Millennia ago, young couples in Egypt prayed to fertility gods with the hope of receiving the gift of a child. Much later, Native Americans performed ceremonial dances to pray for rain and a bountiful harvest. In the middle of the 19th century, the Central European monk Gregor Mendel selectively crossbred pea plants to control the characteristics of their offspring. While the approaches differ, the aim of these endeavors is the same: to set in place levers of control in order to achieve desirable outcomes, or in todays vernacular, to program. In each case, humans develop formal rules and then run processes intended to deliver specific results. At every stage, we use the latest tools and knowledge of the times in efforts to achieve control of bodies, minds, and surroundings. Now on the horizon are new kinds of tools for programming our world. These tools leverage ubiquitous data and use computational power to discern patterns in data, create computational power to discern patterns in data, create computational representations of various systems, and tweak them to achieve desirable outcomes.
Below you will find descriptions of each of the downloadable pieces from our When Everything is Programmable research.
The conference PPTs and their scripts can be found here.
A Map for the Programmable World
This map is designed to help you navigate an emerging computational world, to engage with the new tools for programming while, at the same time, to understand the limitations and potential pitfalls of new tools and approaches. Moving from self to society to environment, the map moves you through 13 forecasts of living in a programmable world, and the tools that will make it happen.
Customizable Map for the Programmable World
Used during our conference as a chance for clients to create their own version of our map focusing on forecasts and tools which were most relevant to their organizations, you can run your own internal workshops to help colleagues to become more familiar with living, working, and succeeding in a programmable world.
Perspectives
Accompanying the map are 13 perspectives, each diving into one of the forecasts found on the map. Each perspective includes an overview of what it will look like, signals of where we can see it already happening, what difference it might make for your future, and what you may want to do differently to succeed in this new world.
Synthetic biology: assembling biological organisms and systems. At the intersection of bioscience and engineering, researchers are learning to design and build living systems that may not exist in nature.
Quantified self: your body and health as a data system. People are applying sensors, social networks, and online data repositories to view their biological processes and behavioral patterns though the lens of data.
Mind over morphology: designing bodies and body parts. Within the worlds of technology and politics, there is a growing discussion of the concepts of "morphological freedom"—the right of persons to alter, augment, or maintain their own bodies, and to have access to or protection from modification technologies and procedures.
Neuroprogramming: coding the brain for desired behaviors, capabilities, and functions. Advances in neuroscience, genetic engineering, imaging, and nanotechnology are converging with ubiquitous computing to give us the ability to exert greater and greater control over the functioning of our brains, leading us toward a future in which we can program our minds.
Smart cities and spaces: sense-able planning. Over the next decade, mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity, the sensory and servo web, and situated software will become tools for programming the social activity of urban places.
Designer social networks: optimizing sociability. Very few of us consider our social relationships as information systems, but digitized sociality is encouraging us to do this. As we increase the variety of things we do online and the number of sites we do them on, we create expanded personal digital footprints.
New taylorism at work: productivity through packet-switching. As more and more of our daily lives and interactions become visible and quantifiable, we are able to look at our work lives and analyze the data, see previously invisible connections, and program many previously serendipitous processes for desirable outcomes.
Embedded governance: downloading laws into objects and the environment. Over the coming decade and beyond, governments will begin to implement automated systems of law and regulation.
Everyone is a programmer: making the world a control system.As people begin to live in—and interact with—a world in which everything is programmable, the need will grow for tools and institutions that teach how to think computationally.
Neurocentric learning: the new pedagogy. Neurocentric learning will use the knowledge and technologies from neuroscience to customize the pedagogic process around the actual and distinct capacities of the mind.
Model(ed) industries: previews and re-do's for business and organizations. In the coming decade, the huge influx of quantitative social data collected through cell phones and sensors will usher in a new era of modeling complex social systems.
Geoengineering:(re)programming the earth. If global warming's effects hit faster than previously expected and the global community remains unwilling to make economic and technological changes swiftly enough to head off disaster, large-scale geoengineering projects may need to be deployed to hold down temperatures.
Combinatorial manufacturing: harnessing natural processes. Humans have always been makers, but the way humans manufacture is undergoing a radical transformation. Tools for computational programming are converging with material science and synthetic biology to give us the ability to actually program matter.
Technology and Forecast Card Deck
Designed to be played with, try grouping different technologies with the forecasts they will most likely enable. The cards can also be used to play around with the customizable map. Each card in the deck focuses on one forecast or technology to allow for easy mixing and matching.
