From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Dec 11 1999 - 18:23:38 MST
At 01:52 PM 10/12/99 -0500, Robin wrote:
>A favorite exercise of futurism skeptics is to look at how far off past
>predictions were.
>But today as we approach the year 2000, most major media are full of
>futurist articles, purporting to tell us what is coming in the next century,
>or even the next millennium. And I can't help but notice that the people
>they have write these articles are mostly *not* decent futurists!
Okay, here's such an article I just had in the national Australian
newspaper, in a bland series called `Chronicles of the Future'. I
deliberately avoided Singularities and other Joe Six-pack repellents,
putting in just enough to twist his brain a little. Is this the kind of
thing you abhor, Robin?
==============
Everyone used to know how the future would be.
In the wonderful year 2000, people would wear silver jump-suits, holidaying
under huge glass domes on the Moon. We'd swallow small coloured pills for
dinner, washed down with sparkling Betelgeuse beetlejuice. Father would
leave for work each morning in his personal helicopter or aircar, flying
across the clean, open 'burbs to a giant city soaring against the crisp sky.
Back at home, Mother would oversee her domestic robot as it did the
household chores, cleaning and tidying and sometimes comically scaring the
cat with its vacuum hose. Giant wall television screens showed scenes from
the long-running soap opera, *The Waltons on Mars*. It was almost like
being there!
The kids? In school, of course, learning from computers, fidgeting for
their leisure time. Once school was out, they'd talk Pop into flying them
to the Space Station, where they'd don wings and flap around in zero
gravity. Or maybe they'd sneak off to Coral City, the deep sea resort where
you could swim amid shoals of sparkling fish, breathing the water thanks to
your temporary Aerator Lung.
Grandparents didn't feature much in this mid-fifties portrait of
Tomorrowland. Maybe the old gentleman would smile over a magazine printed
by his home terminal, puffing contentedly on his pipe. Grandma was probably
arguing jealously with the Nannybot, hoping to take baby for a walk in the
leafy local park.
That plastic, 1950s dream future now looks insanely dated. We don't have
personal aircars, and chances are we never will. Would you want to live
under a bunch of lunatics hurtling around at a few hundred kilometres an
hour, even if their commuter gyros were controlled by smart chips? Think of
the noise, let alone the hazard of falling hardware. And those magnificent
cities with their opalescent towers twined with runways and fly-overs - not
very likely, as a growing middle-class settles down into electronic
commuting from their cocooned nests. The information superhighway beats the
smelly, stressful real thing. In the real city alleys, meanwhile, junkies
twitch and the unemployed seethe.
Those household robots are still pending, too. Deep Blue might trounce the
world champ at chess, but it still can't make your bed or clean the shower.
Instead, we have a huge array of specialised home helpers that once seemed
`futuristic'. Microwave cookers were predicted (as `radar' ovens, since
radar uses microwaves) in 1940s and 1950s science fiction, but nobody
expected to find kids nuking their own TV dinners and chowing down at the
Golden Arches or the local pizza joint.
As for those holiday trips to the Moon and points farther out - not a
chance. Space turned out to be barren, harsh, mind-wrenchingly expensive to
reach and even more treasury-draining to colonise. Intelligent aliens don't
drop by from Ganymede to divert us on late night television. At the start
of the century of the future, we're stuck here firmly on Terra Firma, and
it's getting more crowded every day. [extra proviso abt moon trips being
possible with nano added to accommodate artist's spread]
[Or] So *are* we stuck here? Maybe this is just near-millennial depression.
The future mightn't be all it was cracked up to be, but who would want to
live in a bland Disney-2050 anyway?
Let's try to glimpse the real future. Or some of the many possible futures,
since they'll surely range from heaven to hell. Let's not forget that those
dazed family-values images of Fifties' Tomorrows were created against a
backdrop of almost unendurable anxiety. Global war had just ended with the
death of two cities, not just metaphorically but literally `nuked'.
Although the evil empire turned into a nightmare of squabbling gangsters,
like a tragic remake of Prohibition-Era Chicago, the bombs are still there.
Somehow, though, we no longer dread them as much. The potential for
world-wide havoc is increasing, if anything, but we don't expect nuclear
winter to total us. Maybe it's the Prozac and the Internet, but we seem
more optimistic. Actually this is a reasonable attitude. If the future
isn't going to be like the 1950s picture, neither will it just be like
today, only bigger and worse (or bigger and better). No, it's going to be
strange, even alien. And we'll be there.
We'll be having fun. Very weird fun.
Take a simple fashion issue: what will we be wearing in 2050 when we head
off to the club or to work? Will it be spandex and Goth black for the
office, medieval peasant drab for the night out? Bzzzz! Regard the
assumptions buried there. Jobs? Most people won't work, since artificial
intelligence (AI) will be achieved by around 2025, and AIs will toil for
nothing. Indeed, tiny virus-scale nanotechnology assemblers should be
available by 2050 or earlier, building everything we need out of simple
chemicals - including copies of themselves. When molecular factories
duplicate themselves cheaply, using shareware programs downloaded from the
net, everything is suddenly very different.
Sitting here at the very beginning of the AI, genome and nano revolutions,
it's hard to lock into next century's reality. Within the first few years
of the 21st century, we'll have a complete recipe of our genetic menu.
Fifty years on, designers should have absolute control over our basic gene
template. So how will fashion look? Hey, forget body piercing - the
mid-21st century trend-setters might be four-legged hermaphrodites, or
super-athletes buzzed out of their gourds on designer diseases, or crowds
of dividuals (copies of yourself, electronic clones) roaming cyberspace in
feral gangs.
Too laughably sci-fi to consider seriously? Maybe not. Fast change
propelled this century. It's still accelerating relentlessly, driven by the
inventive power of science and technology, the marketing urges of a global
economy. The gap between now and 2050 will resemble the vast leap from 1900
to now.
Australians in 1900 had a life, Jim, but not as we know it. Silent movies
and crude phonographs had only just been invented. The first plane hadn't
yet taken to the air - while a century later, global tourism is routine,
and a robot spacecraft has already left the solar system. Such trends will
continue. We will be at home in the world, as the world grows ever more
like us. Even the wretched of the earth will have fun, if nanotech gives
them the necessities of life very cheaply, as I discuss in my book *The
Spike*.
Telephones were few and far between back then. Mobile phones were unknown
at the start of this decade, for heaven's sake. Tomorrow they'll be
built-in. Radio hadn't even been *invented* in 1900, let alone television.
The awesome fidelity of digital CDs are only decades old, the desktop
computer even newer. In 2050 powerful computers will be truly ubiquitous -
and some of us might be living inside them, as uploaded emulations of our
own brains. Change is a juggernaut, mutating everything.
That 1950s portrait of wall-screen TVs is just around the corner, linked to
the net, but we won't be watching anything so primitive by 2050, or even
2025. Head-up displays already exist that paint stereo images directly on
each eyeball with harmless laser beams. Look forward to a jewelled headband
with an internet uplink, able to enhance or even replace everything you
look at. The headband will become a simple attachment, then an implanted
chip acting directly on your brain's visual and auditory centres.
Ultimately, we'll share a kind of electronic telepathy.
Everything will shift in a slow but remorseless earthquake. Even in advance
of nanotech, some ludicrously tiny proportion of the work-force already
provides all our food. If anyone in 1900 had glimpsed this dizzyingly weird
world, which we take for granted, our daily lives would have seemed the
most futuristic of fantasies.
How long you can expect to live, that most basic of facts, has nearly
doubled this century. That's extraordinary. In 1900 Australia led the
world, males expecting to make 53 and females 57. Those figures are a bit
misleading, of course, factoring in an intolerable child mortality rate,
prior to antibiotics. Still, even adults safely past vulnerable childhood
could expect to die young by today's standards.
By 1950, life expectancy had shot up an extra 18 years for men and 20 for
women. Those weren't empty years, either, ruined by pain and senility. We
got healthier and stayed active longer. At century's end, men can expect to
live to nearly 80, women older still. Fluoride halted the scourge of tooth
decay. Now, though, the down-side of medical triumph is kicking in.
Diseases that rarely show up in youth and middle-age can make extreme old
age a drawn-out misery.
That might be temporary. Luckily, increasing mastery of the ageing process
will likely solve these hazards as well, as I detail in my book *The Last
Mortal Generation*.
By 2050, medical science might have put an end to routine ageing. Our
cells, tissues and organs will be taught to repair and maintain themselves.
Using techniques drawn from an unprecedented insight into the roots of
mortality, we might gain an effectively unlimited lifespan. What we do with
it - whether it hangs upon our shoulders like a curse or opens wonderful
new pathways before us - is up to us.
So what will we do on our days off? Wrong question - that might be every
day of the week, for most of the citizens of 2050.
Despite AIDs and other scourges, and all the moral panic attending them,
late 20th century domestic mores are quite incredibly freer and more
various than anyone expected fifty years ago. Half a century hence, genomic
engineering will obliterate the worst diseases, and manage those that
mutate to fill the gaps. The delirious sexual escapades of the 1960s and
1970s might return with a bang. Meanwhile, a lot of wild stuff will be
happening in the ultimately safe sex zone - virtual reality (VR).
Movies like *The Matrix*, and high-end interactive games, hint at the
ingenious and thrilling prospects of total immersion in computer-generated
VR. Boundaries between outer and inner worlds will get fluid. Why go to
Mars in a clunky rocket, at fantastic cost, when you can link into a robot
chugging around the awesome mountains and canyons of the red planet? Better
yet, visit the shrieking storms of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn, either
by linking your senses to a distant robot probe or inside a perfect
simulation. These places are alien and hostile to the human body, but with
VR you'll never know the difference.
That doesn't imply a world of VR couch potatoes. Leisure today is more
exhausting and satisfying than ever. We work our bodies in the gym, because
we want to. We play sport hard, practice martial arts at the dojo. You
couldn't hang-glide or jet-ski 30 years ago, and while IMAX movies mimic
some of the thrills we still yearn to do it ourselves. That impulse will
surely persist - and our bodies will be increasingly morphed and re-shaped,
our games more demanding. It will be a future made safe for nerds, but they
will be pumped nerds, nerds with attitude.
Cities might go downward, not up. Nano replicators will make it cheap and
easy to delve deep under the ground, pump moisture out and air in, provide
ample power from solar cells or gene-tweaked fuel crops. The surface could
be returned to a global wildness, alive with once-extinct species and some
newly constructed. You won't feel constricted underground, because your
illusion system will show convincing images of the African veldt (as in a
famous Ray Bradbury tale), complete with breezes and scents and the roars
of distant lions. Your housemates will have their own distinctive inner
worlds, linked by a haze of in-built chips and electronics.
Your very mood may be under your own control, not just due to
fifth-generation drugs (grandchild of Prozac) but tuned by gene-designed
glands. In fact, by 2050, unmodified humans might be on the way out -
replaced without strife or anxiety by smart AIs and posthumans, ourselves
and our deathless children. That will be something to see. That will be
something to be.
============================
Damien Broderick
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