Long Now

“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.

Perspective? No one has a longer or better-informed view of world affairs and America's role than George Shultz, now 97. (Henry Kissinger is only 95.) Secretary Shultz was a US Marine Captain in World War II. After becoming an economics professor at MIT and the University of Chicago he served the Nixon administration as Secretary of Labor, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, then Secretary of the Treasury. Back in private life by 1974, he led Bechtel Group as executive vice president and president. He was appointed by President Reagan as Secretary of State in 1982, where he helped finesse Reagan’s relationship with Gorbachev that wound down the Cold War. Still active in public policy after leaving government in 1989, Shultz has been an advocate for legalizing recreational drugs, for ending the Cuban embargo, for a world totally free of nuclear weapons, and for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Secretary Shultz will be interviewed on stage by Peter Schwartz, currently head of strategy for Salesforce and a founding board member of Long Now, formerly the CEO of Global Business Network and author of The Art of the Long View (01991). This SALT talk was arranged in partnership with the Asia Society of Northern California. The Long Now Foundation and Asia Society Northern California are partnering on a series of talks in Long Now's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series. With the Asia Pacific region being vital to long term thinking for the planet, and especially for those on the Pacific coast, we believe that there is a fruitful collaboration to explore for both of our memberships and the wider public. The Asia Society's depth of knowledge about critical issues, key leaders and cultural perspectives coming out of Asia can inform the topics, people and conversations featured in the long-running Seminar series curated and hosted by Long Now's president Stewart Brand. Public access to the recorded talks broadens the reach of this in-depth collaboration.

The bad news (not news to most): Many wild species are under severe duress. The good news (total news to most): “Nature is thriving in an age of extinction.” Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas has examined a little-noticed phenomenon around the world, that as an unintentional byproduct of massive human impact, biodiversity is increasing in pretty much every region of the world. Evolution has sped up. Wild populations are on the move, sometimes in response to climate change, often hitch-hiking on us. Hybridization is rampant, leading at times to whole new species. The Anthropocene, evidently, is a mass speciation event. An ardent conservationist, Thomas makes the case that conservation efforts are far more effective when we acknowledge—and study— what nature is really up to, and work with it. Chris Thomas is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of York in England and author of Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (02017).

Civilization is both astonishing and astonishingly various when viewed from slightly above. Not so far above as to be lost in planetary context, but just high enough to see a fascinating thing whole, entire, intensely peculiar and informative. The glory is in the high-resolution details, in the perpetually surprising god’s-eye perspective, and in the shocking patterns that we arrange things in without even knowing it. Revel in a host of such images and the understanding that emerges from them with collector/curator Benjamin Grant, author of the book Overview and host of the Instagram project “Daily Overview.”

In Kishore Mahbubani’s view, global power is shifting from the West to the Rest—from Europe and North America to Asia and Africa. He argues that changes will be required both in the West and the Rest to manage the shift gracefully for long-term stability. The rest of the world has learned a great deal from the West. Now it is the West’s turn to learn and to dispel some of its myths about the new world order. Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani served as his nation’s Ambassador to the United Nations and as President of the UN Security Council. He is a Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore where he was Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from 2004 to 2017. His books include Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation (2018); The ASEAN Miracle (2017); The Great Convergence (2013); and The New Asian Hemisphere (2008). The Long Now Foundation and Asia Society Northern California are partnering on a series of talks in Long Now's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series. With the Asia Pacific region being vital to long term thinking for the planet, and especially for those on the Pacific coast, we believe that there is a fruitful collaboration to explore for both of our memberships and the wider public. The Asia Society's depth of knowledge about critical issues, key leaders and cultural perspectives coming out of Asia can inform the topics, people and conversations featured in the long-running Seminar series curated and hosted by Long Now's president Stewart Brand. Public access to the recorded talks broadens the reach of this in-depth collaboration.

The Enlightenment worked, says Steven Pinker. By promoting reason, science, humanism, progress, and peace, the programs set in motion by the 18th-Century intellectual movement became so successful we’ve lost track of what that success came from. Some even discount the success itself, preferring to ignore or deny how much better off humanity keeps becoming, decade after decade, in terms of health, food, money, safety, education, justice, and opportunity. The temptation is to focus on the daily news, which is often dire, and let it obscure the long term news, which is shockingly good. This is the 21st Century, not the 18th, with different problems and different tools. What are Enlightenment values and programs for now?

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).