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The clinical term for the dilemma of modern man is mania. So some would say. Like someone on speed, many of us find that we can multitask like mad, but can't sit still to listen to a symphony. Stewart Brand says that we only do short-term memory. He's talking about both our thought processes and our data-storage media, and he's got a point either way. But even if we are manic, is that necessarily a bad thing? James Gleick looks at our mania in a new book called Faster, which I review this month. And Gregory Benford, in another venue but on the same wavelength, predicts the end of prediction.
A few months ago I wrote about Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now, a book about how we deal with time. I'll now turn to another time book, this one by James Gleick, whose past books, Chaos and Genius, impressed me. His latest, Faster (Random House, 1999; ISBN 0-679-40837-1), is also impressive.
Gleick does a great job of documenting the little evidences of the speedup of our lives. Overnight, it seems, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw have become reflective elder statesmen of the news, the real reporting happening online. What does it mean that these sound-bite spewing talking heads (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) now seem deliberative, and television has come to be seen as a slow medium? TV producers know fits happened: Witness the phenomenon of ironic commentary overlaid on what once passed for hot programming. Beavis and Butthead commenting on last year's videos on MTV, Pop-up Video captions annotating last year's videos on VH-1, and the best of the artform, Mystery Science Theater 3000, ridiculing old science fiction movies. These things, once cutting edge, are now too slow and boring and old fashioned to watch without a separate show overlaid on top of them. The floor of the stock exchange, long taken as a symbol of frenetic activity, has come to the living room: A whole pastime (profession? addiction?) has developed of people sitting at home in front of their computers all day trading stocks. The businesses represented by these stocks are no less frenetic: Companies are expected to go from startup to IPO in 18 months, and product cycles have shrunken dramatically. A widely cited result says that it's better to bring a project in 50 percent over budget than six months late. Just-in-time delivery spawns just-in-time accounting and just-in-time training as the gears of industry grind toward a fabled frictionless economy in which an order from a customer doesn't just trigger an order to a supplier, it becomes an order to the supplier. Doctors complain that they are doing beeper medicine: When you live an interrupt-driven life, all activity becomes crisis management. The instantaneous nature of communications media make us so connected that news can become locked into positive feedback loops, giving us stories that won't die: O.J., Monica, El Nino, Y2K. We have fast-track legislation and fast-track drug trials, and if you can't stand waiting out the intertrack gap between songs on your CDs, Sony will fast-track those for you.
One of the few things actually slowing down in Western countries is driving. Gleick has some fascinating information on traffic, including the proper definition of gridlock, the concept of memory in traffic flows, and the average number of vehicles actually moving at any given moment in downtown Manhattan (9000).
Four minutes a day: That's the amount of time the average American gives to sex, according to Gleick's source. From other sources he comes across that 4-minute figure again: It's also the amount of time per day the average American spends filling out government forms (his source on this is the government itself). Four minutes a day is the amount of time that using a microwave will save you, so thank your microwave that you have any sex life at all. Four minutes is also how long you'll wait today for Windows to start up and shut down, at least.
"Let's give ourselves credit," Gleick quotes an NYU professor, "We have learned to grasp quickly. We can read signs, change lanes and avoid other vehicles at 70 miles per hour while also listening to a song and planning our weekend…" Our eye is quicker than our grandparents'. Folk wisdom used to say that we use only 10 percent of our mental capacity. Are we using more today? Or is quickness bought at a cost of depth? And whatever the cost, is it worth it?
Gleick gives a pretty hilarious survey of the contradictions of self-help time-saving books, but he makes a serious point: Saving time is an ill-defined concept. If you skip the 4 seconds it takes to fasten your seatbelt, is that 4 seconds you can use to make money at your marginal rate of income? Is it a billable 4 seconds? Or does it just disappear? Try to detail exactly how you spend your time during a day, or during an hour, or the last 10 seconds, and you'll find the task fractally infinite. How many hours did you work today? How long is a coastline?
There are other nuggets in this book: The Strong Law of Small Numbers, the Future Packaging Industry. Gleick has done his research well. Finally, he notes, as Brand does in his book, the seemingly incomprehensible fact of the singularity: The fact that many present-day phenomena, graphed against time, go asymptotic a few years from now. Neither Brand nor Gleick give much help in interpreting this fact. Clearly, the number of commercial Internet hosts, the number of software patents, the MIPS of a desktop computer, and the number of chest-pain emergencies will not go infinite in the year 2004, even though the graphs say they will. But what is the message of the graphs? Does all science or civilization break down at the singularity? Surely not, but what happens?
I found the best answer to that in another source. Scientist Gregory Benford, in his science column in the October/ November Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, dealt with it as clearly as anything I've seen.
"One idea that shall surely not survive this century," Benford says, "is that of the readily foreseeable future." Right; the message of the singularity, of the graphs going asymptotic, is simply this: We are running smack up against the massive failure of the art of predicting the future. All prediction, whether linear or geometric or whatever, occurs within a paradigm. Future progress, I read into Benford's words, will chiefly be across paradigms. If that's true, the pace of change will only increase.
How can we keep up with an evermore-rapidly changing world? By changing, of course. Benford says that just as the 20th century was the century of physics, the 21st will be the century of biology. We ourselves will change, as will our vision of ourselves. "The rate of change of our conception of ourselves will probably speed up from its presently already breakneck pace," Benford predicts, hoping we won't call him on the fact that he just said prediction was impossible. But whether his predictions hold or not, he concludes, "one thing is certain: the ride will be interesting. Hold onto your hat."
-- Michael Swaine