Prediction Markets Round-Up

Prediction Markets are a tool for collecting group opinion using market principles. The price is usually based on a conversion of an opinion of the percent likely an event is to happen (i.e., the probability), for example there is a 40% change that Candidate X will win the election. The premise is that there is a lot of hidden information that can be sharable but there are not mechanisms to share it because information-holders either cannot or do not wish to share it (for example that a current work team project may not finish on time). Some research has found that prediction markets may beat polls or experts in terms of forecast accuracy [1].

Figure 1. Prediction Market Example

To aggregate hidden organizational opinion and expertise, Prediction Markets are in use at 100-200 large US organizations as of June 2014: Paypal, HP, BestBuy, Electronic Arts, Boeing, Amazon, Harvard, GM, Hallmark, P&G, Ford, Microsoft, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, CNN, Adobe, American Express, and Bosch. There are several enterprise Prediction Market vendors for enterprise idea management: Consensus Point, Inkling, Spigit/Crowdcast, Bright Idea, and Qmarkets. The main applications of Enterprise Prediction Markets are revenue forecasting, demand planning, and capital budgeting; innovation life cycle management (rate, filter, and prioritize ideas), and project management and risk management.

There are Enterprise Prediction Markets and also Consumer Prediction Markets for event prediction such as politics: election results; economics: box office receipts, product sales; and health: pandemic prediction. Some of the leading markets are Iowa Electronic Markets (and Iowa Electronic Health Markets), the Hollywood Stock Exchange (film box office, TV shows, celebrities), simExchange (gaming: video game consoles, video game launches), CROWDPARK (general), and LongBets (futurist). A new market, SciCast, has recently launched for detailed science and technology predictions.

Markets are typically real-money, reputation-based, or anonymous. In the wake of Intrade’s regulation-forced closure, Bitcoin Prediction Markets are enjoying a surge of trading activity; markets like Predictious, Fairlay, and Bitcoin Bull Bear.

More Information: Prediction Markets @ Singularity University

[1] Trepte, K. et al. Forecasting consumer products using prediction markets. MIT. 2009.

Illiberty in Biohacking, Personal Data Rights, Neuro-diversity, and the Automation Economy

Illiberty is a new concept that describes the notion of a lack of liberty. In one way it is strange that a word for the opposite of liberty and freedom does not exist given how strongly these ideals feature in social, political, and cultural life. However, illiberty is quite subtle; it does not have the bluntness of the freedom-slavery opposition. Illiberty is the sense of a lack of liberty, particularly where there should be liberty. The justice-injustice pairing is similar to the liberty-illiberty relation.

As individuals, we continue to wake up to higher levels of consciousness in constituting ourselves as subjects, and now is the time to develop an awareness and response for new situations of illiberty.

Illiberty extends the familiar equity, social justice, privilege, and access struggles and covers a larger conceptual ground. Here are some new cases of illiberty, many of which we may be unaware: 

• Labor Rights: Mind liberation from working in the corporation, working for others
• Personal Data Rights: rights and responsibilities conferred upon personal data, especially big health science data streams: personal genome data, pacemaker data, biometric data, quantified self-tracking gadgetry data, neuro-data streams
• Citizen Scientist Rights: Non-institutional conduct of scientific research, biorights, biohacking, the biocitizen, community labs
• Neural Rights: Neurodiversity, ASD (autism spectrum disorder), introversion, mind emancipation 
• Economic Rights: Basic income guarantee (JET Vol 24, Issue 1), automation economy, post-scarcity economy
• Augmentation Rights: Rights and responsibilities of augmented persons

Illiberty Studies – Research Agenda 

1. Develop the illiberty concept drawing on: Derrida (democracy to come – inherent illiberty in the conceptualization of liberty), Rancière (emancipation), de Soto (responsibility-taking maturation), Dussel (liberty recast as liberation), Foucault (self-imposed disciplinary power) and Deleuze (micro-fascisms in one’s own thinking). 
2. Identify the conceptual shifts and argument structure in the historical development of equality philosophies (decolonialism, feminism, queer theory, transgender, marriage equality, neurodiversity, polyamory) 

Illiberty Working Group

Extreme Data shapes Future Cities

With over 50% of the planet living in cities as of 2008 growing to an expected 75% by 2050 (when the population is estimated to be 9 billion), seamlessly transitioning to cities-of-the-future should be a key planning goal for every urban area. In some countries like the UK, there are strategic initiatives underway to create Future Cities and Smart Cities that include sponsoring hackathons for citizens to work with open urban data, and in other cases research centers are leading efforts such as the MIT Senseable City Lab using the wireless Internet-of-Things (IOT) to sense the real-time city.

Some of the more familiar recent innovations that are starting to pop-up include smart electricity meters, electric car charging stations, on-demand bicycle transport depots, aspirations for vertical farms, and in public transportation: mobile apps with on-demand schedules, journey-planning, and real-time transport information. As another sign of the times, the Oxford English dictionary added the term Internet-of-things in August 2013.

Extreme Urban Data 
The biggest trend reshaping all aspects of our lives, the Big Data Era, is driving a whole new tier of Future Cities and Smart Cities apps connecting big data, open data, statistical processing, and machine learning to user-friendly apps, web services, and other consumable front-ends. Killer Apps could focus on practical improvements to daily life and resource-use: adaptive lighting, smart waste, pest control, hygiene management, eTolls, transport and traffic management, smart grid, asset tracking, and parking. Killer Apps can also be political – using crowdsourced data and social media scrapings to create tools that are the bottom-up sousveillance antidote to top-down surveillance as envisioned in David Brin’s Transparent Society, for example, companies using social media-sourced data to predict country instability in real-time like Cytora.

Future of Life Sciences: Top 10 List

The next wave of the biotechnology revolution is underway and promises to reshape the world in ways even more transformative than the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions that preceded it.

It is not unimaginable that at some point, all biological processes, human and otherwise, could be understood and managed directly.

Here is a top ten list of key areas of contemporary advance in life sciences:

1. Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology 
2. Regenerative Medicine and 3D Printing 
3. Genomics, “Omics,” and Preventive Medicine 
4. Neuroscience 
5. Nanotechnology 
6. Big Health Data and Information Visualization 
7. Quantified Self (QS), Wearable Computing, and the Internet-of-Things (IOT) 
8. DIYscience, Citizen Science, Participatory Health, and Collective Intelligence 
9. Aging, Rejuvenation, Health Extension, and Robotics 
10. Space 

More information: Slideshare talk from the Max Planck Institute

Identity Authentication and Security Access 2.0

Identity needs to be authenticated in more granular, flexible, real-time ways as digital venues expand and the physical world becomes more digitalized. Technology is now making it possible to rethink and provide a 2.0 update to the whole area of identity authentication and security access services.

The ubiquity of cell phones, and increasingly smartphones, means that many forms of identity authentication can be moved from costly and easy-to-lose physical ID cards to mobile access platforms. QR codes, NFC, and other wireless-based technologies are already starting to be used for security authentication and single-use sign-on for website access.

Work identity badges, hospital access badges, and government and school IDs are examples of physical-world ID cards that can be moved to smartphone ID cards. Likewise many services linking identity authentication to resource-access and mobile payment can be automated, for example, event tickets, work conference room reservation and access, medical equipment and pharmaceutical inventory access, and rental car and hotel check-in and resource access. Digital ID cards can incorporate multi-factor authentication: for example, the visual look, a custom sound or image elicited upon being tapped, or information returned from an external server as the QR code is read.

Polyamory – an Anti-Scarcity Relationship Model for the Future

The first International Academic Polyamory Conference was held in Berkeley CA February 15-17, 2013 with approximately 100 attendees. Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. It is not new or revolutionary that individuals may be involved with more than one other party; what is new is the openness, acknowledgement, and support and encouragement of the situation.

A number of academic studies were presented by researchers from around the world regarding the practice of polyamory. Polyamory is a niche, but increasingly becoming a defined field of sociology research. Theory papers and discussion drew on social movement theory, queer theory, intimacy theory, performance theory, and other aspects of philosophy and sociology. Other conference tracks discussed public education, experiential aspects, and legal and political issues. Some common themes were the notion of plurality and choice in relationship models and a superior level of communications mastery and emotional intelligence.

Plurality of Relationship Models 
There may be many relationship models aside from traditional normative monogamy. One only has to look at the fluidity and nuance in the reality of lived existence to see different kinds of relationships. There is the notion of bringing other relationship models into the light for greater legitimacy under the umbrella that would include monogamies and non-monagamies. Any individual may have an almost endless stream of potential demographic self-identifications to make in the categories of Race, Ethnicity, Religion, Gender, Sexuality, Relationship Model, and other categories. Each category has a plurality and range of possible answers and it would be considered discriminatory and inappropriately normative to privilege any specific identification.

Emotional Mastery 
There may be a belief that polyamorous individuals have a silver bullet and do not experience jealousy and other challenging emotions often occur in relationships. This is not at all the case. The polyamory community has not mastered jealousy, but it is often true that individuals are in trying on an ongoing basis to master communication with the self and others. Individuals in polyamorous relationships may have more experience, permission, and tools at their disposal for recognizing, acknowledging, and managing jealousy and other emotions that arise in human relationships - poly people may be more skilled at dealing with the situation.

Robotic benefits could accelerate into the service and software industries

An animated discussion about the future of robotics occurred at the September 24, 2011 Boulder Colorado Future Salon. One claim is that the last few decades in robotics might be analogous to the status of the computing industry in the 1950-1970s, growing slowly but surely, and suggesting that the pervasiveness and impact of robotics could start to accelerate. There has been significant progress in agricultural automation and factory automation, and this could spread rapidly to service industries and information technology industries.

On the one hand this is the next logical step in fulfilling the ongoing human dream of using technology to provide more free time. On the other hand, while so far robotics has not had a big negative impact on jobs, a more rapid move to automation in more sectors could result in a more significant displacement of human capital.

Industries of the future
There is a tremendous opportunity to identify the industries of the future and start them. Future industries could be clustered by areas such as sustenance (food, energy, and clean resources), health, productive activity, entertainment, and well-being. One obvious group of future technologies will focus on food, for example, vertical farming and lab-grown meat. Mental well-being and enhancement is virtually untapped, although there is some preliminary activity in applying behavioral change and happiness research, and calming technologies. Some key dynamics that govern human behavior will not be going away in the short-term such as the demand for status-garnering and reputation-building (why gaming has been so successful), so industries providing opportunities for this would be well-pitched.

Automated nourishment

An interesting question arose from discussions at the recent IFTF annual forecast presentation - Would people be more or less healthy in a possible future era of 3-D food-printing on-demand?

Both sides of the case can be seen. The immediate conclusion might be that if anyone could print any food item on-demand any time, people would over-consume and be less healthy.

However, one of the biggest mistakes that can occur when considering a potential future advance is thinking of it in isolation and not bringing forward all other aspects of technology and society to this point too. In an era with on-demand 3-D food printing, other changes are also likely to have occurred. The first and most obvious is that perhaps food content or accompanying supplements, drugs, and nutraceuticals have changed to mean that food that tastes good is not necessarily unhealthy, even when consumed in large quantities. Non-fat non-sugar substitutes may have become seamless matches in the quality of taste but not in caloric consumption. Today’s unhealthy foods could go the way of cigarettes. Automated calorie consumption data collection might finally be possible.

A second argument for why people would be more rather than less healthy in an era of on-demand 3-D food printing is the massively granular physical tracking and biofeedback tools that could exist for each person. Smarthouse and smartclothing data collection through scanning and air, toilet, and unnoticeable blood stick diagnostics could be inputs to a continuously updating personal digital health model (e.g.; the future analog to Entelos's virtual patient or Archimedes's virtual twin). A personal digital health model could be used to assess exactly which real-time nutritional adjustments are needed by an individual. An automated menu plan from the kitchen printer may be preferable for creating meals based on an individual’s known preferences and reactions together with real-time needs. The portable personal digital health model could be permissioned into restaurant settings to similarly allow for customized meal synthesis.

A third argument comes from considering the potential trajectories of social networking and behavior change research. Already peer social networks have a strong influence on individual behavior. One’s whole peer network or interest group could be encouraging healthy behavior via team-based support and/or competition. The advent and widespread adoption of self-tracking and social interaction tools could bring about a new sensibility and personal responsibility for health self-management. Optional financial incentives from insurance companies could further facilitate behavior change.

Conclusion
In any possible future, there could be different technologies and social behavioral norms influencing the process of human nourishment. Food could become healthier over time and unobtrusive self-tracking tools and financial incentives could shift people to automated menu plans. Healthier behavior could be triggered just by making it easy.

Integration of life and technology

Life and technology are thought of as discrete but they are starting to converge (a detailed explanation is here) and could continue to become increasingly integrated, unified as is sought with the physical laws. Life sciences have evolved from being an art to a science to now an engineering problem. Life is complex but finite and it is quite possible that all biological processes, human and otherwise, will be understood and managed, including disease and death. All matter, including life, could be designed to spec in the future; the aims of synthetic biology, building genetically-precise organisms from the bottom up, programmable matter and molecular nanotechnology are early examples. In the future, form factor and embodiment could be temporary and determined by purpose.



The above graphic represents the evolution of human and machine intelligence. Given the faster pace of technology advancement, a crossover point, sometimes called the technological singularity is inevitable. Futurist Ray Kurzweil expects this point of machine intelligence surpassing [current] human intelligence in 2029. The two curves could merge (the Human’ line above), with humans reengineering themselves into technology that can learn and evolve as fast as information technology. In actuality, there may be many forms of biological life integrating with technology and more ‘human’ diversity than has ever existed.

Future of intelligence
It is not clear that there is anything special or inherently undesignable or unreplicable about intelligence. Intelligence may be nothing more than the manipulation of patterns of information, and presumably could be substrate agnostic and executor agnostic.

Machine creativity

What are the relevant differences between humans and the machines of the future?

The general claim is that the uniqueness of humans is creativity, imagination and fallibility.

Creativity is rationality
Examining and demystifying the concept of creativity suggests that machines can be every bit as creative as humans. Creativity is merely a new idea or approach, a novel solution to a problem, a fresh representation; a process, a personality attribute, a mindset, an approach to life.

Alternative intelligences/machines can use brute force to rationally crunch through the set of all possible answers to a problem and suggest which are best. Much human creativity comes from "out-of-the-box" thinking which is largely applying knowledge, structure or skills from another domain, and also making mistakes (penicillin, 3M's post-its, Nike's waffle soles, painter Apelles' foam depiction, etc.). Machines can easily do all of this and more, testing a wide range of "out-of-the-box" domains and applying inverse or orthogonal analysis to incorporate human creativity by trial and error.

It is not clear that humans have any positive aspect that cannot be replicated or superseded by an alternative intelligence/machine. Therefore, nothing appears to be lost in the potential extinguishment of the human form as intelligence evolves to non-biological substrates.

Cryonics and the art of the long view

How surprising it is that those with a long view in thinking and behavior are not those with traditional religious beliefs but include sponsors and supporters of the Long Now Foundation and cryonicists. The Long Now Foundation has trans-millennial views on the order of 10,000 years, roughly the forward counterbalance to the history to date of human civilization. Cryonicists, in general, have a practical stance, simultaneously acknowledging the unproven nature of reanimation and assessing and focusing on contributing to the key challenges of the next 200-400 years, as opposed to the 20-50 year (or less) timeframe that appears to be implicit in current individual and political thinking.

Erstwhile cryonicists will do well to remain practically absorbed. It is easy to imagine a long-distanced future visit to the Met, where alongside the Egyptian tombs and mummies, dewars have been emptied to display frozen heads, bodies and pets. Excited expedition excavators from the three key sites, Alcor/Arizona, Cryonics Institute/Michigan and Suspended Animation/Florida pose next to their digs.

Stored possessions and artifacts of the time are neatly arranged in an exhibit with terse placards. "Little is known about the belief systems of these peoples. Middle-era Americans carried many nonmalleable gadgets though it is not clear how useful they were to daily life. It was not atypical for one person to carry cell phones, MP3 players, laptops, power cords, PDAs, cameras, recording devices, cords, batteries and recharging units at all times. [Portable lightweight inexhaustible energy source] was not yet available and devices were not yet appropriately nano-miniaturized and physically embedded."