Tomorrow's People Read online

  For the first time, however, our brains and bodies might be directly modified by electronic interfaces. For a second group, The Technophiles, such a prospect is welcome. The electrical engineer Kevin Warwick, for one, would welcome the prospect of heightened senses, sensations and muscle power that being a cyborg might bring – as we will see later. And cyber-guru Ray Kurzweil is gung-ho for the intimate embrace of silicon:

  There is a clear incentive to go down this path. Given a choice, people will prefer to keep their bones from crumbling, their skin supple, their life systems strong and vital. Improving our lives through neural implants on the mental level, and nanotechnology-enhanced bodies on the physical level, will be popular and compelling. It is another one of those slippery slopes – there is no obvious place to stop this progression until the human race has largely replaced the brains and bodies that evolution first provided.

  Both Warwick and Kurzweil, not to mention other intellectual luminaries such as Marvin Minsky and Igor Aleksander, along with various futurologists such as Ian Pearson and Hans Moravec, all take it as read that another feature of future life will be conscious machines. Kurzweil's message is that our only future as a species will be to merge intimately with our technology: if you can't beat the robots, join them. So imagine a spectrum of beings, from pure carbon-based (as we humans are now) through the cyborg silicon-carbon hybrids that we could become to the ultimate – the vastly superior thinking silicon systems that will be Masters (and again they will have to be male) of the Universe.

  It was actually because he was eavesdropping on a discussion between Kurzweil and the philosopher John Searle, concerning the very question of computer consciousness, that the co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, began to feel anxious about the direction in which future technology was heading. As an undisputed techno-mandarin, Joy created an enormous stir when he wrote of his urgent concern in the magazine Wired, in April 2000, in an article titled ‘Why the future doesn't need us’:

  The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals and small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.

  True, a critical difference between the technology of the 21st-century genetics, nanotechnology and robotics and that of the previous 100 years – darkening as they were with nuclear, biological and chemical doom – is that now it is no longer necessary to take over large facilities or access rare raw materials. Yet an even bigger change in the technology of the future, compared to that of the past, is that a nuclear bomb, though hideous in its potential, cannot self-replicate; but something that might – nanorobots – could soon be taking over the planet.

  Just browse a few websites that are devoted to ‘problems of preserving our civilization’. One worry, you will read, is that the manipulation of matter at the level of atoms, the nanotechnology that promises to be ‘the manufacturing industry of the 21st century’, will bring a new enemy – robots scaled down to the billionth of a metre that the nanolevel mandates, minuscule serfs who are focused on assembling copies of themselves. What might happen, one website asks, if such prolific yet single-minded operatives fell into the hands of even a lone terrorist? But then, of course, intelligent robots do not have to be small to be evil – just much cleverer than us. Common-or-garden human-sized machines might also soon be able to self-assemble, and, more importantly, to think autonomously.

  Bill Joy had never thought of machines heretofore as having the ability to ‘think’; now he is worried that they will, and in so doing lead us into a technology that may replace our species. He worries that humans will become so dependent on machines that we will let machines make decisions. And because these machines will be so much better than humans at working out the best course of action, soon we will capitulate entirely. Joy argues that, in any case, the problems will soon be so complex that humans will be incapable of grasping them. Considering that, in addition to greater mental prowess, these silicon masterminds will have no need to sleep in, nor to hang out in bars, they will soon be way ahead of us, treating us as a lower species destined, as one website warns, to be ‘used as domestic animals’ or even ‘kept in zoos’.

  Kevin Warwick's predictions are similarly ominous: ‘With intelligent machines we will not get a second chance. Once the first powerful machine, with an intelligence similar to that of a human, is switched on, we will most likely not get the opportunity to switch it back off again. We will have started a time bomb ticking on the human race, and we will be unable to switch it off.’

  Equally nightmarish would be an elite minority of humans commanding large systems of machines, whilst the masses languish redundant. Either the elite will simply destroy this useless press of humanity or, in a more benign mood, generously brainwash them so that they give up reproducing and eventually make themselves extinct – it would be kindest to ensure that at all times the masses are universally content. They will be happy, but not free. It is a disturbing thought that these are the views of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski; though he was obviously criminally insane, and no one would for a moment condone his actions, still Joy felt compelled to confront the sentiment that ‘as we are downloaded into our own technology, our humanity will be lost’.

  The coming Age of IT, then, offers a raft of possibilities from conscious automata to self-assembling autocrats to carbon-silicon hybrids. Extreme though such possibilities might seem, especially to The Cynics, it is very likely that a more modest version of carbon-silicon interfacing will feature in 21st-century life before too long. Soon computers will be invisible and ubiquitous – if not actually inside our bodies and brains then sprinkled throughout our clothes, in our spectacles and watches, and converting the most unlikely inanimate objects into ‘smart’ interactive gadgets.

  The real problem is not what is technically feasible but the extent to which what is technically feasible can change our values. The gadgets of applied technology are the direct consequences of the big scientific breakthroughs of the previous century, and promise any day now to influence, with unprecedented intimacy, the previously independent, isolated inner world of the human mind. Yet this widespread availability of modern technology is, for some, a loud enough wake-up call for us to re-evaluate our priorities as a society. Bill Joy again: ‘I think it is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.’

  But of course not all of this third group, The Technophobes, are scientists. Not surprisingly, and indeed more typically, non-scientists' fears are usually grounded in a more romantic view of life, but the fears are there nonetheless. In his Reith Lecture in 2000 Prince Charles summed up the worries of many: ‘If literally nothing is held sacred anymore… what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life”, with potentially disastrous long-term consequences?’

  It may be a little unfair, and certainly incautious, to write off this type of view as simply that of latter-day Luddites, striving in vain to hold back progress with a misconceived vision of some golden bygone age when humans adhered to a Rousseau-like natural nobility, and no one died in childbirth, suffered poor housing, worked at mind-numbing manual tasks or froze to death… It's just that for many there is a very real fear that science, and the technology that it has spawned, have outpaced the checks and balances we need for society to survive – indeed for life as we know it to continue at all.

  In our growing knowledge of life, in biology, the trend for science to be slipping out of control appears already to be gaining an ever faster pace. The rigid hierarchy of a society segregated by biochemical and genetic mani
pulation, from intellectual ‘alphas’ down to ‘epsilons' who operate the lifts, portrayed by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, is now seen as a real future threat by many. Predictably, a morass of websites express serious concerns over genetics, for example: ‘The path is open, by-passing the natural evolution, to design unusual creatures – from fairly useful to imagination-striking monsters.’

  And we might well end up with ‘designer’ babies, potential geniuses or highly obedient and tough soldiers. But manipulation of genes allows further possibilities too; offset against the benefits of gene therapy and new types of medication and diagnostics, there are clones, artificial genes, germ-line engineering, and the tricky relationship of genetic profiling to insurance premiums and job applications. In any event, for The Technophobes, the question of basic survival seems far from certain; according to Bill Joy, the philosopher John Leslie puts the risk of human extinction at 30 per cent at the least. And the astronomer Martin Rees, in his latest book, Our Final Century, rates the chance as no better than odds on that civilization will avoid a catastrophic setback.

  No one could really disagree with Aristotle that ‘All men by nature desire to know’; the human brain has evolved to ask questions, and to survive by answering them. Science is simply the formal realization of our natural curiosity. Yet no one could fool themselves any longer that, as we stand on the cusp of this new century, we are travelling the simple path of ‘progress’. Sure, for several generations now we have strived to balance the pay-off between ‘unnatural' mechanization and a pain-free, hunger-free, longer-lasting existence; but now we face a future of interactive and highly personalized information technology, an intrusive but invisible nanotechnology, not to mention a sophisticated and powerful biotechnology, that could all conspire together to challenge how we think, what kind of individuals we are, and even whether each of us stays an individual at all.

  For The Cynics the implications that this prospect poses, in all its horror and excitement, will be sensationalist hype at best and scaremongering at worst. They won't believe that science will ever be able to produce new types of fundamentally life-transforming technologies, and even if it were, they feel that humans are sufficiently wise and have an inbuilt sanity check to deal with any ethical, cultural or intellectual choices that might ensue. This attitude is not only questionable – in the light of the far more modest precedents that we have witnessed in technology over the last half century – but also chillingly complacent. Can we really afford to assume that humanity will be able to muddle through? And even if we did survive as the unique personalities we are now, in a world bristling with biotech, infotech and nanotech, can we still be sure that such passivity, just letting it all happen, will be the best way to optimize the benefits and reduce any ensuing risks?

  Perhaps both Technophiles and Technophobes would agree on one very important issue that sets them aside from The Cynics: we must be proactive and set the agenda for what we want and need from such rapid technical advances; only then shall we, our children and our grandchildren come to have the best life possible. So first we need to evaluate the 21st-century technologies, and then unflinchingly open our minds to all possibilities…

  2

  Lifestyle: What will we see as reality?

  Humans were once imprisoned by the dark. As night blacked out the hills and trees our ancestors would have become powerless – watching the world shrink from the bright, wide field of daytime to the shivering compass of a candle. The flickering of flames on a wattle-and-daub wall would have imposed a different reality of long shadows and uncertain shapes; and always, waiting beyond the edge of light, would have been the unknown, unexplained, half-imagined forces. Until merely a century or so ago our ancestors must have lived a life where the arrival of dusk never ceased to make them utterly vulnerable. They would have had a collective mindset of fears and wonders that is now almost impossible to comprehend. But, as we stand at the beginning of the 21st century, the human mind could be on the brink of a makeover even more cataclysmic than that which separates the attitudes of these earlier generations from our own new-millennium view. How will the new technologies transform the ways in which we see and understand the world? More immediately, why should these advances have any more impact than the inventions and discoveries that have already underpinned the ebb and flow of previous civilizations?

  Increasingly, it has become the norm to pass people in the streets talking animatedly to no one, single-handedly engrossed in some private crisis: a contemporary illusion of insanity spawned by the ubiquitous cell phone. The haphazard and hectic and intimate press of humanity ebbing and flowing in the shopping centre or on the train, chance smiles and fleeting eye-contact, are a fading reality. Yet imagine a world in which the mobile phone is miniaturized into visual invisibility, insinuated into your clothing, and requiring only a minute amount of power, which can be generated by your own body's reactions. There are no cables or earpiece paraphernalia – your interlocutor might just as well be next to you, but almost in a different dimension. Imagine such a world, where the streets are filled with people lost in invisible, one-sided dialogue all the time, and oblivious to the reality of the physical present around them. The public places of tomorrow, then, might end up not being public anymore, in the way that the park or market or piazza currently imposes spontaneous and intense interaction with others. Instead the high street would become merely a space where many people happen to be, bustling past each other but oblivious to each other as they chattered and laughed and shouted and complained within the dimension of a different reality. Crude caricature though this may be, few would deny that increasing numbers of people are behaving in this way. By offering a route into a parallel world that disregards the messy present perhaps the cell phone is a technical augury of a way of life to come.

  The notion of an alternative to the immediacy of the real world may soon extend significantly from public spaces to the most private of private spaces: the home could also end up looking and, most importantly, feeling very different. Homes have always been our ultimate retreat, the place where we are free to walk around naked, speak our minds, smash the crockery, swing from chandeliers – above all to have complete autonomy over the sounds, sights, smells and tastes of the immediate physical environment. Ever since our ancestors had sufficient technology, money and time to choose wallpaper, hang up a photo or shift ornaments on the mantelpiece, we humans have seen our homes as extensions of ourselves. So if, in this century, our minds are set to be transported beyond the press of the moment, we should not be too surprised that our homes may be both a reflection of, and an important influence on, completely novel ways of experiencing life.

  Given appropriate sanitation and sufficient resources, the human home has adhered to a pretty much familiar pattern. Many of us still live happily in houses built a century or more ago. For as long as we continue to have bodies clamouring with a range of physiological demands it is hard to imagine not continuing to follow the old arrangement of different rooms for different bodily functions. No amount of high-tech could make it attractive to use the same area, however large or bright, circular or sloping, for real-world cooking, sleeping, washing and lavatorial pursuits. Similarly, the atavistic habits of eating together and defecating in private seem impregnable; the classic Luis Buñuel film The Phantom of Liberty had great impact simply because it questioned the age-old norm for dining publicly and voiding bowels and bladder alone. Guests sat around a room, conversing with their hosts, all perched on their own lavatories. Meanwhile, as hunger pangs struck, each individual would whisper their apologies, slip away and seek out the ‘smallest room’. Once there, they would bolt the door, take down a tray from the wall and eat swiftly and silently in isolation.

  This scenario is as illogical as it is unlikely. There is no immediately obvious reason why we should suddenly change our sense of taboos and socialization (‘companion’ after all derives from a ‘sharing of bread’), and if such habits are to change, it will be bec
ause we no longer wish, for new, modern reasons, to socialize rather than because we are answering a call from some deep-seated nook or cranny of the human psyche. On the other hand, our predilection for many small and cosy private rooms over spacious, more communal ‘flexible’ areas is surely not only a matter of eras and evolution, but of personal taste and particular family requirements.

  Just look at the wide diversity today of the kinds of living spaces different people favour. The big change this century, however, may well be that we spend far more time at home; as the real world becomes more dominated by IT, both work and leisure will have the potential to transcend space restrictions. And changes in the way we use space, and what space we use, might sound like science fiction now but could have clear practical advantages in an overcrowded or ecologically compromised planet.

  In the distant future, perhaps, our successors will be living in lighter-than-air mega-structures, or in oxygenated sub-ocean habitats, and thereby be able to move vertically as easily as horizontally. Such a scenario would enormously increase the occupancy space on the planet; and, on a more personal level, this type of vertical living would change dramatically how the senses shape the mind, rather as incessant pain from an aching tooth or the misery of outside toilets formed the outlook of bygone generations. Future humans would have a completely different feel about themselves reaching up and down, as well as sideways, in the 3D world. Constant exposure to a certain set of inputs from the senses, like the endless nights of flickering flame of our ancestors, must surely impact on how a mind, any mind, saturated with such sensations, ends up thinking.