Consider this: the population growth of racialized or non-white groups continues to outpace that of white Canadians. This has created a shift in the demographic balance of the Canadian mosaic, with our population on its way to becoming a “minority majority.”

According to Statistics Canada, by 2031, over 70 percent of Canadians living in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver will be from a visible minority or racialized group. Already, almost half the population in the Greater Toronto Area is a visible minority. Yet we are not seeing an equivalent shift in the halls of power: in business and in government, visible minorities—particularly African-Canadians—still represent a small fraction of the decision-makers relative to their overall population.

In April, a report by the Law Society of Upper Canada looked at the legal profession relative to others and made the following observations: “In Ontario in 2006, members of a visible minority accounted for 30.7 percent of all physicians, 31.7 percent of engineers, 17.6 percent of academics and 11.8 percent of high-level managers, compared to 11.5 percent of lawyers.”

A recently released study, entitled “DiverseCity Counts: A Snapshot of Diverse Leadership in the Greater Toronto Area,” showed that while some sectors are doing better at reflecting the general makeup of the population, visible minorities are underrepresented in leadership positions. Today, visible minorities comprise 49.5 percent of the population, but only 14 percent of senior-level leaders.

The implications of this imbalance will only become more significant as the population continues to shift. Canada must demonstrate the potential of harnessing the best of all of our peoples. Diversity in the leadership of our institutions matters. Far from being a form of tokenism, a significant increase in the number and diversity of visible minorities at all levels of leadership is essential to Canada’s competitiveness.

In May, Governor General Michaëlle Jean addressed business, academic, and socialsector leaders in a speech to the Canadian Club. She told the audience that “saying yes to diversity is saying yes to modernity, to opportunity, and to the very future of our country.” There is an economic case for embracing diversity: to create a “brain gain” by recruiting, hiring, mentoring, developing, and retaining a qualified and diverse workforce. Imagine the dividends for Canada’s global competitiveness when all its citizens have an equal opportunity to lead, to innovate, and to contribute to our social, economic, cultural, and political landscape.

The DiverseCity study also found that visible minorities are underrepresented in the media, accounting for only 19 percent of appearances by broadcasters, reporters, print columnists, subject experts, and commentators. Diversity in media leadership and representation of visible minorities is improving incrementally, but larger gains are needed. Why do we not see or hear from more visible minorities in daily coverage? How long must we wait for media outlets to do the research and start assigning these stories?

One initiative to improve the coverage of racialized minorities is DiverseCity Voices, a new electronic database of experts who are also visible minorities. Journalists can turn to the website to find underrepresented leaders who are able to provide commentary and opinion on current affairs.

Since joining the website, I have appeared in a variety of local and national print and radio, television, broadcast, and social media outlets, providing my opinions on subjects ranging from the Olympic Games, the G20 summit, and Africentric Schools. I’ve received more calls from journalists looking for comment, and that’s important to me. Young people become what they see, and role models of all backgrounds need to be seen and heard.

Sociologist John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic, published in 1965, remains the touchstone for a deeper understanding of the structure of Canadian society. Porter’s findings portrayed Canada as a hierarchical racial pecking order, with attendant consequences for social mobility, access to power, and economic success. In the Canadian mosaic, whites were (and still are) the dominant culture at the top of the heap. Fifty years on, Porter’s study still rings depressingly true. But there is reason to be optimistic.

With a conscious effort to create and sustain diversity in all our institutions, it is possible that Canada’s vertical mosaic will be replaced by one that is inclusive, linear, and beneficial to us all—no matter where we come from or the colour of our skin.

Truth and lies flourish equally online. Exhausted readers are in retreat. Illustration by Matt Daley.

Though you might reasonably condemn the modern internet for a variety of reasons—ruining attention spans, turning all public discourse into a shouting match, or insulting your sexual prowess with badly punctuated mass emails—one thing the medium could always reasonably claim was its potential for spreading truth. Decentralized and egalitarian, the web seemed to herald the end of the coverup: with no authority to stop the spread of information, facts would inevitably slip the bonds of corrupt politicians, crooked industrialists, and tyrannical generals. Sooner or later, we believed, the real facts would always come to light. The Truth Is Out There.

It turns out that’s not, uh, true.

That’s if the results of a recent study from the University of Michigan are anything to go by. The researchers found that people are remarkably resistant to facts that deviate from beliefs they already hold; the phenomenon is particularly acute in those with strong political leanings. This is the “truthiness” that satirical news anchor Stephen Colbert famously named—a trust in gut instincts instead of documented facts. That intuitive concept has now, somewhat ironically, been scientifically proven. In other words, The Truth Is Out There, But Nobody Can Be Bothered To Go Looking For It.

We already know that falsehood, distortion, and bullshit flourish online just as much as fact. The internet is home to climate-change deniers, 9-11 conspiracy nuts, and fringe politics of all sorts—in part because it is so easy to find “facts” that support whatever you believe. The sheer glut and variety of information online has made it difficult to distinguish fact from invention and truthfulness from truthiness. The result, for many people, has been to retreat into the comfort of the mainstream media.

Canada experienced this during the G20 summit in Toronto in July. After some protestors caused property damage early in the weekend, many journalists found themselves at the centre of what they believed to be an excessive police reaction. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were central to this real-time reporting, and people who were following the demonstrations and police actions online had a very different experience than live-TV viewers—who mostly saw sensational footage of a burning police car on a continuous loop for two days.

TVOntario’s Steve Paikin—a man who has built a career on measured neutrality—told of what seemed like an illegitimate round up of legal protestors and the beating of a reporter from the U.K.’s Guardian. The Globe and Mail’s Lisan Jutras wrote of her experience being detained in the rain for hours and taken into police custody.

New media seemed to finally be fulfilling its promise: coverage that was richer, more immediate, more diverse, and faster.

Yet a few days after the summit, an Angus Reid poll revealed that a full two-thirds of Canadians not only supported the police action, but were also “disgusted” with the protestors, despite the fact that the majority of them did nothing more than walk down streets holding placards. Images of anarchists breaking windows dominated big media, and the fact that there was plenty of information online offering a different interpretation mattered little, if at all.

The problem is that, unlike TV, you have to choose what you view online. That means that unless you’re already looking for an alternative take, it’s unlikely to find you. But more than that, the web is full of so many different versions of the truth, from the legitimate to the lunatic, that their very existence undercuts the medium’s validity for many people. When it is as easy to stumble upon a cogent, well-researched critique of global capitalism as it is a raving theory about “the moon-landing hoax,” the tendency is to discount the medium altogether.

By allowing anyone to publish and disseminate information, the web broke the historical link between power and publishing. Many people cheered that change, and for understandable reasons. The web embodies the contemporary collapse of all the things that once seemed beyond question: truth, fact, authority. But when nothing is objectively true, it also means nothing is objectively false. Presented with an almost infinite mass of options, most people, rather than diving in, simply retreat into what they already know—and for the majority, that’s still television.

Tremendous excitement accompanied WikiLeaks’ July release of 91,000 military documents related to the conflict in Afghanistan. Perhaps it’s justified. But earlier this year, when the same organization released “Collateral Murder”—a video that showed an American helicopter crew killing unarmed civilians in Iraq—excitement and controversy produced nothing lasting.

Despite the video’s incendiary content, and the clip’s seven million YouTube views, almost nothing changed. In the face of the official story and people’s faith in the authority that stood behind it, the clip was nothing more than a grain of sand, like those blown about by that helicopter’s blades—one more “fact” among millions, lost in the roar of a rushing, directionless storm.

Bassam and Zahra's studio in Damascus.

In one room of their tiny apartment in a suburb of Damascus, Iraqi artists Bassam and Zahra have set up their studio. It has all the necessary trappings scattered around in a colourful mess: sketches, wooden easels, tubes of pigment, paint brushes soaking in plastic buckets filled with water.

Some of Bassam and Zahra’s finished paintings decorate their apartment walls, some are for sale at a Greekowned gallery in Souq Al-Hamadiyye, and some are for sale at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The couple are refugees who fled to Syria to escape the war in Iraq. They scrape together a living by selling their paintings to tourists. It’s much cheaper to live in Damascus than it is in Baghdad, but even so, they can’t get by without occasional gifts from relatives to make ends meet.

When the war broke out in Iraq in 2003 and work was hard to come by, Bassam began painting portraits for American soldiers. After his neighbourhood was occupied by the Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, he quickly became a suspect. A friend of Bassam’s who ran a bootleg liquor store was killed. After his death, Bassam says life in Baghdad became “like being in a movie, no life and no feeling.” Terrified of the violence, Zahra did not set foot outside of their home for three months.

Paint brushes in Bassam and Zahra's Damascus studio.

As the situation in Baghdad deteriorated, educated, middle-class individuals and students—Zahra’s father, now 75, graduated from Oxford University and was a successful engineer; Bassam’s mother was an accountant—were in danger, either of kidnapping for ransom or of being perceived as collaborating with the American military. So, in 2006, like many other Iraqis, Bassam and Zahra made the difficult decision to leave their families and escape across the border to Syria. Bassam describes a huge sense of relief when they passed into Syrian territory, like he could finally breathe again.

Neither of them have been back to Baghdad since 2006— nor do they want to return. The couple says life before the war was like being “choked.” Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime was oppressive, but stable. Today, sectarian violence is rampant, and neither Zahra nor Bassam believes the situation in Baghdad will improve any time soon.

Some of Bassam's comics.

As refugees in Damascus, they live in perpetual fear of being kicked out of the country and having to return to Iraq. Both of them continue to harbour the dreams they shared when they met at art college: Bassam hopes to have an exhibition of his paintings and perfect his work as a comic artist; Zahra, who laughs easily and is seldom seen out of her Converse sneakers, smiles at the thought of having children. But both are too worried about deportation to consider a family right now.

A phone call from the UNHCR with the promise of resettlement to a Western country is their best chance at finding a normal, stable life. However, they have no illusions that it will happen soon—Syria is home to an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees just like them.

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.”

the delectable year of ear nips
replacing gum. you keep
the crisp crunch of sugar intact.
I suction out a tug of self-esteem.
rubbery, it fit inside a jelly bean

that summer I spent calling
every porsche funny-bum
and laughing on a loop.

that time when the throat
sprouted spontaneous
salivary glands at the scent
of just picked strawberries. we,
pocket empty, kissing instead.

The First Mother’s Day After Dad’s Death

damn you autopilot. mom got out
four plates too. I set out cutlery
at his place. setting weepy against
will, we avert our gazes from how she
covers her mistake, serving her food
on two stacked plates. I re-drawer
his fork and spoon. his knife’s
serrations groove the softened
butter as we make do. lower case
talk’s punctuation’s pauses disarrayed.
she brags of brush clearing, root balls
yanked, the downbeatnik neighbours
their oil tank foibles, their new lemon.
the angles, silverware to clay, are all wrong.
damn you bodies, thinking you own us.

She Dangles a Red Mouse

from her question mark
and the balding hairy stem
swings the plump body,
its red seeds. it shifts its
shiny strawberry hips
to nose, tries to make itself look
casual upside down, as if
it intended to be suspended
like this, wriggling.
it blinks. he blinks.

he realizes he hasn’t
answered, hasn’t been
blamed in her cleavage.
want one? she repeats.
he realizes that her eyes,
their deep deltas have
flattened and her one
sweaty palm cups his
forearm, asks if he’s
all right, but the hand
is a chemo patient
ferret, each finger
with an eye, each nail
missing its eyelashes.

one eyestalk taps, turns
to look at other tables
their sun-glinting cutlery
and animated conversations.
the ferret’s eyestalk grows
long impatient with him
sighs, resigns itself
with a flop across his wrist.
the other nine sag, fidget.

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.

Colony Collapse Disorder hasn't been in the news as much recently, but it continues to plague bee populations and threaten agriculture. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Todd Huffman.

Stories of Colony Collapse Disorder swarmed the mainstream media in 2006. Report after report claimed pollinating bees were dying en masse, abandoning their hives, and putting our entire modern food system at risk. Today we rarely hear about CCD, even though the number of bee colonies that survive each winter continue to drop at abnormal rates. While it would be nice to place the blame entirely on monocrop farming and climate change, CCD-like phenomena have been reported in the U.S. every 30 years since the late 1800s, back when it was called “disappearing disease.” And, as it turns out, there are plenty of bee threats still buzzing about.

Many studies point the stinger at the varroa mite, which weakens and often kills bees by sucking their blood and leaving them susceptible to viruses. Depending on which experts you ask, mites and the diseases they carry cause between 30 and 50 percent of bee deaths annually in the U.S. and up to 85 percent of annual bee deaths in Canada. And it’s not difficult to infect a hive: bees are moved across the country for wintering and, as standard practice, to pollinate crops for large commercial enterprises. This migration leaves bees stressed out and susceptible to disease.

While some believe solving the mite problem will also solve the CCD mystery, others blame wonky weather: late winters, cool springs, long, wet summers, and overly warm falls. Though this year looks good so far, 2008 and 2009 were dismal. Such temperature fluctuations have confused bees and beekeepers alike—they either give bees a late start or keep them buzzing long into their wintering period, frustrating beekeepers who are unable to plan because they don’t know what kind of losses they should expect.

Poor bee diets don’t help, either. In the summer, honeybees across the world are expected to pollinate a third of the crops that make it into our food chain, but are often fed an inadequate pollen-and-nectar diet. Some groups and scientists blame neonicotinoids, or nicotine-based pesticides; others say they’re being properly used. In a pilot project undertaken by the Italian government, neonicotinoids were banned from use on corn in specific parts of northern Italy for one year. After the ban, Italian beekeepers in the north reported no widespread losses—a first in 10 years—giving bee lovers hope that stricter environmental regulations could help colonies thrive again.

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.”

Screenshots from the forthcoming indie video game Guerrilla Gardening

Can a gardening video game change the world for the better?

In a medium that features an overwhelming focus on war-themed shoot-’em-ups, a video game about social change through gardening is a definite change of pace. And if the duo behind Guerrilla Gardening have their way, it will also inspire players to raise a trowel and start sowing the seeds of revolution themselves.

In development for nearly two years, Guerrilla Gardening features a unique mix of stealth and puzzle gameplay. Your goal is to overthrow an evil dictatorship by inspiring citizens to make a change. To do this, you’ll have to plant flowers around government propaganda to make the citizens happy, while avoiding the ever-vigilant police.

According to artist-designer Miguel Sternberg, the idea came from a blog post about the burgeoning guerrilla gardening movement.

“I had already sort of been thinking about games that were about protest and social change and street art,” he explains. “Then I read about guerrilla gardening and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this basically takes all of the things I’ve been sketching about in my notebook as ideas and lets me put them all into one game.’”

Along with his partner, programmer Andrew Pilkiw, Sternberg hopes the game’s theme will help their company, Spooky Squid Games, reach new audiences.

“Like most indie developers, we’re doing it for ourselves, making the sort of game we’d like to play,” says Sternberg. “But I also think that along with hitting the hardcore indie gaming set, it will also hit people who are interested in the theme: the fact that it’s a gardening game.”

As for when Guerrilla Gardening will finally be released, the team says simply, “When it’s done.”