A Tour of the Humanities in 2050, or, The Problem of Everything — transcript
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Okay, there's stragglers still coming in, but it is now officially 10 past the hour, so I'm delighted. Four o'clock by 7 o'clock. Yes, right. We're 10 minutes delayed in everything we do. It's actually Berkeley. Berkeley time. Quentin is currently the Silicon Valley Bureau Chief for Forbes magazine, where he has been since 1999, covering the technology industry. However, prior to that, he spent about 50 years in Asia, in Tokyo for the Wall Street Journal,
and for A.P. Dow Jones in Tokyo, and he's been all over. He also claims, one of his greatest claims to fame is that he's the only SINs faculty, maybe the only Berkeley faculty member, who is regularly featured on Fox News. We could just talk about that if we'd like. Berkeley resident. Yeah, right. And he's taught a class here last semester, which was incredibly well received, and we're going to keep him coming from semester to semester, but we were lucky to have him for the distinguished lecture today, and he's going to speak about the humanities in 2050.
Okay. Thank you very much. I must confess I am honored and not a little bit intimidated to be before you all today. Not just because I'm probably not the smartest or most qualified person in the room for this subject, but I'm following Mitch Kapoor and Don Norman and many other illuminaries, but we'll try to hold something of the standard today. I am, as I said, a business and technology writer who started out with degrees in literature and composition,
intending to be a fiction writer, but like many people in our time, I found out the world was making it up a lot faster and better than I ever could, so I settled for just chronicling it. We journalists tend to flatter ourselves that we are writing the first draft of history, and in that spirit today, I'm going to try and, you know, attempt a first draft of the future, and particularly our sense of ourselves in the future. The two strands in my life, you know, this sort of humanistic or humanities background and the business writing,
combined soon after I thought of the title of this, and I encountered a quote from the social scientist and business consultant writer Peter Drucker. And in 1989, Peter Drucker wrote an essay called Management as a Social Function and Liberal Art. Bear in mind this is 16 years ago. It's a very unusual piece at first because Drucker writes about the technological and social aspects of managing organizations. And he talks about the ultimately spiritual concerns of managing people, how being a manager is a spiritual concern.
And the last sentence in the piece really seized me. He said, management will increasingly be the discipline and practice through which the humanities will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance. This is an extraordinary statement, inasmuch as, for one thing, it indicates that the humanities don't have recognition, impact, and relevance at a level they should right now. And he's kind of right. and, you know, again, that management should be this function. And I think we can, you know, in my talk today, in sparking some conversation, I hope,
which is a critical part of the future, I hope you'll come to see, maybe we can explore why Drucker thinks this is so and why I agree with him anyway. If you're used to business writing, it's a jarring and troubling sentence. So, you know, that usually leads to something productive. Okay, a word about the kind of really monstrous presumptions of my title in the first place. A tour of the humanities in 2050 or the problem of everything. Right. You know, you really don't have any trouble with that until you get to about the fifth word,
humanities. What does humanities mean? So like everybody, I went to Wikipedia and I looked up humanities and it's really strange. There's a disclaimer at the top of the Wikipedia article saying there is controversy about this topic, you know, which I had never encountered before in Wikipedia, it turns out there is controversy about various, tend to be political topics, but you go to the chat page and people are going back and forth saying, I thought mathematics was one of the humanities. Well, it's not by any strict sense, but there was room for that inside this discussion.
And they're saying they want to present a worldwide view. Humanities has its origins in Europe. That's one reason for it. also humanities and social science dripped into each other. There are no hard and fast categories. What I drew from it was it's really very reassuring because people tend not to argue passionately about things that are irrelevant, right? So, you know, at least they're arguing about it, I thought. That's good. And it does underline the chief problem with humanities is the difficulty of setting boundaries, you know, knowing where the humanities are and where they're
not. You can resolve some of it or clarify your thinking by looking at some of the origins or the historical context of the idea of the humanities to begin with. And for that, I'm going to talk about the year 2050 by talking about the 12th century. Humanities is rooted in the kind of modest return to classical learning that took place in the 12th century when the Crusades gave us renewed exposure to the Holy Land and the Arab cultures that had preserved more of the
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classics than we held in Europe and, you know, informed things like courtly love, feudalism. They started reading these classics and picking up on them in this new context and scholastic learning. They went back to the ancient conceit that the world is a kind of question to be answered, that you can draw from it and learn things from it. And that informed medieval education. They revived what was called the trivium and the quadrivium, the classic ways of learning. The trivium is taught first, and the trivium includes logic and grammar and rhetoric, which is to say
thinking and symbol making and the expression of those things, which is now related, it seems to be in history and literature and philosophy, which tend to be the most commonly agreed disciplines of the humanities today. The quadrivium which came first, the trivium was said to be of mind, and the quadrivium which came later was said to be of matter. It's the physical world, and it consisted of arithmetic, which is pure number and calculus now, if you will, music, or the application of number, which is physics and chemistry now, geometry, the study of space,
and astronomy, the application of the theory of space, what we now think of as architecture and engineering. These things had lingered on, these ideas of educating people had lingered on after the fall of the empire, but they were informed and revived with the new text that came out from the Crusades. What we're talking about today are the subjects that really derive from the trivium, which is to say the study of matter and spirit as a way of seeing life entire. The study of internal communication, what am I thinking, and external, how am I expressing. Now in the early
days, the scholastic period. Logic and grammar were seen in a religious context and they were a means of sort of, my internal processes were a better way to divine the nature of God and to see the world in a comprehensible way. To kind of take my inner life and be an agent for God's glorification and ensure the health of my soul and the life beyond. And the managing of the external world and the quadrivium followed on from that. But first you ordered yourself and then you ordered the external world.
So, you know, that worked so well that it kind of shifted away from a strict religious context in the 14th century under a number of influences. You know, better economic conditions leading to a need for a secular education in areas of law and medicine and commercial skills. And Giotto's use of space. There's a bunch of stuff. The most interesting one to me is Petrarch, who is the originator of humanism. and Petrarch took the idea that pagans could also be a source for learning about personal virtue,
which the scholastics didn't see at all. But godless pagans could actually be used as a means of improving ourselves. And this revived a kind of classical idea as the human category of something distinct. There are beasts, there are gods, there is man. We stand apart, but we are part of this process. And by that, he sharpens the idea of the human. He sharpens the idea of the self as a being in the world and secularizes it to some extent. And thus, you know, kind of sets up the framework for the argument of what the humanities are, how they work in the world.
Petrarch is a really interesting guy in this context. Petrarch was a poet and he was a political actor in his time. He was a philologist or a developer of philology. He discovered texts. That's what he was really known for in his day. And he was a freelancer. He sort of traveled around from town to town and got jobs. And being a good freelancer, he was also a self-promoter. And so he kind of developed this idea that he was on to something new. And he really pushed the idea that his humanism was a whole new cultural framework. It was the studia humanitatis.
It was this break from the past. And the information he was giving, the texts he was promoting, really needed to travel more broadly. It was an idea that went on to influence, obviously, the Reformation and the 17th century origins of science, the age of reason. A lot of the work then travels through that, is shot through that. Now, this may have been the most effective PR campaign in all of human history. Because Petrarch's idea about the studia humanitatis became the basis for the term humanism,
which actually was not bestowed until the 19th century. 19th century historians invented the idea of humanism and also invented the term renaissance. They did a harder and faster division than even Petrarch did where there was this idea of a classical world and a Middle Ages and then this rebirth. There was this world made new. And formalizing an idea that Petrarch had had that we're in this new world, which is a fascinating idea because he's sort of setting up the idea that time had gone before
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and then the self is at the center of the stage. The self is there in the Renaissance and everything changes. It's a whole new world, he's saying. Now, obviously you can make too much of the idea that it's a whole new world. I don't think people really sort of are... 1450 happened and then genetically everybody was different. It really isn't like that. But there's something to it as well because aspects of ourselves are amped up and amped down. There are things that are true over time but there are ways in which we are different.
Which kind of takes me through the back door into the other problem area of my title, which is the idea that I'm going to tell you what's in the year 2050. You know, I really don't believe in forecasting of the future. I don't really see how anybody can forecast, you know, what's 40 years out. But people seem to think it's true. You know, George Orwell wrote 1984, and he wasn't writing about 1984 when William Gibson coined cyberspace cyberspace or Richard Stallman started working on open source or Apple Computer made a certain
kind of ad about 1984. He's writing about 1948. You know, he's saying there's perpetual war. Sides change, but war is the necessary thing. There's perpetual shortage. And I don't seem to have the kind of privacy I do anymore. There's a national security state at hand. 1984 is a portrait of 1948. So that maybe you should take my reference to 2050 to be 2005, which means I should have named the title 2060. But, you know, on the plus side, it means I can't give this talk
after 2009. So we're okay. So took a minute, right? So but, you know, so why am I going at that? What is it about 2005 that I think is true of the 19th century and of Petrarch? And what is true in all those times is we see ourselves now as having an absolute break from the past. Petrarch set himself in a new time. In the 19th century, they set themselves in a new time. And that now is some
strange thing. It's like nothing that's ever happened before. But the past doesn't really inform the way it used to. In fact, if there are any historians in the room looking for a good PhD topic, I think you'd probably do a whole history of people seeing themselves as broken from the past. There's a wonderful history of exceptionalism out there. After the French Revolution, they declared year one. Everything was new, you know, or in the early 20th century with Einstein and the generation of 1905, you know, they're writing about how it's all different, and then, of course, Europe collapsed in 1914, and in 1919, Yeats famously wrote that the center
does not hold. The center probably hadn't been holding for a long time. He just noticed it. But it was this idea that everything had flown apart. And there's a sense of it. I mean, it certainly left us with these strange terms for how we lived in the 20th century, modern and postmodern. These are placeholder terms. They describe nothing except now. They don't really talk about how we are. So there was this sense of huge break from the past. There's a similar urgency today, I think. A really enormous sense of difference. It may have something to do with living in the world
after the long nightmare of 1914 to 1989 when Europe tears itself apart and we're sort of rummaging through the leavings of that and finding out what we have. Or the same kind of vast technological and change that encouraged 19th century historians in the industrial period to see themselves in a total break from the past as well. Karl Marx famously said, man, it's different now. Things have changed. But even if we can't put our finger on it, I think many in the room will agree with me
and with Tony Judt, who wrote a recently published book called Postwar, writing about Europe's theme parks and their museums and their educational policies towards history. He writes about an escalating public fascination with the past as a detached artifact, encapsulating not recent memories, but lost memories. History not so much as a source of enlightenment about the present, but rather an illustration of how very different things had once been. The present, he says, is history's orphan.
I think people have felt the present was history's orphan many times but it is an acute sense today. And for my money, the reason for that has a lot to do with an enormous acceleration in our communications and our computational technologies, what some people call the media blur, that all this information is coming at us, There are huge shifts in power balances and social organization. Drucker, again, called the time we're living in the information age, which he said started in the late 1940s, when information and not mechanical principles became the basis for work.
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He went so far as to call this a whole new civilization, breaking us from the past as well. It's hard to know if these things are true when you're living in the middle of them. It really is the job for historians much later on. But it certainly does seem like something big is underway. way. It does seem true and that there's now more information at hand, that there's more urgency to connect to information than there ever was before, and that you need to be there for it in a way. That Google may succeed in what they call a 300-year mission, how world different is
that, to collect all the world's information and make it accessible. And this really, I think, influences the climate of our time, our sense of ourselves, our sense of our minds. And if what I'm saying is accurate, it follows a very distinct pattern having to do with the way in which communications technologies change our sense of the world. It's no accident to me that the Renaissance is linked to the printing press, that the vast increase in the availability of information made the world seem
different. Or for that matter, that the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about machines, but it was also about styles of communication. Bonaparte started using semaphore during his military campaigns, and it was taken up and advanced into telegraphy once they had the electronic means for it. So they were seeing more information coming at them, which leads to its own kind of paradoxical history of thinking things are different where media is concerned. You know, I'd look at this media blur coming at me, I'd check my Blackberry, and I'll check my cell phone, and I'll check my email and other forms,
or all the ads around me. And I kind of want to say that during the last century, the amount and the accuracy of information at hand has increased enormously. Moreover, the time elapsing between an event and the general knowledge of the event has dwindled to a small fraction of what it used to be. I said I'd like to say that because Sidney Chapman got there first and said it in 1904, writing about the Lancashire cotton industry. So, you know, maybe I should look over at Wikipedia and at blogs and at MySpace and all kinds of communication to come and maybe say that
by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. The round globe is a vast head. It is a brain, an instinct with intelligence. Unfortunately, I'd be quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne in the House of Seven Gables in 1851. Bit of a visionary him. But there is something ahistorical about the kind of ahistoricism we have now. And that is to say,
we have a sense that not only is the past a kind of detached artifact, to use Jutt's term, but that we are unrecognizable to the future, that we will become something different from what we are now, that ourselves will be different, that we are evolving into some different kind of being, that the technologies at hand will change us in some fundamental way, not so far in the future, a few decades down the line. If linearity was kind of the model of the self at the Renaissance, that the world had changed but we would be continuing along a path,
now perhaps the model is chaos theory, that we will change absolutely and not even know how. The lawyers among you might kick and say Thomas Huxley said that with evolution that indicates someday we'll evolve and the future being will be as to us as we are to black beetles, or that Nietzsche talks about throwing off certain moral codes and becoming an overman. But Huxley is kind of just theorizing, and Nietzsche is really using a kind of aesthetic.
It's a moral criticism for aesthetic purposes. Here, I think people see it in concrete ways that they find quite plausible. And you see this anecdotally in the way we view the past, but also in contemporary society. One thing I noticed recently is the popularity of books on little things, big books on little things that changed the world. You know, salt, or the gypsies, or tipping points, you know?
Little things that, who knew how that could do that? Or blood, you know, and how it changed everything. Or a dinner in London in 1817 that somehow encapsulates all of art, politics, and sciences in 19th century London. it. And it's interesting because it's a kind of fixation on the butterfly wing, because the hurricane is just too immense, you know? If you know, it's a trope in chaos theory that the flapping of a butterfly wing will cause a hurricane somewhere. So we concentrate these little things about, God, who knew that salt could do all that? And I think that exemplifies some way we feel
about the time. Something big is going to happen, so I better just concentrate on the small thing, you know but there are good reasons to think that's true there are good reasons to think we're going to be different somehow in the future that the idea of being human and the idea of the self will be different and the first off is the relationship of our biological selves with the technology there's a kind of sense that we are the machine will disappear into us and vice versa that we're going to change to meet the needs and opportunities the future will present you know there's a kind of desire in ourselves a war to live up to the media blur to tweak
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ourselves so that we can better get all this knowledge that's potentially available to us. Optimize the moment. I had a friend who was sick recently and she said I was sitting there thinking how I wasn't optimizing myself just then. You know I wasn't getting everything and in a sense that you know difficulty of capturing everything is my first problem of everything. You know the problem everything presents in you needing to access it. It's kind of incipient in the human condition. I don't think we're hardwired to have an off switch in a very good ways. You want information biologically, but now there's so much. There's a kind of overkill
to that extent. Now there's a kind of sense that we aren't really living up to our machines. They're doing a better job than we are, and we somehow need to tweak ourselves and change ourselves. Anybody been to the site Life Hacks? There's this popular site called Life Hacks, and it teaches things like, you know, what are the best caffeinated drinks, how to make an elevator not stop between floors, how to rush on and get more through your day. And, you know, it's sort of the term itself. It's as if we're some computer that should be hacked and tweaked and improved. It's great to see, too, because all the Google ads are about sleep apnea
on the site. But, you know, there are authentic ways in which the technology is invading us, and we're willingly let it, and we think it'll tweak us better for the future. It'll make us more like what we want. Until recently, Google sold a wristwatch you could buy your kids that had gps on it so you could track your kid your kid was everywhere all the time um there's data mining on our shopping habits there's all sorts of electronic monitoring i don't really need to talk about too much here i did a panel on national id
cards recently and um at the end of it they said you know all these experts pro and con said well you know really it's only about a 10-year problem because after that there's going to be cameras everywhere and facial recognition, so who's going to need a card? You know, they're just going to have you all the time anyway. That's going to happen. Okay, that's interesting to think about in the context of what the self will mean in that. You know, so in some ways it's kind of a revival of the medieval idea that we will be continuously observed, only it won't be by God, it'll be by our
databases. Further up, and you know, more plausibly, well, that's plausible, further up there is the idea of genetic recombination, that we're going to tweak ourselves, call our unwanted aspects, take out the parts we don't like in our condition, or tweak ourselves internally with various mind drugs to have better memories, or take away parts of ourselves that society doesn't find useful. It's a sense of being better to escape parts of ourselves that we've agreed we don't like. Taken to the furthest
extreme, this would include death. We're going to take that away, which is the strangest dream of the present, this idea that we ourselves will actually, the machine will not disappear into us, but that we will disappear into the machine ultimately. For those of you who are familiar with Ray Kurzweil's singularity, he takes some very plausible information about the line of Moore's law, the semiconductor density, and follows it out to about 2050, 2060, and posits that for, I think it's 10 bucks, you'll have the computational power of all the brains on the planet.
At which point, you know, we'll have software figured out, we'll have the brain figured out to a point where we can just port ourselves into these machines and live, you know, a lot like forever. In a strange way, this will, you know, kind of ironically realize some 17th century dreams of Descartes that we can reduce all knowledge to mathematics or to Leibniz, that we can produce a universal language of binary code and express everything in zeros and ones,
which has been pretty good to us, but this has taken to a pretty far end. Kurzweil talks about technology as a nature's way of speeding up evolution, maximizing the growth of intelligence, that nature is a thing that wants complexity and intelligence, and This is a way of hijacking biology, which isn't quick enough, and pressing it on. Which may be so, but it may also be a kind of habit of mind we've had for a while, which is to represent the mind in terms of the most impressive technology we have at the time. Freud liked to think about the mind in terms of machinery.
Now we do it in terms of computers. Maybe so, maybe we're just taking the best thing and going, oh, my mind is like that best thing. We shall see. from the point of view of the self and from the point of view of the humanities it is exciting it is extraordinary and it is grotesque previously as i said changes were something that was sort of amped up or turned down this really represents absolute change because kurtzweil posits not only do we live forever but we share all our information with each other all the time we
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We port our entire individuality into each other and have this kind of pool. And this creates, to my mind, the very distinct problem of infinite time, which is to say the absence of desire. We have desire because we're going to die. This time is urgent. Borges expresses this wonderfully in a story called The Immortals, where people live forever, but they're all morons, because if you've got 100 years, who cares? Let a bird build its nest. I have another 100 years after that. and build a nest in my beard.
I have 100 years more after that. I'll do something else. They build cities and ruin them. They don't care. They live out in the open. They become something less than animals because they have no urgency. They have no desire. They are not human anymore. They have infinite time. Which is to say, that is the next problem of everything. If we get everything, we will not be human. Also, I don't really know what to do with that idea, so I'm just going to kind of regard it as a strange artifact of the future. that I can put aside for now, and turn to the other way in which we see ourselves
as becoming different, which is to say our relationship with the crowd in massive real-time communications, something a lot of people are teaching here at Sims. Early on, it seems like access to the Internet and to groups on the Internet, to collections, to Internet cultures, seemed wonderful. They kind of massively enlarged my sense of myself. I can access much more information. I can communicate with many people. I can upload all this information. I can show more of my life to more people. There is a kind of inflation attendant on that,
and as we know, inflation tends to debase currencies and make them less valuable. But nonetheless, that isn't really a worry for most people. Their personal connections will matter more than their generalized connections. Much more problematic from a long-term point of view is the idea, gaining force now, of the group mind and of collective intelligence. is, that individuals can contribute small things, but large collectives develop better and larger products than any one individual can ever build.
You know, in the early aspects, this seems like nothing but good. It's a great search technique, for example. You know, you tag your favorite websites, other people tag theirs, the quality rises, you see what the group likes. It makes search better. You know, open source software, what the group is working on, creates better software than any individual or team can create. You get more functionality for less money. Wikipedia, everybody contributes. It's this wonderful resource for all these topics. Not the humanities, but most of the others. And under the somewhat lousy name of Web 2.0,
a whole bunch of businesses are being created around this idea as well. All these cultures and group minds around it. Mostly they're media businesses with Flickr, Delicious, Dig, Slashdot, Yahoo's Buzzmeter. You can see, you guys know more of these than I do. Which, you know, in some ways is a riff off existing technologies like the open source SETI, like peer-to-peer, but it's also a hybrid. It's human and peer working together. Anybody seen Amazon's MTurk?
The MTurk is an attempt to have the group answer questions more effectively than you ever can. You throw out something like, well, the ones I saw recently were how to solve a certain Microsoft problem, when the best time to fly from Seattle to Maui was, how to have my 30th birthday party. The group is going to answer these better than I can. They're going to offer up more value, and I'm going to pay them for it, and I'll participate, and I'll get it back. You know, the Amazon version looks sort of like a stinker to me, but, you know, there are, you know, people are trying this. And in Korea, there's a very successful one
that people do participate in. And a few years ago, I wrote about a tech company with the how early 21st century is this name, Hello Brain, that was a kind of bizarre where people could form communities and develop semiconductors together. Very complex mechanical tasks, electronic tasks that companies couldn't do as well as they could. Which is all to say that we're admitting the collective is capable of more than I am capable
of. you know at times this feels sort of like doing the wave remember that in stadiums you know you do the wave where you're like it's kind of fun but you're saying someday this is really going to be embarrassing to remember you know but at the same time there are a lot of early signals that this is also going this is true and this is going to have a very profound impact on our lives the chief evidence that it has staying power is the success of google i was talking to Larry Page, one of the guys who came up with Google a while back, and he said, well, tagging
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is really the key to our success. It's all about tagging. You know, Google's alpha, the means by which their search engine became better was that it linked to other pages. And in a sense, they were using what people thought was important. The internet was being voted on. And the important things were the things they sought out first, that there was this collective they could harness and use and become better than everybody else. You know, it worked, right? The searches are better. And in a sense, their advertising model is much similar to that. You buy on AdWords, but you only retain your top position if you are getting the most clicks.
It doesn't matter how much you pay them. They will kick you off if people are not clicking on your ad. So the collective behavior is forcing you to come up with the best possible ad at all times. It's doing better than you can do on your own. It's giving you this feedback all the time. And more interesting, if you sort of go into Google, you can see they're using these principles to manage themselves in really novel ways. They throw out emails all the time where they just throw out ideas and they're exposed. All the engineers are exposed to all the ideas at all times and they kind of vote collectively. Somebody will say, that's a good idea. I'll work on that.
And it could be somebody from a whole other division. In fact, that's part of the idea. They want to break down categories and have the collective looking at things from a number of points of view. They don't like hard and fast points of view. They like multiple points of view, the collective wisdom again. and that slightly misunderstood 20% rule at Google, that's what the 20% is. 20% of your time you are working on something that the collective is essentially electing. You form this team, you make a product based on it, it then dissolves or if it's very successful, it hardens into part of the organization.
So it's a self-reinforcing culture. This first came to my mind when Eric Schmidt pressed on me this book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which is entirely about collective knowledge. James Surowiecki, the New Yorker writer, wrote this book about how collectively we are much more intelligent. This is now a model for organization that is growing and really gaining ground. It is still working out its own rules. We don't know the rules of this yet. It has echoes of Drucker, obviously, that the manager's job is to kind of
maintain and mediate this sense of identity in the group, The best manager will be the one who sustains the group in the best possible way, who fosters this mind and has everyone join in it and have themselves find value in being part of this culture. There are no rules that I've found, really, but there are aspects. Like, for example, at Google, even if it isn't literally true, there's always a sense of this triad at the top. There's Larry, and there's Sergey, and there's Eric. There's no diktat from anyone. It's the three of them.
believe me when you try and do a story on these guys it's always the three of them have to be photographed together you can't photograph one, they've got three they're really into it and you know Time Magazine cover recently all three guys there are other management rules that I think are emerging Slashdot, many other sites use grassroots moderators people arise out of the culture and act inside to preserve the culture, they'll maintain the site they'll talk about they'll kick people off who are causing trouble.
They themselves are not allowed to inject into the conversation, but they maintain the conversation. And that's a really interesting kind of anthropology, if you think about it, because first off, it's saying that there's a kind of universal sense that people are aware their culture is valuable to them for some reason. It's giving them some reward in some sense. And also that it's fragile, that it can fly apart and it needs to be maintained. And that they'll work for free, which a lot of guys like. But also that it's limited. This is being tested, in a sense, with Wikipedia.
I think people want their culture bounded. And Wikipedia is encountering problems now because it's so open. And people are starting to mess with it. Wikipedia wants all the world to join in. And that's why they complain. They have this warning of humanities. This is not a global view. They want global views. And I think they might run into the Casey Stengel problem. Casey Stengel famously said about the restaurant Toot Shores, Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
When things get to fill up, when the cool people have left, when the culture isn't sustained by its distinctness, it will fall apart. And that's going to be an interesting test for Wikipedia down the line. It's also, all of this is somehow going to create a new kind of manager. The best hints I get from it are looking at people, good, successful open source managers. You talk to Linus Torvalds, or I've got a story in Forbes tomorrow about a guy who's done an open source telephone system. And he had a lot in common with Linus and some other guys that met in open source,
which is to say the group gives them a lot of authority and they're very smart guys. They are originators. They have distinct personalities that are warm and open to other people. And they are in no way like Jack Welch. You know, they are not hard-charging CEOs. They are not alpha males. They are open people. Let it happen. But make no mistake, they will also kick people out and maintain the group. they have a strong sense of who they are and what they're about. It's going to be really interesting watching business schools try to generate these people down the line because they all want to be Jack Welch.
35:00–40:00
And that may not really work. I mean, there is an emerging kind of new organizational psychology and a political philosophy that's taking place inside this thinking. That the group mind makes better decisions than I can make on my own. You know, in some sense, this reinforces my sense of self because it gives me these cultures that I can attach to. but it also displaces my sense of self because it supersedes the actions and the judgments I make myself. The group's knowledge is better than my own. There's a near mystification of the group mind of collective intelligence which is to say that the problem of everything is also the problem
of everyone. Now back to history there is a heritage to this idea of the group mind the most famous aspect of which is probably Adam Smith's idea of the invisible hand of the marketplace, that there's a group mind in the market, that collective judgments create the correct price for any good or service the way no individual ever can. But, you know, I want to thank Berndt, because he pointed me to a paper that Berkeley graduate and computer pioneer Doug Engelbart wrote in October of 1962, a more recent heritage inside technology that endorses this. He wrote a
paper called Augmenting Human Intellect, a Conceptual Framework. And he says in this, listen to this, this is great. Three people working together in this augmented mode seem to be more than three times as effective in solving complex problems as one augmented person working alone, and perhaps 10 times as effective as three similar men working together without the computer based augmentation. It is a new and exhilarating experience to be working in independent parallel fashion with some good men. Notice he's making a reference to a culture there, some good men,
some like-minded people. And we feel that the effect of these augmentation developments upon group methods and group capability is actually going to be more pronounced than the effect upon individuals' methods and capabilities. And we are very eager to increase our research effort in that direction. It's also not a bad visionary, I got to say. He was doing it for the Air Force, which is why they actually didn't follow up on this. If you look at this, large institutions don't necessarily welcome the advent of collective mind
because it's a whole new organizational principle and has such a challenge to their hierarchy. And people don't like to change all that much. It's also seen, this idea of collective, I think, in the so-called laws of the valley. Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law. I mean, these aren't laws in any sense. Moore's Law says that the transistor density doubles every 18 to 24 months. I bet you if I leave a transistor on that table, the density does not double in 18 to 24 months. It is an observation about collective behavior
on a repeatable framework, no matter how big the industry is, no matter how many people are working at the problem. And, okay, you could argue that it's sort of Intel's way of imposing a budget line on the strength of development. But at the same time, he's pointing out in 65, that it withstood all those changes and seems to be reputable is an interesting observation, and perhaps a really kind of social observation about the way the group is creating. Similarly, Metcalfe's law talks about this kind of n-squared principle
about the value of networks, no matter how large or small you scale them up. He's talking about values of collectives early on. But now, we're seeing it in a realization that's both broad and wide and I think going to affect institutions in the future. So what are some of the implications and the challenges to the group mind? Well, in Drucker's line about the information society, he called it a new civilization with its organization based on biological principles.
It was an organization to be based on perception instead of mechanistic realities, on internal meanings rather than physical descriptions, a kind of ability to abstract from particulars into groups will be the strength of this and I think that's what he was getting at in talking about the humanistic role the logic and communications based trivium of this age has something to do with performing analysis that can abstract hard categories into more generalized ecologies, into communities into cultures what still has to be determined is how we manage
and organize and reward along these lines but it stands to reason we can't. It also means that logically it's going to be an age of impressions and opinions. I don't need to tell you this. I'm with Fox. I'm with the media. But last week, Columbia University came out with a study saying that Google News accessed 14,000 different news sites, including blogs and all the news sources they had, covering 24 stories.
40:00–45:00
So much for diversity. So much for range. But I think what the study missed was it wasn't necessarily about the stories. It was about all the points of view. It was about all the attitudes. David Halberstam kind of dismissively called this a rise of a culture of allegation and assertion at the expense of an older culture of verification. But it is possible that the use of group mind, of just all those different analyses, all those opinions, all those attitudes, will lead to a kind of collectivity, a triangulation,
where in the concatenation of all the attitudes derives a kind of true way of viewing the story. Who's to say that it isn't to be searched and used in a novel way like that? I've got to admit, as yet there is no sign that the public credulity is dropping at a rapid pace, so maybe not. Another great challenge is that we will certainly be in an ever-faster marketplace of ideas, that change for its own sake will become important. The velocity of opinions and ideas and media will only increase.
I was talking to a VC friend of mine who backed the Internet early on. And I was talking about the self with him. And he said, I don't really care about who you are. Where you're headed defines who you are. Not where you are, but where you're headed defines who you are. It's the visible choices you're making that defines you. And he said he was betting on a future of vector analysis. You just mathematically looked where people were going. You hurry for that. And to be successful at vector analysis, you look for outriders. You look for the two extremes by which you're going to find,
which is kind of interesting if you sort of look at it statistically because that means the bell curve will no longer be like that. It will be like these little lumps at the end and people value more. They'll amp up the outriders because that's the indication of information they can act on more quickly. It also means that if you think cable news is extreme now, with the kind of extremes people are going to look for in the attention deficit world to come. So, what are the particular challenges where the humanities are concerned, where all this is going?
Well, I think the first one is that this age of extremes obviously leads to a kind of sensationalism and a war for attention by any means necessary. You may have noticed that today I didn't use any PowerPoint. I just wanted to distinguish myself from the usual talks you got. It probably can't work more than once, but it was a war to get your attention by doing something different. And there is, obviously, since it is about attention, it will be more of an entertainment culture, even more than before.
This could be good from a humanistic point of view. This could be trivial. Hard to know. There is an anxiety about wanting to optimize our connection with everything and everyone that is not going to go away, no matter how much we augment ourselves. How the humanities cope with this has to do with how we organize information, how we maximize its punch, and how we settle on things that are good and not good and what we do with it. I think a more interesting one to think about, however, is the loss of difficulty in this world to come.
This is interesting. People feel they are expressing their true selves when they are online or finding this truth inside these communal groups. I was listening to an engineer from Second Life Second Life is a kind of game, virtual world people go into where they assume characters they encounter other characters it's very engaging there are people who make over $100,000 a year making little products shirts you can wear, your avatar can wear
ways you can shoot chickens in this world parties they go to, fashion shows, whatever It's a very complex economic system people undergo. He told me that 35% of the adults on Second Life are on the site more than they are at work at this point. He said, this is a quote, For them, the physical world is where they eat and sleep. Second Life is where they live. And that's where their real selves are. And he said, I mean, and this is very familiar to anybody who's been a writer.
You know how hard it is to write what you mean? Inside, you know what it is. It's hard to get it out in the world. I think they have a sense of that in Second Life. That's the real me. That's who I am. But of course, they're showing up without their struggles, their Freudian slips, the baggage of the past, the burdens of history, the nagging pain, whatever. It refers back to that kind of earlier idea that we're not good enough for our technology. We'll present a self. We'll live inside a self without this kind of difficulty and trouble.
45:00–50:00
it's kind of the final triumph of the virtual world in a sense which may or may not be a bad thing but it's certainly a change more to the point for artists and people making a living in the humanities there is a loss of originality the mashup culture the infinite duplication culture means that originals don't matter so much in a mashup you take parts and arrange a third thing and that's what matters The original doesn't really have much status compared to the thing you created off it.
So that, in a way, we're going to create art that's a lot more like folk art. It has a collective dimension to it. It doesn't champion the author. It doesn't champion the artist in the same way that we have for so long. In a horrific way, did you ever see Komar and Melmid's America's Most Popular Painting? This thing is really funny. This was like back in, I think, 95. These two Russian emigres polled 1,001 Americans. 1,001. What a nice digital number.
And they asked them all, what do you want in a painting? And then they took all the averages and made a painting like that. So it's the size of a refrigerator, which was the size the most people wanted. It's got 70% blue in it. It's got George Washington. It's got kids. It's got a hippo. It's got a deer. It's got a lake. It's got whatever everybody wants. It's really ugly. It's a joke, obviously. But at the same time, that's the downside of a collective mind,
unencumbered by any cultural distinction. There is no group there. He just took the whole collective and got what they wanted. He pulled a painting. The death of the artist in the most horrible way. It's a problem, back on the planet, It's a problem that has worried art critics for some time. Walter Benjamin, the German art critic, historian and critic in the 30s, was talking about the loss of what was called the aura, whatever he meant by that. But it was the idea that things being touched by the human hand were going away. And they were celebrating the self in a sense. Things that were touched by the
artist had a greater importance somehow. And the artist was a kind of higher being. He was touched by God in some way that we are not. The rest of us are not. I mean, look at the hyper inflation around Van Gogh's art this day. I mean, you know, a mentally troubled person, sort of traditionally touched by God. People pay $25 million to basically associate themselves with the artifact to own the object. That sense of self may not matter so much anymore.
There may be a kind of death of the individual artist or he'll be seen as a certain relic, which may not be a bad thing in some ways. I recently read where Warren Buffett described himself as an artist whose canvas is the stock market. My art is my investment. If that's what the artist is, we can live without it. You know, it's okay. and you know it means the end of the concept of the artist as a richer soul than the rest of us possess which I think is a little overdone that could probably be a pretty good deal
so the self which was so highly valued in the renaissance and kind of fetishized by the 19th century and in recent times loses some of its authority in the face of the group mind into these vectors that detail what we are we'll turn to other sources for self-knowledge Unfortunately, they may be choice point. They may be my corporate mind, which is telling me more about myself than I can ever know. This would be a very hard thing for most of us to accept. But look, you know, it's really easy to be negative when you're talking about the future in this context
because you can so readily see the things you will lose. And it's hard to understand the things you'll gain or the ways in which you might find value in a world like this. It's like being a monk in the year 1480 going, oh God, there go memory palaces. No one's doing manuscripts anymore. It's sort of missing the idea that the Reformation's around the corner, that books will be readily available, that education's going to explode. So what are some of the positives about the future, setting aside that immortality thing, because I really don't know what to do with it. Well, first off, there's the possibility of a vast rise in communal pleasures,
sort of the way we imagine a medieval festival was, or a Dionysian rite in the classical world. this loss of our burden of self inside the crowd. Or in a Kurzweil world, maybe it'll be great to have the self visit all other selves and commune with them to see all points of view. And this will create some unique and valuable third perspective. Although the idea that we're going to create this kind of intelligence and it's going to care about ourselves is really interesting. In all AI I've ever seen, there is an implicit idea that we're going to create AI
50:00–55:00
and it's going to care about us. You know, that it's going to be like, we're going to build dogs. They're going to come up and kiss our feet. We're not going to build cats that are just going to walk away and not even care what we're doing. We're going to build dogs, not cats. But who knows? That may not be true. New patterns are almost certainly going to be emerged that will tell us things about ourselves, having to do with the way we see ourselves moving through the world, the way we interact with our objects, the way we interact with each other.
will be identified in new ways. There are all these patterns in society and the world that art and science will find in a way they never have before. And this will amplify who we are. You ever heard of blogjects? There is an idea that all objects will have their own blogs, not just people, but things in the world will have a blog. And it will talk about where it is then. This car, you know. My owner didn't wash me. The toaster is mad at the refrigerator. I don't know what. But, you know, it sounds goofy, but it also speaks to our interactions with the world in a
novel way. And we'll find aspects of our life that we have never found before. So, and, you know, with the death of the artist, there is also the prospect of art being everywhere, that aesthetic experience could be sustained at all times, in a world, after all, that is governed by the rules of perception. This would sort of put museums in a position like palaces or gothic cathedrals. They are around and they are interesting, but they are not the sources of energy for us that they were before. A final point about this is,
and I think this might be more a negative than a positive, is the prospect of the end of error. That the humanities, being human, needs our all-too-human mistake-making for us to be ourselves. And when we posit the world of everything, we posit a world without mistakes. We're going to get it right. And so much of what I've been talking about in history had to do with getting it wrong. In the 12th century, when they came up with courtly love, they misread Ovid's metamorphosis. They were getting it wrong. When the humanists came up with the classical idea
of the human beings set apart, he missed the classical idea that this was usually met as a put-down. We're not as good as the gods. We're not as good as the animals. We have all our problems. The alchemy and the science that came from alchemy was based on a mythic being called Hermes Trismegestus out of Egypt. He never existed, but people thought they could learn from this mage and take up his magic, and it gave us science in the end. Or Leibniz, I mentioned his digitization of the world, his pausing of that. It came from his theological ideas and from a misreading of how the I Ching
worked that he was getting from Jesuits in China. Error has been very important in human culture, and if we set aside error, we're going to regret it in the long term. Right-sized crowds, crowds, great data mining, you know, will we get no mistakes? You know, we're going to get another Columbus, sail you America? How can you do that if you don't know, you know, if nobody thinks the world is flat, no one will sail to America, right? Fortunately, there is, again, no sign that we've got it that well wired, or the human error is going to go away anytime soon, but it's an interesting thing to worry about where this is all concerned. But ultimately, the problem of everything and the
problem of everyone is the loss of solitude, that in this media blur, in this continuous connection, we would lose our ability to sit inside ourselves, which is the thing that makes us truly human and identifies us. It's somewhat like the loss of death. It's limiting, but it's also liberating. It would be troubling for meaning and for aesthetic bliss not to have solitary contemplation. Jorge Luis Borges like Nathaniel Hawthorne
was something of a visionary where all this was concerned Bob and I both assigned the same story in the beginning of our classes it's a Borges story called the Library of Babel and in the Library of Babel Borges describes a kind of the ultimate unstructured database all the knowledge in the world is there and these poor librarians wander around because most of it's crack but they're looking for the book where the big answer is going to be, but it's all there. But there's something that is very interesting about the
library that Borges talks about by omission that I think makes us most human of all, and I'll read you this. He says, the universe, which others call the library, is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. It's like a beehive, right? Hexagonal cells. with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of these hexagons, one can see interminably the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty long shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two.
Their height, which is the distance from one floor to the ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway, which opens into another gallery, identical to the first and all the rest. And inside that hallway, there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates all appearances. And what's interesting about that is that Borges never mentions what's on the other wall, the sixth wall. And I think the reason why he never mentions what's on the sixth wall is that it is blank. There is nothing there. And that's what gives things their meaning, the necessity of having both the mirror, the sense of infinitude,
55:00–56:01
but the necessity of having the blank wall. which is to say that if we realized our complete connection to information and others we would face the final problem of everything which is the problem of nothing. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Untranscribed interval, 55:46–55:58: possible silence or omitted speech. No description of this interval has been verified.
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