Can fasting prevent Alzheimer's disease ? And how to answer such questions

Women of Rennell Islands: Were they spared from Alzheimer's disease due to famine experienced in childhood ? 

Humans love to think of themselves as gods, as bright dazzling balls in the sky, radiating ideas and exchanging pointers on how their ideas can solve all the problems in the world. Nowhere is this conceit more apparent than people blathering on the internet. Mea culpa. But the other day, this conceit has been broken for me, when all of a sudden I woke up with a stiff back. Years of lounging on a work desk have taken their toll on my back muscles and they decided to apply for an early retirement package. Of course, I am not willing to grant them that. But their message has been heard, their point has been taken. As if to reinforce the point, which might be lost in subtlety and in the humdrum of life, the changing seasons also gave me a sore throat and a cold. I am reminded that I am a bag of sticks which is held together by fibers, wires and valves, any of which can be twisted out of shape. I used these sick days of staying at home for reading through a set of books that I purchased recently. As it happens, they have to say nary a bit about this physical condition of human existence.

Humans are pipe-shaped animals, with the biggest pipe - the intestinal pipe going from the mouth to the anus. 

This is how Giulia Enders colorfully puts it in her book "Gut: The inside story of our body's most underrated organ".  This book was a good starting point to learn how viscerally our brains are connected to our viscera. But I finished reading another book, that made an exhaustive deconstruction of the notion that we humans live in a Platonic sphere of abstraction and ideas. That is the book "Village Effect" by Susan Pinker, which forcefully reminds us how our brains are tied to our bodies. I think every computer engineer needs to read this book. I recommend this book especially to my friends in the Silicon Valley, plotting their next big social apps or cyber addictions on the unsuspecting masses. As I mentioned, people are not dazzling gods made of ideas, but inherently tied to their physical bodies., which are like bags of sticks. In fact, human bodies are even more rickety than that analogy suggests.

Firstly, our bodies have their genetic makeup of the DNA code, which we have not deciphered yet, but which predisposes us to certain physical and mental states. Beyond the DNA, our bodies have digital switches triggered by the environment, that turn on or off large sections of genetic code. This is known as epigenetics, a phenomenon that can even be transmitted from parents to children. Beyond this digital circuitry at the cellular level, our bodies have a layer of complicated organic chemistry, known as the endocrine system. Various chemicals secreted into our body at different glands make our hearts beat faster, activate our immune systems or shut them down, make us feel comfortable or cranky, and dramatically color our emotional states. Chemicals such as serotonin, epinephrin and oxytocin dictate how we behave as humans. This is why people get addicted to drugs, and why they can be saved by pharmaceuticals. At a layer higher than chemistry, our body is a network of neurons - not just in the brain but significantly also in the gut. The thoughts that we think, the experiences that we have, and the foods that we digest will all influence which chemicals get secreted into our bodies and which digital switches (epigenetics) get turned on so that our DNA can be expressed. Digital technologies pretend that we are simply a software of consciousness running on the hardware of our brains. But this is far from the truth. Designing a good user interface means taking care of all the layers of being human: including the chemical and genetic layers. Needless to say, addressing this level of complexity has not been attempted by anybody yet, and what we have today are awful user interfaces - both for digital systems and for social systems.

This brings me to another book I purchased "The human use of human beings" by Norbert Wiener.  This book is a classic from 1950s and Wiener is one of the founders of computer science, specifically the theory of cybernetic control that addresses the interface between the human and the machine. I have not got to reading this book yet, but Wiener was a visionary not only for computer theory, but also for the monumental blunders that will be done by digital technologies to humankind. According to Wiener, digital technologies are pretty similar to socio-economic and legal systems: both encode a protocol of communication with humans for making them do what is expected of them. The sad thing is that we were tremendously wrong on designing both socio-economic systems as well as digital technologies, simply because we misunderstood humans to be Platonic agents of ideal action, and not as rickety bags of DNA and chemicals.

Getting back to the "Village Effect" by Susan Pinker, the book is a revelation on many fronts: People with strong social circles, as in a small tightly-knit village, lead long and healthy lives. People without strong social bonds suffer not only from loneliness but also from an early death due to a severe lack of immunity to diseases. Face-to-face conversations and pats on the back boost the oxytocin in our bodies which revitalizes the immune system, something which does not happen with virtual messages. Mobile devices and screens have documented negative effects on the cognitive growth of babies and adolescents. Adolescents using digital media and online social networks are at a greater risk of bullying and social conditioning.  The  thing that stuck me is how unanimous the psychologists are. These are fairly new findings in psychology, but they are not controversial. Like the tobacco industry, the computer industry has been simply ignoring these findings. It considers these as "somebody else's problem", nothing to do about it. After reading the book, I was stuck by the mental image of an Indonesian baby that was recently on the news, who was addicted to cigarettes and sniffing out tobacco smoke like a chimney. This disaster in Indonesia is in no small measure due to the advertising of tobacco companies that saw a remarkable growth of sales in the rising populations of Asia (even as the dangers of tobacco got apparent in the USA). The future generations of humanity will probably judge us as badly, letting the young and vulnerable people get addicted to the charms of social networks and digital pornography.

However, there is a fundamental problem that prevents us from connecting cause and effect in complex fields like psychology.  As mentioned earlier, our bodies are like Rube-Goldberg machines, composed of complex systems of chemicals and DNA, each of which is triggered by non-linear switches. The effects of any cause will become apparent only much later, and can only be gauged in a probabilistic sense. Like my stiff back that resulted from my sedentary lifestyle of several years of  lounging on the chair, the effects of modern living on my mind will be apparent only much later. Typically, such effects will be reduced cognitive skills, reduced social empathy, and reduced immunity to diseases. These effects will probably show up clearly only in my old age, when I will be the most vulnerable.

It is said that scientists working in most fields suffer from a physics envy, eager to condense the topic of their study to a pithy set of equations. Unfortunately, this approach to doing science is not valid for complex subjects that have many variables and non-linearities. Nevertheless, scientists in fields as diverse as biology and sociology have the urge to reduce their subjects to crude one-dimensional models, sometimes with tragic consequences. A similar envy exists in medical fields, though I believe it is less known. I term this the Penicillin envy: every pharmacologist and medical practitioner wants to find a wonder drug that can cure the disease of their study. In fact, this is a very modern jealousy, stemming from the remarkable success of the antibiotic drug Penicillin. It just works, as long as the infection is bacterial and the bacteria are not resistant to this drug (which was typically the case when the drug was first tested). This wonder drug inspired the search for many similar drugs that can take effect on the body just as quickly. However,  this search has often been a fool's errand. Our bodies are not pristine laboratories for physics experiments. As I said, they are like Rube-Goldberg machines, complex and remarkable when they work, but threatened by collapse and failure at multiple levels. The complex multi-layered metabolism of our bodies has its own way of healing; drugs and medical procedures can only facilitate this natural healing procedure. Despite great advances in medical science, the workings of our body remain mostly a mystery, and this is especially true for psychological ailments.

In fact, digital technologies are not unique in  creating a set of rich world diseases. People living in traditional hunting-gathering societies have very little problems with diabetes, coronary heart disease, or indeed, back pain.  Our modern sugar-rich diets and sedentary lifestyles are exerting hidden pressures on our internal organs, our immune systems, and our brains. These problems are systemic - stemming from how our society is organized, and not from individual personal choices. For example, the fact that the majority of drinks in the super-market contain massive loads of sugar predisposes us to making that choice for a sugary drink. The fact that the majority of our friends are on Facebook predisposes us to post on Facebook.

Perhaps, the most tragic of the modern diseases is Alzheimer's disease, where the brain shrinks as it becomes clogged by protein. This is a disease closely connected to diabetes (sometimes called type-3 diabetes). With Alzheimer's, the brain suffers a gradual loss in long-term memory, as well as in its capacity to form new memories. Sometimes, people experience mental hallucinations and delusions. In the intermediary stages, they may gradually lose their vocabulary. As the disease advances, people may suffer complete loss of speech and become unable to even perform simple tasks independently. This is a slow and painful way to die. I came across two remarkable essays  on how Alzheimer's disease affects the patients and their caregivers. You may read them at your leisure.

Even after a hundred years of intense study, there is no cure in sight for Alzheimer's. People still dream of a miracle cure, similar to Penicillin. But it is more likely that this disease will be similar to cancer, presenting many fronts on the battle. One interesting piece of information I learnt from Susan Pinker's book is that starvation in mice seems to have a protective effect against Alzheimer's disease as the mice get old. Several scientists speculate that this could be true for humans as well. Pinker also wonders if the elderly people she studied in Sardinia, who live exceptionally long lives, had a protective benefit against Alzheimer's due to starvation they suffered during the second world war. Why should starvation protect against a late onset disease like Alzheimer's ?

This got me thinking about evolutionary reasons, where people who suffered starvation during childhood may have an additional impetus to live older lives, and to keep their memory from deteriorating. I got reminded of Jared Diamond's book "The world until yesterday", where he recounts a singular case from Rennell Islands. In a different online essay, he  relates the same experience.

In 1976, I visited Rennell Island, one of the Solomon Islands, lying in the southwestern Pacific’s cyclone belt. When I asked about wild fruits and seeds that birds ate, my Rennellese informants named dozens of plant species by Rennell language names, named for each plant species all the bird and bat species that eat its fruit, and said whether the fruit is edible for people. They ranked fruits in three categories: those that people never eat; those that people regularly eat; and those that people eat only in famine times, such as after--and here I kept hearing a Rennell term initially unfamiliar to me-- the hungi kengi.  

Those words proved to be the Rennell name for the most destructive cyclone to have hit the island in living memory--apparently around 1910, based on people’s references to datable events of the European colonial administration. The hungi kengi blew down most of Rennell’s forest, destroyed gardens, and drove people to the brink of starvation. Islanders survived by eating fruits of wild plant species that were normally not eaten. But doing so required detailed knowledge about which plants are poisonous, which are not poisonous, and whether and how the poison can be removed by some technique of food preparation.  

When I began pestering my middle-aged Rennellese informants with questions about fruit edibility, I was brought into a hut. There, once my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, I saw the inevitable frail old woman. She was the last living person with direct experience of which plants were found safe and nutritious to eat after the hungi kengi, until people’s gardens began producing again. The old woman explained that she had been a child not quite of marriageable age at the time of the hungi kengi. Since my visit to Rennell was in 1976, and since the cyclone had struck 66 years before, the woman was probably in her early eighties. Her survival after the 1910 cyclone had depended on information remembered by aged survivors of the last big cyclone before the hungi kengi. Now her people’s ability to survive another cyclone would depend on her own memories, which were fortunately very detailed.  

It seems likely that starvation in childhood may activate an epigenetic pathway that prompts the body to live a longer life and to be mentally agile in old age, in order to guide younger kin to stave off hunger and danger when the need arises. This is justified from an evolutionary point of view, whether such a thing exists in the physiology of the human body is an open question. If it does, it is very likely that we can fool our bodies into activating this pathway, by fasting at the right period of our lives.

There are two problems for testing such a hypothesis. Firstly, providing a systematic review of the causes and outcomes will take a very long time : especially if human tests need to be performed, as opposed to using other mammals as proxies. Secondly, there is no money to be made by such a discovery. No pharmaceutical company will become rich by suggesting that people fast. This is the tragedy of our economy. Our society is structured in such a way that important medical advances are being stunted.

I posed this question on fasting and Alzheimer's disease only as an illustrative example. The medical field is replete with such questions. More specifically, serious questions in psychology cannot be answered easily by simple experiments. Due to the very nature of the human body and its multi-layered physiology, we need to conduct experiments on a very large scale and across large timelines. We simply do not have the scientific apparatus today to do those experiments.

Things get even more depressing when you consider economics. If medicine is concerned with the physiology of a single human body, economics ought to be concerned with the health of whole societies (and whole eco-systems). These are, by definition, even more complex systems. But the trend in economics is to argue for simple theories. Very often, these theories are not even tested. Economists suffer very much from tribal affiliations - with opposing camps refusing to engage in a common dialogue and in a common framework for scientific enquiry. In any case, posing open questions that require long-term inspection is not encouraged in this era of high-frequency trading. So what we have in economics today is a pseudo-science, disguised in a plethora of numbers.

In 1949, the Nobel prize in medicine is awarded for a surgical procedure known as "lobotomy", where the neural connections are cut between the pre-frontal cortex (dealing with rational thinking and cognitive complexity) and the central areas dealing with emotions. This was professed as a cure for mental ailments such as Schizophrenia, but later understood to be a tragic disaster. Before this understanding dawned, many patients were lobotomized and turned into vegetables. The Nobel committee realized this fiasco fairly soon, but I wonder how long it will take them to realize such blunders with the Nobel prize in economics, where entire societies have been lobotomized.

The one hope that I have for the future is that it will be possible to model large complex systems directly from the data, using advanced machine learning. These models will ultimately replace the simplistic models in medicine, psychology, human-machine interaction and economics - with more accurate predictive models. This will take time, but ultimately we will realize the follies of the current age.

A natural park for humans

Can humans live in ecological balance with robots ? Artwork by Robert Chew.

A brief history of ecological time: 

Prof. Stephen Hawking recently did a Reddit AMA, where he answered two distinct types of questions: about AI-pocalypse where an AI smarter than humans would spell the end for us, and about technological unemployment where humans lose jobs to robots and AI, that are not necessarily smarter than us in all aspects. I have previously written that the first type of questions based on AI-pocalyptic thinking are distracting. So I will ignore such issues and focus on what Prof. Hawking said on technological unemployment.

Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment), where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done?

The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Prof. Hawking's candid response ruffled a lot of feathers.  Marc Andreessen, the master venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, who created the Netscape Navigator web browser, and thus arguably created the world wide web as we know it today, has tweeted as follows.

Shorter Stephen Hawking: "For hundreds of years, people who claimed that machines reduce jobs have looked silly. But I'll be different!" 😏

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) October 9, 2015

In fact, this is a mischaracterization. Prof. Hawking was clearly arguing against greed and inequality  in capitalism, and not against the automation of work. He is not alone in questioning the current economic paradigm of liberal capitalism, driven mostly by the free movement of global financial capital. Many economists, such as Thomas Piketty in Paris, have documented the rising economic inequality of the current era. Many other economists, despite supporting the free market paradigm, are also questioning the instability and chaos wrought onto the market by modern financial innovations such as derivative trading, high frequency algorithmic trading and global financial deregulation. I have previously argued that the automation of finance is directly connected to the aggregation of data into monopolistic systems, which I termed as Octopuses. The architecture of the world wide web, as developed by Tim Berners-Lee and popularized by Marc Andreessen,  is responsible at a fundamental level for the growing monopolization of the global economy. Thus, it is the specific architecture of computer systems that we chose to develop, and not computation and automation in general, that are responsible for technological unemployment.

In this blog, I will argue that inequality and monopolization, though awful in their own terms, are actually symptoms of a deeper malaise, which is the destruction of biodiversity and ecological balance. This is a story much older than the advent of computers, or indeed, the advent of money.  It is a story as old as hundred thousand years, starting from the spread of humans outside Africa. Ever since that defining moment lost in the depths of time, we humans have systematically destroyed biodiversity on this planet, turning millions of plant and animal species extinct. The scary news is that this rate of species extinction is actually accelerating. In this long dance of death, only one species has been left unaffected - us. But for how long ?

The history of human civilization can be viewed as a long march towards peace, prosperity and health, as forcefully argued by Prof. Steven Pinker and visualized in nice graphs by Max Roser of Oxford University. Human violence has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries. People today in most parts of the world enjoy long peaceful lives in good health. This picture will only get better as  abject poverty continues to drop and medical science continues to progress. However, there are other graphs that illustrate the Anthropocene, the current geological era marked by species extinction and destruction of ecological habitats.  So where is the destiny for humans, in the first set of graphs or in the second set ? Can humans be separated from ecological interdependency that characterizes every other species on this planet ?

We humans are super-predators that kill fully grown adult animals, whereas other predators kill mostly juveniles that are still not ready to breed. Thus, we have successfully wiped out entire species by predation. We are also a highly adaptable species that survives in extremely different geographic climes - from the poles to the tropics, where we encroach onto the ecological niches of other animals and drive them to starvation. Due to our enormous brains and highly cohesive social structure, we humans are efficient virtualizers, who can simulate the behavior of other animals and outcompete them for ecological niches. When one species goes extinct, it brings down a whole network of species that co-evolved with it. Certain animal species, like rats and crows, as well as domestic animals and pets, have co-evolved with us and out-compete many other species to extinction. This aspect of virtualization of behavior gives a good hint of how robots and AI will relate to us humans. As Alan Turing has proved in the universal aspect of computation, computers can be used to simulate any type of behavior in a pristine mathematical sense. In this regard, robots will be even better than us at virtualization of behavior. So will we maintain an ecological balance with them ? Or will we be out-competed across all of our ecological niches ? This is definitely a question for ecological biology and not just for philosophy.

Oikouménē: A cartography of human habitat

Human societies typically considered themselves to be part of nature, although the modern capitalist society is an aberration from the norm. Every cultural tradition that arose in hunting-gathering or agricultural societies has been conscious of ecological limits in nature and developed norms to respect them. However, these lessons were only learnt in retrospect, after observing massive destruction of ecological habitats. Only much later were they encoded in ethics, religion and economic behavior of humans. In all of our past human history, we were able to find new habitats where the learnt lessons could be implemented - by slashing and burning more forest, by spreading across the oceans, by creating technology that enabled us to survive in harsher climes. However, the rate of our technological progress has shrunk the planet. We do not have a second planet to apply the lessons that we learn today. There will be no going back to the drawing table. Earth, the pale blue dot in the vastness of the cosmos, that supported life and shaped our evolution as humans, remains our only home. So there is an urgency to get to grips with the awesomeness of our destructive power, even if all we care for is the selfish survival of our own species.

Ancient Greeks were probably the first to seriously study the geographical habitat of where humans can survive. They termed it Oikouménē (Oikos is home in Greek). Anaximander, Aristotle and ultimately Ptolemy derived detailed maps of the earth that can be inhabited by humans. This gave birth to the disciplines of not only geography and cartography (map making), but also economy and ecology (both derive from the root word of Oikos). In fact, it is impossible to study geography in isolation to the qualitative aspects of economics and ecology. We can also argue that ecology and economics cannot be studied separately from each other, and from the limits imposed by geography. So how is it that today's field of economics is so completely devoid of geographical and ecological consciousness ? How is it that it became an esoteric quasi-religious discipline that establishes truths of its own - on market stability, growth, production etc., independent of ecological limits ? Especially in the fields of macro-economics and finance, where the decisions affect the society on a global level, this selective ignorance of ecological limits will be disastrous. There is a tendency in free market ideologues - the  school of economics that is the most influential today,  to disparage ecological limits altogether as inconsequential,  and subscribe to a belief in the miracles of technology to produce more with less. Green revolution, that expanded agricultural yields, is often cited as proof. But agricultural yields increased only because of concerted scientific investment and technological development after noticing and accepting a severe threat; not by ignoring the ecological limits altogether and not by performing laissez-faire capitalism.

Ptolemy's map of the Oikoumené, reconstructed from the description in his book "Geography". 

Today, we have the serious threat of climate change due to the incessant burning of fossil fuels. Despite the clear evidence that we need a moratorium on fossil fuels (vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas should be left forever buried under the ground),  we keep funding the exploration of new fossil fuels. Our entire economy is deeply enmeshed with the financial interests of oil and natural gas. The network of financial capital, enabled by a loose regulatory framework on a global level, obscures these interests through several layers of virtualization of capital.  In fact, it is impossible to fix any single ecological issue without fixing the rut in financial capital, and the algorithms and computers that enable them.  It is important to note that climate change is not the only ecological threat facing us as humans. There are several planetary boundaries that have been identified, with varying degrees of precision by environmental scientists. However, unlike ancient Greeks, we ignore them completely in our study of economics and Oikouménē.

Planetary boundaries for survival of humans, more information is available in the book "The God Species" by Mark Lynas.  

The economic situation today is so absurd that it should put to rest any ideas that humans are under conscious control, either politically or economically, on our planet. Great wars are being waged today between nuclear armed countries, to secure the mines and distribution pipelines of fossil fuels. Vast populations are being bombarded and displaced geographically. The developed economies of the west are completely clueless about where to invest financially, so as to fund health insurance and  secure the retirement benefits of aging citizens.  Periodic booms and busts of real estate and related non-productive sectors are happening with increasing frequency. On the other hand, vast sections of developing economies are suffering from high unemployment and poor education, especially of the youth. Everybody is terrorized by the whimsies of capital flight, that can happen at the drop of a hat. It is important to note that there is no conscious human agency, either benevolent or malevolent, at the crux of these economic disasters. On the other hand, these faults are systemic - similar to the fractures and creases in a dam that will inevitably result in flooding. But unlike physical fractures, fixing economic fractures is not easy. We are up against the tangle of systemic interests that are deeply enmeshed, and operated today by computer algorithms. Many of these algorithms are closed source, either because they are part of secretive operating procedures of companies and financial institutions, or because they belong to governments but are hidden underneath legal jargon and diplomatic channels. Increasingly, the algorithms that make up a government are being rendered invisible using secret courts (such as the FISA court of USA) or trans-continental business partnerships that are not accountable to any country's law.

There is an important United Nations conference on Climate Change in Paris next month, to achieve a legally binding resolution on all countries to limit the burning of fossil fuels. But hopes are low everywhere. At the global level, the architecture of economic and political systems is so rotten that any agreement that is achieved then will be immediately violated, in spirit if not in letter. So if we are not able to fix the problems at a global level, what can we do to ensure an Oikouménē for the future generations of humanity ?

A natural park for humans 

Yellowstone national park: the first national park in the world 

The answer to this question might be what American novelist Wallace Stegner called the best invention of USA.

"National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."

In 1871, an American geologist named Ferdinand Heyden has achieved the status of a National Park for the Yellowstone region, after feverishly campaigning for several years. He argued that if the federal government fails to protect the territory, nothing will remain of this beautiful landscape.

"The vandals who are now waiting to enter into this wonder-land, will in a single season despoil, beyond recovery, these remarkable curiosities, which have requited all the cunning skill of nature thousands of years to prepare."

The Yellowstone national park gave birth to a widespread movement all over the world, where large tracts of land were set aside by the governments, where sensitive natural ecological balance is maintained and spared from human interference.  It is crucial to note that the value assigned for these national parks is not human monetary benefit, but a spiritual value in letting nature be for nature's sake. It is a value that cannot be measured in human currency of whatever make.

From the very beginning, the involvement of humans in a national park has been up for debate and riddled with racist and classist overtones. Traditional people, such as hunter-gatherer tribes, have long been living in natural landscapes by maintaining ecological balance. With whatever tools and technologies under their employ, they have learnt to curtail their tendencies of greed and over-exploitation of nature, by learning the lessons the hard way over generations. Now as their lands and livelihoods became federal property, they were displaced and succumbed to living in despair under tribal reservations. In many cases, their languages and cultural lore became extinct, as it was devoid of the essence of living in their  natural environment. This specter of cultural extinction is a constant throughout human history and it is accelerating today, just like the parallel rate of biological species extinction.

If we widen the definition of cultural extinction to include the extinction of professions and regular daily routines of people, the story will get much worse. Over the course of civilization, humans have specialized into varied professions based on the specifics of local geography and the availability of economic resources. Often these professions existed for centuries and over generations, thereby crystallizing into a cultural lore on how to lead a happy life in the society. Even today, people who lead long and happy lives invariably live in socially cohesive village societies, whose support is as essential in old age as medicines invented by science. However, in the last couple of centuries, this idyll of village life is getting eroded as many professions disappeared and people were forced to migrate in search of transient opportunities. With automation and robotics, these professions have become even more transient, requiring a nomadic existence where the daily routine will never gets crystallized into a precise set of norms. This constant disruption of routine (and the threat of unemployment) will produce anxiety, to which our species has not been prepared by evolution, even with our large brains and adaptable societies.

So why is it that we refuse to cast humans as deserving of ecological protection, just as trees and animals in a natural park ? We can answer this question in two distinct ways. I believe one answer will lead us to racism and narrow-minded ness, whereas the other answer will lead us to compassion and happiness.

The first answer is centered on "us", trying to protect our specific professions and lifestyles. We can do this by framing laws and closing borders, even as we ignore the plight of other humans and other animals. This is the impetus of conservative politics, that I do not support, even as I understand the anxiety and tensions behind them.  Essentially, conservative politics is blind to a paradox: if we claim protection on the basis of ecological grounds, how can we ignore the plight of other animals and humans ? Are they not as essential as us for maintaining the ecological balance ?

The second answer is centered on "them", trying to protect the specific professions and lifestyles of other humans. This needs to be done beyond any monetary value for justification. When we create a national park, we do not try to measure the value of nature in a human currency, but associate a greater "spiritual" or "ecological" value for the mere existence of nature in balance. Similarly, when we try to protect the professions and lifestyles of other humans, we need to protect them for their own sake. Can we humans be grand enough to overcome selfish greed and protect other humans and animals ? Can we be vigilant enough to protect the ecological balance of other humans and animals, even if we get nothing in return ? Indeed, there is one direct benefit with this type of thinking: compassion leads to happiness.

We can start with cases that urgently need help: traditional people living in subsistence lifestyles throughout the world are under threat. Their lands are being encroached by mining corporations, loggers or livestock farmers. They suffer high rates of sexual and criminal violence. Can we sacrifice something to protect their traditional lifestyle even if we do not share their ethics or morals ?   Can we preserve their languages ? We can then widen this net of compassion for marginal groups of people that live within our own society: sexual minorities, drug addicts, undocumented immigrants. Can we sacrifice something to preserve this lifestyle of others, even if we do not agree with this lifestyle and do not believe in a common destiny with them ?


Raising an AI with good parenting

These questions are not mere philosophical nuisance. These are practical steps to preserve our own Oikouménē, as it comes under threat by robots and AI.  BBC has recently interviewed economists Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAffee, where they gave advice to readers on which jobs will be hard to be replaced by AI (and thus relatively stable). This line of thinking is too deterministic and focussed on the current moment. In fact, trying not to be replaced by a robot is a race that gives no pleasure to any human, as the robots will eventually catch up. If we are bound to run this race, we are definitely screwed.

Most people think of robots as alien beings. Even people who believe in the eventuality of strong AI -  i.e, an emergent artificial consciousness similar to human consciousness, still imagine this AI to be devoid of  any ecological connections to the environment.  Essentially, this is indicative of how desensitized they themselves are, as humans, from the environment. I found it illuminating to think about this aspect in popular movies and books. How many animals have we seen in the Matrix trilogy of movies ? It is as if the entire movie happens in an ecological vacuum consisting of humans and robots, without any other biological life. In general, how much of wildlife do we see in any movie or books about AI ? Isn't it absurd that any AI that comes out of this planet will be disconnected to the ecological niches on this planet ?  If we as humans create good ecological niches that require compassion, any AI that comes to occupy these niches will be compassionate to us. On the other hand, if we create ecological niches that blindly optimize for selfish greed, we cannot guarantee that the interests of AI will be aligned with those of us humans.

Dylan Evans, a British cognitive scientist,  said in a radio interview recently that two things seem to happen to people working on intelligent systems. They either become ecstatic believers of a rapture-like moment, where AI will solve all our problems, or they become paranoid about the terrible enslavement of humanity by a super-complex system.  Bill Joy, the creator of the Java programming language, was the first one I knew of who flipped. Dylan Evans himself flipped to apocalyptic thinking a few years ago. The problem with either ecstatic or apocalyptic mental states is that it is hard to think rationally and reasonably. I believe that having an ecological mindset will help computer scientists to cultivate more nuanced opinions about AI.

I will end this blog on a personal note. I recently attended a brilliant talk by Prof. Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), on how to raise a machine.  This happened at an event celebrating 25 years of Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where I am an alumnus. But I am also an alumnus of CMU, where I was a visiting student twelve years ago. When I was at CMU, Prof. Mitchell's course on machine learning was over-registered and the lecture halls were always filled to capacity. So I was not able to take his course, although I sneaked into some of his lectures. At that time, he just finished an introductory text book on machine learning. The field has advanced greatly in the last ten years, so it was a great opportunity for me to hear from Prof. Mitchell what he thought of the progress. He spoke of the paradigm of function approximation and optimization that achieved the greatest success in machine learning in recent years. But he admitted that this was also something of a disappointment. He recalled a conversation with his mother, where he was trying to explain what machine learning means, when she said

I know about learning. I raised you. 

This is a great analogy. Human children learn about a lot of things (a lot of functions to approximate), and they learn how to learn. Raising a machine needs to be done in a similar fashion. With this as inspiration, Prof. Mitchell created NELL (never ending language learner) - a machine that is never shut down and  that has been trying to build a conceptual model (ontology) of the world, by learning over several years from the web.  This is the closest I am aware of, to an AI that is capable of reaching human-level consciousness, even as it stands extremely far from this goal.  As we see, such a machine needs to be "raised", from examples and good parenting. If we humans create awful examples - by exterminating our ancestors, by destroying eco-systems, by eliminating rivals without compassion - we should not complain if our children (AI) will do the same to us.

Can virtual reality lead us to a virtuous reality ?

Prisoners in a cave seeing shadows on the wall 

Since time immemorial, virtual reality had been a narrative tool for debating philosophical concepts. The brain in a vat, colorfully visualized in the Matrix movies, had been a point of debate before the advent of computers, and even before the advent of writing. The fundamental virtual reality is man's conception of the world in his own mind, which exists even before there is any technology to reproduce it in any form. These debates have produced a rich lore of cultural and philosophical ideas. But today, even as we stand extremely close to implementing virtual reality through technology, we are cut off from these debates about deeper questions, such as how to lead a virtuous life. The Greek philosopher Plato relates a dialogue between the teacher Socrates and his disciple Phaedrus on the virtues of writing. In this, Socrates criticizes the technology of writing for creating false expectations and for corrupting the memory of humans. I think we today need such a critical dialogue on virtual reality, which may be the next great medium for human communication. Before I present arguments for and against virtual reality, I will give a short introduction to the philosophical context.

Plato's cave and Vishnu's dream:  

Plato used the allegory of prisoners trapped in a cave, in order to discuss various political systems in his opus 'Republic'.  These prisoners see shadows of objects projected onto a wall, as lit by a fire which they never see. To them, these shadows represent the entire gamut of reality, and they cannot conceive of a three dimensional object illuminated by natural light. One of the prisoners escapes the cave and sees the world outside, as well as the bright sun illuminating everything. In the beginning, his eyes are unable to take in this light, but gradually he understands the world for what it is. He returns to the cave to explain his findings to the others, but he is unable to find the words to tell them. Further, as he comes back, he finds his eyesight has become incapable of distinguishing the faint shadows on the wall. The prisoners deduce that going out of the cave is terrible, as that would destroy the eyesight. Thus, the prisoners are held in the cave by the captors without the use of force. Some of them need to be restrained by chains, as the person who escaped the cave unnoticed, but the others are there by their own choice. In Plato's narrative, the captors are the people in power - the guardians of the republic. His work discusses different forms of government and their relative virtues. This allegory of the cave is brilliantly rephrased in Emir Kusturica's film 'Underground'. In computer graphics, one of the first immersive virtual environments to have been developed, by Thomas DeFanti and colleagues, was called CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, following the fashion of recursive acronyms that computer scientists like) in reference to Plato.

Two important questions unanswered in the allegory of Plato's cave are how would a prisoner realize that he is imprisoned, and how could he escape. The allegory hits the limit of its narrative potential before answering them. In Indian mythology, I am aware of a few allegories that discuss these questions. Unlike Greek mythology, Indian mythology visualizes the world as an onion, with many layers of virtualness - internal personal world, external social world, outer cosmic world and so on - each of which held in place by the actions of gods. The gods can be thought of as subconscious mental processes, who are not always visible to the conscious mind, but visible when inspected with care. These gods can be understood in a hierarchy, with higher gods referring to more subtle processes that drive the simpler ones. When confronted with the illusion of virtualness that is preventing the conscious mind from seeing the true nature of reality, it can either react angrily demanding the destruction of this illusion, or react in mirth smiling at the illusion and going along with the play of it. These two choices refer to the nature of two principal god-heads in Hindu religion: Shiva and Vishnu respectively. There can be many other choices spanning the spectrum between the two. The formal theory of aesthetics and artistic expression in India, known as 'Rasa', specifies 9 different principal emotions, with different gods commanding the different emotions. For understanding virtual reality, it is illuminating to discuss the mythology of Vishnu. Here, the world is understood as the dream of Vishnu. Over the passage of time, the world becomes more complex as well as more repressive and unjust. It is then that Vishnu enters the world in his own dream as a conscious actor known as an 'avatar', helping the right win over the wrong. Thus, an 'avatar' is an automatic process in the virtual world, that appears whenever the world becomes too unjust. From the perspective of a person living in the virtual world, escaping the illusion means realizing that he is one and the same as the dreamer of this illusion, and doing actions in this world that are just and righteous, similar to what an avatar would do. Currently, the word 'virtual avatar' has taken quite a different meaning - to refer to a simple participant obeying the rules of the game in the virtual world.

Digital, cyber and virtual: 

What is a virtual world ? Do newspapers and television media count as virtual worlds ? Can we consider early internet bulletin boards and social forums as virtual worlds ? What about social media - websites such as Facebook or Twitter ?  What about head-mounted displays such as Oculus Rift or Microsoft Hololens ? I think they are all virtual worlds in some sense, with each technological evolution getting us closer to the ultimate virtual reality. In the 1970s and 80s, the popular adjective was 'digital', which referred to Shannon's information theory that helps us represent any natural signal or phenomenon as digital information. Later on, in the late 80s and early 90s, especially during the rise of the internet, the popular adjective was 'cyber', which originated from Wiener's theory of cybernetics (coming from the Greek root word meaning 'to navigate'), that presented a way to understand human beings as part of a larger technological (or social) system. Personally, I like the words 'cyberspace' and 'cybermedia', as they actively invoke human participation in the technological system. Both these words are slowly going out of fashion. The word 'virtual reality' was invented by Jaron Lanier, another great hero of mine. By this, he meant a world that is 'virtually indistinguishable', for all intents and purposes, from the real world. So the intents and purposes are very important in understanding how close we got to virtual reality. If our intents and purposes in life are just to be passive consumers,  then we are already very close to virtual reality. But I hope that we have deeper desires and dreams. Nowadays, Lanier likes to use the phrase 'being an avatar', to refer to the virtual reality suits that he developed in his pioneering company VPL.  By this phrase, Lanier refers to fully using the body (hands, fingers etc.) and holding active human agency while navigating the virtual world. The popular media today uses virtual reality (often condensed as VR) to mean head-mounted displays like Oculus Rift, which currently do not even feature any controls for the hands. This is a dramatic reduction in scope for the phrase 'virtually indistinguishable from the real world'. It is far easier to build a virtual world where the user watches passively or has very limited set of controls. But these limitations of user-interface are a form of slavery and repression. Unfortunately, most people do not realize them to be so, until they are completely engulfed in the virtual world and cannot escape. In this blog, I will try to elaborate on these issues. I will use the word virtual reality (VR) how Lanier has meant it. Digital media, cyberspace, social media and immersive media can all be considered as partial fulfillments of VR.

What is a virtuous life ?

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin, impatience. Because of impatience we are driven out of paradise. Because of impatience we cannot return. - Franz Kafka 

Every religion has a list of cardinal sins and virtues and devises a scheme to optimize the personal time and resources of its followers, towards achieving these virtues. Kafka has tried to condense all the sins into a single sin of impatience. Going by his opinion, cultivating a lot of patience may be a good virtue, something I am not sure the internet encourages. I find it absolutely stunning that none of the world religions have issued any dictates (yet) on how their followers should spend their time on the internet. For example, religions that value internal reflection and meditation, such as Buddhism, do not prohibit their followers from using Twitter, which inundates the user's attention with a hodge-podge of unrelated tweets and messages. Checking Facebook or Twitter is probably the opposite of meditation, but even the Dalai Lama uses Twitter. I wonder how Buddha (or Mohammed, or Jesus) himself would have evaluated different web sites and services today. I suspect not many would be to his liking.  Personally, I am not religious and do not have an elaborate philosophy on what one should do in life. I will keep it simple. In life, we can try to maximize money, knowledge, power, or reputation. Depending on what we try to maximize, leading a virtuous life may mean different things. But what is the point of doing any of that if we are doing it alone by ourselves ? What will be the value we are getting from all the other people and beings in nature ? So I think leading a virtuous life means cultivating deep friendships. It is on this premise that I will discuss whether virtual reality can lead us to a virtuous life i.e, whether it can lead us to deep and fulfilling friendships. 

Arguments against Virtual Reality:

1) VR will imprison humans into isolated sensory bubbles. 

Most people today are already hooked to their mobile phones. It is not uncommon to see a family spending time together, but each of them typing furiously into their smartphones. This will only get worse in the future with immersive displays. But people may not even be seeing the same world anymore. This is apparent on the websites which collect massive amounts of user data and offer tailor-made services that better fit to the user profiles. By using services like Google, Facebook or Amazon, users might be getting a very biased view of the world. In the future, we can expect these virtual services to encroach into  real world spaces using augmented reality. An empty billboard or a QR-code might be replaced by user-specific visual information. Noise-cancelling headphones might be equipped with computer chips that filter out specific audio patterns and add other context-specific information. In this scenario, can we still say that we share a common world ?

2) VR will destroy our privacy. 

We are already living in an age of huge data trawling, where government spying agencies and corporate services are collecting every single byte of data that comes out of everybody, similar to how large fishing ships trawl the ocean-floor sweeping the entire marine life into extinction.  The most important effect of this massive data collection is that the spying agencies are able to model not only our conscious actions, but also our sub-conscious, to a degree that we are not even aware of. This dramatically reduces the amount of freedom that we can have as free citizens in a republic. Firstly, the vast majority of people voluntarily silence themselves, avoiding behavior patterns that may be construed by the others as problematic. Secondly, even the few who are noisy and adventurous will not be aware of how deeply their choices of action are restricted. With VR, every single sensory input that comes into the window of the user's perception can be spied upon. With sensors attached to the user's body, many subtle readings about temperature and electro-chemical activity in the body can be spied upon, without the user even being conscious of it. Unlike the philosopher kings favored by Plato and Socrates, the powers that spy on us and make decisions about us will be computer programs that have extreme prejudice and zero wisdom. This is a recipe for death and stagnation of our society and culture. 

3) VR will destroy intimacy with the physicality of the real world. 

The problem with VR is that it doesn't have to be very good (virtually indistinguishable from the real world) in order to monopolize 100% of our attention. At present, VR technology cannot handle touch, taste and smell, even though our body has fine-scale touch, taste and smell receptors. Touch may be the most fundamental of all our senses. It is known that babies who lack a loving touch in their early infancy will suffer from serious developmental problems. Our brains are highly adaptable organs and are constantly rewiring themselves to  cater to the various sensory processing needs. If we spend more time in VR, the sensory information that is still incapable of being reproduced by technology will lose out in our brains. It is known that children who spend a lot of time indoors, reading books in a dim light, will develop myopia. Similarly, people spending time looking at computer screens or head-mounted displays will have their visual receptors compromised. One of the problems with current VR displays is that they don't offer accommodation cues, this creates a type of nausea in people. But with repeated use, the users' brains will adapt and rewire themselves. Similar losses can happen with other senses such as proprioception and balance. Our bodies' multiple senses and motor activation are coupled. Hearing affects smell, touch affects vision and so on. These important cross-sensory couplings will be damaged by the use of VR. It is possible that existing digital technologies may have already massively rewired our brains. 

4) VR will destroy a continuous sense of time. 

When sensory information can be modulated and controlled in VR, it can also be presented in an achronistic manner i.e, different events that happen together in time can be presented at different times to the user. This is already the case when we read news or twitter-feeds. Due to information overload, the computer will make decisions for us on where to prioritize our attention. Depending on the type of digital services we use (whether we pay for them or advertisers pay for them), these decisions may not even be in our best interests. Our brains have evolved to modulate their attention to process different events in time. The notion of internal mental time is fundamental to our cognitive skills. When this is destroyed or usurped by a computer, we become incapacitated in responding to our social and emotional priorities. For example, a friend or a family member might need our attention at a specific point in time, but we may not be available to them immediately. Essentially with VR, in addition to isolated data bubbles, we may also be living in isolated temporal bubbles.

5) VR will inhibit sacrifice and charity. 

It is known to psychologists that people value a virtual sacrifice in a very similar way to a real sacrifice involving their time or money. For example, after users like the Facebook page of a cause, they are seen to be donating less actual money to the very same cause. This will be a problem if the users have to allocate a limited budget of time and resources to a set of real world people and causes. They will be unable to make these decisions in a conscious manner, without a clear accounting of how their virtual time and money is transferred to their real time and money. Thus, they might be fooled into thinking that they sacrificed something to the virtual persona of a friend, while their real friend is left cold and dry. This is currently the case for people subscribing to music services like Spotify or Apple Music. It is not clear how much the artists profit from the involvement of the users. With further virtualization, these channels of communication will become more opaque.

6) VR will become a hate-amplifying machine. 

We are currently living in the golden age of internet shaming.  Gossip is a fundamental means of human communication. In fact, our very language may have evolved as a means of social gossip. We gossip primarily about other people, especially if we perceive the others to be cheating or doing something bad. This is a human tendency that has evolved to maintain social cohesion, when we were living in small groups. But now on the internet, this has become a source of massive social witch-hunts, where a negative message is amplified by a vast social horde in a matter of seconds. People feeling self-righteous and vindicated rush in to destroy the supposed culprit for whatever perceived offense (which is often incorrectly perceived, because of the lack of context). Women and young girls, as well as sexual minorities, are typically the target of this hate-amplifying machine of social media. I dread what new types of shaming await us in VR. People have greater propensity to behave nastily in certain social conditions, which may be unwittingly recreated in the virtual world. Anonymity breeds asocial behavior. Impatience leads to frustration and anger. Stripping things out of their context and presenting them in isolated chunks lead to quick judgmental behavior. In fact, peaceful and empathic behavior is the result of slow processes in the brain, that need a long time to consolidate memories and ideas in the prefrontal cortex. Instinctive behavior is typically the result of the so-called reptilian brains, which are responsible for fight-or-flight decisions. It is easier to design a virtual world that engages the instinctive behavior patterns of people, but which ultimately leads to a hate-amplifying machine.  

6) VR will destroy cultural diversity.  

In nature, there is a give and take relationship between different species in an ecosystem. Different species find ecological niches to cater to specific needs and adapt to the others in their surroundings. Due to biodiversity, even if the competition in nature is intense, every plant and animal has the possibility for specialization. This creates a virtuous feedback loop, with greater biodiversity bringing even more opportunities. However, we human beings don't like biodiversity. We have been singularly responsible for the most dramatic biodiversity loss in recent ecological times. We are by far the most adaptable species on the planet, and we eat into many ecological niches that have been historically filled by other animals. Understanding this is important, because the current technological evolution through the internet is nothing but an extension of our own biological evolution. With internet and virtual reality, there is limited possibility for building cultural ecological niches. When everything becomes convertible to digital information openly tradable on the internet, network effects dictate that only few actors will remain. This will be the death for a vast number of human cultural offshoots.

7) VR will create social pressures for confirmative bias. 

When we humans are conscious that we are being watched, especially by people in power, our behavior changes dramatically. We not only avoid talking about unusual opinions, but also actively look to the crowd to spot patterns of majority behavior and confirm to them. This is particularly true in moments of uncertainty and crisis. With VR, the social pressures for confirmation will be far greater, as we will be watched not only for our speech but also for our body language and subconscious thoughts.

8) VR will create a mistaken notion of beauty and happiness in the world. 

With VR, we all have the possibility to maintain a clean persona, something that removes all of our warts and unique idiosyncrasies. Most people will use this opportunity to showcase an idealistic version of themselves. We can already see this today on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. With virtual reality, we may have virtual humans that are impossibly good-looking and cleverer than any real person. Natural processes of aging, getting fat, or making socially inappropriate mistakes will be profiled and corrected in the virtual persona. Good friends are like mirrors to our true selves, and when we can successfully hide our true selves, we can never make any true friends.

9) VR will create a pseudo-flat world where anybody can speak, but nobody will listen. 

One of the greatest hopes about the internet was that it would flatten all the hierarchies of power and enable anybody with an idea to come forward and share it with the others. In reality, this flatness on the network has resulted in a rapid monopolization of user attention. Established news outlets, commercial agencies and celebrities keep getting attention, but it is still extremely hard for novices to find an audience. The social rewards  on the network tend to follow a power law distribution, with a very long tail. With VR, when all the senses are controlled by technological gadgetry on an individual user specific manner, it will be even harder to have an ambient social space, where it is possible to bump into new artists and cultivate new tastes. In due time, people will stop publishing and expressing themselves creatively or emotionally. This will be particularly true for elderly people who will suffer from an even greater sense of isolation.

10) VR will pit the living against the dead. 

Through VR, it is possible to reanimate dead actors and celebrities. Unlike living people, who need to support themselves physically for food and shelter, the dead have no such obligations. Consequently, the media created by dead actors and artists, which are managed by their estates, will be able to out-sell the living artists and actors. Thus, the living artists, even those who are extremely talented and who would normally fall under the 1% who succeed in a long-tail distribution, may not find any audience at all. This is extremely discouraging and most people will not even bother expressing anything. Instead, a combination of dead artists and computer programs will control the attention of people. Nothing is more horrific than living people having a relationship with dead people in VR. This is a scary thought that I had in 2003 and this spurred me to write the very first post in this blog.

Arguments for Virtual Reality:

1) VR will become an empathy machine, helping us understand the perspectives of the others. 

VR can be used to record the entire world as seen from a person's eyes, and thus, it offers the possibility to crawl into her skin and step into her shoes. This will give us an opportunity to see the world from the perspective of a child, a woman, a transgender person, a refugee etc. This will help us build a greater awareness of the terrors of famine, war and poverty. Recently, a movie shot with a panoramic camera rig inside a  Syrian refugee camp has been made for the Oculus Rift. How do we ensure that such media will keep getting made and keep catching the attention of people ? I don't think it is straightforward that using VR will make us more empathic, but it definitely has a potential.

2) VR has infinite space for everyone. This reduces tensions for space and ownership. 

Most disputes we have in the real world are due to limited space and property. In VR, every human being can be provided with an infinite estate of space and property. This abundance will reduce the potential for conflict. But we should not be fooled into thinking that everything will be abundant. Human attention will remain scarce, so this will become a sacred resource that will be hoarded. Even if the users are not completely pulled into the virtual world, virtualization of real resources such as houses and cars can increase space. This is the principle behind the so-called sharing economy. But the current economic models of virtualization of resources, as visible in websites such as Uber and Airbnb, do not actually encourage sharing. Instead, they are a form of monopolization of resources and labour. Unless it is the users themselves who are sharing virtual resources (or virtualizations of real resources) in a peer-to-peer manner, without anybody being the middle-man and hoarding data,  the benefits of increased space will not be felt. This is because, from the narrow perspective of the middle-man, scarcity is more profitable than abundance. 

3) VR can accommodate minority languages and cultures, alternative narratives of history. 

Human history is a series of genocides and mass extinctions. Many cultures have disappeared over the tide of time. This process of cultural extinction is ongoing, many human languages today are at the risk of extinction. This is particularly true of poor countries and traditional societies in tribal organizations. If you are a member of a minority language or group, what obligation do you have to preserve this language ? Would you not be reducing your potential opportunities by not learning the majority language and picking up the majority-approved skills for taking up a job ? These are questions that many human beings are facing today. But with VR, it is possible for us to create virtual worlds with alternative narratives of history, where everybody speaks a different language or participates in a different culture. It will be possible for individuals to check in into these virtual worlds to pick up their lost crafts and languages.

4) VR can build a new powerful language to reason about the world, our past history and motivations.   

When we can record our past in intimate detail, we can reason about it in a scientific manner. When we face a tough choice or decision, for example, on a large investment of money, it will be possible to systematically evaluate all the possible alternatives and tally them with our motivations. This is a tool that is currently available only to large corporations with huge data repositories. With VR, it will be possible for individual human beings to reason about their world experiences in a data-driven manner.  Each human being will potentially develop his own personal language of visualization.

5) VR helps connect friends and family with people at a distance or with a physical handicap. 

Communication technologies have already made it possible for us to talk to distant friends and relatives. With VR, it will be possible to share personal spaces and directly be in their presence. People with a physical handicap will also find it beneficial to communicate through VR than in the real world. It will be possible to walk or move their limbs in a manner that suits to their own personal expression than how they are limited by the handicap. People with extreme handicaps such as motor-neuron diseases, can also benefit from computerized input to interact naturally in VR.

6) VR can help overcome prejudice, we can take up avatars that neutralize our bias on gender, race etc.

We all suffer from a set of prejudices and biases owing to our cultural upbringing. For example, people listen to men more attentively than to women. People also have stronger bias against a woman speaking in a strong and forthcoming manner. Most often, these biases are subconscious, even if we do not admit them consciously. With VR, it will be possible to train us to overcome these biases. It will be possible to assign a common gender or race  for all the participants in a virtual discussion room. Important decisions on politics, economics or ethics can be taken by separating the physical charisma of the speaker from the actual comport of his speech.

7) VR can help us imagine counterfactuals, understand opportunity costs of actions, and  plan large development projects.

Little children spend a lot of time making up fantasy worlds. This is now accepted in child psychology as an important process of growing up, as they construct elaborate models of alternative possibilities known as counterfactuals. Even after we grow up as adults, we require a strong imaginative capacity to reason about counterfactuals in order to build elaborate plans. VR will provide a powerful tool to reason about counterfactuals. For example, if we are planning a large development project, we can visualize it in VR before we commence the construction. We can undertake democratic debate where different participants design alternative possibilities of this project and finer details are discussed. It will be possible to run complex simulations of the project, understand the opportunity costs with respect to the alternatives and continuously improve the design.

8) VR can help overcome deficiencies of sensory perception by modulating and amplifying input.

We are extremely limited in our sensory perception by a narrow band of visual spectrum and auditory bandwidth. We are even more limited in our sense of smell. Further, our vision is  limited by opaque objects and occlusions. Most importantly, we do not see many aspects of the real world, because contextual knowledge plays a key role in how we focus our attention. With VR, we will be able to modulate sensory input, recognize important objects and activities and direct user attention to them by amplifying certain aspects of the input. For example, a doctor will be able to visualize the inner physiology of a patient. An electric technician will be able to visualize the corona around a high tension electric cable. A student of paleontology will be able to visualize an extinct species of animals while studying their bones and fossils. Further, it will be possible to combine multiple sensory inputs and translate them from one modality to another. Completely new signals that are aggregated from large data sets, such as the results of a complex physics experiment or activity on the stock market, can be directly fed into one of the sensory modalities in VR.

9) VR can help us appreciate the natural world and preserve it better. 

With VR, we will be able to visualize the natural world and be in presence of magnificent animals and ecosystems. This active sense of presence is important for many people to help appreciate the wonders of the natural world and thus politically organize to better preserve them. At present, VR is limited in outdoor capture of wild ecosystems, but this is changing very rapidly. It will be possible in the future to appreciate the wonders of coral reefs or deep ocean beds, without actually setting foot on them. This will also help preserve these sensitive ecosystems from tourism.

10) VR can integrate multiple human inputs into one grand social brain. 

One of the grand dreams of the internet was that it would help us integrate multiple human expertises into a grand social brain. Unfortunately, instead of bringing out the best in each of us, it has often reduced us to the least common denominator. However, this race to the bottom is not a given. It is possible that VR will help us overcome our prejudices and limitations, and accept the worthiness of the viewpoints of the others. It may even bring in a more effective democracy. It is still early days, so we can keep hoping for the best.


Drugs, obesity and cyberspace:

There is a strong interrelated history between drugs-based counterculture and internet technologies. Many of the pioneers in computing technologies were libertarians who had strong sympathies for the use of drugs. In fact, many of them were inspired by the mind expanding visions offered by psychadelic drugs. Some of these drugs offered the possibility to closely inspect mental processes, and thus push computing technologies towards an expansion of ordinary mental capacities. When people repeatedly use their computers or internet services, they do not understand that they are actively changing their brains. But this is what they are doing.  Jaron Lanier has thought of virtual reality as a "possibility for exploring alternative states of consciousness", such as what traditional shamans do while they enter the bodies of eagles or jaguars in their dreams. Lanier felt that western culture has become too rationalistic and lost a key opportunity for imagining alternative states of being, which is what virtual reality may have to offer. 

Unfortunately, when computing pioneers start developing their technologies, they will have unrealistically high expectations of the common users. Even in the height of the drugs craze in the 1970s, many people did not take psychadelics like LSD. They may offer opportunities for mental introspection and expansion, but most people are scared by the powerful hallucinations. Instead, most people want to take simple and addictive drugs that make them feel good. Psychedelics like LSD are not addictive, where as tobacco, alcohol (or heroin or cocaine) are highly addictive. Most people forget that sugar is also a drug and that excessive sugar consumption is highly addictive. The market ultimately trains the people to get hooked onto these simple drugs like sugar and alcohol, because the resultant behavioral patterns of users are predictable. In essence, people become converted into pigs in a feeding lot,  mindlessly consuming whatever the market dumps in front of them. A global epidemic of obesity is now raging due to this massive mismanagement of these economic imperatives. 

My engagement with internet services today: 

With digital technologies and virtual reality, we are facing a similar situation as in the food market. Large monopolies on the internet, such as Google or Facebook, like us to be pigs consuming information, getting hooked on the dopamine rush of sugar-like elements, such as social acknowledgement or instant gratification. So we are potentially sleepwalking into a nightmare of virtual reality, instead of a possible paradise. What can we do ? Personally, I am training myself not to get hooked on social networks like Facebook. I will never offer social acknowledgement (likes or positive comments) when my friends are sharing personal moments on Facebook, as I do not want to be complicit in them getting hooked to such services. I do not offer a public comment to anybody on Facebook unless it is something I believe to be an unusual or rather controversial opinion. On Twitter, I have a different strategy, which is to avoid participating in witch-hunts. I try there to never say a negative word or message on any person. I find managing Google services to be the hardest. I still haven't figured out a strategy for this, apart from trying to hide some of my data in places where Google cannot reach yet.  The same is true for any other big company almost working like a monopoly: Amazon (e-commerce), Apple (smartphones) etc. It is better to encourage smaller alternative companies, even though their business model is exactly the same.  I try to encourage local producers and companies, closer to the geographic area where I am staying, because this also makes political engagement possible. But these are all short-term strategies. In the long term, we need to find a more sustainable model for humanistic digital services, on a global level. 

Love and slavery:

There is a great passage in the novel 'Beloved' by Toni Morrison. The male character Paul D, who used to be a slave, ruminates over the nature of love.

So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Glass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. ....

For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back or shoved it into a croaker sack, well, may be you'd have a little love left for the next one. 

These are heart-breaking passages, and the novelist really captures the essence of slavery in this abject giving up on love. But in the very same novel, the female character Sethe says. 

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. 

I think digital slavery through virtual reality is not as terrible as physical slavery. But if we build a tyrannical virtual world, its effects on the human imagination will be equally dismal. Essentially, what we are shaping today are the loves and dreams of future generations. 

Language and slavery: 

When I look at the positives and negative aspects of virtual reality, one common issue stands out - the agency of human users to navigate virtual worlds and create virtual worlds by themselves. At present, virtual worlds (and computing services in general) are opaque to most users. We humans are used to the communication medium of language, which gives us ample opportunities to express ourselves. Even novice speakers can express basic emotions through language, while expert speakers can formulate long and precise arguments. Most people are not aware of it, but language also binds us in chains, preventing the easy germination of certain thoughts and ideas. This is why speaking multiple languages becomes a key cognitive skill that helps us understand the limits of linguistic expression.

With virtual reality, we need a mode of interaction that is similar to language. We are currently far from this, but developing such a language was the original goal of personal computing pioneer Alan Kay. He was instrumental in developing the object oriented language paradigm through Smalltalk, which he hoped would be accessible to young children in schools. Building a framework of computational thinking by virtual reality will be a new medium of human communication.  When today's children grow up speaking in such a medium, they will have greater thoughts and dreams than we can even imagine. If we build it right, it will become a powerful tool for human expression. If not, it will be an instrument of human slavery. Children who grow up being used to virtual slavery will accept real world tyranny.  This is something we should protect them from. The key developer of Smalltalk, Dan Ingalls, has a precious quote about the nature of computing languages.

An operating system is the collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one. 

In fact, with virtual reality, we are currently building tyrannical operating systems, but extremely poor languages for user expression.  This needs to be reversed, until we gradually eliminate the operating system itself.

I would like to leave the readers with the art work of Alex Grey, known as "Net of being". Here, the artist is expressing the subconscious mental state of our society, the dreamer Vishnu, in whom all our internal mental states are connected in an interwoven manner. We need to realize this common consciousness,  which is the only way to fix our society's problems. Art and virtual reality are a means towards that end.

Octopus and the bicycle

In the "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy", there is a spaceship known as the "Heart of Gold", which is run by a hypothetical physical law known as the "infinite improbability drive". It keeps appearing randomly at the most improbable place in the universe, to pick up some negative entropy in order to drive through the vast reaches of space. This spaceship is probably the best analogy for describing the early days of the internet. It has been just a few years ago, but many people have forgotten the exhilarating thrill of those early days.  Within a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks, you could go to strange places into the far reaches of the human imagination, meet with strangers and learn dramatically new things. Most websites in those days had awful designs, but there was a human being behind each one of them, putting personal time and effort into presenting new and original ideas to the world.

In the years that followed, the internet has increasingly become alienated from this human experience. In the beginning, people used many alternative protocols to navigate the internet. But very quickly, the internet has reduced to mean only one thing - the "HTTP" protocol used to navigate the world wide web (WWW). Within a few years, this reduced even further to just a handful of websites - Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.,  that most people spend their online time on. Each person lives now in a manicured data bubble that is managed by large companies and governments. This shrinking of the scope of what the internet means has happened simultaneously with the increasing realization of the loss of privacy and human agency in using the internet. Instead of enabling us to meet new people and ideas, the internet has become a prison where we can only hope to meet computer programs that either want to sell things to us or to spy on us.  The human has been banished from the internet, and wherever present, he is reduced to a byte-sized computerized doppelgänger of himself. Human communication degenerated into trivial status updates and tweets, as the audience for a long and deep conversation has disappeared on the internet.

I belong to the last generation of people who experienced computers before they experienced the internet. In this sense, I belong to a minority of people who have a living memory from before the technology was locked in. Just like human beings, large computer systems also have a childhood. Preserving those early memories of childhood is essential to remind ourselves of the dreams and alternate possibilities that existed. Much too often as we age, we get stuck in a rigid habit and lose track of our deeper desires. Douglas Adams, the writer who dreamed of the spaceship with infinite improbability drive, also made a documentary called "Hyperland" about the upcoming future of the internet. When seen today, this documentary shows some fascinating glimpses into those lost possibilities.

We lack the right metaphors and symbols to express what we have lost over these years. I would like to present two metaphors in this blog - the octopus and the bicycle, that express two sides of any large computer system, including the internet. I hope these metaphors will give a deeper and more personal understanding, such that we may build a better future for the internet.

The legend of the bicycle

"What a computer is to me, it is the most remarkable tool we have come up with. It is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds." - Steve Jobs

It may seem shocking to us now, but computers were never supposed to be personal tools of human beings. Ever since their very conception by Alan Turing (even earlier by Charles Babbage), they were supposed to be centralized systems to organize mathematical thought. Nobody understood why you needed to have a "personal computer", as opposed to simply sharing computational resources for whatever you needed to do. In fact, this is exactly what our society is evolving into now, through the paradigm of cloud computing. When we trust large organizations and their computers to take care of our personal information and needs, whether they be Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook or Google, we are acquiescing to the paradigm that we humans do not need personal computers. This was exactly what the pioneers of computer science believed. So what happened in the 1970s and 80s requires some explanation. This personal computing revolution, as visible to the public through Apple and Microsoft computers and software, was a strange anomaly that needs to be explained. This is where we need the metaphor of the bicycle.

In the Swiss town of Basel in April 19, 1943, a chemist named Albert Hoffman had experimented on himself with a small dose of a synthesized chemical that had profound effects on his mental state. He experienced intense hallucinations and requested to be escorted back home. Since there were no motor vehicles available, he rode his own bicycle, taking a trip that was simultaneously physical and metaphysical. That chemical was LSD. In the later years, it profoundly impacted research into psychology, apart from influencing pop culture at large. Hoffman's bicycle trip is commemorated to this day as "bicycle day" by psychedelic enthusiasts.

But before LSD was discovered by the counter-culture, it was being used in scientific laboratory experiments on volunteers. One of the first set of experiments were done in the San Francisco bay area, on a set of physicists and computer engineers. The altered mental states offered by psychedelics were considered an indication of the vast potential for the augmentation of mind, as being investigated by computer engineers. This specific mind augmentation project was the brain child of Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), who had a singular vision of humans working in tandem with computers.  His contemporaries were thinking of computers merely as tools for automating the thinking process, thereby solving mathematical problems in symbolic logic. The common metaphor used was the mechanical clock. But Engelbart had a different vision, he saw the computer as a vehicle that could be used to transport the human mind and to connect with other humans. His vision was so extraordinary that he had a tough time explaining this to his peers and very few people got it. The psychedelic experience had been crucial for many of those people to grasp this vision. The intense personal nature of this experience also proved that any computer-based augmentation needed to be also personal. One of the engineers who grasped this first was Alan Kay. He used the metaphor of the bicycle to refer to a personal computer,  a personal vehicle for the augmentation of mind.

By the early 1970s, an environmental movement has also germinated in the bay area. An influential event was the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog, showing the picture of the earth as taken from space. Riding a bicycle was also a matter of showing environmental commitment. Alan Kay never drove a car and became part of this bicycling community in Palo Alto. He persisted in his vision that computers need to be direct personal extensions of human intellect, as easy to learn as it is for a kid to ride a bicycle, thereby becoming a new medium of expression as Marshall McLuhan formulated. It was extremely hard to communicate this vision in an era of massive mainframe computers. What both Engelbart and Kay had on their side was a remarkable revolution of miniaturization of electronic integrated circuits, known as Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of Intel popularized the notion that electronic chips were shrinking rapidly and at an exponential rate, meaning that computation would be far cheaper in the future. Engelbart realized this trend far earlier and shaped his entire research agenda keeping faith in this future. The quintessential turning point came when he presented the technologies being developed by himself and colleagues in December 9, 1968. Recognized later as the "mother  of all demos", this presentation showed all the main applications of personal computers and the internet - text editing, video conference, graphical user interfaces, windows etc. But this system also had a lot more possibilities which were later lost in the future due to technology lock-in. Alan Kay was in the audience during this demo and this profoundly impacted him.

Kay later joined the Xerox Parc research center and founded the Learning Research Group, where he hired some of the best engineers from Engelbart's team. He had a unique vision in personalized computing through a very high level language, resembling human communication of ideas. He wanted this programming to be so simple that little kids can do this without much training. This vision gave birth to object oriented programming and personalized windows on a computer screen. Due to strict business practices and lack of imagination, Xerox had been unable to profit from this work.

However, the cascade of social revolutions in 1970s that were unleashed by psychedelic drugs, anti-war movement and environmental concern (all merging into the hippy youth movement) has also produced a popular computing enthusiast movement. This was centralized around the Homebrew Computer Club, which explicitly distanced itself from large power structures like universities and big companies. This club was founded by an idealist named Fred Moore, who wanted a people's computer that could be used by individuals to organize themselves and to plan against powerful adversaries. Many hobbyists have learnt their basic tricks from this club and they all wanted to build personal computers, that they personally and exclusively controlled. Many companies have sprung from this vortex of popular enthusiasm, but the most successful of them was Apple. Ultimately, Apple would grow up to be the heir of the innovations from Xerox Parc and SRI, hiring most of those engineers, including Kay. This was where Steve Jobs got his bicycle metaphor from. This story of the high dreams from the 1960s and 70s, that so influenced our society later, is brilliantly recounted in John Markoff's book "What the dormouse said".

In retrospect, a bicycle is a very unusual analogy for a computer. Unlike cars and trains, it is used mostly by one person exclusively. It is also friendly to the environment, leaving no toxic residues. It is a tool that encourages social mobility. Historically, many men and women gained social and financial independence in the early 1900s, when bicycles were introduced. Many people, especially women, had to fight and overcome social barriers for using bicycles. By using bicycle as a metaphor, a computer was symbolizing all these positives as a human tool for individual empowerment. This vision was a gift from the social and political consciousness of the 1960s and 70s.  But this was a very unusual perspective of looking at computers. It would not be valid for very long, especially after the rise of the internet.

The legend of the octopus

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” - Matt Taibbi 

An octopus is probably the closest thing to an alien being that a human can imagine. Many seafaring cultures have imagined a giant squid or octopus as a vicious monster lurking beneath the seas and attacking sailors. In Norse legend, Kraken is a gigantic sea monster that overturns ships. The French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne used an army of giant squids as a plot device in his novel "Twenty thousand leagues under the sea". where they attack the submarine of Nemo.  H. G. Wells imagined an invasion of earth by octopus-like Martian beings.  This subsequently inspired the popular arcade game "Space Invaders". In an episode of the cartoon "Futurama", a giant space squid called Yivo docks it horny tentacles onto every inhabitant on earth, in a thinly veiled criticism of organized religion. Perhaps most memorably, H.P. Lovecraft referred to an octopus-faced alien monster in his story "Call of the Cthulhu". This giant monster lies dreaming underneath the ocean, reaching into the subconscious of the humans who fall prey to its evil thoughts in the dark recesses of their minds. While waiting for the return of Cthulhu, these humans do its bidding by spreading a cult-like religion with murderous practices. 

What is it that gives us major creeps about the octopus ? Is it its suction cups and sensory organs all over its  body ? Is it its  uncanny craggy camouflage ? Is it its slimy soft body that wiggles through nooks and crannies ? Or is it its tentacles ? I think it is the tentacles. 

Political cartoons have long used the octopus and its tentacles to refer to a huge organization with unwieldy power on many areas - railroad companies, oil corporations, British empire, Soviet Union, and more recently, the secret service and financial conglomerates like the Goldman Sachs. The NSA has preemptively cast itself as an octopus wrapping its tentacles over the globe, in a promotional logo for a spy satellite. This is  a classic tactic for preventing an opponent from shaming oneself, by declaring the shameful act as downright obvious and natural. This is a tactic for desensitizing our vocabulary, but can it unsettle a visceral metaphor rooted deep in our fears ? May be not. The giant octopus and its tentacles will remain a symbol for power that greedily wishes to penetrate every activity, that threatens  the very earth and all humanity.  The story of today is that large computer systems are resurrecting this octopus of our fears. I think the analogy with the cult of the Cthulhu is not too far off. 

In earlier days, the computation required to resurrect this octopus was performed on accounting notebooks and ledgers. Vast monopolies like railroads or empires were built on the basis of precisely modeling the needs of a society and staving off all competition to cater to these needs. One of the earliest examples of using electronic computers to do the same business is Walmart, which successfully outcompeted all retailers out of the US consumer market by precisely modeling the needs of the consumers. But the person to completely realize the power of algorithms in modeling and thus commanding the market is a Hungarian programmer known as Thomas Peterffy.  He founded the field of algorithmic trading on the New York stock market. When it was once temporarily outlawed for computers to bid on the stock market, he created a robotic contraption of a mechanical hand that looked at numbers on the display screen and punched in the right keystrokes to make the bids. He is now a multi-billionaire. 

The vast majority of economic transactions today are conducted through such  algorithmic trading. Behind the interface of economic transactions, there are vast models of computation that predict how people are making economic decisions.  If we consider the computational models to be a giant octopus, its tentacles are probing into every single human being. Just as in a living octopus, these tentacles are hungry for sensory input, spreading their suction cups on every sphere of economic activity. Spying organizations like the NSA similarly nurture another and even larger computational octopus, building a global infrastructure to feed its hunger for data. In the civilian sphere, computer companies like Google and Facebook create their own computational octopuses, which dock their trillion hungry tentacles on every human being and suck up every bit of data that floats by in their vicinity.  The rules of the game for economic success of software companies have changed dramatically. The bigger the computational octopus, the greater the economic reward. It has become immaterial and irrelevant to care for the human experience and added value brought in by software, beyond merely using these as baits to hook up human users to the tentacles.  

The futurist and writer Jaron Lanier calls these computers as "Siren Servers", which he warns will destroy, over the course of time, the very market they model to the minutest detail. Lanier doesn't believe that this will be in the interest of the Siren Servers or the organizations they serve. I think he is wrong in making this conclusion. His error is that he believes that there can be multiple Siren Servers, each modeling activity in its own domain. But I believe there is only one single octopus -  one single Cthulhu that whispers into the greedy subconscious of multiple organizations. In the end, they all want to resurrect this octopus and usher its rule on the planet. Each one of them believes that they are the sole master of this octopus, but they are utterly and hopelessly wrong. 

Lanier acknowledges that there is a race between the octopuses (my term, he calls them Siren Servers) to out-meta each other. Each of these octopuses wants to have the most over-reaching definition of action on this planet and suck up as much data as possible to model everything. Essentially, the octopus that can subsume a smaller octopus will eat it and confiscate its tentacles. This is literally how mergers between software companies happen nowadays. The entire software architecture is discarded and the list of users is confiscated. In other words, the tentacles are immortal and they keep coalescing together. The cult of Cthulhu is now the predominant religion in Silicon valley, where venture capitalists incite young entrepreneurs to hoard users and hook them up with tentacles, with no end game in sight except to sell all this data and users to a gogoolpus like Google or Facebook. 


Can you out-compute the octopus ? 

If we had a time-machine and went back to the Silicon valley of the 1970s, engulfed in all the political tumult and socio-environmental consciousness, it would indeed look like a very strange place. The computer engineers of that day would be outraged to learn where we have ended up. Instead of computers helping individual users to outwit the larger power structures, they have unleashed a consummate spying nightmare. Most of those engineers had participated in the Vietnam war protests, and they would have been shocked to learn that our society has accepted this state of affairs as normal, with almost zero political activism. But after the initial shock of anger and despair, they would also realize how hopeless our situation today is as compared to them. 

In our day, it is futile to even hope to out-compute the octopus. In every quantifiable aspect, the octopus will win. The question for an idealistic start up today would be "What can you do that Google cannot do more efficiently ?". The answer is nothing, or close to nothing. Resistance is futile, join the Borg. 

But there is a catch. The octopus needs to have access to data. If you are able to withhold this data and run the computation yourself, your bicycle will outrun the octopus. It is very tempting to believe that you can build an octopus and ride it yourself. But most certainly, it will be the octopus that rides you and not the other way round. This brings us to a catch. Is there any way to slay the octopus at all, if we cannot grow a powerful adversary to counter it ? 

Ride your bicycle to meet your friends

The greatest gift of human life is the ability to make friendships. It is essential that we do not lose this human essence as we migrate to the cyberspace. It is inevitable that more and more of our daily lives will be conducted online. More sensors will be capturing data about ourselves, from our own homes and within our own bodies, often without our knowledge. It is tempting to believe that this sensory data captured from us is the sum-total of our human existence. It is even more tempting to believe that this is the sum-total of other people. But this is wrong. 

It is an illusion to believe we shall have a complete model of our personalities. Acknowledging this honestly will naturally cultivate humility in us. That is the first step towards meeting other human beings on their own terms, and thus building true friendships. 

We should not force people to do this offline. It had been true in the past that we could log off  from the internet and meet friends in the physical world. But this will be increasingly difficult to do in the future. Most people are unaware that they are perpetually logged onto their social networks, personal messengers and email clients. Thus, it is essential that we develop a culture where we meet people in the cyberspace and cultivate deep friendships in this process. 

How do we do this ? I think we should go back to the dreams of the pioneers and bring back the metaphor of the bicycle. We should be unafraid of riding our rickety bicycles into the cyberspace and meeting friends. We meet other people on their own terms and on their own bicycles. We need to build a culture of sharing bicycles and helping each other with them, without imposing a common design and a common aggregation of data. Otherwise, the bicycle will be just a tentacle of the Octopus. It is possible  that large software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft will also realize this before it is too late.  At their very core, the engineers who work for these large corporations are also human beings, and they cannot deny their fundamental humanity. Most of these engineers, knowingly or otherwise, are inspired by the metaphor of the bicycle, to build a better human experience for everyone. If we build a culture of individual expression of human experience, where the software serves as an individualized tool, we may defeat the octopus using an army of bicycles. 

PS: This post is dedicated to the memory of Doug Engelbart. The image is an art work of Alan Maia. You can buy a T-shirt of this art here.