Long Now

Kim Carson, a creative technologist and futurist, challenges the narrative that AI will replace humanity. Instead, she argues that AI can serve as a mirror, inspiring us to unlock our creative potential. Carson shares her personal journey of integrating roles while reflecting on human emotion versus AI limitations. She emphasizes that true creativity flourishes through love and vulnerability, advocating for empathy in tech design. The conversation also touches on the importance of community in the underground AI scene and envisioning a unified future through collaborative education.

### The power law is the shape of our age You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for instant transmittal to a business partner. Chris Anderson does have killer slides, full of exuberant detail, defining the exact shape of the still emerging opportunity space for finding and selling formerly infindable and unsellable items of every imaginable description. The 25 million music tracks in the world. All the TV ever broadcast. Every single amateur video. All that is old, arcane, micro-niche, against-the-grain, undefinable, or remote is suddenly as accessible as the top of the pops. "The power law is the shape of our age," Anderson asserted, showing the classic ski-jump curve of popularity-- a few things sell in vast quantity, while a great many things sell in small quantity. It's the natural product of variety, inequality, and network effect sifting, which amplifies the inequality. "Everything is measurable now," said Anderson, comparing charts of sales over time of a hit music album with a niche album. The hit declined steeply, the niche album kept its legs. The "long tail" of innumerable tiny-sellers is populated by old hits as well as new and old niche items. That's the time dimension. For the first time in history, archives have a business model. Old stuff is more profitable because the acquisition cost is lower and customer satisfaction is higher. Infinite-inventory Netflix occupies the sweet spot for movie distribution, while Blockbuster is saddled with the tyranny of the new. Anderson explained that we are leaving an age where distribution was ruled by channel scarcity-- 3 TV networks, only so many movie theater screens, limited shelf space for books. "Those scarcity effects make a bottleneck that distorts the market and distorts our culture. Infinite shelf space changes everything." Books are freed up by print-on-demand (already a large and profitable service at Amazon), movies freed by cheap DVDs, old broadcast TV by classics collections, new videos by Google Videos and You Tube online. Even the newest game machines are now designed to be able to emulate their earlier incarnations, so you can play the original "Super Mario Bros." if so inclined-- and many are. "I'm an editor of a Conde-Nast magazine [Wired] AND I'm a blogger," said Anderson. In other words, he works both in the fading world of "pre-filters" and the emerging world of "post-filters." Pre-filtering is ruled by editors, A&R guys ("artist and repertoire," the talent-finders in the music biz), studio execs, and capital-B Buyers. Post-filtering is driven by readers, recommenders, word of mouth, and buyers. Will Hearst joined Anderson on the stage and noted that social networking software has automated word of mouth, and that's what has "unchoked the long tail of sheer obscure quantity in the vast backlog of old movies, for example." Anderson agreed, "The marketing power of customer recommendations is the main driver for Netflix, and it is zero-cost marketing." "By democratizing the tools of distribution, we're seeing a Renaissance in culture. We're starting to find out just how rich our society is in terms of creativity," Anderson said. But isn't there a danger, he was asked from the audience, of our culture falling apart with all this super-empowered diversity? Anderson agreed that we collect strongly and narrowly around our passions now, rather than just weakly and widely around broadcast hits, but the net gain of overall creativity is the main effect, and a positive one. Questions remain, though. "Digital rights is the elephant in the room of freeing the long tail." Clearing copyright on old material is a profoundly wedged process at present, with no solution in sight. Will Hearst fretted that we may be becoming an "opinionocracy," swayed by TV bloviators and online bloggers, losing the grounding of objective reporting. Anderson observed that maybe the two-party system is a pre-long-tail scarcity effect that suppresses the diversity we're now embracing. Much of how we run our culture has yet to catch up with the long tail.

Ezra Klein, a journalist and New York Times columnist, joins Derek Thompson from The Atlantic and author Michael Pollan for a thought-provoking dialogue. They explore the shift from a scarcity to an abundance mindset in politics, particularly after Trump's election. The trio advocates for rediscovering speed in governance to improve efficiency and accountability. They also tackle the housing crisis, urging a balance between community needs and individual interests, while scrutinizing the influence of power on societal progress.

Philosophical inquiry and scientific absurdism meet in the conceptual precision and ice dry wit of Jonathon Keats. In his talk at The Interval, Keats discussed his forays into very long-term photography and other deep time projects. He also announced a site-speciific collaboration with The Long Now Foundation that will create a long-term art work on our Mt. Washington property in Eastern Nevada. As an experimental philosopher and conceptual artist, Jonathon Keats has applied general relativity to time management, personalized the metric system, sold real estate in the higher dimensions of spacetime, and epigenetically resurrected historical figures including George Washington and Jesus Christ. Those are some of the projects he touches on in this talk. Currently Keats is [building pinhole cameras](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/03/experimental_philosopher_jonathon_keats_millennium_camera_experiment.html) of his own design with exposure times of 100 and 1,000 years to document long-term change in cities from San Francisco to Berlin. The Berlin century cameras debuted in 02014. Each person who secretly installed one will eventually inform a child of its location. In 02114 that child is responsible for retrieving the finished photo and returning the camera to the gallery. Where they can get their deposit back. [The first millennium camera](https://asunow.asu.edu/content/asu-art-museum-document-tempe-historys-slowest-photograph) was installed recently at the Arizona State University Art Museum. But his next time art project is five times as ambitious. Keats reveals for the first time in this talk a project to turn bristlecone pines into calendars--living calendars. Bristlecones live up to 5000 years, so they are unique in the duraton they track time through dendrochronology. The artist needed to find a place where these ancient trees are already growing that would work with him to create this project. And happily we at Long Now could do just that. The story of the Centuries of Bristlecone will be a long time in telling. But stay tuned.

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson say we live in an “Age of Turbulence.” Looking around our geopolitical situation, it’s easy to see what they mean. Faced with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous prospects of rapid technological changes in fields like AI, biotechnology, and geoengineering, it is clear that we need new answers to new challenges. Stephen Heintz, a Public policy expert and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), and Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today, work in very different fields. But each of them in his own way has sketched out a vision of what we must do to face down the intersecting crises of our time: While their methods may differ, they align on their conclusions. In their Long Now Talk, Heintz and Robinson propose what they refer to as _A Logic For The Future_ — a new path for international relations in the face of the chaos of our current age. Over the course of their conversation, Stephen and Stan drew on a wide variety of historical examples to contextualize our seemingly unprecedented geopolitical moment. In all of these case studies — from the writing of the Atlantic Charter in the darkest days of World War II to the fraught deal-making and relationship-building that allowed for the signing of the Iran Nuclear deal in 02015 — the two focused on the power of human-driven, almost utopian visions of the future as tools for building a better world. Now, in a moment of geopolitical uncertainty and internal democratic crisis, Stephen and Stan see space for the kinds of utopian imagination and creativity that were so solely missed in prior moments of flux and chaos. Long-term thinking is key to this kind utopian thinking. In Stan’s words, the “optimistic” possibilities of long-term thinking are not just useful in dreaming up a better future. They’re “reinvigorating in how we address the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.”

K Allado-McDowell, an artist and technologist, dives deep into the realm of Neural Media, exploring how AI challenges our creativity and self-perception. They discuss the evolution of AI-generated art and its implications for identity, referencing the viral 'trippysquirrel.jpg.' Allado-McDowell also highlights the optimism found in the chaos of low-quality AI outputs, suggesting that these new tools can deepen our understanding of ourselves and our interconnected world, blurring the lines between art and technology in transformative ways.

Join Ahmed Best, an award-winning artist and Afrofuturist scholar, and Lisa Kay Solomon, Futurist in Residence, as they discuss the vital role of feeling in shaping our future. Best shares insights from his career, emphasizing how emotion and storytelling can foster community. They explore vulnerability's importance in building connections, and challenging narratives to ignite change. Together, they envision a hopeful 2050 rooted in trust and collaboration, highlighting the power of shared experiences to create a thriving and inclusive future.

Benjamin Bratton, a Professor at UC San Diego and Director of the Antikythera think tank, dives into the fascinating realm of planetary computation. He connects ancient technologies like the Antikythera mechanism to modern challenges, emphasizing how our tech outpaces our understanding. Bratton discusses how artificial intelligence interacts with our ecological existence and the philosophical implications of our evolving cognitive landscape. He urges a shift in thinking about intelligence and collaboration as we navigate the complexities of the future.

Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher and author of "History for Tomorrow," while Kate Raworth is a renegade economist known for the "Doughnut Economics" framework. They dive into how history can guide us in creating regenerative economic systems. Discussing doughnut economics, they challenge traditional growth models and advocate for sustainable frameworks that respect social and planetary boundaries. They highlight innovative ownership structures and historical water management practices as pathways to resilience, emphasizing community engagement and long-term thinking.

Neal Stephenson, a visionary author known for his speculative fiction like Cryptonomicon, joins journalist Charles C. Mann to discuss his new book, Polostan. They explore the intriguing themes of historical storytelling set against the backdrop of the Atomic Age. The conversation delves into the creative journey of writing, future challenges like climate change, and the role of women in history. They also touch on humor in exploration narratives and reflect on the complexities of historical events, offering listeners a rich tapestry of insights and ideas.