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Correspondent from the Future: Future & Digital Storytelling
Baratunde Thurston
The Onion
Webvisions 2012, wvpdx
  • @jjpolitics 
    • jack and jill politics
    • “the watermelon has long symbolized intelligence discourse”
  • tv host discovery channel “future of”
  • director of digital at @theonion
  • live hate-tweeting: all twilight movies
  • Author of How To Be Black
    • if you don’t buy this book, you’re a racist
  • Use brainstorm for headline about steve jobs death
  • For live-tweeting events, have prep documents with many dozens of tweets prepared.
  • for oscars: search onion archive and retweet.
  • using analytics to see what got retweeted, and then used that information to decide what to published on the website.
  • Be a Platform
    • Did planned parenthood satire story about “abortionplex”
    • Didn’t ask anyone to do anything, but…
    • Someone created Yelp destination for it
    • Received 282 reviews, quite detailed.
    • Supports and extended the world/story.
  • Invite people to participate
    • “If you sight a 500 foot tall Bin Laden, send pictures.”
  • Evolve Story Across Platforms
    • Created entire campaign around mayorship on foursquare
    • Video
    • In person campaign
    • In these divisive times, we need something to bring people together. That’s whiskey. Hence, “Whiskey Fridays”.
  • #HowBlackAreYou
    • Started as a dialogue on twitter
    • Turned into an idea for a book
    • Interviewed people on video (using iPhone 4s)
    • Invited people to respond on their website and tell their own story
    • The book had dozens of questions around identity.
    • “When did you learn you were black?” … “a white ghost?”
    • Did a live-writing idea:
      • while writing certain chapters:
      • shared screen using join.me
      • shared links on google+ and twitter
      • posted rules on the left:
        • chat amongst yourself, not with me
        • don’t request control, etc.
      • “How self obsessed does one have to be to set something like this up?”
      • “I have an urge to tweet about this”
      • “Based on what I read here, I am going to buy this book.”
      • “it is interesting to see his writing flow”
  • Stories Are Worlds
    • we ask people to suspend disbelief and join us in that world
    • the platforms are just different access points into that world
  • check out http://cultivatedwit.com

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As a writer, I fear losing my manuscript in ways that I’ve never feared losing any other file. And having seen other writers lose their files due to hard drive crashes, viruses, simple mistakes, or stolen laptops, I have seen the grief associated with such loss.

You can avoid this. Here are four easy ways to backup your manuscript and avoid disaster. However, before I list them, you must keep two very important principles in mind:

Multiple versions: It is very important to maintain multiple older versions of your files. Why? Let’s say a  virus infected your computer and corrupts your manuscript file, but you don’t know it yet. Then you backup your manuscript onto a USB drive, copying over the only other existing copy. Now both the original file and the backup file are corrupted. To counter-act this, you want a backup solution that maintains all (or at least many) of the older versions of your files. This way you can go as far back as needed to fine a working version of your file.

Multiple locations: If you backup to a hard drive in your home and have a flood, fire, or theft, you could lose both your computer and your backup location at once. Just having your data in the cloud (e.g. with Google Docs) isn’t insurance against this, because they can have failures too. Ideally you want your files in multiple locations: In your home and somewhere on the internet at a minimum.

In order of ease of use and security, here are my recommendations:

1. Install backup software 

This is the single best thing you can do, because once it’s installed, you can forget about it, and it’ll keep working for you. Do a quick google search for backup software, pick something, and install it. On the Mac, you can use the built-in Time Machine, but Super-Duper is popular as well. Lifehacker has several recommendations for Windows backup software.

Ease of setup: medium
Security: good to excellent (depending on where you back up: ideally it would include the cloud and an external drive)

2. Install Dropbox

Dropbox is fantastic software for sharing files between computers and to the cloud. (Cloud meaning, in this case, their servers on the Internet.) I use Dropbox to share files between my personal computer and my work computer, and a copy of the files also reside on Dropbox’s servers. This means that there are always at least three copies of my files. If you upgrade to the paid version of Dropbox, you can store all older revisions of your files.

Ease of setup: extremely easy
Security: good

3. Email to yourself on Gmail

If you have a Gmail account, which is effectively unlimited in size, you can easily email your entire manuscript to yourself as frequently as needed. Because the files are maintained on Google’s servers, if anything happens to your computer, you can still access them from anywhere you can log into Gmail.

Ease: medium (you have to remember to do it)
Security: medium (again, you have to remember to do it)

4. Copy to USB drive

You can also copy your files to a USB drive. These are so cheap they’re almost free. You can get a tiny (in size) flash drive, or a larger hard-drive based model that can backup your entire computer.

Ease: medium (you have to remember to do it, and you have to find/have the USB drive.)
Security: medium-poor (you can lose the drive, it can crash, etc.)

I hope that you’ll do at least one, if not two of these methods. Otherwise you are putting yourself at risk for a loss of your manuscripts, and that is a very painful loss to experience.

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Jack Miller and Shannon Emerson have been putting on The Big Show for many years now.

It started as a variety show in their garage, expanded to and then out-grew Disjecta, and now has found a home at the Alberta Rose Theatre. The 2012 show takes place on May 19th at 8pm. Admission is just $15.

Their motto is “You can do what you think”:

We’ve seen it all: short films, dancing, bag pipes, juggling, unicorns, short stories, giant squid, singing bees, shadow puppets, musical acts, comedy, and stuff that doesn’t even have a name yet.

We don’t care about where you’re from or what you’ve done, whether you’ve trod the boards or chopped them for firewood, if you’ve played Carnegie Hall or just used their bathroom. If you’re bold enough to release the artistic vision inside you and believe in what you’re doing enough to get up on stage and go for it live, then you could be a Big Show performer.

And if you want to feel the thrill of seeing a home-grown show stocked with unique acts performed by the multifaceted citizenry, then you belong in the Big Show audience.”

Check it out, buy tickets, or sign up to perform. You can do what you think! Anata wa dō omou ka okonau koto ga dekimasu!

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Playing B-Ball with Obama: 6 Steps to Crossing Anything Off Your Bucket List is an inspirational post on Tim Ferriss’s about how to achieve anything you dream of, from playing basketball with President Obama to helping someone find a kidney.

It’s about the experiences of The Buried Life group, four friends who made a list of 100 things they wanted to do before they die. They also made a commitment that, for each item they accomplished, they’d help one stranger achieve a life goal.

The post is great, and they now have a #1 NYT best-seller: What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?

The six steps (explained at length in the original post):

  1. Stop and think about it. Really think about it. (Most people don’t do this until they have a crisis in their life. Don’t wait for a crisis.)
  2. Write it down. (Amazing things happen as soon as you write something down.)
  3. Talk about it. (Everyone knows someone, and someone can help you.)
  4. Be persistent. (Most people give up before they reach their goal. “No” just means “not now”.)
  5. Be ballsy. (“The level of competition is highest for realistic goals because most people don’t set high enough goals for themselves.”)
  6. Help others.
What are your goals?

One of my goals is to see my third book, The Last Firewall, made into a movie.

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I fielded a question earlier today about the right chapter length for novels. Others answered the question saying that there’s no right length. It depends on what the material calls for.

While that’s true, it’s not particularly helpful. There’s a saying about not breaking the rules until you understand the rules, and I think that goes for chapter length too. It’s eventually fine if you have short and long chapters, but until you have some writing experience, it’s good to have a rough outline of what’s appropriate.

My chapters tend to be between 5,000 and 7,000 words. They are usually composed of three scenes, because I tend to intertwine three different point of view (POV) characters. So my scenes tend to be anywhere from 1,200 words for a very short scene to 4,000 words for a very long scene, with most being in the range of 2,000 to 3,000 words.

(Since pages are arbitrary based on page size, font size, etc, it makes the most sense to think in terms of word count.)

If your chapters are short

If you find that your chapters are short, that doesn’t mean that you should add filler.

There shouldn’t be anything you think of as filler in a book. A good book is defined by having every word there for a purpose. Preferably two or three. Each scene should move the plot forward, or reveal something new about a character, or both.

Now it is possible that if you find your scenes or chapters to be very short that you need to practice getting more description down on the page. When I first started writing, I have a very vivid picture in my mind, but I only captured a tiny portion of that down on the page. So to a reader who didn’t already have the full picture on their mind, it seemed like all the action took place in a white room. Check in with your senses: are you describing what characters can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste? Does the reader know what the characters are thinking?

If your chapters are long

On the other hand, if your chapters tend to be too long, look for natural breaks in the action. Each chapter should have an arc: a problem, a journey to resolve the problem, and a resolution, or more commonly, a new problem. Of course, this is at a much smaller resolution than the arc of the book as a whole.

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I just had an interesting conversation with Gene Kim talking about why some topics, be they blog posts or books, attract a lot of attention, while others seem to languish.

It seems that there is an equation that looks something like this:

Attention = f(“Number of people interested in topic”, “Uniqueness of relevant search terms”, “Uniqueness of content offered”, “Value of content”)

That is, there are four factors that dictate the amount of attention a blog post or book gets:

  1. Number of people interested: When I wrote several blog posts about the 4-Hour Body in the beginning of 2011, many people were highly interested. The book had just come out, and Tim Ferriss had a massive marketing/promotion machine. Similarly, I recently had a very popular post on rapid scaling of web applications – another important topic that many people are interested in.
  2. Uniqueness of relevant search terms: “4-Hour Body” is a unique name that didn’t have any search engine conflicts. 
  3. Uniqueness of content: When I wrote my 4-Hour Body content, the book had just come out, and there were almost no other blog posts on the topic. The posts I wrote were unique – content that wasn’t in the book or anywhere else.
  4. Value of content: The content must be valuable enough that people make a decision to share through social media, blog posts, and aggregators.

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It turns out that Daniel Wilson, Chris Robson, and I received some nice press coverage of our talk at SXSW on the future of artificial intelligence. Here’s a sample:

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Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity
#sxsw #robots
John Romano
Author & Researcher
The Digital Beyond
Stephen Reed
@stephenlreed
Bruce Duncan M Ed
Managing Director
Terasem Movement Foundation LifeNaut Project
Bina48
Robot Panelist
  • Rich Personal Data Store + Powerful AI = Virtual You
  • If AI was advanced enough, it could start expressing its own opinion
  • What will it take to create a sentient robot? Do we want to? And where are we in the process?
  • Exponential development: each step gets bigger as you go up the stairs.
  • Accelerating evolution of our tools.
  • It took 400,000 years from fire to bronze. It took 6,000 years from bronze to an iphone in your pocket.
  • is the state of AI today fire or bronze?
  • We are going to approach the singularity.
  • The moment that happens, we will be unable to see beyond. We will have people smarter than us. We can’t anticipate what they would do.
  • Stephen Reed: Texai:
    • A system you can teach useful things
    • Robots are making inroads into the bluecollar workplace.
    • AI makes inroads into whitecollar workplace.
    • Create the mind of a child, and then educate it.
    • We’ll see a demonstration of natural language 
  • Bruce Duncan
    • has a robot that works for him: Bina48
    • Goal with lifenaut is to archive human mind and upload into a robot
    • Mindfiles & Androids
    • Early mind uploading: cave paintings
    • Human beings have a need to upload: to share what’s on their mind.
    • Sum of all social media data can be used to reconstruct personality.
    • https://www.lifenaut.com/
    • Given a saturated datase or “mind file” that can be used by a future AI to be able to replicate your consciousness
    • In the future, you will be expected to have an avatar that is not just off the shelf, but can interact with people and act as you in certain circumstances.
    • http://yes.thatcan.be/my/next/tweet/
    • Genes / Memes / Bemes
    • Digital mindfiles capture bemes:
      • mannerisms
      • personality
      • language
    • What’s in it?
      • digital video/photos
      • blogs and diaries
      • psych tests and lists
      • Bainbridge surveys
      • sensecam data
      • feedback as others see me
    • Terasem Hypothesis: In the future, these reanimated personalities will be able to be imported into biological, nano-technological, and/or robotic bodies.
    • Bina48: first android based on a mindfile
  • Q: Merging mind files?
    • We made a science fiction film based on this: http://2bmovie.com/
    • We have multi-user mind files: to recreate a historical person, or a deceased family member.
  • Q: Did you have any children see Bina48 and how did they react?
    • We had an 8th grade intern, and he just sat down and talked to Bina48. He wasn’t phased by the technology at all.
  • Q: In layman’s terms, what is happening?
    • We use Dragon Naturally Speaking to do voice to text conversion.
    • We take the text input and feed into two databases.
    • One is a chatty database
    • One is a personality database
    • They compete to provide the best answer.
    • The sentences are stored in small pieces. She rarely gives the same sequence of sentences twice.

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Ray Kurzweil
Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit
#sxsw #IQExpand
  • Background
    • Written 4 best selling books
    • 19 honorary doctorates
    • Honored by multiple U.S. Presidents
    • Tons of inventions
  • The hippie movement morphed into silicon valley movement. What we have today is the democratization of technology.
  • You don’t need millions of dollars – you can start world-changing revolutions with what you have. (11 year old girl starts blog, now at 14 is on the cover of vogue with her own fashion line)
  • A boy in Africa today has access to more information than a U.S. President 15 years ago
  • Hardware increases exponentially, but software is stuck in the mud.
  • Watson is very impressive because it’s able to handle the vagaries of the human language. 
  • Made a prediction that computers would beat humans in chess by 1998, and that immediately afterwards we would dismiss chess as a non-significant program.
  • Watson is dealing with human languages. It master human language by reading 200 million pages of English content.
  • It can call up any fact in less than 3 seconds.
  • Some may say that it doesn’t understand it: because it is just statistical extraction of data.
  • But this is exactly how the human brain works.
  • Watson is not operating at human levels of intelligence yet.
  • It combines the capability that it does have with natural language, and combine that with what computers are good at: having total recall of all information.
  • Computers are shrinking at an exponential rate: a 1000x decrease in size and 1000x increase in performance since Kurzweil was an undergrad.
  • Moore’s Law is only one example
  • If you measure the basic fundamental aspects of technology, they are very smooth curves over time. 
  • Paradigms shift: from vacuum tubes to IC. 
  • But overall, the curves are very smooth.
  • It’s not just computers.
    • It’s also smartphones
    • And the bits we move around on wireless networks.
  • A very important area is biology.
  • It wasn’t an information technology problem until recently.
    • DNA Sequencing cost: dropping exponentially
    • Growth in Genbank DNA Sequence Data: increasing exponentially
  • Our genes are 23,000 software programs running in our bodies
  • Health is now a software technology problem. Therefore, it will now be subject to exponential increases.
  • The world of physical things becoming information technology
    • 3D printing: “print me a stradivarius”
    • Someone printed an airplane and flew in it.
    • At Singularity Institute we want to print out low-cost housing
  • The spacial and precisions of brain scanning is doubling
  • The precision of brain simulation is doubling
  • Is this good or bad?
    • Plot of incoming and life expectancy around the world
      • increasing for everyone. divide is still there, but the lowest countries also increased the most
    • Plot of education over time
  • Lev Grossman Interview
  • What do you think of Siri? What does it mean for the landscape of AI?
    • It’s great. People who complain remind me of the joke about the woman who has a chess playing dog, but complains that it has a lousy endgame,
    • It will keep getting better.
  • Turing test: Is it still the benchmark for recognizing self-awareness? To say that it is sentient is just bizarre. What will it take for people to recognize it as sentient?
    • Of all the different proposals, it still has the most credibility.
    • But it’s not perfect.
    • We look like we’re heading for a date of 2029.
    • As soon as we pass it, we’ll probably reject it as a valid test.
    • People will accept an entity as conscious and as a person when it seems that way: when they convince us that they have the complexity and subtly to be our equals.
  • Where is the serious progress going to come from? Is it from siri? Watson? Somewhere else?
    • It’s going to come where there is commercial value.
    • Watson is understanding sequences of words.
    • It would be of tremendous value for search engines to be able to do this.
    • In the future, search engines won’t wait to be asked, they’ll be listening in, and they will pop up information we need.
    • We’ll get used to having this information pop up in some sort of augmented reality.
  • Are they going to judge us for our search terms?
    • Making judgements is the top level of our neocortex. It’s not built in, it’s built up over time, based on what we think. We need a whole framework to make judgements.
    • These systems will make these judgements: what does Lev Grossman want vs. what someone else wants.
  • How much confidence do we have that if greater than human intelligence arises, it will want to be helpful?
    • Promise vs. peril has been an issue with technology since we had fire: it can cook food, but it can burn down our villages.
    • Biotechnology has great promise and great danger: it could be used by terrorists, and it can be used to arrest cancer.
    • Genetics Nanotechnology Robotics (GNR): promise vs. peril is a very large issue. It’s not as much an us vs. them, but an us vs. us. We have conflicts today between groups of humans. They will add GNR into the tools they use for that conflict.
    • We are a human machine civilization. It’s going to be all mixed up: we are all enhanced with computer technology.
    • We do have conflicts between humans. GNR technology can make these conflicts more harmful.
  • Should governments be more active in regulating?
    • Conflicts come from governments. So they should not regulate.
    • We (SXSW people) should be the ones to regulate it.
    • Look at the major political power of Wikipedia: it killed SOPA in hours.
  • When we talk about intelligence expanding, with technology, does it change us quantitatively or qualitatively? Does it change human nature?
    • Mammals evolved and have a neocortex. It was the first time we had an hierarchy of information.
    • Then we had a mass extinction event.
    • Given the radical sudden change in the environment. the mammals survived because they adapted.
    • Evolution recognized this, and used it more.
    • Now we have a front cortex. 
    • If you take a congenitally blind person, the regions of the neocortex used for visual end up getting used for more advanced capability of language analysis.
    • We have about 300 million pattern recognizers in the neocortex.
    • If we extend it, and are able to have even more complex thoughts.
  • Backing up the consciousness in the cloud
  • My experience of the reality around me and the people around me feels diminished when I am buried in my smartphone during this conference. Is this a zero-sum game?
    • There was a big controversy that kids weren’t going to learn arithmetic when calculators were invented.
    • And in fact, they don’t.
    • We’ve outsourced some of our ability to technology.
    • It frees up our energy to be able to do other creative things: like the people at the conference.
    • We are free to choose how we spend out time and how we organize it.
    • You are communicating with other people, either directly or indirectly.
    • It has expanded our minds.
    • We have a 19th century model of education.
    • We should teach our kids how to solve problems
  • Paul Allen essay: published a few months ago, “the singularity is not here”. The law of exponential growth: It’s not a physical law. It’s just an observation until it no longer works. What if we hit a wall?
    • Moore’s law will come to an end: but that’s just the fifth paradigm. Before we had transistors, before that we had vacuum tubes, before that we had mechanical computers.
    • Paul is confusing the end of one paradigm with the end of all growth. We’ll go on to another paradigm.
  • Have you been wrong with your predictions?
    • In terms of the underlying capabilities: everything has stayed right on the curves.
    • In terms of social predictions: those are harder. I rate myself as 86% correct on my social predictions… Like having self-driving cars.
  • According to a research presentation at the Singularity Institute large year: the complexity of even a single cell is immense, and it will be impossible to simulate it all.
    • There is massive redundancy. When we look at how much information is encoded in the genome, you realize that the connections are redundant. 
    • In the cerebullum you have connections wired together 10 million times. Massive levels of redundancy. 
    • You could say a forest is incredibly complex, but there is fractal redundancy.
  • How confident do you feel that the kinds of marvelous benefits that are coming will be available to the 99%?
    • You have to take a lot of comfort from where we are today.
    • Twenty years ago, if you took our a mobile phone, that was a sign that you were an elite. They were big and heavy and limited functionality.
    • Now they can do so much more, and are small, and they are in everyone’s hands.
    • Every field is being empowered by increasingly inexpensive and increasingly powerful tools: music, health, etc.
    • They will make their ways into our bodies and brains, but that’s an arbitrary distinction.
    • I don’t see a tremendous power being given to an elite.
  • Say you’re graduating from college right now. What would you want to do to get yourself ready for the decades to come?
    • All of our education needs to encompass doing as a centerpiece of the curriculum.
    • If I was a student, I would be at an institution where that was how it was done.
  • Questions from audience
    • Q: ?
      • People should learn about how computers work, not just to use them, to know what they are capable of.
      • Biology is a field where doing is a method of learning.
      • Virtual reality: we don’t want to look at these little screens.