PENGUIN BOOKS
TOMORROW'S PEOPLE
Baroness Greenfield, CBE, is a distinguished neuroscientist, broadcaster, writer and bestselling author of The Private Life of the Brain (Penguin) and The Human Brain: A Guided Tour. She is Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
SUSAN GREENFIELD
Tomorrow's People
HOW 21ST-CENTURY
TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING
THE WAY WE THINK AND FEEL
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Published by Allen Lane 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
7
Copyright © Susan Greenfield,2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192608-7
Contents
Preface
1. The Future: What is the problem?
2. Lifestyle: What will we see as reality?
3. Robots: How will we think of our bodies?
4. Work: What will we do with our time?
5. Reproduction: How will we view life?
6. Education: What will we need to learn?
7. Science: What questions will we ask?
8. Terrorism: Shall we still have free will?
9. Human Nature: How robust will it be?
10. The Future: What are the options?
Further Reading
Index
Preface
This book should really have been a novel. Like many, I had often fantasized about conveying a stream of thoughts and insight effortlessly through my fingertips, of telling a story where I myself didn't know the outcome, and writing of characters who developed independent lives and minds of their own. Novel-writing had appeal not just as a means of letting one's mind range free but also because it could do so without all the checks and balances of argument and reference, the meticulous research and fact-checking, that characterizes non-fiction books of the type that I had previously written on the brain. Indeed, such unfettered literary abandonment was just the type of activity I was looking forward to on a quiet beach holiday in the Caribbean during the Christmas break, a few years ago.
But after several days, with a pitiful page or two recriminating me for squandering precious free time for nothing, I had to admit that I was bored with my own efforts. When the author herself finds her narrative pedestrian, her characters clichéd and her dialogue like a long-lost episode of The Woodentops it is time to think again. I abandoned the project and returned to London irritated and frustrated. The problem was that, aside from the thwarted glamour of writing a novel, I did have an interesting idea I really wanted to develop.
Although my day job is research neuroscience, with a primary interest in neuronal mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, I have long been fascinated by the broader and still more slippery question of how the physical brain generates the subjective inner state that we call consciousness. I had, in 1995, attempted a neuroscientific contribution to this question with Journey to the Centers of the Mind, followed in 2000 with The Private Life of the Brain. Needless to say, the ‘hard problem’ of turning the water of physiology into the wine of phenomenology remained unresolved in both cases. But thinking about the issue over and over did prompt a kind of meta-question: what would it be like if the problem was solved after all? What kinds of lives would we all be living? This is what the novel would have explored, and for good measure through the eyes of a brilliant and beautiful heroine, a female neuroscientist…
But reality had intervened and demonstrated with cruel clarity that character development, pace of narrative and gripping dialogue are far from easy. As I was bemoaning my shortcomings over lunch with Stefan McGrath of Penguin, who had been my hugely supportive editor for The Private Life of the Brain, he cut me short with a simple question: what was so alluring about what I had been trying to do? The short answer was that I had been yearning to use my imagination.
As a research scientist I get to speculate from time to time, planning a new set of experiments or trying to interpret a puzzling finding. But speculation unsubstantiated by published data holds no currency. One is always on guard against creating hypothetical scenarios that might account for a result but take too much for granted empirically or disregard existing dogma too uncritically. Yet still, at the end of the day, in the bar or restaurant with colleagues, it can be enormously rewarding intellectually – and indeed helpful back at the bench – to explore the big, empirically intractable questions, to put detailed findings into a wider context, above all to ask ‘what if…?’
So, suggested Stefan, I could indulge my imagination and ask this question, without fretting that I was no Jane Austen: I could write a non-fiction book on the future of our brains or, more accurately, our minds. The idea, once voiced, seemed dead right. During the previous few years I had been reading a little about the new science of nanotechnology and had appeared on the panel of the TV programme Futurewatch, as well as being very impressed by astrophysicist Michio Kaku's Visions, which documents ‘how science will revolutionize the 21st century and beyond’. I had also happened to hear a lecture by Ian Pearson, a futurologist from British Telecom, and had been chilled and excited in equal measure as he unfolded his predictions of a lifestyle dominated by a highly personalized yet intrusive IT.
If these possibilities came to pass, I wondered, what impact might they have on the brain? After all, the ‘plasticity’ of the human brain – how it can reflect individual experience – is widely acknowledged. How might all this technology change our outlook? Moreover, in my excursions into the neuroscience of consciousness I had explored how the personalized brain could, due to mental illness, drugs, dreaming or fast activity, revert to a passive state of raw subjective sensation, a little like a small child or a non-human animal. The new technologies, I came to realize, might also have the effect of putting us into a passive, sensory-laden state where our personalized brains – our minds – become less relevant.
The central issue here, then, isn't the new technologies themselves (on which there exists already a wide range of excellent books, see ‘Further Reading’, pp. 273–6); instead the question is how the advances in science might change our thoughts, feelings and personalities. As such, this book could not be an exhaustive survey of every aspect of the future – for example, I have left out entirely the possibility of space travel and extraterrestrial life. But by the same token, the central question of how our minds might be transformed does de
mand a wide sweep of both the physical and biomedical sciences, rather than a focus on just one discipline or topic. I trust therefore that you, the reader, will not feel caught between the two stools of a non-comprehensive survey and an insufficiently detailed account. The brief, as I saw it, really did need a compromise.
In fact, as I travelled further into the chapters it became clear that we would have to touch on important implications relating not just to the human mind per se but also to economics, politics and, indeed, the state of the world. Perhaps almost inevitably, I found that I was closing the book with a chapter on terrorism. I am writing this preface in very unusual times, on the very day when, around the world, there are demonstrations against war on Iraq. I would hope and expect that by the time this book is published that particular situation will have been resolved, but I fear that terrorism in general will not be regarded as passé. It will become a basic factor in our lives in the future, and as such raises vitally important questions concerning freedom of thought, free will, and hence the nature of individuality. So I find I have ended up writing in celebration of the individual human mind, and making a desperate and deadly serious plea that it will be preserved into the future; this end point seems a long way from the stereotyped science-starlet of the original, aborted novel.
Such journeys cannot be made alone. Because of the wide-ranging nature of the material, I needed advice on specialist areas outside my own expertise, and I am deeply grateful to various colleagues who not only fielded questions but actually read early drafts of the MS: Professor Igor Aleksander (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, London); Professor Peter Atkins (Department of Physical Chemistry, Oxford University); Professor Guy Claxton (Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol); the world-class architect Sir Terry Farrell; Professor Bob Williamson (Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne). In addition I am indebted to Katinka Matson of Brockman Inc., New York, for all her support and advice, and of course Stefan McGrath of Penguin, without whom the whole project would never have happened; I would also like to thank Ben Gribbin of Penguin for meticulous and very valuable line-editing. There are, however, two more colleagues who have proved indispensable in the writing of this book, from its inception to its final delivery. Milla Harrison has provided unflagging support in sourcing and providing the very latest material and information on all the subjects covered; I have yet to work with anyone more willing, efficient and professional. Well, perhaps there is just one: my assistant Viv Pearson, who has not only given 110 per cent secretarial assistance but who, more importantly still, has also been a real friend throughout.
Susan Greenfield, Oxford, February 2003
1
The Future: What is the problem?
Look through an old album of sepia photographs from the early 1900s. There they are, our forebears, most usually posed in front of some cardboard Arcadian scene, doomed to manual or social drudgery and a rigid code of conduct and thought. Those placid, distant faces stare into a world, invisible and unknowable to us, of toothache, outside privies, stale sweat and certainty. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ mused L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ Yet the mid-20th-century British prime minister Harold Macmillan, looking back over a long life to his Victorian childhood, once reminisced that the great watchword of the turn of the century was ‘progress’. Progress – social, economic and above all scientific – was perceived as just that, the forward march of the human intellect, from which we would reap only benefits. And progress came from science.
In the 1950s the scientist knew everything. He (always he) was characterized in television advertisements as the white-coated authority, condescending to endorse ‘scientifically’ the latest washing powder. The very fact that there was television at all transformed not only people's lives but also the way they viewed the world beyond the confines of their own community. The chirpy, capped, short-trousered schoolboy of that era, voraciously swotting up endless facts that ‘every schoolboy knows’, was fascinated by the technological marvels of the Festival of Britain and the new world that science was making possible. Meanwhile penicillin was rescuing many from misery and early death, whilst the contraceptive pill, no longer just a pipe dream, was about to revolutionize the outlook of, and for, women.
But the 20th century has surely taught us, among much else, that everything comes with a price; every schoolchild now knows that scientific and technological advances have colossal potential for both good and evil. Although the public have been aware, ever since Hiroshima, of the need to try to understand the implications of new scientific discoveries, it has only been in the last few decades of the previous century that the alarm bells have grown deafening. GM foods, mad cow disease and brain-scrambling mobile phones have compelled the most ostrich-like technophobe to question what might be happening in the remote and rarefied stratosphere of the laboratory. For science is increasingly not just on our minds but at the heart of our lives, encroaching upon everything that we hold dear: nutrition, reproduction, the climate, communication and education… The impact of science and technology on our existence, in the future, is no longer a whimsical excursion into science fiction.
Those sci-fi images of yesteryear now have an enchantingly amateurish glow. The Daleks in pursuit of Dr Who, the politically correct crew in Star Trek – even that ultimate icon, from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, the psychopathic computer, HAL – are as far-fetched and unthreatening as the tin-foil outfits and staccato jerks of the marionettes in Thunderbirds. The human and humanoid characters, in most cases, think and act like we do. They have similar sets of values and expectations, and the bulk of the appeal depends on a good guys/bad guys plot. And that is how most people used to see the future – not chasing bandits around the galaxy so much as still being human in a world of souped-up, high-tech gadgetry – a gadgetry perhaps of interest to some anorak-kitted nerds, but for the majority of us reasonable everyday folk to be taken in our stride.
But now we face a future where science could actually change everyday life any day soon; many think such transformations are already under way. Yet there are some – let's dub them, without much originality, The Cynics – who do not see any point in dusting down the crystal ball. The chances are, glancing at the track records of our predecessors, that pretty much any prediction anyone makes now will be either impractical or uninspired.
Moreover, just because a technology is up and running doesn't mean to say it will become central to the daily grind. One late-19th-century prediction of the future, for example, was that everyone would travel around in hot-air balloons. And on the other hand, unknown, unimaginable technology can catch us unawares: a picture of a domestic scene ‘in the future’ drawn back in the 1950s shows all manner of gleaming appliances, but no computers, let alone anyone surfing the web. Even a glimmer of the priming technology just wasn't part of normal existence; it would have been a fairly impressive intellectual leap to conceptualize our 50-emails-a-day lifestyle from the standing start of clunky, expensive and essentially mechanical computers whirring and churning in their remote rarity in custom-made rooms of their own. And I remember a summer afternoon in the 1970s, lounging after a heavy lunch on a lawn with friends, when someone, a physicist, first mentioned the microchip – he prophesied that ‘it will change all our lives’. The rest of us hadn't the vaguest idea what he was talking about.
The problem with thinking about the future, shrug The Cynics complacently, is that it is impossible to predict the big new scientific advances that underpin serious technological progress; meanwhile, how easy to be distracted by high-tech toys, the latest variation on an existing theme, amusing enough for escapist science fiction but not sufficiently innovative to restructure our entire existence and our seemingly impregnable mindset. Yet, as physicist Michio Kaku points out, the problem with extrapolating the future in the past – as with the hot-air balloon mass transport system – is that it hasn't been the scientists themse
lves making the predictions. Now they are in a very strong position to do so.
However, The Cynics have long placed a trip wire on the track of human progress, even when scientists have indulged in flights of fancy. They laughed at Christopher Columbus, derided Galileo, scoffed at Darwin and sneered at Freud. A curious feature of The Cynic's attitude is that he (and again it usually is he) thinks that science is on his side, backing up his sane voice of reason against the fantastic. In 1903 a New York Times editorial glibly wrote off Langley's attempts at flight: ‘We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly…’ And a few decades later, in 1936, when technology had become much more part of life, Charles Lindbergh wrote to Harry Guggenheim of Robert Goddard's rocket research: ‘I would much prefer to have Goddard interested in real scientific development than to have him primarily interested in more spectacular achievements which are of less real value.’
Even now one of the most popular quotes for after-dinner speeches has to be the famous prediction of Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, in 1943: ‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.’ And if you had suggested to our 1950s schoolboy that one day his, or her, 21st-century counterpart would have no idea what a slide rule was, or what log tables were all about, they would have thought you utterly crazy.
But it still does not follow that this time, this century should be any different, in terms of the revolutions in science and technology that come and go. Yes, as we shall see, we may well have the technology for a disease-free, hunger-free and even work-free existence. But then, too, the values, fears and hopes engendered in a chilly, smelly cottage on a bleak hillside would have produced an outlook very different from one based on a 20th-century upbringing in a centrally heated suburbia shimmering with shiny, chrome appliances and unforgiving neon lights. Yet we still have the same human brains as our very early ancestors, who stumbled uncomprehendingly around on the savannah some 100, 000 years ago.
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