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Introduction
If the
speculations in previous chapters turn out to be at all accurate,
by 2107 humans may inhabit forms which will not look very much like
people in 2007, even if their legacy bodies remain in carefully
controlled storage. But humanity, in the sense of human nature and
the human psyche will probably be preserved,
however accommodated in electronic or material terms. Thus, the
set of group-oriented social skills and behaviours
which evolved in the early history of hominids, and which this book
has constantly insisted lie at the core of our existence, will also
be preserved.
In the
last chapter some of the possibilities of expanded cognition
were explored, making use of the fact that wireless (or magnetic
or cable) communication will allow the human brain
to work with external sensory inputs and cognitive
settings in a seamless fashion. At the outside edge of such developments
was posited the emergence of RCCs - Remote Cognitive
Collectives, in which the boundaries between individuals
are beginning to dissolve, allowing groups of individuals to function
together in a way which would be orders of magnitude more effective
(faster, more accurate, more intelligent) than one human brain on
its own can achieve.
We also
noted that by assisting introspection bionically
or by gene therapy or manipulation, it might
be possible to 'improve' the human psyche from an ethical
perspective, to make it less dishonest, less aggressive and less
individualistic. Related ethical issues have been largely ducked
so far, and even more serious issues are raised by the fact that,
at least in technical terms, humans will be able to reinvent themselves
in a number of different ways.
These
agendas will have been fairly thoroughly explored by about 2070
in terms of technological feasibility. That is also the timetable
for the emergence of a stable, globalized
'new world order' as sketched out in previous chapters. Attention
will therefore have begun to turn to our longer term prospects.
The purpose
of this chapter is to delineate some of the further-out possibilities
for re-engineering of the human mind, and to elaborate to some extent
the ethical dimensions of such changes.
Why
Should We Want To Change Ourselves?
Not just
because we can, although that on its own makes it certain that we
will, but because evolution hasn't finished
with us, and never will, while we exist; because we seem unable
to secure the good bits of human nature against the bad bits; because
we may destroy ourselves if we don't change; and because we have
allowed the Church and the State
to relieve our 'souls' - for want of a better word - of moral responsibility.
Many people
will argue against interference with the work - variously - of God,
evolution and society; but this argument has no clothes any longer,
if it ever did. We have comprehensively
re-engineered plants and such species as wolves, cats and horses.
We go to enormous lengths to educate children to defy their natures.
We have an vast and growing tower of ethical
rules which constrain humans to behave in prescribed ways in almost
every imaginable situation in life - and, very importantly, these
rules are increasingly global, as Book One has shown. It isn't possible
any longer to 'let 1,000 flowers bloom' - humanity has reached consensus
on an ever wider range of behavioural and economic rules. A process
which we have characterized as ineluctable.
These
masses of rules are nothing less than an attempt to change human
nature by barricading it into a behavioural corner - how much more
elegant it would be to change ourselves.
How
We May Change Ourselves
Before
continuing with a discussion of what types of change might be acceptable
- or accepted - it will be useful to set down some of the technological
possibilities.
- Independence
of the mind and the body; meaning that the psyche
of a human could be re-created in an electronic (probably bio-electronic
by then) assembly, with sensory input (as
previously described) transmitted to the 'host' human, if required,
by wireless or magnetic or cable communication. Ray
Kurzweil 1 predicts that computer
hardware will be powerful enough to run a functional model of
the human mind by the 2020s.
- Abandonment
of bodies altogether. Evidently, this amounts to immortality,
if indeed by then it has not been achieved in physical terms.
- Abandonment of individuality
in favour of collectivities.
- Abandonment of multiple
collectivities in favour of one collectivity.
- The living of multiple
simultaneous lives by one individual.
- The creation of
alternative psychical forms and bodies or societies to accommodate
them (let's be a tiger today).
It is
fairly obvious that human bodies will never travel to the stars
- to other planets outside the solar system. There will just be
no point, when all that is necessary is to pack a series of electronic
genomes suited to different planetary environments
(or just a program to construct a genome in response to any particular
environment which might be encountered). If people like us are still
around, we will travel with the templates as electronic versions
of ourselves, and download into a constructed local life form when
it has been grown. Or more likely we will stay on board our mother
ship in its brain and watch (control) events on the ground through
appropriate robotic agents.
People
will probably never want to give up their individuality; it's on
a level with expecting nation states to give up their armies. But
individuality doesn't have to travel with bestiality - there are
acceptable ways of competing with other people short of killing
them; and 'suffering enobles' - great art and philosophy has come
out of hardship. People will want to retain the ability to suffer
as well as enjoy; without personal growth there is just collective
stasis.
One of
the easiest predictions is that people as individuals will continue
to want to have fun, meaning that on-line gaming and social Virtual
Internet Communities (VICs) will continue to test the boundaries
of what is permissible. Once it is possible for an individual to
be a tiger in a virtual jungle, to inflict and suffer injury, to
hunt and kill (usually virtual) prey, and even to be (virtually)
killed, is there any doubt that sites will provide such experiences?
It is already there, in fact, at today's primitive level of technology.
What is currently missing is the direct sensory link between the
avatar (Remote Cognitive Representation, in
our terminology) doing the experiencing and the owner's mind; and
of course the fully-understood wiring diagram for a tiger's mind,
or at least the parts of it that are needed for a hunt in the jungle.
People
will also presumably be highly reluctant to give up the mating
process, although it may come to be rationed in terms of population
growth, if economics doesn't get there first, as seems more likely.
Collective mating is not a very attractive thought; so we can expect
to see the wooing and mating process become (in fact, remain) a
prominent feature of VICs. The difference, evidently, will be that
physical meeting will not be necessary in order to experience the
various stages of a relationship; in fact, it would be possible
to explore alternative personalities, not necessarily human, either,
before finally adopting a particular personality (or physical form)
for a permanent relationship.
It's hard
to believe that marriage will survive as
an institution. Of course there will always
need to be a body of property rights law, matrimonial and other
family law, but it will come to look very different from today's
law. Polygamy is presumably inoffensive if all parties are willing
and if coition is virtual. It feels the same, remember, between
Remote Cognitive Representations (RCRs) - but you can't catch AIDS.
Perhaps though you could catch something electronic and nasty instead?
While
utilization of new cognitive techniques seems
a certainty at the level of the individual brain, the energy of
the globalisation process will equally not
be denied. It is not perhaps quite right to call it a collectivization
process, but that is not far from the truth. Book One tried to show
that while the energy of the nation state denies
individuality and human-ness, the globalization process, at first
sight paradoxically, does the opposite: it enhances individual rights,
individual choice and individual achievement, but within a carefully
supervized, rule-based framework, which can only be called collective.
The nation state makes rules, by all means, but they are rules for
suppression of individuality, made in the single interest of the
State itself. Its support for individuals is grudging at best.
Thus the
globalization process will encourage and facilitate the creation
of Remote Cognitive Collectives. They won't
look like that at first: they will be 'dispute resolution forums',
or 'joint trading rule supervisory bodies' and the like. But of
course they will use technology to achieve their aims - the formation
of a consensus solution - and little by little, the RCCs will take
shape.
So there
is a case to be made for each of the possibilities listed above,
and absent an ethical or cultural barrier, they will all probably
come to be available to people, who will be able to participate
in any or all of them. People? Wait a moment! People will not be
people, they will be something - lots of somethings - different.
That is the most difficult part of the future to predict. It is
reasonably easy to see how the technological possibilities will
unfurl; but not at all easy to see how our society will change its
rules to accommodate them. When it becomes possible to create a
child with any desired set of physical and mental attributes, who
is to make the choice?
Children
And The Human Genome
From a
strictly utilitarian perspective, children won't be necessary, in
fact, once immortal representations of ourselves inhabit computers;
on the other hand, people will not let go of the pleasure and responsibility
of bringing up a family any more than they will let go of the pleasures
and pains of having a body, even if they choose to use it only very
occasionally. It is likely therefore that children will continue
to be born even when there will no longer be a need for them in
population replacement or evolutionary terms, through a combination
of market forces, willingness to conform to ethical breeding guidelines,
and availability of space and resources.
There
will be plenty of space for there to be more people, in fact, even
if the population has not stabilized: many people may choose to
let go of their human bodies in favour of RCR
and RCC experiences, with occasional physical
embodiment in robotic form (the word is wrong, because the bio-electronic
construct being temporarily 'inhabited' by the individual may take
many physical and psychic forms). Alternatively there may be rationing
of physicality by regulation and/or by the market. Of course it
will be a human right to enjoy physicality for a certain minimum
amount of time, paid for by taxation (unlike
death, taxes will indeed always be with us). And presumably by 2100
the human race will be well on the way to creating its extra lebensraum
in space. Adventurous spirits will travel to the stars in electronic
form and recreate themselves on arrival from local materials.
Outright
experimentation in child-bearing will perhaps not be permitted,
and the human genome, having been 'cleaned-up'
in order to get rid of disease genes and certain anti-social tendencies,
will be maintained as a kind of template onto which parents will
be permitted to map characteristics from a list of fairly narrowly
defined acceptable variations. Musical parents would perhaps want
to give their child capacious lungs (the better to sing) or wide
hands (the better to play octaves or even tenths). Thus far seems
acceptable: these are improvements, even if not used by the child
in later life. If a child of two tennis-playing parents turns out
to be musical (and not wanting to use the powerful shoulders it
was given), then of course it can be a concert pianist through an
RCR surrogate.
What to
do though with ever-greater numbers of individuals who are going
to live for ever, even if they are stored in chips and don't take
up a measurable amount of space or resources? Some of them will
no doubt become couch chips. Will people want to switch themselves
off out of ennui? There is a growing movement for euthanasia in
the early 21st century, but presumably candidates for it are people
who are facing imminent and painful death - will there still be
candidates for death if it is no longer inevitable? Will there then
be rules to isolate people, temporarily or permanently, if they
don't contribute to society in a way that is found acceptable by
their peers?
The
Dark Side Of Change
The dark
side of humanity (and nature) will remain, of course. Disease, in
the sense of transmissible viruses, will presumably
have been tamed by 2070, although that will nearly be an irrelevant
statement since bodily contact between individuals will no longer
be necessary, even if it sometimes takes place. Howard Hughes was
right! But the difficulties caused by viruses on the Internet
demonstrate the rule that any innovation is more vulnerable to competition
or attack from other life forms than an established form which has
already erected its defences.
The Internet
is changing so fast that it is more vulnerable to fraud, deceit
and pure destructiveness than an established technology such as
telephone communication. In virtual reality, even with sensory contact,
there are multiple ways to be deceived, robbed or killed. Given
that direct connection with a Remote Cognitive
Representation implies open-ness to any opportunistic virus which
has already infiltrated the RCR, protecting oneself against damage
is clearly going to be a major issue. A counterfeit thought can't
perhaps do organic damage simply by masquerading as a piece of permitted
sensory input - or can it? If it cloaks a biochemical recipe for
neural poison, then one has subverted the
blood/brain barrier, and organic brain death could be instant.
Such thoughts
are scary; but in truth they are no more scary than blood transfusion,
organ implantation, inoculation, and a host of other widely practiced
invasive medical techniques which could have carried (and in many
cases did carry) with them mortal dangers until they were fully
understood.
The dangers
will delay but not stop implementation of direct sensory communication
and the use of RCRs or RCCs. Perhaps initially such possibly dangerous
and ethically challenging technologies will be used therapeutically
in life-threatening or other extreme situations, and only afterwards
for more frivolous purposes. But there will always be an individual
mad enough to want to try the next thing: once it has worked for
Steve Foster or Sir Richard Branson, it is OK for you!
The prospect
of a constrained mating process which makes only very limited use
of the genetic engineering techniques that
are available obviously raises the issue of cheating, both well-intentioned
cheating (parents who acquire a forbidden gene for their child)
and evil cheating (criminals who construct robot-human hybrids which
masquerade as people).
Cheating
is also going to take place through RCRs and
RCCs, for instance through the inclusion in
an RCR or an RCC of a stolen identity. Criminals could abuse the
functioning of a bank's governing RCC (effectively, its senior management),
using identity fraud or by bribing software engineers to include
illicit code. There are a myriad possibilities.
No doubt
it would be a goal of the authorities (whatever that word may come
to mean in 2100) to remove criminal tendencies from the human genome.
But that is probably impossible, and anyway would be resisted by
the guardians of 'humanity' (a global organization affiliated to
the United Nations). No doubt some of the causes
of criminality can be smoothed away genetically, but as long as
jealousy, the competitive instinct, the trading
faculty and inequality remain parts of human life, there will be
cheaters; and these are not qualities that will find themselves
on the bio-engineering hit list. While human nature remains more
or less intact, then, there will be criminals; therefore there will
also be police, punishment and a judicial process. Naturally
the court process will take place in an (uninfiltrated!) RCC.
Legitimate
RCCs will have defences against infiltration, but in addition there
will also be rogue RCCs, the equivalent of criminal gangs, formed
for the purpose of terrorism or plain robbery and which disguise
themselves as legitimate RCCs. However, the same techniques that
human groups have developed through genetic and social evolution
to maintain personal and group integrity will allow society to combat
deception even in the very different circumstances
of 2100.
The importance
and effectiveness of reputation and its management
were described in Chapter Seven: The Internet, and such mechanisms
will be just as effective in a world populated by 'cleaned-up' humans,
RCRs and RCCs. See If anything,
communication (electronic gossiping!) will
become more thorough and more immediate. Every actor, whether human
or robotic, will have access to complete, global information about
miscreants. You can sin once, but you are then damaged goods in
reputation terms. A criminal RCC would have to spend many years
building up a good reputation, including a requirement that its
individual human members themselves have spotless records, before
it would be sufficiently trusted for the 'sting' to take place.
That is an unlikely combination. More probably, there will be individual
criminals, but they will be outsiders, surviving through not being
known about. Life is going to be hard for them in a data-heavy world.
Still, plenty of well-educated people in the early 21st century
world get stung on the Internet through
a mixture of greed, gullibility and laziness - more characteristics
which we won't be engineering out of the genome!
People
Won't Have To 'Work' But Must Contribute
One
of the most worthwhile aspects of the technological and social developments
surveyed in this book will be the increased freedom they will bring
to human individuals, including the freedom to dispose of one's
time as one chooses.
The last
100 years has seen a steady diminution in the number of hours an
average person spends at work, and in the proportion of people who
work at all, at least in developed countries, alongside increases
in their purchasing power. The amount of economic benefit obtained
by one hour of work has increased dramatically. Technology has been
a major contributor to this process, indeed perhaps the only cause
of it, and is going to continue to provide ever more substantial
economic benefits to mankind. Robots themselves
will clearly take over major swathes of the activities we currently
call work. Even though new types of job will emerge as a result,
the overall effect will be to reduce still further the amount of
time that a normal individual in a developed country has to devote
to work.
Alongside reductions
in obligatory working time, people will increasingly benefit from
the returns on invested wealth. The accumulated wealth of humanity
is already vast, in money terms, even in 2007, and an increasing
number (and proportion) of people do not need to 'work' in the sense
of earning their livings. Consulting
firm McKinsey reported in 2007 that the value of total global financial
assets, including equities, government and corporate debt securities,
and bank deposits, expanded to $140 trillion by the end of 2005,
representing US$17,500 per head of the world's population. McKinsey's
figures recorded a rate of increase of wealth of about 6% per annum
over a number of years. World population, on the other hand, has
been increasing at approximately 1.5% per year, with this figure
tending to fall in recent years. After allowing for inflation, the
differential of 3% per year, if it is maintained, represents growth
in wealth per head of about 35% every ten years. By 2045, wealth
per head of the population would be US$60,000; and by 2095, nearly
US$300,000. And this is not to consider income (investment returns)
from the wealth.
It
is clear, especially if population growth is brought under even
tighter control, that given equal distribution of mankind's accumulated
wealth, there will come a point towards the end of the 21st century
at which there would be enough money for no-one to have to work
to earn income. Of course, no such socialistic
scenario is likely. However, it can be expected that the trend towards
less and less work will continue, even accelerate, and that the
enormous balances of assets that will accumulate will be invested
to a certain extent into savings schemes for poorer people. This
would be a form of global taxation, or redistribution,
which might accompany the final burying of corporation tax, to be
expected in the 2020s. The rich countries cannot stand by while
Africans starve: whether it is achieved through the munificence
of plutocrats such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, or through
redistributive taxation, it is in the interests of the whole of
humanity that poorer people are helped to 'bootstrap' themselves
through better education, financial support and developmental aid
to a higher level of achievement. Surely this will be a major priority
of the 2020s and 2030s.
As 'work', in the sense
of obligatory involvement in a revenue-earning activity, loses its
importance relative to investment management or leisure activities,
people will have time on their hands. It's possible that many people
will just waste this time in various ways, as they do now, but more
likely that individuals will come to want to contribute towards
the future of society, and quite probable that society itself will
come to demand 'contribution' from people. Society already rewards
people who contribute outside their quotidian lives with respect,
honours and even in some cases money.
One's
'work' may come to mean, a contribution to the knowledge, variety
and evolutionary success of the race. Many people already fit that
definition - writers, painters, academics and philosophers, for
instance - and many more people could do so if they had received
appropriate education. It will be argued that only 'clever' people
can do such 'work'; but in future everyone will be clever. What
parent will fail to tick the 'IQ over 150' box when filling out
the child specification?
In addition,
the emergence of a vast range of new associative possibilities through
the interplay of globalization and the Internet,
and the opportunities offered by RCCs for groups
of individuals to explore new ways of thinking, feeling and creating,
will greatly expand the variety and interest of pursuits available
to people, useful or otherwise. It would have been impossible in
1890 to imagine the kaleidoscopic universe of human
culture that would come to exist by 1990, even if some people such
as Jules Verne and H G Wells did succeed in imaging some of the
technologies that would be employed to service it. It is equally
impossible in 2007 to imagine the ten times greater explosion of
cultural diversity and experience that will have taken place by
2107. It is possible however to be sure that it will happen.
Summary
Book One
proposed that globalization will dominate the polity of the future;
Book Two has indulged in some speculation around the societal and
technological forces which may change humanity in the 21st century.
In Book Three, an attempt is made to create a synthesis of these
forces and trends and to describe a number of aspects of the next
100 years in quite concrete terms. Of course the future will probably
not be as Book Three describes it; but then again, maybe it will
be!
Footnotes:
1.
Kurzweil, R The Ray Kurzweil Reader, http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0588.html?
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