Category Archives: future

Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter; a sign for 2012

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The emergence of a Twitter account yesterday in @rupertmurdoch’s name set off a flurry of comment, much of it skeptical. It looked authentic to me and I said so. Now it’s verified, and @wendi_deng his wife is also tweeting (hers as yet unverified, though I think it’s for real and have enjoyed a couple of verisimilitudinous exchanges). I hope they stick at it, though it won’t be easy as it is simple to send abusive tweets and Murdoch is quite a target. And I hope they keep the PR people at bay. They must be tearing out their hair as this will have ruined their New Year weekend.

What’s in my mind is that if we can nudge public figures in politics, business, the arts, elsewhere –  to engage in the 24/7 cocktail party which is Twitter, and to do so in their own voice, the benefits will be incalculable.  For them and for us.

Who’s next?

Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter?

Shifting to WordPress

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As we tidy things up at the year-end, seemed a good idea to shift away from Blogger to WordPress and try out its greater functionality in 2012. . . .

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
A Knowledge Network Asking Tomorrow’s Questions

Content and the Future of Knowledge: How to Win

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Here’s a speech I made in London:

Content and the Future of Knowledge: How to Win

APA CONTENT SUMMIT, London, November 23rd, 2011

Talking about the future always seems too easy or too hard. Anyone can speculate. No-one actually knows. So what’s the point?

If talk is cheap, isn’t this the cheapest? We all know of “futurists” who have discredited themselves sounding like Nostradamus. If we can’t even predict the markets from one week to the next, what price longer-term shifts in culture, technology, and business?

In practical terms, there are two poles to the futures discussion: futurists who pontificate, and cannier leaders who engage in scenario planning. The former may get it very wrong (remember the “paperless office”?) The latter tend to cover their backs by imagining the obvious and making sure all possibilities have been sketched out.

I once took part in a scenario planning project run by the U.S. government called Project Horizon (the report is out there somewhere on the internet). They pulled in Booz Allen to run the process, and top officials from many federal agencies as well as a smattering of outsiders (like me). Five detailed global scenarios were articulated, and after a couple of years of interviews and meetings some core conclusions reached that would fit them all. For a generation and more, governments and major corporations have used scenario planning – pioneered in the oil industry – to guide their long-term decisions. It can be a clumsy process, but captures the insights of “futurists” and other smart thinkers and turns it into usable intelligence to drive decision-making. So what’s ahead for branded content?

First let me sketch five keys to thinking about the future.

1.Change is exponential; don’t ever forget Moore’s Law, which is helping drive it. Gordon Moore, who founded Intel, famously predicted the extraordinary pace of change. He spoke originally of the number of components that could be fitted into integrated circuits as doubling every year. The “law” has evolved into a prediction and observation that every 18 months or so chips would double in power and halve in price; it has proved remarkably accurate and explains why our computers keep getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. What this means is that while the impact may not be as dramatic (there are other factors driving/slowing change than the chip) the pace keeps getting faster. Perhaps annual industry conferences should cease to be annual and, every year, take place after a shorter interval to catch the increasing pace of change.

2.As we think about the future we must avoid at all costs the danger of groupthink – in which everyone essentially agrees with each other. Think Wall Street, 2008. There are no guarantees where change is concerned, but one way to future-proof your business is to make sure that in every planning meeting there is an outlier in the room; someone who just doesn’t agree with everyone else; someone who keeps challenging the assumptions of the group. This does not make for easy process. But it makes for good process. And is unavoidable if the future is in view.

3.We need to think in contexts in which disciplines, perspectives, and styles are mixed; that is, whatever the particular issue we deal with, near term or longer term, our perspectives and decisions will always be improved if we involve people with a variety of expertise and outlook – if you have experience in project management you will be aware of how important this is; but it is a lot more important where the future is concerned.

4.Whether in the formal sense of strategic planning or more ad hoc brainstorming, the future process must be iterative. And (my point about the exponential nature of change) the iterations need to be increasingly frequent.

5.Behind every problem, every issue, lies a question. Get the question wrong and it is pretty much guaranteed you will get the answer wrong, however hard you work at it. The policy institute that I direct, the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, has for its strapline, “Asking Tomorrow’s Questions.” It may not seem obvious, but getting the question right is in fact more significant than how we work on the answer. For example, when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, America – and much of the rest of the world – was enthralled. Interest in space travel is now negligible. How do we account for that? It’s quite simple: the reason everyone was fascinated by the moonshot was not out of interest in space as such, but because it came to symbolize the future. Now, the moonshot as NASA’s great emblem means the opposite. Unless you are 42 you weren’t even born then! The moonshot is the past. If you are excited about the future, you buy an iPad. As we probe the future, we do have to get the question right first. That’s why the “content” idea is important. The issue isn’t magazines. It’s the stuff that goes inside.

That having been said, what does the future hold for branded content? Three underlying principles seem very plain to me. Three huge forces are a work reshaping the landscape.

1.The future is mobile. I met someone the other day who explained that she has an old desktop PC at home, a heavy ageing laptop to carry around, and was wondering about getting a netbook or tablet to use as well. I gently explained she should throw out both the dinosaurs and spend what she thought was an amazingly small sum on a new lightweight item, probably a netbook, given her needs. Point is: we are on the move all the time; we desire to communicate and be informed as we are on the move; and while our smartphones have yet to merge with netbooks and tablets, we know they will. I’m not quite sure how. But I’m confident that in three or four years we shall carry only one device, which will be small enough to use as a phone, and in some clever way expand so we have a full keyboard for easy typing and a full screen for easy viewing. There will be no “PCs” on desks, and I am surprised how many of them are still there. Cloud-based storage is already highly effective where access is sufficiently high-speed. The device in your hand is merely an access-point. Mobile is driving everything – including driving content off paper and into digital.

2.The future is global. The spread of the internet, and especially mobile access, is best compared to a forest-fire. It took decades for landline telephones to spread even around the wealthier parts of the world. Already most Africans have mobile phones; tens of millions of them do not yet have electricity in their homes. They already use their phones for mobile banking more than people in the “west.” And this despite the fact that few have “smartphones” like the Android and Blackberry and iPhone. But cheap versions, especially Android-based, will soon sweep the continent. Point is: Hundreds of millions of consumers are already accessing the global knowledge network we call the internet using mobile devices. Many of them will never have anything else. And the newly-connected global community will benefit enormously from advances in translation technology, which already means you can chat with someone who speaks another language and will soon (five years?) make that routine. This will have enormous impacts on everything from the nature of governments in the “nation-state” system basically established in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia, to the workings of the United Nations and its agencies, to – yes – the future of global brands. The establishment of global brands has been a hallmark of 20th century (primarily American) business. How to retain control of brands is emerging as a huge question as consumers get savvier and more connected. My own view is that Facebook will be over (well, like Myspace) in five years. But there will be powerful successors. How will it be if Brand X has a Facebook-type, crowd-sourced, consumerist group with, say, 2.5 billion members across every global market? I assume someone in Brand HQ is thinking hard about this. Because the game is about to change big-time.

3.The future is social. Companies big and small have been rather desperately seeking to get into “social” with Facebook pages and Like buttons and seeking integration with their product line. My view is that they have hardly begun to work through what this will soon mean. More to the point, how does it relate to branded content?

This is where it gets really interesting. Because the most powerful content-related force out there is best described as reciprocal curation. The future of global knowledge is curation by “friends” or, in Twitter terms, the people you follow; for whom you curate in turn. That is, everyone reads and reflects and assesses and then shares what they read and think with everyone else who happens to be interested. I discuss this phenomenon, which seems to me the central value (and value adder) of the internet, elsewhere. Its significance for branded content becomes clear when we consider the content models currently out there.

As we know, there are basically two others. Paywall and click-through ads. The old-tyme print media has begun to fall back behind paywalls. Search has been powered by click-through. Those two explain the business models of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Google, plus all the lesser players. But these models are flawed. The number paying for journalism and magazine content through paywalls is very small. The exceptions (e.g., Wall Street Journal) are highly specialized and handling high-value intelligence. In general, these efforts have failed. We know the core reason: internet users have learned bad habits; we expect “free.” There remain options, for example using micropayments, that may give “paywall” thinking a future. But it is unlikely to be widespread.

Meanwhile, the click-through ad model is also under stress. Google has grasped around half the web-based advertizing for the simple reason that it dominates search. But it is very hard to believe that this will last. Its algorithms may be smart, but there are other players out there where smart people also work. In five years, perhaps sooner, search (like Facebook-style social) will be seen as a utility. Utilities do not make “economic profit;” do not IPO at vast multi-billion sums. There are fluid markets coming in both social and search, and – this is the key – they will favour branded content.

Which brings us back to its future. Because the news – in the longer term – looks good.

First, effectively all content will migrate to digital; some will also be available in print, though I suspect, in the long term, not much. A digital option for whatever content is presently only in print format will be very rapid. Second, as we noted, curation at all levels will be increasingly crowd-sourced, whether through primitive Like buttons or the far more sophisticated system of reciprocal curation that has evolved at Twitter. Paywalls of all kinds will be abandoned except in areas where intelligence is of high value (even there, the pressure will be great). Click-through will wilt as a funding model for content aggregators as search becomes a utility. It will be the subtler marketing effort of “free” branded content that will triumph. If, that is, it attains an excellence that will survive the scrutiny of an open market in crowd-sourced curation. So there will be a race to the top, driven by the global, mobile, social marketplace for consumers – and for ideas.

Excellence will be the key. A market for content in which there are editors by the billion will be unforgiving. But to the winners, the spoils will be very great. In world increasingly literate and engaged, in which ideas and their expression flow freely and competitively, the content market is set to drive brands as it never has before.


The Wrong Stuff: NASA, Amtrak, and why the answer really is 42

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The Wrong Stuff: NASA, Amtrak, and why the answer really is 42

In my last commentary, I argued that the single greatest risk factor on the planet was the divergence in “corporate culture” between two rather small plots of U.S. real estate: Washington, DC, and Silicon Valley. Two communities bound together by their deeply geographical identity, a disdain for one another, and hubris off the charts. They just happen to be the two most consequent communities in the Solar System. What happens in Mexico stays in Mexico (unless, that is, it involves the cartels). What happens in SV and DC sends seismic shocks through the crust of the 3rd rock from the sun.

It may seem unfair to put Amtrak and NASA in the same sentence. But they just happen to be transportation organizations funded by the federal government. Amtrak, home of the slowest fast train on the planet (the, ahem, surely, ironically named Acela),respectfully engages technology that has changed little since Stevenson’s day: Rails, carriages, and an engine to pull the latter over the former. The only major variant in railroadland worldwide is the Maglev, now embraced by China: magnetic levitation in an electric version of the reversed vacuum cleaner that enables hovercraft to be ships that rarely touch the water. (Point to note: so much of our 21st century excitement is in response to advances in essentially 19th century tech. The telephone and the typewriter have been hybridized to produce mobile devices; their functionality derives from extra bandwidth more than any other factor. QWERTY rules. That’s why Siri is so significant; it’s actually new. But we digress.) My point is not to argue that we need vast investment, federal and private, in a U.S.-wide 21st century railroad system. Ca va sans dire. And maybe the Chinese should run the engineering. (DC-NYC in one hour; DC/NYC-LA/SF in 10?)

NASA‘s core problem is that it is starting to look more and more like Amtrak. At one level that is ridiculous. Not only have its engineers performed feats of utter brilliance that even now seem way beyond the best of the brightest a whole generation later in China and India and for that matter Europe. But as budgets are cut to the quick and the body politic on both sides of the aisle seems hardly to be dominated by visionaries, it can’t be easy to run the agency whose signature achievement happened before everyone under 42 was born (and everyone under 60 could vote). It is not that the agency has lacked visionaries and plans. But how do you top the trip to the moon? Plainly, with the lunar base that everyone over 42 read about when we were kids; and the manned missions to Mars and beyond that the sci-fi writers convinced us would come next and that space engineers have been champing at the budget to get on with ever since.

So what’s the problem? Well, cash, branding, the federal mindset, and now: Space-X and the ubiquitous Richard Branson (whose hand I once shook and on one of whose airplanes I am currently writing) are making it hard to argue for $18bn a year for a mission that’s plainly been derailed (to resort to an Amtrak metaphor). Trips to earth-orbit space may well become utilities, in private hands. The mystique of escaping earth’s pull has folded. And NASA looks like your grandparents’ idea of the right stuff. I mean, look at the logo. Look at the tagline. $18 bn for that?

NASA peeps tend to look back to their great days, and believe that after JFK’s speech and the vast excitement generated by the Moon mission the key is still space. People back then really, really wanted to go into space. Why don’t they want to now? We seem to have flipped; our cosmos is now micro not macro. The most advanced technology and the hottest draw for engineers is the iPhone, a machine for games and music and chat; a private, personal universe. Reality has become social and virtual. How lame is it to want to be an astronaut? My suspicion is it’s way down there with becoming an engineer on the railroad; which is what we all wanted in the 50s and 60s before we decided to shift allegiance from Casey Jones to Neil Armstrong.

However: the excitement of the 60s had little to do with the Moon. It had everything to do with the future. Our iconic embodiment was The Jetsons, the cartoon TV show that brilliantly captured the vision of a tech-enabled world. It seems never have occurred to the Jetson generation that handheld devices would drive the future. Or that in 50 years we would have forgotten the Moon, abandoned the planets, with our space policy focused on a job-sharing dealie with the post-Soviets on an orbiting Bed and Breakfast.

It was the future that grabbed us back then. That place which draws us like a siren. Which we shape with every choice we make. Which at that point was brilliantly grasped by JFK, our best speech-maker in a century. Which sufficiently grasped the American psyche that, across administrations and congresses, it actually happened. 42 years ago.

So what’s NASA to do? For one thing, let’s give its engineers first shot at the Great American Railroad Project, before we outsource to Beijing. Which somewhat illustrates my point. NASAdoes a lot more than space travel (no bad thing, since we aren’t doing much of that at all). It employs and contracts with the world’s greatest network of engineering whizzes. .

But back to the future. NASA‘s glory days were in an America escaping the vicissitudes of wartime restrictions and rejoicing in normality plus refrigerators and TVs. Everyone was worried about the Soviets, yet confident in gung-ho can-do right-stuff solutions and yearning for a tomorrow that seemed bright with technology. That future meant space. But space as subset. NASA isn’t the National Aeronautical and Space Administration at all. It’s the National Future Agency which, time was, dabbled in space, and will do again. We aren’t from the Moon. We happened to go there back in 1969, way past. At root, if we are NASA, we are from the future.

That’s why the fixation with the Moon landing has been slowly doing something terrible to the agency’s image, turning it into a museum of the past. America at its best has always been defined by the future. NASA has the future at its feet. There is certainly no serious competition from any other agency within the federal government.

We are aching for visionary, future-oriented, federal leadership, to engage with transportation systems terrestrial and inter-planetary. Our railways are a joke to anyone who has traveled in Europe, let alone Asia; and as someone recently pointed out (cruelly though not inaccurately) the story of our space program makes perfect sense – if you read it backwards: now we have no human-lift capacity; then we have capacity and use it for earth orbit; then we go to the moon.

How about the tagline, “We’re from the Future”? How about a steady, grandiose, exposition (fromNASA grandees, celebs, pols, anyone who can be got on board) of the narrative of the future, its potentials, its choices, its closeness. How about engaging with Disney and MTV and gamers and sci-fi writers to mash-up a future for America that hits our imagination out of the park?

And so we return to a theme we have explored already. The long term (which is the term of “real life”) versus the short (of politics and big biz). Unless America can mount the long term and stay in the saddle, there is not much else to say. Yet that will take leadership, which is why this discussion of federal investments in transportation goes well beyond the organizations in our gunsights.


NASA‘s ambiguous achievement, in the eyes of America, has been to celebrate the 42-year-old past, and turn the future into a complex airplane they actually decided to call the Shuttle; utility space transportation, aptly named. Meanwhile, on the railroad front, don’t forget who started it. Railroad pioneer Stevenson was a visionary. When he built his little steam engine and sent it off down its track at 29 mph he inaugurated a new age that drove the industrial revolution, led to the rise of the west, and now to the rise of the locomotively-driven east. But he was not interested in utility transportation. I’m sure we all remember the name of his locomotive, which set the pattern for 150 years of rail transportation. He didn’t call it the Shuttle. He called it the Rocket.

Transcendent Texting, Mutual Curation, and Twitter as Tomorrow

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Transcendent Texting, Mutual Curation, and Twitter as Tomorrow

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

President and CEO, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

Flying again, and when the best movie offering is Planet of the Apes and its prequel, the mind turns to higher things. Though the aping gaping is not without worth. It’s a genre of awful movies that focus the human question rather well. What is this human thing, and how shall we who embrace its most visionary grasp of the future, our technological achievements, aspirations, and fears – how shall we best serve out our time as member of Homo sapiens sapiens, and those members of said species who find ourselves cast as its thought leaders? Because, as we have said before, it’s all about the human question; what it means, at the end of the day, to be one of us. Technology is, finally, anthropology, and not the other way around. Planet of the Apes. Not of the Apps.

Not quite all smart people are yet denizens of Twitter. And it still comes in for high-blown denunciations from Great Persons who have never used it. But I ventured to suggest the other day (in a tweet, of course) that it is now an open question whether anyone can be a paid-up member of the commentariat in 2011 without a Twitter handle. Because while it is presently used for a score of different purposes (from chat-chat among friends to crass marketing efforts to smart customer service to newsgathering that beats any other source) at its core it offers two interlocking experiences which deliver value so great it is hard to measure.

First is, as it were, research. Let’s be personal here. I follow 300-400 people, a spread across the half-dozen fields of interest that attract and distract my attention: tech/futures, policy/politics, high culture, publishing, aspects of business/finance, and arcana like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party – twin pillars of a generating #exopolitics, on which more anon. Point is: I have 400 researchers, key thinkers and doers and scanners of every possible horizon, who funnel their best finds and their smartest comments to me: every day, all the time, and for no cost. The value added to my thinking is so immense I find it impossible to think of reverting to other modalities of gathering intelligence and intelligent commentary. The term of art for the vast Twitter output is the “firehose,” and the cap fits. Each and every day, my 400 picked, diligent, smart researchers and commenters send thousands of items my way, their firehoses of news and ideas and assessments trained on me from the directions of my choosing. These curators include some of the leading thinkers on Planet Earth; lesser mortals whose comments are as sharp as they are often amusing; diligent scanners of literature (some in many languages); and representatives of classes of person whose importance is very great to the culture that is evolving around us (nerds, journos, pols, entrepreneurs, even a semi-celeb or two) – evolving in a manner best described (for devotees of evolutionary theory) as rapidly punctuated equilibria, with a heavy dose of Lamarckianism (poor dear loveable Lamarck, once sent to the Gulag in the show-trial oldstyle Commie way in which science tends to proceed, has had something of a rehab thanks to epigenetics and whatnot; which reminds me of Arthur Koestler and The Case of the Midwife Toad – it would be interesting to find out if anyone who reads C-PET’s modest garden hose has read that . . .handy reading for members of the Campaign Against Groupthink). So, first, Twitter is a tool for research which aside from various technical apps – like the spread of disease – gives me daily 100x what I could ever get from a research staff. And it comes pre-curated by people of whatever level of skill and judgment I choose.

Second, Twitter as cocktail party. 24/7. This vast research staff is also quaffing cocktails and engaged in constant chit-chat. One limitation on “firehose” language lies precisely here. In some respects it’s more like a game of enhanced frisbee. Person A passes to B – we can all see; B then adds some comment (expert, snark, both . . .) and on to C. Hey, who’s C? I take a look. C is fascinating; gets added to my staff of researchers and advisers forthwith. Not sure I agree with B, so I push back and offer a comment. And I thank A for sharing something important. Who can tell what A will do? A often responds, and we exchange. B passes on my comment (very common on Twitter, whether it’s complimentary or not) to his/her followers. C wonders who I am who now follows him/her and may decide to follow back. On it flows. And as we travel and write I end up meeting B or C or A (met a Tweep for the first time today at an airport, by arrangement), or on the phone (happened a couple days ago), or for lunch (recently): knowledge drives relationships and relationships drive knowledge. And the potent digital fruit is served up: when VR meets IRL. The juncture of the digital and the analog; ideas and persons in fission.

What to make of this? Three things, for a start.

1. The remarkable power of what I am terming “mutual curation.” If all the smart people I can find start talking to me about the things that most interest them and most interest me, my knowledge will grow exponentially. If the only price I pay is to share what most interests me in return, we have the rudiments of Adam Smith in the realm of knowledge: We each pursue our interests; we all gain.

2. Simplicity can lead to extraordinary complexity; in this case, barely through design and largely serendipitously. This global knowledge generator is at root a system for broadcasting text messages. While a thousand apps have sprung up to add third-party smarts and explore third-party profit, the core simplicity remains. Its power is immeasurable; The Princes of Serendip have won the lottery.

3. I remarked in an earlier commentary that of all the “social media” tools Twitter stands out as the pathway to tomorrow. I’m not enamored of the thought of “one great inter-connected world brain,” language proposed by the editors of a National Science Foundation volume a decade back. But the capacity of my brain to tap into the best and the brightest, and offer what I, Nigel, have to offer in return, is beyond remarkable. This, here, is the Yellow Brick Road. It’s no more possible to conjure up our lives tomorrow than to enable an unborn child to come to terms with kindergarten. But analogy is our friend, and it’s all we have. Think Twitter on steroids and we begin to grasp the key to the 21st century’s enormous knowledge ramp-up through mutual curation. Twitter is not yet another photo-sharing app. Mass-texting just discovered transcendence. It’s both unique and, potentially, omnipotent.

Why does this matter quite so much? Because it addresses the fundamental question faced by human minds (and for that matter machine minds) in Century 21: how to move from essentially indefinite mounds of data to understanding, to wisdom, to judgment, and finally to choices.

What Twitter has demonstrated is mutual curation as both the answer and attainable; and while AIs will play ever larger parts in our lives, Twitter demonstrates the power of curation by networks of persons. Twitter itself and the Twitter-like entities that will follow are less “social media” (I dislike that category for several reasons) than mutual knowledge engines. What follows will be multilayered and vast – driven by every internet-user on Planet Earth who is not fixated with gaming, which will have its own role in defining tomorrow, or lolcats, about which I am less sure.

Follow my tweets, if you like, at @nigelcameron.

Contacting the Future: two efforts in NYC

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I rather like going to conferences in pairs. Something about parallax. Seeing through two eyes; a 3-D on the material that can give insights unplanned by either set of planners. I went to three in a week last summer, and here’s what resulted: http://c-pet.org/?q=node/30.

Still digesting this week’s pair of offerings, but some preliminary reflections as the mulling spices get to work.
Last weekend was the Singularity Summit, second I think in NYC of the series initiated by the Ray-Kurzweil-inspired Institute that essentially serves as curator of his vision of an AI-invested future. His own view is that AI will take over rather soon and be rather benign. One virtue of these events is that some of his colleagues are less convinced of the latter. Some also differ on the former, including somewhat intriguingly PayPal founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who regularly participates and is said to be the chief funder (I do admire his funding of outlier causes sea-steading is another). I love these events and attend when I can as they offer a platform to some of the smartest thinkers about tomorrow – unabashed by the general academic tendency to qualify everything to death and be embarrassed to ask Big Questions. I think SI is too read to offer Big Answers, but at least we get to have a little conversation.
But it’s only a little. If there’s a problem with their events, it’s a highly amusing one. For harbingers of tomorrow, they manage to convene conferences that, qua conferences, are total retro. As I tweeted at the time: Event planning is weak (endless lines meant we started 30m late – anyone able to use Microsoft Project out there in Singularityland, if simpler approaches fail?), an over-stuffed agenda (almost any one speaker would be good for 4x the time allotted), and weak moderating (which meant we soon got later still) – facilities simply too small for the catering. Social media, before, during and after, close to non-existent. Process, knowledge management, from the dark ages: lecture, questions, lecture questions, oops gotta cut short the coffee break . . . ); networking time/opportunities close to zero. http://www.singularitysummit.com/program
Now to Contact. http://contactcon.com/
This was definitely a new economy event! An unconference, in the patois, hosted by Doug Rushkoff and my friend Venessa Miemis. Various phases: Short opening idea pitches, breakouts led by people who had offered, milling around dozens of startups and other initiatives, on and on. Then a wrapup, and two parties. Great food options during the day. A neat review/summary by Peter Vander Auwera (@petervan) at http://petervan.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/contactcon-conference-the-cry-for-freedom/.
Observations? As with the SS, the facilities were overcrowded – a good problem, perhaps, but a problem. An English idiom perhaps captures the program: they had over-egged the pudding. Too much, too many, all rather breathless and too jampacked to get enough of a sense of the whole (for both events: consider a 50% reduction in everything programmed). Contact grasps as SI does not that process, knowledge management, relationships are at the heart of things. Getting there from here is not easy. And the parties offered at the end show something of the problem. The closing party at the event location was sparse (most people had gone home) and having beer only (ouch) and served upstairs (odd) hardly helped (OK: C-PET events close with seriously nice wine, and I go round with the bottles). The afterparty may have been glorious, but I only stopped by long enough to discover the music was much too loud for conversation. Ahem.
I”d be interested to know – speaking of knowledge networks – how many people actualltyb attended both events, here in NYC, a few days apart (and anyone travel on to the Open Science conf on the other coast this weekend? I’m tracking it in Twitterland). The ideas at SS were big, some of them huge, intellectuals performing. The focus at Contact was digital, activist, and much of it start-up/funding-oriented.
Now, if we could bring these two into alignment and get the “new economy” style fine-tuned with big ideas to power it . . . that would be even more interesting. Not suggesting Contact and SI merge. Oh no, the pluritude of denominations when it comes to tech and the future is a fine thing. But it would be interesting to get each to study the other, learn, mutually engage, and perhaps even correlate new time around. #SS11 + #Contactcon = ?
Oh yes, well, C-PET is working in that space. In Washington, where (sorry, peeps) the discussion really needs to be happening.

Steve Jobs dies; a generation ends

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Steve Jobs dies; a generation ends

I never met Steve Jobs. Never even tried. I now regret it, of course. Even to shake a hand and chat for five minutes offers a connection unmediated by the various departments of the press. And I have done that with all kinds of people. But he’s gone, and he’s gone younger than I am, and my mortality and admiration and strategic sense are intermingled in a manner I find disturbing. I don’t think there was anyone who in such a practical way grasped the future – the near future, but the future – and found out how to monetize it using his own imagination and the marvelous skills of those he drew to him. Who else has leaped ahead of the focus group and been glad of it? Who else has produced packaging –packaging! – you feel you must be an aesthetic criminal to discard?

A second generation begins today, October 6. The “digital revolution” that the naive ones of the earth believe has happened and that has just started to find traction – the digital revolution is now into Phase II, post-Jobs, an exploration of the middle distance (10-15 years, which will always be our benchmark) as we contemplate our current competencies and what they will in due time entail. But it is indeed today. There is no comparable starting-point. And while the prophets among us tend increasingly to say we are going to live forever, or close to it, the death of the digital generation’s greatest man at 56 brings us back to the benchmark of human mortality. A mortality he discussed, as few do today, even as he prepared the way for those he knew would live on into a distant future denied to him by the interaction of his pancreas (what’s a pancreas? he once asked) and something called cancer that, despite all our efforts, remains a disease we can do surprisingly little about.

What better way to frame what lies ahead? We shall not become immortal (sorry, Ray). Our lives may indeed extend longer, perhaps much longer. Let’s learn from the example of the iconic figure of our Moore’s-Law driven technological times, who learned of his own mortality and dared speak of it – as he prepared us for immortal Siri and the challenging marvels that will lie ahead.

So, be thankful for a man who broke every mold. And let’s embrace our frail humanity as we also engage the extraordinary prospects for which he helped prepare us.

A PLANETARY INITIATIVE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

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BUILDING GLOBAL ALIGNMENT: A PLANETARY INITIATIVE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FORDEVELOPMENT.
THE UNESCO HIGH PANEL
Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC
I am just back from Paris, where I joined in part of ameeting of a high-level body convened to address one of the most pressingissues on the planet: how best to engage emerging developments in science andtechnology for the benefit of developing nations and poor people.
Since the rich/poor divide keeps getting wider, it is not clearthat S and T will somehow automatically bring the planet into greater harmony.There has been handwringing over the “nano divide,” and recognition thatdespite global access to the internet the compounding effects of emergingtechnologies in the most developed parts of the world will inevitably leavebehind the rest. Alongside that, the emergence of terror as a global threat anddeepening awareness of the power of asymmetry has brought about deeperawareness across the political spectrum that development is a security issue aswell as one of humanity; that “ungovernable areas” are substantially theproduct of sustained poverty and development failure; that the wealthier partsof the planet will be yet better off if the poorer cease to be so poor. That is,economic development, long a nonpartisan goal, is emerging as one of evengreater importance to the global community.
This clutch of questions is complex. Economic initiative ispassing eastward to China and other rapidly-growing Asian economies. The openingkeynote at the Technology Policy Institute’s excellent Aspen Conference lastmonth opined that by 2020 China would surpass the GDP of the United States, andhighly significant re-rankings would be established in relation the present G7and emerging powers like Brazil. Meanwhile, the current crisis in the publicfinances of the west, the crisis in banking, and associated economic woes, havecome at a particularly bad time. The world order established at Bretton Woods –which sounds like a chateau in France but is actually a large house on theoutskirts of Washington – is in free-fall. The push to replace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency gained quitea fillip with the internal arm-wrestling (and to outsiders heedlessbrinkmanship) over the U.S. debt ceiling; and the dyspeptic state of theEurozone and other European economies in the wake of the Icelandic collapse.Add Ireland’s astonishing demise, the deep and still developing crisis in thesouthern European economies, and the role of the banks. The Economist, thatbulwark of sweet reasonableness that remains the bellwether of the economicorder that the New Yorker is to the cultural, reads as close to apocalyptic asit has perhaps ever has.
In parallel, we have a deep and deepening crisis in the capacityof the United States to maintain its innovative edge – and this despitesplendid conferences hosted by such eminent institutions as TPI and Brookings,the efforts in Washington of the Task Force on American Innovation, speeches bythe president, and even the efforts of C-PET in our roundtable series. Aconstant theme of our roundtables has been the bleakness of the current pictureand the deep inadequacy of the bromides being offered to assuage it. “Thequestion for America,” a leading investor stated at C-PET, “is whether we wantto become a second-rate nation, or a third-rate.” Or as Peter Thiel, leadingfunder of PayPal and Facebook (and also, note, of the Ray Kurzweil-associatedSingularity Institute), proposed at the TPI event, U.S. science and technologyhas not been especially innovative for a long time. We went to the moon, andsince then what he charmingly called “the computer industry” has done well.There’s not been much else. Quite the bucket of cold water for the nation thatdeeply prides itself as the taproot of global innovation.
One of the planet’s most undervalued stocks is UNESCO, theUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Based inParis, it was boycotted by the United States for many years because of bias and(remember when?) Soviet influence; but George W. Bush rejoined, and since theearly 2000s we have been reconnected with this remarkable global network. Itsmission and identity are perhaps best expressed in its iconic foundingstatement: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of menthat the defenses of peace must be constructed.” That statement, from the1940s, has peculiar application to the work of the High Panel on Science andTechnology for Development that I attended a few days ago.
It has been a privilege to serve as Chair of the Social andHuman Sciences (SHS) Committee of the United States National Commission forUNESCO, the advisory committee on UNESCO affairs at the Department of State. Akey feature of the panel is that it spans two UNESCO sectors – NaturalSciences, and Social and Human Sciences (SHS). Since SHS includes not onlysocial science and the humanities, but the ethics of science and technology,and human rights, this cross-sectoral identity is both apt and powerful. As Ihave argued more than once, leadership in the 21st century will comefrom those who span sectors and silos; who without loss of the deep expertisethat we find within them can build knowledge networks across them and between;who can engage thinkers and ideas that may initially seem to have little incommon to achieve great common ends. As Moore’s Law, globalization, and otherforces drive us forward faster every year, that truth becomes more relevant andmore vital. This collaboration across the sectors, and between their respectiveAssistant Directors-General, Pilar Alvarez and Gretchen Kalonji, is much to becommended and should be a model for future efforts.
We have all sat through pro forma speeches by ImportantPeople opening events and welcoming participants. UNESCO Director-General IrinaBokova, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting in Washington, opened theSeptember 16 event of the High Panel with eloquence and content. Science, sheargued, should drive development for all. A new humanism is on the horizon.“Innovation should not outstrip human dignity.” The task of the Panel is toaddress inter-disciplinary challenges and to work for capacity-building – whichwould in turn lead to innovation.
The Panel itself consists of global science leaders – suchas Susan Avery, of Woods Hole near Boston, the world’s largest privateoceanographic institute (and also a member of the U.S. National Commission) –together with some from the Social and Human Sciences. Many are distinguishedespecially by their experience in networking and organizing others, such asAhmadou Ndiaye, a Senegalese who heads the developing Pan-African University,and Olive Shisana, chief of the South African Human Science Research Council(which once awarded me a fellowship, as I was pleased to share with her afterthe meeting) and a leading figure at the interface of global health (ex-WHO)and the social sciences. Vijay Chandru, with MIT and Stanford affiliations,leads the Indian biotech industry network. He interested me not least byaddressing the impact of Moore’s Law on the human genome project, another areawhere C-PET is active.
UNESCO faces a remarkable opportunity – to rebuild its 1940sbrand through a series of panels of this kind, taking interdisciplinaryinitiatives with global strategic impact that not only address plain challenges(such as that of global poverty which we all acknowledge) but also to helpshape the global agenda. We are shifting from the old-line United Nationsinstitutions to a new world of BRICS and G-7, 8, whatever, in which traditionalinstitutions have less grip every day and emerging networks have more. Thecombination of its nonpartisan and apolitical stance, and its embrace of“educational, scientific and cultural” questions, positions UNESCO uniquely –for fresh branding and extraordinary influence for good in the years to come.
But the opportunity needs to be grasped. Key members such asthe United States must continue and grow their efforts in support, not least inchanneling extra-budgetary funding to visionary initiatives and encouragingparticipation from leading private sector players including leaders in thetechnology industry. As a bridge between nations at that point which isbecoming more and more central – the interface of science, technology, andsociety – it is uniquely well-placed.
So we shall watch the work of the High Panel with growinginterest.
Nigel Cameron isPresident and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) inWashington, DC, and a commissioner of the United States National Commission forUNESCO. He writes in his personal capacity
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Permission granted toreproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

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How to bridge the Continental Divide; moving Camp David tothe Valley; please, pols, start Asking Tomorrow’s Questions – and call me
Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC
An earlier, more visionary NASA, thank goodness, sent probesinto deep space. Some of them continue to ping us from far beyond the domesticreaches of the Solar System. But even they have not penetrated as far fromWashington as I did last month. I made it all the way to the West Coast.
It is not simply an issue of littorals, or oceans, or theperspectives which follow from occidental or oriental orientation, or even (I’msure someone out on the PC frontier is using this) occidentation. Though one VCI met did note that he looked out on the Pacific; and averred that Washingtonwas really a European city. More common is general-purpose Valley-style eyeball-rolling.And when it comes to “corporate culture” – my base category when I think aboutthe Valley and its polar complement, the District – we know there’s a lot moreto the jewel of the east coast than the magnificently monumented malarial marshthat’s home to the ultimate nonprofit. Some place called NYC, for example, seemsto be a displaced slice of California (now that would be a neat way of keepingit at 50 when we admit DC or Puerto Rico or the Islamic Republic of Afghanistanor whoever is up next). It’s no surprise that someone, somewhere ensured thatNYC’s connection with the District would be something called Acela, famed asthe world’s slowest fast train. No one has been in any rush to integrate theBig Apple with the midsized federal raspberry.
Point here, aside from offering generally snarky commentswhere I think they are due, is that the Valley and the District are far furtherapart than 3,000 miles and a relatively serious mountain range. It’s hard toimagine two more distinctive, consistent, and contrary cultures within theUnited States, the West, the English-speaking peoples, OECD, or whatever highcategory we prefer for “us.” Indeed, it goes beyond “us.” If you are a denizenof DC, the Starbucks on Sand Hill Road is the restaurant at the end of theuniverse.  
Let me underline this with three particulars. There areothers that could be engaged. But these work and they make the point. It is aterrible point.

First is the creativeimperative. In the Valley, they think of themselves as visionaries.Tomorrow is theirs; and their confidence in innovative products and servicesdepends in no small measure on their belief that the future is not simplyinfluencing their thinking (we are, as it were, all futurists now, at least inthese zip codes – if friends in DC will now forgive me a Keynesian allusion)but it will in turn be shaped by their personal and corporate vision. Thefuture is both their study and their creature. They have the kind of symbiosiswith tomorrow that the District has with yesterday.  So creativity, risk, and a longentrepreneurial arc, are their stock in trade.
In the District, a community of generally smart andcommitted persons, the “corporate culture” could hardly be more different.Pretty much whatever our politics, our client (sorry) lies in the past.Maintaining the programs of the Great Society? Returning to the vision of theFounders? Addressing as #1 priority the debt mountain we have built? Each ofthese is meritorious, and wherever our political lines lie for most of us eachof them features. Point is not that they are misplaced priorities. It is simplythat they hail from yesteryear. Left and right are stumbling into the future astheir gaze is fixed on the past.
Second, as a result, thenature of the commitment to the future. Part of the problem with theValley, and one of its clear commonalities with the District, lies in itsinnocent confidence in the future. For the Valley this takes the form of awondrous hopefulness, the kind that is required if great capital sums are to beengaged in start-ups small and large in the knowledge that most will fail andthe confidence that some will succeed big-time. The District is a naïf ofanother kind. The confidence is there, but it is one of presumption. Americacannot fail; therefore, America cannot fail. Innovation, as has been said, isan ATM. While speechmakers come and go on all sides, and they include someseriously serious people, speeches come cheap. News, guys, on both coasts.America can fail. And it’s looking increasingly likely that America will. Andthe reason, the core reason, the axis around which all other reasons turn, liesin the failure of alignment and interconnection between these two vastlyseparated entities. But we shall come back to that.
Third, a shared myopia.Self-confidence and disdain are among the several shared qualities of these twocosmically separated polities. They both think they are too good for the other,have no special need of the other, are bored by the other. Go to one of thoseuncommon conferences on policy in the Valley, and likely as not someonemid-level (aka not really that important) will fly in from DC. Which neatlyreinforces the local view. I well recall one where said mid-level panjandruminsisted at the last minute on re-arranging his appearance as events in (hushedtones) DC required his attendance (I ended up missing his speech as a result).And vice versa. Techworld has its representatives in the District. Some of themare my friends. Mostly they are District hires; native guides; sherpas who knowthe Hill and the agencies and – get this – have remarkably little buy-in to thevalues that vivify the Valley. They are short-termers who understand“language,” hired guns, creatures of the deadline short-term cycles of what wasone Long-Term Nation; of an exceptionalism inverted in high parody. Harbingersof a perverse apocalypse in which an entirely perverse deity rewards those whoconsider 12 months to be long-term.  “Myboard has made it clear to me,” declared –in private, to me – one tech tradeassociation chief recently, “that my focus needs to be on the short-term.” Nowthere’s a suicide note for America. Moore’s Law, aka exponential change, akadisruptive innovation, requires with mathematical solidity that the future bescoped and engaged more each year.Back in 1800, what did it matter? In September 2011, the stakes are beyondcalculation.
I think I once described the relationship between theDistrict and the Valley as a suicide pact. Their fundamental agreement is thatthey are not much interested in the other. But of course it’s worse. It’s agame of Russian roulette, in which we are intent on firing every chamber. We’replaying chicken with our children. We are absolutely ensuring, ensuring, thedestruction of America, by the reciprocal delusion that the Sand Hills RoadStarbucks, and the Rayburn Cafeteria, occupy complementary universes. Yet theydo not. From Ushant to Scilly (if you are into sea-shanties) is, we are told,35 leagues. From the Valley to the District is an immeasurable span. Yet it isone of the two most consequent axes on this particular planet. (The other, ofcourse, is DC-Beijing. How we shall ever address that without first bringingthe Valley and the District into alignment? Who is asking that question, whichneeds to move fast beyond the rhetorical, in either of these zipcodal U.S.entities?)
What am I after? I wrote some time back about the need forevery pol to spend two weeks a year at tech conferences. Please, please. 10days, sans BlackBerry and staff. And the Valley guys? Well maybe if someoneturned the Rayburn Cafeteria, recently refurbished into smart 1950s railroadcafé format (sigh), into a meeting place for peeps rather than tables, the SandHills guys might stop by. But what about this. If the pols commit to the westcoast conferences, what about having the VCs and their entourage each plan tobe in DC and hang a little? See, I’m being practical. A mutual transfusion of culturalblood from these highly diverse species – located as if in different genera –is a key, indeed the key, to U.S. success, global effectiveness, the triumph oftechnologies in a culture still shaped around human values –the future of anation that has no deep wish to learn Mandarin.
The President, whom his supporters and critics need to allowinherited and is seeking to manage an economic and employment crisis withoutparallel in our generation, has addressed Congress and the nation. For somereason, no-one asked me what he should say. There is surely no simpleprescription, no bromide for the hour, no recitation of one ideology or another– although there are plenty of obvious answers that have failed.
How about this for some talkers? Three key opportunitiesstand out, and had they called me, they would each have featured high on mylist.
First, “I’m moving Camp David to Silicon Valley, and willspend at least one week a month of my presidency there. This is not merelysymbolic. I commit that three nights a week, every week, when I am out there inthe Valley, I will invite its brightest and best to dinner. On condition theywill each spend one week a month in DC.”
Second, “I am adding to my cabinet not only the federal CTO,whose status there was discussed during the campaign, but the federal CIO andof course my science advisor; and instructing every cabinet secretary toappoint an under-secretary for the future, who will work hand in glove withthese three cabinet-level officials and have wide influence over all aspects offederal policy.”
Third, “I am tasking a bipartisan panel chaired by Norm Augustineand co-chaired by the President of the National Academies and the President ofthe AAAS and the President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents; andincluding both President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush:  to make recommendations within 2 months as tohow the U.S. lead in science and technology can be both maintained andadvanced, with a view to making us the most competitive nation in the OECDwithin five years. I shall invite members of Congress to sign a bipartisanContract with the Future to join us in ensuring that their recommendations areimplemented in their entirety.”
Those among you who know C-PET will understand that suchproposals do not assume a naïve idea of S and T as the solution to all humanproblems, or a desire of endless U.S. global hegemony. They represent anassumption that the human dimensions of emerging technologies will never beproperly addressed if we do not ramp up our grasp of the significance of theirimplications at least tenfold. And an assumption that the historic role of theUnited States as a beacon of freedom and innovation will be best served in the21st century by an alignment of these two: this nation as the focalpoint of tech/human solutions.
For that is the central question. Technology runs up theMoore’s Law curve. We stay humans (sorry, transhumanists, we do) and need tobenefit in a market economy in which tech has enabled not destroyed jobs, andempowered not zombied human dignity. We need a hotline from the Valley to theDistrict. My sense is clear: one of the two greatest risk issues facing theglobe is the lack of alignment of the D and the V. (The other, as we noted, isthat of the D, empowered or unempowered by the V, and Beijing.)
What we gonna do about it? Obama? Boehner? Perry? Bachmann?Romney? Huntsman? Call me. Then we can sort this out and move on to somethingelse. Oh yes, like getting NASA moving again.
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On Culture, the Future, and Biz

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I have spent the past few days in Sydney, Australia, as the guest of the finance company AMP whose offices dominate the skyline here along the Harbour, overlooking those two icons of this great city – the Opera House, and the Bridge. I’m here along with a score of others from the worlds of social media, futurism, business re-engineering, and such locations. And why? Because AMP for some time has decided to devote a week and a good deal of moolah, once every two years, to an ideafest. A little Aspen, as it were, inside the offices and culture of a very successful major company, drawing hundreds of its executives and board members and clients into an intensive series of thinkfests. They are still in progress.

As are dinners, lunches, assorted engagements inside and outside the company. Tomorrow some of us go off to Melbourne to present a mini version to another segment of the organization.
So what’s afoot? Someone here has a rather smart idea: that actually bringing together ideas people and those who run a forward-looking corporation will bring some very smart new ideas, incarnated in the idea-brokers who present them, into the bloodstream – at a time when the speed of change, the future, innovation, form the subtext of every conversation among savvy business leaders.
Take a look at the program. The videos are popping up as speeches are given (mine is here: http://www.amplifyfestival.com.au/artists/detail/nigel-cameron). Reflect on how your own organization handles ideas – whether its focus is using retreads when they are already widely accepted in the culture, or its interest is on the edge; the cutting edge; the cusp of tomorrow.
More soon. . . . .