The Long Now

I believe I need to put this "out there" because the events of the last few days, the stock market crash and the bombing in India, the 3 dead infants and 1200 sick in China from tainted food, all just tends to highlight that something has gone terribly wrong in the way we think. In a world of exigencies, whether its the minute tremors on the exchange, instant wealth and loss, instant stardom and obscurity and the politics of opportunism, it seems that we are rushing into the future and forsaking our present. We see the present as Risk Management, pithy, controllable, exploitable, with no thought to the larger consequences of our actions. The present is something you can put up on a billboard, that's the amount of detail and depth that we view it with. We have ADD on a scale of 4 billion.

The Long Now Foundation is more than a web page or a movement headed by pioneers of the digital age and the subculture which seeds it. Just like Oppenheimer after the fact, it seems that the owners of revolutionary technologies now want to see that it is in responsible hands. This philosophy is called "Deep Time". To paraphrase Stewart Brand, in ancient times a farmer would plant trees knowing that the beams of his house would need replacement 400 years from now. We cannot even imagine the next few years. Two huge forces are going to shape us in the next 50, the way we view time and the Singularity which will make time itself invalid. This blog attempts to familiarize the reader with both.

The Long Now Foundation took its inspiration from an observation by Brian Eno about New York life. Eno known as the "Godfather of ambient music" is the founding member of Roxy Music. His full article, The Big Here and Long Now, if freely available but I've taken the liberty to quote some passages.

"I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be ‘passing through’. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".

‘Now’ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows....

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Meanwhile, we struggle to negotiate our way through an atmosphere of Utopian promises and dystopian threats, a minefield studded with pots of treasure. We face a future where almost anything could happen. "

The Technological Singularity is a very familiar concept to sci-fi buffs and geeks alike. It portends of a time in the near future where technology would have reached such a level that it would be unintelligible to all of us. It would move on its own wheels, steer its own course, with its own purpose, and leave us a giant irrelevance, dissembling in the dust. It follows from Moore's Law, "the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for half of a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer. Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras." -Wikipedia. The reason we may feel that it applies only minimally right now is because Corporations hold back their innovations for maximum profitability. The future is already patented.

The term "Technological Singularity" was coined by Vernor Vinge. The metaphor of the singularity is taken from astronomy. When a giant star collapses, its density is so great that it swallows everything which doesn't move faster than the speed of light. It becomes a black hole and this region where all light is drawn in, the "event horizon". Its worth having a look at Stewart Brand's article on it. Stewart Brand is the founding editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog, as well as "The Well". He is also a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The man who applied the metaphor to human events is science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge in his novel 1991 novel Across Realtime. The characters realized that technology advance was radically self-accelerating at the time. Innovations that used to take years were being made in months and then days. Then the record stopped. Vinge's characters called the event the Singularity-"a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.

In the metaphor, radical progress is not progress, but the end of the world as we know it.


Opinions vary as to what would be the Singularity's leading mechanism. Proponents of nanotechnology (molecular engineering) are sure that the turning point will be "the assembler breakthrough"-when ultra-tiny, ultra-fast nanomachines capable of self-replication are devised. Others expect that it's the convergence of computer technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, each accelerating the other, that would fuse into a new order of life. Vinge himself sees the tipping point as the moment when machine intelligence, or machine-enhanced intelligence, surpasses normal human intelligence and takes over its own further progress. Another possibility is some emergent property of the all-embracing Internet, which Vinge proposes might "suddenly awaken."

The Long Now Foundation, followed through on its philosophy and decided to build the "Millennium Clock". The architect was none other than Danny Hillis. Danny Hillis is the inventor of massively parallel supercomputers. He pioneered the technology such as the RAID disk array used to store large databases today. He is in the process of creating an artificial life program that emulates biological evolution in the real world.

"I want to build
a clock that ticks
once a year.

The century hand
advances once every
100 years, and the
cuckoo comes out
on the millenium

I want the cuckoo
to come out every
millenium for the
next 10,000 years

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks." - Hillis on the Millennium Clock

"The first prototype of the clock began working on December 31, 1999, just in time to display the transition to the year 2000. At midnight on New Year's Eve, the date indicator changed from 01999 to 02000, and the chime struck twice, to ring in the "third millennium". The Long Now Foundation has purchased a mountaintop near Ely, Nevada, surrounded by the Great Basin National Park, for the permanent storage of the full sized clock, once it is constructed." -Wikipedia

And this is where we are at.
For those who want to have a shot at predicting the future, you can go up against the very people who made it possible @ The Long Bets "The arena for accountable predictions"