I met John Nash, and his colleague Robert Aumann recently. Both won the nobel prize for economy (there isn’t one for mathematics!) for their achievements in games theory.

In our conversation I asked them one of my ‘usual’ questions about the impact of accelerating change, and the strains to which individuals and societies which adapt are exposed. It took a little prodding to let them admit that a new kind of change might indeed be happening! That not all change is equal. That the accumulation of a quantitative change can burst into a phase-changing level of qualitative change.

Here are three videos…

Conversation with John Nash

Conversation with Robert Auman

The two hour long unedited recording at a conference of the ISEO Istitute in which they tell about both their work, and their life is also available in streaming or for download.

Your retina is burned with the afterimage of the comment which says all kinds of witty, and now lost things, and has links to interesting stuff which you won’t be able to look up. As you scramble to select the text, to at least copy it, wondering fleetingly if it would be honest to repost it after the fact, since a bit is a bit is a bit anyway, your computer (hey, this is a Mac crashing and they were not supposed to do this EVAR) decides that this is the best moment to barf and crash badly enough that it needs a cold restart. (Yes, I know, music software, video encoding, a virtual machine, a couple of dozen tabs on a beta browser, a voip client or two, two dozens of IM windows, might, just might justify it. But still, oh stochastic forces, why now, why me?!) The comment gone, the clipboard gone. More panicky checks, with somewhat laconic answers: “no, when you *delete* a record, instead of junking it, it is gone”, “no the database is not a file system, and you can download a ‘RecoverMySQL’ utility to make you happy’, and ‘no, this is a virtual machine, with an automatically compacting virtual disk, so there is no magnetic trace that a military grade data recovery shop could discover there”…

And than, a miracle. It appears that your machine is backed up twice a day. And the comment in question has been posted six minutes (!) before the next backup. And your sysadmin recovers it, and puts it back to its place.

Cathartic!

I don’t recommend it to anybody with a heart condition.

Well! As I am used to say, “what is the question that I should be asking?“:

• How can I thank Marco properly? (I already kneeled in front of him…)
• What are the impacts of progressive dematerialization of our IT infrastructure?
• What guarantees that I work with Steve Jurvetson before I die?

Barack Obama is a choice for a desirable future.

It also helps that, according to the Washington Post’s political compass survey, my views are strongly aligned with his.

The planet is intertwined, connected, unavoidably influencing its different parts with political and economical decisions, which today are not in turn influenced but by those who happen to live within what are called ‘national borders’. We have no mechanism in place to make sure that in a rightly nuanced and well defined manner the needs of those who are not within those borders are also taken into consideration. In the future we will need these tools, and we might then see elections that happen on a global scale, even without a worldwide government. Many of us would have wished to be able and vote in the US elections in the past two rounds, at least. And there a millions of people whose lives have been strongly impacted by their outcome. If it were possible, I’d vote for Barack, in the name of change.

Tomorrow is the day in the primary elections in the US when it’ll be seen if Obama or Clinton is going to become the Democratic candidate in the general elections… that is why I am writing this today.

I asked him: “How can people find the right balance if their adaptability is stretched to its limits by technological progress evolving the rules of change?”

The Dalai Lama answered: “Technological progress has to serve humanity in its quest for happiness. It must not be the other way around, with humans enslaved to technology and money. The difference between humans and technology is that humans have feelings, and what I always say to my friends, is that our education systems have to teach the inner values of spirituality to the person.”

And at the end, like the crack of a whip he said: “I think that one day, the part of the brain which brings feelings should be removed, then we should be like robots, and ourselves become part machines. That would be good, actually. That would be super!” and he laughed…

Was he then joking? Or is the Dalai Lama a singularitarian transhumanist and he laughed so that those who were not ready could pretend and not take him seriously?

The UN has started the final procedures to put to a vote in front of the General Assembly a resolution for a universal moratorium on the death penalty. While not binding, the adoption of a resolution like this would be a further step towards an understanding how civilization ought to evolve in a complex environment that ill tolerates aggression at any level and from any source. And we should better want to be part of the solution then part of the problem ourselves.

A wonderful video at TED by Steven Pinker, ‘A History Of Violence’, illustrates how fallible we are in our evaluations on how the use violence changed in our societies at all scales. Its dramatic decline is illustrated in Pinker’s talk, and should serve as a guideline to politicians as strong as Moore’s law is to engineers as they stumble towards our shared future.

Then there is Sens, which takes further steps, and boldly declares that the invention of death, attributed to that of sexual reproduction a few billion years ago, is also a mistake, which we must correct.

There were a lot of very good speakers at the World Business Forum, and I was glad to be able and attend some of the sessions, and also to mingle with the other speakers. I met Eisner, from Disney, Chizen of Adobe, Perez of Kodak, Ray Kurzweil, and Colin Powell, well, of Kleiner Perkins, he says….

There were no open wifi connections available. It was like “digital kidnapping” as http://www.leeander.com/ says, but I could twitter a little through my 3D connection (even if I do not like t9 too much). You can read the river of tweets over there.

I will be in New York on Monday and Tuesday, in San Diego on Wednesday, and in San Francisco until Monday. The week is pretty full, but if you are around New York on the 4th, or in San Francisco on the 7th, and want to have breakfast, let me know as I am still free in those spots.

A very endearing and clear narrative that tells the childhood and growing into adult life of the author, an extraordinarily gifted person who is able to overcome the challenges of his autism. The observations that he makes about his own emotions, or lack of, are very illuminating, and the planning of interactions is a real study of self-consciousness!

At the head of this economic and technological development, Shugart has always been able to keep a very direct and human style, even when his company grew to revenues of several billion dollars. I met him at a Seagate Technology event in Las Vegas, at the beginning of the nineties. There were 200-300 people and he was calmly sitting on a sofa in the back of the room, with his marquee hawaiian shirt, chatting along. We were introduced, exchanged a few sentences, and our business cards. On his, instead of the traditional CEO title, under his name it read simply “zookeeper”.

In his excellent book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen takes the hard disk industry, and specifically Seagate Technology, as an example for how delicate and difficult it is to keep cannibalizing your technologies in a continuous innovation, where the new process seems a failure at the beginning, and menacingly efficient when it starts to kick finally in.