Toward the Future

Poverty and violence are decreasing worldwide, at truly amazing rates. And of course - as we have seen - this fact seems anathema to grouches of both the far left and the entire right. But it does prove that the Great Program instituted by George Marshall, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and Dwight Eisenhower has been working, in a spectacular mix of good development assistance and the better half of capitalism.

But it is the fight against poverty that stands out even more. As reported in a recent Economist article, Towards the End of Poverty: “In his inaugural address in 1949 Harry Truman said that “more than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of those people.” It has taken much longer than Truman hoped, but the world has lately been making extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, their number fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%—a reduction of almost 1 billion people.”

Amid fretful resignation, we learn of the likely loss of the magnificent Kepler mission,

“I am a member of a civilization that does stuff like that.”

Grand challenges!  It’s an approach to stimulating research and technology that has been around for a while, stretching back to the British “longitude prize” of the 1700s.  Aviation medals and awards spurred rapid advances during the 1920s and 1930s and sparked breakthroughs in human-powered flight in the 1980s and 1990s.  One contest helped lead to creation of the “spaceship” sub-orbital craft that Richard Branson and Burt Rutan will soon use to offer spectacular jaunts for rich folks. (Something I portray evolving into an extreme sport, in Existence.)

Newer X Prizes - stimulated especially by Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation - include Qualcomm’s contest to develop a medical tricorder and Google’s prize for the first private group to land an autonomous mobile probe on the moon, as well as Nokia’s Medical Sensing prize.

I’ve filled out the application and profile for “Mars One” - the proposed endeavor to send volunteers to “colonize” Mars well before a simple manned landing and return can be accomplished. How? Simple.  Make the journey one way!  I have mixed feelings, but I approve of the devil-may-care courage that’s involved and the willingness to toss aside the solipsistic importance of the self for something spectacularly ground-breaking. I can’t promise for sure that I would go.  But I talk about the mind-set and I think I’ve got at least a bit of it.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) and I have both agreed and disagreed about transparency, for years. In his posting, Crime and Privacy, he has opined, for example, that ”Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of crime, it will be forced by public opinion and by resource constraints to legalize anything it can detect but can’t stop.” 

Hm, well, that’s right in the general gist, though wrong in the specifics. What Scott is fumbling around — and that I made explicit in The Transparent Society (1997) — is that universal and pervasive surveillance can take us in either of two directions.  One is toward Big Brother, if elites monopolize the omniscience and can surveil in secret, without accountability or supervision.  In that case, you get what Vernor Vinge called “ubiquitous law enforcement.” And if the cops can’t arrest everyone?  Then they’ll cherry-pick and arrest those whom they don’t like.  In the specifics, Adams is dead wrong.

The “High Quality Research Act,” sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), would strip the peer-review requirement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant process, inserting a new set of funding criteria that is significantly less transparent. Smith, sponsor of the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would expand U.S. oversight over copyrighted intellectual property on the internet, published an editorial in Roll Call describing how his vision of science funding is based not upon the impacts new research may have on the scientific community, but whether that research will “create jobs.” He went on to boast about how much of the House science committee’s $39 billion in agency budgets gets dumped onto nuclear, fracking and “clean coal” projects. Smith has no background in science.  But then, neither do any of the members of the majority party on the House Science Committee.

It appears that Republicans in the U.S. Congress are veering away from the (politically) dangerous ground of entitlement reform, even though President Obama has put on the table an offer to let them have something they long demanded — a reduction in the inflation adjustment for Social Security and Medicare, plus possible even the Bowles-Simpson age-adjustments.  It seems that (as happened with Obama Care) the GOP finds nothing more loathsome than when the opposition says, “Okay, we’ll do it your way. So let’s make a deal.” 

As it turns out, I have long suggested an extremely simple approach that would avoid this pitfall, by simplifying first and then  dealing with political matters second.  It sounds impossible, but it is actually rather straightforward, if only we tried the method called “No Losers Simplification.”

My most memorable meals on Eating Authors with Lawrence Shoen: Dining should be like life itself – contingent and hard to pin down along the simplistic metaphorical axes of mere language. Hence, when pondering my “best meal” I could only come up with several, each in its own context the “best.” For example 16 years old, at a summer academic camp, the strawberry fields next door so overflowing that one lunch we had mountains of the best, most luscious berries I ever tasted. A true surfeit. I stayed after everyone else left, eating ever more slowly, asymptotically, until it was clear that one more was impossible. It would harm the bliss… but the best part was knowing there were mountains more of them nearby, were I to want them. It taught me a lesson in the fine art of human satiation and satiability.

A sampling of interesting items: From John Cleese commenting on creativity, to James Watson commenting on his momentous discovery of the structure of DNA, to Daniel H. Wilson on robotics in our future..and science fiction.