welsh
Junkmaster
Thought this might be interesting to some of you.
The way we are going
Oct 9th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel
By Susan Greenfield
IN HER preface, Susan Greenfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, admits that she had really wanted to write a novel, a story, seen “through the eyes of a brilliant and beautiful heroine, a female neuroscientist”, about the kind of lives we will be living towards the end of this century. Although she dropped the idea in favour of a work of non-fiction, “Tomorrow's People” is set firmly in the dystopian tradition of Huxley and Orwell. Baroness Greenfield's purpose is to issue a warning: that the coming integration of IT and biotechnology will have such a profound effect on the way we think and live that “we are standing on the brink of a mind makeover more cataclysmic that anything in our history.”
Baroness Greenfield is acutely aware of the perils of futurology. Visions from the 1950s of a world in which robots performed the domestic chores, meals were taken as pills and we zoomed around in personal helicopters were touchingly wide of the mark. Critically, nobody from that era foresaw the rise and ubiquity of the computer. Thomas Watson, the legendary boss of IBM, once famously predicted that there might turn out to be a world market for just five computers.
In Baroness Greenfield's vision of the future there is no dividing line between the real and the virtual, and most of our experiences are shaped either by a souped-up version of the internet or by smart drugs. We will rarely have to leave our homes, which will become an extension of our minds and bodies. Entertainment will be on tap to match our moods, while our physical environment, from the view through our windows to the shape of our rooms and the furniture inside them, will have the protean ability to adapt itself to our desires and needs. There will be no cancer or baldness or obesity. Nano-machines inside our bodies will change our appearance at will. Our bodily functions will be monitored and any incipient malfunctions dealt with by clothes that both dispense drugs and have the happy knack of cleaning themselves.
Relationships with other human beings will increasingly become too troublesome and unrewarding compared with the more immediate satisfactions to be had from the ever-present networked screens. We will be able to have sex virtually with anyone, while reproduction will be possible at any stage of our lives and regardless of our sexuality. Knowledge of any skills other than those of the technological elite will become a redundant concept because all the information we will ever need will be instantly available to us all, and because intelligent machines will be able to undertake almost any task better and more quickly that we can ourselves. Reading and writing will be redundant. As for privacy—what was that?
What makes this at least semi-believable is that the technology probably will soon be available to render much of this possible. Moore's Law alone, which decrees that computer-processing power will double every 18 months and has at least another ten years to run, will soon allow computers to do things that are almost unimaginable. After that should come quantum computing—an advance comparable to the replacement of the vacuum tube by the transistor. As professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, Baroness Greenfield is well-placed to understand the impact of the next generation of mind-altering drugs, while the applications for nanotechnologies seem almost limitless.
The author is, thank goodness, horrified by the vision of the future she depicts: “The private ego is the most precious thing we have and it is far more vulnerable than ever before.” That ego, our individualism, is not, she argues, the automatic corollary of having been born human, but instead depends on the availability of an appropriate environment—an environment which, for the first time, we can no longer take for granted. What frightens her is the possibility that we will become so immobilised by dreams and shadows, so free of pain, mentally standardised by the cyber-world that is our principal habitat and rendered oblivious by chemicals, that we will have lost the ability to choose. Scary stuff indeed. That said, she surely makes insufficient allowance for the “yuck” factor. Human beings are a stubborn lot. If we don't like something, we're quite good at avoiding doing it.
The way we are going
Oct 9th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel
By Susan Greenfield
IN HER preface, Susan Greenfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, admits that she had really wanted to write a novel, a story, seen “through the eyes of a brilliant and beautiful heroine, a female neuroscientist”, about the kind of lives we will be living towards the end of this century. Although she dropped the idea in favour of a work of non-fiction, “Tomorrow's People” is set firmly in the dystopian tradition of Huxley and Orwell. Baroness Greenfield's purpose is to issue a warning: that the coming integration of IT and biotechnology will have such a profound effect on the way we think and live that “we are standing on the brink of a mind makeover more cataclysmic that anything in our history.”
Baroness Greenfield is acutely aware of the perils of futurology. Visions from the 1950s of a world in which robots performed the domestic chores, meals were taken as pills and we zoomed around in personal helicopters were touchingly wide of the mark. Critically, nobody from that era foresaw the rise and ubiquity of the computer. Thomas Watson, the legendary boss of IBM, once famously predicted that there might turn out to be a world market for just five computers.
In Baroness Greenfield's vision of the future there is no dividing line between the real and the virtual, and most of our experiences are shaped either by a souped-up version of the internet or by smart drugs. We will rarely have to leave our homes, which will become an extension of our minds and bodies. Entertainment will be on tap to match our moods, while our physical environment, from the view through our windows to the shape of our rooms and the furniture inside them, will have the protean ability to adapt itself to our desires and needs. There will be no cancer or baldness or obesity. Nano-machines inside our bodies will change our appearance at will. Our bodily functions will be monitored and any incipient malfunctions dealt with by clothes that both dispense drugs and have the happy knack of cleaning themselves.
Relationships with other human beings will increasingly become too troublesome and unrewarding compared with the more immediate satisfactions to be had from the ever-present networked screens. We will be able to have sex virtually with anyone, while reproduction will be possible at any stage of our lives and regardless of our sexuality. Knowledge of any skills other than those of the technological elite will become a redundant concept because all the information we will ever need will be instantly available to us all, and because intelligent machines will be able to undertake almost any task better and more quickly that we can ourselves. Reading and writing will be redundant. As for privacy—what was that?
What makes this at least semi-believable is that the technology probably will soon be available to render much of this possible. Moore's Law alone, which decrees that computer-processing power will double every 18 months and has at least another ten years to run, will soon allow computers to do things that are almost unimaginable. After that should come quantum computing—an advance comparable to the replacement of the vacuum tube by the transistor. As professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, Baroness Greenfield is well-placed to understand the impact of the next generation of mind-altering drugs, while the applications for nanotechnologies seem almost limitless.
The author is, thank goodness, horrified by the vision of the future she depicts: “The private ego is the most precious thing we have and it is far more vulnerable than ever before.” That ego, our individualism, is not, she argues, the automatic corollary of having been born human, but instead depends on the availability of an appropriate environment—an environment which, for the first time, we can no longer take for granted. What frightens her is the possibility that we will become so immobilised by dreams and shadows, so free of pain, mentally standardised by the cyber-world that is our principal habitat and rendered oblivious by chemicals, that we will have lost the ability to choose. Scary stuff indeed. That said, she surely makes insufficient allowance for the “yuck” factor. Human beings are a stubborn lot. If we don't like something, we're quite good at avoiding doing it.
Maybe in a couple of centuries.
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