This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

  Both I as a citizen and society as a whole would gain if individuals’ personal datastreams could be mined to extract patterns upon which we could act. Such mining would turn my raw data into predictive information that can anticipate my mood and improve my efficiency, make me healthier and more emotionally intuitive, reveal my scholastic weaknesses and my creative strengths. I want to find the hidden meanings, the unexpected correlations that reveal trends and risk factors of which I had been unaware. In an era of oversharing, we need to think more about data-driven self-discovery.

  A small but fast-growing self-tracking movement is already showing the potential of such thinking, inspired by Kevin Kelly’s quantified self and Gary Wolf’s data-driven life. With its mobile sensors and apps and visualizations, this movement is tracking and measuring exercise, sleep, alertness, productivity, pharmaceutical responses, DNA, heartbeat, diet, financial expenditure—and then sharing and displaying its findings for greater collective understanding. It is using its tools for clustering, classifying, and discovering rules in raw data, but mostly it is simply quantifying that data to extract signals—information—from the noise.

  The cumulative rewards of such thinking will be altruistic rather than narcissistic, whether in pooling personal data for greater scientific understanding (23andMe) or in propagating user-submitted data to motivate behavior change in others (traineo). Indeed, as the work of Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert, and Christakis and Fowler demonstrate so powerfully, accurate individual-level data tracking is key to understanding how human happiness can be quantified, how our social networks affect our behavior, how diseases spread through groups.

  The data is already out there. We just need to encourage people to tap it, share it, and corral it into knowledge.

  Parallelism in Art and Commerce

  Satyajit Das

  Expert, financial derivatives and risk; author, Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives and Extreme Money

  Confluence of factors is highly influential in setting off changes in complex systems. A common example is in risk—the “Swiss cheese” theory. Losses occur only if all controls fail and the holes in the Swiss cheese align.

  Confluence—the coincidence of events in a single setting—is well understood. But parallel developments in different settings or disciplines can also be influential in shaping events. A coincidence of similar logic and processes in seemingly unrelated activities provides indications of likely future developments and risks. The ability to better recognize parallelism would improve our cognitive processes.

  Economic forecasting is dismal, prompting John Kenneth Galbraith to remark that economists were put on Earth only to make astrologers look good. Few economists anticipated the current financial problems. However, the art market proved remarkably accurate in anticipating developments—especially the market in the work of Damien Hirst, the best known of a group of artists dubbed YBAs (Young British Artists).

  Hirst’s most iconic work—The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—is a fourteen-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde and immersed in a vitrine weighing over two tons. The advertising guru Charles Saatchi bought it for £50,000. In December 2004, Saatchi sold the work to Steven Cohen, founder and principal of the über hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, which manages $16 billion. Cohen is thought to have paid $12 million for The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, although there are allegations that it was “only” $8 million. In June 2007, Damien Hirst tried to sell a life-size platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with £15 million worth of 8,601 pavé-set industrial diamonds that weighed a total of 1,106 carats, including a 52.4-carat pink diamond in the center of the forehead valued at £4 million. For the Love of God was a memento mori (in Latin: Remember you must die). The work was offered for sale at £50 million, as part of Hirst’s “Beyond Belief” show. In September 2007, For the Love of God was sold to Hirst and some investors for full price, for later resale.

  The sale of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living marked the final phase of the irresistible rise of markets. The failure of For the Love of God to sell marked its zenith as clearly as any economic marker.

  Parallelism exposes common thought processes and similar valuation approaches to unrelated objects. Hirst was the artist of choice for conspicuously consuming hedge-fund managers, who were getting very rich. Inflated prices suggested the presence of irrational excess. The nature of sought-after Hirst pieces, and even their titles, provided an insight into the hubristic self-image of financiers. With its jaws gaping, poised to swallow its prey, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living mirrored the killer instincts of hedge funds, feared predators in financial markets. Cohen is quoted as saying that he “liked the whole fear factor.” The work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami provides confirmation. Inspired by Hokusai’s famous nineteenth-century woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Murakami’s 727 paintings showed Mr. DOB, a post-nuclear Mickey Mouse character, as a god riding on a cloud or a shark surfing on a wave. The first 727 is owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the second by Steven Cohen.

  Parallelism is also evident in the causes underlying several crises facing humanity. It is generally acknowledged that high levels of debt were a major factor in the ongoing global financial crisis. What is missed is that the logic of debt is similar to one underlying other problematic issues. There is a striking similarity between the problems of the financial system, irreversible climate change, and shortages of vital resources like oil, food, and water. Economic growth and wealth were based on borrowed money. Debt allowed society to borrow from the future. It accelerated consumption, as debt is used to buy something today against the uncertain promise of paying back the borrowing in the future. Society polluted the planet, creating changes in the environment that are difficult to reverse. Underpriced, natural, finite resources were wantonly utilized, without proper concern about conservation.

  In each area, society borrowed from, and pushed problems into, the future. Current growth and short-term profits were pursued at the expense of risks not immediately evident and which would emerge later.

  To dismiss this as short-term thinking and greed is disingenuous. A crucial cognitive factor underlying the approach was a similar process of problem solving—borrowing from and pushing problems further into the future. This process was consistently applied across different problems, without consideration of its relevance, applicability, or desirability. Where such parallelism exists, it feeds on itself, potentially leading to total systemic collapse.

  Recognition and understanding of parallelism is one way to improve our cognitive toolkit. It may provide a better mechanism for predicting specific trends. It may also enable people to increase dialectic richness, drawing on different disciplines. It requires overcoming highly segmented and narrow educational disciplines, rigid institutional structures, and restricted approaches to analysis and problem solving.

  Innovation

  Laurence C. Smith

  Professor of geography and earth & space sciences, University of California–Los Angeles; author, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future

  As scientists, we’re sympathetic to this year’s Edge Question. We’ve asked it of ourselves before, many times, after fruitless days lost at the lab bench or the computer. If only our brains could find a new way to process the delivered information faster, to interpret it better, to align the world’s noisy torrents of data in a crystalline moment of clarity. In a word, for our brains to forgo their familiar thought sequences and innovate.

  To be sure, the word “innovate” has become something of a cliché. Tenacious CEOs, clever engineers, and restless artists come to mind, before the methodical, data-obsessed scientist. But how often do we consider the cognitive role of innovation in the supposedly bone-dry world of hypothesis
testing, mathematical constraints, and data-dependent empiricism?

  In the world of science, innovation stretches the mind to find an explanation when the universe wants to hold on to its secrets just a little longer. This can-do attitude is made all the more valuable, not less, in a world constrained by ultimate barriers—such as continuity of mass and energy, absolute zero, or the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. Innovation is a critical enabler of discovery around and outside of these bounds. It is the occasional architect of that rare, wonderful breakthrough made even when the tide of scientific opinion is against you.

  A reexamination of this word from the scientific perspective reminds us of the extreme power of this cognitive tool, one that most people possess already. Through innovation, we all can transcend social, professional, political, scientific, and most important, personal limits. Perhaps we might all put it to more frequent use.

  The Gibbs Landscape

  Kevin Hand

  Planetary scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  Biology is rarely wasteful. Sure, on the individual organism level there is plenty of waste involved with reproduction and other activities (think of all the fruit on a tree or the millions of sperm that lose out in the race to the egg). But on the ecosystem level, one bug’s trash is another bug’s treasure—provided that some useful energy can still be extracted by reacting that trash with something else in the environment. The food chain is not a simple linear staircase of predator-prey relationships; it is a complex fabric of organisms large, small, and microscopic interacting with one another and with the environment to tap every possible energetic niche.

  Geobiologists and astrobiologists can measure and map this energy—referred to as Gibbs free energy. Doing so is useful for assessing the energetic limits of life on Earth and for assessing potentially habitable regions on other worlds. In an ecosystem, Gibbs free energy—named for its discoverer, the late-nineteenth-century scientist J. Willard Gibbs—is the energy in a biochemical reaction that is available to do work. It’s the energy left over after producing some requisite waste heat and a dollop or two of entropy. This energy to do work is harnessed by biological systems for activities like making repairs, growing, and reproducing. For a given metabolic pathway used by life—for example, reacting carbohydrates with oxygen—we can measure how many joules are available to do work per mole of reactants. Humans, and essentially all the animals you know and love, typically harness a couple thousand kilojoules per mole by burning food with oxygen. Microbes have figured out all sorts of ways to harness Gibbs free energy by combining various gases, liquids, and rocks. Measurements by Tori Hoehler and colleagues at NASA Ames Research Center on methane-generating and sulfate-eating microbes indicate that the limit for life may be about 10 kilojoules per mole. Within a given environment, there may be many chemical pathways in operation, and if there is an open energetic niche, chances are that life will find a way to fill it. Biological ecosystems can be mapped as a landscape of reactions and pathways for harnessing energy. This is the Gibbs landscape.

  Civilizations and the rise of industrial and technological ecosystems bring a new challenge to our understanding of the dynamic between energy needs and energy resources. The Gibbs landscape provides a shorthand abstraction for conceptualizing this dynamic. We can imagine any given city, country, or continent overlain with a map of energy available to do work. This includes, but extends beyond, the chemical-energy framework used in the context of biological ecosystems. For instance, automobiles with internal-combustion engines metabolize gasoline with air. Buildings eat the electricity supplied by power plants or rooftop solar panels. Every component in modern industrial society occupies some niche in the landscape.

  But importantly, many of the Gibbs landscapes in place today are rife with unoccupied niches. The systems we have designed and built are inefficient and incomplete in the utilization of energy to do the work of civilization’s ecosystems. Much of what we have designed excels at producing waste heat with little concern for optimizing work output. From lights that remain on all night to landfills that contain discarded resources, the Gibbs landscapes of today offer much room for technological innovation and evolution. The Gibbs landscape also provides a way to visualize untapped capacity for doing work—wind, solar, hydroelectric, tides, and geothermal are just a few of the layers. Taken together, these layers show us where and how we can work to close the loops and connect the dangling threads of our nascent technological civilization.

  When you start to view the world around you with Gibbsian eyes, you see the untapped potential in many of our modern technological and industrial ecosystems. It’s disturbing at first, because we’ve done such a poor job, but the marriage between civilization and technology is young. The landscape provides much reason for hope, as we continue to innovate and strive to reach the balance and continuity that has served complex biological ecosystems so well for billions of years on Earth.

  Black Swan Technologies

  Vinod Khosla

  Technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Khosla Ventures; formerly general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; founder, Sun Microsystems

  Think back to the world ten years ago. Google had just gotten started; Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. There were no smartphones; no one had remotely conceived of the possibility of the hundred thousand iPhone apps that exist today. The few large-impact technologies (versus slightly incremental advances in technologies) that have occurred in the past ten years are black-swan technologies. In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb defines a black swan as an event of low probability, extreme impact, and only retrospective predictability. Black swans can be positive or negative in their effects and are found in every sector. Still, the most pressing reason I believe black-swan technology to be a conceptual tool that should be in everybody’s cognitive toolkit is simply that the challenges of climate change and energy production we face are too big to be tackled by known solutions and safe bets.

  I recall fifteen years ago, when we were starting Juniper networks, that there was absolutely no interest in replacing traditional telecommunications infrastructure (ATM was the mantra) with Internet protocols. After all, there were hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the legacy infrastructure, and it looked as immovable as today’s energy infrastructure. Conventional wisdom would recommend incremental improvements to maximize the potential of the existing infrastructure. The fundamental flaw in conventional wisdom is the failure to acknowledge the possibility of a black swan. The likely future is not a traditional econometric forecast but rather one of today’s improbables becoming tomorrow’s conventional wisdom. Who would be crazy enough to have forecast in 2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would have access to cell phones as to latrines? Wireless phones were once only for the very rich. With a black-swan technology shot, you need not be constrained by the limits of the current infrastructure, projections, or market. You simply change the assumptions.

  Many argue that since we already have some alternative energy technology, we should quickly deploy it. They fail to see the potential of black-swan technology possibilities; they discount them because they mistake “improbable” for “unimportant” and cannot imagine the art of the possible that technology enables; this alone runs the risk of spending vast amounts of money on outdated conventional wisdom. Even more important, it won’t solve the problems we face. Focusing on short-term, incremental solutions will only distract us from working on producing the home runs that could change the assumptions regarding energy and society’s resources. While there is no shortage of existing technology providing incremental improvements today (be it thin-film solar cells, wind turbines, or lithium-ion batteries), even summed they are simply irrelevant to the scale of our problems. They may make for interesting and sometimes large businesses but will not affect the prevailing energy and resource issues at scale. For that, we must look for and invest in quantum jumps in technology with low prob
ability of success; we must create black-swan technologies. We must enable the multiplication of resources that only technology can create.

  So, what are these next-generation technologies, these black-swan technologies of energy? They are risky investments that stand a high chance of failure but enable larger technological leaps that promise earth-shaking impact if successful: making solar power cheaper than coal, or viable without subsidies; economically making lighting and air conditioning 80 percent more efficient. Consider 100-percent-more-efficient vehicle engines, ultra-cheap energy storage, and countless other technological leaps we can’t yet imagine. It’s unlikely that any single shot works, of course. But even ten Google-like disruptions out of ten thousand shots will upend conventional wisdom, econometric forecasts, and, most important, our energy future.

  To do so, we must reinvent the infrastructure of society by harnessing and motivating bright minds with a whole new set of future assumptions, asking “What could possibly be?” rather than “What is?” We need to create a dynamic environment of creative contention and collective brilliance that will yield innovative ideas from across disciplines to allow innovation to triumph. We must encourage a social ecosystem that encourages taking risks on innovation. Popularization of the concept of black-swan technology is essential to incorporate the right mind-set into entrepreneurs, policy makers, investors, and the public: that anything (maybe even everything) is possible. If we harness and motivate these bright new minds with the right market signals and encouragement, a whole new set of future assumptions, unimaginable today, will be tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.