CONTENTS

PREFACE

Chapter One: Foresight

Chapter Two: To See Or Not to See

Chapter Three: Jumping the Jar

Chapter Four: Unintended, But Not Unanticipated

Chapter Five: Predaptation

Chapter Six: The Invisible Tether

Chapter Seven: Bioleverage

Chapter Eight: A Prescient Mind

Chapter Nine: ForeWorld

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

PREFACE

Ask anyone on the street “What’s the single most important attribute—the one above all others—vital to success?” The first answer you’ll get is money or power. A few may say persistence or a good education. And, some will throw in family and strong role models for good measure.

But is this really true?

Not from a sociobiologist’s perspective.

For it is not the wealthiest, strongest, fastest, or most
cunning—not the most educated or experienced—which prevail when the environment takes a turn. More than a hundred fifty years ago, Charles Darwin revealed that it is our ability to adapt that is the determining factor. And while that may not sound like news today, when you stop and think about it, our attitudes toward adaptation haven’t changed in more than a century. We continue to treat adaptation the way nature does—as some random roll-of-the-dice over which we have little or no control. When the environment changes, some individuals and groups thrive, some hang on for dear life, and others perish. And that’s that.

In truth, we understand very little about how to make ourselves, our workplace, our economy or government more “adaptable.” For example—is there any one skill that matters more than others when it comes to responding more quickly, more precisely, more successfully to change?

It turns out there is.

For it is the organism with the greatest foresight that has the upper hand in any situation.

Foresight allows us to make plans, avert danger, get the jump ahead of others. Foresight commands us to fashion the spear before the attack, sell a stock before it tumbles, cut a cancer before it spreads. Foresight is the precursor to opportunity, the warning before the storm, the salvation before the sin.

There can be no greater advantage than certainty of the future.

And when it comes to man’s prophetic powers, this book could not arrive at a better time. Recent breakthroughs in technology—such as the proliferation of predictive analytics, Big Data, and sensor and satellite technologies—have made it possible to anticipate future outcomes with unprecedented accuracy. With every passing moment our forecasts grow more robust, more consequential, more intrusive. That’s because foreknowledge has turned previous notions about adaptation on its head. We are no longer adapting to changes in the environment. We stand on the cusp of changing the environment to which we must adapt.

And by environment, I mean every environment: physical, economic, political, social… every aspect of human life is affected by our ability to foretell future consequences—and the growing burden to avert antagonistic events before they occur.

Darwin’s world is no more. Even a stalwart theory like evolution must yield to changing circumstance. And while it may seem sacrilegious for a sociobiologist to claim science and technology have brought humankind to the brink of transcending laws that have governed life for billions of years, the truth has no obligation to conform with previous precedent. The world has changed. Humans have changed it. And we must now come to terms with the deeper meaning of that change.

On the Verge is the story of tilting the odds in our favor, manipulating outcomes before the fact, and preempting failure. It is the story of how we rose to become the most elastic organism on Earth and, along the way, unlocked the secret to eternal prosperity. It is the story of where we have been, and where we are headed. It is the story of foresight: the crowning achievement of human ambition.

Rebecca D. Costa
November 10, 2016
Big Sur, California

CHAPTER ONE

Imagine a world where a handful of businesses and governments could foresee the future. In the beginning, they could see to the end of the block. A little later, the end of the street. Then all at once, around the corner, down the highway, across the ocean, and beyond the curvature of the Earth.

Now imagine for a moment their prognostications were right.

Not right once or twice. Right every single time. Imagine anticipating future events with such precision that a threat could be quashed before it had opportunity to materialize; shortages and surpluses could be managed in advance; public opinion shaped beforehand.

Well, imagine no more.

This phenomenon is underway—a shift so subtle it feels like no more than a hand gently ushering us across a crowded room. That crowded room is the Information Age—and we are slowly making our way to the other side to a future that is knowable.

A knowable future? Have I lost my mind?

Perhaps.

But consider the evidence. Fifty years ago, the sex of a newborn was a surprise revealed only at birth. A few decades ago, we didn’t know whether a person was predisposed to breast cancer, baldness, Alzheimer’s, or depression. We didn’t have the meteorological models, instrumentation, or satellite imagery to evacuate an entire city in advance of a hurricane. And no way to know when a country’s currency was on the verge of collapse. Never mind how oil production in the Middle East will affect banana prices in Tokyo…

Every day our ability to anticipate future outcomes grows more acute, more all-encompassing, and extends further out. This sea change has equipped today’s leaders with a previously unimaginable power—the power to respond to and shape events before they occur. We stand on the cusp of what Darwin himself might have called predaptation: the ability to adapt a priori.

Similar to other leaps in human evolution, this capability did not occur overnight. Following millions of years of trial and error—and the failure of over 99 percent of the species that once inhabited Earth—Mother Nature saw fit to bless a single organism with the aptitude to understand “tomorrow.” Our adeptness at conducting sophisticated thought experiments—our ability to assess risk and prioritize complex scenarios in rapid fire—is unique to Homo sapiens. Not only is this faculty unequalled, it is also, without question, the most powerful asset nature has produced to date. For there is no greater advantage than the ability to abate danger or seize opportunity which has yet to manifest. Not in nature. Not in business. Not in governance.

The truth is, every controversy, every intractable problem we face today, every emotionally charged debate is about events we see coming: how to stop climate change; how to save the Euro; how to quash the threat of nuclear war, illegal immigration, and terrorism; how to care for a growing aging population; how to reverse debt, obesity, gun violence, racism, over-fishing, and addiction. We see these things with new foreboding—though we passionately disagree on what to do about them. Or whether anything can be done.

It is fair to say that our initial foray into the future has been clumsy—as awkward as our first attempts at two-legged locomotion. Despite possessing more knowledge and technology than at any other time in human history, we behave schizophrenically toward the future, vacillating between a destiny that is shaped by free will, one that is erratic, indiscernible, and uncontrollable, and one micromanaged by supernatural forces. When a person carelessly invests their money and loses it, when they eat their way to obesity or illness, when they commit a crime and are sentenced, we view these events as the predictable consequences of our actions. But let those same individuals fall in love or get a flat tire on the road and we treat these events as the work of Gods who shuffle the deck for their own pleasure.

Well, which is it? Can we control the future or not?

The ancient Greeks said no. They created three goddess-like “Fates” called the Moirai to explain the trials and triumphs mortals encounter. The Moirai controlled every aspect of human life from birth through death. As the ordained enforcers of destiny, even Gods like Apollo and Poseidon were rendered impotent by the Moirai, let alone the feeble ambitions of men.

Throughout Asian cultures, the future is treated as a time when justice is administered through reward and retribution. According to the principles of Karma, every living organism is held accountable for their actions. A mindful life leads to health, safety, peace, and wealth. Whereas an unconscious life—one that inflicts harm on others—produces suffering for the offender. This is how balance is maintained in the universe.

In areas of Africa and South America, sacrifice plays a large role in determining the future. Small animals, money, food, song, and dance are offered to deities to court favor. Whether that favor is a robust harvest or the birth of a healthy child, villagers come together to perform rituals and offer gifts aimed at turning the tides of fortune.

No matter which culture, religion, or period in human history we examine—from Christianity and Islam to Santeria, from European high society to remote tribes in New Guinea, from the great Egyptian, Ming, and Roman empires to the twenty-first century—the future is portrayed as a tug-of-war between man, chance, and God.

It wasn’t until recently this ambivalence was brought to heel. For the first time, predictive algorithms powered by lightning-fast computers and mobile communications brought the entire universe of human knowledge to man’s fingertips. Technology made it possible to string together millions of variables, in real time, revealing cause-and-effect relationships we never knew existed. And this leap has armed humanity with a staggering power: the power to reverse-engineer the consequences of our most benign actions.

With the Information Age came data. With data, analytics. With analytics, foreknowledge. And with foreknowledge, foresight. As our prowess for prognostication spread, we stumbled upon an unexpected truth—one which has tectonic implications: there is far less randomness to the future than we thought. More of it is predictable than not. And if more is predictable, then more can be manipulated.

And overnight the race to engineer the future was on.

China pulled ahead of the pack, sewing up rare earth minerals throughout the African continent—exporting over a million Chinese citizens to settle there. The United States and Russia staked an early claim to outer space. Visionaries like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Craig Venter, and Ray Kurzweil got a head start in commercial space vehicles, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering. Hundreds of start-ups jumped into sensor and satellite technologies designed to measure anything, anytime, anywhere. Even large retailers got in on the action, quickly locking in milk supplies and prices when rises in temperature were forecasted. Once a connection between warm weather and a decrease in a cow’s milk production could be established, grocery chains began monitoring NASA’s meteorological database to corner supplies before shortages occurred.

As you read this page, businesses and governments are preparing for drones to deliver everything from life-saving medicines to common parcels within minutes.

Last year, Amazon filed for a patent on a blimp-like “floating warehouse,” disrupting previous notions of fixed, terrestrial storage facilities, distribution centers, and factories.

Today, forward-looking insurance carriers and automobile manufacturers are making plans for self-driving cars—vehicles that will eliminate millions of accidents caused by operator error, along with the need for driver training, driver’s licenses, law enforcement, stop signs, and traffic signals. Automobile ownership will become a thing of the past, and there will be no more need for taxis. Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies are preparing for nanobots—smaller than a single cell—that will treat disease from the inside out, making surgery and drug-based treatments obsolete. Retailers, immigration departments, and educators are getting the jump on facial recognition software to screen applicants, identify criminal conduct, and track student and consumer reactions. And political pollsters are not far behind. The only people not surprised by the 2016 election of Donald Trump were technologists who had better tools and data.

We can foresee that within the next decade every human will confer with an electronic cyber twin that looks and behaves the way they do—one which has the ability to quickly search the Internet and deliver only the data their biological counterpart needs to make a decision. Our electronic avatars will know our preferences, our habits, our history, and will allow us to accomplish twice the work in half the time. And bio-feedback sensors will instantly alert us to nutritional deficiencies, dehydration, and the earliest indications of disease.

Every nation will rely on an electronic army to fend off cyber attacks and defend their physical borders; commerce will be driven by a single, universally accepted cyber currency that will eliminate the power to artificially manipulate exchange values; all energy will be renewable and free as breakthroughs in renewable sources, battery storage, etc., reach previously unimaginable capacities; sophisticated 3-D printers will print food to fit our palette preferences, as well as perfectly fitted clothing, furniture, and other goods from the comfort of our homes. Hospitals will use these same 3-D printers to produce prosthetic body parts on the fly, architects will print flawless buildings with the electrical, plumbing, and infrastructure in place, and auto parts companies will print spare parts on demand. This technology and robotics will deal a final death blow to volume manufacturing, causing intellectual property to become the only valuable corporate asset while simultaneously giving rise to a class of “knowledge workers,” the likes of which the world has never known.

These changes are coming. They will be upon us soon.

Ready or not.

CHAPTER TWO

The day I turned sixteen I began looking for my own wheels.

I didn’t have much money—a little babysitting and typing on weekends was the only work available. One summer a neighbor paid me to sleep at their house and feed the dog while they went on vacation. I also counted on my grandmother to send me a little something on birthdays and holidays. It wasn’t a lot, but when all you have are nickels, dollars feel big.

One morning I was sitting at the kitchen table studying my options in the classifieds when my dad walked in.

“What’re you looking for?

“A car,” I said without looking up.

He poured himself a drink and sat down. “What kind of car?”

“A Bug.”

He shuffled through the rest of the paper and pretended to scan the sports page. But I knew what he was doing…

“Anyone going with you?” he piped up.

“Nope.” I was sixteen. I wanted to get my own car.

For a long while neither of us spoke. He with his section of the paper, me with mine. Then he cleared his throat.

“Well… if you want my advice… maybe you should take someone with you. Someone who knows something about cars…”

It was an offer. I kept on reading.

“Okay, then.” He stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed for the garage.

Then he stopped. “It’s your money. And I can see you don’t want any help. But when you get out there, look on the ground for oil. And if the car has more than one hundred thousand miles on it, remember you’re just buying someone else’s problems.” Then he disappeared out the door.

Someone else’s problems?

In 1970, a car with one hundred thousand miles spelled trouble. Today, the odometer on my Land Cruiser reads 276,000 miles, and—knock on wood—it hasn’t required a single major repair. But since I was conditioned by my father to expect the engine to fall out after a hundred thousand miles, I recently asked my dealer to give it a once over. They did. Outside of a sticky antenna and a small tear in the passenger seat, there were no impending signs of doom. In fact, the mechanic who inspected the vehicle said, “You could go four, five hundred thousand miles before you see a problem with this car.”

No problem for half a million miles?

It’s mind-boggling to think the lifespan of an automobile has jumped fivefold since my first license.

How did that happen? More to the point—how did the mechanic know how long my car would run?

The answer is technology.

Human ambition has never shined more brightly than when it comes to advancements in science and technology. In addition to possessing more knowledge about our physical universe than ever before, we’ve developed tools to amplify our ability to foresee failure—tools capable of spotting and shoring up weaknesses long before they become a problem. So whether it’s the transmission, power steering, or heated seats, engineering foresight has produced cars that now run trouble-free for a half a million miles.

And not just cars. Everything can be made safer, cheaper, faster, and more dependable than before. It’s no wonder lifetime warrantees have become commonplace, and once-familiar television and appliance repair shops have disappeared. Everyone knows it’s cheaper to replace a broken appliance than try to fix it. Assuming, of course, you can find the parts.

So what was the breakthrough that allowed us to get out in front of product defects in one generation? Perfect goods in ways we previously couldn’t? What propelled engineering from fixing to foreseeing?

Predictive and Preemptive

Though the first computers were designed to tabulate figures faster than any team of humans could, it didn’t take long before we discovered these machines were also better at aggregating, comparing, contrasting, and manipulating figures. Soon, we began gleaning powerful new insights about the data we were amassing. Then, as computers moved out of hermetically sealed facilities onto our desks and into our homes, programs designed to spot errors began cropping up everywhere. Misspell a word and the computer would underline it. Add the figures incorrectly on a spreadsheet and the miscalculation would change color. Miss an entry and we were prohibited from moving to the next screen.

While these features had a tremendous impact on quality, simply pointing out our spelling, math, or engineering errors was far from optimal. That’s because they worked after an error had already been committed. In other words, at best, they shortened the time between making, finding, and correcting an error—often compressing the timeframe to seconds.

But still, it was after the fact.

Then came the next phase in computing. Overnight the Internet and mobile communications made it possible to access the sum of human knowledge anywhere, anytime. And just as quickly, smart machines aimed at preventing errors came on the scene. In the blink of an eye, we transcended from reversing mistakes to circumventing them. And it was this paradigm shift that gave new utility to foresight.

Before Is Better Than After

In the late ’70s, I had the good fortune to work for one of the companies responsible for this transformation. Headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley, Calma Company was surrounded on all sides by companies that were changing the way humans would one day work and live. Apple was busy putting a computer in every home, Ungermann-Bass was building the first enterprise-wide network, Omex was pioneering optical storage, and Motorola was developing the first cellular phones. It was a time when the best and brightest came pouring in from China, India, Korea, Japan, Russia, and every town in America. At one point there were more PhDs and engineers within thirty square miles than could be found in entire countries.

Though technology was exploding on all fronts, the impetus behind the westward stampede was the semiconductor and integrated circuit. Integrated circuits did exactly what their name implies: they were integrated—a collection of millions of interconnected transistors, capacitors, resistors, and other components reduced to less than one-hundredth the width of a human hair. Though no one realized it at the time, these miniature components were destined to become part of everything powered by electricity—from massive factory machines and spacecraft to coffeemakers, wristwatches, and children’s toys.

But there was one small problem…

Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the engineering drawings for integrated circuits consisted of an incomprehensible maze of dense lines and symbols plotted on sheets of paper the size of a dining table. These manually drawn designs were not only multilayered, but extremely intricate. So intricate that engineers often resorted to printing every layer of a circuit on individual sheets of velum, then carefully laying one piece of velum on top of the other to see whether the components and electrical pathways on one layer interfered with activity on other layers. Imagine, for a moment, dozens of sheets of clear plastic with convoluted mazes stacked one on top of the other. Now imagine trying to spot problems between the sheets of plastic.

Impossible!

So, for a brief period of time, it looked as though integrated circuit design had reached the limits of human ability.

The founders of Calma saw the standoff coming. They were the first to convert the design rules used by engineers into software. They married that software to an electronic drawing tablet, minicomputer, storage device, and flatbed printer, and presto! The world’s first computer-aided design (CAD) system for electronic circuit design was born.

The first CAD stations worked a lot like an electronic “Etch-A-Sketch”—the red plastic toy children use to draw vertical and horizontal lines by manipulating two dials. Only this Etch-A-Sketch was smarter than its operator. It came equipped with everything known about circuit design. Every component. Every specification. Every design rule. Every nuance. Want to find the shortest path to connect two components? The optimal route would light up on a graphics screen. Want to know how fast the finished circuit would perform? The CAD system would simulate performance and point out areas where speed could be improved. Want to know how much the circuit would cost? An itemized Bill of Materials would appear. With the advent of CAD, billions of design decisions were relegated to a machine—one capable of optimizing performance, reliability, and cost better than the most experienced engineer.

CAD was one of many advancements responsible for the birth of automated preemption: technology designed to head off problems before the fact. No more trial and error. No more guesswork. No more endless testing of physical prototypes, tedious iterations, or messy postmortems to identify the cause of failure. Everything about the circuit was known before it ever reached the manufacturing floor.

While Calma was changing preemptive circuit design, other CAD companies such as Auto-Trol, Applicon, CADAM, Computervision, and Intergraph were developing similar tools for other industries. Whether a product was a nuclear submarine or skyscraper, computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering (CAE), and computer-aided manufacturing offered businesses a better way to design, test, build, and foresee future outcomes.

That new dishwasher, coffeemaker, television, camera, and car you just purchased? Today’s manufacturers know exactly how many loads of dishes it will clean, cups of coffee it will brew, photographs it will snap, and miles it will travel before problems will occur. They know which components will fail first, second, and third, and how they will fail. And it is this foreknowledge that instructs today’s businesses on which parts to warrantee, which to mark up, which to stock and train dealerships to replace—even when to start sending enticing upgrade offers, and to whom.

Engineering foresight has come a long way.

I don’t mean to suggest that our ability to foresee failure has become so bulletproof that there aren’t moments when we’re caught off guard. When levees give way to floods, when airbags, children’s toys, and medical implants malfunction, when we ignore the thermal effects that cause a space shuttle’s heat shields to fail, the consequences are grave. But within a short period of time, we get to the bottom of these problems. Then—confident we’ve identified the culprit—we return to outer space and get busy redesigning levees, equipment, and buildings. Only this time, better.

Last week, my ten-year-old toaster quit. I put bread in, the bell rang, and out popped bread again—no toast. For a moment I considered taking it apart to see what was wrong. Then I began thinking about the lifespan of a new toaster—one perfected by today’s CAD systems—one that takes advantage of the new state-of-the-art engineering and manufacturing techniques—it occurred to me I will need only one more toaster for the rest of my life. It was a sobering realization. So I went out and bought the best one I could: the toaster the Queen of England uses. Now, barring a house fire, I’m done with toasters. According to the warranty, I will reach my Mean Time to Failure before my new appliance does.

Reverse-Engineered World

Once I became aware of just how powerful an advantage foresight is, I let it take over my life. These days I reverse-engineer everything. I start with the outcome I want (or don’t want) and work backward. And it’s not just me. Everywhere I look reverse-engineering has taken over. Students pick their colleges according to the job they want when they graduate. Politicians use polling data to shape their campaign messages and platforms. Carbon credits are reverse-engineered based on their future impact on our environment. The entire insurance industry is based on reverse engineering—eligibility and premiums are determined by future risk. What do we think retirement planning and drafting a will or prenup are about?

Take something as straightforward as obtaining a mortgage for a new home.

One of the primary barometers lenders use to qualify borrowers is a mysterious algorithm called a FICO score (Fair Isaac Corporation) which is designed to gauge a person’s creditworthiness. So, if we want to be sure our mortgage is going to be approved, it behooves us to check our FICO score in advance of applying. Then head off anything negative that may impact our score.

So that is what I did.

Once I made the decision to buy a small cabin in Oregon where I could think and write, I quickly went online to check my credit score. Since I pay my bills on time, owe little debt, and have used the same credit cards for thirty years, I expected my score to be nearly perfect. But, to my surprise, the three big credit bureaus didn’t agree. They considered me only a “good” risk, not an “excellent” one. And I had no idea why.

Now, if I had made this discovery a decade ago, I would have telephoned the credit bureaus, waited for them to each mail me printed reports, then tried to make heads or tails out of what they sent me. Even then, I might not have been able to get to the bottom of what was affecting my score. But today, thanks to a suite of easy online tools, there, right next to my number, was a breakdown of the factors negatively affecting it. And next to that, tips on what I could do to raise the number and by exactly how much!

In my case the culprit was my ratio of debt to credit. I may have owed little, but what I owed represented more than 30 percent of my available credit—which wasn’t much since I pay in cash, and haven’t applied for a new card since Reagan was in office. But apparently, 30 percent is some threshold. So—using the powers of foresight and reverse engineering—I could see that I had three options: a) pay down what I owed so it was under 30 percent, or, b) open up more cards to increase my overall credit, or, c) ask for the limits on my current accounts to be raised. In other words, make my debt smaller or credit bigger. So, to be on the safe side, I did both. And presto! My score shot up nineteen points. The exact amount the web site predicted.

My point is simple. By acting to alter my FICO score, I have changed my future. I can now predict, with great certainty, that, barring an act of God, my mortgage will be approved. And I can also predict that I will qualify for the best interest rate available. The cabin is mine.

The Verge

What does it mean to stand on the verge of knowing future outcomes? To move from projecting to prescience? To allow data analytics to guide policy and action rather than tradition, politics, and the vestiges of prehistoric emotions?

It means we are in transition.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking climate change, terrorism, government debt, or pandemic viruses, the challenge is the same: the reticence to move forward on our growing arsenal of foreknowledge.

Thankfully, help is on the way. Technology designed to join the past, present, and future into one seamless algorithm. Systems that treat every new piece of data as part of a larger, more complex pattern. Machines which know no ambivalence, prejudice, or limitations.

And they arrive none too soon.