Blogging from ‘Genie’

I’m inside a lecture hall at UC Berkeley at the kickoff of the sixth annual new media conference, where panelists Howard Rheingold, Denise Caruso, Mark Schapiro and Christina Desser (along with Ray Kurzweil via videoconference) are holding forth on Living With The Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery. (The Webcast is live now.)

Impressive lineup. I last saw Rheingold and Kurzweil together at PopTech in the fall of 2002.

During the reception before the panel, I chatted with Xian Crumlish about using bloggers to help contribute to our upcoming books (Xian is writing “The Power of Many” for O’Reilly). More about that in the coming days.

Someone helped get me set up via wi-fi, although most of the 120 spectators in the audience weren’t so lucky. (Not sure why giving people wi-fi access is considered a security threat.)

Sitting next to me are Vin Crosbie and Ken Sands, who appear on a panel tomorrow. Behind me are Mary Hodder, Peter Merholz, Justin Hall and Isaac (Xianghui) Mao, vice president of United China Investment Ltd. in Shanghai. Isaac says he may have been the first blogger in China. Blogging has taken off in a big way in mainland China, with about 300,000 bloggers today.

Kurzweil is speaking now, giving his take on progress and technology: “The rate of progress is accelerating, it’s doubling every decade. And this goes substantially beyond Moore’s Law, when that runs out in about 15 years we’ll go on to 3D computing. … Our knowledge of the human brain is doubling every year. Human knowledge in general is doubling every year. … By the end of this decade, computers will be so small we won’t see them. We’ll have virtual reality from within the nervous system by 2029,” destroying cancer cells and pathogens. “We’ll be able to reduce heart disease and cancer rates, but we’re also empowering bioterrorists to create designer viruses.”

Howard is talking about how in a few years we’ll be carrying or wearing technology that is many times more powerful than what we know today, and how we need to broaden discussion of topics such as spectrum, DRM, intellectual property and trusted computing beyond the techno-elite so that the general public gets involved.

Schapiro is talking about altering the genetic makeup of humans. “You are beginning to challenge the structures we’re used to in the legal sphere and the political sphere and assessing the criteria of how we decide whether a change is beneficial or not. The legal and technological spheres are being outpaced by technological innovation.”

Denise is talking about biotech, citing government cluelessness on a number of levels. “Innovation at any cost, at this rate of change, doesn’t make a lot of sense. … Industry and government like the way things are, they can game the system to their hearts’ content.”

Kurzweil is now talking about how we’ve diverged from the long haul of evolution: we no longer need to retain all those calories (as in past eras when we might not have had enough to eat); we no longer live 37 years on average. Thus, he has no objection to taking charge of our destiny through technology. He points out that “one kid dies in a gene therapy experiment and Congress launches an investigation and shuts down all genetic research. But there is no consideration given to the hundreds of thousands of people who will die as a result. We need balance added to the equation.”

Howard is suggesting that current government institutions (Congress, regulatory agencies) are ill-equipped to deal with the scale and scope of technological change now taking place. He says after conversations with news media executives, he was struck by how naive he was in thinking that they cared about journalism and issues of public import and the threats to personal liberties when all they really seemed to care about was talking about how their traditional business models are failing. The only bright hope is that technologies are enabling people to get in on the conversation that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. (Insert paen to blogs here.) Great line: “It’s our only bulwark against superstition and madness.”

The most interesting exchange of the evening came on the topic of intellectual property.

Kurzweil pointed out that information is becoming a more important component of society’s values and services. “We have a crisis in copyright protection. It does take capital formation to create these intellectual properties like music and movies.”

Rheingold then broke in, saying, “Ray, I’m astonished you’re falling for that. It’s not about only protecting property, it’s about incenting people to be creative.” He cited the wording of the U.S. Constitution about promoting the arts and sciences, and said that balance has been lost. “I could care less about the business model of the motion picture industry. Certainly we can come up with ways to use p2p without having to prop up archaic business models.”

“It’s clear IP laws are broken,” Denise chimes in. “Every regulatory agency is busted. How do you foment an uprising and get people to move en masse to effect change? It seems that with big media there’s a very thick crust that’s very difficult to break through.”

The session is nearly over. (Isaac Mao just leaned over and told me he sent me a LinkedIn invitation.) My own sense is that the discussion ranged all over the map and could have been put to better use had there been more focus. There also didn’t seem to be much discussion that relates to the guests who flew in from China for the conference. Still, all this intellectual firepower on stage was amazing to see.

Xian is blogging this too, at ThePowerofMany.com, and he has posted some photos, too.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.