The Naked Future

by Patrick Tucker

  If Gus Hunt can’t control this future, if he is not the government, who is?

  We are on the verge of a new world where our systems perceive the present and the future in much the same way we learned to extrapolate the future millions of years ago. But whereas we were once limited to the sensory perceptions of a singular organism, the world we are now creating is one where experience, reduced to signals, can be shared universally, unconsciously, immediately, permanently, or temporarily, depending on what sort of future we’re seeking to access. We will approach these myriad futures with a purpose and certainty that our ancestors would never have thought possible. In this way we will come to resemble gods. Yet we will feel increasingly powerless against the tide of transparency rendering this planet in a new form as surely as the movement of glaciers carved our canyons and valleys.

  The Obituary for Privacy

  Today, the data we create in our comings and goings is mostly separate from the information we post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google. This division is temporary. The incentives for removing the barriers are already larger than the reasons for keeping them in place.

  For instance, after centuries of trying to use math to figure out who should be with whom, only very recently have we developed the means to measure on a day-by-day, second-by-second basis the billion bits, small information exchanges, conversations, moments of happiness, awe, and disappointment that make up a relationship. We can use this to make better decisions, better avoid affairs of the heart that are doomed from the start and strengthen those that we want to keep.

  What are some of the dangers of our new predictive age? Activist and author Eli Pariser wrote of some of them in his book The Filter Bubble. The title refers to a type of “informational determinism,” the inevitable result of too much Web personalization. The filter bubble is a state in which “what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next—a Web history you’re doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of yourself—an endless you-loop.”

  Google and Facebook are perhaps the two most obvious examples of companies using your data to better predict your behavior. But you can always opt out of using Facebook, as millions already have. And while cutting Google out of your life isn’t as easy as it was a decade ago, there are ways to use Google anonymously. An arguably more pernicious threat is posed by systems and companies that are using our information to make predictions about us without our even knowing.

  As we become participants in systems, networks, and communities where data collection plays a role; as we encounter more apps, programs, and platforms that need our data to run; predictability improves as privacy vanishes, a consequence of computers making record keeping and record sharing easier and cheaper.

  If I can impart one piece of advice in reading this book, it’s this: we will not win by shaking our fist in the air at technology. A better solution is to familiarize ourselves with how these tools work; understand how they can be used legitimately in the service of public and consumer empowerment, better living, learning, and loving; and also come to understand how these tools can be abused.

  I’m not yet entirely comfortable in this world. I, too, grow cold at the thought of robots peering down at me anticipating my location in the next few seconds, few minutes, perhaps years from now, or cops in patrol cars looking at me with a narrowed eye, seeing a 10 percent probability of check bouncing or an 80 percent chance of committing a parking violation in the next hour. All I do know is that my discomfort won’t stop the winds that are revealing to the world my intentions, purchases, illnesses, hopes, and fears, my life more clearly for what it is. These capabilities that are emerging from Silicon Valley and Washington, from labs, offices, and garages, are what the military refers to as “force multipliers,” like mustard gas during World War I or night vision goggles during Desert Storm. The thing about force multipliers is that once they’re out of the box, they don’t go back in.

  In a world where everyone has the superpower to see the future, but some can see further, “super” will become meaningless. The naked future will bring with it not just safer cities, smarter students, better movies, healthier bodies, and wider awareness but also new frustrations, inconveniences, and forms of unfairness, to which we will respond with insult. This is what humans do with technological advancement. When given the opportunity to travel five hundred miles per hour thousands of feet in the air, over mountains, oceans, and skyscrapers, we grumble that the people in the front of the mechanical flying marvel have more legroom. Knowledge, widely distributed, does not automatically produce happiness even if it does cure ignorance.

  Although the future will soon feel very different, it will remain fundamentally what it has always been: a state that we create through our decisions but cannot in fact experience. It is a picture we can see with ever greater clarity, but it is an image we will change, an image we are changing. By the time you finish reading this book, it will have changed again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I sometimes tell people that I have the best job in the world because I am privileged to meet and interact with the planet’s smartest folks. That was particularly the case here. I am especially grateful to my interview subjects, including Stephen Wolfram, Adam Sadelik, John Wilbanks, Sacha Chua, Michael Paul, Jehoshua Eliashberg, Peter Norvig, Gordon Jones, and Jeff Hawkins among the various other scientists, entrepreneurs, and pioneers who took time away from important projects to answer my questions. My sincere hope is that I did well by your work, even in those instances where I felt the need to express some moral reservation.

  I must also thank my editor, Niki Papadopoulos, for her focused and clear insight, her tremendous patience, her consistency, and her delicate honesty. This book likewise would not have been possible without the expert advocacy and superb council of my agent, Loretta Barrett, and her colleague Nick Mullendore at Loretta Barrett Books. I am truly thankful to my publisher, Adrian Zackheim, for his incredible support of this work, and everyone at Current Books.

  I would like to thank Cynthia Wagner for making me a better writer, a better editor, for being an exceptional boss, a true friend, and for allowing me to pursue those stories, angles, or wild geese that I felt compelled to chase. I would like to thank Edward Cornish for his mentorship, inspiration, and vision, and Jeff Cornish, Tim Mack, the World Future Society, and the Futurist magazine for affording me every opportunity to explore the future and all that it can be. My father, sister, stepmother, mother-in-law, and father-in-law can be relied on to make a big deal out of even my smallest successes and to forgive the fact that I seem never to be available as I am always typing away at something.

  Most important, I must acknowledge my wife, Beth, for her unwavering partnership, generosity, and love.

  Life is a long lesson in humility, said Sir James Matthew Barrie. He could also have been talking about what this book has been for me. I have many reasons to feel humble.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20–21.

  2. “Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World’s Data Generated over Last Two Years,” ScienceDaily, May 22, 2013, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm.

  3. Patrick Tucker, “Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible?” MIT Technology Review, May 7, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514351/has-big-data-made-anonymity-impossible.

  4. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 1: NAMAZU THE EARTH SHAKER

  1. Mitsuyuki Hoshiba et al., “Outline of the 2011 Off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake (M w 9.0)—Earthquake Early Warning and Observed Seismic Intensity,” Earth Planets Space 63 (Sept. 27, 2011): 547–51.

  2. Earthquake and Tsunami Alarm Systems of Japan, March 11, 2011, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KfBwkMw_M&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

  3. Rachel A. Grant, “Predicting the Unp
redictable: Evidence of Pre-Seismic Anticipatory Behaviour in the Common Toad,” Journal of Zoology, 281, no. 4 (Aug. 2010): 263–71, doi:10.111.

  4. Rachel A. Grant et al., “Ground Water Chemistry Changes Before Major Earthquakes and Possible Effects on Animals,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 8, no. 12 (June 1, 2011): 1936–56, doi:10.3390/ijerph8061936.

  5. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 148, https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_4315599.

  6. Mark D. Weiser and John Seely Brown “The Coming Age of Calm Technology,” Xerox PARC, October 5, 1996, accessed Oct. 10, 2013. http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm.

  7. Joe Burton, “Wearable Devices to Usher in Context-Aware Computing,” ZDNet, accessed Jan. 20, 2013, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/wearable-devices-to-usher-in-context-aware-computing/3276.

  8. Ben Gruber, “First Wi-Fi Pacemaker in US Gives Patient Freedom,” Reuters, August 10, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/08/10/us-pacemaker-idUSTRE5790AK20090810.

  9. Courtney Boyd Myers, “Developing a Wireless System for Detecting Explosive Devices,” Next Web, accessed Jan. 20, 2013, http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/11/23/developing-a-wireless-system-for-detecting-explosive-devices.

  10. Rich Smith, “Shocking Way Electric Utilities Are Making Us Pay for the Smart Grid,” DailyFinance, accessed Jan. 20, 2013, http://dailyfinance.com/2012/05/15/electric-utilities-smart-grid-greed.

  11. Russell Brandom, “Can You Find Me Now? How Carriers Sell Your Location and Get Away with It,” Verge, Apr. 9, 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4187654/how-carriers-sell-your-location-and-get-away-with-it.

  12. Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye et al., “Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility,” Scientific Reports 3 (Mar. 25, 2013), doi:10.1038/srep01376.

  13. Kathryn Zickuhr, “Three-quarters of Smartphone Owners Use Location-Based Services,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, May 11, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Location-based-services.aspx.

  14. Boonsri Dickinson, “Dave Morin Explains Why Britney Spears Visited Path,” Business Insider, Mar. 23, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-britney-spears-went-to-path-2012-3.

  15. “Startup Path Bids to Be ‘Anti-Social Network,’” Economic Times, accessed Jan. 20, 2013, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-11-16/news/27590386_1_social-network-facebook-limits.

  16. Arun Thampi, “Path Uploads Your Entire iPhone Address Book to Its Servers,” mclov.in, February 8, 2012, http://mclov.in/2012/02/08/path-uploads-your-entire-address-book-to-their-servers.html.

  17. Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_3508574.

  18. Adam Sadilek, Henry Kautz, and Jeffrey P. Bigham, “Finding Your Friends and Following Them to Where You Are,” in Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2012 (New York: ACM, 2012), 723–32, doi:10.1145/2124295.2124380.

  19. Adam Sadilek and John Krumm, “Far Out: Predicting Long-term Human Mobility,” Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2012, http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI12/paper/view/4845.

  CHAPTER 2: THE SIGNAL FROM WITHIN

  1. Kashmir Hill, “Fitbit Moves Quickly After Users’ Sex Stats Exposed,” Forbes, July 7, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/07/05/fitbit-moves-quickly-after-users-sex-stats-exposed.

  2. Susannah Fox and Maeve Duggan, Tracking for Health (Pew Internet & American Life Project, Jan. 28, 2013), http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Tracking-for-Health/Summary-of-Findings.aspx.

  3. Kevin Kelly, “Self-Tracking Devices Are Sort of Main Stream Now. Just . . . ,” Jan. 15, 2013, Google+, https://plus.google.com/+KevinKelly/posts/139fExY8d1N.

  4. Graydon Carter, “Recording Artists and Sadistic Chefs,” Vanity Fair, Feb. 1, 2013, http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2013/02/graydon-carter-quan tified-self.

  5. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, chapter 8, EarlyAmerica.com, accessed Jan. 20, 2013, http://www.earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/chapt8.

  6. Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–34.

  7. Michael Mauboussin, “Smart People, Dumb Decisions,” Futurist, Apr. 2010.

  8. Terry Grossman, “Ray Kurzweil’s Plan for Cheating Death,” Futurist, Apr. 2006.

  9. Stephen Wolfram, “The Personal Analytics of My Life,” Stephen Wolfram Blog, Mar. 8, 2012, http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life.

  10. Jennifer R. Piazza et al., “Affective Reactivity to Daily Stressors and Long-term Risk of Reporting a Chronic Physical Health Condition,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine: A Publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine (Oct. 19, 2012), doi:10.1007/s12160-012-9423-0.

  11. Sara LaJeunesse, “Reactions to Everyday Stressors Predict Future Health,” Nov. 2, 2012, http://live.psu.edu/story/62452.

  12. Lisa M. Vizer and Andrew Sears, “Detecting Cognitive Impairment Using Keystroke and Linguistic Features of Typed Text: Toward an Adaptive Method for Continuous Monitoring of Cognitive Status,” in Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society: Information Quality in e-Health, USAB 2011 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2011), 483–500, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-25364-5_34.

  13. Kate Kaye, “There’s Data in That Toothbrush (And Lots of Other Products, Too),” Ad Age, May 20, 2013, http://adage.com/article/dataworks/tooth brushes-pill-packages-record-consumer-data/241557.

  14. Tyler McCormick, Cynthia Rudin, and David Madigan, A Hierarchical Model for Association Rule Mining of Sequential Events: An Approach to Automated Medical Symptom Prediction, SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, Jan. 8, 2011), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1736062.

  15. Mats G. Hansson et al., “Ethics Bureaucracy: A Significant Hurdle for Collaborative Follow-up of Drug Effectiveness in Rare Childhood Diseases,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 97, no. 6 (June 1, 2012): 561–63, doi:10.1136/archdischild-2011-301175.

  CHAPTER 3: #SICK

  1. “Phenotype,” Wikipedia, Dec. 21, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phenotype&oldid=528449757.

  2. Rita Ruben, “Flu Shot Not as Effective as Thought (But Get One Anyway),” NBC News, Oct. 25, 2011, http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/10/25/8484876-flu-shot-not-as-effective-as-thought-but-get-one-anyway.

  3. “Seasonal Influenza (Flu)—Key Facts About Seasonal Flu Vaccine,” CDC, accessed Jan. 21, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/keyfacts.htm.

  4. “EpiFlu—Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data,” accessed Jan. 21, 2013, GISAID, http://platform.gisaid.org/epi3/frontend#11f98c.

  5. National Center for Biotechnology Information, accessed Jan. 21, 2013, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

  6. “First H3N2 Variant Virus Infection Reported for 2012,” CDC, Apr. 12, 2012, http://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/h3n2v-variant-utah.htm.

  7. Declan Butler, “Flu Surveillance Lacking,” Nature 483, no. 7391 (Mar. 28, 2012): 520–22, doi:10.1038/483520a.

  8. Yi-Mo Deng, Natalie Caldwell, and Ian G. Barr, “Rapid Detection and Subtyping of Human Influenza A Viruses and Reassortants by Pyrosequencing,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 8 (Aug. 19, 2011): e23400, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023400.

  9. E. K. Subbarao, W. London, and B. R. Murphy, “A Single Amino Acid in the P2B Gene of Influenza A Virus Is a Determinant of Host Range,” Journal of Virology 67, no. 4 (Apr. 1, 1993): 1761–64.

  10. Sander Herfst et al., “Airborne
Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets,” Science 336, no. 6088 (June 22, 2012): 1534–41, doi:10.1126/science.1213362.

  11. Brendan Maher, “Bird-Flu Research: The Biosecurity Oversight,” Nature 485, no. 7399 (May 24, 2012): 431–34, doi:10.1038/485431a.

  12. Tyler Kokjohn and Kimbal Cooper, “In the Shadow of Pandemic,” Futurist, Oct. 2006.

  13. Patrick Tucker, “Catching a Pandemic, Online,” Futurist, June 2013, http://www.wfs.org/futurist/2013-issues-futurist/may-june-2013-vol-47-no-3/catching-pandemic-online.

  14. Eric Topol, The Creative Destruction of Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 265.

  15. Marcel Salathé et al., “A High-resolution Human Contact Network for Infectious Disease Transmission,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 51 (Dec. 21, 2010): 22020–25, doi:10.1073/pnas.1009094108.

  16. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 19.

  17. Michael R. Moser et al., “An Outbreak of Influenza Aboard a Commercial Airliner,” American Journal of Epidemiology 110, no. 1 (July 1, 1979): 1–6.

  18. M. J. Paul and M. Dredze, “A Model for Mining Public Health Topics from Twitter,” HEALTH 11 (2011): 6–16.

  19. Adam Sadilek, Henry Kautz, and Vincent Silenzio, “Modeling Spread of Disease from Social Interactions,” in Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2012, http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/view/4493.

  20. “Feeling Sick Makes Us Less Social Online Too,” Brigham Young University Media Page, Mar. 25, 2013, http://news.byu.edu/archive13-mar-socialhealth.aspx.

  CHAPTER 4: FIXING THE WEATHER

  1. Wolfgang Wagner, “Taking Responsibility on Publishing the Controversial Paper ‘On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance’ by Spencer and Braswell, Remote Sens. 2011, 3(8), 1603–1613,” Remote Sensing 3, no. 12 (Sept. 2, 2011): 2002–4, doi:10.3390/rs3092002.