The Lobster Pot

As you know if you read my earthquake post, I'm a believer in preparing for the worst. In fact, "preparing for the worst" is a label I'll be applying to quite a few posts here.

But that doesn't at all mean that I'm a pessimist. Totally the contrary, in fact! I am completely psyched about the future and I think that in general things are likely to get a lot better for ost people. Or at least, I hope so.

So "hoping for the best" is another label you'll see showing up here a lot. Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. That's the best way I know of to live a cautious but joyous life.

And it's also the only attitude that's compatible with the increasing drama of the world we live in. By that I mean that there are incredibly powerful trends in both directions in this world, trends that are much deeper and faster-moving than many people realize. Which brings me to the title of this post: lobsters, and pots.

You put a lobster in a pot of cold water, the lobster is relatively happy. Put the pot on the stove and heat it up, and the lobster still takes a while to realize what's going on. By the time the pot is hot enough for the lobster to get worried, it's just about too late.

That's the situation all us humans are in on this planet, in at least two major areas: global warming, and technological development.

I'm completely convinced that global warming is real and is getting rapidly worse. This affects me and my family very directly. We live in Northern California, and California in general is experiencing a lot less snowpack than in previous years. The trends are not positive, either. It's entirely possible that in another decade or two, California will be in a major water crisis. Already this year, Los Angeles is under voluntary water restrictions and mandatory water restrictions aren't out of the question. I would strongly advise people who live in Southern California to start considering where to relocate to.

Preparing for the worst, in this case, means taking seriously the question of whether Northern California is where we want to stay. We have young kids. In a few more years they'll be entering school. Do we want them to live in an area that is under continual threat of drought? To my mind, drought is actually a worse adversary than flooding -- flooding is terrible, but when it recedes, you can clean up and cope. But a sufficiently severe drought can make the entire area nigh uninhabitable for a large part of the entire year.

So we've been scouting the Seattle area -- lots of high tech jobs (good for me) and no shortage of water now or in the future. Yes, they have snowpack issues, but all they need is a few more reservoirs and they're set; there's no indication that Seattle will suffer lack of average total rainfall anytime in the next century or two.

I thought that I was the only person thinking this way until I contacted an old friend (hi, Nadine!) who told me that she and her partner were actively looking for land in Oregon, for exactly this reason: avoiding the coming drought threat here in Northern California.

Almost everyone else we know is pretty much business as usual here. But it looks like Nadine and I are the heat-sensitive lobsters making a break for it. Are we overreacting? Or is everyone else _underreacting?_ Time will tell.

Full disclosure: as you already have noticed, I think a lot about the worst-case scenario. In 2000 I was prepared for major social disruption from the Y2K bug. That never happened. So I know that preparing for the worst is sometimes overkill, if the worst never happens. It's Chicken Little in action: the lobster who jumps out of a pot that never heats up.

Now, what about the converse trend? I'm also a firm believer in the basic idea behind the Singularity: that technological development is accelerating exponentially, and continues to do so in increasingly more areas. The implications of that basic premise are that in much less time than many people expect, the world is going to be an amazingly different place.

I've been a deep believer in these ideas since I was a teenager. In fact, these ideas directly set me on a career path that was [ahead of its time]. This is kind of the Chicken Little scenario again: making plans based on assumptions that are too _optimistic_.

But it doesn't take much looking at the pace of scientific and technological development to believe that things are changing more quickly now than they ever have before, and plotting that trend line is a really exciting prospect. And again, it's one that many people aren't aware of. There's a real chance that, within thirty to fifty years, we'll have self-driving cars, average lifespans (in affluent nations) of over a century, search engines that can answer questions asked in plain English, and computers with direct interfaces to the brain. All of these trends are well underway today, and once all these things exist, the next advances follow even more quickly.

There's a lot of debate about the concept of the Singularity. In a sense, the Singularity is the point at which the lobster pot starts boiling -- the point at which the world becomes unreccognizably different. But here's where the metaphor breaks down, because -- hopefully! remember, we're hoping for the best here! -- there's no point at which technological development kills us all. It may be that the world just keeps getting stranger and richer and more interesting, and each new thing makes people better able to adapt to every other new thing. In that case, we're lobsters who learn to love the hot water, and the hotter it gets the more we like it.

The Singularity is defined as the point in time when technical progress surpasses our ability to foresee its consequences. It's where predictions break down. But by that definition, the Singularity is relative. Talking about this concept with my mother, she said, "I feel like we're already IN the Singularity!" It's dependent on your perspective. So it's very possible that the Singularity will continually recede into the future, even as we continue accelerating towards it.

These themes will come up again and again in this blog: preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, pondering trends in both directions, and thinking about what pots to jump out of and when. Life's an incredible adventure and you'd better pay attention! Let's pay attention together.