Solving compliment inequality

Decades ago, cough, I went on a summer camp with loads of other people. At the end of the week, we were each given a sheet of paper, told to write our name on the top and then pass it to the person on our right. Everyone had to write something nice about everyone else when their sheet arrived. When we got our own sheets back, we could read all the nice things the other people had said about you after hanging around you for a week. It felt rewarding and was a simple but effective demonstration that being nice makes you feel nice. (So does blowing zillions of zombies to bits in a computer game, but let’s ignore that for now.)

With the many social networking sites now, it’s easy to send someone a nice message. Most of us occasionally do. My first question is: since we all know we like to receive kind words and compliments, and we know that everyone else does too, why don’t we do it more?

Someone realised that you could make an app for that and out came Kindr. I understand some of the problems in doing that. Do you have a fixed set to pick from? Do you let people write their own? Should it be anonymous or true ID? How do you prevent bullying? How do you make it pay for itself? Should it be standalone or link into other social media as a plugin? Well, the Kindr people actually got on with it and did it. Maybe it is still early days but I only found Kindr when I did a search for its functionality on Google. It hasn’t yet become the next Facebook, but it was a good idea and I hope it succeeds and grows and gets noticed more and a nice warm waves of niceness floods over society now and then. We need more kindness and love.

On the other hand, maybe it just wasn’t needed. It was already easy to be nice in many ways via existing media. I think the answer lies in basic human nature. We like hearing nice things about us much the same way as we like eating chocolate or ice cream. At first it is wonderful, but it soon makes us sick if we keep doing it. If so, then it is like appetite. Once satisfied, more is less. It is great to receive an occasional pleasant comment. After a while the extra reward levels off and eventually it can even become embarrassing or irritating. Like being kissed – once is great, two is quite sufficient, three is getting continental, please stop. Stroke a cat and it purrs. Keep stroking it and your hand will be full of holes. It isn’t healthy for the recipient to be praised too much either. Look at the ego disaster areas that feature so often on reality TV that have been told they’re wonderful 24/7 and believe it in spite of being as plain as the Serengeti.

I think most people intuitively know just how much is right. We compliment each other when something really deserves it, and then it feels good to both the receiver and the giver. If we do it all the time, it doesn’t. A few people go too far, a few don’t go far enough. I suspect most people could cope with a little more before it is too much but I don’t think we are too far off overall.

Maybe, like wealth, it isn’t the total volume that’s a problem, the real problem is distribution. That’s my point in this blog. Some people get a lot of praise all the time, some rarely get a kind word from anyone. It doesn’t cost anything or take long to say something nice, so we each have it in our power to fix that.

So next time you see someone who doesn’t look like life has treated them very well recently, make sure to give them a generous dose of appreciation. If they smile, you’ll feel better too.

 

Future fashion fun – digital eyebrows

I woke in the middle of the night with another idea not worth patenting, and I’m too lazy to do it, so any entrepreneur who’s too lazy to think of ideas can have it, unless someone already has.

If you make an app that puts a picture of an eyebrow on a phone screen and moves it according to some input (e.g voice, touch, or networked control by your friends or venue), you could use phones to do fun eyebrowy type things at parties, concerts, night clubs etc. You need two phones or a midi-sized tablet unless your eyes are very close together. The phones have accelerometers that know which way up they are and can therefore balance the eyebrows in the right positions. So you can make lots of funny expression on people’s faces using your phones.

Not a Facebook-level idea you’ll agree, but I can imagine some people doing it at parties, especially if they are all controlled by a single app, so that everyone’s eyebrows make the same expression.

You could do it for the whole eye/eyebrow, but then of course you can’t see the your friends laughing, since you’re holding a screen in front of your eyes.

You could have actual physical eyebrows that attach to the tops of your glasses, also controlled remotely.

You could use e-ink/e-paper and make small patches to stick on the skin that do the same function, or a headband. Since they don’t need much power, you won’t need big batteries.

You could do the same for your nose or mouth, so that you have a digitally modifiable face controlled by your friends.

I’m already bored.

Limits of ISIS terrorism in the UK

This is the 3rd article in my short series trying to figure out the level of terrorist danger ISIS poses in the UK, again comparing them with the IRA in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’. (ISIS = Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. IRA = Irish Republican Army). I don’t predict the level it will actually get to, which depends on too many factors, only the limits if everything goes their way.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/isis-comparison-with-the-ira-conflict/ discussed the key difference, that ISIS is a religious group and the IRA was a nationalist one.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/a-pc-roost-for-terrorist-chickens/ then discusses the increased vulnerability in the UK now thanks to ongoing political correctness.

IRA

Wikipedia says: The Provisional IRA’s armed campaign, primarily in Northern Ireland but also in England and mainland Europe, caused the deaths of approximately 1,800 people. The dead included around 1,100 members of the British security forces, and about 640 civilians.

It also gives a plausible estimate of the number of its members :

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was estimated that in the late 1980s the IRA had roughly 300 members in Active Service Units and about another 450 serving in supporting roles [such as “policing” nationalist areas, intelligence gathering, and hiding weapons.]

Sinn Fein, (which was often called the IRA’s ‘political wing’) managed to get 43% support from the nationalist community at its peak in 1981 after the hunger strikes. Provisional IRA approval ratings sat at around 30%. Supporting violence is not the same as supporting use of political means – some want to fight for a cause but won’t do so using violence. That 30% yields an IRA supporter population of around 75,000 from 245,000 nationalist voters. So, from a supporter population of 75,000, only 300 were in IRA active service units and 450 in supporting roles at any particular time, although thousands were involved over the whole troubles. That is a total of only 1% of the relevant population from which they were drawn – those who supported violent campaigns. Only 0.4% were in active service units, i.e actual terrorists. That is an encouragingly small percentage.

ISIS

Government estimate of the number of young men from the UK that went overseas to fight with ISIS is around 500. According to a former head of MI6, 300 have returned already. Some of those will be a problem and some will have lost sympathy with the cause, just as some men joined the IRA and later left, all the way through the troubles. Some will not have gone overseas and therefore can’t be identified and tracked the same way. Over time, ISIS will attempt to recruit more to the cause, and some will drop out. I can’t find official estimates of numbers but there are ways of making such estimates.

Building on Paddy Ashdown’s analogy with the IRA, the same kinds of young men will join ISIS as those who joined the IRA – those with no hope of status or fame or glory from their normal lives who want to be respected and be seen as heroic rebel fighters by holding a weapon, who are easy prey for charismatic leaders with exciting recruitment campaigns. The UK Muslim young men community faces high unemployment.

ISIS draws its support from the non-peace-loving minority of the Muslim community. Citing Wikipedia again, a Pew Research Centre poll showed 72% of Muslims worldwide said violence against civilians is never justified, surprisingly similar to the equivalent 70% found in the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland. They also found in the US and UK that over 1 in 4 Muslims think suicide bombing is sometimes justified, not very different from the world-wide level. (A 2006 survey by NOP found that only 9% of UK Muslims supported violence. Whether attitudes have changed or it is just the way questions are asked is anyone’s guess; for now, I’ll run with both, the calculations are easy.

The 25-30% figures are similar to the situation in Northern Ireland in spite of quite different causes. I lived a third of my life in Belfast and I don’t think the people there generally are any less civilized than people here in England. Maybe it’s just human nature that when faced with a common grievance, 25-30% of us will consider that violence is somewhat acceptable against civilians and support a sub-population of 0.4% terrorists fighting on our behalf.

On the other hand, the vast majority of 70%+ of us are peace-loving. A glass half full or half empty, take your pick.

The UK Muslim community is around 3 million, similar to the USA in fact. 28% of that yields a potential supporter population of  840,000. The potential terrorist 1% of that is 8,400 and 0.4% is 3,360.  If we’re optimistic and take NOP’s 2006 figure of 9% supporting violence, then 270,000 people would be supporting 1080 terrorists if the right terrorist group were to appear in the right circumstances with the right cause and the right leaders and good marketing and were to succeed in its campaigning. That puts an upper limit for extreme Islamist terrorism in the UK at between 3 and 11 times as big as the IRA was at its peak if everything goes its way.

However, neither is the actual number of UK ISIS terrorists, only the potential number of terrorists available if the cause/motivation is right, if the community buys into it, if the ISIS leaders are charismatic, and if they do their marketing well in their catchment communities. So far, 500 have emerged and actually gone off to fight with ISIS, 300 have returned. We don’t know how many stayed here or are only thinking of joining up, or aren’t even thinking of it but might, and we don’t know what will happen that might aggravate the situation and increase recruitment. We don’t know how many will try to come here that aren’t from the UK. There are plenty of ‘known unknowns’.

Some of the known unknowns  are good ones though – it isn’t all scary. In the Middle East, ISIS has clear objectives and controls cities, arms and finance. They say they want to cause problems here too, but they’re a bit busy right now, they don’t have a clear battle to fight here, and most of all our Muslim community doesn’t want to be the source of large scale terrorism so isn’t likely to be cooperative with such an extremist and barbaric group as ISIS. Their particular style of barbarism and particularly extremist views are likely to put off many who might consider supporting another extremist Islamist group. There also isn’t an easy supply of weapons here. All these work in our favor and will dampen ISIS efforts.

So the magnitude of the problem will come down to the relative efforts of our security forces, the efforts of the peace-loving Muslim majority to prevent young men being drawn towards extremism, and the success of ISIS marketing and recruitment. We do know that we do not want 3,360 home-grown ISIS terrorists wandering around the UK, or a similar number in the USA.

Finally, there are two sides to every conflict. ISIS terrorism would likely lead to opposing paramilitary groups. As far as their potential support base goes, ‘Far right’ parties add up to about 2%, about 1.25 million, but I would guess that a much higher proportion of an extremist group supports violence than the general population, so some hand-waving suggests that a similarly sized opposition supporter population terrorist group is not unlikely. We know from elsewhere in Ireland and other EU countries that that 2% could grow to the 25-30% we saw earlier if our government really loses control. In the USA, the catchment group on the ISIS side is still only the same size as the UK, but the potential armed resistance to them is far greater.

In summary, ISIS is potentially a big problem, with 300 home grown potential ISIS terrorists already here in the UK and trained, hundreds being trained overseas and an unknown quantity not yet on the radar. If all goes badly, that could grow to between 1000 and over 3000 active terrorists, compared to the IRA which typically only had 300 active terrorists at a time. Some recent trends have made us much more vulnerable, but there are also many other that lean against ISIS success.

I have a lot of confidence in our intelligence and security forces, who have already prevented a great many potential terrorist acts. The potential magnitude of the problem will keep them well-motivated for quite a while. There is a lot at stake, and ISIS must not get UK terrorism off the ground.

 

Your most likely cause of death is being switched off

This one’s short and sweet.

The majority of you reading this blog live in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. More than half of you are under 40.

That means your natural life expectancy is over 85, so statistically, your body will probably live until after 2060.

By then, electronic mind enhancement will probably mean that most of your mind runs on external electronics, not in your brain, so that your mind won’t die when your body does. You’ll just need to find a new body, probably an android, for those times you aren’t content being on the net. Most of us identify ourselves mainly as our mind, and would still think of ourselves as still alive if our mind carries on as if nothing much has happened, which is likely.

Electronic immortality is not true immortality though. Your mind can only survive on the net as long as it is supported by the infrastructure. That will be controlled by others. Future technology will likely be able to defend against asteroid strikes, power surges cause by solar storms and so on, so accidental death seems unlikely for hundreds of years. However, since minds supported on it need energy to continue running and electronics to be provided and maintained, and will want to make trips into the ‘real’ world, or even live there a lot of the time, they will have a significant resource footprint. They will probably not be considered as valuable as other people whose bodies are still alive. In fact they might be considered as competition – for jobs, resources, space, housing, energy… They may even be seen as easy targets for future cyber-terrorists.

So, it seems quite likely, maybe even inevitable, that life limits will be imposed on the vast majority of you. At some point you will simply be switched off. There might be some prioritization, competitions, lotteries or other selection mechanism, but only some will benefit from it.

Since you are unlikely to die when your body ceases to work, your most likely cause of death is therefore to be switched off. Sorry to break that to you.

A PC roost for terrorist chickens

Political correctness as a secular religion substitute

Being politically correct makes people feel they are good people. It provides a secular substitute for the psychological rewards people used to get from being devoutly religious, a self-built pedestal from which to sneer down on others who are not compliant with all the latest politically correct decrees. It started out long ago with a benign goal to protect abused and vulnerable minorities, but it has since evolved and mutated into a form of oppression in its own right. Surely we all want to protect the vulnerable and all want to stamp out racism, but political correctness long left those goals in the dust. Minorities are often protected without their consent or approval from things they didn’t even know existed, but still have to face any consequent backlash when they are blamed. Perceived oppressors are often victimized based on assumptions, misrepresentations and straw man analyses rather than actual facts or what they actually said. For PC devotees, one set of prejudices and bigotry is simply replaced by another. Instead of erasing barriers within society, political correctness often creates or reinforces them.

Unlike conventional religion, which is largely separated from the state and allows advocates to indulge with little effect on others, political correctness has no such state separation, but is instead deeply integrated into politics, hence its name. It often influences lawmakers, regulators, the media, police and even the judiciary and thereby incurs a cost of impact on the whole society. The PC elite standing on their pedestals get their meta-religious rewards at everyone’s expense, usually funded by the very taxpayers they oppress.

Dangers

Political correctness wouldn’t exist if many didn’t want it that way, but even if the rest of us object to it, it is something we have learned to live with. Sometimes however, denial of reality, spinning reasoning upside down or diverting attention away from unpleasant facts ceases to be just irritating and becomes dangerous. Several military and political leaders have recently expressed grave concerns about our vulnerability to a new wave of terrorism originating from the current Middle East problems. Even as the threat grows, the PC elite try to divert attention to blaming the West, equating moralities and cultural values and making it easier for such potential terrorism to gestate. There are a number of trends resulting from PC and together they add to the terrorist threats we’re currently facing while reducing our defenses, creating something of a perfect storm. Let’s look at some dangers that arise from just three PC themes – the worship of diversity, the redefining of racism, and moral equivalence and see some of the problems and weaknesses they cause. I know too little about the USA to make sensible comment on the exact situation there, but of course they are also targets of the same terrorist groups. I will talk about the UK situation, since that is where I live.

Worship of diversity

In the UK, the Labour Party admitted that they encouraged unchecked immigration throughout their time in power. It is now overloading public services and infrastructure across the UK, and it was apparently done ‘to rub the Conservatives’ noses in diversity’ (as well as to increase Labour supporter population). With EC policy equally PC, other EU countries have had to implement similar policies. Unfortunately, in their eagerness to be PC, neither the EC nor Labour saw any need to impose any limits or even a points system to ensure countries get the best candidates for their needs.

In spite of the PC straw man argument that is often used, the need for immigration is not in dispute, only its magnitude and sources. We certainly need immigration and most immigrants are just normal people just looking for a better life in the UK or refugees looking for safety from overseas conflicts. No reasonable person has any problem with immigration per se, nor the color of the immigrants, but any debate about immigration only last seconds before someone PC throws in accusations of racism, which I’ll discuss shortly. I think I am typical of most British people in being very happy to have people of all shades all around me, and would defend genuine efforts to win equality, but I still think we should not allow unlimited immigration. In reality, after happily welcoming generations of immigrants from diverse backgrounds, what most people see as the problem now is the number of people immigrating and the difficulties it makes for local communities to accommodate and provide services and resources for them, or sometimes even to communicate with them. Stresses have thus resulted from actions born of political correctness that was based on a fallacy, seeking to magnify a racism problem that had almost evaporated. Now that PC policy has created a situation of system overload and non-integration, tensions between communities are increasing and racism is likely to resurface. In this case, PC has already backfired, badly. Across the whole of Europe, the consequences of political correctness have led directly to increased polarization and the rise of extremist parties. It has achieved the exact opposite of the diversity utopia it originally set out to achieve. Like most British, I would like to keep racism consigned to history, but political correctness is resurrecting it.

There are security problems too. A few immigrants are not the nice ordinary people we’d be glad to have next door, but are criminals looking to vanish or religious extremists hoping to brainwash people, or terrorists looking for bases to plan future operations and recruit members. We may even have let in a few war criminals masquerading as refugees after their involvement in genocides. Nobody knows how many less-than-innocent ones are here but with possibly incompetent and certainly severely overworked border agencies, at least some of the holes in the net are still there.

Now that Edward Snowden has released many of the secrets of how our security forces stay on top of terrorism and the PC media have gleefully published some of them, terrorists can minimize their risk of being caught and maximize the numbers of people harmed by their activities. They can also immigrate and communicate more easily.

Redefining Racism

Racism as originally defined is a mainly historic problem in the UK, at least from the host community (i.e. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior). On that definition I have not heard a racist comment or witnessed a racist act against someone from an ethnic minority in the UK for well over a decade (though I accept some people may have a different experience; racism hasn’t vanished completely yet).

However, almost as if the main purpose were to keep the problem alive and protect their claim to holiness, the politically correct elite has attempted, with some legal success, to redefine racism from this ‘treating people of different race as inferior’, to “saying anything unfavorable, whether factual or not, to or about anyone who has a different race, religion, nationality, culture or even accent, or mimicking any of their attributes, unless you are from a protected minority. Some minorities however are to be considered unacceptable and not protected”. Maybe that isn’t how they might write it, but that is clearly what they mean.

I can’t buy into such a definition. It hides true racism and makes it harder to tackle. A healthy society needs genuine equality of race, color, gender, sexuality and age, not privileges for some and oppression for others.

I don’t believe in cultural or ideological equality. Culture and ideology should not be entitled to the same protection as race or color or gender. People can’t choose what color or nationality they were born, but they can choose what they believe and how they behave, unless oppression genuinely prevents them from choosing. We need to clearly distinguish between someone’s race and their behavior and culture, not blur the two. Cultures are not equal. They differ in how they treat people, how they treat animals, their views on democracy, torture, how they fight, their attitudes to freedom of speech and religion. If someone’s religion or culture doesn’t respect equality and freedom and democracy, or if it accepts torture of people or animals, or if its fighters don’t respect the Geneva Convention, then I don’t respect it; I don’t care what color or race or nationality they are.

Opinions are not all equally valid either. You might have an opinion that my art is every bit as good as Monet’s and Dali’s. If so, you’re an idiot, whatever your race or gender.

I can criticize culture or opinion or religion without any mention of race or skin color, distinguishing easily between what is inherited and what is chosen, between body and mind. No big achievement; so can most people. We must protect that distinction. If we lose that distinction between body and mind, there can be no right and wrong, and no justice. If you have freedom of choice, then you also have a responsibility for your choice and you should accept the consequences of that choice. If we can accept a wrong just because it comes from someone in a minority group or is approved of by some religion, how long will it be before criminals are considered just another minority? A recent UK pedophile scandal involved senior PC politicians supporting a group arguing for reduction of the age of consent to 10 and decriminalization of sex with young children. They didn’t want to offend the minority group seeking it, that wouldn’t have been politically correct enough. Although it was a long time ago, it still shows that it may only be a matter of time before being a pedophile is considered just another lifestyle choice, as good as any other. If it has happened once, it may happen again, and the PC climate next time might let it through.

Political correctness prevents civilized discussion across a broad field of academic performance, crime, culture and behavior and therefore prevents many social problems from being dealt with. The PC design of ‘hate crime’ with deliberately fuzzy boundaries generates excess censorship by officialdom and especially self-censorship across society due to fear of false accusation or accidentally falling foul of it. That undermines communication between groups and accelerates tribal divisions and conflict. Views that cannot be voiced can still exist and may grow more extreme and when finally given an outlet, may cause far greater problems.

PC often throws up a self-inflicted problem when a member of a minority group does or says something bad or clearly holds views that are also politically incorrect. PC media tries to avoid reporting any such occurrences, usually trying to divert attention onto another topic and accusing any other media that does deal with it of being racist or use their other weapon, the ad-hom attack. If they can’t avoid reporting it, they strenuously avoid any mention of the culprit’s minority group and if they can’t do that, will search for some way to excuse it, blame it on someone else or pretend it doesn’t matter. Although intended to avoid feeding racism, this makes it more difficult to get the debate necessary and can even increase suspicion of cover-ups and preferential treatment.

Indeed accusations of racism have become a powerful barrier to be thrown up whenever an investigation threatens to uncover any undesirable activity by a member of any ethnic or national minority and even more-so if a group is involved. For example, the authorities were widely accused of racism for investigating the ‘Trojan Horse’ stories, in a city that has already produced many of the recent UK additions to ISIS. Police need to be able to investigate and root out activities that could lead to more extremism and especially those that might be brainwashing kids for terrorism. A police force now terrified of being accused of being institutionally racist is greatly impeded when the race card is played. With an ever-expanding definition, it is played more and more frequently.

Moral relativism

It is common on TV to see atrocities by one side in overseas conflicts being equated to lesser crimes by the other. In fact, rather than even declaring equivalence, PC moral equivalence seemingly insists that all moral judgments are valued in inverse proportion to their commonality with traditional Western values. At best it often equates things from either side that really should not be equated. This creates a highly asymmetric playing field that benefits propaganda from terrorist groups and rogue regimes and undermines military efforts to prevent terrorist acts. It also decreases resistance to views and behaviors that undermine existing values while magnifying any grievance against the West.

PC media often gives a platform to extremists hoping to win new recruits, presumably so they can pretend to be impartial. While our security forces were doing their best to remove recruitment propaganda from the web, some TV news programs gleefully gave them regular free air time. Hate preachers have often been given lengthy interviews to put their arguments across.

The West’s willingness to defend itself is already greatly undermined after decades of moral equivalence eating away at any notion that we have something valuable or special to defend. Fewer and fewer people are prepared to defend our countries or our values against those who wish to replace liberal democracy with medieval tyranny. Our armies fight with threats of severe legal action and media spotlights highlighting every misjudgment on our side, while fighting against those who respect no such notions of civilized warfare.

Summary

Individually, these are things we have learned to live with, but added together, they put the West at a huge disadvantage when faced with media-savvy enemies such as ISIS. We can be certain that ISIS will make full use of each and every one of these PC weaknesses in our cultural defense. The PC chickens may come home to roost.

 

 

ISIS. Comparison with the IRA conflict

Paddy Ashdown just tweeted:

Young UK Muslims joining ISIS; no more typical of islam than young Catholic men joining the IRA, was typical of Catholocism.

It is very rare for me to tweet at politicians, but I think he is partly wrong this time (ignoring the twittery typos). So I responded, to the wrong bit.

IRA was drawn from IRISH Catholics for whom Ireland, not religion was their banner. ISIS is religious not geographic campaign.

I’ll also pick up on where he was right later. Paddy Ashdown is a brave ex-soldier, one of the elite. I normally listen carefully to what he says on TV, and he often makes a very good case, but he makes errors just like the rest of us, and has tinted glasses just like the rest of us. Occasionally he changes my mind on something, which is fine. However, it is a common misunderstanding among the British that the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ were about religion. It was certainly a tribal conflict but it had mixed motivations. As an English Catholic living there through the troubles, changing religion and marrying across the divide, I got flak occasionally on both religion and nationality, but never any serious harm.

The IRA was fighting for a United Ireland, and drew its members and supporters from the Irish nationalist community, almost 100% of whom were Roman Catholic. Doubtless a few of the boys who joined up thought they were doing so to defend Catholics against protestants, but that wasn’t actually what the IRA stood for. The UDA and UVF drew their support from the protestant community, again with a mixed and variable brief of defending Protestantism, defending Ulster and keeping Northern Ireland British. The protestant community mostly descended from Scottish Presbyterians. The troubles were part sectarian and part about nationality, sovereignty and tribal descent. Because there was so much commonality of religious affiliation and being British or Irish, it often did degenerate into simple sectarianism, but that was never its primary driving force, which was whether Northern Ireland should remain British or revert to being part of a united Ireland. That is where Ashdown is wrong. ISIS may have its roots and some major goals in a geographic region but fundamentally it wants to further its cause of extreme Islamism as globally as it can, drawing its members from as wide an area as it can and to fight globally as far as it can. It is religious, not nationalist in its primary motivation.

Now to where Ashdown is right. The IRA and ISIS both draw their members from young men, easy to influence, and both organisations were good at marketing, motivating those young men to recruit and instilling fervor when they did. In both cases also, the young men came from a diverse cross section of the community. There were the intellectual types who had analysed it all and strongly bought in to the cause, and there were the less intellectual types who understood a more simplified message but really just wanted to be somebody, coming from areas offering little or no chance of life success or and chance of status, for whom picking up an Armalite of Kalashnikov rifle would make them someone, create at least the illusion of having respect and status.

The sorts of young men joining ISIS are probably doing so for diverse reasons too, but in their case, even the simplified messages are religious. A few will have fully understood and internalized the cause, many will have understood a very simplified message of doing their bit to defend Islam or Allah and becoming a martyr, but most probably just want to be someone, to have some status and respect. Sadly, very many of the young men joining ISIS will not fully understand what they are getting into or what they are meant to be fighting for. In that sense they are like the few young men who joined the IRA to defend Catholics against Protestants.

We may see this conflict coming to the UK. Our security forces expect people to try hard to make that happen, so they are on the case. Whether and to what degree they succeed we will see. If ISIS do manage to achieve some UK terrorism, we’re likely to see opposing paramilitary groups develop and grow. We’re already seeing a few contenders eager to size that role. If it gets badly out of control, it is possible that a Northern Ireland style conflict could result with extremist groups fighting against each other. The civilian population would be in the line of fire from both sides. Deaths would encourage young people to join up to have the chance to be heroes, and views can harden quickly, increasing the support base and the size of the community from which recruits can be drawn. In Northern Ireland, only a small number of men joined up to fight in the IRA, INLA, UDA or UVF, but there was a large community support behind them, which was occasionally estimated at around the 30% mark.

Our security forces know this risk and are doing their best to avoid it, taking down recruitment sites as fast as they can and trying to police movement across our borders. ISIS have also shown that they are good at the marketing side, managing to get lengthy adverts for their recruitment messages almost nightly on alarmingly cooperative national TV news programs. These news programs are helping to make it as seemingly cool and heroic to join ISIS as it ever was to join the IRA or its opposition. Terrorism can’t flourish without publicity, but these channels seem determined to give them it.

There’s another difference from the conflict in Northern Ireland. The paramilitaries in Northern Ireland didn’t normally decapitate their victims, and normally they would issue warnings before a bombing. ISIS make them look almost civilized.

As an after-thought, has the war on terrorism just mutated into a war on horrorism?

 

 

Future human evolution

I’ve done patches of work on this topic frequently over the last 20 years. It usually features in my books at some point too, but it’s always good to look afresh at anything. Sometimes you see something you didn’t see last time.

Some of the potential future is pretty obvious. I use the word potential, because there are usually choices to be made, regulations that may or may not get in the way, or many other reasons we could divert from the main road or even get blocked completely.

We’ve been learning genetics now for a long time, with a few key breakthroughs. It is certain that our understanding will increase, less certain how far people will be permitted to exploit the potential here in any given time frame. But let’s take a good example to learn a key message first. In IVF, we can filter out embryos that have the ‘wrong’ genes, and use their sibling embryos instead. Few people have a problem with that. At the same time, pregnant women may choose an abortion if they don’t want a child when they discover it is the wrong gender, but in the UK at least, that is illegal. The moral and ethical values of our society are on a random walk though, changing direction frequently. The social assignment of right and wrong can reverse completely in just 30 years. In this example, we saw a complete reversal of attitudes to abortion itself within 30 years, so who is to say we won’t see reversal on the attitude to abortion due to gender? It is unwise to expect that future generations will have the same value sets. In fact, it is highly unlikely that they will.

That lesson likely applies to many technology developments and quite a lot of social ones – such as euthanasia and assisted suicide, both already well into their attitude reversal. At some point, even if something is distasteful to current attitudes, it is pretty likely to be legalized eventually, and hard to ban once the door is opened. There will always be another special case that opens the door a little further. So we should assume that we may eventually use genetics to its full capability, even if it is temporarily blocked for a few decades along the way. The same goes for other biotech, nanotech, IT, AI and any other transhuman enhancements that might come down the road.

So, where can we go in the future? What sorts of splits can we expect in the future human evolution path? It certainly won’t remain as just plain old homo sapiens.

I drew this evolution path a long time ago in the mid 1990s:

It was clear even then that we could connect external IT to the nervous system, eventually the brain, and this would lead to IT-enhanced senses, memory, processing, higher intelligence, hence homo cyberneticus. (No point in having had to suffer Latin at school if you aren’t allowed to get your own back on it later). Meanwhile, genetic enhancement and optimization of selected features would lead to homo optimus. Converging these two – why should you have to choose, why not have a perfect body and an enhanced mind? – you get homo hybridus. Meanwhile, in the robots and AI world, machine intelligence is increasing and we eventually we get the first self-aware AI/robot (it makes little sense to separate the two since networked AI can easily be connected to a machine such as a robot) and this has its own evolution path towards a rich diversity of different kinds of AI and robots, robotus multitudinus. Since both the AI world and the human world could be networked to the same network, it is then easy to see how they could converge, to give homo machinus. This future transhuman would have any of the abilities of humans and machines at its disposal. and eventually the ability to network minds into a shared consciousness. A lot of ordinary conventional humans would remain, but with safe upgrades available, I called them homo sapiens ludditus. As they watch their neighbors getting all the best jobs, winning at all the sports, buying everything, and getting the hottest dates too, many would be tempted to accept the upgrades and homo sapiens might gradually fizzle out.

My future evolution timeline stayed like that for several years. Then in the early 2000s I updated it to include later ideas:

I realized that we could still add AI into computer games long after it becomes comparable with human intelligence, so games like EA’s The Sims might evolve to allow entire civilizations living within a computer game, each aware of their existence, each running just as real a life as you and I. It is perhaps unlikely that we would allow children any time soon to control fully sentient people within a computer game, acting as some sort of a god to them, but who knows, future people will argue that they’re not really real people so it’s OK. Anyway, you could employ them in the game to do real knowledge work, and make money, like slaves. But since you’re nice, you might do an incentive program for them that lets them buy their freedom if they do well, letting them migrate into an android. They could even carry on living in their Sims home and still wander round in our world too.

Emigration from computer games into our world could be high, but the reverse is also possible. If the mind is connected well enough, and enhanced so far by external IT that almost all of it runs on the IT instead of in the brain, then when your body dies, your mind would carry on living. It could live in any world, real or fantasy, or move freely between them. (As I explained in my last blog, it would also be able to travel in time, subject to certain very expensive infrastructural requirements.) As well as migrants coming via electronic immortality route, it would be likely that some people that are unhappy in the real world might prefer to end it all and migrate their minds into a virtual world where they might be happy. As an alternative to suicide, I can imagine that would be a popular route. If they feel better later, they could even come back, using an android.  So we’d have an interesting future with lots of variants of people, AI and computer game and fantasy characters migrating among various real and imaginary worlds.

But it doesn’t stop there. Meanwhile, back in the biotech labs, progress is continuing to harness bacteria to make components of electronic circuits (after which the bacteria are dissolved to leave the electronics). Bacteria can also have genes added to emit light or electrical signals. They could later be enhanced so that as well as being able to fabricate electronic components, they could power them too. We might add various other features too, but eventually, we’re likely to end up with bacteria that contain electronics and can connect to other bacteria nearby that contain other electronics to make sophisticated circuits. We could obviously harness self-assembly and self-organisation, which are also progressing nicely. The result is that we will get smart bacteria, collectively making sophisticated, intelligent, conscious entities of a wide variety, with lots of sensory capability distributed over a wide range. Bacteria Sapiens.

I often talk about smart yogurt using such an approach as a key future computing solution. If it were to stay in a yogurt pot, it would be easy to control. But it won’t. A collective bacterial intelligence such as this could gain a global presence, and could exist in land, sea and air, maybe even in space. Allowing lots of different biological properties could allow colonization of every niche. In fact, the first few generations of bacteria sapiens might be smart enough to design their own offspring. They could probably buy or gain access to equipment to fabricate them and release them to multiply. It might be impossible for humans to stop this once it gets to a certain point. Accidents happen, as do rogue regimes, terrorism and general mad-scientist type mischief.

And meanwhile, we’ll also be modifying nature. We’ll be genetically enhancing a wide range of organisms, bringing some back from extinction, creating new ones, adding new features, changing even some of the basic mechanism by which nature works in some cases. We might even create new kinds of DNA or develop substitutes with enhanced capability. We may change nature’s evolution hugely. With a mix of old and new and modified, nature evolves nicely into Gaia Sapiens.

We’re not finished with the evolution chart though. Here is the next one:

Just one thing is added. Homo zombius. I realized eventually that the sci-fi ideas of zombies being created by viruses could be entirely feasible. A few viruses, bacteria and other parasites can affect the brains of the victims and change their behaviour to harness them for their own life cycle.

See http://io9.com/12-real-parasites-that-control-the-lives-of-their-hosts-461313366 for fun.

Bacteria sapiens could be highly versatile. It could make virus variants if need be. It could evolve itself to be able to live in our bodies, maybe penetrate our brains. Bacteria sapiens could make tiny components that connect to brain cells and intercept signals within our brains, or put signals back in. It could read our thoughts, and then control our thoughts. It could essentially convert people into remote controlled robots, or zombies as we usually call them. They could even control muscles directly to a point, so even if the zombie is decapitated, it could carry on for a short while. I used that as part of my storyline in Space Anchor. If future humans have widespread availability of cordless electricity, as they might, then it is far fetched but possible that headless zombies could wander around for ages, using the bacterial sensors to navigate. Homo zombius would be mankind enslaved by bacteria. Hopefully just a few people, but it could be everyone if we lose the battle. Think how difficult a war against bacteria would be, especially if they can penetrate anyone’s brain and intercept thoughts. The Terminator films looks a lot less scary when you compare the Terminator with the real potential of smart yogurt.

Bacteria sapiens might also need to be consulted when humans plan any transhuman upgrades. If they don’t consent, we might not be able to do other transhuman stuff. Transhumans might only be possible if transbacteria allow it.

Not done yet. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about fairies. I suggested fairies are entirely feasible future variants that would be ideally suited to space travel.

Fairies will dominate space travel

They’d also have lots of environmental advantages as well as most other things from the transhuman library. So I think they’re inevitable. So we should add fairies to the future timeline. We need a revised timeline and they certainly deserve their own branch. But I haven’t drawn it yet, hence this blog as an excuse. Before I do and finish this, what else needs to go on it?

Well, time travel in cyberspace is feasible and attractive beyond 2075. It’s not the proper real world time travel that isn’t permitted by physics, but it could feel just like that to those involved, and it could go further than you might think. It certainly will have some effects in the real world, because some of the active members of the society beyond 2075 might be involved in it. It certainly changes the future evolution timeline if people can essentially migrate from one era to another (there are some very strong caveats applicable here that I tried to explain in the blog, so please don’t misquote me as a nutter – I haven’t forgotten basic physics and logic, I’m just suggesting a feasible implementation of cyberspace that would allow time travel within it. It is really a cyberspace bubble that intersects with the real world at the real time front so doesn’t cause any physics problems, but at that intersection, its users can interact fully with the real world and their cultural experiences of time travel are therefore significant to others outside it.)

What else? OK, well there is a very significant community (many millions of people) that engages in all sorts of fantasy in shared on-line worlds, chat rooms and other forums. Fairies, elves, assorted spirits, assorted gods, dwarves, vampires, werewolves, assorted furry animals, assorted aliens, dolls,  living statues, mannequins, remote controlled people, assorted inanimate but living objects, plants and of course assorted robot/android variants are just some of those that already exist in principle; I’m sure I’ve forgotten some here and anyway, many more are invented every year so an exhaustive list would quickly become out of date. In most cases, many people already role play these with a great deal of conviction and imagination, not just in standalone games, but in communities, with rich cultures, back-stories and story-lines. So we know there is a strong demand, so we’re only waiting for their implementation once technology catches up, and it certainly will.

Biotech can do a lot, and nanotech and IT can add greatly to that. If you can design any kind of body with almost any kind of properties and constraints and abilities, and add any kind of IT and sensing and networking and sharing and external links for control and access and duplication, we will have an extremely rich diversity of future forms with an infinite variety of subcultures, cross-fertilization, migration and transformation. In fact, I can’t add just a few branches to my timeline. I need millions. So instead I will just lump all these extras into a huge collected category that allows almost anything, called Homo Whateverus.

So, here is the future of human (and associates) evolution, for the next 150 years. A few possible cross-links are omitted for clarity

I won’t be around to watch it all happen. But a lot of you will.

 

Time Travel: Cyberspace opens a rift in the virtual time-space continuum

Dr Who should have written this but he didn’t so I have to. We keep seeing those cute little tears in space-time in episodes of the BBC’s Dr Who, that let through Daleks and Cybermen and other nasties. (As an aside, how come feminists never seem to object to the term Cybermen, even though 50% of them are made from women?). Dr Who calls them rifts, and it allegedly needs the energy of entire star systems to open and close them. So, not much use as a weapon then, but still a security issue if our universe leaks.

Sci-fi authors have recognized the obvious dangers of time-space rifts for several decades. They cause problems with causality as well. I got a Physics degree a long time ago (well, Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, but all the maths was EM theory, quantum mechanics and relativity, so it was really a physics degree), but I have never really understood fully why causality is such a big deal. Sure it needs a lot of explaining if it fails, but why would an occasional causal error cause such a huge problem? The Daleks are far more worrying. **Politically incorrect joke censored**

I just wrote about time travel again. All competent physicists rightly switch on their idiot filters automatically on hearing any of the terms ‘cold fusion’, ‘telekinetic’, ‘psychic’, ‘perpetual motion machine’, ‘time travel’ or ‘global warming catastrophe’. Sorry, that last one just sort of crept in there. Time travel is not really possible, unless you’re inside a black hole or you’re talking about a particle shifting atoseconds in a huge accelerator or GPS relativistic corrections or something. A Tardis isn’t going to be here any time soon and may be impossible and never ever come. However, there is a quite real cyberspace route to quite real time travel that will become feasible around 2075, a virtual rift if you like, but no need to activate idiot filters just yet, it’s only a virtual rift, a rift in a sandbox effectively, and it won’t cause the universe to collapse or violate any known laws of physics. So, hit the temporary override button on your idiot filter. It’s a fun thought experiment that gets more and more fun the more you look at it. (Einstein invented thought experiments to investigate relativity, because he couldn’t do any real experiments with the technology of his time. We can’t verify this sort of time travel experimentally yet so thought experiment is the only mechanism available. Sadly, I don’t have Einstein’s brain to hand, but some aspects at least are open to the rest of us to explore.) The hypothesis here is that if you can make a platform that stores the state of all the minds in a system continuously over a period from A to B, and that runs all those minds continuously using a single editable record, then you can travel in time freely between A and B.  Now we need to think it through a bit to test the hypothesis and see what virtual physics we can learn from it, see how real it would be and what it would need and lead to.

I recognized on my first look at it in

The future of time travel: cheat

that cyberspace offers a time travel cheat. The basic idea, to save you reading it now that it’s out of date, is that some time soon after 2050 – let’s take 2075 as the date that crowd-funding enables its implementation – we’ll all be able to connect our brains so well to the machine world that it will be possible to share thoughts and consciousness, sensations, effectively share bodies, live electronically until all the machines stop working, store your mind as a snapshot periodically in case you want to restore to an earlier backup and do all sorts of really fun things like swapping personalities. (You can see why it might attract the required funding so might well become real).  If that recording of your mind is complete enough, and it could be, then, you really could go back to an earlier state of yourself. More importantly, a future time tourist could access all the stored records and create an instance of your mind and chat to you and chat and interact with you from the future. This would allow future historians to do history better. Well, that’s the basic version. Our thought experiment version needs to go a bit further than that. Let’s call it the deluxe version.

If you implement the deluxe version, then minds run almost entirely on the machine world platform, and are hosted there with frequent restore points. The current state of the system is an interactive result of real-time running of all the minds held in cyberspace across the whole stored timeline. For those minds running on the deluxe version platform, there isn’t any other reality. That’s what makes up those future humans and AIs on it. Once you join the system, you can enjoy all of the benefits above and many more.

You could actually change old records and use the machines to ripple the full system-wide consequences all the way through the timeline to whenever your future today is. It would allow you to go back to visit your former self and do some editing, wouldn’t it? And in this deluxe version, the edits you make would ripple through into your later self. That’s what you get when you migrate the human mind from the Mk1 human brain platform into the machine world platform. It becomes endlessly replicable and editable. In this deluxe version, the future world really could be altered by editing the past. You may reasonably ask why we would allow any moron to allow that to be built, but that won’t affect the theoretical ability to travel in time through cyberspace.

It is very easy to see how such a system allows you to chat with someone in the past. What is less obvious, and what my excuse for a brain missed first time round, is that it also lets you travel forwards in time. How, you may reasonably ask, can you access and edit records that don’t exist yet? Well, think of it from the other direction. Someone in the future can restore any previous instance of you from any time point and talk to them, even edit them. They could do that all in some sort of time-play sandbox to save money and avoid quite a few social issues, or they could restore you fully to their time, and since the reality is just real-time emulation all rippled through nicely by the machine platform, you would suddenly appear in the future and become part of that future world. You could wander around in a future android body and do physical things in that future physical world just as if you’d always lived there. Your future self would feel they have travelled in time. But a key factor here is that it could be your future self that makes it happen. You could make a request in 2075 to your future self to bring you to the future in 2150. When 2150 arrives, you see (or might even remember) the request, you go into the archives, and you restore your old 2075 self to 2150, then you instruct deletion of all the records between 2075 and 2150 and then you push the big red button. The system runs all the changes and effects through the timeline, and the result is that you disappear in 2075, and suddenly reappear in 2150.

There would be backups of the alternative timeline, but the official and effective system reality would be that you travelled from 2075 to 2150. That will be the reality running on the deluxe system. Any other realities are just backups and records on a database. Now,so far it’s a one way trip, far better if you can have a quick trip to the future and come back. So, you’re in 2150, suppose you want to go back again. You’ve been around a while and don’t like the new music or the food or something. So before you go, you do the usual time mischief. You collect lots of really useful data about how all the latest tech works, buy the almanacs of who wins what, just like in Back to the Future, just in case the system has bugs that let you use them, and you tweak the dials again. You set the destination to 2075 and hit the big red button. The system writes your new future-wise self over your original 2075 entry, keeping a suitable backup of course. The entry used by the deluxe system is whatever is written in its working record, and that is the you that went to 2150 and back. Any other realities are just backups. So, the system ripples it all through the timeline. You start the day in 2075, have a quick trip for a week’s holiday in 2150, and then return a few minutes later. Your 2075 self will have experienced a trip to 2150 and come back, complete with all the useful data about the 2150 world. If you don’t mess with anything else, you will remember that trip until 2150, at which time you’ll grab a few friends and chat about the first time you ever did time travel.

All of the above is feasible theoretically, and none of it violates any known physics. The universe won’t collapse in a causality paradox bubble rift if you do it, no need to send for Dr Who. That doesn’t mean it isn’t without issues. It still creates a lot of the time travel issues we are so familiar with from sci-fi. But this one isn’t sci-fi – we could build it, and we could get the crowd-funding to make it real by 2075. Don’t get too excited yet though.

You could have gone further into the future than 2150 too, but there is a limit. You can only go as far as there exists a continuous record from where you are. You basically need a road that goes all the way there. If some future authority bans time travel or changes to an incompatible system, that represents a wall you can’t pass through. An even later authority could only remove that wall under certain circumstances, and only if they have the complete records, and the earlier authority might have stopped storing them or even deleted earlier ones and that would ruin any chances of doing it properly.

So, having established that it is possible, we have to ask the more serious question: how real is this time travel? Is it just a cyberspace trick with no impact on the real world? Well, in this scenario, your 2075 mind runs on the deluxe system using its 2075 record. But which one, the old one or the edited one? The edited one of course. The old version is overwritten and ceases to exist except as a backup. There remains no reality except the one you did your time travel trip in. Your time trip is real. But let’s ask a few choice questions, because reality can turn out to be just an illusion sometimes.

So, when you get home to 2075, you can print off your 2150 almanac and brag about all the new technologies you just invented from 2150. Yes?

Yes… if you implement the deluxe version.

Is there a causality paradox?

No.

Will the world end?

No.

But you just short-circuited technology development from 2075 to 2150?

Yes.

So you can do real time travel from 2075? You’ll suddenly vanish from 2075, spend some time in 2150, and later reappear in 2075?

Yes, if you implement the deluxe version.

Well, what happens in 2150?

You’ll do all the pushing red button stuff and have a party with your friends to remember your first time trip. If you set the times right, you could even invite your old self from 2075 as a guest and wave goodbye as you* goes back to 2075.

Or you* could stay in 2150 and there’d be two of you from then on?

Yes

OK, this sounds great fun.  So when can we build this super-duper deluxe version that let’s you time travel from 2075 to 2150 and go back again.

2150

And what happens to me between 2075 and 2150 while I wait for it to be built?

Well, you invest in the deluxe version, connect into the system, and it starts recording all its subscribers’ minds from then on, and you carry on enjoying life until 2150 arrives. Then you can travel from 2075 to 2150, retrospectively.

Retrospectively?

Well, you can travel from 2075 to whatever date in the future the deluxe system still exists. And your 2075 self will fully experience it as time travel. It won’t feel retrospective.

But you have to wait till that date before you can go there?

Yes. But you won’t remember having to wait, all the records of that will be wiped, you’ll just vanish in 2075 and reappear in 2150 or whenever.

What *insert string of chosen expletives here* use is that?

Erm…. Well…. You will still have enjoyed a nice life from 2075 to 2150 before it’s deleted and replaced.

But I won’t remember that will I?

No. But you won’t remember it when you’re dead either.

So I can only do this sort of time travel by having myself wiped off the system for all the years in between after I’ve done it? So the best way of doing that is not to bother with all the effort of living through all those years since they’re going to be deleted anyway and save all the memory and processing by just hibernation in the archives till that date arrives? So I’ll really vanish in 2075 and be restored in 2150 and feel it as time travel? And there won’t be any messy database records to clean up in between, and it will all be nice and environmentally friendly? And not having to run all those people years that would later be deleted will reduce storage and processing costs and system implementation costs dramatically?

Exactly!

OK, sounds a bit better again. But it’s still a fancy cyberspace hibernation scheme really isn’t it?

Well, you can travel back and forth through time as much as you like and socialize with anyone from any time zone and live in any time period. Some people from 2150 might prefer to live in 2075 and some from 2075 prefer to live in 2150. Everyone can choose when they live or just roam freely through the entire time period. A bit like that episode of Star Trek TOS where they all got sent through a portal to different places and times and mixed with societies made of others who had come the same way. You could do that. A bit like a glorified highly immersive computer game.

But what about gambling and using almanacs from the future? And inventing stuff in 2075 that isn’t really invented till 2150?

All the knowledge and data from 2150 will be there in the 2075 system so you won’t have anything new and gambling won’t be a viable industry. But it won’t be actually there until 2150. So the 2075 database will be a retrospective singularity where all of the future knowledge suddenly appears.

Isn’t that a rift in the time-space continuum, letting all the future weapons and political activists and terrorists and their plans through from 2150 to 2075? And Daleks? Some idiot will build one just for the hell of it. They’ll come through the rift too won’t they. And Cyberpersons?

It will not be without technical difficulties. And anyway, they can’t do any actual damage outside the system.

But these minds running in the system will be connected to android bodies or humans outside it. Their minds can time travel through cyberspace. Can’t they do anything nasty?

No, they can only send their minds back and connect to stuff within the system. Any androids and bodies could only be inhabited by first generation minds that belong to that physical time. They can only make use of androids or other body sharing stuff when they travel forwards through time, because it is their chosen future date where the android lives and they can arrange that. On a journey backwards, they can only change stuff running in the system.

 And that’s what stops it violating physics?

Yes

So let’s get this straight. This whole thing is great for extending your mind into cyberspace, sharing bodies, swapping personalities, changing gender or age, sharing consciousness and  some other things. But time travel is only possible for your mind that is supported exclusively in the system. And only that bit in the system can time travel. And your actual 2075 body can’t feel the effect at all or do anything about it? So it’s really another you that this all happens to and you start diverging from your other cyber-self the moment you connect. A replica of you enjoys all the benefits but it thinks it is you and feels like you and essentially is you, but not in the real world. And the original you carries on in parallel.

Correct. It is a big cyberspace bubble created over time with continuous timeline emulation, that only lets you time travel and interact within the bubble. Like an alternative universe, and you can travel in time in it. But it can only interact with the physical universe in real time at the furthermost frontier of the bubble. A frontier that moves into the future at the same speed as the rest of the local space-time continuum and doesn’t cause any physics problems or real time paradoxes outside of the system.

So it’s not REAL time travel. It’s just a sort of cyber-sandbox, albeit one that will be good fun and still worth building.

You can time travel in the parallel universe that you make in cyberspace. But it will be real within that universe. Forwards physical time travel is additionally possible in the physical universe if you migrate your mind totally into cyberspace, e.g. when you die, so you can live electronically, and even then it is really just a fancy form of hibernation. And if you travel back in time in the system, you won’t be able to interact with the physical stuff in the past, only what is running on the system. As long as you accept those limitations, you can travel in time after 2075 and live in any period supported after that.

Why do all the good things only ever happen in another universe?

I don’t know.

No physics or mathematics has knowingly been harmed during this thought experiment. No responsibility is accepted for any time-space rifts created as a result of analytical error.

 

 

Time – The final frontier. Maybe

It is very risky naming the final frontier. A frontier is just the far edge of where we’ve got to.

Technology has a habit of opening new doors to new frontiers so it is a fast way of losing face. When Star Trek named space as the final frontier, it was thought to be so. We’d go off into space and keep discovering new worlds, new civilizations, long after we’ve mapped the ocean floor. Space will keep us busy for a while. In thousands of years we may have gone beyond even our own galaxy if we’ve developed faster than light travel somehow, but that just takes us to more space. It’s big, and maybe we’ll never ever get to explore all of it, but it is just a physical space with physical things in it. We can imagine more than just physical things. That means there is stuff to explore beyond space, so space isn’t the final frontier.

So… not space. Not black holes or other galaxies.

Certainly not the ocean floor, however fashionable that might be to claim. We’ll have mapped that in details long before the rest of space. Not the centre of the Earth, for the same reason.

How about cyberspace? Cyberspace physically includes all the memory in all our computers, but also the imaginary spaces that are represented in it. The entire physical universe could be simulated as just a tiny bit of cyberspace, since it only needs to be rendered when someone looks at it. All the computer game environments and virtual shops are part of it too. The cyberspace tree doesn’t have to make a sound unless someone is there to hear it, but it could. The memory in computers is limited, but the cyberspace limits come from imagination of those building or exploring it. It is sort of infinite, but really its outer limits are just a function of our minds.

Games? Dreams? Human Imagination? Love? All very new agey and sickly sweet, but no. Just like cyberspace, these are also all just different products of the human mind, so all of these can be replaced by ‘the human mind’ as a frontier. I’m still not convinced that is the final one though. Even if we extend that to greatly AI-enhanced future human mind, it still won’t be the final frontier. When we AI-enhance ourselves, and connect to the smart AIs too, we have a sort of global consciousness, linking everyone’s minds together as far as each allows. That’s a bigger frontier, since the individual minds and AIs add up to more cooperative capability than they can achieve individually. The frontier is getting bigger and more interesting. You could explore other people directly, share and meld with them. Fun, but still not the final frontier.

Time adds another dimension. We can’t do physical time travel, and even if we can do so in physics labs with tiny particles for tiny time periods, that won’t necessarily translate into a practical time machine to travel in the physical world. We can time travel in cyberspace though, as I explained in

The future of time travel: cheat

and when our minds are fully networked and everything is recorded, you’ll be able to travel back in time and genuinely interact with people in the past, back to the point where the recording started. You would also be able to travel forwards in time as far as the recording stops and future laws allow (I didn’t fully realise that when I wrote my time travel blog, so I ought to update it, soon). You’d be able to inhabit other peoples’ bodies, share their minds, share consciousness and feelings and emotions and thoughts. The frontier suddenly jumps out a lot once we start that recording, because you can go into the future as far as is continuously permitted. Going into that future allows you to get hold of all the future technologies and bring them back home, short circuiting the future, as long as time police don’t stop you. No, I’m not nuts – if you record everyone’s minds continuously, you can time travel into the future using cyberspace, and the effects extend beyond cyberspace into the real world you inhabit, so although it is certainly a cheat, it is effectively real time travel, backwards and forwards. It needs some security sorted out on warfare, banking and investments, procreation, gambling and so on, as well as lot of other causality issues, but to quote from Back to the Future: ‘What the hell?’ [IMPORTANT EDIT: in my following blog, I revise this a bit and conclude that although time travel to the future in this system lets you do pretty much what you want outside the system, time travel to the past only lets you interact with people and other things supported within the system platform, not the physical universe outside it. This does limit the scope for mischief.]

So, time travel in fully networked fully AI-enhanced cosmically-connected cyberspace/dream-space/imagination/love/games would be a bigger and later frontier. It lets you travel far into the future and so it notionally includes any frontiers invented and included by then. Is it the final one though? Well, there could be some frontiers discovered after the time travel windows are closed. They’d be even finaller, so I won’t bet on it.

 

 

How the Space Anchor works

This is just an extract from my sci-fi book Space Anchor, about the adventures of Carbon Girl and her boyfriend Carbon Man. However, the Space Anchor itself is based on the Kasimir effect and warped space time, so has some similarities with NASA’s warp drive, but will be a lot easier to make and require very little energy. If their’s works, so will this. The space anchor will arrive first, and the most likely route to NASA getting their warp drive is using my space anchor to find another civilisation that already has a warp drive and buy one. Anyway, both remain scifi for a few decades. Just as well really. The Warp drive NASA are playing with will be used first as a weapon system to make ultra-high-lethality kinetic weapons. Let’s hope it doesn’t work. Looks pretty though, I’ll give them that.

From Space Anchor:

It was just a routine chat. G’din debriefed the General on the last trip, mapping out space currents. That often took him near planets and moons, and often meant he’d had to dodge asteroids. This one had been an unusually bad trip with several near misses.

Unfortunately, it was moving mass that created the ripples and currents in the space time fabric that the space anchor used. Without it, they’d have no means of ever getting much further than the solar system. Other techniques such as warp drives were still just science fiction. Nobody had any serious means of getting the speed without carrying massive engines and huge quantities of fuel. The space anchor cheated. The C14 didn’t use much fuel at all, and had fairly basic engines for local travel near Earth. The anchor locked on to the local space time fabric itself. There was no matter there, but it used stacked graphene Kasimir combs, each couple of combs interleaved to create a chamber where virtual particles could appear as the slats separated and be immediately separated from one another as the slats interleaved. High speed waves travelling along the combs opened and closed the gaps rapidly. The combs essentially harnessed the virtual particles’ fundamental need to annihilate by trying to physically prevent them from doing so. Creating a temporary barrier between them simply delayed their annihilation, creating a quantum annihilation pressure. Each frustrated annihilation only caused a tiny force measured at macro scales, but there were a lot of layers in the graphene stacks, and it added up nicely. Even though their lives were short, the strong forces the quantum annihilation pressures generated effectively locked the anchor onto that piece of space. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it absolutely won’t let you steal it away. That would make holes in space time. Nature doesn’t allow holes in space time any more than it allows a tree in a forest to be replaced by an error message saying “tree not found”.

So the space anchor behaved exactly like an anchor should. It stayed where it was put, relative to the local space time. In future space battles, it would undoubtedly be useful for fighters to make rapid turns without using all their fuel. For now, thankfully without those space battles yet, they were happy to use it to make trips faster and shorter.

If the region of space at the anchor was expanding differently from the region where the ship was, which of course was the general idea, the anchor would create a huge force to pull the ship. So, just like a yacht using differences in the winds, the space anchor allowed the C14 to accelerate and brake. Like wind, vacuum energy was free and didn’t need fuel to be carried. The tether was long, but that wasn’t a problem in space. The trouble was, just like wind, it isn’t easy to spot a space current from far away, it is much easier to detect it by being there. Astro-physicists knew where to look for the best chance of finding stronger currents of course but the mapping was still needed. The forces had to be measured, the streams plotted. They had to know where they were, how strong they were, how they behaved. It was very new science and technology. Space-time turbulence had been discovered that could cause very severe vibration when an anchor was being used, although if the anchor was switched off, it would instantly become smooth again and the ship would coast.

One day, space travel would all be easy, but just a few decades in to manned interplanetary travel, it was still anything but routine.  Only a few ships were equipped with space anchors, they were not easy to make and were expensive. The C14 had the first one, since G’din had invented it, and it was still be best equipped ship to do this kind of work. It had three anchors now, improving manoeuvrability – on a good day, G’din could swing it around like a gibbon in the woods.

Space research, tourism, asteroid mining companies and of course the military of many countries all wanted the technology too. But without the other stuff – the Higgs filters, Heisenberg resonators and carbon fur, the anchor was as dangerous as it was useful, and few organisations had ships made out of the materials that could resist even the minor impacts. Most would be riddled with holes on the first trip. So only G’din and the military had them so far, the rest could wait till it was safer.

Fairies will dominate space travel

The future sometimes looks ridiculous. I have occasionally written about smart yogurt and zombies and other things that sound silly but have a real place in the future. I am well used to being laughed at, ever since I invented text messaging and the active contact lens, but I am also well used to saying I told you so later. So: Fairies will play a big role in space travel, probably even dominate it. Yes, those little people with wings, and magic wands, that kind. Laugh all you like, but I am right.

To avoid misrepresentation and being accused of being away with the fairies, let’s be absolutely clear: I don’t believe fairies exist. They never have, except in fairy tales of course. Anyone who thinks they have seen one probably just has poor eyesight or an overactive imagination and maybe saw a dragonfly or was on drugs or was otherwise hallucinating, or whatever. But we will have fairies soon. In 50 or 60 years.

In the second half of this century, we will be able to link and extend our minds into the machine world so well that we will effectively have electronic immortality. You won’t have to die to benefit, you will easily do so while remaining fully alive, extending your mind into the machine world, into any enabled object. Some of those objects will be robots or androids, some might well be organic.

Think of the film Avatar, a story based on yesterday’s ideas. Real science and technology will be far more exciting. You could have an avatar like in the film, but that is just the tip of the iceberg when you consider the social networking implications once the mind-linking technology is commoditised and ubiquitous part of everyday life. There won’t be just one or two avatars used for military purposes like in the film, but millions of people doing that sort of thing all the time.

If an animal’s mind is networked, a human might be able to make some sort of link to it too, again like in Avatar, where the Navii link to their dragon-like creatures. You could have remote presence in the animal. That maybe won’t be as fulfilling as being in a human because the animal has limited functionality, but it might have some purpose. Now let’s leave Avatar behind.

You could link AI to an animal to make it comparable with humans so that your experience could be better, and the animal might have a more interesting life too. Imagine chatting to a pet cat or dog and it chatting back properly.

If your mind is networked as well as we think it could be, you could link your mind to other people’s minds, share consciousness, be a part-time Borg if you want. You could share someone else’s sensations, share their body. You could exchange bodies with someone, or rent yours out and live in the net for a while, or hire a different one. That sounds a lot of fun already. But it gets better.

In the same timeframe, we will have mastered genetics. We will be able to design new kinds of organisms with whatever properties chemistry and physics permits. We’ll have new proteins, new DNA bases, maybe some new bases that don’t use DNA. We’ll also have strong AI, conscious machines. We’ll also be able to link electronics routinely to our organic nervous systems, and we’ll also have a wide range of cybernetic implants to increase sensory capability, memory, IQ, networking and so on.

We will be able to make improved versions of the brain that work and feel pretty much the same as the original, but are far, far smaller. Using synthetic electronics instead of organic cells, signals will travel between neurons at light speed, instead of 200m/s, that’s more than a million times faster. But they won’t have to go so far, because we can also make neurons physically far smaller, hundreds of times smaller, so that’s a couple more zeros to play with. And we can use light to interconnect them, using millions of wavelengths, so they could have millions of connections instead of thousands and those connections will be a billion times faster. And the neurons will switch at terahertz speeds, not hundreds of hertz, that’s also billions of times faster. So even if we keep the same general architecture and feel as the Mk1 brain, we could make it a millimetre across and it could work billions of times faster than the original human brain. But with a lot more connectivity and sensory capability, greater memory, higher processing speed, it would actually be vastly superhuman, even as it retains broadly the same basic human nature.

And guess what? It will easily fit in a fairy.

So, around the time that space industry is really taking off, and we’re doing asteroid mining, and populating bases on Mars and Europa, and thinking of going further, and routinely designing new organisms, we will be able to make highly miniaturized people with brains vastly more capable than conventional humans. Since they are small, it will be quite easy to make them with fully functional wings, exactly the sort of advantage you want in a space ship where gravity is in short supply and you want to make full use of a 3D space. Exactly the sort of thing you want when size and mass is a big issue. Exactly the sort of thing you want when food is in short supply. A custom-designed electronic, fully networked brain is exactly the sort of thing you want when you need a custom-designed organism that can hibernate instantly. Fairies would be ideally suited to space travel. We could even design the brains with lots of circuit redundancy, so that radiation-induced faults can be error-corrected and repaired by newly designed proteins.

Wands are easy too. Linking the mind to a stick, and harnessing the millions of years of recent evolution that has taught us how to use sticks is a pretty good idea too. Waving a wand and just thinking what they want to happen at the target is all the interface a space-fairy needs.

This is a rich seam and I will explore it again some time. But for now, you get the idea.

Space-farers will mostly be space fairies.

 

 

 

 

The future of tolerance and equality

It’s amusing how words often mean the opposite of what they should intuitively mean. It started in trendy-speak when hot came to mean exactly the same as cool, when cool was still a word that was trendy. Wicked means good. Bad means good. Evil means good. Sick means good. Good no longer means good, but has been demoted and now means just about OK, but nothing special – that would be bad or wicked or sick.

The trouble is that it isn’t just children making their own words to rebel against authority. Adults abuse language too, and in far less innocent ways. People’s minds are structured using words, and if you can bend the meaning of a word after those concepts have been assembled, all the concepts built using that word will change too. So, fair sounds a nice sort of word; we all want everything to be fair; so if you can gain control of its meaning and bend it towards your campaign goal, you gain the weight of its feel-good factor and its pleasant associations. Supporting that goal then makes you feel a better sort of person, because it is fair. Unfortunately, ‘fair’ has been perverted to mean resource distribution where your supporters take as big a slice of the pie as possible. Ditto equality. It sounds good, so if you can spin your presentation to make your campaign for superiority appear as if you want everyone to be equal, you can get an Orwellian, Animal Farmy sort of support for it, with your pressure group becoming more equal than others. But then ‘equality’ really means everyone except you being oppressed.

As in Nineteen-eighty-four, Orwell’s Animal Farm was really observations on the politics of his day,  and how language is so easily subverted for political advantage, but marketing and politics techniques have only refined since then. The desire to win power and to use words to do so hasn’t gone away. I think our world today is closer to Orwell’s 1984 than most people want to believe. Censorship is a primary tool of course. Preventing discussion in entire fields of science, culture and politics is an excellent way of stopping people thinking about them. Censorship as a device for oppression and control is as powerful as any propaganda. When censorship isn’t appropriate, the use of words that mean the opposite of what they describe is a good way to redecorate an image to make it more appealing and spin doctors are ubiquitous in politics. A ‘liberal’ sounds like someone who supports freedom, but is actually someone who wants more things to be controlled by the state, with more regulation, less freedom. A ‘democrat’ sounds like it should describe someone who wants everyone to have an equal say but is often someone who wants dictatorship by their supporters and oppression of others. ‘Racist’ used to mean someone who considers people of one skin colour to be superior to those of another, so became a word no reasonable person wants thrown at them, but because it was so powerful a weapon, it has been mutated endlessly until it has become synonymous with ‘nationalist’. It is most often cited now when skin colour is the same and only culture or religion or nationality or even accent is different. Such is the magnitude of the language distortion that in the UK’s recent immigration debates, Europhiles who want to protect immigration privileges for white Europeans over Indians or Chinese or Africans were calling those who want to remove those privileges racist. A Conservative minister used the farcical argument that trying to limit European immigration is racist even though they are the same colour because it would be racist if they were black. This language perversion makes it much harder to eliminate genuine skin colour racism, which is still a significant problem. Racism flourishes. The otherwise intensely politically correct BBC’s Dr Who frequently features the hero or his allies making deeply offensive racist-like remarks about other species with different shapes. People and organisations that are certain of their own holiness often are the most prejudiced, but their blinkers are so narrowly aimed they just cant see it. That blindness now pervades our society.

It is tolerance and equality that are the biggest and most dangerous casualties of this word war. ‘Tolerant’ has evolved to mean extremely intolerant of anyone who doesn’t adopt the same political correctness and this new intolerance is growing quickly.  If you or your friends get something, it is a right, and removing it is a tax, but if the other lot get it, it is a privilege that ‘fairness’ demands should be removed. People will happily accuse an entire group of people of being highly prejudiced, without realizing that such a statement is prejudiced itself. It is common to watch debates where contributors make the most offensive remarks about people who they see as beneath contempt because they hold some much lesser prejudice about some group they support. They just don’t see the same trait magnified in themselves. That they don’t see it indicates that they haven’t really thought about it and have just accepted a view from someone or somewhere else, which shows just how powerful changing the words is. It is only when thinking the meaning through that the obvious contradictions appear, but the emotional content and impact of the words is superficial and immediate.

The new variety of militant atheists particularly have become very intolerant of religions because they say they are intolerant. They use the sanctimonious phrase ‘intolerant of intolerance’, but their intolerance is just as bad as that which they condemn. They condemn religious believers for hypocrisy too but are blind to their own which is just as bad. Their religious fervor for their political correctness religion is as distasteful as any medieval religious persecution or inquisition. They may not physically burn people at a stake, but activists do as much damage to a person and their career and destroy their lives as far as they can, whilst believing they are somehow occupying some moral high ground. Religion may be dying out, but the very same nasty behaviors live on, just with different foundations for exactly the same sanctimony. This new politically correct community are just as sure of their 21st century piety as any medieval priest was of theirs, just as quick to look down on all those not sharing the same self-built pedestal, just as quick to run their own inquisitions.

PC activists demand tolerance and equality for their favored victim group and most reasonable people agree with tolerance and equality, but unlike most ordinary decent people, most activists don’t reciprocate it. Hypocrisy reigns, supported by an alarming apparent lack of self awareness. Surely reasonable people should accept others’ right to exist and accept that even if they might not agree with them they can agree to live peacefully alongside, to live and let live, like we used to until recently. Tolerance means putting up with people whose views you detest as well as those you love. Why have they forgotten that? Actually, they haven’t. Lack of self awareness isn’t the cause, not for activists. It isn’t the case that they’ve forgotten we need to get on, they just don’t want to any more. It is no longer a desire for peace and love and equality, but a desire for cultural supremacy and oppression of dissent.

The clue comes as we see that the new vigorous pursuit of ‘equality’  is too often a thinly disguised clamor for privilege, positive discrimination, quotas, special treatment and eventual superiority. That isn’t new of itself – there have always been fights for privilege – but lately it is often accompanied by oppression and vilification of anyone not supporting that particular campaign for privilege. Trying to win the high ground is one thing, but trying to eliminate everyone else from the entire hill is new. It is no longer enough to get equality. All other viewpoints must be eliminated. It isn’t enough that I should win – you must also lose. That which started as a reasonable desire that all should be equal in all ways has somehow mutated into an ugly tribal conflict where every tribe wants exclusive power and extermination of any tribes that don’t support their dictatorship.

This new intolerance is tribal conflict – less violent but every bit as nasty and aggressive, the sort that leads to violence if left unaddressed. It is war without the niceties of the Geneva convention. We see it manifesting itself in every dimension – political affiliation, age, gender, sexuality, race, culture, wealth, religion… It doesn’t use peaceful debate and open discussion and negotiation to get different groups living side by side on an equal basis. Instead, as I hinted in the first paragraph, seizing control over the meanings of words and distorting them is increasingly the weapon of choice to get a win instead of a draw. Mutual respect and the desire to live in peace, to live and let live, each to their own, has been usurped by assertion of superiority and demand for submission.

It has to stop. We must live together in peace, whatever our differing beliefs and attitudes. The nastiness has to go. The assault on language has to stop. We need to communicate and to do so on a level playing field, without censorship and without the insults. We need to assert genuine equality and tolerance, not play games with words. That isn’t some rose-tinted fluffy bunny dream. It is a recognition that the alternative is eventual civil conflict, the Great Western War that I’ve written about before. That won’t be fun.

See also 

Can we get a less abusive society?

and 

Machiavelli and the coming Great Western War