The Road Ahead

TECHNOLOGY AND US

TIME: WHAT INNOVATION WILL MOST ALTER HOW WE LIVE IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS?

TIM O'REILLY, publisher and technology advocate: Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications. I think we're at the first stages of something that will be profoundly different from anything we have seen before, in terms of the ability of connected computers to deliver results. We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

DON'T WE ALSO RUN THE RISK OF HARNESSING OUR COLLECTIVE IDIOCY? EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN ON THE WEB KNOWS THAT THE RATIO OF SIGNAL TO NOISE IS NOT ALWAYS OPTIMAL.

O'REILLY: Right, but remember what Google did. They basically said, let's look at what all the millions of individual users are linking to, and let's use that information to get the good stuff to float to the top. That turned out to be a very powerful idea, the ramifications of which we're exploring in other areas, such as with tagging on Flickr or blogs. People are finding more ways to have the wisdom of crowds filter that signal-to-noise.

MARK DERY, author and cultural critic: I find the fetishization of the wisdom of crowds fascinating. It has a whiff of '90s cyberhype about it. I'm fascinated by the way in which it contrasts with individual subjectivity. A lot of technologies, such as Flickr, blogging, the iPod, seem to turn the psyche inside out, to extrude the private self into the public sphere. You have people walking down the street listening to iPods, seemingly oblivious to the world, singing. More and more, we're alone in public.

SO IS THE INTERNET TRULY CREATING CONNECTIONS AMONG PEOPLE? OR DIVIDING US AS WE HIDE INSIDE OUR PRIVATE SHELLS?

MOBY, pioneering electronic musician: I have a friend whose Swedish mother--she's in her mid-60s--goes online to meet men. I was with my friend as he drove her to the Hilton to meet a Canadian doctor she'd encountered online, and I thought, How disconcerting. Because it was 10 at night and most likely she was going to meet this guy and stay in his hotel room. Go back 50 years, and she would have been in her Swedish village, depressed, a bit lonely and sad. Instead she's in midtown Manhattan, preparing to spend the night with a doctor, and her son is driving her to the hotel!

O'REILLY: There's also more communication even in apparent isolation. Think about the private bubble people live in. Kids spend a lot of time alone in front of their phone, their TV, their computer. But they are also communicating in new ways, and I suspect most of us in this room maintain communication with a group that is far larger, far more geographically diverse than we ever would have known without technology.

ESTHER DYSON, editor of technology newsletter Release 1.0 for CNET Networks: The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. In my own experience, it has drawn my family closer, as we post pictures on Flickr. It has done more than tap into something latent; it has actually created something that wasn't there with the younger family members. We couldn't do that before because we were all geographically separated.

DAVID BROOKS, author and New York Times columnist: Is it possible that as the Internet creates more geographic diversity, it creates less demographic diversity? There once were millions of people in Elks Clubs, and Elks Clubs were incredibly diverse. These days, with, say, online dating, you can screen people who aren't demographically like yourself.

CLAY SHIRKY, writer and technology consultant: But look at Meetup.com The most active users are stay-at-home moms. In the suburbanized, two-career U.S., social capital has moved away from the neighborhood and toward work. The stay-at-home moms are actually now remarkably disadvantaged in terms of social capital. We're used to thinking everything is going to get more and more virtual until we're these big floaty video heads, but actually there is a return of the real, as we figure out how to use this stuff to have real-world encounters.

ISN'T THERE A RISK THAT DESPITE ITS PROMISE OF DEMOCRATIZING SOCIETY, TECHNOLOGY WILL LOCK US INTO HOMOGENEOUS CLUSTERS?

BROOKS: As the information age matures, you're getting social stratification based on education. If you come from a family earning over $96,000 a year, your odds of getting a bachelor's degree by age 24 are 1 in 2. If you come from a family earning under $36,000, it's 1 in 17. People at the top of the income scale pass down the skills one needs to thrive in this economy to their kids who get into Harvard--where the median student comes from a family making $150,000 a year--and they go on to an affluent suburb. And they pass it down, so you get really good public high schools, and people there are more likely to marry people like themselves.

O'REILLY: Is this really new?

BROOKS: It's increasing more quickly than before. Look at the relationship between a father's income and a son's. Until the '70s, there was a loose relationship. Since then, it has become much tighter.

DERY: But there's also an upside to sociological clustering, at least online. In the 1950s, if you had the hapless happenstance of being born gay in Oklahoma, you might have spent many a lonely night biting your pillow and cursing the heavens for making you the only gay on earth. Now any 18-year-old with a modem is just a click away from a universe of fellow travelers, and to me, that's a good thing.

MALCOLM GLADWELL, author and New Yorker writer: Yes, there is homogenization in clustering, but there are many different clusters being created all at once, and the overall effect can be to increase diversity. It may be that in each of those groups, I'm finding people who are precisely like me, but there are 10 me's. There's Malcolm the football fan, Malcolm the psychology nerd ...

WHO ARE WE, REALLY?

GLADWELL: One of the most striking things in observing the evolution of American society is the rise of travel. If I had to name a single thing that has transformed our life, I would say the rise of JetBlue and Southwest Airlines. They have allowed us all to construct new geographical identities for ourselves. Many working people today travel who never could have in the past, for meetings and conferences and all kinds of things, and this is creating another identity for them.

DYSON: And once you travel, you come back and use other technologies to stay in touch. It used to be if you traveled somewhere for an interesting week, you come home and nothing has changed. Now you can stay in touch with the people you meet. I think cheap telephone service has made a huge difference in how people think. When I went to college as a kid, it was long distance, so I never called home. Now I'm on the phone to London before breakfast.

GLADWELL: I just went on JetBlue's website, looking at JFK to Oakland, and it's $149. At that price, is there a class cutoff, an income cutoff? Sure, but it's really low, about where the class cutoff is for an Xbox. So we're talking about a fairly radical transformation of American society.

BROOKS: I know people who fly to see a football game, but I don't see why this is transformational.

GLADWELL: It is because it allows us to construct new realities and identities for ourselves that break out of our old sense of place.

DERY: I'm fascinated by this idea that JetBlue could be transformative. Weren't we supposed to be celebrating the death of geography right about now? According to the last wave of techno-hype, in the newtopian '90s, we were supposed to be swirling clouds of data bits, teleporting from one point to another through fiber-optic cables.

GLADWELL: Some interesting things come out of all of this travel. I would expect an acceleration of the declining importance of nationality. The rise of transnationalism is already an important recent trend. There are pockets in Queens [N.Y.] that maintain active ties with home in Mexico. If you extrapolate, I don't think foreign policy or any kind of politics can be practiced the way it is now in a country where enormous numbers of people genuinely have dual identities and reinforce them by flying back and forth to their adoptive countries for nothing.

DYSON: I'd like to argue strenuously with that. It may be happening in the U.S., but it's not happening in China, which is extremely nationalist. In Russia, I don't know any Russians who feel anything other than Russian. A brand does not replace a nationality.

GLADWELL: We're not talking about the end of those identities. We're talking about the multiplication of identities so that in addition to the strong national identities, you start to construct new ones. FedEx now has direct flights from interior Chinese cities to cities in North America. So start playing that forward. You're allowing a class of people in China to layer on a new identity to their existing identity of Chinese businessmen as member of some kind of international business elite.

POLITICAL SHIFTS

IS THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE READY FOR CHANGE?

BROOKS: In the United States, we've seen the intense power of partisanship. I think it may have crested, but we're left with this intense polarization--think Red Sox vs. Yankees--where team spirit supplants philosophy. I really don't know what a conservative or liberal is. But I do know what a Republican or Democrat is. Still, I think this phase of intense polarization is ebbing. If you look at the polls over the past year, you see people flaking off from the Republican side--not going over to the Democratic side but being dislodged and just sitting there in the middle.

ARE WE TRULY PAST PARTISANSHIP?

BROOKS: I think there's a level of exhaustion. Plus you have to remind yourself that the partisanship of the parties was never reflective of the country. I've never met a political scientist who thinks public opinion in the country is polarized. There's a big middle on abortion, gay marriage, every single issue, and it really hasn't changed in 30 years.

DERY: Is it possible that a new age of extreme weather--superstorms and such--will create some sort of galvanizing environmental movement that will bring people together?

BROOKS: All I can say is when you ask politicians what subjects come up at town-hall meetings--which is something I do a lot--issues like global warming and environmentalism never come up.

O'REILLY: But it's clear that Hurricane Katrina put global warming on the radar of a lot of people in a way we haven't seen before, and it certainly changes the political dialogue profoundly.

BROOKS: But in surveys too, when you ask people for the 10 issues that matter most to them, it's always health care, jobs, education, gas prices. Environment is never there.

WILL THE AFTERMATH OF KATRINA AFFECT NEXT YEAR'S MIDTERM ELECTIONS?

BROOKS: If the elections were held now, the Republicans would lose. But I think the major effect of Katrina will be to cause people to lose faith in all institutions.

AND THAT HURTS THE INCUMBENT PARTY MOST?

BROOKS: Not necessarily. In the 1970s, the loss of faith in government caused by Vietnam and Watergate actually ended up helping the right because Ronald Reagan came in saying, "Don't trust government." That doesn't mean it'll happen again that way, but there's an opportunity for a party to assert authority and order and say, "I'm going to end the chaos." The hunger for order in society is very strong.

WHO RULES?

O'REILLY: The generation now growing up is going to expect access to information in a way us fuddy-duddies don't take for granted. Some say the Net will lead to a radical democratization--power to the people--but I don't think so. When you harness collective intelligence and the power of blogging, it doesn't mean power to individuals. It means power to the people best able to aggregate those individuals. Google is a profoundly powerful company because it has figured out algorithmically how to learn from millions of people at once.

DYSON: It's much harder to maintain power when everything is transparent, when there's always someone, some outlier coming in, when the discussion is never closed. I don't even think that Google has that much power because its hold on it is tentative. It can easily be eroded.

SHIRKY: We're seeing lots of places where value is being created outside of institutional frameworks, in ways that institutions can't touch. When you look at the way Linux has developed, it's not a model that can be emulated by any organization that wants to pay programmers because if someone has one good idea, it will be added to Linux. You would never hire an employee who only has one good idea. That would be a bad hire.

THE MYTH OF PROGRESS?

GLADWELL: I'd like to make a distinction between change and progress. A lot of what we've been talking about falls in the category of change, not progress. To use a prosaic example, technology related to golf has improved and will continue to improve dramatically. Golf clubs are way better today than they were 10 years ago, and will be way better 10 years from now. Golf scores, however, have remained absolutely stable. This is an important distinction because historically when we talked about the future, we always talked about the possibilities for progress. Today when we talk about the future, we talk about the possibilities for change, which says that either we have deliberately lowered expectations or we're playing a game where we're pretending what we're talking about is progress when all we're doing is talking about change.

DYSON: The fundamental change is that most individuals have more choice. They also have more responsibility: if they don't like the way things are, they can't complain as much--at least not with moral justification. And not everybody likes that. It can be comfortable just to follow orders. But if you consider that most people have a better chance of getting what they want because they have more choices, then by and large, there's progress. People have more choice: they have more power "to," even though they don't have more power "over."

GLADWELL: But most of this falls into the category of giving me more of things that I don't need. The explosion of choices on the Internet--the fact that I can get 100,000 songs on iTunes as opposed to 1,000 songs--is that progress?

DYSON: No. But if I have a choice about whether or not I go to college or where I'm going to work or what job I have, that's a valuable choice.

DERY: Maybe I'm channeling my inner Marxist here--which I'm sure will give David a fit of vapors ...

BROOKS: You'd be surprised.

DERY: ... but I feel that in discussions like this, there's a phenomenon where technopundits wear Global Business Network blinkers. The democratization of available avenues of possibility is always phrased in market-friendly terms. It's about purchasing power--the cornucopia of options available to those who can stuff their shopping carts and proceed to checkout. How many options were available to those who were marooned in New Orleans? The ragtag who are rotting in what used to be quaintly called the real world, somewhere off-line, are left behind.

SHIRKY: That may be true. But the "cloud dwellers" now are far and away the majority of the country. It's not some privileged elite who have access to things like JetBlue flights and the Internet. It's the bulk of America.

CULTURE CLASH

IN MOVIES, MUSIC, I'M SURPRISED PEOPLE HAVEN'T BEEN MORE EFFECTIVE CIRCUMVENTING THE STUDIOS TO GET THINGS MADE.

DYSON: I think the new avenues are effective. You don't notice them because there are more of them. Do you have to be the Beatles to be realized as a creative artist? Do you have to be Bill Gates to be a business success? The whole point of the new market is that it's much more distributed. People find tighter but smaller audiences, what we call "the long tail." It's better than having these fundamentally fictitious hits created by marketing.

MOBY: I know a guy in Barcelona who has started a company to develop algorithms to determine whether a song is going to be a hit. It analyzes music to figure it out--and they're selling it to the record companies, and it's quite effective. If you expand on that, there's no reason you couldn't have your own personal search engine that understands your taste and can instantly analyze music based on a whole bunch of different, very subjective criteria to determine whether you might like it.

BROOKS: My frustration is that as we talk about things today, we end up gravitating toward its informational structure. If you were sitting around in 15th century England and wanted to learn about what Shakespeare was about to write, the economics of the theater might enter your discussion, but it wouldn't dominate it. The structure is kind of important, but it doesn't determine.

MOBY: O.K., but cultural production always goes hand in hand with technological development. Like with the records I make. I wouldn't have been able to make them 20 years ago. It would have cost half a million dollars to make a record instead of $20,000. Now it's just me with a laptop.

GETTING RELIGION

GLADWELL: One of the big trends in American society is the transformation of the evangelical movement and the rise of a more mature, sophisticated, culturally open evangelical church. Ten years from now, I don't think we're going to have the kinds of arguments about religion that we have today. Even the fight over intelligent design, to me, is a harbinger of a trend, which is that the religious world is increasingly willing to put its issues on the table and discuss them in the context of the secular world. Let's argue about evolution vs. creation, using the framework that secular science has given us.

SHIRKY: That's wrong. Intelligent design is a stalking horse for creationism against a particular enemy, evolution.

GLADWELL: I disagree. This is part of an ongoing transformation. We will not continue to have this kind of divide between Evangelicals and the rest of society. I just went to an interesting evangelical conference, and throughout, rock bands were playing. The rock-'n'-roll culture within the evangelical world is indistinguishable in terms of the sound of the music from the rock culture that came out of a very different, irreligious secular tradition, except that the words are about Jesus--love and all that. They're not resisting outside culture, they're embracing it and kind of making it their own. I think intelligent design and Christian rock are similar. It's about taking up form from the outside and trying to Christianize it. Does the debate over evolution matter? Isn't it really a nondebate?

SHIRKY: No. It matters a lot because medicine is starting to become evolutionary, and we want to continue to have doctors who understand that.

GLADWELL: But that's not being threatened. The intelligent-design debate is about what you teach 7-year-olds.

DYSON: What you teach 7-year-olds matters because they grow up.

GLADWELL: But we've already been talking about how great Google is. They can just Google evolution.

BROOKS: I think the debate is unimportant for a different reason, which is that 40% of people in the country don't believe in the theory of evolution, and yet we seem to march on regardless.

GLADWELL: None of this affects the way science is conducted in this century. Does it change you as a software salesman whether you believe in evolution or not? No--no more than it changes you whether you believe in Einstein physics.

DYSON: You can't limit your concern to short-term economic impact. This attitude closes off inquiry. It creates an approach to science that I think is dangerous.

GLADWELL: But keep in mind the idea we've discussed of the multiplication of identity. We will have more debates and disputes, like the one over creationism. When you're having 100 arguments at once, no one of them matters the way it used to. It's important not to use a 19th century moral lens to evaluate the kind of debates we're going to have in the 21st century. We have to accept that the general noise level will increase, but that doesn't matter. You can be a creationist at night and go to work in the morning as a pediatrician and save lives.

DYSON: The real challenge is going to be for the next generation of pediatricians who have to design your baby. It's in the field of genetics and genetic engineering where faith and morality questions will play out. Is it immoral now to abort a Down syndrome baby? In the future, should you use technology to create a perfect baby, finding the right genes? And then you'll be responsible for what you have created in a way that you never were before. No more "will of God ..."

THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM

BROOKS: Abortion rates are down a third, divorce rates are down, crime rates are down some 70%, school violence is down, suicide rates, drug addiction--all of the social indicators that were going the wrong way in the '70s and '80s turned around in the early '90s or so, and are still going in the right direction. So to me, we've changed the way we raise kids, and we probably made them a little more boring, but it is a remarkable generation of wholesomeness. If you don't like wholesomeness, then you're a pessimist, but if you sort of like it, then it's one reason to be fairly optimistic for the next 50 years.

GLADWELL: I'm generally optimistic because I feel that with the pace of development in China and India and other parts of the developing world, we're just adding to the available brainpower and unlocking these large populations of people and their ingenuity and giving them an education. How much easier will it be to solve the problems of the world when we've got 10 times as many brains working on them.

O'REILLY: I guess I'm an optimist too because, on the one hand, many of the technological innovations of the past few decades now are in the payoff stage. On the other, even a serious disruption-- global warming, a pandemic--could serve as a wake-up call, harnessing our ingenuity to make things better.

DYSON: That's true optimism!

MOBY: I find it comforting to bask in the glow of a bunch of erudite optimists. But I think the world is so complicated that I can't be so presumptuous as to justify pessimism or optimism, so I'll stay agnostic. But I like waking up every day, and I think breakfast is a fantastic thing.