Interview: Melanie Swan (3/2/08)

March 04 2008 / by memebox
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 2

This MemeBox interview with Melanie Swan was conducted on March 2, 2008 by Marisa Vitols.

MV: What do you do and how is that related to the future?

MS: My goal is to stimulate the widest possible development and deployment of innovative technology. Historically, technology has been the one phenomenon that has demonstrated continuous positive impact on humanity, ever since the first flint. The benefits of technology are continuing to accelerate as the world becomes more democratized, expressed at higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy and networked globally for peak collaboration.

Towards this goal, I continuously study cutting edge advances in science and technology. I give lectures and workshops and work with a variety of government, non-profit, corporate and startup clients. I also participate in creating and sponsoring innovative technology development and tools and mechanisms to facilitate its generation and adoption. Some of my current projects are Virtual Worlds Data Visualization, Open Access Futures Journals, and the Future of Technology: What might be the next internet?.

MV: How does your background as a futurist come into play when managing a hedge fund and running your own consultancy?

MS: Being a futurist means having a toolkit of both quantitative and qualitative skills to analyze historical, present and future trends both near-term and long-term. Analyzing the implications of trends, patterns and other information applies to nearly any complex phenomenon, including the stock market, technological innovation and adoption, the political economy and many areas of science. The stock market is an interesting math and social behavioral problem to which a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods can be tested and applied.

Many industries and occupations are becoming increasingly complex. The Flynn Effect notes that average I.Q. scores have been rising in each generation, about three points per decade, perhaps due in part to the requirement to think more abstractly about the world. Not just futurists, but everyone can benefit from tools for working with the implications of trends, patterns and increasing volumes of information. In my futurist consulting and research work, I focus on sharing general knowledge and perspective and working with clients to apply it to specific contexts. The part I enjoy the most is seeing people get excited about new technologies and engage in developing and implementing them.

MV:When advising others, what makes you confident and accurate in your guidance? How certain can one ever be about the future?

MS: When thinking about the future, it is important to define outlook time frames and select appropriate analysis tools with an understanding of their scope and limitations. For example, forecasting is a good tool for shorter term quantitative predictions with quarters and years as the time frame, and including sensitivity analysis as one component. Scenario planning on the other hand is a broader tool for looking at longer time frames with greater uncertainty, capturing the key driving dynamics and four possible future states of the world that could occur. Any model should build in an understanding of human bias, anthropomorphism and the Black Swan (the idea that humans are not good at thinking about probability and risk).

The only way to be sure about the future is to expect the unexpected. The story of history is a chain of discontinuities, for example the plane, the car, the radio, wars, nuclear weapons, satellites, computers, the Internet and globalization. Discontinuity is nearly impossible to predict but the possibility for rapid transition time and doubling capacity can be assessed. Cascading technology advances in related fields can also be evaluated, for example, disk drive and battery advances made MP3 players possible; natural language understanding could quickly trigger a large segment of artificial intelligence applications.

MV: Do you expect more people to embrace systematic futures thinking over time? How might this happen?

MS: Systems thinking is an important tool that is experiencing recognition and use in many areas, especially given the general rise in complexity and the interstitial location of many outstanding problems and opportunities. Science could be the biggest beneficiary of systems thinking, together with open-source tools and building-block technology repositories. Systems thinking has long been part of futures studies due to its integrative nature.

Improvements in systems thinking can come from individuals learning and being taught the relevant skill sets, for example, many leading U.S. universities currently offer Systems Biology programs integrating curricula from multiple science areas. Improvement can also come from collaborative tools like wikis and virtual world interactions, so the systems thinking can arise from the group, it does not have to come only from individuals.

MV: Do you see financial markets evolving to be more effective in the coming years? If so, how?

MS: There are three main factors directing the evolution of financial markets in the next decade: first, the growth of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) which is akin to the arrival of the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea) on the world economy in the 1980s, second, the increasing global interconnectedness of economies and third, the demand for natural resources (energy,water, food). These or other factors are not likely to change the efficiency dynamics of financial markets. Imbalances, bubbles, corrections and cycles will persist. The global interconnectedness of economies makes reverberations instantaneous but can also stimulate quicker recovery.

The biggest future evolution in financial markets could be the increasing presence of non-monetary currencies to reflect the new-value attribution models triggered by the radical shift to free information in the economy.

MV: What does transhumanism mean to you? How does it impact/inform your actions?

MS: Transhumanism is generally considered to be the evolutionary transition period between humans and post-humans. Post-humans are beings with significantly augmented physical and mental capabilities compared to current humans. Since it is not clear how or if post-humans will reproduce and it is thought that they will certainly have more and non-traditional reproductive means available to them, it is hard to determine if an official speciation will have occurred.

There can be nodes of discontinuity, but the transhuman path already occurring is one of incrementalism. 10% of Americans are cyborgs today, in the sense of having synthetic items permanently implanted in their bodies: hearing aids, tooth implants, pacemakers, etc. Another example of transhuman capability is the cochlear implants interfacing with hearing cognition for deaf children that are now routine.

Professionally, transhuman advances that help the human body and brain are just one of the areas of technology development I try to facilitate. Personally, as a technophile, I would love to adopt transhuman technologies – when they are proven: be my own wireless access point, have that radical memory extension appliance, the Internet, on board, have a semi-intelligent advisor and valet (SRI CALO is an early example), have the neurogaming headset attached and benefit from personalized gene therapies and in-blood nanomedical monitors.

MV: Given your interest in transhumanism, could you describe your vision of human evolution over the next few decades? How do you think it will all play out?

MS: The long-term evolution of humans could be quite dramatic, even more dramatic than the developments triggered by transhuman technologies. At some point, it is likely that all biological processes will become understood and manageable. Human source-code will be edited. Radical longevity (immortality), together with a potential post-scarcity economy (PSE) triggered by technology revolutions from biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, etc. and the potential replacement of humans by robots for love and sex will make it possible for an automatic wholesale redesign of society which has been primarily organized around reproductive fitness for 500,000 years.

The computer and the brain are the two main contenders for the future of intelligence and will probably overlap and enhance each other in the interim. Ultimately intelligence should be substrate agnostic, it could perform equally well in a variety of digital and physically embodied environments, for example as a miniature probe on Enceladus in a low-gravity body-plan optimum for Mars, as a virtual world avatar, in a computer or in a human or animal embodiment on Earth, using the same ease with which humans change car, bus and skateboard vehicles today.

MV: Why should people consider the possibility of a singularity?

MS: In the futurist community, the word singularity (really technological singularity) is generally taken to refer to a time when machines become more intelligent than humans. A singularity in general is where the currently understood laws of math and physics break down and are not able to explain phenomena, as in the interior of a black hole.

More so now than at any prior time in history, there are several technologies that could fundamentally change life as we know it. Given the accelerating rate of historical technological advances, there could easily be one or more technology revolutions in the next fifty years that will have an even greater impact than the Internet.

Biotechnology, “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moluceular_nanotechnology, and artificial general intelligence are perhaps the three technologies that could have the largest potential impact. Other possible technologies that could have substantial influence include fabbing, synthetic biology, Metaverse technologies, robotics, quantum computing, intelligence augmentation, personalized medicine, affordable space launch and anti-aging therapies.

People should be expecting revolutionary levels of change in their lives and orient themselves to learning about and understanding new technologies and their capabilities and detriments. Technical literacy is increasingly necessary to fully engage with and participate in the society of today and the future.

MV: Peter Thiel recently said that the likelihood of a singularity means there’s great potential for compound growth ahead of us. How would a singularity affect your investment decisions?

MS: There is a distinction between technological revolution and technological singularity. The coming technology revolutions which could have an Internet-level impact have opportunities for compound and even geometric financial returns right now. Some examples are cleantech, personal genomics, anti-aging therapies, 3d data manipulation tools and narrow artificial intelligence as a more efficient version of outsourcing. There are many opportunities for entrepreneurs, corporations and public and private investors. A technological singularity on the other hand is by definition a situation where traditional laws and metrics break down and would likely trigger a post-traditional financial markets era where there is a good chance that growth, alpha and superior financial returns would be irrelevant.

Technology is evolving faster than financial markets. Information is increasingly free. This is causing well-established economic paradigms to expand to reflect this shift. Free access to information pushes the bottleneck higher up the scale to a less entropic, higher resolution value point. What is now valuable is what is being done with the information. Non-monetary currencies for attributing value initially started with reputation. Now they are becoming more rigorous in their assessment of value and are being used for exchange. Some of the new market mechanisms include attention economies, open money (related event: unMoney Convergence banks”:http://www.timebanks.org, social capital markets (related event: Social Capital Markets prediction markets. Evolving to a multi-currency culture could ease a potential future transition to a post-scarcity economy (PSE) as traditional money would be only one recognized store of value.

PREDICTIONS

MV: What are some of the powerful new technologies or disruptive events that you expect to see over the next year, by Dec 31, 2008?

MS:
- 3d cameras
- Geo-tagged online connected objects
- Early versions of neuroheadsets for gaming
- Increased adoption of personal genomics services
- Growth in data visualization for enterprise and science in virtual worlds
- Telemedicine pilots
- Larger computer and television monitors (substantial increase in total square feet of screens in 2008 vs. 2007)
- Progress in virtual world interoperability and increased migration to OpenSim

MV: What powerful new technologies or disruptive events that you expect to see over the next 5 years, by 2013?

MS:
- Proof of the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson
- Google continues to reinvigorate and contribute to the artificial intelligence field
- At least one SARS-type virus or plague has reached a hundred people
- Mediatronic walls available to high-end customers
- Live data streamed into virtual worlds and represented visually is routine
- Augmented reality overlay applications available via mobile phone
- Smart home sensor networks
- Enterprise 3d data visualization
- Virtual worlds start to become an important successor platform to the web for eCommerce
- More heterogeneous passenger vehicles on the road: diesel, hybrid, etc.
- At least one public company has announced their quarterly earnings simultaneously in a virtual world

MV: What are some of the powerful new technologies or disruptive events that you expect to see over the next 10 years, by 2018?

MS:
- Full rat brain modeled by IBM Blue Brain supercomputing project or others
- Attempted bio-terrorism attacks
- Full human genome scans are available for $1,000 or less
- Large populations of the industrialized world have had their genome partially scanned
- Initial versions of human proteome modeled/sequenced, drug discovery revolves around proteomics in addition to genomics
- Some form of universal socialized healthcare exists in the US
- India, China, Singapore, Dubai, etc. have become hotbeds for specific health/drug/technology development
- There is serious consideration of splitting China into multiple administrative parts
- A few pilot PRT (personal rapid transit) projects have been launched
- Some form of avatar-based navigation for mobile phone eCommerce exists

MV: What makes you optimistic and/or pessimistic about the future?

MS: I am a natural optimist. While I think it important to identify, evaluate and deflect existential risk and do so as a Lifeboat Foundation board member, I also think it fairly unlikely that humans would make themselves extinct.

Absent a low-probability luddite backlash, increasing levels of technology will be present in each phase of the future. Obviously, any technology can be used for positive or negative purposes, but society usually matures around the technology and experiences more benefit than detriment.

I am excited about the many technologies under current development which could impact not only short-term challenges but also have tremendous future extensibility, enough to start putting a Kardashev Type I society (where all potential power on the planet is harnessed) within reach. Some of these technologies include: bioremediation (industry conference) biofuel and synthetic biology, molecular nanotechnology, particle accelerator technology, alternative energy and nuclear waste storage, management and eventually decomposition technology.