Hi. I'm sort of going to talk about open source, but I think I want to talk about something a little bigger that I think surrounds open source that I've been noticing lately. And I'll start with a vignette. This is the background of a setting for the novel that I want to write next.
It's about ten, fifteen years in the future. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you reach for is not your blackberry, it's your augmented reality glasses. These as you know show you versions of the world, tagged, untagged, you know, the version where the billboards next to the highway don't exist, keep them out of your vision. There's a version where the people you don't like don't exist, you can tune them in, tune them out. While you slept, various of your software agents have been working for you. You ordered some of them to do their work, but some of them have been working for you without your knowledge. They get their orders not from your conscious mind, but your unconscious mind, your subconscious. My favorite area of interface design in the future is unconcsious computing. By the way, I'm a big fan of operating system design, and in my mind this system that I'm describing works on a kind of mashup of an interrupt-driven version of OS 400, combined with Plan 9, running on something like Microsoft Surface, only it goes through your glasses. You know, pretty simple, I'm sure that'll exist soon.
What do you do for a living? And what do your agents do for a living? Well, that depends on what you think you are. Many of your agents are like investments. They operate autonomously in the real world to supply you with money and other goods, even though you don't know that they're operating. Cell phone roaming is like the quintessential unconscious agent in this sense. I flew down here from Toronto, and my cell phone account followed me. That sort of stuff is going to become ubiquitous. Think about a bot that watches you and updates Twitter every 15 or 20 minutes with some kind of arch comment about what you're doing. That's unconscious computing. Think chat bots, work bots, research bots, relevance filters, aggregators, like the one that we tried to create when I worked for Open Cola, for instance.
You work in a combination of real and virtual worlds, and you work as a combination of your real and virtual selves. With real and virtual relationships with real and virtual entities. But some of your bots collect designs and strategies for using your home fab unit and the tools and resources of your tools collective in your local neighborhood. These systems look for ways to replace money-based transactions in the industrial economy with community-based fab-built solutions. They apply evolutionary engineering, they simulate possible solutions, and they work on things like your home investments, your home repairs, clothing options, everything. Your food, meanwhile, comes from vertical farms. The midwest has been largely turned back into a wild state, except for boutique farming and carbon farming. The countryside is in the midst of a process known as rewilding.
And you, politically, you're neither a democrat nor a republican any more. The traditional political parties have been replaced by new entities that correspond to the nodes in a network analysis of how Americans actually distribute money and power. Your political affiliations also lie partly with a variety of online virtual nations, massive ongoing simulations, overlayed on the real one. This model is more true to your real political values, even though sometimes you consciously disagee with the choices of the party that you're assigned to. This is because your software agents understand you better than you understand yourself.
Some of the political and commercial entities you work for aren't even human. Some represent ecosystem services, such as the wetland that now supplies much of your city's water filtration needs. Because they're now recognized as part of a human economy, such natural entities are now allowed to bill you for their services. And there's more. Wild bears, whale pods, flocks of birds, they're all tagged and ubiquitously monitored in this future. Therefore, they all have their own websites. They blog, they have their fans, and in many cases they have their human spokesmen, who advocate for their needs.
And what this means is sthat the envorinment itself has become a political actor. So is this visuoin of the future true? Well, it doesn't have to be true, I'm a science fiction writer. I'm not going to predict the future, but I would like to give you tools to think about the future. And the tool in this case is a metaphor that overlaps open source and a number of other areas. And I call it the rewilding. I also do some technology foresight, which used to be called futurism, but it's slightly different. There, one doesn't predict the future either, but what you do is look for signals, signals for change, signals that indication a direction for change.
All of the elements of the scenario that I just described come from signals that I see right now. And they all have a common feature. All of those ideas, all of those elements to the little story, share the idea that sometimes you can get things done more efficiently by relinquishing traditional methods of control.
To make it easier to think about these trends, I'm looking at them as one thing, and I've come up with a conceptual metaphor. Rewilding. The original definition of the world wild was "self-willed". In environmental conservation, rewilding is the practice of reintroducing a species, usually a top predator, into a depleted ecology in order to repair that ecology. For example, restoring wolves to Yellowstone national park made the trees healthier, which is a knock-on effect that we now recognize happens.
So what are the signals that I talked about. Here's a signal, Ecosystem services. Instead of just draining a wetland, and replacing it with a water filtration plant, you can calculate the sevices that that wetland supplies, you can put actual dollar figures to it. And if you're putting actual dollar figures to it, you are incorporating something non-human into the human world, into the human economy. And that I think is a new activity for us.
It means knowing how to get ahead by knowing when to leave alone. What to leave alone. Ecosystem services can be seen as services we get for not exercising control over nature. And instead of control, which is an agency that wills passive nature, which bends to your will. We've introduced the idea of negotiating with a self-willed world. And in my little scenario, this runs through all the levels that we've talked about. There's organizational rewilding, and you guys are involved in it. Open source, where you replace top-down hierarchical carrot and stick ocntrol with different means of incenting. Wikinomics, the Slashdot method of site management. Wikipedia, where basically knowledge organizes itself from the ground up. Crowdsourcing, collective intelligence. And open government, government 2.0, and emergent government, all of these deas and buzzwords that are going around, all involve the idea of relinquishing traditional control in favor of knowing when to control and knowing when to leave alone. And this whole process of leaving alone is something that I call rewilding.
Because it means handing over contorl to the self-willed, to something external or different from yourself. And how far down does this rabbit hole go? It goes all the way down, because this sort of thing is happening now in cognitive science too, where we're learning that the "brain is computer mind is software" metaphor sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't. It turns out, you can't think properly if you don't gesture. As you can see I'm gesturing a lot, so I must be thinking a lot.
You use the body to think with. And you use more than the body to think with, you use the external environment around you to think with. There's a great book on the subject by Edwin Hutchins, called Cognition in the Wild, which is all about ship navigation, and how ship navigation is a cognitive duty that cannot be done by a single cognitive agent. It has to be distributed. So even as human beings we sort of exist in a cloud, we do cloud computing as people.
I think that's really cool, by the way. And that means that our definition of ourselves is changing, to involve things that are not ourselves. That when we understand that when we think, it's not just us that are thinking, but it's the tools we use, the people around us, the environment that we incorporate, that all participate in the thinking process. That means we're rewilding our notion of ourselves. We're incorporating the idea of the separate, the different, the self-willed, into our own identity.
I think this is fundamentally important for all the reasons that we've been talking about this week. The value of open source is an example of the value of the self-willed. The value of ecosystem services is huge. The green belt around Toronto, which was recently put in place by the government, that filtered all the water that drains through the aquifer down to the city, if you replace that with a human series of filtration plants, the cost would be colossal. The green belt serves both nature and us at the same time.
And I think this is a model for what's coming down the pipe. When I talk about letting go of control, I'm not talking about some sort of moral thing. This is not a call to turn away from high tech. What I'm thinking, and what I'm hoping to do with this new book, is show that this is the highest technology of all. Because when we started using technology thousands of years ago, we didn't know what we could control, what we couldn't. We didn't know what we had to control, what we could leave alone. So we tried to control everything.
And the whole notion of ecological advance since then has been try and control as much of the world as we can. But the more you learn about something, the more you know what you need to control and what you can leave alone. And I think that we're reaching a point now where were starting, just starting to understand some things well enough that we know when to leave alone.
Democracy, for instance, comes from an insight into hunan nature, about when to leave people alone, when to use the carrot, when to use the stick. The invisible hand fo the market, is a similar insight. These are things we like, because they work. And they work because they include the rewilded world, they include the non-human, non-thought-out, self-motivating, self-motivated part of the world. But we have to know which of those systems we can trust. So we have to know how to understand the system. So what I see coming, and what I'd like to write about, is a world where we understand ourselves and we understand the world well enough that we know when to trust.
Open source is part of that whole process. Learning to trust, learning when to trust, learning when to control. And I think that what you can take away, since we're talking about takeway messages, is the idea that what you're wortking on is actually larger than what you think you're working on. It's part of a larger process. And that process is societal, technological, cultural, it's a huge, huge shift. And when you hear people talking about things like sustainability, they're talking about what you're working on, just another aspect of it.
And hopefully, I can write my book, it'll all make more sense than I've been able to make for you in fifteen minutes here, and we can all move together together. Thanks.