Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan? Guest post by Rohit Talwar

Rohit is CEO of Fastfuture and a long-standing friend as well as an excellent futurist. He and I used to do a joint newsletter, and we have started again. Rohit sends it out to his mailing list as a proper newletter and because I don’t use mailing lists, I guest post it here. I’ll post my bit immediately after this one. I’m especially impressed since his bit ticks almost as many filing category boxes as it uses words.

Here is Rohit’s piece:

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan?

I have just returned from South Korea where I was delivering a keynote speech to a cross-industry forum on how to prepare for and benefit from the opportunities arising from industry convergence. South Korea has made a major strategic commitment starting with government and running through the economy to be a leader in exploiting the potential opportunities arising from the convergence of industries made possible by advances in a range of disciplines. These include information and communications technology, biological and genetic sciences, energy and environmental sciences, cognitive science, materials science and nanotechnology.  From environmental monitoring, smart cars, and intelligent grids through to adaptive bioengineered materials and clothing-embedded wearable sensor device that monitor our health on a continuous basis – the potential is vast.

What struck me about the situation in Korea was how the opportunity is being viewed as a central component of the long-term future of Korea’s economy and how this is manifested in practice. Alongside a national plan, a government sponsored association has been established to drive and facilitate cross-industry collaboration to achieve convergence. In addition to various government-led support initiatives, a range of conferences are being created to help every major sector of the economy understand, explore, act on and realise the potential arising out of convergence.

I am fortunate to get the opportunity to visit 20-25 countries a year across all six continents and get to study and see a lot of what is happening to create tomorrow’s economy. Whilst my perspective is by no means complete, I am not aware of any country where such a systematic and rigorous approach is being taken to driving industry convergence. Those who study Korea know that this approach is nothing new for them – long term research and strategic planning are acknowledged to have played a major role in the evolution of its knowledge economy and rise of Korea and its technology brands on the global stage. Coming from the UK, where it seems that long term thinking and national policy are now long lost relatives, I wonder why it is that so few countries are willing to or capable of taking such a strategic approach.

Rohit on the Road

In the next few months Rohit will delivering speeches in Oslo, Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Denver, Las Vegas, Oman, Leeds and London. Topics to be covered include human enhancement, the future of professional services, the future of HR, transformational forces in business, global drivers of change, how smart businesses create the future, the future technology timeline, the future of travel and tourism, the future of airlines and airports and the future of education. If you would like to arrange a meeting with Rohit in one of these cities or are interested in arranging a presentation or workshop for your organisation, please contact rohit@fastfuture.com

Towards the singularity

This piece was originally written a year ago for ACM proceedings but got lost in their review process, so rather than waste it, here it is before it passes its use-by date. A recent powerpoint presentation highlighting the potential of the singularity but setting that against some of the dangers that we may instead be dragged into a dark age is here.

http://futurizon.com/articles/singularitydarkage.pdf

Anyway, here is my article:

Towards the singularity

About 25 years ago, inspired by the invention of field programmable gate arrays, many engineers recognised that in principle these could be used as the basis of an evolving machine, using a biomimetic approach.  Starting with an array of FPGA-like machines and evolutionary algorithms, clearly the hardware would be able to evolve to its physical limits. It wasn’t long after that before the first simple evolving software and then hardware was achieved. The early 90s saw an explosion in evolutionary development, with evolutionary software as the prime focus due to low range of reconfigurable circuitry. While evolutionary computing got bogged down in biomimetic integrity and genetic algorithms, those of us engineers with futurist mindsets looked towards the far end of the development wedge. We saw that positive feedback across the wider science and technology R&D system would cause development eventually to race ahead of Moore’s Law, as smarter machines enabled faster development and faster discovery in every field. What we now call the singularity is a simple extrapolation of ongoing positive feedback in technology development.

We know that evolution works in nature, and have already proved that we don’t have to fully understand stuff to develop it, just point it in vaguely the right direction and let it evolve and find its own way. Whether via evolution or design, computers will eventually surpass human intelligence, amplify positive feedback still further, and that will lead to the extremely rapid invention with the familiar almost vertical development curve. That is inevitable. Even without evolutionary computing, the singularity will still come, but will be slower, since it would be limited by human knowledge, squandering the potential contribution of machine assistance.

The singularity initially is appealing, inspiring visions of potential technotopia, and the potential would be real if mankind was ready to deal with it, but problems are starting to show through and realisation of them and the consequential actions will slow it down.

Firstly, invention is only the first stage of development, and there are limits on how fast physical development can take place, even with all the self-replicating machines we may expect, however smart they get. So the way the singularity manifests itself at best will be as a rapidly growing gap between creativity and realisation. It will be as if advanced ETs had landed and given us a manual on how to build all their technology. But we still wouldn’t be able to have it all instantly and would have to decide on a priority list.

This isn’t just a theoretical problem. We already have a large creativity gap (i.e., the pile of spare inventions that have been thought up but haven’t yet been developed) – and that indicates that the impact of the singularity will be restricted. If you go to the R&D department of any large technology company, you will find a huge pool of ideas backed by a relatively small pot of funding. Most engineers will be familiar with the frustration of brainstorms where most of the ideas they scribble on post-its get thrown away. Ideas are two a penny even today, but only so many can be developed. If the singularity is to have any real economic significance, it needs to be about more than just quantity of ideas. Even an infinite creativity gap isn’t valuable per se; it needs to be about quality and purpose too. By focusing on the near vertical invention curve, perhaps we miss the point. If you are offered anything you want this afternoon, you still need to ask yourself what it is you want, and that introduces another hurdle to jump over. Clearly, while humans control the allocation of resources and permission to build things, we will hold back development to our human imagination and cultural limits. The singularity could theoretically arrive around 2025, but the practical implications of it will arrive much more slowly.

Secondly, the decisions on what to build depend on our economic culture. In a pure capitalist system, if a new technology allows cheap automation, fewer employees will be needed, and wealth moves towards capital owners. While new jobs are created sufficient quickly, this is just a retraining issue and the economy as a whole can grow, but when automation exceeds the rate at which new jobs can be created, it becomes a problem. If too few people have enough money to buy output, demand falls and the economy spirals downwards. Consequently, many people are already looking at new designs for capitalism to make it economically and socially sustainable (environmentally sustainability is moving quickly towards third place). We don’t have to wait for the singularity; again, signs of this downward spiral are already starting to appear.

In a world eager for the next pad, it is easy to be enthused about future technology if your future income is secure. As technology catches up with human intelligence and even people in well-paid professional jobs start to be replaced, it is easy also to imagine a backlash building, especially if new technologies are used to increase government control of our lives, as they often are. The potential backlash would build until politicians are forced to deal with it, one way or another. Capitalism can’t properly exploit the singularity in its current form, and will have to be redesigned. But how? It will take time to decide.

Thirdly, the singularity presents many existential threats and thereby another reason to force powerful restrictions on scope and rate of development. These could and may well force very different development paths and delay it very significantly, perhaps by decades. It is likely that the military will want to push for powerful new weapons, but a singularity-based arms race could tip the balance rapidly and greatly increase temptation for first strike action. Laser and plasma rifles already exist, at least in experimental form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Star). Terawatt solar wind deflector ray-guns and zombie viruses are within the scope of the 2025 singularity technology (http://futurizon.com/articles/madscientists.pdf). Many more can be listed. Starting with only six known ways that life on earth could be wiped out back in 2000 (nearby supernova, major solar storm, asteroid or comet strike, GM accident, or global nuclear war), my own studies suggest that the number increases exponentially to over 100 by 2050. If each optimistically has a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring in a single year by accident or deliberate action, the probability of extinction rises to 1% per annum and continues to grow exponentially. Do the sums and you end up with an ETA for extinction of 2085, hardly the technotopian future promised by the singularity up front. To avoid such a result, we will be forced to intervene. But how? At the very least we need more time.

Fourthly, we are becoming more and more vulnerable. In a world containing many people who wish to harm us, our dependence on highly complex technology systems is already a significant known military risk, as well as social and economic. Asymmetry is the key word here. But it isn’t just deliberate harm we need to worry about. Recently, solar storms brought our dependency problem into sharp focus. We no longer have the old systems as a backup, nor even people who knew how they worked. As we engineer in ever more complexity and systemic interdependence, we surely build our prosperity on sand. A failure of any part of our critical systems for any reason could quickly lead to cascade failures, and riots for the last bottles of water. Before we rush to grab hold of the singularity, we need first to get a hold of failsafe design and the practice of keeping a backup, not just for our computers but for our whole life support system. I don’t worry about complexity or whether I understand how the system works. I worry about how I and my family will manage when it fails.  But complexity isn’t the only vulnerability.

One of the well-known scenarios that results from all of this is the Terminator scenario, and I am not convinced at all that we have solved this problem yet. (For the uninitiated, the Terminator Scenario is thus called after the Terminator series of film. In this series, the US military develops a powerful satellite-based computer system called Skynet to control their missiles so that they could respond faster to a threat, but the computer system achieves consciousness, decides that humans are actually the threat, and sets about wiping out humanity).  Machines already do most of the design work on the next generation machines. Human engineers make some of the key decisions and tell the machines what to design, mostly, but the proportion of human input is falling. Particularly when we use evolutionary design, the human understanding of the technology that results can be very low indeed. Imagine a scenario where a few smart students plan a prank, and use an off-the-net virus pack to infect millions of machines with an algorithm. The algorithm is very crude but attempts to achieve elements of consciousness or thinking, just for fun, to see what happens, to see how far they can get. Some of the students are in IT, some from bio-tech and nano-tech, some from neuroscience, and a few others. The algorithms are crude but designed as well as they can, using all their latest knowledge of how the neural networks in the brain work. And so they spawn them, on a million machines, each with 1% of the raw processing power of the human brain. And they use evolution in that huge aggregated processing pot to experiment with variants of the algorithm. Over time, the system accumulates a toolbox of different algorithms and circuits that achieve a wide variety of neural functions to some degree to achieve key components of mind or consciousness or awareness. By experimenting with automatically linking these together in many combinations, the students hope to achieve larger and larger degrees of AI. And they might as well harness that AI to refine the evolutionary algorithms too, and make the virus better at infecting even more machines and adapting better, and hiding better. All automatically. Can we be sure that such a prank would always fail? Or could it work, and achieve consciousness in a distributed machine, just like the Skynet from Terminator?

But if you go to singularity timeframes, there are even further dangers. Some people already belong to hobbyist genetic engineering groups or play with 3d printing – and some of those mess with printing electronics too. Circuits can harvest energy from changes in the environment or passing radio waves and so won’t necessarily need batteries. People will try to push the boundaries via those routes too and 2025 is a good way off so lots of progress will occur in all these fields by then. With feedback among all these bio-nano-info-cogno technologies, it is not hard to imagine how students or a terrorist group could make good progress even without proper funding, even while staying anonymous, based anywhere. As hidden net-based programs become smarter and more autonomous, they could notionally get to the point where they interact with genetic assemblers and printers and design biological and electronic devices in a feedback loop. When thinking of a grey goo scenario, forget little micro-mechanical machines. Think bacteria, think GM assemblers, think AI-led environmental adaptation and think of a distributed organism that is part in the machine world and part in the ecosystem. Much of that is achievable long before we get the singularity and the rest very soon after. Transhumanists forget that transbacteria may not allow them to proceed. Smart bacteria may link together into super-smart organisms that think of humans merely as competition for resources. We could be building the engines of our own destruction, even while aiming for technotopia.

I am no doom monger, and I always manage to convince myself that we will muddle through. Sure, we’ll do it badly and get half of the benefit at twice the price and twice the mess. We already know the problems above. They are being addressed in organisations such as the Lifeboat Foundation, there are often conferences or symposia along singularity lines. Government is even starting to react. Studies covering NBIC (nano, bio, info, cogno) convergence issues were initiated by the EU before 2000. The US and Canadian governments have bother run conferences debating ways that mad scientists could use future technologies to cause great harm. So the problems won’t come unexpectedly. Where do we end up?

The problems above are possibilities and even likely if we take the default path of ongoing unfettered development. Positive feedback would deliver on some of the promises, and some of the problems would appear along the way. In the real world, it won’t happen like that. Social and political feedback loops, educated by many ongoing debates such as this symposium, will ensure that regulation is implemented that slows it down, restricting what can legally be done, what can be developed, what can be bought, and by whom. It has to. What we can also be sure of is that much of the regulation will be reactive and badly thought out. So it will be a mess, we will barely muddle through, but muddle through we will. What we can hope for is that it might be a relatively safe mess and the reward at the end is worth it. But let’s start by acknowledging that what we call the singularity is only a theoretical concept, and it can’t be achieved in its pure form. The real world development path will surely be very different, constrained and forced down different paths by physical, cultural and economic limits and forced to comply with a wide range of legal precautions.

Things that don’t work but could

The future of the Olympics, in 2076

Now that it is all over, it is time to think about the future. The last time the Olympics was held in London was 1948, 64 years ago. Going 64 years in the future, what will it be like then?

Watching the Olympics on 3D web TV is about as advanced as it gets today. By the 2024 Olympics, it will be fairly common to use active contact lenses with lasers writing images straight onto your retinas. It will be fully immersive, and almost feel like you’re there. In fact, many of the people in the crowd at the games will also use them, to zoom in or watch replays and extra content. The 2028 Olympics will have the first viewers using primitive-but-fun active skin technology to connect their nervous systems so that they can even feel some of the sensations involved. In gyms up and down the land, runners will be able to pretend they are in the race, running on their treadmills virtually against actual Olympians. They’ll receive their final placing against the others doing the same. This will improve and by 2040 even domestic active skin sensation recording and replay will feel very convincing. By 2076, we’ll have full links between IT and our brains, living the events as if we were athletes ourselves, Total Recall style.

Interfacing to the nervous system will help potential Olympic athletes improve their performance quickly, injecting sensations into the body to make perfect movements just feel better, so their body learns the optimal movement quickly. This will show the first improvements in results in 2032, with heptathletes and decathletes performing almost perfectly in every one of their events.

The 2050 Olympics will see the first competitors who are children of genetically enhanced parents, and some genetically enhanced themselves. They won’t need drugs to out-perform even those regular humans who have overdosed on steroids all their careers. Their careers will last longer too, as biological decline will be less of an issue thanks to their genes. In the same timeframe, drugs will advance enormously too, squeezing extra levels of performance, learning speed, sensory awareness and muscle development. With negative side effects under control, some drugs and implants may be accepted in sports. But fierce arguments over fairness will eventually force a split between the various streams.

The 2076 Olympics will be made up of five events. There will be one ‘original Olympics’ for ordinary unmodified humans, tested thoroughly for any genetic or chemical enhancements, forced to use the same equipment to eliminate technological advantage, possibly given handicaps for any innate genetic advantage they have over the competition. There will be another for the disabled, many of whom will resist being made ‘normal’, even if technology permits. There will be another for robots, with advanced AI and a range of ‘body types’, used as a show-off event for technology companies. Another stream will take place one for un-enhanced athletes using advanced drugs, implant technology, superior equipment, and even externally linked  IT to gain technological advantage and make more exciting sport. It will be far from ‘natural’, but viewers won’t care. And finally, another event for biologically and neurally enhanced super-humans, without any other technology advantage. These streams couldn’t compete fairly head on, but will make distinct events with distinct flavours and advantages.

The spirit of The Games will live on even with this split, and still only the very best will be able to compete, but they will be bigger, better and more exciting for everyone.

See also my previous blog on future sports.

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/future-sports/

Next generation small computers

One of my posts two years ago suggested it would be a great time to bring back the Spectrum computer or something like it:

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/bring-back-the-spectrum/

The new Raspberry Pi is pretty much exactly what I asked for (though I don’t think it came from my request) . For about £22, you get a computer. You plug in a keyboard and a TV and comms, then start programming. I am amazed it has been so long for someone to do it, but better late then never. Now a new generation of kids can learn how to program by messing about, instead of falling victim to the formal teaching that is provided by schools and university. I have always believed that learning how to hack programs together is the best way to understand what you are doing. You can learn formal methods later if need be. I don’t think hacking is the source of bad habits. Rather, it is more likely to show you the workings of the machine so you can exploit it better. I have seen too many taught programmers make good impressions of being mentally crippled after being forced to think in just one way, any fee-thinking and originality purged.

The Raspberry Pi isn’t the only tiny computer around though. FXI also have one, the size of a USB memory stick, and pretty impressive capability, albeit five times the price. It is easy to imagine how devices like this could really change how we work. I like to travel very light and haven’t carried a laptop for years – even the latest are still heavy and big and just aren’t worth the trouble. I won’t even use an iPAD because it is still obese, power-hungry, and altogether too primitive.Turning up at a conference with a memory stick containing your presentation has been fine as an alternative, but you are reliant on the conference laptop having the right setup. If you could bring a full PC memory stick and run everything from that, that would be better. At home it will be good to put media straight onto your TV without cluttering the room up with big boxes. A Slingbox has done that for years, and smart TVs now do it built-in, so it isn’t new, but this makes it a lot easier and cheaper to provide web and media on more conventional TVs.

On the go, you need some sort of visual display of course but soon we will have visor based head up displays that work with fingertip tracking or virtual  keyboards. Then these compact devices will come into their own. You’ll be fully connected and IT capable, but carrying hardly any weight.

Both of these new devices are small but capable, and most of the size they still have left is really interfacing to other devices. The processing guts is much smaller still. There is room to shrink further, and it is clear from these that the era of digital jewellery is almost with us. Imagine the enormous environmental benefits too, if we hardly need any resources to provide for all our IT needs.

It is the curse of futurology that you are never really happy with the stuff available today because you know what is round the corner. But when I can easily fit all my IT into my pocket as a memory stick and wear a lightweight visor as my interface, I’ll be pretty near content. Can’t be long now

Environmental and engineering convergence

My best friend Dave Faulkner runs an environmental consultancy. I host a couple of his papers on global warming on the Futurizon web site. We have many a beer over debate about environmental issues. Over the years, I have worked a few times with both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. I have a lot of respect for Jonathon Porritt and Doug Parr. We share a passion for a healthy environment, though we disagree on some of the ways to achieve it. It’s the same with my friend Dave. I can like and respect a person without agreeing with everything they say. It is nicer still when some common ground appears.

Only a small bit of my work involves environmental issues so I am far from expert in the environment field, though I do have my own embryonic environmental consultancy now. But I am expert at studying the future overall and pretty good at making predictions – I get it right 6 times more often than I get it wrong – and as I look at the many factors affecting the way the world is going, I feel hesitantly optimistic. There is some potential for a techno-utopia but I know we won’t get that. We will take a sub-optimal path that creates as many new problems as we solve. The world of 2050 and beyond will still be a mixture of good and bad, just with different goods and bads.

The approach to our environment though is one area I think will improve. On one side, we have the likes of Porritt and Parr, leading much of the green community and doing what they can to motivate people with the desire to live in a nicer world in harmony with nature. I can’t fault that, only in some of the policies they recommend to achieve it, which I think come from occasional flaws in their analyses. On another side, engineers are racing to develop better technologies, sometimes deliberately to help the environment, but more often almost coincidentally making better toys that happen to be better for the environment. Engineers are mostly driven by market forces, but they are still human, and many also care passionately for the environment, so will generally seek solutions that do their job but are better for the environment where the choice exists. In fact, it is hard to spot examples of new technology that are worse for the environment than their predecessors. Market forces, mediated through well motivated engineers, can make the world better just as well as any green. Both can help us move to a better world. 

I see a lot of needless worrying by environmentalists though, some of whom (I won’t name names) think of scientists and engineers as the enemy. Needless worry, and sometimes counter-productive. One of the big worries this week is that a lot of resources are scarce that we need to make renewable energy, or to make batteries to store it. But almost at the same time, articles appear on inductive power delivery to cars that circumvents the need for large batteries and hence the need for lithium – I even proposed that solution myself a few years ago, so it is good to see it appearing as a project somewhere. New materials for IT are being developed too, so we won’t rely for much longer on the other things that are scarce. So, no worries, it’s just a short-term problem. For the last few years it has been recommending spending trillions to avoid carbon dioxide production. But even without spending any trillions, future energy technology that is being developed anyway will make fossil fuels redundant, so it will take care of itself. Panic is expensive but unnecessary, the worry needless and counter-productive, serving only to slow down the race to sustainability by diverting funds to the wrong areas.

The environment has some very good friends in engineering now. Biomimetics is the engineering field of copying ideas  or at least inspiration from nature. I’ve occasionally use biokleptics when an idea is blatantly stolen. Nature doesn’t have any lawyers defending her intellectual property rights, but has been using random trial and error for 3 billion years to develop some fantastic engineering solutions and if anything encourages their copying. So, someone looks at spiders and develops a new kind of architecture that produces better structures with less material. Going way back to the 80s, I looked at evolution and made the tiny deductive leap to thinking of evolving software and hardware, then soon after looked at embryo growth and came up with ideas of how to self organise telecomms networks and sensor nets. I love biomimetics.  So do many other engineers, and the whole field is exploding now. It will help to make systems, objects, fabrics, materials, architecture and processes that are more energy or resource efficient, and quite often more beautiful.There are a few purists who insist on copying something exactly as nature does it, but mostly engineers are happy to be inspired and make their own tweaks to adapt it to needs. So, long ago, Icarus started the field by copying nature but a century ago we discovered we could make planes more easily with metal fixed wings.

Synthetic biology essentially completes the relationship by adding human design into biology. This embryonic field will expand vastly, and will be used for a wide range of tasks from resource extraction and processing, to computing. Nanotech and insights from neuroscience will add more to allow rich interaction between organic and inorganic devices, often bridging the gap to allow us to put electronic devices in direct connection with our bodies, or those of other creatures. This field also allows the wonderful possibility of undoing some of the damage done to the environment, and even making nature work better. Gaia 2.0 will be with us this century. Of course, if we don’t develop all this science and technology, we will be stuck with a human world that is immensely resource hungry and getting worse, using far more resources than would otherwise be needed, damaging the environment, with no hope of repairing the damage. There wouldn’t even be a plus side, because people would also live poorer lives and be less fulfilled and less happy.

Having been highly convergent on the goal of making the world a better place, this is where engineers often part company with greens. Most engineers think better engineering is the best route to a sustainable world, most greens (and, it has to be admitted, some engineers) think we should slow it all down. This superficially suggests lower environmental impact, implying that people will consume less if they swap devices less often, or don’t get that next pay rise, but it doesn’t deliver. It is a wrong deduction. In much the same way that poor people are often fatter than rich people, what it does change is the access to a better diet, in this case, of environmentally friendlier technology that really needs extra R&D before it is with us. That funding comes from market demand and the ability to pay, and that needs more people to be richer. For the next several decades, what we need is economic growth, selectively. Again, I start to agree with Porritt here. It isn’t just any growth we need, but growth that is spent wisely, using growth to improve peoples lives, and improving the environment we live in either directly or via R&D and the greener technology it will deliver.

Is greed more sustainable than frugality?

Sustainability is much misunderstood. Certainly government and corporate sustainability policies often point completely the wrong way.

To be sustainable, we must ensure that future generations are able to live decent lives. Not much argument about that usually. But conventional wisdom in the field is that this means we should cut back on consumption.  That leap of logic is flawed. Cutting back reduces environmental impact in the short term but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will reduce it in the long term, or overall over any significant length of time. The full lifetime, full system impact is what counts. Achieving a reduction in overall impact well be best served by increasing consumption in the short term, if this leads to development that reduces the later impacts enough to offset short term damage.

An excellent example is in mobile phone design. Vigorous marketing and encouragement to replace mobiles frequently seems to many people to be wasteful and environmentally unsustainable. However, the rapid obsolescence cycle here has given us 150g mobiles that essentially replace 600kg of previously needed IT equipment. If everyone wants a mobile phone, or to access to the functions they provide, then the lowest environmental impact is achieved by using ultra-high tech phones that do far more with far less. Increased consumption has led to lower environmental impact. If instead, we had held back development and demanded that people use their phones till they fail, we would still be using a lot of heavy and resource intensive kit that needs lots more energy, generates far more waste, and would need far more mining, nasty heavy metals and pollution. And it wouldn’t work half as well, so we’d have less happy lives too.

Greed v frugality? Greed is the more sustainable. Because it leads faster to more advanced technology that is invariably better for the environment.

For a fuller analysis of sustainability and technology, download http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf. It is free.

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 6: Dangers from technology progress

Dangers from technology progress

I am very enthusiastic about technology and its potential not just to make our lives better, but also to protect and even restore the environment. However, although I disagree strongly with doom-mongers most of the time, I am far from a utopianist and am quite capable of seeing potential horrors ahead too. The key word is potential. I don’t think they will likely happen, because I hope we will find ways of avoiding them. However, there were only a few ways that life on earth could be extinguished a century ago, and now there are quite a few. Nature gives us plagues, super-volcanoes, asteroid and comet strikes, supernovas and even solar events in the list of possible extinction-level events. To this we added nuclear oblivion in the 1940s. Not long after, research into bio-weapons came up with viruses and bacteria that could wipe out almost all of humanity as well as hydrogen bombs. Now, we can add a much wider range of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or mass destruction, particle accelerator accidents, asteroid steering, and can already see potential accidents or weapons arising from solar wind deflection, zombie viruses, genetic modification accidents, nanobot infestations, grey goo scenarios and many more. If you plot a timeline of all these on a graph, it makes quite a neat exponential curve, with the number of ways we could kill everyone rising to about 100 by 2050 and carrying on rising exponentially even after that. Assessing the probability of such things actually happening is difficult, but starting with a familiar one, most of us think a global nuclear war is unlikely in any particular year, but also worry that it may happen one day. If we are in optimistic mood, we might estimate the probability of a nuclear war as 1 in 10,000 in any particular year. When trouble rises in North Korea, Pakistan, or Iran, we might be less optimistic. There are also plenty of mad scientists and terrorist groups as well as malicious governments, mad dictators and religious extremists who want to make an impression on history, not to mention that any of the events might also happen entirely by accident. Additionally, technology has a habit of becoming commoditised over time, so that more people get access to it. Imagine a far future where every depressed student effectively has access to a big red button labelled as ‘destroy the world’! Taking the 1 in 10,000 chance as an averagely optimistic probability for any of the scenarios (remember), the 100 mechanisms in 2050 would give a one percent chance of an extinction level events happening that year. The one percent would rise every year thereafter. It is therefore easy to estimate that the expectation date for extinction is around 2085 based on this argument and these estimates of probability.

There is little point in worrying about other longer term sustainability issues if we are going to wipe ourselves out along with most of the rest of life on the planet. Therefore, finding ways to prevent technology-enabled disasters is very key to sustainability. In this direction, The Lifeboat Foundation started up some years ago and many benign and fine minds work to finding potential solutions to all the disaster scenarios. This work should be considered absolutely essential but sadly is poorly funded, even compared to far more trivial environmental issues. We can’t prevent nutters and nasty people from existing, but we can certainly find ways of limiting the damage they can cause.

Quality of life sustainability

Some people have a very luxurious lifestyle, others live in total poverty and misery. I don’t think it is possible for everyone to be happy, but we should be able to make it possible for everyone to have a good chance of happiness and certainly we should be able to make enough food and clothes, shelter and clean water available to everyone. Sustainability of quality of life is important too. We should try hard to achieve environmental sustainability without damaging people’s ability to live happily.

Scientific surveys occasionally highlight the things that contribute to happiness, and these can be aggregated to a fairly short list: Peace, health, family and friends, social and political inclusion, a nice environment, justice, education, wealth and respect for human rights. Although these are listed in no particular order wealth is actually a fairly poor indicator of happiness, so making quality of life sustainable does not mean everyone has to be wealthy.

Closing comments

Sadly, both dogma and poor thinking are all too commonplace in environmental debate and this one the biggest barriers to protecting the environment, especially when it is coupled with sanctimony and a contempt for science and technology. By enforcing misguided policies, society is prevented from adopting solutions that could actually protect the environment. With the right incentives and leadership, the science and engineering community could produce far better solutions. Technology can and should bale us out of our sustainability problem. Science and technology can offer real solutions that will work without reducing quality of life. This is surely a far better prospect than attempting to solve the problem by constraining people’s lifestyles. We need to achieve sustainability by applying intelligence.

The full report is also completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the author

Ian Pearson is a full time futurologist, tracking and predicting developments across a wide range of technology, business, society, politics and the environment. He is a Maths and Physics graduate and has worked in numerous branches of engineering, from aeronautics to cybernetics, sustainable transport to electronic cosmetics. His inventions include text messaging and the active contact lens. He was BT’s full-time futurologist from 1991 to 2007 and now works for Futurizon, a small futures institute. He writes, lectures and consults globally on all aspects of the technology-driven future. He has written several books and made over 450 TV and radio appearances. He is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, the World Academy of Art and Science, the Royal Society of Arts, the Institute of Nanotechnology, and the World Innovation Foundation. He holds a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Westminster and an Award for Excellence from the US Army.

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 5: Technology

Caution : this section is long. 5000 words ahead:

Linear Induction Bike Lanes

Electronic bicycle lanes could also be constructed to incentivise cycling. A linear induction motor, laid into or on the cycle lane surface could pull cyclists along if they wanted assistance. Mechanical energy is very cheap, whereas the effort required to cycle long distances or up hills is a strong deterrent to many potential cyclists – they are not all super fit! This linear induction drive would only require a small modification to the bicycle (a simple metal plate affixed to the front forks would probably do), and could easily be switched on and off, could offer variable speeds for individual cyclists. Bikes would be pulled along by the magnetic field. It is quite easy to engineer in various safety precautions to prevent misuse and also to enable charging to make commercial ones viable. With no moving parts, and therefore nothing to clog up, it could be extremely reliable. Tracks could be laid either into the surface, or made as rolls that could be quickly laid out on hills to give extra assistance where it is needed. Of course other technologies such as RFID chips could enable highly personalized control (and payment) systems. Apart from encouraging more bicycle use, it could also be used to increase bicycle speed, which both improves journey time for the cyclist, and reduces the congestion bicycles can cause in other traffic. Making it easier to use bikes, and enabling people to use them to commute without needing a shower as soon as they arrive, would yield system wide benefits through extra bicycle use and increased fitness and because speeds would be higher, they wouldn’t slow down other transport as much or cause so many accidents.

Self-driven Pods

New transport solutions based on electronically driven cars and electronic highways could be developed quickly. The basic technologies are all proven now. Cars in the far future will simply drive themselves. These could dramatically improve personal mobility and social inclusivity, and greatly reduce congestion. People would most likely abandon car ownership if this is done well. If personal driving style is eliminated by electronic overrides, there is far less incentive to personally own a car, and at the same time it will become much easier to implement and manage large fleets of shared cars. Fleets give economy of scale and also far better economy of resource. A car would not spend most of its life idle, but could be in use most of the time. A modest number of cars could cater for a large population, especially since the exact locations of all the cars is known, as well as the destinations and likely arrival times of cars in transit. There are already several instances of car rental systems that allow people to just pick up and drop cars as they wish. This will become much more attractive an option with future technology.

So we may well see large fleets of shared cars, owned by companies, government or social groups. With cars linked electronically into a ‘road train’ for acceleration and braking, they could drive closer together, increasing road occupancy, reducing drag and making road travel more energy efficient. With computers driving the cars, they could be much closer together sideways as well as lengthwise, squeezing more lanes onto the same road area, so it may be possible to increase the number of cars on a stretch of road. Given smaller pods instead of large cars, narrower lanes and closer distancing, it should easily be possible to achieve a factor of 5 in the number on a stretch and since they could all be moving well, overall capacity would improve even more. It also makes it more feasible to run roads with lane direction determined by time of day, with some lanes carrying cars one way in the morning rush, and the other way in the afternoon.

Obviously, lorries need more road space but this can easily be accounted and flow still optimised by a computer driven system. Lorries are already being developed that can work in road trains to save drag and driver fatigue.

Such an electronically controlled system could have a mixture of public and private (large fleet company) ownership. The key feature is that it will have all the flexibility of private transport but be more socially inclusive than current public transport, since older people wouldn’t have to walk to a distant bus stop. All they would do is ask their computer to get them a car.

Car batteries are an obvious storage solution for intermittent energy supplies such as wind or solar energy. However, if direct power pickup from road surfaces is implements, and it is likely, then batteries would not need to be very high capacity, since they would only need relatively short local reach. Using smaller batteries would greatly reduce the need for lithium and other materials, making cars cheaper, lighter and safer.

Buses would be a big spoiler for such a system. Since they have to stop frequently to let people on and off, it would be far better to replace them with individual pods. Each person would get personal service door to door and the reduced size makes it far easier for computers to organise flow around them as they stop. In fact, they may even be small enough to simply use pavement. Few people would miss slow and dirty buses or the risk of having a drunk sit next to you, when faced with the option for comfortable end to end service at probably lower cost.

A public transport system like this would require far less resource than today’s, because far fewer vehicles would be needed, and they would be lighter so need less raw material, and drag would be much lower, so they would use less energy. It would also be safer, cheaper and more socially inclusive by far than what we have today.

Rail use – pod trains

There is really no reason why these self-driven pods or road train technology could not be implemented on the railways too. Rail occupancy can be as low as 0.4% on regional railways. Performance analysis shows that packet switched networks can be safely loaded to 80% occupancy before statistics cause significant performance degradation. So there is clearly a huge opportunity for improving the capacity of railways, perhaps 100-fold, if packet switching based solutions were to be implemented instead of the current system, which allocates a very long stretch of track exclusively to each train because of the safety limits required by the obsolete signalling and control technologies that current railways use. Suppose that electronically driven cars and buses could be taken onto the railways, and interleaved with vans and small rail carriages that spend all their time on railways. For example, cars could be made with dual wheels, as some buses are today. Once on rail, no steering is needed and with the vehicles talking electronically to each other to coordinate braking and acceleration, the driver could do other things while the car drives itself to the destination station, whereupon it would leave the track and use its other wheels to get to its final destination. The cars could be driven very closely, and of course the drag and friction costs would be very low. Furthermore, since most of the journey could be on rail with electric energy easily provided, the car could use an electric motor. Instead of using petrol or diesel, or even fuel cells, it could make very long journeys just on batteries, since the batteries could be recharged during the rail journey. Since railways are simple one-dimensional systems, this would be far less demanding in terms of control systems than the equivalent on the roads. So whereas electronic highways will take some more years to become feasible, rail based systems could be implemented much more quickly, given the will.

Nuclear energy – Thorium

Many environmentalists are in favour of nuclear power compared to a few years ago. Nuclear power has always been a scary option to many people because of the waste disposal problem, and the potential use of some kinds of nuclear power stations to generate material for bombs. Nevertheless, if it does turn out that CO2 emissions are a problem, then it offers an obvious way of reducing them while providing much more stable power than that available from wind, wave or solar.

Today’s nuclear stations mainly use uranium, a few use plutonium, but tomorrow we will probably have many that use thorium, a relatively common element that is cheaper and more readily available than uranium, and produces much less dangerous by products as it decays. The Chinese are currently trying to develop thorium reactors and are likely to succeed. If so, this will provide a great deal of help in achieving a sustainable world that still has enough energy for us all to lead comfortable lives.

In the longer term, fusion based energy is inevitable too, but no-one knows when this is really likely to become reality. The very far future has a glut of potential energy supplies, so it is only the short and medium terms that are threatened with shortages. Long term sustainability is not a problem as far as energy goes.

Nuclear waste disposal

Uranium comes from mines. It is extracted, concentrated, used until it isn’t radioactive enough any more and then we lock it in secure dumps until we figure out what to do with it. One option seems obvious when you remember that it came from a mine originally. If the nuclear waste it replaces were to be extremely diluted by mixing with the refuse from the uranium mine, (or indeed with any other rubbish if it is being used for landfill), then it could all be dumped back in the hole it originally came from, and that would result is a slightly less radioactive mine than the original.

A longer term option lies in the space elevator. Nuclear waste could be flung into the sun, which of course is just a nuclear reactor anyway. It could be an expensive solution compared to burying it or using it up in a thorium reactor, but who knows?

Wind energy

If there is one perfect example of the triumph of green dogma over scientific sense, it would be wind farms. Wind farms can harness superficially free energy but are an eyesore, cause noise and stress, disrupt breeding cycles and kill birds, and may even sap enough of the wind to disturb natural weather patterns. They are ludicrously expensive to build, with little scope for cost reduction requiring heavy subsidies. Because wind doesn’t always blow, they still need other power generation capacity to be provided alongside, and this also needs to be subsidised if the generator companies can’t sell their power all the time. Overall, wind farms as they currently stand are anything but green and should really be a last resort.

There are a few developments that will make wind energy slightly less awful though. One is the use of different kinds of turbines according to the deployment circumstances. Vertical axis turbines may be better in turbulent environments such as housing areas, whereas conventional fans cannot harvest efficiently when the wind direction changes frequently.

Super-capacitors made of novel materials such as graphene offer the prospect of being able to store energy more easily, solving one of the big problems with intermittent energy use.

Plastic capacitor sails

Also on the capacitor side, plastic capacitors change their capacitance as they deform. Wind energy harvesters can be made using large sails covered in millions of tiny plastic capacitors that spin in the wind, deforming and springing back every time they make a rotation. The sails would lie on the surface of the sea, and only become visible when the wind fills the sail. There would be no visible movement from any distance away because of the small size of the capacitors, so this would doubly help visual disturbance. Since the energy would be converted more directly into electricity, there would be no need for a large central generator, no need for heavy engineering. The costs of plastic capacitors today make sail solutions even more expensive than conventional turbines, but materials science often follows Moore’s law cost reductions, whereas mechanical systems don’t. This means that in a few years it may be cheaper to use sails, and the cost benefits would continue to improve thereafter.

Whether such advances will ever make wind energy a good solution is uncertain, but it could be less bad.

Solar farms

Solar farms in equatorial regions are likely to spread, contributing enormously to energy supply, but affecting wealth distribution and already associated with crime and forced people movement. Short term costs are very high but inevitably will fall. They also increase absorption of sun’s energy relative to bare ground. So solar farms would produce a great deal of energy and could be cheap as Moore’s law brings down the costs and increases efficiency of photovoltaics, but it isn’t the clean solution sometimes imagined.

Graphene

Graphene is the new wonder material. Like carbon nanotubes, it is just another form of carbon, the atoms just laid out differently. Having said that, it is far stronger and lighter than steel, is a superb conductor, it can be used as a substrate for electronic circuits, and it is made of carbon, an extremely common element. Its importance in sustainability will come from many angles. To list just a few, it will enable substitution for other materials that are in short supply, expensive or dangerous or resource-consuming to make. It will allow super-capacitors that can replace batteries and store power from intermittent energy supplies. It will make ultrafast computers, better sensors, and many other things we haven’t even imagined yet. Engineers are very excited about its potential and it is impossible to know just how much impact it will eventually have, but it is likely to be huge. As a key pillar in future sustainability, graphene is certainly in there.

AI (artificial intelligence)

If we could produce intelligence synthetically, and therefore provide extra thinking capability to solve problems, this could have a profound effect on technology development rate, in every field. Since it is likely that this will be achieved in the next few decades, AI is a very important sustainability tool, with its enormous potential to invent solutions, increase understanding of the environment, and accelerate research development, but it is rarely mentioned in environment debates. Clearly, smart machines might be used to design smarter machines, which will design smarter ones still, leading exponentially quickly to vastly superhuman intelligence that may well solve many of the problems for us, with new energy technology, and new environmental clean-up and management technology.

We should not rely on AI to save us, but we may reasonably expect that it will, even if some man-made solutions fail. It gives us hope, but not enough certainty to avoid us using other approaches in parallel.

Active contact lens

My own invention in 1991, the active contact lens is a tiny display device that is worn as a contact lens, and contains circuits to project images directly onto the retina. It has already been prototyped in primitive form but in the far future it will offer ultra-high resolution fully immersive 3d images, and will make all other display devices unnecessary (though we may still have some anyway). Any kind of other display could be mimicked as a portion of the active contact lens display area. It is possible therefore to save all the resources and pollution involved in all the others. Given the number of TVs, mobiles, PCs, tablets and so on that could be replaced, the active contact lens can be a significant contributor directly to sustainable resource use.

In addition to replacing other displays, it can also be used for new services such as augmented reality. This allows even a basic environment to be enhanced virtually, and if the display quality is sufficient, it would be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Digital Jewellery

A person wearing a few grammes of digital jewellery in the 2020s will have far more IT capability than someone today with a laptop, phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera, GPS navigation system, security alarm, identity card, electronic cash cards, credit cards, voice recorder, video camera, memory sticks, radio, portable TV, a book, magazine, games console and many other gadgets that haven’t even been invented yet. Furthermore, by 2020, billions more people will be able to afford these sorts of things. These can also be the basis for a distributed cloud platform, requiring far less server farm provision and requiring far less power than today’s server farms. It is important that we get greater miniaturisation and lower energy use if everyone in the world is to have access to all the benefits of IT sustainably. Digital jewellery will be key.

Biomimetics

Biomimetics is simply using nature as stimulation in engineering design. Three billion years of natural evolution has come up with some great ideas, still being discovered. Engineers draw inspiration from these. Sometimes natural techniques and designs can be mimicked almost exactly, sometimes a bit of human tweaking is a good idea, but nature-inspired design is often lighter, stronger, faster, or better in some other way than alternatives. Biomimetics is another great sustainability tool. There are some purists in the field who like to stay true to nature, but as far as sustainability goes, it is great to get ideas wherever they come from, and nature is a big source. Even if the end product looks nothing like nature, its initial inspiration can be important.

Biomimetic architecture has been around quite a while, enabling low power air conditioning systems for example, or skyscrapers that can be lighter weight, or use lower drag materials to reduce wind pressure. There are very many opportunities here.

Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology can be seen as a major derivative or biomimetics. Engineers and scientists have been discovering how nature works at microcellular and even molecular levels, and are now copying and using even genetic tools. At first, the major headlines are in modifying DNA slightly or assembling genomes from off-the-shelf chemicals to create synthetic bacteria, but it will undoubtedly progress to designing whole new classes of proteins, genes, and different types of synthetic organisms. It will also allow us to modify and enhance existing ones. Proteins are nature’s machines, and by understanding how to design and build them for our own purposes, this will be a rich seam for future development.

However, it is not without risk. Messing with nature will allow us to fix a lot of environmental problems. But as it becomes better and eventually commoditised, it is also a tool that lends itself well to the military, terrorists and mad scientists. I would say synthetic biology is in the top three tools when it comes to achieving sustainability, but I’d also put it in the top three risk to life on earth. If we can harness its potential while protecting against its threats, we will have a much better world for sure, but that is no easy task.

Bacterial mining

One example already under way is bacterial mining, designing bacteria to break transform a fixed resource (coal in this case) into a gaseous one (methane) so that it can be extracted more easily. Methane also produces less CO2 than coal for a given amount of energy. This clearly would help sustainability, as would many other custom bacteria. Other roles may be mining rubbish tips to recover useful elements from them, extracting resources without digging big holes and ruining ecosystems; processing waste; fixing carbon; making algae fuels; changing the earth’s albedo and many others. Again, the dangers are possible harmful but unexpected interactions with the environment (and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time we have had unexpected reactions), or commoditised advanced uses being perverted for destruction.

Restoration of the environment to health via genetic technology, desert greening programs, weather control technology and so on, are all highly likely to be developed over the next several decades. Synthetic biology could also yield tools to rescue life on earth after environmental catastrophe, by eventually enabling wholesale redesigning of the ecosystem from the ground up.

Carbon Reefs

Most UK householders are already encouraged to separate plastic waste for recycling, and when it reaches the recycling centres, it is usually compressed into blocks for easier handling, which sadly is often done in China. If these blocks were instead to be dumped in the sea and suitably contained, just off the Norfolk coast for example, transport and processing would produce far less CO₂, carbon would be locked up, coastal erosion would be reduced, land would be reclaimed, and landfill would fill up more slowly. The plastic would effectively become a plastic reef and later, reclaimed land. This approach would be carbon negative, while recycling is at best carbon neutral. One of the obstacles to this solution is the move towards biodegradable plastic, which of course returns carbon to the atmosphere, and ironically, was developed to help the environment. Another is EU law which prohibits dumping plastic in the sea. Another obstacle is environmental groups who argue that we shouldn’t try to resist erosion because it will then happen elsewhere, but that is a rather defeatist attitude. Put some of the blocks there too.

The much levied criticism of conventional plastics, that they will stay around in the environment for thousands of years, actually makes them ideal for a carbon sink. Bio-degradable plastic, and current laws that prevent plastics from being dumped in the sea could turn out to be environmentally damaging, by preventing such solutions.

Some other waste could be mixed in too. For example, glass is borderline recyclable, yielding a environmental benefit when recycling it rather than producing it from scratch, but since this full-life benefit is actually quite small, perhaps it could also be included with the plastic, giving extra density to the waste.

Even organic waste could be processed by heating with reduced oxygen so that it carbonises, giving off natural gas in the process that could be used as fuel. The carbon could be added to the plastic reef to help absorb toxins from the seawater, cleaning it up a bit too.

Fabric Technology

New fabrics that don’t need to be washed are making their way onto markets already. It is the norm for clothes to be washed of course, and not everyone will be happy wearing clothes without ever washing them, but gradually acceptance is likely to grow. Washing machines that require far less water and detergent, and wash at lower temperatures are of course already here, and we will see their penetration increase too. All of these are useful tools in the battle for sustainability.

One of the first fabrics to be released is treated cotton. This is quite ironic, since cotton production is extremely water intensive and polluting. But it is still a start.

We can expect more and better synthetic fabrics in the future of course as well as treatments for natural fibres. Some of these will reduce environmental footprints by keeping us warm and dry and clean while reducing consumption of raw materials, water and energy use. Genetic engineering is likely to improve natural fibres too or make them easier to produce without so much water.

Carbon sequestration

Solutions for carbon sequestration can be developed quickly if we need them. As yet, we don’t really know if we do and this could be money wasted.

Farming

Organic farming generally produces less food per hectare of land, which decreases global food production capacity, which increases prices and makes it harder for poor people to survive, forcing them to have more children, which creates a greater population, greater need for aid and so on. It is a Western luxury that is paid for elsewhere.

Organic farming products are often delivered by a different distribution system, which has different impacts and these also need to be accounted. Additionally, marketing for organic produce tends to reinforce other aspects of lifestyle and attitudes that affect the system in many more subtle ways. For example, as well as consuming ‘organic’ food, the same people are likely to prefer natural fibres instead of synthetic substitutes. This increases demand for cotton. Cotton is becoming a hot environmental topic in itself, producing pollution and water stress among many other socioeconomic problems. Again, the transport, CO₂, energy demand and social impact is very different across the whole system and whole lifecycle from synthetic clothing.

Planes and alternatives

Cheap air travel is a strong focal point for environmental hostility, but it is generally better to solve the actual problem than just tackling a few of the symptoms. The real issue isn’t travel, it is the environmental impact of the travel. Future technology can even provide alternatives to planes if need be. And ultimately, there is no law of physics that says that travel has to use any energy. The whole planet travels 1.5 million miles every day without using any energy at all!

The airline industry is currently researching the potential for both battery powered and hydrogen powered planes. If the hydrogen is produced in an environmentally friendly way, then that would certainly be one solution that would keep air travel going without creating major environmental problems. More interestingly, taking futurology back 100 years, we find ideas that may just have been ahead of their time. At the turn of the 20^th century, futurologists were suggesting long tubes through which people could be propelled in vehicles by compressed air. That idea is now making a comeback, with long tubes that use vacuums and magnetic propulsion instead of compressed air. De-pressurising the tubes reduces air resistance. Superconductivity will make these far better than is possible today. We do not yet posses the tunnelling technology to make such solutions viable on a widespread basis, but they may become viable for high speed city links in the not too far future. For overseas journeys, large plastic tubes might even work, suspended not too far below the surface. Again, once an object is moving, in the absence of friction, it will continue doing so with no power consumption. This could be a very low energy transport solution one day, or perhaps it will be still a curiosity in another 100 years.

Yet another novelty is the idea of using super-cavitation to allow supersonic submarines. It has apparently been demonstrated that high speed travel through water can be done with less resistance than through air. This effect has already been used for torpedo technology.

Virtual existence

Estimates of future population generally only include humans, but we won’t be the only intelligent beings on the planet much longer. Advances in AI promise to make sentient AIs in a decade or two and by the end of this century there will be millions or even billions of them, with a  wide range of intelligence levels and characteristics. They will not only exist to serve people. Some will have a purposeful existence of their own, just as we do. They will have their own culture, and we will interwork with them. AI’s are potentially very diverse in nature, just as organic life is. We shouldn’t assume that they will all sit in rooms looking like computers, or even walk around as robots. Some will, some won’t. Some AIs will stay in the same place. But that ‘place’ could be the entire global network and any associated computer. They may roam electronically. They may also consume resources just like we do, for entertainment, research, building, arts, even growing gardens. We should not preclude AIs necessarily from sharing at least some human interests, as well as many we don’t have. But we can reasonable assume that many or even most AIs are produced to serve human interests. They may help a great deal with science and technology development, so may be extremely valuable in the fight to achieve sustainability. But there are some other lines of thought worth listing before moving on.

Science fiction generally presents robots as having their ‘brain’ on board. With cloud working today, this already looks dated. It is highly likely that robots will have a mixture of on-board and remote capability for processing, sensing, storage and communication. Some robots will essentially be empty husks waiting for occupation by any AI that is capable of occupying them. Or human mind for that matter, once our technology is up to the job. Direct links to the brain are extremely embryonic today, but by 2050, remotely occupying a robot and feeling senses as if you were present in it should be feasible, and if not by then, certainly not long after. This is an important factor for sustainability. It opens the possibility that people could carry on in machine form after their biological bodies die, or even have multiple parallel existences in different forms. It also allows an alternative for of travel, where you simply hire a robot at the destination and use remote presence to be there. There is little point in detail here since these technologies are too far away and will happen in a very different world from ours. It is enough just to mention them and move on, as I will now.

The full report is completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf