The Play Ethic

Curating "FutureFest" for Nesta, London, Sept 28-29, 2013

 

From March 2012 to the end of September 2013, I was asked by Geoff Mulgan, the CEO of Nesta (the UK's innovation agency) to lead-curate a massive festival of the future called, appropriately enough, FutureFest.

The plan was to occupy Shoreditch Town Hall in London, over the weekend of 28th-29th September, and fill its Edwardian municipal grandeur with visions, arguments and demonstrations of the near-future (with an implicit mid-century horizon of 2050). 

Well, we finally executed the plan - and it was an extraordinary event, the speakers, discussion and performances fully captured on the legacy FutureFest website (video, podcast and blogs).

Over these three blogs (one, two, and three) I explain my curatorial vision - but these paragraphs give you a flavour:

Go back to any of the great expos, or even to the earliest futurologists – like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), with its longevity drugs and flying machines, its robots and clones – and it sometimes seems that modernity has always contained the same set of yearnings about the future: stronger, faster, more automation, more communication.

The acme of this might be Walt Disney’s mid-fifties EPCOT (Experimental Community Of Tomorrow), a theme park in which cosmic exploration leaves behind a happy planet of harmonious cultures and sociable, zip-suited citizens.

Well, it’s 2013, and of course we’re wiser and more civilization-weary than all that. Those intricate techno-sciences we devise and set running? They end up rattling our economies, fighting our wars, bombarding our attention spans and challenging our bio-ethics around birth, health and human potential.

And some of the more massive trends heading into the future – the inexorables of population growth and global warming, emergent economies and regions with their own claims to truth and justice – would seem largely resistant to the glittering technical fixes that future-types of the past have put their faith in.

But it’s 2013, and of course we can also imagine – because that’s what humans irrepressibly do – how this progress towards the mid-century might be quite different.

Radical innovation could well find us a combination of energy sources that mitigate the impact of a heating planet. Our computers and devices could as easily amplify our natural capacities for invention and community, as unravel or stymie them.

Over only a few decades of bioscience, our “new normal” could be closer to that menagerie of mutants and cyborgs that you see in the average Star Trek street-scene, than it might be to the mutton-chopped visitors to the Crystal Palace.

How to capture all of these possibilities, in a particular time and place? And in city where the weight of the past, and the chaos of a globalised future, can easily be mapped from the top of a giant glass shard? The principle of a festival – with its tolerance for enthusiasm, dissent and experiment – seemed like the only way it could be gathered together and curated.

FutureFest takes place in Shoreditch Town Hall, London – a building which itself brims with Victorian progressive self-confidence (its motto on the stained glass windows is “more light, more power”). In its cavernous rooms we will be deploying three different methods of thinking about the future.
Firstly, great minds and practitioners (some writing in these pages) will give short but powerfully focussed takes on our options heading towards mid-century, and beyond – everything from the future of religion and altruism, to the future of eating and manufacturing.

Next, we’ll offer immersive spaces in which participants can literally “meet and experience” the future. Real – or at least, artistic and creative – humans will conduct a variety of performances, installations, social games and even banquets, that will leave visitors in a delightful space between “now” and “next”.

And finally, we’ll allow people to go deeper into the future, with a range of forums, seminars, makeshops and technical expos from organizations like the Oxford Martin Institute, Arup, the BBC, Berg, Dyson and many others. (Pat Kane, "Making the Future Dance", Futurefest site).

We had a sell-out on the day, saw millions of interactions around the #futurefest hashtag on Twitter, and with any luck FutureFest will become a regular event in the cities of the UK for years to come. Certainly one of the most satisfying creative endeavours I've yet directed. 

Some of the most notable press included the Observer "FutureFest" supplement, Peter Aspden in the FT (podcast and article), Pat Kane interviewed for the Monocle Podcast. 

And here's some breathless highlights of the two days:

Rewind: The Man Machines (for Guardian Weekend, 7 Aug 1993)

Amazing what access to a free Glasgow public-library data-base can dig up... As my curator of Nesta's FutureFest comes to a shuddering conclusion (28-29 September, 2013, Shoreditch Town Hall London, be there!), I'm reprinting a piece I wrote for the Guardian Weekend section in 1993, under the editorship of Deborah Orr, exploring my (and our) perennial fascinating with robots.

 Over twenty years ago, now - and I'm surprised at my pre-Net, humanistic techno-scepticism (I think, post-Net and the revolution in mind sciences, I'm a wee bit more cyborg myself now). But it's also worth noting that the robotics and AI evangelists have been saying, for decades, "in 20 years time..." And as far as I can see, it's still about 5 years to the self-driving car (though we do have joysticked drones). However, the same anxieties about automation and the status of productive humans still lingers (see MIT's Technology Review edition from earlier this year). I also note that Shadow, the robotics tinkerers I profiled in the piece, are still going strong.

Hope you enjoy - I'm enjoying finding these pieces, more to come. -- PK

 

* * *

The Man Machines 

By Pat Kane

Dreams of automata created in man's own image nestle deep in the human psyche. PAT KANE fantasized about androids from childhood. But a trip into robo-reality turned his fascination into contempt and paranoia

The Guardian, ‘Weekend’, 07 Aug 1993.

 

THERE was a time when I wanted nothing more than to be a robot. I was between seven and nine years old: that period when your fantasies are as wild and intense as they were in infancy, except that you have developed the ability to marshal facts and figures to firm them up. By night, my finger would inch its way through spine-cracked copies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. By day, after school or at weekends, I would get my two brothers - cast as mad, merciless alien scientists - to turn me into a Positronic Man. A Killer Android. A robot.

I remember lying there on the sitting room carpet, as Garry-John and Gregory hauled imaginary intestines and vital organs out of my midriff; sawed through my skull to remove the "useless brain-flesh", pulled out bones and eyes with a sucking sound, and replaced them with titanium struts and video orbs. When they'd finished their evil work, brutally clamping my ripped flesh together with rivets and screw-nuts, my brothers would retire to the settee-cum-control-room, push a few school rulers jammed between cushions to switch me on, and wait.

Even today, I can feel that tingle of absolute self-alienation: rising jerkily but precisely to gaze upon my creators, now whimpering to order on the sofa. And then the sci-fi monotone, rising like a steely taste up through my mouth: I am not a human. I am a robot . . . As I lurched malevolently towards my younger brothers, there was always a point at which the delicious fakery of their play-fear slipped into real anxiety. And I knew I was making myself truly robot-like when I could stop advancing about an inch from their tear-streaked, finger-clawed faces, and break up their trauma by cracking into a big daft smile. "It's only me." 

But the power of that moment - and the power of the robot - has never left me, driving a fascination that's filled filing cabinets and bookshelves for over 20 years. I don't think it's left my brothers either. They still recoil from the sight of automata on the screen, whether it's ventriloquist's dummies advancing on their makers in mid-afternoon telly-films, or the latest manipulatory achievement in robot limbs as seen on the nightly news. "That kind of thing gives me the creeps, man . . ." It makes me feel guilty.

Reviews of "Who Owns The Future?" by Jaron Lanier, and "To Save Everything, Click Here", by Evgeny Morozov

Another second chance at an author review - this time two authors. I had already covered Jaron Lanier's I Am Not A Gadget I'd reviewed for Scotsman, and Morozov's The Net Delusion for the Independent.

As a mild Net enthusiast - for deep reasons, see here - I enjoy reading Net sceptics, as a useful corrective against boosterism and woods-not-seeing. But what's great about both these new books is that they are essentially political economies of the net - something an Enlightenment Scot recognises...

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, Friday 15 March 2013 (unedited version below, Independent version here)

For both of these writers, manifesting their manifestos in splendid chunks of wood-pulp and ink, the days of digital enchantment are over. Critical friends like Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier - the first a political scientist, the second a hardcore digeratus - provide a service to all network idealists. Caught up in our hypnotic loops of design and interaction, they remind us that “the internet” (a total concept that Morozov rejects in any case) is a particular construct of power, money and technical decisions, rather than some state of cybernature.  

In particular, Who Owns The Future is an undeniably impressive feat of rhetoric, argument and bully-pulpitry - what Lanier himself calls “speculative advocacy” - on behalf of the middle-classes of the 21st century.

Applying information to automation creates a giant, implacable flow of efficiency, of doing more for less. What’s valuable about Lanier’s book is that, in the course of trying to make the torrent manageable, he provides a tour d’horizon of what we’ll have to cope with in the near future - beyond the usual candidates of the music business and media blown away by the free web, or financial services dissolving economies in an ecstasy of computation.

White van men (and their entire industry) will be destroyed by driverless cars; whole production and distribution systems will be unravelled by 3-D printing of objects in local communities. Surgeons and nurses, lawyers and teachers - all manner of professions - will feed their tacit skills into ever more adept robots and expert systems.

As someone who founded one of the more destabilizing fields of net hi-tech, Virtual Reality, in the 90s, and who is currently grinding the software cogs at Microsoft Research, Lanier could never be cranky about future-tech. Yet he does invoke the more sophisticated cry of the original 18th-century Luddites, when they objected to machinery only when they judged not to “benefit the commonality”.

The commonality that Lanier wants to erect defenses for are what he calls, with a particular American resonance, the “middle-classes” (a term which, translated into UK terms, seems to include hard-working aspirers as well as Waitrose-bothering professionals - Miliband’s “squeezed middle” comes close).

These middle-classes have been constituted by what he calls “levees”: barriers and structures that diffuse and defuse the firestorm of capital and technology, and make it into a livable landscape - whether those barriers be unions, welfare states, academic tenure, copyright. In the face of what, taken in the round, seems like a epochal leap to a different level of productivity, Lanier wants new levees to be constructed - but ones that are “graceful and ordinary...strengthened, not weakened, as more and more people embrace them”.

His solution, simply put, is to turn the open, endless copying-machine commons of the web into a pay-per-click (and get-paid-per-someone-else’s-click) phenomenon - a marketplace with a near-neuronal density and ubiquity of financial transactions. In what Lanier regards as a perversion of the original ideals of network pioneers like Ted Nelson, he believes we currently cavort in a false free-for-all of content and interactivity.

This bounty is provided by giant companies like Facebook and Google, who make huge profits out of what he calls “spying operations” - devising ever-more seductive interfaces to encourage our garrulous, sociable and sharing natures, and selling the patterns of that behaviour to advertisers. In To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov usefully places this within a wider and broader history of what he calls “solutionism” - the engineer-driven idea that most phenomena (including the sheer quiddity of human behaviour) can be quantified and data-crunched.

Lanier has impish science-fictional fun extending the implications what he calls these “Siren Servers” into coming waves of technoculture. Would we want to be surrounded by a world of smart objects we get free or cheap access to - a Google Reality - as long as allow them to transmit data about our activities to their databanks? Morozov equally imagines all kinds of control-society horrors: how about medical-care discounts brought about by your real-time healthy-living data - or conversely, penalties for bingeing on cream-cakes?

Lanier wants us to realize that behind every abstract unit of information stands a real human being, either ultimately generating it or affected by it. As we perch on the brink of a vast new wave of info-powered automation, it’s urgent for him that we humanize the process by putting ourselves, as identifiable economic actors, back into the process.

Yet Lanier falters when specifying the exact structures and protocols that would shift us from an “internet” to what could be called an “econonet” (or maybe just a “moneynet”). At times it does seem like a contractual nightmare - in which he admits that accountants would become superstars, and lawyers (or robo-laywers) could crawl over every potential infraction of a nanopayment.

Lanier’s explicit identification of his system with a bourgeois interest is also useful - as an alternative Marxist explanation is easily to hand. The forces of production are about to take another enormous leap forward, while the relations of production are straggling far behind. Perhaps our argument with Siren Servers (and the wild new manufactures and automatons about to connect with them) should be more about whether they are like public utilities in waiting, ready for accountability and transparency as railroads and water systems once were. And if global warming demands a reduction in carbon-generating consumerist frenzy, is this best served by a new planetary network which makes every click an commercial transaction? Will expanding the cash nexus to every clickable corner of our lives help or hinder?  

Morozov would recoil at any Marxism - as a Belarusian exile, for good reason - but it is striking that To Save Everything, Click Here is almost silent about the enterprise dimension of the internet. Indeed, as a brand of Luddite, Morozov is much more interested than the techie Lanier in literally sticking a sabot in the cogs. One of his suggestions for cultivated our net disenchantment is something called “adversarial design”, where we let devices into our lives that frustrate our appetite for frictionless info-fun. For example, the Natural Path, a software system that kills off real plants, if you use it too heedlessly.

Somehow, the idea of strapping on the digital equivalent of a cilice doesn’t feel like the best path to enlightenment about our true cybernetic reality. But both Morozov and Lanier are to be generally congratulated for the clarity and brio of their technorealism. It’s a better basis for moving forward with this extraordinary “extension of man”, in McLuhan’s old words, than either technophobia or technophilia.

Review of "Future Perfect" by Steven Johnson

One of joys of my reviewing career for the Independent over the years is that you can often get two chances to sample an author's work. I covered Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good For You" in 2005 (about which, I'm surprised to find myself so sniffy).

And the prospect of a Romney victory (thankfuly thwarted) hangs over this review of Johnson's latest, an attempt at political intervention (of a geeky kind), which has curious echoes of the UK's "Third Way"/"Big Society" projects. But an "elegant" (argh, I use that word twice over two reviews!) writer, of great pleasure and utility.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, 17 November 2012 (Unedited version below, Independent version here)

To be called the “Darwin of Technology” by Steve Jobs’s biographer, Walter Issacson, is a blurb quote to die for. Over the years, the American author Steven Johnson’s elegantly-phrased combinations of history, cultural critique and complexity theory have carved out a solid niche for him in the “big ideas” stretch of the bookshelf.

Yet with Future Perfect, Johnson is putting a pause on tracing connections between slime molds and 19th century city maps, or Joseph Priestly and Gaia theory. He’s bringing his status to the bully pulpit, as his compatriots might say, and proposing a political movement (called “the peer progressives”) in which the geeks inherit the earth. Or at least, lift their entranced faces from their OLED screens, and begin to assert their knowledge-worker clout in government and the public sphere.

For all his characteristic, science-and-humanities-spanning polymathery in this book, what Johnson is describing is the moment where (as that old bearded contemporary of Darwin’s might say) the netheads and creatives become not just a class in themselves, but a class for themselves. That is: aware that they have interests, a particular claim on power and resources, and the confidence to mobilize in that direction.

That direction is one that would have been familiar to the Big Society Tories, in the first flush of their idealism a few years ago. Johnson’s American peer progressives would enthusiastically sign up to Cameron’s axiom (now bromide) that “there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same as the state”. They’re wary of top-down government control, and enthusiastic about “civic accountabilty and participation in public-sector issues”.

They want “choice and experiment” in state schools, and think teaching unions “hinder innovation”. They think markets and open networks are great at keeping new ideas flowing, but are suspicious of corporate governance and political over-regulation of the flows.  

To UK ears, it has a familiar recent ring: Burke’s small platoons and Hayek’s catallaxy, as rendered by the proselytizing of the smarter Conservatives like Jesse Norman and Philip Blond. But it’s given a Silicon Valley shimmer by Johnson’s internet experience, both as observer and entrepreneur.

It’s not that Johnson is misdescribing the “network society” that Manuel Castells identified and predicted in the mid-nineties, for centre-right ends. The social transformation of the Net is undeniable, founded in Paul Baran’s idea of the “distributed network” - where power comes not from hierarchy, nor from insurgence, but from the marginal contributions of many, building up a rich commons of information and practice, usable by all.

Johnson is correct to identify that this pervasive system of communication has made new kinds of value communicable, beyond just money or bureaucracy - and that this shakes up, or at least shows up the gaps in, our old institutions. Newspapers can’t compete with how social media allows us to recommend and annotate the news of the world (and our neighbourhoods) to our friends and peers. Big corps can’t compete with smaller, stakeholder and “employee-owned” companies, inspired by the inclusiveness and transparency of the Net (Nick Clegg rather alarmingly cited here), whose peer-oriented work cultures actually deliver better returns long-term.

In the most interesting chapter, Johnson shows how our transatlantic frustrations with representative democracy - whether the malaise of US political funding, or Westminster centralism - could be answered by looking at something pioneered by the anti-copyright Pirate Party, called “liquid democracy” (or more mundanely, “proxy” or “delegate” voting).

Socialism’s problem is that it takes up too many evenings, as Oscar Wilde once put it. But a more active, plebiscitary democracy might actually work, if we could easily pledge our vote (or as easily retract it from) a “peer” who we recognized as expert or passionate in the field. Sounds complicated? Perhaps no more so than participatory budgeting so prevalent in leftist Latin American - or the elaborately coordinated voluntary labours that go into Wikipedia. Yes, Johnson admits, they’re all structures open to gaming and abuse. But we’re happy with the endemic stasis and near-corruption of our current systems?

As many of the illustrative initiatives in this book come from the Obama administration - clearly, the geeks made the White House - there’s a rather poignant tremor running through the prose. The Romneyverse, if it transpires, looks like falling a little short in stakeholder virtues. But Johnson has written a fascinating book. Let’s see if it’s an elegy for a failed intellectual consensus.

Review of Andrew Smith's "Totally Wired"

Andrew Smith's writing has come my way before, in his garrulous yet also moving interviews with surviving moon astronauts, Moondust, which I reviewed. But his book reminds me of a mid-90s era when I was also involved in the early ecstasies of dot-commery (and wrote about it for the Independent too). His style, a little too reckless for the astronauts, totally matches the gonzo-digital tale of Josh Harris.

Totally Wired: On The Trail Of The Dotcom Swindle, By Andrew Smith

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, 22 September, 2012 (Unedited version below, Independent version here)

One can imagine the elevator pitch that would sell this rumbunctious account of the madness of the nineties’ dot-bust to Hollywood: “The Social Network meets Hammer of The Gods, via Warhol’s Factory”. Mark E Smith’s The Fall clattering out beneath the titles. I’d go: wouldn’t you?

Andrew Smith, whose previous book Moonshot has come to mind again in the wake of Neil Armstrong’s passing, has written a similarly humane and garrulous account of space exploration. But this space is the one that opened up between computers and networks twenty years ago. And whereas at least some men actually got to the moon and back, Totally Wired is mostly about how these early dreams of cyberspatial utopia were frustratingly thwarted.

Yet in his tale of Josh Harris, a brilliant though damaged screenager whose digital company Pseudo encompassed the best and worst of the “creative age” of the nineties, Smith wants to alert us to the roots of our current unreality - where the mediations of “confidence” and “reputation” define the fate of stock-markets, national governments and over-valued social network companies (naming no names).

In a charming style which could be described as gadget-dad gonzo, Smith captures the tulip-tinged froth of 90’s cyberculture with great accuracy. I wrote for this paper in 1997 about my time with a parallel outfit in London, Microsoft’s Blizzard, which laboured in the same Sisyphean fields as Pseudo - trying to attract punters onto an exclusive network, with over-ambitious content that could barely sputter down the available phonelines. [FYI: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/click-and-im-a-microserf-1265773.html]

Yet while both our audiences were tiny, at least Harris used his venture capital to host fantastic, gilded-era Manhattan parties. Propeller-headed Truman-Capotes orchestrated polymorphous, performance-art revels - which were filmed, live-cast and contractually captured as “property of Pseudo”. Sound familiar, reality tv fans? Smith sticks with this flakiest of uber-geeks - and the writer is dogged, trailing him from his fly-blown hideaway in Ethiopia to the bullshit lounges of the Sundance Festival in Colorado - because he believes Harris was a pioneer of the communicative omni-trance of our current smart-phoned, i-playing, big-brotherly era.

However genuinely prescient Josh Harris was, the accelerando of digitality continues apace, making the extraordinary ordinary. In terms of function, Skype and Google Hangouts can now do everything that Pseudo and its chemically-fuelled net-heads were trying to squeeze through their tiny Nineties pipes. Except now, it’s as quotidian as a tool for hobbyists and activists on your high-street clever-phone.

Even Harris’s Matrix-like paranoid fantasies - about social media softening us up for “mental harvesting” by some mysterious power - are only wrong about the mystery: we know who they are. As the current nostrum has it, if you pay nothing for your net-service, then you are the product. Google or Facebook enable you to be your own multimedia channel - but the cost is a panoptical tracking of all your input and clickery, the better to target a micro-pitch at your innermost consumer desire.

“Harvesting” isn’t too bad an agrarian metaphor: but the appropriate resistance is closer to that of the Diggers or the Chartists against enclosure, than battling the otherworldly “Ticklers” generated by Harris’s DMT’d delusions.

But Totally Wired is an account of financialization, as well as intoxication. For a self-confessed economics rube, Smith is very clear about how the liberalisations of the Fed - and all those 401K pension funds sloshing around the 90‘s US market - meshed toxically with the euphoria of the early dot-coms. Smith also believes that these net-idealists were the victims of a “heist”, shafted by market-fixing bankers in a shares scam known as “laddering”. Such financial innovation, he suggests, paved the way for the sub-prime chicanery that led to the 2008 crash.

Smith is a little too wired himself at times, occasionally taken by the ecstasies of communication in a manner that many po-mo types will rather shufflingly remember. And when things get too capitalistically vertiginous, it’s nice to recall that Harris stole the idea of “pseudo-names” from the public-sector network Minitel, launched by that lumbering democratic-socialist dinosaur France in the early 80s.

There’s a Net that’s as close to the public library, or the town square, as it is to Burroughsian experiment and quantitative easing: Wikileaks and the Arab Springs barely make a mention here. But Smith does us a service in reminding us how total wiredness can so easily lead to total weirdness. And that the off-switch is right over there, just a finger-stretch away.

Ghosting into the machine - "rise of the robots" piece for The Scotsman

Been fascinated by robots - technology, culture and politics - since I was a small boy (and as a young man - see this Guardian piece).

Another bite at that problematic for The Scotsman. 

 

Ghosting into the machine

Pat Kane

The Scotsman, 17 March 2012

[Original pre-edit text below: Scotsman published version here]

Go into almost any high-street supermarket today in Scotland today, and you will almost certainly be faced with a friendly neighbourhood robot. The self-operating checkout tills that have broken out like a rash across the sector over the last few years may not immediately seem like cousins of the killer androids from science-fiction. 

But anyone who’s used them knows the robot moment. One absent-minded act - for example, passing an item from basket to bag without scanning it properly - and the screen equably notes that there is “an unscanned item in the bagging area”. And won’t let you go any further until you remove it, and scan it again. 

Sometimes you - and the robot - both get confused, requiring a real live meat-machine to come over and help you. But when you get up to speed with it, you quietly marvel at its ability to sense exactly what item has been placed in your placcy bag. 

My emotions are mixed before this machine. On one level, I can often enjoy the activity itself - there’s an element of self-help and dexterity about it. But on another level, I look over anxiously at the human-staffed tills. Should I be depriving some student, part-time mother or new immigrant to the country the chance of a living wage? 

Or should I be happy that the relentless tide of automation is liberating workers from meaningless labour? Wouldn’t I rather deal with a robot, than suffer the experience of someone so bored by their routine they’re half-alive anyway? 

Economists and academics would say that any angst about the human-replacing effects of automation is historically faulty. Every technological innovation that’s enabled us to increase efficiency and productivity, to do more transformation of nature with less human labour, has led to an increase in the general sum of happiness - by making products cheaper, by forcing us to create new jobs and sectors that turn out to create value in new and different ways. 

That’s what humans are like with technology, they say. Look at the exponential rise that innovation has brought in living standards, longevity, material comfort. We can’t, and shouldn’t, be Luddites. 

But what happens when these innovations start to simulate the very mental and skills-based agility that supposed to define us as essentially human? When they can begin to understand language, and see the world, as clearly as we do? When they have infinitely better memories, and can make connections and see patterns much more powerfully? 

We are already in an age where some the most unique human capacities for knowledge and decision are being gradually and casually automated. It’s no news that chess grandmasters are regularly humbled by data-crunching mega-computers. Last year, the two human winners of the US general knowledge quiz show Jeopardy were trounced in live and direct competition with Watson, IBM’s latest silicon brain. 

The case-crunching and research that lawyers bill for can now be substantially carried-out by computer programs intelligently looking for patterns or precedents. We heard last year that sports journalists are even under threat: algorithms can now pull together perfectly serviceable prose from a string of facts reported from a game. 

But one of the most startling mental robotisations might even be the process of scientific discovery itself. A group at Cornell University have created a computer program called Eureqa (available now, and for free, on the web). If you feed Eureqa enough data, it will eventually formulate the kind of natural law that previous took humans like Isaac Newton and William Hamilton to do. 

Last year, Eureqa was given a whole load of information about the dynamics of a bacterium cell. After crunching through billions of equations, chucking away the irrelevant ones like failed species in Darwinian evolution, it came to what its makers call a "beautiful, elegant equation that described how the cell worked, and that held true over all new experiments". 

The trouble was they had no idea how the machine had gotten there, or what underlying principle the equation expressed. “It was like consulting an oracle”, says Micheal Schmidt, one of its makers, quoted in the online magazine Slate. Schmidt thinks it’s possible that such computers may discover laws - derived from the unimaginably numerous interactions of genes, neurons and perhaps even markets - that we simply won’t be able to understand. Eureqa, or its successors, will be in the position of “trying to explain Shakespeare to a dog”. 

“Robot-assistance” is the friendlier face of automation. Surgeons are now finding that, in certain kinds of sutures and probings, a robot’s hand or instrument - though still guided by a doctor - is much more steady and precise than a human hand. The surgeon can even be thousands of miles away, guiding it via an internet link. When looking for abnormalities in cervical smears, mammograms or coronary arteries, computers can now perform what’s known as “double reading” of scans - two doctors looking at the same results, in order to better detect problems. 

Hospitals are using much more autonomous robots too. Using smartphone technology to locate and guide themselves in busy environments, barrel-like robots on wheels are beginning to appear as useful helpmates in wards and corridors. The new South Glasgow Hospitals Campus in Glasgow has just ordered 22 robots to operate in a subterranean tunnel, tasked to distribute laundry, equipment, food and medicines to the whole building.

Yet we shouldn’t forget where the cutting-edge drive to make robots usable and ubiquitous in our lives comes from - and at least in Europe and America, that’s the military-industrial complex. One company in Boston, iRobot, exemplifies the two-faces of robotics. It makes cute products like Roomba (a disc-like vacuum cleaner that navigates rooms autonomously) and Scooba (which does the same for bathroom floors). But the same tech also enables military robots like FirstLook, mobile video cameras which US soldiers can throw into windows before storming a building. 

The US government’s Defense Advance Research and Projects Agency, or DARPA, is notorious for funding the most wild-eyed robotics research. Look up the LS3 - Legged Squad Support System, being developed for the US Army - and be more than a little disturbed. The LS3’s four legs can negotiate the roughest of terrain by itself, while its body can bear fuel and provisions for soldiers. 

Yet in its nervy, stuttering walk, it looks like a combination of a horse and a cockroach. One of its most infamous promotional videos shows the device cast upon a frozen lake, where its engineers kick and shove at it, trying but failing to overturn the machine. A war horse, indeed - but usefully insensate to pain or abuse. 

A recent TED video showed yet another DARPA-supported project of tiny helicoptered drones, all chattering to each other and flying in formation - grids, figures of eight - and even buzzing out the James Bond theme tune. The drones we know from the wars in Afghanistan are robots remotely guided by humans, thousands of miles away: the writer PW Singer quotes a young air force lieutenant who says "It's like a video game with the ability to kill. It's like ... freaking cool."

Yet what the TED video shows is a spine-tingling degree of self-organisation among these machines. One of the creepier images is where the micro-drones swarm collectively and efficiently though a window, arranging themselves ready for action on the other side. These are robots as pack animals, or an insect swarm - at the fringes of your worst science-fiction nightmare. 

But in another video, we see the same drones arranging themselves to steadily build a columnar construction out of rods, moving to a virtual architectural plan programmed into their tiny brains. It doesn’t take too much projecting to see the near-future possibility of building sites requiring much less workers, and much more machines of this precision, labouring tirelessly 24 hours a day. 

Undoubtedly we need to exercise a public stake in the advance of automation. Applied purely under a commercial regime, robotisation leaves us with massively efficient factories, offices and industries, but hardly anyone with any wages left to buy the products and services they produce. 

The current leaps-forward might compel us to return to those old leisure society arguments again. To what extent should we begin to distribute the gains from our technological ingenuity in a more equitable and collective manner - perhaps with an expanded concept of the “social wage”, and considerably shorter working weeks? 

The joke among radicals these days is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But I sometimes wonder if it’s even more difficult to imagine a perspective on automation which would subject it to the test of “benefitting the commonality”, as the original Luddites put it - rather than having us just tumble along in the wake of business, military and academic progress. 

In short, I’d like to feel better about those wee women standing forlornly at the end of the supermarket check-out, watching their economic redundancy played out with every customer scan. 

What is a "Constitute"? Prez to HubWestminster, London, 15/11/11

This is a very tentative presentation I made to Vinay Gupta's Truth and Beauty seminar at HubWestminster in London, on a concept I've been toying around with in my mind for a few months now... What is a "constitute" - as opposed to an institute? Or a constitution?

Personally, it's an answer to my anxiety about being drowned in rich and meaningful connections in the social-media age, and not being able to turn even a small percentage of them into resources for action or enterprise (of whatever kind - civic, intellectual, commercial). Do we need to forge a "craft of info-citizenship" or "netizenship", some guild-like or practice-like behaviours or conventions, that can capture the value of the relentless connecting, conversing and curating we do with our networked devices? Similar to the hacker ethic, or agile programming, or the Transition Towns protocols - but at the level of a great conversation in a cafe that we don't just want to let sink into the background of our busy lives? "Ok, this has gone well...let's make this a constitute...." So what behaviours/duties/commitments would that imply?

The word "constitute" points to a need to name a new, network-society subtlety in the relationship between idea and action (of course, there are older and other words like rubric, model, method, praxis, meme... I just happened to notice that constitute wasn't a noun!). And theoretically, it's another one of my journeys into the Italian Marxist tradition, looking at culture and communication as real forces for systemic change in society (but particularly coming from the work of Negri/Hardt, Virno, Marazzi, Bifo). And behind that - always behind that - my 30 year sea-journey with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in which I occasionally, nowadays, glimpse the shore... 

All comments welcome (indeed if you do comment/repost, it becomes a constitute!) 

What is a "Constitute"? Pat Kane prez to HubWestminster

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Pat Kane review of "Free Ride" by Robert Levine

This is my review (for the Independent) of the Robert Levine book Free Ride: How The Internet Destroyed The Culture Business, And How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. The book is fascinating, detailed and dogged in its defence of intellectual copyright in the digital age - but I think it lacks a wider societal context, to explain the take up of the "open web" and its distinctive attitude to the sharing (rather than the purchasing) of cultural artefacts. 

I didn't really explore this angle in the review, but I am brewing up a proper Socratic exchange with the Scottish writer Ewan Morrison, whose clarion-call to prevent "The End of Books" at this years Edinburgh International Books Festival caused quite a fuss. Ewan is embracing and endorsing Levine's argument completely - and we've begun our detailed exchange on this Facebook post. But watch this space, because I think we'll be announcing a more engaged, and public, discussion about this soon. Meantime, all comments welcomed below. 

How To Sink The Pirates of The Web 

Unedited Review of Robert Levine's Free Ride in The Independent, 2 September, 2011 (edited version)

By Pat Kane

 

My eldest geek daughter and I were helpless with laughter the other night, rapt at our screens before another webcast discovery. 

We had found a brilliant “mash-up”: footage of the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster, lip-synching precisely to the Tom Waits song “God’s Away On Business”. (Really, get thee to a search engine now: your day will be beatified). Such a diverting, obsessional labour of love is what we celebrate about the internet - amateur energies coursing through democratic tools, coming to mass attention from nowhere. 

But what might the respective intellectual-property lawyers from Henson Enterprises, or Waits’s record label Anti, have to say about such a wisp of joy? According to Robert Levine, they should be fully empowered to discourage such irreverent bricolage, with all manner of punitions and legal threats. 

In this comprehensive but relentless book, Levine (an ex-editor of US music business bible Billboard) wants to make us realise that the internet’s facilitation of “free culture” - or a world of piracy to some - has to come to an end. His case is that technology companies have built their businesses - whether web-based and advertiser-driven, or integrated device companies like Apple - on the basis of unpriced (or underpriced) content, made possible by the open (or more precisely, under-controlled) web. Levine has made an very authoritative attempt to substantiate the content creators’ fightback. 

But his angst for the good old days of the music business (roughly the early to mid 90’s, before those subversive, system-wielding geeks came to spoil the party) also reveals some rather grisly commercial assumptions. For example, one of his problems with iTunes, even though it’s a monetised service, is that it “unbundles” the album. The consumer is now able to spend less money picking off favourite tracks - rather than, as before, having to spend more money on a complete magnum opus (including those interminable urban soundscape tracks on the second CD). 

Yet Levine has no appreciation for how this unbundling allows listeners to create their own stimulating playlists, refining and amplifying their musical enthusiasms. Would this ultimately result in more spend per consumer? Levine cites studies that say no, against others that say yes - but he also admits there is a general failure of objective market research in this area. Yet it’s indicative of the overly corporate, pro-bottom-line tone of this book that even Apple’s brilliant, integrated and mostly successful effort to commercialise the infinitely copyable is worth his sustained grouch.  

What would a “functioning market” for digital culture look like for Levine? A balance of stick and carrot, entrepreneurship and regulation, which he calls “blanket” or “collective licensing”. The carrots are well-designed content “services” (the current exemplar is the music-streaming service Spotify). We receive a bountiful - but licensed - downpour of music (Levine thinks it could be extended to other media, like tv and journalism) to our various screens and headphones. 

It would “feel like free”, because the user experience is the same click-frenzy as present: it wouldn’t be free, however, because our actual payment would be subsumed into the rental fees we pay for our information devices. (Levine predicts that we would have to accept some price rises in these rents). 

The “stick” part is that licenses, obviously, have to be enforced. Performing Rights Society inspectors already go round radio stations, restaurants and cafes, making sure these establishments are paying their dues for playing music. So a software equivalent would regularly monitor the usages of these services across the networks - ensuring that some agreed proportion of revenues is returned to the rights-holders (be they corporations or individual musicians).

Levine hopes we can redefine copyright, “the right to copy” - an unenforceable absurdity after ten years of the vast copy-machine known as the Web - as copyrisk. Like traditional actuaries gathering together pools of money to insure against the inevitable risk of shipwreck (or car accident), the content business needs to find a way to collectively compensate authors and creators for the healthy turbulence of internet usage. 

You almost feel sorry for Levine, in all his mercantile passion, when he discovers where these “collective licensing” agreements are already proving most successful: in Northern Europe, from Ireland to Germany, Denmark to Finland. That is, in national cultures where “they socialize any number of expenses that others would view as private. And as anyone involved in health care can tell you”, he continues sorrowfully, “what works smoothly in Scandinavia can start fights in the US”. 

His call for a “statutory approach” in his own country, as the American polity gyres and gambles on its various fundamentalist axes, seems rather forlorn. 

Ian Hargreaves’ constructive recent Digital Economy report in the UK would seem to chime with this European approach. He suggested a one-stop Digital Rights Exchange, which would help make intellectual property somewhat more trackable - and thus licensable - across the expanding wilds of bandwidth. 

 And away from the heavy-metal clangour of “thieves” and “property-owners” (oh enough of that, for the moment) it’s the filigree of patient, intelligent policy - forged through a boring old stakeholder-driven commitment to a well-regulated mixed economy - that will bring stability to these debates. Which labours, to his credit, Levine fully endorses.

Incidentally, Hargreaves’ report makes an astute and charming proposal: we should recognise the rights of parodists and satirists to recombine digital material, without Matrix-like IP lawyers swooping down to exterminate them. It looks like, at least in this jurisdiction, that Cookie Monster Tom will continue to flap his gums freely. Our house will be pleased.  

Journalism/Networks/Ontology: my presentation to Media140 Barcelona #media140

Update2.0: Rachel McAthy's reports on my speech on Journalism.co.uk, here and here. 

Update: Jay Rosen's 8-tweet presentation, 'The Great Horizontal', had a lot of overlap with mine below - and a lot more lucid too (I think I'm a bit too ludic...). 

Original post: Here's the presentation I've just delivered to the Media140 conference in Barcelona - hi to all the attendees, and I'd be delighted to hear your responses in comments below. If you want to talk to me directly, please mail here.  BTW, the Twitter hashtag for the conference is  #media140 or #media140cat. 

Journalism, Networks, Ontology: Pat kane presentation at Media140 barcelona

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Some great questions afterwards - I've built and developed my original answers. 

Q: In Castells' era of mass self-communication, how do we ensure that there isn't so much noise that noone can hear the crucial information?

A: This is my point about the editorial function - it has to be more ambitious, as a scarce expertise in an overloaded information environment. But perhaps professional editorial should not be tied to the old business models, bemoaning falling paper sales, shrinking classified ad revenues, and pining for a remonetisation of their sales through mobile and tablet devices. Perhaps they should be talking to charities and NGOs, or thinking about establishing trust funds with philanthropists to secure long-term editorial functioning. Yes there is the public service media option - but I would also like to think futuristically about that too. 

Q: But doesn't reasserting the editorial function just mean that we're going back to the old, pre-internet days of gatekeepers and institutions of information authority?

A: No - because as Clay Shirky says, the costs of creating such an editorial institution are much lower than they ever were, given the "insanely easy group forming tools" that the Net provides. Take the range of ex-Wikileaks employees who are setting up what they regard as better services for handling leaked information (see Open Leaks). I also think that editorial skills becomes something that gets spread through the citizenry. That will pluralise the idea of "objectivity" that is often, in reality, hides an unacknowledged and unconscious world-view among many journalists. 

My Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken

Here's my Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, her long-awaited opus on how computer games can motivate global change - about as pure a manifestation of The Play Ethic as it's possible to express. A short review, nowhere near adequate to the content of the book, but hopefully it'll jar you to buy it.

 

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World

Jane McGonigal (Jonathan Cape)

Reviewed by Pat Kane, The Independent, 25 Feb 2011

 It has been strange to read a book which claims that reality is listless, uninspiring and broken compared to computer games as the Arab revolutions swarm across our screens. We watch real citizens defy real riot police in order to achieve real control of public space and institutions. At this moment, it's not that easy to hear Jane McGonigal tell us that immersion among the trolls and space warriors of virtual worlds is a way to recover our sense of epic idealism and heroic altruism. 

But even in the blazing context of the new Arab dawn, McGonigal might have a point. One of the cheekier posters held up by the Tunisian youth in their mass protests was "Game Over": and we know generally how much cyber-culture enabled the fall of Ben Ali.

Even though Mubarak in Egypt was sharp enough to hit the off-switch early, it didn't seem to matter anyway. Digital-era protestors were already planning to play around with the oppressive reality of Egyptian public life. Remarkably like the "alternate reality games" that McGonigal has created in the streets of major cities for corporate clients, young activists began to stage creative protests that subtly reclaimed their streets. They flash-mobbed in city centres to sing the national anthem; they dressed in black and stood silently beside the Nile.

Egyptian street tactics for the initial "day of rage" on 25 January - in the words of activist Ahmed Salah, aiming "to be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces]" - sound exactly like the kind of collaborative, laterally-thinking play that McGonigal (and others, like Steven Johnson and Tom Chatfield) celebrate as the core cognitive benefit of computer games. Sociologists, here's a brief: how has interactive culture shaped a new sense of civic confidence among Arab youth?

Reality Is Broken is the most powerful justification yet for computer games as one of our central literacies - parallel to literature or movies in the way they connect our motivations and energies with the challenges of understanding and intervening in our social worlds. As with literacy in the first Enlightenment, the huge popular embrace of this medium provides a rich test-bed for new grand theories about human nature and society.

Armed with an impressive bibliography in psychology and neuroscience, McGonigal makes the claim that the huge rush towards gameplay is a kind of exodus from what Theodor Adorno called "damaged life" - work that doesn't satisfy, relationships that don't persist, societies that don't find a place for hope or ambition. She brilliantly links the growing scholarship on happiness to the gimmicks and tricks that commercial game designers devise to engage their febrile audiences. Games help us get off the "hedonic treadmill", in which our consumer choices are fated never to satisfy us, and help us build up what she calls hedonic resilience.

The tough challenges we willingly embrace in computer games generate an internal sense of satisfaction that spills over into other areas of our lives. For example, and counter-intuitively, she cites numerous studies that heavy social gamers display greater levels of community-mindedness than non-gamers.

Ambitiously, McGonigal wants to take that emerging swell of human engagement and connect it to the solution of real-world problems. She has been involved in games about peak oil and other global instabilities, where the fun comes from playing out possible futures, using comic strips, web videos and elaborate avatars.

McGonigal begins and ends her book with Herodotus's tale of the Lydians, who turned to dice games to help them get through their 18 years of famine - and then played one final, giant game, drawing lots to choose which half of the population would leave the country to seek prosperity elsewhere. Her point is that games can both raise spirits and build collective understanding, particularly at moments of extreme crisis.

As Arab activists grapple with the grown-up difficulties of a free public sphere, they may currently have a less-than-ludic take on their "broken" reality. But there was an imaginative component of these protests which took its cue from something other than the usual verities about civil rights. As McGonigal might say: watch this game-space. 

Pat Kane's 'The Play Ethic' is published by Macmillan