The Vault by RajeshPunjabi

T E VA LT Compiled and Designed by Rajesh Punjabi

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T E VA LT Compiled and Designed by Rajesh Punjabi

CR DITS Book design copyright ÂŠ 2013 by Rajesh Punjabi. All rights reserved. Rajesh Punjabi RajeshPunjabi87@gmail.com Published by Rajesh Punjabi for the course GR 601_Type Systems, instructed by Carolina de Bartolo in Fall 2013 at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise with-out the express written permission of the publisher.

CO T NTS 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 2 That There are so Many Important Unreported Stories. Hans Weise

The World is Losing Potable Water at a Rate that is Unprecedented. Eric J. Hall 11 Abrupt Climate Change William H. Calvin

Quality Pigs Brian Goodwin

The Internationalization of the Third Culture Lee Smolin 23 The Disconnect Between Wealth and Well-Being: It’s Not the Economy

The Immortalization of Humanity Clifford Pickover

Survival Depends on the Race Between Education and Catastrophe Leon M. Lederman

The Erosion of Traditional Ellis Rubinstein

The Reduction Since 1993 In American Crime Is An Illusion David Lykken 49 The Imminent Paradigm Shift In Understanding The Conscious Mind Stuart Hameroff 52 There Are No Things.

David G. Myers

The World Isn’t Going to Hell John Gilmore

Piet Hut

The Way Stories About Complex Scientific Controversies Are Often Unintentionally Mis-reported by the Mainstream Media. Stephen Schneider 58 The Loss of our Species’ Biography Steven Pinker

Emergence of an Integrated Human-Earth Organism Richard Potts 66

0 0 0 3 0 0 0 4 America’s Descent into Computer-Aided Unconsciousness and Consumer Fascism Eric J. Hall 73 How will the Internet Influence Democracy? Howard Rheingold 74 The Information Revolution Requires a Matching Education Revolution Robert Hormats

Appropriation of the Internet as an Effective and Powerful Tool of Large Scale Global Social Protest Phil Leggiere 85 The Quiet Resurgence of Psychedelic Compounds as Instruments of Both Spiritual and Scientific Exploration John Horgan

People are Morphing into Machines. Rodney A. Brooks

The End of Money Brian Goodwin

The End of the Brain Eduardo Punset

The End of Gene Control Anne Fausto-Sterling 104 The End of the Nation-State Robert Aunger

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The Death of Nations Rafael Núñez 113

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T AT TH RE AR SO MA Y IMP RTA T UNR PORT D ST RIES Hans Weise Filmmaker, writer, and web developer Given the number of media outlets for independent voices to tell good stories, the vanilla quality of mainstream reporting is like the proverbial frog in a pot of water who doesn’t notice the slow temperature increase and boils cozily. In a consumer-oriented culture under a booming economy, critical voices are marginalized and the questions “we” ask ourselves lose color and substance and become sensational and picayune. A news magazine won’t tell you about record-setting U.S. arms sales, for instance, but they will tell you that Ricky Martin is the sexiest man alive. Consumers don’t like to hear that things aren’t what they seem, so advertisers won’t support those who publish such nonsense. The same goes for education—people are still uncomfortable with the idea that we’ve descended from apes and so, in the case of Kansas at least, students needn’t be burdened with that knowledge.

Populations are expanding into areas where water is scarce and aquifers will be drained in less than 100 years at current consumption rates.

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TH WOR D IS LOSI G POTA LE WAT R AT A R TE TH T IS UNPR CEDEN ED Eric J. Hall CFO of rightscenter.com, Inc Quite an interesting question and one that required both research and introspection. I finally had to rely on what I have experienced in traveling to 6 of the earth’s continents. The world is losing potable water at a rate that is unprecedented. Saharan and sub-saharan Africa water supplies are contaminated with bilharzia, schistosomiasis (sic), giardia, and other water-born parasites and diseases. Russia has seen the Caspian Sea and other land-locked lakes decline rapidly over the past 25 years due to evaporation from a warmer climate and drainage to irrigate arid lands. Populations are expanding into areas where water is scarce and aquifers will be drained in less than 100 years at current consumption rates. Even my favorite Sierra streams are polluted with giardia and require treatment before you can drink the water. China, India, Asia, and South America are also faced with the same problems of water-born diseases and decreasing supplies. In the 19th century we saw battles fought over water rights in New Mexico. What will happen in the next centur y when nations are faced with hydro projects in a neighboring countr y decreases the flow of water to another countr y. This is already happening in Turkey where a massive hydro project threatens Iraq’s water supply. Will this be Saddam’s next war?

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Scientists still do not understand what the impact of desalinization of sea water will have on the balance of the global ecosystem. The salt removed has to go somewhere, usually back into the water. Will increased salinity impact polar ice caps or the temperature of the earth’s oceans? We have already seen an increase in the salinity of water in Russia, the Middle East, and even in areas in the USA. In terms of consumption, we waste a tremendous amount of water as individuals. More water goes down the drain or the gutter as we continue to plant water-intensive lawns or keep the tap running while we brush our teeth. Recent droughts in California have highlighted how much water can be saved on a daily basis. On the converse, in many thirdworld countries more time is spent each day bringing the necessary water to the home as wells dry up. You can’t be productive if you’re always fetching water. The next global war will be fought over water, not imperialism or political ideology. Man can live without a lot of things, but not water. Mainstream media in all countries have been absent in their reporting as well as conservation groups like the Sierra Club. What will the world do when there’s not enough rain to go around?

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THE AMOUNT OF FRESHWATER AVAILABLE

Saltwater Freshwater stored in ice caps Available freshwater

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ABR PT C IMATE CHA GE William H. Calvin Neuroscientist; Professor, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever That’s easy: abrupt climate change, the sort of thing where most of the earth returns to ice-age temperatures in just a decade or two, accompanied by a major worldwide drought. Then, centuries later, it flips back just as quickly. This has happened hundreds of times in the past. The earth’s climate has at least two modes of operation that it flips between, just as your window air-conditioner cycles between fan and cool with a shudder. And it doesn’t just settle down into the alternate mode: the transition often has a flicker like an aging fluorescent light bulb. There are sometimes a half-dozen whiplash cycles between warm-and-wet and cool-and-dusty, all within one madhouse century. On a scale far larger than we saw in the El Nino several years ago, major forest fires denude much of the human habitat. To the extent the geophysicists understand the mechanism, it’s due to a rearrangement in the northern extension of the Gulf Stream. A number of computer simulations, dating back to 1987, of the winds and ocean currents have shown that gradual global warming can trigger such a mode switch within several centuries, mostly due to the increased rainfall into the northern North Atlantic Ocean (if the cold salty surface waters are diluted by fresh water, they won’t flush in the usual manner that allows more warm water to flow north and lose its heat). Meltwater floods from Iceland and Greenland will do the job if tropical-warming-enhanced rainfall doesn’t.

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This has been the major story in the geophysical sciences of the last decade. I’ve been puzzled since 1987 about why this story hasn’t been widely reported. A few newspapers finally started reporting the story in some detail two years ago but still almost no one knows about it, probably because editors and readers confuse it with gradual climate change via greenhouse gases. This longstanding gradual warming story seems to cause the abrupt story to be sidetracked, even though another abrupt cooling is easily the most catastrophic outcome of gradual warming, far worse than the usual economic and ecological burden envisaged. How would I report it? Start with the three million year history of abrupt coolings and how they have likely affected pre-human evolution. Our ancestors lived through a lot of these abrupt climate changes, and some humans will survive the next one. It’s our civilization that likely won’t, just because the whiplashes happen so quickly that warfare over plummeting resources leaves a downsized world where everyone hates their neighbors for good reason. Fortunately, if we get our act together, there are few things we might do to stabilize the patient, buying some extra time in the same manner as preventive medicine has extended the human lifespan. Those who stand a chance of resisting—people who actually think—are rewarded handsomely for their compliance, and awarded favorable media representations such as “geek chic.” These monikers are reser ved for intelligent people who surrender their neural power to the enhancement of the machine, by becoming vested web programmers, for example. Those who refuse to suspend active thought are labeled communist, liberal, or simply “unfashionably pessimistic.” Worse, they are unfaithful enemies of NASDAQ, and the divinely ordained expansion of the US economy. Ultimately, if such a story were actually reported, it would have to dress itself in irony, or appear as the result of an abstract intellectual exercise, so as not to alert too much attention.

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Temperature change in degrees Celsius ยบC

TREND IN AVERAGE SURFACE TEMPERATURE IN MESO-AMERICA

+1.5 +1.0 +0.5 0 -0.5 -1.0 -1.5 1900

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Q ALITY PIGS Brian Goodwin Professor of biology at the Schumacher College My story is about pigs! How could anything connected with pigs possibly have significant cultural consequences? It comes from research that entails a fundamental change in the scope of scientific inquir y. To appreciate what is at stake, we need to recall a basic assumption in the practice of western science: reliable knowledge about nature depends upon measurement. We can be sure of the wavelength of light rays from the setting sun, but there’s no way we can determine the beauty of a sunset. Or we can find out the weight of a pig, but we can never know if a pig is happy or sad. Western science is about quantities, which are regarded as “objective” properties of the world that everyone using the same method of measurement can agree on. It is not about qualities such as pleasure, pain, honesty, happiness or grief, which are regarded as subjective states that are not objectively real, however important they may seem to us. But what if it could be shown that qualities can be evaluated just as reliably and consistently as quantities? And by essentially the same scientific procedures? This is what has been shown in studies by a research team working in Edinburgh. People were shown videos of individual pigs interacting in a standard pen with the team leader, Francoise Wemelsfelder. They were asked to write down for each pig any set of terms that they felt described the quality of its behavior. These included words such as bold, aggressive, playful for one animal; timid, shy, nervous for another; indifferent, independent, self-absorbed for a third, and so on. There was no limit to the number of descriptors that could be used

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It is not about qualities such as pleasure, pain, honesty, happiness or grief, which are regarded as subjective states that are not objectively real, however important they may seem to us.

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for any pig. A routine procedure was then followed in which each pig was evaluated again by each observer using all their chosen pig-descriptive terms and the results compared over the whole group of observers to see if there was consistency of evaluation. This type of procedure is regularly used in evaluation of food quality and flavor, but it has never before been used to see if people agree about an animal’s ‘subjective’ state in terms of its behavior. The results were startling: there was a high level of consensus among people about the quality of behavior shown by different pigs. Their assessments were not arbitrary, personally idiosyncratic descriptions, but evaluations with a high degree of intersubjective consistency. This is precisely the basis of scientific ‘objectivity’: agreement between different observers using an agreed method of observation. This opens the door to a science of qualities with startling implications.

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The most important aspects of our lives are connected with qualities: quality of relationships, quality of education, quality of our environment, quality of life generally. We spend a great deal of time evaluating the behavior of those on whom we depend and trying to sort out whether they are happy, angry, depressed, reliable, and so on; i.e., we get a lot of practice at evaluating others’ internal states by reading their behavior. And on the whole we are pretty good at it, despite dramatic errors of judgment to which we are prone. So it isn’t all that surprising that people with no familiarity with pigs should nevertheless be very consistent at evaluating the quality of their behavior. But what is most dramatically lacking in the lives of people in ‘developed’ countries at the moment is, by general consensus, quality of life. Quantities we have in abundance—of food, technological gadgets of all kinds, cars, aircraft, information, and so on; the things that our science of measurement and quantities has been so successful at providing. But that science has degraded qualities such as beauty, love, joy, grief, and creativity to mere epiphenomenal subjectivity, regarding them as ephemeral shadows with no objective reality. We intuitively know better. But now we can actually explore this territor y systematically, scientifically, and reinvest our world with the qualities that are essential for living full lives; not just for humans but also for pigs and cows and trees and cities and landscapes and watersheds and cultures and the biosphere. With a science of qualities we can start to recover the wisdom we lost when we restricted our search for reliable knowledge to measurable quantities and cut ourselves off from the qualitative half of the world without which we and all else must perish.

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THE INT RNATIO ALIZATION OF TH T IRD CULT RE Lee Smolin Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Time Reborn The internationalization of the third culture, by which I mean the growth of a class of people who do creative work of some kind (science, arts, media, business, technology, finance, fashion, etc) who live and work in a country other than their own, are married to such a person, or both. This is not a new situation, but what is new is the extent to which the combination of inexpensive air travel, telephone the Internet and computer technologies makes living and working outside of ones native country not only easy but increasingly attractive for a growing proportion of people in these professions. This is a natural consequence of the internationalization of these areas, which has made frequent international travel, and periods of studying and working abroad the norm rather than the exception. It is made possible by the ascendancy of English as a global language and the long period in which the developed world has been more or less at peace. With the end of the cold war, the growth of democracies in Latin America and the Far East and the unification of Europe there remain few significant political obstructions to the growth in size and influence of a denationalized community of people who work in exactly those areas which are most critical for shaping the human future. This class of people shares not only a common language and a common set of tastes in food, clothing, coffee, furniture, housing, entertainment, etc, but are increasingly coming to share a common political outlook, which is far more international than those from the

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One can meet young people whose parents each speak a different language, grew up in another country, got a university education in a fourth, and now work in a fifth

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old literary cultures, based as they are each on a national language and history. It is perhaps too early to characterize this outlook, but it involves a mix of traditional social democratic and environmental concerns with an interest (or perhaps self-interest) in the links between creative work, international exchange of ideas and technologies and economic growth. Moreover, they share an interest in the conditions which make their lives possible, which are peace, stability, democracy and economic prosperity, and these are more important to them than the nationalist concerns of their native countries. It is not surprising that the daily experience of juggling different languages, identities and cultures gives these people a much more optimistic outlook concerning issues such as pluralism and multiculturalism than those from the literary cultures. Most of them feel an attachment and identification to their native culture, but they also feel alienated from the party politics and petty nationalisms of their home countries. When they move to a new country they do not immigrate in the traditional sense, rather they enter a denationalized zone in which their colleagues and neighbors come from an array of countries and the place where they happen to be is less important than the work they do. How they and their children will resolve these different loyalties is far from clear. One can meet young people whose parents each speak a different language, who grew up in a third country, did a university education in a fourth, and now work in a fifth. What the political loyalties of such people will be is impossible to predict, but it seems not impossible that the growing concentrations of such people in the areas of work that most influence public taste and economic growth may catalyze the evolution of nation states into local governments and the invention of a global political system.

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THE DISCO NECT B TWEEN W ALTH & WEL -BEING: IT’S N T THE E ONOMY David G. Myers Professor of Psychology, Hope College; author Psychology, 10th Edition Does money buy happiness? Few of us would agree. But would a little more money make us a little happier? Many of us smirk and nod. There is, we believe, some connection between fiscal fitness and emotional fulfillment. Most of us tell Gallup that, yes, we would like to be rich. Three in four entering American collegians—nearly double the 1970 proportion—now consider it “very important” or “essential” that they become “very well off financially.” Money matters. Think of it as today’s American dream: life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness. “Of course money buys happiness,” writes Andrew Tobias. Wouldn’t anyone be happier with the indulgences promised by the magazine sweepstakes: a 40 foot yacht, deluxe motor home, private housekeeper? Anyone who has seen Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous knows as much. “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it right,” proclaimed a Lexus ad. Well, are rich people happier? Researchers have found that in poor countries, such as Bangladesh, being relatively well off does make for greater well-being. We need food, rest, shelter, social contact.

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But—the underreported story in our materialistic age—in countries where nearly everyone can afford life’s necessities, increasing affluence matters surprisingly little. The correlation between income and happiness is “surprisingly weak,” observed University of Michigan researcher Ronald Inglehart in one 16 nation study of 170,000 people. Once comfortable, more money provides diminishing returns. The second piece of pie, or the second $100,000, never tastes as good as the first. Even lottery winners, those whose income is much higher than 10 years ago, and the very rich people—the Forbes’ 100 wealthiest Americans surveyed by University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener—are only slightly happier than the average American. Making it big brings temporary joy. But in the long run wealth is like health: Its utter absence can breed misery, but having doesn’t guarantee happiness. Happiness seems less a matter of getting what we want than of wanting what we have. Has our collective happiness floated upward with the rising economic tide? In 1957, when economist John Galbraith was about to describe the United States as the Affluent Society, Americans’ per person income, expressed in today’s dollars, was $8700. Today it is $20,000. Compared to 1957, we are now “the doubly affluent society”—with double what money buys. We have twice as many cars per person. We eat out two and a half times as often. Compared to the late 1950s when few Americans had dishwashers, clothes dryers, or air conditioning, most do today. So, believing that it’s very important to be very well off, are we now happier? We are not. Since 1957, the number of Americans who say they are “ver y happy” has declined from 35 to 32 percent. Meanwhile, the divorce rate has doubled, the teen suicide rate has nearly tripled, the violent crime rate has nearly quadrupled (even after the recent

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decline), and depression has mushroomed. These facts of life explode a bombshell underneath our society’s materialism: Economic growth has provided no boost to human morale. When it comes to psychological well being, it is not the economy, stupid. We know it, sort of. Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow reports that 89 percent of people say “our society is much too materialistic.” Other people are too materialistic, that is. For 84 percent also wished they had more money, and 78 percent said is was “very or fairly important” to have “a beautiful home, a new car and other nice things.”

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THE WOR D ISN’T GOI G TO HE L John Gilmore Entrepreneur disguised as a philanthropist Media sells your attention to advertisers using bad news. This makes people think the bad news is the real state of the world. Pollution is making the world a worse place, raw materials are being used up, bigger populations are overconsuming us into wretchedness, etc. They even want all of us to waste our time sorting garbage for fear that we’ll run out of barren land to put it on! The real story is that human life has gotten better and better and better over the centuries. The world used to be a very polluted place—if you count deadly infectious bacteria in the environment. Centuries of focus on clean drinking water, separating sewers from food and water supplies, medicine, and nutrition have resulted in human life span being literally doubled and tripled, first in “civilized” countries and then in “developing” countries. China has doubled life-span in this century. Everyone grows up taller and stronger than hundreds of years ago. There is much less pollution in London today than in any recorded century. There is much less pollution in the US today than in any recorded decade. There are more proven oil reserves than ever before, and in fifty years when those have been used, another fifty or sixty years’ worth will have been worth locating. There are more acres of forest in North America than a hundred years ago. (There’s a market for growing trees now, and they can be transported to where people want to buy the wood! Two hundred years ago it was more work to move wood twenty miles in carts on mud roads, than it was to take it across the Atlantic!) Resources of all types are getting cheaper and

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cheaper, as measured in decades and centuries. There is no reason to believe that these trends will change. (Remember the people like Paul Erlich who predicted world famine by 2000? They are still making predictions, but you shouldn’t believe ‘em any more, because it’s 2000 and the starving hordes aren’t here.) Prof. Julian Simon was a “liberal who got mugged”—by the facts. He started off trying to prove the environment was getting worse, but whenever he found actual historical data, it contradicted that thesis. Eventually he changed his mind and started writing books about it. Ultimate Resource 2 is his updated book about how all the resources except one of-a-kind objects are becoming less scarce, except humans. (Human attention commands higher and higher prices over the decades, a trend easily visible in the price of labor, despite there being more humans around.) The State of Humanity is a very well documented (footnoted) survey of human life, health, and the environment. It points you to actual historical data showing the real long-term trends in human longevity, health, welfare, prices of materials, acres of forest, number of species known, pollution, smoke, you name it he’s got it. Knee-jerk liberals beware! These are the kinds of books that you won’t like to read. The interior feeling of a mind stretching is uncomfortable, though the result is well worth it.

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Media sells your attention to advertisers using bad news. This makes people think the bad news is the real state of the world.

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THE IMMO TALIZ TION OF HUMA ITY Clifford Pickover Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book Trilogy The most unreported stor y deals with evolution of human lifespans and intelligence. Although we hear news reports about how humans will live longer in the future, we rarely hear reports that our children or grandchildren will be immortal by the end of the next century. Given the tremendous advances in molecular biochemistry that will take place by 2100, we will certainly uncover the molecular and cellular mysteries of aging, and therefore many humans will live forever, assuming they don’t suffer a fatal accident. I am amazed that this obvious concept is not discussed more often or taken more seriously. Of course, the ecological, economic, political, social, and religious implications will be extreme. Imagine an immortal Pope discussing the afterlife with his followers—or the growth of two social classes, those that can afford immortality and those too poor to gain access to the required anti-aging “treatment.” Similarly, most scientists and lay people seem to think that there is intelligent, space-faring life elsewhere in the universe. A related unreported story is just how special human intelligence is. Despite what we see in Star Wars and Star Trek, I don’t expect intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution on other worlds. Since the beginning of life on Earth, as many as 50 billion species have arisen, and only one of them has acquired technology. If intelligence has such has high sur vival value, why are so few creatures intelligent? Mammals are not the most successful or plentiful of animals. Ninety-five percent of all animal species are invertebrates. Most of the worm species on our planet have not even been discovered yet, and there are a billion insects wandering the Earth.

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If humankind were destroyed in some great cataclysm, in my opinion there is very little possibility that our level of intelligence would ever be achieved on Earth again. If human intelligence is an evolutionary accident, and mathematical, linguistic, artistic, and technological abilities a very improbable bonus, then there is little reason to expect that life on other worlds will ever develop intelligence that allows them to explore the stars. Both intelligence and mechanical dexterity appear to be necessary to make radio transmitting devices for communication between the stars. How likely is it that we will find a race having both traits? Very few Earth organisms have much of either. As evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has suggested, those that have acquired a little of one (smart dolphins, dexterous spiders) have acquired none of the other, and the only species to acquire a little of both (chimpanzees) has been rather unsuccessful. The most successful creatures on Earth are the dumb and clumsy rats and beetles, which both found better routes to their current dominance. If we do receive a message from the stars, it will undermine much of our current thinking about evolutionary mechanisms. Despite the improbabilities, we must continue to scan the stars for signs of intelligence. I agree with the ancient Persian proverb, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The seeker is a finder,â&#x20AC;? which suggests we must always search in order to understand our place in our universe.

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LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH Turkey Hungar y Slovak Republic Poland Mexico Czech Republic Korea Denmark United States Portugal Ireland Belgium Greece Germany Finland United Kingdom Austria Netherlands New Zealand France Nor way Canada Italy Sweden Australia Spain Iceland Japan 60

Average Life Expectancy (yrs)

SURVI AL DEPEN S ON THE RACE BETWE N ED CATION AND CATAST OPHE Leon M. Lederman Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory A greatly underrated crisis looming over us was predicted by the futurist H. G. Wells. In about 1922 he commented that survival would depend on the race between education and catastrophe. The justification for this profound foresight can be seen in the incredible violence of this century we have survived, and the newfound capacity of mankind to obliterate the planet. Today, although political rhetoric extols education, the educational system we have cleverly devised and which is in part a product of the wisdom of our founding fathers defies reform. It is a system incapable of learning from either our successes or our failures. How many parents and policy makers know that the system for teaching science in 99% of our high schools was installed over 100 years ago? A National Committee of Ten in 1893 chaired by a Harvard President recommended that high school children be instructed in science in the sequence Biology, then Chemistry, and then Physics. The logic was not wholly alphabetical since Physics was thought to require a more thorough grounding in mathematics. Then came the 20th century, the most scientifically productive century in the history of mankind. Revolutions in all these and other disciplines have changed the fundamental

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concepts and have created a kind of hierarchy of sciences; the discover y of the atom, quantum mechanics, nuclear sciences, molecular structures, quantum chemistry, earth sciences and astrophysics, cellular structures and DNA. To all of this, the high school system was unmoved. These events and pleas to high school authorities from scientists and knowledgeable teachers went unheeded. The system defies change. We still teach the disciplines as unconnected subjects with ninth grade biology as a chore of memorizing more new words than 9th and 10th grade French together! This is only one dramatic example of the resistance of the system to change. Our well-documented failure in science education is matched by failures in geography, histor y, literature and so forth. “So what?” critics say. “Look at our booming economy. If we can do so well economically, our educational system can’t be all that important.” Here is where appeal to H. G. Wells’ insightful vision enters. The trend lines of our work force are ominous. Increasing numbers of our citizens are cut-off from access to technological components of societ y, are alienated and are condemned to scientific and technological illiteracy. We have by the process, solidified and increased the gap between the two classes of our culture. And the formative elements of culture outside of school: TV, cinema, and radio . . . strongly encourage this partition. Look at the social (as well as economic) status of teachers. Most parents want the best teachers for their children, but would bridle at the suggestion that their children become teachers.

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You do not have to be a rocket scientist to construct catastrophes out of a failed educational system.

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The penalties of continuing to graduate cultural illiterates (in science and the humanities) may not be evident in year 2000 Wall Street, but it is troubling the leaders of our economic success, the CEO’s of major corporations who see a grim future in our workforce. Can we continue to import educated workers? As the low-level service jobs continue to give way to robots and computers, the needs are increasingly for workers who have high level reasoning skills, which a proper education can supply to the vast majority of students. But what is it that threatens “catastrophe” in the 21st century? Aside from the dark implication of a hardening two-class system, there is a world around us that provides global challenges to society and solutions require large popular consensus. Global climate change, population stabilization, the need for research to understand ourselves and our world, the need for extensive educational reform, support for the arts, preservation of natural resources, clean air and water, clean streets and city beautification, preservation of our wilderness areas and our biodiversity–these and other elements make life worth living, and cannot sensibly be confined to enclaves of the rich. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to construct catastrophes out of a failed educational system.

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THE ER SION OF TRADITIO AL Ellis Rubinstein Chief Executive Officer of the New York Academy of Sciences. I believe the world to be experiencing an unprecedented erosion of traditional “divides”. Yes, we can all point to examples of horrific ideological conflict, but such tribalism surely seems anachronistic to most of us. And that is because many of us have grown accustomed in the latter decades of the 20th century to a kind of social enlightenment that stems from urbanization, globalization, and the sharing of common information disseminated by our extraordinary new communication tools. Now, it may seem obvious that nationalism and political and religious ideologies are having an increasingly hard time remaining “pure” in the face of increased face-to-face contact with those who see things differently from us. Moreover, we cannot easily cling to our most formative views when we increasingly find ourselves in conversation via phone and e-mail with others who see the world differently from us. And, finally, it must be ever more difficult to remain isolated in our views of others when we are surrounded by images of them—often touching images—on film and television. Still, all this may have been discussed somewhat in various media. What especially intrigues me is the apparent erosion among relatively educated families of a different “cultural divide”: the generational divide. What are the drivers of this shift? And what are its effects?

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In my necessarily limited experience, I have obser ved that parents and children are increasingly “friends”. It has been much noted that the Baby Boom generation and their children share many of the same interests in music. At formal events—I think of my recent experience in Sweden attending the Nobel festivities—teenagers and 20-somethings happily mingled with their elders who, if they were male, were dressed in cut-aways. Indeed, some of the young people were wearing special costumes in order to play roles in this highly traditional event. In my time, we would have seriously considered committing suicide before putting on costumes provided by our elders, then attending hours of events populated largely by our parents and grandparents, and finally dancing to “retro” music in the closest imaginable proximity to our parents and even grandparents. I conclude from this and similar experiences that as this new millennium begins, a sort of truce has taken place between generations, with parents and children attempting to bridge divides that, in my view, ought naturally to exist between them. If I am correct about this, then surely there are major ramifications on our culture...and I’m not at all sure they would only be for the good. I worry, for example, that some needed element of rebelliousness is being “bred out” of the system of growing up. I worry that this may have an effect on creative thought. And I worry that the potential lack of tension between generations might lead to a kind of stagnation in the arts, humanities and sciences. Am I alone in this concern? I personally haven’t seen this topic addressed in the all too limited spectrum of publications I can personally scan. So maybe others have publicly shared this concern. If not, however, I vote for this as one of the most important underreported stories of our time.

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The much-touted reduction since 1993 in American crime is an illusion. The U.S. rate of violent crime today is still nearly four times what it was in 1960.

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THE REDUC ION SINCE 1993 IN AM RICAN C IME IS AN IL USION David Lykken Behavioral geneticist; Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota. The much-touted reduction since 1993 in American crime is an illusion. The U.S. rate of violent crime today is still nearly four times what it was in 1960. The recent dip in crime is the predictable result of our segregating in our prisons more than six times the number who were inmates as recently as 1975. A few of these inmates are psychopaths, persons whose genetic temperaments made them too difficult for the average parents to successfully socialize. A few others are mentally ill or retarded or sheer victims of circumstance. But most are sociopaths, persons broadly normal in genetic endowment who matured unsocialized due to parental mis-, mal-, or non-feasance. Like our language talent, humans evolved an ability to acquire a conscience, to feel empathy and altruism, to accept the responsibilities of a member of the social group. But, like the language talent, this proclivity for socialization requires to be elicited, shaped, and reinforced during childhood. The epidemic of crime that began in the 1960s is due largely to the fact that, of males aged 15 to 24, the group responsible for at least half our violent crime, the proportion who were reared without fathers is now four times what it was in 1960. More than two-thirds ofâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;abused children, juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, pregnant teen-ager s, homeless per sons, adult cr iminal sâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;were reared w ithout the participation of their biological fathers. Calculated separately for white and black youngsters, it can be shown that a fatherless boy is seven times more likely to become

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incarcerated as delinquent than a boy raised by both biological parents. Judith Rich Harris argues that parents are fungible, that children are shaped mainly by their genes and their peers. I think she is 80% correct but I think that there are a few super-parents who effectively nurture and cultivate their children (and largely determine their choice of peers). And I am certain that the bottom 10% of parents are truly malignant—immature, or overburdened, or indifferent, or sociopathic themselves—so that their children are almost certain to be robbed of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Suppose we were to require those who wish to have—and keep—a baby must be mature, married, self-supporting, and never convicted of a crime of violence. If the parents of the 1.3 million Americans currently in prison had met such simple licensure requirements, I believe that at least a million of those inmates would instead be tax-paying citizens and neighbors. Interfering with parental rights, even as modestly as this, is rather frightening because the instinct to procreate is as strong in us as it is in all the birds and beasts. But homo sapiens should be able to agree that the rights of the children outweigh those of parents who are unable or unwilling to grow up, get married, and get a job.

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THE IMMINE T PARADI M S IFT IN UND RSTAN ING THE C NSCIOUS MIND Stuart Hameroff Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona Today’s most important unreported stor y is an imminent paradigm shift in the understanding of consciousness. Quantum computation will soon replace our familiar classical computation as primary metaphor for the brain/mind. The purported brain=mind=computer analogy promising robot/computer superiority human/machine hybridization, from classical computers, is a myth promulgated by the “silicon-industrial complex.“ Quantum computation was proposed in the 1980’s by Feynmann, Benioff, Deutsch and others to take advantage of the mysterious but well documented quantum phenomena of 1) superposition (particles existing in multiple states or locations simultaneously) and 2) entanglement (instantaneous, non-local communication among quantum states). Whereas classical computers represent information digitally as “bits” of either 1 OR 0, quantum computation utilizes “qubits” in which information exists in quantum superposition of both 1 AND 0. While in superposition, multiple entangled qubits may interact nonlocally, resulting in computation of near-infinite massive parallelism.

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It seems almost inevitable that quantum computation will have an enormous impact on information technology.

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In 1994 Peter Shor of Bell Labs proved that quantum computers (if they are able to be built) could factor large numbers into their primes (the key to modern cr yptography, banking codes etc) with unprecedented efficiency, rendering conventional systems obsolete. Shor’s work sparked major funding in the general area of quantum information (quantum computation, quantum cr yptography, quantum teleportation). An apparent roadblock to quantum computation—the problem of decoherence by environmental interactions—was potentially solved in the mid 1990’s by groups who developed quantum error correction codes which can detect and repair decoherence before quantum computation is destroyed. In the past several years numerous quantum computational prototypes have been developed, and various technologies for full blown, large scale quantum computers are being explored. It seems almost inevitable that quantum computation will have an enormous impact on information technology. The brain/mind has traditionally been compared to contemporary vanguards of information processing (dating from the Greeks’ “seal ring in wax” as a metaphor for memory, to the telephone switching circuit, to the hologram, to the modern day classical computer in which consciousness “emerges” from complex computation among simple neurons). As quantum computation comes to the forefront of technology, human nature (and ego) will surely resist the notion that technology bears superior intellect, and search for quantum computation in the brain.

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There are cogent reasons for believing that quantum computation does indeed operate in the brain, and such suggestions have been made by theorists including Sir John Eccles and Sir Roger Penrose. However critics quickly point out that the warm, wet, noisy brain must be inhospitable to delicate quantum effects which (in the case of superconductors, Bose-Einstein condensates etc) seem to require complete isolation and temperatures near absolute zero to prevent decoherence. On the other hand “quantum-mind” advocates suggest that biological quantum coherence is metabolically “pumped”, point to several lines of evidence suggesting that biological evolution has solved the decoherence problem, observe that only quantum computation can solve the enigmatic features of consciousness, and propose testable predictions of quantum-mind theories (on the contrary, experimental predictions regarding classical computational emergence of consciousness have not been put forth). The implication, and potential theme for the next century, is that we are not strictly emergent products of higher order complexity, but creatures connected to the basic level of the universe.

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T ERE ARE NO T INGS Piet Hut Professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton That’s right. No thing exists, there are only actions. We live in a world of verbs, and nouns are only shorthand for those verbs whose actions are sufficiently stationary to show some thing-like behavior. These statements may seem like philosophy or poetry, but in fact they are an accurate description of the material world, when we take into account the quantum nature of reality. Future historians will be puzzled by the fact that this interpretation has not been generally accepted, 75 years after the discovery of quantum mechanics. Most physics text books still describe the quantum world in largely classical terms. Consequently anything quantum seems riddled with paradoxes and weird behavior. One generally talks about the “state” of a particle, such as an electron, as if it really had an independent thing-like existence, as in classical mechanics. For example, the term `state vector’ is used, even though its operational properties belie almost anything we normally associate with a state. Two voices have recently stressed this verb-like character of reality, those of David Finkelstein, in his book Quantum Relativity, and of David Mermin, in his article, “What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us” [1998, Amer. J. of Phys. 66, 753]. In the words of the second David, “Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not.” In other words, matter acts, but there are no actors behind the actions; the verbs are verbing

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all by themselves without a need to introduce nouns. Actions act upon other actions. The ontology of the world thus becomes remarkably simple, with no duality between the existence of a thing and its properties: properties are all there is. Indeed: there are no things. Two hundred years ago, William Blake scolded the physicists for their cold and limited view of the world, in terms of a clockwork mechanism, in which there was no room for spontaneity and wonder. Fortunately, physicists did not listen to the poet, and pushed on with their program. But to their own utter surprise, they realized with the discovery of quantum mechanics that nature exhibits a deeply fundamental form of spontaneity, undreamt of in classical physics. An understanding of matter as dissolving into a play of interactions, partly spontaneous, would certainly have pleased Blake. What will be next? While physics may still seem to lack a fundamental way of touching upon meaning and wonder, who is to say that those will remain forever outside the domain of physics? We simply do not know and cannot know what physics will look like, a mere few hundred years from now. There is an analogy with computer languages. Physicists have a traditional aversion to learning any other language than Fortran, with which they grow up, no matter how useful the other languages may be. But without ever parting from their beloved Fortran, it was Fortran that changed out from under them, incorporating many of the features that the other languages had pioneered. So, when asked how future physicists will program, a good answer is: we have not the foggiest idea, but whatever it is, it will still be called Fortran. Similarly, our understanding of the material world, including the very notion of what matter and existence is, is likely to keep changing radically over the next few hundred years. In what direction, we have no idea. The only thing we can safely predict is that the study of those wonderful new aspects of reality will still be called physics.

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STORI S ABO T COMP EX SCI NTIFIC C NTROV RSIES ARE OFT N MIS-REPORT D BY THE MEDIA Stephen Schneider Climatologist and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences And since policy making to deal with such controversies calls for value judgments, and that in turn requires a scientifically literate public to telegraph their value preferences to leaders, miscommunication of the nature of scientific controversy has serious implications for democracy in a world of exploding complexity. In political reporting, it is both common and appropriate to “get the other side”: if the Democrat gives a speech, the Republican gets comparable time/inches/prominence. This doctrine of “balance”—which is still taught proudly in journalism schools in the U.S.—is supposed to underlie the journalistic independence of the Fourth Estate. [And let’s not forget that conflict packaged in sound bite-sized chunks garners higher ratings than more circumspect reporting.] But while journalists rightly defend the need for balance in truly bipolar stories, how many scientific controversies are really two-sided? More likely, there will be several competing paradigms and a half a dozen marginal ideas kicking around scientific controversies. And when the issues have high-stakes political winners and losers—like the global warming topic I work in—it is to be expected that various special interests will compete for their spin. We’ve all seen media filled with the views of environmental catastrophists, technological cornucopians, ideological opponents of collective controls on

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entrepreneurial activities, or denial from industrial producers of products that pollute— to name the usual prime players. And each often has their hired or favored PhDs handy with ready explanations and slick sound bites—e.g., why carbon dioxide buildup in the air will be either catastrophic or good for you. Unfortunately, here is where a serious—and largely unreported by the very people who bring us this daily show—disjuncture occurs. For example, in the name of “balance”, a 200-scientist, two-years-in-the-making refereed scientific assessment gets comparable space or airtime to a handful of “contrarian” scientists saying it “ain’t so”. When I challenge this equal time reporting to my media colleagues, they accuse me of being against “balance”. This parade of dueling scientists isn’t remotely “balance” I respond, but rather, utter distortion—unless the journalist also reports the relative credibility of each quoted position. I call the latter doctrine “perspective”—as opposed to the “balance” that journalists label. In science all opinions are decidedly not equal, and we spend the bulk of our effor t winnowing the less from the more probable lines of inquir y. Moreover, when we are assessors, we are obligated to report whether our estimates of the likelihood of some set of hypothesized outcomes are based on objective rather than subjective odds. I don’t have space to get into the “frequentist” versus “Bayesian” debate over what is ever “objective”, but awareness of the issue is also part of what scientific literacy entails—even for scientists. Nevertheless, I do agree it would be irresponsible not to cover minority opinions in media accounts of complex controversies. My concern comes when contradictor y scientific

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opinions are offered without any attempt to report the relative credibility of these views. Then, the public—and political leaders too for the most part—are left to do that difficult assessment job themselves. More often than not the “dueling scientists” get equal time in the story, confusion sets in and outlier opinions win equal status at the bar of public opinion with more widely accepted views. Of course, as Kuhn has taught us, once in a while someone comes along to overthrow the mainstream doctrine—but we celebrate these paradigm busters primarily because they are rare, not commonplace. One well-known editor argued with me that to report scientific credibility “calls for a judgment on the part of the journalist, and that most reporters lack specialized qualifications to do that”. “Without making judgments how can they choose what to report and who to quote”, I responded? “Why don’t you get someone from the Flat Earth Society to ‘balance’ every space shot you cover—isn’t that a ‘judgment’ about their lack of credibility”? Of course, they could hire such specialists, but only a few major media outlets do—and those reporters are decidedly not at the top of the respect hierarchy in corporate media. Science must always examine and test dissent, even if it takes a long time to reduce some uncertainties. But science policy needs to know where the mainstream is at the moment. My mantra to those seeking scientific literacy in order to address the implications of the debate is to remember to ask all competing claimants of scientific “truth” three questions: 1), “What can happen?”, 2), “What are the odds?”, and 3) “How do you know?” And if you intend to ask the third question, plan to have a pen and paper along and be willing to check references, for question 3) isn’t a sound bite-length inquiry. In summary, most stories turn the doctrine of balance on its head by applying it too literally to complex, multi-faceted scientific debates. Then, the unreported story becomes that there actually are different probabilities that belong to each of the various positions covered, yet these conflicting positions appear in the story to be equally likely.

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Science must always examine and test dissent, even if it takes a long time to reduce some uncertainties.

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THE L SS OF OUR SPECI Sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; BI GRAP Y Steven Pinker Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University Just as we are beginning to appreciate the importance of our prehistoric and evolutionary roots to understanding the human condition, precious and irreplaceable information about them is in danger of being lost forever: 1. Languages. The 6,000 languages spoken on the planet hold information about prehistoric expansions and migrations, about universal constraints and learnable variation in the human language faculty, and about the art, social system, and knowledge of the people who speak it. Between 50% and 90% of those languages are expected to vanish in this century (because of cultural assimilation), most before they have been systematically studied. 2. Hunter-gatherers. Large-scale agriculture, cities, and other aspects of what we call â&#x20AC;&#x153;civilizationâ&#x20AC;? are recent inventions (< 10,000 years old), too young to have exerted significant evolutionary change on the human genome, and have led to cataclysmic changes in the human lifestyle. The best information about the ecological and social lifestyle to which our minds and bodies are biologically adapted lies in the few remaining foraging or hunting and gathering peoples. These peoples are now assimilating, being absorbed, being pushed off their lands, or dying of disease.

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3. Genome diversity. The past decade has provided an unprecedented glimpse of recent human evolutionary history from analyses of diversity in mitochondrial and genomic DNA across aboriginal peoples. As aboriginal people increasingly intermarr y with larger groups, this information is being lost (especially with the recent discovery that mitochondrial DNA , long thought to be inherited only along the female line, in fact shows signs of recombination). 4. Fossils. Vast stretches of human prehistory must be inferred from a small number of precious hominid fossils. The fossils arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t going anywhere, but political instability in east Africa closes down crucial areas of exploration, and because of a lack of resources existing sites are sometimes inadequately protected from erosion and vandalism. 5. Great apes in the wild. Information about the behavior of our closest living relatives, the bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, requires many years of intensive observation in inaccessible locations, but these animals and their habitats are rapidly being destroyed. What these five areas of research have in common, aside from being precious and endangered, is that they require enormous dedication from individual researchers, they are underfunded (often running on a shoestring from private foundations), and have low prestige within their respective fields. A relatively small reallocation of priorities (either by expanding the pie or by diverting resources from juggernauts such as neuroscience and molecular biology, whose subject matter will still be around in ten years) could have an immeasurable payoff in our understanding of ourselves. How will we explain to students in 2020 that we permanently frittered away the opportunity to write our speciesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; biography?

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A relatively small reallocation of priorities could have an immeasurable payoff in our understanding of ourselves.

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THE EM RGENCE OF AN INT GRATED HUMAN-EAR H ORGANI M Richard Potts Director of The Human Origins Program Several under-reported stories come to mind. Almost all powerful stories concern human beings in some way or another, metaphorically or directly. One result of globalization, let’s call it cultural unity, is a story of such power. I’ll mention only one facet of this story. Over the past 50,000 years, the vast diversification of human culture, the creation of quasi distinct cultures, the plural stands as a peculiarity of Homo sapiens (relative to earlier humans and other organisms). Human life has divided into diverse languages and ways of organizing kin, technologies, economies, even mating and demographic systems. It’s a process that reflects our ken for doing things differently from the people in the next valley. Globalization may mean the dissolving (all too gradually) of tribal mentality. But there’s more to it. The related extinction of languages, loss of local cultural information, and decay of cultur al bar r ier s, all point tow ard an eventual homogenization of behavior that hasn’t existed at such a scale (across all humans) since the Paleolithic prior to 50,000 years ago, or even much earlier. The result: the loss of alternative adaptive strategies and behavioral options, which have been rather important in the histor y of human adaptability. That’s pretty big.

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In seeking a truly unreported story, though, it’s wise to think a little further out, to make an unexpected prediction. How can that be done? “Unexpected prediction” seems contradictory. Well, the history of life is full of curious experiments, and careful study lets one fathom its rash opportunism and rises and erasures of biotic complexity. The histor y offers hints. An intriguing case is the evolution of the complex cell, the basis of all eukaryotic life, including multicellular organisms. The cell, with its nucleus, mitochrondria, centrioles, and other components, represents an ecosystem of earlier organisms. The cell emerged evidently by symbiosis of a few early organisms brought together in a single, coordinated system. It’s complex internally, but it evolved by simplifying, by gleaning from the surrounding ecosystem. Each of us carries around about a hundred trillion of these simplified early ecosystems, which are coordinated at even higher levels of organization ? tissues, organ systems, the individual. The big unreported story that I fancy is a latter-day parallel to this fateful development in life’s history. Human alteration of ecosystems presents the parallel ? a sweeping simplification of a previously diverse biotic system. Homo sapiens has slashed, culled, and gleaned. It has forged symbiotic relationships with a few other species (domesticates) that help fuel its metabolism (economic functions) as humans enhance the replication of those few at other species’ expense. While these observations are somewhat familiar, the unreported part is this: The global reach of this process threatens/promises to create a single extended organism. The superorganism continues to alter the planet and promises to touch virtually every place on the third rock from the sun. Will this strange organism eventually harness the intricate linkages of ocean, atmosphere, land, and deep Ear th? Will it seize control over the

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circulation of heat, moisture, energy, and materials that are the core operations of the planet? Hard to say without a crystal ball. At its current trajectory, the process seems destined to turn the planet into a cell, highly complex in its own right but evolved by vast simplification of its original setting. Certainly a different Gaia than is usually envisioned. If this stor y has any validity, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting that the initial loss of cultural alternatives, due to globalization, roughly coincides with the emergence of this incipient planetary organism. What I suggest here is the onset of a Bizarre New World, not an especially brave one. It might take more braver y to conser ve Earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biological diversity and diverse ways of being human, salvaging species and cultures from oblivion in a globalized world. Then again...this may already be old fashioned sentiment. Any important story, even as complicated as this one, needs a headline: Human-Earth Organism Evolves. Will It Survive? What Will It Become?

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AMERICA’S D SCENT INTO C MPUTER-AID D UNC NSCIOUSNE S & C NSUMER FA CISM Douglas Rushkoff Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Present Shock We have taught our machines to conduct propaganda. Web sites and other media are designed to be “sticky,” using any means necessary to maintain our attention. Computers are programmed to stimulate Pavlovian responses from human beings, using techniques like one-to-one marketing, collaborative filtering, and hypnotic information architecture. Computers then record our responses in order to refine these techniques, automatically and without the need for human intervention. The only metrics used to measure the success of banner ads and web sites is the amount of economic activity—consumption and production—they are able to stimulate in their human user/subjects. As a result, the future content and structure of media will be designed by machines with no priority other than to induce spending. It amounts to a closed feedback loop between us and our computers, where—after their initial programming—the machines take the active role and human beings behave automatically. Programs adjust themselves in real time, based on their moment to moment success in generating the proper, mindless responses from us. In fact, computers and software are already charged with the design of their own successors. They are encouraged to evolve, while we are encouraged to devolve into impulsive, thoughtless passivity.

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H W WILL THE INT RNET INFLU NCE D MOCRACY? Howard Rheingold Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs The way we learn to use the Internet in the next few years (or fail to learn) will influence the way our grandchildren govern themselves. Yet only a tiny fraction of the news stories about the impact of the Net focus attention on the ways many to-many communication technology might be changing democracyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and those few stories that are published center on how traditional political parties are using the Web, not on how grassroots movements might be finding a voice. Democracy is not just about voting for our leaders. Democracy is about citizens who have the information and freedom of communication the need to govern themselves. Although it would be illogical to say that the printing press created modern democratic nation-states, it would have been impossible to conceive, foment, or implement self-government without the widespread literacy made possible by printing technology. The more we know about the kind of literacy citizens are granted by the Internet, the better our chances of using that literacy to strengthen democracy. And what could be more important? What good is health and wealth and great personal home entertainment media without liberty? Every communication technology alters governance and political processes. Candidates and issues are packaged and sold on television by the very same professionals who package and sell other commodities. In the age of mass media, the amount of money a candidate can spend on television advertising is the single most important influence on

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the electoral success. Now that the Internet has transformed every desktop into a printing press, broadcasting station, and place of assembly, will enough people learn to make use of this potential? Or will our lack of news, information, and understanding of the Net as a political tool prove insufficient against the centralization of capital, power, and knowledge that modern media also make possible? The same tool that affords tremendous power to the grassroots, the broad citizenry, the cacophony of competing “factions” necessary for healthy democracy, also affords tremendous power to the elites who already have wealth and power. Guess who can best afford to apply the tool to further their ends? What’s in it for big media interests to inform us about how we can compete with big media interests? The political power afforded to citizens by the Web is not a technology issue. Technology makes a great democratization of publishing, journalism, public discourse possible, but does not determine whether or not that potential will be realized. Every computer connected to the Net can publish a manifesto, broadcast audio and video eyewitness reports of events in real time, host a virtual community where people argue about those manifestos and broadcasts. Will only the cranks, the enthusiasts, the fringe groups take advantage of this communication platform? Or will many-to-many communication skills become a broader literacy, the way knowing and arguing about the issues of the day in print was the literacy necessary for the American revolution? The “public sphere” is what the German political philosopher Habermas called that part of public life where ordinary people exchange information and opinions regarding potholes on main street and national elections, school bonds and foreign policy. Habermas claimed

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Imagine what might happen if more people were told that the Web could help them remain free, and enhance their shopping experience?

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that the democratic revolutions of the 18th century were incubated in the coffee houses and committees of correspondence, informed by the pamphlets and newspaper debates where citizens argued about how to govern themselves without a King. Public governance could only emerge from public opinion. Habermas wrote: “By “public sphere,” we mean first of all a domain in our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed.” The public sphere is the reason why the modern coup d’etat requires paratroopers to capture television broadcast stations—because those are the places where the power to influence public opinion is concentrated. The problem with the public sphere during the past sixty years of broadcast communications has been that a small number of people have wielded communication technology to mold the public opinion of entire populations. The means of creating and distributing the kind of media content that could influence public opinion—magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations—were too expensive for any but a few. Just as books were once too expensive for any but a few. The PC and the Internet changed that. Desktop video, desktop radio, desktop debates, digicam journalism, drastically reduced the barriers to publishing and broadcasting. These technological capabilities have emerged only recently, and are evolving rapidly. While much attention is focused on how many-to-many audio technology is threatening the existing music industry, little attention is focused on political portals. While all eyes are on e-commerce, relatively few know about public opinion BBS s, cause-related marketing, web-accessible voting and finance data.

Look at VoxCap, and the Minnesota E-Democracy Project, project, the California Voter’s foundation, and scores of other unreported experiments. Imagine what might happen if more people were told that the Web could help them remain free, and enhance their shopping experience?

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THE INF RMATION REV LUTION REQ IRES A MATCHING ED CATION REV LUTION Robert Hormats Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International Today’s most important unreported story is that for many millions of people in the industrialized and developing countries education and training are not keeping up with the information technology revolution. As the world enters the 21st century we need more robust educational education and training, benchmarking to ensure that educational systems provide the skills needed for this new era and resource commitments that recognize that educational investments are critical to economic prosperity and social stability in this new century. If the benefits of the information technology revolution are to be broadly shared, and its economic potential fully realized, a far greater effor t is required during and after school years to enable larger numbers of people to utilize and benefit from new information technologies. Failure to do this will widen the digital divide and the income gap within and among nations, sowing seeds of social unrest and political instability. It also will deprive our economies of the talents of many people who could make enormous contributions to science, medicine, business, the arts and many other fields of endeavor were they able to realize their full educational and professional potential. The goal of our societies should be not only to be sure schools and homes are wired and online—itself a critical infrastructure challenge—but to provide education and training programs so that larger and larger numbers of people at all income levels can use these new technologies to learn and create during their school years and throughout their lives.

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For the US, whose population is steadily aging, this means ensuring that older citizens have greater training in the use of these new technologies. And it means that younger Americans, especially minorities who will become an increasingly significant portion of the 21st century workforce, have far greater education and training in the use of information technologies than many do now. The better trained they are the better position they will be in to contribute productively to the US economyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;empowered by these new technologies. In the emerging economies, IT education is an important part of their evolution into dynamic participants in the global information economy, attracting more and more investment based not only on low labor costs or large domestic markets but also on their innovativeness and ability to adapt to a world where more and more high quality jobs are knowledge based. In much of Asia the financial crisis received so much attention that much of the world paid little attention to the dynamic changes in the information technology sector taking place in the region; impressive as that is, it can be even more impressive as greater investment in human capital expands the number of information / technology savvy citizens in these countries and thus broadens the base of high-tech prosperity. In the least developed economies, IT education should be a top priority. It is greatly in the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interest that they be able to achieve their full economic potential. A substantial amount of international support from the private sector and governments will be needed. This can both prevent these nations from falling further behind and unlock the innovative potential of their peoples. An education revolution in industrialized, emerging and developing nations is needed to keep up with and realize the full potential of the information technology revolution. We should not become so enamored of technology that we ignore the human dimension that is so critical to its success and to the social progress that these technologies have the potential to accelerate.

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An education revolution in industrialized and developing nations is needed to keep up with, and realize, the full potential of the information technology revolution.

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AP ROPRIATI N OF THE INT RNET AS AN EF ECTIVE AND P WERFUL TOOL OF L RGE SCALE GLOB L S CIAL PROTE T Phil Leggiere Free-lance journalist Buried beneath the blitz of news coverage of the rise of e-commerce and the emergence of the World Wide Web as a new focal point of consumerism (the most ubiquitous stories of the moment) is a potentially just as significant, still unreported, story: the appropriation of the Internet as an effective and powerful tool of large scale global social protest. Most major mainstream broadcast and cable news coverage and commentary rather jadedly treated the WTO protests in Seattle last month as a fluke, a nostalgic hippie flashback. Their cynicism reflects not only the binders of their Beltway mindsets, but the bias of their own, now challenged, media formats. For most of the past forty years, since broadcast television emerged in about 1960 as the primary deliverer (and definer) of news, political activism evolved in a kind of dependent relationship (which superficially some took to be a symbiotic one) to television. Intuitively, sometimes by instinct, sometimes, as students of McLuhan, quite consciously, activists of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, attuned to the persuasive power of the mediated image, learned to cast and craft their political protests at least in part as media politics. Grass roots organizing remained, as always, the essential underpinning of a viable social movement, but angling for a dramatic visually intense slot on the nightly news

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In the next few years we may witness the blossoming of the first era of mass global populist cyber-protest.

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(what Abbie Hoffman called “Becoming an Advertisement for the Revolution” or “Media Freaking”) became a primary tactic, if not full fledged strategy. The power relationship, however, was always ultimately one-sided. Those who lived by the televised image, could be easily squashed by the image gatekeepers, canceled like a burnt-out sit-com or cops-and-robbers show once their novelty effect ebbed. And when “The Whole World” was no longer watching, communication was pretty easily squelched. What the WTO protests represent, far from Luddite know-nothing-ism (despite the handful of brick throwing John Zerzan/Theodore Kaczynski “anarchy-primitivists” whom broadcast T V reflexively and inevitably locked-in on as the T V stars of the event) is the first social protest movement created largely through and communicating largely via the Web. Which is to say the first, potentially at least, able to by-pass the gatekeepers of mainstream media while reaching hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of participants/ observers/ sympathizers and others, globally on an ongoing basis. This suggests that the populist cyberpunk roots of Net BBS’s are surviving and even flourishing alongside the corporate branding the Web is undergoing. With due apologies to the great writer Bruce Sterling (who advises us to retire cyber prefixes once and for all), I can’t help thinking that, despite the apparent easy triumph of cyber-commercialization (the Web as global strip-mall), the next few years may also witness the blossoming of the first era of mass global populist cyber-protest.

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THE Q IET RESURG NCE OF PSYC EDELIC C MPOUNDS AS INSTRUM NTS OF BOTH SPIRIT AL AND SCI NTIFIC EXPLOR TION John Horgan Science writings program at the Stevens Institute of Technology The story that has gripped me lately is the quiet resurgence of psychedelic compounds as instruments of both spiritual and scientific exploration. This trend is unfolding worldwide. I just attended a conference in Switzerland at which scholars presented findings on the physiological and psychological effects of drugs such as psilocybin, L SD and MDMA (Ecstacy). At the meeting, I met an American chemist who had synthesized a new compound that seems to induce transcendent experiences as reliably as LSD does but with a greatly reduced risk of bad trips; a Russian psychiatrist who for more than 15 years has successfully treated alcoholics with the hallucinogen ketamine; and a German anthropologist who touts the spiritual benefits of a potent Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Long a staple of Indian shamans, ayahuasca now serves as a sacrament for two fast-growing churches in Brazil. Offshoots of these churches are springing up in the U.S. and Europe. Several non-profit groups in the U.S. are attempting to rehabilitate the image of psychedelic drugs through public education and by supporting research on the drugsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; clinical and therapeutic potential. They include the Heffter Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Multidisciplinar y Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS , based in Florida. The question is, will this new psychedelic movement founder, as its predecessor did in the 1960â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s? Or will it bring about the profound spiritual and social changes that has been envisioned by the advocates?

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ANNUAL NUMBER OF NEW USERS OF ECSTASY & LSD 2000

Number of New Users

1500

1000

500

0 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

Ecstasy LSD

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PE PLE ARE M RPHING INTO MACHINES Rodney A. Brooks Roboticist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) , MIT; Founder, Chairman & CTO, Heartland Robotics, Inc.; Author, Flesh and Machines Since I work in building autonomous humanoid robots reporters always ask me what will happen when the robots get really smart. Will they decide that we (us, people) are useless and stupid and take over the world from us? I have recently come to realize that this will never happen. Because there won’t be any of us (people) for them (pure robots) to take over from. Barring an asteroid size thwack that knocks humans back into pre-technological society, humankind has embarked on a journey of technological manipulation of our bodies. The first few decades of the new millennium will be a moral battleground as we question, reject, and accept these innovations. Different cultures will accept them at different rates (e.g., organ transplantation is currently routine in the United States, but unacceptable in Japan), but our ultimate nature will lead to wide spread adoption. And just what are these technologies? Already there are thousands of people walking around with cochlea implants, enabling the formerly deaf to hear again—these implants include direct electronic to neural connections. Human trials have started with retina chips being inserted in blind people’s eyes (for certain classes of blindness, such as macular degeneration), enabling simple perceptions. Recently I was confronted with a researcher in our lab, a double leg amputee, stepping off the elevator that I was waiting

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for—from the knees up he was all human, from the knees down he was robot, and prototype robot at that—metal shafts, joints full of magneto-restrictive fluids, single board computers, batteries, connectors, and wire harnesses flopping everywhere; not a hint of antiseptic packaging—it was all hanging out for all to see. Many other researchers are placing chips in animal, and sometimes human, flesh and letting neurons grow and connect to them. The direct neural interface between man and machine is starting to happen. At the same time surger y is becoming more acceptable for all sorts of body modifications—I worry that I am missing the boat carrying these heavy glasses around on my nose when everyone else is going down to the mall and having direct laser surgery on their eyes to correct their vision. And at the same time cellular level manipulation of our bodies is becoming real through genetic therapies. Right now we ban Olympic athletes who have used steroids. Fairly soon we may have to start banning kids with neural Internet connection implants from having them switched on while taking the SATs. Not long after that it may be virtually mandatory to have one in order to have a chance taking the new ISATs (Internet SATs). We will become a merger between flesh and machines, and we (the robot-people) will be a step ahead of them (the pure robots). We won’t have to worry about them taking over.

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THE END OF M NEY Thomas Petzinger Editor, Reporter No one, least of all in the press—least of all in the business press—has seen the beginnings of what may be the greatest revolution in the history of commerce: the end of money, and with it the concept of the customer. Until there was money, there was no such thing as a customer. It wasn’t swapping tools for fish that turned a Polynesian islander from a trader into a customer. That’s simply barter. The idea of “buyer” and “seller” emerged only when one party swapped something with a fixed use for something fungible. Often, the money received by the seller had a modest utilitarian purpose; gold, for instance, could be hammered into nose rings, false teeth or satellite solar arrays. But money became the foundation of economic life precisely because it had symbolic more than practical value. Then God gave us lawyers and accountants to prevent underweighing and overcharging, to make sure that every exchange of tangible things for intangible money was perfectly balanced, perfectly reciprocal. But this is a conceit of economists, accountants and lawyers, as everyday commercial life reveals. Because it can be turned into anything, money represents dreams unfulfilled, and unrequited dreams, at any price, are worth more than dreams realized. We all realize this intuitively. A buyer asks a seller to give up a mere thing; a seller asks a buyer to give up hopes and possibilities. For the same reason, it’s more costly for sellers to recruit buyers than for buyers to recruit sellers: Sellers can exchange their stuff for only one thing (money), while buyers can exchange their money for

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anything. That’s why, in the real world of purportedly balanced transactions, sellers invariably defer to buyers—why we say, “the customer is king,” and, “The customer is always right.” But let’s say it’s 2000 and you’re Time Inc. You own some of the best-known media properties in the world: Sports Illustrated, People magazine, etc. You want to leverage those properties. So you approach Yahoo!, say, or American Online. You propose to provide content to them. They propose to promote your brand. And as you sit down to the bargaining table to sort out the economics of all this, you throw up your hands and ask, “Are we paying you or are you paying us?” That’s how these negotiations actually go. “Who’s paying whom?” Asking a question like that signals that maybe nobody needs to pay anything to anybody. Lots of value is created, but “nobody’s paying for it”. It just happens because two (or more) business par tners create something together. In these situations firms can’t begin to account for the nickels and dimes in the deal and may not even bother trying. In these situations, relationships triumph over transactions. Money drastically diminishes as a factor in the deal. And the identity of the customer—Are we paying you or are you paying us?—becomes fuzzy. The ver y concept of the customer begins to disappear. Look at Silicon Valley. Every major firm there is a node in a complex network in which a huge fraction of the value creation could never be accounted for in monetar y terms. Should Intel pay for Microsoft to optimize operating systems in a way that makes Intel chips ubiquitous? Or should Microsoft pay Intel to design chips that make Microsoft operating systems ubiquitous?

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The press and the pundits are clueless about the effects of these demonetized value-added dealings. No wonder, because all their measurements are expressed as units of money. Unless some dough changes hands, even the biggest commercial developments are as unheard as trees falling in the distant forest. The data mavens at Commerce are blind to the value created when Yahoo! ads a new Web site listing or when Mapquest shaves 0.6 miles off my trip. When the Labor Department calculates the Consumer Price Index it has no idea that its own Web pages are being dished out on free Linux source code or that a building contractor in Bowie, Md., decided to eat a change order because he wanted to preser ve the goodwill of his client—and that more and more of the economy is being transacted on such a basis. When Dr. Greenspan and the poo-bahs at the Fed deliberate over the “irrational exuberance” of the stock market, how much weight do you suppose they’re giving to the fact that the marginal cost of a transaction in a world of e-commerce has essentially dropped to zero? More demonetization. Today most of the money in the world isn’t even made of paper, much less metal. It exists as binary digits. No wonder the central banks of the world are heaving their gold reserves into a collapsing market. Who needs gold when money sheds the slightest pretense of being anything but data? Say good-bye to gold. Gold is history. If you want currency backed by something tangible, sign up for 5,000 frequent flier miles on a new Visa card.

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THE E D OF THE BR IN Eduardo Punset Scientist; Spanish Television Presenter; Author, The Happiness Trip It is the best candidate to the major unreported event of the next century. Only people in need really do need a brain. Plants donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, and get along pretty well without it: photosynthesis alone largely fulfil all their requirements. Actually, now that we know that we share, for better or worse similar DNA , the instruction booklet that designs living organisms robust enough to ensure survival, but flexible enough to adapt to changing environments, the missing brain is the only difference between plants and us. And as weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll quickly learn during the next century, it is nothing to be very proud of. Although it seems harder to define the differences within the brainy species themselves, including primates and other animals, it is, however, rather surprising to find that -in the History of human thought- there has hardly been a single intellectual who has not condescended to share the collective and unending appraisal of the substantial differences between men and the rest. In fact, this debate has bored quite a few generations of learned hominids. Fortunately, it is about to end thanks to, above all other scientists, Lynn Margulis. Let me explain why. It has taken quite some time and arguing to show that most animals do indeed communicate and master reasonably evolved languages to that end. There is nothing terribly creative about the capacity to learn a language; as Steven Pinker pointed out it is genetic, and could not be more damn simple, since it is digital. Men can do it; other mammals too. The only surprising thing about it is the sheer impotence of current scientific thought to unveil the basics of animal culture.

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Despite the fact that we share the same genes, tool-making also helped to substantiate the differences between hominids and chimps. Of course, a few of those genes are different, but we still don’t know which of them actually makes the difference. The tool making singularity, however, has not outlived the language exclusiveness. As other people moved by curiosity, I have enjoyed looking at zoologist Sabater’s collection of chimp’s sandals, hats, seed’s catchers and sticks for all sorts of widely different uses, such as beating, or carving the sand searching for fresh water during the dry season, instead of trying to drink in muddy soils. The identification of consciousness—since scientists assumed twenty years ago that the scientific method could be extended to these domains, then left to superstition—looked like the final argument. “We’re conscious of ourselves. We know who we are. And they don’t”. It was the most serious argument ever put forward in our defense. It did not matter that chimps could also recognize themselves in a mirror; somehow they would not show the precise awareness, nor the same cognitive capacity to ruminate about one self. Unfortunately, biologists like Lynn Margulis showed that bacteria—as far back as two billion years ago- could not manage their electric-like motors, nor their magnetic navigation systems, without some realization of what on earth they were building up those ultramodern transport systems for. You just can’t pretend any longer that bacteria are not conscious too. For those still interested in the old debate about the differences between the brainy species, let me remind you that the most avant garde argument now runs something like this: only the descendants of the Australopitecus have developed the capacity to generate symbols. Nobody can demonstrate neither when nor how it happened; I myself am convinced that the whole thing started six thousand years ago when people settled to labor the land, and women had to leave their babies unattended shouting all day long.

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The identification of consciousness looked like the final argument. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re conscious of ourselves. We know who we are. And they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t.

But total allegiance to symbols like the San Francisco 49ers, the Serbian motherland, or the Manchester United colors are undeniably humane. No chimpanzee would risk his life for these or similar symbols, nor for that matter would leave their newly born unattended. Chimpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mothers love to carry them. There at last is something which makes us really different from other animals. The capacity to generate symbols and to blindly follow them, has indeed taken Homo Sapiens a long way off from the brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original purpose: to go in the right direction, and to anticipate a few questions. A very lucid New York physiologist attending last December a Neuroscience Congress at the birthplace of Ramon y Cajal, actually told me he knows of a particular species who ends up eating its own brain once it settles in the right place and knows the basic answers. Could it not be that the brain has taken over a bunch of simple people who were only in need of a few addresses and of guessing what on earth was going to happen tomorrow? The World Health Organization is predicting that life expectancy will reach one hundred and twenty five years very shortly. Neuroscientists should start worrying about the outcome of forty additional years with jammed brains immersed in the process of deepening their symbolic capacity, leaving at long last an unbridgeable and recognizable gap with plants and animals.

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Yet despite this distinctive capacity to generate symbols, some 25% of the population— excluding criminals—have serious brain dysfunctions, and most medical obser vers already agree that brain disorders will be the most serious health threat in the twenty-first centur y. The lucky 75% who will not be insane already know, according to the latest statistics, that more patients die as a result of practitioner’s brains guessing wrongly about the nature and treatment of real or invented illness, than people succumb on the roads and from heart failure altogether. Thankfully, building a collective brain through Internet should alleviate the stress of saturated individual brains, and help manage the lives of the great majority of people who have already been overcome by too many choices regarding the path to follow and the answers to non-formulated questions, even under current life expectancy models. I’m afraid that quite a few of them will, however, regret the placid and constructive life of brainless plants.

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THE E D OF GENE C NTROL Anne Fausto-Sterling Professor of Biology and Women’s Studies at Brown University As the 20th century draws to a close, biologists triumphantly announce the beginning of the end of the project to sequence the human genome. Metaphoric hyperbole runs rampant as we speak of “reading the book of life” and of “unraveling the essence of what it means to be human”. But less noticed is the fact that developmental biologists who study the role of genes in development are busily dethroning the gene. When I was a young embr yologist I lectured about genes in development. Following the dogma of the time, I told my students that there were two groups of genes. First, there were housekeeping genes—those responsible for the mundane daily functions of the cell—the feminine duties of maintenance. These genes supposedly kept the machinery running smoothly—respiration and waste disposal went on quietly and demurely. But the really important genes were the development genes—those masculine entities that pioneered new territory and wrought new form from undifferentiated plasm. The goal of any self-respecting developmental geneticist was to find those special genes for development and thus unravel the mystery of how genes control the formation of new organisms. The successes have been many and profound. Developmental biologists have uncovered myriad genes involved in embryo formation. They have found an amazing continuity of genetic structure and function across the phyla. We now understand in fabulous detail the

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function of many genes in development. But something funny happened on the way to the genetic forum. The distinction between housekeeping genes and development genes has become increasingly hard to maintain. Some development genes fall into the category of transcription regulators, as might be expected for genes that control genetic expression. But many turn out to be involved in cell communication and signaling. What is more these genes donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t control development. In a real sense development controls the genes. The same genetic read-out can have a vastly different outcome depending upon when during development and in which cell the protein is produced. Indeed, most development genes seem to act at multiple times during development and in many tissue and cell types. The same gene can play a key role in quite a variety of developmental events. The important stor y is that the search for genes that control development has shown us that our initial idea that genes control processes within an organism is wrong. Instead genes are one set of actors within a developmental system. The system itself contains all of the preexisting contents of the cell, organ or organism. These include thousands of gene products, other chemicals such as ions, lipids, carbohydrates and more, all organized and compartmentalized in a highly-structured physical setting (the cell and its substructures, the organ and its tissues, the organism and its organ systems). From before the turn of the century embryologists debated whether the cytoplasm controlled the nucleus or vice versa. What the last decade of research on genes in development reveals is that both things are simultaneously trueâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the system and its history control development. Genes are but one of many crucial components of the process.

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THE E D OF THE NATI N-ST TE Robert Aunger Biological anthropologist One of the big stories of the last century was globalization and the rise of plodding great dinosaur-like institutions promoting the interests of the Fortune 500. Of course, merger-mania continues to capture headlines, creating ever-larger multinational firms, centralizing information and money and hence power in the hands of a few old white guys. This is Goliath, and Goliath at a scale above the State. On David’s side of the battle for our hearts and souls, we have the Internet, the weapon of Everyman. The Internet is the newfound instrument of the little people, bringing us all within a few clicks of each other (the so-called “small world” phenomenon). It is no accident that the first to flock to this medium were minorities of all kinds poodle-lovers, UFO -watchers and other fringe-dwellers. Here, through this network, they found a way to broadcast their message across the world at virtually no cost through an avenue not controlled by Walmart or Banque Credit Suisse. What is getting squeezed out in this picture is the institution in the middle, the nationstate. It is easy for the media to focus on the President as he waves to them while boarding Air Force One indeed, they fawn on these “photo-ops.” The existence of standardized channels, like the press advisor, for disseminating “important messages” makes their job easy. Thus, the media haven’t noticed that the institution the President represents is increasingly irrelevant to the course of events. Why? Let’s look at the sources of State power, and how they are being eroded.

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First, money is no longer tied to any material token (see Thomas Petzinger, Jr., this Forum). Once the link to cowrie shells or gold bullion is severed, the exchange of value becomes a matter of trust. And this trust is increasingly being placed in computers and the Internet again. Greenspan can control greenbacks, but not e-money. Any zit-faced teenager can become an instant millionaire by flipping a digit on a strategic computer account. This is digital democratization, of a sort. So one of the vital sources of centralized governmental power control over the money supply is increasingly no longer in the hands of the State. What about the distribution of wealth? It used to be that those close to the political decision-making machiner y could write the rules for moneymaking and thus guarantee themselves advantages: policies informed incentives. But the globalization of capital markets has reversed that causal ordering: money now flows as if national boundaries were invisible, slipping rightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;round local rules and regulations. The policy-makers are always a step behind. So the State no longer finds it easy to ply favorites with favors. The ultimate source of control, is access to information. What you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t act on. Governments have long recognized how important this is. Can States nowadays control public opinion? Are the media operated by people the State can coopt? Well, sometimes. But the Fall of the Wall suggests control is never perfect. So you can tell some of the people what to do some of the time, but not whole populations what to think for very long. It just costs too much. And (as Phil Leggiere points out elsewhere in this Forum), the Internet is now a powerful means for protest against State interests. No wonder States are trying hard to control this organically-grown monster.

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The ultimate source of control, is access to information. What you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t act on.

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States of course use various means to attract allegiance beside the media. For example, they stir up patriotism by the tried-and-true method of demonizing outsiders. However, of late, it has become harder to direct aggression “outside,” as made obvious by the proliferation of aggressive conflicts along ethnic lines within States (Jaron Lanier’s non-Clausewitzian wars, in this Forum). The other possibility, of course, is that some splinter group will get hold of, or make, a nuclear warhead, and hold a government ransom. So the ability to incite war, another source of State power, seems to be coming from other quar ters. This constitutes additional evidence of the soon-to-be demise of States. What people really care about, the social psychologists tell us, is the group they identify with. You don’t identify with Uncle Sam (a clever anthropomorphizing gimmick that only works during war); you identify with Uncle Fred and the other kin who share your name. So it’s difficult for people to identify with a country. It’s too big of just a jerry-rigged bit of color on a map in many cases. How can you care when your vote has no influence over outcomes? “Representative” government is farcical when a population is counted in millions. Of course, if you’re rich, you can buy influence, but the ante is always being upped as some other special interest vies for control over your Man in Washington. Besides, those guys always log roll anyway. When your self-concept, wealth and well-being derive from participation in other kinds of community, the State becomes an anachronism.

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The result of all this will not be the arrival of the Libertarian heaven, a State-less society. It is just that mid-level governance will be replaced by larger- and smaller-scale institutions. We wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have monolithic Big Brother looking over our shoulders in the next century. Instead, we will become a network of tightly linked individuals, empowered by technologies for maintaining personal relationships across space and time. We will all choose to be cyborgs (Rodney A. Brooks), with implants that permanently jack us into the global brain (Ivan Amato), because of the power we derive from our environmentally augmented intelligence (Andy Clark, with apologies to Edwin Hutchins and Merlin Donald). We will all come to live in what Manuel Castells calls a Network Society, and begin, literally, to â&#x20AC;&#x153;think globally and act locally.â&#x20AC;?

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THE DE TH OF NATI NS Rafael Núñez Co-author of Where Mathematics Comes From; Philosophy of the Flesh For centuries societies have organized themselves in terms of kingdoms, countries, and states. Towards the second half of the recently past 20th Century these geographical, cultural, and political “units” acquired a more precise meaning through the establishment of modern “nations”. The process was consolidated, among others, through the creation of the so called United Nations, and the independence of most colonial territories in Africa during the 60’s. Today, we naturally see the world as organized in clear-cut and well-defined units: the world’s nations (just check the colors of a political atlas). Nations have their own citizens, well established territories, capital cities, flags, currencies, stamps and postal systems, military forces, embassies, national anthems, and even their own sport teams competing in the various planet-scale events. This widespread view not only has been taken for granted by most sectors of the public opinion, but also it has served as the foundation of the highest form of international organization—the United Nations. The most serious world affairs have been approached with this nation-oriented paradigm. But the reality of our contemporary global society (which goes far beyond pure global technology) is gradually showing that the world is not a large collection of nations. Nations, as we know them, are not anymore the appropriate “unit of analysis” to run the world, and to deal with its problems. Here is why. Environmental problems: Purely national/inter-national efforts to avoid the pollution of rivers, to protect the ozone layer, to manage (and avoid) environmental disasters, and to

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protect endangered species and biological diversity, have not given good results. New forms of global organizations, such as W WF and Greenpeace, have emerged to deal with these problems in a more efficient manner. Natural resources: The management of the world’s forests, the Antarctic ice, and fishing resources, has shown that they don’t belong to the national/inter-national realm. Again, new and more efficient forms of global organizations have emerged for addressing these problems. Sovereignty: The relatively recent arrest in London of the ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (facing a potential extradition to Spain), has raised unprecedented and deep issues about the sovereignty of nations. The Chilean government claims that Pinochet should be judged in Chile, but international laws seem to be gradually evolving towards a form of jurisdiction that is above the sovereignty of nations. The role of supra national organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is becoming extremely prominent in redefining these issues. Neutrality: The complexity of contemporar y world organization is leaving almost no room for neutrality. Contemporar y Swiss society, for instance, is experiencing an important identity crisis, since their traditional neutrality is no longer tenable in the new European and international contexts. One of their essential aspects of national identity neutrality is collapsing. A simple fact illustrates this crisis. In 1992, during the World Expo in Seville, the official Swiss stand exhibited the following motto: “Switzerland does not exist.”

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Ethnic groups representation: Many ethnic groups around the world whose territories extend over several nations, such as Kurds (who live mainly in Eastern Turkey, Western Iran, and Northern Iraq) or Aymaras (who live in Eastern Bolivia, Southern Peru, and Northern Chile), have had almost no representation in international organizations. Their problems haven’t been heard in a world organized under the nation-paradigm. These groups, however, have been in the news on the last decade bringing their issues more to the foreground, thus relegating the traditional nations to a less prominent role. Epidemics: Serious epidemics such as AIDS and new forms of tuberculosis, are spreading at alarming rates in some areas of the world. The cure, the study, and the control of these epidemics demand organizational efforts that go well beyond national/inter-national schema. The emergence of many NGO’s dealing with health issues is an attempt to provide more appropriate answers to these devastating situations. Civil wars and ethnic cleansing: The stopping and control of ethnic massacres such as the ones observed in the former Yugoslavian regions, and those between Tutsis and Hutus in Africa, demand quick intervention and serious negotiation. A heavy nation-oriented apparatus is usually extremely slow and inefficient in dealing with this kind of situations. It can’t capture the subtleties of cultural dynamics. Ongoing separatism and proliferation of nations: The world has more and more nations. Only a few dozen nations founded the United Nations half a century ago. Today the UN has around two hundred members (The International Olympic Committee and FIFA , the World’s Football Federation, have even more!). And it is not over. Former Soviet republics, Slovenia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and so on, already created new nations. Many others, such as the Basque country, Quebec, and Chechnya, are still looking for their independence. An ever increasing number of nations will eventually collapse.

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Loss of national property and national icons: The openness and dynamism of international markets, as well as the globalization of foreign investment have altered at unprecedented levels the sense of what is “national”. For instance, many airlines (to take a very simple example) usually seen as “national” airlines, today belong in fact to extra-national companies. Such is the case of Aerolineas Argentinas, LOT Polish Airlines, TAP Portugal, and L AN Peru, to mention only a few. National airlines, which in many countries have been

seen as national icons, are simply not national anymore. Of course, the same applies to fishing waters, mines, forests, shopping malls, vineyards, and so on. These are only a few examples. There are many others. Very serious ones, such as the primacy of watersheds over national borders in solving serious problems of water distribution. And less serious ones, such as the potential collapse of one of the Canadian national sports (ice-hockey), if their franchises continue to move to more profitable lands in the United States. All these aspects of our contemporary societies challenge the very notion of “nation”, and reveal the primacy of other factors which are not captured by nation-oriented institutions. The world is now gradually adjusting to these changes, and is coming up with new forms of organization, where nations, as such, play a far less important role. Such is the case of the formation of the European Community (which allows for free circulation of people and merchandises), the establishment of a “European passport”, and the creation of the Euro as common currency. After all, many national borders are, like those straight lines one sees in the maps of Africa and North America, extremely arbitrary. It shouldn’t then be a surprise that the world divided into nations is becoming an anachronism from the days when the world was ruled by a few powerful kingdoms, that ignored, fundamental aspects of ethnic, cultural, biological, and environmental dynamics. We are now witnessing the death of nations as we know them.

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IND X A

Advertisers 9, 31, 33

Democracy

America 11, 17, 23, 26–28, 31, 48–49, 29, 51, 73, 76, 82, 88, 96, 116

B Biology 18, 38, 40–41, 64, 100, 104

25, 58, 74–76, 79

E Earth 11–12, 15, 37–41, 60, 67–68, 100, 103 Ecology 16, 37, 63 Economy 9, 16, 29, 40–41, 82, 97 Education 9, 21, 24–25, 40–43, 81–83, 88 Environment 21, 25, 31–32, 53, 58, 99, 111,

Catastrophe 40, 43

113, 116

Climate 11, 15–16, 40, 43

Evolution 16, 25, 37–38, 40, 54, 63–64, 67,

Communist 16

76, 79, 81–83, 87, 95,

Consumer 9, 85, 97 Computer 15, 23, 40, 43, 52–54,57, 73, 76, 91, 108 Culture 9, 21, 23–25, 40, 46, 63, 66–68, 90, 99, 41

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F Feynmann 52

Global 12, 15, 23, 40, 43–45, 58, 66–68, 82,

Machine 16, 52, 73, 91, 104, 108

85–87, 107–111, 113–116

Media 9, 12, 16, 23, 31, 45, 58–60, 73–76, 79,

Government 25, 74, 82, 108, 110, 114

85–87, 96, 107

Geography 40

Medicine 16, 31, 81

Money 26–28, 74, 95–96, 107–108

Health 28, 31–32, 74–76, 103, 116

Humans 16, 21, 31–32, 37, 49, 66, 90

Nation 11, 23–25, 28, 40, 45–46, 59, 64, 74, 76, 81–83, 107–108, 113–116

I International 23–25, 81–82, 113–114, 116 Internet 23, 74–76, 79, 85, 91, 103, 107–108 Invention 25, 63

J Judgment 21, 58, 60

Nature 18, 54, 56, 58, 90, 103

O Oil 31

P Peace 23, 25, 114 Politics 25, 85

L Literacy 40–41, 59–60, 74–76 Literature 41

Pollution 31–32, 113 Population 10, 11, 31, 40, 43, 79, 82, 103, 108–110

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Quantum 40, 41, 52–54, 56, 65

Violence 40, 51

R Revolution 40, 76, 79, 81–83, 87, 95

S Society 28, 40–43, 60, 90, 111, 113–114 Survival 37, 40, 99

T Technology 23, 37, 53–54, 65, 74, 76, 79, 81, 83, 88, 11 Temperature 9, 12, 15, 17, 54

U Universe 37, 38, 54

120

Vote 46, 79, 110

W War 11, 12, 23, 37, 85, 110, 114 Water 9, 11, 12–13, 15, 21, 31, 40, 43, 100, 116 Wealth 28, 74, 76, 108, 110 Web 9, 16, 73–74, 76–79, 85, 87, 97

C LOPHON Typeset in FF DIN. All information design has been reinterpreted and redesigned by Rajesh Punjabi. Photo on cover and page 78 by flickr/ostrograd; page 08 by flickr/ mmahaffie; page 14 by flickr/F.X.Enderby; page 27 by flickr/danmachold; page 22 by flickr/Man_of Steel; page 30 by flickr/getoutsmar t101; pages 36 and 69 by flickr/Daniel STL; page 4 4 by flickr/ JashonBechtel; pages 47 and 62 by flickr/jhoweaa; page 50 by flickr/Lychee_Aloe; page 72 by flickr/twurdemann; page 80 by flickr/Paco_X; page 84 by flickr/vannpiazza; page 106 by flickr/Amanda SG; pages 94, 98, 112, and 117, by Rajesh Punjabi Printed on Accent Opaque Digital 100 lb Text Smooth on Epson 3880 Stylus Pro. Bound at The Key Printing and Binding, Oakland, CA, USA

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T E VA LT What is todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most unrepor ted stor y? This was the annual questioned asked on TheEdge.org in the year 2000. This book is a compilation of several of the proposed answers that were submitted by scholars, scientists, authors, and enthusiasts. Over the course of the year responses include several theories and insights based on trends and speculations. These are the stories that we are not meant to know.

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