Governments should be a lot more assertive about rooting out spam, phishing, viruses, and scams. While private sector solutions address this, the amount of waste that it is creating on the system - and just the environmental cost of added server activity for all this dirty trash - is enormous.
Below is a picture of the amount of good content (24%) VS. Spam and Threats that were blocked by our company recently. It is staggering.
One of the best efforts I have seen at explaining the way we are consuming and living beyond sustainability in this world comes from The Global Footprint Network. At the Skoll World Forum a couple weeks ago, Mathis Wackernagel handed me a business-card sized brochure that very poignantly and clearly explains how consumption in the developed and oil-producing world is depleting our globe in measurably dangerous ways. You should visit the page tracking human development growth and related ecological footprint growth. Their solution, not easy to implement but succintly showing the only way forward, is to aim for sustainable human development.
You can take a quiz to establish and track your own human footprint.
The holy grail for environmentally conscious manufacturers and consumers is truly bio-degradable effective packaging. While the biggest threat is in plastic bottles and packaging materials that overwhelm our landfills, even small wrappers add up.
The challenge to manufacturers is that the very things that make wrappers good - impermeability, sealing out oxygen to prevent oxidation and decomposition - are also what makes the wrappers hard to decompose. And if you try to use corn-based bio-degradable wrappers, exposure to moisture can make the wrapper protection degrade and be ineffective. At KIND we keep looking for solutions that could enable us to use bio-degradable wrappers but have yet to find the answer (if anyone has any technology or ideas, please let me know).
Frito-Lay just announced that the outer layer of its Sun Chips will use compostable packaging. That is nice, but what is really interesting is their commitment that within 1 year, they aim to also use compostable packaging for the bags’ interior. If they really achieve it, that will be a remarkable step.
In reply to my post, Mapping Your Life’s Journey, I got a really interesting email from my friend Jonathan Harris, the cool artist whose work is as fascinating as this note:
There is a centuries-old idea coming from the Hindu tradition, of "The Akashic Record", which is said to be metaphysical plane where all information is stored — every thought, action, interaction, and idea that has ever occurred. A kind of cosmic filing system.
There is debate over whether The Akashic Record is already completely written (and we simply follow it, like actors following a script), or whether it gets updated every instant with new information (and free will exists).
It is believed that when we dream, we access the Akashic Record, and that this is why dreams often contain either future prophecies, or seemingly random events from long ago that haven’t been thought of for years (because in the Akashic Record, all things are equally simple to access, like searching on Google, or, perhaps more appropriately to dreams, clicking "random page").
It is also believed that tapping into the Akashic Record is our source of energy, and that this is why our bodies need REM sleep to function (REM sleep being the time we access this record).
Whether you believe in this stuff or not, I agree with Daniel that we are fast approaching a time when our technology will essentially create the Akashic Record for us. You could say that this will happen in "another dimension", as the meta-layer of aggregate online information could be considered as such.
I am very interested in seeing this happen, and believe that it will (if the world doesn’t end first, that is).
Jonathan
P.S. Apologies to any purely deductive rationalists on this list
Often in life I am sure you wonder if you had met a person before. Have our lives crossed paths before a more recent episode? When was the first time we met? Where we together in a particular place – whether at school, or at a conference, or talk, or during our childhoods? Could you even rewind a part of your brain and see what you said to that person when you first met them? I daydreamed about a sci-fi future where the “grid” could keep all your information about every place you’ve been, and what your thoughts and experiences and interactions were like.
Then I realized that a lot of this could already be done rather easily NOW.
All you need is a GPS mapping device with a time-mapping database. Your iphone or blackberry could have an application that every 5 minutes or every hour or every day (depending on your preferred settings and subscription/storage capacity) could store your GPS location at that particular time.
Three or thirty years later, you could wonder openly with your date, or an employee or a colleague if you had met before, or where your lives had intersected before, and you’d just sync your databases to find the crossing points, if any, that exist. You could make some pieces private or public, open or closed. But you’d have the ability to trace back steps at important points, quite simply.
At a formative moment, you could even connect a blog journal or video entry to your geo-time-map.
This would not only be fun and functional, but also existentially transformative.
We always are “surprised” at how small this world is, and how enormous a coincidence it is that you find a friend in a far away random place.
In fact, I have always thought that the laws of numbers make these encounters quite probable, and most likely there are many more opportunities for interactions among people you know, whose paths you cross by milliseconds without knowing it. If you could look at your grid and compare it with a friend’s, or with all your universe of friends, how many amazing “coincidences” wouldn’t you find – when you opted to?
Perhaps Doppler or GoogleMaps or Facebook or a new web/business platform you have could take advantage of this idea.
Marco Berrebi (Face2Face) emailed me an insight I thought was worth sharing:
PS : the more I think about the Middle-East conflict, the more I think about the theory of Gauss (mathematician of the early 19th century) saying that equations with several variables evolving within a wide range of possible values cannot be solved until we limit the range of the possible values. This would mean that until it becomes widely accepted that peace will happen within a space limited by Clinton Parameters / Arab Peace Plan / Geneva Initiative / Ayalon-Nusseibeh negotiation, nothing can happen. Just mathematics …
It is true that complexity makes it harder to narrow down choices. That only gets worse when you add the Mideast bargaining mentality that most Israeli and Palestinian politicians have, and the pandering to each side that has made people assume they can get peace without making compromises.
Tom Friedman wrote a provocative article about how we have been living our lives and running our economy at the expense of the next generations - and how the environment and the planet will not bail us out.
Peter Thum, the co-founder of Ethos Water (later sold to Starbucks) and I had a conversation a couple weeks along these lines - about how successful new business models will strive to ensure retail, food, entertainment gifts and consumption are sustainable.
The advent of the internet and related electronic worlds and virtual worlds could theoretically provide some clues here - except for the sobering fact that a lot of these seemingly cost-free worlds and avatars actually cost a ton in terms of energy/electricity, storage, etc. Whoever decodes this will make a huge contribution…
Have you ever wondered why some kids can be so mean, bullying others with cruel insensitive actions? A brain scan study hints that "bullies" actually derive pleasure from seeing someone else get hurt.
From an article in the New York Times quoting George Dyson:
Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth.
And:
“The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good,” George Dyson writes. “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.”
Also fascinating from the same article:
Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:
But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.
Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.
A new social psychology study asserts watching meanness and aggression on TV rubs off on viewers. If true, we are in for something.
