Long Now

The human quest to understand our world continues. The Director of Stanford’s [Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)](http://casbs.stanford.edu/) discusses how academics and researchers have organized the study of human action, society, and institutions over time, how they share their findings, and what transformations we need for the future. [Margaret Levi](https://casbs.stanford.edu/margaret-levi) is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and the Sara Miller McCune Director of CASBS. She is Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

## Making the world better **Much of Pinker’s talk** was devoted to showing how most of the things than humans care about (except climate) have been getting drastically better over the last few centuries and decades. The roster includes length of life, health, food, prosperity, education, human rights, freedom from violence and accidents, leisure, and happiness—world wide. That good news is surprising to many and unwelcome to some, who fear it could foster complacent optimism. “While pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you,“ Pinker noted, “optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.” So Pinker explored the specific causes of progress in each domain and what it will take to keep the progress going over the coming decades and centuries despite inevitable setbacks and new threats. The main roots of continual advance Pinker sees as the values pushed by the 18th Century Enlightenment—reason, science, humanism, and progress. Those values can’t be taken for granted because they are far from universal. From the 18th Century to this day, they are opposed and sometimes defeated by authority, tradition, faith, mysticism, intuition, ideology, romanticism, and exclusion. Human nature doesn’t change much, but progress can proceed anyway thanks to benign institutions such as democracy, markets, a free press, schools and universities, scientific societies, declarations of rights, and global organizations for cooperation. Their job is to apply knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing. It is no accident that “Secular liberal democracies are the happiest and healthiest places on Earth.” What is the program for continued progress? Don’t treat every problem as a sign that we should burn down our institutions and hope for something better to rise out of the ashes. Nor should we treat progress as a mystical force guaranteed to lift us ever upward. Progress is the result of human effort, guided by an _idea_ : that if we apply reason and science to make a better world, we can gradually succeed. If we continue to embrace that idea, Pinker concluded, it’s reasonable to expect progress to continue. If we don’t, it may not.

Travel the ancient Silk Road with an archaeologist researching a revolutionary idea. Nomadic pastoralists, far from being irrelevant outliers, may have helped shape civilizations at continental scale. Drawing on his exciting field work, Michael Frachetti shows how alternative ways of conceptualizing the very essence of the word “civilization” helps us to recast our understanding of regional political economies through time and discover the unexpected roots and formation of one of the world’s most extensive and long-standing social and economic networks – the Silk Road that connected Asia to Europe. Archaeologist Michael Frachetti is an Associate Professor with the Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis and author of _Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia_ (02008).

Everything will be connected to the network, even things that shouldn’t be. From automobiles to egg timers, Kuniavsky explains all these devices will try to get our attention and prove their value. They’ll also attempt to predict the future—at least the immediate future of our desires. But they won’t be very good at that for a while. In fact, for every 100 connected devices that are guessing your needs, if they were all right an impressive 99% of the time, there would always be one that’s wrong. The range of human-machine interactions goes from the person making all the decisions to full automation (like the fuel injection inside a car engine). In between is tricky terrain, tasks that we aren’t sure if we trust computers to run themselves. When automation needs to be approved step-by-step or human judgement otherwise needs to be on call, then the "cognitive load” on the attendant can flip the equation. A poorly conceived labor saving device can turn an internet appliance worse than useless: a labor creating device. How will ‘adaptive’ objects tell us that they are changing? Will we ever accept a fully automated airplane? Do you actually need a smart toaster if it’s only going to spam you? At the intersection of The Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and User Experience Design we should proceed with some caution as the stakes can be high or conversely benefits may be minimal. We are destined for a period of more gadgets than tools, as consumer & social standards evolve over time and myriad algorithms slowly amass learnings. But Kuniavsky points out there is already a long history of smart thinking about these challenges, starting as early as the cyberneticists of the 01940s. The ongoing work of designers and engineers, such as Tom Sheridan and Bill Verplank in the 01970s, offers wisdom to keep in mind as things speed up. “I’m neither a fan of or a critic of these technologies. I think they are actually too complex to be reduced in that way” says Kuniavsky. But after surveying a bit of the history and the state of “smart things” today, he offers up suggestions for the inevitable years ahead. Humans will need sober strategies to tame the menagerie of well-meaning bots, all trying to predict our needs in an unprecedentedly entangled world. “We are at the beginning of this thing.”

In _[DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells us about Ourselves](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Freediving-Renegade-Science-Ourselves/dp/0547985525)_ James Nestor follows extreme athletes, adventurers, and scientists as they plumb the limits of the ocean's depths and uncover startling discoveries that, in many cases, redefine our understanding of the ocean and ourselves. Freedivers dive without scuba gear, holding their breath longer than had been thought humanly possible, and thus confirming the legendary feats of Japanese pearl divers. Nestor explains that the human body actually adapts in real time as it reaches depths where we’d expect it to be crushed. For experienced freedivers a “master switch” flips and they are able to handle the pressure and their body automatically ration oxygen to safely extend their time below. But free diving is only the beginning. Nestor explains how citizen scientist freedivers interact with sperm whales and other sea life in ways that are not possible using other technologies. They can swim within feet of these giant mammals. And the whales amazingly reorient themselves as if to start a conversation. In fact they send clicks (recordings of which Nestor plays onstage) which are used for communication, not geolocation. When you realize how developed the brains of these creatures are, it’s not surprising that they would have something to say. And considering the possibilities of communicating with dolphins and whales is something that Nestor feels strongly about (as he mentioned in [an Ignite Talk he gave for us](https://youtu.be/KrjyevcdNVg) in 02016). There’s even more in this talk including evidence of how some humans use extra-sensory capabilities that are employed by sharks and whales: magnetic sensitivity and echolocation. In languages that feature cardinal directions rather than relative ones, native speakers always orient themselves correctly in numerous studies--no compass needed. Humans can teach themselves echolocation, and in fact he introduces us to a group of young blind man who uses clicks to enable him to ride a bike through the city and tell one object from another. Overall Nestor's talk shows us that the wonders of the ocean may be more accessible and relatable than we’d ever imagined them to be.

## Two ways to save humanity **Mann titled his talk “The Edge of the Petri Dish.”** He explained, “If you drop a couple protozoa in a Petri dish filled with nutrient goo, they will multiply until they run out of resources or drown in their own wastes.” Humans in the world Petri dish appear to be similarly doomed, judging by our exponential increases in population, energy use, water use, income, and greenhouse gases. How to save humanity? Opposing grand approaches emerged from two remarkable scientists in the mid-20th century who fought each other their entire lives. Their solutions were so persuasive that their impassioned argument continues 70 years later to dominate how we think about dealing with the still-exacerbating exponential impacts. Norman Borlaug, the one Mann calls “the Wizard,” was a farm kid trained as a forester. In 1944 he found himself in impoverished Mexico with an impossible task—solve the ancient fungal killer of wheat, rust. First he invented high-volume crossbreeding, then shuttle breeding (between winter wheat and spring wheat), and then semi-dwarf wheat. The resulting package of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizer, and irrigation became the Green Revolution that ended most of hunger throughout the world for the first time in history. There were costs. The diversity of crops went down. Excess fertilizer became a pollutant. Agriculture industrialized at increasing scale, and displaced smallhold farmers fled to urban slums. William Vogt, who Mann calls “the Prophet,” was a poor city kid who followed his interest in birds to become an isolated researcher on the revolting guano islands of Peru. He discovered that periodic massive bird die-offs on the islands were caused by the El Niño cycle pushing the Humboldt Current with its huge load of anchovetas away from the coast and starving the birds. The birds were, Vogt declared, subject to an inescapable “carrying capacity.“ That became the foundational idea of the environmental movement, later expressed in terms such as “limits to growth,” “ecological overshoot,” and “planetary boundaries.” Vogt spelled out the worldview in his powerful 1948 book, _The Road to Survival_. The Prophets-versus-Wizards debate keeps on raging—artisanal organic farming versus factory-like mega-farms; distributed solar energy versus centralized fossil fuel refineries and nuclear power plants; dealing with climate change by planting a zillion trees versus geoengineering with aerosols in the stratosphere. The question continues: How do we best manage our world Petri dish? Restraint? Or innovation? Can humanity change its behavior at planet scale? Mann ended by pointing out that in 1800 slavery was universal in the world and had been throughout history. Then it ended. How? Prophets say that morally committed abolitionists did it. Wizards say that clever labor-saving machinery did it. Maybe it was the combination.

Historian Louis Hyman's work focuses on the history of American capitalism. In his book _[Borrow: The American Way of Debt](https://www.amazon.com/Borrow-American-Debt-Vintage-Original/dp/0307741680/)_ , he examines in detail how the evolution of personal debt has not only changed the economics of this country but the culture itself. Capitalism in the short term appears dominant and inevitable. The machinations of markets and capitalist fortunes seem like they always have been; but that's very much not the case. Before examining a forgotten stumble of capitalism during the New Deal Era, Hyman gave us a multi-millennial economic viewpoint to put things in context. In fact capitalism is an anomaly in the history of civilization: for millennia our world was accurately characterized by the idea of Malthusian Stasis: world GDP per capita essentially did not change in the pre-industrial age. Only these few centuries has the dynamism of capitalism spiked the hockey stick of economic growth. As such, maybe it's not surprising that a relatively young system like capitalism will stumble every few decades as happened in the Great Depression. And as Hyman says is happening again today. Capitalism stalls when capitalists hold on to their money rather than putting it to work. And when banks and businesses are not being brave, not risking their money to make more money, the government can play a key role and fiscally encourage that potentially high-reward "risky" investment. Discussing the New Deal era, Hyman introduces us to key figures behind the scenes and to agencies, three-letter acronyms that you may not have learned about in US History class, that played pivotal roles in invigorating the economy during those years. He also draws comparisons with the current economic situation. One missed lesson goes back to Hyman's area of expertise: consumer debt. Today's banks have loaned much more money to individuals than to businesses. Securitized consumer debt has become their main business rather than loaning money to new, risky, high reward businesses. As Hyman explains, "Those are supposed to be flip-flopped. That's how economies grow. They don't grow through consumer debt." The banks' money is sitting in the vault; it isn't out working in the world. $2.4 trillion is sitting in US banks that could be funding businesses. There are also lessons to be learned from post-Depression technology investment. Specifically we need to find a new leading sector and break out of a technologically incrementalist era which Hyman says has gone on now for decades. He calls for crazy ideas--tech that sounds as far out as a self-driving car did a decade ago. Space elevators and “rocket boots” are what we need to jumpstart capitalism, get the money flowing, and move that graph further up and to the right.

As humans increasingly dominate Earth’s natural systems over the coming centuries (“the Anthropocene”), how can we ensure that it becomes a “good Anthopocene”—a world in which nature and humanity prosper together? Ecosystem ecologist Elena Bennett believes that discovering the most effective paths to such a future is a bottom-up process, as countless projects all over the world are exploring how nature and humans can best collaborate. She has collected 500 such examples and assembled them into a hopeful narrative pointing toward an Anthropocene Epoch in which all life thrives. Instances of the good Anthropocene are already here. They just need to be examined, distributed, and connected up to a working whole.

The Internet was once seen as a democratizing force, but today social media platforms have become exploitable intermediaries of political discourse. How should governments, institutions and tech companies respond? In the wake of an Internet-mediated and norm-breaking election, we've asked one of the United States' premier election law experts to speak for us about what comes next. Author and Stanford Law professor Nathaniel Persily focuses on the law of democracy, addressing issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance and redistricting. A sought-after nonpartisan voice in voting rights, he has served as a court-appointed expert to draw legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland and New York and as special master for the redistricting of Connecticut’s congressional districts. His other principal area of scholarly interest concerns American public opinion toward various constitutional controversies. Persily designed the Constitutional Attitudes Survey, a national public opinion poll executed in both 02009 and 02010. The survey includes an array of questions concerning attitudes toward the Supreme Court, constitutional interpretation and specific constitutional controversies. He also served on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan commission created by President Obama to deal with the long lines at the polling place and other administrative problems witnessed in the 02012 election.

While traditionally social factors have been considered to have primary influence on political behaviors and preferences, more recent research shows that there's also a strong heritable component to ideological attitudes. Rose McDermott, professor of International Relations at Brown University and a 02015-16 Stanford CASBS fellow, discussed her research on the influence of genetic contributions to political and social behavior. McDermott studies the biological influences which interact with environmental factors to shape ideology across the political spectrum in cultures around the world. McDermott has described her work as intended to offer an _interdisciplinary approach to the interaction of psychological processes and political outcomes._ Her research has included conducting embedded experiments on attitudes toward gender equality in numerous countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Uganda, Indonesia, Mongolia and India. She is the author of _Political Psychology in International Relations_ and co-editor of _Man Is by Nature a Political Animal_. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 02013. Dr. Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard. She has held numerous fellowships, including the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University. She is a two-time fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.