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The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars were started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking; to help nudge civilization toward our goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.
David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive. Sum, his collection of afterlife alternatives, made a stunning literary debut last year and now appears in 21 languages. Simultaneously he is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, specializing in time perception.
In this talk he spells out how to save the world.
This talk was given at Herbst Theatre on Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco, California on Thursday April 1, 02010
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Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but ruins and scattered genetics." It takes luck and new technology to survive. We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization:
1. "Try not to cough on one another." More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce.
2. "Don't lose things." As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost." Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Books. "Distribute, don't reinvent."
3. "Tell each other faster." Don't let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by Ushahidi.com, which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time.
4. "Mitigate tyranny." The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China.
5. "Get more brains involved in solving problems." Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, Foldit (protein folding), and Cstart (moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing."
6. "Try not to run out of energy." When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online.
But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.
-- by Stewart Brand| MP3 Audio |
| PDF Transcript |
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The Long Now Foundation • Fostering Long-term Responsibility • est. 01996.
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• 1 year, 9 months ago
For someone who has worked fulltime-plus for many years to advance the cause of sustainable Internet development, it was gratifying -- but also a bit troubling -- to hear David Eagleman's suggestion that the Internet represents our best hope for averting a civilizational collapse. At the moment, the Internet itself is on the cusp of a major evolutionary inflection point, after which most of the seemingly highest probability future development trajectories lead to states that would probably not satisfy Eagleman's expectations, or even live up to the expectations of today's non-casual Internet participant-contributors.
That inflection point will arrive in appx. 12-18 months, when the last remaining reserves of unallocated IPv4 addresses will be depleted. To date, these protocol number resources have served as the fundamental logical "glue" holding the Internet together, and enabling the 35k or so independently administered Internet networks to seamlessly interact and exchange traffic with one another. Unfortunately, The designated successor address resource, called IPv6, is not backward compatible with the IPv4 addressing standard, which means that future aspiring network operators that only have access to IPv6 will be perpetually isolated and unreachable from the rest of the Internet -- unless they can somehow secure access to IPv4 themselves (e.g., by buying or leasing it from an "incumbent" IPv4 holder, or by relying on an incumbent IPv4-based network to serve as a permanent middleman/broker for all interactions with the rest of the built Internet). Today, despite the looming inevitability of IPv4 exhaustion, only about 5% of existing Internet networks globally are even capable of providing such a service.
From an economic standpoint, many of the causes behind this particular form of aggregate adaptation to the looming change could be usefully compared to the conditions leading up to (and that might have been anticipated by interested parties beforehand) the Enclosures. I don't know enough about neurological systems to suggest a relevant comparison by name, but I have no doubt that Dr. Eagleman and others could fill in that particular blank. How would one characterize a distributed processing system in which established system-wide, mesh-like interactions are gradually canalized/partitioned into and superceded by less flexible/variable, more linear/serial, and more narrowly scoped interactions? How would one diagnose a learning system in which the possibility for (and any memory of) future learning is absolutely contingent on the active support of dominant subsystems that came to achieve that status as a result of past learning?