The Naked Future (30 page)

You have a vision of the future in your head. In fact, you've harbored hundreds of thousands of different visions over the course of your lifetime. When your mind is at rest, it drifts into the future like a cottonwood sailboat pulled downstream by a gentle but persistent current. You dream of the future. Based on these visions, you take certain actions and avoid others. You govern your life in accordance with your hopes and fears of what the future will be even though every vision is an illusion.

What is the future? It is an organizational tool our species uses to delay gratification and stretch beyond our animal impulses. It is the idea of the future that allows us to build, save, invest, stifle impulses, and dedicate ourselves to objectives greater than the immediate. The future derives its functionality from its perceived changeability. We don't think about it without also imagining ourselves altering it.

Our belief in the future enabled us to sit and focus long enough to build stone tools required for hunting, then to plant crops and wait for harvest. It allowed for the creation of currencies, companies, colleges, retirement and health-care systems, and the like.

Here's a secret about the grandest of all human inventions: conjuring up the future is more than something we just do, it's the raison d'être for our most humanistic brain regions. The future is not a destination; it's a product of the brain, a product we evolved in order to make decisions in the present. Long before the capital-
F
Future became an imaginary destination, it was a tool that humankind evolved to turn memories into predictions about what will happen next in order to better our chances for survival in a very dangerous, wild world.

The work of Harvard neuroscientist Moshe Bar, University of
Ottawa researcher Jody Culham, Washington University professor Jeffrey Zacks, and others suggest that the cortical networks at play when we imagine the future—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the hippocampal formation, the medial parietal cortex, and particularly the medial temporal lobe—are the same ones associated with memory. We visualize the future in the same part of the brain that we use to recall the past and we exert similar amounts of effort—measured in hemoglobin flow—to do so.
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Neurologically, the act of imagining a scenario is a lot like the act of remembering, says Bar. When these areas light up under fMRI, a prediction is born. That means our mental constructs of the future are a direct extension of our lived experience, a fact of neurological functioning that is central to the way we live and organize our lives.

Bar's research shows that we're also living in the future even when we don't realize it, when we're daydreaming. Our approach to it influences our every interaction, from our personality tics to the errors to which we are most susceptible. “One might wonder why our brain is investing energy in mind wandering, fantasizing and revisiting (and modifying) existing memories. I propose that a central role of what seems random thoughts and aimless mental simulations is to create ‘memories.' Information encoded in our memory guides and sometimes dictates our future behavior,” he writes.

As any attorney who has ever cross-examined a witness will tell you, memories aren't fixed. A person recalls things differently depending on the context she is in and what she's specifically trying to do. We alter our memories constantly depending on where we are, what we've just been through, and the circumstances under which we are being asked to remember. Bar's research provides a partial explanation for why this is. “Both real and simulated memories could be helpful later in the future by providing approximated
scripts
for thought and action” (emphasis added). How we remember predicts what we're going to do next.

We may actually
grieve
for the future as much as the past. Individuals who have devoted considerable time and mental resources
to the visualization of a life spent with a particular person (in marriage) or to a particular life course (career) may show strong activity in the regions associated with planning. There may exist (again, theoretically) a measurable correlation between the amount of time specifically devoted to visualizing and planning a future with an individual and the amount of activity in these frontal regions after a breakup. In other words, you may be able to measure how traumatized someone is or will be by the dissolution of a relationship if you can measure the amount of time he's spent thinking about the future of that relationship. When we fall in love with a person, we're really falling for the future with them, an ungraspable dream.

A few years ago, across the United States from Bar's lab, Hawkins spearheaded a growing body of research to support the theory that the neocortex evolved expressly for the purpose of turning sensory data, in the form of lived experiences, into predictions. In many ways, the accomplishment he's most proud of is not a device or a company, it's the memory-prediction framework theory, a sort of unified theory for the brain purporting to explain why the brain, and specifically the neocortex, functions the way that it does.

Just as our gazing into the future takes a wide variety of forms, from strategizing to passive daydreaming, likewise the act of prediction serves a number of functions beyond just making decisions and plans. Prediction, in the brain, is also an act of learning.
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We make predictions constantly as a means of testing the accuracy of what we've encoded and how we reexperience our memories. In fact, the predictions that have the most value to the brain as learning devices are the ones that are
wrong.

Those experiences that bear out our expectations are much less likely to make their way into our permanent memory. We disregard them the same way we do boring episodes in our life, those little events that we were easily prepared for and that played out almost exactly how we anticipated that they would. The converse is true as well, says Bar. “Unpredictable incoming aspects that do not meet the possibilities offered by the top-down predictions can provide a
signal both for attentional allocation as well as for subsequent memory encoding,” he writes.
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When we're presented with an outcome that doesn't meet with our anticipations, our attention shifts. Our brains attempt to record the moment in as much detail as possible, not just the literal truth of what surprised us but other sensory data as well: the sound of the moment, the smell of it. We attempt to absorb the entire pattern. The feeling can be euphoric or it can match the clinical definition of trauma but the brain understands these experiences as learning, the acquisition of new information of possible use to survival.

We predict to learn but we also resist learning. In 2002 Duke neuroscientists Scott A. Huettel, Peter B. Mack, and Gregory McCarthy took sixteen volunteers and showed them a random series of shapes. When new incoming information violated the perceived pattern, the volunteers' brains showed significant activation, indicating surprise. Though the sequence was completely arbitrary, the fMRI showed that volunteers couldn't help but see—or rather invent—patterns in the sequence. No statistical fact ever feels more credible than our own experience.
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Herein is where nature gets the last laugh; we're born predictors, but we're also bad predicators. We make up the future as we go along, get the answer wrong, and then convince ourselves we were right. This is why the inside view is so pernicious.

We evolved the brain, particularly the neocortex, to make guesses, but we did all that evolving over the course of millions of years. Mainstream science holds that the process of human evolution stopped some fifty thousand years ago, long before the dawn of human civilization. More important, this growing, changing, and adapting occurred in a natural setting where we had to hunt, scavenge, and avoid predators to survive.

That simple fact is essential to understanding how the future is becoming more visible. But our relationship to the future will always be psychological at its core. We engage the future through the act of prediction. What we now know about prediction is this:

1. Predictions in the brain come from lived experience.
   
2. Experience comes from processing sensory input—what we see, hear, and feel. If we can call the brain a type of computer (a common but incomplete analogy), this is data that our low-level neurons pick up, analyze, and then send to the higher-level neurons that make up the neocortex for processing and feedback.
   
3. The future changes depending on the amount of input and the manner in which it is processed.
   

So far, you've read about different devices that play a role in creating an anticipatory environment. Sensors embedded in the ground that detect P-waves enable us to predict S-waves; mobile devices we carry with us telegraph our future location based on where we've been. But the world that anticipates your every move will also be a wild and lifelike thing. It's a place full of moving parts, creatures that take actions based on what they can predict about your next move. They, too, are evolving the ability to anticipate the future, your future, on the basis of lived experience.

A few days after meeting Jeff Hawkins I journey to Esther's German Bakery in Los Galtos to meet with Paul Hofmann. Hofmann is the chief technology officer of Saffron Technology, a company that's also creating a continuous prediction platform based on neurological functioning. Hofmann is one of those European men who seem ageless. He has a thick mane of gray hair but his face is young and smooth. His accent is Bavarian but he sounds a lot like Hawkins in what he says.

“We will see the automation of cognitive thinking. It will happen like we have a pocket calculator,” he predicts.

Saffron's product is a program that also builds models automatically based on incoming data; it also has a hierarchy, but the program emphasizes a mix of semantic and statistical reasoning. “We can analyze text, extract the semantics, and build context, counts, and then you can calculate entropy, relevance, matrices, and based
on that, you can do pattern prediction,” says Hofmann. At present, the market they're aiming for is one client, the government.

In addition to Hofmann, who was a vice president of research at SAP Labs, Saffron has a rather notable person on its board, John Poindexter, the former national security adviser and DARPA researcher. Following the 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks Poindexter pushed for a sweeping system of surveillance and terrorist targeting called Total Information Awareness (TIA). It involved analyzing e-mails, photos, and live camera footage to detect suspicious activity in real time. Critics called the plan a mass surveillance project. It was soon defunded and Poindexter was hounded out of his job.

Ironically, the portion of the proposal that cost Poindexter his position had little to do with surveillance. As part of the project, Poindexter wanted to set up a futures casino as a way to incentivize information discovery. Here's how it worked: if you were in the intelligence community (an umbrella term that applies not just to working spies but to former spies, informants, and analysts, an internationally dispersed web of thousands of people) and you had a suspicion about a crime or a terrorist plot, you could wager on the likelihood of the event's outcome and make money. According to Poindexter's theory, analysts or informants would be more likely to be forthcoming with information of value if they could profit by it directly and anonymously.

Poindexter's prediction market represented a distinct innovation over the way various federal agencies had gone about the task of collecting and coordinating information before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Poindexter showed that his method was more accurate and effective than conventional information gathering. It also proved to be a political flash point.

When word of the prediction market project hit the public, Senator Bryan Dorgan (D-ND) claimed that because the program rewarded people for having inside information without asking where they got it, it might well
cause
the very attacks it was invented to predict. A full investigation of Poindexter's Information Awareness Office (IAO) within DARPA followed, which led to the public
revelation of domestic spying activity on the part of the office. Funding was cut and John Poindexter submitted his resignation to DARPA director Anthony Tether on August 13, 2003.

If you look at the TIA proposal today, it appears much less controversial than it did a decade ago. Several of the information-gathering methods proposed are indeed in use by law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies around the world. Dozens of private online prediction markets have sprung up, allowing people to bet on any number of world events.

TIA is effectively live.

I ask Hofmann about this, whether he shares the privacy concerns of people who argue that we were moving toward a massive surveillance state.

“Privacy is a blip on the radar of history,” he tells me.

He takes a bite from his thick, buttery pastry, sips from his iced tea, and calmly continues.

“Until I was eight years old, I lived in a small village in the Austrian countryside. Then my parents moved me to Vienna. I experienced, for the first time, anonymity. Nobody knew me. Now, the world is a global village. Everyone knows everyone again.”

In 1998, roughly ten years after Mark D. Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing” to describe a world in which the objects in our environment became passive listeners, futurist and science-fiction author David Brin published a nonfiction book titled
The Transparent Society
, which discusses the future effects of ubiquitous computing. The first chapter poses two alternative futures. One saw the Orwellian vision of total state surveillance. Empowered and active citizens dominated the second scenario and they used the new capabilities of the awakened environment to check and humble those who would call themselves guardians of the public order.

“In the Information Age to come, cameras and databases will sprout like crocuses—or weeds—whether we like it or not. Over the long run, we as a people must decide. Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny . . . our secrets laid open . . . if in return we get
flashlights of our own, that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm? Even the arrogant and strong? Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?”
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