On Collaborative Consumption

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I went to no less than two seminars on The Collaborative Economy/Collaborative Consumption this past week. The first seminar was organised by KTH acquaintances of mine who work in the research project "Beyond GDP growth" and the second seminar was organised by the think tank "Global Utmaning" [Global challenge], "an independent and entrepreneurial think tank that promotes long-term solutions to crises in ecological, economic and social systems". These seminars were in fact held almost back-to-back with the first being a May 2 afternoon affair and the second being a May 3 breakfast seminar. Both events had four invited guests and one person, Åsa Minoz, had in fact been invited as a speaker to both of these events.

The first seminar had four guests:
- Åsa Minoz, working with innovation policies, social innovations and social entrepreneurship together with her partner Sara Modig in their company ModigMinoz.
- Fredrik Söderkvist, economist at Unionen, Sweden's largest trade union for white collar workers in the private sector.
- Emma Öhrvall, collaborative consumption activist and co-founder of Collaborative Economy Gothenburg.
- Erik Wallin, founder of BagHitch. How it works? "We connect spare capacity in vehicles with people who need to send stuff".

Short summary:
- Åsa was the most well-read and she could stand up to anyone in a discussion about collaborative consumption and related concepts. She had a whirlwind presentation where she pointed out various dichotomies, trends and contradictions.
- Fredrik started by discussing automatisation - an important issue for the 500 000 Unionen members (who, he mentioned, will be considerably fewer in the future). I don't know if he really managed to bridge automation and collaborative consumption but I did however feel that I would have been considerably more worried about current trends if I was walking in his shoes. He mentioned "creative destruction" and the "solution" was to "re-training people to professions that are well adapted to the needs of the labor market". I sounded lika a lot of hand-waving to me.
- Emma was nice and genuine. In this context she was an Åsa-in-development. She brought flavour by showing and discussing various concrete examples of collaborative consumption (Åsa was for the most part on the level "above" concrete examples).
- Erik was an entrepreneur and he talked like an entrepreneur. Big words came out of his mouth, but he had taken some shortcuts in his internal reasoning processes. He assumed that an increased market for second-hand products (Blocket/Craigslist) is always and invariably a good thing (e.g. buying someone else's old stuff instead of buying new), but, there is plenty of space for rebound effects and there are many question marks. Enlarging the marketplace (event if it's "only" the marketplace for "pre-owned" products) might be good or it might be bad from a sustainability point of view.

The moderator, Ulrika Gunnarsson Östling, asked a question about the effects of collaborative consumption on the environment. Åsa urged us to think in terms of services ("transportation") instead of products ("cars"). Emma pointed out that we have to think about how services are designed, what assumptions are designed/built in to them from the very beginning and how we manage/steer them. Erik's "contribution" was to state that it's important to encourage innovation and not steer/govern developments too much, and, that environmental concerns have to stand back at first and enter at a later stage so as not to "hinder innovation".

Erik's positon reminded me of a quote by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!". That quote would have to be altered and a version that is customised for Erik reads like this: "It is easy for a man to argue about the benefits of something [e.g. collaborative consumption] when he so obviously benefits from the spread of that something".

I also do have to mention that Åsa's comment about the need for experimentation (instead of just talking about collaborative consumption) sounds good and is reasonable, but, could also be construed as being borderline hostile to studying (e.g. conducting research) on collaborative consumption. Why spend a lot of time studying something when the end result is just "talk" when the alternative is to do something and change the world?

The seminar was nice, but I felt that there should have been at least one person in the panel who had more qualms or was more sceptical towards collaborative consumption. The emphasis was decidedly on the (potentially) positive effects of collaborative consumption and about (unsubstantiated) hopes about the future, but, it would have been interesting to hear a more critical voice discuss problems that are present already today and some of the worries we should guard against in the future.

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The second seminar asked if Collaborative Consumption was something genuinely new or yet another trend and Global Challenge had again invited four guests:
- Åsa Minoz (again), working with innovation policies, social innovations, social entrepreneurship together with her partner Sara Modig in their form ModigMinoz.
- Anna Felländer, ex-chief economist, now digitisation and future economist at Swedbank
- Johanna Giorgi, strategist working with sustainability aspects of economic development at Tillväxtverket [The Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth]
- Ulf Kristersson, member of the parliament and economic-political spokesperson for Moderaterna [The Moderate Party]

The set-up was slightly different as the moderator (Alexander Crawford) invited the speakers up to the stage in pairs. As he had prepared questions, it became more of a three-way conversation.

- Anna started off strongly with some econo-speak; unused capacities, low costs, dormant competence, decreased tax bases, perfect competition (within a platform) but a race for critical mass and quickly emerging monopolies between the platforms. Self-regulation works fine in some industries/lines of business and the sharing economy works as a catalyst, so-so in others and in yet other extern regulation is a must. Åsa followed and did her thing (see above).

Alexander asked how Sharing Economy companies that are moving towards IPOs and the stock market  (Airbnb, Über) should be regarded. Both Anna and Åsa discussed "cooperative ownership" as a possible model, e.g.g "what if every Über driver owned a small part of Über?". The gloomy alternative is that the 1% will own (also) the Sharing Economy but neither Anna nor Åsa saw that as threat and they instead put their faith in historical precedents during the process of industrialisation (factories and capital vs workers and unions).

Alexander then asked Johanna and Ulf how we can encourage positive developments and counteract the negative developments. Ulf answered that he was of three minds. As an ex-IT consultant he is enthusiastic, almost blissful about the fact that what we hoped for 10 or 15 years ago (when reading Wired and Fast Company) has or is about to happen. As an economist, he wants to cut the crap and just get all the numbers into an Excel sheet to be able to count on the effects. Finally, as a tax bureaucrat, he wants Collaborative Consumption to become a part of the legal economy. Looking at the tex needs of the state to be able to uphold promises made, you will tend to become sceptical towards new technologies and he also said (I really liked it!) that "new technologies is a lousy excuse for tax evasion".

After this point in time, I did not really take any good notes, but rather became enmeshed in my own thoughts. I did however manage to squeeze in one of the two questions that there was time for before the seminar ended. My question went something like this:
- "Many have expressed high hopes for the future. Even when some problem has been highlighted, solutions to that same problem has been emphasised in the same breath. But, I'd like to know what worries you? What keeps you awake at night?"
I don't really know that I got any great answers to that question unfortunately.

Due to the book I'm currently reading, some of my thoughts went like this:
- Many express high hopes for the future when thinking about Collaborative Consumption. It might be natural to focus on what we hope for and on potential positive effects when talking about something new.
- But imagine that this debate had been held during the first tentative steps of industrialisation (200 years ago), sometime when the battle between the old order (water power) and the new order (steam engine) was fought.
- Many would have expressed high hopes for the future (of coal and steam) also at that time.
- It is then up to each and everyone of us to discern whether industrialisation has had primarily positive or negative consequences, and, to what extent the potential for positive change has been realised.
- ...but it's not so easy, in hindsight, to say that the best solution won (water power vs steam steam).
- Same thing with the car. There were electric cars 100 years ago but the internal combustion engine won out. So, did the best solution win?
- Industrialisation as it indeed did happen was very much in line with Åsa's call for "experimentation", but, it is also possible to in hindsight see the disadvantages of to little advance thinking, steering and regulation. Stuff happens. You end up somewhere, but not necessarily where you wanted to be.

I'll finish the blog post with the unanswered question that Alexander asked at the beginning of the seminar: "Does Collaborative Consumption represent something genuinely new or not?"
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Fly or die

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I went to a workshop last week, "Fly or die?". It also had a subtitle, "The future of the travelling scientist and the exchange of academic knowledge". The workshop is part of a ongoing project, "Traveling without borders", at "KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory" (I honestly didn't know we had one). From the workshop invitation:

KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory welcomes you to an exciting and somewhat different workshop. Together we seek to imagine a future where longdistance travels are scarce and airplane tickets are no longer cheap. How do we exchange ideas and scientific discoveries in that future? What can we do today, on a practical level, to develop and reevaluate the travelling scientist and the exchange of academic knowledge?

Let’s ask ourselves: What is necessary travelling? What is an essential conference? What can be discussed and decided on video chats or voice calls? To explore these questions we will collaborate in group discussions about the practice, rationale and morality of travelling.

The title "Fly or die?" relates to the expression "publish or perish" as well as to "carbon scholarship". Academics (researchers) have large CO2 footprints because we fly all over the place to work in (pan-European) research projects and attend conferences. So how can we decrease flying "without hindering the free exchange of ideas in the future"?

After a short introduction to the project, we were divided into smaller groups and discussed the question "How do we exchange ideas and scientific discoveries in the future?" for about 30 or 40 minutes before we met up again. We were also provided with a few questions to help us on our way:
- How do we travel?
- Where do we meet to work?
- How do we communicate?
- Who are part of academic in 2030-2040?

My group consisted of both people I knew (Elina Ericsson, Vlad Coroama, Jacob von Oelreich) as well as a newcomer (don't remember her name). Since our discussion was pretty much all over the place, I have tried to prune it a little. We basically started with the main question and let it carry us hither and dither.

One person in our group started by stating that "little" or "nothing" will change in the next 15 years. The exchange of ideas and the exchange of goods (through trade) has "always" been with us and "always" will. We academics "need" to travel in order to continue to exchange ideas, and, some of the current work practices would not be possible without air flight and computer-mediated communication. I found this to be limited perspective for two different reasons. The first is that I can imagine not just one but several reasons for why this could change in the next 20 or so years, e.g. peak oil, economic decline, environmental concerns etc. The second reason is that this is an exceedingly boring and unproductive position to take at a workshop where we are encouraged and tasked to think "outside the box".

The most fruitful idea in our conversation then centered around the slow movement and a recently published book (March 2016), "The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy". Here's an early (2013) draft I just found - it's perhaps a conference paper about the concept "the slow professor".

If we can't fly, then we need to rethink the frantic speed with which things happen today and make a virtue out of slowness. So what could "slow academia" imply? What would it look like? What would be the upside compared to the current situation?

We first established that there are some people who for various reasons try to avoid "excessive" (air) travel already today. Perhaps they have young children at home or an ailing parent, a large environmental consciousness, little access to funds for travelling, or, perhaps they suffer from fear of flying (or pretend to be!)? These persons could be seen as the forerunners of norms and habits that will be widespread 20 years from now. We could imagine a diverging academy where some people, or even some universities will continue to fly a lot and hang on to current criteria about what constitutes quality in the academy, while others will go for a totally different model. We speculated about the reappearance of slow travel and the equivalent of young intellectuals' "Grand Tour" which was popular from the mid-17th to the mid-19th century:

"The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means, or those of more humble origin who could find a sponsor. ... It served as an educational rite of passage." (Wikipedia)

and

"Three hundred years ago, wealthy young Englishmen began taking a post-Oxbridge trek through France and Italy in search of art, culture and the roots of Western civilization. With nearly unlimited funds, aristocratic connections and months (or years) to roam, they commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled with the upper crust of the Continent." (The New York Times, 2008)

Perhaps there could be a special academic position, say "travelling journeyman" (the bringer of knowledge, "pollinating" the universities he passes by on his trip) - the retro-future equivalent of today's post-doctoral researchers? During that special period of your life, you are perhaps not allowed to publish (a taboo?) so as to concentrate on your personal development as an academic and on your important task of transferring knowledge between (relatively) isolated academic communities.

We could still travel to conferences, but not as often and obviously not as fast. We would then travel less frequently but for longer durations. If I go to a far-away conference in, say, the US, my hosts would be expected to help me set up a lecture tour after the conference. Conferences that are currently held every year would shift to every second or even less often. More local (national, regional) conferences would on the other hand thrive, but much of what is implied in "slow academy" would counteract young academics forming families at a young age. Travelling over land or sea to attend distant conferences would be hard on partners and on children. Slow academia would once again force people to make "irreversible" life choice at a youngish age and the academic ladder would once again be more aligned with biological age. It would be hard to start your ph.d. studies at the mature age of 30 or 40 as most people have settled down at that age (partner, children) and might also have certain life expectations that might be at odds with slow academia. The slow academic would tend to postponed children until having been established as a slow professor (e.g. until holding a permanent position).

Up until now, I have written about relatively direct effects, but we also traced out some "second-order effects". If every action has a consequence, then each consequence has another consequence and these are the second-order effects. Some car-related (unintended, unplanned-for) second-order effects are smog, urban gridlock, drive-in theatres and changes in dating and courtship culture, drag racing, extreme community, suburbia etc.

We assumed that slow academia will mean also a slower pace of publishing academic paper, but also an increase in the quality of the average paper. Slow academia and and a slower pace of publishing would also tend to make papers longer. Instead of writing a short paper for a conference, we would increasingly write longer journal papers, book chapters, or, full-length books. We agreed that the slow academy would need to find suitable criteria for evaluating research and that these criteria would differ significantly from those used today. The slow academy would also reward teaching (as compared to research) to a much higher extent than today. Teaching is an on-campus place-bound activity that would fit well with the structure that slow academia and the slow university would be tasked with.

The perhaps most intriguing thoughts we came up with had to do with another "unintended" consequence of decreased (air) travels. In a world where travelling is slow and arduous, we would turn to the local and perhaps become more involved in local space-based projects, e.g. collaborating with local groups, attempting to steer och change the city we live in or perhaps becoming active in local or regional politics (or in political issues).

My colleague Ambjörn has commented that he can be in close contact with half a dozen European colleagues (in just as many countries) who work on exactly the same things he does, but, he doesn't have a clue about the research that his next-door neighbour does. His close contacts with researchers elsewhere function much like personal wormholes. In a travel-constrained future, we would however to a larger extent need to find intellectual gratification and our intellectual peers in our close vicinity (the next door over, in a neighbouring research group or at another department at the same university) - rather than through these "wormholes" spanning time and space. That would also mean that the possibility of founding distinct, place-based and place-bound "schools of thought"would increase significantly (e.g. "The Chicago School of architecture" or "The Frankfurt School of social theory"). "Networking" would decrease and the balance between today's ubiquitous "weak ties" and the slower but more durable "strong ties" would shift in favour of the latter.

After having reconvened and discussed our "findings" cursorily, we were given a slightly different task, namely to think about the question "What can be done now?". We discussed that question in the same group (except that Tinni Ernsjöö Rappe replaced Vlad at our table). We again had some supporting questions, namely:

- How can we travel [today]?
- Where can we meet to work [today]?
- How can we communicate [today]?
- How is responsible for these changes?

We started to discuss if we were supposed to be "reasonable" and base our discussion and our proposed measures on what is deemed "possible" right at this moment, or, if we were supped to be visionary and utopian in our thinking. It seemed the workshop leaders did not have any strong opinions (which I thought was slightly strange) so we of course went for the visionary option. 

I suggested that KTH have just decided to become the first air travel-free university by 2030. What would that mean? What policies would be necessary? What would need to happen between now and 2030 in order to accomplish that goal? This became the topic we discussed for the rest of the session.

The question about what it would mean in practice was relatively easy to figure out. From Jan 1, 2030, KTH will not reimburse any costs for air travel. If you want to travel by air, you would have to pay it out of your own pocket (with your own taxed money). You would no longer be at your own liberty to finance air travel by "siphoning off" means from your own research projects. Long before that, KTH would hava instituted a (draconian?) internal tax on CO2/air flight that would subsidise train tickets.

Taking such a decision would mean ultra overdrive super PR for KTH. But could KTH be an air travel-free university and a world-class university and one and the same time? We imagine that such a policy would tend to attract some academics but of course also repel others, and this would happen in short order rather than in the very last years leading up to 2030. Would KTH have problems hiring "top researchers" or would they instead stand in line to work at KTH? Would KTH employees continue to travel by air in their private lives? Yes, we probably would, and that could be ok (or at least "ok") as long as we are appropriately ashamed of our plane trips and as long as we don't post any status updates about trips and exotic locations in our Facebook feed. That is something that irritates me already today and I suspect that that kind of "anti pro-social environmental behaviour" might raise the bar for what what constitutes a successful lifestyle as well as encourage others to mimic or surpass our trips to exotic locations in a futile zero-sum game of vying for social status. 

Since KTH would still want to encourage an academic exchange of ideas, KTH would institute stipends for in- and out-bound slow travel and for extended visits/sabbatical (say, months or upwards to a year). KTH would naturally also have a stock of (on- or near-campus) apartments for temporary guests to make such academic exchange easier. 

A recurring topic in our discussions was alternative to flying. Trains are ok, but, they do take time and they don't have the best facilities for spending that time "productively" (working). So how about planning to go on conference trips together with your favourite colleagues and get work done during the longish trip? Better working facilities (for example group rooms or meeting rooms) should then be offered on trains. Perhaps KTH should have its own branded KTH train wagons that you could request/books for conference trips? Just as was suggested above, we should of course coordinate conference trips with other academic visits and activities. The KTH train wagons could tour through Europe, "packed with professors". We joked that the train would be complemented by the KTH stables for local travelling in style. Not so much of a joke was the suggestions that we should go by boat on those few trips that take us to other continents. And we should naturally use computer-mediated communication instead of travelling whenever possible!

How long time would it take to go someplace by boat? Some Internet "research" gives that it takes a week or so to go from Rotterdam to New York in a modern container ships that travels at speeds in excess of 20 knots (37 km/h = 750 km/day). A trip from China to the US west coast would twice as long.

What would KTH's policy for organising conferences be in a travel-constrained future? By organising a conference, KTH researchers "stay home", but we at the same time encourage others to travel so as to attend our conferences. One innovative suggestion was that conferences should be better coordinated. It's nice to visit Scandinavia in August when it can be unbearably hot in many other parts of the world. It's less nice to visit during the winter. So, the annual Scandinavian academic conference season would be the month of August (this can be compared to "hunting season"). Other parts of the world could "claim" other seasons. It would then be easier to go to two or even three coordinated conferences and to combine trips and travel arrangements with colleagues in other/related areas. I will myself attend two conferences after the summer that (by happenstance) turn out to be very well coordinated. I will first attend the 4th ICT4S conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (August 29 - September 1) and then 8th EESD conference in Bruges, Belgium (September 4-7). They are "only" 200 km apart by the "Noordzee Route" (the North Sea Cycle Route) so it would in fact be kind of viable to travel between them by bike in two days if you are in reasonably good shape!

But perhaps trips and travelling are overrated in the first place (see the reasoning about slow academia above)? Perhaps we can avoid many trips by encouraging and rewarding journal articles rather then conference publications? We also had a heated discussion at our table about whether changed travel habits today was primarily the responsibility of the individual researcher (or the research group), or, if such changes should come "from above" and "afflict" everyone equally (i.e. bottom-up vs top down change). Is it the responsibility of those individuals, research groups or departments that do research on sustainability to lead the way and refrain from air travel already today? Or, do we put our faith in changed travel policies? The Australian researcher Yolande Strengers wrote a great text two years ago, "Fly or die: air travel and the internationalisation of academic careers" which treated the contradictions and paradoxes that she herself struggled with at a personal level:

"My short-term position as a Visiting Researcher from Australia in the DEMAND Centre (UK) is a case in point. In responding to a call for international visitors I found myself on a 25+ hour plane trip from one side of the planet to the other. The intention? To work with DEMAND researchers and contribute to the Centre’s ambition of developing new ways to think about reducing energy demand, including that associated with travel."

An interesting effect of attending this workshop was that one of the participants in our group (Jacob von Oelreich) sent an e-mail to the KTH environmental manager with the header "Tightening of KTH's travel policy and sustainability goals for traveling". This resulted in an invitation to a meeting with her in the beginning of June. He forwarded the invitation me and to Elina se we too are welcome to tag along to that meeting. I will of course also direct him to this blog post! We'll see what comes out of such a meeting - of what is deemed "possible" and "realistic" and what is deemed "utopian" of perhaps "weird" or even "foolish".

One final goofy and distasteful comment went to the heart of the dilemma between on the one hand KTH striving to be a world-leading university and on the other hand decreasing our air travel/CO2 emissions. A "shortcut" to becoming a world-leading university could be to not give a damn about all the doomish climate change "hyperbole", continue to live and travel exactly the way we do today, lean back and then let the competition burn away or sink under the waves. 

The final round-up discussion discussed various loose ends, for example:
- The current pan-European system for booking train trips sucks!
- Should we to a higher extent discuss the reasons for why we travel? If those reasons and incentives change, there would be less need for air travel.
- What would the implications for fund-raising be?
- Should there be more public shaming of (for example) egregious air travellers or examples of double standards or double morals?

- How can we challenge academic myths that you have to travel in order to excel? My personal favourite example is the totally brilliant but elusive Swedish social psychologist Johan Asplund who lives in the countryside and who never attends conferences. He has written 20 books but "It is said that he thinks that the essence of a text gets lost if you translate it, and therefore refuses being published in other languages". His language is im-pecc-a-ble and he guess he has more important things to do than to "waste time" trying to convince others of the brilliance of his writings or to argue with people who have misunderstood his writings).

- Travelling does not equal academic excellence, travelling is academic networking. It's a little like making a career out of writing and sending scholarly letters back and forth in the 16th century - but not yourself doing any of the science you write about. It is also unfair because it increases the risk that it's not the best ideas that spread, but rather those ideas that are proposed and hammered in by those with the most money (to travel and attend conferences). It's a winner-takes-it-all game ("power laws" are at play rather than the normal distribution).
- ...But is there a risk for parochial, national academic communities in a travel-constrained world and how do we avoid that?
- Today you can be well-known or even famous through the Internet (e.g. TED talks), rather than by travelling to conferences and holding keynotes. We need to further develop ideas about how to communicate our ideas in other ways that those based on propelling our physical bodies around the planet!

A final, boring comment was: "if the duration of our trips increase, what do we do with our partners, our pets, our children and our ageing mother?". To that I say "if the planet burns, what do we do with our partners, our pets, our children and our grandchildren?".

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The Internet at the eco-village

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It's been a long time coming but our article "The Internet at the eco-village: Performing sustainability in the twenty-first century" has finally been published. The good news is that it is published in "First Monday" (a monthly peer-reviewed open access academic journal covering research about the Internet) and it is available for anyone anywhere to read. The article abstract can be found below. Our article was in fact published in their 20th anniversary issue:

"First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals solely devoted to research about the Internet. First Monday has published 1,561 papers in 240 issues, written by 2,171 different authors. The May 2016 issue marks the 20th anniversary of First Monday. The first issue appeared two decades ago on the first Monday of May 1996 on a server in Copenhagen, coinciding with the opening of the International World Wide Web Conference in Paris."

I'm the second author of the paper and the first author is my wife, Teresa Cerratto-Pargman. We have also worked with Bonnie Nardi who is the third author of the paper. We met and got to know Bonnie during our sabbatical at UCI two years ago. We have, on and off, worked with the paper during the last two years but it is in fact Tessy, the first author, who has done the major part of the work.

One thing that is interesting - a strength as well as a complication - is the fact that two of the authors (me and my wife) have been involved in the establishment of the ecovillage in question. From the methods section of the paper, one of the four methods for data collection has been (some variety of) "participant observation".

"Two of the authors have been involved in the development of the eco-village since it was founded in 2009. One of the authors is currently a member of the economic association. While they have not been the most active of members, their observations and personal experiences underpin our understanding of the eco-villages’ vision, organization, principles and practices."

The other methods were 1) a survey, 2) analysis of key policy documents and 3) analysis of the 850 messages that were sent on a distribution list during 11 months. The paper is most clearly related to Lisa Nathan's "Ecovillages, values, and interactive technology: Balancing sustainability with daily life in 21st century America" (2008) and perhaps also Maria Håkansson and Phoebe Senger's "Beyond being green: Simple living families and ICT" (2013, pdf).

I am especially happy with my late-in-the-game contribution to the analysis which was written in response to reviewers' comments:

"For Ekoby, [many] topics that potentially could be framed in terms of “sustainability” lie in the shadows. They are not thought about or discussed. ICT is one. We have referred to it as an “ideological blind spot” elsewhere in this text. There are other blind spots that are not problematized or discussed at Ekoby as well ... Ekoby constructs a normality of its own, where some areas and topics are intensely discussed, while others go unnoticed or are ignored. We have shown that digital technologies play an important role for producing cohesion, coordination and strategizing at Ekoby. ICT technologies and the Internet can be represented as the “pinnacle” of industrial civilization and thus vulnerable to exactly those changes that Ekoby members worry about and prepare for. Despite this, Ekoby members apparently do not notice, or they discount or deny the impact of their communication and information practices on the environment and the implications of their reliance on these tools. As a consequence, alternative ways of using ICTs in the eco-village did not seem to be on the list of changes deemed necessary to construct a more resilient community and a more sustainable way of living.

It is possible to analyze this stance in terms of “oversight” or “denial”. In her book Living in denial, Norgaard (2011) discusses the reactions of residents in a rural Norwegian community after the unusually warm winter of 2000–2001. While residents were highly educated, they perceived the phenomenon of global warning as both undeniable and at the same time unimaginable. Norgaard analyses their behavior in terms of “socially organized denial” — global warming is accepted, but it is still disconnected from residents’ everyday practices and everyday lives, despite having large effects on the local economy. We imagine that Ekoby members either are unaware of the connection between their use of ICT and sustainability, or alternatively, that ICT is so very useful in their everyday lives — including in their roles as Ekoby members — that they consciously or unconsciously have chosen not to think about it and “live in denial”."

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Abstract

Is the digital infrastructure and its footprint an ideological blind spot for recently emerging ecological communities, including eco-villages? This paper examines how a group of people who are concerned with environmental issues such as peak oil and climate change are orchestrating a transition toward a more sustainable and resilient way of living. We studied a Swedish eco-village, considering how computing in this community contributes to defining what alternative ways of living might look like in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a social-ecological perspective, the analysis illustrates, on the one hand, that the Internet, along with the digital devices we use to access it, capitalizes and mobilizes values, knowledge and social relationships that in turn enhance resilience in the eco-village. On the other hand, the analysis shows that an explicit focus on ecological values is not sufficient for a community of individuals to significantly transform Internet use to conform to ecological ideals. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the imbrication of social technologies with practices that are oriented to perform sustainable and resilient ways of living.
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Next generation screens: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?

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I recently wrote a blog post about the workshop proposal, "Computing within Limits: Visions of computing beyond Moore’s law" we submitted to the 4th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S). The papers deadline for the conference was extended by two weeks but has now passed, but not before I (yesterday) submitted a paper to the conference, "Next generation screens: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?".

The paper has quite a history, it was submitted to the ICT4S conference two years ago, but was at that time rejected. The title back then was "Green websites for next generation screens: Energy savings and agency" and I of course wrote a blog post about it. That paper, in its turn, builds on a bachelor's thesis of two then-students of mine (now co-authors), Edward Ahlsén and Cecilia Engelbart. The paper back then tried to (apparently not too successfully) reframe their thesis but when I reread the paper, I definitely have sympathy for why it was rejected. That paper showed promise but was a little confusing and didn't really know what conclusions it wanted to draw.

The new-and-improved paper has used the ICT4S 2014 paper as a starting point but has substantially developed and reframed it. I estimate that about half of the new paper consists of recently written text and the point of the new paper is actually quite different from the 2014 paper. To sum it up, I feel that the argument that is made in the new paper is better written, more well-crafted and is significantly more forceful and interesting too. I hope the reviewers will agree. Below is the paper abstract, but first a quote from the paper's discussion:


"we can unequivocally conclude that a switch from one screen technology to another would have a truly insignificant impact in the larger whole. This conclusion is supported by juxtapositioning MacKay (2009), who states that the average European consumes 125 kWh of energy per day (ibid., p.104), with the trivially small energy requirements of a modern smartphone. Fully charging an iPhone 5 or a Samsung Galaxy SIII consumes 9.5 Wh and 12.3 Wh respectively (Fisher 2012). Doing so once per day for a year adds up to 3.5 kWh and 4.5 kWh respectively. These figures are also comparable with the corresponding figures of the more recent iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus (Fisher 2014), despite the latter having significantly larger screens. As mentioned above, the possible energy savings are dwarfed by the massive amounts of energy that is used in the process of manufacturing the smartphone. It has been estimated that the embodied energy of a smartphone is in the order of 1 gigajoule (GJ), or, 278 kWh (Raghavan & Ma 2011). That means that the energy that has been used to manufacture the phone corresponds to charging the phone once per day for upwards to 70 years!"

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Here is the paper abstract:

Next generation screens: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?

Technological developments in screen technologies pitches the thinner, brighter and energy-stingy OLED screen as a possible replacement for today’s television, computer and smartphone LCD screens. An OLED screen does not consume any energy at all when it displays the color black, but the potentially large energy savings can unfortunately evaporate and instead turn to losses when white is displayed. There is thus a mismatch between on the one hand the energy profiles of OLED screens and on the other hand user habits and current webpage design practices. This example thus raises important questions about system boundaries and about how to evaluate sustainable (or “sustainable”) technologies.

We conducted a pilot study of user acceptance of alternative, OLED-adapted color schemes for webpages. We briefly discuss the results of the study, but primarily use it as a starting point for discussing the underlying questions of where, or indeed even if it makes sense to work towards realising the OLED screens’ potential for energy savings. Moving from LED to OLED screens is not only a matter of choosing between competing screen technologies, but would rather have implications for hardware and software design as well as for the practices of web designers, end users and content providers.

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Pluralizing the future information society

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This blog post should have been published in February but my blog was on hiatus at that time.

We have submitted a paper, "Pluralizing the future information society" to the journal "Technological Forecasting and Social Change". The paper is an outcome of the research project "Scenarios and impacts of the information society" where we have worked with developing five different scenarios of what the future information society could look like, and then assessed the environmental impact (and to a smaller extent also the social impact) of these scenarios/societies. I (and my co-authors below) have belonged to the research project sub-group that was tasked with developing the scenarios and this paper is the best place to read about them.

I notice that the last time I wrote about this research project was fully two years ago, but this yet older blog post is more relevant as it describes the five scenarios in question in just a few sentences each. Below is the paper abstract, we are currently waiting for feedback and hoping they will accept it for publication in the journal.

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Pluralizing the future information society

Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling, Mattias Höjer, Daniel Pargman and Luciane Aguiar Borges

  

Key words: Scenarios, sustainability, ICT, futures 

Abstract

Following the argument that the sustainability challenges that emerge from the production and use of ICT are complex to evaluate due to the high pace of ICT development, the rapid dissemination of new ICT infrastructure and devices and their unpredictable effects on socio-economic structures, this study shows that there are alternatives to contemporary forecasted futures and exemplifies that ICT can be used to facilitate different societal developments. It is argued that creating parallel possible futures (plural) aids in the process of identifying potential benefits and drawbacks of technological development and situate current decisions in a longer time frame. The process of designing five images of the future of Sweden in 2060 is, then, presented and some of the advantages of using these images for different purposes are discussed. Among the concluding reflections it is highlighted that exploring benefits and drawbacks of different possible futures can empower actors that at the present play a role in shaping and implementing ICT strategies and policies and also actors from other sectors getting to see the opportunities and risks with ICT.

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Books I've read (May)

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I'm still way behind - I read the books below between mid-April and May last year. The previous blog post about "books I have read recently" can be found here. All three books below treat the topic of exuberant technological optimism including "the Singulary" and other fairy tales. The number of asterisks (*) signify the number of quotes from the book that can be found further below. 

*********************** "Know thy enemy". I knew already in advance that I wouldn't agree with Raymond Kurzweil's perspective, but I also felt that I want to have read one of this books about the Singularity since there are many intelligent people who do agree with his perspective. "The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology" (2005) is his follow-up to "The age of intelligent machines" (1990) and "The age of spiritual machines" (1999).

Kurzweil's basic thesis is that everything is speeding up; computers, knowledge production, innovations etc. and the main value of future products will lie not in the material substrate but in information (and thus amenable to quantum leaps of improvements in tandem with increases in computing power price/performance. Current medicine might mean eating a pill. Computing-enhanced future medicine will mean eating a pill that is custom made for you to fit your age, weight, health, previous conditions, personal and family history of disease and your DNA. You will mainly pay for that customisation, i.e. information (bits) will trump chemistry (atoms) in terms of value-creation. 

Many things follow from exponential developments of computing power; we will, according to Kurzweil, "soon" integrate computers (processing power) with our brains and become a new species. Things will just get better and better and the Singularity is basically "rapture for techno-nerds" - the point in time when we will invent and develop as much in a year as we have done throughout human history up until that point in time. Something like that - see below for a bunch of quotes from the book. Here's the blurb from the hyperbolic back cover:

"At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil present a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspring vision of our ultimate destiny."

Kurzweil is either stark raving mad or a genius who is way ahead of the rest of us. He is undoubtably a very smart person - an inventor and a businessman - but that doesn't preclude him from being stark raving mad. Enough already! Why not check out his (23 minutes long) Ted talk about "The accelerating power of technology" from 2005? If you can't get enough of him, then have a look at his other Ted talks. 

The book is a 500 pages long brick and the writing is unfortunately uneven. Some parts are very interesting, other parts go into way too much detail and are tedious and boring. He might be a smart guy, but Kurzweil no great author. Perhaps a chip in his brain will fix that in no time at all?

************* Professor of history Patrick McCray's "The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future" (2013) is an interesting read. It is a case study of two visionary scientists/engineers ("visioneers") who worked tirelessly, for decades, to develop their ideas (projects) and to promote these to policymakers and the general public.

The first visioneer is Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill who peered at space and developed his ideas about permanent space station - colonies - that would house tens of thousands of inhabitants. The second visioneer is MIT-trained engineer Eric Drexler who instead peered at the molecular world and developed the ideas of nanotechnology. The part that I found especially interesting was how these endeavours could both be seen as examples of engineers' reactions to the idea of Limits (c.f. the 1970's oil crises (1973, 1979) and the Limits to Growth report from (1972). From the book sleeve:

"These modern utopians predicted that their technologies could transform societey as humans mastered the ability to create new worlds, undertook atomic-scale engineering, and, if truly successful, overcame their own biolgoical limits. The Visioneers tells the story of how these scientists and the communities they fostered imagines, designed, and popularized speculative technologies such as space colonies and nanotechnologies. Patrick McCray traces how these visioneers blended countercultural ideals with hard science, entrepreneurship, libertarianism, and unbridled optimism about the future. He shows how they built networks that communicated their ideas to writers, politician, and corporate leaders."

These visioneers then are the intellectual forbearers to Kurzweil and other Singularitarians and McCray does a good job of tracing the "ideas behind the ideas". 

************ Robert Garaci is, interestingly enough, a professor or Religious studies and he has studied the beliefs of the people portrayed in the previous two books in terms of faith and religion. His book "Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality" (2010) traces the history of these ideas (with a focus on Ray Kurzweil and the popular books of roboticist Hans Moravec) to "similar ... apocalyptic traditions of Judaism and Christianity", i.e. that we live at the end of times, that the end (of sorts) is near - or is the end in fact the beginning of something new for the faithful? From the book sleeve:

"Apocalyptic AI , the hope that we might one day upload our minds into machines or cyberspace and live forever, is a surprisingly widespread and influential idea, affecting everything from the world view of online gamers to government research funding and philosophical though. In Apocalyptic AI, Robert Geraci offers the first serious account of this "cyber-theology" and the people who promote it."

While be books by no means was uninteresting, I felt that it promised more than it delivered. 

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----- What is the singularity?  -----

"What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. ... The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.7-8.

----- Hyping the Singularity -----

"The Singularity will allow us to transcend [the] limitation of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. ... Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology - which will be indistinguishable from ourselves - will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. ... Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.9.

----- On environmentalists' lack of imagination  -----

"Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today's world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.13.

----- On the law of accelerating returns  -----

"Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Isn't there a point at which humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? For unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would 1,000 scientists, each 1,000 times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating 1,000 times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One chronological year would be like a millennium for them. What would they come up with?

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.24.

----- The difference between a madman and a genius can be hard to tell at times  -----

"Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to crate new generations of technology. By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. *This is not because human will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond*."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.40-41.

----- Has this guy tried to hand in a travel expense report lately?  -----

"the overriding, impersonal forces of the law of accelerating returns are ... moving in the right direction. Consider that technology in a particular area starts out unaffordable and not working very well. Then it becomes merely expensive and works a little better. The next step is the product becomes inexpensive and works really well. Finally, the technology becomes virtually free and works great."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.95.

----- On humans as flawed machines but progressing towards a better future  -----

"While human neurons are wondrous creations, we wouldn't (and don't) design computing circuits using the same slow methods. Despite the ingenuity of the designs evolved through natural selection, they are many orders of magnitude less capable than what we will be able to engineer. As we reverse engineer our bodies and brains, we will be in a position to create comparable systems that are far more durable and that operate thousands to millions of times faster than our naturally evolved systems. Our electronic circuits are already more than one million times faster than a neuron's electrochemical processes, and this speed is continuing to accelerate. Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.127.

----- On the value of 1000 USD in 2080  -----

"Even with the restrictions we have discussed, the ultimate limits of computers are profoundly high. ... MIT professor Seth Lloyd has estimated the maximum computational capacity, according to the known laws of physics, of a computer ... about the size and weight of a small laptop computer - what he calls the "ultimate laptop." ... As discussed above, each atom [in that computer] can potentially be used for computation. ... [The] "ultimate portable computer" would be able to perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (assumed at ten billion human brains for ten thousand years) in ten microseconds. ... this amount of computing is estimated to be available for one thousand dollars by 2080."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.133-135.

----- On so many scientists not being bold enough and "underestimating the rate of change"  ----

"I frequently encounter colleagues who argue that it will be a century or longer before we can understand in detail the methods of the brain. As with so many long-term scientific projections, this one is base on a linear view of the future and ignores the inherent acceleration of progress, as well as the exponential growth of each underlying technology. Such overly conservative views are also frequently based on an underestimation of the breadth of contemporary accomplishments, even by practitioners in the field."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.196-197.

----- On uploading the brain to a computer  -----

"A more controversial application ... is *scanning the brain to upload it*. Uploading a human brain means scanning all of its salient details and then reinstantiating those details into a suitably powerful computational substrate. These process would capture a person's entire personality, memory, skills, and history. ... To capture this level of detail will require scanning from within the brain using nanobots, the technology for which will be available by the late 2020s. Thus, the early 2030s is a reasonable time frame for the computational performance, memory, and brain-scanning prerequisites of uploading. ... We should point out that a person's personality and skills do not reside only in the brain, although that is their principal location."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.198-200.

----- On popping pills to live forever  -----

In my [2004 book] Fantastic voyage ... I wrote ... "Whereas some of my contemporaries may be satisfied to embrace ageing gracefully as part of the cycle of life, that is not my view. It may be 'natural,' but I don't see anything positive in losing my mental agility, sensory acuity, physical limberness, sexual desire, or any other human ability. I view disease and death at any age as a calamity, as problems to be overcome. ... I have been very aggressiv about reprogramming my biochemistry. I take 250 supplements (pills) a day and receive a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week (basically nutritional supplements delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract). ... Approaching this as an engineer, I measure dozens of levels of nutrients (such as vitamins, minerals, and fats), hormones, and metabolic by-products in my blood and other body samples (such as hair and saliva). ... Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative - and optimal (based on my current knowledge).

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.210-211.

----- On the one simple solution to world hunger  -----

"Cloning technologies ... offer a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat and other protein sources in a factory *without animals* by cloning animal muscle tissue. Benefits would include extremely low cost, avoidance of pesticides and hormones that occur in natural meat, greatly reduced environmental impact (compared to factory faming), improved nutritional profile, and no animal suffering. As with therapeutic cloning [e.g. cloning a new copy of your liver etc.], we would not be creating the entire animal but rather directly producing the desired animal parts or flesh. ... By creating meat in this way, it becomes subject to the law of accelerating returns ... and will thus become extremely inexpensive. ... meat could become so inexpensive that it would have a profound effect on the affordability of food. The advent of animal-less meat will also eliminate animal suffering. The economics of factory farming place a very low priority on the comfort of animals, which are treated as cogs in a machine. The meat produced in this manner, although normal in all other respects, would not be part of an animal with a nervous system, which is generally regarded as a necessary element for suffering to occur, at least in a biological animal. We could use the same approach to produce such animal by-products as leather and fur. Other major advantages would be to eliminate the enormous ecological and environmental damage created by factory farming"

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.224.

----- On humans as gods with the world (and the universe!) as our plaything  -----

"Biology will never be able to match what we will be capable of engineering once we fully understand biology's principles of operation. The revolution in nanotechnology, however, will ultimately enable us to redesign and rebuild, molecule by molecule, our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.227.

----- The technophile's dream of transcending the body  -----

"the intertwined revolutions of [Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics] will transform our frail version 1.0 human bodies into their far more durable and capable version 2.0 counterparts. Billions of nanobots will travel through the bloodstream in our bodies and brains. In our bodies, they will destroy pathogens, correct DNA errors, eliminate toxins, and perform many other tasks to enhance our physical well-being. As a result, we will be able to live indefinitely without ageing. In our brains, the massively distributed nanobots will ... provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, as well as neurological correlates of our emotions, from within the nervous system."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.299-300.

----- On redesigning eating  -----

Sex has largely been separated from its biological function. For the most part, we engage in sexual activity for intimate communication and sensual pleasure, not reproduction. Conversely, we have devised multiple methods for creating babies without physical sex ... This disentanglement of sex from its biological function ... has been readily, even eagerly, adopted by the mainstream in the developed world. So why don't we provide the same extrication of purpose from biology for another activity that also provides both social intimacy and sensual pleasure, namely, eating? ... our digestive processes ... are optimized for a period in our evolutionary development that is dramatically different from the one in which we now find our selves [and] the designs of our digestive and other bodily systems are far from optimal for current conditions."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.301-302.

----- On autonomous robot swarm armies of the future  -----

"I am one of five members of the Army Science Advisory Group (ASAG), which advises the U.S. Army on priorities for its science research. Although our briefings, deliberations, and recommendations are confidential, I can share some overall technological directions that are being pursued by the army and all of the U.S. armed forces. ... The U.S. Joint Forces Command's Project Alpha (responsible for accelerating transformative ideas throughout the armed services) envisions a 2025 fighting force that "is largely robotic," incorporating tactical autonomous combatants (TACs) ... One of the programs contributing to the 2020s concept of self-organizing swarms of small robots is the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS) program ... which envisions a drone army of unmanned, autonomous robots in the water, on the ground, and in the air. The swarms will have human commanders with decentralized command and control and what project head Allen Moshfegh calls an "impregnable Internet in the sky"."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.331-333.

----- Welcome, Skynet: On autonomous "smart dust" weapon systems  -----

"DARPA is developing devices even tinier than birds and bumblebees called "smart dust" - complex sensor systems not much bigger than a pinhead. Once fully developed, swarms of millions of these devices could be dropped into enemy territory to provide highly detailed surveillance and ultimately support offensive warfare missions (for example, releasing nano-weapons. ... Want to find a key enemy? Need to locate hidden weapons? Massive numbers of essentially invisible spies could monitor every square inch of enemy territory, identify every person (though thermal and electromagnetic imaging, eventually DNA tests, and other means) and every weapon and even carry out missions to destroy enemy targets.

...

As military weapons become smaller in size and larger in number, it won't be desirable or feasible to maintain human control over each device. So increasing the level of autonomous control is another importan goal. Once machine intelligence catches up with biological human intelligence, many more systems will be fully autonomous."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.334-335.

----- On not thinking small  -----

"Once a planet yields a technology-creating species and that species creates computation (as has happened here), it is only a matter of a few centuries before its intelligence saturates the matter and energy in its vicinity, and it begins to expand outward at at least the speed of light (with some suggestions of circumventing this limit). Such a civilization will then overcome gravity (thorough exquisite and vast technology) and other cosmological forces - or, to be fully accurate, it will maneuver and control these forces - and engineer the universe it wants. This is the goal of the Singularity."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.364.

----- On the Singularity upending biological evolution  -----

"to me being human means being part of a civilization that seeks to extend its boundaries. We are already reaching beyond our biology by rapidly gaining the tools to reprogram and augment it. If we regard a human modified with technology as no longer human, where would we draw the defining line? Is a human with a bionic heart still human? How about someone with a neurological implant? ... How about someone with ten nanobots in his brain? How about 500 million nanobots? ... ... Our merger with our technology has aspects of a slippery slope, but one that slides up toward greater promise, not down into Nietzsche's abyss. Some observers refer to this merger as creating a new "species." But the whole idea of a species is a biological concept, and what we are doing is transcending biology. The transformation underlying the Singularity is not just another in a long line of steps in biological evolution. We are upending biological evolution altogether."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.374.

----- Only technology can save us!  -----

"We don't have to look past today to see the intertwined promise and peril of technological advancement. Imagine describing the dangers (atomic and hydrogen bombs for one thing) that exist today to people who lived a couple of hundred years ago. They would think it mad to take such risks. But how many people in 2005 would really want to go back to the short, brutish, disease-filled poverty-stricken, disaster-prone lives that 99 percent of the human race struggled through a couple of centuries ago? We may romanticize the past but up until fairly recently most of humanity lived extremely fragile lives in which one all-too-common misfortune could spell disaster. ... There were no social safely nets. Substantial portions of our species still live in this precarious way, which is at least one reason to continue technological progress and the economic enhancement that accompanies it. Only technology, with its ability to provide orders of magnitude of improvements in capability and affordability, has the scale to confront problems such as poverty, disease, pollution, and the other overriding concerns of society today."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.408.

----- Only technology can save us (again)!  -----

"Other voices [are] arguing for broad-based relinquishment of technology. McKibben takes the position that we already have sufficient technology and that further progress should end. In his latest book, "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age", he metaphorically compares technology to beer: "One beer is good, two beers may be better; eight beers, you're almost certainly going to regret." That metaphor misses the point and ignores the extensive suffering that remains in the human world that we can alleviate through sustained scientific advance. Although new technologies, like anything else, may be used to excess at times, their promise is not just a matter of adding a fourth cell phone or doubling the number of unwanted e-mails. Rather, it means perfecting the technologies to conquer cancer and other devastating diseases, creating ubiquitous wealth to overcome poverty, cleaning up the environment from the effects of the first industrial revolution ... and overcoming many other age-old problems."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.410.

----- On Luddite environmentalists  -----

"Certain parts of the environmental movement have become fundamentalist Luddites - "fundamentalist" because of their misguided attempt to preserve things as they are (or were); "Luddite" because of the reflexive stance against technological solutions to outstanding problems. Ironically it is GMO plants - many of which are designed to resist insects and other forms of blight and thereby require greatly reduced levels of chemicals, if any - that offer the best hope for reversing environmental assault from chemicals such as pesticides... In the end, it is only technology - especially [genetics, nanotechnology and robotics] - that will offer the leverage needed to overcome problems that human civilization has struggled with for many generations."

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.415.

----- On energy and transportation becoming information technologies  -----

"As I discussed in chapter 5, the full advent of [molecular nanotechnology]-based manufacturing will bring the law of accelerating returns to such areas as energy and transportation. Once we can create virtually any physical product from information and very inexpensive raw materials, these traditionally slow-moving industries will see the same kind of annual doubling of price-performance and capacity that we see in information technologies. Energy and transportation will effectively become information technologies. ... we will be able to manufacture devices - including flying machines of varying sizes - for almost no cost, other than the cost of the design (which needs to be amortized only once). ... with the full realization of the [genetics, nanotechnology and robotics] revolutions in a few decades, every area of human endeavor will essentially comprise information technologies"

Kurzweil, R. (2005). "The singularity is near", p.457-458.

----- On imagining a limitless future  -----

"Space colonization and nanotechnology. At first sight they present an odd combination. ... Despite their vastly different scales, futuristic concepts for settlements in space and for nanotechnology both centered on the mastery of the material world though technology. ... In both cases, proponents imagined building a limitless tomorrow that sidestepped catastrophist scenarios of the future to offer endless space to expand, an abundance of resources, and, in the most radical version, the possibility of transcending the mortal limits of the human body itself."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.8-10.

----- On imagining the future 50 years ago -----

"The scenarios of the technological future this book explores originated with a fascination, even obsession, with the future that surface in the 1960s and continued into the following decade. ... In 1966, a few people who saw the future as a new frontier formed the World Future Society. By 1974, its membership had climbed past fifteen thousand. Space exploration, the advent of microelectronics, the growing ubiquity of computers, and the ability to genetically engineer new organisms certainly sparked profound questions about the future. Darker currents in American society also contributed to American' tendency to look forward uneasily. Crises of confidence about the government and national power caused by Vietnam and Watergate coupled with inflation, oil shortages, and unemployment made people fearful for the future. One response to this apprehension and anxiety was to try to predict, with an aim toward managing, what the future had in store."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.14-15.

----- On the "visioneers"  -----

"Visioneers' imagined futures, shaped by technologies they helped promote, were just a few decades over the horizon, a time they hoped to personally experience. ... In this book, we will see how different individuals and the groups that coalesced around them vied to construct and claim the future through their writings, their designs, and their interactions with broader publics. In doing so, they often rejected other possible futures, especially those suggeting that the resources of the planet, the ingenuity of its people, and even our own life spans presented limits. ... visioneers ... often existed at the blurry border between scientific fact, technological possibility, and optimistic speculation."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.16-17.

----- On the 1970s debate of "the scarcity society"  -----

"The only long-term solution, according to [the Club of Rome 1972] Limits [to Growth report], was an equilibrium state in which economic and population growth were actively stabilized. An orderly transition to this new "scarcity society" would demand a firm had at the tiller of Spaceship Earth. This meant, among other things, extensive management and regulation of politics, societies, and economies. ... Economists who assumed growth was a fundamental tenet of modernity proved particularly hostile to Limits. Demand for resources, critics said, was historically contingent. Factory owners did not clamor for coal in the sixteenth century, nor was uranium a desired international commodity until after 1945. Technological innovation, meanwhile, remained unpredictable and surprisingly generous ... Simply extrapolating existing trends, which critics claimed already rested on a shaky foundation of data, into the future while allowing no role for human intervention or game-changing technological innovation weakened the credibility of Limits. A smaller group of scholars counseled a more optimistic view of the future, saying "unlike resources found in nature, technology is a manmade resource, whose abundance can be continuously increased.""

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.34-35.

----- On the reception of the 1972 Limits to Growth report  -----

"One of President Nixon's cabinet secretaries praised the MIT group for their good intentions but wondered how nations could halt growth without inviting "the destruction of our liberties and freedom." If one embraced the implications of the "Spaceship Earth" metaphor, this meant accepting "the strictest sort of economic and technological husbandry." Such choices would make the political future "much less libertarian and much more authoritarian." ... Even as it was debated in the United States, [the Club of Rome 1972] Limits [to Growth report] suggested very real consequences overseas. For leaders of countries like Mexico and India, which were in the process of technological modernization, a future with a steady-state global economy appeared as "chilling as the doomsday prophecy ... an elitist aristocratic, white-man's conspiracy" to lock developing "nations into perpetual poverty." Others saw Limits's proscriptions differently. Chinese policy makers, for example, adopted methodologies similar to what the MIT team had used to formulate their country's "one-child" policy."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.36-37.

----- On working out the basic concepts of space colonies in the 1970s  -----

"When the [1975] Ames/Stanford summer study concluded, NASA released its initial findings [and] reporters were intrigued by the idea that space colonization might be a "paying proposition" ... It would also offer a "way out from the sense of closure and of limits which is now oppressive to many people on Earth." For a world that had "lost its frontiers," and expanded human presence in space could offer a "sense of hope and of new options and opportunities.""

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.83.

----- On the L5 vision of colonizing space  -----

"The Hensons launched the L5 society in August 1975. The name, naturally, came from the ... point ...proposed as the location for the first space settlements. ... At some point in the not-so-distant future, the Hensons imagined that L5ers would convene at an actual space settlement for one final meeting and then disband, their mission accomplished. ... L5 News relentlessly argued that an expanded human presence in space, with ordinary citizens leading the way, was vital for the future. L5 News typified an emerging underground and niche-oriented West Coast "print culture." Many of these publications promoted particular counter-cultural lifestyles and activities - meditation, vegetarianism, hand-made houses - to a relatively small but dedicated readership. L5's newsletter suggest some hybridized version of this, as they showed an alternative and ostensibly self-sufficient lifestyle of the future yet one mediated through some of the most complex technologies in existence."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.90-92.

----- On space and cyberspace and frontiers to be explored and colonised  -----

"Space colonies and giant solar power stations represented an idiosyncratic solution to problems that some Americans were already tackling with backyard windmills and rooftop solar panels. ... Many pro-space enthusiasts saw nothing schizophrenic in pursuing environmentally friendly goals via resource-intensive technological solutions. ... the citizens' pro-space movement presaged the odd political alliances that emerged two decades later when left- and right-wing writers and political leaders united in their enthusiasm for the Internet and the opening of the new "electronic frontier.""

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.96-97.

----- On the emergence of 1970s "pro-technology communities"  -----

"The new pro-technology communities ... took positions outside the mainstream of traditional technology-oriented organizations, such as professional societies and industrial associations, but their ideas and activism intrigued a growing segment of the American public. In time, enthusiasm for citizen-oriented space exploration helped foment fresh technological visions. These new plans for the future would be based not on launching rockets into space but on manipulating data bits, genes, and molecules."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.112.

----- On finding ever new technological frontiers to explore in the 1980s  -----

"As the excitement of the space program waned, new technological frontiers were found not beyond our planet but with the manipulation of matter at the smallest scales. Instead of imagining a future that started with settlements floating in the inky vacuum of space, this new future derived from manipulations of the cell's interior machinery and the integrated circuit's crystalline architecture."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.146.

----- On the idea of recruiting self-replicating machines to colonise the solar system and beyond  -----

"In the late 1970s, the possibility of self-replicating machines caught the attention of Robert A. Frosch, NASA's new head administrator. ... Frosch suggested that self-replicating machines might be vital to the future of planetary exploration as well as our terrestrial economy. Frosch started with the assumption that securing access to energy and materials "out in the solar system" was one way to overcome the Limits to Growth thesis but that conventional approaches to accessing space resources were too expensive. As a solution, he proposed "machines which can construct generation after generation of machines ... in a pseudo-biological way.""

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.157.

----- On dreams of going into space then and now  -----

"Like the pro-space movement [of the 1970s] and the early nanotech community, the NewSpace ethos of the early twenty-first century was shot through with a certain libertarian ideology. It championed free markets, less government, fewer regulations, and well-earned profits for those who pushed the technological envelope. ... Unlike the guiding beliefs of the initial cohort drawn to the ... ideas of space-based settlements as places for social experimentation and communal living, today's NewSpace ethos is relentlessly capitalistic."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.263.

----- On hard limits spurring technological visionaries to dream of possible futures  -----

"A person who fell asleep in 1972 with The Limits to Growth on their lap and then woke up today would find today's headlines eerily familiar. As I write this ... newspapers announce soaring oil prices, shortages of key minerals, and the birth of Spaceship Earth's seven billionth inhabitant. In response to dire expectations, "doomster" have suggested the need for restraints and restrictions, ideas that their "boomster" counterparts resist. Language redolent of the Limits era is circulating once again. ... Warnings of limits provided a powerful motivation for visioneeers ... and will doubtless encourage new people to propose paths for technological futures."

McCray, W. P. (2012). The visioneers, p.274.

----- On "Apocalyptic Artificial Intelligence"  -----

"Apocalyptic AI [Artificial Intelligence] names a genre of popular science books and essays written by researchers in robotics and AI. These researchers include Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick in robotics and Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, and Hugo de Garis in AI. These individuals are professional researchers, some of whom are justly famous for their technical work. In their pop science books, they extrapolate from current research trends to claim that in the first half of the twenty-first century, intelligent machines will populate the earth. By the end of the twenty-first century, machines might well be the only form of intelligent life on the planet. ... we will upload our conscious minds into robots and computers, which will provide us with the limitless computational power and effective immortality that Apocalyptic AI advocates believe make robot life better than human life."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.1.

----- On the here-and-now function of predicting that we will upload our minds into machines and live forever  -----

"Pop science book, especially those by Carnegie Mellon University's Hans Moravec and AI researcher Ray Kurzweil, take a dualistic approach to the world, one where physical and biological reality and bodily life are computationally inefficient and "bad" while rational, mechanical minds and virtual reality are efficient and "good". Moravec, Kurzweil, and others predict that we will upload our minds into machines and live forever in a virtual paradise. ... robotics and AI enjoy government support as a consequence of the fantastic promises made by Apocalyptic AI authors. ... The value of the apocalyptic imagination lies in its power to create excitement in the lay public and government funding agencies. Pop science in general and Apocalyptic AI in particular is a - sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious - strategy for the acquisition of cultural prestige, especially as such prestige is measured in financial support."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.2-3.

----- On the merger between mind and computer as a variety of Judeo-Christian religious traditions  -----

"Apocalyptic AI advocates [the] promise that in the very near future technological progress will allow us to build supremely intelligent machines and to copy our own minds into machines so that we can live forever in a virtual realm of cyberspace ... Apocalyptic AI is a movement in popular science books that integrates the religious categories of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic traditions with scientific predictions based upon current technological developments. Ultimately, the promises of Apocalyptic AI are almost identical to those of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic traditions. Should they come true, the world will be, once again, a place of magic."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.8-9.

----- On the intersection of religious ideals and digital technology -----

"Secularism ... stimulates revival in traditional religious practice and ... also religious innovation. Just as all of the world's religions were once on their respective cultural fringes, a new religious movement that revolves around the future of robotics and AI might someday become fully mainstream ... The intersection of religious ideals and digital technology first occurred in countercultural groups that united communalist ideals, New Age spirituality, and technological progressivism. Countercultural groups ... expected computers to usher in freedom from the modern world's stultification and alienation [and] modems became the doorways into paradise. ... the leaders in digital culture believed that the Internet would usher in a new world of harmony among people and the environment. A new peer-to-peer society would promote collective liberation and a leveling of traditional hierarchies."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.11-12.

----- On the transcendence through robotics and AI  -----

"advocates of Apocalyptic AI ... feel fundamentally alienated by embodied existence. Their bodies prevent their minds from reaching the heights they desire, so they look forward to a future when they can depart the physical and biological world altogether, downloading their minds into computers and living forever in cyberspace ... On one side stand mind, machine, and virtual reality. On the other side stand body, biology, and the physical world. Apocalyptic AI offer resolution ... in a transcendent new world of pure mind."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.24.

----- Robotopia is slated to arrive by mid-century  -----

"The Age of Robots will lift the burden of human subsistence from our shoulders and improve the quality of human life. Robot corporations will move manufacturing into outer space, eliminating pollution and freeing human beings for a life of leisure. Universal ownership of the robot corporations will ensure that all human beings have a source of income. The resemblance to Francis Bacon's seventeenth-century work New Atlantis is uncanny: we will control the weather, manufacturing of all goods will be free, and all human needs will be fulfilled. The robots capable of delivering us from evil will arise by the middle of the twenty-first century. ... We will retreat from the stress of urban life and return to the supposedly noble past to which we are better evolved. Nationhood and warfare will become obsolete"

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.32.

----- On the body as expandable for AI enthusiasts  -----

"If the brain is nothing but a machine, then how can mind be separated from it in the Apocalyptic AI account? Mind, says the advocates of Apocalyptic AI, is a pattern of intermation housed in the brain and nothign more. Further, there is nothing special about the brain that makes it a particularly appropriate house for that pattern. Therefore, the brain can be replaced. All we have to do is identify the pattern and copy it exactly into a computer. The pattern is the imprtant part, says Moravec, if it "is preserved, I am preserved. The rest is mere jelly"."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.33-34.

----- On the intimate relationship between AI and Science Fiction  -----

"The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) claims that "for those interested in AI, science fiction offers a window to the future, a mirror for the present, and even interesting career opportunities". The AAAI is *the* official voice of AI research in the United States and it explicitly defends the truth value of science fction - and not only with regards to interpreting present culture but as a way of predicting the future! ... Life imitates art: researchers try to build the fascinating things described in science fiction."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.53.

----- On Artificial intelligence and/as religion  -----

"With congressional budgets shrinking, every government-funded project in the United States required advocates. An enormously expensive scientific laboratory with negligible tangible payoff required more than a little support, especially as its cost ballooned from 4 billion to 12 billion dollars. [The pop science book] "Dreams of a Final Theory" was Weinberg's effort to convince the lay public to support the SSC [Superconducting Super Collider]. ... "Dreams" ... is a fine popularization of physics but a poor text for acquiring converts. ... Weinberg sought to raise the prestige of physicists by denigrating religion, whereas Apocalyptic AI raises the prestige of roboticists and AI researchers by hybridizing science and religion."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.61-62.

----- On transhumanism  -----

"Transhumanists believe that rationality, science, and technology are the keys to improving humanity and prividing a happy "posthuman" existence. In particular, transhumanism borrows from technological progrss in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, asserting that future advance will eliminate illness, aging, and even death. Common transhumanist questions include, "what to do about retirement age when people live indefinitely?" and "how to ethically distribute advanced technology?" ... Transhumanist groups are explicitly evangelical."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.84-85.

----- On granting "human rights" to robots  -----

"The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots (ASPCR), for example, condones granting legal rights to the future's intelligent robots. "Robots are people too! Or at least, they will be someday," the group announces on its Web page (www.aspcr.com). The group argues that to deny robots their rights will equal, in its inhumanity, the nineteenth-century denial of rights to people of African descent."

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.122.

----- On thinking of robots as living creatures  -----

"As robots get more competent at a wider variety of tasks, our interaction with them will deepen. We evolved, after all, to be suckers ... We name robot vacuums and befriend our toys. We talk to (scream at) our computers. When the robots walk around, talk to us, and generally behave like they are alive, we will be faced with a serious problem. We will wonder if they are, in fact, alive and if they are conscious of it. And as soon as we lose our certainty that they are "just machines" we will wonder if we owe them the kinds of social and legal obligations that we owe to human beings (or at least those we owe to plants or animals).

Geraci, R. M. (2010). Apocalyptic AI, p.140-141.

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