The Shape of CFPs to Come

• Up to the year 1984, the vision of George Orwell's novel 1984 was probably dominant.
• From the year 1984 until near the end of of the century, the other extreme grew in popularity (eg, Tim May's "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto")
• Since the late 1990s, there are those who see "How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle" (John Walker, "The Digital Imprimatur").

+

No one knows the future, so scenarios are much preferred to predictions. (And for some of the broadest issues, scenarios are more useful than elaborate probability analysis.)

• Science fiction uses scenarios as the setting for drama.
• Others (eg, GBN) use scenarios as a basis for planning:
  • Build those wild-eyed scenarios, each at the extreme of plausibility but in a different direction.
    • For each scenario, build a list of symptoms and anti-symptoms
    • Taken together, list responses common to different scenarios, with a major goal of maintaining flexibility.
  • Track relevant events as time passes
    • Update existing scenarios accordingly
    • Create new scenarios accordingly

The scenario I have in mind today assumes

• No grand physical disasters. (Note that this excludes many plausible outcomes -- see Martin Rees's Our Final Hour.)
• Computing and communication performance trends sustained over the coming twenty years.

+

• Well, it's not really secret, though it may not be recognized for what it is.
• It proceeds emergently, so little or no global organization is needed.
• Modern economics and technology empower it.
• Almost every constituency is a supporter of some aspect of it.
• So who are the participants?
  • Certainly the usual suspects:
    • National defense
    • Homeland security
    • Financial crimes enforcement
    • Police, regulators, and tax collectors at all levels and in all jurisdictions. But besides the classical bureaucratic and power imperatives behind these players, much of their behavior is driven by popular demand. And there other participants:
  • Most everyone owning intellectual property.
  • Everyone who sees that the world would be a better place if only people couldn't do bad things.
  • Every geek who sees the power of oncoming technology and thinks "That would be so cool!" (The story of the geek and the guillotine comes to mind here.)

Pogo captured the driving wisdom: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

And now, the wildest control-freak dreams of each of these groups can be satisfied:

+

Some relevant hardware trends:

• Embedded systems
• Networked embedded systems
• Fine-grained distribution
  • Localizers
  • Smart Dust. Warneke, Last, and Pister, IEEE Computer, January 2001, p44-51: "We will program the walls and the furniture, and some day even the insects and the dust."

These technologies and the economic advantage they confer appear to head us inexorably toward a future where physical objects know what they are, where they are, and how to communicated with their nearby neighbors -- and thus, in principle -- with anywhere. In this situation, physical reality becomes its own database and cyberspace leaks out into the real world.

• Software is all. If a desired product can't be done with software on top of the uniform (network/localizer/sensor/effector) substrate, then there is something wrong with the product concept.
• In the 20th century, people often used real world metaphors in their programming. Now turn that around: Almost every aspect of computer science should have a concrete analog in the network/localizer/sensor/effector real world -- and where this doesn't appear to be true, that's evidence of unexploited opportunity! On the dark side, there are dramatic new meanings for things like:
  • Denial of Service Attacks
  • Zombies
  • % kill -9 -u user

A world such as this cries out for a new kind of public safety, the perfect storm of confluent interests. Clipper meets the V-chip meets DRM and TIA:

+

• The dedication of a small amount of bandwidth for regulatory use
• The dedication of a small amount of semiconductor real estate for regulatory use:

cfp96.jpg

+

• Incremental deployment is feasible (no flag day necessary)
  • True ubiquity not needed to begin with
  • Deployment as the "progressive implementation of standards"
  • Deployment enforced through obsolescence
• Much less visible security in our everyday lives
  • Gone, the waiting at checkpoints!
  • Gone, the cameras visible everywhere!
• Less crime of all sorts, and far fewer false convictions
• Intellectual property seamlessly protected and ubiquitously profitable.
• Less paperwork and less visible bureaucracy!
• Transparent taxation: Income Tax and VAT largely replaced by BiT.
• Real-time downloadability of new regulatory regimes!
• Individually customized regulatory regimes.
• Legislative reality becomes external, physical reality! (Thus, SHE is the ultimate policy response of those disastisfied by the unruliness of the natural world.)

SHE fits the trajectory that economics and technical progress are following. The infrastructure for such control will probably arrive in any case.

+

• SHE would be evaded, subverted, corrupted, and exploited in a million different ways.
  • Imagine the Drug Wars, only much more "interesting".
  • Moonshine fabs?
  • The golden age of trapdoors: "Who owns the trapdoors, owns the world."
• Planners (say, CFPs now and in the future) will prevent SHE or mitigate its worst effects.
  • Problem for such planners: What to do when a natural right is no longer inherent in nature? (Example: privacy; example radical response: symmetric non-privacy à la David Brin's The Transparent Society.)
  • Problem for such planners: How to cope with exponentially growing complexity.
  • Problem for such planners: How to cope with the shortsighted self-interests of the myriad players, each more powerful at their focus than any non-profit organization.
  • Fortunately, these difficult problems are followed closely on by powerful solutions (next slide). In fact, Pogo's pessimistic wisdom is a very twentieth century thing.

+

• The Internet is changing what makes the economic power of a nation.
• Economic power lies in the combination of:
  • Large populations of educated, creative, enthusiastic people, pursuing their myriad independent goals, but planning and coordinating with one another via
  • Computer networks and shared data services.

The leaders of the most powerful countries are coming to realize this, and to realize that at least the illusion of freedom is necessary to maintain this creativity machine.

What leaders may not realize is that the creativity machine includes millions of people who are as bright and knowledgeable as anyone who has ever captained a great nation. For such an ensemble, the "illusion of freedom" needs be more like real freedom than has ever existed in human history.

+

• New forms of coordination, affiliance. A new populism powered by deep knowledge, self-interest so broad as to be mistaken for tolerance, and an automatic, preternatural vigilence. See:
  • Gregory Stock's Metaman
  • Bruce Sterling's "Maneki Neko"
• And then there's the Technological Singularity
  • Alas, imagining a post-Singularity CFP is a little like a frog imagining a conference on wetlands management. The topic is of interest, but beyond our mental horizon.

-