S07E10 of Connection Problem: The Ryanair Test for Tech; Generational Ponzi Schemes; New Imaginations
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Hi there,
A relatively quick on this week. Enjoy!
Yours,
— Peter
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You’re receiving this because you signed up for this newsletter on tinyletter.com/pbihr or through my company’s website, thewavingcat.com. The Waving Cat is a boutique research and strategic advisory firm; I also co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies. On Twitter, I’m @peterbihr. If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.
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A radical rethinking of… everything
Two texts by (sci-fi author) Kim Stanley Robinson crossed my path kind of by chance around the same time. I say “kind of” because it’s the kind of kind of that happens on Twitter, where you mention something and kind folks share their pointers and so it’s not really by chance as such but more by giving those sources to emerge around the same time. But I digress.
Kim Stanley Robinson writes a bunch of excellent sci-fi, much of it that feels really fresh to me. Nothing more so than the (I find) excellent New York 2140 (the link goes to Wikipedia), which is set in NYC 120 years from now in a work heavily shaped by climate change — and yet manages to offer some hopeful and genuinely interesting world building.
KSR (as fans call him) also write a lot of non-fiction, much of which having to do with climate change and societal changes. The future and how we need to shape it if we’re not to undermine our own and our kids’ futures. And in these two texts (one from May, the other one I couldn’t tell) he tackles exactly that, with a focus on how the Covid pandemic has opened up a huge window of opportunity to change.
The global impact of Covid has brought global changes that were previously unthinkable; and that window has not yet fully closed again. The Coronavirus is, in KSR’s words, rewriting our imaginations. Which means we can tackle, hopefully and if we act swiftly and decisively, stop the generational Ponzi scheme on which the world economy operates.
Some excerpts that stood out to me below (highlights mine).
First, the notion that I think many of us can subscribe to: That we’re living through a historic turning point, a caesura. That the before world is qualitatively different than the after world:
“Valuing the right things and wanting to keep on valuing them—maybe that’s also part of our new structure of feeling. As is knowing how much work there is to be done. But the spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change. It’s like a bell ringing to start a race. Off we go—into a new time.”
And just how different this new world is, how it plays by different rules:
“In mid-March, in a prior age, I spent a week rafting down the Grand Canyon. When I left for the trip, the United States was still beginning to grapple with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. Italy was suffering; the N.B.A. had just suspended its season; Tom Hanks had been reported ill. When I hiked back up, on March 19th, it was into a different world. I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly. (…)The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling. In many ways, we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense.“
Between both texts he doubles down on this particular aspect — that the specific type of economy we’ve been taking for granted and that has dominated everything for the last 20-30 years has now failed us (in aggregate) in just about any measure you can apply (wealth gap, externalized costs, global warming, etc.) and that whatever comes next will have to be built on a new foundation:
“The sustainable and just civilization that we all hope to create cannot be built using a capitalist economy. “
He calls this a generational Ponzi scheme:
“in a sense there’s a collusion between buyers and sellers to make sure the hidden costs, the deferred costs, the denied costs, the “externalities,” will be shoved onto future generations. Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere.”
Finally, and this really struck home for me, he points something out that appears to be obviously true:
“Social justice is in fact good environmental policy, it is a kind of technology, in that it is a political software, critical to human survival. And the hyper-consumption of the rich and the deep poverty of the poor are among the worst environmental impacts of any human activities, so solving inequality is not just the right thing to do; it’s the optimally survivable thing to do.”
These are excellent reads. I highly recommend them.
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The Ryanair Test for Technology
I realized that one of the more useful lenses for analyzing — or at least probing — new technologies is to think about them from adversarial points of view.
Typically, this means considering how they could be used for abuse (a violent ex, a corrupt government, a criminal) but also much more banal: What if there's simply a fairly crappy implementation? I mentally refer to this as the Ryanair Test for Technology:
What would this look like in real life if it was operated by Ryanair? Would it still be cool, or totally suck? Where would all the up-sell happen? How would it be to be blasted with ads while using it?
I've been using this for quite some time and all I can say is that I've found it reliably useful. It's a simple way to suss out potential issues like mis-aligned business models and incentives, externalized costs, etc. Give it a try and let me know if this works for you?
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Unconventional computing
Well worth reading: Beyond Smart Rocks — It’s time to reimagine what a computer could be. It’s a great overview/intro (though probably not written with that intention) of the emerging field of unconventional computing. And what a name that is! UC refers to computation done not digitally, but through chemical, biological or other means. All the fuzzy, sticky, squishy stuff!
And of course I’m saying it kinda jokingly but really this is amazing and fascinating and quite possibly a good chunk of our technological future since the materials we work with (like silicone) impact what and how we compute. There’s a wide range of potential materials to work with:
“For material changes, we must look farther afield, to an organism that occurs naturally only in the most fleeting of places. We need to glimpse into the loamy rot of a felled tree in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, or examine the glistening walls of a damp cave. That’s where we may just find the answer to computing’s intractable rock problem: down there, among the slime molds.”
Consider this (highlights mine):
“Biological systems not only anticipate, but excel at certain thorny computational tasks. In one experiment, researchers released a Physarum polycephalum slime mold on a topographical relief map of the United States. They placed it on the West Coast, on the Oregon coastal town of Newport, and placed a pile of oat flakes — the slime mold’s favorite food —at the other end of the country, in Boston, Massachusetts. The mold shot out protoplasmic tubes, searching for an efficient path towards the oat flakes it sensed via airborne chemicals. After five days, the mold reached Boston, cutting across the country while avoiding mountainous terrain. You may recognize its path if you’ve ever road-tripped from Oregon to New England: the slime mold charted Route 20, the longest road in the US.
Physarum polycephalum is an expert at such tasks. Its sensing, searching protoplasmic tubes can solve mazes, design efficient networks, and easily find the shortest path between points on a map. In a range of experiments, it has modeled the roadways of ancient Rome, traced a perfect copy of Japan’s interconnected rail networks, and smashed the Traveling Salesman Problem, an exponentially complex math problem. It has no central nervous system, but Physarum is capable of limited learning, making it a leading candidate for a new kind of biological computer system — one that isn’t mined, but grown.””
So if you’ve ever wondered what might be next after — or, I guess, parallel to — quantum computing, here’s a starting point. There’s no deeper, no actionable point here except: It blows my mind to think about this, and it’s delightful. What a time to be alive.
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Currently reading: The Hidden Girl, Ken Liu; Solarpunk, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro
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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat!
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies can have a positive social impact. At the core of his work is the mission to align emerging technologies and citizen empowerment. To do this, he works at the intersection of technology, governance, policy and social impact — with foundations, public and private sector. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research and strategic advisory firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and an Edgeryders Fellow (2019). He tweets at @peterbihr and blogs at thewavingcat.com. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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