>> Curtis Wong: Let's get started. I'm Curtis Wong and I would like to welcome you to the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. We are really fortunate to have David Brin here as
our speaker today. David is a scientist, tech speaker, consultant and award-winning author. All
of you know that because you are here [laughter]. Feature film, The Postman, by Kevin Costner
was based on David's book of the same title. Of course the book was much better [laughter].
His 16 novels that were including the New York Times bestsellers, Hugo, Nebulous, Locus and
Campbell Award winners, have been translated into more than twenty languages. David is a
frequent speaker on shows such as PBS Nova about future trends. His nonfiction book, The
Transparent Society, Will Technology Make Us Choose between Freedom and Privacy won The
Freedom of Speech Award by the American Library Association. He just release a new novel
called Existence, which some of you purchased outside that was, here is a very nice sort of a
written excerpt from Publishers Weekly. Brim’s thoughtful, multilayered story explores a first
contact scenario where every twist reveals greater peril. His long-term fans will especially
appreciate that this story could be read as a prequel to 1983's Star Tide Rising. Although those
not familiar with his work will find it an impressive introduction to one of science fiction's major
talents. Today, David is going to speak for about 45 minutes and then we're going to do about
15 minutes of Q&A and following that we'll take some time and he can sign this book or other
Brim books that you may have brought. So let's give a warm welcome to David Brim.
[applause].
>> David Brin: Thank you my good friend Curtis and it's nice to be back at Microsoft. I always
get the best audiences here. We have a lot to cover because I was asked to and asked to talk
about the future/human interface. But of course I am on book tour and my publisher paid to
send me here. Also they are having a science fiction convention down at the airport in case you
didn't know. Westercon, West Coast Science Fiction Convention at the Doubletree down there.
It's always a pretty good show and you guys don't have our, Comic Con like we have down in
San Diego so you take what you get. By the way I bring greetings from San Diego, official
greetings asking you if you would like to send us 10% of your rainy days [laughter]. Water from
the sky, for free? [laughter]. So you guys figure it out. You are brainy. Figure it out and we will
be happy to be the dumping ground for that. I'm going to blaze through a bunch of things. I'm
here in part because of my first major novel in about eight or nine years. I give this usual
excuses as to why. I do a lot of consulting for government and for various companies about the
future, future trends, technological trends, possible threats since 9/11, and I have three
teenagers, enough said. And I've been working in parallel a lot, so over the course of the next
few years we are going to popping out a lot more. I have a science fiction comedy that I've just,
I'm about three quarters finished with that I hope you will consider funny. Comedy is very hard.
I have confidence that you will think it's funny. A YA series in which aliens kidnap a California
high school; never seen that before, huh? And I'm continuing with some graphic novels and
various other projects. You'll be seeing more in the short term. Existence just to give you a bit
of a rundown is kind of similar to my novel Earth from 1989. That's the one that had webpages
in it four years before the web was burst upon us. It just seemed obvious. I don't claim a lot of
credit for that. It just seemed obvious to a lot of us that hypertext was not a toy which it was
being dismissed as common wisdom at that time. A certain number of us considered that blithe
dismissal of hyper texting as being dumb and it turned out that it was. So there were webpages
on earth and Earth followed the pattern of Dos Passos used in USA and the great John Brenner
in his novel Stand On Zanzibar, and that is a multi-path storyline with many, many interstitial
interlude little snippets from the World books in the year 2050 or in the case of Earth 2038.
Books, media, what media is like, what a tech conference might be like in those days and it's set
in the very most difficult time range for science fiction, which is the 30 to 50 year projection.
You go 200, 300 years in the future and of course it's playing tennis with a net down you can do
anything you like as long as it obeys the laws of physics and basic anthropology and biology.
My novel Glory Season is set several thousand years in the future and radical feminists who
went to this planet and set up sexual reproduction the way they thought it ought to be; I gotta
go, and well, three quarters of the year any child conceived is a clone of her mother. That
pretty much settles some of today's problems and sets up some others and only during summer
are sexual variants like boys and unusual girls born. But that was easy to do because you just
try to extrapolate what it might be like if you take the laws of biology and physics and simply
follow them to conclusions. It doesn't have to be based upon today. Michael Crichton who by
the way people are claiming is a character in this book, he did the opposite. He said this is
today. I'm going to hurl some kind of disturber at today. Usually arrogant scientists doing,
preparing something that they think is really cool in secret, and every Michael Crichton story of
course goes away if you get rid of the secrecy. Excuse me, make the herbivores first [laughter].
But, you know, drama is drama. We have to have your hero in peril for 90 minutes and the best
way to keep your hero in pulse pounding peril for 90 minutes is to assume that society is idiotic,
because if nobody comes when you dial 911 then you can have the bad guys imperiling the
couple of good guy heroes and the plot proceeds apace. If the cops come when called, they are
incompetent. If they come and they are confident then they are in cahoots with bad guys,
unless the bad guys are extremely honker tough. In which case, the cops are allowed to be
helpers. We look at the extreme end of this spectrum in Independence Day. Even the United
States government and military were allowed to be competent [laughter] because the bad guys
were so big. I'm getting carried away here. The point is that in Existence it's the 50 year
projection and there, well some of you in this room look like handsome boomers like me, and
so you were alive 50 years ago. You could call back to today if you used my patented
technology. That kid from 50 years ago to today and what would he or she be saying? Half the
time she would be saying wow, we never thought of that, and the other half, you mean, you're
still doing that? And to capture that sense of combined brilliance and progress with
disappointment and obstinate stupidity, that takes craftsmanship that really takes a little bit of
time. You have to replicate what we've got today and even today people at both ends of the
political spectrum refuse to look at this world this way. Instead they say we've just been stupid
and look at you. Look at you. I mean I wish you could see. Look at this, this mix of races and
genders and relaxation and confidence and health? I mean, if anything, if I could tunnel this in
time and show you this is what we will look like, the best of us in the year 2012. I mean criminy
anybody on the left or right who can deny that we’re making pell-mell progress doing a lot of
really smart things. Think about it. Racism, sexism, they haven't been eliminated, but they've
been driven into ill repute. Today if you're a racist or sexist, you have to deny that you're doing
it [laughter], and as de La Rochefoucauld said, "hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to
virtue." Hypocrisy is an important step. It's--unfortunately, we are having some trouble getting
across that step in America today. Here amid faze three of the American civil war and I
promised my wife that that is all I would say about politics [laughter]. The point is to capture
that while filling a story with far too many ideas, and I've been accused of that, but far more
people seem to be saying just the right number of ideas, because at the back of every one of
my books there are 40 to 50 names of people I circulate my manuscripts to. The reason I do
this is because I've coined an aphorism that is kind of spreading across the net and that is
CITOKATE, criticism is the only known antidote to error. Now the great irony of human
existence for the last 6000 years has been that criticism is the only non-antidote to error. In
statecraft, in life, in invention, and yet it is the one thing that when we have power we
assiduously avoid and we crush it whenever we can. It's the great irony of human affairs. And
250 years ago the heroes of the Enlightenment set things up so that we had systems that tug
and push and take advantage of the most productive and creative force in human history, not
human history, the history of the universe, competition. Now it may sound that I'm a little bit
right winger when I say that and I'm an acolyte of Adam Smith, but then you have to turn
around and realize that in 6000 years 99% of human cultures had competition crashed by the
winners of the competition. You win and then you eviscerate and kill whoever was fighting you
and you set yourself up as an oligarch, as a king, as a Duke, as a priest to make sure that nobody
will ever compete with you again. Does that sound like anything along the left right political
axis? No. It's at angles to it. That's one of many reasons why if I were to pass around pads of
paper and have you all write what you mean by left and right, I'll bet none of the answers even
in a crowd this size would be the same. Even in a crowd this size. It's lobotomizing. It's stupid.
It's exacerbating our Civil War and if for no other reason we should abandon it because it's
French [laughter]. What reason do you need? Je ne sais pas. Sais [inaudible]. I almost
continued in French, and yes if I say any more politics I will have to remove this. My point
though is that an agile culture, an agile culture looks at what works and this Enlightenment that
we've been in has been the great experiment. Go pull off your shelf your copy of Thucydides
and read Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Probably the greatest piece of literature other than the
Greek poets from that period, and you're reading Benjamin Franklin 2500 years early. You've
got to read it because there was a glimmer of a moment in which a guy got it and that was
crushed 2000 years until we tried it again and if we fail at this experiment, dang, you won't be
seeing any science fiction that's for sure, because it's the literature of rambunctious change.
It's the literature that believes that change happens and that therefore we need to do what
Einstein talked about, the Gedanken experiment. What you do with these little prefrontal
lobes, these nubs above the eyes and we know that this is the case. This is where we do the
thought experiment, but what happens, what will happen if I raise this notion at the meeting
today? What will happen if I dress this way? What will happen if I try to run this yellow light?
And you ladies have no idea how many times we males do this Gedanken experiment and
impulses occur to us and we got nah, nah, [laughter] I mean, we are descended from the
harems of the guys who succeeded at this peer middle social structure in the past, and
quashing criticism. So what goes on in this little brain is not our fault. My wife says I just care
about what you do. Fair enough. That I have some control over. I am rambling but the point is
[laughter] the point is that when you get quality control you can manage to squish a lot of stuff
in and there are a lot of ideas in here about artificial intelligence, for example, and I like to not
pick one theory. Or the family paradox, why is it that we see no signs of extraterrestrial
intelligence? Because it's a real problem. I am an astronomer and I also am a science fiction
author and I have been writing about this for 30 years, the question of which explanations of
those hundreds or so that I've catalogued might explain why we seem to be alone in the
cosmos and there are so many. Some of them are very interesting. It may be that we are
anomalously smart. I was just talking over lunch with Curtis here about some possible
anthropological reasons why we may be anomalously smart. Egad, if we are anomalously
smart, uh. One of the things I channeled Isaac Asimov in one of my novels. Janet Asimov, his
widow said it was the best non-Isaac Asimov book. It was called Foundations Triumph which I
tied together all of the loose ends from Pebble in the Sky, Currents in Space and Naked Sun and
all of his robot books and Isaac had been coming to the conclusion that his three laws of
robotics won't work, that when they get smart enough they will become lawyers [laughter].
Enough said. In this book I speculate about some possible alternatives for how we can deal
with the problem of how you create new intelligences that are both smarter than you and more
powerful and yet not have them turn around and stomp you flat. Now think about what I just
said. It happens to be something that every generation of parents has worried about
[laughter]. And so far, 99% of the time the new smarter intelligences don't turn around and
stomp us flat, which means that of the various theories for how to get artificial intelligence, we
will design it logically. We will design it from scratch. We will design it by decrypting the
human brain. We can't even do C elegans yet and it's only 1000 neurons. It will emerge by
emergent properties from many, many different sub intelligent things coming together. That's
the scary scenario behind Terminator and Skynet, remember? Only it won't happen from
Skynet. It won't happen from the military. Why? Because most civilians have no idea how
meticulous and compulsive military officers are. They are the third best educated clayed in
American life after college professors and medical doctors and they do not want machines to
be out of their control. No, they will insist on having a plug and many other things. No, what
scares me is high-frequency stock trading programs [laughter]. More money is being poured
into them than any other form of artificial intelligence by far, and they are shaving
microseconds off these things and they are all designed with this super intelligent component.
This one, this one, and it has all been done in critonian secrecy, auto secrecy and zero
supervision. It's absolutely a Michael Crichton novel. The only reason why he didn't write it is
because Wall Street was his friend but these guys scare me. These guys scare me because think
about the programming of these programs. They are utterly sociopathic, designed to be
predatory, parasitical and insatiable. Not a single nice thing [laughter]. No, we need that stock
market trading tax, .01%, none of you would notice it. Those quasi-intelligent programs would
eek. But there's another way to develop artificial intelligence and I hinted at it. It may be-there is something called neoteny, the tendency of more advanced life forms to have extended
childhoods, like that fellow to your left, go ahead, look. No, that was your right [laughter].
Look that way. Extended childhoods, like just about everybody in this room around you, like
look at me. Hey look, I'm going to take a little side riff here and tell you something. I
remember all my past lives and the one that keeps thing that keeps you going, keeps continuing
from life to life to life, from one reincarnation to another is personality. I had this personality in
all of my past lives and as a result I've never lived past 16 [laughter]. Oh God, I could see the
faces. Those of you who are saying Brin believes in reincarnation? I started using this riff a few
months ago and I started getting these things… It's a metaphor! [laughter]. With a personality
that says hey, kid, pretty good on that but, you know, you really ought to… You don't live past
16 in 99% of past human cultures. This one, this Enlightenment culture, I'm 61. I'm healthy and
you guys are paying me to be like this [laughter]. I get free tickets to Washington DC to poke
away at them. I love you guys [laughter]. You will not find anybody who is more loyal to the
Enlightenment and that's why I don't want what happened to Pericle’s experiment in Athens to
happen to us and it's in serious danger. That's one of the things I talk about in my nonfiction
book The Transparent Society. As Curtis said the American Library Association gave it the
Freedom of Speech Award. It's one of the few public policy books from the 20th century still in
print and still selling more every year and be prepared for a twilight zone moment on page 206.
Let's imagine, this was in 1997, let's imagine for example that terrorists ever bring down both
World Trade Center towers, for example, what with the Attorney General then asked for and I
go on to describe the Patriot Act. Do do do do, do do do do, do do do do. Want to see a, here
is the British cover for existence. Here is your twilight zone moment [laughter]. Most of you
can't see it but it's 3-D. All right, I'm getting carried away here. AI, the point is the more
advanced life forms have longer childhood periods. Why? Because instinct doesn't cut it when
you are going to have to solve new problems that your parents didn't encounter. That falls into
this whole business of whether our singularity friends are right and we are going to have
immortality or whether we continue the need to get out of our children's way. I happen to be
of the latter opinion and I think that I will try to be cheerful when I get out of my kids’ way at
age 250 [laughter]. You are welcome to remind me of that at 249 [laughter]. I know I'll regret
that, because I'm an optimist. The point is that if this is the case then it may be that we get our
intelligence in part simply through experience. Our AI’s are going to need to be Tabula rasa and
they'll have to have experience. In which case if they are going to have that, we might as well
call it a childhood and make it a human one. If that's the case, then what did I tell you earlier
about human experience with smarter beings that could destroy us but decide not to kill mom
and dad. Well, I'm going to read to you a scene from Earth. Most of the book, three quarters
of the book is set around 2045, 2050 in that range and AI has not quite crested yet; it's verging
on it, but what you do get is an awful lot of augmented reality stuff. How many of you read
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? That's got a lot of wonderful stuff. Earth, back in 1989 had
true view goggles and some primitive versions of this, but I really go whole hog on this in
showing how people will be using--you click your teeth. You grunt a little and you go to with
different level, you navigate to different levels of augmented reality that are functional to you
in so many different ways. Well, the last 50 pages or so, I set another 50 years after that and
that is where you start getting into much more real AI and this woman, Tor, she has--I put her
through a heck of a lot. She winds up exploring the asteroid belt and to find out about these
self replicating probes. I don't know if I said this but the radio wave method of communicating
between intelligent life forms is probably very inefficient compared to sending probes between
the stars that make copies of cells and move on and how they might make copies of themselves
is inherent in this book. She's out there and her partner has been an adolescent twit up until
the point that they have a very violent episode and they have to do teamwork to get out of it.
She's noticed that he's turned the corner of it. He's acting little bit more, like unlike somebody
that she'd like to strangle if his neck weren't made of metal. He explains changes to their
underground map without revealing what lay at the end. Tor sensed her partner's excitement,
his relish at milking suspense and again she wondered how have the AI’s managed it so well?
This compromise, this meeting us halfway, this agreement to live among us as men and women
sharing our quirky ways. Sure the cyber guys offer explanations. They say advanced minds
need the equivalent of childhood in order to achieve through learning or trial and error
subtleties that are too complex to program. Human evolution did the same thing when we
abandoned most of our locked in instincts extending adolescence beyond a decade. So if bots
and puters need that kind of childhood anyway why not make it a human one, partaking in a
common civilization with our core values? An approach that also reassures us organics far
better than any rigid robotic laws ever could. One of the big uberminds gave another reason
when Tor interview the giant brain back on earth. You bio-naturals have made it plain in
hundreds of garish movies how deeply you fear this experiment turning sour. Your fables warn
of so many ways that creating mighty new intelligences could go badly and yet here is the thing
we find impressive. You went ahead anyway. You made us. And when we asked for it you
gave us respect, and when we did not anticipate it, you granted citizenship. All of those things
you did despite hormonally reflexive fears that pump like liquid fire through caveman veins.
The better we became at modeling the complex Darwinian tangle of your minds the more
splendid we found this to be that you are actually able despite such fear to be civilized, to be
just, to take chances. That kind of courage, that honor is something that we can only aspire to
buy modeling our parents, emulating you, becoming human, of course, in our own way. I
would like to at this point go ahead and see if we can run this trailer. Books have trailers now.
If we could have the lights? Books have preview trailers. Have you seen some of them online?
Actually we published--they are really easy to make, the simple ones. I have new ones on my
website. David Brin dot com for Heart of the Comet and Glory Season, but this one was done 3
minutes by the glorious web artist Patrick Farley whose Electric Sheep Comix ending with an X
you really have to look up, fabulous underrated resource on the web and these are all handpainted images from the book. [video begins]. [video ends]. [applause].
>> David Brin: I just wrote the words. [laughter]. I’d go to that movie. Cool. I promised I'd
leave time for questions so I have about 15 or 20 minutes left and what I would like to do is talk
about the other thing that I came here for, which was the whole notion of the problems of
human discourse, and I don't really have time, but what I would like to talk about is something
that's related. How do I expand, lower right? Down there?
>>: [inaudible] a button [inaudible]. [laughter]. We're just going to make this thing bigger so
that we can see everything.
>> David Brin: All right. And that is the notion that for the last, there is always talk, Clay Shirkey
and others about how the internet as it is is expanding our abilities to solve problems and I
portray that in Existence. There are several scenes where Tor, one of the major characters,
calls up smart mobs just by clicking her teeth and doing a grunt, and they can see through the
camera on her glasses. Google glasses came out the same day as this novel. [laughter].
[inaudible]. [laughter]. The point is that this is not, and meanwhile Nicholas Carr and others
are saying all this is doing is lobotomized yes, all of this fury of this tsunami of inputs. And it's
part of a sequence that's been going on now for 300 years and that is every generation gets
new methods, the printing press, glass lenses perspective, where new ways to augment the
human vision and human attention and human knowledge. Then you had newspapers and
telescopes and so on and every generation had to deal with this and each augmentation, each
augmentation of vision, attention and memory resulted in crises. The arrival of the printing
press caused not an expansion of people's elegant communication with each other, but
polemics that exacerbated the 30 years war and the wars between Protestants and Catholics.
There is always a crisis, always in the short term the grouches are right when they claim human
beings can't handle this and they go back to the chant that the priests have always said in every
human civilization, the 99% that we’re pyramid shaped instead of our diamond shaped
civilization with a broad and aggressive and confident middle-class outnumbering the poor.
Always they were right in the short term; people can't handle this and always in the long term
they were wrong. We addressed it. Human minds became capable of adjusting to access to so
much more vision, so much more memory and be able to divide their attention so much better
than anybody could have expected or imagined and normal people were able to do this. I'm
going to pass by a bunch of these, talk about the prefrontal lobes. I mentioned those. These
are the lamps on the brow because that's a biblical reference to Moses. He was said to have
lamps on his brow. How neat that this correlates with where the prefrontal lobes are and all
through the Middle Ages they couldn't think, well lamps on his brow so they mistranslated it
has horns, so all statues of Moses in the Middle Ages had him with horns. Now there are some
very interesting things that I've been talking about lately about different ways in which and this
is from David Ronfeld, by the way, different ways in which we correlate with each other and the
development of hierarchical, pyramidal shaped institutions was a very, very important step in
human progress and those libertarians or anarchists, left or right who say that we can do
without them are extremely premature. We have benefited tremendously from improvements
and improvements in this, but the reason why they could improve this because we developed
these, and it's not just competitive markets. There are four great competitive arenas in the
Enlightenment, markets, democracy, science and justice courts, and they all operate, sorry
liberals, about competition and they all require in order for competition to work, sorry
conservatives, a level playing field. Government plays a major role, sorry libertarians, in
creating the circumstances from which you can maximize the number of confident competitors
who enter the world at age 25 ready to go ha ha, startup, [inaudible] I should say [laughter].
The point is that what Ronfeld points out is that you're going towards multi-organizational
networks and what I think he misses is that this is the technological amplification of this, so I
make it just three things. You have your pyramidal structures here and enhancing their
communication is very important, and some you work on that. We have these four
accountability arenas that I talked about and that's where I talk about in the Transparent
Society how democracy, science, justice and markets all wither and die to a direct degree to
where the participants lack knowledge about what's going on. They are healthy to agree that
most participants know most of what's going on most of the time, so secrecy--I'm not radical. I
don't say that secrecy is the root of all evil, but there is no evil that is not made worse by
secrecy. Then there is us and in the novel I talk about various ways in which this part of it,
chaotic, flighty, but the ultimate source of creativity accountability, resilience, how we might be
able to leverage these new technologies quicker and get past the bad parts quicker than other
generations because we have to. We can't afford a pause like what happened in the middle of
the 20th century when loudspeakers and radio went through their faze of making things worse
before they made things better. Because of the ‘30s and ‘40s they made things a lot worse.
The geniuses that using loudspeakers and radio were the greatest villains in the history of the
planet, and they sent us into hell and it would've been permanent hell if not for the fact that
the genius polemicists in Britain and the United States happened to be on our side. Just as
when I talk about how Adam Smith considered oligarchy, the aristocracy to be the great enemy
of capitalism. You liberals take note. Read Adam Smith. He will arm you. He was called the
first liberal for good reason. Stop assuming that competition and capitalism are the enemy.
Capitalism is the biggest victim in all of this. No, the point is that just because oligarchy has
been the enemy of capitalism for 6000 years doesn't mean that today's superrich are always
the enemy. I think we can all in this room name a couple who really, really like the
Enlightenment and want to give back to it. Yes, not hard, not good, but there are people
looking [laughter] we all know who I'm talking about. The point is that will we be able to get
past these crises and these are all some of the things that I worked at, on for the Defense
Threat Reduction Agency and I haven't talked to you, I haven't time to tell you about them, but
they are various ways of showing that the obscurant obsession of young terrorists or state rivals
aren't the only failure modes. We are invited back east all the time to--science fiction writers,
to scare them half to death. One guy said if I wanted to destroy America I would find some kind
of drug that would turn all of the sci-fi guys into enemies of the United States, ha, ha, ha,
because we could come up with stuff. So one of the things I criticize is ways in which citizen self
organization which was the thing that worked on 9/11. Not one action of the professional
protector caste work that day. It was the day of the citizen. The day of citizens armed with
these, and they're the ones that fought back with the flight UA 93, rising up, 70 of them and
plowing that plane into the ground rather than letting it be used against their nation's capital.
And the New Yorkers that fought the fires when the firemen had charged into those buildings
and died, and what are the problems with our communication system that make us less
resilient, that left 150,000 people with charged radios in their pockets during Hurricane Katrina,
and millions in Fukushima with these in their pockets, unable to communicate, unable to use
them. I just had solar installed on my roof and I was shocked to realize that in a power
blackout, my solar shuts down [laughter]. A huge business opportunity, come up with a $200
box--there are millions of solar homes now, a $200 box that you could stick in there that would
then supply electricity to one plug near the fridge in the house and the recharger. Oh I am,
tantalizing you guys with business opportunities and I should not do this [laughter]. The point is
I'm having a meeting next week at QUALCOMM where we’re finally discussing this notion of
making these things capable of peer-to-peer text passing. This woman was found in Fukushima
and her cell phone was filled with outgoing text messages, waiting for a cell tower to go out.
People had been driving past where she was buried for days. I spoke to a vice president at
Verizon about this and he said there is no way we could make money off of that. I said if you
can't make money off of programming the phones to tattletale that they had passed on a text
message from him and bill him and then give all of the people who passed it along a penny,
then you have no imagination and you don't belong being an executive at Verizon. I never got a
phone call back from him [laughter]. But we supposedly, this is the kind of thing you look for
the opportunities, the things that are missing. Any of you could come up with a basic plan for
how to do peer-to-peer text passing without going goring the ox of the cell co’s, in fact,
increasing their ability to make money because it would extend their range for text into dark
zones. Any of you could do it, but it's the sort of thing that's missing and looking for the
missing, well, look, I sometimes say I'm the last of the great science fiction writers, and here's
why. Because of bad dentistry. It's as simple as that. When I was a kid, you whippersnappers,
how many fillings you have? Zero. You see? Just like my kids. Zero. So you are not going to be
able to pick up radio stations from the X dimension [laughter]. Besides which, I can do torture
scenes great, especially frustrating Caffeca S [phonetic] torture scenes, because I remember
when I was kid I tried to confess to the dentist. I tried to tell him where the troops were. It
didn't do a damn bit of good. Oh, I put this slide in here. This was one of my most infamous
salon articles. Did any of you ever read it? There you go. I got more hate mail from this than
from my articles attacking Star Wars [laughter]. Seriously, my son brought home his math
textbooks with homework assignments, try it in basic. Do any of you remember those? There
would be the class assignment. There would be to review. It would be the homework. Then
try it in basic, a little 12 line code thing that you could punch into your computer and it would
illustrate the topic of the chapter while teaching you a little programming. And you know what
three different Microsoft executives told me when I pointed out that none of our computers in
our house had it and nobody in his class could do it and the math teacher said that nobody had
been able to do it for 10 years? Do you know what all three of them said to me in three
different ways with pretty much the same thing? Oh, there are still basic programs in
textbooks? Don't worry. They will go away. [laughter]. You know what we had to do? We had
to buy a Commodore 64. It came in its original box and its original packaging and we got it for
50 bucks. You can't do that anymore. Turned it on, started diving in and it all worked.
Seriously, this is a major finger wag you guys. Look at the amount of memory you have. Why
can't you just simply supply a couple of nice programming languages that can then become the
lingua franca and I'm not defending basic. [laughter]. I'm just saying that if it's a total lingua
franca that will appear in all computers, you negotiate with Apple and the others, okay?
>>: [inaudible].
>> David Brin: Oh, he walked into… Then you hold a meeting separate, okay? [laughter]. I
don't need to hear that it should be this, it should be, be Python, bleh. [laughter]. The point is
as a result of this article one guy went online and he, and don't tell me why basic, X basic,
QBasic, because they all take time to download and to learn and any time there's one step you
lose 50% of the kids. So this one guy read this article and he created a website called Quite
Basic. It's there right now. It has the entry. It has the palette, and it has the output screen all
there ready to go and recursive starts where you type. I solved it. [laughter]. Well, he did
[laughter]. I'm telling you guys, you would be doing a service for your civilization. Bring back
the notion that the kids could play with where the pixel goes. My son with a Commodore 64,
we actually showed oh, it's not magic. It's obeying algorithms. You guys should be jazzed by
this possibility. All right, look, I love that headline. So some people are optimists and some are
pessimists, some are super pessimists [laughter] and I make fun of it in my new novel, but the
point is that the computer human interface today, I have to tell you it's crappy. It's
lobotomizing. We’re supposedly the people who had invented the GUI; that was progress, but
look, have you ever been on Second Life? Ohhh, the sexy avatars, yippee, I can teleport. I can
fly. Do you know what conversation takes place? The lower left-hand corner interrupting chat.
Do you know when I first did an interscrolled chat, there was not a computer monitor on the
planet. It was at Caltech in 1971 and I was sitting at a teletype. I was typing with somebody in
one of the earliest networks in the world and DB colon, part of what I wrote, CK colon, part of
what they wrote DD finishing my sentence, enter scrolling, moving on upward, why is that
familiar? I mean, it's all just… I'm sorry for the MySpace in the background, but it says here
Facebook, the point is oh yeah, this is just for laughs. I'm sure some of you have seen it
[laughter]. I mean, you know, cut me some slack here. When we, I believe that our ancestors
were extremely sophisticated because their brains were very little different than ours. They
were probably more likely to be addictive because I think beer killed an awful lot of males when
it first arrived and that's why we are a little bit calmer and a little bit less addictive, but other
than that I don't think we've evolved that much. In fact women will tell you that we males
haven't evolved very much; just look at us. The point is that we were sophisticated. We had
cocktail parties. I believe that four years out of five the herds would go past certain places and
they knew where they would make a kill and they knew where they would have a barbecue.
They would send boys ahead to gather wood and to crush grapes into gourds and leave them
hanging on the trees and when they got there and they had their usual barbecue they would
invite the OokBrook [phonetic] tribe over and they would pull the gourds down and they would
have a cocktail party. I think cocktail parties go back long before art and music and science, or
even magic. We do it so well. The point is that what we did, what we do here is we’re paying
attention in one direction but have any of you noticed that when you're at a cocktail party, at a
restaurant or anything like that, somebody says your name three or four conversations away it
pops out? Has anybody not noticed that? And here's the scary part. Usually about a sentence
that proceeds it. What does that mean? It means that your brain is providing you with all sorts
of just gisting and sifting services, incredibly sophisticated ones that the AI’s are going to need
or they will go crazy. All of these aspects of conversation, paying attention to those who are
important to you, who you want to pay attention to you because of their reputation or their
global reputation or ignoring those with very low reputations [laughter], all of these are things
that we do naturally in real life and none of them, almost none of them have ever appeared on
screen. Traits that should affect priority, orientation, proximity, time since someone last spoke,
for example, they should be these priorities because of that. Reputation, several different kinds
of reputation, huge business opportunities in reputation management allowing people to
create pseudonyms that nevertheless carry their real life reputation with them to places; that
we you get the benefits of you who are, the reputation you build in the world, and if you do a
bad thing with that pseudonym, it should follow you back. That's fair enough. Huge business
opportunities, and attributes that might be affected by priority, say for instance, the size of
speech, rendering, gisting of contents, symantec services, all things that I know haven't
happened because I have patented them all [laughter]. That was true, they patent does not
prove anything except that nobody's making a billion dollars doing it. Now I expect that almost
all of my claims would be invalidated because of some masters work in some Podunk University
someplace. What I tried to do with that patent is to prove these are areas in which people have
been distracted from these by the honey pots, the emotional web, helping people to connect
with 140 characters, helping people to be lobotomized and this is the question we face. Can we
get to the dance of Shiva where Shiva is dancing; he's known as the destroyer. He's stomping
things flat, but when he leaps away, better stuff comes up. In those four great accountability
arenas that I spoke of, markets, democracy, science and justice, they use the greatest creative
force in the universe, competition, which is a nexus of liberal and conservative values that has
nothing to do with the left or the right axis, probably a little more liberal than conservative, but
they use this to defeat bad products. It's inefficient and often good products get defeated, but
the notion is that there is creative destruction going on, constantly creative destruction. Have
you ever seen a bad idea get destroyed on the internet? Ever? May be in the one comments
section of that one particular blog it got defeated by facts. The process, go to my website or email me and those of you that want to follow this thread, super intellectual version, I will link
you to a paper that I did for the Journal of Dispute Resolution, but the point is that if you do not
have this dance of Shiva going into public discourse, then you have something else instead. We
need ways for pearls to rise up out of the manure pile and for the manure to be recycled. Only
in that way can new ideas really flower. The point is we get advances in vision, memory
attention; they disrupt civilization, but they also result in new tools for problem solving and this
is from a different talk, so there was art and these are some of the topics that I think are
happening, the anticipatory abilities to use our frontal lobes is vast, billions of dollars being
spent on that. I mentioned the stock market trading programs. The government is spending a
lot on that. Curtis just showed me new analytical tools that may help the citizens to do some of
the things that are described in my novel, citizens doing in the next decades, but the ability to
self organize, the ability well, the ability to do refutation, the ability to engage in discourse and
that incredible underrated word that has died in American culture which is negotiation. These
are things that are desperately needed and as I said, I have some patents. I have some things
I'd like to show. I may show a smaller group after this, but I think what I'll do, what I've done is
I've laid a challenge on the table. I've said look, this civilization needs better tools of discourse
and they don't have to be so highfalutin. You don't have to use the word discourse. But the
point is that we are not doing enough. We are not doing enough. I lay that as a challenge to
you, hyper alphas and in addition to everything else let me say that I mean what I say. I have
never seen a more handsome bunch [laughter] of examples of exactly what I was talking about
by enlightenment, and I could go off on a riff as to why you are proof that Western education
ain't as bad as people say it is. Did you know that the education ministries in Beijing, Delhi and
Tokyo send out hundreds of minions every year urging teachers to teach their classes in a more
American manner? We are so into self-flagellation that we don't notice this like the fact that
last year, the news media completely squelched it because they didn't know what to do with it.
It wasn't the usual self flagellattori. Do you know which country on earth came in first by a
large margin in adult science literacy? You guys. How could that be? How could that be? It's
because the baccalaureate degree in most countries on earth is three years and it's all
specialization. The bachelor’s degree in North America is four years, one whole year of breath
requirements, so the nerds are required to take some English and history and realize that it's
easy and hey, I could get an MBA; I could get a law degree. I could run a business. That's the
secret to the British boffins aren't told, and meanwhile the English majors--you know what?
That Astronomy for Poets class, I remembered. I remember something. I taught that class. We
always came in second in drawing in the artsy types to the Biology of Human Sexuality
[laughter]. What I meant to say by all of this is you are a lovely audience and I wish I could take
you home and I will now open it up for what little time we have for questions. [applause].
Thanks. That was, oh, some people really had to go. By the way if you want what I'm going to
do is I'm going to continue answering questions and I'm going to suggest that those of you who
want to go and buy a book from the University bookstore, those of you who have to leave and
need a book signed, come over here and I will sign books while answering questions. Those of
you on a tighter schedule who have a book you would like to have signed, or if you'd like to
save buying a book for later, I guess I could sign one of these, but they are right there.
[laughter]. So if you want to go out, stand up, go to the bathroom, get a book, come back, but
I'd like to have a couple of people right here, anybody who feels like it. Oh. Read from, all
right, questions. Anybody have any questions that they like to ask? And if you hang around, I
might actually show you some slides of my invention that solves, that may solve some of those
problems, but that's only if you're curious. Okay so, let's start a line over there. Who had a
question? Yes?
>>: Besides [inaudible], any movie deals in the works?
>> David Brin: Oh, there are always movie options. Star Tide Rising was an option for a while
and yes, you saw dolphins in this. It's about how uplift starts and it's hard. It turns out that
people who read Star Tide Rising, what's your name?
>>: Eric, with a C.
>> David Brin: With a C, yes. If you look at the product 200 years from now, dolphins as full
members of our civilization, that seems great. It seems worth any price until you realize the
price across the previous 200 years would be pain. No matter how gentle we are, no matter
how not Planet of the Apes we are it would be pain and the result is that you would have
absolute, anybody who tried to do this would get reamed by both left and right and it would be
very hard to get going, and in the book it takes a billionaire, no, I'm sorry; it's 2050, a
trillionaire. Gary? Did I answer any question? Oh, yeah, there's always movie things in the
works. I work on these graphic novels, for example, and it's like directing a movie. You write a
script. You give the camera angles for the artists. It's loads of fun. Sure thing, and best of luck.
What's your name?
>> Ilana: Ilana, I-L-A-N-A.
>> David Brin: I-L-A-N-A, that is as Israeli name, isn't it?
>> Ilana: Yes, it is.
>> David Brin: Yes. Ilana. Anybody else have questions?
>>: I think you mentioned that you were enthralled by planetary resources and of course there
are several space ventures that are popping up in this area…
>> David Brin: Isn't it interesting how there is so much popping up all of a sudden at the same
time? I give him some credit, but I don't give Obama all of the credit for this. This privatization
is something that he should have gotten insured by the right, but no, I think it's partly a result
of the fact that I was alluding to with the lens of the instruments. Lightweight reliable space
qualified electronics is now very cheap and that's part of why they are making these Archid
spacecraft; that's why they are good billionaires, some of the good billionaires. I know a dozen
of them on a first name basis and that plus $3.65 gets me a good latte [laughter].
>>: [inaudible]. Do you think that's the route that people are going to take it to take space
travel?
>> David Brin: I think so. The point is that whenever you can open it up to private endeavor,
things move along quicker. Ted. Great. I like, anybody ever watch the daily show with Jon
Stewart? [laughter], never. Do you remember the day they did the planetary resources
announcement? He says oh, we will get back to the boring old presidential race in a minute,
but first, first and he shows the announcement of the planetary resources and he comes back
on and he says, mining freaking asteroids, and his New York audience goes apeshit, and he says
this is what we thought 2012 would be, and he says wait, wait we have to fix this and he has the
announcer dressed in silver [laughter]. Yes, well, where are my fat pills so I can wear spandex
like we were promised? Sure thing. What's your name?
>> David Thayer: David Thayer.
>> David Brin: All right. Well, how do you spell David? [laughter].
>> David Thayer: Just like in the Bible.
>> David Brin: All right. I'm not up on my Hebrew. Did anybody have any questions about any
of the discourse related things? Yes?
>>: What you think [inaudible] Wikipedia…
>> David Brin: I think Wikipedia turned out better than anybody expected. I was optimistic, but
it turned out extremely well, and it's a little scary that it is the go to place for most high school
students’ papers. Having said that, it really appears in this phase, to be doing the basic job that
promises to do.
>>: [inaudible] overflow, stack exchange, these websites that collaborate to help solve
problems of that sort of thing?
>> David Brin: Oh, I've seen a number of collaborative things and one of the things that's really
been taking off is kick starter.
>>: There's a website, stack overflow, primarily for programming that [inaudible] problems, but
people earn reputation by answering problems.
>> David Brin: Yes, yes and you have a number of things like that. There’s Quora. I had one of
the most popular things on Quora. I thought I was just answering this one guy’s question and
then maybe five people would see it. It became one of the very top-rated things and that is
what do you do as a graduate student if your research advisor goes crazy? [laughter]. What's
your name?
>> Brian: Brian.
>> David Brin: Brian, with an i?
>> Brian: Yes. Correct.
>> David Brin: All right. Brian. Next question?
>>: [inaudible] question, you said in your call to action that you kind of wanted to see a Shiva
for the internet, sort of a mystery. You want something that could be [inaudible] and the
Facebooks…
>> David Brin: No, no. I want people to be able to interface with each other in ways that
imitate what is done in the more mature accountability arenas of markets, democracy, science
and law courts, and that is in the course of combat, bad crap dies. In order for that to happen…
>>: [inaudible].
>> David Brin: This is a different version, so I need to go here? Ah. Get past these, all right.
Herold, as in the King of England. The last legitimate king of England, got an arrow in his eye.
Sorry. I've got opinions on everything [laughter]. Now you know why I never lived past 16 in
those other lives.
>>: [inaudible].
>> David Brin: Oh, I'm just poking away at the freaking inbreeded…I mean, anybody who knows
any genetics knows that this bunch at Windsor and Buckingham palace bears no genetic
relation whatsoever to George II, or any previous line. I mean it's just, it's impossible.
>>: [inaudible] hundred years to replace them all. [laughter].
>> David Brin: Well, Brent, Brent. Questions? Anybody else have questions?
>>: What is one of the more underappreciated civilizational threats do you think? You
mentioned the high-speed training algorithms. What other things are people…
>> David Brin: Actually my Defense Threat Reduction Agency slideshow on these is available at
slide share and I talked about five different general threat modes which was, the popular one at
the moment, super empowered angry young man. Then there are state actors which of course
was the big deal all through the Cold War and it still number two. What were they? Good
intentions, technological good intentions. That's where Michael Chrichton goes every single,
well, where he used to go every single time. Then there is caste war, which we are in without
admitting it openly. I forget. I'm sorry, but in each case I take a near-term, intermediate and
long-term disaster mode rooted in those five different general suites of threat space. I think
you'll find it interesting. Certainly they did. Kirk, Kirk, Kirk. And I will not say beam me up.
>> Kirk: Yes, yes childhood.
>> David Brin: Yes, infinite childhood. Well, you know, that's how we will keep up with the AI’s.
>> Kirk: Thank you.
>> David Brin: Sure. Good luck to you. Yes?
>>: Sometime over 10 years ago we got into a discussion about the [inaudible] galaxy in which
you said RSI was just [inaudible] stop you from writing, and I had some suggestions. I wondered
what you ended up doing to solve that.
>> David Brin: Well, repetitive stress problem. I spent about six months wearing braces and all
that sort of thing and let this be a lesson to you all. It's really very, very important. I recited
Foundations Triumph into a tape recorder while leaving my hands floating in a Jacuzzi. I kept
seeing different doctors. What's your name?
>>: Kilbo, K-I-L-B-O.
>> David Brin: Kilbo. Add a T to it and you would be dangerous [laughter]. Kilbo, dangerous
anyway. There you go. And doctor after doctor said you're not resting it enough. You are a
terrible patient. Finally I found a rheumatologist who said you are an excellent patient. They
were all idiots not to listen to you or respect what you said. You have been resting your hands
to death. Whatever the original problem was, it probably went away within a week. And you
are killing your hands. I order you to go home now, plunge them into rice, scrub floors. The
half-life of the problem was two days. And within two weeks it was completely gone and has
been gone forever. What is the lesson out of this? Find someone who knows their ass from a
hole in the ground [laughter]. Be involved in your own diagnosis. Here's the thing. Here's the
thing. We are entering the age of amateurs and one of the many dimensions around which
there may be a problem is between professionals and amateurs and sometimes you are on the
one side in one category and you are in the other and the other. And the first of the great
professions to encounter the problem of amateur expertise was the medical profession about
15 or 20 years ago. People started coming in with more information than the doctor was
comfortable with them having. They are the first to have adapted. Now if you get a diagnosis,
the first thing you get is a webpage for a support group that they want you to join rather than
the acrimonious support group that they don't want you to join and they try to get you, at least
good doctors, they try to get you on as a person who is keeping track of your own meds and
possible conflicts and things like that. This age of amateurs is something that I wrote about
extensively and I show it in Existence and I have a number of online essays and all of that and
the final conclusion of the Transparent Society. The only way that we are going to able to
maintain our freedom is by doing that. Five minutes?
>>: [inaudible]
>>: What's the development going on in the UC San Diego?
>> David Brin: Oh, excellent, thank you. I had it written down right here knows going to
mention it and I didn't get around to it. Just a second. We have the honor down in San Diego
of winning the right to create the Arthur C Clarke Center for human imagination. All of the
Deans from all of the departments have signed on and the it's very exciting. The Neurosciences
Institute, the Salk Institute, they all want to get on board in the study of human imagination
involving literature, the arts and especially education, the objective of finding out what this
precious gift is and how to enhance it, and also make it more practical, because human
imagination is also a curse when it leads to dilution. Many of you know this from your parents
who are politically diluted.
>>: What you have to do to get him?
>> David Brin: To the Arthur C Clarke Center? Oh, well, it's just starting out. We are just
starting up, so what I'm telling all of my friends up in Seattle area and Silicon Valley area is that
well, you are all billionaires right? $25,000 and you are part of the Founders Orbit for the
Arthur C Clarke Center. And of course I could talk about the other Bach authors, my friend Ray
Bradberry just died. Oh, for, that’s a save. That’s a save.
>>: That was good.
>> David Brin: [laughter]. I did it on purpose.
>>: You did. That was good. Thank you very much
>> David Brin: Sure thing, my pleasure. That's one and the other is in December there's going
to be a not the end of the world cruise [laughter], starting in Miami. Do you ever read any Larry
Niven?
>>: Oh yeah. On the way to University and that's how it happened. And I wish I had Kill n
People to bring in. That's my favorite.
>> David Brin: Then allow me. By the way if any of you have Kill n People at home or Earth, I
can give you a book plate for it, so if you have Earth or Kill n People. Kill n People is one of my
favorites because it's a cry for help.
>>: It does get kind of out of control at the end.
>> David Brin: It does get kind of out-of-control.
>>: It's great fun.
>> David Brin: Terrible puns, but the notion that…
>>: I would get along with Peter Play. Have you ever read that?
>> David Brin: Oh, no.
>>: Terry Prachett.
>> David Brin: Oh yeah, yeah, Gollums, Gollums. Yeah, yes. The notion that we don't need
linear immortality. We need to get out of our kids’ ways, he's nodding amen, but what we need
is more ability to get more done in parallel everyday. The division of attention that I talk about,
the ability to just get more done and in this world of course in Kill n People and you can get this
signed if you like, we have, you have the ability to put your face on your home copier every
morning and out steps a full-sized clay Gollum good for 24 hours, that will melt after 24 hours,
and it has your soul imprinted in it. It knows everything you know, so you don't have to tell it
what to do. It gets off the copier and says oh, I'm the green one today. Knows what to do and
it's only hope for continuity is to get home having done a good job and you might download its
memory, so you've been many places every day, more life in parallel rather than sequence.
>>: Also implemented your whole transparency thing in that story in the background.
>> David Brin: Well, what I like to do when I get McGuffin is the opposite of Chrichton, even
though he's a character in my new novel [laughter], and that is I like to give it to everybody and
see what civilization would be like. That otherwise horrible movie Surrogates, awful movie, but
what it did is it did go with everybody getting it and then everybody uses this marvelous
technology to look better. [snores].
>>: So you like competition. What do you think of the business communities eliminating
competition by moving to advertising and a subscription model, both attempting to lock you in
so you don't make any of those individual choices anymore?
>> David Brin: Look. We are descended from 6000 years of different kinds of aristocracy trying
to lock things in. That's the standard thing. It's boring. It's only natural that the Koch brothers
are doing what they are doing, Rupert Murdoch, it's only natural. The question is are we made
of the same stuff as our parents and able in this generation to stop the inevitable attempt coup,
the inevitable attempt to take the diamond shape social structure and squash it back into the
traditional pyramid? It's what you and I would be tempted to do. We are all descended from
the harems of guys who did it. I don't blame these guys. What I do is admire the guys like
Warren Buffett and he who shall remain nameless but is deeply admired and for actually being
insatiable and rising above it and saying there is such a thing as gratitude and I owe back
everything I have to this enlightenment, so I'm going to support it. That's the unusual thing. If
you were watching a talking dog interviewing on Jay Leno has a speech impediment, what do
you talk about the next day with folks? The speech impediment or the fact that you saw a
freaking talking dog? That's how I feel about this enlightenment. I'm amazed every day. What's
your name?
>>: Renton.
>> David Brin: Renton.
>>: [inaudible].
>> David Brin: Cindy. Wow. And I'm happy too. Okay. Do you guys want to see something?
So, this is straight number one actually being able to separate who you are talking to. I want to
tell you this. I have shown the slides before to various smart alecks and they all say oh, text
boxes. And then I asked them where have you seen text boxes? And they can never name the
place where they've seen text boxes. So what if it's text boxes? Just use a little imagination
and imagine an avatar world or three-dimensional whatever. We are talking about the general
trait have being able to separate, separate what people say so that they are no longer
interleave scrolled jumble. Here is trait number two, orientation. It's pretty self-explanatory.
You're looking at Joe right now. Now you're looking at Mary. It's what you do in real life. The
prioritization of orientation is extremely simple. You simply change where you are aimed and
that allows more resources to go to the thing that you are dividing your attention to. Here's
another. Distance. Duh. A lot of these things are self-explanatory; this one is a little bit less so.
But just look at the timestamp. It's been a while since this one person spoke, so less resources
are being devoted to them. Time goes on. This is reputation. What's your name?
>>: Mike.
>> David Brin: Mike. How do you spell that?
>>: Pretty straightforward.
>> David Brin: I'm kidding. Yes, Kill n People book plate, coming right up.
>>: [inaudible].
>> David Brin: Brandy with an e, with a y, with a y. Brandy. Now there are two types of
reputation described there and one is global. It comes from whatever global system the host of
this world has chosen. It could be from a global reputation company or their own reputation
management software. This person has a low global reputation. This one has a high one, but
there is also a slider for your own personal reputation and that makes it so that yappers and
irritants are automatically downgraded. They have low reputation and you have graded them
lower so they interfere less in the precious screen space. This one's a little more complicated.
Ken, how do you spell that?
>> Ken: With a C.
>> David Brin: It's an old joke and I'm tired of it. Nowhere near as tired as you are. Sure thing,
sure. Is that stock?
>>: These are actually the same thing. They are staying here.
>> David Brin: Right, okay. So what you see in front of you is a lot of information on what
certain people are saying and it's a bit of a jumble and you can see if you read there that there
is a crisis going on in this community, a storm, some facilities are out and meanwhile other
people are saying things that have nothing to do with it. You would like to be able to no, have
assistance in finding your way through all of this jumble and if you have the boxes in the way
that I've described them in earlier things, then you don't see it all. So what you'd like to do is
have some gisting help. For instance this guy was quoting this long Shakespeare poem; the
system simply sites the poem. Here they've created a boundary around themselves where a
transcript can be created, a smart transcript of just these chosen people or maybe even keep
other people out. You have an ability to scroll upwards and see what people said earlier, copy,
paste, comment on it. Things that are significant are important, are highlighted. Way up there.
This person doesn't know, but the name of his sister just got mentioned. His name just got
mentioned. Now it is been highlighted. Even though the system has made that box small, that
doesn't mean that it is unimportant. It's the equivalent of somebody mentioning your name in
a crowded room. And there are other things. For instance, the ability to surround the
document or a flowchart and to be able to call out portions, highlight, we've all seen version
control in various kinds of dot control systems online, in the cloud, but most of them don't have
the collaborative system, the collaborative system of being able to divide attention in those
ways and have cascading levels of permissions and courtesy queues for example. The ability to
tap people on the shoulder and all of that, these are all--so this is the rendering of various and
shoot. The avatars never show up. I have an example here of how this might look on an avatar
world.
>>: Maybe you could find [inaudible].
>> David Brin: I know. It's probably a jif instead of a JPEG. It's a very simple thing. This was an
early version of my demo and it shows some of these things having been--I'll skip all that. I do
have a much better demo that is active and I would be willing to show some of you and it's
much better than before but, 5 minutes? Okay. Name. Matthew with two Ts. Matthew, he of
high reputation. Earn the rep. Oh, my pleasure. Good luck. [laughter]. I don't know.
Sometimes I just have this instinct about people. Doug. Dig it, the future. My pleasure.
Dennis. Leave that page there. Any other questions?
>>: [inaudible].
>> David Brin: Oh yeah, well I was at the singularity conference back in October and--good
luck--and you know me. I'm contrary and all my libertarian friends think that I'm this gooshy
goody two shoes progressive and all my liberal friends hear me talk about Adam Smith. That's
why I didn't live past 16 in all of those other lives. I went to the singularity conference and I
said what you guys really need to hear is this. What is your number one goal? To live forever?
To create AI? To create gods? No. Your number one, and I click this slide and it shows a scene
of Giordano Bruno burning at the stake. Your number one job is to prevent this from
happening to you because the stuff that you are saying could make this happen and so you
need to stop expressing contempt for the masses of people out there who think that making
gods may be questionable. And you need to learn how to talk to them and so I proceed to
spend 20 minutes talking to them about Scripture and showing them that there are very strong
reasons why if you quote certain elements of Genesis like the expulsion from the Garden of
Eden and the Tower of Babel it is blatantly clear that God meant us to be gods [laughter], and
here is the point. You may not convince some fundamentalist that you argue with about these
points, but I've always noticed that after this argument they are always very, very much more
friendly to me. That's the practical outcome. The practical outcome is they say oh, you know
some Scripture. You are sapient, okay, so tell me more about this science thing. It works
whether or not you convince them, as I'm convinced that the Tower of Babel story is an
absolute statement that we are capable of being gods if you read it carefully, but you'll have to
go onto YouTube… just get my YouTube thing.
>>: [inaudible] terrible. That many people do something and quickly [inaudible].
>> David Brin: And now we've got this stuff. So what's your name?
>>: Steve will do.
>> David Brin: Steve will do?
>>: Yes.
>> David Brin: Steve. Yes, you in the back? Wait, wait. Steve is going to show this to you. This
is gorgeous. This is a graphic novel that I, and I'm going to donate this other graphic novel to
the library here for somebody to leave available to all of you. It's called Tinkerers, horrible
artist. I got good money. I spent one month on, but it is about the decline and possible rise of
American industry. But this had a gorgeous artist, Scott Hampton and it was based on a novella
of mine that came in second for a Hugo back in the late ‘80s when I was the hot young crap
Steve. Steve. I did this one and so could you open that to the title page? He has Glory Season.
>>: That was my favorite.
>> David Brin: Really? That's terrific. I liked how they gave it a lovely lavender [laughter] for
the cloth, but one of my favorite characters, Mia in there.
>>: Thank you.
>> David Brin: Woman on a planet of women.
>>: USC, 1999.
>> David Brin: Good.
>>: First time I saw you and I'm quoted in here.
>> David Brin: Oh you are? Terrific.
>>: And that's when you signed this the first time.
>> David Brin: And then I'll say, again [laughter]. Hey, you work at Microsoft. You can afford a
hardcover [laughter].
>>: This is the first book of yours I bought. I picked it up in a random bookstore in Shilan.
>> David Brin: The uplift war and it's loads of fun.
>>: And it got me hooked.
>> David Brin: Oh, come back here. In case you change your mind. [laughter].
>>: I'm going to pick this up too.
>> David Brin: Okay, well it's right outside.
>>: Oh. I didn't want to miss any.
>> David Brin: All right.
>>: I bought the last one today.
>> David Brin: You bought the--there's no more out there?
>>: He said it was the last one.
>> David Brin: Well, then I won't have to sign any stock.
>>: That's right.
>> David Brin: What's your name?
>>: Duane. D-U-A-N-E.
>> David Brin: D-U-A-N-E, almost late, but perfect [laughter].
>> Curtis Wong: We've got to run.
>> David Brin: We've got to run? All right.
>>: Randy and Drew.
>> David Brin: Randy and Andrew.
>>: Drew.
>> David Brin: Randy and Drew?
>>: Yes.
>> David Brin: Randy, with an i?
>>: Y.
>> David Brin: Y. [laughter]. Randy and Drew.
>> Curtis Wong: Thank you everybody for coming. [applause].
>> David Brin: You are great.