founder and tech age guru Kevin Kelly - who joined C-PET for an Innovation Leaders’ Telecon last week – argues in his remarkable new book What Technology Wants, it is hardly up to us as a species to say No. But that does not preclude the need for actionable foresight, for leadership grounded in the future, for decisions. Far, far from it.

So, what to do, and specifically what to do in Washington, DC? Three principles, four strategies, and a challenge.

First, three principles.

Embrace Convergence. The old distinctions between this science and that (biology, chemistry, physics . . .) are dying. A recent report from MIT, launched at the AAAS earlier this month, set out this argument elegantly. And it was being heard: respondents included the FDA Commissioner, an NIH director, and Tom Kalil, associate director for policy at OSTP, the White House tech policy think tank. Yet (as I pointed out to some of the above) the same point was being made a decade ago in the NSF’s Converging Technologies project by Mike Roco and Bill Bainbridge and many others. Even then, it was hardly new. It is, however, profound. Disruptive. Hard for the science and funding establishments to grasp and acknowledge (at the launch, AAAS leader Alan Leshner said it would “make life hell” for them). And it goes further. The old distinctions between science, engineering, and technology are also weakening. The distinctions between the institutions that fund public S and T make less sense every day. Action is needed at the top level of these institutions; apt structural realignment that is not merely epiphenomenal.
Smash the silos. Convergence reaches further, far beyond S and T, into a wider growing commonality that has always demanded attention and almost always been ignored. We have innovation, risk, policy, regulation, social policy, ethics, investment - each one of which is intimately connected with each of the others as the synapses join the neurons in the brain. The knowledge of none of them can properly be stated and engaged without knowledge in all the others. I wrote recently in more detail about the relations of innovation and ethics (the third point of my “Three rules for 2011”). Think mash-up, boys and girls. It’s the only way; and the combo of warp speed and the data petaclasm means unless we find way to make this work we should be scared, very scared. Concurrent engineering is needed across the whole front. Now.
Engage all articulate voices. In reaching beyond partisanship, we need to transcend the potent tendency to disregard opinions we see as extreme or simply unreasonable. At one recent event, a corporate science leader stated he wanted all voices round the table - except those who were biased. I made the obvious point in return, that bias is inevitable, and the appearance of bias on the part of those with whom we disagree universal. Yet the point is fundamental: If we seek to capture the very best ideas, and to fight groupthink with every sinew (a clear task of the innovative thinker; and a no-brainer, surely, in the wake of the dot-com bust and the Wall St collapse), we must welcome all articulate voices, and learn from them, and let them shape our common conversation. So often it is from the extremes that the best questions come, even if those on the extremes do not have the answers. So often those with the answers are not asking the right questions. Think Copernicus. Think Einstein. Goodness, think Wall Street. To capture value, we need every articulate voice round the table. Right through the conversation.

Next: four strategic actions. Need a bridge to the future? Here’s how to start.

1. We must disprivilege disagreement. We need mechanisms intellectual and practical that empower and reward political and executive initiatives in areas that are not driven by partisan and ideological divergence – because they simply are not within the purview of our current binary politics. Sadly, with few exceptions, it is only when an issue proves controversial enough, and someone on one side of it has political power, that there is action. I am given to offering suggestions that are indeed naïve, but are offered as thought-experiments, not talkers for lobbyists. What about a joint committee of congress whose brief is to take up issues that are important but uncontroversial? With very senior membership? And crowd-sourced, web-based grassroots to drive its future-focused agenda?

2. We must work steadily to reweight the points of conviction within our political traditions, and enable new issues to rise up. What does it mean to be a “conservative” or “liberal” when the issue is privacy (which may be one of the cornerstones of 21^st century society); or the brain-machine interface (now available in a $100 iPhone app; destined utterly to reshape the human experience); or humanoid robotics (which could destroy 50% of the jobs in the labor force). Let’s hear it from Moveon.org and the Tea Party and the Center for American Progress and Heritage and Brookings and all the rest.

3. We need to span the coasts. Last summer I proposed (somewhat but not entirely satirically) an act of congress that would require all elected federal officials to attend a series of technology conferences every year, of the kind that are typically hosted on the west coast. Not “attend” as in make-a-speech-at-and-leave, but attend as in attend – attentively, beginning to end, and into the cocktail hours and the dinners and the late-night drinks where the mash-up takes off. Believe me, if every Hill denizen sat through two weeks’ worth a year, it would be the learning experience that transformed America. (Idea: what about making a start with a bipartisan Pledge for America’s Future?) Not of course that all the high-tech and the innovative thinking are on the left coast. Yet by the same token, the Valley guys need to get a lot more serious about Washington. I asked the leader of one of our largest corporations why it is that, while he has a 15-year plan for China, when he gets to DC he believes his lobbyists that 12 months is long-term.

4. Washington, meet Washington. I count at least five Washingtons; DC as MPD. So: We have the mainstream policy community – federal government plus think tanks. Then we have the other policy community, which has remarkably little connection: Defense and intel. Then we have universities; which despite all those centers and programs have – yes – remarkably little traction in either of the former. Then we have the heavyweight business community, the Economic Club of Washington, the Dulles Corridor, the defense contractors who uniquely and bizarrely advertise their jet planes on bus shelters and radio shows. Then, #5, we have the District, qua Council. The local politicos; bad, indifferent, and good; yet what entirely unique potential to build the most innovative community in America, to the utter benefit of all five of these Washingtons. My point? Every improved connection across these communities that co-exist within one District and two States (most in just a handful of zipcodes) adds value. Incremental value. Value rising without apparent limit. And at no necessary dollar cost at all. Network effects, par excellence.

Now the challenge. No question, 2011 is a pivotal year. We’re recovering, slowly, from the shock of the 2008 financial trauma. We’re gearing up for battle royal in 2012 and 2016, but we really aren’t sure how to as the drivers of our politics are increasingly found in the exopolitics of the profoundly disenchanted.. We’re coming to some sort of terms with the new post-Cold War world order, so different from the mono-polar world some had expected, with BRIC, Group-of ad hoc global leadership jams, a Russia decisively post that wonderful if dipso Yeltsin, Gates in extraordinarily generous retirement while MS looks increasingly old-economy, still 20-something Zuckerberg man of the year though (surely!) with FB a concept and company ageing prematurely fast, and Julian Assange holding to ransom not so much the secrecy of U.S. global communications as the possibility of institutional privacy in a world now pivoting on asymmetry – and therefore the notion that the big guys wield the big power.

The challenge is to determine to live and act as if there were a future. As if it were capable, in some substantive measure, of being anticipated. As if our own futures mattered to us. As if electoral cycles are, as it were, made for man; not man for electoral cycles. As if the smart and committed women and men who represent this very great nation on Capitol Hill and at 1600 Penn. NW and in the myriad agencies (and indeed in the Court) were tapping tomorrow so that their choices for today will stand the test of time.

Not much, perhaps, to hope for. Non-naïve, surely. Non-cynical, assuredly. American through and through. Can’t [nc1] imagine the Founders saying no.

[nc1]agi

Convergence?

2011-01-05T19:40:00.003-05:00

So yesterday the AAAS hosted an MIT panel and a high-level group of federal respondents (including FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburger and OSTP's policy wonk, Tom Kalil) to discuss convergence and a report from MIT building on their Koch cancer center experience (it brings together phycisists, biologists, and chemists, mirabile dictu; they are all on each floor -we were shown a plan - though in segregated groups, not intermingled, we noted).

It was a very worthwhile morning, and the room was packed. Lucky me: arrived late, and got relegated to a front-row seat reserved for but unoccupied by the press.

The report is good, though curiously couched in terms of the history of biology - not a lot of convergent thinking there; convergence, of course, in one sense, is the recovery of a vision lost when the all-round "scientist," who had briefly flourished in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, and who would combine A with B with C and probably numismatics, was lost to specialism and the new-style universities and information overload and modernity. But at one level, as I shared with some of the participants afterwards and would have with the assembled group had the Q and A not been controlled through 5x3 cards, there was nothing on offer that Mike Roco and Bill Bainbridge had not addressed in their tumultuous "Converging Technologies" series at NSF a decade earlier. And of course convergence goes back before then.

The question is: action. We need it, we need it soon, and it difficult to see our current structure delivering it. Alan Leshner, Mr. AAAS, said it well: funding and reviewing institutions will be threatened like hell by the prospect of inter-disciplinary approaches becoming serious.

An excellent report, and a stimulating morning. Wondering, here, what comes next.

Three rules for 2011; or, Hitting 2012 on the Upswing

2010-12-29T13:16:00.001-05:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), Washington, DC

It’s all about trends. Not the celeb-type “trending” that’s become trendy on Twitter. But reading the runes; sensing which trends that can be seen to have meaning. More Chinese- than English-speakers on the internet in 5 years? Young people’s use of email dropped almost one-half in 2 years? What does the ineluctable shift to mobile mean for the latest FCC pronouncement on “neutrality”? The faster everything moves, the more important it is to track the trends and pick the ones that will shape the future. Which means, not least, that decisions can no longer be data-driven in the way we used to believe they should. Knowledge-powered intuition, decision-making in creative groups, scanning for patterns amid the petaclasm of data.

As we used to say in slower times, a difference in quantity can become one in quality. When tectonic plates finally shift; when paradigms shatter; when conventional wisdom becomes so much (dangerous) trash. We’ve seen it domestically with the explosive emergence of an exopolitics – from Moveon.org to the Tea Party, the cable-TV-star rallies, and beyond. We’ve seen it in geopolitical terms with the first harbingers of the Asymmetric Century. Two men have emerged who best understand how the rules have changed, and neither works for the USG (clue: their names begin with A and Bin L). We are seeing it, back of all this, in the technosphere, where Moore’s Law has teamed with much-too-young people like Zuckerberg and Stone and the Grouponites and the Quora crowd not just (as we tend too readily to think) to give us fun gadgets that could even have business use, but to shake by the hair the entire human project - with Gutenbergesque, Manhattanprojectian, Sputnikish, tectonic éclat. Years back my then team kindly presented me with a mug. “Some people make things happen; some people watch things happen; some people wonder what happened.” Boy, are we in Category 3!

But that’s not how the United States is going to re-find its debt-ridden, educationally-deficited, anxious but laurel-resting, footing in 2011. It’s through leadership (internally and ex), vision, and a recognition of two huge facts. First, that we can make good decisions for the present only if we have a firm if complex grasp on the future. Second, that while everything is not about technology, technology is about everything.

So: the respective science and technology committees of House and Senate need to trump all others and set the pace (note to Leader Reid and Speaker-elect Boehner); the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a White House adjunct with little budget and not much more influence but some excellent people, needs to hold sway like OMB over every agency (note to POTUS); and (could I be even more controversial? But I have said some of this before anyway . . .) all political appointees should be fired on January 1, and rehired only if they score a high pass in an innovation-friendly, future-aware, test (POTUS again; he could do that in a memo); and we should ditch academic tenure (it can, I think, be done in an appropriations rider – House GOP please note) to shake to the foundations the disciplinary silos that mean 20-somethings get the big interdisciplinary ideas but siloed 50- and 60-somethings run their careers and make the grants. (OK, I know, good steps have been taken to encourage inter-disciplinarity and innovation; but we are talking tectonics, and timescale, and U.S. leadership; so while we are about it, what about diverting, say, 25% of all S and T spending to a new federal research-funding body led by 10 top VC and entrepreneurs, 7 of them under 30, most of them from the Valley? Again, an approps rider could do it, could it not? Time for some serious, risky, experimentation.)

So Rule #1: business as unusual.

Rule #2: the emergence of what I am calling an “exopolitics” (hereby reclaiming the term from the UFO peeps who had helped themselves to it; much more useful to the rest of us) offers an exceptional opportunity for us to begin to refurbish our political traditions and positions (as I have said before, we have them, we need them, and I have mine) through re-prioritization and, crucially, addressing how new and emerging issues find their place within them. So: what if those most engaged with the virtues of the Founders took more seriously their locus in the visionary Enlightenment of the 18^th Century, and their commitment in Article I to innovation through its corollary, intellectual property? My sense is that before long the comparative advantage of the United States (thank you, Ricardo) may lie almost entirely in the IP domain. (See Neal Stephenson’s remarkable 1995 book The Diamond Age for a prefiguring of such a future.) What if those most focused on questions of social justice, and most quizzical of market-oriented solutions to them, reflected more seriously on the Moore’s-Law-driven, exponential impacts of emerging technologies on the next and next-but-one generations? These may or may not be the best salients into our current political topography. But they suggest something that some “conservatives” on left and right will find threatening, while the true radicals across the spectrum whose first loves are the good of the people and the standing of America will find pregnant with possibility: changing priorities will reshape traditional positions, and new issues will reshape agendas. It is very hard to imagine the politics of, say, 2020, as those of 2008. If they are, it will be all over for us.

Point is: the current deep disillusion with politics-as-usual has given leaders across the spectrum a once-in-a-generation chance to reshape the agenda and refurbish both the credibility and utility of the political class, as servants of the future not simply of the past.

So Rule #2: use the rising exopolitics to refurbish, repristinate, and future up our political traditions. And our political class.

Rule #3. A vigorous embrace of innovation and technology’s future is key. But that does not suggest we street-luge our way downhill into a technophilic naïve-topia. Far from it. It’s being future-aware that enables us to critique its possibilities. It is those who favor one-day-at-a-time who will ironically bring in a technoworld uncritiqued by the norms of social and cultural and political conviction; the short-termists ensure the lobsters get cooked. The visionaries are those who open the conversations. Looking ahead 10 years brings values immediately to the table, since values drive both policy and markets, and investors know that very well.

Case in point. C-PET is collaborating with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center in a series of events in 2011 addressing emerging technologies and their social impacts (you can register through c-pet.org). Back of the burgeoning discussion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) lies a growing awareness that in the world of 2011 the business environment will increasingly favor what are perceived as socially-responsible uses of capital. The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), founded in the 90s by the late Paul Newman, brings together 150+ Fortune 500 CEOs. Its CEO, Charles Moore, recently commissioned McKinsey to produce a fascinating report on business strategy and sustainability in the emerging global environment that makes just this point.

http://www.corporatephilanthropy.org/download/pdfs/resources/Shaping-the-Future.pdf

So Rule #3: as we grasp the innovation agenda, we must face the values issues it entails. They are not side-issues, “ethics” concerns, matters for “public engagement;” they will shape both policy and markets; and they lie at the heart of our nation’s choices as Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson meet Ray Kurzweil and Mark Zuckerberg.

Point is: the ostrich will always be out-smarted, and that is true both of the political classes and their associated values communities here in the United States - and of the United States in the global community. Which is not to say that I favor a U.S. “industrial policy” approach (though I hope we are tracking with care those competitors – pretty much all of them - who are putting their money there; let’s track how that is working); or the idea that we should appoint an innovation czar to solve the problem (surely, in decade 2 of century 21, that is squarely the job of our chief executive? – point to ponder as the jockeying for 2012 begins).

So what will 2011 bring? More of the same - being short-changed by our short-term thinking; America rests on wilting laurels as more energetic nations assert themselves?

We need to man up, and woman up, to refurbish our capacity as both chief global citizen, and chief global competitor. As a nation founded squarely, uniquely, on principle, America’s calling is to bring to a single point of focus our vision of the good life and our extraordinary capacity to innovate.

C-PET’s task is to bring them into focus. Whoever frames the questions shapes the future.

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement

Why Washington Needs the Future

2010-12-13T08:31:00.002-05:00

If we are to have one, we had better start talking about it; quadrant 2 in DC; an ode to Bill Joy

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

If the New Yorker is the world’s best magazine, the Economist can’t lie far behind - smart, wry, transatlantic cousins. And - unlike much else we read today - elegantly written. I fell for the Economist in high school; they had a special deal for teens and it hooked me more than 40 years ago. It’s less stuffy now, more intuitive. I’ve just been reading the latest. A big article on Google. And a special supplement on China (more about that later). Two giants out there shaping things, and us. Focus on the Future.

It’s now 10 years since Bill Joy, co-founder of the late Sun Microsystems and esteemed technology guru, penned his jeremiad, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” - in, of all hallowed places, Wired magazine. A clarion call to reflect hard and deep, it took on board the Gestalt of both techno-optimists (a glorious digitized post-mortal future awaits us) and techno-pessimists (we are likely to destroy ourselves by accident or cyborg ourselves by design into a machine future). Either way, he argued, Homo sap seems doomed; surplus to future requirements.

These extremes have tended to dominate debate, insofar as we have had any. Joy’s extended op-ed led to surprisingly little; it joined the lore of the conversation among the cognoscenti, not least for its approving use of that equally well-known, though less read, text, the manifesto of the Unabomber. But no-one took up the challenge. Even Joy failed to produce the rumored book-length statement of his own case.

But the gauntlet had been thrown down. Can we manage a future in which galloping Gordon Moore’s Law keeps driving us up that apocalyptic curve without our ending up either bumping into Ray Kurzweil living on the hard drive next door, or being grey gooed with Prince Charles - in a final resolution of the problem of global population that reduces it rapidly to nil? Is there some way species Homo can be sufficiently sapiens to mature in sync with century 21 – and sail between the Scylla of the Matrix and the Charybdis of a bowl of reheated primeval soup? Or, perhaps (to throw in a third dystopia) a casserole of Soylent Green?

These options have dominated what conversation we have had, for the plain reason that territory lying between the poles has remained terra incognita. And in Washington, the most consequent city on the planet, there has been almost nothing at all in the way of grown-up conversation. Mainstream opinion left and right is occupied elsewhere, with issues of the much more immediate future (plus, to be fair, without any enthusiasm, the long-term old business of the deficit). Which is sadly ironic, since leadership always entails the casting of long-term vision; though leadership is not a quality defining our times.

We know some of the many reasons. It’s partly the calendar of democracy, with its premium on the short term and, in tandem, the privileging of issues of disagreement. Net effect is to leave the outriders free to proclaim their visions of glory and gloom, and (note this, investors and tech execs and enthusiasts for a techno-future; note it well) in the process slowly but surely to brand emerging technologies in gaudy colors of risk. Do note that I’m not saying Joy was fundamentally wrong, or that the sugary optimism of Kurzweil and the gooey pessimism of Prince Charles are to be discounted. To the contrary, counted is what they need to be. As we address tomorrow’s questions, the roundtable crucially needs their voices as we work for a positive sum outcome. But it needs the voices of others too. Others who are silent on the greatest issues of our tomorrow. Ten years on, Joy’s deeply provocative challenge remains unanswered. Whether he is right, partly right, or completely wrong-headed, America does not know. It is this conversation, with its many ancillaries, entailments, and cognates, that should be at the heart of our national life. It is a thousand pities that a Delphic oracle (forgive the pun, if you got it) from one of the leaders of the digital revolution was relegated to the status of marginalia; yet another curiosity from the west coast. And another thousand that insistent pleas for a pro-innovation policy culture are seen as a nagging annoyance. It may not help that they tend to focus on tax breaks and visas, though this is Washington where unless there’s a bottom line in the next 12 months, it’s hard to keep anyone’s attention. But that’s all part of the problem, isn’t it? And it’s a problem we need to fix. Hey, this is America; maybe we can even fix strategic problems. With ourselves.

I know that we are distracted from the long term by pressing and vital things. By war and terror. By health. Unemployment. But the bread and butter of politics will always claim all of our time unless we ensure that does not happen. Remember Stephen Covey, the pop time-management icon, and his Quadrant 2? The important but non-urgent. Management 101, for strategic individuals and organization – and nations. Smart people always know better; but they don’t always act better. The urgent consumes all available effort and attention. It will surely be the death of us if we can’t turn this around.

I’m also aware that there are plenty of people in Washington focused on the long term, not least the impacts of technology. One center of gravity lies in the security community, though even their discussions that are not secret don’t bleed into the mainstream. Another: back in the early 2000s, the National Science Foundation convened a series of conferences on technological convergence (the so-called NBIC process), and raised revolutionary potential impacts. It suffered from (picking up my point above) too much transhumanist and general techno-optimist flavoring, but it opened a vast and urgent agenda. Partly for that reason, it had little discernible impact on the broad policy community; though the Europeans pricked up their ears and concluded that the United States had taken a transhumanist turn (long story; I found myself trying to explain to the relevant EU advisory group that NBIC was just a bunch of smart people holding conferences, and that for good reasons and bad there was no command interest in their efforts; the EU had commissioned a “high-level expert group” to head off what it saw as a nascent U.S. policy push into transhumanism). Another: I was interested to participate around the same time in Project Horizon, an inter-agency futures scanning effort led by the State Department (and Booz Allen), looking 20 years ahead. It was an impressive process involving enormous efforts and some very senior federal (and a smattering of non-federal) players. But (as I duly pointed out, when I had opportunity) while it engaged in smart horizon-scanning in a series of heavyweight scenarios, not one of them took enough note of likely tech developments. Not one. Now: NBIC meets Project Horizon would have been fun.

Or to bring us depressingly up-to-date: the Wikileaks debacle has more than demonstrated that the dramatic asymmetries that seem destined to characterize 21^st-century life are beyond the imagination of thinkers, doers, and leaders whose preoccupation with the past and its current entailments and the threats and opportunities hosted by next week leaves us naked in the face of exponential change.

We need to retake our bearings: the vast rising giant which is China, run by engineers and unconstrained by election cycles and donors and approps and the Washington Post and the Tea Party and Moveon.org and all the rest; the cornucopeia of materials that NBIC generated; the strategic nous of Project Horizon; Bill Joy’s savvy and nuanced jeremiad. America as a nation at its most effective and best has always been defined by the future as much as the past. Its continued economic success and global leadership depend on nothing less, as we seek to be chief global competitor and lead global citizen in century 21. Decade #2 is now upon us.

For those who are interested:

NBIC: http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_report.pdf

Joy: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Project Horizon: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/state/state_dept_2025.pdf

This commentary may be forwarded/re-posted if unedited and with acknowledgement.W

Hanging together, lest we hang one by one:

2010-11-21T05:42:00.002-05:00

The C-PET Mash-up and American Leadership in Century 21

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

At the heart of our C-PET view of things lie two convictions. First, that knowledge networking is the way to go; and every articulate view should be round the table, not because we naively believe win-win is always possible or indeed desirable, but because a positive sum outcome is always both. Second, that while silos may be necessary (we need strong expert communities) they need to be connected – in fact, connected more deeply than ever. As the sheer quantity of knowledge explodes in giddy exponential fashion (the Petaclasm was my word for it), the knowledge bearers in their tight-knit expert communities need to engage more across and outside them. Or to put it another way, with every new petabyte of data popping from the cauldron of knowledge, the meta-community becomes more important. Of course, this is the opposite of what you would expect. It’s the opposite of what most people expect. More data needs more experts; build bigger silos; bring in bigger forklifts. Fordism in the ever vaster databank.

Yet aside from the eternally valid and inexhaustibly funny Peter Principle (younger readers may need to Google that; studies keep suggesting that Lawrence Peter was absolutely if zanily on the button – and you should read the book; flip from Google to Amazon and grab it before you forget) - the vastness of data creation is what gives the lie to the warehousing siloism we have inherited. The fixation with data threatens to engulf us in a tsunami of facts that quenches not only wisdom (now there’s a word from the past), but the capacity for innovation; like those curious and generally elderly people whose houses are stuffed with every newspaper they ever purchased. What’s leadership tomorrow? Well, let’s start with a mash-up of these two. Wise innovation? Innovative wisdom? Either of those would do us nicely. Fordism in the petaclasm offers a decent, intelligent, worthy way to decline and a suffocating, bureaucratic, death. We need to devote our energies to finding, defining, working, another approach altogether. The new leadership is light-touch, scarily flexible, focused on influencing more than ordering, vision-setting every hour of every day, framing and reframing the lives of everyone on the team, and living at the hub of a metanetwork that hums and whines and fizzes with people who know more than the leader, but who see in the beat of the leaderly baton an order that both descends from and ascends towards tomorrow.

The silos are not, of course, just those created by academic disciplines, though as we know that is bad enough; really bad. Many of our smartest minds end up in the academy, on the receiving end of the substantial federal largesse that the NIH and NSF and other agencies pour into the careers of researchers in the world of STEM. Vannevar Bush, that other Bush (no relation, apparently) whose influence looms large in the America of today – larger, surely than he or his wartime patron FDR could ever have imagined in that far-off world of the 1940s – set up the model in response to his president’s request that the wartime experience of science and government snuggling together be replicated in time of peace. So a measure of government’s commitment to S and T has become its funding of the NIH/NSF apparatus. I’m not offering a view on this conventional-wisdom measure of commitment to innovation, the future, the common good, rationality, and more. (I note my esteemed friend Dan Sarewitz’ recent questioning of this idea, in the hallowed journal Nature of all places; his bearded head, thus extended above the parapet, I am expecting soon to see displayed on a stake over the doors of the National Academies.) But it is undeniable that the billions we are pumping into STEM (well, mainly STE) are shoring up the silos (not sure if that extension of the metaphor works) and underwriting the structure of an S and T establishment in which inter-disciplinary collaboration is as rhetorically appealing as it is destructive of silo-dependent career paths. And while I’m not deliberately setting out to lose my remaining friends in the academy, I do think that academic tenure and the path thereto (there is of course no path therefrom) represent one of the nuttier ideas to have hit the west (aka, for this purpose, America). Sure, put huge pressures on young researchers to achieve A, B, C. Then give them a sabbatical and a pile of moolah. But then start over. The alternative of ensuring that inter-disciplinary efforts are lauded in the tenure process is as plausible as expecting those whom we now charmingly refer to as non-state bad actors to be good sports and kiss the opportunities of asymmetry goodbye. People tend, almost, almost always, to act in their interests.

Yet my point is broader. Little by little academics are collaborating across traditional boundaries; hurrah! It will undoubtedly happen more, partly since academics themselves are developing new mangled disciplines like bioinformatics and of course nanoscale science and engineering, in which the trad distinctions just don’t work.

But the silos in Washington are on another scale, reflecting of course fundamental assumptions within the culture at large but, as tends to happen in the world of policy, drawing them out into an exaggerated and deeply contrasted form. Business. S and T. Policy-in-general. Values. Innovation. Of course, there are relationships. But this fragmented vision is deeply, deeply flawed; and it’s at the heart of our malaise as we seek to face the future – a future exponentially rushing from the past like an express train. We in C-PET are out to put the pieces together. It is together that they will define America’s success in the years ahead. It is together that, at a more profound level, they will define the human future. It is together that they possess the potential to reshape our politics. It is together that they offer leaders, from putative presidents all the way down, an opportunity to shine even as they take up the task of refurbishing an aging policy culture.

Which is my point about hanging together. If we can’t correlate these questions and their respective knowledge communities, they will all fail. In their networked connectedness lies the last best hope of success, the kind of transcendent success that would give to America the commanding heights in century 21 that it attained in 20. Because it is precisely in the correlation of these things that leadership lies. I’ve made the point elsewhere that America must set itself to be both global competitor and global citizen – the true friend as well as the rival of the emerging economic powers. There are many reasons, though network logic is plainly one; without friendship and the affect that it brings, stability in the economic if not the political order will always be in jeopardy, and stakes of all kinds are being raised all the time. We need, if you will, a social Marshall Plan to engulf the rising nations of Asia and Latin America, so that our children truly see our peoples as sharers of one exceedingly small planet and a common human lot. Only that will free us for the kind of economic competition on which the future also depends, but without the xenophobic sense that it is a zero sum game. Remember: tech is deeply changing things. In X years, X being a finite number, we shall have realtime translation devices that enable Facebook friends (or more likely friends on the various interoperable networks that will succeed MZ’s genius creation; by then he will be playing Bill Gates and giving it all away) to span all, all, language groups, in a magnificent reversal of the curse of Babel.

My suspicion is that the technologies will then also, finally, favor the little guy. The bad news? They will instantiate asymmetry, which could lead to continuous strife as a background radiation. The good? They will make things harder not easier for both commercial and governmental control. Such developments will give globalization a whole new bite, and popular movements wholly fresh impact on the global scale. Let’s say Twitter’s successor has two billion members in eight years from now, and something starts to trend and keeps on trending – public opinion as a global force will have arrived. The current (problematic) situation, in which the United Nations treats NGOs (which are often highly partisan) as the representatives of the global public, will be over. I’m not sure the UN will then be the point (I think the UN as in Security Council and GA will be oldline; UNESCO and other elements in the UN system could become a bigger deal, but on the political/economic front groups like G-20 will have all initiative); but whatever intergovernmental organizations there are, we shall see the emergence of global publics.

The point of this seeming digression is to illustrate the kind of world into which America’s projection of leadership will increasingly take place; a world in which silos are breaking down, in which people power will make life a lot more challenging for national governments, a world in which old-style structures like the core of the UN system, with their constitutions and procedures and Robert’s Rules on steroids – in which they remain in place as they fade in significance and are supplanted by the ad-hocery of the G approach. G-whatever is just a bunch of governmental guys who get invited round for a beer. It’s a high-end tweet-up. Now: combine the tweet-up “UN” which the G system is bringing in and global people power through translation software and son-of-Facebook apps, and you can begin to understand the context within which America will be acting, and needing to look good, in just a little while.

So back to integration. By pumping the innovation agenda, and bringing smart and strategic business perspectives to bear on the policy community, we are working to get the long term at the core of Washington’s politics. Embracing the future in a way that is imaginative but non-naïve, we begin to address the impacts of such diverse and extraordinary developments as virtual reality, the brain-machine interface, synthetic biology, humanoid robotics. Once their potential impacts begin to be examined, we are into risk assessment; and in tandem where those impacts stand in relation to our existing notions of the good life, and the varied political traditions that seek to sustain them. In other words, consideration of risk and values issues arise directly from a future-embracing vision. Marty Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and a member of C-PET’s Board of Directors, has raised the question of our handling of risk on a succession of occasions at our monthly roundtables. He urges a principle of caution, which assesses risk side by side with tech developments. He distinguishes this from the “precautionary principle” commonly spoken of in Europe, which seeks to resolve risk issues before developments take place. And Marty’s risk approach could be readily paralleled by a critique on the ground of human values (aka ethics). If you look ahead, you can be circumspect, and work on risk and values side by side with technology. Parallel processing is the key. This kind of embrace of innovation and future-mindedness represents the summum bonum for the tech community. By the same token, they know well that societal values just like environmental and other risk aspects are crucial to commercial success. Which is not to suggest “win-win.” I dislike the concept, not least as it demeans genuine disagreement and devalues the deep value of unresolved, conflicting vision. These are vital elements in progress as well as in the critique that ensures that “progress” really takes us forward, and does in a manner that is (in all its many senses) sustainable. Not win-win. But yes, positive sum outcome. Clarifying key issues; teasing out where agreement and disagreement lie, as all voices are invited to define the issues as well as speak to them; building consensus where possible and establishing both the nature and the weighting to respective parties of issues that remain outside the consensus circle. This process, which bridges silos and builds the knowledge network across disciplines as the context for decision-making, is future-oriented and inherently embraces innovation. But it is not naïve as to risk, it candidly acknowledges that all human conduct is driven by human values, and it recognizes that unease and disagreement in the values arena are huge questions for investors, business leaders, and policymakers alike. That is, the silos interconnect – and do so the more where future and potentially disruptive developments are concerned.

Point being: unless we hang together, we investors and values advocates and innovators and policy mavens and risk gurus, we shall surely hang separately. Build an open-textured knowledge network, draw in all articulate voices, frame and ask tomorrow’s questions. That’s how we man up for today’s decisions. And that’s the C-PET mash-up.

Asking Tomorrow's Questions

2010-11-11T19:35:00.004-05:00

Asking Tomorrow’s Questions:

As we move on from the Waterwheel Economy

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

In his extraordinary book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and one of the tech gurus of our age, points out that around the time of the American revolution, waterwheels were not halving in price every year. Not.

I’m still mulling the book, which will need to be reckoned with by every serious-minded person (if only because Walt Isaacson commends it in unusually serious terms). But there’s no better illustration of the dilemma of America, and in particular of Washington, in 2010. We have a terrific system for the waterwheel economy. It is not faring quite so well in the age of the chip. Stasis is so day-before-yesterday.

So a series of insurgent challenges is being posed, the most insistent on the innovation front. But this is not just about innovation, and setting the ground-rules to enable the U.S. economy to be competitive at a time when the rules have been drastically changed by advances around the planet and the move to a global economic order. It’s about innovation, but back of issues like R. and D. tax credits and visa reform and a vastly needed and overdue overhaul in public education lies something yet more significant. The story of the 20^th century was one in which the United States took over Britain’s role as the dominant economic and military power, and allied it with thought leadership that extended from politics to law to science and engineering - producing far and away the most successful nation this globe has seen. And while Americans and others will always have their disagreements about this or that aspect of the story, backstopping failing imperial Britain (and France!) in two Euro-world wars, going head-to-head with Soviet Russia for as long as it took, sending Nixon to China in an extraordinary and aptly operatic move - and building this ARPANET thing that has changed the world’s life for good, and for good and all – the American stamp on the 20^th century is indelible. The question is of the 21^st, and it goes far, far beyond whether Intel or its successor will end up as a Chinese enterprise, and whether “the next big thing” will splash down far from the land of zip codes (a prospect Intel’s Otellini, who has emerged as the smartest and loudest champion of U.S. innovation, keeps pointing out; anyone really, really listening at either end of Pennsylvania Ave?).

Put one way, the problem is one of “the vision thing,” on the large scale. I’ve written before about our crisis in leadership, which without prejudice to some fine women and men is profound and chronic. I am not convinced that this is a problem inherent in the democratic order, or the American version of it, though there is not the slightest doubt that the shorter the electoral cycle, the more challenging the demands of visionary leadership. I was recently in China, and in conversation with one of the adroit, humane, intelligent persons who are coming to dominate this vast engine of the future. And I said: I must be honest; your country does not face some of the special problems that western democracies do, because your leaders can build a vision for the long term (he merely smiled). And in times of swift change, that can be and may finally and fatefully prove to be vital to success. Point is: western, and especially U.S., leaders must find it within them to look much further ahead, and cast such a vision to the citizens who place and sustain them in power. Ironically, as we know, greater flexibility and faster, more imaginative decision-making are strongly correlated with longer-term vision.

Yet where does that vision arise? It comes from a due sense of what matters, in the medium to long term (which for our purposes can be 5-10-15 years). And we know there is much that matters. According to our several political and cultural traditions, we focus on family values, or the rights of minorities, or the dynamics of workplace organizing, or success on Wall Street, or the freedom of the individual (whether ACLU-style or the sometimes overlapping view from the right, or the more radical libertarian take). These things matter. We all of us locate ourselves in one or perhaps more than one of these hampers of political goods. And so we should. But a way must be found to focus also, and equally, on the vast issue of a future – powered by Moore’s Law and those little circuits his company turns out by the million, powered by that ARPANET thing with the web and “search” imposing remarkable order upon it, and scanning the horizon for the explosive impacts of one new technology on another – from bio to robotics to neuroscience – as they are caught by the rolling shockwave of nanoscale exponential convergence. We truly ain’t seen nothing yet. Both/and. Progressive AND future-oriented. Social conservative AND embracing a vision for 2025. Tea Party AND tracking the transhumanists. Google alerts for C as well as B and A. Or is walking and chewing gum beyond us? Note to ideologues of all kinds: sure, this future focus will affect our current agenda, of course it will. Politics is about a combo of principle and priority. The future is going to have to nose its way in to every one of our current political traditions, and what the final impact of that will be we can’t yet guess.

But the key to the answer lies in asking Tomorrow’s Questions, not today’s. I’ve already suggested that every political appointee should be tested for their innovation-mindedness (which is something the current or next administration could do in a heartbeat, and I believe that heartbeat could transform this nation’s prospects and our global leadership, just fyi). I’ve suggested, more humorously and a little sadly, that every elected federal representative should be required to attend a series of technology conferences every year. And how about this: every presidential debate should have two equal parts: questions from the present, and questions from the future. No leader of a great power can any longer survive and succeed unless she or he is a serious futurist. We need to know. She or he will also need to fit one of the major political-social traditions from which we cull leaders, and be able to give an account of today’s agenda, deeply rooted as it is in yesterday. But unless there is an equal and opposite and potentially critical reaction to that agenda rooted in tomorrow, the nation’s prospects are parlous; to put it plainly, our goose is cooked in the global oven. We need vibrant political leadership on both sides of the aisle, and from the several sectors that make up each side, that is qualified in Tomorrow’s Questions. Just as the ABA scrutinizes candidates for high judicial office, and declares them qualified or not, we need a new politics of pre-qualification. Hands up if you disagree.

But what are Tomorrow’s Questions? In broad terms some are very obvious. They are not all about technology, indeed at one level few are, but they are all raised or raised afresh by technology – and they illustrate the manner in which while the future will still be about people and their societies, it will also and always be freighted with the impact of technology. Privacy. Intellectual Property. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, especially applied to humanoids and what that means for the workforce (and warfare). Sustainability, in the complex political and ecological systems of tomorrow. Where lies U.S. competitive advantage when high-end manufacturing and innovation have migrated, or at least equally dispersed, to Asia? How do we find security and freedom in a world gripped by asymmetry, and the technologies that enable it? What will it mean if human lives keep getting longer, and longer? And neuroscience: if the brain is chemically explicable, what price jurisprudence – a M’Naughten Defense (note for non-lawyers: insanity) for everyone? And what about “enhancements,” in which we – or some of us - get smart chips in our brains? And we connect direct from the brain to the web, and communications devices? These are some samples. Not one of them has anything measurable in the way of political salience in 2010. Each of them has vast implications for leadership in the decade to come. And a word to candidates and their potential inquisitors: generalized pap will not count as an answer. “Don’t know” is fine as an answer, as long as you show you understand the question and its import, because then you will be motivated to go find out. If we need to, let’s try the polygraph. Or is this not serious enough for that?

So C-PET has set its agenda to elicit (gather) and elucidate (clarify) Tomorrow’s Questions, and bring the most expert panels together to consider them. It isn’t that we don’t think today’s are important; but today’s more rudimentary questions are someone else’s job and pretty much everyone else is doing it. And it isn’t that there are lacking exceedingly smart people in the federal government who spend their time and energies on these issues, though most of them need both more prominence and more money if they are going to make much difference. The NSF “converging technologies” conferences in the early 2000s scoped the territory nicely. To be blunt: give OSTP the clout of OMB, stuff it with visionaries like Roco and Bainbridge and Kurzweil and Whitesides and Augustine, and we are on our way to being home and dry. We have smart people and key offices. But they do not set the pace, frame the questions, shape the conversation, lead the thinking of the nation. And this is about leadership and a fundamental shift in the ways of thinking and doing of a nation that has been top dog for three generations and wants to keep the job. America has begun to do what vigorous, successful superpowers always have at a certain point in their trajectory, and it is a dangerous thing from which recovery will require dynamic change: it has begun to take itself for granted. If you think I’m mongering in scare, go west, young man, and keep going west, right through Menlo Park, until you hit the far side of the Pacific rim, and then tell me I’m wrong.

Neither is this an effort to focus America away from its past. One of the most engaging features of the modern world is the degree to which as we jet-set around we move in and out of cultures profoundly shaped by their respective pasts. The survival of highly divergent societies in 2010, like on a more local scale that of regional accents across America and every nation, is counter-intuitive but vital to our understanding of the present. The United States may be the nation most self-conscious of its past, rooted as it is in the very deliberate acts and words of the founders that divorced this nation from its imperial overlord and set the rules as immigrants arrived from all corners. If the question is, what would the founders want of the internet, or synthetic biology, or nanoscale engineering, so be it. They were among the greatest minds of their Enlightenment age, and they knew all about science, and change; they even thought up the USPTO.

Neither is this simply an effort at 21^st century techno-jingoism; and it’s important to make this point and to note it, as the United States needs to be lead global citizen as well as its keenest global competitor. Part of America’s role in the generation ahead is to compete, and to compete successfully as Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage enables us, as we believe, to find what we can do best and benefit the world in the process. Part of it is also to show how high-tech can be high-touch; how our leading global techno-culture can be the most humane and culturally sophisticated of societies. These go together.

Here, then, is an open invitation. Send us your list of the top 10 questions, either in one-sentence form or with paragraphs and references. Explain why you see them as key. Our hopper has a broad opening and nothing will go to waste. We shall work on the best ideas, circulate and recirculate, visit and revisit our list, and press Tomorrow’s Questions as the questions that must be addressed today.

The waterwheel economy is dead, and the world of information, asymmetry, and exponential change is upon us. It will not do for our political establishment to keep its eyes wide shut as we look ahead, or – at best – squint into the sunlight. Time for full frontal engagement with tomorrow.

Cameron Commentaries #7

May be reproduced in full and with attribution.

My Take: The Future of Biotechnology

2010-11-07T06:15:00.002-05:00

C-PET’s November 5 roundtable

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

Our roundtable on the future of the biotech industry drew together some of its smartest participants.

Jennie Hunter-Cevera, Executive VP at RTI, was until recently president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Gregory Stock, co-founder of Signum Biosciences, had an earlier and distinguished career writing on bioethics. Robert Friedman, director of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s San Diego facility, once worked in DC at the sadly defunct congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Rachel Levinson, Director of National Research Initiatives for Arizona State University – who was once biotechnology lead for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That said, some further 60 participants sat round the table and crammed the seats around the walls, including senior representatives from various agencies including the departments of State and Defense, science attaches and at least one ambassador from nearly a dozen embassies and missions, and assorted leaders from the think tank and wider policy communities. In a town that tends to cope with events like this by sending the most junior person in the office along to take notes, so far as I’m aware there was only one intern in the entire group. Maybe that’s because we serve such great sandwiches and coffee.

And there was a corresponding buzz to the occasion. “Welcome to our latest mash-up,” I said to greet the crowd, noting that perhaps half of them would have been well qualified to be part of the panel – including some distinguished voices who are becoming regulars at our roundtables and made substantive contributions again this time. Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. Tom Donlan, editorial page editor at Baron’s. Garland McCoy, a founder of the Technology Policy Institute. John Palafoutas from the Task Force for American Innovation. Simon Berkovich from George Washington University. Robert McCreight, after a long career at State, now at George Mason. Jaydee Hanson, formerly with the United Methodist Church and now the Center for Technology Assessment. Mike Nelson from Georgetown, who like me was tweeting (go to #c-pet if you want some epigrammatic gems from @mikenelson and @nigelcameron) though Twitter seems barely have arrived this far east – if needed, there’s a DC tech policy parable. Jim DeLong of the Convergence Law Institute. On it goes.

After pithy perspectives from the panelists the conversation ranged from IP to investment to hope and hype and back. And here’s a thought someone shared: would new synbio organisms fall under the Endangered Species Act? A major point of focus was the recent announcement that the Department of Justice had reversed the policy of administrations of both parties by taking the view that the isolation of individual genes was not patentable. Opinions were expressed pro and con, with concern expressed as to the potential impact of this news on investment – introducing a fresh element of uncertainty into an already less than robust situation. But it was also noted that solid opposition to the concept of gene patents was articulated by conservative and liberal religious leaders in an unusual act of public agreement some time ago.

There are also a focus on the big picture of bioscience. Has it been wrongly focused? The complexity that has unfolded since the beginnings of modern genetics seems to keep on going. A fundamental focus on epigenetics is needed. Interdisciplinary approaches are crucial, and some raised whether the set-up of NIH and other research funding agencies should be reconfigured.

Another special focus was on risk. One strand of discussion: our systems are much too risk averse; the FDA would not now approve either aspirin or penicillin; what of the risks we take by failing to embrace new therapeutic options? Another strand: we need to find a consensus that is cautionary in exploring these new frontiers – in contrast to the European “precautionary” principle that many see as unduly negative, yet very alive to the detection of risk in parallel with new developments. Another strand: how do we assess and handle the risk inherent in synthetic biology and other developments with dangerous pathogens – which unlike even nuclear material have a capacity for indefinitely scaled harm? Focus here from some highly-expert participants was on the need for the right people to be doing the work and handling the materials, as other kinds of controls cannot be adequate (my comment: a trusted traveler approach). A further reminder that the asymmetric century is an inherently unstable and scary place to be; but it’s where we are.

From my moderator’s perch I tried to press the question of how things are trending, what the industry will look like in 10 years, and was waiting and hoping for some forthright declarations of confidence and vision. But I think it’s fair to say they were not to be had. Shall we in 10 years we shall still be facing the doubts and investment problems and controversial disruptions we do now?

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

Leadership in the Petaclasm

2010-10-31T20:26:00.001-04:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC

When teens say TMI it means they don’t want embarrassing details. But Eric Schmidt, Mr. Google, has the ultimate TMI facts: until 2003, he states with customary Delphic authority, the world had created 5 petabytes of data. By 2010, we do it every two days.

This does not of course mean we have suddenly become vastly more productive; half of that data comes not from Wall Street and CERN and China People’s Daily, but my kids’ photos on Facebook. Point is: the explosion in data, and data capture, are partnered with the speed of change as drivers of complexity. How to know what matters when it comes to the future? To put it another way, what’s leadership in Millennium 3?

Back in 1998, an elderly gentleman was asked by a television reporter how he was going to vote. "If God had intended us to vote," he responded, "he would have given us candidates.” Of course, there were two respectable candidates running that year for the presidency. But I took his point then and I take it even more strongly now. We are facing a crisis of leadership. At a time of deep geopolitical unease, with a seismic shift underway in power relations around the globe and fresh emerging asymmetries, and technological changes zipping up a curve that gets only steeper, leadership is faltering.

So what’s leadership in 2010? Well, we know about management. It was management – from Fordism on – that defined and exemplified the 20^th century. In corporate and government life, we got ourselves organized. Management theorists don’t all agree with each other, but they tend to be speaking about the same thing. You can study “management” and write papers about it. Yet not so with leadership. Leadership books, like leaders, are quirky, guru-esque. Approaches succeed that look wildly different. Last month, I was speaking at a conference on leadership for emerging corporate leaders from around the globe. Two presenters who were among the top corporate leaders were asked to speak about leadership and change. One was modest, orderly, and made much of his walking past five of his executives in first class to take his seat in economy with the cheapest ticket he could buy; leadership by example. The other, flamboyant head of one of the largest automakers, was asked what car he drove: there’s a Maserati outside, he said, and I have Ferraris in my garage. What’s more – speaking of quirky - he has one hundred direct reports, and runs his company with three Blackberries and three cellphones. And in politics? There too, we’ve had consensus-builders and consensus-breakers. A recent writer said of Churchill that in 1939-40, he “defined leadership for the rest of time.” Point is: leadership is not the kind of thing that leads to uniformity, good practice, rules to be learned.

The medievals, as usual, knew a thing or two. When you can’t define something, you can get a long way by clarifying what it is not. Hence (in their case, with God), the via negativa. We know (well, we do, but plenty of putative leaders do not!) that leadership is not management. And neither is it emulation of your favorite leader. Yet there are things we can say. Leadership is always about change. It’s therefore about the future; about knowledge – and in the context of TMI and the petaclasm, knowing what you need to know. It’s about relationships, building the network you need - so you can locate yourself at the heart of the unique knowledge network that will drive your decision-making and make you the best-informed person on the planet for your particular role. It’s about the constant interrogation of ends and goals in the interests of clarity and fidelity; and utter, ruthless flexibility when it comes to means.

To put it another way: the leader is the bridge-builder. Since we were talking about the medievals, pontifex is the Latin word - inherited from the pagan Roman priesthood. But while the pontiff (pontifex maximus, chief bridge-builder) builds a vertical bridge to God, the merely human leader builds horizontal bridges of several kinds. The bridge between her/himself and the led. This is what we know best, and it lies at the core of our politics. If you can’t build that bridge, you just don’t get to be the leader. But – note well, politicos great and small - this is a mere necessary condition of leadership. On its own it is far from sufficient. Two others, at least, set the leader in play to lead, in the flux of the petaclasm, the shifting tectonic plates of global power, the asymmetric threats that chink like Ruskin’s dreadful geologists’ hammers.

First, a bridge to the future. And the faster change takes place, the more central this becomes. That is to say, leadership that is both innovative and constantly embracing of innovation.

Second, a bridge across the silos, disciplines, communities; a networking that draws on ever more diverse sources in the midst of the data deluge and the growing inter-connectedness. Leadership through innovation through networks of knowledge.

Without these two, no leader will succeed in the 21^st century. Hence my semi-serious suggestion that all elected representatives be required every year to attend a series of conferences on technology and the future. Hence my serious suggestion that all political appointees should be screened, without exception, for their innovation-mindedness, alertness to the demands of the future, engagement in the knowledge network. Because what this analysis underlines is that we need the right kind of people in leadership. Unless they are knowledge leaders and innovation leaders, whatever their skills and virtues, their capacity to lead America in Millennium 3 is fatally compromised. They need to be the right kind of people, and they need to be operating within the right kind - of “corporate culture,” in which innovative future-mindedness, and knowledge networking, are prized. There’s no question that America shaped the global 20^th century. If it is to be more than a bit player in the 21^st, we need, well, change.

But back to the via negativa. Two things that I’m not saying. First, that in all its branches the USG lacks extraordinarily smart people who are innovative, future-oriented knowledge networkers. They are there. But who would claim that they set the pace? The general presumptions of Washington’s political culture and its priorities lie elsewhere, in the political short term. Second, that our global competitors (I’m drafting this on my way back from a trip to China) will have it all their own way. I think there is everything to play for. But other players seem, shall we say, rather more evidently aware of the fact there is a game afoot.

The genius of America’s global dominance in the 20^th has lain precisely in its capacity to capture the imagination of peoples as they have strained forward into freedom, and to twin this visionary leadership with the potency of an educational/industrial economy capable of developing and delivering technologies to satisfy consumer markets – and in the late 20^th century, the tools of change that have granted global access to the digital vectors of tomorrow. America’s challenge is now to continue to build comparative advantage at the meeting-point of freedom and technological empowerment; to demonstrate future-oriented leadership in the global knowledge economy. At the point at which high-value, creative efforts are now in the grasp of our competitors.

Stasis all over again?

Shall we? That raises another set of questions about leadership and change. I’m feeling for a category here. As we know well, there’s a tendency for stasis, or at least its expectation, to follow bursts of revolutionary change. Future fatigue? The change plateau? It’s as if once the exponential curve has delivered some game-changing shift, the players need a rest. They stop thinking about exploding the assumptions around them, and start thinking about their stock options. Yet the curve keeps on going up. To move beyond the middle ages into the Reformation of the 16^th century, a favored tag was ecclesia reformata semper reformanda: the reformed church must go on being reformed. Listen up, Redmond and Palo Alto. My other gig in Switzerland was to lead a workshop at UBS on investment and emerging technologies. Who seriously believes that in 5-7 years the two uber-brands of the web, Google and Facebook, will still be as dominant as they are now, pressing ahead, and – crucial to their current valuations - generating economic profit? One reason the naïve statements and creepy actions of both these splendid efforts on the question of privacy are so interesting lies precisely in their assumption that their ways of doing business are here to stay, and we shall need to get used to the fact. 5-7 years? Expect both search and the kind of “social networking” embodied in Facebook to be well on their way to commodity status, prematurely ageing companies in a world in which everything – including the classic company life-cycle matrix – moves faster every day. (If that’s not a lesson to learn from the great AOL-Time Warner debacle, back in the 90s when things moved a lot slower, I don’t know what is; someone paid what - $100bn? more? - to teach us a classic biz school case.)

Key point here: Moore’s Law, globalization, and much else have created a situation in which it is not technology that is characteristic of the future, but change (and change in the context of growing asymmetry). This point seems to me to have been spectacularly ungrasped by major tech leaders. It isn’t that we shan’t need search or won’t wish to share pics and news with our friends. It’s that the ageing of these branded behemoths, with their hubristic tendencies, and the smartness that drives scores of start-ups year by year, will have moved our focus elsewhere. They will feel about as hip as the telecoms do now. (And this just in: who noticed the “Fear Award” delivered to Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s threats to privacy at the Stewart/Colbert “rally for sanity”? That should send shivers down many spines.)

From the Edge

So leadership, always the most daunting of human tasks, in the 21^st century is intimately correlated with the two great facts of the age: the petaflood of data, and the instantiation of exponential change. The development and engagement of knowledge networks, and fundamental flexibility that grasps the change principle, have always been components in leadership, but they emerge now as the key qualifiers. The clock will not turn back. TMI will always define our data; a tempting stasis will frame our engagement with the latest change and the latest emerging technologies. We must now learn to lead not from the front but the edge.

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

Innovating our innovation talk: how do we raise the game in DC?

2010-10-22T04:14:00.002-04:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

The most difficult issues are always those closely connected with many more. So it is with innovation. We don’t have a simple definition, though we have parameters. We know it doesn’t just refer to technology. We know the smartest inventors may not be the innovators. We know that somehow the United States has been lead innovation nation for some time. We fear the loss of this complex, potent capacity.

We should expect that something as complex would require subtlety to address. Yet like most things in Washington, it follows a pattern: smart people feel obliged to dumb down their conversation to get the attention of other smart people who have felt obliged to dumb down their receptivity. So whether you are on the inside or the outside of the vast machine of government, there’s a big element of (can we say it?) roleplay. It’s just another of the problems.

This is the context into which Intel’s Paul Otellini, among others, has been firing salvoes. The time is running out, “Washington” has to change, U.S. competitiveness is at issue; and, ultimately, the vibrancy of the economy and our children’s future depend on it.

One thing that interests us at C-PET is the connections. Between technology, values, risk, policy – and innovation. Between an innovative mindset and future-oriented decision-making. Between cognizance of the future, and competence for today. So our recent roundtable, co-sponsored by the Task Force on American Innovation, asked “What’s Washington’s Problem?” Here is the planet’s technology leader by a long, long way. But a nation whose tech leaders are consumed by unease about what lies ahead.

An issue we did not discuss, but that is surely pertinent, is the geography of U.S. technology, so much of which is based on the west coast. How do the drivers of west coast innovation see Washington? I think in two ways. First, it is a long way away. Curious the impact that geographic distance still has on power and decisions. Second, some time back a VC in Menlo Park told me that when he looks out of his window, he sees the Pacific; in Washington, they see the Atlantic. If the Valley had taken the Beltway seriously all along things could already be rather different.

Back to complexity. Our roundtable underlined the fact by the variety of its presenters and the themes they took up. And when I pressed them – as I do on these occasions – for the lead strategic issues that must be addressed, the answer was not clear. Or, it was that there are many. Which amounts to my mind to the same thing.

Here are some highlights; video will soon be on c-pet.org:

FCC’s Phoebe Yang set out the process behind the broadband plan, which is plainly key to technology success; and made a fundamental C-PET argument – that innovation thrives when rules are clear!
Marty Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, spoke about the conditions for sustainable innovation, including a more candid inclusion in the 21^st century of the externalities, environmental and other, that our capitalist system had managed in the 20^th to avoid. He called for a new social contract between the public, private sector, and the research community, which focused on minimizing harms and maximizing benefits – long-term. And for a new Education Advanced Projects Agency on the DARPA model to fast-track the best reforms to U.S. education.
John Palafoutas of the Inventors Hall of Fame and Task Force for American Innovation, set out some basic problems: 2-year Congress, few politicians have a science and technology background, and ultimately a handful of lead political figures actually make the decisions
Stephen Ezell, ITIF: we are in denial, politics has failed us; leaders don’t believe we can fall behind
Kent Hughes, Woodrow Wilson Center: remember the “sputnik moment” and how it woke up America, and our response the Japanese dominance of tech markets ; we need global bench-marking
Garland McCoy, TPI: maybe we should focus more on quality; India could give us a run for our money

It’s plain that there are some key policy issues – taxes and visas – on which everyone seems to agree we face pressures that are making us increasingly uncompetitive. But are these the core innovation issues? As Marty Apple and others pointed out, much of the fruit of our innovation is now going overseas for manufacture; the trend may grow.

Here are what I see as the key underlying issues:

We need long-term thinking, scanning, planning on the part of leaders in government. There is plenty of it in many locations in Washington, but they are all lower down the scale. Where we need it is at the pinnacle of decision-making, in the executive and legislative branches. Politicians need to be much better at fighting short-term political campaigns while not disprivileging long-term issues that are nonpartisan in character. Otherwise democracy will surely strangle its own future. The electoral cycle cannot be our decision-making cycle. And as change comes faster, our horizons must extend further.

So we need a disposition toward innovation and an embrace of new possibilities at all levels of government. Hence my (at least half-serious) suggestion elsewhere of an innovation-mindedness test for political appointees.

And how do we get there? It will involve a culture shift in the Washington thinks, not simply how it works. But we have to get to it. And soon.

The Ultimate Mash-up: Innovation in Washington?

2010-09-05T18:28:00.002-04:00

In Aspen with Tom Lehrer on my Mind

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Once a Tom Lehrer fan, always one; at least, you can’t keep him out of your head. So I was sitting in Aspen at the TPI innovation conference a week or two back, and this time it was his Vatican Rag. But the tagline now: “innovate, innovate, innovate.”

Of course, in tech circles innovation is the talk of the town (as in, Washington), even though it is often twinned with a sense of resignation. The problem is that politics was never designed for a society in which the rate of technology’s development is exploding at ever more rapid rates. Remember Thomas Malthus, 18^th century English clergyman and statistician, and his half-true theory of demographics? (It was resurrected for a time in the semi-hoax of the “population bomb” in the 60s.) Malthus said population grows geometrically, food resources arithmetically; ergo famine, disease, large-scale death. So here: technology’s progress is as exponential as it comes, Moore’s Law as far as the eye can see. And politics? Our system of governance? Well, it’s arithmetical in every sense. Big Bang versus Steady State. Which did not much matter when the curve was a lot flatter. We saw the future in gradualist terms, and we got away with it. No longer. We’re facing a crisis, potentially deadly, for the nation that has been fated to be top dog as the exponential tech revolution heads skyward. How is steady-state politics to fathom, let alone frame, the fissile material that is 21^st century technology?

Intel’s Paul Otellini has been hammering his theme. American needs innovation; it needs an innovation-focused Washington; the nation’s losing its edge. Earlier in the year he teamed up with the Aspen Institute to host a crisis summit at the Ronald Reagan Building in downdown DC. Otellini emceed corporate leaders, innovation gurus like John Kao, and the Obama administration’s Larry Summers and Arne Duncan. What’s innovation? Why is it in crisis? What can be done? It was impressive, an A-list event that kept the A-listers on task for 24 hours.

Then as summer came we circled around, and Otellini again was center-stage in Aspen - Aspen the place, this time, not the Institute. A glittering occasion. As well as Otellini, the Technology Policy Institute hosted CEO-turned-politico Carly Fiorina, VC and LinkedIn pioneer Reid Hoffman, Intuit’s folksy CEO Brad Smith, and Valley entrepreneur and writer Andrew Keen. And its program asked the question, over and over: is America losing its edge? (Answer does not require a trip to Aspen. It’s yes. And you can see the video online. Techpolicyinstitute.org)

My point is that the questions go deep. How shall government of the people, by the people, for the people, guided by members of Congress who dutifully ride their horses to Washington for two-year stints per the Constitution, and an administration whose decisional timeline is rarely longer, address what is best seen as a slow but quickening and essentially uncontrolled explosion? Today’s key resource that creates both wealth and security is something quite novel: information, data. Perhaps the most disruptive invention in our generation has been something which simply didn’t exist a generation ago: search. Most people think the “digital revolution” is now mainly behind us. It has barely, barely begun. And you don’t have to be a disciple of Kurzweil to believe that the curve is set to start going close to vertical in our lifetimes. One a counter-intuitive principle of living with change: the faster it goes, the more important to look ahead. We just can’t make good decisions for today without spending time in tomorrow.

Back in the early 2000s, the National Science Foundation, brainchild of that practical genius Vannevar Bush (who famously foresaw an analog version of the web using that handy but clunky old-time invention, the microfiche), convened a series of conferences on what they called “converging technologies” – nano, bio, info, cogno, the “NBIC” mantra. I presented at one, attended others, and have written of them in critical terms as they were too much influenced by a naïve “transhumanism” (which blunted, rather than sharpened, their impact) and not enough focused on engaging the policy implications of the very remarkable developments they considered. But they were right to throw the future in the mix and ask hard questions about where current tech trends are leading.

And where is there now to meet the future in Washington? It’s future-mindedness that we need more than anything other single thing. A visionary, open, reflective, awareness that science and technology are framing every emerging question. That there is no area of policy or social and personal life unaffected. That change gets faster every day. That every elected and appointed official, while they may not be technologists, must be a futurist. Must have the keenest interest in what lies ahead, in the pace of change, how things are trending, in the impacts good and bad of every shift in the power and price of the chip – and every creative thought that determines what those chips deliver. And the chips are driving it all. Synthetic biology applies engineering to genetics. Artificial intelligence and robotics are moving far beyond the production lines of Detroit. One thing we know as we look ahead: this will not be your grandmother’s future. I won’t say all bets are off, because some things are pretty clear. Two of them are the sheer extraordinary pace of change, and its pervasive, disruptive impacts.

Yet out political culture continues pretty much as it has. We fund S and T. The genome project was for a time center-stage. Now it is the $1.5 bn National Nanotechnology Initiative (on which C-PET has a half-day Roundtable discussion on 9/17; come join us). And of course the Space Program. And NIH. We all agree all these things are important, vital. Researchers, and tech business leaders, want more funding for research and development. They want a tax regime that would make the United States the most competitive, start-up friendly nation in the world. We may well think that is a no-brainer. (Why are no-brainers so hard in DC?)

But the issue goes deeper. The problem in Washington lies not just in the short-term nature of politics, but also in the privileging of issues of disagreement that often gives them more importance than they deserve, in our binary political environment; and disprivileging, as it were, of issues that don’t fit the conventional divides. Then add that few of our leaders are attuned to the future. We know there are exceptions. But we know the default. And while democracy strenuously needs principled disagreement, no nation will thrive in the 21^st century that cannot place the impact of technology – and its implications, good and bad – at the center of its view of things, and do so in manner that is both highly informed and multi-disciplinary.

Of course, no-one in Washington is actually against innovation. It sounds odd to be asking the question, when every year huge sums in federal dollars are doled out to the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health; when the Department of Defense is a vast consumer and patron of the highest tech around; when the current administration came in trailing a cloud of appointees and rhetoric from Silicon Valley and Seattle. And of course the United States dominates the global emerging technology landscape in ways that many do not quite grasp. Perhaps 75%. Yet this extraordinary dominance is not our birthright, and U.S. companies are busy globalizing – not least to hedge their bets.

One of the stars of the Intel/Aspen conference was John Kao, whose brilliantly perceptive book on innovation lays out an anatomy of the problem. He wants innovation-specific roles in DC, an innovation council, an “innovation czar” approach. That might be useful. I’m not convinced. It might also let everyone else off the hook, and in the process ensure the failure of the “innovation” appointees. And it assumes a model of government as problem-solver that many of us question, especially in the 21^st century and in the area most open-textured and dependent on initiative. Yes, by all means let’s have the most innovation-friendly tax (and immigration) regimes in the world. But that is government removing obstacles rather than trying itself to solve problems. The issue is pervasive and needs a pervasive solution. How about this? We all read the news stories about the vast questionnaire required of potential Obama appointees. What about adding a smart instrument to test engagement, aptitude, awareness of innovation and its future? - an innovation/futurist litmus-test for every political appointee? That’s the kind of thing a seriously integrated, pro-innovation government would take forward.

As a congressional newspaper put it recently, Digital Nation, Analog Hill. And the issue is not simply the Hill (which, for the record, has full-function email, although remains one of the few places on earth where faxes are still in routine use). It’s appointees to thousands of offices and hundreds of boards. It’s the think tanks. Washington has (literally) hundreds of them. There are half a dozen big ones with wide-ranging portfolios and the intellectual firepower of universities. Where is technology, innovation, on their agendas? The issue is one of pervasive corporate culture.

And what about the west coast, the Valley, the tech heavyweights? Well when they get into town, they tend to do what people in town do: focus on the next year, focus on language issues, lobby the FCC, work on tax breaks for R and D. Which at one level is fine. Yet their cynicism about policymakers and their focus on immediate issues go hand in hand. All very logical, especially when they have been assured by their policy people that there is no chance of influencing the culture, game-changing, paradigm-shifting. Washington’s time-horizon is if anything shorter than before. Get over it, and get in there and lobby. Big, big mistake. We gotta change the culture. How? I have ideas, we all have ideas. We have to work at it. Keep working at it. America needs our efforts, and if we keep at it, year in year out, on a corporate and social rather than a political timescale, we may succeed. If we don’t, one thing we can be sure of is that we won’t.

Fortune 100 corporations work with 5, 10-year plans and in the tech sector are constantly scoping beyond the next decade. And that’s what they need to do in DC, side by side with what they do now; lobby for the short term, work for change in the long. The corporate culture of our political establishment is sick, it is antithetical to the interests of the nation as well as its technology companies, and it is failing to face the radical implications that emerging developments will have for its own agenda. Employment. Healthcare. Security. Education. Technology policy has long since ceased to be chiefly about technology – but, as Michael Caine would say, not many people know that.

And the next big thing? We listened in Aspen while Otellini warned that unless Washington changes, it will not come from Silicon Valley. The world is flat, and getting flatter.

Much flatter than back in the 60s, when globalized threats were of another kind and Tom Lehrer sang his satire on the loyalties of the famous German rocket scientist whose skills had laid the foundation of the space program. But Lehrer’s caustic humor is as relevant now on a very different competitive stage. “And I’m learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.”

Lehrer lyrics at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom+lehrer/

Join us for C-PET’s Emerging Technologies Roundtable on Innovation in Washington over lunch on October 13 in our G Street offices. Register at c-pet.org.

Permission to reproduce/circulate if unedited and with attribution.

My Take: A Week in Tomorrow

2010-08-20T10:00:00.005-04:00

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), Washington, DC

Quite the eventful time for me, this past week, immersing myself in tomorrow.

First up, our C-PET Roundtable on Synthetic Biology last Friday. Biology isn’t what it used to be. As the engineering approach to living systems moves beyond theory to practice (as J. Craig Venter has recently reminded us), side by side with extraordinary possibilities for good lie options for the weird – and the scary. Scary, not least, in the Asymmetric Century. In tandem with concerns lest we “play God” lie anxieties at least as great that someone will play the Devil. Smallpox, anyone? Not your grandmother’s WMDs.

Then a quick shuttle over to San Francisco on Friday afternoon. Once again an instant reminder of the Bay Area’s reputation as a technology hub. My cab driver explained she had taken a sabbatical (her word) from running her second tech start-up (I’m not making this up). I was in town for the annual “summit” (that’s catching on as an edgy name for what we just used to call a conference) of the Singularity Institute, widely seen as inspired by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. And she was driving me, Friday evening (this was a long day), to an opening party in the home of investor and guru Peter Thiel. And a fun party it was, all the way through to some time in the small hours of Saturday morning when a dozen of us were left huddled outside trying to find another cab and the fun had subsided.

The two days that followed were nonstop candy for the (still biological) brains of the devotees, and also for the scattered handful of participants who like me are more quizzical. I had protested the way an earlier “summit” had been opened, with the greeting “Welcome Singularitarians.” This time we were all included, I suppose. “Welcome, Singularitarians - and Concerned Citizens.” Kurzweil's is the most famous name among a group of futurist thinkers who have inspired the Singularity Institute, and its sibling Singularity University (a summer school for the very smart, hosted by NASA Ames, that was recently given a prominent write-up in the New York Times). But key summiteers are eager to point out that the Institute is not directly affiliated with Kurzweil. Which was, perhaps curiously, illustrated by the fact he addressed the 620 or so enthusiasts, to their chagrin, on a screen; and actually told them he was on vacation (shades of BP’s mastery of public relations).

One reason I have become a reg at these events is the extraordinary quality and range of the presenters. There really is nothing quite like it – for sheer fat sticks of intellectual cordite. Aspen, of course, attracts the most distinguished names in any Who’s Who. Burning Man and South by Southwest, offer hip context for techies and fellow-travelers. Yet for all the sometimes cultic feel, the Singularity efforts are singular in their commitment to the brainpower they keep suggesting is about to migrate to the chip, when (as RK stated this time around) we merge with our tools. Corvids and parrots, we learned, have intelligence on a par with the great apes; who have intelligence on a par with six-year-old children (the video of a crow bending wire, unbidden and untrained, to make a fishing hook – in the city where Hitchcock filmed part of The Birds - sent shivers down my mammalian spine). Cooling the recently heart-attacked as if they had fallen under ice could markedly improve our ability to bring them round, but it’s held up by red tape. Hour after hour of it; two tight-packed days, rounded off by magician, debunker, humorist, and – as he pointed out – Darwin lookalike, James Randi. Of course, as usual the drum-beat was of accelerating artificial intelligence. Yet the dialectic was perhaps more evident this time than in the past - between those who have confidence in the shape of the curve and sense we are close to going vertical, and those, especially from the biosciences, who keep saying we understand so remarkably little of our wetware (or even that of the animals), that the effort to duplicate it is faintly ridiculous.

As in the past, there was a brief staged debate, though the debaters spent most of their time falling over each other with pleasantries and agreements, so as an effort to ventilate the huge issues before the summit it failed. More generally, if there is a criticism to be made aside from (to use a handy Briticism that Americans could do with knowing) the general over-egging of the pudding (too much, too many, an embarras de richesse), it would lie here: in the need to discuss, to absorb, to hear fewer speeches, lectures, or perorations, and get the uber-brains round some tables to engage – and answer for themselves to their intellectual peers. This of course is what Aspen does; and Davos. It’s what we do at C-PET. It’s what helps build collaborative knowledge networks and reaches for a positive sum outcome for all parties.

So as I sat there at the back, being hit by flying half-bricks of intellect for hour after hour and tweeting to keep myself focused, what I craved most was a 10-15 minute limit to speechifying and a heavy dose of moderated engagement. What would the parrot lady say to the surgeon and the engineer? What would the robotics gurus say to each other, with or without the intermediation of their machines, which all seemed to be called Zeno? What would anyone have to say about the policy implications of the enterprise? Where are the National Academies? Where is OSTP? Where are the AI guys from Sandia, with whom I spent two days some years ago at ASU on the implications of enhanced human intelligence, and where is the spirit of that smart but self-critical gathering?

I’m quite a Kurzweil fan. As I told him at the San Jose summit, and as I have not ceased to tell the Singularity Institute leaders whom I admire, he has raised fundamental questions that have ramifications for everyone and everything – and that are being widely ignored. The SI people are not all Kurzweil clones in their optimism and notions of timescale. I was interested in Peter Thiel’s speech at the last event, in New York City, where he was criticized for taking a more generic view of the “singularity” and hit back that the movement includes people who take many views (as we were told this time, he is the major financial backer of the Institute). And in Vernor Vinge’s comment (he’s the computer expert and sci-fi writer whose early use of the term “singularity” has made him a godfather to the movement) at another, that “the longer we have our hand on the tiller, the better.” But the discussion has to go mainstream. There are ways to make that happen, and ways to make it harder to achieve.

The next stop on my trip was Seattle, for the pii2010 conference on privacy and identity of which C-PET is a co-sponsor. Quite the humdinger. Privacy experts from corporate and non-profit sectors, all-round IT gurus, and some outspoken commentators, produced the perfect mix. And the first evening offered a party and a tangent: pitch slam for a dozen start-ups looking for funding - basically speed-dating from the front of the room; 1-5 minute sales pitches for some highly creative efforts. A handy reminder of how things work in techland, among the small-scale practitioners rather than the large-scale theoreticians. There was also, interestingly, a lot more tweeting going on than at the Singularity, as some dozens of us kept up a parallel conversation and fed in questions in realtime. The matrix of online identity, online and offline privacy, and the future, lies at the heart of our culture – and some of the most profound questions Homo sapiens has yet faced.

The coincidental launch of Facebook’s Places feature tracking and sharing users’ locations, added a little salsa to the conversation. The vast quantities of data we are spewing onto the web have become the raw material for an evolving, global industry. Who owns all this stuff? Read the terms of online services (some of which run to dozens of pages of legalese, so take your lawyer with you and/or a nice bottle of red wine) and you find you have gaily signed away an ocean of rights you assumed were yours, or would have had you thought about them (example from me: Amazon! Go read what they can do with your book reviews). Privacy has yet to emerge as a money-making value proposition for the world of the internet. Yet it may. And my main takeaway from pii2010, aside from the sheer intellect and creativity of the participants (good news for us, or since most of them are corporate players, scarily bad?), was the notion that we should see this as our “banking” our own data, make it portable, find tech solutions to the fact that it is scattered across the web, some on our hard drives and much in the cloud - and encourage the emergence of business models within which we choose to sell what we choose to sell. Yet the current context, of playing ducks and drakes with ever-changing “privacy” rules, is not encouraging. As someone said, and I recall tweeting, every internet service has stayed true to its privacy commitments - until it has decided to change them. And the most chilling moment of pii2010? A panelist asked who we the audience would most trust to take care of our online data. He read a list of options, which ended with government. Hardly anyone voted for any of them. And these are the professionals. My comment: like transplant surgeons who don’t carry donor cards.

So as I return from my week in tomorrow, how do things look? My conviction that Washington, DC is mired in yesterday is clearer than ever; my sense of the urgency and opportunity we confront starker. We’re already a decade into the Asymmetry Century that opened with 9/11; synthetic biology, which carries the seeds of vast benefit, by accident or malicious design could deliver quite ghastly surprises; a technology with a malicious black swan built-in. We are shooting, at a rapid speed though we do not know how fast, up a curve into a world in which AI and robotics have a far larger footprint, and may yet stamp us out. In the meantime, our notions of identity are up for grabs, as we spew data online by the petabyte and think little of the consequences.

Yet how, as conversation after conversation has run, can Washington, DC be changed? Here’s one idea, totally practical and easy to implement. The U.S. Politicians’ Exposure to Technology Act, which could for all I care be known as Eric (Schmidt)’s Law (sounds better than PETA). It would require every politico elected to national office, from POTUS down, and every administration political appointee (the Plum List), to attend in their first year in office a minimum of 4 technology conferences to be selected from a list to be compiled by a committee consisting of the CEOs of the three largest NASDAQ companies and the six newest Valley tech start-ups of the previous year; and 2 in all subsequent years in office. Believe me, aside from doing wonders to registrations at tech events (if perhaps shifting the feel of the conversation a little), it would revolutionize the DC policy community – and do more for U.S. innovation than a myriad initiatives, breast-beating, commissions, and the valiant efforts of the several tech think-tanks.

The point I go around making is that unless you visit tomorrow you are fundamentally unqualified for decision-making today. I just spent a week there. I’m exhausted. Looking forward to getting back to now. But does anyone really disagree? And if Eric’s Law is not the answer, what is? This nation remains the greatest can-do society, at least since Rome. Let’s get onto it.

Permission given to forward and cross-post unedited and with full attribution.

singinst.org

pii2010.com

nigel.cameron@c-pet.org

SynBio round 1

2010-08-14T10:36:00.001-04:00

My Take

C-PET’s Synthetic Biology Roundtable, first round

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

I’ve had a couple of encounters with synthetic biology before. The National Science Foundation invited me to join a site visit to the main federally funded synbio research project, with a mandate to review all the non-technical aspects (ethics, security, law, and so on); and Nature Biotechnology asked me along with the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan, doyen of contemporary bioethicists, to write commentaries for a special number back in 2009. So I’ve thought about what’s going on, and was very pleased to host and moderate round 1 of C-PET’s synbio process.

As those who were there (from think tanks, universities, a slew of embassies, federal agencies, the House science committee, and elsewhere) will recall, the discussion took off in some fascinating directions. C-PET is, of course, a think tank. But think tanks come in various shapes and sizes. Unlike most, we are non-partisan. We like process. We see ourselves as helping build a collaborative knowledge network. We don’t believe naively in win-win, but we do work for outcomes with a net benefit to everyone in the room. And our roundtables are designed to engage. Short presentations, not least as many in the room could readily be on the panel and probably everyone has relevant expertise. Short presentations, because engagement in the knowledge network is the key. And while some of our longer events have formal keynotes, our roundtable panels are designed for process. No PowerPoint. Plenty of exchanges, as the knowledge network builds and deepens. Not so much Q and A as participation. Having a large conference table at the center of things certainly helps. It may not be circular, like King Arthur’s (and, as it happens, the cabinet table of 19^th century British leader Benjamin Disraeli, around which I recently dined in the basement of a London club), but it is rounder than most Washington tables.

We decided to take at least two bites at this cherry. Next up is November 5. Round 1 was a scoping exercise. And the scope of synbio is hard to grasp. It ranges from industrial process and a concern about over-regulation (Rina Singh from the trade group BIO’s focus) to the ethics of “playing God” (raised by Penn’s Jonathan Moreno) to security scenarios of unimaginable scariness (“what if the Unabomber had been a biologist?” asked security expert Jonathan Tucker from the Monterey Institute, after stating that the #1 synbio anxiety of security experts is that smallpox could become the WMD of choice). From that we got into the problem of silo-ing individual technologies (and is “bioethics” becoming yet another silo, I asked?), the deep lack of long-term tech policy interest in the DC community, and the problem of policy driven by press release - as happened back in 1997 with Dolly the Sheep. Craig Venter’s latest announcement of his work in synthetic biology led to a presidential letter to the current bioethics commission to come up with a quick report and recommendations (though Penn’s Amy Gutmann, chair of the Obama commission, has six months for hers; back in 1997, Bill Clinton demanded that Dolly’s implications be clarified within three).

From around the table, perhaps the most perceptive of many shrewd observations came from Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. As technologies develop, he averred, we need to ensure that, in parallel, we see the negatives and threats even as we focus on the benefits. When I pressed him, he distinguished this approach from the common European “precautionary principle,” which is more cautious in its method and would hog-tie (my term!) innovation and the development of tomorrow’s technologies. Jonathan Tucker’s emphatic statement of the scary possibilities that could flow from synbio (scary is also my term, though was synbio guru Drew Endy’s word in the New Yorker piece a year ago that brought this stuff to the attention of the cognoscenti) led to reflection on the emergence of asymmetric threats, and the fact that (as he noted) a smart teen will soon be able to go bio rogue. How are we to contain such a situation? Moreno set context by drawing us back to Plato and the eugenics of Sparta and the relations of politics and biology in every age. Yet the terms of trade have changed, the stakes are raised: what is the emerging biopolitics of tomorrow? The discussion also focused on the international arena. One of BIO’s concerns is that the strong US focus on biosecurity is not matched by equivalent approaches from Europe, and especially not Asia. Regulatory regimes can have the effect of curtailing U.S. competitiveness.

I pressed the issue of asymmetry. While the 21^st century tends to be defined in tech terms (“Biotech Century,” as Jeremy Rifkin titles one of his books; “Nano Century,” as I did one of mine), it might make more sense to see it as the asymmetric century. We don’t need to wait for biosmart rogue teens. Competence in QWERTY, that 19^th century skill, recently enabled Wikileaks to publish tens of thousands of secret files, and a hacker to share 200 million sets of Facebook info. I shared a recent book purchase, a new study of the Battle of Cannae (perhaps Imperial Rome’s greatest defeat). Rome raised a huge army to bring Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, to his knees. Hannibal, the man who wrote his name in history by bring elephants over the impassable Alps in winter, was a master of asymmetric tactics, like bin Laden in our day. He trapped this great army and killed probably half its men. My point: today, all he would have needed was a keyboard. The 21^st century has given asymmetry its head. Synbio offers asymmetric tools that lie far beyond the imagining of former generations.

There is of course disagreement among the most expert of experts as to the real significance of Venter’s latest move. But our panel was unanimous that while press releases are given to exaggeration, what Venter has accomplished is a big deal, and has handily set in motion a serious engagement with its implications.

C-PET’s round 2 will, we hope, bring us nearer some sort of conclusion. We look forward to being joined by Venter’s colleague Robert Friedman. By then perhaps the President’s bioethics commission will have written a draft report. My personal hope is that they will venture far beyond bioethics, assess synbio in its wider possibilities, and perhaps even urge our short-term, technology-unfocused Washington culture into a far wider engagement with the 21^st-century implications of these explosive developments.

Back in the early 2000’s, the National Science Foundation hosted a series of events under the banner “Converging Technologies.” They (conferences and books) had something of a “transhumanist” flavor (“enhancing human performance”), which seemed to me unfortunate as it distracted from what they were really saying: that, as it were, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Driven by extraordinary advances in science, technology is set to reshape the human experience over and over. The digital revolution has hardly begun. And what awaits us in nano, bio, IT and cognitive science (NBIC, the NSF watchword for these events) – and, perhaps especially, the development of Artificial Intelligence – is vast, if impossible to predict. The marriage of engineering and biology which is synbio is set to cut a vast swathe through the experience of the human community, for good and for ill. In parallel, the AI/robotics discussion takes a different but no less potentially transformative approach.

Meanwhile, the prophets of risk continue in their labor. Stephen Hawking, who some claim is Newton’s equal, tells us to evacuate the earth within 100 years. Martin Rees, cosmologist and top UK scientist (president of the Royal Society which essentially founded modern science in the 18^th century) tells us in his book Our Final Century (ridiculous and demeaning U.S. title, Our Final Hour) that the odds are against our survival on planet Earth. And Bill Joy, uber-technologist and guru at Sun in its heyday, famously told us back in 2000 “Why the Future doesn’t need us.” (Answer for those too young to be reading Wired 10 years ago: because we make a ghastly mistake, or (more subtly) because we make seemingly sensible choices that add up to the voluntary extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens.)

In his presentation, Moreno had suggested that he would not be alive in 100 years’ time to see what might eventuate. I reminded him that Ray Kurzweil, prophet of an AI-driven future and for all his (perhaps undue) optimism respected as thinker and inventer by some of the smartest minds on the planet, not only believes he has a shot at living for ever but is a year or two older than both Moreno and me.

My take? I’m concerned about “bioethics” as yet another silo, but hopeful that Amy Gutmann will take on a wider range of issues and be heard. Concerned that because “playing God” language doesn’t play with the cognoscenti that over-reaching claims of some bioscientists will go unchallenged (I’ve never liked the “playing God” way of playing, though probably all of us know what it means and find its implications intuitively disturbing). Concerned that asymmetry could doom us to an either/or between an Orwellian/Kafkan state and a situation of constant and dire threat from smart sociopath teens and QWERTY-certified Mullahs.

But come join us at 10, G Street NE (tucked away behind the Post Office for those who know DC) on November 5. Perhaps all will be resolved, as the C-PET knowledge network brings yet more smart minds into collaborative engagement and takes forward this global conversation.

The Privacy Agenda

2010-07-12T18:35:00.003-04:00

My Take

C-PET’s latest Roundtable: Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, President and CEO

Questions raised at the interface of privacy and emerging technologies go far beyond recent controversies over the way Google, Facebook and other social media giants use our information. (As the saying goes, we ain’t seen nothing yet: what about nanodust tracking? And long before that problem may come along, what about the security uses of our info?) But it’s here in our near-universal embrace of social networking and search that the most problematic questions have been raised for general discussion.

It’s problematic for many reasons – for starters, it really isn’t clear whether and how much most people are particularly concerned about privacy. Companies grasping for business models are loathe to limit their options. And because the apps can be so complicated that setting out privacy options that do indeed permit the user to control what is and is not revealed and to whom can prove terminally complex. When experts confess to confusion as to their choices (as plenty of them do), the choice mechanisms (well-intended or not) are plainly shown to be fake. Just as communication is all about your audience actually getting the message, not just your delivering it and hoping for the best; so consent must be informed and its mechanisms as easy to work through as the typical less-smart and less-techie user. That much is simple.

One reason these discussions matter so much lies precisely in the way in which social networking has got under our skin. It’s helped to integrate the internet in our lives with almost the character of a utility (interesting note: Finland just made broadband access a legal right). Our being so used to online social engagement has helped blind users to the question of what’s happening to their information. Do they care? Would they if they thought about it? It’s also providing a context in which we can road test what privacy means in a world of high digital penetration – in which, for example, Facebook alone claims nearly 10% of the species among its regular users. And more than two-thirds of Homo sapiens have mobile “telephones,” as we still call these exponentially multi-purpose handheld devices. (Another note: thinking of them as phones has helped habituate us to them and at the same time made us less aware of their revolutionary significance.) Facebook’s stewardship of our info, and our capacity to hold such companies to account and work their “privacy settings,” will prove potent shapers of the assumptions of the next generation of networking technologies.

Our panel noted that there had been progress in the efforts of these companies, though these settings remain “still barely usable.” It’s not clear, at least to the companies, how sensitive their market really is to the privacy question. The development of the Internet of Things will greatly raise the stakes as vastly more of our planet will end up interconnected. The trend to the consolidation of online identities, and the move away from pseudonymity, has taken place partly deliberately and for good reasons, but has had the effect of worsening the privacy situation as distinct areas of our online lives become conflated and accessible to others. The gap between what we think we have in the way of privacy, and what we actually have, is getting bigger.

I raised my own questions at the end. Will privacy become the most costly commodity of the 21^st century? Will it take the collapse of one of the great internet brands in a privacy controversy – their equivalent of Deepwater, but without the oil reserves to mitigate the collapse of public confidence and stock price – to shift the gears of the industry and make privacy protection into its central value? Why not a TQM (total quality management) approach to privacy from top to bottom? One thing seemed clear: these issues are far from resolved, and as technology evolves and business and social patterns morph the nature of the issues will keep shifting.

We are planning more Roundtables on privacy, moving from social media into issues of biometrics and security.

Privacy Panel

2010-07-08T05:44:00.002-04:00

Preparations for our Roundtable on privacy and emerging technologies are now complete: tomorrow's event will be fascinating as it brings together industry and civil society perspectives. My suspicion is that privacy, in its many aspects, is emerging as perhaps the single biggest issue of the 21st century. Yet the said 21st century has yet to wake up to the fact.

Here's the program:

You are invited to an
Emerging Technologies Roundtable:

July 9, 2010 - Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Privacy is emerging as one of the hottest topics of the 21st century, as emerging technologies revolutionize our experience of communication, security, business, and ever other aspect of our lives. Recent controversies have focused on Facebook and Google. Do these technologies inherently challenge our notions of privacy? Are we ready for lives that involve far more public disclosure? Eric Schmidt's much-quoted statement "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" set off a firestorm of comment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation responded: "Google, governments, and technologists need to understand more broadly that ignoring privacy protections in the innovations we incorporate into our lives not only invites invasions of our personal space and comfort, but opens the door to future abuses of power." It might have added: it also invites consumer rejection and fundamental challenges to the acceptance and success of our technologies.

This is the first of a series of C-PET Emerging Technologies Roundtable events to focus the privacy debate. Space is limited: please RSVP promptly to secure your seat. There is no charge for participation, and lunch will be provided.

The Emerging Technologies Roundtable brings together diverse stakeholders to focus key issues and look ahead to their long-term impact.

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Friday, July 9, 2010

Privacy and Emerging Technologies

at the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
10 G Street NE, Suite 710
11:45AM - 1:30PM (Lunch provided, please RSVP)

Register for this event »

Speakers include:

Jules Polonetsky - "Privacy Innovations and Privacy Gaps 2010"
Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum; former Chief Privacy Officer, AOL

Daniel W. Caprio
Managing Director, McKenna, Long and Aldridge; former Chief Privacy Officer, Department of Commerce

Erica Newland
Policy Analyst, Center for Democracy and Technology

Jay Stanley
Senior Policy Analyst, Speech, Privacy, and Technology, ACLU

Moderator: Nigel M. Cameron
President and CEO, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET)

The UEA Climate Mess

2010-07-07T21:10:00.006-04:00

News that the third committee looking into the scandal that lately enveloped the UK's lead climate center at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has finally delivered its report, and while clearing the top scientist involve of dishonesty chastised him for much else, raises all kinds of issues.

As is widely recognized, the hacking of a large number of emails from UEA handed an advantage to those critical of the position of the International Panel on Climate Change (as had several other discrete events, especially the exposure of the scary Himalayan glacier scenario as some kind of muddled error based on a popular publication) - in the crucial run-up to the Copenhagen summit. While it is hard to establish cause and effect, the failure of the summit to achieve what many had hoped for and expected was certainly not helped by the errors - and the whiff of hubris that lay behind them.

The point here is that the climate change debate runs from science and technology through social values and civil society to governments and the global community; it's a phenomenon which offers a highly unusual case study. What led to the tipping point turning particular views among many science experts into a global movement is hard to explain. Many factors came together. By the same token, what led the movement to tip backwards at Copenhagen is also obscure. We can identify factors; it is hard to suggest causality.

What is of interest is the manner in which technical views (contested by some serious experts, but widely held) turned into a global crusade and then suddenly, when the key global policy event was convened, faltered. Without prejudice to the significance of this set of issues, there are many more with global moment that have barely reached the consciousness of a small, indeed tiny, minority. Yet they could. It may be they are of vast consequence; it may be they are not. But they would take on consequence if they experienced the kind of viral spread that climate change has. For example, what about the impact of humanoid robotics on employment? In x years' time, it could be profound, essentially extinguishing either (the optimistic view) the need for menial, repetitive, unskilled labor; or (perhaps more realistically) the job opportunities of billions of unskilled and not well-educated persons. Or what about disastrous damage from asteroid or comet collisions? Or the escape or malicious manufacture of a dangerous pathogen? Or . . . . There is a very long list, much of which is tabulated in the illuminating short book by Martin (Lord) Rees, currently president of the UK's Royal Society and a leading astrophysicist, Our Final Century. (American readers note: the silly title stateside is Our Final Hour. Rees is making an argument about the 21st century.)

Point is: the crossover from informed smart S and T opinion to, as it were, the public domain, is not a simple, logical progression. It occurs (cf. Thomas Kuhn and his evergreen prescience) in a jump. Just like the question, why did Europe decide to say no thank you to GMO food? The interface of heavy science research and widespread public sentiment is no easy thing to predict or manage. Next week I shall be at a conference of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative on "stakeholder" attitudes to nano and the NNI's latest strategic plan. People in general know and care little about these things. Then, all of a sudden, they care a good deal, whether they know or not.

Whatever other lessons we learn, the road from An Inconvenient Truth to Copenhagen went by way of some seriously short-sighted decision-making at the University of East Anglia. That may or may not have been where the wheels came loose. But as the 21st century presses ahead, the risk implications of public and political disinterest in science and emerging technologies get only greater.

What Technology itself is up to

2010-07-07T11:11:00.002-04:00

I'm interested in the way in which the mainstream media have begun to pick up on developments and ideas in the technosphere. Of course, they have a very long way to go. But they are on their way. Which is good for technology and, indeed, the rest of us. Is "technology" to be considered, as it were, one of us? Well, that's the question raised obliquely by the title of Kevin Kelly's much-awaited book "What Technology Wants," previewed in this healthily quizzical NY Times blog by Robert Wright.

Wright's blog is titled obliquely enough itself - "Building one big brain." And as Wright notes, "Kelly does say in 'What Technology Wants' that technology is increasingly like 'a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.'" Hmmm. After the selfish gene, the selfish chip?

Rights and Expectations

2010-07-06T07:45:00.004-04:00

News that Finland has taken the lead in making broadband access a "legal right" has been quickly followed by the report from a major UK foundation that it is now regarded as part of a social baseline - those items "no longer regarded as luxuries but as essentials."

When one goes on to read the rest of the Rowntree list (it seems Brits can't face the idea that their fellow-citizens must live without DVD players, mobile phones, fridge-freezers, and at least one week's going off on vacation - though, phew, it need not be overseas) it does raise the question of the power of expectations in a rapidly-shifting culture. To put it another way, it should perhaps encourage us to reflect a little on the way in which technologies have the capacity to limit as well as enhance our choices. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/06/internet-access-home-essential-survey

Form and Function and Print

2010-07-01T11:09:00.006-04:00

News that movable type is on its way out in China, where it was invented (pre-Gutenberg) and has involved using and storing upwards of 4,000 characters (versus the alphabets of western languages), offers a potent reminder of the gains and losses of transformative technologies. In juxtaposition: a jeremiad from Luke Johnson, the UK business leader who tried (and failed) to turn around the fortunes of the Borders bookstore chain, and now says that high street bookstores are dead. (http://www.deadline.com/2010/06/ex-c4-boss-warns-bookstores-are-doomed/)

There's no artifact more central to human society's progress than the book, which is why Gutenberg proved the Silicon Valley of early modern Europe (catalyzing and enabling everything from the Reformation to democracy and public education). As the Murdoch press retreats behind paywalls, Google's book projects offer a potential lifeline to threatened publishers even as they corral dead authors, and I enjoy scanning half a dozen newspapers online before I need to buy one (including, I should add, their book reviews, which lead me to buy more books than before) - it seems too early, much too early, for the entry of either Jeremiah or his nemesis, Pollyanna. We just don't know. As to those bookstores, the entirely unpredictable virus-like spread of the coffee house, an 18th century institution now ubiquitous in the 21st, may show the way. Can't people make their own coffee? Somehow they prefer to drink it in little rooms up and down those high streets. Don't they have offices and libraries to work in? Somehow they prefer to write their papers and work their clients and play with their spreadsheets - and, indeed, author their books, as I have one or two of mine, and as the most successful of all living writers, J.K. Rowling, famously did with hers - cheek by jowel with stay-at-home-moms escaping those homes with their retinue of little people and even the occasional kind of person who "used to" frequent cafes before the risogimento of cafe society (remember when?) - in a coffee house. My suspicion is that books and coffee have a bright high street future together, along with people who bring their digital worlds with them but also like to hang with other humans too.

Yet some things we do know. Transformational change, invariably, comes about by analogy. The pieces re-arrange, the whole continues in a new form but a recognizable. The book function, like the news function, is central to human flourishing and will continue so to be. The aesthetics of print have already become detached from its informational function. That works well with pulp fiction, as it does also with pulp fact - all the way from the latest fat thriller to the latest edition of the greatly overpriced college or high school text - both of whose days, or at least whose years, are numbered, perhaps in single digits. (A slimming of publisher and author profits for textbooks is an easy prediction, and a very good thing too.) It works barely at all at the higher end, where works of fact as of fiction have an intended shelf-life that requires shelving, and draw from the reader a good deal more than eyeball attention. Form is starting to follow function all over again.

Predicting the American Future

2010-06-24T09:01:00.001-04:00

I can predict one thing about the future with confidence: the “August” issue of the Smithsonian magazine will tell us what Americans think about the somewhat more distant future (2050). Whether they are right is another matter. But it’s good they are thinking. Unless we have some clear notion of what is likely to happen tomorrow, it’s not really possible to make good decisions today.

The Smithsonian report is introduced by the assertion that, “If the U.S. has a national religion, the closest thing to it is faith in technology.” Odd statement from the director of surveys at Pew, since, well, surveys show that America certainly has a national religion, and it is, well, mainly, Christianity. What’s more, the idea that Americans have blind faith in technology is something of a myth. I just checked the latest (2010) of the annual surveys conducted by Virginian Commonwealth University on public attitudes to science. If you ask the question, has science “created as many problems for society as it has solutions,” you get a whopping YES from half the population (50%, precisely, in the 2010 poll, though the numbers range from mid-40s to mid-50s). That’s a result that should get the attention of investors and technology gurus even as it makes the rest of us thoughtful. Here’s the poll: http://www.vcu.edu/lifesci/images2/survey2010.pdf

As to what we think as we speculate 40 years hence, the Smithsonian survey is well worth reading. People are upbeat about many things, traditionally split on immigration policy, worried that despite their high-tech hopefulness technology won’t preserve the environment, and . . . well, read it yourself.

It’s very good that we are thinking about the future. Let’s do more of it.

What is Emerging from the WH?

2010-06-16T11:48:00.002-04:00

News a couple weeks back that the Office of Science and Technology Policy had established an inter-agency working group on emerging technologies was tantalizing - and potentially important. Its announcement by means of the OSTP blog means that we know about it but not very much. It was described as "part of an effort to give special attention to technologies so new—such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology—that their policy implications are still being gauged." A somewhat curious statement. It implies that the policy implications of older technologies are already gauged (oil exploration?! internet/IP/privacy . . .?) - and also that nano and synbio are "so new," when they were in the news a decade ago. Indeed, Bill Clinton's memorably Caltech speech that launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative was just over 10 years ago.

These may be quibbles, but they point to substantive issues of neglect that, perhaps, are being made good. We shall see. Inter-agency groups are both the most necessary and the most demanding of federal activities. The pervasive and cross-sectoral impacts of emerging technologies may prove the ultimate test of our capacity to develop policy responses through our silo-driven mechanisms. So the ETIPC (yep, it has an acronym, so it must be authentically federal!) is a promising initiative.

Its parties comprise OSTP with the office of the US Trade Representative and the Office of Management and Budget. We shall watch its efforts with interest.

The Singularity reaches the NY Times (via NASA and the business section)

2010-06-14T11:34:00.006-04:00

The emerging technologies are beginning to emerge, at least into the higher echelons of the culture. First it was synthetic biology in the New Yorker, now the Singularity in the NY Times. Interestingly, the business section of the NYT. Which all goes to show that some of us have been right to look to savvy investors to raise the key questions - and, just perhaps, to persuade policymakers and cultural leaders of them.

Ashlee Vance's piece about the "singularity university" (a summer school program based at NASA Ames) well shows that some of the smartest people out there are looking far ahead, while the policy establishment is focused on today and tomorrow. One can see why they do. Problem is, unless you have some idea what lies down much further the road, you are liable to get today and tomorrow wrong.

The disconnect is actually huge, and as so often happens those focused on each end pull further apart and lose yet more perspective by their mutual disinclination. One interesting feature of the NYT report is the variety of perspectives it reports. I go to Singularity conferences when I can, and I think this is typical. While there is a default kind of "true believer," who believes it will all happen a week on Tuesday AND be wonderful, that's a caricature of many of the smart and rather diverse people who participate. So the Times quotes the NSF's Bill Bainbridge to say that things are not happening as fast as some had hoped. It quotes James Hughes as suggesting that the Singularity is not just Kurzweil's concept of it. It notes Peter Thiele's involvement, which seems to be more generic than true-believerish - he seems to be committed to the rapid development of these technologies without expecting the supersession of the human race. What they have in common, of course, is a conviction that things are trending this way. And if that is the case, then it matters.

And people who are less, some much less, positive about the scope and timescale of these developments - and also those less convinced of their likely benevolence (compare Stephen Hawking's recent warning that extra-terrestrials may not be friendly, so perhaps we should keep out cosmic heads down) - need to start paying a lot more attention.

And on the neuroscience theme . . . .

2010-02-15T22:41:00.002-05:00

I mentioned the project hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center back in 1998. The EPPC website no longer carries details, and it would seem that the mooted book project did not work out.

However, a lengthy review that states it is based on transcripts is available at:http://www.naturalism.org/neurosci.htm.

As the url indicates, the review sets out from a naturalistic perspective, and among other things critiques the generally non-naturalistic views of those who took part in the original conference (who included Bill Bennett, who gave the keynote) as unable to offer the kind of account of ethics in the face of reductionism that it set out to do - claiming that naturalism is better suited to the task.

Getting our heads round neuroscience at AEI

2010-02-01T22:11:00.005-05:00

What an interesting afternoon, though an odd one as we sat for 4.5 hours without a break (well, we all took our own breaks, but odd all the same; and no chance to mingle). Video apparently will soon be posted, and I recommend you take a look. Roger Scruton kicked off in splendid style, with a strong supporting cast of Stephen Morse (Penn), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke), Raymond Tallis (London) and Sally Satel (AEI).

The main focus of the afternoon was on the problem of reductionist approaches to the brain -especially in relation to law. If we are "only" chemically-induced brain states, how can we be morally or criminally accountable? The summary view seemed to be that the courts are basically ignoring the claims of fMRI-toting theorists because they have the gumption to realize that a common sense view is to be preferred - accepting the "folk psychology" view that led to and sustains our legal system. Otherwise, there would be no basis for finding anyone guilty, let alone punishing them, and juries have too much sense than to open that particular Pandora's Box.

More of interest to me - and the question I was set to ask had the chair called on my waving arm - is how the public is making out after a decade and more of news magazine covers telling us where and how our brains are doing this or that. As one speaker tartly noted, we are all good at looking for excuses. Neuroscience, seen as offering a reductionist explanation, would seem to offer the ultimate excuse.

Back in 2007, I moderated a day conference at the National Press Club that touched on both neuroscience and artificial intelligence (under the title, A Spotless Mind?), that included Pat Churchland, Congressman Brad Sherman, and critics of some current and prospective developments from the right and the left.

And I was reminded of a project in which I was involved, convened by Fred Goodwin, former NIMH director, under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1997-98, under the title Neuroscience and the Human Spirit. It concluded in a 2-day conference at the National Press Club starring Bill Bennett, among others.

We can be glad that AEI is picking up this agenda.

ERBI 2009: Technology Networking and Peripheral Vision in Cambridge

2009-06-27T19:35:00.005-04:00

The largest networking conference for European biotechs is hosted every summer by ERBI (acronyms tend to turn into names as they outgrow their original scope, and so it is with this one). The Cambridge BioPartnering Exchange. Participants were mainly UK-based, with a large number headquartered in and around Cambridge (where else, given the research, business, and cultural resources clustered on the banks of the Cam?). I had been invited to go along to chair a panel on emerging tech issues, and could hardly refuse. (Full disclosure: I am a Cambridge grad, so any excuse to visit home is appreciated.) And the Wellcome Trust set-up at Hinxton provides an excellent venue, and not only because of the ambient wifi (can anyone now run a serious professional event without it?).

A comment on the nature of the networking. I’m always interested in hanging out where worlds come together, and while this was a very biz-focused crowd it hosted many diversities – various internationals (especially Canadians, who were there in profusion), and a healthy cluster of CEOs, along with the biz dev types and the consultants who tend to pepper such gatherings. UKTI and consular tech people mingled with lawyers and a smattering of academics and networking leaders come to network their networks. My clutch of biz cards was I think representative: 5 out of 6 are on LinkedIn (mostly seriously, though a couple of people with two accounts and one actually with three – does that mean they are even more serious or less so?). Interestingly, almost all the LI people I connected with protect their own lists of connections. (I’ve never done that: love sharing old friends with new friends in our increasingly viral world.) And perhaps equally interestingly hardly anyone seemed to be on Twitter. Fiona Godsman (@fiona_godsman for those who know what that means!) and I gamely tweeted into the ether from time to time at #ERBI09, but without a lot of chums. It will be interesting to see if projecting a hashtag page during conference sessions catches on at events like this; and the extent to which it energizes rather than simply distracts from the presentations. It will certainly make them more responsive and engaged (in the same way as prohibiting PowerPoint, or limiting it to 3 slides, as some conferences do). Just some suggestions.

Our panel was focused on personalized medicine and other future developments – an opportunity for the kind of general discussion that most sessions did not permit. In my intro I was asked to explain something about the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), and it set the context for the kind of interdisciplinary and wide-ranging discussion that should intersperse all our focused and necessarily narrow engagement with technical, commercial, ethical, and other issues. The reason is simple: the speed of change is so great that no-one can any longer be merely a specialist. Which is not to say that we can be merely generalists either. Perhaps a good model of an achievable aim is specialism at one level or another, plus excellent peripheral vision. So industry people can talk to finance people and policy people and ethics people and technology experts, and have enough overlap that they are really communicating. “Personalized medicine,” whether it is the Holy Grail or not, is a great example of the kind of issue that will yield only to that kind of discussion. Part of the value of panels like this at high-level professional/business conferences is to encourage those in attendance to “get peripheral” in the way they think. Peripherality, as it were, is no longer peripheral; it emerges as a key driver of success – especially when times are a-changing and paradigms a-fracturing. From the discussions I had with dozens of ERBI-ites, things don’t look bad at all from this perspective. The somewhat diminished attendance at our session owed as much to its timing (late afternoon) as its topic, though in general peripherality is not valued as it should be. (In the academic world, the equivalent attitude – spouted in response to almost any collaborative or novel project – is “how will this help me get tenure?”)

So I emphasized the importance of anticipatory discussion; of cross-sectoral discussion; and of mainstreaming the discussion since the more potentially transformative the question (and biotech, neuro, AI and other items we touched on are vastly so) the better prepared everyone has to be – even if we see “everyone” in terms only of markets and regulatory environments. Both stem ultimately from people’s understanding and tolerances. As it happens, greater “peripherality” among experts and leaders helps us all learn the language in which we can engage the people out there – not just the people in here - and develop a common grammar.

Our three expert panelists showed how good experts can get be at communicating across the lines. Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neurophysiology at Cambridge and a leader in her field, set the pace by summing up her own research on diagnosing dementia and related themes. She pointed out what enormous sums could be saved if therapies could put off the onset of Alzheimer’s by even one year. Kieran Breen, former pharmacy lecturer at Dundee and now R and D Director of the Parkinson’s Disease Society, offered a patient’s-eye view, and reviewed many aspects of the prospect of personalized medicine (personal medical plans, the 5% of inherited factors, stem cells, gene therapy, neuro implants). Harald Schmidt, Assistant Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics – the UK’s de facto national bioethics body – reviewed their extensive work on the implications of the paradigm shift towards personalization – including the marketing of products to patients.

In discussion this all went a little further. What fundamental shifts in healthcare delivery might result? How do we cope with hyped expectations, with growing public enthusiasm for “cures” that may prove much harder to deliver than they believe? with threats to the public funding of science (and healthcare) in the unfolding economic climate? with broader issues such as intellectual property and developing world pressure for resource equity? As with all the best discussions, it ended with hands still in the air.

So thank you, ERBI, for the invitation, and to ERBI’s new leader Harriet Fear, whose debut event went swimmingly. Let’s keep encouraging peripheral vision to power discussion across sectors, and long-term strategic reflection in a context in which the next quarter and the next funding tranche tend to focus the mind too wonderfully. If all the talk about the “biotech” century” and technological convergence and exponential improvements in health is more than dubious hype and rhetoric, that’s the only way to go.

A Bridge to Somewhere: the Tech Policy Summit (and C-PET's Agenda)

2009-05-16T11:54:00.007-04:00

Tech Policy Central's annual Summit this past week in San Mateo brought together luminaries from several worlds. In three packed days of panels, discussion flowed widely and expertly across fields from IP to broadband access to the haunting problem of the perceived lack of sympathetic understanding of the federal government for the tech community. Highlights were tweeted as we went along (#tps09). One such: that when President Obama handed the British Queen an iPod, he was probably breaking both the TOS and US copyright law. Another: that when you write an email, during its lifecycle it goes through probably eight different sets of legal status. Another: one speaker reeled off a list of ways in which the Obama administration, deemed to be far the most connected with tech leaders the US has known, is challenging its interests – from anti-trust to offshore earnings.

I was impressed - especially with the quality of the panelists. If representation from Washington was not at quite the highest levels, this was no great surprise. And it neatly illustrated the disconnect that ran through much of the discussion and that is one of the key reasons we are building C-PET.

TPS’s agenda was generally focused on the present and the near-term future -the cultural and legislative gaps between the feds and the Valley. Yet this current failure is a taproot of the key strategic issue around which C-PET is being formed – the fundamental lack of high-level policy interest in the future impact of emerging technologies. If the current situation were healthier, the question of the future would be simpler to address. Which is one reason why the current gaps, and TPS’s efforts to bridge them, are so important. Of course, there are others: we sorely need a vibrant and coherent address to such issues of privacy and IP in the context of current and emerging technologies.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the program lay in the panels that were intended to touch on the Great Gap. Not that panelists lacked smarts and articulate reflection. But they seemed either to have despaired of change, or to believe that it would come about by additive efforts. One preached that we needed to do “more and more and more” to get the issues in front of our legislators. And one of the federal speakers himself made a plea for more lobbying.

This ain’t gonna cut it. And my disappointment lay in the fact that no-one – at least no-one when I was listening, as I sat and tweeted and emailed and did all the distracted things we now do at conferences in technoworld – said simply: this is a strategic issue; indeed, a series of strategic issues; they will not be resolved by lobbying and getting a smattering of people from the Valley into government; we face a vast question and need to come up with some quite fresh answers.

Here’s my take. Strategic issues include:

1. We are in the middle of a tech-driven Kulturkampf. A cultural revolution. Legislative process and political leadership in general (even the Blackberry-toting President) are the creatures of a way of understanding the world, and the relations between technology and the world, that were laid down (at best) in the days of Vannevar Bush and Eisenhower. Our approach to IP of course goes back much further, and has barely adapted (as illustrated by current lawsuits against Myriad Genetics on the breast-cancer gene, and Google on their use of trademarks as ad triggers). And the protection of privacy (as noted above) is a bizarre affair. Think Gestalt. Think tectonic shifts. Think Thomas_Kuhn.

2. It is not simply that things are changing. Our mechanisms to manage this change are very weak. The Science Committee of the House of Representatives is not exactly the capstone committee; the place where aspiring members want to top out their careers. Its members and staff have done a fine job. But they are not the leaders of opinion, even Hill opinion. It remains to be seen whether the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will take more initiative in this administration than the last (and I expect it will), but most people, including (to my surprise; but on reflection perhaps not) assorted attendees at TPS, did not know what it was. The demise of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which offered a non-partisan view of the implications of new technologies, goes back to Newt Gingrich’s reforms of Congress. If OTA were around today (and, interestingly, Hillary Clinton advocated its reinstatement during her campaign) it would have a lot on its docket. (And while some tech advocates assume that such assessments will always be negative, savvy investors – who know what GMO stands for – take a broader view of the value of social critique. We need many things – not just an Office of Technology Enthusiasm.) And when did the Washington Post, which has a lot to do with the federal agenda (setting and reflecting) last lead with a tech story (aside, perhaps, from stem cells, which should be filed under politics rather than tech).

3. Geography. If a key goal of TPS is to seek to build the Bridge to Somewhere (aka DC), why is it convened on the wrong coast? The United States has perhaps the most “geographical” government of any nation on the planet (though the phenomenon is characteristic of federal entities). What happens in Mexico may stay in Mexico. What happens in DC is what happens. I’m not making a practical criticism – if TPS09 had been convened in DC it might have garnered some more senior federal panelists, but would have lost maybe two-thirds of its attendees (and no-one in DC expects to pay to go to anything, let alone to have to sit through tree days of it!). Which says something about the reciprocal problem of DC and the Valley. But there’s no doubt about it: out-of-towners and lobbyists don’t cut the mustard. If you want to be taken seriously, strategically seriously, in the Beltway – at least on something other than a narrow money/language/vote issue - you need to hang out in the right zipcode. And it’s an interesting reflection on the subtle impacts of IT that “geographicality” is perhaps even more important now than it was; as it is constantly surprising us.

4. Which raises the question of the commitment of our political class, and the people they represent, to S and T. That’s the Big One. It lies behind the lackadaisical interest in the particulars in tech as such (rather than its ad hoc use) on the part of cultural and political leaders. The general disinterest of the major think tanks in the issues that will ultimately provide the context for all issues. The generally hobbyist treatment meted out by the press in their "technology" sections. And so on.

5. And that in turn brings us to C-PET’s agenda, which of course is more future-focused. The need is not just to bridge into today’s tech policy, but tomorrow’s.

So, thanks to Natalie and Marc and their colleagues. An agenda of profound importance laid bare – importance to entrepreneurs, and citizens, and the United States. We have much work to do.

Of "Social Networks"

2009-05-09T04:01:00.003-04:00

The recent spate of twittering about Twitter prompts a somewhat longer than 140-character observation. As you will know if you tweet, the algorithms of this hottest “social network” are designed to encourage somewhat incestuous conversations; a battery of them resulted from the Nielsen research suggesting a 60% churn of members from month to month, twice that of FaceBook and MySpace when they were the same size. Yet given how different Twitter is from FB, the category “social network” (SN) becomes part of the problem.

I’ve been engaged in my own exploration; there really is no other way. Only by jumping in and swimming can you understand what the water is like. Theoretical reflection doesn’t cut it. Each SN has its own character; is sui generis, as we used to say when we looked to Latin rather than tweets to summarize. Hence one of my (and I know others’) pet peeves: people who post the same posts to several networks at once. A habit encouraged by platforms like TweetDeck (which I like for other reasons, like its built-in tiny url option; why doesn’t Twitter do that for you?). I’m not sure if Twitter:FB is as FB:LinkedIn. But it’s something like that. We are working by analogy. Sure, SNs are all the same kind of thing. But they are also very different kinds of that thing. (Not sure if anyone calls Second Life an SN site, but by rights it is. And one would have thought dating sites certainly were. And so on.) In any case, we have always had social networks; the significant feature of these sites is that they are web-based networks which may or may not have much of a “social” element.

Which reminds me, am I alone in being perplexed why journalists seem to feel obliged when they refer to FB, for example, to describe it as a social networking site? Or Twitter as a microblogging site? As if anyone who knew what a social networking site was would not know about FB. And a fortiori, as if anyone who would go around using the category microblogging would have a clue what it meant were they not the kind of people who were familiar with Twitter (and very likely first came across the generic term microblogging only as a result of that familiarity). I’m not sure if it is a sign of the rather aged novelty of the medium (my favorite free-wifi coffee house chain Panera Bread still invites one to “surf the internet” on its login page), of the angst of sub-editors who may only just have discovered the fax (oops, facsimile, as hotels still seem to want to call them), or of the precious stylistic tendencies of journos who want to look hip (I know more than you do about the cool stuff; you have heard of the site, I know the meta-narrative).

FB’s move to help us segment friends from, well, less-than friends is no doubt one straw in the SN wind. LinkedIn is immensely and very differently useful, seen as an opportunity to shape one’s online c.v. presence in the age of Google and as a self-updating address book for people we may or may not “know” but did at least exchange cards with. Just what Twitter “followers” (who include friends, bots, and seemingly quite random adherents) have in common with even FB “friends” is unclear. But some people have developed the knack of acquiring them in droves (and, of course, in certain cases, monetizing the fact).

Point being: the SN category is not helping us, any more than we would be helped by calling airlines, buses and motor cars transportation networking – and having solicitous sub-edited journos talking about “United Airlines, the transportation networking company” (it is annoying enough to have the Wall Street Journal insist in every single reference to American Airlines, per its house style, that it is “a unit of AMR”).

Back to Twitter. I think of the 100+ whom I am following only two actually answer the question and tell me what they are doing; and of those only one does it literally, without side comments, essentially offering snapshots of his schedule. I keep following as it makes him a curiosity. As to the other 100, they seem to be doing rather different things from each other. This is part of Twitter’s fascination: a very basic tool with many, many uses; a street one may walk down with very different destinations in mind – and indeed with now hundreds of external applications being developed to enhance such uses. Some may be monetizing, others merely self-aggrandizing (and which of us would not want to have our telegrams read by myriads?) or replicating in Twitland networks from outside, or indeed developing a “presence” simply because they are expected to set up shop in every e-venue. Why do some Twitters not understand that posting dozens of tweets is a turn-off? (It’s the only reason so far that I have unfollowed people.) That posting multi-tweet messages that therefore read backwards is bizarre, even when there are not intervening posts from elsewhere? That being “followed” by a celebrity (BarackObama seems to be following all over the place) offers a new level of weirdness (one assumes it is a crass, or perhaps not so crass, method of acquiring followers who wish to return the “compliment”)? Of course, all this goes some way to explain the high level of churn.

Needless to say, celebrities (political and otherwise) have found the perfect medium with which to communicate with fans/followers/voters – to pump out carefully message-controlled mini-bites without the messy need for journalists to get in the way (let alone ask pesky questions). The Obama campaign’s mastery of web strategy is rightly legendary (is it 13 million email addresses they acquired?), and the presence of Oprah and Brittney and Kuchner suggests smart adaptation to new PR opportunities. On the other hand, Twitter as-is is hardly designed for the readers of People Magazine (which once quoted me, so I can’t be too hard on it); expect more obviously and user-friendly PR platforms to follow. Which raises a broader point: there are many Twitters, and if microblogging continues to take off we may expect segmentation, both within the site and among twitteresque brands and functionalities.

Cloning deja vue; something to teach us?

2009-04-23T08:15:00.005-04:00

Back in 1997 when the world heard the news of the first mammalian cloning (Dolly the sheep, of course) it gripped the imagination of a global audience and provided endless copy to the news media. More than once since then it has broken surface again - such as when the Raelian group claimed to have succeeded in human cloning efforts. In parallel, politicians in many countries (and diplomats at the United Nations) responded with assorted legislative and regulatory efforts. The cross-cutting debate about embryonic stem cells (which can be got from cloned embryos, even if so far they have usually been culled from embryos created by in vitro fertilisation), and the hyped prospect of "therapeutic cloning," gained political traction in many places - and had the effect of distracting attention from the cloning issue as such.

This time around, the story is not so big. But it has made it to the front pages, even though there seems no more in the way of substantiation that the work (to produce cloned born humans) has been or can be done than in the earlier press-conference explosions of the past decade. There's no doubt that publicity-hungry researchers (and cultists) can still milk the word, but it is yielding less as time passes.

Lessons? Well, for one, the five-letter word clone continues to have enormous drawing power. It fascinates, with some combination of the fascination of the horrible and the excitement of the future. The technology behind it (so-called somatic-cell nuclear transfer) may be rather passe - as Sir Ian Wilmut, Dolly's creator, re-stated on a panel we shared during the recent Cambridge (UK) Science Festival - he is now looking elsewhere for stem cell success. But like "genetically-modified foods" (mainly in Europe) "clone" is a word to be conjured with. And conjurors intent on media coverage or policy debate have shown its magical powers. Whether these technologies are good, bad, indifferent, tedious, exicting, or some combination of the above (and my own views on cloning itself have been made clear elsewhere), they grip the public imagination.

Secondly, the public does not - in general - have much understanding of S and T issues on which it may have very strong opinions. This is not to insult the public intelligence (though the wisdom of crowds is not necessarily wisdom) but to underline the problems that emerge when matters that have generally been considered "technical" explode onto the public stage. Perhaps the biggest problem lies in the area of risk. As our economy migrates increasingly into dependence on technology-driven innovation which in the nature of the case will prove disruptive and not simply replicate the products and processes it supersedes, where are the bombs buried? When public understanding is low, economic and social impact high, and something highly novel and sci-fi in character at stake, we have reason to be scared. Nanotechnology has offered the best and most widespread example of the problem so far.

The answer? Well, platitudes about the need for "public engagement" are true, though the problem of engaging the public early enough in the development of new things is one we have yet to solve.

Perhaps we should be grateful to Dr. Zavos, the self-promoting would-be cloner, for reminding us.

Our Brains and Us

2009-04-10T07:54:00.004-04:00

As we focus on the financial collapse and its economic consequences – and the routines of elections and wars and whatever the New York Times and Washington Post deem to be “news” – in the background we hear the drip, drip, drip of something else. Technologies of this kind and that are slowly but surely enabling us to start remaking not Iraq and Afghanistan, or even Wall Street, but human nature itself.

To say that is to raise the $64,000 question: who picks the stories and decides what is “news”? Who decides the weighting of A and B and C? And were there an ombudsman or an internal affairs department to ask if they got it right, what would he or she say?

For some of us, while the lead news stories are important, there is something else at least equally so. And the latest illustration (brought to us, not least, by the New York Times, though on an inner page, is the development of drugs to enable individuals to get rid of unpleasant memories. Not in the way alcohol can – getting rid of all memories for a few hours; but as a surgical exercise in brain/memory management. Did you catch the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Go see it. It’s zany. But it’s on point. Do we want a world in which we can edit our memories? To which the answer is surely yes, and no, and yes, and no . . . .

Whatever the answer, the idea that we should be able to take charge of what we have remembered is, well, huge. Think about your own memories. Of love, of abuse, of disappointment, of triumph. Of guilt. Of childhood, which sets the memory patterns most of us spend our lives working through. This is big deal.

Of course, there is a lot more to the brain than memory. And efforts to harness its other capacities proceed apace. The brain-machine interface (BMI) may prove to be the biggest deal of the century. Implants to make us smarter or more connected (Google? Instant messaging?) are not any longer in the land of science fiction. Brainwaves, which sounds like a term from the black-and-white world of the 1950s along with ray-guns, are already being harnessed to control video games. Neuro-marketing (which may use MRIs to see how focus groups respond to ad messages) is up and running. The colonization of the brain is already in progress.

Good? Bad? Inevitable? I don’t think we know. Of enormous importance? Indubitably, yet how many of us have grasped that point? Its implications for just about all of human activity are hard to gauge. Hard, partly, because hardly anyone who is not an enthusiast has begin even to think about that they could be. For education, for security, for freedom and privacy, for jurisprudence, for democracy, for business?

We humans have been around a long time. It’s taken all that time for us to come to this particular point, where not only our bodies but our very brains are becoming the subject of our efforts at control and design and, to use the old term, dominion. Shouldn’t we be spending as much attention on this as we are on all the other stuff?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html

Prospecting C-PET

2009-03-30T12:36:00.003-04:00

The Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET - say it see-pet, and think C-SPAN) has been a work in progress for two years, during which time we have built up an increasingly respected presence on the technology policy arena. We have many people involved – some “big names” and some behind-the-scenes volunteers; we have held key events and are creating an ever-growing development plan to ensure the organisation grows to meet its potential. We are well on the way to achieving our goal of becoming Washington’s authoritative think tank on US and global emerging technology policy.

And then the real work will start.

A well-funded, authoritative and widely supported non-governmental body that speaks with authority on emerging technologies is badly needed. Some might say that the start of the deepest recession that any of us has experienced is no time to be looking for funding to start another talking shop. But that is not the way to think.

When C-PET is fully operational and fully funded it will be good news for us all. Good news for potential tech investors who have concerns about the impact of tech projects and public reception of them. Good news for risk managers and reinsurers too. Good news for technophiles who don't want their apple carts upset. Good news for techno-critics who want to make sure the talking is done before the doing. Good news for policymakers, who always tend to ignore long-term impacts in favour of quick wins. In short, good news for society. And at a time when there is acute pressure on funding – in both the public and private sectors – there is an event greater need to invest today in robust long-term thinking - to prevent us from making decisions and indecision that cannot easily be undone tomorrow.

To this end, C-PET must encourage much more widespread discussion and debate on technology issues; start such discussions earlier; engage all of the relevant players including those with strong opinions. In short we must provide the forum in which informed, wise policy decision-making is supported.

C-PET is needed both in the US and worldwide. The previous lack of such a body - especially in Washington where none of the other major think tanks has a major interest (or generally any interest) in the emerging technologies that are the drivers of the innovation economy and future security - defies belief. The US dominates around 75% of these technologies, all the way from the ubiquitous but ever-shifting internet to artificial intelligence to the more distant prospects of synthetic biology.

Details of what we are doing can be found on our pro tem. website at c-pet.org. The purpose of this blog as we move ahead is for me to report on the process (not least of securing major funding for an innovative project in the current financial context) and to comment on some of the many reasons why we believe C-PET matters so much.

Your responses will be welcome!

Cameron Confidential

Moving house to Wordpress!

Content and the Future of Knowledge: How to Win

The Wrong Stuff: NASA, Amtrak, and why the answer really is 42

Transcendent Texting, Mutual Curation, and Twitter as Tomorrow

Contacting the Future: two efforts in NYC

Steve Jobs dies; a generation ends

A PLANETARY INITIATIVE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

On Culture, the Future, and Biz

Where the Past meets the Future: Life in the Cosmic Kink

SXSW, NXNE, and the new Fundamentalism; A perspective from the analog polis of a digital people

On the Innovation of DC: Washington's Witching Word in Century 21

Let’s Engineer the Future:

Convergence?

Three rules for 2011; or, Hitting 2012 on the Upswing

Why Washington Needs the Future

Hanging together, lest we hang one by one:

Asking Tomorrow's Questions

My Take: The Future of Biotechnology

Leadership in the Petaclasm

Innovating our innovation talk: how do we raise the game in DC?

The Ultimate Mash-up: Innovation in Washington?

My Take: A Week in Tomorrow

SynBio round 1

The Privacy Agenda

Privacy Panel

You are invited to an Emerging Technologies Roundtable: July 9, 2010 - Privacy and Emerging Technologies

The UEA Climate Mess

What Technology itself is up to

Rights and Expectations

Form and Function and Print

Predicting the American Future

What is Emerging from the WH?

The Singularity reaches the NY Times (via NASA and the business section)

And on the neuroscience theme . . . .

Getting our heads round neuroscience at AEI

ERBI 2009: Technology Networking and Peripheral Vision in Cambridge

A Bridge to Somewhere: the Tech Policy Summit (and C-PET's Agenda)

Of "Social Networks"

Cloning deja vue; something to teach us?

Our Brains and Us

Prospecting C-PET

You are invited to an
Emerging Technologies Roundtable:

July 9, 2010 - Privacy and Emerging Technologies