One of the best things about LIFT is that the organizers are fanatical about getting the videos from the conference up within hours.  Some 80 videos are now up here.

If you have time to watch just one, make it Paul Barnett. With flair, humor and lots of hand-waving for “technology joy”, Barnett compares his work as Creative Director at Electronic Arts to the history of cinema and Vegas casinos. Really.  

Note: These are running notes for LIFT ‘08; for more complete blog coverage check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP. 

Genevieve Bell says that people on average tell “between 6 -20 lies per day”. 

Which of course makes me think: what have lied about today?  Well, I told my 3-year old nephew that if he didn’t finish his yogurt that he’d never play professional football (although the truth is that his genetic disposition will likely be the primary cause of his future career disappointment, rather than the vanilla yogurt).  I also told him that the batteries of his Lion King reader book had died.  This was a total lie, because in fact I removed a battery when the bugger was in the bathroom, rendering the book mute (although in my own defense, I truly feel this was a lie necessary to protect the both of us, as I was afraid of what I’d do if I heard the “Circle of Life” song one more time today).  And I told my mother I was relaxing and taking the day off of work (yeah, right). Ok, so that’s three lies.  According to Bell’s stats, it looks like I’m below average. I suppose for once I should be glad I’m not an over-achiever.

Bell, an anthropologist at Intel, conducted research to explore the role that lies and secrets play in our digital lives.   She starts her talk by admitting that she lied to Yahoo about her birthday.  Not a cardinal sin of course, but it did have consequences: she had forgotten her Flickr login and since she couldn’t remember her fictitious birthday, she was unable to retrieve her password and was locked out of Yahoo and other online accounts.

It turns out lying is more common than we think.  Bell says a UK survey revealed that 45% of mobile phone owners admitted to having lied about their whereabouts via text messages.  Cornell research showed that 100% of online daters have lied (usually about height or weight).  The rest of us lie for a variety of reasons: 40% to conceal misbehavior, 14% to keep our own social world ticking over; 9% to increase popularity.

The point is that lies - and its cousin, secrets - are a natural and integral part of life, and that we have constructed various social and cultural responses to them.  Lying on the witness stand is perjury, but telling a secret to one’s lawyer is perfectly legal, and in fact protected.  While most religions proscribe that lying is bad, secrets are a different story.  Secrets, Bell assets, cement relationships; paradoxically, they create trust: forms of “secret” or sacred knowledge are deeply rooted in our cultural, religious and political systems.

So what does this have to do with our digital lives?  If lies and secrets abound in the “real” world, online they positively flourish. Bells says lies about location, context, intent and identity (physical appearance, aspirations, demography, status and standing) are all possible, sometimes even required, in the context of our digital lives.  For instance, MySpace restricts access to those 14 years old and up; there are a surprising percentage of MySpace users who claim to be over 100. The question is: are information/communication technologies (and related applications and services) succeeding in part because they facilitate our lying ways?  Or are our lies and secrets are necessary to keep us ‘safe’?

Lies and secrets online are not only commonplace, they’re sometimes celebrated: the website PostSecret is a gallery of “secrets” that people have sent in via postcard, letter, etc.  (side note: PS is one of the most addictively voyeuristic sites online; it’s the 14^th most popular website and has spawned a book and community meetups).

Bell quotes James Katz, saying we’re “entering an arms race of digital deception” - that for every device that provides “truth”, another channel or device emerges that facilitates deception: cell phone tracking technology can reveal your whereabouts, but services like MobileAlibi can create a fictitious back story about why you were there (and who you were with). A newer generation of technologies have even greater potential to tell the “truth” unbidden: lie-detection algorithms on text messages and emails, GPS trackers and more.  Bell’s talk is fascinating; like most provocative speakers she raises more questions than answers, but they’re intriguing ones: is technology creating or mitigating truthiness? How are our cultural ideals and practices - something as basic and “moral” as truth telling - changing as we interact with technology?

Note: these are running notes for LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP.

François Grey is the Head of IT Communications at CERN, the Switzerland-based research center most widely known as the birthplace of the web and home to the world’s largest scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to smashing participles and looking for new ones, when the LHC begins operations later this year, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually.  To analyze the mountains of the data the project will rely on the LHC Grid, a globally distributed network of computers. The approach is similar to that used by SETI @ Home which taps into the spare computing power of millions of volunteer computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in search of extraterrestrial life. The idea is catching on: Grey says today there are dozens of distributed computing projects in fields such as molecular biology, climatology and particle physics; the Sony PS3 is pre-loaded with software to enable it to connect with Folding@Home, aStanford-based project that’s studying protein folding.

A unique culture has evolved around distributed computing projects, creating tight-knit communities of volunteers.  To incentivize participation projects like SETI give volunteers “credits” for donating computing time; individuals and teams self-organize and compete to donate the most hours.  Message boards act as a social networking site for volunteers and individual profiles make participation in the project personal: Matthew Tine (aka Stainmaster) is a 32-year old Australian who has been a SETI@home member since 2000 and has to date donated over 18,000 hours of CPU time.

Grey says is science taking the distributed network concept one step further, from volunteer computing to “volunteer thinking”.  As he describes it: a new generation of projects is emerging that taps into not only the computers, but the brains of the volunteers, inviting them to analyze scientific data online: cataloguing galaxies, scouring microscope images, or mapping out remote regions.  For instance, Galaxy Zoo taps armchair astronomers to help scientists classify galaxies by looking at images and identifying whether it’s a spiral or an elliptical galaxy.  Using legions of people is not only efficient, it’s also more effective: collectively human brains are better than computers at pattern recognition, and algorithms would invariably throw out the “unusual, weird or wonderful” patterns that would attract the attention of a curious human.

Herbaria at Home is using a similar crowd-sourcing approach digitize and document the world’s largest collections of herbarium specimens; another project, AfricaMap seeks to create more accurate cartographic maps of Africa by asking volunteers to look at satellite images over the African continent and search for roads, bridges, human settlements, rivers, agriculture fields, etc.

Distributed computing has spawned distributed thinking, a trend Grey calls “citizen cyberscience”, or philanthropic crowdsourcing. It’s a fascinating concept and one that could mobilize an army of amateur scientists into service.

 The speakers are great, the networking is casual and unpretentious. But what really ties the LIFT experience together is the cheese.  Specifically: the Thursday night fondue, a LIFT tradition that this year reached epic proportions as organizers managed the super-human feat of hosting for 600 people. Yes, that’s one big bowl of cheese. 

Note: these are running notes LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT conference blog or LunchOverIP.

On the outside, Kevin Warwick looks like your typical middle-aged, mild-mannered Brit. On the inside, however, he’s jacked his body up with most of the technology you’d find in your living room.  His experiments with neural implants, RFID sensors and robotic arms have earned him the title of the world’s first cyborg. 

Kevin’s theory is simple: as human beings, we have very limited senses - just five to be exact, and none of them particularly noteworthy.  Collectively, dogs, cats and bats outweigh us from a sensory perspective.  But why should we be satisfied with the genetic equivalent of second-place?  Why not use technology to extend our senses, to give us super-sonic hearing or ‘bionic’ eyesight?

For both ethical and legal reasons (”I’d never get permission for a test group”) Warwick has conducted his “cyborg” experiments on himself and his wife.  In the first, he implanted a tiny RFID tag into his arm which, connected to his computer, allowed him to control the doors and lights in his lab as well as operate a robotic arm some 5000km away.  In effect, his arm had its own IP address.  Another experiment extended his sensory range, in essence giving him an extra sonar sense: blindfolded he could “sense” (like a bat) when an object came close to him, just from the impulses in his arm.

In a later experiment, Warwick connected (via another set of implants) both his and his wife’s nervous systems: when he moved his hand, she felt the impulses, creating a nascent form of telegraphic communication between their nervous systems. He cautions that these are early-stage experiments, that it will be decades before brain-to-brain communication becomes a reality.  But the question is out there: what happens when it does?

As usual, Kevin captivates the audience - he’s funny, articulate and completely engaging.  Perhaps it’s his guy-next-door persona that makes the message all the more potent: maybe cyborgs of the future will look less like the Terminator and more like Mr. Rodgers.

I’ve heard Kevin speak before, and was grateful for the opportunity to spend the day with him last year in his lab at University of Reading, where he is a professor of cybernetics.  The hype around him abounds, but while he likes to play the cyborg, my sense is that his real passion is improving the human condition.  The possibilities of super-sonic senses may sound narcissistic, but side-effects of the research (ie, a cure for Parkinson’s disease) are anything but.  To cure neurological disorders or repair damaged or severed limbs (of which there are record numbers of in returning war veterans) we need to come to grips - both scientifically and culturally - with a new concept of what the human body, indeed a human being, can be.  

 LIFT ‘08 opens with a keynote from Bruce Sterling, which ends up a being a cross between a disappointment and an annoyance.  He starts with the “prediction” that nothing much will happen in 2008, that the year will basically be “crappy” and then proceeds to read (from his notes) a beautifully-written and entertaining but completely off-the-wall essay reflecting on the possible ‘futures’ of French Prime Minister Sarkozy and his new wife.

In general, I’m as much a Sterling fan as the next person (well, truth be told, maybe less so.  I don’t normally read science fiction and I never could get behind the concept “blogjects”).  But I’ve heard him give some absolutely fabulous speeches, and there’s rarely a column that I miss. 

Perhaps the plethora of speaking invitations has given Sterling the idea he has a free pass to get up on stage and say whatever he wants, whether it’s appropriate to the audience or not.   One had the impression that the extent of his preparation for LIFT was swigging down a latte and saying “let’s see, today’s Thursday… I’m in Europe… it’s a conference about the future…. I’ll say 2008 will be a crappy year and gossip about the French prime minister.”  But perhaps I’m not being fair: maybe that speech was meant for a different conference and he just forgot what day it was.

If I had come to LIFT to hear Sterling speak, I would have been hugely disappointed.  But thankfully, LIFT is about more than big-name speakers.  In contrast to other conferences that are filled with speaking “whales” LIFT guarantees a fair share of surprises - smaller names (and egos), but big ideas.  And most importantly, it delivers on that promise.  The fabulous thing about LIFT is that one can easily shake off a bad keynote, settle in and wait for real show to begin.

Laurent Haug (co-founder of the LIFT conferences) wrote a fabulous post recently called “Eight Things I Think I Think”  - an intriguing list of things he knows, but isn’t sure why. A few years ago Edge co-founder John Brockman published a great book on a similar topic, a compilation of answers to the question: “What do you believe is true even though you can’t prove it?”

It’s a perfect exercise for a futurist who is asked on a regular basis “what do you think will happen in the future?” (the problem with that question being that I always feel compelled to provide an answer that is what I call provokacredible - that is, thought-provoking enough to earn my stripes as a futurist, but credible enough to keep me gainfully employed).

But sometimes, like tonight, as I approach the almost-end of the week I realize that my brain cells are numb from too much email and I’m listing too far towards the present and not enough into the future. And so I found Laurent’s post - and a fabulous Oregon Coast Pinot Noir - a welcome antidote, reminding me that sometimes, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, it’s better to blink, not think.  And so in the spirit of great blog posts that make you think (kudos, Laurent) here’s my own list of things I think I think:

Privacy is an antiquated notion. Our current arguments about both online and offline privacy will be seen by future generations at best as quaint and naive, at worst, as narrow-minded and ignorant.

Cybership will become more important than citizenship.

In the next five years bottled water-drinkers will be as socially marginalized as cigarette smokers (ok, this is one I actually hope for).

Both Malcolm Gladwell and Duncan Watts are wrong: ideas propagate because of platforms, not people. The social media sphere has become the primary means for disseminating information and ideas throughout society.

In the next decade we will develop a pharmacological cure for sleep.  And maybe - just maybe - that’s a good thing.

Breakthroughs in genomics and neuroscience will spark a widespread debate about “what it means to be human” that will become the primary focus of public discourse over the next two decades, fracturing religions and spurring geo-political conflicts.

DNA and social capital will become primary currencies in the future, complete with their own markets, traders and fluctuating value indexes.

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p.s. -   Laurent: deepest apologies for stealing your idea, but many thanks for the inspiration and mental nudge.  I owe you a beer at LIFT.  Or an Oregon Pinot.

Switzerland.
Fondue.
Chocolate.
Wicked cool people and ideas.

What’s not to love?

I go to my share of conferences (well, truth be told, more than my share) and as a result I’m turning into what could be politely described as a conference snob.  It takes a bit to get me revved up for a conference these days, but one of my absolute favorites is coming up in a couple of weeks: LIFT.

Held in Geneva, Switzerland (reason for going #1), LIFT describes itself as “three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies.” What makes it different is a thoughtfully designed program and a hip but relaxed vibe (think designers and techies, minus the black turtlenecks and the awkward geekiness).  Yes, there are traditional keynotes and panels, but in the spirit of user-generated content the program also features a number of workshops and “open stage talks” that are proposed and selected by LIFT attendees.  Accompanying all of this is “LIFT+”, a set of artistic activities, many of which are interactive (last year included gaming, a digital orchestra and a wall-sized conference ‘book’ designed by attendees).  And of course, there’s the fondue party.

Registration is here.