IdeaFestival

Imagining the future: Elon, Pew predictions

In partnership with the Pew Internet Project, Elon University makes predictions for the next 150 years. Some look tame enough - intelligent materials and "Super" supercomputers are envisioned near term. But then the fun begins. For 2015 "adaptable materials" and teleportation are predicted; for 2016-2025, "paint-on power;" for 2026-2045, "biostasis in space" and the Singularity; and for 2046-2150, a Mars colony and time travel.

If this is your kind of thing check out the current Long Bets, which always has some interesting wagers. The featured bet today: human survival.

I'm already all in.

Wayne

Unanswerable

Ethan Zuckerman raises some big questions at My Heart's in Accra, including a reference to - he beat me to it - the Harvard Business Review articles I linked to yesterday.

I really must get rid of some of the feeds I've collected.

I'll also have to check out that Wired piece on 42 of the biggest unanswered - and as Ethan suggests, possibly unanswerable - questions in science. I've been interested lately in that very issue, having finished the book, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, which describes rational life uninformed by the   arts and senses. Describing in this extended essay some of the perils of strict reasoning Robert Fogelin concludes that perhaps philosophy may be best suited to marking the limits of rationalism (though I hasten to add, not of discovery).

...Thought, when it proceeds in a certain way, is self-destructive in the related ways of falling into paradox, of turning dialectical or becoming skeptical. My view is that when problems arise in this way, they are completely intelligible and wholly unanswerable. The question here is factual: What in science and ordinary life blocks this drift into intellectual disaster? [My emphasis. And following a brief quote from Hume on the usefulness of "fancy" in avoiding these traps] ...If our faculties were stronger, we would be prepared to believe even less."

Here, I'll point out that the antonym to discursive reasoning is apophasis, which has its own long history, particularly in theology where the subject matter is rather more immaterial. The method describes something by eliminating whatever doesn't apply so that what's left, as this famous detective pointed out, is what's left.

Wayne

HAL do you feel?

CIO says "affective" or "emotional" computing is making real gains.

Incorporating emotion into computing requires another transition. IT started out as, quite literally, data processing: compiling and summarizing numbers, such as quarterly sales figures and fuel consumption. Then came data mining, where we correlated numbers in innovative ways to discover new relationships. Now, computer scientists and software development firms are revisiting what we mean by "data." Human emotion is becoming another input for computers to collect and to which computer software can respond.

The intent isn't to create an empathic artificial intelligence that experiences emotion. In these applications, the software analyzes human behavior and helps humans to make better business decisions. Many of these projects are still in the research labs, but a few are available as enterprise products.

The post title is in reference is to these well known movies.

Wayne

Harvard Business Review on hope, algorithm, failure

Peering into its crystal ball, Harvard Business Review lists 20 "breakthrough ideas" for 2007. Three that grabbed my attention: "Algorithms in the Attic" - dusting off yesterday's "abstruse equations" to solve today's problems; "The Leader from Hope" - why "hope" shouldn't be a four letter word in business; and Clay Shirky "In Defense of Ready, Fire, Aim" on why the bulk of open source projects fail and why "outfailure" works.

Wayne

Darfur

Nicholas Kristof the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist at the New York Times (and confirmed speaker at the 2007 ideaFestival) has been relentless in his on-the-ground reporting on the horrendous situation in Darfur and in pushing for an end to the violence there. Now he is inviting others to offer their "practical ideas" for Darfur. Suggestions can be sent to him at [email protected].

Kris

Talking up underachievement

John Maeda talks up underachieving at MIT.

It is why in a society of overachievers, I look for opportunities to teach the merits of underachievement. This is not easy, and I don't expect to have the answers here for at least a few more decades.

Nicely put.

Rest is the big idea. Have a great weekend.

Wayne

Spike

When I was a small boy and my friends and I walked along the railroad tracks, we looked for unused spikes. Designed to be hammered into the wooden ties that held the rails in place so to assure rolling stock safe passage, not a single such spike was even vaguely reminiscent of the famous Golden Spike hammered ceremoniously into the track at Ogden, Utah, in 1869 and thus loudly announcing the completion of our intercontinental railroad.

Today, spikes are extrusions, not intrusions. A few decades ago, a French historian coined the term an “erupting event” to signify what we now so frequently call a “spike.”

In the debacle called the current civil war in Iraq, insurgency numbers and military casualties are spiked, tearing upward from the crazy quilt of war. 

Ours is a time of the Dominant Visual, when graphs and charts and a plethora of brilliant colors lead our eyes to conclusions heretofore left to the harsh monochromes bequeathed by the Enlightenment.

As for spikes, a railroad, industrial product and metaphor, they are fictions grounded—or uplifted--only in our peacock-colored imagination.

RayBetts

"Five things" you didn't know

Well, Bruno, I was thinking about it when you asked. Thanks for the invite. Having scratched out this list I realize it's perhaps more of a public confession than anything else, but here are five things you are probably didn't know about me:

• I was a poor to average student throughout most of my formal education, often getting into trouble in public grade school for rushing through my assigned work so that I could thumb through the aging Encyclopedia Britannica volumes in the back of most class rooms. With due apologies to the public school system in northern Louisiana, I learned as much from the encyclopedias.
• Though not Roman Catholic, I attended St. Johns' University in Minnesota, which is also the home of some famous architecture and 150 or so Benedictine monks, making it one of the larger monasteries in the world. "Collegeville" is in the middle of the area popularized by American essayist and humorist Garrison Keillor as Lake Wobegon. And for the record, the women, mostly of German and Scandinavian descent, really are strong.
• For the past decade, I've lived on a small working asparagus and beef cattle farm in Central Kentucky, which is managed by my wife. For fun, I tend grafted chestnut trees in a small orchard I planted. Because chestnut blight decimated the American Chestnut population in the Appalachian range, chestnuts grown east of the Mississippi river in the United States are still relatively rare.
• I'm an introvert, which broadly, sadly, sometimes means I prefer the company of ideas more than people - "INTP" on the Myers-Briggs scale for those you keeping score. I'm working on it. It also probably explains my unnatural attraction to philosophy, and in particular, epistemology. Nonetheless, crouching invisibly behind your computer screen and writing about ideas for the ideaFestival is just about the perfect match of man and means.
• And finally, since this public confession is so popular, you should know I'm theistic - in part because it's intellectually rewarding. Unlike partisans on either side of the God divide, I'm not mad about it.

Wayne

Steven Pinker: the presupposition of metaphor

Why must we refer so often to something else to say something specific about the here and now? In the Toronto Star article, Of Thought and Metaphor, Steven Pinker offers some insight on the importance of metaphor in speech. Near the end:

The boring explanation is that using metaphor is a quick-and-dirty way of expressing a new idea without the trouble of coining [notice the metaphor] and propagating a new word.

But that presupposes that the mind itself works metaphorically, that we see the abstract commonality between argument and war, between progress and motion. And it presupposes that the mind, at some level, must reason very concretely in order that these metaphors be understand and become contagious.

Pinker, author of the book Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, will be out with another, "The Stuff of Thought," (not available yet for pre-order) later in the year. He goes into more detail about his work in this interview at Gene Expressions, including a brief description of the forthcoming book.

Of great interest to me is the "presupposition" Pinker pursues: just what is that "concrete" process able to produce metaphor and language, the miracle of a child's first utterance as well as the soaring text of William Shakespeare?

Wayne

How design thinking precedes innovation

Luke Wroblewski at Functioning Form recounts a talk by Tim Brown, CEO at IDEO, about how design thinking drives business innovation.

Some points of interest: Brown describes "design thinking" as a human-centered approach to solving business and technical problems. It can be used to "drive strategy.... no one knows how to act on strategy from Powerpoint or Excel."

To make the human-centered problem solving link explicit, Brown spends some time on inspiration. Inspired people, like good scientists and artists, have keen observational powers and are open to surprise. In short, they look. But more than most, they see. They are also empathetic, able to feel something toward the object of their thoughts.

Brown also touches on ideation, implementation and managing innovation. The latter should be managed as a portfolio of innovative states - revolutionary, evolutionary and incremental.

I'm not sure if this is Luke's summary of Brown's talk - or Brown himself - but the last paragraph in the post is descriptive.

Design thinking is a human centered approach to problem solving. Its a process built from People (inspiration gained by looking & listening to them), Prototyping (ideating quickly to make things real), and Stories (getting things implemented by selling compelling narratives not "concepts").

Check out the whole post for yourself. I find these kinds of attempts to get inside innovation, to find the physics, if you will, of design thinking, of inspiration, fascinating.

Wayne