EmergingTechs Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, and Geoengineering in the Governance Eye

The second annual Governance of Emerging Technologies conference held in Phoenix AZ May 27-29, 2014 discussed a variety of governance (regulation), legal, and ethical aspects of three areas of emerging technology: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and geoengineering (climate management).

The prevailing attitude in nanotechnology is much like that in artificial intelligence, “no new news” and some degree of weariness after having experienced a few hype-bust cycles, coupled with the invisibility frontier. The invisibility frontier is when an exciting emerging technology becomes so pervasive and widely-deployed that it becomes invisible. There are numerous nanotechnology implementations in a range of fields including materials, computing, structures, nanoparticles, and new methods, similar to the way artificial intelligence deployments are also widely in use but ‘invisible’ in fraud detection, ATM machine operation, data management algorithms, and traffic coordination.

Perhaps the biggest moment of clarity was that different groups of people with different value systems, cultures, and ideals are coming together with more frequency than historically to solve problems. The locus of international interaction is no longer primarily geopolitics, but shifting to be much more one of collaboration between smaller groups in specific contexts who are inventing models for sharing knowledge that simultaneously reconfigure and extend it to different perspectives and value systems.

Wearables-Mobile-IOT Tech creates Fourth Person Perspective

So far the individual has almost always existed in the context of a society of others. This could change in the farther future as individuals might be in the form of a variety of digital and physical copies in different stages of augmentation. It could become more difficult to find ‘like-others.’ My claim is that the function of alterity (an awareness of others that triggers subjectivation) would need to persist for individuals to fully become themselves, but it would not need to come from others that are like us.

All that is needed is some sort of external otherness that can show us ourselves in a new way to facilitate a moment of development. There is nothing in the function of alterity to suggest that it must be an ‘other’ that is like us. It is just that it has been this way historically, because other humans have been the ready form of ‘the other.’ It has been easiest and most noticeable when another human serves as a device like a mirror allowing us to see ourselves in a new way.

However, it is quite possible that the alterity function could be fulfilled in many other ways that do not involve a self-similar subject. One mechanism that is already allowing us to see ourselves in new ways is quantified self-tracking gadgetry. The ensemble of QS gadgets creates a fourth-person perspective, an objective means of seeing ourselves via exteriority and alterity that can trigger a moment of subjectivation. Now understanding the alterity function as such, there could be many alternative means of fulfilling it. 

Longer video on the topic: Posthuman Interpretation of Simondon's Individuation

Enterprise IoT: Connected Product User Communities

A key hurdle point for any newtech’s becoming truly mainstream is adoption by the enterprise market. The newtech innovates its way into a variety of business applications geared to improve efficiency and save time and money. This is not just internally to the enterprise, but as a widespread feature of products and services offered. Some examples are the Internet, email, video conferencing, IP telephony, virtual worlds, and wikis.

One big shift is towards making all products connected. This means actually connected via sensors, not just a website to look up for product information and customer services. This is revolutionary to businesses because immediately, every product can be transformed from a one-off shelf purchase to an ongoing service that is part of social community.

Every product can be a relationship with the consumer. 

Connected products can phone home with continuous information about product usage and failure (most ethically with customer opt-in).

Just like the ability to interact with content on websites and engage in social networking with other users became an expectation with web properties, product user communities have already been evolving to be more interactive with product web sites, Facebook pages and likes, Twitter accounts, and sometimes fan fiction. Connected product user communities is the next step and it could be giant. If the requisite infrastructure is in place, connected products could deploy quickly because of the more intimate relationship vendors perceive as attainable with consumers from the high-resolution continuous information exchange.

IoT ecology design is crucial. IoT sensors must operate in concert with other communications networks, but their low power requirements could draw from the existing infrastructure of the user’s wearable ecosystem (smartphone, smartwatch, wearable display (Glass), wifi, cloud), smarthome (Nest, Hive, Tado, etc.), automotive data networks, and other IoT tracking infrastructure. With IoT sensors, the 10:1 ratio of person to connected devices could quickly exponentiate to 100:1. The IoT ecosystem requires an architecture that is quite different from the Internet’s packets, redundancy, lookups, and TCPIP switching, a design that can accommodate higher bursts in traffic, data input from sensor clouds (a sensor landscape acting like a school of fish), and more kinds and types of data transmission, but can also power share, massively distribute, and intercommunicate.

Personalized Drone Delivery: the new Personal Computer?

Miniaturization, robotics, and the hastening automation economy are coming together in interesting new ways. Personal drone delivery services could be a fast-arriving concept. Amazon announced PrimeAir in November 2013, to possibly be ready for launch in 2015 pending US FAA regulations of personal drone airspace. In the ideal case, the service would deliver ordered items within 30-60 minutes. Similarly, Dubai and the UAE announced a personalized drone delivery service including eye-scanning verification for government documents. Personalized or at least targeted micro-delivery via drones is not a new idea. One obvious use is delivering aid, medicine, and other supplies to remote, war-torn, economically-strapped, crisis-based, or other remote or sensitive geographic areas (Singularity University example: Matternet). As is the case with many newtech ideas, a modern version of personal remote delivery was conceptualized in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End (2006).

The potential cost savings, convenience, and efficiency gains make a strong argument in favor of personalized drone delivery. Immediately many human-based delivery and courier services could be put out of business. Supply chains could be reinvented to support services that still need both a human and drone aspect (such as court filings and within office building deliveries), although amphibious drones could be just around the corner: robotic-on-land and flying-in-air for urban office and apartment building deliveries. Hiro Protagonist is out of a job not due to landing in a swimming pool but due to personalized drone pizza delivery services!

Longer-term implications could include a redesign of how space is used. Personal drone delivery services could become like the pneumatic tubes or dumbwaiters of the past, including the secure vestibule area already envisioned for delivery at home and office entry areas. Downtown traffic and congestion could be significantly reduced. An obvious challenge is quality of life degradation due to noise and the visual detritus of drones. Are human civilizations relegated to becoming the hive substrate for the incessant and pervasive buzzing of personal drones circling as they conduct their business? Hopefully the 'Prius drone' (e.g.; quiet) and pleasing visual design will be part of the modernization. Personal drone delivery could be an important intermediary step on the way to the 3D home printing of all desired objects.

Figure 1: Let them Eat Drones (photography drone at Versailles). Image Credit

Digital Literacy: Learning Newtech for its Own Sake

Digital literacy is a new capability and feature of our modern world, where consciously or unconsciously, there is a category in our lives called ‘learning newtech.’

There are two levels: first the basic skill acquisition and conceptual understanding required to learn a newtech, and second, the psychology of the digital learning curve which includes evaluating and justifying the time investment and utility of learning au courrant digital literacy tools with the appreciation that they will be almost immediately obsolescent.

We might complain about the effort required to master contemporary areas of digital literacy like learning mobile app development, the big data statistical manipulation language R, and scripting frameworks like node.js and jQuery. At the same time as we forget our many digital proficiencies, and the time invested to acquire them; previous generations of digital tools like file sharing, photo-uploading, Excel macros, Microsoft Word, PREZI presentations, file archival, and system restoration.

It is arguable that we should devote explicit effort to digital literacy, and further that digital literacy for its own sake could also be an objective. Taking Stanford University as an example, all incoming students must take a software programming class; pedagogically the language requirement is still in place, but it has shifted from French, Spanish, or German to C++, Java, or Python.

Towards a fourth person perspective

Are the currently known perspectives, first, second, and third person, the only possible perspectives? With modern technology, it might be possible to construct a fourth person perspective, or even a fifth and sixth, that offers a new view on ourselves and different interaction possibilities with the world. One obvious means of this could be the concept of Siri 2.0, a mental performance optimization platform that reduces bias, serves as a personal virtual coach, and buffers communication.

Grounds for, and a potential understanding of a fourth person perspective may be found in philosophy. Philosophers such as Charles Pierce, Habermas, Levinas, Roarty, George Mead, and Stephen Darwall have helped to characterize salient aspects of the first, second, and third person perspectives, and this work could be examined, and extended to a fourth person perspective. Some of the most helpful elements that a fourth person perspective could afford are a different means of introspection and performative action-taking.

Newtech: enterprise social networks

Like email, instant messaging, and wikis, the latest newtech spreading into businesses is social networks, essentially serving as a private internal version of Facebook and Twitter. Enterprise social networks are used for a number of purposes, first and foremost, status updates to work teams, but also for real-time messaging with colleagues including document transfer, broadcast announcements, and opinion capture via polls. There are several companies in the enterprise social software sector (Gartner chart). Among the most vibrant are Yammer and Chatter (affiliated with salesforce) each of which has over 100,000 corporate customers in a wide range of industries from finance to entertainment to professional sports; Jive is a third large company in the space. The standard pricing model appears to be freemium-based, free for light-users and $5/seat/month for power users. Enterprise social networks are typically externally-hosted.

Two of the key challenges that come to mind with enterprise social software are: consolidation with other internal communications platforms and data mining. As with enterprise instant messaging, archival and retrieval is important, both at the personal level (for productivity) and organization level (for information systems backup and compliance). There need to be effective ways to consolidate and mine multi-platform internal communications. Formalizing the explosion of casual interaction as it naturally occurs could be abstracted into value-added tools such as a codification of internal knowledge and expertise in the internal wiki for training purposes. It might also be possible to integrate communication flows unobtrusively and automatically into prediction markets or other sentiment analysis algorithms to capture opinion about key upcoming events like product launches and quarterly sales results.

Information broadcast with group messaging

Group messaging services allow groups to communicate in real time, through mobile apps or on the web. Multiple parties can interact, receive updates simultaneously, and possibly see the location of others and transmit their own.

Some of the big names in the space are beluga (acquired by Facebook in Nov 2010), convore, textPlus / GOGII ($15 million financing raised in February 2011), and groupme.

Group messaging is like many examples of NewTech - it was initially created to solve a problem, but through use, novel functionality becomes more obvious and new classes of applications are developed. In fact, it is starting to look like group messaging is not about communication, but rather multi-channel information broadcast.

One new class of functionality that is enabled is large-scale operations. Going beyond work groups and activity coordinating with friends, there is no reason that groups could not be arbitrarily large. An obvious recent use case is crisis management. Group messaging could be used for crisis alerts (for example, to issue the 80-second advance warning in the Japanese earthquake), and search and rescue. Another large-scale application is voting, or any kind of opinion-measurement. Presumably, group messaging could be a better version of the current real-time pulse of the web, Twitter. Twitter is operating at scale, recently reporting 36 million tweets during the 2011 Oscars, and more during the Grammys and Superbowl, but could benefit from the additional aggregation, stratification, and interaction functionality of group messaging.

Societal Design 101

Social construction and economic design like that in Dubai/the UAE is particularly interesting in two ways: what it suggests for the future of technology on Earth and in the context of designing space-based societies such as on the Moon, Mars, asteroids and orbiting satellites.

Newtech adoption as geopolitical strategy
On Earth, as technological advances are accelerating and emerging in more areas, early adopter societies, particularly less democratic ones, could mandate technology implementation and move ahead quickly. Imagine that Singapore for example, has a big push into molecular nanotechnology and develops diamond mechanosynthesis or requires adoption of life extension technologies, generating a citizenry suddenly much healthier and more productive with longer life spans, perhaps increasing GDP by one or more orders of magnitude. There will likely be a variety of worldwide responses and uptake patterns to futuretech as it emerges, possibly creating a far greater range of human diversity than currently exists. Genetically-modified food, human genomic testing and stem cell research are contemporary examples of diverse national responses to newtech.

Space-based societal design
Constructed rather than organically grown Earth-based societies are a good template for a potential Moon base and other space-based communities; societies like the Antarctic science outposts and managed economies such as Dubai and the UAE. There could certainly be any variety of non-Earth-based societies with differing levels of political and social restrictions and freedoms. Especially in the early days, stricter regimes are more likely to prevail for survival, safety and cohesion reasons.

Are today's technologies life-transforming?

Technologies people have experienced in the last 20 years like the PC, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and personal video recorders have been life changing but have they been truly transformative? Despite the current rapid pace of technology change and innovation, it can be argued that some inventions in the late 1800s/early 1900s period had a more dramatic impact on people's lives - the advent of electricity, indoor plumbing, cars replacing horses, hospitals and more.

Examining the changes in the 100 years ago era and the present era suggests that the changes are of different types. While they are both the implementation of better tools to ease human labor, the 100 years ago changes were more about basic hardcore real world problems of comfort, health, sanitation and efficiency, building linearly to a more modern baseline. Our recent changes, and the ones coming, are more profound in a different way - they are about opening up non-linear possibilities in human thought space and creativity. There is an assumption that we are at baseline and improving exponentially from there. Today we have the privilege of thinking about what it is like to extend humanness, to travel off the Earth, to change and create new organisms from the DNA up and a myriad of other formerly almost unimaginable phenomenon.

How to contribute to tech world

The science world is changing faster than ever now and will continue to speed up. One action for an individual to do is to try to keep up by learning about the technologies, innovation, changes, trends, current solutions and future problems in key areas like semiconductors, biotech, nanotech, physics and cosmology. Given the possible constraints of a non-science educational background, a generalist/macro not micro skillset and purview (e.g.; non-technical background, competence and interest) what are the obvious, useful and meaningful ways for an individual to participate in the massively evolving technology future?

Any role with a macro (e.g.; multi-topic) purview required is an interesting possibility. One category of roles is the popularizers, educators, explainers and evangelists/cheerleaders. Writers, synthesizers, presenters and thought-leaders with agendas are another category of roles, somehow a little more active, adding their views/vision to the explication role. Both of these categories involve other people as the consumer/observer of the content.

What are higher level categories that are more creative and content/info-generating, thereby potentially more worthwhile to certain value systems? Other forms of writing/creation: considering the implications of the technologies (though still may be heavily people/society-related), making a list of detailed predictions, adjusting life in expectation of the arrival of the technologies, drawing or other graphical abstraction of the technology or the implications of the technology. Inventing a new use or a new technology, like text-to-speech files for the iPod, is actively creating and participating. These days its easy to make or get a new technology idea made. Think about what you'd like to fix in your life and what are potential solutions. Keep a list of daily invention ideas.

Higher-level active writing, invention, ....more to come....