Future Days
Download Your Brain
Sony couldn't have asked for better publicity. A British futurologist, Ian Pearson of BT -- who seems to love getting his name in the papers and featured prominently in my graduate thesis on futurology -- points out that the PlayStation 3 has one percent of the processing power of the human brain. Throw in Moore's Law and its quantum successors, and in 50 years' time we'll be able to
download our brains onto a computer of equal processing power. Supposedly, says Pearson, that'll make death no more than a minor inconvenience as we transfer our consciousness to the virtual realm.
An interesting FAQ on the
meaning of life has some relevance for forward thinkers, and indeed for anyone wondering what kind of career they should go into if they want their work to matter to the future. Specifically, the following section:
What will make a difference two hundred million years from now? In order of importance:
Advances in supercomputing hardware and artificial intelligence.
Advances in computing hardware and software programming techniques.
Advances in cognitive science, neurosurgery, neuroimaging, and neurosilicate interfaces.
Deregulation or capital flows which make the above work easier.
Advances in science and technology in general.
Advances in the computing industry and the Internet in general.
Preventing riots, wars, and other disruptions to civilization.
Providing essential infrastructure and manufacturing for the world economy.
Providing fringe infrastructure for the world economy.
The
Extropy Institute is dedicated to a so-called Transhumanist future. That may sound like jargon, and indeed it is, but they are only one of a handful of intellectual groups still devoted to anything like the concept of a coming Utopia. Perfection is never possible, of course, but I believe the striving for it is what keeps us alive. And these guys are definitely striving. How can you not love a group whose slogan reads
Incubating positive futures since 1988 through tomorrow?
The Future And Its Enemies is a book that suggests a new political dichotomy: not liberal versus conservative, but those who embrace change and those who feel the future is something to approach with caution. Myself, I'm firmly in the former camp.
Is
this the way the world ends?
Okay, I haven't been too good about keeping this blog up (one blog is exhausting enough by itself). I do intend to keep it up, and a radical redesign is on the way. In the meantime, here's a whole passel of interesting futurist sites to take note of:
A Futurist at the Movies is very erudite, and ranks films according to the believability of their future.
Revelations of the Future Kind is a list of links so comprehensive that it almost makes me throw up my hands and give up on the whole Future Daze idea. Almost ...
An Illustrated Speculative Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change is wonderfully earnest, although there's a little less of the "illustrated" than the title might make you think. Still, an excellent place to start visualizing the future.
Five years ago, experts at the University of Washington produced a
Guide to the Year 2088.FutureFile claims to be the Web's leading resource about the future, although author Todd Maffin seems to be as busy as I am -- the top link is from May 13.
Around the turn of the millennium, Britain's Sunday Times came up with a
Chronicle of the Future (Dammit, that's the name I was going to use for my futurism project ...) It suffers from the expected problems of newspaper sensationalism and pre-millennial hype, but is still worth checking out for the illustrations and the wonderful style: writing from the future, not to it.
E.T., Don’t Phone Home; Drop a Line Instead
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Were E.T. really interested in getting in touch with home, he might be better off writing than phoning, according to Christopher Rose, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Rose contends that inscribing information and physically sending it to some location in deep space is more energy-efficient than pulsing it out on radio waves, which disperse as they travel.
“Think of a flashlight beam,” Rose says. “Its intensity decreases as it gets farther from its source. The same is true of the beam of a laser pointer, though the distance is much longer. The unavoidable fact is that waves, both light and radio, disperse over distance, and over great distance, they disperse a lot.”
Rose and Gregory Wright, a physicist, are co-authors of a paper titled, “Inscribed matter as an energy-efficient means of communication with an extraterrestrial civilization,” which appears on the cover of the September 2 issue of Nature. The paper grew out of Rose’s work at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers’ School of Engineering. “Our original question was, ‘How do you get the most bits per second over a wireless channel?’” Rose says. This led him to consider distance, and the “energy budget” required for sending a signal. The budget increases with distance, Rose contends, and the detectability of the signal diminishes. The less detectable a message is, the lower its speed.
In addition, Rose says, when waves pass a particular point, they’ve passed it for good. Potential recipients at that point might be unable to snag a passing message for any one of many reasons. They might not be listening. They might be extinct. So someone sending such a message would have to send it over and over to increase the chance of its being received. The energy budget goes up accordingly. A physical message, however, stays where it lands.
Rose is in favor of listening for that close encounter, but he thinks researchers should have their eyes open, too. Rose speculates that “messages” might be anything from actual text in a real language to (more likely) organic material embedded in an asteroid – or in the crater made by such an asteroid upon striking Earth. Messages – and Rose suggests there might be many of them, perhaps millions – might literally be at our feet. They might be awaiting our discovery on the moon, or on one of Jupiter’s moons. They might be dramatic or mundane. A bottle floating in the ocean is just a bottle floating in the ocean – unless, upon closer inspection, it turns out to have a message in it.
Rose concedes that this idea may be hard to accept, but this difficulty arises from our concern about time. If the sender isn’t concerned about reaching the recipient and getting an answer in his own lifetime, inscribing and sending is the way to go.
“If haste is unimportant, sending messages inscribed on some material can be strikingly more efficient than communicating by electromagnetic waves,” Rose says.
Of course, E.T.’s choice of medium might be affected by how much he had to say. “Since messages require protection from cosmic radiation, and small messages might be difficult to find amid the clutter near a recipient, ‘inscribed matter’ is most effective for long, archival messages, as opposed to potentially short ‘we exist’ announcements,” Rose says.
2067: Majority Rules
What if the desires of the many, of the mob, were given free rein? What if we had total democracy?
What if our descendents shook their heads when showing their children round the Lincoln Memorial at how little democracy we had?
“You see, honey, they only had the elections back then. They didn’t have the polls. Not even the weekly ones! Well, not really. They didn’t really have any force. Back then, legislatures like Congress actually, by tradition, did what they wanted. But people realized that simply meant rule by the corporations. And they realized they had to do something. They created the first nationwide Smart Mob, called Majority Rules. It was open to anyone to join. There was no cost, and it had great benefits. It wasn’t controlled by any one person. There was a small team of administrative staff that replaced itself every year; all they did was make sure the smart mob machinery ran smoothly. Anything contentious within the group was decided by, you guessed it, majority rule. Every single item of legislation considered by Congress came up for a vote. They put Congress on notice. Every one of them started the session with twelve karma points – votes of conscience, we now call them. Any Congressmen who voted against the will of the majority as recorded on that day would loose karma points on the Majority Rules website. Anyone who sponsored a bill that the majority disliked would also loose karma points. Anyone whose karma points were in the negative come election day – well, they wouldn’t be around much longer. It kept working, and as it kept working, more people joined, which ensured that it would continue to keep working. How could it fail? It was too simple. Sign up online, take part in at least one vote every day to keep your membership current. Win prizes for participating. And you don’t have to agree with each and every result. Anything even close to a 50-50 split meant no karma points would be lost. Even natural loners, outsiders, freethinkers, the minority, were drawn to it. After all, as the ads kept telling them, if you’re dissatisfied with a Majority Rules vote, change it next time around – by joining in the conversation! There was a kind of herd instinct about it, which Majority Rules played on. The machinery was set up so it was a real insider’s club. They handed out free PDAphone headsets with a heavily discounted service plan for members – which, because of the vast amount of chatter over each vote, paid for itself. They did anything to keep that conversation going. The media started to pay a great deal of attention – some of it negative, at first, until Majority Rules passed an internal vote creating a voluntary boycott of newschannels and sheets who refused to give MR “proper consideration.” Then, of course, they swung the other way. They became cheerleaders for the organization. After all, it was cheap polling. And easy newsgathering. Every lead story became a “gimme” – as in, just give me the Majority Rules numbers on this. MR was not unreceptive to the media, either. They allowed each news organization a chance to feed one question into the MR system every day, and trumpet the results on their front pages and at the top of their broadcasts. Instead of circulation or viewership, media orgs started to boast about their MR turnout – that is, what percentage of the total organization deemed this question interesting enough to vote on it? High turnout figures almost became a story in themselves, especially when you had large-print numbers on the first page/screen.
“So the media was neutered. Congress was effectively neutered. And they were happy to be neutered, most of them. The media had a smorgasboard of easy stories and a sense of facilitating the national conversation, which was all they ever really wanted. Congress got their faces on every national news broadcast – because MR worked, people were actually interested in the process again – and a self-righteous sense of doing the people’s work, which is all they ever really wanted, too. Occasionally you’d get a maverick Senator coming perilously close to his 12 allotted conscience votes – but often, if he was doing this, it was a gamble that he could change people’s minds by being forthright. He’d certainly stand out, receive a lot of airtime for his views, and quite possibly swing public opinion close enough to the 50-50 field to survive. The President was rated too, of course, on his executive actions. Out of deference to the office, he received 24 karma points. But if he so much as spoke an unpopular opinion, you could almost feel the laser-like attention focus on the next day’s media polls. Had he lost – or gained – his bully pulpit touch? Could he move the numbers?
Corporations were kind of neutered, kind of empowered. After all, many majority votes were in favor of less regulation, and there was nothing preventing them spending on advertising to sway opinion. But they couldn’t fool all the people all the time. When they did something wrong, when they stepped out of line, when they bullied other companies and fiddled their accounts and despoiled the environment, they were punished. Big time.
“The system worked. Ten years or so after the founding of MR, the politicians made it official with the Benson Act, which standardized the conscience vote system. Karma points were no longer necessary. True democracy had come to America at last.
“What’s that, honey? Do I think there’s any danger of a charismatic MR administrator persuading the public to change the rules that administrators have to step down, thus starting a whole new dangerous politics? No, I don’t think that’s at all likely. Do you?”
Future Fragments
Assumption 1: Human growth continues to despoil the human environment.
Assumption 2: Consumers will want ever-closer-to-instant gratification.
Even if they don't, corporations will assume they do. And life imitates trendspotting.Assumption 3: Corporations take over the conduct of politics from nation states.
Internecine conflict and Byzantine 'partnerships' are the order of the day.Assumption 4: Hackers become the new pirates.
In every sense.Assumption 5: Mind-expanding and experience-enhancing drug use continues to rise.
The acceptability, availability and desire for quick-fix drugs will increase as long as the culture of capitalism does. Eventually we will realize they are one and the same thing. A solution to unhappiness! Buy now!Assumption 6: Advertising is becoming ever more invasive and ever more intense.
We are building an advertocracy, not a democracy. There will, simply, be no other form of authority as clever or as incessant as advertising. We give it power, elevate it above politicians and pundits, because it informs our base needs far better. Even the US military, which blankets a country with leaflets as a precedent to bombs, recognizes this. Assumption 7: Human cloning is inevitable.
Assumption 8: Near-infinite bandwidth is inevitable.
Assumption 9: Charismatic and meritocratic institutions will always succeed in the long term.
Call it the marriage of capitalism and Darwinism.Assumption 10: Cities are, in effect, new life forms.
If social conventions continue on the trajectory of the last hundred years, we'll have tribal cultures -- techno tribal cultures, to be sure -- within fifty years.Assumption 11: The age of science as we know it is coming to an end.
Traditional science is based on causuality. But only the cause and effect that can be studied, or that flows forward in time. There are other kinds -- and science itself will prove that when it stumbles upon the inexplicable, as it has already begun to do.
2257: America the Feudal
The United States has become a corporate-military, bilingual, white-hispanic dictatorship. Its departmental PR agencies are becoming intertwined with the mainstream media. There are 62 states, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Quebec, Cuba, Canada, the Philippines and the six-state former UK-and-Eire. Life for its citizens is a never-ending techogical playpen of earthly and virtual pleasures. There are few limits to freedom. Nobody misses the painful duty of voting. Yes, if certain people get their kicks by knowing about the government's corruption, let them find it and rebroadcast it over that old fashioned, free but ghettoized, amateur and nonprofit haven called the Internet (as opposed to the corporation-run, entertainment-filled ExtraNet, which 90% of the citizens use). It won't make much difference.
Patriotism, meanwhile, has become practically feudalized. Corporations, Homeland Security forces (a confluence of the army, airforce, CIA, FBI, NSA and USPD), The Space Navy (which runs all military campaigns through precision airstrikes and lasering from high altitude), large and wealthy families -- all jump at the chance to license their own colorful, heraldic versions of Old Glory.
2479: Our Sins Come Back
The world has been overrun by two of our worst nightmares. Insects and viruses, after hundreds of years of enforced evolution brought on by mankind's pesticides and pharmacology, have become super-potent and resistant to just about everything science throws at them. We are fighting a losing battle against hordes of increasingly diverse and wily insect critters for control of the increasingly tropical global climate and its food supply. We retreat into large domed cities with space for fields of genetically engineered crops, but there we find breeding grounds for myriad super-diseases swifter than influenza, more awful than the Black Death and more misunderstood than AIDS.
Everyone is assumed to be a carrier. For our own safety, we are all kept in individual quarantine. Our apartments -- little more than padded cells -- are swabbed clean every day by nanobots. Society starts to smile on those who conduct all their human affairs over the Internet, and frowns on excessive social contact (indeed, those who indulge in it die out in a matter of generations). Meeting other people for "facetime" is a titilating taboo. Long-term couples are tolerated: if they get to the stage of coupling without catching something lethal from each other, it is generally assumed they have the kind of resistant genes we need to breed into the race. Much more outrageous is the kind of face-to-face contact known as Deathwishing: three or more people holding in-person house parties for a whole evening, sometimes longer. If they locate Deathwishers, the Corpse Cops daren't intervene. They just set up a perimeter around the apartment, and wait to extract the bodies.
2104: How to Elect an American President
Only corporations get to vote. The number of votes they have depends on their total number of employees. The rationale is that since corporations are going to sway elections anyway, you might as well give them a basis for fair and equal influence without unseemly amounts of money changing hands. No dubious campaign donations to muck up the evening news and put people off politicians.
Work becomes a much more homogeneous place, and the sense of community squeezed out of the world by capitalist forces returns in the form of love and loyalty for ones co-workers, all of whom tend to have pretty much the same ideological viewpoint as you. CEOs are really hungry for this kind of power once it is proposed, and they control large corporate security forces that have largely taken the place of the local police.
The majority of those people who don't work for any corporation are either freaks who choose not to, most of whom are going to feel alienated no matter what you do to them, or geeks who are far too wrapped up in their own personal obsession to care about politics. Better not to bother them unduly with all that 20th-century style campaign advertising. Besides, if the principle of one-man one-vote matters that much to you, you'll be working for one of those ecologically-sound, touchy-feely corporations that gives out its votes to employees and allows them a conscience. If you work someplace else, and it means that much to you, go ahead. Go on strike. Your job will be outsourced and you'll get half-pay, then you'll return and people will make jokes about you behind your cubicle. It's not the government's concern.
2359: One minute to Midnight
The final flowering of eschatalogical "last days" Christianity. After this, few believers are prepared to pinpoint the final coming of Christ with any accuracy, and the faith settles down forever into a calmer, more rational view of world history. The gospel of St. John the Divine fades into obscurity.
