The future of music creation

When I was a student, I saw people around me that could play musical instruments and since I couldn’t, I felt a bit inadequate, so I went out and bought a £13 guitar and taught myself to play. Later, I bought a keyboard and learned to play that too. I’ve never been much good at either, and can’t read music, but  if I know a tune, I can usually play it by ear and sometimes I compose, though I never record any of my compositions. Music is highly rewarding, whether listening or creating. I play well enough for my enjoyment and there are plenty of others who can play far better to entertain audiences.

Like almost everyone, most of the music I listen to is created by others and today, you can access music by a wide range of means. It does seem to me though that the music industry is stuck in the 20th century. Even concerts seem primitive compared to what is possible. So have streaming and download services. For some reason, new technology seems mostly to have escaped its attention, apart from a few geeks. There are a few innovative musicians and bands out there but they represent a tiny fraction of the music industry. Mainstream music is decades out of date.

Starting with the instruments themselves, even electronic instruments produce sound that appears to come from a single location. An electronic violin or guitar is just an electronic version of a violin or guitar, the sound all appears to come from a single point all the way through. It doesn’t  throw sound all over the place or use a wide range of dynamic effects to embrace the audience in surround sound effects. Why not? Why can’t a musician or a technician make the music meander around the listener, creating additional emotional content by getting up close, whispering right into an ear, like a violinist picking out an individual woman in a bar and serenading her? High quality surround sound systems have been in home cinemas for yonks. They are certainly easy to arrange in a high budget concert. Audio shouldn’t stop with stereo. It is surprising just how little use current music makes of existing surround sound capability. It is as if they think everyone only ever listens on headphones.

Of course, there is no rule that electronic instruments have to be just electronic derivatives of traditional ones, and to be fair, many sounds and effects on keyboards and electric guitars do go a lot further than just emulating traditional variants. But there still seems to be very little innovation in new kinds of instrument to explore dynamic audio effects, especially any that make full use of the space around the musician and audience. With the gesture recognition already available even on an Xbox or PS3, surely we should have a much more imaginative range of potential instruments, where you can make precise gestures, wave or throw your arms, squeeze your hands, make an emotional facial expression or delicately pinch, bend or slide fingers to create effects. Even multi-touch on phones or pads should have made a far bigger impact by now.

(As an aside, ever since I was a child, I have thought that there must be a visual equivalent to music. I don’t know what it is, and probably never will, but surely, there must be visual patterns or effects that can generate an equivalent emotional response to music. I feel sure that one day someone will discover how to generate them and the field will develop.)

The human body is a good instrument itself. Most people can sing to a point or at least hum or whistle a tune even if they can’t play an instrument. A musical instrument is really just an unnecessary interface between your brain, which knows what sound you want to make, and an audio production mechanism. Up until the late 20th century, the instrument made the sound, today, outside of a live concert at least,  it is very usually a computer with a digital to analog converter and a speaker attached. Links between computers and people are far better now though, so we can bypass the hard-to-learn instrument bit. With thought recognition, nerve monitoring, humming, whistling, gesture and expression recognition and so on, there is a very rich output from the body that can potentially be used far more intuitively and directly to generate the sound. You shouldn’t have to learn how to play an instrument in the 21st century. The sound creation process should interface almost directly to your brain as intuitively as your body does. If you can hum it, you can play it. Or should be able to, if the industry was keeping up.

Going a bit further, most of us have some idea what sort of music or effect we want to create, but don’t know quite enough about music to have the experience or skill to know quite what. A skilled composer may be able to write something down right away to achieve a musical effect that the rest of us would struggle to imagine. So, add some AI. Most music is based on fairly straightforward mathematical principles, even symphonies are mostly combinations of effects and sequences that fit well within AI-friendly guidelines. We use calculators to do calculations, so use AI to help compose music. Any of us should be able to compose great music with tools we should be able to build now. It shouldn’t be the future, it should be the present.

Let’s look at music distribution. When we buy a music track or stream it, why do we still only get the audio? Why isn’t the music video included by default? Sure, you can watch on YouTube but then you generally get low quality audio and video. Why isn’t purchased music delivered at the highest quality with full HD 3D video included, or videos if the band has made a few, with all the latest ones included as they emerge? If a video is available for music video channels, it surely should be available to those who have bought the music. That it isn’t reflects the contempt that the music industry generally shows to its customers. It treats us as a bunch of thieves who must only ever be given the least possible access for the greatest possible outlay, to make up for all the times we must of course be stealing off them. That attitude has to change if the industry is to achieve its potential. 

Augmented reality is emerging now. It already offers some potential to add overlays at concerts but in a few years, when video visors are commonplace, we should expect to see band members playing up in the air, flying around the audience, virtual band members, cartoon and fantasy creations all over the place doping all sorts of things, visual special effects overlaying the sound effects. Concerts will be a spectacular opportunity to blend the best of visual, audio, dance, storytelling, games and musical arts together. Concerts could be much more exciting, if they use the technology potential. Will they? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Much of this could be done already, but only a little is.

Now lets consider the emotional connection between a musician and the listener. We are all very aware of the intense (though unilateral) relationship teens can often build with their pop idols. They may follow them on Twitter and other social nets as well as listening to their music and buying their posters. Augmented reality will let them go much further still. They could have their idol with them pretty much all the time, virtually present in their field of view, maybe even walking hand in hand, maybe even kissing them. The potential spectrum extends from distant listening to intimate cuddles. Bearing in mind especially the ages of many fans, how far should we allow this to go and how could it be policed?

Clothing adds potential to the emotional content during listening too. Headphones are fine for the information part of audio, but the lack of stomach-throbbing sound limits the depth of the experience. Music is more than information. Some music is only half there if it isn’t at the right volume. I know from personal experience that not everyone seems to understand this, but turning the volume down (or indeed up) sometimes destroys the emotional content. Sometimes you have to feel the music, sometimes let it fully conquer your senses. Already, people are experimenting with clothes that can house electronics, some that flash on and off in synch with the music, and some that will be able to contract and expand their fibres under electronic control. You will be able to buy clothes that give you the same vibration you would otherwise get from the sub-woofer or the rock concert.

Further down the line, we will be able to connect IT directly into the nervous system. Active skin is not far away. Inducing voltages and current in nerves via tiny implants or onplants on patches of skin will allow computers to generate sensations directly.

This augmented reality and a link to the nervous system gives another whole dimension to telepresence. Band members at a concert will be able to play right in front of audience members, shake them, cuddle them. The emotional connection could be a lot better.

Picking up electrical clues from the skin allows automated music selection according to the wearers emotional state. Even properties like skin conductivity can give clues about emotional state. Depending on your stress level for example, music could be played that soothes you, or if you feel calm, maybe more stimulating tracks could be played. Playlists would thus adapt to how you feel.

Finally, music is a social thing too. It brings people together in shared experiences. This is especially true for the musicians, but audience members often feel some shared experience too. Atmosphere. Social networking already sees some people sharing what music they are listening too (I don’t want to share my tastes but I recognise that some people do, and that’s fine). Where shared musical taste is important to a social group, it could be enhanced by providing tools to enable shared composition. AI can already write music in particular styles – you can feed Mozart of Beethoven into some music generators and they will produce music that sounds like it had been composed by that person, they can compose that as fast as it comes out of the speakers. It could take style preferences from a small group of people and produce music that fits across those styles. The result is a sort of tribal music, representative of the tribe that generated it. In this way, music could become even more of a social tool in the future than it already is.

Thinking of starting a blog but not sure if it’s worth it? It is.

Yes. Blogging is easy and fun and definitely worth it.

I started my wordpress blog  just over three years ago. I have put out 160 posts and had 60,000 readers, 375 per post. Pathetic if you compare to the top blogs, but comparing yourself to others is the fast way to misery, so don’t. I look at the world on my terms, with my limits and my ability, not that of others. Some do better, some worse, so what? I’m me, not them.

In influence terms, with my readership level, it is probably equivalent to doing a talk on that topic to a conference of 375 people, (which is a big part of my business). But blogging is a lot easier, much faster if you include prep and travel time, and less stressful.

Blogging is unpaid work, but it costs in in other ways. It helps me to think an idea through, and to refresh and update old ideas. Occasionally, comments by readers point out errors and omissions too. It therefore helps make my other consultancy and talks fresh and weed out errors in my thinking, keeping customers happy. Happy customers generate more happy customers. So although it is unpaid directly, it probably significantly generates and maintains revenue indirectly.

And of course it is a sort of advertising.

There are numerous other paybacks that are hard to quantify but which certainly add justification. It’s a way of recording an idea so you can point to it later and say “I told you so” or “I said that first”. A way of teasing friends or colleagues, generating responses and discussion or occasionally just having a good rant. It can be entertainment, education or thought stimulation for readers, or maybe just a piece that readers can empathise with and share an experience.

But mostly, blogging is about being part of the bigger community, being part of a huge discussion panel, social networking, making some input and feeling satisfaction if you occasionally write something you can be proud of.

If you write a blog, none of this is news to you. If you don’t, I’d encourage you to have a go. It is easy to get started, especially on wordpress, and free, unless you want to pay for deluxe facilities. Just go to the wordpress.com page, click a few obvious buttons to create a free account, fill in some simple data and you’re flying. Half an hour to your first post. There are loads of page designs to pick from that you can personalise, most are free. You can buy premium upgrades of course, but they are entirely optional.

Go on. You know you have something to say or share that other people will be interested in.

Future food production

Food production is adapting to increased environmental awareness, but we will see far more change over coming years.

There is a lot of innovation right now in food production. Hydroponics is growing, as are vertical farms, home growing and focus on local production that is encouraging cottage industry specialists. There are some nice synergies. Greenhouses can make good use of waste heat from power stations and also benefit from the CO2 given off if they burn fossil fuels, which of course is locked up when the plants convert it to biomass. This effectively increases the energy efficiency of the power station by adding an extra layer of chemical energy recovery after thermal. There are many articles already out there about hydroponics etc so I don’t need to repeat them here. That’s what Google is for.

The web makes it easy for producers of all kinds to have a closer relationship with customers, so it is now possible to organise local marketing and distribution around social networking, with groups of customers even commissioning crops grown according to specific regimes. GPS-enabled tractors can treat each square metre of a field effectively as a different managed allotment. With people more interested in exactly how their food is produced, this is sure to find a healthy market as the economy recovers.

At higher levels, financial strain during the lengthy recession is forcing many people to commercialise their hobbies, such as baking or catering, creating a growing home-made sector. This will even extend into arts ad crafts thanks to new technology such as 3D printing, which will make its way into the kitchen any time soon.  So the emerging pattern is one of rapidly increasing diversity in food production, from crop growing to processed foods manufacture. This creates opportunities for increased competition in the food space, but also presents risks to existing manufacturers. As ever with any kind of turbulence, the winners and losers will be decided by how willing and able companies are to adapt.

Vertical farms on the walls of tall buildings add agricultural space to cities and as well as growing food, also helps air quality. The food would be of dubious taste and value if air were polluted as badly as it used to be, but with emissions now, it is probably OK. A variety of mechanisms have been suggests for vertical farms. Some look more feasible than others, but the general idea seems workable, and experimentation and development will sort out which solutions work best. One thing that is easy to forget though is that the amount of sunlight incident on a given land area doesn’t depend on the building architecture raised on it, and using a wall gives a lower energy density than a field or a roof because the same total light is spread over a larger area. Interior farms of course need artificial light, but if that is produced via nuclear energy, then it might still work out well environmentally.

Home finishing is a good prospect too. Many people are already used to part bake products, where they buy a product that is already mostly prepared and just needs finishing off in the oven to make one with all the benefits of freshly made cuisine. Microwave and other ready-meals are even more familiar. 3D printing technology may even have a future role, making edible frills and accessories to brighten up appearance.

Home finishing could be done as a small local business too. Large manufacturers could gain local presence for fresh produce by using local finishers, and these could be ordinary households or based in small offices or shops, making a new cottage industry. They could also work well with local manufacturing and distribution companies. Social networks could provide most of the platform for these local business clouds but they could also be based on systems run by large companies.

This social potential is useful if people rebel against the multinationals at some point. With frequent problem areas like tax avoidance, misleading information, exploitation and other issues that are setting people against them, having a fall-back position increases leverage by showing that communities are not powerless.

Current biotechnology research into lab-grown meat might eventually flourish into a large meat manufacturing industry. It is hard to tell yet how successful it might be in creating cost effective, healthy and palatable solutions. Vegetarian meats would presumably see a good market since many vegetarians avoid meat mainly because of the ways animals are reared and treated, and many meat eaters also have some reservations and would be willing to switch. Lab-grown meat would be little different from a yoghurt in terms of its cruelty implications. Although the principle has been proven, much work is need to replicate textures and taste well at a reasonable cost.

Lab-grown meat could be more energy efficient than that produced by animals, and would liberate farmland for crops. Together with increasing productivity in crop production anyway, some expect that we will be able to start returning land to nature in the second half of this century because we will make plenty of food for everyone with less land.

Biotech will create new varieties of crops, some with extra vitamin content or other health benefits, lower fat animals and enable varieties that are adapted to a wider range of climates, thereby increasing the amount of land that could be used for agriculture.

Home printer technology also is being hyped for food production, or rather assembly is probably a more accurate description, since nobody is yet suggesting its use for making the raw materials such as proteins and carbohydrates.  Its is effectively the next level up in abstraction from the lab grown products. Even chocolate could be made using printers. Food printers could only ever be a niche market, but could sit alongside other home gadgets such as microwaves and mixers. Cakes, confectionery,  frills and accessories would be the probable markets. It would especially appeal to the kinds of people who make elaborate cake decorations and could extend creative food design to a much broader group.

Food technology will continue to other areas too, making more appealing products from even wider range of raw materials. GM bacteria or algae could compete well with land grown crops. Algae may be grown at sea as part of carbon reduction schemes anyway, and could be used for either biofuel or as a component for food production. Of course, many foods contain lots of ingredients, so even if it isn’t suitable as a main platform, such humble starting points may be a used as fillers or other additives.

Of course, fish farming is bound to increase too. Many fish species are threatened today and near extinction of a key species does eventually force governments to listen and act. Although regulation so far has at best been poor, it can only improve and perhaps we may soon have a global set of treaties that ensure sustainable fishing and farming. There will also be a place for GM fish that maybe grow faster or breed faster. Some countries will be more willing to accept GM than others but when the choice is high prices v GM, GM will win out.

Things that don’t work but could

The future of gender

Warning: this is a 10,000 word entry, not my usual page or two

Introduction

Scope Limitation

I lecture occasionally about the future of sex, but I find gender as a whole is a fascinating subject. I don’t want my blog to get x-rated so need to be a bit careful what I cover and how, but I do think the future of gender is a topic worth writing about and I don’t need to get all adulty to make it interesting. If you are adult, you can use your own imagination to colour in any areas left uncoloured. Having said that, I’d still prefer you don’t proceed if you are under 18 or easily upset. I will cover this as far as I can.

I must also apologise at the outset that I haven’t managed to organise my thoughts on this very well. There are a number of dimensions to consider and it doesn’t lend itself well to a one dimensional article. There are probably some huge gaping holes in my coverage, even though this is a 10,000 word article. I think of this as an early stage in my thinking and therefore as a work in progress. I would welcome and thoughts on areas I have missed, and some of you will also have personal and first hand gender change experiences that are quite alien to me, that I would like to learn about. Although Einstein relied on it, and I love to copy his example, you simply cant do everything by thought experiment.

What is gender?

Wikipedia’s entry on gender is disappointing and seems lacking in scope. It is typical of academic treatments all too common in Wikipedia that use formality, obfuscation and unnecessary addition of superficial details in place of completeness of scope, understanding or insight. Nevertheless, it serves as a basic foundation on which to build. Its definition of gender:

“Gender is a range of characteristics of femininity and masculinity.^[1] Depending on the context, the term may refer to such concepts as sex (as in the general state of being male or female), social roles (as in gender roles) or gender identity.”

Its gender taxonomy is adequate:

chromosomes may be 46xx, 46xy, 47xxy (Klinefelter’s syndrome), 45xo (Turner’s syndrome), 47xyy, 47xxx, 48xxyy, 46xx/xy , mosaic , other mosaic, and others.

gonads may be testicles, ovaries, one of each (hermaphrodites), ovotestes, or other gonadal dysgenesis

hormones: androgens including testosterone; estrogens — including estradiol, estriol, estrone; antiandrogens and others

and of course genitals, but also secondary characteristics such as breasts,

there are also differences such as

brain structure -special kinds of secondary characteristics, due to their influence on psychology and behaviour

gender identity – psychological identification with either of the two main sexes

gender role – social conformity with expectations for either of the two main sexes and finally

erotic preference - gynophilia, androphilia, bisexuality, asexuality and various paraphilias.

I really hope those keywords don’t cause me any problems.

At least that is all pretty clear, but it is clearly pre-IT thinking and too medically oriented so misses a lot of importance. Humans are advanced animals, and their brains and accumulated culture add a great deal of extra scope beyond what nature bequeaths to most creatures. There is no mention in the article of the huge degree of virtualisation, abstraction, compartmenatilisation, multi-dimensionalism or parallelism of gender common in virtual worlds, dream-space and social media and the associate impacts in real world psychology. It is purely two dimensional, recognising genetic and social gender but still only male or female. I don’t believe for a moment that gender has suddenly changed beyond recognition or that sociologists must all be blind, so I can only infer that the discipline of gender studies is deliberately self-restricting. I can’t imagine why.

I don’t normally bother with definitions anyway, preferring to live in an analog world where common sense rules. I certainly don’t recognise the Wikipedia one as anything other than of historical interest. But let’s start with it as just that, assuming the last 30 years hasn’t happened yet and that everyone is still hiding in a Victorian closet.

Male, female, what else for physical gender?

Male and female isn’t a bad starting point per se. Natural sexuality uses just two sexes. In the 1990s, a few of my BT colleagues did a study on the numbers of sexes that should be used in genetic algorithms (a method of engineering using random mutations on ‘genes’, which are typically options for algorithms, and fitness testing, loosely based on Darwinian evolution). They found that the optimal number of sexes averages between 2 and 3. Two is fine, and nature ran with it. But you could have 3 or 4 or any number. It isn’t optimal from an evolutionary perspective, but it is for purpose and that is all nature needs.

There aren’t any common names for additional genders yet, though I am sure names exist within subcultures. Sure, we have male, female, neuter and hermaphrodite and lots of intersex variants, some of which do have names, but that is just one physical dimension and even so, there is some overlap among the names, and disagreement and confusion as to their precise meaning. When we start to add extra genders, there will be far more possible combinations.

New chromosomes

Initial (birth) physical gender in nature is largely determined by genes. Usually, two X chromosomes make a girl, and an X and Y create a boy. Even then, things can go wrong and some competitive sports issues have been raised in recent years by mismatches between chromosomal state and physical appearance, resulting in arguments over the gender of a winner and their consequential right to compete in that event. It is possible to have X and Y or two Xs and a Y and yet be born with an apparently female body. Before we start on designing new kinds of chromosome, let’s look briefly at what we might be designing them for.

Opportunity for new gender dimensions

Humans treat sex as a recreational and social activity as well as a reproductive one. Some future genders may be involved in reproductive processes and some may not. Some associated activities may generate sexual pleasure, others may not. Some genders could have roles as ‘bridges’ between two or more other genders, not directly providing any of the genes for future offspring, but involved as a necessary link in the reproductive process, as simple carriers, or genetic filters or processors. Regardless or the biological simplicity or complexity of the role, the organs, gender identity, social roles, rituals, and so on are essentially orthogonal dimensions, so could be designed pretty independently. The timelines for different types would not necessarily be similar, and designs could evolve over time. Obviously, making a new gender capable of reproduction is more difficult than just making a few cosmetic features, especially ones that aren’t deeply woven into the sensory or emotional or sexual response systems.

Adding new reproduction-capable genders or sexes will presumably require synthetic biology to create new genes, as well as a great deal of imagination and creativity to decide what gonads, genitals, other organs and sexual features to add. There is little point in speculating yet what they would look like, because it is a completely open space for creativity and experimentation.

Suppose as well as an X or Y, we were to add A, B, C… and Z chromosomes to carry the genes for them. They would need designed to achieve the features desired, but engineers will be able to do that in due course. We don’t yet understand how to design DNA to achieve particular features, but it is only a matter of time before we will. We will also one day be able to make DNA alternatives so won’t be limited by its capabilities. Physics and biology certainly allow it, the market will demand it, and engineers will build it. There are different ways of proceeding. We could end up with 3 or more chromosomes, or we could just modify existing ones to incorporate modified genes. Maybe only one type of cell is affected, or a few, or maybe all. Synthetic biology is a relatively open design space.

However, we choose to do the bio-engineering, by the end of this century, there could be a range of biological sexes  to add to male and female. We will still have neuter, male, female, and hermaphrodite, but also gender A, B, C, …,  multi-gender, hybrid genders, and so on ad infinitum. People may be able to pick any blend of them for their offspring.  Instead of two genders and a few mutations, we will have lots.

Associated practices

Creating new types of sex organs and associated mating practices is one thing, but the whole of sexuality could be redesigned at the same time. These new sexes will often interact in completely new ways. There will be arguments over whether some should be classed as new species since not all will be able to interbreed with traditional humans.

New gender roles, identities and erotic preferences would all have to be designed and engineered. It would be possible to engineer what makes attractiveness to a particular type of person of a particular gender. This isn’t all new, sci-fi writers have included inter-species relationships for decades, though they have generally stuck with traditional male and female in each species. But at least they have got as far as working out some attractive features and rituals, for Klingons at least. Where there is a big gap is in the scope for many genders being involved in an interaction, rather than the traditional one or two. To paraphrase Peter Cochrane, we don’t have six genders in nature because the chances of six people getting together at once without any of them having a headache is minimal. We will one day have gender designers and engineers working with sociologists, neuroscientists and many other disciplines to come up with new genders, roles, practices, rituals and attractiveness design.

Full Transgender

Change of physical gender today requires a lot of pain and mental stress, and isn’t something undertaken lightly. Even after all that, biotechnology still can’t offer a full chromosomal change and cosmetic surgery can only accomplish so much, so the changes are limited to outward appearance, organ reassignment and hormone medication. Results vary considerably in achieving a convincing change. Perhaps one day, if much hyped nano-medicine ever achieves its full potential, a full chromosomal retrofit and body reshaping may be possible so that the person becomes how they would have been had they been born their chosen gender. In that scenario, if the technology can do all that, then it can probably also achieve pretty much any body design desired, so gender change may be be just one option in a long selection of major body redesigns, way behind youth restoration in popularity. In the extreme, an average looking middle aged man may be able to change into an attractive young woman. And it need not be permanent, they could change back, though I wouldn’t expect much of a queue of attractive young women wanting to become middle aged men.

It is unlikely that it will become easy to change gender physically, so however much it may appeal as a concept, frequent recreational gender changing of their physical body is unlikely. It will still be something people do once at most.

Neural linking of external technology

Many people are well used to gadgetry in sex, some leave that kind of play for others. A variety of means are used to create stimulation, but electronic stimulators particularly hint at what the future offers. Stimulation is generated by using cleverly designed toys with electrodes that generate variable voltages and frequencies into relevant parts. In the next decade or two, active skin will use electronics printed directly on to the skin surface, along with some that penetrates deep into the skin to connect to nerve endings, enabling recording and replaying of sensations. It can then be expected that the sophistication, capability and personalisation of sex devices will increase dramatically.

It is possible that in the future, a variety of strap-ons, harnesses, sheaths and plugs will exist that not only create intense sexual stimulation, but do so from a library of recorded experiences, or indeed those downloaded from others. Future porn may well include recorded experiences from or with other people, and of course just like conventional porn, these could be enhanced with the neural equivalents of Photoshop. Further in the future, when we understand the brain better, and can engineer direct links into it, it may be that areas of some people’s brains may be modified or taught to treat the sensations from these devices as if they were truly part of their bodies.

This then reopens the scope for modification of gender. For example, it may be possible for a woman using a strap-on to feel as if it were an actual part of her, getting appropriate sensations from it. This could be sensations appropriate to males, or specially designed new ones for women. This is the most likely starting point for another class of gender modification. Toys could be added to an otherwise conventional body and linked into the nervous system and/or brain so well that they allow true full sensory transgender play. They could also be added alongside other sexual organs and sensations or, by perhaps using TMS-based signal attenuation, it could displace the original sex sensations. By generating another dimension for gender play, it greatly increases the scope for gender fluidity. When mixed with multiple genders, of course the scope increases still further.

The person wearing the device may well experience a convincing change in gender from a purely sensory point of view, but their outward appearance to another person would still be that of someone of original gender wearing a device. Outward appearance matters, but a convincing visual change to match the assumed gender could be done using augmented reality. Augmented reality adds another huge area for gender change and experimentation and deserves its own section later.

Unlike permanent transgender operations, these devices could be attached and detached at will, allowing people to oscillate freely among genders, opening the door to recreational gender change.

Recreational gender change

These future sex toys will allow a high level of sensory immersion in a different gender. Their use and popularity is evidenced by the high level of recreational gender change that  already features heavily in virtual worlds. Virtual worlds have many applications, but highly relevant to gender play, they are often used for computer games and for socialising, often combining both. They are also heavily used for role play, exploration of new places,, cultures and experiences and experimentation.

Gender identity is a bit more fluid than Wikipedia suggests. People role play different genders frequently in computer games and social virtual worlds and the experience can vary across a broad spectrum from totally detached and 3rd party to fully immersive. Sometimes, people may compartmentalise the experience, so they remain fully their normal gender in their real life while playing as another in a game or in a virtual world. Or they might become fully immersed in the role and feel as if they are the other gender for a while. Over prolonged sessions, their gender identity may blur somewhat.

Gaming

In gaming, people generally play as a character, such as a soldier or superhero, a wizard or alien. They explore worlds that range from totally fantasy to those based on real places and real life. Sometimes, games give a choice of character, and often people will play as a character of different gender to themselves. Men often play as female characters even if they don’t have any transgender intent. The standard justification is that they since they are looking at the world through a viewpoint just behind their character, they would rather look for the next 30 hours at an attractive female rear than a male one. Of course, it may also just be fun playing at being female for a while and then the role play can become a superficial gender change experience. Women gamers would find it hard to avoid having to play as a male character occasionally, since many games are designed with only male playable characters. Either way, games are a simple and painless way of exploring another gender superficially.

Virtual worlds and social networking

Such gender changing becomes a step more real once the game allows interaction with other people. It may still be in the context of a game or role play, but there is a wider spectrum of role play with other real humans involved rather than just lines of computer code. In a game, the real person hides behind their online gamer persona, which then hides behind the game character’s avatar. There is still little social risk since the game offers the excuse to play, but the degree of immersion into the other gender is consequently limited too.

When the game is removed and it becomes primarily a social networking world, like World of Warcraft or Second Life for example, the player is a step closer to their avatar and their immersion in the gender of their avatar is more real. The deliberate choice of gender and name for their avatar at the outset creates an extra level of buy-in. They are self-representing in a way that a computer game character isn’t. Choosing a different gender from their normal self is an act of minor but nevertheless deliberate deception. In spite of that, though some people may present in their normal gender, the temptation to try out a different gender at least once is irresistible to most people. About three quarters of people in virtual worlds and chat rooms have tried presenting as a different gender and some do so very often.

When they present as a different gender, the player must then consider not only what they look like to themselves on the screen, but how they present themselves to others and how they are seen. They also have to consider their personality, and the degree to which they modify that to support their virtual gender change. The level of association with the avatar varies from person to person and from time to time, but the result is that virtual gender play varies all the way from frivolous to deeply immersive and self absorbing in way that the person genuinely feels themselves to be the presented gender. It seems reasonable to say that although playing a different gendered character in a computer game isn’t always gender play, doing so in an online social context probably always is, even if it is temporary and far less committing than full gender reassignment. By being forced to interact personally rather than just hitting buttons on a controller, the buy-in crosses the boundary. Before looking at the future of this, we need to mention filters.

Filters

Reality TV is based in large part on the huge gulf that can occur between the image someone thinks they project and what is perceived by the viewer as reality. We see the world, other people and even ourselves through a series of filters. These are at least as important in gender play too.

Since people generally haven’t any actual experience of fully being another gender, they can only experience their virtual trans-gender through context-specific filters. When presenting to other people as a different gender in a virtual world, several of these filters come into play and they add another dimension.

Firstly, the superficial gender that is presented means different things to different people – beyond agreeing on genitalia, we don’t all share exactly the same prejudices about what male or female mean. People build up a picture in real life of how it must feel to be another gender and can play to that image but have no way of benchmarking that with real life feeling.

Secondly, no-one knows exactly how a particular image would be perceived by another. All they can do is to use their interactions with others as feedback on how convincing they may be.

Thirdly, even given an image that someone wants to project, there is another error in the actual presentation of it – there is no perfect feedback system that lets someone see accurately how others perceive what they think they are projecting.

Fourthly, there may be a fetishist bias to project an image that appeals to the tastes and fetishes of the person changing gender themselves. In such cases, the outward superficial appearance is what matters most to the person, and the acting out of a fantasy, rather than the immersion in the other gender.

So there are errors in presentation, interpretation and difference of meaning, and the experience of gender change may be diluted by other accompanying role plays.

Degree of reality

The other person may initially see someone in the gender they present, but anyone familiar with online social networking will learn to suspect a gender mismatch so they won’t necessarily accept it at face value. They may or may not know the person’s real gender, they may only believe it to a point, or they may realise they are presenting an alternative one. But they may not care. The same excuses for presenting a false gender may still  be successfully offered if the player doesn’t want to admit to any transgender feelings, but gender play is so common online that few would really care. It is a lightweight way of experiencing gender play with others. The lower threshold for gender acceptance also means that the reality of the experience is reduced, since people don’t necessarily treat others as they would someone whose gender they are sure of.

Other social sites

In non-play social sites, role play isn’t assumed and the self is more exposed. Some sites such as Google+ enforce the use of real identity, others such as Facebook don’t. Gender play on social networking sites is therefore not as socially acceptable as in virtual worlds where it is considered a routine part of role playing.

Virtual worlds ought to be a place where new genders should emerge. The main barriers preventing this in the real world don’t exist, though there are still barriers of culture and imagination.  So we should expect virtual worlds to be the first places for trying out new genders, with their associated cultural baggage, practices and rituals.

Future virtual worlds will have better graphics, full 3d immersion and eventually sensory recording and replay. The quality of communication with others and the quality of shared experiences in 3d realistic environments and situations will increase proportionately. These will make them a more realistic and immersive exploration of the other gender too, and will increase the overall feeling of reality of the experience.

What does the absence of new genders in virtual worlds teach us?

The lack of new genders on virtual worlds is interesting. People are certainly enthusiastic about experimenting. Changing into robots, drones, monsters, animals, furries, aliens, dolls, even objects is commonplace, and swapping between genders is also commonplace, but apart from male, female, neuter and some shemale variants, there conspicuously aren’t any other genders. Is this just failure of imagination, or does it simple reflect the fact that people are coming from an existing state with its associated sexual preferences, and are therefore only drawn to these options? The latter seems the more likely explanation.

Immersion

Thanks to these filters, the degree of reality of gender changing experiences available in virtual worlds is highly variable, both to the person undergoing the gender change and to other people interacting with them. Adding future technology increases the potential sensory quality, but won’t necessarily change the social assumptions or trust. If the gender changing is just fetishist self-voyeurism or role play, then that may not matter much, but if the intent is to pass as the other gender then it would matter more.

Interaction in virtual worlds today is often just via text chat and animations, but voice changing technology may also be used to pretend in a little more depth. As this improves in quality, it may allow people to pass as an alternative gender much more easily and convincingly. Avatars can be made to look any way, and they will improve in quality over time too. They will become full 3d and some virtual worlds may become fairly convincing replicas of real life.

Artificial intelligence can also play a part, acting as a real time coach and filter, changing the outward presentation of a gender by altering or enhancing mannerisms, gestures and other body language, use of verbal language, such as choice of words, phrases, style, subject matter, the lengths of sentences and other clues to gender.

At that point we will really start to see crossover of the technology into other forms of chat, with webcams able to change video image, conversational style and content and voice in real time to allow people to pass in real life chat situations as another gender. Some may do so only in social interactions, others may use it for work too.

In chat rooms, ever since they started, some people have presented as different genders, so anyone’s friends lists will include some people whose real gender they know for certain, some they know for certain are gender-bending, and some in between, where there are varying levels of suspicion that they may not really be their presented gender. Virtual worlds added even more play potential, and soon webcams will increase it further still. Soon, thanks to the trend of working from home, we may not know the genders of the people with whom we are working. Not knowing the genders of all your friends is not new, but it also isn’t ubiquitous. Many people have never used a chat room or virtual world, so have no first hand experience of gender confusion. No doubt some people would consider it to be a social problem if people frequently present as another gender from time to time, others will feel perfectly comfortable with it.

Augmented reality

Augmented reality is a bit different from this, offering more scope for change and adding still more new dimensions to gender play. AR allows computer generated images and data to be overlaid onto the field of view. This started off in everyday practice with simple text and symbols on smart-phone screens, but the idea space is over 20 years old now, and only the technology is holding back realisation. It will quickly evolve into a fully immersive overlay capability where the uses can selectively overlay or replace real world images with computer generate ones. So, virtual architecture may modify the appearance of buildings or streets, virtual fauna and flora will decorate them, and people can be cosmetically enhanced or simply replaced by avatars. That means a user could make all the ugly people look prettier, replace them with images of their favourite celebrities, or just delete them from the field of view (though some mechanism is needed to prevent collisions when they are physically close).

There are a number of choices that make it interesting.

Firstly, who controls how one person sees another. Is it the viewer, or the person being seen, or some third party such as an application or service provider?

Can someone assert their chosen edited appearance on the viewer, and can they do so differently for each group of potential viewers, or tailor how they appear to the context and specifics of that interaction? All of the above?

Does the viewer get to choose between an avatar and a real life image, even if an edited one, or an alternative avatar, or a cosmetically enhanced appearance, or is that also decided by the person being seen?

If the viewer has control, can they also choose the gender of the other people they see?

Can the person being seen assert their chosen gender, and hide their real one from the image production system?

Should there be a right to see how someone else is visualising you, or even how they are visualising others? If so, under which circumstances? Should the police be able to check that your visualisation of someone else isn’t demeaning or insulting, or a race crime? Should your use of overlays be forced to be recorded in case it needs to be policed in future?

Obviously, these choices give a lot of options for potential gender interactions. As well as gender, images could also show people with different ages, races, even species, or as an object, as someone else, or as a group of people, or show a group as an individual. Someone playing a character in a computer game or virtual world may find it fun to use that same character avatar on the high street. A full AR replacement of people in the street could be a very different world to live in.

There would be some social pressure on application providers to prevent too much abuse of such systems, but also some demands from minority groups to protect their specific interests. It seems reasonable that a transgendered person or a transvestite should have the right to present themselves as their chosen gender. Since someone may be just exploring gender options prior to considering becoming transgendered, that right would also need to extend to casual recreational gender change. But that only requires that their original gender be concealed from the viewer or system. It doesn’t prevent the viewer from replacing or modifying what they see. They could still replace any stranger’s image with a customised one of their own choosing, and it isn’t necessary to know anything about the stranger to do so. So it is possible to protect transgender rights while still allowing viewers to choose how they modify the world they see.

Augmented reality also allows people to select and apply components of how they (or an application provider) believe other genders might feel by changing the appearance of the world to that ideal. Certain parts of images may be enhanced or dulled to reflect the relative importance. A crude example may be feminising it by adding more pinks or flowers or children or female oriented ads. Hopefully, the reality would be a little more sophisticated.

Augmented reality will objectify women

Our treatment of others varies according to how we perceive their gender.

Augmented reality will bring many benefits and improve our lives in many ways, such as enjoying virtual architecture, playing immersive computer games while a partner is shopping, or enjoying artworks transposed onto walls in the high street. But it won’t all be wonderful.

In spite of marketing hype and misrepresentation of basic location based services, AR is only here in very primitive form today, outside the lab anyway. But very soon, we will use visors and contact lenses to enable a fully 3D, hi-res overlay on the real world. So notionally, someone can make everything in the world look how they want, but only to a point. They can transform a dull shop or office into an elaborate palace of spaceship. But even if they change what these look like, you still need to represent real physical structures and obstacles in your fantasy overlay world, or they may bump into them, and that includes all the walls and furniture, lamp posts, bollards, vehicles, and of course other people. Augmented reality allows us to change their appearance thoroughly but they still need to be there somehow.

When it comes to people, there will be some small battles. Each of us may have a wide variety of avatars, and may have invested a great deal of time and money making or buying them. Someone may have a digital aura, hoping to present different avatars to different passers-by according to their profiles. They may want to look younger or thinner or as a character they enjoy playing in a computer game. They may present a selection of options. The avatar they choose to overlay could be any one of the images on offer, that they spent so much time on. Maybe some people get to pick from several on offer, or are restricted to just one that is set for their profile type.

However, other people may choose not to see that avatar, but instead to superimpose one of their own choosing. The question of who decides what the viewer sees is the first and most obvious battle in AR and it will probably be won by the viewer (there may be exceptions, and these may be imposed by regulations). The other person will decide how they want to see you, regardless of your preferences.

Someone could spend a great deal of time making an avatar or tweaking virtual make-up to perfection, but if someone wants to see Lady Gaga walking past instead of them, they will. A stranger’s body becomes no more than an object on which to display any avatar or image someone else chooses. People are quite literally reduced to an object in the AR world. Those with concerns over objectification of women will not like what AR will bring.

Firstly they may just take an actual physical appearance (via a video camera built into their visor for example) and digitally change it,  so it is still definitely still the target person, but now dressed more nicely, or dressed in sexy lingerie, or how they might look naked, body-fitting any images from a porn site. This could easily be done automatically in real time using some app or other. They could even use the actual face as input to image matching search engines to find the most plausible naked lookalikes. So anyone can digitally dress or undress anyone, not just with their eyes, but with a hi-res visor using sophisticated software and image processing software. They could put anyone in any kind of outfit, change their skin colour or make-up, and make them look as pretty and glamorous or as slutty as they want. The victim won’t have any idea what someone looking at them is seeing. They simply won’t know whether they are being treated with respect, flattered, or made to look even prettier, which they might not mind, or perhaps being digitally stripped or degraded which they probably will mind a lot.

Anyone can treat anyone else as just an object on which to superimpose some other avatar, which could be anything or anyone, a zombie, favourite actress or supermodel. They won’t need consent and again the victim won’t have any idea what the viewer are seeing. The avatar may make the same gestures and movements as the real person. In some ways this won’t be so bad. People are still reduced to objects but at least it isn’t that particular individual that they’re looking at naked. Most strangers on the high street were just moving obstacles to avoid bumping into anyway. Most people will cope with that bit. It is when interaction starts that it starts to matter. Many people won’t enjoy it if someone is chatting to them but looking at someone else entirely, especially if they are a friend or partner. Kissing one person while looking at someone else would be a breach of trust. This sort of thing could and probably will damage a lot of relationships.

It’s a fairly safe bet that the software to do some or all of this is already in development. Maybe some of it already exists in primitive forms but it will develop quickly once AR display technology is really with us. The visor hardware required is certainly on its way and primitive versions will be here by the end of 2012.

In the office, in the home, when you’re shopping or at a party, people won’t have any idea what or who someone else is seeing when they look at them. The main casualty will be trust.  It will make us question how much we trust each of our friends and colleagues and acquaintances. It will build walls. People will often become suspicious of others, not just strangers but friends and colleagues. Some people will become fearful. People may dress as primly as they like, but if the viewer sees them in a slutty outfit, perhaps their behaviour and attitudes will be governed by that rather than reality. So there could be an increase in sexual assault or rape. Women especially may more often be objectified, in more circumstances. Many men objectify women already. In the future AR world , they’ll be able to do so far more effectively without everyone knowing.

Augmented reality accessories

It is possible to use virtual accessories as well as real ones. An augmented reality strap-on or vibrator may look similar to a real one, but of course doesn’t have the same physical presence and the same goes for any other imagined accessory for any future gender. If it is to have anything more than a symbolic presence in role play, it needs somehow to connect into the nervous system or at least to be able to create some sort of sensation. Linking a virtual accessory to the peripheral nervous system can be done via active skin, pressure pads, smart gloves or data suits. In the far future it may be possible link directly into the brain. There are lots of options.

The potential to make augmented reality accessories that can be associated with real sensations and take a real part in gender–related practices allows new genders to come into play long before they are possible to make genetically.

However, we must ask just how ‘real’ such genders would be. The people using such virtual appliances may take part in interesting experiences, but their original body and original gender remains intact unless they undertake further action.

It is possible to have original equipment disconnected or removed, and to use the augmented reality devices instead. It may also be possible to block or attenuate the sensations from them at the brain using derivatives of trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or some future signal blocking means. With this associated physical gender reassignment, augmented reality would offer a proper means of gender change with less trauma.

Once we start linking to the peripheral nervous system, we can dissociate the physical acts causing a stimulus from the sensation experienced. Though frivolous and perhaps ridiculous, it is entirely possible to create intense sexual sensation or even orgasm just by typing a capital O on a keyboard, or by any other action.

The existing nervous system is limited in its scope though, and it would be better to be able to map sensations onto new areas of the brain. Thanks to research and development on tools to help disabled people interpret the world around them, we know that the brain is able to accept stimuli and learn to interpret and experience them over time. This again offers scope for new genders before we get to building them genetically.

Compartmentalising and acting

Humans are skilled at presenting filtered or enhanced views of themselves to others. We talk of wearing a shield or a mask. We all do it all the time, at work and socially, presenting edited personas to different groups.

Some people are very good at it and become actors. The acting profession is a good point to look for gender insight. Actors often complain that people treat them as if they were the character they play, which shows that for some people, the line between fiction and reality can sometimes get blurred. Presumably, that would make it easier for them to take people’s presented gender at face value and perhaps not even consider whether it may be faked.

Another clue from acting is that actors sometimes practise for a role by immersing themselves in the character’s situation, so that they can begin to identify with it more closely and play the role more naturally. In essence they are deliberately blurring the lines of their own fiction and reality. Or at least part of it.

From birth, we start registering differences between male and female. Each of us forms a unique view of how it is to be our own gender and how it might feel to be another. If we try to act as if we were another gender, that is the prejudice we have to start from. To improve on that, some people live part or full time in the guise of the other gender, just as actors may live in their character. Gender reassignment surgery usually follows a lengthy period of such living, since it isn’t properly reversible, yet. This ensures that the person feels comfortable in their new gender before the final commitment. They will experience others’ reactions to themselves but may also feel differently while in the other gender. The playing of the new role is important because it changes how someone feels inside, not just how they look outside.

Recreational gender changing is temporary in nature and therefore lends itself more to compartmentalising rather than essentially practising a new life. Again, like acting, someone knows who they ‘really’ are, but allocates a sub-mindset to play their role. Someone presenting themselves as another gender in a chat room or virtual world is likely compartmentalising. They have a normal everyday life as one gender, but play act with a particular mindset in their chat room role.

There isn’t a limit on how many roles someone can act. In everyday life, we all have dozens of slightly different personas to cover all the different social groups we belong to. In chat rooms and virtual worlds, people often have several alternative personas, or alts. Some people use over twenty regularly. That is easy to understand, but what is surprising is that they manage successfully to use several at the same time. They may even have one of their alts apparently chatting to other ones so that they can maintain the pretence. This requires a degree of skill to keep them all separate and prevent others from suspecting. But it is exactly that skill that also allows someone to compartmentalise gender. People may have some alts in one gender and some in another. Some may flip between them. They use the appropriate gender filters to present each one according to circumstance.

Such compartmentalisation skill is common, and shows that some people will be adept at doing so with future genders too. They will have to juggle lots of roles, with all the associated memory and behaviours, and they will do so in games, chat rooms, social networking sites, virtual worlds, and augmented reality overlays, and in a wide variety of everyday business and social interactions, but they will have AI to help them translate body and verbal language between them, handle all their avatars, and even act in their place or alongside when they are not sufficiently present. We can only expect gender to become even more blurred and dynamic as recreational gender play becomes more powerful and immersive.

Blurring of gender identity

That raises the question of degree to which someone’s psychological gender identity can blur as a result of frequent recreational gender play. If someone puts effort into presenting as another gender for significant periods, running the appropriate emulators alongside the normal ones, it is inevitable that they will gradually adopt some of what they consider to be the attitudes of the other gender, and some behaviours will cross over into their other compartments. The various models all have to access some of the same underlying thinking and control processes – they won’t all be duplicated and kept separate – so the appropriate neural circuitry and skills will change accordingly. This must be especially so in areas that don’t get shielded from outsiders, the ones they don’t think of as particularly visible or gender-relevant, because they are less careful to keep them in separate compartments. Over time, their gender identity will inevitably blur. This may well make them more accepting and tolerant of the other gender, but if they are frequent recreational gender changers, that is unlikely to have been an issue in the first place.

Dreams

Dreams are related to games and virtual worlds. They share some of the same mental emulation of a perceived reality, albeit in dreams the emulator is heavily distorted and filtered. Some people sometimes dream of themselves in another gender. It may feature as a central part of the dream storyline, perhaps that somehow they have been transformed, it may be that they just happen to be that gender, or it may be purely incidental, not particularly relevant to the storyline. Or it may be a way of indulging in an aspirational gender change for someone who has transgender thoughts. In lucid dreams, it can even be a form of recreational gender change.

Which brings us nicely to the idea that we will soon be able to choose what we dream of, and link our dreams to those of other people. Gender play in dreams may then become as common as it already is in virtual worlds.

Augmented reality could use a variety of displays, including goggles or active contact lenses. Contact lenses have the advantage of being under the eyelids so the images can be seen even when eyes are closed. During dreams, feedback from brain signals could be used to direct the selection of imagery produced in the lenses, enhancing dreams and allowing them to be linked with those of other people. This is closer than you may imagine.

Even today it is possible to pick up clues as to the images the person is seeing, and this could link into programming in an augmented reality system to generate additional appropriate imagery. We are all familiar with building external sound into dreams, and we should expect that augmented reality images could also be used by our brains. So if programs are designed well, they could use the topic detected from the sleeper as an input to search utilities, then playing appropriate media to enhance or even guide the dreamer. This would allow some element of choice before sleep, where the person could pick dreams from a menu, and have a good chance of experiencing them. Gender could be one of the choices of course.

It will be possible to link people’s dreams together, provided they are both in a dream state at the same time. Detecting signals from each one and feeding in appropriate augmented reality to each, they could be guided along converging paths until their dreams overlap. Then they would be able to interact with each other in the dreams using nerve signals to directly control the dream ‘avatar’ in the other person’s dream. Ongoing development of thought recognition should enable such dreams not only to be gently guided but also recorded.

Dreams feel more immersive and real than computer games so gender play in them may be more significant in some ways. Habitually dreaming as another gender may have long term effects on waking state too.

Voyeuristic gender play

People may choose to swap gender for a variety of reasons. Men often choose a female version of the hero in computer games, so that they can look at an attractive woman for the next 30 hours rather than a man. They are acting female for purely voyeuristic reasons, not as a means of gender experimentation. Similarly in virtual worlds, people may choose an alternative gender for the avatar simply so that they can look at them or watch them act out a role in a fantasy. This is very different from wanting to be that gender. However, someone else may do exactly the same things to try and experience being that gender. Intent is important, not the act. Intent governs the degree of association with that gender. Are they living the character, or just watching the character?

Aspirational gender

In contrast to voyeuristic play, someone may genuinely aspire to be another gender or to adopt some of its characteristics. They may want the full TG package, or may want to pick and mix from their picture of the traits on offer, TG-lite if you will. There are very many variants of this. Physically, there are lots of combinations of surgical and hormonal changes, as well as simple use of cosmetics. There are also many variations of feminised, camp or tomboyish behaviour, which may result from natural, environmental or medical use of hormones, exposure to cultural pressures or from deliberate personal choice. Pick and mix gender is illustrated in typical sissy play, where a basket of cherry-picked feminine attributes and behaviours are assembled while retaining the underlying masculinity. This falls short of the full gender change play that also happens in such worlds. The outlets in virtual worlds allow people to indulge many behaviours they associate with another gender safely, and they can do so openly or hidden as they wish. The result is a rich mixture of variations of the two standard genders.

Some people feel that they are the wrong gender and some badly enough to go through the trauma of surgical reassignment, but there are many more who would change if they could do so easily and painlessly, and probably even more who would choose to be another gender if they were able to live their life again or reincarnate. The social barriers to changing are high, as are the physical ones. But that doesn’t necessarily affect the aspiration to change gender. Technologies that allow this in part or avoiding negative social issues would cater to these latent gender changers and thus be relatively popular since they allow at least some of the frustrated aspirations to be achieved.

Environmental impact on gender - exposure to feminising chemicals

Many studies over the last decade (and even earlier) have shown endocrine disruptors (which mimic the behaviour of estrogens) in the environment causing feminisation in insects, fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals. Such chemicals come from plastics, packaging, pesticides, cleaning products and even shampoo and the linings of tin cans. In extreme cases, polluted rivers have seen 100% of male fish (Roach) becoming hermaphrodite. Effects are greater in the young. Google it for examples. You’ll find lots.

Humans are animals too of course, and although they may not have enough exposure to human endocrine disruptors in our everyday environment to cause adult men to actually change into women, again there do appear to be significant effects, especially on such things as sperm counts, breast development and testicular cancer rates. Sperm counts have fallen dramatically over the last few decades.

In the womb, effects are potentially far greater. In 2007, the Arctic Measurement and Assessment Program found twice as many girls as boys being born due to levels of chemicals in the blood of pregnant women there that were high enough to cause gender change. In Japan too, fewer boys are being born.

Surprisingly perhaps, the effects on humans have not had much study, but this is perhaps because of the potential reactions of militants in the gay and transgender communities. It is a sensitive area, but we ought to be able to discuss it properly and openly. We are using more and more chemicals in our everyday lives – more hygiene and cleaning products, more processed foods, more packaging, more plastics generally. Exposure to human endocrine disruptors is already high and may become higher if we keep brushing the issues under the carpet.

What is at stake?

If men are becoming feminised, we will gradually lose the contributions of one end of the masculinity spectrum. Gender lines have already blurred and are blurring further, and the impact  on our culture is as important as the impact on health and fertility. These problems will escalate if unborn babies and younger generations with greater vulnerability are exposed to relatively higher exposures.

It does seem that men are showing their feminine sides far more than used to be the norm. Are metrosexuals in increasing abundance because of fashion and cultural exposure, or because of chemicals changing their preferences, or a combination. Why do men cry more now? Why are more men gay and bisexual than before? Why do far more teenage boys want gender changes than before? Any one trend arises from a combination of factors, but if the overall feminisation is due in part to chemical exposure, and it probably is, then perhaps that is a problem that should be fixed. Genders are important and should be a matter of choice human culture and social make-up shouldn’t be dictated by pollution.

Why does it matter?

Male, female, inter-gender and transgender people make diverse contributions to overall society and culture. The different ways men behave and think and react and emote, or not should be valued and preserved as well as other genders and behaviours. The feminised end of the male spectrum is growing, but we should worry about losing ‘straight’, non-metrosexual masculinity. It has value too. In the gender spectrum, one end of the male part is becoming fainter while the other intensifies.

So what to do?

If cultural and chemical effects on men created pressure in opposite directions, they might cancel to some degree, but they don’t. They both create feminising pressure. Men have been under strong social and media pressure to feminise for decades. It simply isn’t fashionable to be a man today. Male behaviour is ridiculed routinely throughout the media, especially in advertising, with men portrayed as cavemen and idiots in a world of highly evolved and intelligent women. Men are encouraged to explore and show their feminine sides. The UK and US education systems have been restructured to favour the ways girls learn. Boys are punished and put down in the playground if they dare to behave as boys. Selection of participants in reality TV shows such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘I’m a Celebrity’ and ‘Come dine with me’ greatly favours feminised men to fill the male half. TV presenting is the same. Women have significantly greater legal rights than men. In the workplace, women and gay men are heavily protected and given positive discrimination at the expense of straight men. While chemical exposure is already creating biological feminising pressure, society is kicking masculinity while it’s down.

We should obviously start to limit exposure to chemicals that cause feminisation. But society should also question its attitudes and consider the long term consequences of anti-masculinity pressure. Do we really want a world with only feminised men? Masculinity deserves to be preserved too.

Symbionts

Science fiction (such as Star Trek) holds the concepts of symbionts, organisms that share bodies, where one acts as a host or carrier for the other in a symbiotic relationship, though of course it could equally be parasitic or commensalistic. This sort of thing could extend to gender too, where two distinct characters interact, share or overlap in such ways that they form a gender together. Separately they may have no gender or hold a different one, but when linked together they generate a new distinct gender.

The question arises as to how far this concept could be taken. In principle, quite far. One group could participate in a number of distinct genders depending how they combine with other groups. Three or more could combine. They could have some physical, some neural, and some virtual links. With many different ways of connecting and sharing sensations, emotions and thoughts, with many combinations of organism and indeed synthetic organisms or AIs, the idea space is huge.

Gender forcing

Some people have fantasies (or nightmares for a few too) of forced gender change. In the real world, this would be a relatively rare event (I assume that some people enslaved in the sex trade may have forced gender change, but have no idea how widespread a problem that is) but in virtual worlds, it apparently happens quite a lot.  Of course, the victim may want it to happen, in which case they would simply be enjoying no-fault recreational gender change while pushing the blame onto someone else. But it could also be genuinely unwanted. As a part of role play or a game forfeit, and temporary, it may still be accepted. If it is permanent that might be very different. In such a case, it could have more severe consequences.

Widely different degrees of reality and immersion are possible, as I have discussed already. If someone is forced into a different gender even in a virtual world and can’t revert for some reason, maybe their identity irrevocably locked to that gender, then they would simply have to get used to it, or leave that virtual world. It wouldn’t necessarily always be possible to create a new identity to escape and the social costs of leaving entirely might make the new gender the lesser of two evils. This could extend to some augmented reality applications, again with varying degrees of immersion and realism.

A closely related problem is that if someone assumes a different gender in a virtual world for a significant time, they may accumulate valued relationships that would be damaged if they were to change to their real gender, so again the costs of reverting would be unacceptable and they are effectively locked in their presented gender. Since there is so much gender play in virtual environments, I suspect this is not likely to be a major issue overall, but it still could be for particular individuals or relationships. Although less likely than in socialising virtual worlds, it is possible that employees in geographically spread virtual companies could present to some or all of their colleagues as an alternative gender than their reality, and reverting could potentially thus come at a career cost. Video and voice changing technologies will make such pretence easier and perhaps more common. Fiction has many examples of people presenting in a different gender to colleagues for professional reasons. The spread of freelancing and virtual companies makes it more likely, and the potential lock-in would follow.

So gender forcing is already here, albeit mainly virtually. The magnitude of the problems would presumably simply scale with the degree and intensity of recreational gender play, since other forcing issues would correlate highly with this too.

Empathetic gender play

Compartmentalising allows people to assume multiple parallel threads of behaviour and present different genders or gender-related traits to different groups even at the same time. The personal psychological costs and difficulty associated with this would vary between individuals but if it is easy for someone, they may do it a lot. Even without any particular desire to change, they may simply find it easier to empathise with another person by assuming their gender during the encounter. It may be such casual gender changing would happen for other reasons too.

Gender as an art form

I’ve always found it fascinating as a technologist and engineer how the first users of new technological breakthroughs are so often artists. As we mess around increasingly with genetics, it can only be a while before we see the first artistic exploration of gender creation. I wouldn’t know where to start predicting what artists will do with it, I’ve already mentioned most of the available dimensions. Part of the fun of art is the surprise when it happens. Let’s wait and see.

How many genders are there?

Most people would initially count male and female, and quickly recall others such as shemales (or ladyboys) and hermaphrodites. But there are already a lot more combinations. Assuming many different degrees of casualness, immersiveness, and commitment, virtualisation, parallelism and multi-threading of gender play, on top of many different states and combinations of physical, hormonal and psychological base, there are already hundreds of possible gender states. This number will grow markedly as we add new dimensions for experimentation. Each extra dimension would include several possible states, so the far future will certainly contain thousands of potential variations.

The future of gender is a very diverse one!

Connecting up? let’s shake on that. Guest post by Chris Moseley

“Let’s connect up!” A former American associate of mine used that phrase all the time and nice lady that she is, those words always had an empty, rather dread ring to them. “Connecting up” invariably meant participation in a teleconference where, blind to each other’s facial expressions, attire – hairstyles! – the contributors to the so-called ‘conference’ were left anxiously trying to assemble layers of meaning and depth from each other’s lifeless pleonasms. The communications experience was never much better when we actually saw each other; teleconferencing offered its own unique brand of awfulness, which unvaryingly got in the way of good discussion. Of course there is nothing unusual about this type of experience – it’s common in fact, which makes it all the more dreadful. With all the technology that has come about to help us ‘connect’, much faster and with less effort than ever before, we have become ever more detached from real, flesh and blood relationships. Digital communications simply does not cut it when it comes to developing a relationship. Of course we all know the mantra, the arguments for communications technology. It’s an important tool that helps us to make plans more efficiently, and to stay in touch with friends and loved ones. It is a portal to our business world – to making money! It has even proved to be critically important to the cause of liberty and democracy, witness the events that led to the Arab Spring. And yet I feel that we’re all missing out terribly by confining ourselves to studying our smartphones instead of reading the faces of the people around us, or by choosing to text a few words to a colleague in the office via Skype when he/she is only a few feet away (oh, yes, this is really happening more and more now). I suppose we must keep faith and hope for common sense to lead us back to a sensible blend of technology and good old-fashioned human contact. Or perhaps those clever fellows at BT, Ma Bell, Deutsche Telecom or Telstra will find a viable substitute via interactive holographic technology, or some form of advanced avatar communications. Mmm, I believe that I would still rather shake someone’s hand and, err, smile.

Chris Moseley, 17 Mile Studios, Brisbane, Australia

www.17milestudios.com.au

To each according to their effort

This blog is very long, around 4000 words, and looks at various forms of exploitation and how we might design a better system. It is as much a personal exploration of the field as anything.

Hardening of attitudes to welfare abuse

There is growing resentment right across the political spectrum against those taking welfare who won’t do enough to try to look after themselves but expect handouts, while others are having to work hard to make ends meet. And at the same time, resentment against the rich who use loopholes in the law to find technically legal but morally dubious tax avoidance schemes. What these have in common is that they exploit others. I want in this blog to look at a variety of ways in which people exploit others, some that we are so used to we don’t even notice any more. And of course this is important in helping to determine what may happen in the future.

If you have any knowledge of economics, please go away now, I don’t want to offend you by teaching basic economics, especially if I get it wrong. Otherwise, please explore with me.

The few have always exploited the many

We recently had a short break visiting the Cotswolds (a chocolate-box picture area of England). We saw a huge Roman villa, fantastic mosaics in the Roman museum in Cirencester, and a couple of stately homes. Then we went to Portugal where we saw the very ornate but tasteless Palace of Penna. It made me realise just how much better off we are today, when thanks to technology development, even a modest income buys vastly superior functionality and comfort than even royalty used to have to put up with.

I used to enjoy seeing such things, but the last few years I have found them increasingly disturbing. I still find them interesting to look at, but now they make me angry, as monuments to the ability of the few to exploit the efforts of the many for their own gain. So while admiring the landscape architecture of Lancelot (Capability) Brown, and the Roman mosaics, I felt sorry for the many people who had little or no choice but to do all the work for relatively little reward. Especially so with buildings like the Palace of Penna where an obviously enormous amount of hard work has been spent on something that ended up hideously ugly. Even if the artists and workmen were paid a good wage, their abilities could probably still have been put to much more constructive use.

But we don’t want equality of poverty

I strongly believe that we overvalue capital compared to knowledge, talent and effort, resulting in too high a proportion of wealth going to capital owners.  Capitalism sometimes saps too many of the rewards of effort away from those who earn them. However, few people would argue for a system where everyone is poorer just so that we can have equality, as happened in communism, and as would be the result if some current socialists got their ways. The system should be fair to everyone, but if we are to prosper as a society, it also needs to incentivise the production of wealth.

Exploitation of society by the lazy and greedy

That of course brings us to the abuse at the other end, with some people who are perfectly able to work drawing state benefits instead (or indeed as well as wages from work) and thereby putting unjust extra load on the welfare system. This of course acts as a major drain on hard working people too and reduces the rewards of effort. Those who work hard may thus see their money disappearing at both ends, possibly taken by exploitative employers and certainly taken by the state to give to others. Exploitation is still exploitation whether it is by the privileged or the lazy. We all want the welfare system, because another powerful force in human nature is to care for others, and we instinctively want to help those who can’t help themselves. But that doesn’t mean we want to be taken advantage of.

Rewarding effort is essential for a healthy economy

As a general principle, extra effort or skill or risk or investment should reap extra reward. If there is too little incentive to do put in more work or investment, human nature dictates that most people won’t do it. The same goes for leading others or building companies and employing others. If you don’t get extra reward from enabling or leading other people to create more, you probably won’t bother doing that either. Very many communes have started up with idealism and failed for this reason.

In both of these cases, a few nice people will do more, even without financial incentive, simply because it makes them feel good to work hard or help others, but most won’t, or will start doing so and quickly give up when appreciation runs dry or they become frustrated by the laziness of others.

While effort and investment and skill and leadership must all be rewarded to make a healthy economy, it is a natural and fair consequence of rewarding these that some people will become richer than others, and if they help many other people also to do more, they may become quite a lot richer than others.

‘To each according to their effort’ is a fundamentally better approach than ‘from each according to their ability and to each according to their need’ as preached by communists – it is simply more in tune with human nature. It makes more people do more, so we all prosper. Trying to level the playing field by redistributing wealth too much deters effort and ultimately makes everyone worse off. A reasonable gap between rich and poor is both necessary and fair.

But we shouldn’t let people demand too much of the rewards

However, an extreme gap indicates that there is exploitation, that some people are keeping rather too much of the reward from the efforts of others. As always, we need to find the right balance. Greed does seem to be one of the powerful forces in human nature, and if opportunity exists for someone to take more for themselves at the expense of others, some will. I don’t believe we should try to change human nature, but I do believe we should try to defend the weak against exploitation by the greedy. Some studies have shown a correlation between social inequality and social problems of crime, poor education and so on. That doesn’t prove causality of course, but it does seem reasonable to infer causality in any case here.

I wrote in April

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/will-barclays-become-a-not-for-profit-company/

highlighting the situation in large companies such as Barclays where top managers seem to run the company as if it were their own, allocating huge rewards for themselves at the expense of both customers and shareholders’ interests. Such abuse of position is widespread across the economy, but is very much in the spotlight now, and it will inevitably be reined back over time in spite of fierce resistance from the beneficiaries. The power of public pressure via shame should not be underestimated, even though some seem conspicuously immune to it. Where the abusers still decide to abuse, power will come either by shareholders disposing of abusers, or regulators giving shareholders better power to over-rule where there is abuse, as is already starting to happen, or by direct pay caps for public sector chiefs. The situation at the moment gives too much power to managers and shareholders need to given back the rights to control their own companies more fully.

Reducing market friction

There are many opportunities to exploit others, and always some who will try to take the fullest advantage. We won’t ever make everyone nice, but at least we can make exploitation more difficult. Part of the problem is social structure and governance of course, but part is also market imperfection. While social structure only changes slowly, and government is doomed to suffer the underlying problems associated with democracy, we can almost certainly do something about the market using better technology. So let’s look at the market for areas to tweak.

Strength of position

Kings or slave owners may have been able to force subjects to work, but a modern employer theoretically has to offer competitive terms and conditions to get someone to work, and people are theoretically free to sell their efforts, or not. Then the theory becomes more complex and the playing field starts to tilt. People have to live, and they have to support their dependants.  Not everyone is born with the intellectual gifts or social privileges that enable them to be entrepreneurs or high-earning professionals who can pick and choose their work and set their own prices. And if someone can’t sell their efforts directly to a customer, they may have to accept whatever terms and conditions are available from a local employer or trader. 

Location location location makes traders powerful

In fact, most people have to look and see what jobs there are locally and have to apply for one of them because they need the money, and can’t travel far, so are in a very poor bargaining position. By contrast, capital providers and leaders and entrepreneurs and traders have always been in an excellent position to exploit this. In a town with high unemployment, or low wages, or indeed, throughout a poor country, potential employees will settle for the local wage rate for that kind of work, but that may differ hugely from the rate for similar work elsewhere.

The laws of supply and demand apply, but the locations of supply and demand need not be the same, and where they aren’t, traders are the ones who benefit, not those doing the work. Traders have existed and prospered for millennia and have often become very wealthy by exploiting the difference in labour costs and produce prices around the world. 

Manufacturers can play the same geography game

Now with increasing globalisation, those with good logistics available to them can use these differences in manufacturing too, using cheap labour in one place to produce goods that can be sold for high prices in other places. Is it only the margins and the balance of bargaining power that determines whether this exploitation is fair or not, or is it also the availability of access to markets? What is a fair margin? How much of the profit should we allow traders or manufacturers to keep? If not enough, and markets are not free and lubricated enough, potential producers may stay idle and be even poorer because they can’t sell their efforts. If too much, someone else is getting rich at their expense. 

Making access to free global markets easier and better will help

We need to create a system where people on both sides are empowered to ensure a fair deal. At the moment, it is tilted very heavily in favour of the trader, selling the produce of cheap labour in expensive markets. When someone has no choice but to take what’s going, they are weak and vulnerable. If they can sell into a bigger market, they are stronger.

If everyone everywhere can see your produce and can get it delivered, then prices will tend to become fairer. There is still need for distributors, and they will still need paid, but they are just suppliers of a service in a competitive market too, and with free choice of customer and supplier at every stage, all parties can negotiate to get a deal they are all content with, where no-one is at an a priori disadvantage. It may still work out cheaper to buy from a great distance, but at least each party has agreed acceptable terms on a relatively level playing field. The web has already gone some way to improving market visibility but it is still difficult for many people to access the web with reasonable speed and security, and many more don’t understand how to do things like making websites, especially ones that have commerce functions. 

If we can make better free access to markets, then unfair exploitation should become less of a problem, because it will be easier for people to sell their effort direct to an end customer, but it will have to become a lot easier to display your goods on the web for all to see without undue risk. Making the web easier to use, and automating as much as possible of the security and administration should help a lot. This is happening quite quickly, but it needs time.

Import levies can reduce the incentive to exploit low wage workers

Levies can be added to imported goods so that someone can’t use cheap labour in one area to compete with the equivalent product made in the other. This is well tried and operates frequently where manufacturers pressure their governments to protect them from overseas competition that they see as unfair. However, it is usually aimed at protecting the richer employees from cheap competition rather than trying to increase wages for those being exploited in low wage economies. So it is far from ideal. Better a tool that allows pressure to increase the proportion of proceeds that go to the workers.

Peer pressure via transparency of margins

Another is to provide transparency in price attribution. If customers can see how much of the purchase price is going to each of the agents involved in its production and distribution chain, then pressure increases to pay a decent wage to the workers who actually make it, and less to those who merely sell it. Just like greed and caring, shame is another powerful emotion in the suite of human nature, and people will generally be more honest and fair if they know others can see what they are doing.

However, I do not expect this would work very well in practice, since most customers don’t care enough to get ethically involved in every purchase, and the further away and more socially distant the workers are, the less customers care. And if the person needing shamed is thousands of miles away, the peer pressure is non-existent. Yet again, location is important.

Transparency to the workforce

In our economy, and across the developed world, typically about half of the profits of someone’s ‘job’ go to the person doing it and the other half goes to the owners of the company employing them.  Transparency helps customers decide on supplier, but also helps employees to decide whether to work for a particular employer. They should of course be made fully aware of how they will be rewarded but also how much of their efforts will reward others. In a good company, the chiefs may be able to generate greater rewards for both staff and shareholders (and themselves), but as long as the details are all available, a free and informed choice can be made.

The community can generate its own businesses

In a well automated web environment, some company types would no longer be needed. Companies are often top down designs, with departments and employee structures that are populated by staff. The reverse is increasingly feasible, with groups of freelancers and small businesses using the web to find each other, and working loosely together as virtual companies to address the same markets the traditional company once did. But instead of giving half of the profits to a company owner, they reap the full rewards and share it between them. The administrative functions once done by the company are largely off-the-shelf and cheap. The few essential professional functions that the company provided can also be found as independents in the same marketplace. Virtual companies are the 21st century co-operative. The employees own the company and keep all the profits. Not surprisingly, many people have already left big companies to set up on their own as freelancers and small businesses.

Unfortunately, this model can’t work everywhere. Sometimes, a large factory is needed, or large capital investment. This favours the rich and powerful, and of course large companies, but there is again a new model that will start to come into play.

Investors don’t have to be wealthy individuals or big companies. They can also be communities. In a period where banks have become extremely unpopular, community banking will become very appealing once it is demonstrated to work. Building societies will make a comeback, but even they are more organised than is strictly necessary in a mature web age.  Linking people in a community with some savings to others who need to borrow it to make a business will become easier as social and business networking develops the trust based communities needed to make this feasible. Trust is essential, but it is often based on social knowledge, and recommendations can be shared. Abusers could be filtered out, and in any case, their potential existence creates a sub market for risk assessors and insurance specialists, who may have left companies to go freelance too. Communities may provide their own finance for companies that provide goods and services for the local community. This is a natural development of the routine output of today’s social entrepreneurs. Community based company creation, nurturing, staffing and running is a very viable local model that could work very well for many areas of manufacturing, services, food production and community work. Some of this is already embryonic on the net today, but it could grow nicely as the web continues to mature.

Whether this could grow to the size needed to make a car factory or a chip fabrication plant or a major pharmaceutical R&D lab is doubtful, but even these models are being challenged – future cars may not need the same sorts of production, a lot of biotech is suited to garden sheds, and local 3D printing can address a lot of production needs, even some electronic ones. So the number of industries completely immune to this trend is probably quite small. Most will be affected a bit or greatly. Companies that are deeply woven into communities may dominate the future commercial landscape. And as that happens, both the willingness and the capability to exploit others reduces.

If we move towards this kind of system, companies will be more responsive to our needs, while providing a stronger base on which to build other enterprises. Integrated into community banking, it is hard to see why we would need today’s banks in such a world. We could dispense with a huge drain on our finances. Banks contribute no extra to the overall economy (taken globally) and syphon off considerable fees. Without them, people could keep more of what they earn and growth would accelerate.

Exploitation via celebrity?

With the football thankfully over now, many would agree that perhaps we don’t get very good value for money from our footballers. They get astronomically large pay for poor performance. Individually, few of them seem to be intellectual giants, but the industry as a whole has grown enormously. By creating a monopoly of well supported clubs, they have established a position where they can extract huge fees for tickets, merchandising and TV coverage. The ordinary person has to pay heavily to watch a match, while the few people putting on the show get enormous rewards. Is this exploitation?

It is certainly shrewd business dealing by football, but mainly, the TV companies seem to be stupid. If they declined to pay huge fees to air the matches, the most likely outcome is that fees would tumble to a very nominal level quickly, after which the football associations would have to start paying the TV channels for air time to sell the game coverage direct to fans, or else distribute coverage via the net. They would have no choice. TV companies could easily end up being paid to show matches. And when viewers each have to pay explicitly to watch rather than have the fees hidden in a TV license or satellite subscription, the takings would drop and the wages given to footballers would inevitably follow. But not far enough.

However, they would still be paid very well, probably still grossly overpaid. We may still moan at them, but they are simply benefiting from scale of market, not exploiting. If you can sell unique entertainment or indeed any other valuable service, to a large number of people, you can generate a lot of income. If you don’t need many staff, they can be paid very well. Individual celebrities have emerged from every area of entertainment who get huge incomes simply because they can generate small amounts of cash from very large numbers of people. If many individuals vale the product highly, as in top level boxing for example, stars can be massively rewarded.

It is hard to label this as exploitation though. It is simply taking advantage of scale. If I can sell something at a sensible price and make a decent income from a small number of customers, someone better who can sell an even better product at the same price to a much larger number of people will be paid far much more. In this case, the customer gets a better product for the same outlay, so is hardly being exploited, but the superior provider will get rich. If we forced them to sell better products cheaper than someone else’s inferior one, simply to reduce their income, we would destroy the incentive to be good. No-one benefits from that.

Entertainment isn’t unique here. The same goes for writing a good game or a piece or app, or inventing Facebook. In fact, the basis of the information economy, which includes entertainment, is very different from the industrial one. Information products can be reproduced, essentially without cost without losing their value. There are lots of products that can be sold to lots of people for low prices, that do no harm to anyone, add quality to lives and still make providers very wealthy. Let’s hope we can find some more.

So even without exploitation, we will still have the super-rich. Fine.

There will always be relatively poor and super rich people. But I think that is OK. What we should try to ensure is that people don’t get rich by abusing or exploiting others. If they can still get rich, great! Then at least it is fair, and they should enjoy their wealth, within the law, provided that the law prevents them from using it to abuse or exploit others. Let’s stop worrying about punishing wealth per se, and focus instead on how it has been obtained, and on eliminating abuses.

But there is a natural limit to how much you can use

As the global population climbs, and people get wealthier everywhere, the number of super rich will grow, even if we eliminate unfairness and exploitation totally. But if we take huge amounts of money out of the system and put it in someone’s bank account, they will not be able to dispose of it all. In most cases, without great determination and extravagance indeed, the actual practical loading that an individual can make on the system is quite limited. They can only eat so much, occupy so much land, use up so much natural resource, have so many lovers. The rest of the world’s resources, of whatever kind, are still available to everyone else.

So their reward is naturally capped, they simply don’t have the time or energy to use up any more. Any money they put in investments or cash is just a figure on a spreadsheet, and a license to use the power it comes with. But while power is important in other ways, (and I might write on that some time),  it is not directly an economic drain – it doesn’t affect how much is left for the rest of us. Above a certain amount that varies with individual imagination, taste and personality, extra wealth doesn’t give anything except power. It effectively disappears, and supply and demand and prices balance for the rest accordingly.

Power takes us full circle

When we have spent all we can, and just get extra power from the extra income, it is time to start asking other kinds of questions. Some would challenge the right of the super rich to use their wealth to do things that others might think should be decided by the whole population.  Should they be able to tackle Aids in Africa, run their own space programs, or build influential media empires? Well, we can make laws to prevent abuses and exploitation. Given that, without destroying the principle of ‘To each according to their effort’, I don’t yet see how or even why we should try to stop them.

Was the Roman villa we visited built by well rewarded workers?Probably not. Could something equivalent be built by a rich person who has done no harm to anyone, or even brought universal good. Yes. It isn’t what or how much that matter, but how.

Exploration over. In future, I will have to read up on the owners of stately homes before I get angry at them.

What is a climate scientist? Indeed, are there any?

We hear the term frequently, but what qualifies some people and not others to be classed as climate scientists?  You might think it is just someone who studies things that affect the climate. But very many people do that, not just those who call themselves climate scientists. The term actually seems to refer solely to a group who have commandeered the term for themselves and share a particular viewpoint, with partly overlapping skills in a subset of the relevant disciplines. In recent times,it seems that to be an official ‘climate scientist’ you must believe that the main thing that counts is human interference and in particular, CO2. All other factors must be processed from this particular bias.

To me, the climate looks like it is affected by a great many influences. Climate models produced by ‘climate scientists’ have been extremely poor at predicting changes so far, and one reason for this is that they exclude many of the relevant factors.

I am struggling to think of any scientific discipline that doesn’t have something to say about some influence on climate. Many branches of chemistry and physics are important in understanding how the atmosphere works, and the oceans, and glaciers, and soil. We have some understanding of some natural cycles, but far from all, and far from complete. We need biologists and chemists and physicists to tell us about soil, and forests, and ocean life, and how species and entire ecosystems react and adapt to changing circumstances, with migrations or adaptation or evolution for example. We need to understand how draining bogs or chopping trees to make room for biofuels affects the climate. How using bio-waste for fuel instead of ploughing it into the ground affects soil structure, plant growth, and carbon interchange. We need to understand how cosmic rays interact with the earth’s magnetic field, how this is affected by solar activity, how sunspots form, and even gravitational interactions with the planets that affect solar cycles. We need to understand glacial melting, how glaciers move differently as temperature changes, how black carbon from diesel engines affects their heat absorption, how clouds form, how they act to warm or cool the earth according to circumstances. We need to understand ocean cycles much better, as well as gas and heat interchange between layers, how this is affected by weather and so on. I could go on, endlessly. We need to understand the many different ways we could make energy in the future, the many options for capture and containment of emissions or pollutants, or positive effects some might have on plant growth and animal food chains.

But it doesn’t stop with science, not be a long way. We also need people skilled in anthropology and demography and sociology and human psychology, who understand how people react when faced with choices of lifestyle when presented in many different ways with different spins, or faced with intimidation or eviction because of environmental policies.  And how groups or tribes or countries will interact and distribute burdens and costs and rewards, or fight, or flee. And religious leaders who understand well the impacts of religious pressures on people’s attitudes and behaviours, even if they don’t subscribe to any organised religion. Clearly environmental behaviour has a strong religious motivation for many people, even if that is just as a crude religion substitute.

We even need people who understand animal psychology, how small mammals react to wind turbine flicker for example, and how this affects the food chain, ecosystem balance and eventual interchange with the atmosphere and the rest of the environment.

And politicians, they understand how to influence people, and marketers, and estate agents. They can help predict behaviours and adaptation and how entire countries may or will interact according to changes in climate, real or imagined.

And we need economists to look at the many alternatives and compare costs and benefits, preferably without ideological and political bias. We need to compare strategies for adaptation and mitigation and avoidance. Honestly and objectively. And we need ethicists to help evaluate the same from human perspectives.

And we need loads of mathematicians, especially statisticians. Climate science is very complicated, and a lot of measurements and trend analyses need in-depth statistical skills, apparently lacking in official climate science, as evidenced by the infamous hockey stick graph. But we also need some to model things like traffic flows so we can predict emissions from different policies.

And we need lots of engineers too, to assess likely costs and timescales for development of alternatives for energy, transport, entertainment and business IT. We need a lot of engineers!

And don’t forget architects, who influence energy balance via choices of shapes, materials and colour schemes as well as how buildings maintain a pleasant environment for the inhabitants.

Ah yes, and futurists. Many futurists are systems thinkers with an understanding of how things link together and how they may develop. You need a few of them too.

I have probably forgotten lots of others. The point is that there are very many factors that need to be included. No-one, and I mean no-one, can possibly have a good grasp of all of them. You can know a bit about a lot of things or a lot about a few things, but you can’t know a lot about everything. I would say that there are no people at all who know about all the things that affect climate in any depth, and therefore no group deserves a monopoly on that title.

So, if you only look in any depth at a few interaction in the oceans and atmosphere and ignore many of the rest of the factors affecting climate, as ‘climate scientists’ seem to, it is hard to see a good reason to continue to hold the title any more than anyone with another label like astrophysicist, or politician. ‘Climate scientists’ as we currently classify them, know a bit about some things that affect climate. So do many other groups. Having skills in a few of the relevant areas doesn’t give any right to dismiss others with skills in a different few. And if they consistently get it wrong, as they do, then there is even less reason to trust their particular viewpoints. And that’s before we even start considering whether they are even honest about the stuff they do talk about. And as Donna Lamframboise has pointed out recently, they don’t deserve to be trusted.

http://thegwpf.org/best-of-blogs/5864-donna-lamframboise-no-reasonable-person-should-trust-climate-scientists.html

Blocking Pirate Bay makes little sense

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9236667/Pirate-Bay-must-be-blocked-High-Court-tells-ISPs.html Justice Arnold ruled that ISPs must block their customers from accessing Pirate Bay. Regardless of the morality or legality of Pirate Bay, forcing ISPs to block access to it will cause them inconvenience and costs, but won’t fix the core problem of copyright materials being exchanged without permission from the owners.

I have never looked at the Pirate Bay site, but I am aware of what it offers. It doesn’t host material, but allows its users to download from each other. By blocking access to the Bay, the judge blocks another one of billions of ways to exchange data. Many others exist and it is very easy to set up new ones, so trying to deal with them one by one seems rather pointless. Pirate Bay’s users will simply use alternatives. If they were to block all current file sharing sites, others would spring up to replace them, and if need be, with technological variations that set them outside of any new legislation. At best judges could play a poor catch-up game in an eternal war between global creativity and the law. Because that is what this is.

Pirate Bay can only be blocked because it is possible to identify it and put it in court. It is possible to write software that doesn’t need a central site, or indeed any legally identifiable substance. It could for example be open-source software written and maintained by evolving adaptive AI, hidden behind anonymity, distributed algorithms and encryption walls, roaming freely among web servers and PCs, never stopping anywhere. It could be untraceable. It could use combinations of mobile or fixed phone nets, the internet, direct gadget-gadget comms and even use codes on other platforms such as newspapers. Such a system would be dangerous to build from a number of perspectives, but may be forced by actions to close alternatives. If people feel angered by arrogance and greed, they may be pushed down this development road. The only way to fully stop such a system would be to stop communication.

The simple fact is that technology that we depend on for most aspects of our lives also makes it possible to swap files, and to do so secretly as needed. We could switch it off, but our economy and society would collapse. To pretend otherwise is folly. Companies that feel abused should recognise that the world has moved on and they need to adapt their businesses to survive in the world today, not ask everyone to move back to the world of yesterday so that they can cope. Because we can’t and shouldn’t even waste time trying to. My copyright material gets stolen frequently. So what? I just write more. That model works fine for me. It ain’t broke, and trying to fix it without understanding how stuff works won’t protect anyone and will only make it worse for all of us.

More uses for 3d printing

3D printers are growing in popularity, with a wide range in price from domestic models to high-end industrial printers. The field is already over-hyped, but there is still room for even more, so here we go.

Restoration

3D printing is a good solution for production of items in one-off or small run quantity, so restoration is one field that will particularly benefit. If a component of a machine is damaged or missing, it can be replaced, if a piece has been broken off an ornament, a 3D scan of the remaining piece could be compared with how it should be and 3D patches designed and printed to restore the full object.

Creativity & Crafts

Creativity too will benefit. Especially with assistance from clever software, many people will find that what they thought was their small streak of creativity is actually not that small at all, and will be encouraged to create. The amateur art world can be expected to expand greatly, both in virtual art and physical sculpture. We will see a new renaissance, especially in sculpture and crafts, but also in imaginative hybrid virtual-physical arts. Physical objects may be printed or remain virtual, displayed in augmented reality perhaps. Some of these will be scalable, with tiny versions made on home 3D printers. People may use these test prints to refine their works, and possibly then have larger ones produced on more expensive printers owned by clubs or businesses. They could print it using the 3D printing firm down the road, or just upload the design to a web-based producer for printing and home delivery later in the week.

Fashion will benefit from 3D printing too, with accessories designed or downloaded and printed on demand. A customer may not want to design their own accessories fully, but may start with a choice of template of some sort that they customise to taste, so that their accessories are still personalised but don’t need to much involvement of time and effort.

Could printed miniatures become as important as photos?

People take a lot of photos and videos, and they are a key tool in social networking as well as capturing memories. If 3D scans or photos are taken, and miniature physical models printed, they might have a greater social and personal value even than photos.

Micro-robotics and espionage

3D printing is capable of making lots of intricate parts that would be hard to manufacture by any other means, so should be appropriate for some of the parts useful in making small robots, such as tiny insects that can fly into properties undetected.

Internal printing

Conventional 3D printers, if there can be such a thing so early in their development, use line of sight to make objects by building them in thin layers. Although this allows elaborate structures to be made, it doesn’t allow everything, and there are some structures or objects that would be more easily made if it were possible to print internally. Although lasers would be of little use in opaque objects, x-rays might work fine in some circumstances. This would allow retro-fitting too.

Cancer treatment

If x-ray or printing can be made to work, then it may be possible to build heating circuits inside cancers, and then inductive power supplies could burn away the tumours. Alternatively, smart circuits could be implanted to activate encapsulated drugs when they arrive at the scene.

This would require a one-off exposure to x-rays, but not necessarily similarly damaging levels to those used in radiotherapy.

Direct brain-machine links

Looking further ahead, internal printing of circuits or electronic components inside the brain will be a superb means to do interfacing between man and machine. X-rays can in principle be focused to 1nm, easily fine enough resolution to make contacts to specific brain regions. Obviously x-rays are not something that people would want to be exposed to frequently, but many people would volunteer  (e.g. I would) to have some circuits implanted at least for R&D purposes, since greater insights into how the brain does stuff will accelerate greatly the development of biomimetic AI. But if those circuits were able to link parts of the brain to the web for fast thought based access to search, processing, or sensory enhancement, I’d be fighting millions of transhumanists to get to the front of the long queue.