Ayahuasca and Human Destiny

Ayahuasca and Human Destiny
Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D.

My good friend and colleague, Dr. Charles Grob, has extended a kind invitation to submit a contribution to this special edition of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, devoted to the topic of ayahuasca, for which he has been selected as guest editor. I’m pleased to be asked and happy to respond, particularly since I have collaborated for many years with Dr. Grob and other colleagues who are represented here, on various aspects of the scientific study of ayahuasca. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of my life.

In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.

Partly as a result of our collective efforts, over the last few decades ayahuasca has become one of the most thoroughly studied of the traditional shamanic plant hallucinogens. We now have a firm understanding of the plant species that are utilized in its preparation, including the diverse pharmacopoeia of ayahuasca admixture plants, a shamanic technology unto itself that begs additional investigation. We understand the chemistry of the active constituents of its primary botanical components, and have better insight into its remarkable synergistic pharmacology.

We have identified potential therapeutic applications for ayahuasca and the role that it may some day find in healing the physical and spiritual wounds of individuals, if it is ever afforded its rightful place in medical practice. Ethnographically, my colleagues and I have made contributions to an understanding of the central role that ayahuasca already has in the context of Amazonian shamanism and ethnomedicine. We have described, and written about, its status as a window into the sacred cosmology of magic, witchcraft, transcendent experience, and healing that permeates and defines the practices of Mestizo ethnomedicine.

The visionary paintings of Peruvian shaman and artist Pablo Amaringo, brought so beautifully to the attention of the world by Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, has helped to make that tradition accessible to many who would otherwise have seen it (if they were aware of it at all) as alien, exotic, and incomprehensible. To an extent, our work has shed some small light on the more contemporary role of ayahuasca as the sacramental vehicle of syncretic religious movements that originated in Brasil and now are reaching out globally, if incrementally, to embrace a sick and wounded world that desperately yearns for the healing that this mind/body/spirit medicine can offer.

The story of ayahuasca, and our evolving understanding of its place in the world, and of its significance for medicine, pharmacology, ethnobotany, and shamanic studies, is far from over, and in fact, it may have just begun. I would like to believe that is the case. But for the purposes of this contribution, rather than submit yet another dense and lengthy review on the botany, chemistry, pharmacology, &c., of ayahuasca, I have chosen to adopt a broader perspective, and to indulge in some reflections, and speculations on the past and future of ayahuasca of the sort that a scientist, probably mercifully, rarely shares with his colleagues or the larger world.

To those readers who may wish for my more usual nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject, I call attention to my recent review in the journal Pharmacology and Therapeutics (McKenna, 2004). In addition, a complete list of all of “my” publications on ayahuasca is appended to the end of this article; and I use the term “my” advisedly because these publications represent the work and creativity of many people with whom I’ve been privileged to collaborate over the years. They would not exist without them.

On a personal level, ayahuasca has been for me both a scientific and professional continuing carrot, and a plant teacher and guide of incomparable wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. My earliest encounters with ayahuasca were experiential; only later did it become an object of scientific curiosity, sparked in part by a desire to understand the mechanism, the machineries, that might underlie the profound experiences that it elicited.

As a young man just getting started in the field of ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca seemed to me more than worthy of a lifetime of scientific study; and so it has proven to be. Pursuing an understanding of ayahuasca has led to many exotic places that I would never have visited otherwise, from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the laboratory complexes of the National Institute of Mental Health and Stanford; it has led to the formation of warm friendships and fruitful collaborations with many colleagues who have shared my curiosity about the mysteries of this curious plant complex.

These collaborations, and more importantly, these friendships, continue, as does the quest for understanding. Though there have been detours along the way, always, and inevitably, they have led back to the central quest. Often, after the fact, I have seen how those apparent detours were not so far off the path after all, as they supplied some insight, some skill, or some experience, that in hindsight proved necessary to the furtherance of the quest.

Just as ayahuasca has been for me personally something of a Holy Grail, as it has been for many others, I have the intuition that it may have a similar role with respect to our entire species. Anyone who is personally experienced with ayahuasca is aware that it has much to teach us; there is incredible wisdom and intelligence there. And to my mind, one of the most profound and humbling lessons that ayahuasca teaches – one that we thick-headed humans have the hardest time grasping – is the realization that “you monkeys only think you’re running things.”

Though I state it humorously, here and in other talks and writings, it is nonetheless a profound insight on which may depend the very survival of our species, and our planet. Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance, and self-delusion. We assume that we dominate nature; that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago; we rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere; at the same time we slash and burn the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species, and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life on the planet.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Our spiritual institutions have devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment, the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.

I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years, and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For millennia it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers of the primordial rainforests of South America; in the mid-20th century Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry, and pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis with humanity). At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people, representatives of “greater” civilization.

To these few men and women, ayahuasca provided revelations, and they in turn responded (in the way that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by founding religious sects with a messianic mission; in this case, a mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging, and sustaining the fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honoring our place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world “religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.

Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious and political power structures, and indeed, it is. It is a threat to the continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial, and political authorities have made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even earlier.

But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca, clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It has found new homes, and new friends, in nearly every part of the world where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them, outrun them.

There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which, unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish). Even if the Amazon itself is leveled for cattle pasture or burned for charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage in its dialog with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people are listening.

It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is turn on the nightly news.

Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments, religions, and political power structures that seem today so permanent and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil record. The real question is, will we be here long enough to hear its message, to integrate what it is trying to tell us, and to change in response, before it is too late?

Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell.

+++++++++++++++

McKenna, Dennis J. (2004) Clinical investigations of the therapeutic potential of Ayahuasca: Rationale and regulatory challenges. Pharmacology and Therapeutics. 102:111-129.
Dennis J. McKenna (1999) Ayahuasca: an ethnopharmacologic history. In: R. Metzner, (ed) Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature. Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Callaway, J. C., D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, L. P. Raymon, R.E. Poland, E. N. Andrade, E. O. Andrade, D. C. Mash (1999) Pharmacokinetics of Hoasca alkaloids in Healthy Humans. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 65:243-256.
McKenna, DJ, JC Callaway, CS Grob (1999). The scientific investigation of ayahuasca: A review of past and current research. Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research 1:
Callaway, J. C., L. P. Raymon, W. L. Hearn, D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, D. C. Mash (1996) Quantitation of N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala alkaloids in human plasma after oral dosing with Ayahuasca. Journal of Analytical Toxicology 20: 492-497
C. S. Grob, D. J. McKenna, J. C. Callaway, G. S. Brito, E. S. Neves, G. Oberlender, O. L. Saide, E. Labigalini, C. Tacla, C. T. Miranda, R. J. Strassman, K. B. Boone (1996) Human pharmacology of hoasca, a plant hallucinogen used in ritual context in Brasil: Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. 184:86-94. McKenna, DJ (1996)
James C. Callaway, M. M. Airaksinen, Dennis J. McKenna, Glacus S. Brito, & Charles S. Grob (1994) Platelet serotonin uptake sites increased in drinkers of ayahuasca. Psychopharmacology 116: 385-387
Dennis J. McKenna, L. E. Luna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1995) Biodynamic constituents in Ayahuasca admixture plants: an uninvestigated folk pharmacopoeia. In: von Reis, S., and R. E. Schultes (eds). Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Dioscorides Press, Portland
Dennis J. McKenna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1985) On the comparative ethnopharmacology of the Malpighiaceous and Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 17:35-39.
Dennis J. McKenna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1984), Biochemistry and pharmacology of tryptamine and ß-carboline derivatives: A minireview. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 16:347-358.
Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, & F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants: Tryptamine and ß-carboline constituents of Ayahuasca. J. of Ethnopharmacology 10:195-223.
Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, & F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants Pt. II: Constituents of orally active Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. of Ethnopharmacology 12:179-211.
Dennis J. McKenna & G. H. N. Towers (1981) Ultra-violet mediated cytotoxic activity of ß-carboline alkaloids. Phytochemistry 20:1001-1004

Xara Project: Future Paradise

Thursday, April 27 through Sunday, April 30, 2006.

I just heard of the Xara Project. Sounds wonderful. Here's the basic description from their website:

Come share 4 days and 3 nights with a thousand other brilliant souls living the life of a future paradise, and celebrate again the experience of your own life.

Xara Dulzura is an outdoor retreat exploring personal, creative mythology through visual and performing arts, workshops, landscape, hospitality, and one another.

Madre Grande Monastery is located on 264 secluded acres of oaks, stony hills and meadows high above and beyond rural Dulzura, in southeast San Diego County.

Here we pre-enact Xara, a pastoral paradise civilization 400 years in the future, imagine the myths and rites that would inform and sustain that world, and dream them to life for one another through interactive visual and performing arts. The most important vision and spirit is your own in this shared exploration of creative mythology through mutual art, hospitality, and personal experience.

We hope you will join our future Floralia as we celebrate the coming of new summer, the full-throated roar of life in its prime, and the building of the new.

Loving, Networking & Macroscale Engineering

I just got off the phone with Reverand Tom. I'm very glad to have met such a brilliant and passionate man who deeply cares about where we are going. He has put forward a tremendous body of work that I believe finally addresses so many of our planetary problems head on. I have yet been unable to find serious argument with any part of his proposal. It is both visionary, and should be taken as such, but also a deeply thought-out and rigorous plan for making concrete and meaningful, positive change in the world The best part of Tom's ideas is he embraces ALL, and leaves no one out. His plan does not require some fundamental force in our society to change - whether it be good or evil, great or small. Rather Tom, like an Aikido master, lovingly colloborates with these forces for the benefit of all. Whether they be the super rich elite or the poorest child.

What Reverend Tom is proposing is nothing short of pure unbounded love fueled by hyper-rationality and spiritual gusto.

So what's next? I believe Tom is right. We are on the verge of a total breakdown of everything we know. All of our old systems our on the verge of collapse. Everything will break down. But not in a bad way. This breakdown will merely be a reshuffling of the deck, an economic renewal towards something greater - a new holistic system of planetary stewardship and radical accelerating transhumanist hyper economics into the cosmic frontier. It benefits everyone. And the only way this is going to happen is through macroscale engineering projects which the super-rich will decide is what they want to do next. Why? Because they will have to if they want to survive, and because it will be exciting for them. It will allow them to go to the next frontier. All the automation in the world is not going to be enough for the super-rich to bootstrap themselves to the stars. Not even nanotechnology is going to save them. They are going to need as many people as they can all participating in the greatest projects of our generation, of any generation. They will produce enormous wealth for those at the top, and more wealth for all us that we have never seen before. It's a win-win situation for all of us. To get a good idea of some of these starter macro-scale engineering projects, please Tom's articles, Collective Empowerment (pdf) and New Section XVI.

Please be nice to Tom. He is a super nice guy. Disagree, debate, argue, but please be nice. Tom is not crazy, only a brilliant, sensitive and caring man wishing to help, and I believe he is just the one to do it. Let's give him a chance.

I told Tom that his ideas are a few steps ahead of most people, and probably at least a step or two ahead of even the most astute Future Hi reader. What he has presented in these preliminary documents are first drafts, raw manifestos to get the ball rolling. Let's see where we can go next.

Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom

I've been observing the optimism and "pronoia" espoused by upwinger and Chris in their posts, and the angst espoused by Ralph Metzner in his article, and in their own unique ways, by Paul and eventhorizon. I'd like to offer a perspective on how we can reconcile these divergent perspectives into a single worldview, and how we can "take charge of the situation" and proactively instigate the future of joy, ecstacy, freedom, and abundance that God has prearranged (but not preordained) via universal intelligence. I've been researching a "hyper-holism" that reconciles epistemological and ontological opposites — so that we can: a) see the world's political situation in its true context, and b) effectively reconcile religious and political opposites. What follows is the preface for a large paper/thesis that I am working on. Following the preface is a description of a special twenty-one page .pdf file that I have prepared, and a link to it. It is meant to offer a message of hope that is unbridled, yet grounded in the deepest Truth of our Reality. I can not think of a better forum in which to release this material, and hope you will find it to be both interesting and useful.

------------------------------ Beginning of Preface ------------------------------

Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom

This work is based on ten years of research at the point where science and the world's many religions come together without compromise. This research reveals a symmetry in the structure of human belief, as per the four cardinal paradigms of culture depicted below. As such, this paper draws insight with equal ease from: a) hard rational logic, b) the inspired appreciation of scripture, c) awakened subjectivity, and d) heartfelt ecological sensibility. This research also shows that the goals of collective empowerment and entheogenic freedom are closely related to each other, and to the securing of a unique destiny that is virtually unknown outside "psychedelic futurism." In particular, it shows why these twin goals can not be easily and fruitfully secured unless the quest to do so is made inseparable from a destiny characterized internally by communal, nanotech ecotopia, and externally, by a system of cosmic life that would eventually compare to this earth, in the same way that a towering oak compares to an acorn. It then maps out the way forward in detail.

Religious Monotheism
|
...Mystical Pantheism --------.....-------- Scientific Materialism
|
Paganism/Environmentalism

This paper cuts through mundane superstition to tackle the subject of time-symmetric causation head-on. The belief that cause always precedes effect is the most deeply ingrained superstition of the human race. Many are aware that time as we know it is an illusion. Few however, are aware that behind this illusion is a meta-reality in which objective forward in time processes, and subjective backward in time processes engage a holographic relationship of infinite depth. The paper introduces the nature of this relationship, and describes the primal challenge therein (and backs itself up with an appendix detailing the 12+ logical/philosophical arguments and 40+ pieces of empirical/observational evidence that overwhelmingly confirm the reality of time-symmetric causation). In this regard, it: a) presents the living destiny that has been prearranged, but not preordained, by the gestalt quantum-computational intelligence of Reality, i.e. God, and b) shows how the interaction of the real-numbered physical realm and the complex-numbered imaginal realm is rapidly bringing civilization toward an Eschaton characterized by a stark bifurcation of destiny.

This paper's goal is to give an overview of how we can help guide civilization through the lethal economic crisis that it will face circa 2010-2014 — while at the same time, securing freedom for entheogens in the context of specific group energy rituals. It is meant to offer a solid foundation for the challenge at hand. I hope it will be the starting-point for the wide-ranging discussions that will need to occur in these areas.

-------------------------------- End of Preface --------------------------------

Because this proposal touches on so many different aspects of culture, I have assembled bits and pieces of my work into the special twenty-one page file mentioned above. This file is designed to acquaint "psychedelic futurists" with the scope of my analysis, and the course of action that I am proposing. Because the new hyper-holism is so radical in its breadth, and the journey through and beyond the Eschaton even more radical, I have interspersed various charts with the text, and put everything in the order that I believe will be the easiest to follow. Included are the following:

1. A two-page chunk that contains the above preface and a high-level conceptual overview.
2. A two-page chunk that details the true role of the Divine Feminine vis a vis the Eschaton.
3. Two one-page charts that describe the four-fold symmetry of human culture in detail.
4. A detailed six-page introduction of how we may understand and navigate the Eschaton.
5. A two-page chart that describes "holographic libertarianism," an innovative political idea.
6. The three-page description of what life might be like in the "Millennium" and beyond.
7. A four-page list of experiments that should powerfully confirm time-symmetric causation.

This is obviously a work in progress, and some things may still be a bit rough (especially the list of experiments). Beyond that, the main six-page introduction contains a lot more information than would normally be there (to momentarily compensate for the unfinished paper per se). Please bear with it, for I feel that this research will prove to be accurate, and that the proposals based on it will ultimately be useful.

This file is intended to take people on a visionary journey. I hope Paul and the other people here experience it that way, and by this means, feel the living energy of an entheogenic future that is forever trying to get our attention. My suggestion would be to print out a copy, fasten your seat belt, and happy journeys!

http://home.earthlink.net/~thomaswinans/CollectiveEmpowerment.pdf

If people are interested in hearing more, I'll be happy to discuss the subject matter here, and/or post links to the various sections of the paper as I complete them. Please give me your feedback.

Sincerely,
Reverend Tom

Gaians vs Transhumans: Or How to Survive the Crash

What is everyone think of this?

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth.

In many ways it is the exact opposite of transhumanism. However, there are so many things said that are so correct and wise, that I can't really argue with it. What do you think?

I wrote something about this particular divide in 1998 called "Gaians vs Transhumans" Here is an excerpt:

Regarding Gaians vs Transhumans, there is really is no conflict and I consider myself to be both. I see no reason why we as children of Gaia shouldn't be able to survive, prosper and grow, while harmoniously restoring the biosphere to a pre-human paradise. If done right, nanotechnologies are the most environmentally friendly technology that could possibly exist. It is the perfect emulation of life in everyway, while also possessing an evolutionary unfoldment of ever- increasing intelligence. In no time at all, nanotechnology could reverse every "damaging" thing we've ever done, while simulataneously bootstrapping life and intelligence to the stars, which is by far holistically, cosmically and universally the most sustainable thing life could ever do. Life is about balance, beauty and harmony, but it is also about evolution, growth and awakening. Let a thousand worlds flourish!

Thanks Sunface for the link. :)

Liberating Capital, You and Me.

In a way I am a capitalist in the most extreme sense. I believe capital should be as free as possible to do what it wants to do. Before you brandish me, please understand I am not a corporatist, Randian, or some kind of right-wing Extropian. I don't believe in the current system of corporate control. True capitalism would be free of such crazy and corrupt constraints. I'll be blunt; Ayn Rand had it all wrong. Most extropians and libertarians as well. They hijacked the idea and took it hostage. But it's hostage status is about to end.

HERE IS MY VISION OF WHERE THINGS ARE ACTUALLY GOING

The Internet is already pervasive. Already people are paying exorbitant amounts of money to buy virtual things and places in virtual games. Many of these games are using virtual currency within the game. It has become so valuable to some people that they are now buying OTHER things besides game stuff. For example, people have exchanged thousands of earned game money into "real" dollars and vice versa. How long until out of control decentralized p2p currencies proliferate? Not long I suspect. Meanwhile, the Internet itself is becoming more liberated and decentralized, more p2p applications are flourishing, open source in every stripe and every possible application is being developed. Wikipedia is offering all of its knowledge for free. Google, Yahoo and at some point many, many others will be offering the entire worlds knowledge found in books (tens of millions of them) online. And this is just the beginning. Within 10 years, the Internet will have allowed almost everything we know and are to become digitized. This includes money, which as I pointed out above, HAS ALREADY STARTED.

Please keep in mind, that while all this is happening, alternative energy continues to get cheaper and more pervasive, nanomaterials and soon nanofabs will start cropping up everywhere, totally disrupting the corporate supply chain, making people ever more autonomous, which further feeds on itself the mobility of people, things, ideas, money, everything. Further driving prices down.

Capitalism, regardless of what the top corporations want, is ultimately about creating more capital - more, more and still more without end. Economic growth in every way. It's about creating a world without limits. A world with limits, limits capital. Capital like life, like information, like you, desperately wants to be free. And it will do whatever it has to become that way. The reason is that the degree to which any player in the system operates with that philosophy, and competes in the marketplace that way, will win. Again, wikipedia vs. Britannica, Linux vs. windows., etc. Decentralized marketplaces out compete centralized ones. We should have learned that when the west beat the Soviet Union, just because such a centrally controlled economy is not sustainable. It’s stupid and vunerable to corruption and control. The same thing has happed here now. They are trying to create a corporate controlled state economy, in which very specific corporations have all the control over everyone and everything else on the planet - total world domination. The problem with this plan is that it has all the same weaknesses as the old soviet system. It's basically replacing the soviet party with the corporate party. Our CEO's become more like their leaders - fat cats. The parallels are striking. That is the ultimate irony of what is unfolding on the world stage today. It can't last and is not sutainable. Capitalism and communism are both being transcended by capital itself. Capital liberated from capitalism. I know I'm contradicting myself here, but basically what I'm saying is we have no words or models for whats coming next. IT IS THAT REVOLUTIONARY!! It’s an entirely new p2p, decentralized system - one so powerful, decentralized and free beyond anything that has existed before, that nothing will stand a chance of stopping it. It is so revolutionary, that our poor conditioned brains may have a really hard time getting our minds around it. But it is completely logical once you think about it. In fact, corporations have been trying very hard to make sure you don't understand it. But now's your chance to wake up from your sleep, and see that economic liberation is at hand.

As everything gets cheaper and cheaper with advancing technology, it will become highly profitable for a company to start paying people to do anything they want. Now its important to understand what I mean by company. Companies of today are a dying breed, their current crazy system is about to collapse. Instead, companies will continue to exist, except they will become totally amorphous, totally transparent to the economy itself. So streamlined, that they will become indistinguisable from everything else. Please read my Leisure society article to understand how this actually will work. Anyway, in exchange for people paid to do whatever they want, people have only two things they have to do in return. Share any ideas they have about how to make the world a better place, including an agreed upon amount of money they might make off of it back to the company. A symbiotic relationship. Those companies elsewhere on the globe, who insist on not paying people, will have to resort to selling their products to only those already rich enough to afford it, as most everyone else will be unemployed as a result of rapidly increasing automation. Meanwhile, the other companies are taking all the untapped genius of the marketplace, by making customers loyal to their products in exchange for any help they can give. The amount of creativity, ingenuity that will come from this will be extraordinary. Parties will crop up, new entertainment venues, pleasure centers, vacation resorts, gaming ideas. Trust me when people have all that free time, they will begin a new renaissance of creativity like we have never seen before. There will only be so much sex, pot and TV that the average person will engage in. Most people will start doing other things, when they realize that it will get really boring, especially knowing there is WAY more happening in the world and will want to be a part of the fun, than sit around and be a slug all day. Besides, the ability of neuro-enhancement is already reaching a point, where pleasure, or at least the elimination of depression is easy. I truly believe that Burning Man is trailblazing this type of global leisure society.

Sure, the generous company might be taking risks with any one person, but it's the numbers their counting on. Besides, having a poor customer who can't afford to buy any of their stuff in this extremely connected world will in the end hurt and drag down their bottom line. Helping everyone will be in everyone's best interest. It is now, but people haven't quite figured that out yet. The prevailing paradigm being promoted by them is "you must work HARD to get money". "If you aren't working hard, you're a cheat, a lazy bum, a parasite" or whatever other lame name they have to come up with to keep you enslaved. Quite simply, their thinking is archaic, backward, Puritanical, illogical. And capitilism has no patience for backward thinking - it rewards the most forward thinking. The decentralized technologies that are coming rapidly, as well as the totally novel and radically liberating economic landscape that is approaching, breaks all the rules. Those who are generous will make the most money, period. Greedy types will wither away into nothing. Generosity will be magnified by the network, and will be repaid in greater levels of generosity. This is the true Gift Economy that you keep hearing about. Its not some pipe dream, its in fact what is actually happening as we speak. All the basic foundations are being laid now. And guess what, almost everyone, including corporations are becoming part of this new game, whether they like it or not. Everyone adds and is adding to the network, especially and including the third world, sharing ideas, and the network itself and all of its millions of open-source engineers continues to extend and empower it beyond anything we can imagine.

The Internet is not some static thing, it is the enabler, which keeps getting more enabled to enable more, in a bootstrapping feedback loop. Just think, the web itself was an experimental application running on one guys machine just 13 years ago. Now it is everywhere. It has become so pervasive we hardly even question it anymore. Well the web is only the beginning; there are now thousands of new applications being created right now that are extending it in ways we have barely begun to understand. Music was liberated by Napster, then gnutella, then bittorrent, now Exeem. Movies are next, followed by just about every type of patent and copyright. "Aye, the sky is falling, rampant piracy is robbing us!” But who is really robbing whom here? Corporations robbed it from the public domain. So the marketplace of people, capital and technological progress itself is taking it back into balance. Will the legal system have any power to stop this onslaught? Nope. If it did, then why are all the p2p applications still running at record bandwidths? Beginning to see the picture now? They can't stop it. The genie is out of the bottle. Since everything is becoming digitized, and everything digitized is becoming FREE, then everything becomes free. Capital (i.e. money) then becomes almost meaningless. Simple and logical right? Anything that can't be digitized will become of marginal cost, easily paid for by your continued positive presence in the world. If you still don't get it, it's all right, it's your brain's way of dealing with the shock of believing it was impossible, utopian, etc. So be kind to yourself, pick your jaw up off the floor from the shockingly good news, take a breather, relax, come back in a few days, read this again, and you'll probably get it the second time around. Personally, I've gone over this all a hundred times and I'm still gettting my mind around it. It's perfectly ok, we've all been thru hell and back under a lifetime of wage slavery and corporate-tv brainwashing. So believing something this fucking great and optimistic is just way to hard to believe right now. I understand! But it's true. You'll feel whole lots better when you finally realize it. I know I did. :)

References:

Coding Our Way to Liberation
Capital, Power and Ecology: Reasons for Optimism
The Coming Leisure Society

Related Links:

Ripple: Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Currency and Payment System

Collapsing Upwards

Hi everyone. Yep, it's been a long time since I wrote anything for Future Hi or anywhere else for that matter. I've been so busy with more practical matters that finding the time to express my thoughts publicly has not been possible.

Indictments and Political Scandal

As you may have heard, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted on five felony counts. In those moments where I take politics seriously, this could be a big deal and make me happy, but it doesn't. It's quite possible these indictments are only the beginning of seeing this criminal adminstration fall from power as much as it deserves to. Regardless of the probability of that, it all doesn't matter. The damage has already been done. America's reputation has been shattered, the deficts are soaring, dramatic increases in police state powers have been essentially cemented into law , etc., yada, yada, ad nauseum. Basically, the entire political game is a dead end for you, me and humanity. I can't possibly think how any reform, no matter how sweeping will make much of a difference. Politics is dead, lets move on.

Post-Politics:

If we hope to have a future, we need to start thinking post-politically. Some people, might have a problem with that whole concept. They think that has long as individual interact with each other, there will be politics. This is not true. As Timothy Leary made a strong case for, politics is rooted in power struggles within the contraints of a planetary 2-dimensional surface. Iain Banks makes the most compelling case I've ever read. As long as we remain on a planet, there is limited space in which we can travel. Any direction we decide to go in, we will inevitable end up back where we started. All corners of the globe have in some way been explored, colonized, utilized, cordoned off, walled, fenced, enclosed, patented, owned, copyrighted, raped and plundered. There is no wild and free frontier left, no place left to explore or to escape to. Sure, there are some places more free than others, but the differences are often trivial. For most people on the planet, life is hard, brutish and short. For those of us lucky enough to be in the developed world, the walls are closing in, fast. But,

End of Hierarchies and Traditional Power Structures:

Don't loose hope folks, because things are a accelerat'n! The current system with all its corruption, greed and shear stupidity and incompetence can't last much longer. Not only from an environmental and sustainable point of view, but because there is rapid, but still deep current change underway. It's all around us, and it's happening without anyone noticing much. It's not some big monolithic light from the sky change that we are archetypically expecting, but a much more subtle and profound change happening that we won't notice until its already happened. These changes are all around us. Humanity is waking up. People are becoming more aware, we are taking all of these tools and technologies for granted. The network is growing, and will continue to grow. Meanwhile, what we actually see with our traditional conditioning is more laws, copyrights, restrictions and so on. It's all an illusion folks. They only exist if you believe they exist. Most, if not all of these new laws are almost entirely uneforceable. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to network intelligence, peer to peer technologies, free internet, sustainable energy systems, etc.

Power of the Network:

Here is an example of some of the stuff that the power of the network is producing by motivated programmers:

Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet (Internet)

Developed by the Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux.

On the alternative energy front:

don't even know where to begin. Breakthroughs in this area are happening almost daily. If you've been reading blogs like World Changing, you'll see that there is so much going on with alternative energy now, that it is now impossible to keep up with the overwhelming rapid pace of global conversion to post-peak-oil alternatives.

Canda Proposing 30 GW wind farm in far north

On the space migration front:

Spaceship One and Two, and then Space Ship Three hold so much promise. There are only the beginning, but they are the first genuine steps of humanity getting off of the planet. With the advent of mass produced nanotubes, we could soon see the commercial construction of several space elevators. Space elevators mean price to space in the hundreds of dollars. Hundreds to change your life forever. What does this mean for the space game? It means that almost everyone who wants to go will go. When you have millions, billions of people who can now afford to go to space, there will be the infrastructure to support it. Every enterprising, capitalizing individual or group will make sure of that. Because the profit potential of this will be enormous beyond all comprehension. To give you an idea, imagine what the total World Gross Product is today. It will triple within the first 5 years of a sub-$1000 price to orbit, and after that it will continue to grow at a conservative 20% a year. Imagine the total economy of humanity growing by 20% a year. You are not rich now? You will be, and so will everyone else. Nothing will ever be the same after this.

I can already hear people, saying, "But what about molecular nanotechnology?". Yes! What's amazing about the above figures is all of that is possible without molecular nanotech. It only requires some master of nanomaterial construction. Once nanotech assemblers hit the scence, things will really take off.

On the longevity front:

If you make it the next 20 years, you're going to live damn near forever. So you might as well accept it. :)

So, what's in store in the next 20 years and beyond

Have fun! Now for me, back to the work at hand. :)

Japan 2015: Auto-Door

I chose that title, because in many ways Japan is already 10 years ahead of the rest of the world in may ways. I think the main reason is because they had to spend their wealth on making the country a better place, rather than on spending one third of it on building the largest military on earth. Livingry vs. Weaponry.

Featured here is an Auto-Door by Tanaka. Although this particular device isn't going to save the world, its a perfect 10 in the cool department. Here is a demo video (real video).

From Gizmodo:

Cleanliness, efficiency, compactness, cool-factor… for a variety of reasons, automatic doors have become a standard feature of Japanese shops. While the typical sliding star-trek style design has proven itself, the tanaka auto door aims to improve upon a good concept. This new design entails strips equipped with infrared sensors that open to the approximate shape of the person or object passing through, minimizing entry of dust, pollen, and bugs while keeping precious air-conditioning in. The technology for the new design seems to be in it’s infancy, but Japan has proven once again that it’s a least 10 years ahead of everyone else.

Three Angles on World Changing

From R.U. Sirius' latest Neofiles.

The demise of the digital revolution has been much exaggerated. We are still producing strange hybrids and lucid networked solutions — dissolving the old hard categories. Thus, for NeoFiles #14, we have the collective problem solving of Jamais Cascios, the non-linear media surfing of DJ Spooky, and the post-ideological libertarianism of Nick Gillespie. Three very different angles united by a sense of pace — despite the outward dreariness of the endless Iraq war and the slow drift towards social insecurity, this world is changing fast and real transformations are possible.

Thanks Bruce.

Inventing Our Evolution

From the Washington Post:

Inventing Our Evolution
We're almost able to build better human beings. But are we ready?
Post
Monday, May 16, 2005; A01

The surge of innovation that has given the world everything from iPods to talking cars is now turning inward, to our own minds and bodies. In an adaptation from his new book, Washington Post staff writer Joel Garreau looks at the impact of the new technology.

Some changes in what it means to be human:

· Matthew Nagel, 25, can move objects with his thoughts. The paralyzed former high school football star, whose spinal cord was severed in a stabbing incident, has a jack coming out of the right side of his skull. Sensors in his brain can read his neurons as they fire. These are connected via computer to a robotic hand. When he thinks about moving his hand, the artificial thumb and forefinger open and close. Researchers hope this technology will, within our lifetimes, allow the wheelchair-bound to walk. The military hopes it will allow pilots to fly jets using their minds.

· Around the country, companies such as Memory Pharmaceuticals, Sention, Helicon Therapeutics, Saegis Pharmaceuticals and Cortex Pharmaceuticals are racing to bring memory-enhancing drugs to market before the end of this decade. If clinical trials continue successfully, these pills could be a bigger pharmaceutical bonanza than Viagra. Not only do they hold the promise of banishing the senior moments of aging baby boomers; they might improve the SAT scores of kids by 200 points or more.

· At the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, programs seek to modify the metabolisms of soldiers so as to allow them to function efficiently without sleep or even food for as much as a week. For shorter periods, they might even be able to survive without oxygen. Another program seeks to allow soldiers to stop bleeding by focusing their thoughts on the wound. Yet another program is investigating ways to allow veterans to regrow blown-off arms and legs, like salamanders.

Traditionally, human technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment, resulting in, for example, clothing, agriculture, cities and airplanes. Now, however, we have started aiming our technologies inward. We are transforming our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities and our progeny. Serious people, including some at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, consider such modification of what it means to be human to be a radical evolution -- one that we direct ourselves. They expect it to be in full flower in the next 10 to 20 years.

"The next frontier," says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, "is our own selves."

The process has already begun. Prozac and its ilk modify personality. Viagra alters metabolism. You can see deep change in the basics of biology most clearly, however, wherever you find the keenest competition. Sport is a good example.

"The current doping agony," says John Hoberman, a University of Texas authority on performance drugs, "is a kind of very confused referendum on the future of human enhancement." Some athletes today look grotesque. Curt Schilling, the All-Star pitcher, in 2002 talked to Sports Illustrated about the major leagues. "Guys out there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven body parts that just don't look right."

Steroids are merely a primitive form of human enhancement, however. H. Lee Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the recent Athens Olympics may have been the last without genetically enhanced athletes. His researchers have created super-muscled "Schwarzenegger rats." They're built like steers, with necks wider than their heads. They live longer and recover more quickly from injuries than do their unenhanced comrades. Sweeney sees it as only a matter of time before such technology seeps into the sports world.

Human enhancement is hardly limited to sport. In 2003, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill to fund research at the molecular level that could lead to medical robots traveling the human bloodstream to fight cancer or fat cells. At the University of Pennsylvania, ordinary male mouse embryo cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans, it could open the way for two gay males to make a baby -- blurring the standard model of parenthood. In 2004, a new technology for the first time allowed women to beat the biological clock. Portions of their ovaries, frozen when they are young and fertile, can be reimplanted in their sixties, seventies or eighties, potentially allowing them to bear children then.

The genetic, robotic and nano-technologies creating such dramatic change are accelerating as quickly as has information technology for the past four decades. The rapid development of all these fields is intertwined.

It was in 1965 that Gordon E. Moore, director of Fairchild's Research and Development Laboratories, noted, in an article for the 35th-anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, that the complexity of "minimum cost semiconductor components" had been doubling every year since the first prototype microchip was produced six years before. And he predicted this doubling would continue every year for the next 10 years.

Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, would come to christen this claim "Moore's Law."

Over time it has been modified. As the core faith of the entire global computer industry, it is now stated this way: The power of information technology will double every 18 months, for as far as the eye can see.

Sure enough, in 2002, the 27th doubling occurred right on schedule with a billion-transistor chip. A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next step is as great as all the previous steps put together. Twenty-seven consecutive doublings of anything man-made, an increase of well over 100 million times-- especially in so short a period -- is unprecedented in human history.

This is exponential change. It's a curve that goes straight up.

Optimists say that culture and values can control the impact of these advances.

"You have to make a distinction between the science and the technological applications," says Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project. "It's probably true that in terms of the basic science, it's pretty hard to stop that. It's not one guy in a laboratory somewhere. But not everything that is scientifically possible will actually be technologically implemented and used on a large scale. In the case of human cloning, there's an abstract possibility that people will want to do that, but the number of people who are going to want to take the risk is going to be awfully small."

Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama says. "We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn't take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust -- "

Fukuyama thinks the school of hard knocks will slow down a lot of attempts. "People may in the abstract say that they're willing to take that risk. But the moment you have a deformed baby born as a result of someone trying to do some genetic modification, I think there will be a really big backlash against it."

Today, nonetheless, we are surrounded by the practical effects of this curve of exponential technological change. IBM this year fired up a new machine called Blue Gene/L. It is ultimately expected to be 1,000 times as powerful as Deep Blue, the machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. "If this computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an important milestone in the future of medicine and health care," said Paul M. Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research, when the project was announced.

Proteins control all cellular processes in the body. They fold into highly complex, three-dimensional shapes that determine their function. Even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into an agent of disease. Blue Gene/L is intended to investigate how. Thus, breakthroughs in computers today are creating breakthroughs in biology. "One day, you're going to be able to walk into a doctor's office and have a computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you, and then instantly prescribe a treatment best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup," Horn said.

What's remarkable, then, is not this computer's speed but our ability to use it to open new vistas in entirely different fields -- in this case, the ability to change how our bodies work at the most basic level. This is possible because at a thousand trillion operations per second, this computer might have something approaching the raw processing power of the human brain.

Nathan Myhrvold, the former technology chief of Microsoft, points out that it cost $12 billion to sequence the first human genome. You will soon be able to get your own done for $10, he expects.

If an implant in a paralyzed man's head can read his thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into better versions of themselves, the line between the engineered and the born begins to blur.

For example, in Silicon Valley, there is a biotech company called Rinat Neuroscience. DARPA provided critical early funding for its "pain vaccine," a substance designed to block intense pain in less than 10 seconds. Its effects last for 30 days. Tests show it doesn't stifle reactions. If you touch a hot stove, your hand will still automatically jerk away. But after that, the torment is greatly reduced. The product works on the inflammatory response that is responsible for the majority of subacute pain. If you get shot, you feel the bullet, but after that, the inflammation and swelling that trigger agony are substantially reduced. The company is deep into animal testing, is preparing reports for scientific conferences, and has now attracted venture capital funding.

Another DARPA program, originally christened Regenesis, started with the observation that if you cut off the tail of a tadpole, the tail will regrow. If you cut off an appendage of an adult frog, however, it won't, because certain genetic signals have been switched off. This process is carried out by a mass of undifferentiated cells called a blastema, also called a regeneration bud. The bud has the capability to develop into an organ or an appendage, if it gets the right signals. Early results in mice indicate that such blastemas might be generated in humans. The program, now called Restorative Injury Repair, is aimed at allowing regrowth of a blown-off hand or a breast removed in a mastectomy. (Instances of amputated fingertips regenerating in children under 12 have long been noted in scientific journals.) "We had it; we lost it; we need to find it again" was Regenesis's original slogan.

Snooze and Lose?
There are three groups of people usually attracted to any new enhancement. In order, they are the sick, the otherwise healthy with a critical need, and the enterprising. This became immediately obvious when a drug called modafinil entered the market earlier this decade. It is intended to shut off the urge to sleep, without the jitter, buzz, euphoria, crash, or potential for paranoid delusion of stimulants such as amphetamines, cocaine or even caffeine.

The FDA originally approved modafinil for narcoleptics who fall asleep frequently and uncontrollably. But this widely available prescription drug, with the trade name Provigil, immediately was tested on healthy young U.S. Army helicopter pilots. It allowed them to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, it turned out they could get up and do it again for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.

But it's the future of the third group -- the millions who, in the immortal words of Kiss, "wanna rock-and-roll all night and party every day" -- that holds the potential for changing society. Will people feel that they need to routinely control their sleep in order to be competitive? Will unenhanced people get fewer promotions and raises than their modified colleagues? Will this start an arms race over human consciousness?

Consider the case of a little boy born in Germany at the turn of this century. As reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, his doctors immediately noticed he had unusually large muscles bulging from his tiny arms and legs. By the time he was 4 1/2 , it was clear that he was extraordinarily strong. Most children his age can lift about one pound with each arm. He could hold a seven-pound dumbbell aloft with each outstretched hand. He is the first human confirmed to have a genetic variation that builds extraordinary muscles. If the effect can be duplicated, it could treat or cure muscle-wasting diseases.

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals is testing a drug designed to do just that as a treatment for the most common form of muscular dystrophy. Will athletes try to exploit the discovery to enhance their abilities?

"Athletes find a way of using just about anything," says Elizabeth M. McNally of the University of Chicago, who wrote an article accompanying the findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This, unfortunately, is no exception."

Views of the Future
Ray Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence pioneer and winner of the National Medal of Technology, shrugs at the controversy over the use of stem cells from human embryos: "All the political energy that has gone into this issue -- it is not even slowing down the most narrow approach." It is simply being pursued outside the United States -- in China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Scandinavia and Great Britain, where scientists will probably achieve success first, he notes.

In the next couple of decades, Kurzweil predicts, life expectancy will rise to at least 120 years. Most diseases will be prevented or reversed. Drugs will be individually tailored to a person's DNA. Robots smaller than blood cells -- nanobots, as they are called -- will be routinely injected by the millions into people's bloodstreams. They will be used primarily as diagnostic scouts and patrols, so if anything goes wrong in a person's body, it can be caught extremely early.

As James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, famously put it: "No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

Gregory Stock of UCLA sees this as the inevitable outcome of the decoding of the human genome. "We have spent billions to unravel our biology, not out of idle curiosity, but in the hope of bettering our lives," he said at a 2003 Yale bioethics conference. "We are not about to turn away from this."

Stock sees humanity embracing artificial chromosomes -- rudimentary versions of which already exist. Right now, the human body has 23 chromosome pairs, with the chromosomes numbered 1 through 46. Messing with them is tricky -- you never know when you're going to inadvertently step on unanticipated interactions. By adding a new chromosome pair (Nos. 47 and 48) to the embryo, however, the possibilities appear endless. Stock, in his book "Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future," describes it as the safest way to substantially modify humans because, he says, it would minimize unintended consequences. On top of that, the chromosome insertion sites could have an off switch activated by an injection if we wanted to stop whatever we'd started. This would give future generations a chance to undo whatever we did.

Stock offers this analysis to counter the argument offered by some bioethicists that inheritable genetic line engineering should be unconditionally banned because future generations harmed by wrongful or unsuccessful modifications would have no control over the matter.

But the very idea of aspiring to such godlike powers is blasphemous to some. "Genetic engineering," writes Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, is "the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But the promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will."

Stock rejects this view. "We should not just accept but embrace the new technologies, because they're filled with promise," he says. Within a few years, he writes, "traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright irresponsible." His projections, he asserts, are not at all out of touch with reality.

Adapted from the book "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human" by Joel Garreau, to be published May 17 by Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. © 2005 by Joel Garreau. Reprinted with permission.

Science finding Spirit

After reading up on some of the theories of Quantum Physics, and then Physics as a whole, I was surprised how closely linked some of the theories are to well known concepts of Magick and Spirituality in general.

String theory started to bring to mind Don Juan's description of 'Incandescent threads stretched into infinity in every conceivable direction'. Type-2 String theory having 10 dimensions that equal the number of Kabbalistic planes, M-theory with 11 dimensions, which of course still maps the Kabbalistic planes when the hidden or 11th Sephiroth Daath is included. David Bohm's idea of our universe enfolding back into the substance from where it came from, mirroring Terence McKenna's idea of everything coming from the singularity.

These two ideas especially. To quote Terence McKenna :

"All these images - the starship, the space colony, the lapis - are precursory images. They follow naturally from the idea that history is the shock wave of eschatology. As close distance with the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing itself. In the final moment the Unspeakable stands revealed."

And then David Bohm :

"Let's say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter. But there could well be other such pulses. To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; In a greater context, it's a little ripple. Everything emerges by unfoldment from the holomovement, then enfolds back into the implicate order."

In many ways Physics theories are arriving at conclusions the Magicians, Shamans, Buddhists, Sorcerers, and many others of the Earth have known all along : that objective reality is just one of many realities open to human perception. In a way it's almost poetic : Science is helping to re-affirm many Occult and Spiritual beliefs and ideas even though it's so seperated from them. The comparisons help to show on many levels that aspects of reality repeat themselves in a fractal nature.

Maybe one day if the seperated fields of Science can work together, work alongside and learn from each other, they could guide the whole profession to a place that's a lot more balanced, productive and helpful for Humanity and the Earth as a whole, and at the same time develop the all round skills to help guide evolution alongside the great Artists and Adepts of the future.

Sci-Fi Living: Future Art from NAO Design

From the same people who brought us the mini Jawa Crawler, NAO Design has lots of other goodies, many of which have been inspired and created for the Playa. Below are some of my favorites. They remind me of something I might see in Barbarella or in Spock's quarters. Most of these are reproductions can purchased from NAO's online store.

Vertebrate Lamp
A columnar lamp comprised of a white lycra sleeve stretched over circular fiberglass ribs. The Vertebrate is adaptable to be stretched and anchored floor-to-ceiling, or made to be free-standing with an internal frame of up to 8 feet in height. The lamp is illuminated internally with either standard halogen or fluorescent blacklight, or a combination of the two. Dimmer switch included.

Eliptolux Lamp
A steep cut across a tube of high impact plastic exposes the elliptical cross-section of the Eliptolux table lamp. A halogen bulb sits in the base, weighted for stability, and the white interior projects light up and out, providing a warm glow without direct glare.

Tower Lamp
Three stainless steel slides, each perforated with hundreds of holes and lined on the interior with hanji paper, come together to form the triangular hanging Tower Lamp. Can also be converted to a standing desk lamp. Uses a standard halogen bulb and measures 24 inches high.

Holey Glow
Three thousand, six hundred holes perforate the plastic cylinder of each Holey Glow lamp. The interior is illuminated with a halogen bulb and lined with dyed hanji paper of a variety of colors. Measures forty inches by six inches wide.

Nellophone
Musical organs operate on the principle that reverberating the air within a pipe of given length will produce a note an octave above a tube that is twice its length, and it is this effect that the Nellophone utilizes to sound its thirty different note from A an octave below middle C to D and octave above middle C. With the musician standing at the instrument's axis, a slap of the special paddles across the padded mouth of each tube produces a hauntingly electronic sound. The tubes range in length from 6 to 30 feet, and the entire device spans 12 feet wide by 15 feet high.

Cauldone
9 triangular plates of welded steel comprise the hexagonal basin and feet of the Cauldrone fire pit. Measuring 35 inches across and standing 16 inches tall, the conically-shaped basin accommodates a large volume of ashes to minimize the need for emptying, while the pointed feet minimize heat transfer to the surface below. The mood, however, is maximized when the dark, angled form of the pit frames bright curls of flame.

Antler Fire
In the cold of winter of the dark night, this odd headpiece actually does serve to provide both heat and light, though it is usually worn just for looks. The helmet itself is made of leather and steel to protect the wearer's head. A portable 1-lb. propane cylinder is worn on the belt and connects via a small hose to the back of the helmet. Six shape-able copper tubes protrude from the helmet and are specially tipped to prevent blowout of the flames. Runs for 1 hour on a single tank, and includes a manual valve on the helmet.

KinetAural Suit
Pressure, light, and flex sensors embedded in the neck, elbows, wrists, knees, and feet sense and transmit bodily movements to a PC where they are synthesized into sounds that move with the user. Various sound templates allow modulation of seven variables including pitch, volume, phase and waveform.

Floating Speakers
Acoustic speakers are comprised, in essence of a thin diaphragm to couple sound to the air, and a driver to resonate the diaphragm. In these speakers, the driver is optimized for lightweight, and the diaphragm is a special Mylar balloon which enables sound of surprisingly high fidelity to emanate from the silvery orb floating overhead. It is anchored by a stylized base which contains a miniature amplifier, 9-volt battery, and plug for connecting to standard headphone jacks.

TeleFloatation
The core of this craft, which houses a color video camera, 2.4 Ghz video transmitter, and radio control receiver, mounts onto an 8-foot balloon and propeller assembly for flight, or onto a 7-inch car chassis for terrestrial use.

The camera's video signal is received by a wearable module that displays the onboard view to the remote pilot via a custom heads-up display helmet, which itself senses lateral and vertical head movement and translates that motion into equivalent panning of the camera. The result is a surreal experience that immerses the user in a disembodied form and allows a dream-like exploration and interaction.

William Irwin Thompson: Visions of a Holistic Future

This is a follow-up post to Building a Robust Psychedelic Community

According to William Irwin Thompson, the founder of the Lindisfarne Association and author of many books on the future, humanity is passing through a collective spiritual initiation. This process has three phases:

1. The illumination of the shadow side
2. Discovery of the edge of sanity
3. Defeat of the ego

According to Thompson, these stages and changes will affect different sections of society at different times. The first will be teh various spiritual communities; next the artistic community; then the scientists and; finally the politicians.

According to Thompson, there are different cultural forces at work to reshape the planet. The first is an emergent sense of world community. The second is the decentralization of cities. The third is the miniaturization of technology. The fourth is the interiorization of consciousness.

These four forces are working to create a new model for living - what he calls the meta-industrial village. Such villages would be characterized by:

1. Energy self-sufficiency
2. Agricultural self-sufficiency
3. Cottage industries for production of salable goods
4. Education of body mind and spirit for village members.

My question: Does this make sense? Is such a future as outlined by Thompson viable? Are there any indications of the growth of any meta-industrial village in the western world?

How Can We Change the Future?

Poetry.

So said James Carse, the author of Finite + Infinite Games, at a talk entitled ""Religious War in Light of the Infinite Game" I went to last Friday, hosted by the Long Now Foundation.

There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.

Will the finite players consume the infinite players? His vision shows him that that is the most likely outcome if we as a species do not evolve.

And then the game will end.

But the poets are the ones who can help us keep playing, as long as the too are playing the infinite game.

So what is a poet? His definition of poets and poetry came from Plato's Republic.

A poet is one who changes another's perception of reality with intent. And of course by changing the way someone thinks one changes the way they act.

Who are our poets? His prime example of the poet in the now was Osama Bin Laden. A man who, primarily thru some simple videos, caused massive intentional change in the world. It was a poetic act. But this is, of course, poetry bound to the service of the finite game.

Now undoubtedly some of you reading this will realize that where he uses the word poet, some may use magician, sorcerer. I personally do. I find it to be the metaphor that contains the most useful information to understand this aspect of the world. The best definition of magic, after all, is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.

And what do sorcerers do? Cast spells. Entrance, enchant, hypnotize.

This follows on greatly from LXV23's vision in Memewars.

The battles we need to fight, the choices we need to make, the spells we need to cast, the poetry we need to write, the fundamental change we need to create is ...

To show people how to lighten up.

Loosen up.

Have fun.
And play.

Illuminate.
Awaken.

And dissolve their reality tunnels, their finite less than zero sum games.

Because the infinite game is the only real game in town.

Peak Oil: Open Forum

Is this our future?

or this?

or something else altogether different?

Peak Oil is getting more and more attention these days. Most people either think that Peak Oil is decades away so we have nothing to worry about, or it is now upon us, or soon will be, and that society as we know it will collapse. Most of the latter think progress will not continue and we will not be able to transition to an alternative energy economy. They say most people, at least in the developed world, will die and those that are left will be living like the Amish; making do with what scraps they can find (Think The Postman). Do you agree, disagree? Why?

Some people say that we must transition to a hydrogen economy. Our pals over at World Changing, just posted an overview of the hydrogen economy, with some good links. I have become more skeptical of the hydrogen economy, in light of some of its proponents saying we may have to depend on centralized nuclear power to make it feasible. For me, that is two strikes against it - nuclear (with all of its waste), and centralized (controlled by elites). My opinion is that the more decentralized and ecologically sustainable our energy infrastructure is, the more democratic, and politically and environmentally stable our world would be. I'm hoping we can transition to an alternative energy infrastructure before it's too late.

Is it too late for a Design Science Revolution?

Do you think that we will transition past Peak Oil into a transhumanist future? How? Or is the future going to look like the Amish in rural Pennsylvania? Do you think that this whole question is the wrong question? Is Peak Oil a myth?

My main reason for starting this open forum is to hear from people who can provide a third point of view - one that acknowledges the peak oil problem, while providing a way out that does not consist of going back 200 years and living like the Amish.

Let the conversation begin.

New Dark Ages or New Aeon?

Sorry for the large number of political posts coming in the wake of this election, but I figure the mood is right to discuss it while we are so hungry for hope. I think all this stuff is VERY relevant to our future because it's going to effect everyone on the planet. Incubating positive and sustainable futures is going to require heroic work by all of us if we want to see it come to pass. It will be to our advantage to see where political forces are moving to best prepare us for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

You may have heard Bin Ladin's latest video communiqué, where he's stated his true intention of bankrupting the United States. Bruce Sterling posted an interesting piece, but the most enligntened analysis I've ever read of Al Qaeda is here.

What I find ironic is that before Bin laden, America already beat him to the punch! America is already bankrupt, but our economy is being artifically propped up by other nations, especially Japan. With Bush having taken turned the countries biggest surplus into the biggest deficit has been nothing but a final blow into the belly of the beast. Bush and Bin Laden can fight for credit for bankrupting the country if that's what they want to do. Who cares, the job is done already. It shoud also be noted that bankrupting the government has long been on the agenda of extreme right fiscal conservatives such as Grover Norquist, who is one of Bush's main economic advisors and has stated repeatedly that is precisely what he intends to do. And if you've been following the news, the Bush Administration recently asked for the debt ceiling to be raised a couple more trillion dollars! What a joke.

All of this of course is completely insane, yet people are getting all upset because supposedly our children and grandchildren will have to pay it off. Sorry, but that is just nonsense. You can't bleed blood from a turnip either. It's time for a serious reality check. America's debt is now so huge that it will never be paid off! And what do debtors do who can't pay off their debts? They declare bankruptcy. The only reason America hasn't done it yet, is that all sorts of foreign investors have kept it from happening, especially Japan. But bankruptcy is now inevitable and will likely occur on Bush's watch, now that he is president again for the next 4 years.

So what then does this really mean for the American Empire and in turn the rest of the world?

Several months ago Future Hi Editor and good friend Flemming Funch posted this interesting analysis, which I've quoted below in it's entirety.

How, then, does a nation deal with debts that so greatly outrun its ability to pay? There are basically only five strategies. All are unappealing. Most are calamitous.

The most difficult strategy is, not surprisingly, the honest one: raise taxes and pay your bills. This is what King George III did following the Seven Years War with France in 1763. England had quadrupled its national debt in fighting the War and needed money to pay it off. It turned to the richest people in the realm, the Colonists, and began taxing paper, glass, paint, lead, and, of course, tea. The result, as we know, was the American Revolution.

It was the same strategy-raising taxes on the rich-that Louis XVI attempted in 1789. The French national debt had grown 10 fold under the pharoic opulence of Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV. Louis called the nobility and the clergy together and told them they would have to ante up. They, after all, had been exempted from taxes by Louis XIV in order to buy their complicity in his autocratic reign. Indignant, they refused to pay, precipitating the French Revolution, the most explosive upheaval to established government in the last thousand years.

A second strategy to deal with excessive debts is simply to print money. This is what Weimar Germany did to address the crushing debt imposed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Before it was over the government had inflated the money supply by over a trillion times, leading some to comment that it was a waste of ink to put it onto paper worth so much less than the ink itself. The German middle class, whose assets were held at fixed amounts in government pensions, was destroyed. The collapse gave direct rise to Adolph Hitler.

A third strategy for dealing with onerous national debt is to sell off national assets. This is one of the first strategies the IMF imposes on third world countries that have gotten behind in their payments to western banks. Government-run industries, from telecommunications to water systems, are "privatized" and the country's natural resources are sold off to the highest foreign bidder. This is what Great Britain was forced to do in the aftermath or World War II.

Two world wars in only 30 years had ravaged the British economy and the pound sterling. Facing collapse at home (and revolution abroad), the government surrendered almost all of its colonies, from India and Pakistan to Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. These had been among the greatest wealth-producing properties of modern times, the ones that had made the British Empire what it was. Their loss left Britain a second-rate power with only misty memories of its once imperial greatness.

A fourth strategy for dealing with excessive debt is to repudiate it. This was used for centuries in the early days of the modern world and was revived two years ago by Argentina which brazenly refused to pay some $110 billion in debts it had accumulated over prior decades. More ominously, it was this strategy that was used by the Bolsheviks after they took power in the Russian Revolution.

The new communist government refused to be bound by the debts of the overthrown Romanovs. But the French had loaned heavily to the Russian government for decades before World War I and now were left in a lurch. A cascading series of defaults from one bank to another caused a liquidity crisis on the continent, ultimately setting off the Great Depression.

Finally, there is plunder. When a nation's debt load becomes so huge it cannot plausibly reassure creditors regarding repayment, it must seek some source of wealth, any source, to keep the borrowed money flowing. This, naked predation, is what kept the Roman Empire alive for the last two hundred years of its existence. It is the strategy adopted by the Spanish Empire-silver and gold from America-and which eventually destroyed the vitality of its own merchant and civil servant classes.

Which, then, of the five above strategies will the U.S. adopt to deal with its exploding debt problem?

The author concludes, quite reasonably, I think, that Bush's answer will be a combination of solutions 3, 4 and 5. Sell off big chunks of assets to private interests, negate the responsibility for covering future social security, and go and plunder resources in other countries. Not pretty, but one might possibly keep it going for a while before anybody notices.

I think the world is starting to notice. Question now is what is the world going to do about it?

My thinking is that if America goes bankrupt so will most of the world. Large companies like Halliburton, which have acted as parasites of taxpayers’ money will go down the tubes with it. I can see two possible futures emerging from this. The first is Bin Laden's dream of seeing the entire modern world come crashing down into a new dark ages. The other is seeing all the worlds’ people, empowered by sustainable technologies and global communications, w building a better society out of the ashes of the old. It reminds me of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. When it fell, it was the start of a 1000-year dark age. Can this time be any different? I think so. One very important thing separates us from those 1600 years ago. Today we have technology that is speeding up like crazy. Nanotechnology is right around the corner; perhaps just in time to pick up when everything else comes crashing down.

For half of my life I've heard many people say it's going to get worse before it gets better. Perhaps it will take a disaster of "apocalyptic" magnitude for humanity to self-correct. In my opinion the current system is broken beyond repair. Now with the fundamentalist on both sides declaring jihad, this broken system can't maintain itself much longer. Something is going to give, and when it does I expect the whole house of cards to come falling down with it. Lets just hope that there will be enough progressive and enlightened people in the aftermath to lead us out of the darkness into a new more enlightened golden dawn.

Some parting thoughts via DRT News:

The Optimism of Uncertainty

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability.

Breaking the Veil

Ever since I was a small child I’ve had the most amazing dream life. Although I’ve also had my share of nightmares and even off periods, most of the time my dreams are always deeply satisfying and beautiful. Like most children I lacked the capacity to clearly distinguish between the dream world and reality. However, if you ask the Aborigini’s, such a distinction is meaningless anyway, with the dreamworld being the more "real" of the two. For me this is a belief I share with them and have carried into adulthood. My dreams have offered so many profound insights, and the lucidity of them has been so intense and real to the depths of my being, that to deny the veracity of these experiences would be to deny my very soul – the deepest meanings that guide my life. And it is here that people start to make value judgments that although the inner life of dreams might be significant, the external world is more important, because without it we die. In the West particularly this emphasis has been valued almost exclusively to the detriment to our inner lives. As Ghandi once said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, he said, "I think it’s a good idea."

So what am I getting at? Quite simply, I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here. I have speculated often about how I think there are “dark forces” that are conspiring in one way or another, perhaps merely out of greedy and banal self-interest to further their own ends, at the expense of everyone else. So as a result over the centuries we now have this overly complex, rigged system that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of not only everyone else, but now the planet itself.

Bucky Fuller said way back in 1965 that right now we have the capability to feed, house and clothe everyone on the planet sufficiently that everyone would live like billionaires. So why hasn’t this happened? Because those at the top want remain the exlusive shareholders of such graces. To sacrifice their exclusivity would be to sacrifice power and control. Since fear ultimately rules these people, that fear will keep them stuck in this struggle for power. Unfortunately for them, their days of power and control are coming to an end. Despite the signs all around of us of increasing repression, surveillance and control, there is no way the system can sustain itself much longer. I have written about this lack of sustainability here and here.

I started thinking deeply again about all of this since I came back from Burning Man a few weeks ago. The evidence of a build-up towards some kind of cambrian explosion as Ming points out here is all around us. What amazes me these last few years is how much everything has changed from a 'potential' standpoint in terms of connectivity, collective intelligence, communications, smart mobs, internet, global network point of view, yet how much everything has remained the same.

How much longer can the old hierarchies, this old civilization keep hanging on amidst so much grass-roots intelligence burgeoning all around us? Burning Man is a good example of just how much energy and connectivity is there - so much that it was overwhelming... and until I went I had no idea! I could feel it everywhere, the social networks, the people all talking with each other, most of them all on this high vibratory wavelength. It's not a fluke, and it's not just because of Burning Man. It's already there. I compare it to the functioning of mushrooms, which are merely the sex organs of this vast underground mycellia network. This network grows, and grows, and it then reaches a critical point, where it then flowers. I see the same thing now in what I recently called Counter Culture 2.0. The connections are so thick and complex, that no manner of oppression can wipe it out now, except the end of life itself.

And since each day the technologies of connectivity continue to minuturize and grow smarter each day, there will come a point, soon I think, where this huge breakout will occur.

Those at the top are not stupid, they know this, sense this is coming, which is why I think they are so scared, and the global politic is getting so nasty and repressive, especially here in the states, where this connective freedom is greatest. That is no coincidence.

So rather than some smooth "controlled" evolutionary move upwards, its going to be a sudden out of control breakout. I suppose I was hoping for the former, but I'll settle for the latter over stagnation and death.

I'm more hopeful than ever.

Predicting the Future

OK, it is a lot easier to criticise other people's predictions than to make one's own. But it might get one going on thinking of better ones. I was just reading an article, It’s 2014, and life is the same. Only better by Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. And, well, as his title honestly says, he's describing life the same, just a little better. And it struck me how much it sounded like essays I would write about the future when I was around 11. That's about 34 years ago. He writes better than I did, but then again my predictions were about the year 2000, which was considered "The Future" back then.

I thought that in the year 2000 we'd be able to work at home if we wanted, and we'd be able to shop in stores through video screens at home, and that we'd be able to get our own personalized newspaper printed out every morning, with exactly the kind of news we'd prefer. I'd be able to speak commands to machines around me, and robots in my kitchen could make me breakfast on their own, and clean the house. We'd have self-driving cars. Or flying cars if we were going into the country. We'd be able to easily travel up to a space station, or to the Moon or Mars.

The first part of my predictions were quite spot on. That's called the Internet. The rest is, shockingly, hardly any closer than in 1970. The space program was more active and vibrant back then. The test projects for self-driving cars look about the same as they did back then. You still can't buy a flying car.

Cars and houses look about the same. Oh, they have different styling, but nothing fundamentally different at all. Air bags? They could have made a balloon be blown up really quickly back then too, if anybody had asked for it.

The stuff that has changed unbelivably much is the virtual. The stuff we can do inside computers. Even though we're still strangely conservative about what we make them do. We manage to make computers 10,000 faster, and still word processing seems no faster than way back when. But the greater power leverages other things to happen. Like, the way we connect things together and how we network information - that suddenly puts us on a different plane.

Notice that the features of my old prediction that require AI didn't happen. Because, surprisingly to some, AI didn't really happen. I can buy a vacuum cleaner that will move around on the floor and clean by itself, fairly well, if you have certain types of flooer surfaces, and not too difficult things in its way. One could probably have made that mechanically in 1970 or 1950, if it were a priority, and not much worse. Today I can speak to a computer and it might type my words pretty well, if I've trained it, but it still doesn't understand what I say, even vaguely. No, it wasn't so much the AI that advanced. It was the ability to calculate much faster, and to connect lots of things together, and to make various kinds of virtual realities possible.

Interestingly, the material technologies that are most promising, and that really might give us a profoundly, drastically different future are all in the realm of the virtual. Making matter virtual. Nano-tech, quantum physics, genetics. Really small stuff that, if we find out how to program it, suddenly allows us to rebuild reality in a drastically different way.

Will we have done so by 2014? Will it really just be that your toilet analyzes your urine and tells you you've got a cold? And that your kitchen cooks a low-carb breakfast for you by itself? I hope not, although those might possibly be good things.

Predictions of daily life in the future easily end up sounding sort of sugar coated and problem free. So, if one 35 years ago predicted that I today could have a custom newspaper on a screen and shop in stores and talk with people in other countries on a video phone, it would be presented as if it somehow made life leisurely and problem-free. But life is no less stressful today, and my life isn't suddenly leisurely because I have those things. It is kind of like an architect's mock-up of a new building, with stylized people who stroll about between green trees and pathways, with conveniently located service facilities. But when it is actually built, it is just some mall, and it is filled with real people who're stressed and on their way somewhere. Usually never looks as leisurely and perfect as in the vision. At least not unless it stays as a virtual simulation of some kind.

But, again, in 10 years, will anything have managed to REALLY change how we live. The Internet changed it more in a couple of years than anything else I can think of in the past 100 years. It was a disruptive change. Most forecasters have a hard time guessing which disruptive changes will come along. Although we have a few very likely ones in our focus. Nano, genetics. And some people center it all around an expected major AI breakthrough. In part because that might potentially solve some of the huge dangers inherent in some of the other things.

It is entirely possible that somebody might invent cheap universal nano-tech within the next 10 years. I mean something that can construct whatever you imagine, or rather whatever you can program, or download the blueprint for, as long as the needed atoms are around. Like an inkjet printer that spits out atoms and print objects. Suddenly objects are virtual, and the game would totally change. How we live would change thoroughly and drastically within just a few months.

The future is so open now, with such a range of possibilies, that it becomes almost laughable to predict a world in 10 years that just has more, and a little cooler stuff, that is essentially the same. But many of the bold predictions from 35 years ago didn't happen at all, and we just got more of the same. So of course we might have just more of the same in 10 years. Maybe a better electronic voting system for choosing between your favorite Republican presidential candidate and your favorite Democratic candidate. Yawn, gasp! The FCC releases some more spectrum, and technology gets better, so you can have 100Mbits to your cellphone, and watch movies in 3D in the bus, which will be charged to your credit card, and which then self-destructs in 5 hours. All cars would have nagivation systems, and maybe collision detection systems. Just enough stuff every year to make you keep buying. The US army would have robotic bombers that more efficiently could kill more people in foreign places, without even having to send any people there. Microsoft would've come out with some updated version of the paperclip, which can make more wide-spanning stupid assumptions about everything you're trying to do, and correct even more things that didn't need to be corrected.

I'd be leaning towards hoping for some disruptive and more pervasive change. Something so disruptive that it kills most of those factors that would otherwise ensure that we'd just have more of the same. Something that destroys the current economic power structure. In a good way, in making it instantly obsolete and replaced with something better. I hope for such things because, despite increasingly rapid change in some areas, the future is at risk of being boring and stagnant.

I also expect disruptive change for the reason that progress in many areas is held back by backwards economics. The future that was expected from the year 2000 a few decades before was quite reasonable and logical. It would have happened if it weren't because there weren't any terribly profitable reason for investing capital in making it so. What was profitable was to give us apparently a little more of the same every year, in a new model, with new features, but nothing that really changed things. Weren't any profit in giving us space stations. Certainly weren't any in even attempting to feed us all, or even get us clean drinking water. Weren't any profit in taking good care of our environment.

Collectively I think we'll discover that we've been cheated, and that we're living in a falsely retarded world that doesn't have to be that way at all. Some forces are going to clash. Disruptive paradigm shifts sometimes come about because of pent-up problems that weren't solved, and pent-up solutions that existed, but weren't applied. At some point it breaks through, and things have to change rather quickly, because they failed to change gradually.

Our greatest leverage is in the areas that aren't artificially retarded, because nobody figured out yet how to do so, because they didn't start trying before it was too late. Our ability to network ourselves with each other and with information, electronically, and the likelihood we'll be free to do that faster and better. It is a way we can create something very different, which might at first be somewhat invisible. Not a different kind of car or microwave for me and my family. Not just something a few people are consuming. Something millions of people are doing together. A whole new collective organism. Which needs to start dealing better with meaning. And which, once it gets smarter, or we get smarter through it, needs to feed back to our material world and make it smarter and more fun and livable, on our own collective terms.

Being creatures who tend to live in certain mental grooves, when asked to predict the future, we usually extrapolate more of the same. Which might be right. But we usually forget to predict the changed behavior that comes about when certain things go through certain thresholds. For many years we had telephones. And for years one could very expensively get a portable one. We didn't expect the changed behavior patterns that would come about by a majority of people in the world having a cheap portable phone in their pocket at all times. One could have predicted that electronic networks would have allowed us to send electronic mail to each other, and it would be more efficient than paper mail. But the social aspects of what happened when enough of us were online would have been hard to predict. We can predict many things one could do if one had self-replicating nano-tech. But is hard to predict what will change and what will happen once those things are accepted and widespread, and we use that as a springboard for something else. We might see the next hilltop, but have a hard time seeing the valleys and bigger hills beyond it. There are event horizons beyond which we can't see, no matter the strength of our glasses, so we have to imagine.

I predict that within the next 10 years there will be at least one, but probably several disruptive changes that are so surprising and pervasive that life will be very different from how we know it or how we project it to be. There won't be a Ford Taurus 2014 or an NBC Nightline News or an aisle in the supermarket with fruit juice with 10% more real fruit. Other than in a retro simulation for people who like them for atmosphere. I don't know. There is no future, really. There's just right now, and there still will be just now in 10 years. Thinking about the future as separate from the now is just one of those mind games we play with ourselves, when we are bored or inspired, or fearful or hopeful. A mind game that sometimes helps us knowing which fork in the road to take right now, by examining which of the imagined journeys would suit us best.

Humanities Coming Long Life and Prosperity

Humanity is going to survive. Already we are undergoing rapid technological change, becoming more modular, flexible and adaptable. In a very real sense almost every human alive today is in the process of becoming transhuman.

This is an issue I’ve thought about a long time – the future, the future of humanity, of life and intelligence. It would be fair to say it has been my life long obsession. For almost that entire time, this obsession has taken its toll on my ego, resulting in times of joy, optimism and delight, as well as grief, sorrow and crippling paranoia. I’ve delved deep into both science and mysticism, inner and outer space, looking for answers, clues to where life is heading. Some would say that life is heading nowhere in particular, that it is nothing more than a product of blind evolution and random mutation meandering its way through time. But yet, there is evolution. Although perhaps on the microscopic scale random mutation reigns supreme, over time there is a clear movement from simplicity to complexity. From homogeneity to diversity. From entropy to extropy. Now life has filled every niche, even niches that no scientist could ever have thought possible less than a decade ago. There is life in the bottom of the ocean, in high pressure boiling water, and miles deep below the Antarctic ice shelf. Humanity with our intelligence has steadily moved from cave dwelling hunter gatherers, barely surviving from one generation to the next, into a global species capable of surviving everywhere, even in the cold vacuum of outerspace.

There is a vector then to this march of evolution through time. And it hasn’t come without its fair share of bruises. Solar Storms, tectonic shifts, cometary and meteor impacts, global atmospheric poisoning, super-volcanoes, ice ages and global warming – resulting in at least 5 major extinctions in earth’s history.

And now we have our modern era. One that for most people is filled with fear and gloom, and what some scientista are now saying is earths sixth great extinction. Throughout history humanity has had its own fair share of bruises - starvation, disease, famine, wars, plagues, cultural clashes, and mother nature. Yet we have survived every manner of both environmental assault and human folly. And now in our present era we are experiencing the most rapid change our planet has ever seen, due almost entirely to a feedback loop in which we are directly amplifying and being amplified by. Depending on who you talk to, and more importantly how you interpret the overwhelming amount of incoming data, we are either heading for extinction or transcending into something altogether new and spectacular – a quantum evolutionary leap equivalent or exceeding in magnitude all evolutionary leaps before it.

At this point almost every intelligent person has weighed in on the subject. Technologist like Bill Joy thinks that our chances of survival are slim. The astophysicist Martin Rees and the technologist-inventor Ray Kurzweil are putting our odds at around 50/50. And the Singularitarians are saying that unless a super intelligence can be created soon, are odds of making it are less than 1%. So who’s right? One thing is for certain, the means of our destruction are multiplying and falling into ever greater numbers of hands. As Mark Pesce says, we are rapidly approaching the day when, for all intents and purposes, every child will have tactical nuclear weapons.

Yet, despite these alleged facts and expert pontificated probabilities, I’m placing my bets on the survival and prosperity of intelligent life. And it won’t be just survival that is life’s inheritance, but abundant, glorious, diverse and ultimately supremely happy life expanding rapidly out into the universe towards infinity.

How did I come to this conclusion? First and foremost life has always made it, and the historical evidence continues to mount. But more importantly - despite every major new piece of data that says we shouldn't be here, we shouldn't have survived, our existence is testament that we did! The fact that anything exists at all is pretty miraculous. And according to inflationary theory, our universe teeters on the edge of zero-point vacuum fluctuations that could wipe us all out in an instant. Yet we are still here! But something more than just scientific evidence moved me to this conclusion. Not long ago, for a few precious moments I slipped the bonds of my ego long enough to see that life is doing just fine, despite my own ego’s particular problems or worries to the contrary. All my life, I have in some manner placed my ego at the center of what is important, what constitutes what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, what will improve our odds of survival and/or diminish it. Like most people, I deeply feared death in some manner or other. Yet, as I look around at all that is happening, my ego, and probably yours too is under assault from constant accelerating change, information anxiety, unpredictability and increasing uncertainty as to whether we as individuals will survive. Because I placed my worldview within the context of my ego, I increasingly came to the conclusion that life will not make it. When it is more accurate to say that any one individual life, including mine is faced with greater uncertainty. In turn I placed my ego in line with humanity and life as a whole, mistakingly placing the odds of my survival in line with that of the whole species. Having transcended my ego long enough to see this, I no longer despair at what has always been true anyway, that my ego will not survive even if my physical form remains intact. The changes are too drastic for my ego to remain intact. Each day our ego's go through almost imperceptible little mini-deaths and rebirths. Every so often, a traumatic even results in a larger death and rebirth of our worldview. Hopefully this rebirth results in a more positive and life affirming mindset. As the world goes through more change, our ego has to evolve, and transcend itself more and more if it hopes to stay in the game, amidst increasing novelty and unpredictability.

In every sense the world politic has never been more unstable than it is now. Those in power are feeling this change even more than we are. While we experienced the ups and downs of economic cycles, those at the top lived under relative stability. But now the degree of change is so rapid, that even their cocoon of stability is under direct assault. Their long used habits of maintaining the status quo are failing, and they are having to constantly re-think new ways of maintaining control. As a friend reminded me recently quoting Star Wars, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers". This fact is scaring the hell out of them, and so they are rapidly making attempts to bring the entire resources of the globe under their direct control. The evidence is all around us. The question is will they succeed? No. They may come close, but things are moving way too fast now. Change is so great that all their models of control are obsoleted before they can ever become policy. In the time it takes them to think up a new method of control, life and change have evolved past their model. Unfortunately these people are really desperate. Think of them as drug addicts who have become long accustomed to having absolute power, or at least sufficient power to maintain their way of life. They are now loosing that power to the decentralized forces of the network. More and more power is falling into the hands of more and more people, at ever cheaper costs. Al Qaeda may be a convenient boogeyman for them, but it is also symbolic of this decentralization that is scaring them so much.

Bruce Sterling has speculated that this decentralization of power is going to make for one very crazy ride, where thugs of every variety will be committing atrocities all over the globe. A complete breakdown of nation states into tribal feuding thugs, duking it out for control of markets and territories, while the rest of us are caught in the middle. I have no doubt this is one likely possibility. Unfortunately, this acceleration of technological savvy and networked intelligence will continue to increase, and those thugs in turn will find it increasingly difficult to maintain any kind of control.

Meanwhile, the chances of accidental or intentional release of a nasty bug that wipes out a large percentage of humanity is becoming more likely. The question is how will humanity respond to all of this? If there is one thing people hate it is despotism. Every chance people are given a chance they always choose democracy. Despite ever increasing stupidity of the US government in attempting to lock down the internet, the world is wising up to this. I have no idea how any of this will shape up or shake out. My guess is there is going to be a lot of death and destruction. I would not be surprised at all if 80% or more of humanity is wiped out ever the next 20 years. Some have even said that is in fact the agenda of those in power. That may be so, but their biggest mistake will be thinking they will control this new world in the wake of so much death and destruction. Although 80% of humanity might be dead, the remaining 20% are going to be extremely motivated. And even though the technologies of control will be unprecedented, so too will the power of technology be in the streets. The collective power of the network made possible by ever smarter social software will allow collective action like the world has never seen. The balance of power is already shifting in this direction at rapid pace, and desperate attempts to tip that balance back will be temporary at best.

So after every major catastrophe, despotism, global war, nuclear attacks, biological virus, there will be survivors. Because if life has learned anything is that it wants to survive. And humanity being the intelligent edge of this evolutionary life force will use all of its drive to survive. Through the massive collective action of individuals powered by decentralized networks, people will build new communities and move forward past all of these horrible atrocities. We/They will look back at all the mistakes that were made that led to such devastation and vow never to repeat them. We/They will be deeply grateful to all of us alive today who lived right now doing our best to sort it all out, and who were alive as humanity and all of life enters the coming bottleneck. Life and in turn humanity will go on to prosper, evolve into transhumanity, post-humanity taking the best of everything and shedding the worst as it moves out into the cosmos. Our ego's have no choice.

Mind & Destiny

By Elwin Reed

Do you remember the last time when you heard, or saw, or read another of those predictions of doom and gloom for our civilization? Was it just yesterday, certainly sometime within the last week. Perhaps it was about how we are going to perish from a global warming brought about by any of perhaps a dozen of the currently popular doomsday theories, ranging from the decimation of the rain forests to the thinning of the ozone layer; and I don't deny it, these do loom large as problems on the planet earth.

Then there is the contrarian view, that instead of worrying about global warming, we should be pre-occupied with the onslaught of a new Ice Age; instead of burning up, we are going to freeze to death!

And if that particular end doesn't appeal to you, there are scientists who stand ready to persuade you that before you ever get a chance to fry from the heat, or freeze from the cold, the global changes in weather patterns are already underway that will result in such enormous meltoffs of the polar icecaps, that most of the human race will simply drown in the rising waters of the oceans.

And then there are the possibilities of the earth tilting on its axis, or a catastrophic series of earthquakes, or we might all perish in a thermonuclear holocaust.

Pretty grim stuff, isn't it? And we are surrounded by it, inundated in it, there seems to be no getting away from it some days.

As the wife said to her husband: "Shall we watch the six o'clock news and get indigestion, or wait for the ten o'clock news and have insomnia?"

There seems to be something in man's nature that just loves bad news [see Disasterbation]. Don't believe me? Just look at a newspaper.., any paper.., any day, and look for the good news. Since the dawn of our known civilization ten thousand years ago, it's been like that, and I don't think it's going to change now.

But it can change for you and I. We don't have to subscribe to all the doom and gloom scenarios that abound out there! There is too much to be positive about, there is too glorious a future ahead for our civilization, for us to get bogged down in the negativities of this present time, which in the over all scale of the human existence, may be measured as no more than a fleeting moment. And this isn't some kind of pollyann-ish optimism. It's not an optimism based on a positive attitude without anything to back it up.

We, the human race, have got an ace in the hole. We've got a MIND.

That's right, I said a mind! The human mind is what has got us this far and it's going to get us a lot farther. Just how far, no one knows, but later on I would like to suggest a few possibilities, possibilities that are so far reaching as to be beyond our present capacities of complete comprehension. We can understand the underlying logic of the possibility, we just can't grasp all the ramifications if "possibility" becomes "reality."

Few of us really appreciate the absolute marvel that is our minds. Everything you have - your work, your relationships, your philosophy of life, your material possessions - has come to you as a result of your using your mind. Now consider this: Experts say that we use less than ten per cent of our mental capacity, and some noted and well-known scientists, like Margaret Mead, and Abraham Maslow, believed the figure was actually closer to five or six per cent.

At UCLA, there is a Brain Research Institute and their work points to enormous abilities latent in everyone. Researchers there suggest an incredible hypothesis:

The ultimate creative capacity of the human brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite.

A Russian scientist by the name of Yefremov, wrote this in a scientific journal:

Man, under average conditions of work and life, uses only a small part of his thinking equipment. If we were to use only half its capacity, we could, without any difficulty whatever, learn forty languages, memorize the largest encyclopedia from cover to cover, and complete the required courses for degrees in dozens of colleges.

Amongst the experts, that statement is not considered as an exaggeration; it is the generally accepted theoretical view of man's mental potentials.

And here is where the optimistic part comes into play. When Maslow and Mead were estimating that man was only using five or six per cent of his potential thinking capacity, that was thirty or forty years ago. There is reason to believe that today, forty years later, man is actually using closer to ten percent of his capacity.

Because of the dynamics of present day television and movies, for example, with the visual effects of space and starships, and the life-like replication of human anatomy in books and models, we are gradually changing the way we think, and it takes more of our mental capacity to think in this new way. Rather than a linear flow of thought and reasoning, we are slowly adapting to an holistic flow of thought and reasoning. Rather than solving a problem as a logical progression of reasoning from fact A, to fact B, and so on, to a resultant conclusion, we are sometimes using an holistic viewpoint, we see the problem in a more multi-dimensional fashion, which may or may not lead, ultimately, to the same conclusion as before, but more quickly, and having considered more possibilities.

And like the story of the one-hundredth monkey, this is happening to all of us; whether we are eight or eighty, we are all of us using more of our mental capacity now than our parents did, and who knows how much more those born one hundred years from now, will be using?

Think for a moment where we have been, and where we've come in terms of progress, and we must realize that it is the human mind that has brought it about. It's hard to believe that we've come farther in the realm of progress in the past fifty years than we have in all the preceding ten thousand years of human civilization. Of all the scientists that have ever lived, ninety per cent of them are alive today, which may account for another astounding fact, our scientific knowledge is estimated to have doubled in just the last forty years, that is, since 1955. And for some of us, that doesn't seem like such a long time ago!

We, the human race, are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge of all kinds. We are on a ride to the future, and we are positioned on the early quickening of an exponential curve. And we had better buckle in, because like it or not, we're all going along on this ride, there's no choice! You all know what an exponential curve looks like. There's this flat part at the start where at first there seems to be little discernible difference in the level of the line, it looks more like a straight line than a curve, then slowly it starts rising, then more and more quickly, until finally it begins to look like a straight line again, only now it's a vertical straight line, and the rate of increase becomes astronomical in value.

And that part at the bottom, where the flat straight line starts curving up into the vertical line, that's where we are right now. We're just starting on the really interesting part.

Future Shock Levels

The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" - future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of future shock.

A few years earlier, Gordon Moore in his now famous paper (PDF) introduced the idea that would eventually be called Moore’s Law, that states that the speed and density of microprocessor design will follow an exponential curve. This was at a time when computers had barely had any impact on society, nearly 20 years before PC’s made hardly a dent on the economic landscape. 30 years later we saw the explosion of the Internet into the world. Now 40 years later, microprocessors speed is doubling almost every year, and its effects are extraordinary. Not a day goes buy now when some scientific or technological advance isn’t hitting the front pages. As Ray Kurzweil suggest with his Law of Accelerating Returns, microprocessor are such an integrated part of our lives of economic progress, that now society too is caught up in this accelerating change, suggesting that we could see as much change in the next 25 years, as we saw in the last 10,000 years combined!

As one of the leading thinkers on the singularity, Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone accustomed to thinking about extremes of future technological change and advancement. After having many wide ranging discussions with futurists of all stripes, he noticed that certain technological implications can be too “far out” or shocking to some groups more than others. So he came up with what he calls Future Shock Levels or the level that different people find themselves in terms of their concept of the future, and what they are willing to consider, or which is too futuristic or even shocking for them.

Shock Level 0

Degree of Change: Flat.

Technologies: Same as today, maybe more TV channels, bigger cars or TV's.

The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.

For people at this level, the future is seen as pretty much the same as it is today. If you could chart their concept of the future on a graph, you would see change reaching a plateau today and leveling off from here on out. Almost every economic and political paper about the future I’ve read falls into this category. When they discuss wide ranging implications of their policy decisions, there is hardly any mention of technological change at all, and only in the most mundane ways with concepts of Level 1 being described as something to be afraid of, with dangerous out-of-control implications. The current climate of fear over cloning and stem-cell therapy falls into this level.

Shock Level 1

Degree of Change: Logarithmic, then hitting a relative plateau in a decade or two.

Technologies: Virtual reality, living to a hundred, e-commerce, hydrogen economy, ubiquitous computing, stem-cell cloning, minor genetic improvements.

At this level you will find the majority of futurists and future oriented publications. Modern technological frontiers as depicted in Wired Magazine and books like Future Shock and Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. Included in this group are most scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers and technophiles.

Placed on a chart, future progress will continue upwards in a logarithmic fashion, with each year bringing the same amount of change as last year. Eventually this incremental change will lead to people living to a hundred, and optimistically in a society with clean energy, general economic prosperity, and conservative space exploration scenarios.

In my experience most of the people described above think about the future in relatively conservative terms. If you ever read a future oriented article by one of them they often say things like, “This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but perhaps my children or grandchildren will live to see it”, If you ever read a quote like that you know you're reading someone at SL1. Almost every report that comes out of NASA is hopelessly stuck at SL1.

Shock Level 2

Degree of Change: Logarithmic to Exponential

Technologies: major genetic engineering, medical immortality, interstellar travel, and new "alien" cultures.

At this level you’ll find your typical SF Fan. Literary SF and cutting edge magazines like Mondo 2000, Omni or Future Magazine of days past were filled with Level 2 ideas. Ironically, I don’t know of a single popular SF movie or TV show that exists comfortably at this level. Not even Star Trek qualifies for SL2, as it barely considers life spans past 100, with immortality remaining the exclusive domain of “super-advanced aliens”.

Up and until the 1980’s there wasn’t much discussion of future change past level 2, except in the most limited sense. This is probably because the concept of radical accelerating change was still beyond the radar of almost every forward thinking person at the time. Enabling Level 3 technologies like molecular nanotechnology were not even considered then. The only exceptions I know of are Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, who were completely at home with post-human evolution (SL3).

Shock Level 3

Degree of Change: Exponential

Technologies: Immortality, nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, intelligence increase, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration, megascale engineering.

Clearly identifiable people didn't exist at this level until the 1980’s when groups like the Extropians and transhumanists emerged. Writers like Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary with his SMI2LE concept were the first people to my knowledge who discussed this level in any depth. However, it wasn’t until Eric Drexler published his book Engines of Creation that finally set the stage for concrete, detailed technological speculation of SL3 possibilities.

Shock Level 4

Degree of Change: Exponential to Hyperbolic (Accelerating Acceleration)

Technologies: Singularity, Matrioska "Jupiter" Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it."

The only people I know who are comfortable discussing change at this level are Singularitarians, and some cutting edge psychedelic pioneers like Terrence McKenna and John Lilly. Olaf Stapledon in his book Star Maker waxed poetic about SL3 megascale engineering and SL4 ultra-intelligences, and John Lilly discussed multiple encounters with a SL4 intelligences, which he gave names like "ECCO" and "Solid State Entities". The first writer to bring this into concrete technological terms was Vernor Vinge in his 1993 paper . These ideas were soon picked up by Extropians and Transhumanists, but as far as I know it wasn’t until the Singularitarians that this level was embraced concretely and enthusiastically.

As Eli says, If there's a Shock Level Five, I'm not sure I want to know about it!

Eli goes on to say,

If somebody is still worried about virtual reality (low end of SL1), you can safely try explaining medical immortality (low-end SL2), but not nanotechnology (SL3) or uploading (high SL3). They might believe you, but they will be frightened - shocked.

By a similar token, a Singularitarian can shock a science-fiction fan, but not an Extropian - the Extropian will be interested, perhaps enthusiastic, but not shocked. (Of course, if the person was already enthusiastic about Transhumanism, they might be wildly enthusiastic about the Singularity.) An Extropian can shock your average Wired reader, but should be careful about trying this with the "person on the street" - they may be frightened. And so on. In general, one shock level gets you enthusiasm, two gets you a strong reaction - wild enthusiasm or disbelief, three gets you frightened - not necessarily hostile, but frightened, and four can get you burned at the stake.

...

Imagining the year 3000

A group of creative futurist thinkers tried to imagine the year 3000 within the framework of a conversation. It is somewhat interesting, I think, but mostly because the results are rather pathetic. Despite trying not to, they mostly end up imagining a little more of the same. As they mention, the people in the year 1000 would have made completely ridiculous predictions of the year 2000. They probably didn't even have a concept of "progress". Now, at least, we expect that lots of things will change in the future. But we have a hard time getting over just imagining a gradual evolution of the things we know. How would government be changed, and economy, and education, and shopping? Who says we'll have any? Anyway, one of the better statements from that conversation is this one from Bart Kosko:

"What is Heaven? Heaven's a place where you can create worlds at will, and the ideal Heaven is where you run the whole thing yourself. The current means of getting to Heaven involve various supernatural systems for which, at this point, there's no scientific evidence. So I think we can reduce Heaven to an engineering project, which we're doing. The demand for Heaven is great--witness the desire of every human heart, from the people who built the ancient pyramids to modern society, to live beyond one's biologically allotted time. Our plan is ultimately to transfer human consciousness from the brain to bits of information in a computer chip, or some other kind of computational medium, so that just by thinking--that act of volition--we'll be able to create our own personal world. And I think the first stage of Heaven will be the sensory world, and beyond that I think we'd hit a higher, spiritual plane.

What will make all the difference is the disruptive events and technologies. I think there will be a whole number of those way before the year 3000, each of which will change everything. Like:

Open extraterrestrial contact. Thinking that extraterretrials are only folks we might meet once we've painstakingly developed intrastellar travel after hundreds of years is a little naive. They might well show themselves much earlier in the game. And nothing will be the same once we're dealing openly with races that are millions of years ahead of us in development. I'd guess we'd have joined the galactic federation long time before the year 3000.

Self-replicating nano-tech. If we can construct anything material simply by laying out the blueprint of how to make it, that changes everything. All stuff will be free, for one thing, and economy as we know it is no longer meaningful. Neither will a lot of the struggles we now have with the environment.

Multiple Parallel Universes. Once we realize conclusively and demonstrably that there are multiple versions of our universe, a close to infinite amount, and we can actually interact with them - everything changes. Quantum Physics is no longer just a bizarre, but interesting set of equations that theoretical physicists can play with.

Conscious Collective Intelligence. What if and when we realize conclusively that there are higher orders of intelligence than ours. My bet is not on artificial intelligence, but on the manifestation of collective natural intelligence. E.g. we discover that humanity has an intelligence that is way beyond our individual intelligences, but which includes all of our minds. And that intelligence starts acting more noticably and decisively. We can't quite think of ourselves the same after that. The Internet might possibly supply the initial wiring that helps this happen.

Virtual Reality more real than Material Reality. One way or another we'll develop immersive virtual reality that we can step into and which addresses all of our senses. The Holodeck. It might involve direct connections with our neurology and our brains, or it might be done with projections and sensory feedback on the outside. Either way, it will change our society dramatically if it suddenly is possible and practical for lots of people to live most of our life within virtual realities of our choice.

Information Singularity. At some point it becomes quite trivial to record everything that ever happens to everybody, and all meta-data that anybody can imagine applying to anything, and to make it thoroughly indexed and instantly available to anybody who needs it. It might no longer be meaningful to "search" for anything, or to keep secrets, or to pretend that things are any different from what they are, because anybody can check in an instant.

All of these are pretty much already on the program, and I'd expect them within the next 100 years, not the next 1000. And there are of course lots of things I might not even imagine, which will change everything even more. It is by its very nature very hard to predict surprisingly disruptive events. Even more so, a sequence of disruptive events, building upon one another.

There's a political and economical battle which will play out as to who should control all of this. We currently live in a political and economical system that will encourage and assist and reward certain people in power positions for keeping all of these things under their own exclusive control, and for keeping the rest of us in a more old-fashioned world that is manufactured by these very same technologies. Along the lines of "The Matrix". I.e. they might be the ones who make business deals with the extraterrestrials, and who will zip around in private hyperspace crafts, and who will keep the rest of us living in an immersive virtual reality where everything is pretty much the same, just a little fancier, where we still go to work and make money and watch TV and vote in elections, while they keep our every move monitored and catalogued and profiled.

The more important thing that needs to happen way before the year 3000 is something that is neither a technological change nor an external event. We as a species and as individuals need to realize where the real power is. We need to experience a grassroots revolution of consciousness where we discover without a shadow of a doubt that all the power in society comes from us, and that we're free to create something better, rather than just going along with what is presented to us. We need to go through a kartharsis, a transformation, after which it will be impossible for any small elite to control the rest of us by owning the information or the secret knowledge or the technology or the media. There's plenty of movement towards that in the mindsphere of the Internet at this point, but it is not nearly enough. It is hard to say exactly how it will look or how it will work. If we play our cards well and we wake up at the right time, and we figure out how to work together, a paradise of our own making will be ours, where wonders beyond belief are the routine of life. If we don't get it, or we're too late, we'll notice some day that we somehow only ended up with more of the same, and somebody else holds all the cards, and the cards are so powerful that we no longer have any opportunity for changing the system.

There's a window of opportunity that probably isn't all that large. It is an opportunity to evolve, individually and collectively, to be able to deal with a totally different world, as conscious and free and connected beings. The change will probably be within us, a psychological or spiritual change, but its emergent manifestation will be in the way we will be able to network and self-organize and collaborate on a wide scale. It is a matter of considerable urgency.

Artificial Jellyfish

Just read this at Engadget. Here is the originating site.

It’s like something out of Blade Runner: an artist in Japan is crafting simulated jellyfish out of artificial human skin. They’re not alive, but just like real jellyfish they can float around gracefully in a fish tank.

After an initial feeling of "ewww, yuck", I can see the beauty of these. I'm not sure how he achieved the artificial color, as the site is Japanese.

Agile Learning

By Erica Tesla

I went down to UNO this morning to get what is not the first (nor the last, I'm sure) form I'll have to fill out to get myself and my husband back on the Path of Higher Education. The paperwork required simply to gain permission to learn is astounding.

Now, I've heard it said that college isn't actually about learning at all--it's all about your threshold for dealing with bull and bureacracy. If that's true, so long as your tolerance for those things increases during your time in college, you have learned something.

But an increased tolerance for bureaucracy, though it may be a goal now, will probably not be an advantage in the future.

The heart of the singularity, in my understanding, is the point at which nothing stands still. Memes burn in the fire of change and those who are able move on; that's what it's about. The singularity is the point at which agility surpasses its status as an advantage and becomes a survival skill, a necessity. In a future that moves at the speed of light, who will have time for all of this paperwork?

What scares me about the current higher education process is actually the length of commitment, and the proactive nature of the learning process employed. Deciding to go to college typically means devoting yourself for at least four years to a field that more narrowly defines your knowledge base and skill set, while admittedly (hopefully) deepening both.

But the model in which specialization occurs proactively isn't of much use if you have no idea what you'll need to know to enjoy a productive life, or even to survive, tomorrow.

I think that the solution is a more agile form of learning. The most agile form of learning occurs when a person first attains a broad base of widely applicable knowledge and the skills with which to both attain new knowledge and to make the best use of that which they already have. After that initial learning--largely "learning how to learn"--they can take an adaptive, reactive approach to specialized knowledges and tasks. This is even more agile when paired with hands-on-experience--a person can be productive in the current learning field while learning about it.

I think that college, along with the rest of the current educational model, is neither the most efficient way to learn, nor the best--at best, for now, it may be a good route to a higher paycheck. But is that enough? Can the very slow process of learning through the current educational model survive a world that's speeding up?

The Hedonistic Imperative

"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.

"The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."

"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend..."

"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life.... It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world."

"The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted."

"Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own."

To read the rest of this manifesto by David Pearce please visit The Hedonistic Imperative.

The Future Says 'Hi'

The future as told through the present has been awfully grim lately. Most futures these days have a huge downside. Pessimism is fashionable once again. Plenty of experts are warning us of impending catastrophe. Many saying we have less than a 50% of making it through the next 100 years. Bill Joy keeps saying the future doesn't need us anymore. Nowadays utopian thinking is considered fanciful, useless, even dangerous. At this point most people are simply afraid to think mich of anything else. They are afraid of boogey men like Bin Laden, of the next terrorist strike, or that the future won't include them. They have forgotten how to imagine a hopeful, positive, life-affirming future. Yet obviously that is exactly what we need. The future does need us, now more than ever!

The more optimistic our outlook is, the more likely we are to be on the lookout for solutions. The future has yet to be created, so I see no reason why we shouldn't put all our efforts towards creating the most fantastic and hopeful future we can imagine.

I do understand this malaise. For me personally it started during the 80's when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded. Exploding along with that shuttle were all my dreams and goals inspired of going into space. Inspired by the Apollo program when I was a kid and later by the Space Colony prospects outlined by Gerald K. O'Neil, I figured I'd be living at L5 by now. Three weeks after the Columbia accident I received my termination notice from NASA, where I was working on a student cooperative, Around this time, the war on some drugs escalated, which was really a war against hippie culture first started by Nixon. So here I was watching both high frontiers (outer and inner) being closed down around me. During the rest of the 80's we had Reaganomics, dystopian cyberpunk, and just all around bad news. Then in the middle 90's, things started to pick up again with Wired Magazine and the birth of the World Wide Web. But then by 2001, it all came falling back to earth again with the dot-com crash and 9-11. Well, it's time for another kick in the pants optimistic visionary quest.

When I dream at night, those wonderfully lucid flying dreams that I have often, I recall all of those wild-eyed, trippy, fantastically fun and pleasure filled dreams of far-out futuristic possibilities. And it got me wondering about bringing those types of visions to reality somehow. A vision to share with others. With everything going on now, I feel an inexorable drive to create more than ever before. It feels almost like a moral imperative. Perhaps if I can network with other sufficiently tuned-in minds on the planet I can least find some kindred spirits who share a vision of a much better future. A future where fun, pleasure, love and peace are pervasive - space colonies, interstellar pleasure cruise ships, orgasmatrons, sexy computers voices and intimate zero-gravity environments. And for those of you who haven't heard of Ian Banks, I highly suggest you read his books about The Culture, a website I host on this server. Its my hope that this site will evolve into a compelling vision that will inspire people to rebirth the future anew. A refreshing, positive, life-affirming, creatively spirited future we can look forward to again. Remember, we create the future, so lets get started.

Psychedelic S.F.

This is a copy of the original article that inspired me to start Future Hi.

TECHSPLOITATION: Psychedelic S.F.

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
January 6, 2003

"I am stoned," the captain says gravely, his face in half-light as the glowing spaceship controls leave trails in the darkness behind him. He and his intrepid crew have just smoked a nicely rolled joint, the perfect preparation for their fatal mission. In a psychedelic apocalypse future, planet Earth is doomed because sperm counts have gotten so low that nobody can reproduce. Elite crews of men have been sent to the far reaches of the galaxy to find "fertility" and a place to plant their last remaining seed. They are armed only with pot, booze, and a special pill that will make them potent – granting them one last chance to inseminate whatever they can before they die.

Welcome to the world of Candy Von Dewd, the new movie from Jacques Boyreau and the gang at San Francisco's world-famous Werepad. For years the Werepad has entertained audiences with bizarro treats from its extensive exploitation-film archive in a groovy, fur-lined movie theater. Packed with weird horror, science fiction, psychedelia, and William Shatner, the Werepad collection is clearly Boyreau's inspiration for Candy Von Dewd. The flick is awash in trippy special effects, and its fragmentary, drug-addled plot never strays far from scenes that require lots of latex-clad go-go dancers. Candy, the film's eponymous heroine, is a sort of confusing cross between Barbarella and Austin Powers who arrives just in time to save the day.

Watching Boyreau's obsessively detailed re-creation of a 1960s science-fiction fantasy was jarring – I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen S.F. that was so goofy, orgiastic, and colorful. With a few exceptions, all the S.F. movies of the past few years have been relentlessly, sternly cyber. Computers are tiny, vicious implants; pseudocybernetic heroes in black snort digital information like drugs; skies are made of sludge; and sex, if it happens at all, is magnitudes less erotic than gunplay. There are absolutely no go-go dancers of any kind.

Candy Von Dewd's aggressive 1960s nostalgia reminded me of another recent, although less appealing, indie S.F. movie: CQ, directed by Roman "Spawn of Francis Ford" Coppola, also a Bay Area local. CQ is set mostly during 1969, and it follows the toneless adventures of an angsty young filmmaker in Paris who is working on a movie about a Candy Von Dewd-like heroine named Dragonfly. The cheesy S.F. scenes from CQ's movie-within-a-movie – complete with go-go boots, sparkly moonscapes, and a revolutionary leader who says, "We must be free to make love all day" – are the best parts of the picture. They're nostalgia for the future, a future that people once imagined could be sexy, fun, and revolutionary all at the same time.

These days the future isn't fun. The revolution is grimy and depressing. S.F. flicks like the upcoming Matrix Reloaded, and even fantasies like The Two Towers, offer hope but only on the condition that we delay gratification forever. And movies with "hard science" themes like Minority Report and soon-to-be-released thriller The Core depict science as drab and destructive, not psychedelic and life-affirming.

Perhaps that's why young S.F. filmmakers are turning back to old visions of the future. They're searching for ways to tell new stories about what's coming next, stories that don't have the bulging muscles of Reagan-Bush America and aren't set to the tune of punk rock. They're trying to imagine what it meant to create "high-tech" computer consoles with buttons the shape and color of lollipops. They're looking for planets full of dope-smoking alien kids instead of slimy, flesh-eating hive minds.

Who knows if this is a good thing? Maybe the new wave of psychedelic S.F. will just inspire a few more people to buy candy-colored iMacs and get really into laser light shows. But I hope movies like Candy Von Dewd, however small and silly they may be, are a sign that people are rethinking the future.

And none too soon, either, what with government oppression getting more trippy every day. Apparently, various officials have been removing sex-education material from the National Cancer Institute Web site, which is run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Someone – no one at the CDC is saying who – replaced information on birth control with the scientifically dubious "fact" that abortion causes cancer. What's next? Does gay sex cause cancer too?

Still, as long as go-go dancers shimmy to the light of the interplanetary vibe, there is hope for sex in the future. And hope for drugs too. Recently, nonprofit pharmaceutical company Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies got permission to start running a stage-one clinical trial on MDMA. And where do you suppose the review board was that finally gave MAPS the go-ahead to test this psychedelic drug on human subjects? San Francisco.

'Candy Von Dewd' plays in a double bill with Zardoz Jan. 15-16, 7 p.m., Four Star Theater, 2200 Clement, San Francisco, (415) 666-3488.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who often clicks the heels of her sneakers together and whispers, "There's no place like home." Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.