The Futures Of The Human Race

As described in Chapter One, and reinforced in other earlier chapters, self-awareness (consciousness) is a prominent feature of the human psyche (a concept that includes the totality of a person's cognitive processes, conscious as well as unconscious). Consciousness was greatly expanded, if indeed it didn't originate, during the period in which humans learned to live in groups, a process which also included the evolution of symbolic thought, culminating in the use of language.

With the development of the human social group came also the emergence of morality as we now understand it. It is not clear that consciousness would have been required for the evolution of morality, but it is certainly true today that humans are aware of, even obsessed by their moral nature.

Although it seems that the basic foundations of morality, including reciprocal altruism and a predisposition to trust others arose in the context of the social group, and are part of humans' genetic endowment, cultural development has greatly expanded the ethical structures under which modern people exist.

Individuality, as it is experienced by modern humans, is also bound up with consciousness (self-awareness). Other key cognitive advances which have helped to make up the foundation of the modern psyche are a sense of historical time, something which may not be shared by any other animal, and the practice of naming people and objects, something which was a necessary precursor to language.

It is not right, however, to suppose that individual, moral consciousness is an adequate basis for a successful society, in the absence of collective institutions, at least not without considerable and often painful personal development. Neither morality nor individual consciousness could have developed originally other than as an expression of the collective, and the same is very probably true for every new individual even today. Writer after writer (see the Introduction) insists upon the groupish nature of early humans and their social institutions.

For a modern person, saturated in belief in the elaborate individuality that has somehow come to be erected in opposition to the over-mighty State, it requires a super-human effort of mind to realise that the group came first, the individual came second, and the State, by a long way, came last.

After tens or hundreds of thousands of years during which human societies governed themselves as self-contained groups, it is just in the last few thousand years that monarchs, religions and eventually states have taken it upon themselves to deliver ethics and justice. This process has reached a pathological extreme, and it has been the message of the greater part of this book that a reaction is now going to take place, helped along by globalization and the Internet.

The subject of this chapter is the fate of the human psyche as this next transformation takes place in human social affairs.

For the moment skirting around the possibility that humans may choose types of psyche which are different from the one we now have (but see below), the options open to a member of contemporary society might be listed as follows:

The first of these leads to lack of moral basis in life, due to the unsatisfactory moral leadership given by the State (it demands moral hegemony, but then behaves completely amorally in relation to its citizens, and fails to provide satisfactory models or moral teaching). The result is hoodies and the rest.

The second is very successful for those individuals who do it, but fails to address the pressing questions that are posed by humanity's progress. Examples of communities that have retreated to (or stayed in) past folkish social models are the Hutterites and the Amish. 'Revivalist' US religious communities probably fall into this bracket, as do activist organizations such as Al Quaede. Scientologists, nuns and monks are other examples of communities that solve the problems of modern society by ignoring them.

The third path seems to be the only possible one for an individual who wishes to be 'saved' from the moral desert of the modern world, while continuing to be a part of that world. It doesn't absolutely require a conscious decision to follow such a path, but is probably much more difficult without awareness of what is going on. It is difficult because it requires acceptance of the unconscious, group-based nature of one's psyche, which cannot easily be accessed by the enquiring conscious mind, but which informs the whole of the structure of the personality, especially as regards social dealings with the outside world.

The 'groupish' unconsciousness carries with it the moral burden of all the groups to which an individual belongs, even if part of this may have been contributed from external sources (from the 10 Commandments to the Code of Practice for Futures Traders to the rules of your golf club). In order for an individual to construct her own independent yet 'groupish' universe, it is necessary for the conscious mind, including the superego, to accept the body of these rules as a real and forceful part of the psyche. In history, few people have achieved this; but it is becoming easier because of better understanding of the workings of the mind and society. Nowadays a reasonably well-educated person is already a few steps up the ladder before they even start.

It needs to become the goal of society that all its members should fit this specification, unless they wish to follow the second path. The cop-out, the first path, should not be a permitted option, because that is what will lead to a permanent underclass, and nightmare visions like H G Wells's Eloi and Morlocks. It is quite surprising how many science fiction writers have imagined a 2-layer society of this kind; it is indeed one of the greatest dangers facing humans, but it can be avoided fairly easily as long as an inclusive agenda is adopted by those people who are in a position to influence the choices of individuals and their organizations.

This is not to say that lager and Little Britain are to be banned in favour of a diet of Chateau Petrus and The Art of Fugue. It is not necessary to be elitist in order to understand and participate in collective, 'groupish' activities and mind-sets.

The goal of a more aware and conscious, a more informed individual, with fewer internal barriers to understanding (of billions of them, indeed) can be approached through self-education and through the development of organizations (clubs, associations, virtual worlds). This process will take place anyway even without a conscious determination to follow it through on the part of a given individual because of the advancing 'groupish' tendencies of globalization and the Internet that have been sketched in previous chapters. But in addition, as technology advances during the next 100 years, there will also come to be ways of changing the human psyche from the outside, so to speak, alongside the autonomous internal growth processes.

The brains we have got now are of course miraculous, but they are the result of countless tiny improvements to what went before rather than the outcome of one coherent piece of planning aimed at creating a brain for the 21st century - or any other particular moment in time.

As is to be expected, each new cognitive faculty required, so to speak, by evolution, has had to be fitted in alongside the existing instrument, or on top of it. The result is a patchwork of areas with overlapping functions and a wiring diagram, once it has been deciphered, that is far more complicated than perhaps it need have been if all had been designed at once.

As described in the last chapter, tools now being developed including gene therapy, genetic manipulation, bionic implantation, cognitive extensions such as robots, and eventually electronic brain cloning, will open up possibilities for imposing changes on the evolved psyches we now possess, by way of assisting the ability of an individual to function adequately in society as it evolves, including a likelihood that inter-personal communication will become far deeper than it is now through direct brain-to-brain connections bypassing existing sensory channels, and perhaps employing shared cognitive spaces.

Any such development raises significant ethical issues, which have been laid out in previous chapters to a certain extent. Once again it's necessary to state that it's not the purpose of this book to take sides in ethical debate, but simply to explore our possible futures on a pragmatic basis.

It's not very easy to construct the way in which the different technological possibilities will interplay, not least because of the social and ethical constraints that will affect their deployment; however, here are some guesses.

In Chapter One, there was a brief discussion of the possible origins and purpose of consciousness, including a description of its relationship with other parts of the brain. The discussion was taken further, particularly as regards the role of deception (and self-deception) in human cognitive functioning in Chapter Seven, The Internet. Any attempt to break down the barriers that exist between the conscious and the unconscious mind (and some degree of this is essential for anyone following the third, preferred option above) runs immediately into the fact of human deception.

The appearance of deception as an inter-personal, social technique is possibly associated with the beginnings of a theory of mind (awareness of others as separate individuals) and an understanding of intentionality (the ability to impute motivation to others). Deception is described among a very wide range of animal species, and certainly existed as an adaptive technique long before the emergence of social groupings of animals, but individual behaviour intended to deceive one or more conspecifics emerges only as part of 'groupish' behaviour (eg among some primates), and seems to require at least a primitive ability to think of the other as different from oneself.

Recent work on self-deception shows how the human consciousness is used by various parts of the psyche and the external group for their own purposes, and is strongly at odds with any view that consciousness has a directing role in human behaviour. Prominent in the exploration of human self-deception has been Robert Trivers, who describes multiple forms of self-deception which surface in the consciousness, including:

the enhancement of deception of others;
input from the internal voices of significant others, notably including parents;
the results of internal genetic conflict, particularly between maternal and paternal genes; and
creating a favourable future orientation.

In support of the isolated role of the consciousness in much cognitive processing, research work carried out by B Libet ¹ clarifies the timetables involved. A highly significant physiological fact is that while it takes about 20 ms for a nervous signal to reach the brain from for example a finger, and the finger can respond in 50 ms, the signal does not register in consciousness (if at all) for 500 ms. A nervous 'round-trip' involving cognitive processing (but not the conscious mind) may take between 100 and 200 ms. However, the registering of a conscious 'intention' to act takes 350 ms from its neuronal origins, and there is a further 200 ms between the registering of the intention and the carrying out of the action. Says Trivers: 'It seems as if our conscious mind is more of an on-looker than a decision-maker'. 500 ms (half a second) is an age in many types of inter-personal transaction, and it seems most unlikely that evolution would have hobbled the ability of the brain to deliver accurate in-group behaviour by constructing such a slow decision processes.

Jean Piaget ² is one of many authors who insist that the conscious contains only a selective set of the results of extensive cognitive activity being carried out in the brain at large, and that those results can sometimes be misleading. Although he is dealing with the child, he explicitly states that this principle applies to all humans.

Pascal Boyer ³ describes the mental processes involved in decision-making in a wide range of situations, independently of consciousness: 'Various plans for action are considered and most of them are rejected by higher planning functions without our being aware of this selection'. Such processes may well take account of 'moral' precepts and may well not take account of beliefs (or moral attitudes) available to the consciousness if they are momentarily inappropriate, leading to self-deception, although this was not (necessarily) the intended outcome of the process.

Evidently there were benefits from the interlocking roles of consciousness and deception in the historical context of human social development, but it is not clear that it is necessary or desirable for the situation to continue as it is. Humans seem to be born ready to deceive rather than ready to trust, and each individual goes through a long and difficult process of socialization and personal self-development in order to attain a reasonable level of openness, transparency and honesty in social dealings. Many people, perhaps most, never do.

It would arguably be an improvement to the human psyche to arrange better access for consciousness to those parts of the brain it cannot currently access, and to the processes that take place in them. That could include some parts of what we currently term the 'unconscious'. There may be occasions on which a more sentient human being might still choose to be deceptive - but many people might think it an improvement if hypocrisy, bigotry, snobbery and the like played a much less prominent role in human affairs, which is the likely result if people could be aware of the unconscious processes that cause them to dissemble - both to others and to themselves.

More needs to be known about how the brain functions before one could be very specific about how such a change could be effected, but some directions can already be discerned.

The bilateral symmetry of the brain is one candidate for attention. This symmetry was a response to a particular set of environmental demands (there are conflicting theories about just which demands) but it has led to curious lacunae in human thinking processes. The popular conception of 'left brain' versus 'right brain' (feeling versus ratiocination) is not wrong, and there are many situations in life in which a more even-handed access to the two hemispheres would be adaptive for today's human individuals.

During a discussion of anosognosia (a condition in which a person who suffers disability due to brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of their handicap), Ramachandran and Blakeslee ⁴ link self-deception to the existence of two hemispheres in the brain, without going so far as to suggest any causative mechanism.

Dr Tim Crow ⁵, of the Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, followed by Affara at Cambridge, show that functional bi-lateralisation of the brain followed the evolution of hominids, and can be attributed to a mutated protein involved in early development of the embryo. This development took place at generally the same time that the set of group behaviours began to emerge (about 3 - 4 million years ago, based on DNA evidence).

Improving inter-hemispherical communication, which currently takes place mostly through the corpus callosum (a relatively small and limited bundle of neuronal tissue linking the two hemispheres), either through bionic implants, selective dna or drug therapy, or embryonic manipulation, is likely to have a good effect on the cognitive effectiveness of an individual in some situations, at least.

Improved access to memory is another clear candidate for advanced technology. There are already drugs and gene therapies which retard or even cure memory impairment in senile dementia and other conditions. Clearly it will not be long before their use becomes widespread to improve recall. Research work has made progress in locating the 'lexicon' used by the brain to store words and their associated meanings.

Although there doesn't seem to be a capacity problem as such in the brain, it is probable that it will be possible to improve the scale and functioning of memory using either bionic implants or wireless or magnetic access to external stores of data. At present, the brain routinely accesses external linguistic information held in a variety of storage media via at least the three senses of sight, hearing and touch. Pathways from the different sensory areas converge towards areas which receive and process the linguistic data and meld it with related internal data to produce, eventually, linguistic output. The 'melding' area is the point in the brain at which input could be received from additional data stores whether internal or external. That may also be the point from which pathways could be created towards currently 'subsconscious' stores of cognitive data.

One particularly intriguing area is the access of the consciousness to 'groupish' segments of the brain, that is the parts of the brain which hold knowledge of group memberships, relationships with other group members, and the sets of rules which govern those relationships. Many researchers have supposed that the enormous volume of this information was one of the main causes of increasing brain-size in early hominids. Although some of this information is available to consciousness, some of the time, most of it is hidden, although of course it is used all the time by the unconscious decision-making cognitive apparatus.

These and other re-engineerings of the internal workings of the brain are likely to be technically feasible by 2050, if not before, and alongside them will be opportunities for enlargement of a human's cognitive space through access to external electronic cognition. External memory (data-bases) was mentioned above, in the sense of a static store of information that would be available to the existing brain through wireless, magnetic or even cable communication. Given a choice between having a 'port' on the side of one's head, or implanted communication devices, some people may choose the former. The disadvantage, obviously, is that while 'plugged in' some mobility is lost. In many situations that might not matter.

External cognitive devices with which humans will learn to communicate will include robots, domestic control systems, teaching computers, electronic 'rooms' for group use in, eg, business activity, clubs of all kinds, and family forums.

It is already commonplace to view through the sensory apparatus of robotic devices. Surgeons operate remotely; Houston inspects the shuttle for damage through remote cameras or through cameras held by astronauts; pilots have 'head-up' displays of telemetry or targets. The crucial step forward will be for such sensory information (not just visual) to be received directly by the brain. Experimental control of prosthetic limbs by thought processes has already been demonstrated, with a combination of nerve signals and electronic sensors; it is only a matter of time before the brain will be able to receive and work with information transmitted from remote sources - say, 2020. Shortly after that a human will be able to control a robot as if it was an organic extension of the human body (this has already been demonstrated in monkeys - see the previous chapter); and by adding quasi-human cognitive abilities to the robot, an individual will be able to work in a sentient partnership with the robot. The robot at that point has in a real sense become a partial cognitive clone of the human, and many aspects of a human's daily life could be lived through such surrogate devices. The avoidance of physical risk is one obvious benefit, but there are many others, including that people would no longer need to travel.

One of the most interesting prospective applications of 'remote cognition', to give it a name, is group cognition. It's not possible to know whether Jung's 'collective unconscious' just means an understanding shared by a number of group members, or whether it refers to some sort of buried telepathic ability which humans have lost during the development of speech and visual, especially facial communication. What is sure, though, is that remote cognition will permit people to work together in a common cognitive space, in which they will have access (with permission) to parts of each other's own minds. The beginnings of this can be seen in the virtual 'rooms' which are used by Merger & Acquisition teams, and even more in the virtual communities that have been created on the Internet such as Second Life and MySpace.

Internet virtual communities were mentioned briefly in Chapter Two as instruments of cultural globalization; here the focus will be on their relationship to psychological reality. Critics of VICs (Virtual or Vicarious Internet Communities) will have it that they are unreal in some damaging way, and offer a distorted version of reality that can cause the stunting or inappropriate development of young humans' psyches. Specifically, people worry that VICs may encourage violence, maladaptive sexual behaviour, or drug-taking. Such fears may not be without foundation, but only to the extent that VICs offer a group environment which may lead youngsters astray in exactly the same way as do some types of social group in the 'real' world. Perhaps some gaming experiences (distinguished from VICs, at least so far) may go too far in terms of depicting or encouraging violence or sex; but that is not the world of VICs, which - so far at any rate - seem to be mostly inhabited by grown-ups or near grown-ups, and are surprisingly like the real world, with explicit rules of behaviour, trading economies in which real value is created or lost, and real outcomes in relationship terms, although - again, so far - these have to be conducted in the 'real' world once they go past a fairly basic level of contact.

VICs, including fantasy worlds such as World of Warcraft, and interactive games as they currently exist are studied in Appendix Three. Here we will speculate on how they may develop in the light of the availability of the sorts of cognitive enhancement described above.

Individuals 'playing' in fantasy worlds or socializing in VICs commonly represent themselves through avatars, which may have human form but may also take other forms, particularly in fantasy worlds. In many VICs there is nothing to prevent a person from representing themselves as closely as they can in their avatar, but normally there is no compulsion for one to do that, except perhaps on sites whose primary purpose is dating, where the organizers will go to some lengths to prevent impersonation, for obvious reasons. On some sites, though, individuals may 'date' each other through their avatars, without any intention that the relationship will come to have a real-world parallel.

It seems likely that there will come to be a cleaner distinction between faithful self-representation and imaginary representations, and not least because cognitive enhancement is going to permit a much wider range of experience while 'on-line'.

Currently, the inhabitant of an avatar does not experience sensory input directly from the avatar. Visual and auditory inputs are of course present, but they are generated by the software running the site. This will change. Just as for robots (described above), people will be able to share the sensory experience of the avatar once direct wireless or cable communication is possible between the brain and the remote device. In the case of VICs and games, it will be the player console or local computer which generates the signals that bypass the sensory interface of the player (eyes, ears, skin etc) and are received directly by the sensory processing module of the brain.

As well as receiving direct input from the 'senses' of her avatar, an individual will also be able to receive input from the senses and cognitive processes of other avatars involved in social interaction (group activity) in the VIC. Currently that information is available only to the limited extent that the avatar can see, hear or touch other avatars (just as in real life). Evidently, it will be easier to receive information from the mental processing of other avatars than it will be to receive such information from conspecifics in real life (because it is already in communicable electronic form), and this is why collective cognitive activity is likely to take place first and by preference in electronic spaces. It will happen between 'real' individuals as well, but considerably more sophisticated technology will be required for that, and may be overtaken by a process of migration of human minds from our heads to computers (which by 2030 will be more powerful, more flexible, faster and better at communicating than we are).

Previous paragraphs, and the previous chapter, have introduced the idea humans will be able to communicate directly with external electronic or bio-electronic cognitive representations, whether of humans or other types of psyche. This proposition, which underlies many of the predictions contained in the remainder of the book, requires some further explanation.

The direction of much current research, some of it referred to in the previous chapter, and the almost unanimous opinion of technologically expert futurist writers (distinguished from science fiction writers) is indeed that it will be possible to bypass primary sensory input devices (eyes, ears, skin, the afferent nervous system) and for an external cognitive being or device to have two-way interaction with sensory processing modules in the brain or even with purely cognitive sections of the brain by imitating the data-streams the brain expects. See for instance Kurzweil ⁶. Various signalling techniques may be used, including wireless or magnetic fields, or even cables. On a mechanical level, nanobots could receive and transmit from within capillaries in the brain; and the science of direct brain implants in humans is already under development for therapeutic purposes (eg Parkinson's disease), although evidently it is still at an early stage.

Apart from the mechanics, two other pre-conditions for brain-to-robot communication are that robots' brains should have sufficient processing capacity to match the human brain, even if only in certain respects, and that the 'wiring diagram' of the brain should have been sufficiently deciphered to allow human thought processes to be recreated or modelled in non-human cognitive assemblies (this last is the province of AI, or Artificial Intelligence). It is not really in doubt any longer that these two conditions will be fulfilled, the only question is when. As to the former, the operation of Moore's Law (the doubling of the number of electronic components on a chip every 24 months), the matching progress of miniaturization, and continuing increases in computation speeds would result in a computer which is smaller, faster and with more computational capacity than the human brain within less than ten years. Artificial Intelligence researchers are busy at work both analyzing the methods of the human brain with a battery of investigative techniques and also constructing equivalent methods of computation which achieve the same results as a human brain without necessarily copying its working methods. 2020 seems to be an outside estimate of the moment at which the Turing test will be satisfied by a computer (that it should be indistinguishable from a human brain to an outside observer).

2020 would also seem to be a reasonable estimate of the timescale for at least primitive control by the human brain of remote cognitive representations, presumably still primarily electronic, although with an increasing proportion of bio-electronic 'tissue'.

There are difficulties in reaching satisfactory names for 'remote cognitive representations'. Conventionally they have been called robots; but the more 'human' they become, the less satisfactory that term comes to seem. The word 'avatar' is also not too satisfactory, since it carries with it the sense of being an artificial construct, whereas in most situations what is wanted, and will be provided, is a more or less faithful (if partial) version of the original. The word clone is also overlaid with a lot of extraneous meanings by now. So for the rest of this book, we will continue to use the term Remote Cognitive Representation (but will gradually switch to abbreviating it to RCR) to describe a device or construct which faithfully represents all or part of an individual in a 'real' or virtual environment.

It is important to see that Remote Cognitive Representations (RCRs) will become the preferred method of interacting with other people (other RCRs no doubt) in a wide variety of situations, and to distinguish them from avatars as used in gaming or other imaginary (and often deceptive) situations. Right here we will skip over the difficulties of identification that will be raised by Remote Cognitive Representations. These are not different in kind from those that already exist as regards people, and they will be solved by the same types of method.

Apart their use in Virtual Internet Communities (VICs), Remote Cognitive Representations will be useful for business meetings between robots or in virtual 'rooms', for queuing, for attending conferences, if such still exist, for going to art galleries, concerts, plays, sporting events (and possibly for competing in some of them), for attending educational classrooms or lecture theatres.

It will be seen that the Virtual Internet Community is in fact not to be thought of as just a playful Internet social environment - as Remote Cognitive Representations become more powerful, the VIC will become the norm for many types of human private or business forum.

It is also clear that VICs allow an individual to become far more efficient, since she can be represented in multiple social settings simultaneously. The Remote Cognitive Representation can of course be given an amount of autonomy appropriate to a particular setting, so that the 'owner' becomes aware of the RCR's sensory and cognitive states only in pre-determined circumstances, or of course at the behest of the owner. 95% of shopping, for instance, does not require a decision process from the owner and could easily be multi-tracked with other activities (child-minding, say).

So far, the RCR has been discussed as if its capabilities merely reflect a sub-set of its owner's chacteristics; but in reality the RCR will soon come to be capable of more, for instance by holding sets of data which cannot be accommodated in (or are not needed by) the owner's 'home' cognitive space. Remote Cognitive Representations will also come to be able to pool the experience of groups of other owners and/or their RCRs. For this type of unit, we will use the expression Remote Cognitive Collective (abbreviated RCC). Uses might include multi-university research projects, in which a Remote Cognitive Collective could house the current state of research knowledge as held in the personal cognitive spaces of multiple researchers, or business teams, so that a marketing strategy meeting could take place in an RCC, combining the current knowledge and skills of the individual members of the team, together with externally-acquired sets of market data which would be too voluminous to be held individually.

It is fascinating to speculate on the protocols which would be necessary to govern the awareness by individuals of the state of an Remote Cognitive Collective, and the rules to govern their active participation in what we must still call a meeting, although it wouldn't seem much like a meeting in the 'real world'. From one point of view it would be easier to communicate with the mental states of one's peers in such a meeting, since the RCC would hold data about the current cognitive state of participants in highly organised forms.

Among groups of collaborators who know each other well, it is not clear whether a participant would want or need to receive visual, auditory or tactile sensory input (albeit bypassing the personal sensory interface) from the Remote Cognitive Collective. A meeting might take place on a purely intellectual level - and it might often be very quick! To some extent, the 'rules of engagement' will depend heavily on a resolution of the 'language' issue referred to in earlier chapters. That is to say, if it emerges that all linguistic constructs have (or could have) non-linguistic representations in the brain, then meetings would be silent, or rather, would not employ words at any level. If, as is perhaps more likely, it emerges that certain classes of linguistic concept are dealt with as words even at deeper levels of the brain (this might for instance be true of names, numbers and time) then exchanges at a linguistic level will still be needed.

Remote Cognitive Collectives might develop as purely passive fora, to be inhabited as occasion demands by multiple individuals; but they will also probably come to have initiative and even perhaps personality on their own account. We could call this an 'active RCC', with autonomous tasks ranging from simple activities such as data collection to the representation of the collective will of the group as a quasi-human actor in relationships with other Remote Cognitive Representations, RCCs or individuals. In terms of an on-line gaming environment, a team could have a joint atavar, or a team of atavars communicating through a collective room.

One way or another, the collective psyche which currently exists among groups of individuals at an unconscious level, as described by Jung and Neumann, will come to exist more transparently in the Remote Cognitive Collective. There are no theoretical limits to the 'size' of an RCC, and at the extreme it would be - will be - possible for large numbers of people to express their will (vote, for instance) through an RCC.

Although the final chapter of this Part and then Part Three will extend guesses about the future as far forwards as 2100, predictions past 2050 about how people may live are highly speculative. The period 2020-2050 is perhaps more predictable, and as a preparation for the remainder of the book, this chapter ends with an imaginary description of how one particular individual may begin his day in 2040.

The assumptions made for this particular exploration (most of which have been 'trailed' in earlier chapters) are to be thought of as applying to the period 2030 - 2050. They may be called Utopian, or nightmarish, depending on where you are coming from!

Born Hong Kong, 2015, of a Russo-Chinese mother and a British father, Ivan is 25 and still lives in Hong Kong with his parents.

7am. Ivan's wife, Lily wakes him. In fact Lily is visiting her family in Beijing and is 'inhabiting' her local Remote Cognitive Representation (RCR), a humanoid but clearly non-human robot.

It is no longer necessary for people to meet each other 'in the flesh' with rare exceptions. An individual's RCR - of which she may have several - can represent its remote 'owner', and if an encounter is not real-time, ie under conscious control, its details are transmitted back to the other party's brain by wireless using a small 2-way implant linked to aural, visual and tactile input and ouput channels. The RCR is not strictly necessary in such transactions, of course, given the wireless links which connect every individual brain to the Internet, but most people prefer to suppose the physical presence of their counter-party (wife, child, parent, colleague etc) either through their direct holographic image, or through an RCR.

Naturally, during an encounter between two people, whether or not RCRs are involved, either party has access to the full ESS (expanded sensory space - the global knowledge acquis of the human race), and participants can view or otherwise experience external input that may be useful in the transaction. (Did you see Federer yesterday?)

Group interactions between more than two people are almost invariably carried out through RCRs, due to the difficulty for the brain of maintaining contact with multiple external partners. RCRs have far greater multi-channel communication capacity than individual brains, however much enhanced.

After a few minutes, Ivan and Lily switch from their twosome to their family group, which currently has 11 members, in order to discuss caring arrangements for Lily's grandmother, who is in a nursing home in London.

At this point, Ivan's RCR invites other members of the group to participate in the discussion. Some (perhaps pre-warned) will agree; others will be absent. All will of course receive details of the meeting through their own RCRs later on if they don't participate in real time, and in any event may have posted their contributions and opinions in their own RCRs in advance of the meeting. During the discussion, hosted by Ivan's RCR, since he initiated the exchange, individuals who 'take the floor' will inhabit their own RCRs while they are speaking. (Within a very few years, such 'meetings' will be taking place in a Remote Cognitive Collective (RCC), but in 2040 that technology has only just been developed, and there are still major ethical and operational issues to be resolved.)

In 2007, in the author's family, living in four different countries, the eight Internet-enabled members already routinely write e-mails on family subjects to the group - it's far more efficient and accurate than all those multiple phone calls and meetings. Nowadays we all know what's going on. It's easy to make a phone call or send a separate e-mail in case you want to add something more private, but we hardly ever do. It's an interesting fact (but an expected one) that within this family group there has not needed to be any discussion about procedures, rules, propriety etc - we all know instinctively (we are a kin-group after all) what can be said, and when, and to whom.

8am. After breakfast, Ivan attends a (virtual) lecture as part of his post-graduate course in cognitive informatics. He has moved to his living room and for the lecture (his avatar) chooses to wear an outfit copied (by the RCR) from last night's talk show. Of course, Ivan is actually still in his shorts. His presence at the lecture is delivered by the RCR, as is the case for the other 20 or so students, and the lecturer.

The lecturer is a slightly different case, being a composite of eight different lecturers voted on by the student group. When the group formed, through a sophisticated version of an Internet chat-room, which can be thought of as an early form of an Remote Cognitive Collective, they selected a learning institution, then picked eight course elements from eight different academic bodies world-wide. AURSS (Advanced Universal Really Simple Syndication) combines the elements into a synthesized series of presentations. The lecture is interactive, in real time, and it occasionally (but seldom) happens that there is a question needing referral back to one of the eight source-lecturers, who may not necessarily be on-line for the lecture (mostly they are, because they want to get paid!).

After the lecture, which had been pre-scheduled as part of the course, Ivan remained in the virtual world of the institute socializing with other students in his group. He also spent time in the institute's library, doing some research, had a private consultation with his tutor, and finally made some contributions to his group's thesis-project.

Post-graduate studies, and indeed graduate courses in general, contain very little individually prepared and marked work by 2040. Instead, groups of students work together on tasks and projects. To some extent this is a response to the over-specialization which had dogged academic studies at the beginning of the 21st century and reflects a general trend in academic research: a project conducted by a group of 20 individuals is evidently able to draw on a far wider range of inputs than a single-author project. Given the resources of the Internet and the extended External Sensory Space (ESS), the cognitive limitations of one individual are seen as a barrier to effective research in most cases when the use of RCRs, real-time virtual project capsules (VPCs - the environment, akin to a VIC - within which a project takes place and is managed) and AURSS can produce much fuller results while preserving individual creative input. Not that individual effort is unrecognized or unrewarded: course marking distinguishes individual achievement even in the most group-oriented environments, and real-time rankings of students are accessible at all times both to them and to tutors. Projects are also competitively ranked: groups of students take immense pride in the current score of their projects, and an underperforming student receives short shrift from his fellows.

Ivan's institute (the Global Institute for Psycho-Sciences or GIPS) doesn't of course have any presence in the physical world. As a private body, it competes against its peers for funding from its students or from state scholarships.

GIPS is an example of a learning institution which performs recognisably the same functions as an old-style university: it has an academic body, offers courses, has students, and has research departments, although business management is more professional than previously. 'Tenure' still exists, despite periodic efforts to extinguish it, but the complete freedom of students to choose courses made up of multiple components from a variety of world-wide learning institutions ensures a high level of competence among lecturers. Other institutions have preferred to become purely academic (offering course modules to 'universities' on an out-sourced basis), or purely learning-based (student groups 'buy in' the courses they want within the organisational structure of the university). On the whole, though, the classical 'mixed' model has survived the virtual transition.

GIPS is run under a highly elaborated set of rules (laws) which deal with all aspects of academic and student life. These laws were developed and are maintained by local representative bodies (groups) of academics, administrators and students, but operate within a global standard-setting structure to ensure compatibility between courses and academic results.

The World Educational Organization (WEO), which administers the overall structure and provides a quasi-legal arbitration and appeals process, was formed shortly after machine translation reached the stage at which language communication difficulties became vanishingly small.

Of course, humans remain imperfect, and crime is ever-present. Criminal law and many parts of civil law have remained residence-based, although international co-operation is far stronger than it used to be in terms of extradition, judicial procedure and correction. Institutions such as GIPS are quick to refer any apparent infringement of societal norms to the appropriate national enforcement organisation; their licenses depend on it.

By 12 noon, Ivan's academic session is finished. He plans to play tennis and have lunch with a friend he met through a Google tennis group (Hong Kong branch). Tennis as a game hasn't changed much since 2007, but tennis clubs nowadays are strictly virtual. The courts themselves are operated as commercial facilities, and when you want to have a game, your RCR will find you the ideal venue and book and pay for it.

A normal site-based tennis club, 2005-style, had typically a mixture of members: old and young, good and bad, those who cheat and those who don't, etc. Although this added a certain amount of complex charm to the process of getting a game of tennis, it wasn't long before the provision of time on tennis courts became separated from the more social aspects of the game, and Internet groups of tennis players began to call the shots as to when, with whom and how they could play. The Google Hong Kong branch has around fifty different sections, each populated by a particular type of player. You can belong to more than one group - Ivan belongs to three of them, the 'married couple group', the 'good, young male player singles' group, and the 'daytime' group.

As with most groups on the Internet, group members are subject to various sets of rules, some universal and some particular. The universal rules lay down some broad principles of group participation: you are who you say you are (and you may have to prove it to an independent arbiter); the basis of your participation must be explicit (if you have a commercial goal, this must be declared); and so on. The particular rules are normally to do with behaviour between group members, and range from minor aspects of etiquette (don't shout in capitals when mailing) to group-specific rules (eg, for a tennis player, what to wear, use of correct shoes, avoidance of bad language).

All of Ivan's activities during his day so far have been associated with group activity, entirely through his own choice, and the groups he has worked or played with have been small, between 8 and 150, which corresponds pretty much to the range of group sizes that early humans encountered, and in which they acquired their groupish nature.

Another notable characteristic of Ivan's life with and through private groups is that the State is nowhere involved in setting or enforcing the rules. In 2040 there certainly still are areas of life in which the State prescribes and enforces rules, but the 21st century has seen a gradual shrinkage of such areas, as people have come to realise that most human activity is better organised at the local, group level rather than by the over-arching State.

The key influences which came together in the first decades of the 21st century to bring about the situation described above are as follows:

In 2040 it is widely supposed that future human evolution at the biological level will be technology-driven. Already of course there is no part of the body which cannot be replaced or improved by a bionic or artificial biological or bio-electronic device; and some human faculties are routinely enhanced by implants shortly after birth - hearing is the most obvious example with major improvements in the perceived frequency range and spatial discrimination. Direct manipulation of the genome has removed the great majority of genetically-transmitted diseases; and babies are 'designed' to an extent which would have seemed unacceptable even 20 years ago.

Cognitive faculties have also been enhanced in a real, genetic sense by manipulation of the genome, and are further sharpened by appropriate drug therapies, although these remain controversial. But the most obvious sense in which the human psyche has evolved, and continues to evolve, while not genetic, is through the enormous expansion of individual and group cognitive power made possible by better communication and increased access to knowledge, due to the Internet and the invention of RCRs.

Up to this point, the narrative has focused mainly on developments that can be expected to affect human society in the next sixty years, say up to 2060. In the next and final chapter of Book Two we will need to move a step further in order to consider alternatives to humans, or if you prefer, ways in which we may choose to develop our minds in future.

Book Three will present an overall history and time-line of the 21st century, and the regulatory and cultural structures which will have to be developed to accommodate the wide-ranging technological possibilities which have been touched on above. In particular, the implications of the development of RCRs and RCCs for human individuals and their culture are obviously immense.

1. Libet, B (1996) Neuronal Time Factors in Conscious and Unconscious Mental Functions, in Towards a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussion and Debates, ed S R Hameroff A W Kaszniak & A Scott, pp 337-347, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

2. Piaget, J (1973) The Child and Reality; Problems of Genetic Psychology, tr A Rosin, Viking Press, USA (originally published in French in 1972)

3. Boyer, P (2001) Religion Explained; The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Basic Books, New York

4. Ramachandran, V S, and Blakeslee, S (1998) Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind, Fourth Estate Limited, London