All Tomorrow's Parties

The world population explosion, driving up demand for food, clashes with the West's desire to reduce its dependency on the world's major oil producers by growing biofuels. Biofuels seemed to be a brilliant response to declining fossil fuel energy reserves, but are they just adding to the chaos? So it seems according to a leaked World Bank Report which estimates that the drive to biofuels has driven up world food prices by a massive 75%.

Doh! Gotta think of something else! In our rush to address the multiple interlinked crises we are beginning to face by seizing the latest innovation, we usually find it is too good to be true. It's usually only as we alter our behaviour and begin to relax that the true implications of the gear shift become clear. Biofuels is one example, carbon offsetting is another as people and organisations continue to burn through fuel whilst outsourcing their conscience to some corporate-accounting jiggery-pokery.

Still, it's hard. I even felt myself exhale calmly, at last week's New Scientist event, as Ray Hammond hinted that artificial intelligence may soon come to our rescue by solving all of the problems that currently reside in homo sapiens' 'too hard' box. It might, but we can't stop trying to solve our problems in the meantime just because we think that the world's greatest agony aunt might be a few technological iterations away. We are continually challenged with seeking out, adopting and quite often rejecting new technologies, tools, techniques and behaviours as we try to keep the plates spinning until the 'singularity' event, when our computers' intelligence eclipses our own, occurs.

As markets transform themselves in the face of technical, cultural and commercial changes, will their new identities pass the green test? Take the music industry for example. Always one for predicting its own untimely demise, it is in fact a multi-billion dollar industry which has proved itself more than adept at coping with the demise of vinyl, the rise and fall of the CD, the spectre of Napster and the rise of legimate and illegitimate downloads. Its current response is to shift its emphasis away from making the bulk of its money on the music itself and diverting its attention to the huge revenues which can be generated from mammoth tours and festivals, with all of the merchandising and spin-off activities that come with them.

So whilst we all take a greener route to accessing our media, through downloading music or video, those savings get trounced as the entertainment industry ramps up its spend on ever more expensive energy-sapping tours, events and festivals which, the the UK, US and Europe, fill up almost every weekend from Easter to autumn. No doubt there's some convenient carbon offsetting going on... so that's OK.

Festivals. I'm rarely drawn to them. I usually skim across the vast line-ups sprawling over multiple stages and several days and circle those acts I'd like to see. I generally come up with less than a handful... enough to fill a couple of hours really. However, this week saw the line-up revealed for September's "All Tomorrow's Parties" festival. Unusually, I found that I was circling more acts than I was striking out. I'd love to go, but even if I could afford it, how could I justify flying to New York's Catskill Mountains for the weekend.

Where will we look for experiences to rival the live gig/festival experience? Probably to technology again as the avatars we create in our Second Lives become more closely integrated with our most closely-felt perceptions and experiences. In the meantime, I suppose that I'll just have to wait for another opportunity to see Bob Mould, Dinosaur Jr, Tortoise and Mogwai on the same bill. What are the odds?

UPDATE:

Here's a useful perspective on this stuff from today's Sunday Times.

Your survival is not mandatory.

I went along to last week's Visions of the Future event at London's Science Museum as organised by the New Scientist. The aim of the event was to present awards to those who had won a competition to decide which technology would have the biggest impact on our working lives in 50 years’ time. However, shoring up the awards ceremony were futurologists James Bellini and Ray Hammond and I was keen to hear what they had to say about how our lives are going to change over the the remainder of this century.

My trick back meant that I took a seat towards the back of the 500 or so guests as they milled about quaffing wine and eating canapes. So whilst I saw very little of the speakers, I had the opportunity to sit and think about what they had to say instead of shuffling from foot to foot.

Bellini kicked off with some definitions. Most importantly he makes a differentation between digital natives and digital immigrants. Those who've grown up with the internet and mobile phones are without doubt digital natives, whereas those who've begun to adopt and adapt tend to form the digital immigrant community. The main point though is, when over 50% of the world's population has yet to make a phone-call, most of us are still digital immigrants!

A lot of the commentary which followed focused on work and its shift from being somewhere we go to, to something we do. This, combined with our ongoing immersion in an always-on, always-connected, networked world introduces wider concepts such as the wisdom of the crowd and the worldwide conversation. By 2020, Bellini suggests that 80% of all workers will be free-workers or teleworkers. Yes people will still meet up. The hotdesking trend of the '90s continues, but human nature still intervenes as regular staff get in earlier and earlier to bag the same hotdesk every day!

Hammond followed on from Bellini with a number of clear themes which he feels are going to shape our future. Firstly, the world population explosion actually underpins a number of the subsequent themes, particularly the energy and food crisis, as we seek to find enough water for a global population set to almost double in our lifetimes.

Unsurprisingly, the climate crisis was up next. Hammond refuses to use the term climate change, which sounds more like a lifestyle choice or global warming which almost hints at being a good thing.

In discussing the looming energy crisis Hammond reassured his audience that oil will never ever run out. This is simply because it will become far too expensive to burn.

Globalisation is a theme which can probably contribute the most as a force for goodness and peace across the planet, as it lifts millions out of poverty.

A revolution in medicine will see us shifting towards the prevention of the disease and extending life. Nano medicines and stem cell technologies may see us regrowing and replacing organs within 15 years!

The exponential accleration in technological development is a critical theme, as it just might contain some of the answers to the challenges set by the others. As the Moore's Law curve reaches the near vertical we will draw closer to what Hammond describes as a singularity event between 2028 and 2035.

If this sounds like science fiction, that's because it has been to date, but around that time computers will become as clever as humans. In the years to follow, they will carry on along that same curve. So after a year they'll be twice as clever as we are, after two years, they'll be four times as smart, and so on. Scary stuff for Terminator fans. However, we simply don't know what lies beyond the singularity and just how technology will be brought to bear on the other challenges we face.

Will this super-human intelligence be able to deliver renewable energy sources quickly enough to enable us to reduce the density of carbon in our atmosphere in sufficient time to avert disaster. Will it enable us develop new crops and food technologies to meet the needs of the world's burgeoning population.

Of course, we simply don't know, but it just might be too soon to give up hope for Lent.

On the other hand, something reminded Hammond of a final theme, just before the close of the event. The others... the bottom billion people on the world who don't form part of the developing 2.2 billion. If we don't do something for them, the revolution in cheap and ubiquitous communications means that they will see our lifestyles and they will come and take it for themselves by whatever means necessary. What's more, we may not notice this final theme until it is too late.