Accelerating the Future into Being

This article, co-authored by Rene and Megan May, will be published in the Counter Culture issue of Volume Magazine, August 2010.

As two of the founding members of SpaceCollective.org, a forward-looking think tank concerned with how exponential changes in technology are shaping our future selves, we are often reminded how much our inquiry owes to the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

In spite of its connection to the US military, DARPA exemplifies the essence of America's much heralded knack for innovation, unapologetically anticipating failure as one of the inevitable outcomes of looking farther forward than most — according to DARPA, if you don’t have failures, you’re not far enough out.

In order to “accelerate the future into being,” DARPA foots the bill for some of the most ambitious engineering projects known to man, including reverse engineering the brain, while opportunistically embracing whatever unpredictable results their esoteric projects may yield.

Thus far, the results of their envelope pushing, scattershot approach have been impressive. They have successfully funded breakthroughs like global positioning satellites, the cell phone, speech recognition software, the graphical user interface, the Unix operating system, super-capacitors, advanced fuel cells, a multitude of air, land, and sea robots, and more. Even the US Space Agency, NASA, was a spin-off from DARPA (called ARPA at the time).




Ironically, while DARPA’s formal ambition is to create a superhuman soldier, most of the agency’s projects don’t end up on the battlefield, but rather proceed to transform the civilian world we live in, and ultimately our overall sense of who and what we are. In his book Radical Evolution, which extensively documents DARPA’s ambitions to enhance humanity, Joel Garreau makes the fundamental hypothesis that today we are riding a curve of exponential change that is unprecedented in human history, and will transform no less than human nature. Garreau defines our historical moment as follows:

“We've tried Socratic reasoning and Buddhist enlightenment and Christian sanctification and Cartesian logic and the New Soviet Man. Our successes have ranged from mixed to limited at best. Nonetheless, we are pressing forward, attempting again to improve not just our worlds but our very selves. Who knows? Maybe this time we'll get it right.”

In the mid ‘60s, Darpa took a giant step in that direction by funding a project that promised to “augment human intellect,” through computers.




At the time, there was no field of computer science, there were no computer science departments in universities, and certainly no computer networks. There was, however, an engineer named Douglas Engelbart, who was convinced that computers had a purpose beyond number crunching.

Engelbart's vision was shared by the head of DARPA's research department, J.C.R. Licklider, who articulated the idea that a “man-machine symbiosis” would produce a new entity that would “think “as no human brain has ever thought before." It was Licklider who would convince DARPA to fund Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect project. 

Engelbart’s research would culminate in an epic demonstration of the first computer mouse, the graphical user interface, hypertext, and networked computers to a crowd of awestruck engineers who initially balked at Engelbart’s DARPA-supported schemes. And soon enough, his center at Stanford would become the first node of the Internet – giving rise to a technology that we never knew we needed but which has since become ubiquitous.




As it happens, the instigators of the world transforming technological paradigm shifts that are the subject of this article, are engineers whose primary focus is on how things might work without being overly preoccupied with the precise outcome of their tinkering. Indeed, neither Engelbart nor Licklider could have possibly predicted the explosive impact their joint venture would have a few decades down the line.

As has been extensively documented by Kevin Kelly, in just the first 2000 days after the web was born, we had already contributed 3 billion web pages, demonstrating an unanticipated eagerness to share. In the process, we’ve taken the liberty to freely share billions of dollars worth of copyrighted material, increasingly cut out the middleman from our commercial transactions, and forced many institutions that represented the dominant culture to reinvent themselves or perish. It’s safe to say then, that in today’s world the engineers who materialize these technologies are the instigators, if not the leaders of a revolution, often operating without manifestoes, business plans, or even support from the scientific community, which, according to Joel Garreau, "can take years if not decades to catch up with adequate explanations for some of the technological developments DARPA and others are pushing through. It is the final triumph of Edison over Einstein."

In the last ten years, a younger generation of triumphant engineers have stepped to the plate to build upon Engelbart’s augmentation metaphor. Foremost among them are the founders of Google Inc, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who set out to “expand people’s minds” with an ever-refined search algorithm that has since become one of the key operating principles of the web.

From their humble PhD project at Stanford, they’ve gone on to index all the world’s information and managed to create one of the most successful companies in the world, based almost entirely on the popularity of its revolutionary search technology, which has since prompted Google to venture into many unforeseen directions. Despite its founders’ initial reluctance to turn their project into a platform for advertising, one of these ventures is Google’s world famous Adsense technology, which leverages their powerful index of related information to generate context-specific ads alongside search queries and other Google services.




This customized approach has elevated advertising to a level that is infinitely more subtle than blanketing the world with TV commercials for McDonalds, while providing Google with the financial wherewithal to pursue its founders’ far-reaching vision to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”

This is a tried and true strategy; after all broadcast TV first provided us with an unprecedented window on the world thanks almost exclusively to revenue generated by commercials for shampoo and vacuum cleaners. The success of this trade-off would ultimately contribute to such world changing feats as ending the war in Vietnam by bringing the battlefield into our living room.

In the ‘60s, Marshall McLuhan, the media philosopher who seems to have understood the engineer’s mind better than most, predicted that what had started with a TV in every home would eventually turn the world into a “Global Village.” But what he couldn’t have foreseen is that today Google is marrying television with the Internet, and is getting to know all the villagers on a first-name basis while - like an old-time switchboard operator running a local party line – the company’s Android operating system for smart phones will allow Google to keep close tabs on all its neighbors around the planet, wherever they are, swapping recipes and gossip or reporting on the current patronage of their local pub. In this increasingly symbiotic relationship with their customers, Google is becoming intimately aware of who we are, where we are and what we like, while optimizing our lives, by providing us with a constantly updated supply of mutually beneficial tools and services, like Gmail, Google Wave, Google Chrome, Google Voice, Google Checkout, Google Health — the list is getting longer by the day. And in every instance we voluntarily share more and more of our private lives with Google’s ever-growing data centers. Indeed, it may not be long before we're sharing even our most personal genomic details with the company; after all, Sergey Brin is not only an investor in the leading personal genomics company 23AndMe, but the company’s co-founder is his wife.


Given the tremendous task of indexing and contextualizing the rapidly growing amounts of data Google acquires from one moment to the next, including their massive digitization of books, their controversial worldwide street view project, and so on, it seems only logical for Sergey Brin to anticipate that “artificial intelligence” will emerge within a few years. A prospect that did not escape George Dyson, when he visited the Googleplex several years ago and concluded that the company would soon find itself “at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are." And in the most remarkable about-face, rather than suffering from Big Brother paranoia, younger generations today appear to be in on the master plan, freely sharing everything with Google’s cloud computing infrastructure as if they agree by consensus that throwing caution to the wind may well be the necessary path by which the Internet will deliver the constant innovation they have come to expect.

As we continue to develop our relationship with the machine, we may yet become the enhanced human beings envisioned by the early advocates of augmented intelligence. However, according to maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil, chances are that soon we may no longer be able to recognize the emerging entity as one of our own.




In the best tradition of the calculated recklessness American innovators excel at, Kurzweil predicts that within decades machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, at which point all bets will be off, and we may find ourselves jumping into a DARPA-esque black hole from which a whole new existential paradigm will emerge.

Google is certainly no stranger to the fact that technology can change faster than expected, and the company is throwing in its lot with Kurzweil by co-sponsoring his Singularity University. This initiative may spawn yet another generation of radical engineers, inspired by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who first defined the Singularity as the inevitable moment when “computer /human interfaces become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent,” and go on to create exponentially more intelligent entities at accelerating speeds.

While this may sound like a far-fetched concept only DARPA would fund, the Singularity theory is actually based on Intel founder Gordon Moore’s sober observation that the power of information-technology is doubling every eighteen months and will continue to do so. Moore’s law, of course, has become the core faith of the booming computing industry for the last few decades, and has recently inspired Intel to promise a complete merger between man and machine by 2050.

When you add it all up, it looks like the next step in our DARPA-esque technological evolution may not be financed by the military, but by a major corporation like Google or Intel, at the risk of trading one potential liability for an even more debatable patron.

After all, anyone who has read alarming books like counterculture stalwart Douglas Rushkoff’s “Life Inc” or watched the equally bleak documentary “The Corporation,” knows that these business entities are often viral, perhaps even "sociopathic," institutions, operating in the sole interest of quarterly results and shareholder value. So one can only wonder what will happen if Page and Brin's longstanding promise to do no “evil” is jeopardized by their unexpected failure to deliver the enviable profit margins the company has been boasting so far. If they were to arrive at such a juncture they might be forced to relinquish control or even be ousted by the company’s shareholders who — as Apple's Steve Jobs and Yahoo founder Jerry Chang found out the hard way — are ultimately calling the shots. This would inevitably leave us at the mercy of whoever might step in to guide Google’s exploding machine intelligence, and inherit the mountains of data we have entrusted to the company.

Ultimately, the best thing corporations like Google can hope for is that we, the users, continue to go along with their founders’ plans, and that our compliance will generate sufficient income to hold the company's board at bay — leaving it up to Larry Page and Sergey Brin to stay the course as they help ring in the Singularity.

If there is one redeeming aspect of working within the corporate system that rules the Internet today, it’s that the same services that allow us to share personal information, also provide us with a platform to voice our discontent. When Facebook, for example, makes unfavorable changes, their initiatives are instantly squashed by user revolts. And at the moment, the social network’s less than transparent attempts at manipulating privacy settings for its own gain are seriously jeopardizing its reputation among users who make their negative opinion of its founder, Marc Zuckerberg, very public.

At this juncture, corporate leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin — and all the other engineers operating within this mysterious algorithmic culture whose products we so eagerly adopt, should perhaps be scrutinized in the same way as we probe our politicians. So we decided to use Google’s search algorithm to do a little data mining on its creators, and the results of our queries proved to be as reassuring as they are revelatory.

It turns out that the philosophical underpinnings of today’s Internet, take us back as far as 1907, when a radical Italian woman, named Maria Montessori, conceived of an anti-authoritarian educational system that would focus entirely on the students’ individuality, tapping into their eagerness to share, and their inherent desire to learn.




What at the time was seen as a marginal educational model has, more than a century later, taken on a prophetic significance, which the educational innovator herself could not possibly have imagined when she wrote:

“Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society.”

From the first day of class the Montessori method offers pre-school students a simple set of building blocks to play with, which has caused a Singularity in its own right by catalyzing the genius of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and George Braque, all of whom left an indelible mark on 20th Century culture.




As it happens, in the 21st century, the list of Montessori alumni includes Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of whom attribute Google's success story to their Montessori education, which they credit for teaching them to be self-directed and to think for themselves, while giving them the freedom to pursue their own illustrious path. This would ultimately lead to the creation of their non-hierarchical mega-corporation, which promotes the Internet’s bottom-up ethos through the creation of simple user-friendly tools to access all the world’s information. And these tools have in turn produced a whole new generation of autodidacts, spontaneously sharing with each other and the world in the best tradition of a Montessori education.

In fact, no initiative on the Internet demonstrates the success of Montessori’s educational principles better than Wikipedia. This open-source platform for knowledge creation has proven that people are both willing and able to collectively generate and regulate a vast accumulation of knowledge. So it makes perfect sense that its founder, Jimmy Wales, is a Montessori graduate as well.

Other disciples include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who revolutionized online commerce, and Will Wright, the pioneer of interactive games, who credits Montessori’s ideas as the main inspiration for his world-building game “The Sims” and the more recent “Spore,” which invites players to single-handedly re-invent the entire universe.

Together, these men make up the pillars of today’s interactive paradigm, which encourages us to participate in “the unfolding of the human soul,” and by extension “the rising of a New Man,” as envisioned by Maria Montessori, who, at the tender age of 13 attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dream — to become an engineer.

She must have understood — even back then — that, as Marshall McLuhan puts it,

“first we build the tools, then they build us.”

Rene
Megan May

Fri, Jun 25, 2010  Permanent link

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