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.

[13:04] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Hey everybody, welcome – we’ll be starting in a few minutes – still lots of people coming in – If this is your first time here, please feel free to grab a gift bag and some treats from the back tables – and welcome to to Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon

[13:06] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Our Salon Spotlight Guest this week is Davidorban Agnon. David is the Founder of OpenSpime, Inc., Vulcano, a community in SL, Lunarez, and numerous other companies and nonprofits, is a blogger, inventor and creative thinker – and David’s going to be talking about his activities, and about The New Renaissance – welcome, David!

[13:08] Davidorban:
Thanks Soph, for the kind intro. Hello everybody! Thanks for having me in front of such an interesting and stimulating audience.

I will speek for about 20-30 minutes and then it will be great to open the floor for discussion and questions and all the fun we can have. But first, I would like to ask some of you some questions.

When I speak in front of a physical audience I always try and establish their ‘breaking point’ in terms of what tools online they do use or even have heard of so let me ask each of you, and just answer with a yes or no.

First question: have you ever contributed to Wikipedia?

[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: no
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Nope
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: yes
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Yes
[13:12] Chimera Cosmos: read only
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: yes
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yeds
[13:12] Extropia DaSilva: No.
[13:12] Galatea Gynoid: minor edits
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: and went to wikimania
[13:12] Tara Yeats: -d
[13:12] Malburns Writer: once or twice
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: I try to aviod acting like I know things…
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes once or twice
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes

[13:12] Davidorban: Second question: do you use Twitter?
[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: no
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: gods yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: addictively
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Yepyep!
[13:12] Yel Oh: hi Alanagh
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yes
[13:12] Dani Revnik: no
[13:12] Kanomi Pikajuna: not any more
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Twitter uses me
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:13] Galatea Gynoid: reluctantly :p
[13:13] Chimera Cosmos: yes, a litle

[13:13] Davidorban:
Third question: would you go as far in lifestreaming as to put (assuming you have any) biological signals online in realtime (for example heartbeats)?
[13:13] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:13] Zentinal Ziskey: nope
[13:13] Velicia Llewellyn: No
[13:14] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: n/a
[13:14] Nikitten Ninetails: no
[13:14] Grace McDunnough has no heartbeat
[13:14] Stan Aichi: sure
[13:14] Yel Oh: if I could think of a good reason to . . yes
[13:14] Extropia DaSilva: Me? No. My primary might but not me.
[13:14] Tara Yeats: unlkiekly
[13:14] Crap Mariner pleads the Fifth
[13:14] Galatea Gynoid: Not sure there’d be a point…
[13:14] Shava Suntzu: unlikely
[13:14] Chimera Cosmos: sure

[13:15] Davidorban:
Fourth question: assuming you could (with an implant or upgrade) merge thoughts, and PURPOSE, with more entities, would you do it?
[13:15] Malburns Writer: Mal hopes to put memories online before heartbeat fades, but …
[13:15] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:15] Centrasian Wise: yep
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Yes
[13:15] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: yes
[13:15] Crap Mariner: No
[13:15] Velicia Llewellyn: …..come again Dave?
[13:15] Yel Oh: yes
[13:15] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Crap: Resistance is futile. :p
[13:15] Shava Suntzu: I want to know more about it before I’d say yes or no
[13:16] Grace McDunnough: Join the merge, Vel . you know you want to
[13:16] Zentinal Ziskey: yes, selectively and voluntarily
[13:16] Velicia Llewellyn: Gotcha

[13:16] Davidorban: So.. thanks for this. It is interesting how when speaking to different audiences you can always lose them after a while with the answers becoming prevalently no, or huh, but not here!
[13:16] Grace McDunnough winks
[13:17] Davidorban: So, let’s start!

And then come back to see what the questions could/should mean, if anything… Let me start with a little dash into history. The ages of humanity have been determined by the evolution of ideas, and their implementations in technology, and societal organization. We have had several epochs, that have been characterized by the interplay between structures and aggregations of various levels: the individual, the family, the clan, the village, the city, the kingdom, the nation state.

Today’s dominant organization, the nation state, is creaking under the forces of globalization. Not only global commerce of products, but also services, and in general the flow of ideas. The metaverse is one of the most important harbingers of the forthcoming changes. And we, in Second Life are experiencing the approaching shockwaves: all the various crackdowns on innovative and controversial practices in SL are a sign of how disquieting, and at the same time how important these experiments are for the physical world.

They are just afraid and rightly so: change is too hard for lazy mammals.

And we are the ones who have to reassure the physical world that change can be beneficial, and while hard, not drammatic, or tragic.

One of my main interests in memetics, and universal Darwinism in general… Dynamic evolution in the metaverse in omnipresent. The evolutionary aspects of Second Life itself are undeniable:
- an environment with constraints hosts
- activities that are observed and copied
- with variation through reinvention
…this is the basic recipe for any universal Darwinian evolution.

I created Vulcano in SL, which you are all welcome not only to visit, but also to be part of, as an evolving social structure. Vulcano on Second Life has been born as an experiment in applying these rules within a social structure. What happens if you let everybody do what they most want to do and learn in SL, to build whatever they want?

The only ‘seed’ as the starting point of the evolution being “apply common sense”!

Since everybody’s definition of common sense is different, there will be a lot of variation, as the news of Vulcano is passed around and people here “Hey you can do anything on Vulcano, as long as it makes sense”. And given the maximum number of prims on a land, there is an environmental constraint that is applied, eliminating what are the stupid ideas, and keeping the ones that in this context make most sense.

After more than a year of evolution on Vulcano we are ready to start and abstract some of the things we learned!

Lesson one: stakes must not always be raised!
We have had thermonuclear attacks, which we survived, and decided not to ban the attacker. The biological necessity of always trumping the enemy so that you won’t be exterminated doesn’t apply!

Lesson two: you can encourage mistakes!
The wonderful sensation of being free to experiment (the childlike wonder, as FSJ would say) is here to stay even as adults when you realize that other people are making the same at the same time as you are or that they went through the same experiences as you are.

Lesson three: metarules are fundamentally important!
In order not to burden the growing community with more and more rules, we have metarules that establish the survival value of the social structures, and the rules that sustain them.

Our next excersise running right now is going to be the design of a dynamic constitution that will have an XML formulation in order to be machine readable, and allow the evaluation of DIFFERENCES between different forumlations. Why is this very important in our opinion? When different online worlds in the metaverse interoperate the frontier crossing them will beeven more important than those between countries today as the changes will impact the laws not only of the social structure, but ownership, DRM, control, identity. When you are crossing in an Open Source world, you shall leave all your nice DRM protected dresses behind!

(BTW: as a consequence, since this filter is not symmetrical, Open Source creation is bound to overcome greatly close sourced creation in the metaverse as well)

So, to start the final part of my speech…
When ideas flow freely, since they are not a scarce resource, what you must keep is adding value through further elements of invention, and creativity.

What happens to humanity as we merge with machines?
What will become of natural humans in a world of automation, where white collar jobs are as regularly mechanised, as blue collar ones in the ’70s or the ’80s?

Too many people are living in a state of fear. Because they confuse evolution with extermination. Still today the most numerous life forms on the planet are bacteria.

Humans are the foundation of the technological evolution, which is going to acquire a large degree of autonomous life. When humans decoupled themselves from the grind of the natural environment 10000 years ago with the invention of agriculture, they took on the new grind of organizing their new life as mechanizers. After 10000 years of trying we are now on the verge of actually being able and go back to what we are good at: chatting, grooming, telling stories, etc.

Without the heartbreaking realities of a 20 year long average lifespan and without the incredible loss of ideas being born just to be extinguished becaue of lack of connectedness.

This is what I call the New Renaissance!

Going back, by going forward: embracing technological tools, to achieve fulfilling and stimulating lives where creativity is unbounded by commercial rules and flows openly adding to humanity’s happiness in an inclusive society that is not afraid of the future that it is building

[13:41] Davidorban: THE END

Please read the full Q/A session on Scribd

Tomorrow I will be speaking at Extropia Core at 1PM PST, invited by Sophrosyne Stenvaag for her ‘Saturday Salon‘ conversations. The title of my speech is going to be “The New Renaissance“

Mixed reality enters the time axis, as I am holding a lecture at the California School of International Management while being physically there, after having held a seminar remotely, which apparently they liked!

This time we are going to talk about “A New Metaphor For The Digital Divide”. The lecture will be delivered via Mogulus online, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Friday, March 7, starting 9PM PST (6PM CET).

Thanks, Marc, and for the invitation and the organization of the event!

and also the slides that were used:

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

David Orban
“Strategic Marketing Evolves – The changing role of brands in the network age”
Disintermediation is immediacy. After a hiatus of ten thousand years, during which more and more sophisticated tools were needed to overcome the lack of contact between the producers and consumers, today, with the new opportunities that the network gives us, we can go back to rely on reputation as the surest guide on which to base our transactions.

You can also download the slides, and the audio of the lecture separately if you prefer.

[Update: I also uploaded the audio of the QA session following the lecture]

I have been invited to hold a lesson at the California School of International Management‘s course on Strategic Marketing. The lesson will be delivered online, via Skype, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Wednesday, February 6, starting 2PM PST (11PM CET). If you would like to attend just let me know in the comments, or write me an email a tweet, or anything else that you fancy, and I will be very happy to have you with us.

During the seminar I will concentrate on analyzing the role of brands and strategic messaging in the future, drawing a parallel with what these concepts might have meant in prehistoric times, and concluding that today we have to speak with the same immediacy, and spontaneity that has formed the basis of communication then.

Thanks, Marc, for the invitation and the organization of the event!

17.20 Chris Anderson is in Milan at a conference, organized by ‘The Ruling Companies’, and a bunch of bloggers have been invited to cover the event live, so here I am, sitting in the first row, and listening to what is being said. I am actually curious to see if there will be new nuggets, and what the Italian speakers here are going to say.

The Minister of Communications, Paolo Gentiloni, is also here. Which is fun, since a law that came up just last week promoted by him would have made blogging in Italy impossible except by big budget professional publishers.

17.30 Chris Anderson: “Where we are standing right now may very well be ground zero of what we now call the long tail, since Milan, and Italy in general has grown even in the industrial age on niche styles, and products of high couture, fashion, wine, food, which now has spread, through the internet to the rest of the world”

He is doing his slideshow. Excusing himself for the American examples in front of the European audience, and translating the Bell curve into Gaussian distribution, and the power-law into Pareto’s.

17.53 “The network effect is… uhm… the network effect is… argh, I have a hard time explaining it on-stage. You know, the internet, the web, right?” A true bushism.

“Hits succeed because they make the most efficient use of a limited distribution. They are a product of supply chain, not of demand

The cost of shelf space has fallen to zero. For the first time everything made in the world is available.

The fastest growing part of the market is what was missing in the culture before

Redbridge from Anhauser Busch, a beer for people with glutin allergies, is the example of a shift in culture, which is independent of the internet. People everywhere are developing a taste for niches.”

18.00 “The Ryanair Effect: with choice in travel the destinations are becoming more varied, as we reveal the new places where we want to spend our time”

I don’t know if I will be able to ask questions, but if I will here are some that I would:

1. Copyright is an agreement between content owners and society. When the legislative criminalizes behavior that a large portion of society deems possible, and legal, to protect content owners, the balance of this agreement hurts what is the perception of the importance of legality in the entirety of society itself. Isn’t it time to reconsider the original agreement?

2. What is the Long Tail of Politics? (just popped into my mind, since lately I am thinking a lot about open government, and wonder if the expression actually means anything.)

18.20 Shows a drab corporate photo of Steve Ballmer and says “Microsoft has an image problem” then the video “The Day Of The Long Tail”

18.30 Minister Gentiloni says “We are not outside of the wave of transformation that Chris Anderson described”. Yeah. We might not be outside of it, but Italy certainly is at the periphery of it. Look at Google deciding that it wasn’t worth keeping Italian programmers enticed with their contest for the Android applications because of bureaucratic complications. I stopped listening to him, and after a few minutes asked Paolo Valdemarin sitting on my side if he was saying anything meaningful. He says “No.”

18.50 Question time. I actually got to ask the first question, and it was, more or less, the first one I listed above. Chris answered confirming that during the day he works for copyright, and by night whatever he does he releases with Creative Commons Attribution license. He says “I don’t own an excusive license to my ideas, and I want to share them, and get the feedback from them”

Gentiloni remarks, relevant to Italian…

Wow, as I was writing this, and sorry for the time jump (19.09) and interrupting myself, but answering a question from Camisari Calzolari, Gentiloni (telepathic, or maybe my question was obvious enough) has just answered my second question, and he said that the Long Tail of Politics is the presence of 22 parties in the Italian parliament.

…so, getting back in time to the answer to the first question, he says that the Urbani decree (putting jail term for copyright infringement, which as many laws in Italy has never been enforced) has to be changed. We’ll see.

I also had the chance to tell Chris that I already uploaded a video highlight of his talk while he was talking, with a Creative Commons Attribution License, and complete with titles, and credits, and got his applause

19.15 Answering a question from Roberto Dadda about Free, his new book, Chris confirms that it will be available as a free digital download, as a free audiobook! Woot.

19.20 Answering an other question about ‘The Machine is Us/Using Us’ he says that “Yes, we are building an artificial intelligence in Google, but I don’t see a way this could become corruptive and be used against us.”

END

Now on for the ‘Long Dinner’ where I heard Chris is actually going to join us!
(Sorry for many links missing. I will put them in shortly. In the meantime you can use Google!)

“From e-tail to v-business: are virtual goods an entirely new category?”

The conversation was very lively, and well moderated by Adam Pasick. I am especially proud of Cory Doctorow having sat through it, and asked a question as well! I met him in the speakers’ lounge after lunch, and he said that he wasn’t sure he could make it, so it looks like my short pitch helped (as well as the fact that he was on the panel after ours!).