IFTF's Future Now

Gregg Zachary on "Why terrorism isn't reshaping technology"

Technology journalist and longtime Silicon Valley-watcher Gregg Zachary asks why "Why terrorism isn't reshaping technology." Despite comparisons to World War II (which spurred investment in scientific research) and Sputnik (which led to the creation of the American space program), Zachary argues that the war on terrorism hasn't had much impact on Silicon Valley. Why?

Partly it's because there's a feeling among researchers that the government already possesses -- or can easily obtain -- the most important technologies needed to deter terrorists, and that the challenge is instead to mobilize existing technology properly....

Moreover, because the terror threat is not well-defined, there's no single technological fix, unlike the way the United Sates could counter Russia's achievements in space by putting Americans on the moon....

In the end, an awareness of the limits of innovation probably is good. That there is no technological "fix" for the present danger forces everyone to confront social, economic and political issues that elude the net of science.

Pentagon and climate change

Recently the Observer reported on a Pentagon-sponsored study on the strategic implications of climate change. The piece has generated a lot of attention, but unfortunately it illuminates the limits of futures work more than the future itself.

Let's begin with the Observer piece, subtly titled "Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us," reports that

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

The story has been picked up in a number of places (this Common Dreams report is representative). But there are two problems: the report isn't a prediction, and it wasn't a secret report. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted yesterday, the purpose of the study was to

investigate the "worst-case" possible events, those that are highly unlikely to happen but, if they did happen, would be catastrophic, especially in their impacts on U.S. military operations -- "low probability, high impact" events, as they are known in the futurological world....

Unlikely though such events are, such studies are valuable, Schwartz said -- as valuable as if, say, someone in the 1990s had investigated the highly unlikely looking possibility that someone would try to destroy the World Trade Center by flying two airplanes into it, he noted....

Unfortunately, the distinction between prediction and highly improbable was muddied by some of the more frantic press coverage.

The report wasn't "secret" in the sense of being classified. I don't know what the Pentagon plans (or ever planned) to circulate the study publicly, or whether the press attacks made them decide not to make it public. But a month before the Observer piece, Fortune published an article (available online to subscribers) about the report that summarized it thus:

Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies.

Of course, the worst-case scenarios are very scary, and even the mid-range problems are pretty frightening; but the jump from "might happen" to "will happen" is one that futurists are as loath to make as journalists are eager to make. Scenarios should be read-- and reported on-- as possibilities, and warnings, but not as predictions.

Geocaching goes mainstream

The San Jose Mercury News has an article on the growing popularity of geocaching, a sport that involves using GPS and the Web to locate hidden caches-- a bit like high-tech (yet accessible, and relatively cheap) treasure-hunting.

Several of us at the Institute have been fascinated with geocaching: it's a great example of a self-organizing, technology-enabled activity. There's no official geocaching rules body, though Geocaching.com comes closest to being the hub of the network. In the course of reading articles about geocaching published in the last several years, I noticed something interesting: in the last 12-18 months, people stopped writing about the sport as a weird, nerdy thing, and started writing about it as a kind of wholesome family entertainment. It ceased to be a marginal activity for techies, and became a way to get the whole family into the great outdoors.

Today's Mercury News piece both exemplifies this rhetorical shift, and provides some data-points, including the organization of a geocaching cruise in which "cachers can meet and socialize, then hunt for caches when the ship drops anchor in Grand Cayman, Costa Maya, Cozumel and Belize before returning to Tampa, Fla."

There probably should be some kind of rule among social scientists that when you can fill a cruise ship with people interested in something, it can no longer be described as a marginal activity.

RFID, privacy, and collective good

Information Week has a good article on how companies are starting to think about RFID and privacy. It makes a couple points that are right but unoriginal-- item-level tagging is still a few years away, but it's not too early to start implementing designs and policies to deal with the privacy issues; that lots of other technologies have traded a measure of privacy for some gain (e.g., a cheaper price, faster service), with little complaint-- and one that is new and very smart: that there's going to be very strong interdependence among companies when it comes to respecting privacy.

Sandy Hughes, global privacy officer for consumer-products manufacturer Procter & Gamble Co., heads a newly formed subcommittee at RFID industry group EPCglobal, called the Chief Privacy Officer Forum. "One thing that's really important with this technology is the reliance that retailers and manufacturers have in this together," she says. "So it's not something where we can just say for P&G, here's our privacy program, so everybody implement it the way we say. Since it's supply chain, we're all dependent on each other on how we implement it."

This strikes me as a significant point. In a sense, you can think of company interests on RFID and privacy as following a prisoner's dilemma: each company can choose being behaving well (e.g. working with others on agreed-upon standards for consumer privacy) for long-term gain, or misbehaving (e.g. collecting information) for short-term gain. However, thinking short-term will hurt everyone over the long term, and cheaters in particular. If true, this could work for consumers: companies that are tempted to misbehave may be effectively reined in by fear of Wal-Mart and DOD when moral persuasion fails.

[via RFID News]

Recent IFTF publications

The purpose of Future Now is to capture some of the more interesting bits from the flow of things I look at in the course of doing my research. Readers may not know that the actual final results of this work are also publicly available. On our recent reports page, you can find studies of nanotechnology and MEMS, technology and entertainment, connective technologies, aging Baby boomers, and the future of diagnostics. You're welcome!

Nanogeography

Nanovip.com, a nanotechnology business directory, has published an interesting set of charts on the geographical distribution of nanotechnology companies. Their findings are not too surprising for anyone who follows the field (nor are they significantly different from what we've talked about in our research): the U.S. leads in total number of nanotechnology companies, with certain countries in Europe and Asia coming on strong.

Designing remotes

Katie Hafner's New York Times article on designing the TiVO remote is a must-read, as it offers a nice window into the kinds of challenges technology companies will need to meet in the future.

[T]he remote has become the centerpiece of home entertainment: so many functions have been relegated to this slip of an object that if it is lost, you may find yourself unable to do so much as call up a menu for watching the movie you popped into the DVD player.

But if the remote control is a linchpin, it is also often an inscrutable one.... The device can feel like an afterthought, thrown together without any planning at all.

Increasingly, however, electronics companies are recognizing that building an easy-to-use remote control is an important and challenging task.

The TiVO remote-- a peanut-shaped device with about 30 buttons on it-- is full of interesting, subtle design decisions: for example, the buttons were made of a hard rubber, and the designers put no small effort into making "the feel of hitting the buttons [similar[ to that of playing a piano." (Button behavior is an often-overlooked but critical aspect of device design: the Apple mouse's designers worried about it a lot, too.)

Amateur scientists and Benkler's peer production

A while ago I posed the question of whether "historians of science made use of the literature on social networks and open exchange systems-- e.g., Woody Powell's work on networks, Yochai Benkler's studies of open source, etc.?" In the course of reading Benkler's "Coase's Penguin," a couple thoughts on the subject came to me.

Of course, the notion that nonscientists could contribute to scientific research projects is not new, and in the world of peer-to-peer systems, is definitely old news: just think of projects like SETI@Home, which send pieces of radio astronomy data to desktops for analysis. But with SETI@Home (and Stanford's protein folding project), the person doesn't really do anything other than contribute processor cycles: all the actual analysis is done by a piece of software that users download to their computers. What's more interesting is the question of whether peer-to-peer networks and other tools that facilitate "peer production" (to use Benkler's term) could help create a new role for amateurs as active contributors to science.

1 GB for $1?

dottocomu reports that "NTT has developed a storage technology that allows 1GB of data (in the prototype) to be stored on a layered clear plastic chip that's the size of a postage stamp and costs a few hundred yen."

Korean scientists interviewed on cloning

Today's New York Times has an interview with Drs. Woo Suk Hwang and Shin Yong Moon, the Korean scientists who recently announced that they had cloned and extracted a stem cell line from a human embryo. One interesting moment in the questioning dealt with government regulation of human cloning and stem cell research, and touched on issues of both ethics and national scientific competitiveness:

Q. Leon R. Kass, the bioethics adviser to President Bush, said that he would like to see your type of research banned in the United States. What is your reaction?

WOO SUK HWANG: Our goal has never been to create cloned human babies, but to find the causes of incurable diseases and to offer a new window for cures.

SHIN YONG MOON: Professor Hwang and I have called for a ban on reproductive cloning. We don't want people using our techniques to make human beings. We urge every nation to prepare a law as soon as possible to prevent human cloning. As a scientist, I think reproductive cloning should be banned.

Q. What do you think would happen to American science if all cloning were banned?

MOON: If all human cloning will be prohibited here, that would be a problem for American science. Stem cell research [which cloning facilitates] is very important for understanding the basic science of human development. And it is also very important for new drug evaluations. So biotechnology development — not all of it, but some — would be delayed and hindered in the United States.

Q. Do you have problems with your own government over your work?

HWANG: I can answer your question like this: If Korea were to prohibit therapeutic cloning research, we would have to go to other countries where it is permitted — Singapore, mainland China, maybe Great Britain. But my hope is that the Korean government will give us the license to do this kind of research. If they don't, we will move.