Reporters on all beats are so obsessed with the here-and-now they ignore what is going on beneath, the trends that will make up tomorrow.
This has always been my indictment of the business I have called home for nearly 40 years. It’s why I didn’t make more of my news career than I did. I was constantly looking around corners, seeking the future, rather than looking closely at what was in front of me.
That’s OK. I’ve had a good life. No, make that a great life. A wonderful life partner, two great kids, a home we have built together, comfort in our old age, and memories of good times.
But I’m still looking around corners, still trying to figure out what’s next. Ask any old person. Inside them you’ll always find a 20-year old going “what the fuck?”
For a decade now, ever since I began seeing that technology was going to achieve political power, and sustain that power, meaning all that’s happening now is a play I foresaw, I have been thinking about what comes next.
The Internet of Things? Renewable energy? Artificial Intelligence? All these of the now. They’re what is happening. I foresaw IoT nearly 15 years ago now, and reported on it here to you, as “The World of Always On.” I began covering renewable energy just as that area began to boom, and predicted we would achieve crossover with fossil fuels by 2016. As we did. Artificial intelligence? I’d settle for some of the real kind, frankly.
No, I’m thinking well ahead, past my own death, to the rising tide that will challenge and, eventually, overthrow technology at the center of our economy and politics.
I’m thinking about biology.
Cloud-powered biological science is the only hope we have of saving this planet from our own wantonness. The task of this century is clear. It’s a version of Ray Bradbury’s classic, The Martian Chronicles, but he was 93 million miles off. It is this planet which must be terraformed. Or as Bugs Bunny told Marvin the Martian, “All my FRIENDS is on da Eoirth.”
We are past the point of prevention here. The Inconvenient Truth of our time is that life must be re-engineered, and the balance of nature re-built, if our species is to have any hope. This is the war the generation we call “millennials” will be fighting, all their lives. And when they go to their own rest, somewhere near the end of this century, they will be the true Greatest Generation.
We are starting to see DNA as a programming language now, and CRISPR as a sort of Microsoft Basic in programming it. Circa 1975. There may be no Apple II. Growing clouds, and the coming Cloud Internet, will be sufficient to get the work started.
One of the best speeches I’ve ever heard came from Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, about 5 years ago now. He talked about standardized screws and fittings, invented 60 years after the steam engine began the Industrial Revolution, and how these simple standards made possible the transportation revolution industry was built for. Bridges, railroads, steamships, then mass produced cars, airplanes and eventually spaceships. All these things were possible only because of standard fittings, which let designers scale production and begin the process of automation.
That’s what clouds and open source are, he said. They’re the standard screws and fittings. The Information Revolution, in other words, has barely begun.
He was right. And the first task of this new type of technology isn’t to generate human comfort, but to save humanity from its lesser angels.
I have sent two hostages out into this great work.
My daughter, who leaves for Europe in a few weeks, is devoted to the practical side of the problem. She has been educated in the balance of nature, of the dance between predator and prey, and is focused on rebuilding this balance in our cities and suburbs. Nature, pushed out of its place by our second homes, ranchettes, and lakeside cottages, has come to town.
All sorts of animals that never lived in town now do so. Rabbits, coyotes, deer and feral hogs now fight for niches alongside native inhabitants like raccoon, squirrel, opossum and rats. Sometimes the invaders are beneficial. Coyotes are better against rats than we are, because rats can hide from us quite easily. But they can’t hide from owls, or hawks, or the other predators now coming in. On the other hand, the new predators create fear in our suburbs. They’ll take a cat, and they’ll take you if you’re not careful.
Europe is a playground for the advances of this new ecology. Re-forestation, re-wilding, the replacement of unused farms and parks with places where, it is hoped, the true wild things we drove to extinction might play again. Where are the limits? We don’t know. There is much to learn, and once it’s learned much to teach, and much to change in how we live and how we treat the natural world that we may have tamed, but that still exists all around us.
I have a second hostage. My son, who has decided that microbiology is his thing, and who, it turns out, has his mother’s talent for programming. The intersection between the wet work of experimentation, and the dry work of computing is where the great discoveries of our time will happen. And, if you must know, it’s where the money is. If I were 26 again, it’s what I would be covering every day, and forget the money. The money will be there.
Right now, the bio-engineers are mainly playing defense. They have re-engineered standard crops like corn to feed the world. They are going after dread disease with new weapons of understanding, and a new ability to engineer solutions that simply did not exist in my time. But my point today is that they must also go on offense. We must change, from the inside out, if we’re to survive. We must start running our planet as one thing if we’re to survive.
There is work here for everyone. There is work for activists, for politicians, for writers, for philosophers, even for soldiers in creating this new world.
And that work doesn’t end with Trump. It begins there. As a new America was created after 1865, and a new world order was created after 1945, it will be the task of the next Great Generation to build new order after the beasts of our time will have devoured themselves, and the world again belongs to the little people, who offer crumbs to birds.
