Optimism vs Pessimism

Speaking of the tradeoffs between optimism and pessimism....

While cynics get a brief tactical advantage by getting to sneer, like playground bullies, they undermine their own effectiveness at generating changes - in society or in their own lives.  And there is another major drawback, pointed out by "Paul" over in my cogent-smart comment community. 

"Self-identifying pessimists I have known claim that by being pessimistic they avoid being ripped off, but if you read the literature on stress you find that they pay a high price for it. Having a negative outlook causes your endocrine system to release cortisol and a host of other stress-related hormones (as does insufficient sleep). This chronic release has some serious side-effects, including the shrinking of the hippocampus. Anyone who wishes to know their enemy needs to accept that their own body can be one of their worst. Grumpy old men trap themselves in a feedback loop of hypochondria and failing mental health. Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford makes the point that thinking positive thoughts all by itself cuts off these stress hormones and releases others that have more beneficial health effects. Optimists might get cheated once in awhile, but they tend to live longer and happier lives."

Here's the Amazon link to Sapolsky's most well-known book: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases and coping. 

I would add that optimist-pragmatists live vastly more effective lives since they believe their efforts can change their circumstances, their lives and even their nation or society.  This may make them seem fools, part of the time. But they are also more likely to try collaborative or competitive efforts to make change. Automatically that means they are more likely (even occasionally) to succeed.

The world was made by the Franklins and Lincolns and Edisons and Roosevelts and Marshalls who believed it could be changed.

== They WANT us afraid ==

One commenter said "9/11 was a huge kick in the nuts for our culture. Maybe I am wrong, but people did not seem so unkind and paranoid and crazy with religion before then."

Ah, but 9/11 was a "kick in the nuts" only because we let it be. Our parents suffered such losses weekly during WWII and they were the lucky ones, compared to Britain... and then Germany, Russia, Japan. Yes, we entered a ridiculous state of panic.  But it was deliberately pushed upon us... and especially upon Red America. 

The media and the Bushes portrayed us as wimps and we swallowed it. 

 Except many of us didn't! Read Rebecca Solnit's A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL. (See below.) There is an industry based on keeping us panicky.  But we don't have to buy the product.  Steven Pinker proved... most things are getting better!  We need to note that, not  in order to kick back, but to have the confidence it will take to evade further mine-fields...

...and get to Star Trek.

== Can mythology and Sci Fi help?==

"The future was better when Star Trek: The Next Generation was making it."  So asserts an interesting rumination on how only one major media sic fi franchise has ever taken on the hardest and best challenge — telling good stories, criticizing possible errors, while assuming that maybe - just maybe - our grandchildren mights be better than us.  That Hard Assumption terrifies most lazy producers, directors and writers.  How much easier to make the Dullard-Dystopic Assumption, that we will fail and that our descendants will all be fools? It makes plotting and action trivial.  At the small cost of chopping away at our confidence as a civilization and a people.!

Glimmers of the finer path were seen in Babylon Five. I see hints of it in Halle Berry's EXTANT. Maybe the star-trekkian mantle of adventure-with-critical-optimism will be taken up by Marc Zicree's Space Command.  Oh, and I  left out STARGATE! Very upbeat. Except for one huge flaw. They stuck - till the end - with the insane premise that it would panic all of humanity senseless, if they revealed to citizens that Earth was now the lead planet in a newly hopeful galactic federation. Um?

Still… the irony is stunning.  That my own chief pessimism about our future is rooted in Hollywood's absolute determination to undermine our confidence with pummeling after pummeling of relentless pessimism.

 == Future Tech ==

Wow. Read this from Mark Anderson: 

“At the CEATEC Japan electronics industry trade show held in October, Rohm exhibited its wearable key device, a multi-function, key-shaped item capable of counting your steps, telling you if you are walking up and / or down stairs, are on a bicycle or in a car or on a train (in case you didn't know), estimating distance (point and triangulate), counting calories, detecting metal particles in your food or somewhere else they shouldn't be, locking and unlocking your cellphone, and monitoring UV exposure so you can avoid sunburn. It contains a gyroscope, a proximity sensor, an accelerometer, a pressure sensor, an ambient light sensor, a color sensor, a UV sensor, a magnetometer, a Bluetooth Low Energy wireless communication IC, and a microcontroller. Bought in volume, the unit price is one US dollar.”  

What an age.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is asking for ideas from the private sector on breakthrough technologies to guide military investment for the next decade and beyond. 

As war drones improve, disturbing questions arise. As John Markoff says in the New York Times: “Britain’s “fire and forget” Brimstone missiles, for example, can distinguish among tanks and cars and buses without human assistance, and can hunt targets in a predesignated region without oversight. The Brimstones also communicate with one another, sharing their targets.”

The U.S. Defense Dept actually takes these issues seriously: “In a directive published in 2012, the Pentagon drew a line between semiautonomous weapons, whose targets are chosen by a human operator, and fully autonomous weapons that can hunt and engage targets without intervention."

Weapons of the future, the directive said, must be “designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”

== ... and prescience... ==

Rumors fly about, that Apple has teamed up with SpaceX and Tesla... or is it Google?... to create a new "iCar!" The patent cited here is just one of many that might be involved. As both a future-pundit and a stockholder in all those companies (Apple, since 1981), I approve!

Still might I point to this image from my 2009 graphic novel TINKERERS, kinda foreseeing this event?  Someone put it on my predictions wiki?

== Be prepared! ==

A fascinating glimpse of a study of disasters, showing that most people die because they are too passive, when situations become dire. Rather than madness, or an animalistic stampede for the exits, it is often people’s disinclination to panic that puts them at higher risk.  Very interesting and important…

…and yet, it does not tell the whole story.  Which Rebecca Solnit does in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, showing that, when they get a little time to think, many people respond to baad situations with courage and grit and dedicated citizenship.

Following up on that… I am doing my part: I took the CERT Civil Defense training and upgraded so I am now in California's Disaster Corps. They might call me up to head for any disaster site in the state. But CERT is lower level - local and neighborhood oriented with training that a busy person can take. You get certified and received tools... and confidence. It makes you part of the civilization's network of resilience.

== Miscellaneous ==

New and exciting: The Brighter Brains Speaker Bureau will connect your group, company or conference with dazzlingly interesting keynoters. It’s just getting started, but I confess to being impressed!  (If a bit biased ;-)

This list of "52 common misconceptions" is useful and fun... but I do know that the left-right brain "debunking" is very misleading.  It is more false than true.

PODCASTS!  A couple of new ones. First on Bloomberg… Predicting and Inventing the Future: Bill Frezza’s interview with me is available on SoundCloud and YouTube:

On some similar topics, I get carried away and blather on and on about the power of sci fi in self-preventing prophecies on The Note Show. The host seemed pleased, despite hardly getting a word in! Available at www.thenoteshow.com/david-brin and also on itunes and stitcher.

Yikes! Can the decline in marriage be attributed to … free online porn?

So cool! But this dinosaur costume could give some stranger a heart attack! 

Privacy will not go away -- but it will evolve

The issue will not go away. But at last the reflexes seem to be fading. The silly reflex - for example - to demand that we solve information age problems by shutting down info flows.  By standing in front of the data tsunami like King Canute screaming "Stop!"  Instead of learning to surf.

First: this is too easy to do. "The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists."

What is your reaction. Outrage? Want to ban this?  Fool. Yeah, that's gonna work, as cameras get smaller, faster, better, cheaper faster than Moore's law. Endlessly. Think TEN years ahead. Try some imagination, for a change, hm?

Driving this kind of activity underground will only empower elites and make them hire nasty-secretive henchmen to do all this in secret. 

On the other hand, if we stay calm, we can instead be militant for something that works… keeping public supervision representatives and public-access cameras in the control rooms of these systems! Require that operator-henchmen in such systems change jobs after 5 years and go to places where they can be encouraged to tell if there had been abuse. Whistleblower rewards. Lot of them.

These are deterrence vs abuse methods that use sight, which is possible. Deterring sight itself is not.

Can I belabor the point, having learned the hard way just how difficult it is? Worrying about what others KNOW is inherently insane, because you can never verify what someone else does not know! 

But you can verify what others DO with their knowledge. Preventing others from doing bad things is possible -- if we can see.

We became free by saying to elites: "You will inevitably see. But we demand the right and power to see (and supervise) you!" 

Again, there is an addiction to cynically demanding that we solve info age problems by reducing the amount and flow of light. By shouting at others "don't look!"  That approach is not only hopeless, it is illogical. Show me one example, across 6000 years, of it ever having worked. 

 == Shining Light on Anonymity ==

The Troll Hunters: This article shows the dawning of a new and badly-needed type of transparency… the hunting down and holding-accountable of internet trolls. 

“It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it. The anonymity provided by the Internet fosters communities where people can feed on each other’s hate without consequence.”

Follow this Swedish journalist who tracks and exposes Internet trolls on his television show Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter). The author reminds us that “attempts to curb online hate must always contend with the long-standing ideals that imagine the Internet’s main purpose as offering unfettered space for free speech and marginalized ideas.”

“Anonymity online is possible, but it’s frail,” says one researcher who has exposed cryptic neo-Nazis.  

One lesson from this article — perhaps not intended — is to make clear the need for an intermediate, win-win solution that will promote pseudonymity — the purchase of vetted IDs from trusted sources that also convey meta-data about credibility and allowing accountability. This would be easy to accomplish, using some of the same methods as BitCoin.  The resulting billion dollar industry could give us the best of both worlds.

== Mass Surveillance and Terrorism ==

Mass surveillance ineffective at fighting terrorism -- This article about surveillance follows the standard pattern. Starting out informative, it moves on to gloomy dudgeon, and concludes with a general armwave call for unsepecified actions, in directions that cannot possibly work.

“In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.K. government is redoubling its efforts to engage in mass surveillance. Prime Minister David Cameron wants to reintroduce the so-called snoopers’ charter—properly, the Communications Data Bill—which would compel telecom companies to keep records of all Internet, email, and cellphone activity. He also wants to ban encrypted communications services.”

France has blanket electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert the Charlie Hebdo events. They process vast amounts of imperfect intelligence data and do not have the resources to monitor all known suspects 24/7. “The French authorities lost track of these extremists long enough for them to carry out their murderous acts.”

Good point!  (Though it ignores the likelihood (with real evidence) that many other attacks were staunched by national protector castes. Notice that the possibility is never raised by the writer, that this is a matter of ratios, not black and white.

Only then, alas, the pattern repeats yet again. The author reaches exactly the wrong conclusion: 

“It is statistically impossible for total population surveillance to be an effective tool for catching terrorists.”

Sorry, but this article, while informative and important, is also wrongheaded… the way nearly all earnest and sincere journalism on the topic of surveillance tends to ultimately swing wrongheaded. Always, we see the same pattern, almost every time: a smart person, knowledgable and committed to enlightened civilization, bemoaning some trend that appears likely to empower Big Brother — some Orwellian nightmare of top-down control by elites of government, of wealth, of corporatcy, criminality or tech-wizardry.

Always, these alarums are spot-on correct — till we get to the end of each piece, when the pundit recommends… 

... nothing useful, whatsoever. 

Either the article dissipates into hand-wringing that someone oughta do something, or else vague notions that we should STOP the encroachment of cameras and data sifters, somehow, despite the unstoppable trend (sometimes called “Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law”) that cameras get smaller, faster, cheaper, more numerous and more mobile every year.

For nigh onto 20 years I have pointed out that nothing can stop this tsunami of eyes, swarming across the world. Those who try to stand, in the face of this wave, shouting “halt!” reveal nothing but their own myopia.

== Reiterating till the year 2050 ==

Elites will see — name one counter example across recorded history, when they willingly gave up a method of intelligence gathering.  If we panic, passing laws to forbid surveillance, all we will accomplish, in the prophetic words of science fiction legend Robert Heinlein, will be to “make the spy bugs smaller.”

There is another approach, a trend that is happening all around us and one that may save freedom, despite the fact that our pundits refuse to look at it.  The trend is “sousveillance,” or assertively using these new technologies to look BACK at power.  The effects are already being seen in police departments across America, as lapel cameras become standard on cop uniforms and as citizens get used to applying their now-entrenched right to record authority.  This is the trend that will save us…

…yet the hand-wringers cannot glimpse anything that doesn’t fit their narrative.

==  Privacy Dead or Alive ==

Speaking of smart dopes… “Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University. Said her colleague Sophia Roosth: “We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism,” “It’s not whether this is going to happen, it’s already happening… We live in a surveillance state today.”

Notice, yet again, the mental block. The inability to even turn the brain and mind toward sousveillance and the tech empowerment of the individual as a phenomenon or even as a possibility to be refuted with facts or logic. It seems plainly impossible for most such mavens to wrap their heads around the possibility that light might punish abusers and invaders of privacy – precisely that effect that we have seen for the last 100 years. So much for Harvard.

Privacy will not go away -- but it will evolve. 

== Miscellany ==

A "warrant canary" is a method by which companies like Google can - in theory - let you know when the government has served a warrant for your information under a gag order.  If the company sends you daily messages "We have not been served any warants for your data… today."  Then when the notifications stop… You get the idea. And I would count on it about as far as I can drop kick an NFL linebacker.

How should the FTC have responded when Google was found to be using ad-tracking cookies that circumvented Apple’s Safari web browser? Or when Amazon’s one-click technology allowed children to make in-app purchases too easily? Or when Uber’s staff was caught using the company’s so-called “God View” application to surreptitiously track people’s comings and goings? This report gives regulators a four-part analytical framework to evaluate infractions and determine what types of penalties are called for based on a sliding scale of intent and resulting harm. — A sensible offering from folks who still believe in something called “middle ground.”  Offering some persuasive charts reminiscent of The Transparent Society.

== Untraceable Money ==

See where we're heading, if we don't fight for transparency: Loopholes in U.S. Laws allow billions in untraceable foreign funds to pour into N.Y. C. Real Estate: "Behind the dark glass towers of the Time Warner Center looming over Central Park, a majority of owners have taken steps to keep their identities hidden, registering condos in trusts, limited liability companies or other entities that shield their names. By piercing the secrecy of more than 200 shell companies, The New York Times documented a decade of ownership in this iconic Manhattan way station for global money transforming the city’s real estate market.

"Many of the owners represent a cross-section of American wealth: chief executives and celebrities, doctors and lawyers, technology entrepreneurs and Wall Street traders.

"But The Times also found a growing proportion of wealthy foreigners, at least 16 of whom have been the subject of government inquiries around the world, either personally or as heads of companies. The cases range from housing and environmental violations to financial fraud. Four owners have been arrested, and another four have been the subject of fines or penalties for illegal activities.

The foreign owners have included government officials and close associates of officials from Russia, Colombia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan and Mexico."

As an indication of how well-cloaked shell company ownership is, it took The Times more than a year to unravel the ownership of shell companies with condos in the Time Warner Center, by searching business and court records from more than 20 countries, interviewing dozens of people with close knowledge of the complex, examining hundreds of property records and connecting the dots from lawyers or relatives named on deeds to the actual buyers.

A Renaissance in Science Fiction Cinema & Television

Where's this Golden Age of Science Fiction cinema we keep hearing about?  Oh, certainly most of the ingredients are here!  Never before have so many studios, cable channels, download services and amateurs been creating so much content, and SF is almost as pervasive as cop dramas.

Effects keep getting better, along with production values. It's now possible to storyboard a project -- from beginning to end -- with such detail -- that the storyboard itself ought to be a high art form, with millions of followers.  Indeed, the animated storyboard, complete with audible dialogue and music, would be a spectacular way to generate writer-centered and story-centered content, requiring only a small team of half a dozen to create a full, 90 minute dramatic experience every bit as compelling as a full-featured film... but that's a topic for another day.

Elsewhere I have spoken of the Hollywood Idiot Plot, in which cinema has been lobotomized -- channeled into endless remakes and red-dos and sequels... but also into relentlessly repeating the same dullard plot cliches of "chosen ones" and utter hopelessness of there ever being anything like "civilization." Sure, you have to keep a couple of heroes in pulse pounding jeopardy for 90 minutes!  That's a given. What is not necessary is to poison all our confidence by creating that jeopardy in the laziest way possible.  See the article, if you haven't already.  It will open your eyes.

(Oh, how I wish James Cameron would. He came SO close to achieving what he wanted to achieve, with Avatar... only to create a gorgeous mythology that poisons the very heart of our confidence that we can become better people.  So sad.)

Still, there are glimmers of light.  I have written elsewhere that I much admire Interstellar, by Christopher Nolan. (Though I'd deeply love to insert three sentences, near the end, that would have fixed an ambiguously unsatisfying ending.)  Cuaron's GRAVITY was artful and enthralling.  

Charlie Brooker's British television anthology BLACK MIRROR is bold and imaginative and provocative... a modern update on the Twilight Zone, each episode a rather dark reflection on the future of technology and society, often with disturbing twists...though most stories would do fine in forty minutes, not sixty.

We enjoyed the Halle Berry TV series Extant, far more than we expected to. There's some mystical chosen-one mumbo.  But for the most part it is real science fiction with some class. It was unafraid to break cliches and show an actual human institution being heroic and helpful and just -- a refeshing change from the modern-hackneyed reflex.  And the notion of making AI by raising it as a human child is Something I've written about many times, especially in Existence.  It's the only method that has ever worked, in the past.  Here, it was even rather moving.

Elsewhere, I described my mixed (largely positive) feelings about a TV project I helped to advise... SyFy's "Ascension." While the sex stuff got a bit tedious, there were no betrayals of the root scifi concept, which - if nothing else - was damned original! Perhaps the focus will be better, if it's renewed... and if they heed good advice.  Certainly have a look!

Aw heck... I'll go ahead and append, below, more about "Ascension" and "Interstellar"!

But first, let's finish the good news roundup. For example, see this cool preview to SyFy's new series THE EXPANSE,  based on the "James Corey" series of rollicking space operas - starting with Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War.

Why don't I mention Predestination, the movie based on Robert Heinlein's utter-classic short story "All You Zombies"? My hopes are high! Looking forward to seeing it.

Just released: A pilot based upon Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"?  Coming: (wow) a dramatized series based on Asimov's Foundation universe? (Do it!  All the way to my own culminating novel!) Plus a miniseries of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End?

Oh, let it be so.  Ending what has mostly been a wasteland of sheap fantasies, cheaper teen-sploitation dystopias and remakes and tedious sequels.

 Let it finally be so.

== Sci Fi and Film ==

Take a look at The Derelict: A 12 minute indie sci fi item on YouTube, with quite worthy effects.

“Plug” is  a pretty good recent bit of indie sci fi… post apocalyptic and clearly meant to be the first part of a series.  We may be in for a new era of creativity.

Children of the Machine is an upcoming web series led by Igby Goes Down producer Marco Weber that is set in a near-future dystopia where androids have taken over. Scheduled for a Fall 2015 release, the show will be BitTorrent‘s first-ever original series. 

Interesting and moving - this is a tour-review of Star Trek's philosophy of humanism. There are those among us who will find these messages objectionable, and that's sad. The core notion of Trek is that we can become better than we are - and that ambition has always been within us. (It's even deeply rooted in scripture.) All we need is the confident ambition to make it so.

Why James Cameron's Aliens is the best movie about technology: An interesting ode to a very good film.  Too bad Cameron's excellent "Aliens" was followed by the stunningly wretched betrayal Aliens III -- probably the very worst betrayal-of-faith with the audience in the history of cinema. But that was an era, lasting 25+ years, when every sci fi franchise followed the same pattern.  

Movie number two in any series was spectacularly good... followed by a third work that reversed every moral point,  stabbing the viewer with a spew of illogic and noxious messages and reversals of every single moral point. It happened in Star Trek and Star Wars and Terminator and so on... but the betrayal in the Aliens series was the most deliberately dreadful, ever.  So much so that I am convinced the whole thing is what Ripley dreamt! While asleep on her way home to live a long and happy life. With Newt.

 == Storytelling in Hollywood ==

Okay, let me come back and offer those quibbles on Christoper Nolan's film, INTERSTELLAR!

 Alas, it seems that today’s generation cannot even grasp the notion of working together toward an optimistic ambition.  Only Star Trek (pre-J.J. Abrams) and Spiderman ever show average citizens being sensible. So viewers always identify with the small group that defies the mob. In this case, the mob is willing to roll over and die, while a small group wants to strive ahead. I critique this tendency in modern storytelling in my article: Our Favorite Cliche: A World Filled with Idiots.

Though pause... Nolan in this case wants us all to join the camp of the strivers and the dreamers.  So the "typical cliche" in this case has its heart in the right place.

Some of you sneered at the “love in 5 dimensions" theme in INTERSTELLAR.  Come on guys, will you please learn to chill out enough to enjoy a great flick!  Ponder that “love in 5 dimensions" is NOT a physical causative in this film! If you thought that, you weren’t paying attention, guys.  The “love” thing is self-motivating for the characters. They use it as a focus-incantation and it wholly fits, at that level. It keeps the astronaut going.

 But the “reach” magical intervention is not  “love in 5 dimensions."  It is reverse causation by future beings and the sci-blather in the flick was solid enough for this physicist to just shrug and grin and keep enjoying the show.

Far worse, none of you pointed out that the planet that is NEAR the black hole has years-to-hours time dilation, yet he plunges into the Black Hole later, and experiences almost none.  Also… WTF is this solar system?  The planets orbit a star and a black hole?  Aw heck.  I set all that aside and didn't let it bug me.  (Learn to do that!)

Anyway, my friend, the epic and epochal physicist Kip Thorne, wrote The Science of Interstellar.  I look forward to reading it, when I come up for air!

My biggest -- in fact only real complaint -- comes in the morally ambiguous situation at the very end. Did Murph's breakthrough save most of humanity? I also wanted to hear that the evacuation would (they think) give Earth herself a chance to (with tender care) recover.  How to telegraph that, with just maybe four sentences of dialogue and a couple of panoramas?

How about glimpsing thousands of those cylinder colonies! While being told some volunteers would stay to take care of and heal the Earth. They were successfully saving Earth’s population ... but no one yet had the guts yet to go through the wormhole.

"Guts," says our hero. "I may be obsolete... but guts I got."

And he goes. 

== Reprise on… ASCENSION! ==

After serving as a science consultant during some planning phases, I came away from watching the three-night miniseries ASCENSION mostly impressed. We had a viewing party here at our place with Sheldon Brown and Richard Dreyfuss and his wife Svetlana.

Everyone saw the main plot twist coming. But the two extra-twists at the end were real surprises and tasty.

Sure, one can see why the “stewardess” thing got inflated in order to have a sexy ambiance to attract audience numbers for renewal.  Must have helped sell it to executives as “Mad Men in Space.”  Another sore point? It did disappoint me how much the people aboard seemed more like ocean liner passengers than crew. (I recommended the “upper-lower-decks” problem be more nuanced; maybe they can do that in the second season.)

In the final crisis scene, a well-drilled crew should have all rushed to emergency stations. The fact that they weren't well-drilled suggests this Captain may not be right for the job, after all.

But the overall look and feel were terrific and the notion of science fiction in the background was tempting.  One can easily imagine such things getting greater emphasis, as a real series develops.  I hope that if the show is renewed,, some of its potential for real sci fi can be developed. A little more EUREKA and a bit less MAD MEN or FIRESTARTER... though those aspects were fun! 

In this clip, I talk about the series... Author David Brin Explains The Real Science Behind the new show Ascension.

Now... anyone care to develop that animated storyboard thing?  Oh the stories we could tell!