Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

“Depend upon it, sir,” quoth the inimitable dictionographer and wit Samuel Johnson, “when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

I’ve just been to the movies, or as near as I get to the movies since we launched C-PET three years ago. I’m flying back from Europe, mercifully upgraded, and before turning my attention to this think-piece viewed Inside Job, which despite its occasional tendencies to ape the Michael Moore school of cinematography gives not too bad a layman’s-eye-view of the Wall Street collapse, its precursors and sequelae. At least, over dinner with a fair splash of a not-bad Hermitage that was my take. So on my mind now, aside from wishing I could be Roger Ebert and do nothing else than watch movies and write about them, are such trivia as systemic risk, the eternal struggle of the short versus the long term, the anemic quality of what passes as leadership in both corporate and government sectors (sorry, guys), and what we might designate the Ivy League Perplex, or Cameron’s Law of Destructive Compacted Intellect: the more people who get involved in an enterprise and the smarter they are the less they seem able to avoid Groupthink 101. Just look at the rows of bankers lined up like coconuts at a shy during those Congressional hearings. Never, perhaps, has so much been unanticipated by so few to the detriment of so many.

Before we move on, two reflections. First, I’m all for regulation when we need it, and even more for self-regulation when we don’t, but neither of them is worth a cent unless we realize that Groupthink is Public Enemy #1 – if our goal is to build, ahem, sustainable value. What a surprise: the same elites spawn regulators and regulatees, and – even without the revolving doors that any sane, market-oriented, janitor would long since have jammed shut – elites are characterized by a general inability to harbor simultaneously two or more seriously conflicting ideas (Thomas Kuhn again comes to mind). And second: as the Japanese imbroglio has reminded us with sober force, what can go wrong will go wrong, and all the wishful thinking in the cosmos will not avail to prevent it. It seems that in 1896 there was a tsunami in the same region that was all of two feet different in height (at a point where they both reached well over 100 feet). They knew this when they built their Maginot Line of sea walls and installed their backup generators at ground level and all the rest. Catastrophic risks tend to be larger than they appear.

Back to my trip. Two key reasons for it. First, a visit to UNESCO HQ in Paris. UNESCO is a greatly undervalued stock in the human enterprise, a core opportunity for nonpartisan foreign policy for the United States, a meeting-point for the many global communities in science and the arts and culture and the social sciences and humanities and ethics . . .. Like it or not, we are now into a grand planetary effort on nearly all levels, in the context of deep disciplinary convergence. And they converge elegantly in Rue Miollis and Place Fontenoy. I was privileged to spend time with some of the smartest and most committed of people. The decision of George W. Bush that the United States should rejoin UNESCO was a surprise to pretty much everyone. I hope we are making the most of it to leverage the global conversation; not least about the dramatic impacts that emerging technologies will have in constantly reshaping the conditions for life on our planet.

Thence to London, meeting with a C-PET partner, an entrepreneur with far-sighted investments in core tech areas – because we need partners in this effort, both individuals and corporations, so we can scale. In Washington, private and corporate funding is directed to two standard ends: short-term policy impacts, and long-term ideology. Both are explicable and important. Taken together, they are proving disastrous. C-PET is neither ideological nor partisan, and is defiantly long-term in our thinking; quite unWashingtonian, indeed. So back to the theme of sustainable value. We need partners who are out for the long term, who get it, and who want Washington to get it – before it’s too late. (Seriously, call me. 202 607 3803.)

Point is that we shall need to leverage all possible resources, with global institutions and innovative leaders in the business community taking the initiative, if we are to get policy leaders to focus on the great unmentionable; the cliché in every room; that f-word; the future.

Advocates of the future confront three related tendencies.

The first we know well, the tyranny of tomorrow. The next election, the next vote, the next donor call: all powerful determinants of the decision-making machine. What is it, as we might ask, that concentrates our minds? Tomorrow, or the day after?

Second, the twin problems of risk and groupthink; and a very general tendency among us to discount future risk if to count it at full value has a high present cost (there’s a technical term for this: wishful thinking). Sad to say, the Wall Street example is especially telling here, as not only our elite financial institutions but both self-regulation (the ratings agencies) and non-self-regulation (the many responsible agencies) almost universally failed to anticipate something that with hindsight seems blindingly obvious. Bundling highly dubious loans into AAA securities and incentivising everyone in the system with short-term rewards looks as screwed-up a proposition as could be devised. Some sadly similar approaches seem to be emerging from the Fukushima story. Partly for this reason at C-PET we have a principle ofcultivating outliers. “All articulate voices round the table, all the time.” On any issue, the smart deniers of conventional wisdom are the most valuable people in the room, precisely because they are the most uncomfortable to be with – and to reason with. Not because we feel a need to cater to minorities, or to be nice to crazies. But because their critique brings value into the knowledge network that is unobtainable in any other way.

Third, something more basic that contributes to both of the above. There is a widespread human tendency, with which we are all of us familiar, that can be simply expressed as the “kink” in the curve where the past meets the future The exponential line of human technological progress, long driven by information and for the past generation by the power of the chip, is kinked. It is kinked, inevitably, at the present. We look back and see it rising inexorably and constantly faster. We look ahead and (admit it) see it leveling off. There are many telling examples around us, not least the current valuations being placed on hot digital properties like Google and Facebook. I spent some time last fall at UBS in Switzerland – their executive development center at Wolfsberg – and gave a workshop on this very issue. We look back seven years and there was no Facebook. The idea that if we look forward seven years, or five, there may be no Facebook – or that the brand may continue but essentially as a commodity service lacking the capacity for economic profit – is unthinkable to most of us (though it was eloquently put last August at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Summit by a smart iconoclastic analyst).

And why? Because the entire principle here is one of knowledge-driven disruption, at an exponential pace; not of the establishment of new, stable, corporate technology-based empires in the stead of the displaced old. Indeed, the point is broader. For most people, the “digital revolution” has happened; and it has bequeathed us Blackberries and iPads. Yet the revolution has barely begun. As if shielding our eyes from too bright a light, we cope with the Future Shock of which Alvin Toffler warned us (prophetically but as it turned out much too soon) by squinting. The curve has a kink. And it just happens to be today.

So back to Dr. Johnson. The sum of all fears does not lie in the next donor call, or vote, or even the next election. It lies beyond. 10+ years offers a good rule of thumb. That’s when current trends in technology, innovation, values, policy, risk will have delivered dramatic changes to our landscape, whether or not we are looking ahead. Will the explosion in field after field have brought about results that we would now regret? Robots that take away much of the market for unskilled labor? Devices that turn our children, and ourselves, into cyborgian zombies? Retail-level biotechnology that leaves every high schooler a potential bioweapons manufacturer? A world in which governments and corporations and leakers have ended our ability to keep data private? All serious possibilities, and most of them outcomes we would deplore. Will the United States be a second or third tier nation – as policies adverse to innovative research and development keep pushing us down the global pecking order and disenabling the creative enterprise to which we have become habituated? Or can we anticipate, mitigate, consider, and even plan?

Only if these and so many other possibilities concentrate our minds wonderfully, which is not going to happen until we de-kink the present and prepare for a future defined by exponential change.

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Pretty much all of hip and would-be hip America has been lolling, partying, festooning, and tweeting in an alternate universe these past days. Woodstock for the geeks? Neverland of the digerati? Or (ouch) a retreat into a new Century 21 Fundamentalism, a bolt-hole from the realtime world into a might-have-been America?

In case you didn’t know, it’s called South by Southwest, or SXSW (which looks like something from the NYSE, but this proleptic and cabalistic stock is not yet traded), or South By, as say the cognoscenti. I suppose it might also be Burning Man. And there’s a different sense in which it could be TED. There are (ahem) various denominations. These camp meetings (ouch, sorry, please, don’t hit me) of the techno-Fundamentalists are anchor-points of an emerging, intricate, alternative world, a digi-religion, a hip-technological complex that offers hope to those who choose to flee the real world of (deep breath) K Street and approps committees and the Tea Party (TP had the support of 41% of the electorate in November) and the West Wing and deficits and sinophobia and donorphilia and the dire electoral cycle. An alternative world to federal Washington, and the space-time continuum.

Because America qua democracy, qua waning global superpower, is defiantly NXNE. Beltway America. Agency America. 202 and 20002 America. A vast, well-meaning, bureaucratic, Fordist, clunking, machine; swamping the bright and visionary minds who pepper its lumpen molasses, as it sullenly subsides back into the malarial swamp on which it was once built by the idealists of a teenage nation whose premature aging has driven its smart (but perhaps less smart than they think) minds to seek solace in a religion of disengagement. In a mythical America, convened far from the madding crowd’s ignoble electoral strife. A theme park, a Westworld (remember the Yul Brinner classic?), a place that multiverse theory says must exist but that for all present purposes is less a wormhole to nirvana than a sinkhole from reality.

Because America is going down. Steve Burrill, doyen of biotech investors (and, full disclosure, member of C-PET’s Board of Directors) stated unambiguously at a recent Innovation Roundtable that America has a choice: whether to become a second tier nation, or a third tier. Quite apart from current efforts to slash federal R and D budgets by a Congress newly cognizant of its fiscal responsibilities, there are deep-seated structural disabilities that the world’s leading nation has chosen to impose on itself in order to ensure that “world’s leading nation” is a title it will before long shed. The conquest of America is no achievement of hell-bent fascists or the bakelite apparachiks of Soviet glory days – back when the IGB (how many at SXSW know that acronym?) was a perilous thin red line and much depended on nuclear bluster and troopships rushing the Atlantic like a football field. No: it is a terrible self-conquest, half-witting, coated in irony and insouciance as well as plain dumb pig-ignorance of where our interest really lies. A self-conquest whose outcome is self-immolation. The triumph of means over ends. As if Pizarro had been an Inca.

But why has digital America decided to give the federal capital and all for which it stands so wide a berth? It is not my point that the Washington Convention Center and its satellite hotels here in the Beltway are where South By and its cognates should assemble, though that would not be entirely bad. The avoidance of NXNE is at a more visceral, strategic, fundamental level, and its implications run far from the epiphenomena of event location. The digital tribes simply don’t see Washington as their capital.

Question is, what to do? And answer is, o digerati, think Washington. Swarm Washington. Invest (old meaning; lay siege to) Washington. Work with assiduous focus and strategic resilience to change Washington. Task yourself, techno-America, with this challenge, do-or-die: Transform the political culture of this city, perhaps the most geographical center of power on the planet, into the SXSW of government. And understand that we truly need a Kulturkampf in which the future becomes the lobbyist for America; a struggle for the corporate culture of our political life here in an analog polis blinded by the present to its digitally-driven future.

Back to my theme. Where is techno-corporate America’s plan, in parallel with their 10-year plans to build markets in China, to turn Washington into a political capital fit to sustain America’s leadership role as Century 21 moves deep into its second decade? Why are the SXSWers not focused NXNE?

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For a nation founded on ideas, whose history has included many of the best thinkers to be birthed on planet earth, we seem remarkably devoid of them. I can’t count the number of meetings I have had with business and policy leaders in which they actually tell me they are cynical. That nothing is really going to change. That, in a phrase more than one has used, I “need not to be naïve.” That because there is no new money (and may be less old money) there’s nothing new we can do. And on it goes.

But I believe in ideas, and the extraordinary power of a dynamic, growing, knowledge network. Transforming, disruptive power. Power not just to provide solutions, but to find out what lies back of presenting problems. Not just to engage in controversy but to reconfigure it. Not just to help prepare for what comes next, but decisively to engage its direction. Frame the questions, and you will shape the future. This is not to be naïve. But it is to recognize that the cynicism that so readily pervades our political culture has itself become the #1 barrier to the strategic action by which alone America’s future will be determined – and America’s capacity for global greatness and global good sustained.

Note to our many friends around the world, and in the diplomatic and IGO and NGO communities in DC who are partners in our knowledge network: I think we agree that there are few on the planet who will benefit if a cynical, short-term, disconnect from the future shapes Washington DC in the second decade of century 21. I think we are agreed that a failing America will be a flailing America, defensive and protectionist and suspicious – just about the worst news for the global community. I think we are agreed that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage – if every nation does what it’s best at, all nations benefit – enables America as chief global competitor as well as chief global citizen; there need be no zero sum in this game.

I have written in recent weeks of what the data explosion and new warp-speed of change mean for “expertise” (a word that sounds increasingly dated in the knowledge world) and leadership (that baseline in change times that for . Both have become a lot more interesting; complex; and of course threatening to those who man (and they usual do indeed man) the silos of tradition where power is locked down, and knowledge locked in.

As we know, harbingers of such paradigmatic change are not unique to our time, even if the pace of change is. John Ruskin, the great Victorian social and literary critic (think H. L. Mencken), wrote in the mid-19^th century, when the revolution in science and religion was transforming his world, that he could hear the chink of the geologists’ hammers at every cadence of the Bible verses. For us, aptly enough, it is visual not auditory: each time we think technology, century 21, asymmetry, we don’t hear chinks, we see near-subliminal visions of that inexorably rising graph of Moore’s Law, penetrating with unimpeded exponential impact through a generation past, and setting its curvilinear path to a future beyond our imaginings. We face change quite literally beyond belief. And the question is not whether we wish it. As Wired founder and tech age guru Kevin Kelly – who joined C-PET for an Innovation Leaders’ Telecon last week – argues in his remarkable new book What Technology Wants, it is hardly up to us as a species to say No. But that does not preclude the need for actionable foresight, for leadership grounded in the future, for decisions. Far, far from it.

So, what to do, and specifically what to do in Washington, DC?Three principles, four strategies, and a challenge.

First, three principles.

1. Embrace Convergence. The old distinctions between this science and that (biology, chemistry, physics . . .) are dying. A recent report from MIT, launched at the AAAS earlier this month, set out this argument elegantly. And it was being heard: respondents included the FDA Commissioner, an NIH director, and Tom Kalil, associate director for policy at OSTP, the White House tech policy think tank. Yet (as I pointed out to some of the above) the same point was being made a decade ago in the NSF’s Converging Technologies project by Mike Roco and Bill Bainbridge and many others. Even then, it was hardly new. It is, however, profound. Disruptive. Hard for the science and funding establishments to grasp and acknowledge (at the launch, AAAS leader Alan Leshner said it would “make life hell” for them). And it goes further. The old distinctions between science, engineering, and technology are also weakening. The distinctions between the institutions that fund public S and T make less sense every day. Action is needed at the top level of these institutions; apt structural realignment that is not merely epiphenomenal.
2. Smash the silos. Convergence reaches further, far beyond S and T, into a wider growing commonality that has always demanded attention and almost always been ignored. We have innovation, risk, policy, regulation, social policy, ethics, investment – each one of which is intimately connected with each of the others as the synapses join the neurons in the brain. The knowledge of none of them can properly be stated and engaged without knowledge in all the others. I wrote recently in more detail about the relations of innovation and ethics (the third point of my “Three rules for 2011”). Think mash-up, boys and girls. It’s the only way; and the combo of warp speed and the data petaclasm means unless we find way to make this work we should be scared, very scared. Concurrent engineering is needed across the whole front. Now.
3. Engage all articulate voices. In reaching beyond partisanship, we need to transcend the potent tendency to disregard opinions we see as extreme or simply unreasonable. At one recent event, a corporate science leader stated he wanted all voices round the table – except those who were biased. I made the obvious point in return, that bias is inevitable, and the appearance of bias on the part of those with whom we disagree universal. Yet the point is fundamental: If we seek to capture the very best ideas, and to fight groupthink with every sinew (a clear task of the innovative thinker; and a no-brainer, surely, in the wake of the dot-com bust and the Wall St collapse), we must welcome all articulate voices, and learn from them, and let them shape our common conversation. So often it is from the extremes that the best questions come, even if those on the extremes do not have the answers. So often those with the answers are not asking the right questions. Think Copernicus. Think Einstein. Goodness, think Wall Street. To capture value, we need every articulate voice round the table. Right through the conversation.

Next: four strategic actions. Need a bridge to the future? Here’s how to start.

1. We must disprivilege disagreement. We need mechanisms intellectual and practical that empower and reward political and executive initiatives in areas that are not driven by partisan and ideological divergence – because they simply are not within the purview of our current binary politics. Sadly, with few exceptions, it is only when an issue proves controversial enough, and someone on one side of it has political power, that there is action. I am given to offering suggestions that are indeed naïve, but are offered as thought-experiments, not talkers for lobbyists. What about a joint committee of congress whose brief is to take up issues that are important but uncontroversial? With very senior membership? And crowd-sourced, web-based grassroots to drive its future-focused agenda?

2.We must work steadily to reweight the points of conviction within our political traditions, and enable new issues to rise up. What does it mean to be a “conservative” or “liberal” when the issue is privacy (which may be one of the cornerstones of 21^st century society); or the brain-machine interface (now available in a $100 iPhone app; destined utterly to reshape the human experience); or humanoid robotics (which could destroy 50% of the jobs in the labor force). Let’s hear it from Moveon.org and the Tea Party and the Center for American Progress and Heritage and Brookings and all the rest.

3. We need to span the coasts. Last summer I proposed (somewhat but not entirely satirically) an act of congress that would require all elected federal officials to attend a series of technology conferences every year, of the kind that are typically hosted on the west coast. Not “attend” as in make-a-speech-at-and-leave, but attend as in attend – attentively, beginning to end, and into the cocktail hours and the dinners and the late-night drinks where the mash-up takes off. Believe me, if every Hill denizen sat through two weeks’ worth a year, it would be the learning experience that transformed America. (Idea: what about making a start with a bipartisan Pledge for America’s Future?) Not of course that all the high-tech and the innovative thinking are on the left coast. Yet by the same token, the Valley guys need to get a lot more serious about Washington. I asked the leader of one of our largest corporations why it is that, while he has a 15-year plan for China, when he gets to DC he believes his lobbyists that 12 months is long-term.

4. Washington, meet Washington. I count at least five Washingtons; DC as MPD. So: We have the mainstream policy community – federal government plus think tanks. Then we have the other policy community, which has remarkably little connection: Defense and intel. Then we have universities; which despite all those centers and programs have – yes – remarkably little traction in either of the former. Then we have the heavyweight business community, the Economic Club of Washington, the Dulles Corridor, the defense contractors who uniquely and bizarrely advertise their jet planes on bus shelters and radio shows. Then, #5, we have the District, qua Council. The local politicos; bad, indifferent, and good; yet what entirely unique potential to build the most innovative community in America, to the utter benefit of all five of these Washingtons. My point? Every improved connection across these communities that co-exist within one District and two States (most in just a handful of zipcodes) adds value. Incremental value. Value rising without apparent limit. And at no necessary dollar cost at all. Network effects, par excellence.

Now the challenge. No question, 2011 is a pivotal year. We’re recovering, slowly, from the shock of the 2008 financial trauma. We’re gearing up for battle royal in 2012 and 2016, but we really aren’t sure how to as the drivers of our politics are increasingly found in the exopolitics of the profoundly disenchanted.. We’re coming to some sort of terms with the new post-Cold War world order, so different from the mono-polar world some had expected, with BRIC, Group-of ad hoc global leadership jams, a Russia decisively post that wonderful if dipso Yeltsin, Gates in extraordinarily generous retirement while MS looks increasingly old-economy, still 20-something Zuckerberg man of the year though (surely!) with FB a concept and company ageing prematurely fast, and Julian Assange holding to ransom not so much the secrecy of U.S. global communications as the possibility of institutional privacy in a world now pivoting on asymmetry – and therefore the notion that the big guys wield the big power.

The challenge is to determine to live and act as if there were a future. As if it were capable, in some substantive measure, of being anticipated. As if our own futures mattered to us. As if electoral cycles are, as it were, made for man; not man for electoral cycles. As if the smart and committed women and men who represent this very great nation on Capitol Hill and at 1600 Penn. NW and in the myriad agencies (and indeed in the Court) were tapping tomorrow so that their choices for today will stand the test of time.

Not much, perhaps, to hope for. Non-naïve, surely. Non-cynical, assuredly. American through and through. Can’t[nc1] imagine the Founders saying no.

So yesterday the AAAS hosted an MIT panel and a high-level group of federal respondents (including FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburger and OSTP’s policy wonk, Tom Kalil) to discuss convergence and a report from MIT building on their Koch cancer center experience (it brings together phycisists, biologists, and chemists, mirabile dictu; they are all on each floor -we were shown a plan – though in segregated groups, not intermingled, we noted).

It’s all about trends. Not the celeb-type “trending” that’s become trendy on Twitter. But reading the runes; sensing which trends that can be seen to have meaning. More Chinese- than English-speakers on the internet in 5 years? Young people’s use of email dropped almost one-half in 2 years? What does the ineluctable shift to mobile mean for the latest FCC pronouncement on “neutrality”? The faster everything moves, the more important it is to track the trends and pick the ones that will shape the future. Which means, not least, that decisions can no longer be data-driven in the way we used to believe they should. Knowledge-powered intuition, decision-making in creative groups, scanning for patterns amid the exaclasm of data.

As we used to say in slower times, a difference in quantity can become one in quality. When tectonic plates finally shift; when paradigms shatter; when conventional wisdom becomes so much (dangerous) trash. We’ve seen it domestically with the explosive emergence of an exopolitics – from Moveon.org to the Tea Party, the cable-TV-star rallies, and beyond. We’ve seen it in geopolitical terms with the first harbingers of the Asymmetric Century. Two men have emerged who best understand how the rules have changed, and neither works for the USG (clue: their names begin with A and Bin L). We are seeing it, back of all this, in the technosphere, where Moore’s Law has teamed with much-too-young people like Zuckerberg and Stone and the Grouponites and the Quora crowd not just (as we tend too readily to think) to give us fun gadgets that could even have business use, but to shake by the hair the entire human project – with Gutenbergesque, Manhattanprojectian, Sputnikish, tectonic éclat. Years back my then team kindly presented me with a mug. “Some people make things happen; some people watch things happen; some people wonder what happened.” Boy, are we in Category 3!

But that’s not how the United States is going to re-find its debt-ridden, educationally-deficited, anxious but laurel-resting, footing in 2011.It’s through leadership (internally and ex), vision, and a recognition of two huge facts. First, that we can make good decisions for the present only if we have a firm if complex grasp on the future. Second, that while everything is not about technology, technology is about everything.

So: the respective science and technology committees of House and Senate need to trump all others and set the pace (note to Leader Reid and Speaker-elect Boehner); the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a White House adjunct with little budget and not much more influence but some excellent people, needs to hold sway like OMB over every agency (note to POTUS); and (could I be even more controversial? But I have said some of this before anyway . . .) all political appointees should be fired on January 1, and rehired only if they score a high pass in an innovation-friendly, future-aware, test (POTUS again; he could do that in a memo); and we should ditch academic tenure (it can, I think, be done in an appropriations rider – House GOP please note) to shake to the foundations the disciplinary silos that mean 20-somethings get the big interdisciplinary ideas but siloed 50- and 60-somethings run their careers and make the grants. (OK, I know, good steps have been taken to encourage inter-disciplinarity and innovation; but we are talking tectonics, and timescale, and U.S. leadership; so while we are about it, what about diverting, say, 25% of all S and T spending to a new federal research-funding body led by 10 top VC and entrepreneurs, 7 of them under 30, most of them from the Valley? Again, an approps rider could do it, could it not? Time for some serious, risky, experimentation.)

So Rule #1: business as unusual.

Rule #2: the emergence of what I am calling an “exopolitics” (hereby reclaiming the term from the UFO peeps who had helped themselves to it; much more useful to the rest of us) offers an exceptional opportunity for us to begin to refurbish our political traditions and positions (as I have said before, we have them, we need them, and I have mine) through re-prioritization and, crucially, addressing how new and emerging issues find their place within them. So: what if those most engaged with the virtues of the Founders took more seriously their locus in the visionary Enlightenment of the 18^th Century, and their commitment in Article I to innovation through its corollary, intellectual property? My sense is that before long the comparative advantage of the United States (thank you, Ricardo) may lie almost entirely in the IP domain. (See Neal Stephenson’s remarkable 1995 book The Diamond Age for a prefiguring of such a future.) What if those most focused on questions of social justice, and most quizzical of market-oriented solutions to them, reflected more seriously on the Moore’s-Law-driven, exponential impacts of emerging technologies on the next and next-but-one generations? These may or may not be the best salients into our current political topography. But they suggest something that some “conservatives” on left and right will find threatening, while the true radicals across the spectrum whose first loves are the good of the people and the standing of America will find pregnant with possibility: changing priorities will reshape traditional positions, and new issues will reshape agendas. It is very hard to imagine the politics of, say, 2020, as those of 2008. If they are, it will be all over for us.

Point is: the current deep disillusion with politics-as-usual has given leaders across the spectrum a once-in-a-generation chance to reshape the agenda and refurbish both the credibility and utility of the political class, as servants of the future not simply of the past.

So Rule #2: use the rising exopolitics to refurbish, repristinate, and future up our political traditions. And our political class.

Rule #3. A vigorous embrace of innovation and technology’s future is key. But that does not suggest we street-luge our way downhill into a technophilic naïve-topia. Far from it. It’s being future-aware that enables us to critique its possibilities. It is those who favor one-day-at-a-time who will ironically bring in a technoworld uncritiqued by the norms of social and cultural and political conviction; the short-termists ensure the lobsters get cooked. The visionaries are those who open the conversations. Looking ahead 10 years brings values immediately to the table, since values drive both policy and markets, and investors know that very well.

Case in point. C-PET is collaborating with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center in a series of events in 2011 addressing emerging technologies and their social impacts (you can register through c-pet.org). Back of the burgeoning discussion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) lies a growing awareness that in the world of 2011 the business environment will increasingly favor what are perceived as socially-responsible uses of capital. The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), founded in the 90s by the late Paul Newman, brings together 150+ Fortune 500 CEOs. Its CEO, Charles Moore, recently commissioned McKinsey to produce a fascinating report on business strategy and sustainability in the emerging global environment that makes just this point.

http://www.corporatephilanthropy.org/download/pdfs/resources/Shaping-the-Future.pdf

So Rule #3: as we grasp the innovation agenda, we must face the values issues it entails. They are not side-issues, “ethics” concerns, matters for “public engagement;” they will shape both policy and markets; and they lie at the heart of our nation’s choices as Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson meet Ray Kurzweil and Mark Zuckerberg.

Point is: the ostrich will always be out-smarted, and that is true both of the political classes and their associated values communities here in the United States – and of the United States in the global community. Which is not to say that I favor a U.S. “industrial policy” approach (though I hope we are tracking with care those competitors – pretty much all of them – who are putting their money there; let’s track how that is working); or the idea that we should appoint an innovation czar to solve the problem (surely, in decade 2 of century 21, that is squarely the job of our chief executive? – point to ponder as the jockeying for 2012 begins).

So what will 2011 bring? More of the same – being short-changed by our short-term thinking; America rests on wilting laurels as more energetic nations assert themselves?

We need to man up, and woman up, to refurbish our capacity as both chief global citizen, and chief global competitor. As a nation founded squarely, uniquely, on principle, America’s calling is to bring to a single point of focus our vision of the good life and our extraordinary capacity to innovate.

C-PET’s task is to bring them into focus. Whoever frames the questions shapes the future.

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement

If we are to have one, we had better start talking about it; quadrant 2 in DC; an ode to Bill Joy

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

If the New Yorker is the world’s best magazine, the Economist can’t lie far behind – smart, wry, transatlantic cousins. And – unlike much else we read today – elegantly written. I fell for the Economist in high school; they had a special deal for teens and it hooked me more than 40 years ago. It’s less stuffy now, more intuitive. I’ve just been reading the latest. A big article on Google. And a special supplement on China (more about that later). Two giants out there shaping things, and us. Focus on the Future.

It’s now 10 years since Bill Joy, co-founder of the late Sun Microsystems and esteemed technology guru, penned his jeremiad, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” – in, of all hallowed places, Wired magazine. A clarion call to reflect hard and deep, it took on board the Gestalt of both techno-optimists (a glorious digitized post-mortal future awaits us) and techno-pessimists (we are likely to destroy ourselves by accident or cyborg ourselves by design into a machine future). Either way, he argued, Homo sap seems doomed; surplus to future requirements.

These extremes have tended to dominate debate, insofar as we have had any. Joy’s extended op-ed led to surprisingly little; it joined the lore of the conversation among the cognoscenti, not least for its approving use of that equally well-known, though less read, text, the manifesto of the Unabomber. But no-one took up the challenge. Even Joy failed to produce the rumored book-length statement of his own case.

But the gauntlet had been thrown down. Can we manage a future in which galloping Gordon Moore’s Law keeps driving us up that apocalyptic curve without our ending up either bumping into Ray Kurzweil living on the hard drive next door, or being grey gooed with Prince Charles – in a final resolution of the problem of global population that reduces it rapidly to nil? Is there some way species Homo can be sufficiently sapiens to mature in sync with century 21 – and sail between the Scylla of the Matrix and the Charybdis of a bowl of reheated primeval soup? Or, perhaps (to throw in a third dystopia) a casserole of Soylent Green?

These options have dominated what conversation we have had, for the plain reason that territory lying between the poles has remained terra incognita. And in Washington, the most consequent city on the planet, there has been almost nothing at all in the way of grown-up conversation. Mainstream opinion left and right is occupied elsewhere, with issues of the much more immediate future (plus, to be fair, without any enthusiasm, the long-term old business of the deficit). Which is sadly ironic, since leadership always entails the casting of long-term vision; though leadership is not a quality defining our times.

We know some of the many reasons. It’s partly the calendar of democracy, with its premium on the short term and, in tandem, the privileging of issues of disagreement. Net effect is to leave the outriders free to proclaim their visions of glory and gloom, and (note this, investors and tech execs and enthusiasts for a techno-future; note it well) in the process slowly but surely to brand emerging technologies in gaudy colors of risk. Do note that I’m not saying Joy was fundamentally wrong, or that the sugary optimism of Kurzweil and the gooey pessimism of Prince Charles are to be discounted. To the contrary, counted is what they need to be. As we address tomorrow’s questions, the roundtable crucially needs their voices as we work for a positive sum outcome. But it needs the voices of others too. Others who are silent on the greatest issues of our tomorrow. Ten years on, Joy’s deeply provocative challenge remains unanswered. Whether he is right, partly right, or completely wrong-headed, America does not know. It is this conversation, with its many ancillaries, entailments, and cognates, that should be at the heart of our national life. It is a thousand pities that a Delphic oracle (forgive the pun, if you got it) from one of the leaders of the digital revolution was relegated to the status of marginalia; yet another curiosity from the west coast. And another thousand that insistent pleas for a pro-innovation policy culture are seen as a nagging annoyance. It may not help that they tend to focus on tax breaks and visas, though this is Washington where unless there’s a bottom line in the next 12 months, it’s hard to keep anyone’s attention. But that’s all part of the problem, isn’t it? And it’s a problem we need to fix. Hey, this is America; maybe we can even fix strategic problems. With ourselves.

I know that we are distracted from the long term by pressing and vital things. By war and terror. By health. Unemployment. But the bread and butter of politics will always claim all of our time unless we ensure that does not happen. Remember Stephen Covey, the pop time-management icon, and his Quadrant 2? The important but non-urgent. Management 101, for strategic individuals and organization – and nations. Smart people always know better; but they don’t always act better. The urgent consumes all available effort and attention. It will surely be the death of us if we can’t turn this around.

I’m also aware that there are plenty of people in Washington focused on the long term, not least the impacts of technology. One center of gravity lies in the security community, though even their discussions that are not secret don’t bleed into the mainstream. Another: back in the early 2000s, the National Science Foundation convened a series of conferences on technological convergence (the so-called NBIC process), and raised revolutionary potential impacts. It suffered from (picking up my point above) too much transhumanist and general techno-optimist flavoring, but it opened a vast and urgent agenda. Partly for that reason, it had little discernible impact on the broad policy community; though the Europeans pricked up their ears and concluded that the United States had taken a transhumanist turn (long story; I found myself trying to explain to the relevant EU advisory group that NBIC was just a bunch of smart people holding conferences, and that for good reasons and bad there was no command interest in their efforts; the EU had commissioned a “high-level expert group” to head off what it saw as a nascent U.S. policy push into transhumanism). Another: I was interested to participate around the same time in Project Horizon, an inter-agency futures scanning effort led by the State Department (and Booz Allen), looking 20 years ahead. It was an impressive process involving enormous efforts and some very senior federal (and a smattering of non-federal) players. But (as I duly pointed out, when I had opportunity) while it engaged in smart horizon-scanning in a series of heavyweight scenarios, not one of them took enough note of likely tech developments. Not one. Now: NBIC meets Project Horizon would have been fun.

Or to bring us depressingly up-to-date: the Wikileaks debacle has more than demonstrated that the dramatic asymmetries that seem destined to characterize 21^st-century life are beyond the imagination of thinkers, doers, and leaders whose preoccupation with the past and its current entailments and the threats and opportunities hosted by next week leaves us naked in the face of exponential change.

We need to retake our bearings: the vast rising giant which is China, run by engineers and unconstrained by election cycles and donors and approps and the Washington Post and the Tea Party and Moveon.org and all the rest; the cornucopeia of materials that NBIC generated; the strategic nous of Project Horizon; Bill Joy’s savvy and nuanced jeremiad. America as a nation at its most effective and best has always been defined by the future as much as the past. Its continued economic success and global leadership depend on nothing less, as we seek to be chief global competitor and lead global citizen in century 21. Decade #2 is now upon us.

For those who are interested:

NBIC: http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_report.pdf

Joy: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Project Horizon: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/state/state_dept_2025.pdf

This commentary may be forwarded/re-posted if unedited and with acknowledgement.W

The C-PET Mash-up and American Leadership in Century 21

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

At the heart of our C-PET view of things lie two convictions. First, that knowledge networking is the way to go; and every articulate view should be round the table, not because we naively believe win-win is always possible or indeed desirable, but because a positive sum outcome is always both. Second, that while silos may be necessary (we need strong expert communities) they need to be connected – in fact, connected more deeply than ever. As the sheer quantity of knowledge explodes in giddy exponential fashion (the Petaclasm was my word for it), the knowledge bearers in their tight-knit expert communities need to engage more across and outside them. Or to put it another way, with every new petabyte of data popping from the cauldron of knowledge, the meta-community becomes more important. Of course, this is the opposite of what you would expect. It’s the opposite of what most people expect. More data needs more experts; build bigger silos; bring in bigger forklifts. Fordism in the ever vaster databank.

Yet aside from the eternally valid and inexhaustibly funny Peter Principle (younger readers may need to Google that; studies keep suggesting that Lawrence Peter was absolutely if zanily on the button – and you should read the book; flip from Google to Amazon and grab it before you forget) – the vastness of data creation is what gives the lie to the warehousing siloism we have inherited. The fixation with data threatens to engulf us in a tsunami of facts that quenches not only wisdom (now there’s a word from the past), but the capacity for innovation; like those curious and generally elderly people whose houses are stuffed with every newspaper they ever purchased. What’s leadership tomorrow? Well, let’s start with a mash-up of these two. Wise innovation? Innovative wisdom? Either of those would do us nicely. Fordism in the petaclasm offers a decent, intelligent, worthy way to decline and a suffocating, bureaucratic, death. We need to devote our energies to finding, defining, working, another approach altogether. The new leadership is light-touch, scarily flexible, focused on influencing more than ordering, vision-setting every hour of every day, framing and reframing the lives of everyone on the team, and living at the hub of a metanetwork that hums and whines and fizzes with people who know more than the leader, but who see in the beat of the leaderly baton an order that both descends from and ascends towards tomorrow.

The silos are not, of course, just those created by academic disciplines, though as we know that is bad enough; really bad. Many of our smartest minds end up in the academy, on the receiving end of the substantial federal largesse that the NIH and NSF and other agencies pour into the careers of researchers in the world of STEM. Vannevar Bush, that other Bush (no relation, apparently) whose influence looms large in the America of today – larger, surely than he or his wartime patron FDR could ever have imagined in that far-off world of the 1940s – set up the model in response to his president’s request that the wartime experience of science and government snuggling together be replicated in time of peace. So a measure of government’s commitment to S and T has become its funding of the NIH/NSF apparatus. I’m not offering a view on this conventional-wisdom measure of commitment to innovation, the future, the common good, rationality, and more. (I note my esteemed friend Dan Sarewitz’ recent questioning of this idea, in the hallowed journal Nature of all places; his bearded head, thus extended above the parapet, I am expecting soon to see displayed on a stake over the doors of the National Academies.) But it is undeniable that the billions we are pumping into STEM (well, mainly STE) are shoring up the silos (not sure if that extension of the metaphor works) and underwriting the structure of an S and T establishment in which inter-disciplinary collaboration is as rhetorically appealing as it is destructive of silo-dependent career paths. And while I’m not deliberately setting out to lose my remaining friends in the academy, I do think that academic tenure and the path thereto (there is of course no path therefrom) represent one of the nuttier ideas to have hit the west (aka, for this purpose, America). Sure, put huge pressures on young researchers to achieve A, B, C. Then give them a sabbatical and a pile of moolah. But then start over. The alternative of ensuring that inter-disciplinary efforts are lauded in the tenure process is as plausible as expecting those whom we now charmingly refer to as non-state bad actors to be good sports and kiss the opportunities of asymmetry goodbye. People tend, almost, almost always, to act in their interests.

Yet my point is broader. Little by little academics are collaborating across traditional boundaries; hurrah! It will undoubtedly happen more, partly since academics themselves are developing new mangled disciplines like bioinformatics and of course nanoscale science and engineering, in which the trad distinctions just don’t work.

But the silos in Washington are on another scale, reflecting of course fundamental assumptions within the culture at large but, as tends to happen in the world of policy, drawing them out into an exaggerated and deeply contrasted form. Business. S and T. Policy-in-general. Values. Innovation. Of course, there are relationships. But this fragmented vision is deeply, deeply flawed; and it’s at the heart of our malaise as we seek to face the future – a future exponentially rushing from the past like an express train. We in C-PET are out to put the pieces together. It is together that they will define America’s success in the years ahead. It is together that, at a more profound level, they will define the human future. It is together that they possess the potential to reshape our politics. It is together that they offer leaders, from putative presidents all the way down, an opportunity to shine even as they take up the task of refurbishing an aging policy culture.

Which is my point about hanging together. If we can’t correlate these questions and their respective knowledge communities, they will all fail. In their networked connectedness lies the last best hope of success, the kind of transcendent success that would give to America the commanding heights in century 21 that it attained in 20. Because it is precisely in the correlation of these things that leadership lies. I’ve made the point elsewhere that America must set itself to be both global competitor and global citizen – the true friend as well as the rival of the emerging economic powers. There are many reasons, though network logic is plainly one; without friendship and the affect that it brings, stability in the economic if not the political order will always be in jeopardy, and stakes of all kinds are being raised all the time. We need, if you will, a social Marshall Plan to engulf the rising nations of Asia and Latin America, so that our children truly see our peoples as sharers of one exceedingly small planet and a common human lot. Only that will free us for the kind of economic competition on which the future also depends, but without the xenophobic sense that it is a zero sum game. Remember: tech is deeply changing things. In X years, X being a finite number, we shall have realtime translation devices that enable Facebook friends (or more likely friends on the various interoperable networks that will succeed MZ’s genius creation; by then he will be playing Bill Gates and giving it all away) to span all, all, language groups, in a magnificent reversal of the curse of Babel.

My suspicion is that the technologies will then also, finally, favor the little guy. The bad news? They will instantiate asymmetry, which could lead to continuous strife as a background radiation. The good? They will make things harder not easier for both commercial and governmental control. Such developments will give globalization a whole new bite, and popular movements wholly fresh impact on the global scale. Let’s say Twitter’s successor has two billion members in eight years from now, and something starts to trend and keeps on trending – public opinion as a global force will have arrived. The current (problematic) situation, in which the United Nations treats NGOs (which are often highly partisan) as the representatives of the global public, will be over. I’m not sure the UN will then be the point (I think the UN as in Security Council and GA will be oldline; UNESCO and other elements in the UN system could become a bigger deal, but on the political/economic front groups like G-20 will have all initiative); but whatever intergovernmental organizations there are, we shall see the emergence of global publics.

The point of this seeming digression is to illustrate the kind of world into which America’s projection of leadership will increasingly take place; a world in which silos are breaking down, in which people power will make life a lot more challenging for national governments, a world in which old-style structures like the core of the UN system, with their constitutions and procedures and Robert’s Rules on steroids – in which they remain in place as they fade in significance and are supplanted by the ad-hocery of the G approach. G-whatever is just a bunch of governmental guys who get invited round for a beer. It’s a high-end tweet-up. Now: combine the tweet-up “UN” which the G system is bringing in and global people power through translation software and son-of-Facebook apps, and you can begin to understand the context within which America will be acting, and needing to look good, in just a little while.

So back to integration. By pumping the innovation agenda, and bringing smart and strategic business perspectives to bear on the policy community, we are working to get the long term at the core of Washington’s politics. Embracing the future in a way that is imaginative but non-naïve, we begin to address the impacts of such diverse and extraordinary developments as virtual reality, the brain-machine interface, synthetic biology, humanoid robotics. Once their potential impacts begin to be examined, we are into risk assessment; and in tandem where those impacts stand in relation to our existing notions of the good life, and the varied political traditions that seek to sustain them. In other words, consideration of risk and values issues arise directly from a future-embracing vision. Marty Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and a member of C-PET’s Board of Directors, has raised the question of our handling of risk on a succession of occasions at our monthly roundtables. He urges a principle of caution, which assesses risk side by side with tech developments. He distinguishes this from the “precautionary principle” commonly spoken of in Europe, which seeks to resolve risk issues before developments take place. And Marty’s risk approach could be readily paralleled by a critique on the ground of human values (aka ethics). If you look ahead, you can be circumspect, and work on risk and values side by side with technology. Parallel processing is the key. This kind of embrace of innovation and future-mindedness represents the summum bonum for the tech community. By the same token, they know well that societal values just like environmental and other risk aspects are crucial to commercial success. Which is not to suggest “win-win.” I dislike the concept, not least as it demeans genuine disagreement and devalues the deep value of unresolved, conflicting vision. These are vital elements in progress as well as in the critique that ensures that “progress” really takes us forward, and does in a manner that is (in all its many senses) sustainable. Not win-win. But yes, positive sum outcome. Clarifying key issues; teasing out where agreement and disagreement lie, as all voices are invited to define the issues as well as speak to them; building consensus where possible and establishing both the nature and the weighting to respective parties of issues that remain outside the consensus circle. This process, which bridges silos and builds the knowledge network across disciplines as the context for decision-making, is future-oriented and inherently embraces innovation. But it is not naïve as to risk, it candidly acknowledges that all human conduct is driven by human values, and it recognizes that unease and disagreement in the values arena are huge questions for investors, business leaders, and policymakers alike. That is, the silos interconnect – and do so the more where future and potentially disruptive developments are concerned.

Point being: unless we hang together, we investors and values advocates and innovators and policy mavens and risk gurus, we shall surely hang separately. Build an open-textured knowledge network, draw in all articulate voices, frame and ask tomorrow’s questions. That’s how we man up for today’s decisions. And that’s the C-PET mash-up.

Asking Tomorrow’s Questions:

As we move on from the Waterwheel Economy

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

In his extraordinary book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and one of the tech gurus of our age, points out that around the time of the American revolution, waterwheels were not halving in price every year. Not.

I’m still mulling the book, which will need to be reckoned with by every serious-minded person (if only because Walt Isaacson commends it in unusually serious terms). But there’s no better illustration of the dilemma of America, and in particular of Washington, in 2010. We have a terrific system for the waterwheel economy. It is not faring quite so well in the age of the chip. Stasis is so day-before-yesterday.

So a series of insurgent challenges is being posed, the most insistent on the innovation front. But this is not just about innovation, and setting the ground-rules to enable the U.S. economy to be competitive at a time when the rules have been drastically changed by advances around the planet and the move to a global economic order. It’s about innovation, but back of issues like R. and D. tax credits and visa reform and a vastly needed and overdue overhaul in public education lies something yet more significant. The story of the 20^th century was one in which the United States took over Britain’s role as the dominant economic and military power, and allied it with thought leadership that extended from politics to law to science and engineering – producing far and away the most successful nation this globe has seen. And while Americans and others will always have their disagreements about this or that aspect of the story, backstopping failing imperial Britain (and France!) in two Euro-world wars, going head-to-head with Soviet Russia for as long as it took, sending Nixon to China in an extraordinary and aptly operatic move – and building this ARPANET thing that has changed the world’s life for good, and for good and all – the American stamp on the 20^th century is indelible. The question is of the 21^st, and it goes far, far beyond whether Intel or its successor will end up as a Chinese enterprise, and whether “the next big thing” will splash down far from the land of zip codes (a prospect Intel’s Otellini, who has emerged as the smartest and loudest champion of U.S. innovation, keeps pointing out; anyone really, really listening at either end of Pennsylvania Ave?).

Put one way, the problem is one of “the vision thing,” on the large scale. I’ve written before about our crisis in leadership, which without prejudice to some fine women and men is profound and chronic. I am not convinced that this is a problem inherent in the democratic order, or the American version of it, though there is not the slightest doubt that the shorter the electoral cycle, the more challenging the demands of visionary leadership. I was recently in China, and in conversation with one of the adroit, humane, intelligent persons who are coming to dominate this vast engine of the future. And I said: I must be honest; your country does not face some of the special problems that western democracies do, because your leaders can build a vision for the long term (he merely smiled). And in times of swift change, that can be and may finally and fatefully prove to be vital to success. Point is: western, and especially U.S., leaders must find it within them to look much further ahead, and cast such a vision to the citizens who place and sustain them in power. Ironically, as we know, greater flexibility and faster, more imaginative decision-making are strongly correlated with longer-term vision.

Yet where does that vision arise? It comes from a due sense of what matters, in the medium to long term (which for our purposes can be 5-10-15 years). And we know there is much that matters. According to our several political and cultural traditions, we focus on family values, or the rights of minorities, or the dynamics of workplace organizing, or success on Wall Street, or the freedom of the individual (whether ACLU-style or the sometimes overlapping view from the right, or the more radical libertarian take). These things matter. We all of us locate ourselves in one or perhaps more than one of these hampers of political goods. And so we should. But a way must be found to focus also, and equally, on the vast issue of a future – powered by Moore’s Law and those little circuits his company turns out by the million, powered by that ARPANET thing with the web and “search” imposing remarkable order upon it, and scanning the horizon for the explosive impacts of one new technology on another – from bio to robotics to neuroscience – as they are caught by the rolling shockwave of nanoscale exponential convergence. We truly ain’t seen nothing yet. Both/and. Progressive AND future-oriented. Social conservative AND embracing a vision for 2025. Tea Party AND tracking the transhumanists. Google alerts for C as well as B and A. Or is walking and chewing gum beyond us? Note to ideologues of all kinds: sure, this future focus will affect our current agenda, of course it will. Politics is about a combo of principle and priority. The future is going to have to nose its way in to every one of our current political traditions, and what the final impact of that will be we can’t yet guess.

But the key to the answer lies in asking Tomorrow’s Questions, not today’s. I’ve already suggested that every political appointee should be tested for their innovation-mindedness (which is something the current or next administration could do in a heartbeat, and I believe that heartbeat could transform this nation’s prospects and our global leadership, just fyi). I’ve suggested, more humorously and a little sadly, that every elected federal representative should be required to attend a series of technology conferences every year. And how about this: every presidential debate should have two equal parts: questions from the present, and questions from the future. No leader of a great power can any longer survive and succeed unless she or he is a serious futurist. We need to know. She or he will also need to fit one of the major political-social traditions from which we cull leaders, and be able to give an account of today’s agenda, deeply rooted as it is in yesterday. But unless there is an equal and opposite and potentially critical reaction to that agenda rooted in tomorrow, the nation’s prospects are parlous; to put it plainly, our goose is cooked in the global oven. We need vibrant political leadership on both sides of the aisle, and from the several sectors that make up each side, that is qualified in Tomorrow’s Questions. Just as the ABA scrutinizes candidates for high judicial office, and declares them qualified or not, we need a new politics of pre-qualification. Hands up if you disagree.

But what are Tomorrow’s Questions? In broad terms some are very obvious. They are not all about technology, indeed at one level few are, but they are all raised or raised afresh by technology – and they illustrate the manner in which while the future will still be about people and their societies, it will also and always be freighted with the impact of technology. Privacy. Intellectual Property. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, especially applied to humanoids and what that means for the workforce (and warfare). Sustainability, in the complex political and ecological systems of tomorrow. Where lies U.S. competitive advantage when high-end manufacturing and innovation have migrated, or at least equally dispersed, to Asia? How do we find security and freedom in a world gripped by asymmetry, and the technologies that enable it? What will it mean if human lives keep getting longer, and longer? And neuroscience: if the brain is chemically explicable, what price jurisprudence – a M’Naughten Defense (note for non-lawyers: insanity) for everyone? And what about “enhancements,” in which we – or some of us – get smart chips in our brains? And we connect direct from the brain to the web, and communications devices? These are some samples. Not one of them has anything measurable in the way of political salience in 2010. Each of them has vast implications for leadership in the decade to come. And a word to candidates and their potential inquisitors: generalized pap will not count as an answer. “Don’t know” is fine as an answer, as long as you show you understand the question and its import, because then you will be motivated to go find out. If we need to, let’s try the polygraph. Or is this not serious enough for that?

So C-PET has set its agenda to elicit (gather) and elucidate (clarify) Tomorrow’s Questions, and bring the most expert panels together to consider them. It isn’t that we don’t think today’s are important; but today’s more rudimentary questions are someone else’s job and pretty much everyone else is doing it. And it isn’t that there are lacking exceedingly smart people in the federal government who spend their time and energies on these issues, though most of them need both more prominence and more money if they are going to make much difference. The NSF “converging technologies” conferences in the early 2000s scoped the territory nicely. To be blunt: give OSTP the clout of OMB, stuff it with visionaries like Roco and Bainbridge and Kurzweil and Whitesides and Augustine, and we are on our way to being home and dry. We have smart people and key offices. But they do not set the pace, frame the questions, shape the conversation, lead the thinking of the nation. And this is about leadership and a fundamental shift in the ways of thinking and doing of a nation that has been top dog for three generations and wants to keep the job. America has begun to do what vigorous, successful superpowers always have at a certain point in their trajectory, and it is a dangerous thing from which recovery will require dynamic change: it has begun to take itself for granted. If you think I’m mongering in scare, go west, young man, and keep going west, right through Menlo Park, until you hit the far side of the Pacific rim, and then tell me I’m wrong.

Neither is this an effort to focus America away from its past. One of the most engaging features of the modern world is the degree to which as we jet-set around we move in and out of cultures profoundly shaped by their respective pasts. The survival of highly divergent societies in 2010, like on a more local scale that of regional accents across America and every nation, is counter-intuitive but vital to our understanding of the present. The United States may be the nation most self-conscious of its past, rooted as it is in the very deliberate acts and words of the founders that divorced this nation from its imperial overlord and set the rules as immigrants arrived from all corners. If the question is, what would the founders want of the internet, or synthetic biology, or nanoscale engineering, so be it. They were among the greatest minds of their Enlightenment age, and they knew all about science, and change; they even thought up the USPTO.

Neither is this simply an effort at 21^st century techno-jingoism; and it’s important to make this point and to note it, as the United States needs to be lead global citizen as well as its keenest global competitor. Part of America’s role in the generation ahead is to compete, and to compete successfully as Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage enables us, as we believe, to find what we can do best and benefit the world in the process. Part of it is also to show how high-tech can be high-touch; how our leading global techno-culture can be the most humane and culturally sophisticated of societies. These go together.

Here, then, is an open invitation. Send us your list of the top 10 questions, either in one-sentence form or with paragraphs and references. Explain why you see them as key. Our hopper has a broad opening and nothing will go to waste. We shall work on the best ideas, circulate and recirculate, visit and revisit our list, and press Tomorrow’s Questions as the questions that must be addressed today.

The waterwheel economy is dead, and the world of information, asymmetry, and exponential change is upon us. It will not do for our political establishment to keep its eyes wide shut as we look ahead, or – at best – squint into the sunlight. Time for full frontal engagement with tomorrow.

Cameron Commentaries #7

May be reproduced in full and with attribution.

C-PET’s November 5 roundtable

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

Our roundtable on the future of the biotech industry drew together some of its smartest participants.

Jennie Hunter-Cevera, Executive VP at RTI, was until recently president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Gregory Stock, co-founder of Signum Biosciences, had an earlier and distinguished career writing on bioethics. Robert Friedman, director of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s San Diego facility, once worked in DC at the sadly defunct congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Rachel Levinson, Director of National Research Initiatives for Arizona State University – who was once biotechnology lead for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That said, some further 60 participants sat round the table and crammed the seats around the walls, including senior representatives from various agencies including the departments of State and Defense, science attaches and at least one ambassador from nearly a dozen embassies and missions, and assorted leaders from the think tank and wider policy communities. In a town that tends to cope with events like this by sending the most junior person in the office along to take notes, so far as I’m aware there was only one intern in the entire group. Maybe that’s because we serve such great sandwiches and coffee.

And there was a corresponding buzz to the occasion. “Welcome to our latest mash-up,” I said to greet the crowd, noting that perhaps half of them would have been well qualified to be part of the panel – including some distinguished voices who are becoming regulars at our roundtables and made substantive contributions again this time. Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. Tom Donlan, editorial page editor at Baron’s. Garland McCoy, a founder of the Technology Policy Institute. John Palafoutas from the Task Force for American Innovation. Simon Berkovich from George Washington University. Robert McCreight, after a long career at State, now at George Mason. Jaydee Hanson, formerly with the United Methodist Church and now the Center for Technology Assessment. Mike Nelson from Georgetown, who like me was tweeting (go to #c-pet if you want some epigrammatic gems from @mikenelson and @nigelcameron) though Twitter seems barely have arrived this far east – if needed, there’s a DC tech policy parable. Jim DeLong of the Convergence Law Institute. On it goes.

After pithy perspectives from the panelists the conversation ranged from IP to investment to hope and hype and back. And here’s a thought someone shared: would new synbio organisms fall under the Endangered Species Act? A major point of focus was the recent announcement that the Department of Justice had reversed the policy of administrations of both parties by taking the view that the isolation of individual genes was not patentable. Opinions were expressed pro and con, with concern expressed as to the potential impact of this news on investment – introducing a fresh element of uncertainty into an already less than robust situation. But it was also noted that solid opposition to the concept of gene patents was articulated by conservative and liberal religious leaders in an unusual act of public agreement some time ago.

There are also a focus on the big picture of bioscience. Has it been wrongly focused? The complexity that has unfolded since the beginnings of modern genetics seems to keep on going. A fundamental focus on epigenetics is needed. Interdisciplinary approaches are crucial, and some raised whether the set-up of NIH and other research funding agencies should be reconfigured.

Another special focus was on risk. One strand of discussion: our systems are much too risk averse; the FDA would not now approve either aspirin or penicillin; what of the risks we take by failing to embrace new therapeutic options? Another strand: we need to find a consensus that is cautionary in exploring these new frontiers – in contrast to the European “precautionary” principle that many see as unduly negative, yet very alive to the detection of risk in parallel with new developments. Another strand: how do we assess and handle the risk inherent in synthetic biology and other developments with dangerous pathogens – which unlike even nuclear material have a capacity for indefinitely scaled harm? Focus here from some highly-expert participants was on the need for the right people to be doing the work and handling the materials, as other kinds of controls cannot be adequate (my comment: a trusted traveler approach). A further reminder that the asymmetric century is an inherently unstable and scary place to be; but it’s where we are.

From my moderator’s perch I tried to press the question of how things are trending, what the industry will look like in 10 years, and was waiting and hoping for some forthright declarations of confidence and vision. But I think it’s fair to say they were not to be had. Shall we in 10 years we shall still be facing the doubts and investment problems and controversial disruptions we do now?

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

Quite the eventful time for me, this past week, immersing myself in tomorrow.

First up, our C-PET Roundtable on Synthetic Biology last Friday. Biology isn’t what it used to be. As the engineering approach to living systems moves beyond theory to practice (as J. Craig Venter has recently reminded us), side by side with extraordinary possibilities for good lie options for the weird – and the scary. Scary, not least, in the Asymmetric Century. In tandem with concerns lest we “play God” lie anxieties at least as great that someone will play the Devil. Smallpox, anyone? Not your grandmother’s WMDs.

Then a quick shuttle over to San Francisco on Friday afternoon. Once again an instant reminder of the Bay Area’s reputation as a technology hub. My cab driver explained she had taken a sabbatical (her word) from running her second tech start-up (I’m not making this up). I was in town for the annual “summit” (that’s catching on as an edgy name for what we just used to call a conference) of the Singularity Institute, widely seen as inspired by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. And she was driving me, Friday evening (this was a long day), to an opening party in the home of investor and guru Peter Thiel. And a fun party it was, all the way through to some time in the small hours of Saturday morning when a dozen of us were left huddled outside trying to find another cab and the fun had subsided.

The two days that followed were nonstop candy for the (still biological) brains of the devotees, and also for the scattered handful of participants who like me are more quizzical. I had protested the way an earlier “summit” had been opened, with the greeting “Welcome Singularitarians.” This time we were all included, I suppose. “Welcome, Singularitarians – and Concerned Citizens.” Kurzweil’s is the most famous name among a group of futurist thinkers who have inspired the Singularity Institute, and its sibling Singularity University (a summer school for the very smart, hosted by NASA Ames, that was recently given a prominent write-up in the New York Times). But key summiteers are eager to point out that the Institute is not directly affiliated with Kurzweil. Which was, perhaps curiously, illustrated by the fact he addressed the 620 or so enthusiasts, to their chagrin, on a screen; and actually told them he was on vacation (shades of BP’s mastery of public relations).

One reason I have become a reg at these events is the extraordinary quality and range of the presenters. There really is nothing quite like it – for sheer fat sticks of intellectual cordite. Aspen, of course, attracts the most distinguished names in any Who’s Who. Burning Man and South by Southwest, offer hip context for techies and fellow-travelers. Yet for all the sometimes cultic feel, the Singularity efforts are singular in their commitment to the brainpower they keep suggesting is about to migrate to the chip, when (as RK stated this time around) we merge with our tools. Corvids and parrots, we learned, have intelligence on a par with the great apes; who have intelligence on a par with six-year-old children (the video of a crow bending wire, unbidden and untrained, to make a fishing hook – in the city where Hitchcock filmed part of The Birds – sent shivers down my mammalian spine). Cooling the recently heart-attacked as if they had fallen under ice could markedly improve our ability to bring them round, but it’s held up by red tape. Hour after hour of it; two tight-packed days, rounded off by magician, debunker, humorist, and – as he pointed out – Darwin lookalike, James Randi. Of course, as usual the drum-beat was of accelerating artificial intelligence. Yet the dialectic was perhaps more evident this time than in the past – between those who have confidence in the shape of the curve and sense we are close to going vertical, and those, especially from the biosciences, who keep saying we understand so remarkably little of our wetware (or even that of the animals), that the effort to duplicate it is faintly ridiculous.

As in the past, there was a brief staged debate, though the debaters spent most of their time falling over each other with pleasantries and agreements, so as an effort to ventilate the huge issues before the summit it failed. More generally, if there is a criticism to be made aside from (to use a handy Briticism that Americans could do with knowing) the general over-egging of the pudding (too much, too many, an embarras de richesse), it would lie here: in the need to discuss, to absorb, to hear fewer speeches, lectures, or perorations, and get the uber-brains round some tables to engage – and answer for themselves to their intellectual peers. This of course is what Aspen does; and Davos. It’s what we do at C-PET. It’s what helps build collaborative knowledge networks and reaches for a positive sum outcome for all parties.

So as I sat there at the back, being hit by flying half-bricks of intellect for hour after hour and tweeting to keep myself focused, what I craved most was a 10-15 minute limit to speechifying and a heavy dose of moderated engagement. What would the parrot lady say to the surgeon and the engineer? What would the robotics gurus say to each other, with or without the intermediation of their machines, which all seemed to be called Zeno? What would anyone have to say about the policy implications of the enterprise?Where are the National Academies? Where is OSTP? Where are the AI guys from Sandia, with whom I spent two days some years ago at ASU on the implications of enhanced human intelligence, and where is the spirit of that smart but self-critical gathering?

I’m quite a Kurzweil fan. As I told him at the San Jose summit, and as I have not ceased to tell the Singularity Institute leaders whom I admire, he has raised fundamental questions that have ramifications for everyone and everything – and that are being widely ignored. The SI people are not all Kurzweil clones in their optimism and notions of timescale. I was interested in Peter Thiel’s speech at the last event, in New York City, where he was criticized for taking a more generic view of the “singularity” and hit back that the movement includes people who take many views (as we were told this time, he is the major financial backer of the Institute). And in Vernor Vinge’s comment (he’s the computer expert and sci-fi writer whose early use of the term “singularity” has made him a godfather to the movement) at another, that “the longer we have our hand on the tiller, the better.” But the discussion has to go mainstream. There are ways to make that happen, and ways to make it harder to achieve.

The next stop on my trip was Seattle, for the pii2010 conference on privacy and identity of which C-PET is a co-sponsor. Quite the humdinger. Privacy experts from corporate and non-profit sectors, all-round IT gurus, and some outspoken commentators, produced the perfect mix. And the first evening offered a party and a tangent: pitch slam for a dozen start-ups looking for funding – basically speed-dating from the front of the room; 1-5 minute sales pitches for some highly creative efforts. A handy reminder of how things work in techland, among the small-scale practitioners rather than the large-scale theoreticians. There was also, interestingly, a lot more tweeting going on than at the Singularity, as some dozens of us kept up a parallel conversation and fed in questions in realtime. The matrix of online identity, online and offline privacy, and the future, lies at the heart of our culture – and some of the most profound questions Homo sapiens has yet faced.

The coincidental launch of Facebook’s Places feature tracking and sharing users’ locations, added a little salsa to the conversation. The vast quantities of data we are spewing onto the web have become the raw material for an evolving, global industry. Who owns all this stuff? Read the terms of online services (some of which run to dozens of pages of legalese, so take your lawyer with you and/or a nice bottle of red wine) and you find you have gaily signed away an ocean of rights you assumed were yours, or would have had you thought about them (example from me: Amazon! Go read what they can do with your book reviews). Privacy has yet to emerge as a money-making value proposition for the world of the internet. Yet it may. And my main takeaway from pii2010, aside from the sheer intellect and creativity of the participants (good news for us, or since most of them are corporate players, scarily bad?), was the notion that we should see this as our “banking” our own data, make it portable, find tech solutions to the fact that it is scattered across the web, some on our hard drives and much in the cloud – and encourage the emergence of business models within which we choose to sell what we choose to sell. Yet the current context, of playing ducks and drakes with ever-changing “privacy” rules, is not encouraging. As someone said, and I recall tweeting, every internet service has stayed true to its privacy commitments – until it has decided to change them. And the most chilling moment of pii2010? A panelist asked who we the audience would most trust to take care of our online data. He read a list of options, which ended with government. Hardly anyone voted for any of them. And these are the professionals. My comment: like transplant surgeons who don’t carry donor cards.

So as I return from my week in tomorrow, how do things look? My conviction that Washington, DC is mired in yesterday is clearer than ever; my sense of the urgency and opportunity we confront starker. We’re already a decade into the Asymmetry Century that opened with 9/11; synthetic biology, which carries the seeds of vast benefit, by accident or malicious design could deliver quite ghastly surprises; a technology with a malicious black swan built-in. We are shooting, at a rapid speed though we do not know how fast, up a curve into a world in which AI and robotics have a far larger footprint, and may yet stamp us out. In the meantime, our notions of identity are up for grabs, as we spew data online by the petabyte and think little of the consequences.

Yet how, as conversation after conversation has run, can Washington, DC be changed? Here’s one idea, totally practical and easy to implement. The U.S. Politicians’ Exposure to Technology Act, which could for all I care be known as Eric (Schmidt)’s Law (sounds better than PETA). It would require every politico elected to national office, from POTUS down, and every administration political appointee (the Plum List), to attend in their first year in office a minimum of 4 technology conferences to be selected from a list to be compiled by a committee consisting of the CEOs of the three largest NASDAQ companies and the six newest Valley tech start-ups of the previous year; and 2 in all subsequent years in office. Believe me, aside from doing wonders to registrations at tech events (if perhaps shifting the feel of the conversation a little), it would revolutionize the DC policy community – and do more for U.S. innovation than a myriad initiatives, breast-beating, commissions, and the valiant efforts of the several tech think-tanks.

The point I go around making is that unless you visit tomorrow you are fundamentally unqualified for decision-making today. I just spent a week there. I’m exhausted. Looking forward to getting back to now. But does anyone really disagree? And if Eric’s Law is not the answer, what is? This nation remains the greatest can-do society, at least since Rome. Let’s get onto it.

Permission given to forward and cross-post unedited and with full attribution.

singinst.org

pii2010.com

nigel.cameron@c-pet.org