Long Now

In his new novel, Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan uses science fiction and counter-factual history to speculate about the coming of artificial intelligence and its effect on human relations. The opening page introduces a pivotal character, "Sir Alan Turing, war hero and presiding genius of the digital age.” The evening with McEwan will feature conversation with Stewart Brand, based on written questions from the audience, along with some readings. Ian McEwan is the author of Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam (1998; Booker Prize), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005), The Children Act (2014), and others. Twelve movies have been made from his novels and short stories, five of them with screenplays by McEwan.

The ocean is not just filling up, it’s swelling up. Half of sea-level rise comes just from the warming of the water. No matter what humans do next, we are now doomed to deal with drastically higher flooding of the world's coasts every year for decades, possibly centuries. Nearly half of humanity lives near coasts. Many of our greatest cities, and their infrastructure, will have to deal with the ever-rising waters. Some coasts in the world are already experiencing what is coming for every coast soon. Jeff Goodell's reports from those places are doubly grim. The harm is already huge, but the response of local people is even more disturbing. With few exceptions, they and their governments refuse to accept that the problem is permanent and will keep getting worse. Those most affected by global warming—rich and poor—remain perversely in denial about it. There’s lots of talk, but humanity is doing almost nothing to adapt to sea level rise. So far. Jeff Goodell is author of The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (2017), How To Cool the Planet (2010), and Big Coal (2006).

What can fifty-somethings bring of value to companies that are mostly twenty-somethings, and vice versa? A needed blending of depth with currency. Chip Conley, a long-time hotelier (Joie de Vivre Hospitality) and author (Peak; The Rebel Rules; Emotional Equations), was hired at 52 by the drastically youthful, disruptive startup Airbnb to be its Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He found he was simultaneously an intern learning the digital ropes and a seasoned veteran mentoring the company’s leadership. Expanding beyond the traditional Silicon Valley role of “executive whisperer,” Conley led the company’s focus on its countless hosts worldwide. His new book, Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, makes the case for intergenerational savvy in organizations and explores what it takes to become a useful elder these days. A jolt of rejuvenation comes with the job.

John Brockman's newly released book Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI is the springboard for this Seminar on Artificial Intelligence. Brockman will interview several of the contributors to the book, Rodney Brooks, Alison Gopnik and Stuart Russell on stage. Following the interviews, Kevin Kelly will host the Q&A and discussion with the group. John Brockman is founder and publisher of the online salon Edge.org, a website devoted to discussions of cutting-edge science by many of the world's foremost thinkers, the leaders of what he has termed "the third culture." Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist and roboticist, former Director (1997-2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder of Rethink Robotics and iRobot Corp. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Her areas of expertise are in cognitive and language development, with specialties in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Stuart Russell is a computer scientist focused on artificial intelligence and computational physiology. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco.Kevin Kelly is a Long Now Board member, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website.

To think usefully about humanity’s future, you have to bear everything in mind simultaneously. Nobody has managed that better than Martin Rees in his succinct summing-up book: ON THE FUTURE: Prospects for Humanity. As the recent President of the Royal Society (and longtime Royal Astronomer), Rees is current with all the relevant science and technology. At 76, he has seen a lot of theories about the future come and go. He has expert comfort in thinking at cosmic scale and teaching the excitement of that perspective. He has explored the darkest scenarios in a previous book, OUR FINAL HOUR: A Scientist’s Warning (2004), which examined potential extreme threats from nuclear weapons, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, climate change, and terrorism. Civilization’s greatest danger comes from civilization itself, which now operates at planetary scale. Consequently, he says, to head off the hazards and realize humanity’s potentially fabulous prospects, "We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term.” And we can.

50 years ago, Stewart Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog — one of the cornerstones of the American counterculture. The evening program of The Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration was held on October 13, 02018, and featured conversations between Whole Earth Catalog contributors and contemporary wave-makers as they discussed the legacy of the Catalog and what the next 50 years might hold. Speakers included Ryan Phelan, Danica Remy, Rusty Schweickart, Kevin Kelly, Simone Giertz, Howard Rheingold, Chip Conley, Stephanie Mills, Stephanie Feldstein, Stewart Brand and Sal Khan. The event was sponsored by the San Francisco Art Institute, WIRED, The Long Now Foundation, Ken and Maddy Dychtwald, Peter and Cathleen Schwartz, Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan, Juan and Mary Enriquez, and Gerry Ohrstrom. Learn more about the Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration. Watch Whole Earth Flashbacks, a documentary that profiles the creators of the Whole Earth Catalog and the community they inspired. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

“This time is different.” Historians: “Ha.” “The Net is net beneficial.” Historian Niall Ferguson: “Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?” Ferguson analyzes the structure and prospects of “Cyberia” as yet another round in the endless battle between hierarchy and networks that has wrought spasms of innovation and chaos throughout history. He examines those previous rounds (including all that was set in motion by the printing press) in light of the current paradoxes of radical networking enabled by digital technology being the engine of massive hierarchical companies (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and their equivalents in China) and exploited by populists and authoritarians around the world. He puts the fundamental question this way: “Is our age likely to repeat the experience of the period after 1500, when the printing revolution unleashed wave after wave of revolution? Will the new networks liberate us from the shackles of the administrative state as the revolutionary networks of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries freed our ancestors from the shackles of spiritual and temporal hierarchy? Or will the established hierarchies of our time succeed more quickly than their imperial predecessors in co-opting the networks, and enlist them in their ancient vice of waging war?” Niall Ferguson is currently a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His books include The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018); Civilization: The West and the Rest (2012); and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2009).

With her stunning breakthroughs in neural imaging, Mary Lou Jepsen is making the brain readable (and stimulatable) in real time. That will revolutionize brain study and brain medicine, but what about brain communication? Could a direct high-resolution interface to the brain lead to what might be called practical mental telepathy? What are the prospects for brain enhancement? What are the ethics of direct brain reading and intervention? Mary Lou Jepsen founds programs and companies on the hairy edges of physics, invents solutions and takes them to prototype all the way through to high volume mass production. She's done this at Intel, MIT’s Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child, Pixel Qi, Google X, and Facebook (Oculus). She is the founder and CEO of Openwater, which is "devising a new generation of imaging technologies, with high resolution and low costs, enabling medical diagnoses and treatments, and a new era of fluid and affordable brain-to-computer communications."

An expert on rationality, judgement, and strategy, Julia Galef notes that "our capacity for reason evolved to serve two very different purposes that are often at odds with each other. On the one hand, reason helps us figure out what’s true; on the other hand, it also helps us defend ideas that are false-but-strategically-useful. I’ll explore these two different modes of thought — I call them “the scout” and “the soldier” — and what determines which mode we default to. Finally, I’ll argue that modern humans would be better off with more scout mode and less soldier mode, and I’ll share some thoughts on how to make that happen.” Galef is founder of the Update Project and hosts the podcast Rationally Speaking.

"We live in a spectacular time,” says Juan Benet. "We're a century into our computing phase transition. The latest stages have created astonishing powers for individuals, groups, and our species as a whole. We are also faced with accumulating dangers -- the capabilities to end the whole humanity experiment are growing and are ever more accessible. In light of the promethean fire that is computing, we must prevent bad outcomes and lock in good ones to build robust foundations for our knowledge, and a safe future. There is much we can do in the short-term to secure the long-term." "I come from the front lines of computing platform design to share a number of new super-powers at our disposal, some old challenges that are now soluble, and some new open problems. In this next decade, we’ll need to leverage peer-to-peer networks, crypto-economics, blockchains, Open Source, Open Services, decentralization, incentive-structure engineering, and so much more to ensure short-term safety and the long-term flourishing of humanity.” Juan Benet is the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)---a new protocol which uses content-addressing to make the web faster, safer, and more open—and the creator of Filecoin, a cryptocurrency-incentivized storage market.