# Edge 2000 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-is-todays-most-important-unreported-story) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-todays-most-important-unreported-story) - **Archive year:** 2000 - **Response rows represented:** 97 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 96 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 1 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 97 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2000-001 — America's Descent Into Computer-Aided Unconsciousness And Consumer Fascism — Douglas Rushkoff > Computers then record our responses in order to refine these techniques, automatically and without the need for human intervention. The only metrics used to measure the success of banner ads and web sites is the amount of economic activity - consumption and production - they are able to stimulate in their human user/subjects. As a result, the future content and structure of media will be designed by machines with no priority other than to induce spending. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [America's Descent Into Computer-Aided Unconsciousness And Consumer Fascism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11921) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-002 — The Size Of The Digital Universe — George Dyson > Sales figures of all kinds are readily available, whereas absolute numbers (of processors, CPU cycles, addressable memory, disk space, total lines of code) are scarce. We are left to make rough approximations (skewed by volatility in prices) where there could and should be a precise, ongoing count. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 47 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Size Of The Digital Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11936) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-003 — What Scientific Research Is Really Like — Pattie Maes > The public still thinks of research as a very serious and lonely activity. The picture of a scientist that typically comes to mind is that of a person in labcoat hunched over heavy books, locked up in their ivory tower. The truth is that scientists are more like a group of uninhibited, curious kids at play. Maybe teenagers would be more into science if they had a more accurate picture of what research is like and realized that one way to avoid growing up is to become a scientist. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, MIT MediaLab; Program Head, MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What Scientific Research Is Really Like](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11952) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-004 — The Reasons For Right-Wing Extremism In Europe And The U.S. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > Today (but I hope not tomorrow) I think the most important unreported story concerns the reasons for a return of right-wing extremism in Europe, and for the first time in the U.S. Since I am not a journalist I would not report such a story, but I would first find out if it is really true, and if true then study what its causes are. Is it that people are running out of hope and meaning? Have the Western democracies run out of believable goals? What conditions favor fascism and what can we do to prevent them from spreading? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Reasons For Right-Wing Extremism In Europe And The U.S.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11968) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-005 — Abrupt Climate Change — William H. Calvin > How would I report it? Start with the three million year history of abrupt coolings and how they have likely affected prehuman evolution. Our ancestors lived through a lot of these abrupt climate changes, and some humans will survive the next one. It's our civilization that likely won't, just because the whiplashes happen so quickly that warfare over plummeting resources leaves a downsized world where everyone hates their neighbors for good reason. Fortunately, if we get our act together, there are few things we might do to stabilize the patient, buying some extra time in the same manner as preventive medicine has extended the human lifespan. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Abrupt Climate Change](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11983) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-006 — Quality Pigs — Brian Goodwin > The results were startling: there was a high level of consensus among people about the quality of behavior shown by different pigs. Their assessments were not arbitrary, personally idiosyncratic descriptions, but evaluations with a high degree of intersubjective consistency. This is precisely the basis of scientific 'objectivity': agreement between different observers using an agreed method of observation. This opens the door to a science of qualities with startling implications. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Quality Pigs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11662) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-007 — The Transformation Of The American Musical Ear — John McWhorter > There are now two generations of Americans who have grown up after the rock revolution of the late 1960s, for whom classical music and the old style Broadway/Hollywood songs are largely marginal. As a result, today's typical American ear is attuned more to rhythm and vocal emotion — the strengths of rock and rap — than to melody and harmony, the strengths of classical music and Golden Age pop. This is true not just of teenagers but of people roughly fifty and under, and has been the most seismic shift in musical sensibility since the advent of ragtime introduced the American ear to syncopation a century ago. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Transformation Of The American Musical Ear](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11830) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-008 — How does a brain give rise to a mind? — Stephen Grossberg > During the past decade, theorists of mind and brain have finally been able to model the detailed temporal dynamics of known brain cells and circuits...AND the observable behaviors that they control, using the same model. Thus, for the first time in history, there are theories powerful enough to begin to explicitly show how our minds arise from our brains. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and artificial neural network research - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How does a brain give rise to a mind?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11679) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-009 — The Peace Dividend — Stewart Brand > Whatever happened to looking for the Peace Dividend? What if the rampant prosperity in America these years is it? Money not spent on Defense gets spent on something. Research not sequestered into Defense applications gets loose into the world faster, and in pace with other events in technology and science. Policies not organized around paranoia can be organized around judicious optimism. The more former enemies there are, the more new customers and suppliers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Peace Dividend](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11845) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-010 — (1) The closing of the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven National Lab; (2) Eppawala — Philip W. Anderson > In any case the loss of the HFBR closes one of the world's most productive scientific instruments and sends the entire community off to our friendly competitors in Europe and Japan. Neutron scattering and diffraction is central to much of condensed matter physics and useful in biology, chemistry and several branches of technology. Approximately 300 experiments were run the last year the HFBR was up. There was no conceivable economic reason for shutting it down — it was a very inexpensive instrument relative to the projects which are replacing it. Its real problem is the anti-intellectual bias of the majority culture. If only we had been able to label it "organic" rather than "nuclear" it would have survived. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [(1) The closing of the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven National Lab; (2) Eppawala](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11694) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-011 — Parenting Styles Have Changed But Children Have Not — Judith Rich Harris > In the early part of this century, parents didn't worry about shoring up their children's self-esteem or sense of autonomy, and they didn't feel called upon to provide them with "unconditional love." They worried that their children might become spoiled, self-centered, or disobedient. In those days, spankings were administered routinely, often with a weapon such as a belt or a ruler. Kisses were exchanged once a day, at bedtime. Declarations of parental love were made once a lifetime, from the deathbed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Parenting Styles Have Changed But Children Have Not](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11859) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-012 — The Remaking Of Personality As Seen In Language. — James J. O'Donnell > Until a few years ago, tracking the evolution of language was only possible for idle gentlemen: university scholars, amateur dilettantes (whence arose the Oxford English Dictionary), or pompous columnists (only one of whom has a weekly piece in the New York Times Magazine). It was carried on from an elite gentleman's club perspective and consisted of deploring decline and patronizing neologism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Remaking Of Personality As Seen In Language.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11709) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-013 — The Internationalization of the Third Culture — Lee Smolin > How they and their children will resolve these different loyalties is far from clear. One can meet young people whose parents each speak a different language, who grew up in a third country, did a university education in a fourth, and now work in a fifth. What the political loyalties of such people will be is impossible to predict, but it seems not impossible that the growing concentrations of such people in the areas of work that most influence public taste and economic growth may catalyze the evolution of nation states into local governments and the invention of a global political system. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Internationalization of the Third Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11875) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-014 — Science and technology Editor — Philip Elmer DeWitt > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer, Editor, Fortune - **Extract length:** 6 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Science and technology Editor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11557) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-015 — Women Are Still Considered Inferior To Men — Sylvia Paull > Why is the thought of electing a woman president of the United States so unthinkable to most of the population? Why is it surprising that most Fortune 1000 companies still lack a woman on their board of directors? Why do women athletes still lack funding and popular support on a scale that their male counterparts garner? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** founder of Gracenet - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Women Are Still Considered Inferior To Men](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11723) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-016 — The Politicians Who Are Running On Education Platforms Don't Actually Care About Education — Roger Schank > As each presidential candidate makes education the big issue for his campaign we need to understand that none of them actually wants change in education. There are two main reasons for this. The first are vested interests. Those who oppose real change in our schools include teachers unions who lobby heavily for the status quo, book publishers who are afraid of losing the textbook investments they have made, testing services and test preparation services who have a significant investment in keeping things as they are and parents who really would be quite frightened if the schools changed in a way that made their own educations seem irrelevant. No politician wants to challenge a group like this so no politician wants to do any more than pay lip service to the issue. The second reason is more insidious. When real reformers propose that everyone should be equally educated there are gasps from the elitists who run our government. Their concern? If everyone were educated, who would do the menial jobs? Hard as it may be to believe this issue is raised quite often in Washington. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 184 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Politicians Who Are Running On Education Platforms Don't Actually Care About Education](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11890) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-017 — The Quiet Resurgence of Psychedelic Compounds as Instruments of Both Spiritual and Scientific Exploration — John Horgan > Several non-profit groups in the U.S. are attempting to rehabilitate the image of psychedelic drugs through public education and by supporting research on the drugs' clinical and therapeutic potential. They include the Heffter Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS, based in Florida. The question is, will this new psychedelic movement founder, as its predecessor did in the 1960's? Or will it bring about the profound spiritual and social changes that advocates envision? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Quiet Resurgence of Psychedelic Compounds as Instruments of Both Spiritual and Scientific Exploration](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11572) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-018 — The End Of Money — Thomas Petzinger > "Who's paying whom?" Asking a question like that signals that maybe nobody needs to pay anything to anybody. Lots of value is created, but "nobody's paying for it". It just happens because two (or more) business partners create something together. In these situations firms can't begin to account for the nickels and dimes in the deal and may not even bother trying. In these situations, relationships triumph over transactions. Money drastically diminishes as a factor in the deal. And the identity of the customer — Are we paying you or are you paying us? — becomes fuzzy. The very concept of the customer begins to disappear. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** editor, reporter - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The End Of Money](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11739) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-019 — (1) African Civil Wars; (2) Evolutionary Theory Is Not Intuitive; Creationism Is — Howard Gardner > Local: In my own areas of psychology and education, there is plenty of interest nowadays in student achievement in schools. Yet the coverage of these matters in the press almost entirely leaves out knowledge which enjoys wide consensus among researchers. In the area of human development, it is recognized that youngsters pass through stages or phases, and it makes no sense to treat a four year old as if he or she were simply a "slower" or less informed middle school student or adult. In the area of cognitive studies, it is recognized that youngsters "construct" their own theories by which they attempt to make sense of the world; and that these intuitive theories often fly directly in the face of the theories and disciplines which we hope that they will ultimately master. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [(1) African Civil Wars; (2) Evolutionary Theory Is Not Intuitive; Creationism Is](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11906) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-020 — That There Are So Many Important Unreported Stories. — Hans Weise > Given the number of media outlets for independent voices to tell good stories, the vanilla quality of mainstream reporting is like the proverbial frog in a pot of water who doesn't notice the slow temperature increase and boils cozily. In a consumer-oriented culture under a booming economy, critical voices are marginalized and the questions "we" ask ourselves lose color and substance and become sensational and picayune. A news magazine won't tell you about record-setting U.S. arms sales, for instance, but they will tell you that Ricky Martin is the sexiest man alive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** filmmaker, writer, and Web developer - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [That There Are So Many Important Unreported Stories.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11588) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-021 — The Concept Of Ecology — Stephen R. Kellert > As Aldo Leopold once suggested, the greatest invention of the 20th century might be the concept of ecology. It reminds us of the illusory nature of the concept of the autonomous, unitary, individual being. We are all — ourselves as persons, the human animal, all species, in all likelihood, the universe — a constant product of relational and transactional processes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Ecologist, Yale - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Concept Of Ecology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11754) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-022 — The Immortalization of Humanity — Clifford Pickover > Similarly, most scientists and lay people seem to think that there is intelligent, space-faring life elsewhere in the universe. A related unreported story is just how special human intelligence is. Despite what we see in Star Wars and Star Trek, I don't expect intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution on other worlds. Since the beginning of life on Earth, as many as 50 billion species have arisen, and only one of them has acquired technology. If intelligence has such has high survival value, why are so few creatures intelligent? Mammals are not the most successful or plentiful of animals. Ninety-five percent of all animal species are invertebrates. Most of the worm species on our planet have not even been discovered yet, and there are a billion insects wandering the Earth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Immortalization of Humanity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11603) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-023 — The World Is Losing Potable Water At A Rate That Is Unprecedented. — Eric J. Hall > The world is losing potable water at a rate that is unprecedented. Saharan and sub-saharan Africa water supplies are contaminated with bilharzia, schistosomiasis (sic), giardia, and other water-born parasites and diseases. Russia has seen the Caspian Sea and other land-locked lakes decline rapidly over the past 25 years due to evaporation from a warmer climate and drainage to irrigate arid lands. Populations are expanding into areas where water is scarce and aquifers will be drained in less than 100 years at current consumption rates. Even my favorite Sierra streams are polluted with giardia and require treatment before you can drink the water. China, India, Asia, and South America are also faced with the same problems of water-born diseases and decreasing supplies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CFO of rightscenter.com, Inc - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The World Is Losing Potable Water At A Rate That Is Unprecedented.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11769) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-024 — How Will The Internet Influence Democracy? — Howard Rheingold > Every communication technology alters governance and political processes. Candidates and issues are packaged and sold on television by the very same professionals who package and sell other commodities. In the age of mass media, the amount of money a candidate can spend on television advertising is the single most important influence on the electoral success. Now that the Internet has transformed every desktop into a printing press, broadcasting station, and place of assembly, will enough people learn to make use of this potential? Or will our lack of news, information, and understanding of the Net as a political tool prove insufficient against the centralization of capital, power, and knowledge that modern media also make possible? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [How Will The Internet Influence Democracy?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11618) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-025 — The World Isn't Going to Hell — John Gilmore > Media sells your attention to advertisers using bad news. This makes people think the bad news is the real state of the world. Pollution is making the world a worse place, raw materials are being used up, bigger populations are overconsuming us into wretchedness, etc. They even want all of us to waste our time sorting garbage for fear that we'll run out of barren land to put it on! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Activist - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The World Isn't Going to Hell](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11784) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-026 — The Planet Itself Is Becoming Self Aware — Ivan Amato > One of the most important un(der)reported stories today is the way the inanimate world built by humanity is becoming ever more innervated with sensors (cameras, microphones, strain gauges, magnetic sensors, GPS receivers, transponders, infrared sensors, satellite surveillance, etc.) as well as communications systems linking these sensors to computers that can store, analyze and act on those signals just like biological brains. What's more, all of these sensors are likely to ultimately link into a next-generation Internet via ultra-miniaturized, on-board, wireless connections (one of the main R&D thrusts of the microelectromechanical systems community). Millions of millions of thermometers, barometers, GPs transponders in vehicles, seismic monitors, radiation monitors, department store surveillance cameras, and thousands of other gadgets watching the world will all feed data into the system. This will amount to a global-scale, sensitive infrastructure a planet-sized body, that is — whereby myriad sensory signals will constantly feed into a global-scale cyberspace coursing with sophisticated pattern-recognition abilities, knowledge-discovery (data-mining) systems, and other artificial cognition tools. One consequence will be that Earth will have a new kind of planetary self-awareness akin the bodily awareness living creatures have due to their sensory tissue. Debate about personal privacy will become almost moot since the entire world will constitute a glass house. On the up side, the complexity of this worldwide awareness — and the new categories of data about the world will become available — is likely to lead to emergent phenomena as surprising as the way life emerges from molecules and consciousness from life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Freelance print and radio Writer; Editor of the Pathways of Discovery essay series for Science Magazine - **Extract length:** 250 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Planet Itself Is Becoming Self Aware](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11634) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-027 — The Potentially Glorious, or Dangerous, Massive Cultural Impact of Mitochondrial DNA Studies. — Sally M. Gall > What would be the result of such knowledge? A delight in finding out that we are all more or less brothers and sisters under the skin, leading — one hopes — to a decrease in hostilities between antagonistic groups? Or would a new clannishness emerge in which anyone who is more, say, than six degrees of genetic separation from oneself is identified as a natural enemy? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** librettist, poet, critic, and scholar - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Potentially Glorious, or Dangerous, Massive Cultural Impact of Mitochondrial DNA Studies.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11800) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-028 — How The Human Brain Models The World — Arnold Trehub > A plausible explanation of how the brain can create internal models of veridical and hypothetical worlds has long eluded theorists. But recently there has been significant progress in the theoretical understanding of this defining aspect of human cognition, and it has scarcely been reported. About a decade ago, I wrote in The Cognitive Brain that the capability for invention is arguably the most consequential characteristic that distinguishes humans from all other creatures. Our cognitive brain is especially endowed with neuronal mechanisms that can model within their biological structures all conceivable worlds, as well as the world we directly perceive or know to exist. External expressions of an unbounded diversity of brain-created models constitute the arts and sciences and all the artifacts and enterprises of human society. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [How The Human Brain Models The World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11649) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-029 — People are Morphing into Machines. — Rodney A. Brooks > Since I work in building autonomous humanoid robots reporters always ask me what will happen when the robots get really smart. Will they decide that we (us, people) are useless and stupid and take over the world from us? I have recently come to realize that this will never happen. Because there won't be any us (people) for them (pure robots) to take over from. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [People are Morphing into Machines.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11815) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-030 — Educational Inequities — Joseph LeDoux > As a nation we pay lip service to the idea that we're all created equal. But the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Is this because the poor have bad brains that can't learn to do better, or because their brains never get the opportunity to learn? We know that even the best of brains needs input from the environment to form and flourish. So why do we allow schools in poor neighborhoods, as a rule, to be so much worse? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Educational Inequities](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11193) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-031 — The End of Gene Control — Anne Fausto-Sterling > When I was a young embryologist I lectured about genes in development. Following the dogma of the time, I told my students that there were two groups of genes. First, there were housekeeping genes — those responsible for the mundane daily functions of the cell — the feminine duties of maintenance. These genes supposedly kept the machinery running smoothly — respiration and waste disposal went on quietly and demurely. But the really important genes were the development genes — those masculine entities that pioneered new territory and wrought new form from undifferentiated plasm. The goal of any self-respecting developmental geneticist was to find those special genes for development and thus unravel the mystery of how genes control the formation of new organisms. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology and Women's Studies at Brown University - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The End of Gene Control](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11349) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-032 — There Are No Things. — Piet Hut > There is an analogy with computer languages. Physicists have a traditional aversion to learning any other language than Fortran, with which they grow up, no matter how useful the other languages may be. But without ever parting from their beloved Fortran, it was Fortran that changed out from under them, incorporating many of the features that the other languages had pioneered. So, when asked how future physicists will program, a good answer is: we have not the foggiest idea, but whatever it is, it will still be called Fortran. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [There Are No Things.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11514) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-033 — The Disconnect Between Wealth and Well-Being: It's Not the Economy, Stupid — David G. Myers > Has our collective happiness floated upward with the rising economic tide? In 1957, when economist John Galbraith was about to describe the United States as the Affluent Society, Americans’ per person income, expressed in today's dollars, was $8700. Today it is $20,000. Compared to 1957, we are now "the doubly affluent society" — with double what money buys. We have twice as many cars per person. We eat out two and a half times as often. Compared to the late 1950s when few Americans had dishwashers, clothes dryers, or air conditioning, most do today. So, believing that it's very important to be very well off, are we now happier ? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Disconnect Between Wealth and Well-Being: It's Not the Economy, Stupid](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11208) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-034 — That the Human Mind is Less and Less In the Head — Andy Clark > Human brains are making the human world smarter and smarter, so that they (the brains) can be dumb in peace. Or rather, we are progressively altering our environment so that our brains, which are good at pattern-matching, at sensory recognition, and at the manipulation of objects in the world, can support intelligent choice and action by their participation in much larger networks. Human development is a process in which the brain becomes deeply tuned to the available environmental surround, be it pen, paper and sketchpad, or PC, Palm Pilot and designer software. As the century closes, and our typical, reliable environmental props and supports become ever more sophisticated and interlinked, so the mental machinery that makes us who we are is becoming ever more extended, interanimated and networked. In the near future, software agents whose profiles have evolved alongside those of a specific individual will count as part of the individual person. To say that I use those software agents will be strictly false. Instead, my brain and the various personalized manifestations of new technology will constitute integrated thinking things. I will no more be the user of these close-knit technologies than I am the user of the various sub- systems already existing within my biological brain. Instead, better to see both those sub-systems and these close-knit external technologies, as together constituting a spatially extended kind of user or person. The next step may be, as Rodney Brooks suggests, to put as much of that technology back inside the biological membrane as possible. This buys easier portability without changing the real state of affairs. We are already (mental) cyborgs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 269 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [That the Human Mind is Less and Less In the Head](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11365) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-035 — The Lack of Services to Heal Abused Children — Jeff Jacobs > The emotional, physical, sexual abuse of children in our society and the lack of services to heal them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of Civitas Initiative - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Lack of Services to Heal Abused Children](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11528) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-036 — The Way Stories About Complex Scientific Controversies Are Often Unintentionally Mis-reported by the Mainstream Media. — Stephen Schneider > In science all opinions are decidedly not equal, and we spend the bulk of our effort winnowing the less from the more probable lines of inquiry. Moreover, when we are assessors, we are obligated to report whether our estimates of the likelihood of some set of hypothesized outcomes are based on objective rather than subjective odds. I don't have space to get into the "frequentist" versus "Bayesian" debate over what is ever "objective", but awareness of the issue is also part of what scientific literacy entails — even for scientists. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Way Stories About Complex Scientific Controversies Are Often Unintentionally Mis-reported by the Mainstream Media.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11223) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-037 — The Death of the Paragraph — Keith Devlin > We may be moving toward a generation that is cognitively unable to acquire information efficiently by reading a paragraph. They can read words and sentences — such as the bits of text you find on a graphical display on a web page — but they are not equipped to assimilate structured information that requires a paragraph to get across. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Death of the Paragraph](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11380) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-038 — Two Stories, One Encouraging, the Other Worrying — Lance Knobel > Less encouraging is the largely ignored story of climate change. All media have great difficulty in covering stories that develop over generations. Who in 1900 would have written about the changing role of women or the spread of democracy, two of the extraordinary shifts of the last century. The failure of the Kyoto conference on climate change to get significant action by the advanced, industrialized countries on climate change means that the problems will get far worse before there is any chance of them getting better. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Writer and Strategist - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Two Stories, One Encouraging, the Other Worrying](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11542) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-039 — The End of the Brain — Eduardo Punset > Yet despite this distinctive capacity to generate symbols, some 25% of the population — excluding criminals — have serious brain disfunctions, and most medical observers already agree that brain disorders will be the most serious health threat in the twenty-first century. The lucky 75% who will not be insane already know, according to the latest statistics, that more patients die as a result of practitioner's brains guessing wrongly about the nature and treatment of real or invented illness, than people succumb on the roads and from heart failure altogether. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Spanish Television Presenter; Author, The Happiness Trip - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The End of the Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11238) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-040 — The Globalization of Illness — Dean Ornish > Illnesses like coronary heart disease that used to be very rare in countries such as Japan and other Asian countries are becoming epidemics, causing huge drains on their economies as well as enormous personal suffering — much of which could be avoided. The same is true for prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, arthritis, and so on. Trillions of dollars in direct and indirect expenditures could be avoided, along with untold suffering. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and President of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Globalization of Illness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11395) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-041 — The True Nature of Much of Human Illness Eludes Mankind. — Mehmet C. Oz > The body is sacred and our provincial understanding of its workings in imbued with cultural biases that are bred from birth and dominated by guttural rather than cerebral influences. The resulting theology of the medicine insists that all citizens having heart attacks must have chest pain, or smoke, or have type A personalities, or have high cholesterol, or be obese. The observation that half the victims of mankind's largest killer do not fit this profile eludes the public. And how do these risk factors explain why heart attacks are most likely to occur on Monday mornings? We make the error of assuming that medicine, which describes tendencies rather than certainty, is a mathematical field rather than a statistical field. Even the act of observing disease in the form of a patient-physician relationship can alter the natural history of the illness, the medical equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics. This may explain the well know placebo effect and its dark relative, the nocebo impact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Irving Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center - **Extract length:** 165 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The True Nature of Much of Human Illness Eludes Mankind.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11240) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-042 — The most important unreported story — Bart Kosko > The most important unreported story at the dawn of the Information Age has two parts: (1) The last Sunday of the 20th century passed and the United States Government still continued to outlaw first-class mail on Sunday and (2) no one complained. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 42 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The most important unreported story](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11411) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-043 — The Reduction Since 1993 In American Crime Is An Illusion — David Lykken > Suppose we were to require those who wish to have — and keep — a baby must be mature, married, self-supporting, and never convicted of a crime of violence. If the parents of the 1.3 million Americans currently in prison had met such simple licensure requirements, I believe that at least a million of those inmates would instead be tax-paying citizens and neighbors. Interfering with parental rights, even as modestly as this, is rather frightening because the instinct to procreate is as strong in us as it is in all the birds and beasts. But homo sapiens should be able to agree that the rights of the children outweigh those of parents who are unable or unwilling to grow up, get married, and get a job. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Behavioral Geneticist and Emeritus Professor, University of Minnesota - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Reduction Since 1993 In American Crime Is An Illusion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11255) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-044 — Exercise Can Make you Smarter — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Fred Gage, a colleague of mine at the Salk Institute, has discovered that new neurons are born every day in the hippocampus, an important part of the brain for long-term memory of facts and events, even in adults. This was first found in rats, but has now been shown in monkeys and humans, and not just in the hippocampus, but also in the cerebral cortex, the storehouse of our experience and the fountainhead of our creativity. This was widely reported, but what has emerged since then is even more encouraging. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Exercise Can Make you Smarter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11426) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-045 — The Imminent Paradigm Shift In Understanding The Conscious Mind — Stuart Hameroff > The brain/mind has traditionally been compared to contemporary vanguards of information processing (dating from the Greeks' "seal ring in wax" as a metaphor for memory, to the telephone switching circuit, to the hologram, to the modern day classical computer in which consciousness "emerges" from complex computation among simple neurons). As quantum computation comes to the forefront of technology, human nature (and ego) will surely resist the notion that technology bears superior intellect, and search for quantum computation in the brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Imminent Paradigm Shift In Understanding The Conscious Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11270) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-046 — How Great the Kids Are Today. — Philip Brockman > The young people I work with at NASA's Langley Research Center are sharp and hard working. We get some of the best, but they are almost all great. And what is rarely understood, nevermind reported, is that they have to process about twice the information that I had to deal with starting out in research in 1959. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How Great the Kids Are Today.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11440) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-047 — The Erosion of Traditional — Ellis Rubinstein > Now, it may seem obvious that nationalism and political and religious ideologies are having an increasingly hard time remaining "pure" in the face of increased face-to-face contact with those who see things differently from us. Moreover, we cannot easily cling to our most formative views when we increasingly find ourselves in conversation via phone and e-mail with others who see the world differently from us. And, finally, it must be ever more difficult to remain isolated in our views of others when we are surrounded by images of them — often touching images — on film and television. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Executive Officer of the New York Academy of Sciences. - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Erosion of Traditional](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11286) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-048 — Hidden Consequences of Our Daily Choices as Consumers of Products and Services — Daniel Goleman > I applaud, for instance, the mutual funds and other corporate citizens who are offering shareholders the option to get their reports via the internet, rather than wasting resources — trees, power, etc. — mailing thousands of hard copies. One fund informs me, for instance, that if all members sign up for internet reports, the savings in pulp amounts to more than three hundred trees per year. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Hidden Consequences of Our Daily Choices as Consumers of Products and Services](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11455) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-049 — The Roads Not Taken — Hans Ulrich Obrist > I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories. As Bergson showed, realization is only one case of the possible. There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects and so on. The beginning of a new millennium seems like a good moment to remember certain roads not taken in an active and dynamic and not nostalgic way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Roads Not Taken](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11301) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-050 — (1) The Health Crisis in Africa and (2) The Poor Level of Educational Distribution. — Unattributed Edge contributor > A second problem comes from my experience teaching in Uganda. I had the great pleasure, and honor of teaching students in Uganda. I have never seen such a thirst to learn. And yet, much of the educational system is lacking in basic supplies and materials that would transfer these students into highly educated scholars. Like the poor distribution of medicinal supplies, there is an equally poor level of educational distribution. The inequities here are dramatic. Those of us who write for the Edge, should put our heads together to think of some way to help, to lend our minds to theirs. Any takers? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [(1) The Health Crisis in Africa and (2) The Poor Level of Educational Distribution.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11470) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-051 — a) The Extraordinary Proliferation of Jobs and Careers; b) James P. Carse's Jewel of a Book, Finite and Infinite Games — Julian Barbour > The very notion of the "most important unreported story" makes it inevitable that any answer will be highly subjective. For can anyone honestly say they know for sure what is the most important thing in life? One might say that the very essence of life is growth and uncertainty about the direction in which it happens. I feel forced to look for striking unreported stories whose ultimate importance is inevitably unknown. Then I find that no story is completely unreported, only underreported compared with the standards I would apply. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; Author, The Janus Point - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [a) The Extraordinary Proliferation of Jobs and Careers; b) James P. Carse's Jewel of a Book, Finite and Infinite Games](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11163) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-052 — Decoding the Human Genome is a Long Term Project — Peter Cochrane > We are currently being fed a series of snippets detailing the unraveling of the human blueprint — our genome. If every isolated and obscure report were strung end to end, and edited thoroughly into a coherent whole, we might just have a comprehensible story — and one of the most important to be told. But let me jump to the end point and make an educated guess! I suspect that when we decide that tweaking the odd gene or two seems like a good idea to cure this or that disease or shortcoming, or to get this or that eye color etc, we will get a heck of a surprise. It seems to me that the likelihood that individual genes are singularly responsible for any one trait is pretty slim. So I am putting my money on a reasonably strong interdependency, that is — we will have to attend to complex combinations of genes to achieve some desired effect. Realizing an adequate level of understanding of the complexity of the genome code book may well take considerably more effort than the initial mapping of all the raw elements. Like Morse Code and the German Enigma machines of W.W.II, we will almost certainly require some hefty computing power to do the job. Now this really will be worth reporting! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Partner, Formicio; Chairman & CEO, Cochrane Associates - **Extract length:** 218 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Decoding the Human Genome is a Long Term Project](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11317) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-053 — The Population Fizzle — Kevin Kelly > While the absolute numbers of humans on Earth will continue to rise for another generation at least, birth rates around the world are sinking, particularly in the developed countries. In the coming decades many emerging countries — currently boosting the rise in absolute population numbers — will themselves make the transition to lower birth rates. While most estimates see the global population of Earth peaking around 2040-50, what none of them show is what happens afterward. Unless some unknown counterforce arises, what happens after the peak is that the world's birth rate steadily sinks below replacement level. Increasing people's longevity can only slightly postpone this population fizzle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Population Fizzle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11485) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-054 — The Classification Theorem for Finite Simple Groups — Verena Huber-Dyson > Then comes the search for a more elegant, easier, snappier route. By 1985 that second stage of the project was well under way. The "enormous proof" has set a new trend in mathematics. It is a True Tale of a Tower of Babel with a Happy Ending! All those mathematicians toiling side by side, if spread all over the globe, each with his own outlook, language, bag of tricks: constructing geometries, permuting objects, calculating characters, centralizing, fusing, signalizing and inventing all sorts of new terms for situations that had been lying there waiting to be recognized, named and used. They were not treading on each other's toes but collaborating in a prolific way unprecedented in the history of mathematics! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** 1923-2016; Emeritus Professor, Formerly, Philosophy Department. University of Calgary, Alberta Canada - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Classification Theorem for Finite Simple Groups](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11178) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-055 — A Lost Civilization — Eberhard Zangger > The publication of the Beyköy tablets will take this sequence of upheavals in western thought one step further. It will demonstrate — once and for all — that "western culture" is an arbitrary, abstract concept resting upon the wishful thinking of certain eighteenth century members of the educated class. Old world civilizations, especially that of ancient Greece, evolved from frontier outposts of much older Asian civilizations in the adjacent Orient. The practices characterizing western civilization — domestication of animals and plants, agriculture, husbandry, permanent homes, life in village communities, metallurgy, politics and cosmology — all clearly originated in Asia. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing director of science communications - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A Lost Civilization](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11332) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-056 — The Enduring Vitality of the More Moderate Kinds of Religions — Freeman Dyson > The enduring vitality of the more moderate kinds of religion. Although the fanatical and fundamentalist versions of religion receive heavy attention from the media, the moderate versions of religion do not. The majority of religious people are neither fanatical nor fundamentalist. This is true of Christians, Jews and Moslems alike. In the modern world, with inequalities between rich and poor growing sharper, governments are increasingly incapable or unwilling to take care of the poor. Organized religions increasingly provide the glue that holds societies together, giving equal respect to those who profit from economic prosperity and those who are left behind. This is true even in such a prosperous and technologically advanced community as Princeton, New Jersey, where I live. Princeton has more than twenty churches, all trying in their different ways to reach out to people in need, all bridging the gap between young and old as well as the gap between rich and poor. Religion plays this same role, holding communities together with bonds of fellowship, among the Arabs of the West Bank, the Jews of Brooklyn, and the African-Americans of Trenton, New Jersey. Religions that have endured for a thousand years and helped generations of oppressed people to survive are not about to disappear. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 206 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Enduring Vitality of the More Moderate Kinds of Religions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11499) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-057 — The Rise of Organic Farming in Europe — Rupert Sheldrake > First there was the trauma of mad cow disease and the emergence of CJD, its human form, contracted through eating beef. No one knows whether the death toll will rise to thousands or even millions; the incubation time can be many years. Then in 1999 there was the remarkable public rejection of genetically modifie foods, much to the surprise of Monsanto and their government supporters. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** biologist and author - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Rise of Organic Farming in Europe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10890) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-058 — The End of the Dream of a More Gentle World — Carlo Rovelli > Killed by the simple fact that most of the times — and this one is no exception — the stronger and aggressive wins and the gentle one looses. Killed by the fears it generated in the privileged. Killed by its own naivete, by horrors its unrealism generated, by its incapacity to defend itself from the thirst of power hidden inside. And killed by the thousand of reported and over-reported stories of its sins. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The End of the Dream of a More Gentle World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11046) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-059 — Linda Tripp's Makeover — Thomas de Zengotita > Remember the new Nixon? Distant ancestor of Al Gore remakes and of McCain and Bradley, the "story" candidates, and every prominent real life figure today who is now obliged to play some version of themselves. On the other front, we have cases of performer resurrections in new guises going back to the straightforward comebacks of Frank Sinatra and John Travolta to Madonna and Michael Jackson makeovers to Garth Brooks effort to recreate himself as a fictional celebrity whose name escapes me at the moment. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Linda Tripp's Makeover](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10904) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-060 — The sexual abuse of children by women — Timothy Taylor > Whatever its biological and cultural antecedents — poor parent-infant bonding, the urge to control and dominate, repression, hidden traditions of perversion, etc. — the truth of abuse by males has only recently been accepted, and the extent of it probably remains underestimated. By contrast, abuse by females is almost totally unreported outside specialist clinical literature. Successful criminal prosecutions, rare enough for the former, are almost unheard of for the latter except where they comprise part of more unusual psychopathic crimes (such as the torture and murder of children). But there is nothing inherently implausible about there being as many female as male paedophiles in any given human community. That women paedophiles have been a systemic part of recent social reality is, in my view, today's most important unreported story. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The sexual abuse of children by women](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11060) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-061 — The Swiftness of the Societal Changes That Occurred Two-thirds of the Way Through the Century — Kenneth W. Ford > I lived through the period on a university campus, and saw rapid changes in higher education, not to mention dress and behavior, that are with us still. My own professional society, the American Physical Society, transformed itself between the late 1960s and the early 1970s from an organization that held meeting and published papers to an organization that, in addition, promotes equity, highlights links between science and society, seeks to influence policy, and cares for the welfare of its individual members. Why did so much with lasting impact — happen so quickly? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Retired Director of the American Institute of Physics - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Swiftness of the Societal Changes That Occurred Two-thirds of the Way Through the Century](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10763) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-062 — The Gradual The Growth of a Prosperous Middle Class in China and in India — Denis Dutton > Nevertheless, this development is of staggering importance. Middle class peoples worldwide, particularly in a world dependent on global trade, have important values in common. They share the values they place on material comfort. They borrow in living styles from one another. They appreciate to an increasing extent each others' cultures and entertainments. And they place an important value on social stability. Countries with prosperous middle classes are less likely to declare war on one another: they have too much to lose. In the modern world, war is a pastime for losers and ideologues; the middle classes tend to be neither. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily; Author, The Art Instinct - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Gradual The Growth of a Prosperous Middle Class in China and in India](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10918) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-063 — Maslow's America — Daniel Pink > Deep into the middle class, Americans are enjoying a standard of living unmatched in world history and unthinkable to our ancestors just 100 years ago. This development goes well beyond today's high Dow and low unemployment rate. (Insert startling factoid about VCRs, longevity, car ownership, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, or computing power here.) And demographics are only deepening the significance of the moment. Roughly seven out of eight Americans were not alive during the Great Depression ? and therefore have no conscious memory of outright, widespread, hope-flattening economic privation. (Note: long gas lines and short recessions don't qualify as life-altering hardship.) As a result, the default assumption of middle class American life has profoundly changed: the expectation of comfort has replaced the fear of privation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor, Wired; Author, To Sell is Human - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Maslow's America](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11074) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-064 — Good News — Nancy Etcoff > Four of five stories on trends in American life that appear on national television news describe negative, frightful trends rather than hopeful ones. Crime stories are the top category of local news, outnumbering segments on health, business, and government combined. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist and faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and of Harvard University - **Extract length:** 40 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Good News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10777) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-065 — Discrimination in the Mating Market — David M. Buss > Being shunned on the mating market relegates some individuals to a loveless life that may cause bitterness and resentment. As the rock star Jim Morrison noted, "women seem wicked when you're unwanted." Discrimination on the mating market, of course, cuts across sex, race, and other groups that have names and organized advocates. Neither men nor women are exempt. For those who suffer discrimination on the mating market, there exists no judicial body to rectify the injustice, no court of appeals. It's not against the law to have preferences in mating, and no set of social customs declares that all potential mates must be treated equally or given a fair chance to compete. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Discrimination in the Mating Market](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10932) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-066 — The Information Revolution Requires A Matching Education Revolution — Robert Hormats > Today's most important unreported story is that for many millions of people in the industrialized and developing countries education and training are not keeping up with the information technology revolution. As the world enters the 21st century we need more robust educational education and training, benchmarking to ensure that educational systems provide the skills needed for this new era and resource commitments that recognize that educational investments are critical to economic prosperity and social stability in this new century. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International. - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Information Revolution Requires A Matching Education Revolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11089) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-067 — Social Policy Implications of the New Happiness Research — Geoffrey Miller > (5) For those who suffer from very low levels of subjective well-being (e.g. major depression), the most potent anti-depressants are pharmaceutical, not social or economic. Six months on Prozac™, Wellbutrin™, Serzone™, or Effexor™ will usually put a depressed person back near a normal happiness set-point (apparently by increasing serotonin's effects in the left prefrontal cortex). The effects of such drugs are much stronger than any increase in wealth or status, or any other attempt to change the external conditions of life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Social Policy Implications of the New Happiness Research](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10791) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-068 — The Peculiar Feedback Loops - Both Negative and Positive - That Drive Media Reporting of Technological and Science Issues — Charles Arthur > Meanwhile climate change, that oft-repeated phrase, is almost accepted as being right here, right now; to the extent that my news editor's eyes glaze over at the mention of more global warming data, more melting ice shelves (apart from "Are there good pictures?" A calving ice shelf can do it.) There is clearly a negative feedback loop running there. The only way to garner interest is to present someone or some paper which says it isn't happening. Which seems to me pointless, before Stephen Schneider jumps on me. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Freelance Technology Journalist - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Peculiar Feedback Loops - Both Negative and Positive - That Drive Media Reporting of Technological and Science Issues](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10946) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-069 — The End of Clausewitzian War — Jaron Lanier > In former Yugoslavia, an upwelling of need for absolute identity trumped rational, material self interest. This phenomenon can also perhaps be seen in some instances in the rise of Islamic militancy. The recent rise of violent events perpetrated in the name of "traditional" identities, values, and beliefs is startling. Once again, such violence has always existed, but almost always before it has been coupled with a component of material motivation. The Biblical Israelites were enslaved and subjected economic abuse, for example. The fundamentalists who attack abortion clinics seek no improved material prospects. Neither do the Taliban. Or the bombers of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The End of Clausewitzian War](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11103) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-070 — The Non-US Uniform Mobile Standard — David Braunschvig > In Europe, location-sensitive services are being tested as we speak, enabling merchants to reach pedestrians and motorists with information and opportunities. Thus, rather than competing online with pure-play e-commerce companies, established bricks-and-mortar businesses could find their revenge in the high streets, thanks to these devices. The best technologies enabling these experiences might well come from all over the world ­ but the first movers are likely to find a privileged ground in Europe: a caveat for the complacent in the US ! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Adjunct Senior Fellow for Business and Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations; Founder and Managing Principal, Braunschvig LLC - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Non-US Uniform Mobile Standard](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10806) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-071 — Weird Ape Fouls Planet — Delta Willis > Secondly, it's a story I'd rather not research and write because it is a bummer. The first half I did attempt; I truly do think humans are quite a wonderfully weird, unique species and the story of our place within the evolution of life on earth is fantastic (and for many, still unbelievable.) But when it comes to our impact on the earth, the already palpable effects of over-population, I get bogged down in the details, or distracted by Untold Story Number Two (Equal Rights Amendment Never Passed U.S. Senate). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Paleontologist; Author, Hominid Gang - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Weird Ape Fouls Planet](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10961) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-072 — The Coming Transformation in Human Life and Society in the Post-Genomic World — Steven R. Quartz > Although there hasn't been any shortage of stories on genes in the press, public dialogue hasn't even begun to seriously consider how radically genetic technologies will alter human life and society — and probably all much sooner than we think. Forget cloning — the pace of the Human Genome Project combined with the emerging dominance of market forces in dictating how spinoff technologies from gene therapy to engineering novel genes will be utilized suggests that we'll soon be able to retool human life (altering human traits from life history — aging, reproduction — to intelligence and personality). We haven't really begun to consider the enormous implications these will have for the design of human society and social policy, from the family unit to education and work. My bet is that feasible technologies to retool human life will put us face to face with the basic dilemma of deciding what it means to be human within two decades. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Co-author, Cool - **Extract length:** 157 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Coming Transformation in Human Life and Society in the Post-Genomic World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11118) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-073 — Chemistry for non-chemists; Entrepreneurism — Philip Campbell > My first thought was "chemistry for non-chemists". Few people write about chemistry for the public, few stories appear in the press. It's intrinsically difficult and, anyway, biology is, for the foreseeable future, just too sensational (in both good and questionable senses) and fast-moving for all but the sexiest of the rest of science to get much of a chance to compete for space in the media. But there is room for unusual science writers who know how to hit a nerve with a neat association between interesting chemistry and the everyday world - there just seem to be too few in existence and/or too little demand. (I'd mention John Emslie and my colleague Philip Ball as two honourable examples.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Chemistry for non-chemists; Entrepreneurism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10820) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-074 — A Dollar a Week Will End World Hunger — Tor Nørretranders > Obviously, once the money to end hunger is available, all sorts of obstructions will appear before those in need are fed: bureaucracies, mafias, corruption, waste. But is it not then time that we deal with them? A very important effect of annual donations from a billion people is the resulting global awareness of the embarrassment involved in the present unnecessary situation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [A Dollar a Week Will End World Hunger](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10975) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-075 — The Walkie-Talkie Theory: Bipedalism Was Necessary For Human Speech Evolution — Robert Provine > Speech is a byproduct of the respiratory adjustments associated with walking upright on two legs. With bipedalism came a secondary and unrecognized consequence, the respiratory plasticity necessary for speech. Quadrupedal species must synchronize their locomotion and respiratory cycles at a ratio of 1:1(strides per breath), a coupling required by the shared, rhythmic use of the thoracic complex (sternum, ribs, and associated musculature), and the need to endure impacts of the forelimbs during running. Without such sychronization, running quadrupeds would fall face first into the dust because their thorax would be only a floppy air-filled bag that could not absorb the shock of forelimb strikes. Human bipedal runners free of these mechanical constraints on the thorax employ a wide variety of phase-locked patterns (4:1, 3:1, 2:1 [most common], 1:1, 5:2, and 3:2), evidence of a more plastic coupling between respiratory rhythm and gait. The relative emancipation of breathing from locomotion permitted by bipedality was necessary for the subsequent selection for the virtuosic acts of vocalization we know as speech. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 168 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Walkie-Talkie Theory: Bipedalism Was Necessary For Human Speech Evolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11132) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-076 — The Loss of our Species' Biography — Steven Pinker > 2. Hunter-gatherers. Large-scale agriculture, cities, and other aspects of what we call "civilization" are recent inventions (< 10,000 years old), too young to have exerted significant evolutionary change on the human genome, and have led to cataclysmic changes in the human lifestyle. The best information about the ecological and social lifestyle to which our minds and bodies are biologically adapted lies in the few remaining foraging or hunting and gathering peoples. These peoples are now assimilating, being absorbed, being pushed off their lands, or dying of disease. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Loss of our Species' Biography](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10834) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-077 — Maybe Media Is the Real Opiate of the People — Denise Caruso > Not long ago, for example, it occurred to me that the rising obesity rate of our TV-addicted population might actually have something to do with the fact that any given hour of programming will yield an infinity of food porn — sexy, slender women shoving two-pound dripping hamburgers into lipsticked mouths, or normal-sized families cheerily gorging themselves at tables piled with giant lobsters and steaks and all manner of things oozing fat and sugar. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Digital Commerce/Technology Columnist, the New York Times - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Maybe Media Is the Real Opiate of the People](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10990) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-078 — Henry Warwick My friend, John Brockman, asked me, What is the most important unreported story of the year? — Henry Warwick > I contacted a number of people in this regard, among them; an editor of a major San Francisco weekly newspaper, a writer for a major San Francisco daily newspaper, a photo editor for another daily, and a writer for a weekly newspaper and the internet, located near Seattle. Four people from completely different backgrounds- and they all said (basically) the same thing- "How can it be that there is incredible poverty amidst incomparable wealth, so often resulting in homelessness? " - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** artist, composer, and scientist - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Henry Warwick My friend, John Brockman, asked me, What is the most important unreported story of the year?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11147) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-079 — The Farce of the Slacker Generation (Or What the Hell Happened to Generation X)? — Jason Calacanis > In the early nineties, when I graduated from college, the media was obsessed with a generation of indifferent teenagers and twenty-somethings who couldn' t be bothered with social causes, careers, or the general state of humanity. Ironically, the same media structure which had previously been upset with the 60s generation for being too rebellious was now upset the kids born in the 70s and the 80s for not being rebellious enough. They branded us slackers and they called us generation X, ho-hum. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Internet Entrepreneur; Angel Investor - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Farce of the Slacker Generation (Or What the Hell Happened to Generation X)?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10846) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-080 — Appropriation of the Internet as an Effective and Powerful Tool of Large Scale Global Social Protest — Phil Leggiere > What the WTO protests represent, far from Luddite know-nothing-ism (despite the handful of brick throwing John Zerzan/Theodore Kaczynski "anarcho-primitivists" whom broadcast TV reflexively and inevitably locked-in on as the TV stars of the event) is the first social protest movement created largely through and communicating largely via the Web. Which is to say the first, potentially at least, able to by-pass the gatekeepers of mainstream media while reaching hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of participants/observers/ sympathizers and others, globally on an ongoing basis. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** free-lance journalist - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Appropriation of the Internet as an Effective and Powerful Tool of Large Scale Global Social Protest](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11004) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-081 — The Fact That There Are No Longer ANY Unreported Stories — Raphael Kasper > "Today's most important unreported story" may be the fact that there are no longer ANY unreported stories. To be sure, there are stories that are given less attention than some might think appropriate, and others that are inaccurate or misleading. But the proliferation of sources of information — the Internet, myriad cable television stations, niche magazines, alternative newspapers — makes it virtually certain that no occurrence can remain secret or unmentioned. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Fact That There Are No Longer ANY Unreported Stories](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10861) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-082 — Survival Depends on the Race Between Education and Catastrophe — Leon M. Lederman > The penalties of continuing to graduate cultural illiterates (in science and the humanities) may not be evident in year 2000 Wall Street, but it is troubling the leaders of our economic success, the CEO’s of major corporations who see a grim future in our workforce. Can we continue to import educated workers? As the low-level service jobs continue to give way to robots and computers, the needs are increasingly for workers who have high level reasoning skills, which a proper education can supply to the vast majority of students. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Survival Depends on the Race Between Education and Catastrophe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11018) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-083 — The Consequences of Choices Made About The Internet Today — Marney Morris > The quality of information design in the US is declining. Good information design should reveal relationships about the information. It should make you smarter. Learning disorders are on the rise. It's not because we are getting better at diagnosing them. It's because we are creating them. All too often our textbooks are confusing or misleading. And that same lack of thoughtful design pervades the personal computer, and the Internet. Information design is a science that needs to underpin our society if we are going to remain democratic and vital. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Interaction Design, Engineering Department, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Consequences of Choices Made About The Internet Today](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10875) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-084 — The Dramatic Fall in the Rate of Growth in Global Population — Peter Schwartz > My candidate for most important unreported story is the dramatic fall in the rate of growth in global population. Instead of hitting 20, 20 or even 50 billion as was feared only a few years ago, with all the associated horror, it is likely to reach between ten and eleven billion by mid century. The implications for the carrying capacity of the planet are profound. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Dramatic Fall in the Rate of Growth in Global Population](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11032) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-085 — The End of the Nation-State — Robert Aunger > The result of all this will not be the arrival of the Libertarian heaven, a State-less society. It is just that mid-level governance will be replaced by larger- and smaller-scale institutions. We won't have monolithic Big Brother looking over our shoulders in the next century. Instead, we will become a network of tightly linked individuals, empowered by technologies for maintaining personal relationships across space and time. We will all choose to be cyborgs (Rodney A. Brooks), with implants that permanently jack us into the global brain (Ivan Amato), because of the power we derive from our environmentally augmented intelligence (Andy Clark, with apologies to Edwin Hutchins and Merlin Donald). We will all come to live in what Manuel Castells calls a Network Society, and begin, literally, to "think globally and act locally." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist; Author, Gaining Control - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The End of the Nation-State](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10737) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-086 — I. A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship — Sherry Turkle > In the 1960s through the 1980s, researchers in artificial intelligence took part in what we might call the classical "great AI debates" where the central question was whether machines could be "really" intelligent. This classical debate was essentialist; the new relational objects tend to enable researchers and their public to sidestep such arguments about what is inherent in the computer. Instead, the new objects depend on what people attribute to them; they shift the focus to what the objects evoke in us. When we are asked to care for an object (the robot Kismet, the plaything Furby), when the cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, people are moved to experience that object as intelligent. Beyond this, they feel a connection to it. So the question here is not to enter a debate about whether relational objects "really" have emotions, but to reflect on a series of issues having to do with what relational artifacts evoke in the user. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 162 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [I. A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10596) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-087 — Emergence of an Integrated Human-Earth Organism — Richard Potts > Several under-reported stories come to mind. Almost all powerful stories concern human beings in some way or another, metaphorically or directly. One result of globalization, let's call it cultural unity, is a story of such power. I'll mention only one facet of this story. Over the past 50,000 years, the vast diversification of human culture ? the creation of quasi distinct cultures, the plural ? stands as a peculiarity of Homo sapiens (relative to earlier humans and other organisms). Human life has divided into diverse languages and ways of organizing kin, technologies, economies, even mating and demographic systems. It's a process that reflects our ken for doing things differently from the people in the next valley. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director of The Human Origins Program - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Emergence of an Integrated Human-Earth Organism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10751) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-088 — Is the Market on Prozac? — Randolph Nesse > What percent of brokers, dealers, and investors are taking antidepressant drugs? Wealthy, stressed urbanites are especially likely to use them. I would not be surprised to learn that one in four large investors has used some kind of mood-altering drug. What effects do these drugs have on investment behavior? We don't know. A 1998 study by Brian Knutson and colleagues found that the serotonin specific antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) did not cause euphoria in normal people, but did block negative affects like fear and sadness. From seeing many patients who take such agents, I know that some experience only improved mood, often a miraculous and even life-saving change. Others, however, report that they become far less cautious than they were before, worrying too little about real dangers. This is exactly the mind-set of many current investors. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Is the Market on Prozac?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10609) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-089 — Response to Paul Davies — Margaret Wertheim > I appreciate Paul Davies' response to my question "What is science, and do indigenous kniowledge systems also contain a genuine scientific understanding of the world?" My point in raising this question is not to suggest that Western science is not universal - clearly the same law of gravity operates in the deserts of central Australia as operates in the labs of Caltech. In that sense Western science is indeed something that every culture can share and benefit from, if they so choose. At issue here is really the reverse question: Might there also be discoveries about the way the world works that have been made by other cultures, that we in the West have not yet come to - knowledge that we in turn might benefit from? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science writer and commentator - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Response to Paul Davies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10622) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-090 — Response to Margaret Wertheim — Paul Davies > The reasons for Europe being the birthplace of true science are complex, but they certainly have a lot to do with Greek philosophy, with its notion that humans could come to understand how the world works through rational reasoning, and the three monothesitic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — with their notion of a real, lawlike, created order in nature, imposed by a Grand Architect. Although science began in Europe, it is universal and now available to all cultures. We can continue to cherish the belief systems of other cultures, whilst recognizing that scientific knowledge is something special that tanscends cultures. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Response to Margaret Wertheim](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10636) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-091 — The Death of Nations — Rafael Núñez > • Neutrality: The complexity of contemporary world organization is leaving almost no room for neutrality. Contemporary Swiss society, for instance, is experiencing an important identity crisis, since their traditional neutrality is no longer tenable in the new european and international contexts. One of their essential aspects of national identity — neutrality - is collapsing. A simple fact illustrates this crisis. In 1992, during the World Expo in Seville, the official Swiss stand exhibited the following motto: "Switzerland does not exist". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Death of Nations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10652) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-092 — Shifting Empires and Power — Thomas A. Bass > THOMAS A. BASS is the author of The Predictors, Back to Vietnamerica, Reinventing the Future, Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa , and The Eudaemonic Pie. A frequent contributor to Smithsonian, Audubon, Discover, The New York Times, and other publications, he is Contributing Writer for Wired magazine and Scholar-in-Residence at Hamilton College. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of English and Journalism, State University of New York, Albany; Author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved US - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Shifting Empires and Power](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10666) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-093 — Indigenous Science — Margaret Wertheim > The claim that other cultures have genuine sciences (and sometimes also complex logics) embedded in their knowledge systems, raises again the whole philosophical issue of what exactly does the word "science" mean. Helen Verran, an Australian philosopher of science who is one of the leaders of the ethnoscience movement, has made the point that having the chance to study other sciences gives us a unique opportunity to reflect back on our own science. Her work on the Yolgnu provides a important window from which to see our own scientific insights in a new light. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science writer and commentator - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Indigenous Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10680) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-094 — The last word on Y2K: The Y1K Problem — W. Brian Arthur > Just before the year 1000, a rumor arose in a certain town in Germany, Hamelin I believe, that the coming of the new time would bring rats to the public buildings. Some had been spotted in the basement of the town hall, some in the local stables. Rat preventers were hired at great price, and indeed when the century turned no rats were to be seen. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Visiting Researcher, Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC; Inaugural Recipient, Lagrange Prize; Author, The Nature of Technology - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The last word on Y2K: The Y1K Problem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10694) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-095 — New York Times Sells Out! — David Bunnell > Cultural differences between the two companies and differing standards of journalism aren't seen as major stumbling blocks to getting the deal done. The biggest challenge will be to get the two sides to agree to a valuation that gives shareholders of both companies plenty to cheer for. This is complicated because The Onion has a market cap that is several hundred billion dollars higher than the New York Times Company. The expectation, though is this will be worked out to be similar to AOL's purchase of Time Warner, with The Onion shareholders getting about 55 to 60 percent of the merger company. Thus, The New Times Shareholder will see an instant up tick in their stock which should compensate them more than adequately for losing control of the company. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, PC Magazine, PC World, Macworld, Macworld Expo, New Media and BioWorld - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [New York Times Sells Out!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10708) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-096 — Infection Is Much Bigger Than We Thought, Bigger Than We Think, And Perhaps Bigger Than We Can Think — Paul W. Ewald > A judgment on this pronouncement can be assessed incrementally decade by decade over the next half-century. What are the diseases to keep an eye on? Heart disease and stroke; Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases; impotence, polycystic ovary disease, cancers of the breast and ovaries, the penis and prostate; schizophrenia and the other major mental illnesses. The list goes on. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Infection Is Much Bigger Than We Thought, Bigger Than We Think, And Perhaps Bigger Than We Can Think](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10722) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2000-097 — How Kids Replaced the Generals — Joseph "Yossi" Vardi > The most important untold story according my opinion is how kids replaced the generals as the major source of defining the innovation agenda of the world; how the biblical prophecy "thou shell turn your swords into Sony Playstation 2" is being fulfilled; how the underlying power sending satellites to the skies, creating fabs for 128 bit machines, pushing for broadband, is not any longer based on the defense needs of the big powers ,but on the imagination and the passion of kids (and adults) to play games, see 1000 channels of television, and listen to music!! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** chairman of International Technologies - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [How Kids Replaced the Generals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10584) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted