This is what we have to look forward to?

Is it odd to be more excited about the presidential primaries than the general election?  During the primaries, I tracked the news closely and followed the debates like boxing matches.  With the candidates selected I find myself far less enthusiastic.  Like Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, I find myself asking, “Who are these guys?”  What do they stand for, and how would each of them address the challenges we face?

If their reaction to the current financial crisis is any indication, we’re in for a long dearth of leadership.  I subscribe to the “it’s the economy, stupid” school of politics for many reasons.  I’m a business geek; I work for bank holding company; and our family is shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for adoptions while still trying to fund our retirement.  Any candidate who offers a real possibility of extending social security, repealing the alternative minimum tax, and improving adoption tax credits has my attention. What I’m hearing from the candidates regarding the Wall Street crisis is not encouraging.

John McCain asserts the “foundations of the economy are strong” and then contradicts himself four hours later with the statement that “the economy is at risk.”  While technically not mutually exclusive statements, there is enough confusion here to make me uneasy.  Inflammatory comments about wanting to fire the head of the SEC are hardly constructive, and the born-again populist attacks on “Wall Street greed” are insincere and vapid.  I had to agree with the Obama droid who wondered aloud whether McCain was channeling Dennis Kucinich.

Yet Obama is no better.  To listen to him, the entire morass on Wall Street is George W. Bush’s fault.  Bush didn’t see it coming, and therefore didn’t impose “regulations” earlier in the decade.  (The argument about the efficacy of any regulation that could have made it through the Washington machine is beyond the scope of my words today.)   You can’t blame a politician for pointing out the flaws of the incumbent, but the argument has to be legitimate.  Would a Gore or Kerry presidency have prevented the financial meltdown?  I don’t see how.

Now we have McCain wanting to postpone Friday’s debate with Obama to focus on brokering a solution.  At least McCain is trying to do something, though the magnanimity of the effort is dulled by the grandstanding of claiming to “suspend” his campaign.  To anyone who believes that the nominee of a major party is “suspending” anything within 40 days of the election, I offer the investment opportunity of some prime Florida real estate (or perhaps a bridge to Ketchikan).  Politicians need to be well versed in both salesmanship and leadership, but they must not insult the electorate by pretending we don’t know the difference.  Nevertheless, I am intrigued by McCain’s proposal of bringing both nominees to the negotiating table.  This puts the winner in the unenviable position of having to eat his own cooking (or dog food, if you prefer).  If Obama wins, at least we won’t have yet another “I told you so” moment where he holds forth on what he would have done, had he had any involvement in the process at all.  Talk is cheap; whiskey costs money. 

At the moment, I tend to agree with one pundit who said recently that the response to the crisis thus far from both campaigns has been “moronic”.  Whether the debate goes forward as planned, or we get speeches on the capitol steps extolling how each candidate has “reached across party lines” to broker the bailout agreement, we can at least hope for something more detailed on the subject.  We may even get some policy morsels by which to judge these guys prior to putting one of them in the oval office.  There’s a cartoon by Gary Larson showing two bears as seen through a rifle scope.  The bear that is centered in the cross-hairs is looking right at the gun and pointing at his companion with a foolish expression on his face.  Time will tell which bear represents which candidate, but right now they’re both fair game.

 

Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

Now that we're all settled in our new/old house, there is enough time to establish some sort of routine. My work schedule now is longer than it was in Austin, and the commute is slightly longer as well; this makes me treasure weekends all the more (especially when the 1 year-old is napping).

I finished Year Million several weeks ago. I'm not normally one for anthologies, but the premise was too good to resist: ask a bunch of folks, from a variety of fields, what they think will be the state of the human race in a million years. I think the question has an inherit Rorschach quality to it, in the sense that people unavoidably extrapolate from what they regard as the seeds of significance today. Thus, engineers eagerly contemplate nanotechnology and the digital singularity; biologists examine potential evolutionary paths, and the astrophysicists, already accustomed to looking forward and backward in time by the nature of their vocation, take us even beyond year million to the far-distant time when everything (almost) goes dark.

Although the contributors come from many different fields of study, a few common themes emerged as I made my way through the essays. Several writers postulated that the ultimate destiny of the human race lies in transforming our solar system into a vast thinking machine, called a Matrioshka Brain, which captures a very high percentage of the sun's energy in nested layers of material, and converts it to computational power. The fundamental idea here is that we will have transcended organic existence and downloaded ourselves into a supercomputer; instead of living in brick and mortar buildings, we'll create them out of bits and bytes, in a kind of inconceivably advanced version of World of Warcraft or Second Life.

The goal of all this nonsense is immortality and an avoidance of all those unpleasant aspects of life, e.g., the scarcity of resources that causes us to get up every morning and go to work. The most astute of those folks who focused on the M-brain hypothesis, though, pointed out a couple of flaws. First, the scarcity of resources problem does not go away, it merely crystallizes into a singular quest for more computational power, fed by raw energy, as we would seek to make our virtual country club McMansions ever larger and more ornate. In other words, human nature doesn't change when we trade cells for silicon.

The second flaw in the M-brain hypothesis, only partially answered in the ecumenical sphere of the popular audience, is the lack of any philosophical, moral, or theological advancement. If we assume that we're all going to be immortal, perched in virtual worlds of our own making, things would get awfully boring. Most religious people accept the premise (which comes in a variety of specific concepts) that this life we have on Earth is merely one stop on a journey that began before we were born and will continue after we die. Artificially prolonging this phase of existence would be as pointless as an adolescent never wanting to turn 18. (Not that we don't see this elsewhere in our popular culture, of course.) I understand that the panel brought together for this anthology would not delve too deeply into religious or philosophical aspects, but to ignore it altogether is an unfortunate oversight. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive.

Overall, I found much to intrigue me about these futurist essays. Very few of them focused on the dystopian notion that we will nuke ourselves or poison our planet to extinction (though the "gray goo" hypothesis of nanomachines going amok and destroying the entire planet was mentioned more than once). The ideas put forth, from interstellar travel to amazing digital and engineering feats, were very interesting. But reading these ideas made me grateful for my religious and philosophical understanding about the meaning of life. Examining the question of our million year destiny without accounting for God's hand in my life is an interesting mental exercise, but not an existence I'd ever look forward to.