Alex Pang's Future2: The Future of Futures

Knowledge Tools of the Future

A report on "Knowledge Tools of the Future" that I co-authored with Mike Love (not the Beach Boy, the other one) is now available on the IFTF Web site. For those of you too lazy to download the PDF, I've summarized it in the extended post. For those too lazy to click on the "Read More," it comes down to this:

Computers good.
People better.
Computers + communities = best.

That's pretty much it. There's also some philosophical (or sociological, depending on team you play or root for) stuff about the nature of knowledge, and the degree to which knowledge tools have to be social; the different types of intelligence that humans and computers exhibit (something I've also written about on The End of Cyberspace); and the future of memory.

It also lays out an argument for why simple, social, and symbiotic knowledge tools are triumphing over complex ones-- why the mouse conquered the world, but the chord keyboard and the rest of Doug Engelbart's system languishes in obscurity.

Update: It occurs to me that this is one of a number of pieces that I wrote or co-authored that are available on the IFTF Web site. Others include:

• The Next Scientific Revolution
• Ecoscience in the Marketplace
• DIY Manufacturing
• Simulation and the Future of Virtuality
• Intentional Biology: Nature as Source and Code
• Science and Technology 2005-2055
• The Future of RFID
• The Future of R&D

I also have pieces in the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Ten Year Forecasts, though those are very large PDFs.

[To the tune of U2 and Johnny Cash, "The Wanderer," from the album Zooropa (I give it 3 stars).]

Can dolphins think about the future?

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert argued that humans are the only animals who think about the future. Gilbert's not the only one who's made this argument, and it's not uncontroversial. Recently, there have been several reports of other mammals demonstrating forward-thinking ability, most recently dolphins:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming.

But she didn't stop there.

One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.