Long Now

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George Dyson: There's Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing Jan 09, 2004

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### Long-term thinking about large-scale computing Ever since his 1997 breakthrough book, _Darwin Among the Machines_ , Dyson has become regarded as a leading historian and interpreter of computer science, bringing a rigorous and unconventional perspective. Thus his willingness to examine the long-term prospects for mega-scale computing. Most computer people are averse to discussing seriously any future beyond ten years. With the Dyson seminar, our series begins to get down to specific cases of applying long-term thinking. "Your now is only as long as you remember. To way to understand the future is give the present more depth," said George Dyson at the start of his Seminar at Long Now last Thursday. Then he proceeded to help us remember what really went on at the very beginning of computerdom, back in 1947 at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) when John von Neumann and colleagues were inventing the digital world. Thanks to his physicist/mathematician father Freeman, George grew up at the IAS, along with his older sister Esther. Last year he went back to spend an entire year burrowing through the ancient files and logbooks of the von Neumann period. A skilled photographer, he has hundreds of richly evocative photos of those records to show. In them the past comes to life. Nion McEvoy said George's artifacts are deep and consequential, like relics from earliest Christianity. The artifacts showed that at the beginning the code was small and sound and the machines (vacuum tubes and oscilloscope tubes) were maddenly flaky. By the end of that period the machines had become reliable, and most of the problems were in the ever-growing code. Von Neumann wrote a landmark paper, "Reliable Organizations of Unreliable Elements." Strings of bits (then still called binary digits) come in two forms, Dyson reminded us---sequential in time and structural in space. The sequences make things happen; stored as structure they are memory. Building an architecture that would manage the transitions adroitly and also scale up radically for decades was a profound achievement. Engineers were never particularly welcome at the IAS. One letter shows an administrator complaining that the computer people from the basement were using excessive quantities of sugar and tea, and doing so at all hours of the night. Programmers evidently have been caffeine and sugar swilling nocturnal troglodytes from the very start. Like Eniac, the IAS computer was mainly used for atomic bomb studies---that's where the money came from. The researchers also worked on weather prediction (with approaches still in use, only now they're fast enough to predict the future instead of the past), and von Neumann assumed we would eventually use them to control the weather---an assumption George shares. By 1953 at the IAS Nils Barricelli was working on "Symbiogenetic Evolution Processes Realized by Artificial Methods," running the first artificial life programs. (Their source code is still around and could come to life again.) Danny Hillis, who has also done a-life experiments, noted that there are no seriously long-lived computations going on (max is a year, for prime numbers and the like). Maybe Long Now should start some. George ended by looking at the larger picture. He said that computation at present is still parasitic on us, but it probably is in the process of becoming part of life itself---it's just another system of genetics. Evolution, after all, is massively parallel computation, and now the world of code is evolving, perhaps to reshape the tree of life itself. As von Neumann's famous work on Theory of Games showed, coalitions are the most important element. "The great collective organism we're becoming part of will have a completely different sense of time."

Peter Schwartz: The Art Of The Really Long View Dec 12, 2003

Show notes

### The art of the really long view For such a weighty subject there was a lot of guffawing going on in the Seminar Thursday night. The topic was "The Art of the Really Long View." Peter Schwartz chatted through his slides for tonight's lecture, then the discussion waded in. Present were Danny Hillis, Leighton Read, Angie Thieriot, Ryan Phelan, David Rumsey, Eric Greenberg, Kevin Kelly, Anders Hove, Schwartz, and me. The event was very well audio and video taped, so we can link you to a fuller version later. For now, here's a few of my notes. Much of discussion circled around Schwartz's assertion that the most durable and influential of human artifacts are IDEAS. And a distinction worth drawing is between POWERFUL ideas and GOOD ideas. Not all powerful ideas turn out to be good, in the long run. For example, Schwartz proposed that monotheism has been an extremely powerful idea, dominating all kinds of human activity for millennia, but its overall goodness is increasingly questionable. Or take the powerful idea of Communism and the powerful idea of Capitalism. Looking at them when both were being touted as world solutions around, say, 1890, how would you distinguish which one was likelier to play out as good? Most of us, then, would probably have given the nod to Communism, particularly in light of robber-baron excesses in the US, etc. Danny Hillis proposed that bad powerful ideas are essentially collective hallucinations which mask reality, whereas good powerful ideas have built into them all kinds of reality checks. So Capitalism---expressed as markets---has prevailed so far because it is an emergent, distributed, out-of-control feedback system. Some notable quotes (among many): > "The future is the ONLY thing we can do anything about." --Hillis > "Denial is a special case of optimism." --Leighton Read. Revisiting Long Now's frequent chant that multiplying options is the great good to do for future generations, we examined the idea of "toxic choice"---for instance the stupefying multiplicity of choices in a supermarket or department store that make you long for a good boutique. "But lots of boutiques," said Ryan Phelan. "I've got it! " said Read, "We'll have two big toxic choice emporiums, connected by a bunch of boutiques! I think we've just invented the mall." Contemplating work to be done, Schwartz said: "We know it would be a good idea to have the rule of law extended to include ecological systems, but we haven't figured out how to make that a powerful idea yet."

Brian Eno: The Long Now Nov 14, 2003

Show notes

### The Long Now Brian told the origins of his realizations about the "small here" versus the "big here" and the "short now" versus the "long now." He noted that the Big Here is pretty well popularized now, with exotic restaurants everywhere, "world" music, globalization, and routine photos of the whole earth. Instant world news and the internet has led to increased empathy worldwide. But empathy in space has not been matched by empathy in time. If anything, empathy for people to come has decreased. We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal. Danny Hillis proposed that there's a bug in our thinking about these matters---about long-term responsibility. We need to figure out what the bug is and how to fix it. We're still in an early, fumbling phase of doing that, like the period before the Royal Society in 18th-century England began to figure out science. Tim O'Reilly gave an example of the kind of precept that can emerge from taking the longer-term seriously. These days shoppers are often checking out goods (trying on clothes, etc.) in regular retail stores but then going online to buy the same goods at some killer discount price. Convenient for the shopper, terrible for the shops, who are going out of business, hurting communities in the process. The aggregate of lots of local, short-term advantage-taking is large-scale, long-term harm. Hence Tim's proposed precept, now spreading on the internet: "Buy where you shop." Ie. When you shop online, buy there. When you shop in shops, buy there. Four simple words that serve as a reminder to head off accumulative harm. Leighton Read observed that imagining the future is an acquired skill, and comes in stages. An infant can't imagine the next bottle, or plan for it. A teenager can at most imagine the next six months, and only on a good day; on a rowdy Saturday night, Sunday morning is too remote to grasp. For us adults the distant future is still unimaginable. One thing that Leighton likes about the 10,000-year Clock project is that it lets you imagine a particular part of the very remote future---the Clock ticking away in its mountain---and then you can widen your scope from there, to include climate change over centuries, for example. Alexander Rose suggested that we should collect examples where a small effort in the present pays off huge in the long term. Tim O'Reilly would like to see us develop a taxonomy of such practices. Brian's talk Friday night at Fort Mason was a smashing affair. Some 750 people were pried into the Herbst Pavillion, while 400-500 had to be turned away. Eno evidently attracts the sweetest, brightest people---everyone was polite and helpful and patient. The only publicity for the lecture had been email forwarded among friends and posted on blogs, plus one radio show (Michael Krasny's "Forum").

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