Conference fatigue stifles ideation?

The slate of must-attend conferences this fall has been intense, from Accelerating Change to Web 2.0 to State of Play to the Second Life Convention to Pop!Tech to the Serious Gaming Summit. At least Pop!Tech will have free live streaming.

Not only is there an abundance of conferences, a lot of the same speakers and the same ideas are at all the conferences. The speakers have trouble keeping pace too, new or even refreshed ideas have been rare.

Certainly there are lots more people doing interesting speaker-worthy things but no one knows about it and they are not getting picked up on the conference grid, or of course maybe they are too busy doing interesting things to speak about doing interesting things.

Conferences are still a great place for synergies and new ideas but the pressure is on organizers to keep them fresh and widen the context and definition of interesting speakers. Also, maybe other formats besides the wrote formula of speaker lecture + Q&A could be explored like simulation, group workshops with meaningful outcomes, online collaborations, etc. BrainJams are a step in the right direction.

Physical entities must move to digital worlds

Should physical world entities such as each individual, company, club, interest group, celebrity, band, etc. have a digital environment presence?

One fear is a garish re-creation of the physical world in the same or maybe a worse form in the digital environment. Hm, wait, isn't this most of what Second Life is currently? The metaverse must include mainstream non-techy culture in order to ramp. The Internet 1.0 evolved slowly from deep tech to technorati to tech savvy to mainstream. With Internet 2.0, the gap will shrink rapidly, some corporates like Wells Fargo already have a 'metaverse' presence in Second Life and authors have included an online reading and signing event on their book tours.

Although it would be interesting to see how digital environments would evolve on their own with growing groups of the tech savvy signing in, moving the mass market to the digital environment with haste will probably create a more interesting digital world more quickly. There will always be plenty of digital environment pockets for deep tech to ideate and instantiate. For example, Second Life could be the mainstream platform while deep tech moves to other metaverse worlds with radically different parameters.

As mentioned in the previous post, each physical world entity should be considering and creating its expanded-functionality digital environment presence. More interestingly, we should also be thinking about new digital world presences. For example, a book could have a digital environment presence, initially mediated by the author and readers. An idea could have a presence.

Expression in a digital environment

What is so great about a digital environment compared to the physical world?

There are currently two main kinds of experience to have in a digital environment such as Second Life, Project Entropia and Sims Online: avatar representation and interactive activities.

If the digital world is avatar-based as the current models seem to be, you create a visual representation of yourself or your presence in the form of a person, animal or object, which is a chance to explore and experiment with identity. You can be someone or something else. Shape, size, gender, age, color, texture and other attributes are all an exploration. Another property of digital identity is dynamism, you can change your avatar'’s appearance at any time.

Doing activities is the second main experience in digital worlds, including social chat, dancing, gambling, designing and building objects, discussion and learning.

The list of potential activities is much longer. There could be a digital world version of any physical world activity; best represented as an adaptation and abstraction with fun new elements, not just a re-creation of the physical world activity. The ability for any group to meet and interact in a richer synchronous way than with current Internet-based methods of chats, email lists and websites is just starting to be imagined.

Each physical world entity (e.g.; business, university, hobby group, book club) should be thinking about what its digital environment presence should be, where it should be (e.g.; in the existing digital worlds of Second Life, etc. or in its own digital world) and starting to get it created. For businesses and services, there are two audiences/customer sets, the existing customer set that can be brought into the digital environment and the customer set that is in the digital environment already.

Marketing to digital environment participants for business or other purposes is an interesting puzzle, a mix of traditional and new marketing techniques. Maybe Second Life and other environment custodians or external digital world watchers will make aggregated demographic user data available for an idea of the profile segments that are already part of the digital environment.

Metaverse in Mosaic

The metaverse, aka, the real Internet 2.0, is currently at the stage of the Internet at the time of the Mosaic browser circa 1996, e.g.; at the beginning when only techies understand what it is and are using it, before it explodes into mainstream. Right now, there are at minimum several metaverses in the early stages of development, launch and use; it is not clear which of these metaverses could be the big one. Maybe they will all be displaced in the Netscape tradition. There will probably be many metaverses, and we may even be able to have as many of our own metaverses as we like.

The metaverse is an immersive audio visual experience with much richer creation, collaboration, communication and exploration possibilities than in the current and still primarily linear text based Internet. Some of the current builders of metaverse worlds are Second Life, with a purported 60,000 subscribers to the their free world as of October 2005, There, Croquet, and coming soon, a 3-D browser from ManyOne. Second Life is becoming an important platform but is not the only platform. Croquet has some interesting capabilities for creating metaverse worlds with different physics and other attributes.

What will be needed for the widespread deployment and use of the metaverse? Not much, just an imagination, a broadband connection (maybe Google's rumored wireless broadband strategy will be helpful) and a good graphics card.

...and the metaverse may come from China...a very different kind of made in China...

Self is an outdated concept

With the advent of AI, self will be a redundant term. The self will be many, an "individual" will be a large entity with many parts. The current emphasis on collaboration is already shifting the role of the self.

Even now self is an egotistical relic that is increasingly unnecessary. Memes are what is important. Self is only important in that better memes come from some selves, and that some selves are more focused on memes than other topics. Right now there is still a role for ideas developed by selves, in the future maybe only ideas synthesized by groups are of chief import.

Importance of execution slips

The historical trend up until even a few years ago and amplified by the first Internet boom, was that for any great idea, it was likely that many people independently came up with it, one example: the Internet could be used to collect large groups of business buyers for volume discounts. Since ideas were known, 90% of the game was execution.

Now, ideas are proliferating at more levels and the idea is what is more important, the idea is the innovation, good ideas are the bottleneck. Execution has become easier and more streamlined and is still a sometimes difficult real world problem but the higher order value is on ideas. The value of ideas as standalones is increasingly seen now, the non-implementing idea progenitor is not penalized as in the past.

That wonderful future, always 20-30 years out

There are the old guard futurist groups, the World Future Society, World Transhumanist Association, Foresight Insititute and others whose membership swelled decades ago with the former zenith of interest in science and technology and dreams of the US space program. In the last decade, the new guard futurist goups like the Acceleration Studies Foundation, the Singularity Institute, Extropy Institute, etc. have arrived. Instead of having devised a means of incorporating new tiers of ideas (the groups are mainly stratified by generation), which would seem like a first order futurist project, the old guard and new guard groups do not seem to understand each other and disagree about what is important and interesting.

However, at any time point, all the futurist groups carry the same message of a different future arriving in 20-30 years. Even erstwhile members start to remark that this never seems to happen in the decades they have been involved with the movement. Waning interest in the futures area is compounded by the "no new news" dynamic, the focus on long-time horizons and known problems rarely results in new and exciting news despite that everyone agrees that technological change is accelerating. As futurist Paul Saffo says, a clear view should not be mistaken for a short distance.

The acceleration camp of today might argue that this is precisely the point, futurists must stay ever-vigilant because otherwise big change will pop up truly unannounced but is there really a grand payback to studying the future other than being informed as a general interest. The usual time and effort focused on progress in the areas we selves we can perpetuate now is perhaps the most future-oriented endeavor in which we can engage.

Benefits of radical life extension

An Egyptologist remarked in shock after hearing about uploading for the first time at the 2003 Accelerating Change Conference that it is "unbelievable, humans have not changed in 8000 years; the cult of immortality still rules." This comment illustrates the conventional wisdom, that aspiring to radical life extension or immortality is hubristic, puerile and otherwise unwarranted.

However, aspiring to immortality is natural, appropriate and inevitable. At minimum, it would be hypocritical not to support human immortality given the myriad ways that humans influence nearly all other aspects of life and the environment.

Some assumptions are part of accepting the aspiration to immortality such as that the quality of health would be excellent (as compared with today's elongated periods of inferior health prior to death). Also there would need to be ways of refreshing mindsets, beliefs and values, preserving the beneficial aspects of the dying out and rebirth in the traditional life cycle. It has been a step of progress when the incoming generation supersedes the outgoing generation in thoughts, norms, ideas, culture, etc. As human consciousness expands beyond the current unit of the self, it will be great to incorporate many more individual and group ideas.

Resource consumption is also not a worry. First, before considering the impact of immortality on fertility, the current resources of the world and likely improvements in efficiency of resource consumption and (re)generation will be sufficient. The newly immortal will have more time to work on projects such as extra-terran colonization and asteroid mining. Second, assuming an initial continuation of the biological substrate, the fertility rate would probably further decline initially as people got used to immortality, and then since resource consumption is much more of an issue to an immortal, the fertility rate could increase again as people feel comfortabe with resource planning and want to have fun, experiment and create more brain power.

Filling those now truly endless days should also not be a concern. Humans are already learning to be responsible for generating their own happiness and fulfillment as mortals, so this would be extended and many more and different activities could be tackled with immortality.

Why are women not using their brains?

Despite neural research irrefutably substantiating the capability of the female brain and exhibiting the multi-leveled, macro and long term-viewed, multi-tasking, societal synthesis-orientation and other unique capabilities of female brains, this resource remains largely untapped.

A landmark circa 2003 New York Times article cited that 50% of college graduates and entry level professionals are women, but 10 years later only 1/3 of these women remain in the work force; the September 2005 'What do Yale Women Want' (Stabiner, Karen. "What Yale Women Want." Los Angeles Times. Friday, September 23, 2005) article cited only approximately one third of women wanting to work. This can only be construed as a gross misuse of talent, human capability and brain power.

It is a mystery why females do not demand a higher deployment of their brains and women's lack of actualization is a human productivity loss and psychological tragedy.

It is certainly true that work may not absorb women's brains in a fulfilling way, particularly in the limited majority of work force roles that are currently still available to women, but men may be equally unfulfilled at work. That work in general is not fulfilling and that both men and women are not using their full brain power is an embarrassing commentary on the state of affairs of society, which has been recently pointed up by Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind and others. Women are less willing to put up with something that does not work for them as men are, men do not think they have any option other than to work.

Men should be observed, are equally at fault, if they do not find the work force fulfilling, they too are responsible for devising an alternative; with the money and stature social hypnosis it is hard for men to notice that a better alternative may be warranted. In a post-economic imperative and ectogenesis-acceptable society, how much female and male brain actualization will be occurring?

Assumed competence in microcredit and beyond

The most important point in Banker to the Poor, the history of the world's largest microcredit organization, the Grameen Bank, is the idea of assuming competence in people in general and specifically in microcredit loan borrowers. All humans are resourceful and can make appropriately self-interested and creative decisions to improve their situations, both in the developing and developed world. Many people and institutions have the fallacy of thinking that step one in any anti-poverty program is providing training to the participants, which is completely incorrect and in particular assumes people do not know what to do. In fact, the opposite is true, people know exactly what to do, and the focus should be on removing the structural barriers they face such as inadequate access to credit and welfare disincentives.

Grameen Bank founder, economist and author Muhammed Yunus suggests that one reason international aid programs have not made a difference in world poverty levels is because they have had the wrong objective. The aid objective should be the eradication of poverty (which has quantitative measures), not the amorphous development goal which has largely played out in the form of building dams and bridges. Yunus argues that credit should be a basic human right.

The result is that the Grameen Bank has been quite successful, lending over $5 billion to more than 4 million borrowers (95% women) with a 99% repayment rate and serving as the best-practices example for microlending. There are many innovative aspects to the structure of the Grameen Bank and its loans including continuous feedback loops, repayment beginning in the week following the granting of the loan and mini-syndication groups. Probably the strongest reason for the high repayment comes from the 5-member borrower team structure in which each member takes out a loan per the recommendation of the group and the group essentially co-guarantees the loans of the others. Stronger than the power and threat of the bank is the social and cultural threat of letting down the business partners in the loan group.

Some critics claim that the high loan repayment can also be ascribed to the lack of welfare or any other support system to fall back upon in developing countries, but the Grameen system has been proven to work in locations such as Europe and the US where welfare systems exist.

The mindset of assuming competence extends beyond the microcredit arena and can pervade any and all personal and professional dealings and even how you think of yourself. Instead of handicapping incompetence, gauging levels of competence, talking down to people and assuming ignorance, why not act with the dignity of assuming competence.

AI wakes up from Blogs

Blogs are the most human aspect of the Internet and of all human archived data and material. Blogs show personality, fallibility, value systems, perception and solving of general problems, adaptability and most closely what it is like to be human. It would be scary to see strong AI wake up from the OpEds or personal narratives represented in traditional journalism.

An interesting science fiction story would be an AI, a collaborative hive mind of course, waking up by reading every post in the blogosphere. It would evolve as bloggers keep adding posts and progressing in their own thinking and as additional bloggers come online. It begs the question of what impression AI (or any external observer) would have of human *intelligence* from the blogosphere. Interesting given the main current distribution areas of uber-techiness and random personal musings with a sprinkle of politics and business. What is the nature of collective human intelligence and how do we know if it is represented in the blogosphere or not?

Not only could blogs help an AI wake up, they could help with a real world problem - online dating. Though wildly popular, how effective are dating and linkedin-type social networking websites? One shortcoming is the gap between what people say they are (honestly or not) and what they actually are (or would be perceived as being externally). Dating and social software websites tell who the person thinks he/she is, blogs show how the person actually is. Depending on the tone and level of information, a blog usually cannot help but display the personality, attitudes, value system, key focus areas and many other aspects of a person that are lacking in a cold profile. Reading someone's blog is presumably somewhat similar in some ways to what it would actually be like to interact with that person.

Which further begs the question of how can/is human interaction changing. Reading someone's blog (political, business, technology, personal or futurist) is generally public but intimate. There is much more of a sense of knowing that person (or more precisely, knowing what that person is like) than with other communications media. This happens all the time with celebrities but is closer and more intimate with blogs since bloggers are 'people like us' and there may be a higher degree of shared interests and the possibility of reciprocal communication.

Reading a friend's blog is a great and efficient way to stay current with what the person is thinking and experiencing and comments can certainly make the experience interactive. When a live interaction occurs, the focus does not need to be on catching up but can be on higher level aspects like synergistically developing new ideas. Can face-to-face interaction be diminished by reading blogs? Should it? Is this already occurring? What are our real human needs for live interaction and are they evolving?

Inadvertently, blogs seem to be advancing human communication towards the broader mind meld mechanism science fiction writers have long-imagined (one example is described in Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress), a communication system that moves beyond the primitiveness of literal words, body language and tone to the comprehension of multi-dimensional chains of thoughts and their genesis including value systems, beliefs and life experiences. Communicating with someone can be much broader than responding to how they look and speak at a specific moment.