So Far July 14, 2000

With updates and all, I have not had a much time to do the reading I intended. That will wait for next week. This week's column is more opinion than normal but it has some connections with the sequencing of the human genome.

The idea for this column started with Celera's announcement of the 'complete' sequencing of the human genome. (We all know this is incorrect but it makes great copy.) I got to listen to Dan Rather state that this was one of the most important days in human history, then promptly roll right in to a standard discussion of all the terrible problems of biotechnology (i.e. human cloning, privacy, genetic engineering). I am a firm believer in mankind's ability to solve problems when they have been defined. It is the unintended, out-of-the-box thinking that often results from excellent problem solving that is one of mankind's greatest talents.

A friend, 'John Steed' (the name has been changed to protect somebody or other) is my worst nightmare. He is someone who asks great open ended questions and then actually listens to what I say. Then he asks incredible probing questions, indicating that he is not only listening to me but actually following what I am saying. Needless to say, I know I can talk for way too long but John always leads the conversation into really thought-provoking areas, providing enlightenment, even though he is not the one doing much of the talking. A wonderful gift.

'John' gave me a book recently called The Clock of the Long Now. It is written by Stewart Brand (author of The Whole Earth Catalog) and incorporates many of the ideas from some of today's most provocative artists, both in the performing arts, such as Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson, and in the technical arts, such as Bill Joy or Ester Dyson.

I won't go into too much about the book. It does have a very interesting premise. Instead of making a clock that can measure ever shorter times, how would you make a clock that could last 10,000 years and only measured centuries? Simply considering such a problem opens your perceptions to new ideas. Where would you house such a clock? How could you insure that it would survive? What type of technology would it use? These all cause you to look at the problem, and the world, in a different way.

There are a ton of ideas in this book. I don't agree with many of them but I have to appreciate someone who can look at the world and ask questions that are skewed enough to cause other people to think deeply. Thinking outside of the box has become such a cliché. But possessing the ability to cause OTHER people to think outside the box is even rarer and, probably, more precious.

Brand discusses the inability of many so-called futurists to accurately describe the real future that develops. For at least the last 200 years, prominent people have stated that the end is in sight. That population growth will overwhelm agricultural production. That science has discovered pretty much all it ever will and that all that is left is filling in the holes. That there will be no more trees left to build warships. They simply extend exponential curves into the future, but are unable to foresee the astonishing results when human ingenuity enters the picture. They usually do not apply creative approaches to viewing the future, sticking to the much easier proclamation that the end is near. I really appreciated Brand's book and his vision. They obviously believe than mankind WILL still be around in 10,000 years, in a form that will be able to understand and appreciate such a thing as a Clock of the Long Now.

In the early 70's, there was a popular book called 'The Limits to Growth'. It discussed many of the same topics Malthus had, almost 150 years earlier. Some trends increase at an exponential rate, such a population growth. Other trends increase at much slower, arithmetic rates, such as agricultural yield or petroleum production. At some point the rate of increase from the exponential growth will swamp all other trends, and if this increase is something like population growth, disaster will result. At least that is what will happen if you simply extrapolate curves into the future. The 'Limits to Growth' made some predictions, saying that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and natural gas by 1993. Wrong on every count. Perhaps right as far as it went by extrapolating curves but missing the mark totally in their ability to predict the future.

The writer of 'The Population Bomb', Paul Erhlich, made a bet around the same time with an economist named Simon. A great story about Simon. In the '70's airlines did what they do today, they overbooked, tremendously. And they would bump people who were the least likely to complain, such as the elderly, young, etc. These people were given a small bonus and hussled off the plane. Involuntarily. Simon proposed a system in which people would be asked to voluntarily leave the plane by essentially 'auctioning' off the seats. An airline would notify people that it would pay them a bounty if they gave up their seat. Simon's numbers showed that this would not only make people less upset, it would actually save the airlines money! No one listened to Simon for years. They did not really evaluate it. They simply said it would not work. When he was finally able to get it evaluated, it worked perfectly. This procedure continues to be used today, to our everlasting benefit. Remember this the next time you hear them 'auctioning' off seats on a full flight to Hawaii.

Ehrlich is a Malthusian, someone who believes that natural resources are limited and that mankind has already set in motion its own destruction. Simon was a Cornicopian, believing instead that human ingenuity would always overcome any problem of natural resource shortages. He challenged Ehrlich to pick any 5 commodities totaling $1000 dollars in 1980. They would check the prices in 1990, take inflation into account, and chose a winner. Ehrlich said the commodities would be worth more. Simon said they would be worth less. Ten years later, Simon won by such a large amount that he would have been the winner even if inflation had not been included. The $1000 worth of natural resources in 1980 was worth less than $600 in 1990. Pretty awful return on an investment but pretty good for the Cornicopians.

So which is right, the depressing Malthusian, proclaiming a message of doom and destruction, or the Cornicopian, telling us that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be even better? Ehrlich said: "Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.", while a 19th century Cornicopian said: "Both the jay hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay hawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens."

Now, these two viewpoints are not really mutually exclusive. They both contain kernels of the truth. Exponential curves do not keep going forever. There are checks on the system, physical and otherwise. The worry of the Malthusians derives a fundamental property of any exponentially growing system. Imagine a water lily in the middle of a lake. The lily doubles in size every day. It will completely fill the lake in 30 days. So, how many days does it take for the lily to fill half the lake?....29 days. So for most of the month it does not appear that the lily is really growing very fast. If you wait too long, you may not be able to stop or even affect the problem. This is the Malthusian view. They are often proclaiming that it is already too late and famine is just on the horizon.

But what they have so far forgotten to include in their equations is the beneficial side of human creativity. Because human ingenuity has, so far, alwas increased at faster rates than anything else. We have so far ALWAYS found a way around a problem.Our greatest creativity seems to arise during adversity. As Tierney's article states, the Greeks moved from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age because of a local scarcity of tin. I am sure there were Greeks millennia ago saying that the end was near, that the lack of tin meant the end of Greece. The lack of whale oil in the mid 1800's led to petroleum. We adapt, improvise and improve. Things may slow us down in one direction, but we have a great ability to move in entirely novel directions that just can not be predicted.

So, I tend to be more a boomer than a doomer. Things are getting better in many ways. There are aspects of the human genome that we do not even imagine yet that will be incredibly important 10 years from now. Over the last 10,000 years we have selected for problem solvers. Without them we would never have gotten to the year 2000. The Malthusians serve a great purpose, helping to keep our eyes focussed on dangerous problems that potentially endanger all of us. Problems we need to solve in order to provide for our own survival and that of most animals. But they should not make predictions. They tend to be wrong. So far. That qualifying 'So far' still worries me but I believe the vision of Stewart Brand is far closer to the truth than Paul Ehrlich. Just call me Dr. Pangloss.