Video of my talk at AMP in Sydney is now available. It runs about an hour:

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There will be a prize (to be determined) for whomever comes up with the goofiest screencap of me from this video. My candidate is shown above, but I know you can do better.

The "blue" and the "green" are identical colors (RGB 0/255/150). Discuss.

Yes, they are. Grab this image and test the colors yourself.

Here are more.

From Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomy blogger, who says:

The orange stripes go through the "green" spiral but not the "blue" one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color. [...]

This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed.

In other words, your brain hates you.

Presentation #1 done. They scheduled me for 7:30 in the morning, so the crowd was lighter than I expected. Fortunately, my body was still on California time, so 7:30 in the morning felt like early afternoon for me!

A few meetings today, then a repeat of the talk tomorrow afternoon.

There's an audio recording of the talk out there, but the quality is pretty bad -- wildly variable volume and bursts of static. Hopefully, there will be a cleaned-up version.

Here's my slide deck at Slideshare. Many of the slides will be familiar -- as you know, I'm a great believer in recycling.

(UPDATE: Okay, here's the audio. They cleaned it up -- although it still starts with a loud static blast, sorry -- but there's occasional dropout. If you listen to it with the slideshare file open, though, you should be able to follow along and pick up what the mic didn't.)

On Wednesday morning, I'll be presenting at AMPLIFY 09 in Sydney, Australia. The topic of my talk? "What if we really COULD change the future for the better?"

It's at once a bit unsettling and a bit of a relief to be speaking about this subject again. I've spent so much time, of late, writing about and talking about Big Hairy Crises and Our Failure to Confront Them (tm), that I almost forgot what I should be doing. In a way, it's good that the Atlantic article was delayed so long; it ended up being a nice reminder that not all of my work has to be so dire.

Pictures, etc., to follow as usual.

My new Fast Company article went live this morning, "The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution." It looks at some of the less-savory implications of the heroic use of Twitter in Iran.

Consider, for a moment, what we're seeing happening in Iran: mass-action coordinated, at least in part, through Twitter; traditional media in Iran having lost any legitimacy for the angry populace, alternative media--like Twitter--increasingly becoming the sole source of information; and a growing sense of persecution and crisis, abetted by the limited streams of rumor-heavy news. Let me again emphasize that I don't think that what's happening in Iran is a misuse of social media; what I do think is that the same kinds of dynamics that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far darker.

Just as radio was used to great effect by those seeking to unleash genocide against ethnic rivals, social media like Twitter is likely to be used at some point to do others harm.

(The title of this post -- and the image above -- will make sense when you read the FC article.)

Image by Anastasia Vasilakis for The Atlantic

Big Media #2, my Atlantic Monthly article, hit the web today: Get Smarter (or "Get Smart" in the print edition).

Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano technologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

This article brings together a number of the themes that infuse my work, from augmentation to environmental threats to the need to have a hand in shaping our own futures. There are a few lines, here and there, that long-time readers will recognize, but there's a lot of new stuff, too, ideas and arguments I've wanted to explore, but have been waiting for this to hit before doing so.

It's been a long wait. A little less than a year ago, Atlantic Monthly editor Reihan Salam asked me to write a piece for the magazine. Initially aimed at the November 2008 issue, it was to be a fairly direct reply to Nick Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article of the July/August 2008 issue. Little things like a historic election intervened, however, and my article got bumped; it resurfaced this Spring, when Reihan brought on a terrific editor, James Gibney, to shepherd it through to print.

I'm very happy with the result, and I greatly look forward to hearing your responses and critiques.

Imminent Death of Wall Street Journal Expected

At least according to the people who took the time to write to the editors of the Wall Street Journal in response to my essay. (All of the letters-to-the-editor emails on the article are being forwarded my way.) Sometimes, they noted that they were canceling their subscription to the Journal, and one person graciously included the letter that he had sent -- via paper mail -- to the editor-in-chief, who may not know what his devilish underlings had gotten themselves into.

A good friend of mine who braved the free-fire zone of the actual comments section reports that the nicer things people had to say were that I should "sell [my] mansion", "write science fiction" and "dress like dr. evil." (Sorry, I don't look good in all-white.) Others report ongoing jokes about my name, and a couple of folks who apparently now hate me with a white-hot passion.

So it goes.

In which I admit that I have become a reluctant geoengineering advocate.

To their credit, the Wall Street Journal editors I worked with gave me absolutely no push-back about including numerous strident calls for carbon emissions elimination alongside geoengineering.

To be clear, geoengineering won’t solve global warming. It’s not a “techno-fix.” It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who’s to blame if Country A’s geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let’s be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload.

But what geoengineering can do is slow the increase in temperatures, delay potentially catastrophic “tipping point” events—such as a disastrous melting of the Arctic permafrost—and give us time to make the changes to our economies and our societies necessary to end the climate disaster.

Geoengineering, in other words, is simply a temporary “stay of execution.” We will still have to work for a pardon.

That said, I have no desire to wade into the fever swamps that the comments section for this piece will shortly become.

While in Amsterdam, I had the pleasure of meeting with the group FreedomLab. They interviewed me on a series of topics, including geoengineering; a DVD of the interview will be available in the next few weeks. In the meantime, in connection with Monday's publication of my piece on geoengineering for the Wall Street Journal, they've sent me some of the clips where I talk about the subject.

Here's the first, What is Geoengineering?:

Four more videos -- The Geoengineering Dilemma, The Political Aspects of Geoengineering, Catastrophe or Radical Action?, and The Anthropocene and Human Responsibility -- below the fold.

As always, feedback is more than welcome.

Continue reading "Understanding Geoengineering" »