The site was launched by the forever forward-looking Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelley, working with Wired magazine and featuring some of the usual suspects of West Coast future-think. Longbets.com lets individuals place real bets, minimum $1,000, on aspects of the future. Since some of these bets won’t be decided until dates like 2150, nobody actually wins the dough-it’s invested in something called the Farsight Fund portfolio and then goes to the charity of the winner’s choice. As the site says, “You keep the most important thing, which is public credit for winning your Long Bet.” The site kicked off with some high-rolling names in technology-Ray Kurzweil, Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson, Gordon Bell, Danny Hillis, and Nathan Myhrvold. Their initial wagers include “By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes,” or “A computer or ‘machine intelligence’ will pass the Turing Test [mimic human intelligence] by 2029.”
A few of the bets are in areas I sometimes mull. Dave Winer, Silicon Valley software pioneer and early blogger, bet Martin Niesenholtz of New York Times Digital that “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, Weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ site.” Editor Jason Epstein bet Internet guru Vint Cert that “By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks.”
Those two predictions seem pretty easy to call. In Winer’s case, if Weblogs turn out to work well as a journalistic form, by 2007 they’ll be integral parts of The New York Times and every other mainstream publication. As a member of the East Coast media establishment, I can testify: even if we don’t invent something, we’re still perfectly happy to co-opt it. Click here for Exhibit A. Advantage: Niesenholtz.
And Epstein’s vision of worldwide print-on-demand by 2010 certainly would solve the overwhelming impracticality of our current ink-on-dead-trees book production scheme. The problem: there are still a lot of folks in the book world who profit from the current impracticality, and they’re not going to rush to put themselves out of business. Plus, Epstein skewed the bet by making it “worldwide”-China, for example, publishes millions of books, but they’re not going to be deploying print-on-demand networks anytime soon.
However, it’s hard to be too critical about efforts to predict the future, because nobody really does it well. Even the scientists closest to the technology usually don’t have a clue. One of my college physics professors, for example, worked on lasers back when they were still called “a solution looking for a problem.” One day the professor showed our class some humorous ideas for “practical” laser applications, based around the principle that the heat in a laser beam is contained in the form of light. That means the beam can bounce off light-colored material without damage and only burns when the light is absorbed by a darker surface.
One of his ideas, therefore, was the laser typewriter eraser: the beam vaporized the ink of the mistyped character but left the paper intact. Another was the laser potato peeler, which vaporized the brown skin but didn’t mar the white potato flesh. The class chuckled dutifully at our professor’s demonstrations; back then lasers were both very expensive and about the size of refrigerators. But my classmates would have laughed me off campus had I stood up and announced what would actually be the number-one, world-wide application for the laser another decade or so in the future: the replacement of phonograph records with compact discs, using a tiny laser as the pickup device.
As it turned out, one of my professor’s jokes came true-there actually is an industrial laser potato peeler-and by now, having virtually eliminated phonograph records, lasers are being used to replace eyeglasses. The point is simple: even a scientist right at the origins of the technology hadn’t a clue as to how it might ultimately be used.
On the other hand, science fiction writers often get credit for predicting the future-Jules Verne for putting a man on the moon, William Gibson for “cyberspace.” Sometimes corporate think tanks even hire science fiction writers-at far higher day-rates than they earn writing short stories-but it may not be the best investment. I say that even though, as a sometime science fiction writer, a number of ideas I wrote in the early Seventies came to pass, remarkably close to the way I’d imagined them.
Once, for example, I wrote about a silent violin with piezoelectric strings that can be heard only through headphones-and two decades later Yamaha introduced just such an instrument. Another time I imagined flowers implanted with genes from luminescent sea creatures, creating blossoms that glow in the dark. Thirty years later, luminescence genes are regularly used as markers in genetic research; a recent result was a tobacco plant with leaves that glow. But I can’t take much credit for prescience: the fact is that in science fiction we throw out so many new ideas to create our alternative worlds that what would be truly remarkable is if none of them really happened.
Technology-being the intersection of science and human imagination-will likely always surprise us. And so Longbets.org, in recently expanding its discussion area to include a broader range of proposed bets, is on the right track. It’s really talking about the future, rather than predicting it, that helps us come up with the best ideas about how to shape it. Longbets.org provides a smart venue for the conversation. And in the end, as computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
