The Naked Future (2 page)

We still have choices to make. I'll discuss some of the forms those choices will take. But the worst possible move we as a society can make right now is demand that technological progress reverse itself. This is futile and shortsighted. We may be uncomfortable with the way companies, the NSA, and other groups use and abuse our information but that doesn't mean we will be producing less data anytime soon. As I mentioned earlier, according to the research group IDC there will be forty-four times as much digital information in 2020 as there was in 2009.
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You have a clear choice: use your data or someone else will.

This is not a book about a change that is going to happen so much as a change that has already occurred but has yet to be acknowledged or fully felt. This is not a declaration of independence from corporate America, the government, or anything else. It's the record of our journey to this new place: the naked future.

Namazu the Earth Shaker

THE
date is April 12, 2011. I'm on a highway in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima, home to a now infamous nuclear power plant that's in the process of melting down. I've just left the city of Ishinomaki where I was covering relief efforts that began following last month's earthquake and tsunami and I'm now heading back to Tokyo. In the car with me are two Japanese fishermen who speak no English, an Australian fireman named Simon, a British reporter stringing for a newspaper out of the Middle East, and a Japanese relief coordinator. Our route is taking us well within the eighty-kilometer “evacuation zone” that the U.S. government has advised its citizens to stay the hell out of. None of us have any illusions that it's safe to be here. For this reason, and because we're behind schedule, we're driving extremely fast.

Everyone on this road is driving fast.

Suddenly, a loud, sirenlike noise tears through the car's interior. Simon pulls his walkie-talkie from his Gore-Tex jacket. A bright red light cries out in distress at rhythmic intervals.

“Pull over,” Simon commands. The driver applies the brakes,
not exactly slamming them but not gradually depressing them, either, and steers the car to the side of the road. Like a surreal piece of choreographed theater, every other car on the road also slows and banks.

A moment later, we feel the ground beneath us rise and fall. This is a 6.0 tremor, large enough that—had we been traveling at our previous speed of more than eighty miles per hour—we likely would have crashed. The fishermen, Simon, the car's other occupants, and I look around at one another. We share a silent acknowledgment that we have just barely avoided a terrible accident.

I'm alive today thanks in part to Japan's Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system, a network of more than four thousand seismographic sensor stations.
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These devices detect the low-level initial tremors called primary waves or P-waves that are released by seismic activity. An earthquake's P-wave telegraphs the size of the secondary wave or S-wave, the tremors that crash cities and bring the fury of the sea to shore. The system computes the signals as input and issues output, the feedback of which takes the form of Simon's phone going off.

The alert is issued automatically the second that the seismometer detects the signal and transfers it to headquarters.

Because earthquakes are a frequent occurrence in Japan, the alarm now goes off so often it has almost become background noise. In the moments before the 2011 earthquake hit, television broadcasts across the country were briefly interrupted by a crisp, telephonic ringing. A bright blue box appeared on every television screen showing the eastern coast of Japan and a large red
X
offshore depicting the earthquake's epicenter. In one of the eerier video clips that emerged from March 11, 2011, members of Japan's parliament can be seen debating a piece of legislation. Because they're accustomed to the signals they're slow to react to the warning at first. When they realize the size of the earthquake, they look nervously to the swinging chandeliers above them. The picture cuts to a flustered anchorman who warns of a possible tsunami off the coast of the prefecture of Miyagi.
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The Japanese have been applying creativity and resourcefulness to earthquake prediction for centuries. Historically, national myth held that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a giant catfish, or
namazu
, called the Earth Shaker. Though the idea seems ridiculous today, the Japanese took it very seriously at various points throughout their history. In 1592 the samurai warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued what is perhaps the strangest building-code edict in history to the men constructing his castle in the Fushimi district of Kyoto: “Be sure to implement all catfish countermeasures.”

In the later Edo period small catfish were awarded a reputation as earthquake predictors. Strange fish behavior was thought to be an indication that the giant
namazu
was on the prowl for mischief.

Today, the idea feels fanciful. Several centuries of steady scientific progress have taught us to look for concrete causal relationships in order to understand how one physical entity might influence another. We know that the earth's tectonic plates are affected neither by subterranean fish, nor the position of the constellation of Cassiopeia, nor the current level of God's wrath but by physical systems of enormous complexity and limited accessibility. Our understanding of the world through the lens of science suggests that P-waves indicate S-waves, but there exists no physical mechanism by which a catfish could know of an earthquake days in advance. Anecdotal evidence to the contrary proves only that humans have active imaginations, because catfish don't predict earthquakes.

Turns out, they almost do.

One of the key triggers of large seismic events is the buildup of pressure between rock formations in the earth's crust. This pressure also releases electrical activity and will do so days before large quake events. Loose “defect electrons” rise up through porous gaps in the earth's crust; they ionize when they meet the air. Under the
right
circumstances, this can cause subtle hydrogen peroxide increases in certain fault lines proximate to bodies of water, making such bodies just a bit toxic to very sensitive marine fauna.

British zoologist Rachel Grant observed this phenomenon
firsthand when hundreds of toads fled a pond near L'Aquila, Italy, in the days just prior to an enormous 2010 earthquake. As Grant wrote in her paper that was published in the
Journal of Zoology
, “Our study is one of the first to document animal behavior before, during and after an earthquake. Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system.”
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Catfish, like toads, have extremely sensitive skin. But unlike toads, they can't abandon a body of water that's becoming toxic. They can only thrash about or behave strangely, like the Earth Shaker.
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In his book
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't
, statistician Nate Silver is rather hard on Grant. He suggests, though not explicitly, that she's reached an insupportable conclusion, as her paper seems to assert that the observed toad behavior is “evidence that they [toads] had predicted the earthquake.” He describes her work as the sort of thing that “exhausts” real seismologists and notes dismissively, “Some of the stuff in academic journals is hard to distinguish from ancient Japanese folklore.”
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Silver is certainly a talented statistician deserving of the celebrity that's been awarded him. He's right to point out that history is littered with failed attempts to predict earthquakes, often by observing strange animal behavior. He's also right to point out that statistical analysis of previous earthquakes is surely a far more useful signal than is toad behavior, at least for now.

But he's misstating Grant's intent. She's not suggesting that the toad behavior is “evidence that they predicted the earthquake.” Neither the toads of L'Aquila, nor the catfish of Japan, nor even the EEW are actually predicting anything and Rachel Grant knows this perfectly well. These are feats not of prognostication but of detection. Grant and her colleagues acknowledge that testing the hypothesis outside a laboratory setting has thus far been impossible because they still don't know when and where an earthquake will strike. And neither do the toads. When they're in a pond with higher hydrogen peroxide levels they become uncomfortable and they leave. They are indifferent to earthquakes, to Nate Silver, and to the future.

It's humans who predict things.

As we attempt to make use of this abundance of telemetric data, we're going to make errors. One of the statistical traps Silver and other statisticians warn against is overfitting, or applying a specific solution to a general problem. In the case of earthquakes, this could mean watching toads rather than history because toad behavior lends itself to a very specific type of prediction method.

We are about to enter a golden age of overfitting, if such a thing can be said to exist. The sheer volume of data we now generate as individuals and institutions suggests that more people will be able to create more models with data points and observations that offer the false promise of certainty. We will model more and so we will make more errors, but an increase in modeling activity will not diminish the costs or consequences of those errors. Many small mistakes will feel extremely large particularly in the context of international stock and commodities markets. Overfitting also speaks to an impulsivity that's in our nature. We gravitate toward evidence, data, and facts that support a conclusion we've already reached or bolster the argument we're trying to make. Finally there's enough data to lend some support to virtually
any
argument, no matter how crazy. To overfit is human.

But the fact that electrical activity from pressure increases days before large seismic events is beyond dispute. It's exactly the sort of predictor that could reliably indicate an approaching disaster if only humanity could devise some cost-effective way to place millions of sensitive electron detectors deep beneath the earth's surface near fault lines. It's science fiction. But at one point, so was the idea of a sensor spiderweb that could detect P-waves.

We are turning our physical environment into a catfish.

In 1988 a scientist at Xerox PARC named Mark D. Weiser put forward a novel vision for the future. Computer hardware, he said, would migrate from deskbound PCs to pads, boards, and “smart”
systems that were part of the physical environment. The term Weiser gave this new sensing environment was “ubiquitous computing.”

This vision for the future speaks a lot about the man who came up with it. Weiser was not a typical computer hardware genius. Take a look at his informal writings and the accounts of people who knew him and you will not find a man who loved gadgets and code for their own sake but someone motivated by a passion for
actual
experience, a sensualist, a devotee of skydiving, rock repelling, and lead drummer in a punk band called Severe Tire Damage. Through ubiquitous computing he imagined a future in which humans interacted with computers on an unconscious level, through regular activity; a future in which computers served to remove annoyances and answer questions like “Where are the car keys?” “Can I get a parking place?” and “Is that shirt I saw last week at Macy's still on the rack?”
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while keeping us connected to what we care about. Computers weren't supposed to get in our way, or be constantly in our hands, or be connected to our ears through shiny white earplugs, or demand that we answer their every chirp and bell. As they became better they were supposed to become more numerous but also disappear into the background.

A decade after his death, it's the “ubiquitous” portion of Weiser's ubiquitous computing vision that's becoming reality for most of us. The total number of devices connected to the Internet first exceeded the size of the global human population in 2008 or so, according to Cisco, and is growing far faster.

Cisco forecasts that there will be 50 billion machine-to-machine devices in existence by 2020, up from 13 billion in 2013. Today, we call ubiquitous computing by another name: the Internet of Things.

For large institutional or corporate consumers of information, the spread of sensors and computer hardware across the physical environment amounts to better inventory tracking and customer targeting, which will help bottom lines. The Internet of Things can be found most immediately in the RFID tags that have made their way
onto everything from enormous inventory palettes to the clothing labels that Swiss textile company TexTrace
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sews into American Apparel clothing to track shipments. Most RFID tags that we encounter today are small squares of paper, plastic, or glass containing a microchip and an antenna at a cost of about twenty cents. The microchip holds information about the product (or thing the RFID is connected to). The antenna allows an RFID reader to access data on the chip via a unique radio signal. Unlike a simple printed bar or quick response (QR) code, the RFID tag doesn't have to be directly under the reader to work. The reader need only be close by. This allows retailers to monitor the inventory in their store in something like real time. Some futurists have suggested that RFID could one day render the checkout station obsolete. In this future, when you saw a product that you wanted you would simply pluck it from the shelf and—so long as you had a user account or were identifiable to that store—walk out the door. The product's RFID tag would tell the retailer the product had been purchased and your account would be debited. Sound far-fetched? Millions of Americans today
buy
access to toll roads through the dashboard-mounted RFID tags that are part of the E-ZPass system. The act of purchasing takes the form of a simple deceleration and a brief exchange of data between the RFID tag's antenna and the tollbooth's reader. And RFID is just one of the many smart or sensing tags and microchips that are making their way into our physical environment at rapidly decreasing cost.

For patients and graying baby boomers, the Internet of Things is ushering in a revolution in real-time medical care. It is alive inside the chest of Carol Kasyjanski, a woman who in 2009 became the second human being to receive a Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker that allows her heart to dialogue directly with her doctor.
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The first was former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, who received one in 2007, but never activated the device's broadcasting capability for fear of hackers.

The military uses the Internet of Things to do more with less. In Afghanistan it takes the form of the fifteen hundred “unattended
ground sensors” that the U.S. Army is leaving littered across the Afghan countryside as the U.S. mission there winds down. These sensors, which are intended to pick up human movement, are intended to allow the Pentagon to eavesdrop on the countryside and detect how Afghans (or Pakistanis) are moving over their country.