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This years Edge question is: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

Biocurious has a good overview of the answers, here.

My personal favorite is Stuart Kauffman’s answer, that large parts of the universe are free of physical law. A brilliantly argued piece of true scientific heresy (although here from a biological rather than a fundamental physics perspective). This is an idea which I have a hunch may be right, placing natural selection as the creation mechanism above gods and scientific law, rather than the the artifacts which are produced by them.

This article on the BBC today claims that “Two search requests on the internet website Google produce as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle”, according to Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross.

Yet in the same article, Google say that “in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query”. Google have a blog post which goes into more detail about the environmental cost of search.

Given that laptop power is somewhere between 20 and 50 Watts and a desktop somewhere between 50 and a 150 Watts and takes fractions of a second to search, whereas the average kettle requires 1800 Watts and takes over a minute to boil, there is something wrong here (by a factor of tens of thousands). In fact, the act of wandering over to a kettle and switching it on uses more energy than a Google search. I assume this is bad journalism rather than bad science.

Elsewhere in the article is the statement “A recent study estimated the global IT sector generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines put together.”

This is a largely meaningless assertion since without the global IT sector people would have to use planes more. In addition, ‘global IT sector’ includes all of the computers required to design, build and operate aircraft, all of the computers used to search for and book trips all of the computers used for in flight entertainment systems and all of the computers used by air traffic control.

In terms of moving people around to exchange information, if you wanted to make plane travel several million times more efficient, an Internet enabled computer is a viable alternative.

Since the availability of efficient access to information makes us access it wastefully (i.e. more people search for Paris Hilton than travel to Paris to stay in the Hilton) the idea of computer waste has some validity. However, to curb carbon emissions, fighting spam (denial of service attacks alone, account for more Internet traffic than all the world’s email) and improving software efficiency (searching Outlook is several thousand times slower than Gmail) would be a priority above making computer hardware more efficient, which has happened on its own through Moore’s Law.

Assuming that we should look at computer hardware and Internet infrastructure efficiency as a priority, there are two aspects to computer power use, calculation and bit transfer. If we measure the average bandwidth of a human being’s speech in bits and compare that to the energy used for bit transfer via the internet the latter is several million times more efficient. To illustrate the point, imagine the inefficiency of shipping a computer across the word to deliver an email. This is what shipping people to meetings via plane is like.

The calculation cost is also more efficient by a factor of several million, in many cases. The cost of calculating by slide rule and human requires feeding humans. If there were some equivalent unit of measure for computers, analogous to horse power, (human power) that measured serial calculations in terms of what a slide rule enables the brake human power of my laptop would be the equivalent of a football stadium full of snack eating, kettle boiling, tea drinking, human calculators.

For massively parallel calculations, human power is still more efficient, but it is realistic to assume that we will be able to develop machines that will outperform us. When we do, we should look at what energy saving that will allow as well as what it will consume.

When diamonds were discovered in South Africa at the beginning of the 19th century, the supply of diamonds was increased by a factor of thousands, threatening a crash in prices.

The solution was found by the De Beers cartel who created the idea of the mass market engagement ring:

“in 1880 almost no one in the U.S. owned a diamond engagement ring, by the 1920s it was expected that a middle-class bride would receive one. By the 1950s even laboring-class brides were expected to be able to display a diamond — thanks to the newfound formula of De Beers, according to which an engagement ring should cost a bridegroom two months of his salary, before taxes.”

Robert Proctor, Stanford Professor of the History of Science: The Agateer

Yves Smith comments on a paper called “Bullshit Promises” by Curtis Bridgeman and Karen Sandrik which was picked up by Elizabeth Warren.

Both the paper and Smith’s commentary are a must read.

In summary, the hand wringing about the failure of certain facets of capitalism which have American cultural associations (such as gung ho rather than conservative bankers), has begun and a mainstream awareness of the hitherto niche idea of a culture of manufactured consent (i.e. bullshit) is perhaps emerging.

Smith points to the fact that white lies are endemic in corporate culture in the US. Anyone who has had to navigate the corrupt and cynical inefficiency of anything from healthcare insurance companies to retail banks (not just investment banks) will be aware of something fundamentally wrong with the way that these organizations worked in the decade or so leading up to the crash. Unfortunately entrepreneurship and innovation will suffer because of the reaction against the systemic incompetency in these sclerotic organizations and will no-doubt result in regulation which will be ill thought out and wrongly targeted.

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2008 was an early end to a decade with no name. The post millennium? The new century? The decadent decade, perhaps? It was an entire era of price without value, a zeitgeist that artists would surely try to capture, symbolically. But how to do it and still sell your work? Perhaps Damien Hirst knew how?

Damien Hirst is very rich and he is not stupid. His most daring work of art was an elaborate joke that could have become a symbol of this decade that closed down early – a platinum and diamond-crusted real human skull, the world’s most vulgar trophy. Like a gorilla hand ashtray or an elephant foot umbrella stand, this $100 million decorative, anatomical, bling trinket needed to be sold to someone very rich and very stupid for it to be complete, a tasteless prize that was bought and therefore self-awarded rather than given.

Who would be the recipient of this severed head which was completely covered in money, but in less money ($25M) than its asking price ($100M)? Would it be a Russian oligarch, a Manhattan property tycoon, a member of the Saud family, a London hedge fund manager, a vapid LA Youtube celebrity or any other of the monstrous avatars of the decadent decade. Sadly, even the diamond skull was a flop, and was rumored to have been bought by Hirst himself, to save face. Like the hedge fund managers, Hirst became rich but didn’t leave the legacy he wanted, and the contemporary art market, which peaked with his $170M takings at the “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale, was merely a bubble created by the recently rich who wanted new stuff rather than antiques and wished for the million dollar art equivalent of fast food, to buy taste, immediately.

But this bubble was particularly symbolic. The contemporary art market was leveraged beyond real estate and stocks and artists were part of the culture they could have been dissecting and rebelling against, they were collaborators rather than renegades. The sudden demise of famous living artists tells a better story than the art itself ever could.

Ben Lewis tells the story of the contemporary art bubble in Prospect:

“While British house prices took six years to double at the start of this century, contemporary art managed it in just one, 2006-07. (Over the same period, old masters went up by just 7.6 per cent and British 17th to 19th century watercolours actually lost value.) Contemporary art in the emerging economies did even better. The value of its sales in China increased by 983 per cent in one year (2005-06). In Russia they rose 2,365 per cent in five years (2000-05), while its stock market increased by “only” about 300 per cent…The Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6m (1999-2008); work by the American artist Richard Prince went up 60 to 80 times (2003-2008). The German painter Anselm Reyle was unknown in 2003; you could have picked up one of his stripe paintings for €14,000. Now he has a studio with 60 assistants turning them out for about €200,000 each.”

For almost a decade now, I have run a list of technology predictions for the coming year.

This year is different, there is no list, because:

1. Not that much will visibly happen in the web industry, there’s not exactly going to be a plethora of IPO’s, private equity driven M&A, new VC investments, product launch cocktail parties or company expensable conference junkets. Web 2.0 will die with a whimper rather than a bang, and the clever people will have plenty of thinking time to work quietly on the innovation will drive the next cycle. It should be noted, however, that it looks like the legacy of this time around (Youtube, Flickr, Facebook), is not that impressive compared to last time, or even what happened in between (Google, Paypal, Skype). Perhaps Kleiner Perkins were right to pass?

2. The changes we are seeing are macro changes that take years. We will see the acceleration of the shift online for things like commodity eCommerce (i.e. non luxury and based on price), media rental and broker intermediated transactions. By the end of this recession, there will be fewer shopping malls, Blockbusters or Virgin Megastores; travel agents will be near extinct, and there will be far less realtors. Amazon, Google and possibly even Neflix will be much bigger companies and a hybrid of UK style franchised real estate brokerage (Foxtons) and aggregated online real estate sites (Trulia) will largely wipe out information blocking middle-men like the independent realtor.

3. Short term gloom will mask longer term optimism. After periodic mini rallies, there will be another major stock decline for companies such as Google, after a second wave of economic bad news. This will preface a long steady climb for companies that belong in the emerging, remade landscape.

4. There will be a short term focus on shoring up existing industries to create jobs, but whatever America does to prop up industrial production will fail in the long term. Things like low end cars perhaps shouldn’t be made in the US. Conversely the reactionary overshoot of financial services regulation and the death of monetarism will mean that America cannot rely on a Thatcher style services economy. Even if technology and culture (media) will be America’s flagship industries, employment creating stimulus programs will mask this change.

5. US military and economic hegemony will inevitably decline, from its post Cold War singularity, and the events of last year are possibly the inflection point. The future role of America’s near total dominance in something seemingly far less important, such as the Internet, will be different. This is a change whose effects are currently impossible to predict. Note this doesn’t mean that America role as a sole superpower is superceded by China or something that melodramatic, just that the abnormal and unsustainable period of near global, single nation dominance will recede. With it, there will be cultural changes. The world will become slightly less Americanized, and that possibly means the diminishing of an historically abnormal culture dominated by what can best be described as recreational shopping.

6. The short term fluctuations in the fortune of web 2.0 companies are completely irrelevant considering the long term changes to the Internet industry and the short term affects elsewhere. In other words, even for those who work in technology, what is happening in the industry is irrelevant compared to both the effect that the collapse of the US banking system could have on our lives in the short term and the effect of secular technological trends.

7. America is in a similar place to Britain at the end of the Edwardian era. Frankly there is a lot more to worry about than a 40% decline in display ad revenue. Om Malik, one of the the most likeable and wise people in the industry put things in perspective best.

“That’s the last bubble I can find in the U.S. I cannot imagine why anybody would give money to the U.S. government for 30 years for less than a 4% yield. I certainly wouldn’t. There are going to be gigantic amounts of bonds coming to the market, and inflation will be coming back. “

Link

Hear hear.

Niall Ferguson reviews Lords of Finance:

“As the world teeters on the brink of another great financial cliff, we can only hope that the modern-day Lords of Finance will co-operate to better effect. I suspect none has much time for bedtime reading these days. But should Messrs Bernanke, King and Trichet need a reminder of what can go wrong when central bankers achieve only the semblance, but not the reality, of co-operation, Lords of Finance is the book they should read.

As a matter of urgency, a Chinese translation should also be sent to Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China.”

(Pedant’s note: A brink is an edge of a cliff. Its funny that the expression “teeters on the brink…” which is normally used as a metaphor, e.g. “teeters on the brink of recession” jars like a mixed metaphor when used in its literal sense, as it is here.)

The Council on Foreign Relations have pulled together a bunch of graphs about the recession. The results are disturbing.

1. Shanghai – down 65.2%
2. Mumbai – down 51.9%
3. Singapore – down 49.2%
4. Hong Kong – down 48.3%
5. Paris – down 42.7%
6. Tokyo – down 42.1%
7. Sydney – down 41.3%
8. Frankfurt – down 40.4%
9. New York – down 34%
10. London – down 31.3%

London has the worst year in its history (but the index in question is only 20 years old), although comes out bottom of the list in terms of severity.

The chart is interesting in that the two places which could be worst affected in the longer term are New York and London, and the markets that are most likely to bounce back are Shanghai and Mumbai. This is partly a function of size and resulting inertia.

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