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Last Day in San Francisco
Reflections on evolution, the military and robotic fish
25 June 2012

Chinatown

City Light front window (detail)

Leaving City Lights

Across the street

Ditto

Not my favourite vegetable

Heads we win, tails they lose

Facade of a Chinatown building

Wall art that speaks of Banksy

A reminder of where we are

Last day in San Francisco. We make a bee line for City Lights, one of the key surviving San Francisco bookstores, and the one with perhaps the greatest profile, dating back to 1953.  Having been given 7-8 books by Karen Murphy at Wiley, and knowing we were under a Sword of Damocles with baggage allowances on Virgin Atlantic, I went under strict injunctions not to buy books. But couldn't, somehow, resist.

I bought John Long's Darwin's Devices, sub-titled 'What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology.' The cover sports a sailfish, perhaps a marlin, like the one that sped across the wall of the Ferry Place Seafood restaurant we frequented on the San Francisco waterfont. Only difference was that part of its flank is peeled back to expose the robotics inside. Can't wait to read it. That's what San Francisco does to you - or, perhaps, me. Aided and abetted by our conversation with Tim Brown at IDEO, earlier in the week (see 22 June entry).

But then seeing all the sea and ocean products in the stores in Chinatown, I confess I began to despair of our chances as a species of achieving anything like sustainability, short of a total population crash. I confess that my mood wasn't lifted when I began to read 2052, a new book by Jørgen Randers, one of the authors of 1972's Limits to Growth study.

My essay in Jørgen's book is about the future of the military. With the relative failure of the Rio+20 summit while I was in California, despite what some of those present may now claim, the military option will increasingly be in our minds.

Trying to put a positive spin on all of this, I look at ways in which parts of the armed forces - and the wider military-industrial complex - might be repurposed to protect the global environment and to work towards biosphere restoration. Edward de Bono's po comes to mind: let's imagine it might be possible. The conversations this week make me hopeful that at least some parts of the world can get elements of this right. 

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