New Media Consortium 2016 conference: my keynote
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Slides for my NMC 2016 conference closing keynote. I wanted to do two things here: 1) Really go presentation Zen 2) Focus on technology and its possibilities over the next two generations
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New Media Consortium 2016 conference: my keynote
- 1. Surviving the Renaissance: Flourishing in an Age of Technology-Driven Chaos and Disruption Flourishing in an Age of Technology-Driven Chaos and Disruption New Media Consortium June 02016
- 9. 1. Short term: to 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021
- 14. Making stuff • Global economic shifts • Rethinking consumer vs producer • What happens when we take students seriously as producers? http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/blog/
- 15. Hardware heading towards the invisible https://www.flickr.com/photos/26556146@N07/16347907406/
- 17. Internet of Everything Rethink: • privacy • data ownership and control • safety tradeoffs • public and private • Brin, T Society http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html
- 22. The boring new old stuff Social media, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, open source, data analytics, mobile computing, gaming, gamification, virtualization, digitization, digital storytelling, always-on media capture, always- on surveillance, hacking…
- 23. That's all in the short term.
- 24. We already know all about this stuff.
- 31. AI taking up human functions http://americangut.org/how-it-works/
- 34. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-08/wall-street-has-hit-peak-human-and-an-algorith
- 37. objections • Humans want contact! • Automation is too expensive! • I’m scared of machines doing bad things to me and my children!
- 39. • Let’s look ahead even further. Try 2050. http://www.businessinsider.com/ways-the-world-will-be-terrifying-in-2050-2015-3
- 41. The new silicon order • Bostrom, Hawking, Forbin Project • Or Iain Banks. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177 /
- 42. The new social order • Given sufficient automation in post-1990 forms? • Might not see new jobs appear. • Income inequality accelerates to 19th-century levels. • we could see two new worlds of work.
- 45. The new humanity What happens to our sense of what it means to be human?
- 47. A new nature “Really, what I am is a futurist,.. Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.” -marine biologist Ruth Gates http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests , http://www.billmckibben.com/eaarth/eaarthbook.html
- 49. Hacking the world • Humans change humans • Humans change the world • The new world changes humans • And so it goes.
- 50. Renaissance? • A rebirth of human creativity and identity • an expansion of our powers and capacities • fraught with all kinds of dangers and disasters
- 57. Let’s go even further https://www.quora.com/What-will-the-world-look-like-in-
- 59. We are so not ready • Weird simultaneity of popular ($ $-fed) embrace of technology with strong anti-scientism, unreason • Academic disciplines not necessarily ready (think political science, macroeconomics) • Radical divides over human nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_McCarthy
- 60. We are so not ready • Horrendous American tv “news” • Horrible legacy of prejudice restricting human growth and creativity • Returning inequality “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “
- 61. What shouldn’t we do? Don't think about it.
- 62. What shouldn’t we do? Stop evading the issue by thinking about retirement
- 63. What shouldn’t we do? (present generations don’t have a good record about leaving a world to the young right now)
- 64. What is to be done? The blindingly obvious things:
- 65. What is to be done? Collaborate with each other, across institutions, sectors, nations, populations, professions
- 66. What is to be done? Work through inter institutional groups (like NMC!)
- 67. What is to be done? Use social media
- 68. What is to be done? Use and be open
- 69. What is to be done? Read and watch science fiction
- 70. What is to be done? The not so obvious, and challenging: Rethink everything in terms of automation’s possibilities…
- 71. What is to be done? What could be replaced?
- 72. What is to be done? Become a cyborg
- 73. What is to be done? Use futures methods
- 74. What is to be done? More challenging:
- 75. What is to be done? Lead - you’re best placed on campus to inform people in context
- 76. What is to be done? Get political
- 77. What is to be done? Imagine different worlds and inhabiting them - yourselves, your institution, your children and the generation to come
- 79. Image credits •Each cited on slide. •Otherwise, mine.
- 80. Selected bibliography Andrea Castillo, “Can a Bot Run a Company?” http://reason.com/archives/2016/05/24/can-a-bot-run-a-company Alison Cook-Sather, Catherine Bovill, Peter Felten, Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty (2014) Kristi DePaul, “Robot Writers, Open Education, and the Future of EdTech” (2015) http://er.educause.edu/blogs/2016/4/kyle-bowen-robot-writers-open-educatio . Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble” http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene .
- 81. Selected bibliography Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future. Rebecca Keller, “The Rise of Manufacturing Marks the Fall of Globalization.” https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/rise-manufacturing-mark Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable . Ray Kurzweil, http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-erase-bad-memories-an
- 82. Selected bibliography Brooke McCarthy, “Flex-Foot Cheetah”. http://www.ele.uri.edu/courses/bme281/F11/BrookeM_2.pdf Alexis Madrigal, "'The Future Is About Old People, in Big Cities, Afraid of the Sky’". http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/the-futu Babak Parviz, "Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens" http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-
- 83. Selected bibliography Brandt Ranj, "Goldman Sachs says VR will be bigger than TV in 10 years “. http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-predicts-vr David Rose, Enchanted Objects. Avianne Tan, “Legally Blind 5th Grader Sees Mother for 1st Time Through Electronic Glasses”, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/legally-blind-5th-grader-sees
Editor's Notes
- An honor to address an organization - a community - that has meant so much to me for more than a decade. NMC is a source of inspiration, learning, challenges, and many friendships.
- In honor of the futures work long conducted by the NMC, allow me to take you on a futuring journey for the next hour Here’s my plan: some quick introductory notes The short- term future medium-term future Longer term What to do
- Introductory notes One risk: Technological determinism. Assumes that technological developments drive some non-tech changes - here, to education and society. Related: that people will keep developing and playing with tech. Simpler: taking tech invention seriously.
- Not talking much about Black Swans (Singularity, airborne Ebola, WWI-scale disaster, zombie apocalypse) Also, not much on most non-tech contexts (economics, policy, demographics)
- Is the future a good one or a bad time? Utopia - reality - dystopia spectrum
- 2 guides History: we have a good sense, now, about how humans tend to create and react to new technologies.
- Much of today’s talk is informed by science fiction. not only has sf been giving us visions of possible futures, not only tools for imagining the future, but technologists and designers are increasingly influenced by what sf has already imagined. If you’re not reading science fiction, you’re not ready for the rest of the 21st century.
- We are living through a remarkable time, when revolutions are ripping through traditional education. An unprecedented boom in human creativity thanks to the digital revolution is returning storytelling and story-sharing capabilities to people around the world. And powerful changes in economics, demographics, and globalization, not to mention technology, are reshaping education. Some of schooling *as we know it* might not survive the decade.
- Technological development rushes on. VR in now in place, with applications in gaming, storytelling, and visualization. AR is developing broadly, for basic visualizations across many different hardware platforms.
- VR is progressing rapidly. Watch the costs drop and accessibility rise. Content is starting to appear. Next? AR and VR connect and intertwine, as the digital and nondigital worlds are thoroughly interlaced. Think Mixed Reality. Think computing in space. Watch Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap
- Meanwhile, 3d printing is growing rapidly. In education, we’ve seen it move from engineering to libraries. Think: 3d printing across the curriculum.
- 3d printing is allied to new learning spaces A DiY ethos contributes to the growth of Makerspaces and the Maker movement.
- Those spaces and technologies link up with the often-heralded transition from consumption to co-creation and production, which continues. Think: student as producer, student as maker
- Meanwhile, hardware continues to shrink, as Moore’s Law continues to hold. For example, my alma mater, UM, produced a combination camera, data storage, and Wifi connection the size of a grain of rice - last year. Let’s assume hardware keeps shrinking. This will let us embed hardware throughout our environment. It will let us do more with projected displays, flexible interfaces. Contact lenses as interfaces could well appear. Mark Weiser’s dreams of ubiquitous computing are coming true
- One way of describing this world of small, embedded, invisible, and environmental hardware is the IoT. This is already occurring through an enormous infrastructure build out: Expanding into the IPv6 internet protocol Developing new middleware, OSes Building out data ownership and control systems
- at a technical level, will we rethink what a file is? Imagine an ecosystem mostly composed of streams, not documents in directories; points and flows, not files.
- Will there be hyperlinks in the internet of everything? What happens to the web in a world of ubiquitous, often invisible computing? There are many incentives to not develop the web. For example, mobile apps, streaming video, AAA video games, the LMS, paywalls all offer alternatives to the open web of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. Perhaps the web of 2021 will become like US community tv, trawled by a few humans and increasing #s of AIs. Or perhaps, as Kevin Kelly suggests, we’ll see the IoE hyperlinked and Googleable. Perhaps we’ll improve our ability to search and link across time, connecting to a site’s prior states, hyperlinking the emerging history of the web.
- While we shrink some hardware devices, we send others into the air. Drones are changing public and private spaces, around the world. There are peaceful uses for delivery, photography, research, art. http://laughingsquid.com/the-first-aerial-illuminated-drone-show-in-the-united-states-takes-place-over-the-mojave-desert/
- Some hobbyists have figured out how to add new devices to drones, such as shotguns and chainsaws. Others, like the United States Pentagon, have created still more uses in war and espionage. Drones were once largely controlled; now some are semi-autonomous, or autonomous, acting on their own. Already ethicists and insurance companies debate the implications of drone crimes, asking who’s responsible for injuries and deaths at the metaphorical hands of a literal machine. And automating jobs: Japanese firm Komatsu uses drones on construction projects to feed data to automated trucks and digging machines. http://grendz.com/pin/1623/
- So many future trends are historical trends that won't die, or seem to die only to lurch back into life later on. Some of you may remember p2p architectures dating back to the 1990s. Blockchain is a new realization of that concept. Not only has blockchain led to bitcoin, an interesting, messy, and potentially transformative financial development, but now, through Ethereum, supports decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO): distributed, automated enterprises. One such already functions as a fundraising and fund dispersal firm.
- There’s more, of course. There always is.
- The next 5 years.
- Let’s look ahead 10 years. To 2026.
- Facebook is already looking ahead to that point, and planning.
- Note what they want to nail down by then.
- So to get to 2026, let’s just assume progress, and let’s consider artificial intelligence. Not at the level of a cataclysmic, world-rebooting Singularity. Just extrapolations of current trends, along the lines marked out by McAfee and Bryjolfson. Let’s assume Moore’s law continues. Add in that quantum computing starts to appear at consumer and enterprise levels. We start talking about a Fourth Industrial Revolution.
- Let’s grant further, steady growth in deep learning and advanced neural networks . Count Google’s victory over the game of Go as a milestone, and Siri’s uncanny abilities as a baseline.
- Then we have to rethink how we design the digital world. Maybe all of it. How does more advanced AI force us to reconceive data standards and publication, information architecture, archiving, for starters?
- We generate a vast and growing horde of data. This is fodder for machines. Projects are appearing every day to take advantage of improving machine analysis, like http://americangut.org , which aims to improve your health by diving deeply into your guts to better understand their microbial life. We’ve already seen criminal analytics automated (which has problems: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing?utm_source=digg)
- machine to machine functions keep rising, such as high frequency trading, which has already advanced beyond regulators’ abilities to constrain. Already we’ve seen flash crashes, economic incidents, driven by the conversation among programs. Looking ahead to 2026, imagine increasing segments of human life automated as m2m. We could see the emergence of a posthuman order in our lives.
- Automation means both AI and robots. The combination is extending into more human labor functions. This can supplement labor shortfalls (Japan, China) or replacing labor with capital (everywhere). Robots + AI + 3dprinting could mean deglobalization More: Emotional analysts - when at par? when beyond? What does good machine translation do? Combining the IOE w/automation and MR, should we anticipate the appearance of intelligence, even sentient tools?
- We’re seeing the automation of more job functions and entire jobs Sometimes, replace human functions, physical or mental (expert systems) -Since 1990, for the first time in centuries, without creating new ones, perhaps leading to rising unemployment. Imagine a 2026 with persistent 10% or 20% unemployment. What does education mean in such a world?
- We’re also seeing the development of automated creativity. Already operational in writing (finance, sports, weather) and images. This image is a screen cap from a neutral net recreating a classic movie - 2001 - on its own terms.
- This image was created by Google’s DreamDream, which turned my photo of our pre conference session into mild psychedelia. We’re also seeing automated assistants. For example, tools for analyzing one’s writing, which can help us edit and revise more effectively - without a teacher. We’ve seen IBM’s Watson help point to new avenues of medical research, and legal AIs help with document analysis. By 2026 will we see an AI acknowledged, or even credited as coauthor for a scholarly article? How should we expect creativity itself to change with automation? The history of human interaction with technology suggests we should, as humans love to revise old forms and create new ones with each invented medium. So look to new ways of making art, different forms of storytelling, fresh takes on gaming, and, maybe, new forms of creativity in 2026 we lack the words to describe in 2016.
- There are plenty of objections to such an automation-shaped scenario. Answer: except when we don’t. Introverts; unpleasant tasks; geeks and increasing geeky culture; younger folks. Answer: capital continues to accumulate; that’s one part of rising inequality (Piketty’s R>g). And prices drop, historically. Answer: what happens when the machines are safer and better than humans? Think of self-driving cars, while human drivers murder tens of thousands each year. Or robots in hospitals, where human accidents kill 100s of thousands every year.
- Let’s look ahead even further. Try 2050.
- And let’s be open to the full range of possibilities.
- What's happening in the long range horizon is truly disruptive. We're seeing grand challenges loom like science fiction plotlines. The specter of automation threatens to radically reformat the world of work and society, changing the world our students will inhabit while supplanting teaching and learning. And that's just for starters.
- Let’s consider different ways AI could unfold. Nick Bostrom at Oxford has done speculative research into the different ways AI could grow and shape the world, ranging from benign to malign to simply strange. Stephen Hawking wants us of proceeding too quickly, of allowing a dangerous force to erupt across our deeply networked world; imagine how much more threatening his warning becomes in an IoE world. There’s the dystopia of a world ruled by inhuman AI, like the classic movie The Forbin Project Then there’s the utopian vision of Iain Banks. Imagine benign, grand, and administrative AI that simply works to improve human life. That’s a continuum of 2050s.
- two new worlds of work On the one hand, the mass of humans work part time at low wages, living at a subsistence level, otherwise engaged and entertained by a rich and endless digital environment. Above them are the 1%, often deeply skilled, the owners and managers of the new digital order. There isn’t much middle class between them. Call it the new Gilded Age, or neofeudalism. On the other hand, automation unleashes a new era in human prosperity, of digital delights and technology-enabled offline goods. New political regulations and social orders transfer enough wealth to the majority of people to enable them to lead rich and rewarding lives, which combine productive work with reflective leisure - what one British organization half-jokingly referred to as Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Again, That’s a continuum of 2050s.
- Perhaps we combine and synthesize these movements. Technology doesn’t replace humans, but extend and enrich us. We work and play in ever-closer relationship to the digital world. We are both metaphorically and literally cyborgs.
- At the same time as we develop silicon technology we apply digital tools and concepts to the biological realm. New tools, like CRISPR, give us the ability to shape offspring - to edit life - with increasing precision and power. Open source biology gives new insights into life forms - and shares that knowledge widely. Consider a recent paper in World Neurosurgery, “Brainjacking: implant security issues in invasive neuromodulation”. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com.sci-hub.cc/retrieve/pii/S1878875016302728 Or consider another paper, on creating macromolecules to reduce the spread of infection within a body. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b00091
- Consider more deeply what happens when we apply these technologies to humanity. What happens to our sense of what it means to be human?
- What we think of as “human” may change beyond recognition. We’re already there in 2016 with bionics (show feet blades, cochlear implants) and widespread, legal, even mandated psychopharmaceuticals (image: Prozac Nation). Brain-controlled machines. nutraceuticals. We’re starting to print tissue and organ replacements. Precision medicine via bioinformatics, new imaging technologies, and nano tech medicine are coming on line. New devices give some measure of sight to some blind people. A Stony Brook team used targeted light to alter acetylcholine in the brains of mammals, removing some emotional memories. We can conceive of editing human DNA via CRISPR and gene driving. Some populations live decades longer than they did just 2 generations ago; if life extension becomes even basically successful, by 2050 will we see 100 become the new 60? Meanwhile, biological indicators are increasingly used in security: retina scanning, gait recognition. With such innovations, after such knowledge, what happens to our sense of what it means to be human? How does public health change? Does health care become the leading American industry? What’s the public interest in editing people’s minds and bodies?
- None of this occurs in a vaccuum. As we alter life and grow the digital world, we also alter the earth. As we change humanity, we alter nature. We may, by 2050, speak of a new Earth. Already some use the term Anthropocene to describe the planet after the year 1900.
- The Northwest passage is now open. Multiple nations are engaged in a geopolitical rush for the north polar region, which is now opening up into a new world That’s just the start. What happens when snows and permafrost retreat northwards, opening up lands for farming? When hot climate turn arid and desertification begins? Do more cities become like Las Vegas, artificial creations maintained solely by massive infrastructural investment? When do people flee such cities? What changes will occur in the planetary ecosystem when we produce hybrid and novel forms of life? In a parallel to the transformation wrought by infusing human bodies and societies with increasing numbers of machines, what happens to the natural world when that world is suffused with small, networked, data-gathering devices? What happens to the thin layer of life wrapping the Earth’s rocky mantle when we achieve nanotechnology at industrial scale, or nanotechnology at consumer scale? Will digital connectivity laminate or subsume the biosphere? In one of his novels Iain Banks describes the infusion of computation into the world through tiny, networked devices. Others have used the term computronium to name the new material that results. Banks coins the sharper word Smatter (smart matter). By 2050, will we produce smatter in labs? Or in garages? What would we call this world, revised by humans and post human technologies? Donna Haraway offers the maybe tongue-in-cheek term “Cthulhucene”.
- By 2050 we’ve hacked the world, and keep on doing so.
- Perhaps 2050 is a time of human rebirth.
- Maybe new politics appears by 2050. Think of this combination: drones, perhaps perpetually aloft thanks to solar power, with big data, IOE-based surveillance, and data analytics backed by AI could yield a dictator’s ecstatic dream of total social control. https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-just-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/ Does this system elicit a new politics in 2050? For some, they idolize heroes of our time: Snowden, Alexandra Elbakyan. Others abhor them as dangerous criminals. What kind of politics are described by their fans and opponents?
- A new politics: here, for example, is a proposal for casting some urban areas as Rebel Cities, spaces where surveillance is disallowed. Would such spaces be fruitful ground for shooters like the one in Orlando, as well as for creative expression? Would Rebel Cities descend into chilling cycles of escalating violence and terror, or create new forms of social amity? By 2050 has this range of thinking about surveillance become the new left-right, blue-red political bedrock? After we hack the earth and transform our population, do we end up with what Bruce Sterling calls “cities full of old people, afraid of the sky”?
- Hang on. What could stop some or all of these from happening? Moore’s law’s slowing , so pace ratchets down a bit (but turn to robotics and quantum computing) No-growth economies (you first; seriously, convince people; plus Keynesian economics; plus vast equity issues of telling developing world to stop) Resource crash “giving up the gun” (rarely works, historically; exception of state power against crossbow)
- Or a new anti-technological politics, urging us to return to an older form of humanity. NeoLuddites? anti-intellectuals? New Humanists?
- Religious movement against new technologies? Frank Herbert gave us such a vision in his classic novel Dune, where a kind of crusade blocks AIs from working for centuries.
- Various Black Swans could occur, such as an extraordinarily massive solar event or EMP strikes from some foe or the clathrate gun fires.
- Imagine 2075. The humans we knew from the year 2000 are a vanishingly rare type, studied by descendants of anthropologists. Artificial intelligences busily work around and above the globe, redesigning life. The biosphere has gained and lost species and entire biomes. The Earth… is transformed. Education and creativity? something else entirely. Some inspired and creative AI and semi-human teams launch mixed reality reenactments of life in 2016.
- 4. What is to be done? How can we anticipate and act strategically in the face of such potential transformation? (scared face image)
- Political sclerosis and dystopian reaction Political leaders opposed to civil liberties: Trump, Clinton; Cameron; China’s gamified autocracy; journalism: Sans Frontiers report; Turkey arresting journalists on press freedom day
- You. Help. Make. The. Future. It isn’t something just done to you, delivered like gifts from a cargo cult. You help make the future. Every decision you make contributes. When you craft a creative work, or teach in a certain way, or nudge a campus in one direction, or support a political candidate, or tell a story, or dream out loud, or influence younger folks, you help co-create what is coming next. Don’t be passive - it’s too late! You’re already making it happen. You are all - each of you - practicing futurists and world-makers. Do so with open eyes, and the flame of creative possibility roaring in your heart. Thank you.