The Long Now Foundation, San Francisco
Photo: PK Read

My goal yesterday was to visit the headquarters and museum of the Long Now Foundation, a project intended to extend the time perception of a global culture with ever foreshortening horizons. For those who think in terms of quarterly or even annual goals, this is not for the faint of heart.

I had expected a museum with models of the Long Now Clock, a pr0ject to build what is billed as the ‘slowest computer on the planet’, a 10,000 year clock that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium”. There is a prototype of the clock in London’s Science Museum, and I did indeed find small models and tooled versions of clock mechanisms at the small museum in the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, right on the Bay.

But what I also found were two employees packing everything into boxes, some empty shelves and a place in transition for the long-term. The clock design phase, started back in the late 1990s, is over. The new phase – a phase of increased discussion and context-building – is underway. The museum will become a salon, the salon will serve drinks, all aged long-term. Potential salon patrons can buy their own named whiskies, gin, wines, all kept at the salon for evenings of timely discussions, all aged for long-term commitment. My kind of place.

They will be open until June 2013, close for remodeling, and reopen in Fall 2013.

The Long Now Foundation site.

Prototype image of the 10,000 Year Clock. The final structure will be over 200 feet (60 meters) tall.
Image: Long Now Foundation

It’s easy to see why we humans think in terms of years. After all, we base our thinking on the world around us, and the world around us travels around its star in what we call a year. If we lived on Jupiter, we might still think in terms of years, I suppose, but each year would last almost 12 of our current years. Assuming we had similar lifespans (and could actually survive on Jupiter, etc.), we would reach adolescence at age 1, be adult by age 2, and middle-aged at 4. How would that change our expectations?

For most people living in modern society, life is a quick-flowing, mercurial thing, and this is encouraged even further by modern technologies. Meanwhile, our world continues to orbit the Sun at its more or less stately pace and the cycles of the planet are mostly far longer than we comprehend or choose to reflect in our actions.

How welcome, then, is the project of the 10,000 Year Clock! A project that shows how we humans think:  how we keep time, how we design, our limitations and our potential. An actual clock, a massive device with gears and chimes built into a mountain, meant to keep time on a centennial and millennial scale, an attempt to think long and speak to ourselves in the future.

The undertaking is supported by the Long Now Foundation. Its president is Stewart Brand, who is quoted as saying, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.“

While I think short-sightedness is a built-in feature of human life – after all, we get hungry every single day and often our horizons don’t extend much beyond fulfilling our various hungers – it does seem that our intelligence should lead us to take a longer view of our place in vast natural cycles. If for no other reason than self-preservation.

The clock itself, designed by Danny Hillis, is funded by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. There is a fine irony in the founder of a company based on the rapid satisfaction of consumer needs investing his wealth in a project meant to instruct on the importance of the long term. Still, there have always been those who invest in the future even as they reap the wealth of the present.

And maybe that’s one of the lessons.

The Mechanical Chimes play music designed by Brian Eno. Using a progressive algorithm, large star-shaped plates, called Geneva Wheels, running down the center of the clock will generate a different bell ringing order for each day of the next 10,000 years.
Photo/Text: James Martin/CNET

4 July 02012 is 236 years since 4 July 01776.

It’s possible the United States of America will still exist in year 10000 (ten thousand). Year 10,000 is the first year requiring 5-digit year format. The 5-digit year format will be good up through year 99,999 (ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine).

If the U.S.A. was a person, then 236 years of age compared to 10,000 years of age makes us a 2.36-year-old (i.e. we’re in our terrible twos).

“Planetary Resources’ mission is mine near-Earth asteroids for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals.”

Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson are the co-founders and co-chairmen of Planetary Resources Inc.

Hmm… From Ross Perot (my dad’s generation) to Ross Perot Jr. (my generation)…

“I am an investor in Planetary Resources, first and foremost, because I believe in the team behind it. I’m honored to be on the ground floor with a team that possesses this caliber of expertise, vision, drive and history of success.” — Ross Perot, Jr.

The investors in Planetary Resources Inc. is impressive: Eric Schmidt, K. Ram Shriram, Charles Simonyi, Ph.D., Larry Page, and Ross Perot, Jr.

PlanetaryResources.com::The Asteroid Mining Company

56 Days Since My First “Learning About the Future in 50 Minutes” Talk

I was 54 on 8 April 02012. Hmm… Reverse the digits of Mike Wallace’s death age (digits of 93 reversed is 39) and add that number to my age (54) and you get Mike Wallace’s death age (93 = 39 + 54).

39 years is a long time. I’ll turn 93 in the year 02050. I think it’s possible that if I’m alive in 02050, then I could end up being alive in the years 02150, 02250, 02350, and so on.

39 years of SCREAM (Science, Computing, Robotics, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) enabled by Infinite Computing. I don’t have enough imagination to image what the info-, bio-, nano-, robo- advances are going to be over the span of the next 39 years.

These days I consider 93 an “old” age, but 39 years from now it’s possible I’ll consider 93 a “young” age.

Prior to this embryonic stem cell moment, I had presented the QOTW (Quote Of The Week).

The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. I have tolerated a lot — Doug Engelbart (01925-)

I briefly mention how the way we use computers today can be attributed to Doug Engelbart’s work back in the 1960s. I also mentioned that Engelbart is alive and still working on his lifelong dream of augmenting human intelligence.

Student: What do you mean by augmenting human intelligence?
Me: Make all people equal when it comes to IQ.
Student: What?!?!? How do we do this?
Me: Well, one example, the Googlers want a Google object implanted in our brains.
Student: What?!?!? Won’t we be like robots?
Me: We solve for ‘x’ in this class. Search Google for site:wired.com bill joy future and read Why the future doesn’t need us.

Prior to this embryonic stem cell moment, I mentioned that is was nice having two binary dates in a row. Yesterday was 10/10/10 and today was 10/11/10. Next month will be fun because we have 11/11/11 and 11/11/11 will be the last binary date until 1 January 02100. I wasn’t able to move of this topic until I pointed out the blasphemy of using a 2-digit year.

Me: I should be shot for using a 2-digit year. If anything, we should be using a 5-digit year.
Student: 5-digit year?!?!?!?
Me: Yes. 2010 is really 02010. But you don’t want to start using a 5-digit year because that will put you completely out-of-sync with the rest of society.
Student: Nobody uses a 5-digit year.
Me: We solve for ‘x’ in this class. Visit http://longnow.org

At the very start of class (i.e. prior to this embryonic stem cell moment), I mentioned that The Simpsons last night was a mathy episode (Lisa coached baseball using statistics/probability) and I tweeted about it.

At this point the energy level of the class started its fall to zero because it was time for us to solve for ‘x’.

“30-year economic forecast”… Hee-haw.

“Recovery from this recession could take decades”… I don’t know how you define “recovery,” but I keep “seeing” 02013 as being a major breakout year. In other words, the “recovery” will take decades if we assume one-year decades (and one-decade centuries). Note: I use 5-digit years for a reason. [visit LongNow.org and subscribe to the SingularityU YouTube channel]

Want to get majorily depressed? Investigate “lump of labor.” We’re not yet in the Robotics Age; consequently, this recession’s “recovery” is giving us insight into the “lump of labor” problem that is awaiting us. The next recession has the potential to make this recession look like good times. In a nutshell: We need to start electing 21st century leaders rather than 20th century political dinosaurs.

“Neal Stephenson�s new novel, ANATHEM, germinated in 01999 when Danny Hillis asked him and several other contributors to sketch out their ideas of what the Millennium Clock might look like. Stephenson tossed off a quick sketch and promptly forgot about it. Five years later however, when he was between projects, the idea came back to him, and he began to explore the possibility of building a novel around it. ANATHEM is the result, and will be released on September 9th, 02008.

I recently finished reading the review copy that Neal sent. The book pulled me in immediately, and I ended up reading the nearly 1000-page tome in just a few days. Set in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle. Here is what Stewart, Danny and Kevin from the Long Now board had to say…”

The first event that got me fired up was Nissam Taleb’s talk about his recent book, Black Swan, on Monday, 2/04/08 at the SALT. As I said, I wasn’t able to attend, but Steward Brand did send out a brief email summary, so I’m pretty fired up about listening/watching the talk in the days to come. Truth be told, I have not yet read Black Swan (only barely skimmed it), but I skimmed the good parts.

Here’s what Steward Brand said in the email following the talk, in all it’s CTRL-C and CTRL-V glory, if you didn’t receive the email yourself.

P.S. I do enjoy how “Nobel Prize” rhymes with”Ferragamo ties.”

On January 11, 2008, Saffo spoke on “Embracing Uncertainty: The Secret to Effective Forecasting” at one of Long Now’s Seminars About Long Term Thinking. Having recently relocated to Boulder, Colorado from the San Francisco Bay Area, I wasn’t able to attend this live, but I did enjoy the audio repost and I’m looking forward to the video.

Saffo discussed several of the methods he uses in forecasting, which he also recently described in the Harvard Business Review article entitled “Six Rules for Effective Forecasting.” He started out by recalling one particular forecast he received from a friend some time ago which was supposedly from CNN, although Saffo was been unable to confirm it’s true source. The forecast read, “Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree Al Qaeda Leader is Dead or Alive.” Saffo remarked that on the surface this was not a good forecast, being quite obvious, but in fact that is was actually a great forecast, because it accurately and completed captured the uncertainty of that moment. He said “The biggest mistake of a forecaster can make is being more certain than the facts suggest.” I suppose that assumes a high degree of confidence in the validity of our perceptions / beliefs, and a high degree of actual validity in those perceptions / beliefs, but that is an entirely separate nut to be cracked at another time.

Saffo said that “Uncertainty is not just an artifact of imperfect foresight. Uncertainty is intrinsic in the process and in my opinion, it is very good news. That’s good news because uncertainty is opportunity.”

I’ve pulled out some nuggets from his talk, but the crux of it was that uncertainty is everywhere and that forecasters must embrace it.

Embrace uncertainty

How does one embrace uncertainty? Saffo suggests that you must “map the cone of uncertainty” by taking an event and extending outwards from that event. It’s a cone shape because the degree of uncertainty increases over time. I know what the weather is like right now, I have lower confidence about what it will be like fifteen minutes from now, and I would have extremely low confidence in describing the weather in two weeks. This seems very obvious, and Saffo remarked that much of these forecasting best practices are common sense and so not terribly original. What’s important about the cone is not the shape, but how widely or narrowly it is drawn, and the difficulty one has in describing the edges. He went on to say, “The art of forecasting is understanding uncertainty and also balancing between a stance where if you look at things to narrowly, if you draw that cone to narrowly, you’re going to miss things that happen, if you draw it to broadly, you’re going to spend your whole time navel gazing around events that may never come to pass. The art, what makes forecasting hard, isn’t predicting the outcome. What makes forecasting hard is predicting the edges of the cone.”

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance

Saffo said that “things surprise us for a very simple reason and that is that change is never linear.” I think that Nissam Nicholas Taleb may argue that things surprise us for different reasons, but that too is for another time. Saffo suggested that effective forecasters are constantly looking for s-curves, the model of so many technologies and trends that we see today. An s-curve (sigmoid curve or logistic curve) is a model of the growth of something where growth begins slowly at first, then is characterized by an inflection point followed by exponential growth, followed later by slowing growth and finally zero growth. S-curves often stack on top of each other, which many believe results in a true acceleration of change. Saffo is skeptical of whether or now we are experiencing a true acceleration, but acknowledged the phenomenon of compounding s-curves, especially in technology.

“The future constantly arrives late and in unexpected ways.”

Saffo argued that most “overnight successes” are really ideas that are about 20 years old at the time of their success. He provided several examples, including the demise of LucasFilm’s Habitat and the successive failures of similar products which eventually lead to Second Life. He provided another example of the takeoff in web technologies resulting from how an oversupply of engineering talent in Silicon Valley following the failure of interactive TV in the early 90’s. He suggested that if you want a short term win in the market, look for something that has been failing for 20 years and everybody says will never happen – invest in that. “[Silicon valley] is built on the rubble of failure, not the spires of earlier success.”

Look for indicators and things that don’t fit

Saffo said the way you avoid being blindsided is to look for indicators. He mentioned research published in 1977 suggesting global climate change, Usenet newsgroups in 1984 discussing a software bug that would affect computers in the year 2000 (Y2K bug). He discussed the Roomba and how research showed that 2/3 of Roomba owners named theirs and 1/3 had taken them on vacation or to a friends house. These are indicators. IFTF calls them weak signals. The success of the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge at virtually the same time that a 108-car pileup occurred with human-drivers is another indicator. Saffo argued that forecasters should look for things that don’t make sense or are just really weird.

Saffo commented that Peter Schwartz, “a brilliant futurist, is fond of remarking that the difference between a good forecast and reality is that a good forecast has to be believable and internally consistent – and of course, reality labors under no such constraints.” The moral of the story is that it is important to look for wildcards. Saffo said that wildcards “test the edge of the cone” and “define the ragged edge of plausibility of any good forecast.” Several places to look for wildcards are in really bad forecasts, bad magazines, and science fiction.

Look Back Twice As Far As You’re Looking Forward

Historical observation can provide hints as to what may happen in the future. It’s not surprising that many of the best practitioners of foresight are historians. Saffo certainly is no exception. Saffo said that “a rear view mirror is a damn good forecasting tool if you use it in the right way… backsight is the secret to foresight… look back and random little indicators will suddenly line up into a very powerful beacon hinting at the future.”

Be indifferent

Separate your preferred future from the future that is most probable.

Assume you are wrong and forecast often

“Good forecasting is the inverse of traditional good research” where conclusions are reached only after carefully analysis of data. Instead, come to a conclusion early and set out to prove yourself wrong.

Additional Saffo quotes to enjoy:

On Feb 4th, 2008, Nassim Nicholas Taleb will be speaking at The Long Now Foundation about his book Black Swan, which I am eagerly anticipating.