Inequality, thy name is doorknob!

Recently, here at the offices of This Magazine, where the magic of journalism comes alive, and even the chairs have a political opinion, we’ve installed a doorknob. We retired our door lever, and got a doorknob. Folks, let me tell you, I do not like it.

The first morning after the installation, I arrived as I normally do—groggy, slightly out of breath (I’ve been taking the stairs lately) my cotton gloves still on and a coffee in one hand. I go to clutch what I thought would be—what my muscle memory had trained me to expect as—a lever, but I got a sad, slippery fistful of doorknob. The cotton glove slides, my body shifts, my coffee sloshes and spills a bit on my right pant leg. Mood: sour.

This is the thinking behind the City of Vancouver’s recent decision to ban doorknobs. No, not so fumbling grumps such as myself have to dry-clean their pants less often, but so mobility, accessibility is equal for all. The Center for Independence of Individuals with Disabilities (CID) lists on its website that of all the different types of door handles, the knob is perhaps the most inaccessible, since it “requires tight grasping and twisting to operate”. The Vancouver city officials, in banning the doorknob for new housing and building construction, are trying for “universal design”, an egalitarian principle of creating space that is equally accessible and enjoyable for all people, including the elderly, and those with disabilities.

But where, some are asking, does this leave the knob, that most iconic of door handles? When we venture to doodle a house now, must we master the curvature of a lever? Allen Joslyn, president of the Antique Door Knob Collectors of America, says “to say that when I build my private home and nobody is disabled that I have to put levers on, strikes me as overreach.”

I for one think that the reach is just far enough. The only reason one might have for choosing an object with poorer usability is for cosmetic effect. And when an aesthetic feature literally stands in the way of certain individuals’ right to accessibility and mobility, we don’t, as a society, need it.

Plus, I just hate opening doorknobs with winter gloves.

The issue features our brand new look, as well as our first annual Corporate Hall of Shame. We’re really excited about the issue and can’t wait to hear what you think. The issue will be on newsstands across Canada next week. But why wait? Subscribe today and get the issue delivered right to your door and save 43% off the newsstand price. Visit this.org/subscribe right now. Seriously, stop reading and do it.

We’ll be having a launch party for the issue in Toronto in September. Stay tuned for more details. Hope to see you there!

Photo: TXTILEcity

I take my hat off to the Textile Museum of Canada’s cool new project, TXTILEcity. Besides giving Torontonians a legit reason to walk down the street stuck to their smartphones, this interactive project uses Google map technology, and video and audio clips to relay the social, cultural, economic and artistic history behind Toronto’s textile and clothing industries.

The museum partnered with the digital arts non-profit Year Zero One and murmur Toronto for this self-directed walking tour of the city. If you’ve experienced murmur’s audio tours before, TXTILEcity works in a similar fashion. There are TXTILEcity signs posted throughout the city’s downtown core. When you see one, call the number and listen to an audio history of that location, its significance to the city and the textile industry. Or, if you are carrying a smart phone, there is an Apple- and Android-friendly app that provides the audio, plus video interviews and archival footage (or you can stay home in air conditioning and access everything from the website or YouTube, but that’s not as much fun as standing on Spadina listening to your own private history lesson).

The content ranges from discussions about Urban Outfitters and the gentrification of Queen Street West to Joe Mimran recalling the first Club Monaco, to the history of the Hudson Bay blanket. At the AGO, curator Michelle Jacques talks about the relationship between contemporary art and textiles through Germaine Koh’s Knitwork. The artist has been unraveling knitwear and re-knitting the yarn into a long, continuously growing worm-like entity since 1992.

But the history of workers rights and activism in the textile industry is the main thread of the tour. For instance, 483 Bay Street (by the Eaton’s Centre) is where the Eaton’s factory used to stand. The conditions were so deplorable that in 1912, 1,000 workers went on a three-month strike. Afterward, some of the organizers opened their own factories on Spadina, marking the beginning of the garment district as we know it today.

Just like the physical Textile Museum of Canada (if you haven’t been there in person, go!), TXTILEcity is an unsung gem, sharing stories and artifacts that otherwise would remain forgotten or ignored.

Papercraft scene of Toronto streetcars by Drew Nelson. Image courtesy the artist.

A compact card unfolds into a three-dimensional paper scene: a polar bear atop an ice drift looking to the murky depths below, surrounded by the brilliant aurora borealis. Drew Nelson’s origami creations, like the man himself, are a harmonious, detailed and delicate reflection of his world and what he wants to contribute to it.

Nelson is the creative force behind Kinetic Energy Paper Oddities, a maker of pop-up cards, stationery, dioramas, and other paperengineering curiosities. KEPO has been producing meticulously designed cards made out of biodegradable recycled paper for four years now, but Nelson has been a paper lover since childhood.

“I like the fact that you can take a flat sheet of paper and turn it into something three-dimensional,” he says. After graduating from York University’s fine arts program, Nelson headed to Japan where he travelled and worked to pay off school debts. In his spare time he studied the Japanese paper-folding arts of origami and kirigami. After returning to Canada, Nelson aimed to bring the same level of craft and technical rigor he saw in Japan to his work.

Origami (the word comes from the Japanese for oru, to fold, and kami, paper) is hundreds of years old. There is only one material requirement, paper, usually six inches square, precisely folded to look like animals, plants, buildings, and more.

The “kinetic” in KEPO refers to the transfer of energy—from the card maker to the giver to the receiver. Nelson strives for balance and harmony in his work, in his meditation practice, and in the world around him. “I enjoy making cards because it’s peaceful and meditative,” he says. “I love watching somebody open a card and see the buyer’s face light up. I’m passing something on to them,” and that energy is then passed on to the recipient.

While card making is often regarded as a disposable art form, Nelson likes it because cards are increasingly special in a culture dominated by electronic communication. “We’re losing the box under the bed with photos and a card from your grandmother. The more technological and paperless we become, there’s going to be the desire for something tactile,” he says.

Next Nelson is preparing to showcase, in collaboration with Toronto’s Everyone is an Artist collective, a project he’s been nursing for some time: an eight-piece scenic diorama of Toronto’s iconic streetcars. “I love that streak of red that goes through the city,” he says. “I’ve always loved these trains.” He was planning to make the streetcar project of pop-up souvenir cards, but opted for a showcase instead. “The past couple of years I have been designing the business so it can reflect what it is I want to do, without losing the integrity of my work. I’m learning to say no to things that will steer me off track.” He won’t produce work for companies that are environmentally destructive or have poor employment practices, for instance.

“We’re suffering from big-box stores,” Nelson says. “We’ve gotten too big—people want something cheap and fast. It’s so wasteful.”

In this slick, modern iWorld, Nelson infuses an ancient craft and a sense of community into his remarkable paper creations: “I want to produce a product that gets kept because it’s worthwhile, because time has been put into it.”

Interior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

Walk around Vancouver’s Jericho Beach in 2011 and you’ll see some odd architecture: an empty concrete wharf, a welded steel railing that overlooks English Bay, a strange rail embedded beneath the sailing club. These are all that is left of a complex of five gigantic aircraft hangars that was home to an international conference 35 years ago.

Lindsay Brown, a textile designer and board president of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, is working to unearth a forgotten piece of Vancouver’s history: Habitat ’76, a United Nations-sponsored conference that brought together figures like Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, and Mother Teresa, to discuss and explore human living conditions and social justice. She is gathering information towards publishing a book.

An adjunct to the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, the Habitat Forum was infused with a distinctly mid-’70s brand of optimism and utopianism. The five huge seaplane hangars, left over from the 1930s, were converted into theatres, halls and restaurants for the thousands of people who attended. The theatre, styled to look like a First Nations longhouse, had a Bill Reid mural.

Brown, a thirteen-year-old girl at the time, visited the Habitat forum and calls it a life-changing experience. “It had a kind of a carnival atmosphere. It had a less controlled atmosphere than the city generally had. People call it ‘No Fun City’ now. When you’re thirteen, you don’t exactly know what’s going on, but it had that feeling of ideas and experimentation as well as fun. It was so beautiful.”

Exterior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

She was impressed with the ferment of artistic and political ideas and creativity at Habitat, in contrast to the staid conservatism she experienced in the rest of the city. “You did get the sense you were in a global event rather than the sort of parochial Vancouver I’d been used to.”

Years later, Brown never forgot about Habitat. She would Google it now and then, but was often frustrated that little or nothing turned up. Habitat seemed to have been forgotten. In 2009, she decided that if nobody else would write a book about it, she would.

Brown managed to track down Al Clapp, Habitat’s organizer and a prominent broadcaster. ““I said, ‘Hi, I’m a child of Habitat. I want to write about it. Can we talk?’ He said, ‘Sure. I’m in Victoria. Come on over.’” Brown visited Clapp, who loaned her his archive of photos and other material. “That’s when I knew there was a book in it.”

Brown says that, unlike Expo ’86, Habitat ’76 was deliberately buried by Vancouver’s city government. “It’s very hard to keep a history alive when you have absolutely zero public, official recognition of it. I think it was deliberately suppressed.” The aircraft hangars were demolished and the 35th anniversary came and went with little fanfare.

More than just nostalgia, Brown believes that Habitat’s ideals are increasingly relevant today with the renewed focus on urban planning. “One of the interesting things about Habitat is that it thought about those things, what is actually livable at a human level? What should neighbourhoods and cities be like?”

Anne Carson's 'Nox: An Epitaph for My Brother' (New Directions Press)

In the last year, U.S. publisher New Directions released two irresistible books: Nox: An Epitaph for my Brother, by Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, and Microscripts, by Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser. They’re irresistible by virtue of their content, of course, but also their presentation: Nox is a striking accordion of a book, made up of photographs, drawings, and anecdotes printed on a giant strip of paper folded into just under 200 pages, and housed in a beautiful box. And Microscripts, one of a handful of Walser’s works recently made available in agile translations by Susan Bernofsky, collects 25 microscripts—short pieces Walser wrote in his unique, shrunken-down shorthand—reproduced on narrow strips of paper in full colour, along with more legible translations. These books are beautiful, sophisticated, and most of all, fun. Fun to touch, fun to read, fun to share and give away.

They’re also a merciful reprieve from the current gloomy atmosphere of the book business, which lately has been stuck on repeat, obsessed with the spread of e-books. Book-industry and mainstream media alike have perpetuated a conversation in which the discussion of books has been replaced by a lament for them.

To be clear: e-books are great, and getting better. As standards rise and technical knowledge spreads, e-books will only become more relevant—more experiential, interactive, engaging, and innovative. But as we’ve seen in the music industry, the shift to mass-market digital has also spurred a return to small print-run, high-quality physical editions—vinyl LPs, special editions, original artwork. The growing ubiquity and quality of e-books doesn’t need to come at the expense of the quality of print. We can have better-produced books all around.

Recently, a coalition of small Canadian publishers launched the Handmade Campaign, which aims to promote books with exceptional production values. Featured titles include Migration Songs by Anna Quon (Invisible Publishing), The Sleep of Four Cities by Jen Currin (Anvil Press), and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson (Coach House Books). These publishers continue to release high-quality print editions of their books, using textured cover stock and paper and superior typesetting, while also making them available in digital form. In doing so, they’re meeting two very distinct needs: permanence, tactility, and quality on one hand, and ease of access on the other. These two market demands are coexisting, not mutually exclusive. The growing prevalence of e-books should pave the way for an increase in demand for, and availability of, handcrafted, limited-edition book objects. As readers have greater digital access to a greater number of titles, including longburied back-catalogue and public-domain titles, they will become choosier about what they want to give shelf room in their homes.

These days, I find myself acquiring new books in one of three ways: from friends, from the library, or from digital retailers like Kobo, the e-reader backed mainly by Indigo Books & Music. When I’m smitten with a book—whether because of the story or the design—I’ll go out and buy the print edition for my shelf. I’m not buying fewer books; in fact, in some cases, I’m buying the same book twice. I’m building a collection, and I’d prefer that it be comprised of beautiful artifacts, not $10 mass-market paperbacks.

The new world of e-books presents an opportunity for publishers, not a limitation. As Kassia Krozser wrote in a July 2010 post on publishing blog Booksquare, “Print becomes more valuable when it becomes less disposable.” E-books can be used as a way to facilitate different release schedules by allowing publishers to introduce titles as limited-edition advance releases, or responding to the popularity of certain e-books by issuing post-publication collectors’ editions.

Compared to most other forms of entertainment, books are terribly cheap. Let’s use some of the conversation about e-books to reopen the door to a more mainstream appreciation of and dialogue about beautiful print editions—to redevelop a wider appreciation of books instead of bemoaning a change that’s inevitable. The fight between the two isn’t really a fight: given the choice between print and digital books, I choose both.

Illustration by Chris Kim

Aging sucks, says Michael Roy Ames. At 45, he sees signs of his own mortality every time he looks in a mirror—the greying and thinning hair, the creases in his face. Ames doesn’t despair, though. He expects to see the day when scientific advances will reverse his aging process, replace his body parts as they wear out, and allow him to live forever.

“I’d rather live to a million and 45 if I possibly can,” says Ames, a Vancouver resident and president of the Canadian chapter of the U.S.-based Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “I don’t want to die any time soon.”

“The Singularity” is the name of an event that Ames and others like him predict will happen sometime in the near future: the emergence of a technological, artificial intelligence many times smarter than any human brain. An intelligence whose thought patterns will be as inconceivable to us as our own thoughts are to, say, a lab rat. The awakening of this superhuman consciousness, Singularitarians believe, could happen gradually or quickly, with beneficent or malicious intent. But one way or another, they believe it is inevitable. And imminent.

“It’s going to happen sooner than we think,” Ames says. “A few years ago, I was thinking of 2015 as an optimistic date—so five years from now. I would still hold to that as an optimistic date. Five years from now is looking doable, definitely, from a hardware point of view.”

By profession, Ames is in his last year of an apprenticeship as a linesman with B.C. Hydro. He used to be a computer programmer, but decided he’d rather work outdoors. He’s still interested in computers and programming, but now it’s for fun. And he has an ongoing interest in how accelerating changes in technology will radically alter the structure of human society. “I mean, we’ve seen the internet do things with our society that were unimaginable 30 years ago,” Ames says. The Singularity could occur suddenly, he says, in a “hard landing,” or gradually, a “soft landing.” (There are as many interpretations of the Singularity as there are believers.) But in any case, it would involve a transformation of what it means to be human. It could range from radical life extension to the total merging of human and machine intelligence.

The ramifications of such a future are mind-boggling. Since nobody can predict the shape of things on the other side of that looking glass, the nature of politics, economics, and culture in a post-Singularity world—if those things continue to exist at all—also defy prediction. Will it involve humans surrendering their freedoms to a super-intelligent entity? Will only certain guests be invited to that party, with the vast majority left outside those digital gates? Nobody knows, although Ames notes that previous technological marvels such as colour TVs, microwave ovens, and cellphones were initially available only to wealthy elites but eventually became affordable for the masses. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent Singularitarian, envisions a future where nanotechnology, fabricating everything from the molecular level, reduces the cost of every object effectively to zero, eradicating poverty, hunger, and disease in the process.

One doesn’t have to buy into such a sea change, though, to acknowledge that technological innovation will continue to be a dominant force in human lives, just as it was in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until the Industrial Revolution, technological changes occurred slowly. One response to the upheaval in the shift from agrarian to industrial society was the Luddite movement, which recognized the threats posed by new machines but underestimated their potential to enhance and improve people’s lives. Out of that, however, grew the modern labour movement, a political force that succeeded, often through costly and bloody struggles, to ensure that the fruits of technology were more equitably distributed. Those struggles led to the five-day workweek, the eight-hour workday and occupational safety standards that workers in the industrialized world now take for granted.

Today, political and regulatory change tends to follow technology because of simple cause and effect; governments couldn’t mandate seat belts until the automakers invented them. In the future, though, waiting for bold new technologies to emerge before taking political or regulatory action might have dire consequences. See, for instance, nuclear weapons or deep-sea oil drilling, the kind of experiment-now-regulate-later technologies that have proved so dangerous. Nanotechnology in particular poses an existential threat, says Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom (more on that shortly).

Dealing with such issues, which involve the entire planet, will require international co-operation. But as we’ve seen from the difficulty in driving action on climate change, negotiating effective global agreements isn’t easy. And while climate change is a massive process taking place over decades, risky new technologies are likely to emerge much faster.

The mission of the Singularity Institute is to ensure that nascent super-intelligent technology is friendly and not menacing, and that it helps humans enhance their lives—not destroy them, or the rest of the life on the planet.

Not all people who believe in technology’s power to transform humanity are Singularitarians. Transhumanists, as their name implies, also expect technology to alter the species. “These are two communities that seem to have a connection,” says George Dvorsky, president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that one follows the other. I happen to know many transhumanists who don’t buy into the Singularity at all.”

While both groups believe that rapid technological progress will radically reshape our lives, the Singularitarians believe a unified, superhuman intelligence is a necessary part of that change. Transhumanists believe no such super-intelligent entity is necessary. Either way, both believe that our future will be completely unrecognizable. “We are talking about transforming what it means to be human,” Dvorsky says.

“Combine faster intelligence, smarter intelligence, and recursively self-improving intelligence, and the result is an event so huge that there are no metaphors left,” states the Singularity Institute’s definition. Kurzweil interprets this as a future where humans can upload their minds to a supercomputer system. All he has to do is stay healthy long enough for computer systems to advance to the point where that becomes possible. Kurzweil has become famous for popping up to 200 vitamin pills and supplements a day in his quest to keep pace with advances in life extension. He has even mused on the possibility of bringing his own father back to life in that cyber realm.

Ames and Dvorsky each have a more modest vision of the future that includes radical life-extension without having to upload their minds to a computer or raise the dead. Their respective movements are also very modest, numbering, at most, a couple of dozen each in Canada, although both have thousands of adherents scattered around the world.

One might even observe that the movements have lost steam in recent years. One prominent Canadian transhumanism website now exists only for “archival purposes.” Even the main website of the Singularity Institute isn’t updated as frequently as one might expect of an organization that purports to be on the vanguard of technological change. Viewed on July 1, 2010, the “Latest News” on the site’s Updates & Press page was from 2007, although postings on its blog were current.

Dvorsky concedes that his group, which he has led since its founding in 2002, was more intensely organized at the beginning and would draw 20 to 40 people to its weekly meetings, depending on the topic. (Life extension was a good draw, he says.)

“What we did after that is we lost a little momentum,” Dvorsky says. The audiences were getting smaller and it tended to be the same small group coming out to the events, he says. About two years ago, the meetings were cut back to two or three hours once a month. “There is no interest in having a group dedicated to transhumanism at the chapter level.”

David Coombes, the vice-president of the Canadian chapter of the Singularity Institute, admitted earlier this year that he hadn’t thought about the Singularity for weeks. He was preoccupied with the here-and-now challenges of his work as an immigration consultant. Yet his century-old heritage home in Victoria, B.C., is still the Canadian headquarters of the institute, as it was when Ames was staying there four years ago.

“You don’t bump into a transhumanist on every street corner,” Dvorsky jokes. Today there are just a few handfuls of true believers “who get it,” he says, and Singularitarians are similarly scarce. But regardless of their current numbers, they believe their activities today are key, because if and when the Singularity occurs, it will involve everyone on Earth.

“It’s going to be one for the planet,” Ames says. “You think about the internet. There’s no Canadian internet; there’s no American internet; it’s the internet for the planet.”

It would be tempting to dismiss transhumanism and Singularitarianism as fringe movements, given their small sizes and outsized ideas. The Singularity, for example, has been called “the Rapture of the Nerds,” even though it’s an entirely secular notion that doesn’t invoke anything supernatural. As Coombes put it four years ago, “I believe there could be a higher power when we make it or when we become it.”

But to dismiss transhumanists and Singularitarians as kooks would be a mistake, says Toronto-based futurist Richard Worzel. “The fact that they don’t share mainstream views may say more about the mainstream than it does about them,” says Worzel, who has speculated about such areas as radical advances in medicine. “Einstein was roundly viewed as a charlatan and a fraud and detracting from the proper study of physics. When he started, he was the only one who held his views. I think it’s fairly clear which way history went.”

That doesn’t mean transhumanists and Singularitarians are modern Einsteins; they could still be proven wrong, Worzel cautions. “But I don’t think there’s any question that what they’re doing is a legitimate pursuit of knowledge,” he says. “And that’s the real test.”

Worzel expects to witness cures for all cancers, the growth of replacement organs, and the making of prosthetic limbs that exceed the capabilities of natural ones. “There’s probably disagreement over how quickly we get there,” he says. “There’s probably disagreement to the extent to which we are going to become transhuman. But yes, they’re headed in a direction that we are going.”

Both Worzel and Victoria, B.C.-based futurist Ken Stratford agree that what transhumanists are contemplating borders on science fiction. “That doesn’t mean to say it can’t become science fact,” Stratford says. “You know, the further you play out a piece of rope, the less control you have over where it goes.”

Much of the criticism surrounding transhumanists and Singularitarians isn’t that they’ll be proven wrong, but that they’ll prove to be correct—and with dire consequences. Among those sounding that alarm is computer scientist Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems. In an oftcited 2000 Wired magazine essay titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Joy outlined the dangers of biotechnology, nanotechnology and super-smart artificial intelligence. Biotechnology would enable a genetically engineered plague. Nanotechnology would allow a destructive force to convert all biological matter on the planet into grey goo. Humanity would be hunted and enslaved by a malevolent machine intelligence à la the Terminator or Matrix movies. (While Kurzweil acknowledges the threats, he disagrees with Joy that preventing them might require restrictions on technological advancements.)

In a 2002 essay on existential risks, Swedish transhumanist Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, noted it will be “considerably easier” to create a destructive nanobot system than to create effective defences against one. “It is therefore likely that there will be a period of vulnerability during which this technology must be prevented from coming into the wrong hands,” he wrote. The future convenience of such technology, combined with its capacity for quickly gobbling up the biosphere, makes it potentially even more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Bostrom even argued that to save the planet it will be necessary to launch a pre-emptive strike against any rogue state that doesn’t go along with international monitoring of nanotechnology. Bostrom is best known for his “simulation argument,” in which he posits that the reality we inhabit might be a computer simulation run by an advanced civilization. While the argument itself doesn’t estimate the likelihood that we exist in a simulation, in interviews Bostrom has put the odds at about one in five. He even includes a sudden shutdown of such a simulation as an existential threat, although he offers no ideas on what those trapped inside it might do about it.

Compared with that simulation scenario, Kurzweil’s ideas seem fairly prosaic: he graphs exponential increases in biological evolution, and even the evolution of the universe itself, from the Big Bang through the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms to complex molecules to the formation of life. He takes Moore’s Law (the 45-yearold observation by Intel founder Gordon Moore that computer processing power doubles every 18 months) and applies it to all technology.

Since the creation of the first computer in the 1940s, processing power has doubled about 32 times. In 2005, Kurzweil estimated it will take only about five more doublings for a super-computer to “emulate the human brain.” A decade beyond that, today’s equivalent of a desktop computer will have that capacity. He expects the Singularity to arrive by 2045. By 2080, he says, a $1,000 processor will be able to compute the total sum of human knowledge in a fraction of a second. By then, in Kurzweil’s vision, reality will have merged with virtual reality, enabling super-consciousness to zip across the cosmos at light speed or even faster.

We’re accelerating toward this but simply haven’t noticed, Kurzweil says, because at this stage, the exponential graph is still relatively flat. Once it reaches what he calls the “knee of the curve,” it turns upward sharply. Technology is getting close to the knee now, he says.

Kurzweil’s hypothesis is controversial, to say the least. In a 2005 paper, physicist Jonathan Huebner argued that the exact opposite has been happening. He concluded that technological innovation peaked in 1873, has been decreasing ever since, and by 2024 will be evolving at the same rate as it did during the Dark Ages. Singularitarians have questioned Huebner’s methodology, which examined patent data and about 7,000 subjective “important technological developments.” By that measure, the automobile was an “important technological development,” but every refinement since the Model T didn’t register.

P. Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, accuses Kurzweil of cheating in his graphs that purport to show biological and technological evolutions increasing exponentially. For example, Myers describes one of Kurzweil’s charts as “an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion.” Myers succinctly dismisses Kurzweil as a “first-rate bullshit artist.”

Despite this, the idea of the Singularity has friends in high places. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel counts among the financial backers of the Singularity Institute. Bill Gates praises Kurzweil’s predictions. And motivational speaker Tony Robbins gushes about the tech guru, who also has cred as a computer expert and inventor. (speech recognition and optical-font recognition devices count among his innovations). Kurzweil recently co-founded, and is the first chancellor of, Singularity University at the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, California, The university’s officers include its co-founder and X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis, internet pioneer Vint Cerf, SimCity creator Will Wright, Nobel-winning physicist George Smoot, and futurist Paul Saffo. (The skew toward maleness is not imaginary; however, the Canadian chapter of the Singularity Institute counts two women on its board of directors, one of whom, Kay Reardon, is a grandmother whose official bio says she is “still kicking ass.”)

While Kurzweil popularized the subject with the publication of his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, mathematician and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge actually coined the idea in a 1993 paper. (In a 2007 presentation, Vinge called post-Singularity events “as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.”) Kurzweil, though, has become the public face of the Singularity, including starring in a 2009 documentary, Transcendent Man, and producing a 2010 film based on his best-known book. While his fans consider Kurzweil a visionary, University of Waterloo professor Thomas Homer-Dixon calls him “a menace.”

“I think he plays into this type of false optimism, this kind of techno-hubris or techno-optimism that says we can solve our problems,” says Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down. “I can’t tell you how many times, especially in the States, I run into people who say we don’t have to worry about climate change; we’ll just fix that problem when we come to it, when it gets bad.” He acidly observes, “It’s going be extremely ironic if Mr. Kurzweil dies of cancer.”

Homer-Dixon says the obstacles are simply far more complex than technology optimists think. The biggest hurdle is what he calls the “curse of dimensionality.” Parsing the human genome, for example, has revealed that few diseases have a single genetic cause; most are caused by complex genetic interactions combined with environmental factors that are very difficult to model.

“What we’ve found out is that many of the challenges, specifically in human illness, are enormously multi-factorial, and that we actually know very little more now, even knowing the human genome, than we did before. It’s actually interesting to read the stories that are coming out in Nature on this that the scientists are really frustrated. They thought this was going to be a huge breakthrough and it turns out it is just an incremental step in the direction of solving problems.”

The Singularitarians and transhumanists acknowledge current realities but serenely insist their moment is coming. In 2002, 51 “top researchers in the field” of human aging endorsed a statement published in Scientific American that included this unambiguous observation: “there are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today that have been demonstrated to influence the processes of aging.” However, the statement also noted: “Most biogerontologists believe that our rapidly expanding scientific knowledge holds the promise that means may eventually be discovered to slow the rate of aging. If successful, these interventions are likely to postpone age-related diseases and disorders and extend the period of healthy life.” One prominent researcher on that list of signatories, Aubrey de Grey, has famously proclaimed that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has already been born.

Even before new technologies approach anything remotely resembling the Singularity, they are bound to have impacts on our lives, and those changes will require radical revisions of public policy. From bioethics to civil rights to education and beyond, new technologies require, and will continue to require, difficult choices at every level of government. Plenty of the philosophical questions Singularitarians debate are, for today at least, sheer fantasy. But some of those questions urgently need answering now, today. What does privacy mean in a networked age? Should we keep patients alive just because we can? Do corporations have the right to claim ownership of the building blocks of life? In each of these cases, technological capabilities have already far outrun public policy. And the Singularity, even if it never materializes, provides a useful frame for thinking about how technology and society interact, and what we want our future to be.

Ames knows what he wants from the future: another million years of life. Until then, he’s keeping the faith. “I’m sure there will be a time in my life when I’ll say, ‘Maybe I’ve had enough now and I’ll just end it,’” Ames says. “But until that time comes up, hey, I’m game.”

TerraCycle products made from garbage (from left): backpack made from Capri Sun packets; messenger bag made from Oreo wrappers; tote made from potato chip bags.

The Claim

Supporters of “upcycling”— turning garbage into funky purses, photo frames, jewelry, and more—say it’s a great way to minimize what’s going into our mountainous landfills. But just how truly green is this practice?

The Investigation

One company that’s been making waves in the world of upcycling is TerraCycle. Partenered with such big businesses as Kraft, TerraCycle proudly embraces the “eco-capitalism” label.

Currently, it mostly turns unrecyclable drink pouches into backpacks, tote bags, and pencil cases. Since there’s nothing else that can be done with this silver heavy-duty packaging, TerraCycle’s brightly coloured upcycled products are “turning a negative into a positive,” says company spokesperson Brian Young. TerraCycle also donates two cents for every pouch it collects to the charity or school of your choice.

It’s all very warm and fuzzy, so it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger problem: why are we creating so much garbage in the first place?

Then there’s upcycling’s carbon footprint when it’s scaled up. TerraCycle, based in New Jersey, collects juice pouches from across North America and ships them to a variety of manufacturing centres in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and across Asia. The finished products are then shipped back across the continent to big-box retailers.

While TerraCycle does ship by train when possible as part of its plan to minimize its environmental impact, all this continent-crossing leaves the same type of hefty carbon footprint typically associated with any large-scale manufacturer.

To deal with this downside, upcycling should be the purview of local projects, says Jesse Lemieux, a sustainability expert and founder of Pacific Permaculture. He believes that people need to be taught how to deal with the waste in their immediate surroundings, rather than having large companies take care of it for them.

“I appreciate that people are coming up with creative solutions to garbage,” he adds. “There’s more and more of a need for this. But the whole system has to change. Unless we address that, all of this is just a Band-Aid.”

The Verdict

We agree with Lemieux. Upcycling is a symptom, not a cure. While there’s no doubt TerraCycle and other upcyclers are diverting trash from landfills, our real focus—as individuals and as voters— should be less on how to prettify our garbage and more on how to stop creating it. Of the three Rs, “reduce” remains the most important.

Eric Deis's large-scale photographic installation of Last Chance. Image courtesy the artist.

Even after all its Olympic-related world-class-city posturing, Vancouver remains very much at odds with itself. At once a bedroom community, a wannabe metropolis, and the centre of a long-running real-estate boom, the city is like a teenager who keeps changing her clothes, says visual artist Eric Deis. “Kids grow up, they push boundaries, they try different things. I think that’s what’s happening with this city,” he says.

We’re leafing through a collection of Deis’s photographs at his studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a few blocks from his home. It’s a Friday morning in May, and the first signs of summer have cast a new optimism over the city like they always do at this time of year, as if challenging more restless residents to tough it out and stay. But if the 30-year-old Deis has his way, this could be his last year in Vancouver. Like any serious artist, he wants to go where the opportunity lies. Despite years of photographic work documenting the city, plus a large-scale public installation and a well-received gallery show this year, it’s just not here.

“I’ve explored all my opportunities in Vancouver, and I’ve kind of maxed out,” Deis explains. “Vancouver’s cost of living is so high, but I don’t think the return of what you’re getting out of living in the city is on par. Sure, it has mountains, you can go skiing, you can take your yacht for a spin. But as far as cultural stuff, it kind of pales in comparison to other places.”

Deis’s complaints are common. Provincial government cuts to arts funding in the last year have left British Columbia’s arts and culture sectors reeling, and an unstable real-estate market creates increasingly prohibitive conditions for young people to live affordably in the city. Deis’s work—mostly large-format photography of architecture and urban spaces—depicts Vancouver in the midst of this transition. His focus on construction sites, homes on the cusp of demolition, and tensions surrounding gentrification and real estate development also capture the conditions that compel people like him to leave town. His images often take on the character of dioramas in their forfeiture of single-subject focus for wide-ranging narrative studies of streetscapes and inbetween spaces.

In Last Chance, Deis captures a new condominium development on Richards Street. The street sits on the boundary of Yaletown, an upscale downtown neighbourhood that has grown rapidly over the last 15 years into a forest of high-rise condo properties. A small green bungalow stands beside the banners advertising the condominiums. The house, affectionately known by locals as “the little green house,” was eventually demolished in the condo construction process. Last Chance was installed as a large-format photograph on the wall of Vancouver’s CBC building in April, where it stayed for five months. Deis’s other works, such as the luminous Hipsters and Drug Dealer, inhabit similar moods of loss and transformation. Seen together, Deis’s photographs comprise an intriguing series that deftly captures urban history in a seemingly ageless and perpetually adolescent city.

Eric Deis. Photographed by Tomas Svab.

Deis is no stranger to transition himself. Born on a military base on B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands, he was raised in Red Deer, Alberta, attended art school in Vancouver, completed an MFA in San Diego, and returned to Vancouver in 2004. He’s not sure where he’ll move next, but like many emerging artists his age, survival as an artist in Vancouver isn’t likely. “They haven’t built an office tower [in Vancouver] in the last 20 years, because it’s three times more profitable to build a condo tower. That changes the dynamic of the city,” he says. “Vancouver, instead of becoming an economic or business hub, becomes a sleepy suburb.” Downtown’s suburban turn is rooted in condo marketing to baby boomers in search of a second mortgage, Deis says, not a first home.

Deis’s sharp eye and idiosyncratic photography—at once self-aware and critical of its surroundings—presents a brilliant reflection of a changing city at the end of a decade. Too bad he’s so eager to leave.

The billions of dollars and years of research that NASA has spent studying Mars may have finally yielded some results here on Earth.

Earlier this year, NASA scientists told the UN water conference in Egypt that they could use radar technology originally developed to search for water beneath Mars’ surface to find H2O buried up to a kilometre beneath the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Such equipment could help ease global water shortages and avoid future conflicts over water supply, Dr. Essam Heggy, a planetary scientist and a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told gathered delegates. Scans of Darfur, he added, show that the entire region sits atop a series of dried lakes and valleys that are 6,000 years old, suggesting there may be underground aquifers that could be tapped for water.

Don’t grab the straws yet, though.

“Certainly having a larger water supply could—if used wisely—reduce the level of conflict,” says Professor Dan Shrubsole, chair of the geography department at the University of Western Ontario and a specialist in water management. “But in terms of ensuring that the water is wisely and efficiently used? That’s another question.”

And it’s an important one to ask. Just digging up more water—instead of tackling the root cause of our global water shortages—is hardly the most responsible route. And as a concept, drilling miles into the earth to extract its valuable fluids—ahem, see the BP Gulf oil disaster—seems less credible by the day.

Fact is, we waste a lot of water. UNESCO estimates that up to 90 percent of water used globally is consumed by agriculture and industry, and much of it is wasted. According to the Stockholm International Water Institute, up to half of all water used to produce food worldwide is wasted through inefficient irrigation techniques, or leaking pipes and crumbling infrastructure. We’re literally pouring billions of litres of water down the drain.

Shrubsole also warns that NASA’s plan to connect surface water systems over national borders could elevate tensions between water-starved nations, leading to conflicts over who owns the rights to the water, and where. Governments need to take the initiative to establish ground water management regimes that are transprovincial, trans-state, and transnational, he stresses. Unless that happens, Shrubsole is doubtful that just drilling for more water could avert resource conflicts. “There are lots of conflicts over water now,” he says, “And there will be lots of conflict over water in the future.”