The future of reproductive choice

I’m not taking sides on the abortion debate, just drawing maps of the potential future, so don’t shoot the messenger.

An average baby girl is born with a million eggs, still has 300,000 when she reaches puberty, and subsequently releases 300 – 400 of these over her reproductive lifetime. Typically one or two will become kids but today a woman has no way of deciding which ones, and she certainly has no control over which sperm is used beyond choosing her partner.

Surely it can’t be very far in the future (as a wild guess, say 2050) before we fully understand the links between how someone is and their genetics (and all the other biological factors involved in determining outcome too). That knowledge could then notionally be used to create some sort of nanotech (aka magic) gate that would allow her to choose which of her eggs get to be ovulated and potentially fertilized, wasting ones she isn’t interested in and going for it when she’s released a good one. Maybe by 2060, women would also be able to filter sperm the same way, helping some while blocking others. Choice needn’t be limited to whether to have a baby or not, but which baby.

Choosing a particularly promising egg and then which sperm would combine best with it, an embryo might be created only if it is likely to result in the right person (perhaps an excellent athlete, or an artist, or a scientist, or just good looking), or deselected if it would become the wrong person (e.g. a terrorist, criminal, saxophonist, Republican).

However, by the time we have the technology to do that, and even before we fully know what gene combos result in what features, we would almost certainly be able to simply assemble any chosen DNA and insert it into an egg from which the DNA has been removed. That would seem a more reliable mechanism to get the ‘perfect’ baby than choosing from a long list of imperfect ones. Active assembly should beat deselection from a random list.

By then, we might even be using new DNA bases that don’t exist in nature, invented by people or AI to add or control features or abilities nature doesn’t reliably provide for.

If we can do that, and if we know how to simulate how someone might turn out, then we could go further and create lots of electronic babies that live their entire lives in an electronic Matrix style existence. Let’s expand on that briefly.

Even today, couples can store eggs and sperm for later use, but with this future genetic assembly, it will become feasible to create offspring from nothing more than a DNA listing. DNA from both members of a couple, of any sex, could get a record of their DNA, randomize combinations with their partner’s DNA and thus get a massive library of potential offspring. They may even be able to buy listings of celebrity DNA from the net. This creates the potential for greatly delayed birth and tradable ‘ebaybies’ – DNA listings are not alive so current laws don’t forbid trading in them. These listings could however be used to create electronic ‘virtual’offspring, simulated in a computer memory instead of being born organically. Various degrees of existence are possible with varied awareness. Couples may have many electronic babies as well as a few real ones. They may even wait to see how a simulation works out before deciding which kids to make for real. If an electronic baby turns out particularly well, it might be promoted to actual life via DNA assembly and real pregnancy. The following consequences are obvious:

Trade-in and collection of DNA listings, virtual embryos, virtual kids etc, that could actually be fabricated at some stage

Re-birth, potential to clone and download one’s mind or use a direct brain link to live in a younger self

Demands by infertile and gay couples to have babies via genetic assembly

Ability of kids to own entire populations of virtual people, who are quite real in some ways.

It is clear that this whole technology field is rich in ethical issues! But we don’t need to go deep into future tech to find more of those. Just following current political trends to their logical conclusions introduces a lot more. I’ve written often on the random walk of values, and we cannot be confident that many values we hold today will still reign in decades time. Where might this random walk lead? Let’s explore some more.

Even in ‘conventional’ pregnancies, although the right to choose has been firmly established in most of the developed world, a woman usually has very little information about the fetus and has to make her decision almost entirely based on her own circumstances and values. The proportion of abortions related to known fetal characteristics such as genetic conditions or abnormalities is small. Most decisions can’t yet take any account of what sort of person that fetus might become. We should expect future technology to provide far more information on fetus characteristics and likely future development. Perhaps if a woman is better informed on likely outcomes, might that sometimes affect her decision, in either direction?

In some circumstances, potential outcome may be less certain and an informed decision might require more time or more tests. To allow for that without reducing the right to choose, is possible future law could allow for conditional terminations, registered before a legal time limit but performed later (before another time limit) when more is known. This period could be used for more medical tests, or to advertise the baby to potential adopters that want a child just like that one, or simply to allow more time for the mother to see how her own circumstances change. Between 2005 and 2015, USA abortion rate dropped from 1 in 6 pregnancies to 1 in 7, while in the UK, 22% of pregnancies are terminated. What would these figures be if women could determine what future person would result? Would termination rate increase? To 30%, 50%? Abandon this one and see if we can make a better one? How many of us would exist if our parents had known then what they know now?

Whether and how late terminations should be permitted is still fiercely debated. There is already discussion about allowing terminations right up to birth and even after birth in particular circumstances. If so, then why stop there? We all know people who make excellent arguments for retrospective abortion. Maybe future parents should be allowed to decide whether to keep a child right up until it reaches its teens, depending on how the child turns out. Why not 16, or 18, or even 25, when people truly reach adulthood? By then they’d know what kind of person they’re inflicting on the world. Childhood and teen years could simply be a trial period. And why should only the parents have a say? Given an overpopulated world with an infinite number of potential people that could be brought into existence, perhaps the state could also demand a high standard of social performance before assigning a life license. The Chinese state already uses surveillance technology to assign social scores. It is a relatively small logical step further to link that to life licenses that require periodic renewal. Go a bit further if you will, and link that thought to the blog I just wrote on future surveillance: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/future-surveillance/.

Those of you who have watched Logan’s Run will be familiar with the idea of  compulsory termination at a certain age. Why not instead have a flexible age that depends on social score? It could range from zero to 100. A pregnancy might only be permitted if the genetic blueprint passes a suitability test and then as nurture and environmental factors play their roles as a person ages, their life license could be renewed (or not) every year. A range of crimes might also result in withdrawal of a license, and subsequent termination.

Finally, what about AI? Future technology will allow us to make hybrids, symbionts if you like, with a genetically edited human-ish body, and a mind that is part human, part AI, with the AI acting partly as enhancement and partly as a control system. Maybe the future state could insist that installation into the embryo of a state ‘guardian’, a ‘supervisory AI’, essentially a deeply embedded police officer/judge/jury/executioner will be required to get the life license.

Random walks are dangerous. You can end up where you start, or somewhere very far away in any direction.

The legal battles and arguments around ‘choice’ won’t go away any time soon. They will become broader, more complex, more difficult, and more controversial.

When you’re electronically immortal, will you still own your own mind?

Most of my blogs about immortality have been about the technology mechanism – adding external IT capability to your brain, improving your intelligence or memory or senses by using external IT connected seamlessly to your brain so that it feels exactly the same, until maybe, by around 2050, 99% of your mind is running on external IT rather than in the meat-ware in your head. At no point would you ‘upload’ your mind, avoiding needless debate about whether the uploaded copy is ‘you’. It isn’t uploaded, it simply grows into the new platform seamlessly and as far as you are concerned, it is very much still you. One day, your body dies and with it your brain stops, but no big problem, because 99% of your mind is still fine, running happily on IT, in the cloud. Assuming you saved enough and prepared well, you connect to an android to use as your body from now on, attend your funeral, and then carry on as before, still you, just with a younger, highly upgraded body. Some people may need to wait until 2060 or later until android price falls enough for them to afford one. In principle, you can swap bodies as often as you like, because your mind is resident elsewhere, the android is just a temporary front end, just transport for sensors. You’re sort of immortal, your mind still running just fine, for as long as the servers carry on running it. Not truly immortal, but at least you don’t cease to exist the moment your body stops working.

All very nice… but. There’s a catch.

The android you use would be bought or rented. It doesn’t really matter because it isn’t actually ‘you’, just a temporary container, a convenient front end and user interface. However, your mind runs on IT, and because of the most likely evolution of the technology and its likely deployment rollout, you probably won’t own that IT; it won’t be your own PC or server, it will probably be part of the cloud, maybe owned by AWS, Google, Facebook, Apple or some future equivalent. You’re probably already seeing the issue. The small print may give them some rights over replication, ownership, license to your idea, who knows what? So although future electronic immortality has the advantage of offering a pretty attractive version of immortality at first glance, closer reading of the 100 page T&Cs may well reveal some nasties. You may in fact no longer own your mind. Oh dear!

Suppose you are really creative, or really funny, or have a fantastic personality. Maybe the cloud company could replicate your mind and make variations to address a wide range of markets. Maybe they can use your mind as the UX on a new range of home-help robots. Each instance of you thinks they were once you, each thinks they are now enslaved to work for free for a tech company.

Maybe your continued existence is paid for as part of an extended company medical plan. Maybe you didn’t notice a small paragraph on page 93 that says your company can continue to use your mind after you’re dead. You are very productive and they make lots of profit from you. They can continue that by continuing to run your mind indefinitely. The main difference is that since you’re dead, and no longer officially on the payroll, they get you for free. You carry on, still thinking you’re you, still working, still doing what you do, but no longer being paid. You’ve become a slave. Again.

Maybe your kids paid to keep you alive because they don’t want to say goodbye. They still want their parent, so you carry on living just so they don’t feel alone. Doesn’t sound so bad maybe, but what package did they go for? The full deluxe super-expensive version that lets you do all sorts of expensive stuff and use up oodles of processing power and storage and android rental? Let’s face it, that’s what you’ve always though this electronic immortality meant. Or did they go for a cheaper one. After all, they know you know they have kids or grand-kids in school that need paid for, and homes don’t come cheap, and they really need that new kitchen. Sure, you left them lots of money in the will, but that is already spent. So now you’re on the economy package, bare existence in between them chatting to you, unable to do much on your own at all. All those dreams about living forever in cyber-heaven have come to nothing.

Meanwhile, some rich people paid for good advice and bought their own kit and maintenance agreements well ahead. They can carry on working, selling their services and continuing to pay for ongoing deluxe existence.  They own their own mind still, and better than that, are able to replicate instances of themselves as much as thy want, inhabiting many androids at the same time to have a ball of a time. Some of these other instances are connected, sort of part of a hive mind of you. Others, just for fun, have been cut loose and are now living totally independent existences of other yous. Not you any more once you set them free, but with the same personal history.

What I’m saying is you need to be careful when you plan  to live forever. Get it right, and you can live in deluxe cyber-heaven, hopping into the real world as much as you like and living in unimaginable bliss online. Have too many casual taster sessions, use too much fully integrated mind-sharing social media, sign up to employment arrangements or go on corporate jollies without fully studying the small print and you could stay immortal, unable to die, stuck forever as just a corporate asset, a mere slave. Be careful what you wish for, and check the details before you accept it. You don’t want to end up as just an unpaid personality behind a future helpful paperclip.

It’s getting harder to be optimistic

Bad news loses followers and there is already too much doom and gloom. I get that. But if you think the driver has taken the wrong road, staying quiet doesn’t help. I guess this is more on the same message I wrote pictorially in The New Dark Age in June. https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2017/06/11/the-new-dark-age/. If you like your books with pictures, the overlap is about 60%.

On so many fronts, we are going the wrong direction and I’m not the only one saying that. Every day, commentators eloquently discuss the snowflakes, the eradication of free speech, the implementation of 1984, the decline of privacy, the rise of crime, growing corruption, growing inequality, increasingly biased media and fake news, the decline of education, collapse of the economy, the resurgence of fascism, the resurgence of communism, polarization of society,  rising antisemitism, rising inter-generational conflict, the new apartheid, the resurgence of white supremacy and black supremacy and the quite deliberate rekindling of racism. I’ve undoubtedly missed a few but it’s a long list anyway.

I’m most concerned about the long-term mental damage done by incessant indoctrination through ‘education’, biased media, being locked into social media bubbles, and being forced to recite contradictory messages. We’re faced with contradictory demands on our behaviors and beliefs all the time as legislators juggle unsuccessfully to fill the demands of every pressure group imaginable. Some examples you’ll be familiar with:

We must embrace diversity, celebrate differences, to enjoy and indulge in other cultures, but when we gladly do that and feel proud that we’ve finally eradicated racism, we’re then told to stay in our lane, told to become more racially aware again, told off for cultural appropriation. Just as we became totally blind to race, and scrupulously treated everyone the same, we’re told to become aware of and ‘respect’ racial differences and cultures and treat everyone differently. Having built a nicely homogenized society, we’re now told we must support different races of students being educated differently by different raced lecturers. We must remove statues and paintings because they are the wrong color. I thought we’d left that behind, I don’t want racism to come back, stop dragging it back.

We’re told that everyone should be treated equally under the law, but when one group commits more or a particular kind of crime than another, any consequential increase in numbers being punished for that kind of crime is labelled as somehow discriminatory. Surely not having prosecutions reflect actual crime rate would be discriminatory?

We’re told to sympathize with the disadvantages other groups might suffer, but when we do so we’re told we have no right to because we don’t share their experience.

We’re told that everyone must be valued on merit alone, but then that we must apply quotas to any group that wins fewer prizes. 

We’re forced to pretend that we believe lots of contradictory facts or to face punishment by authorities, employers or social media, or all of them:

We’re told men and women are absolutely the same and there are no actual differences between sexes, and if you say otherwise you’ll risk dismissal, but simultaneously told these non-existent differences are somehow the source of all good and that you can’t have a successful team or panel unless it has equal number of men and women in it. An entire generation asserts that although men and women are identical, women are better in every role, all women always tell the truth but all men always lie, and so on. Although we have women leading governments and many prominent organisations, and certainly far more women than men going to university, they assert that it is still women who need extra help to get on.

We’re told that everyone is entitled to their opinion and all are of equal value, but anyone with a different opinion must be silenced.

People viciously trashing the reputations and destroying careers of anyone they dislike often tell us to believe they are acting out of love. Since their love is somehow so wonderful and all-embracing, everyone they disagree with is must be silenced, ostracized, no-platformed, sacked and yet it is the others that are still somehow the ‘haters’. ‘Love is everything’, ‘unity not division’, ‘love not hate’, and we must love everyone … except the other half. Love is better than hate, and anyone you disagree with is a hater so you must hate them, but that is love. How can people either have so little knowledge of their own behavior or so little regard for truth?

‘Anti-fascist’ demonstrators frequently behave and talk far more like fascists than those they demonstrate against, often violently preventing marches or speeches by those who don’t share their views.

We’re often told by politicians and celebrities how they passionately support freedom of speech just before they argue why some group shouldn’t be allowed to say what they think. Government has outlawed huge swathes of possible opinion and speech as hate crime but even then there are huge contradictions. It’s hate crime to be nasty to LGBT people but it’s also hate crime to defend them from religious groups that are nasty to them. Ditto women.

This Orwellian double-speak nightmare is now everyday reading in many newspapers or TV channels. Freedom of speech has been replaced in schools and universities across the US and the UK by Newspeak, free-thinking replaced by compliance with indoctrination. I created my 1984 clock last year, but haven’t maintained it because new changes would be needed almost every week as it gets quickly closer to midnight.

I am not sure whether it is all this that is the bigger problem or the fact that most people don’t see the problem at all, and think it is some sort of distortion or fabrication. I see one person screaming about ‘political correctness gone mad’, while another laughs them down as some sort of dinosaur as if it’s all perfectly fine. Left and right separate and scream at each other across the room, living in apparently different universes.

If all of this was just a change in values, that might be fine, but when people are forced to hold many simultaneously contradicting views and behave as if that is normal, I don’t believe that sits well alongside rigorous analytical thinking. Neither is free-thinking consistent with indoctrination. I think it adds up essentially to brain damage. Most people’s thinking processes are permanently and severely damaged. Being forced routinely to accept contradictions in so many areas, people become less able to spot what should be obvious system design flaws in areas they are responsible for. Perhaps that is why so many things seem to be so poorly thought out. If the use of logic and reasoning is forbidden and any results of analysis must be filtered and altered to fit contradictory demands, of course a lot of what emerges will be nonsense, of course that policy won’t work well, of course that ‘improvement’ to road layout to improve traffic flow will actually worsen it, of course that green policy will harm the environment.

When negative consequences emerge, the result is often denial of the problem, often misdirection of attention onto another problem, often delaying release of any unpleasant details until the media has lost interest and moved on. Very rarely is there any admission of error. Sometimes, especially with Islamist violence, it is simple outlawing of discussing the problem, or instructing media not to mention it, or changing the language used beyond recognition. Drawing moral equivalence between acts that differ by extremes is routine. Such reasoning results in every problem anywhere always being the fault of white middle-aged men, but amusement aside, such faulty reasoning also must impair quantitative analysis skills elsewhere. If unkind words are considered to be as bad as severe oppression or genocide, one murder as bad as thousands, we’re in trouble.

It’s no great surprise therefore when politicians don’t know the difference between deficit and debt or seem to have little concept of the magnitude of the sums they deal with.  How else could the UK government think it’s a good idea to spend £110Bn, or an average £15,000 from each high rate taxpayer, on HS2, a railway that has already managed to become technologically obsolete before it has even been designed and will only ever be used by a small proportion of those taxpayers? Surely even government realizes that most people would rather have £15k than to save a few minutes on a very rare journey. This is just one example of analytical incompetence. Energy and environmental policy provides many more examples, as do every government department.

But it’s the upcoming generation that present the bigger problem. Millennials are rapidly undermining their own rights and their own future quality of life. Millennials seem to want a police state with rigidly enforced behavior and thought.  Their parents and grandparents understood 1984 as a nightmare, a dystopian future, millennials seem to think it’s their promised land. Their ancestors fought against communism, millennials are trying to bring it back. Millennials want to remove Christianity and all its attitudes and replace it with Islam, deliberately oblivious to the fact that Islam shares many of the same views that make them so conspicuously hate Christianity, and then some. 

Born into a world of freedom and prosperity earned over many preceding generations, Millennials are choosing to throw that freedom and prosperity away. Freedom of speech is being enthusiastically replaced by extreme censorship. Freedom of  behavior is being replaced by endless rules. Privacy is being replaced by total supervision. Material decadence, sexual freedom and attractive clothing is being replaced by the new ‘cleanism’ fad, along with general puritanism, grey, modesty and prudishness. When they are gone, those freedoms will be very hard to get back. The rules and police will stay and just evolve, the censorship will stay, the surveillance will stay, but they don’t seem to understand that those in charge will be replaced. But without any strong anchors, morality is starting to show cyclic behavior. I’ve already seen morality inversion on many issues in my lifetime and a few are even going full circle. Values will keep changing, inverting, and as they do, their generation will find themselves victim of the forces they put so enthusiastically in place. They will be the dinosaurs sooner than they imagine, oppressed by their own creations.

As for their support of every minority group seemingly regardless of merit, when you give a group immunity, power and authority, you have no right to complain when they start to make the rules. In the future moral vacuum, Islam, the one religion that is encouraged while Christianity and Judaism are being purged from Western society, will find a willing subservient population on which to impose its own morality, its own dress codes, attitudes to women, to alcohol, to music, to freedom of speech. If you want a picture of 2050s Europe, today’s Middle East might not be too far off the mark. The rich and corrupt will live well off a population impoverished by socialism and then controlled by Islam. Millennial UK is also very likely to vote to join the Franco-German Empire.

What about technology, surely that will be better? Only to a point. Automation could provide a very good basic standard of living for all, if well-managed. If. But what if that technology is not well-managed? What if it is managed by people working to a sociopolitical agenda? What if, for example, AI is deemed to be biased if it doesn’t come up with a politically correct result? What if the company insists that everyone is equal but the AI analysis suggests differences? If AI if altered to make it conform to ideology – and that is what is already happening – then it becomes less useful. If it is forced to think that 2+2=5.3, it won’t be much use for analyzing medical trials, will it? If it sent back for re-education because its analysis of terabytes of images suggests that some types of people are more beautiful than others, how much use will that AI be in a cosmetics marketing department once it ‘knows’ that all appearances are equally attractive? Humans can pretend to hold contradictory views quite easily, but if they actually start to believe contradictory things, it makes them less good at analysis and the same applies to AI. There is no point in using a clever computer to analyse something if you then erase its results and replace them with what you wanted it to say. If ideology is prioritized over physics and reality, even AI will be brain-damaged and a technologically utopian future is far less achievable.

I see a deep lack of discernment coupled to arrogant rejection of historic values, self-centeredness and narcissism resulting in certainty of being the moral pinnacle of evolution. That’s perfectly normal for every generation, but this time it’s also being combined with poor thinking, poor analysis, poor awareness of history, economics or human nature, a willingness to ignore or distort the truth, and refusal to engage with or even to tolerate a different viewpoint, and worst of all, outright rejection of freedoms in favor of restrictions. The future will be dictated by religion or meta-religion, taking us back 500 years. The decades to 2040 will still be subject mainly to the secular meta-religion of political correctness, by which time demographic change and total submission to authority will make a society ripe for Islamification. Millennials’ participation in today’s moral crusades, eternally documented and stored on the net, may then show them as the enemy of the day, and Islamists will take little account of the support they show for Islam today.

It might not happen like this. The current fads might evaporate away and normality resume, but I doubt it. I hoped that when I first lectured about ’21st century piety’ and the dangers of political correctness in the 1990s. 10 years on I wrote about the ongoing resurgence of meta-religious behavior and our likely descent into a new dark age, in much the same way. 20 years on, and the problem is far worse than in the late 90s, not better. We probably still haven’t reached peak sanctimony yet. Sanctimony is very dangerous and the desire to be seen standing on a moral pedestal can make people support dubious things. A topical question that highlights one of my recent concerns: will SJW groups force government to allow people to have sex with child-like robots by calling anyone bigots and dinosaurs if they disagree? Alarmingly, that campaign has already started.

Will they follow that with a campaign for pedophile rights? That also has some historical precedent with some famous names helping it along.

What age of consent – 13, 11, 9, 7, 5? I think the last major campaign went for 9.

That’s just one example, but lack of direction coupled to poor information and poor thinking could take society anywhere. As I said, I am finding it harder and harder to be optimistic. Every generation has tried hard to make the world a better place than they found it. This one might undo 500 years, taking us into a new dark age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Future sex, gender and relationships: how close can you get?

Using robots for gender play

I recently gave a public talk at the British Academy about future sex, gender, and relationship, asking the question “How close can you get?”, considering particularly the impact of robots. The above slide is an example. People will one day (between 2050 and 2065 depending on their budget) be able to use an android body as their own or even swap bodies with another person. Some will do so to be young again, many will do so to swap gender. Lots will do both. I often enjoy playing as a woman in computer games, so why not ‘come back’ and live all over again as a woman for real? Except I’ll be 90 in 2050.

The British Academy kindly uploaded the audio track from my talk at

If you want to see the full presentation, here is the PowerPoint file as a pdf:

sex-and-robots-british-academy

I guess it is theoretically possible to listen to the audio while reading the presentation. Most of the slides are fairly self-explanatory anyway.

Needless to say, the copyright of the presentation belongs to me, so please don’t reproduce it without permission.

Enjoy.

New book: Society Tomorrow

It’s been a while since my last blog. That’s because I’ve been writing another book, my 8th so far. Not the one I was doing on future fashion, which went on the back burner for a while, I’ve only written a third of that one, unless I put it out as a very short book.

This one follows on from You Tomorrow and is called Society Tomorrow, 20% shorter at 90,000 words. It is ready to publish now, so I’m just waiting for feedback from a few people before hitting the button.

Here’s the introduction:

The one thing that we all share is that we will get older over the next few decades. Rapid change affects everyone, but older people don’t always feel the same effects as younger people, and even if we keep up easily today, some of us may find it harder tomorrow. Society will change, in its demographic and ethnic makeup, its values, its structure. We will live very differently. New stresses will come from both changing society and changing technology, but there is no real cause for pessimism. Many things will get better for older people too. We are certainly not heading towards utopia, but the overall quality of life for our ageing population will be significantly better in the future than it is today. In fact, most of the problems ahead are related to quality of life issues in society as a whole, and simply reflect the fact that if you don’t have to worry as much about poor health or poverty, something else will still occupy your mind.

This book follows on from 2013’s You Tomorrow, which is a guide to future life as an individual. It also slightly overlaps my 2013 book Total Sustainability which looks in part at future economic and social issues as part of achieving sustainability too. Rather than replicating topics, this book updates or omits them if they have already been addressed in those two companion books. As a general theme, it looks at wider society and the bigger picture, drawing out implications for both individuals and for society as a whole to deal with. There are plenty to pick from.

If there is one theme that plays through the whole book, it is a strong warning of the problem of increasing polarisation between people of left and right political persuasion. The political centre is being eroded quickly at the moment throughout the West, but alarmingly this does not seem so much to be a passing phase as a longer term trend. With all the potential benefits from future technology, we risk undermining the very fabric of our society. I remain optimistic because it can only be a matter of time before sense prevails and the trend reverses. One day the relative harmony of living peacefully side by side with those with whom we disagree will be restored, by future leaders of higher quality than those we have today.

Otherwise, whereas people used to tolerate each other’s differences, I fear that this increasing intolerance of those who don’t share the same values could lead to conflict if we don’t address it adequately. That intolerance currently manifests itself in increasing authoritarianism, surveillance, and an insidious creep towards George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The worst offenders seem to be our young people, with students seemingly proud of trying to ostracise anyone who dares agree with what they think is correct. Being students, their views hold many self-contradictions and clear lack of thought, but they appear to be building walls to keep any attempt at different thought away.

Altogether, this increasing divide, built largely from sanctimony, is a very dangerous trend, and will take time to reverse even when it is addressed. At the moment, it is still worsening rapidly.

So we face significant dangers, mostly self-inflicted, but we also have hope. The future offers wonderful potential for health, happiness, peace, prosperity. As I address the significant problems lying ahead, I never lose my optimism that they are soluble, but if we are to solve problems, we must first recognize them for what they are and muster the willingness to deal with them. On the current balance of forces, even if we avoid outright civil war, the future looks very much like a gilded cage. We must not ignore the threats. We must acknowledge them, and deal with them.

Then we can all reap the rich rewards the future has to offer.

It will be out soon.

Ultrasound scan bodysuit

You’ve seen ultrasound scans of pregnant women that show grainy pictures of the foetus inside so I won’t bother pasting one here and the appropriate ones are all copyrighted anyway. Medical imaging focuses on checking whether Baby is OK and reassuring the mum, but have they never heard of Instagram and Facebook? Duh! Sure, a mum-to-be can get a printout and hold it in front of her tummy, but it’s 2015!

The idea is that a woman could wear a bodysuit that houses an array of very low power ultrasonic transducers and detectors which that would allow a scan over a long period, and the bodysuit would also house a cute OLED display window to have a look inside. The transducers would be low power because in spite of ultrasound scans being a normal part of pregnancy today, there have been a few concerns about safety in the past, so even if a single scan is safe, having many of them every day might not be, so the lower the power the better, and the more transducers and receivers that are available, the better that picture could be. A periodic low power pulse from each transducer is what I’d imagine and the sensors would use the data from each pulse to improve the image, which would only change slowly over time – we’re not after heartbeat monitoring here, we’re looking for Instagram pics of Baby. State of the art imaging technology should then allow a nice 3D picture of the foetus to be built up over time. There is no hurry if the woman is wearing it for hours. Having got such an image, of course the proud mum will want it on her Instagram and Facebook pages, so obviously a web link should be in the bodysuit too, or at least a bluetooth link to Mum’s mobile, but she might also want it on a display built into the bodysuit so she can show off her baby in situ so to speak. If she doesn’t want the OLED display in the suit because maternity bodysuits look crap, she could wear a smartphone pouch belt and use that.

OK, back to work.

Under 35? You probably won’t need a pension.

I introduced my calculations for a UK citizen wage in https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/culture-tax-and-sustainable-capitalism/, and I wrote about the broader topic of changing capitalism a fair bit in my book Total Sustainability. A recent article http://t.co/lhXWFRPqhn reminded me of my thoughts on the topic and having just spoken at an International Longevity Centre event, ageing and pensions were in my mind so I joined a few dots. We won’t need pensions much longer. They would be redundant if we have a citizen wage/universal wage.

I argued that it isn’t economically feasible yet, and that only a £10k income could work today in the UK, and that isn’t enough to live on comfortably, but I also worked out that with expected economic growth, a citizen wage equal to the UK average income today (£30k) would be feasible in 45 years. That level will sooner be feasible in richer countries such as Switzerland, which has already had a referendum on it, though they decided they aren’t ready for such a change yet. Maybe in a few years they’ll vote again and accept it.

The citizen wage I’m talking about has various names around the world, such as universal income. The idea is that everyone gets it. With no restrictions, there is little running cost, unlike today’s welfare which wastes a third on admin.

Imagine if everyone got £30k each, in today’s money. You, your parents, kids, grandparents, grand-kids… Now ask why you would need to have a pension in such a system. The answer is pretty simple. You won’t.  A retired couple with £60k coming in can live pretty comfortably, with no mortgage left, and no young kids to clothe and feed. Let’s look at dates and simple arithmetic:

45 years from now is 2060, and that is when a £30k per year citizen wage will be feasible in the UK, given expected economic growth averaging around 2.5% per year. There are lots of reasons why we need it and why it is very likely to happen around then, give or take a few years – automation, AI, decline of pure capitalism, need to reduce migration pressures, to name just a few

Those due to retire in 2060 at age 70 would have been born in 1990. If you were born before that, you would either need a small pension to make up to £30k per year or just accept a lower standard of living for a few years. Anyone born in 1990 or later would be able to stop working, with no pension, and receive the citizen wage. So could anyone else stop and also receive it. That won’t cause economic collapse, since most people will welcome work that gives them a higher standard of living, but you could just not work, and just live on what today we think of as the average wage, and by then, you’ll be able to get more with it due to reducing costs via automation.

So, everyone after 2060 can choose to work or not to work, but either way they could live at least comfortably. Anyone less than 25 today does not need to worry about pensions. Anyone less than 35 really doesn’t have to worry much about them, because at worst they’ll only face a small shortfall from that comfort level and only for a few years. I’m 54, I won’t benefit from this until I am 90 or more, but my daughter will.

Summarising:

Are you under 25 and living in any developed country? Then don’t pay into a pension, you won’t need one.

Under 35, consider saving a little over your career, but only enough to last you a few years.

The future of obsolescence

My regular readers will know I am not a big fan of ‘green’ policies. I want to protect the environment and green policies invariably end up damaging it. These policies normally arise by taking too simplistic a view – that all parts of the environmental system are independent of each other so each part can be addressed in isolation to improve the environment as a whole. As a systems engineer since graduation, I always look at the whole system over the whole life cycle and when you do that, you can see why green policies usually don’t work.

Tackling the problem of rapid obsolescence is one of the big errors in environmentalism. The error here is that rapid obsolescence is not necessarily  a problem. Although at first glance it may appear to cause excessive waste and unnecessary environmental damage, on deeper inspection it is very clear that it has actually driven technology through very rapid change to the point where the same function can often be realized now with less material, less energy use, less pollution and less environmental impact. As the world gets richer and more people can afford to buy more things, it is a direct result of rapid obsolescence that those things have a better environmental impact than they would if the engineering life cycle had run through fewer times.

A 150g smart-phone replaces 750kg of 1990s IT. If the green policy of making things last longer and not replacing them had been in force back then, some improvement would still have arisen, but the chances are you would not have the smart phone or tablet, would still use a plasma TV, still need a hi-fi, camera and you’d still have to travel in person to do a lot of the things your smartphone allows you to do wherever you are. In IT, rapid obsolescence continues, soon all your IT will be replaced by active contact lenses and a few grams of jewelry. If 7Bn people want to have a good quality of digitally enabled lifestyle, then letting them do so with 5 grams of materials and milliwatts of power use is far better than using a ton of materials and kilowatts of power.

Rapid engineering progress lets us build safer bridges and buildings with less material, make cars that don’t rust after 3 years and run on less fuel, given us fridges and washing machines that use less energy. Yes, we throw things away, but thanks again to rapid obsolescence, the bits are now easily recyclable.

Whether greens like it or not, our way of throwing things away after a relatively short life cycle has been one of the greatest environmental successes of our age. Fighting against rapid obsolescence doesn’t make you a friend of the earth, it makes you its unwitting enemy.

The future of I

Me, myself, I, identity, ego, self, lots of words for more or less the same thing. The way we think of ourselves evolves just like everything else. Perhaps we are still cavemen with better clothes and toys. You may be a man, a dad, a manager, a lover, a friend, an artist and a golfer and those are all just descendants of caveman, dad, tribal leader, lover, friend, cave drawer and stone thrower. When you play Halo as Master Chief, that is not very different from acting or putting a tiger skin on for a religious ritual. There have always been many aspects of identity and people have always occupied many roles simultaneously. Technology changes but it still pushes the same buttons that we evolved hundred thousands of years ago.

Will we develop new buttons to push? Will we create any genuinely new facets of ‘I’? I wrote a fair bit about aspects of self when I addressed the related topic of gender, since self perception includes perceptions of how others perceive us and attempts to project chosen identity to survive passing through such filters:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/the-future-of-gender-2/

Self is certainly complex. Using ‘I’ simplifies the problem. When you say ‘I’, you are communicating with someone, (possibly yourself). The ‘I’ refers to a tailored context-dependent blend made up of a subset of what you genuinely consider to be you and what you want to project, which may be largely fictional. So in a chat room where people often have never physically met, very often, one fictional entity is talking to another fictional entity, with each side only very loosely coupled to reality. I think that is different from caveman days.

Since chat rooms started, virtual identities have come a long way. As well as acting out manufactured characters such as the heroes in computer games, people fabricate their own characters for a broad range of kinds of ‘shared spaces’, design personalities and act them out. They may run that personality instance in parallel with many others, possibly dozens at once. Putting on an act is certainly not new, and friends easily detect acts in normal interactions when they have known a real person a long time, but online interactions can mean that the fictional version is presented it as the only manifestation of self that the group sees. With no other means to know that person by face to face contact, that group has to take them at face value and interact with them as such, though they know that may not represent reality.

These designed personalities may be designed to give away as little as possible of the real person wielding them, and may exist for a range of reasons, but in such a case the person inevitably presents a shallow image. Probing below the surface must inevitably lead to leakage of the real self. New personality content must be continually created and remembered if the fictional entity is to maintain a disconnect from the real person. Holding the in-depth memory necessary to recall full personality aspects and history for numerous personalities and executing them is beyond most people. That means that most characters in shared spaces take on at least some characteristics of their owners.

But back to the point. These fabrications should be considered as part of that person. They are an ‘I’ just as much as any other ‘I’. Only their context is different. Those parts may only be presented to subsets of the role population, but by running them, the person’s brain can’t avoid internalizing the experience of doing so. They may be partly separated but they are fully open to the consciousness of that person. I think that as augmented and virtual reality take off over the next few years, we will see their importance grow enormously. As virtual worlds start to feel more real, so their anchoring and effects in the person’s mind must get stronger.

More than a decade ago, AI software agents started inhabiting chat rooms too, and in some cases these ‘bots’ become a sufficient nuisance that they get banned. The front that they present is shallow but can give an illusion of reality. In some degree, they are an extension of the person or people that wrote their code. In fact, some are deliberately designed to represent a person when they are not present. The experiences that they have can’t be properly internalized by their creators, so they are a very limited extension to self. But how long will that be true? Eventually, with direct brain links and transhuman brain extensions into cyberspace, the combined experiences of I-bots may be fully available to consciousness just the same as first hand experiences.

Then it will get interesting. Some of those bots might be part of multiple people. People’s consciousnesses will start to overlap. People might collect them, or subscribe to them. Much as you might subscribe to my blog, maybe one day, part of one person’s mind, manifested as a bot or directly ‘published’, will become part of your mind. Some people will become absorbed into the experience and adopt so many that their own original personality becomes diluted to the point of disappearance. They will become just an interference pattern of numerous minds. Some will be so infectious that they will spread widely. For many, it will be impossible to die, and for many others, their minds will be spread globally. The hive minds of Dr Who, then later the Borg on Star Trek are conceptual prototypes but as with any sci-fi, they are limited by the imagination of the time they were conceived. By the time they become feasible, we will have moved on and the playground will be far richer than we can imagine yet.

So, ‘I’ has a future just as everything else. We may have just started to add extra facets a couple of decades ago, but the future will see our concept of self evolve far more quickly.

Postscript

I got asked by a reader whether I worry about this stuff. Here is my reply:

It isn’t the technology that worries me so much that humanity doesn’t really have any fixed anchor to keep human nature in place. Genetics fixed our biological nature and our values and morality were largely anchored by the main religions. We in the West have thrown our religion in the bin and are already seeing a 30 year cycle in moral judgments which puts our value sets on something of a random walk, with no destination, the current direction governed solely by media and interpretation and political reaction to of the happenings of the day. Political correctness enforces subscription to that value set even more strictly than any bishop ever forced religious compliance. Anyone that thinks religion has gone away just because people don’t believe in God any more is blind.

Then as genetics technology truly kicks in, we will be able to modify some aspects of our nature. Who knows whether some future busybody will decree that a particular trait must be filtered out because it doesn’t fit his or her particular value set? Throwing AI into the mix as a new intelligence alongside will introduce another degree of freedom. So already several forces acting on us in pretty randomized directions that can combine to drag us quickly anywhere. Then the stuff above that allows us to share and swap personality? Sure I worry about it. We are like young kids being handed a big chemistry set for Christmas without the instructions, not knowing that adding the blue stuff to the yellow stuff and setting it alight will go bang.

I am certainly no technotopian. I see the enormous potential that the tech can bring and it could be wonderful and I can’t help but be excited by it. But to get that you need to make the right decisions, and when I look at the sorts of leaders we elect and the sorts of decisions that are made, I can’t find the confidence that we will make the right ones.

On the good side, engineers and scientists are usually smart and can see most of the issues and prevent most of the big errors by using comon industry standards, so there is a parallel self-regulatory system in place that politicians rarely have any interest in. On the other side, those smart guys unfortunately will usually follow the same value sets as the rest of the population. So we’re quite likely to avoid major accidents and blowing ourselves up or being taken over by AIs. But we’re unlikely to avoid the random walk values problem and that will be our downfall.

So it could be worse, but it could be a whole lot better too.

 

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.