Is secular substitution of religion a threat to western civilisation?

In 1997 I delivered a presentation to the World Futures Society conference titled: The future of sex, politics and religion. In it, I used a few slides outlining secular substitutes for religion that constitute what I called ’21st century piety’. I’ve repeated my analysis many times since and still hold firmly by it, virtually unchanged since then. A lot of evidence since has backed it up, and lots of other people now agree.

My theory was that as people move away from traditional religion, the powerful inner drive remains to feel ‘holy’, that you are a good person, doing the right thing, on some moral high ground. It is a powerful force built into human nature, similar to the desire to feel social approval and status. When it is no longer satisfied by holding to religious rules, it may crystallise around other behaviours, that can mostly be summarised by ‘isms’. Vegetarianism and pacifism were the oldest ones to be conspicuous, often accompanied by New Ageism, followed soon by anti-capitalism, then environmentalism, now evolved into the even more religious warmism. Some behaviours don’t end in ism, but are just as obviously religion substitutes, such as subscribing strongly to political correctness or being an animal rights activist. Even hard-line atheism can be a religion substitute. It pushes exactly the same behavioural buttons.

I fully support protecting the environment, looking after animals, defending the poor, the powerless, the oppressed. I don’t mind vegetarians unless they start getting sanctimonious about it. I am not for a second suggesting there is anything bad about these. It is only when they become a religion substitute that they become problematic, but unfortunately that happens far too often. When something is internalised like a religious faith, it becomes almost immune to outside challenge, a faith unaffected by exposure to hard reality. But like religious faith, it remains a powerful driver of behaviour, and if the person involved is in power, potentially a powerful driver of policy. It can drive similar oppression of those with other world views, in much the same way as the Spanish Inquisition, but with a somewhat updated means of punishing the heretics. In short, the religion substitutes show many of the same problems we used to associate with the extremes of religion.

That’s the problem. The western world has managed pretty well over centuries to eventually separate religion from front line politics, so that politicians might pay lip service to some god or other to get elected, but would successfully put their religion aside once elected and the western state has been effectively secular for many years.  Even though they have gained acceptance in much of the wider population, because these religion substitutes are newer, they are not yet actively filtered from the official decision processes, and in many cases have even gained the power levels that religion once held at its peak. They feature much more heavily in government policies, but since they are faith based rather than reality based, the policies based on them are often illogical and can even be counter-productive, achieving the opposite of what they intend. Wishful thinking does not unfortunately rank highly among the natural forces understood by physicists, chemists or biologists. It doesn’t even rank highly as a social force.  Random policies seemingly pulled out of thin air don’t necessarily work just because they have been sprinkled with words such as equality, fairness and sustainability. Nature also requires that they meet other criteria – they have to follow basic laws of nature. They also have to be compatible with human social, economic, cultural and political forces. But having those sprinkles added is all that is needed to see them pass into legislation. 

And that is what makes religion substitutes a threat to western civilisation. Passing nonsensical legislation just because it sounds nice is a fast way to cripple the economy, damage the environment, wreck education or degrade social cohesion, as we have already frequently seen. I don’t need to pick a particular country, this is almost universally true  across the Western world. Policy making everywhere often seems to be little more than stringing together a few platitudes about ensuring fairness, equality, sustainability, with no actual depth or substance or systems analysis that would show reliable mechanisms by which they actually would happen, while ignoring unfashionable or unpleasant known forces or facts of nature that might prevent them from happening. Turning a blind eye to reality, while laying the wishful thinking on thickly and adding loads of nice sounding marketing words to make the policy politically accepted, using the unspoken but obvious threat of the Inquisition to ensure little resistance. That seems to be the norm now. 

If it were global then the whole world would decline, but it isn’t. Some areas are even worse crippled by the extremes of religion itself. Others seem more logical. Many areas face joint problems of corruption and poverty. With different problems and different approaches to solving them, we will all fare differently.

But we know from history that empires don’t last for ever. The decline of the West is well under way, with secular religion substitution at the helm.  When reality takes a back seat to faith, there can be no other outcome. And it is just faith, in different clothes, and it won’t work any better than religion did.

Is politics now circular?

The traditional political model is a line with the far left at one end and the far right at the other. Parties occupy a range and may share some policies with parties that are usually positioned elsewhere and individuals may also support a range of policies from across the spectrum. Nevertheless, the model works fairly well to describe general baskets of attitudes so is a useful tool to save time when discussing baskets of policies and attitudes.

I think in recent years the situation has evolved somewhat, and I propose this circular model as more valid now in the UK, I haven’t considered the USA:

 

I am tempted to show another scale, with peace loving acceptance and tolerance towards the top and irate, intolerant, demonstrative attention seeking towards the bottom. Most of the chart as it is should be uncontroversial, showing a typical spread from old labour through to UKIP, though some may object to my filing the Lib Dems where I have. There has been migration and evolution of the parties certainly, but at least some of the old distinctions still generally apply. However, watching extremists from the hard left and right, it is often difficult to distinguish between them and that’s why I think it is appropriate to move to a circular model. Whereas the middle ground and both moderate wings share a reasonably sophisticated multidimensional view of the world and come to different conclusions mainly via application of different value sets, the extremes don’t conform to this. They extremes share a common overly simplistic and hardened attitude that often refuses engagement and discussion but loudly demands that everyone listens. A few cherry-picked facts is all they need to draw extreme conclusions. Differences in their reasoning are fairly minor compared to their overall behavioural type, so I draw them in close proximity.

I am fully open to debate on the merits and drawbacks of this model. If it is rubbish, I will happily change it. But please don’t just say it is rubbish, please explain why, and offer an improvement.

 

We’re all getting nicer are we? Then tell that to those poor zombies in The Typing of the Dead. (Guest post by Chris Moseley)

This is a guest post from Chris Moseley, Owner and Managing Director of Infinite Space PR

There was a time when British bobbies rode bicycles, dressed in full fig policeman’s uniform, complete with Coxcomb helmet and brightly polished buttons on their tunics. This antediluvian fellow – let’s call him PC Pinkleton – would nod to Mrs Peartree, a spinster of this parish out for a walk in her sensible brown brogues, twin set and real pearls, and then wave to the local vicar as he pruned his roses. The worst ‘crime’ that PC Pinkleton might encounter would be a few young lads scrumping for apples in Squire Trelawney’s orchard. A clip around the ear, and a stern lecture on the moral perils of ‘thieving’ and PC Pinkleton’s duty and day were done. Then along came clashes between Mods and Rockers, pitched battles with skinheads, fights with bikers, football hooligans and flying pickets. Throw in a few rioting miners and poll tax protestors and for about a 30 year period life for the English bobby became pretty tough. Just at the point when PC Pinkleton was morphing from Dixon of Dock Green into Robocop, complete with padded riot gear, guns, mace and a US military style helmet, it appears that the uncivil civilian has become tamed.

This is the news, announced this week, that rates of murder and violent crime have fallen more rapidly in the UK in the past decade than many other countries in Western Europe. The UK Peace Index, from the Institute for Economics and Peace, found that UK homicides per 100,000 people had fallen from 1.99 in 2003, to one in 2012. The UK was more peaceful overall, it said, with the reasons for it many and varied. The index found Broadland, Norfolk, to be the most peaceful local council area but Lewisham, London, to be the least. The research by the international non-profit research organisation comes as a separate study by Cardiff University suggests the number of people treated in hospital in England and Wales after violent incidents fell by 14% in 2012. Some 267,291 people required care – 40,706 fewer than in 2011 – according to a sample of 54 hospital units, its report said. BBC home editor Mark Easton called it the “riddle of peacefulness” and said the fall in violence was “perhaps a symptom of a new morality”.

Well, I am just a bit sceptical about all this and more than a little annoyed that the BBC deliberately skirted a really interesting debate and chose instead to pursue an extremely anodyne and rather risible line of discussion. In essence, Mark Easton’s BBC TV and radio pieces concluded with the argument that perhaps as a society we had come to abhor violence. A lovely thought, and while the prospect of peace breaking out all over the place is an attractive one, and I don’t doubt the veracity of the findings of The UK Peace Index, I am more than little dubious about the notion that human nature has altered so markedly in such a short time. Perhaps one of the reasons that the UK in 2013 is more like A Brave New World than the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange is that nearly all of today’s violence is rendered sublimated and vicarious thanks to computer games, combined with the soporific influence of cheap, supermarket-procured booze. Computer games, particularly the violent ones are, after all, a form of Aldous Huxley’s Soma (“All of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects”), although rather than allowing one to drift into a peaceful state, they act as a cathartic vent. One can enter a virtual world of almost any description, reach for a virtual sword, gun or mace, and proceed to blitz the hell out the “enemy”, which is arguably a form of proxy violence that could instead by directed at one’s boss, a driver in a road rage encounter, the bank manager, even an annoying neighbour. One of the most popular games in the UK today, The Typing of the Dead, confronts the would-be gaming hero with hoards of zombies. Using a keyboard words flash up on the screen which the player needs to type as quickly as possible, thereby killing as many zombies as possible. What a relief to wipe out all those irritating pillocks who inevitably emerge from everyday life without once having to get one’s hands dirty (and what a great lesson in typing too).

Isn’t it possible that we’re just as violent and angry as we used to be? We just express our rage and violence, well, virtually.

http://www.infinitespacepr.com/

Culture tax and sustainable capitalism

I have written several times now about changing capitalism and democracy to make them suited to the 21st century. Regardless of party politics, most people want a future where nobody is too poor to live a dignified and comfortable life. To ensuring that that is possible, we need to tweak a few things.

I suggested a long time ago that there could be a basic income for all, without any means testing on it, so that everyone has an income at a level they can live on. No means testing means little admin. Then wages go on top, so that everyone is encouraged to work, and then all income from all sources is totalled and taxed appropriately. It is a nice idea. I wasn’t the first to recommend it and many others are saying much the same. The idea is old, but the figures are rarely discussed. It is harder than it sounds and being a nice idea doesn’t ensure  economic feasibility.

The difference between figures between parties would be relatively minor so let’s ignore party politics. In today’s money, it would be great if everyone could have, say, £30k a year as a state benefit, then earn whatever they can on top. 30k doesn’t make you rich, but you can live OK on it so nobody would be poor in any proper sense of the word. With everyone economically provided for and able to lead comfortable and dignified lives, it would be a utopia compared to today. Sadly, it doesn’t add up yet. 65,000,000 x 30,000 = 1,950Bn . The UK economy isn’t that big. The state only gets to control part of GDP and out of that reduced budget it also has its other costs of providing health, education, defence etc, so the amount that could be dished out to everyone on this basis is therefore a lot smaller than 30k. Even if the state takes 75% of GDP and spends most of it on the base allowance, 10k per person would be pushing it. So a family could afford a modest lifestyle, but single people would really struggle. Some people would need additional help, and that reduces the pool left to pay the basic allowance still further. Also, if the state takes 75% of GDP, only 25% is left for everything else, so salaries would be flat, reducing the incentive to work, while investment and entrepreneurial activity are starved of both resources and incentive.

Simple maths thus forces us to make compromises. Sharing resources reduces costs considerably. In a first revision, families might be given less for kids than for the adults, but what about groups of young adults sharing a big house? They may be adults but they also benefit from the same economy of shared resources. So maybe there should be a household limit, or a bedroom tax, or forms and means testing, and it mustn’t incentivise people living separately or house supply suffers. Anyway, it is already getting complicated and our original nice idea is in the bin. That’s why it is such a mess at the moment. There just isn’t enough money to make everyone comfortable without doing lots of allowances and testing and admin. We all want utopia, but we can’t afford it. Even the modest 30k-per-person utopia costs at least 3 times more than we can afford.

However, if we can get back to an average 2.5% growth per year in real terms, and surely we can, it would only take 45 years to get there. That isn’t such a long time. We have hope that if we can get some better government than we have had of late, and are prepared to live with a little economic tweaking, we could achieve good quality of life for all in the second half of the century.

So I really like the idea of a simple welfare system, providing a generous base level allowance to everyone, topped up by rewards of effort, but we will have to wait before we can afford to put that base level at anything like comfortable standards.

Meanwhile, we need to tweak some other things to have any chance of getting there. I’ve commented often that pure capitalism would eventually lead to a machine-based economy, with the machine owners having more and more of the cash, and everyone else getting poorer, so the system will fail. Communism fails too.

On the other hand, capitalism works fine when rewards are shared more equally, it fails when wealth concentration is too high or when incentive is too low. Preserving the incentive to work and create is a mainly matter of setting tax levels well. Making sure that wealth doesn’t get concentrated too much needs a new kind of tax.

The solution I suggest is a culture tax. Culture in the widest meaning.

When someone creates and builds a company, they don’t do so from a state of nothing. They currently take for granted all the accumulated knowledge and culture, trained workforce, access to infrastructure, machines, governance, administrative systems, markets, distribution systems and so on. They add just another tiny brick to what is already a huge and highly elaborate structure. They may invest heavily in their time and money but actually when  considered overall as part of the system their company inhabits, they only pay for a fraction of the things their company will use.

That accumulated knowledge, culture and infrastructure belongs to everyone, not just those who choose to use it. Businesses might consider that this is what they pay taxes for already, but that isn’t explicit in the current system.

The big businesses that are currently avoiding paying UK taxes by paying overseas companies for intellectual property rights could be seen as trailblazing this approach. If they can understand and even justify the idea of paying another part of their company for IP or a franchise, why not pay the host country for IP for access to their entire culture?

This kind of tax would provide the means needed to avoid too much concentration of wealth. A future  businessman might choose to use only software and machines instead of a human workforce to save costs, but levying taxes on use of  the cultural base that makes that possible allows a direct link between use of advanced technology and taxation. Sure, he might add a little extra insight or new knowledge, but would still have to pay the rest of society for access to its share of the cultural base, inherited from the previous generations, on which his company is based. The more he automates, the more sophisticated his use of the system, the more he cuts a human workforce out of his empire, the higher his taxation.

Linking to technology use makes sense. Future AI and robots could do a lot of work currently done by humans. A very small number of people could own almost all of the productive economy. But they would be getting far more than their share of the cultural base, which must belong equally to everyone. In a village where one farmer owns all the sheep, other villagers would be right to ask for rent for their share of the commons if he wants to graze them there.

I feel confident that this extra tax would solve many of the problems associated with automation. We all equally own the country, its culture, laws, language, human knowledge (apart from current patents, trademarks etc. of course), its public infrastructure, not just businessmen. Everyone surely should have the right to be paid if someone else uses part of their share.

The extra culture tax would not magically make the economy bigger. It would just ensure that it is more equally shared out. It is a useful tool to be used by future governments to make it possible to keep capitalism sustainable, preventing its collapse, preserving incentive while fairly distributing reward. Without such a tax, capitalism simply may not survive.

Has the sisterhood forgotten older women?

We just went through International Women’s Day and I was one of many people asked to write an essay on the above topic for a compendium of essays for the International Longevity Centre, highlighting problems faced by older women and asking if they have been forgotten by feminism.

The pdf of the whole compendium is downloadable from

http://www.ilcuk.org.uk/index.php/publications/publication_details/has_the_sisterhood_forgotten_older_women

At the moment of writing, it is available via Internet Explorer but not Chrome. I haven’t tested other browsers.

UK crime and policing

The news that the level of reported crime in the UK has fallen over the last decade or two is the subject of much debate.  Is it because crime has fallen, or because less is being reported? If crime has actually fallen, is that because the police are doing a better job or some other reason? Will crime fall or rise in the future?

My view is that our police are grossly overpaid (high salaries, huge pensions), often corrupt (by admission of chief inspectors), politically biased (plebgate, London riots) and self serving, lazy, inefficient, and generally a waste of money, and I don’t for a minute believe they deserve any credit for falling crime.

I think the crime figures are the sum of many components, none of which show the police in a good light. Let’s unpick that.

Let’s start from the generous standpoint that recorded crime may be falling – generous because even that assumes that they haven’t put too much political spin on the figures. I’d personally expect the police to spin it, but let’s ignore that for now.

Recorded crime isn’t a simple count of crimes committed, nor even those that people tell the police about.

Some crimes don’t even get as far as being reported of course. If confidence in the police is low, as it is, then people may think there is little point in wasting their time (and money, since you usually have to pay for the call now) in doing so. Reporting a crime often means spending ages giving loads of details, knowing absolutely nothing will happen other than, at best, that the crime is recorded. It is common perception based on everyday experience that police will often say there isn’t much they can do about x,y or z, so there is very little incentive to report many crimes. In the case of significant theft or vandalism someone might need a crime number to claim on insurance, but otherwise, if there is no hope that the police will find the criminal and then bother to prosecute them, many people won’t bother. So it is a safe assumption that a lot of crimes don’t even get as far as being mentioned to a police officer. I have seen many that I haven’t bothered to report, for exactly those reasons. So have you.

Once a crime does get mentioned to the police, it still has to jump over some more hurdles to actually make it into the official books.  From personal experience, I know some cases fall at those hurdles too. As well as the person telling the police, the person has to persuade the police to do something about it and demand that it is recorded. Since police want to look good, they resist doing that and will make excuses for not recording it officially. The police may also try to persuade the crime reporter to let them mark a case as solved even when it hasn’t been. They may also just sideline a case and hope it is forgotten about. So, some reported offences don’t make it onto the books and some that do are inaccurately marked as solved.

This means that crime levels exceed recorded crime levels. No big surprise there. But if that has been the case for many years, as it has, and recorded crime levels have fallen, that would still indicate a fall in crime levels. But that still doesn’t make the police look good.

Technology improvement alone would be expected to give a very significant reduction in crime level. Someone is less likely to commit a car theft since it is harder to do so now. They are less likely to murder or rape someone if they know that it is almost impossible to avoid leaving DNA evidence all over the place. They are less likely to shoplift or mug someone if they are aware of zillions of surveillance cameras that will record the act. Improving technology has certainly reduced crime.

A further reduction in crime level is expected due to changes in insurance. If your insurance policies demand that you have a car immobiliser and a burglar alarm, and lock your doors and windows with high quality locks, as they probably do, then that will reduce both home and car crime.

Another reduction is actually due to lack of confidence in the police. If you believe for whatever reasons that the police won’t protect you and your property, you will probably take more care of it yourself. The police try hard to encourage such thinking because it saves them effort. So they tell people not to attract crime by using expensive phones or wearing expensive jewellery or dressing in short skirts. Few people have so little common sense that they need such advice from the police, and lack of confidence in police protection is hardly something they can brag about.

More controversially, still further reduction has been linked recently to the drop in lead exposure via petrol. This is hypothesised to have reduced violent tendencies a little. By similar argument, increasing feminisation of men due to endocrine disrupters in the environment may also have played a part.

So, if the police can’t claim credit for a drop in crime, what effect do they have?

The police have managed to establish a strong reputation for handing out repeat cautions to those repeat criminals they can be bothered to catch, and making excuses why the rest are just too hard to track down, yet cracking down hard on easy-to-spot first offenders on political correctness or minor traffic offences. In short, they have created something of an inverted prison, where generally law-abiding people live expecting harsh penalties for doing anything slightly naughty, so that they can show high clear-up stats, while hardened criminals can expect to be let off with a slight slap of the wrist. Meanwhile, recent confessions from police chiefs indicate astonishingly high levels of corruption in every force. It looks convincingly as if police are all too often on the wrong side of the law. One law for them and one for us is the consistent picture. Reality stands in stark contrast with the dedication shown in TV police dramas. A bit like the NHS then.

What of the future? Technology will continue to make it easier to look after your own stuff and prevent it being used by a thief. It will make it easier to spot and identify criminals and collect evidence. Insurance will make it more difficult to avoid using such technology. Lack of confidence in the police will continue to grow, so people will take even more on themselves to avoid crime. The police will become even more worthless, even more of a force of state oppression and political correctness and even more of a criminal’s friend.

Meanwhile, as technology makes physical crime harder, more criminals have moved online. Technology has kept up to some degree, with the online security companies taking the protector role, not the police. The police influence here is to demand every more surveillance, less privacy and more restriction on online activity, but no actual help at all. Again they seek to create oppression in place of protection.

Crime will continue to fall, but the police will deserve even less credit. If we didn’t already have the police, we might have to invent something,  but it would bear little resemblance to what we have now.

Future population v resources. Humans are not a plague.

Sir David Attenborough is once again in the news, arguing that humans are a plague on the earth. He has been an excellent presenter over the years, but he does himself no favours by making such claims. Doomsayers are invariably wrong. I’ve written a few times about this, but here’s a quick refresher to save you looking them up.

Let’s get rid of a silly straw man before we start – exponential growth continuing forever. Nobody sane think the Earth’s human population will carry on increasing exponentially forever. Obviously it will level off. Exponential growth all the way to infinity isn’t sustainable, but since the population will level off around 10 billion, we really don’t need to spend too much time worrying about the mathematics of infinite consumption. I would personally put the maximum capacity of the Earth at around 100 billion, but I don’t expect us ever to have more than 10 billion here, and nobody sensible does. Other planets will house some more, but they will have their own economics.

First, we aren’t running out of physical resources, just moving them around. Apart from a few spacecraft that have moves some stuff off planet, some excess radioactive decay induced in power stations and weapons, and helium and hydrogen escaping from the atmosphere, all of which is offset by meteorites and dust landing from space, all we have done is convert stuff to other forms. Almost all materials are more plentiful now than they were 40 years ago when Sir David’s predecessors warned of the world running out imminently. They were wrong, so is he. If we do start to run short, we can mine key elements from rubbish tips and use energy to convert back to any form we need. We can engineer substitutes  And we can gather them from space. Another way of looking at this issue is that we live on top of 6000km of resources and only have homes a few metres deep. When we fill them, which doesn’t take much, we dispose of one thing to make room for a new one. Recycling technology is getting better all the time, at the same time as material technology means we need less stuff to make something, and can do so with a wider range of input elements.

We are slowly depleting some organic resources. For example, fossil fuels, but there are several hundred years supply left, and we will not need any more than a tiny fraction of that before we move to other energy sources. Also, fish, many stocks are threatened around the world, so fishing needs some work in designing and implementing better practices, but that is not unachievable by any means. Forestry is being depleted in some areas and expanding in others. Some of the areas that are being wiped out are because environmentalists and other doomsayers have forced daft policies through that perversely encourage people to burn forests down to make the land available for biofuel plantations and carbon offset schemes.

We certainly are not short of space. If the inhabitable land in the world were inhabited at the same density as southern England, we could house 70-80 billion people. The UK sometimes feels full when we get stuck in traffic jams or queues for public services, but these are mainly a matter of design. Self driving vehicles can increase road capacity by a factor of 5, regional rail capacity by a factor of 200. Replacement of most public sector workers by machines, or better still, good system design, would eradicate most queues and improve most services.

Energy isn’t a problem in the long term in spite of what doomsayers claim. Shale gas is already reducing costs in the USA at the same time as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In Europe, where doomsayers and environmentalist have more power to influence policy, CO2 emissions are increasing while energy costs threaten many areas of the economy. Obama’s recent speech threatens to undermine the USA’s advantage but that’s another story. Nuclear energy currently depends on uranium  but thorium based power is under development and is very likely to succeed in due course, adding several hundred years of supply. Solar, fusion, geothermal and shale gas will add to this to provide abundant power for even a much great population, within a few decades, well ahead of the population curve. The only energy shortages we will see will be doomsayer-induced.

Future generations will face debts handed on to them without their consent, but will also inherit a physical and cultural infrastructure with built in positive feedback that ensure rapid technological development. Among its many benefits, future technology will greatly reduce the amount of material needed to accomplish a task. It will also expand the global economy to provide enough wealth to buy a decent standards of living for everyone. It will also clean up the environment  It will also produce far more food from less land area, allowing land to be returned to nature. Food production per hectare has doubled in the last 30 years. The technology promises further gains  into the foreseeable future.

The world Attenborough is scared of will actually be a greener and more pleasant land, with nature in a better state than today, with a larger world population that is richer and better fed, almost certainly no more than 10 billion. Providing that is, that we can stop doomsayers forcing their policies through – the only thing that would really wreck the environment. A doomsayer-free human population is not a plague but a benefit to the Earth and nature. The doomsayers themselves and their daft policies are the greatest proven threat. If Sir David really cares about nature, he should focus on letting us be inspired by nature as he does so brilliantly, and let technologists get on with making sure it can flourish in the future

 

 

When will AI marriage become legal?

Gay marriage is so yesterday. OK, it isn’t quite yet, but everything has been said a million times and I don’t intend to repeat it. A related but much more interesting debate is already gathering volume globally. When will you be able to marry your robot or AI?

The traditional Oxford English definition of marriage:

The formal union of a man and a woman, typically recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife. 

But, as is being asked by some, who says they have to be a man and a woman? Why can’t they be any sex? I don’t want to get into the arguments, because people on both sides argue passionately, often flying in the face of logic, but here is a gender neutral alternative definition:

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people called spouses that establishes rights and obligations between the spouses, between the spouses and their children, and between the spouses and their in-laws.

Well, I am all for equality for all, but who says they have to be people?

If we are going to fight over definitions, surely we should try to finish with one that might survive more than a decade or two. This one simply won’t.

Artificial intelligence, or AI as it is usually called now, is making good progress. We already have computers with more raw number crunching power than the human brain. Their software, and indeed their requirement to use software, makes them far from equivalent overall, but I don’t think we will be waiting very long now for AI machines that we will agree are conscious, self aware, intelligent, sentient, with emotions, capable of forming human-like relationships. A few cranks will still object maybe, but so what?

These AIs will likely be based on adaptive analog neural networks rather than digital processing so they will not be so different from us really. Different futurists list different dates for AIs with man-machine equivalence, depending mostly on the prejudices and experiences bequeathed by their own backgrounds. I’d say 10 years, some say 15 or 20. Some say we will never get there, but they are just wrong, so wrong. We will soon have artificially intelligent entities comparable to humans in intellect and emotional capability. So how about this definition? :

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between conscious entities called spouses that establishes rights and obligations between the spouses, between the spouses and their derivatives, and those legally connected to them.

An AI might or might not be connected to a robot. An AI may not have any permanent physical form, and robots are really a red herring here. The mind is what is surely important, not the container. An AI can still be an entity that lives for a long enough time to be eligible for a long term relationship. I often watch sci-fi or play computer games, and many have AI characters that take on some sort of avatar – Edi in Mass Effect or Cortana in Halo for example. Sometimes these avatars are made to look very attractive, even super-attractive. It is easy to imaging how someone could fall in love with their AI. It isn’t much harder to imagine that they could fall in love with each other.

It’s a while since I last wrote about machine consciousness so I’ll say how I think it will work again now.

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/gel-computing/ tells of my ideas on gel computing. A lot of adaptive electronic devices suspended in gel that can set up free space optical links to each other would be an excellent way of making an artificial brain-like processor.

Using this as a base, and with each of the tiny capsules being able to perform calculations, an extremely powerful digital processor could be created. But I don’t believe digital processors can become conscious, however much their processing increases in speed. It is an act of faith I guess, I can’t prove it, but coming from a computer modelling background it seems to me that a digital computer can simulate the processes in consciousness but it can’t emulate them and that difference is crucial.

I firmly believe consciousness is a matter of internal sensing. The same way that you sense sound or images or touch, you can sense the processes based on those same neural functions and their derivatives in your brain. Emotions ditto. We make ideas and concepts out of words and images and sounds and other sensory things and emotions too. We regenerate the same sorts of patterns, and filter them similarly to create new knowledge, thoughts and memories, a sort of vortex of sensory stimuli and echoes. Consciousness might not actually just be internal sensing, we don’t know yet exactly how it works, but even if it isn’t, you could do it that way. Internal sensing can be the basis of a conscious machine, an AI. Here’s a picture. This would work. I am sure of it. There will also be other ways of achieving consciousness, and they might have different flavours. But for the purposes of arguing for AI marriage, we only need one method of achieving consciousness to be feasible.

I think this sort of AI design could work and it would certainly be capable of emotions. In fact, it would be capable of a much wider range of emotions than human experience. I believe it could fall in love, with a human, alien, or another AI. AIs will have a range and variety of gender capabilities and characteristics. People will be able to link to them in new ways, creating new forms of intimacy. The same technology will also enable new genders for people too, as I discussed recently. In the long term view, gay marriage is just another point on a long line.

When we set aside the arguing over gender equality, what we usually agree on is the importance of love. People can fall in love with any other human of any age, race or gender, but they are also capable of loving a sufficiently developed AI. As we rush to legislate for gender equality, it really is time to start opening the debate. AI will come in a very wide range of capability and flavour. Some will be equivalent or even superior to humans in many ways. They will have needs, they will want rights, and they will become powerful enough to demand them. Sooner or later, we will need to consider equality for them too. And I for one will be on their side.

What will your next body be like?

Many engineers, including me, think that some time around 2050, we will be able to make very high quality links between the brains and machines. To such an extent that it will thereafter be possible (albeit expensive for some years) to arrange that most of your mind – your thinking, memories, even sensations and emotions, could reside mainly in the machine world. Some (perhaps some memories that are rarely remembered for example) may not be suited to such external accessibility, but the majority should be.

The main aim of this research area is to design electronic solutions to immortality. But actually, that is only one application, and I have discussed electronic immortality a few times now :

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/how-to-live-forever/

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/increasing-longevity-and-electronic-immortality-3bn-people-to-live-forever/

What I want to focus on this time is that you don’t have to die to benefit. If your mind is so well connected, you could inhabit a new body, without having to vacate your existing one. Furthermore, there really isn’t much to stop you getting a new body, using that, and dumping your old one in a life support system. You won’t do that, but you could. Either way, you could get a new body or an extra one, and as I asked in passing in my last blog, what will your new body look like?

Firstly, why would you want to do this? Well, you might be old, suffering the drawbacks of ageing, not as mobile and agile as you want to be, you might be young, but not as pretty or fit as you want to be, or maybe you would prefer to be someone else, like your favourite celebrity, a top sports hero, or maybe you’d prefer to be a different gender perhaps? Or maybe you just generally feel you’d like to have the chance to start over, do it differently. Maybe you want to explore a different lifestyle, or maybe it is a way of expressing your artistic streak. So, with all these reasons and more, there will be plenty of demand for wanting a new body and a potentially new life.

Options

Lets explore some of the options. Don’t be too channelled by assuming you even have to be human. There is a huge range of potential here, but some restrictions will be necessary too. Lots of things will be possible, but not permissible.

Firstly, tastes will vary a lot. People may want their body to look professional for career reasons, others will prefer sexy, others sporty. Most people will only have one at a time, so will choose it carefully. A bit like buying a house. But not everyone will be conservative.

Just like buying a house, some rich people will want to own several for different circumstances, and many others would want several but can’t afford it, so there could be a rental market. But as I will argue shortly, you probably won’t be allowed to use too many at the same time, so that means we will need some form of storage, and ethics dictates that the ‘spare’ bodies mustn’t be ‘alive’ or conscious. There are lots of ways to do this. Using a detachable brain is one, or not to put a brain in at all, using empty immobile husks that are switched on and then linked to your remote mind in the cloud to become alive. This sounds preferable to me. Most likely they would be inorganic. I don’t think it will be ethically acceptable to grow cloned bodies in some sort of farm and remove their brains, so using some sort of android is probably best all round.

So, although you can do a lot with biotech, and there are some options there, I do think that most replacement bodies, if not all, will be androids using synthetic materials and AI’s, not biological bodies.

As for materials, it is already possible to buy lifelike full sized dolls, but the materials will continue to improve, as will robotics. You could look how you want to look, and your new body would be as youthful, strong, and flexible as you want or need it to be.

Now that we’re in that very broad android/robot creativity space, you could be any species, fantasy character, alien, robot, android or pretty much any imaginary form that could be fabricated. You could be any size or shape from a bacterium to an avatar for an AI spaceship (such as Rommy’s avatar in Andromeda, or Edi in Mass Effect. Noteworthy of course is that both Rommy and Edi felt compelled to get bodies too, so that they could maximise their usefuleness, even though they were both useful in their pure AI form.)

You could be any age. It might be very difficult to make a body that can grow, so you might need a succession of bodies if you want to start off as a child again. Already, warning bells are ringing in my head and I realise that we will need to restrict options and police things. Do we really want to allow adults people to assume the bodies of children, with all the obvious paedophilic dangers that would bring? Probably not, and I suspect this will be one of the first regulations restricting choice. You could become young again, but the law will make it so your appearance must remain adult. For the same obvious reasons, you wouldn’t be allowed to become something like a teddy bear or doll or any other form that would provide easy access to children.

You could be any gender. I wrote about future gender potential recently in:

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/the-future-of-gender/

There will be lots of genders and sexuality variations in that time frame.  Getting a new or an extra body with a different gender will obviously appeal to people with transgender desires, but it might go further and appeal to those who want a body of each sex too. Why not? You can be perfectly comfortable with your sexuality in your existing gender, but  still choose a different gender for your new body. If you can have a body in each gender, many people will want to. You may not be restricted to one or two bodies, so you might buy several bodies of different ages, genders, races and appearances. You could have a whole village of variants of you. Again, obvious restrictions loom large. Regulation would not allow people, however rich or powerful, to have huge numbers of bodies running around at the same time. The environmental, social, political and military impacts would get too large. I can’t say what the limits will be, but there will certainly be limits. But within those limits, you could have a lot of flexibility, and fun.

You could be any species. An alien, or an elf, or a dog. Technology can do most shapes and as for how it might feel, noone knows how elves or dogs or aliens feel anyway, so you have a clean slate to work with, customising till you are satisfied that what you create matches your desire. But again, should elves be allowed to interbreed with people, or aliens? Or dogs? The technology is exciting, but it does create a whole new genre of ethical, regulatory and policing problems too. But then again, we need to create new jobs anyway.

Other restrictions on relationships might spring up. If you have two or more bodies, will they be allowed to have sex with each other, marry, adopt kids, or be both parents of your own kids. Bear in mind cloning may well be legal by then and artificial wombs may even exist, so being both parents of your own cloned offspring is possible. If they do have sex, you will be connected into both bodies, so will control and experience both sides. It is worth noting here that you will also be able to link into other people’s nervous systems using similar technology, so the idea of experiencing the ‘other’ side of a sex act will not be unique to using your own bodies.

What about being a superhero? You could do that too, within legal limits, and of course those stretch a bit for police and military roles. Adding extra senses and capabilities is easy if your mind is connected to an entire network of sensors, processors and actuators. Remember, the body you use is just an android so if your superheroing activity gets you killed, it is just a temporary inconvenience. Claim on insurance or expenses and buy a new body for the next performance.

In this future world, you may think it would be hard to juggle mindsets between different bodies, but today’s computer games give us some insight. Many people take on roles every day, as aliens, wizards or any fantasy in their computer gaming. They still achieve sanity in their main life, showing that it is almost certainly possible to safely juggle multiple bodies with their distinct roles and appearances too. The human mind is pretty versatile, and a healthy adult mind is also very robust. With future AI assistance and monitoring it should be even safer. So it ought to be safe to explore and have fun in a world where you can use a different body at will, maybe for an hour or maybe for a lifetime, and even inhabit a few at once.

So, again, what will your next body look like?

Things that don’t work but could