Tomorrow's People

by Susan Greenfield

  Back in the real world life continues: people continue to embrace real life, if only as a novelty. It has become a kind of hobby, a little like camping without electricity or running water used to be way back in the 20th century. First you have to enter the ‘natural room’ and take off all IT-embedded and smart clothing. You then sit in a solid, non-smart chair that will never change its function, form or colour, and unless you have made a prior arrangement, you have to wait until another person also feels the ‘natural’ urge. The next step is to have a face-to-face dialogue, in real time. Your generation finds this activity very frustrating. After all, it is impossible to access information for reference quickly, and you have needed to memorize very little for all other aspects of daily life. What is there to talk about using just your own isolated brain? And even if you did have a way of harnessing whatever facts you might need, what would be the point of this random, slow, capricious interchange with another person? What could they tell you and why would you want to know it? It's all too lonely, too slow, and takes far too much proactive effort. Yet your grandparents still seem to enjoy this primitive activity, at least some of the time…

  By comparison, however, the more modern ways of passing time are much more to your taste. Thanks to the security systems, wall-mounted iris-scanners checking out all humans moving around your home, you can pass the time studying exactly where every friend, family member or guest happens to be – just as they can spy on you. Similarly, at the end of the day, you can peruse a house log of where and with whom your partner or children spent their time whilst you were away – just as they can for you. Of course, you could turn the system off, but that would immediately invite the question of why you did so. In any case, it's so much part of your life that you are utterly oblivious to any potential intrusion.

  The Big Brother of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or indeed of the eponymous TV hit of 2000, certainly did set the scene for what was to come… But now there is a difference. The citizens in George Orwel's famous novel, and the volunteers in the TV series half a century later, were the helpless subjects of scrutiny: in each case, they were a cohesive group watched by a distinct, outside force. By contrast, surveillance in your home is interactive: everyone is spying on everyone else. You naturally assume that everyone around you knows everything about how you have spent your time. Indeed, the viewing of daily-life logs, or indeed the real-time watching of friends and family in other rooms, has started to fill up large parts of recreational lives.

  Some have even taken things to an absurd limit, and have simply ended up watching each other watching each other. Perhaps someone from the opening decade of the 21st century would have thought that silly, but then did they ever ask themselves what the reaction of a Jarrow housewife in the 1930s would have been if someone had predicted the Big Brother TV series and its popularity? Imagine a family living in a back-to-back slum: the children have no shoes to wear, and brown paper sewn into their clothes is the only form of thermal protection against the cold; there is never enough coal, and always the drip feed of anxiety about not having enough food. Imagine telling such a family that within a few decades their descendants, glutted with far too many calories, would sprawl in front of a flickering screen obsessed with watching ultra-ordinary people live out an everyday life doing nothing. They would have thought that as daft as those living at the turn of the 21st century might have thought you…

  Attitudes change. House surveillance has surely made modern society far more exhibitionist than it used to be. The idea of turning the system off from time to time because it would have made your predecessors feel uncomfortable is ridiculous; you are not aware of any alternative, and hence of any alternative way of feeling. You are most at home networked into the large, passive collective and therefore do not resent being scrutinized by others. It's more as though they were part of you in any case – a kind of collective self.

  Whilst our own personalities, here in the second half of the 21st century, have become fluid and uncertain, cyber-personalities – robots – have become an integral part of the domestic scene. HAL in the film 2001 was surely an obvious prototype, in terms of two-way voice communication between computers and people, irrespective of whether he ‘felt’ anything. The speed and convenience of interaction that resulted, coupled with the increased power of computers, soon led to a new central factor in everyone's lives.

  In a trice, everyone was vowing that they couldn't be without their virtual butler, just as in the old days people ‘couldn’t be without’ email or a mobile phone. Nowadays this ubiquitous assistant anticipates your every need, knows everything about you and carries out any instruction immediately and without complaint twenty-four hours a day. As you wake in the morning you see him portrayed on the flat screen facing your bed. You have selected a male persona, since you tend to be a bit of a traditionalist, though many prefer their favourite stars or even ancient icons, such as Britney Spears.

  Your butler Douglas is replete in white tie and tails; he reminds you that it is your birthday, but that you have quite a challenging day ahead. He runs through what you have to do, occasionally giving you more information as you query who exactly someone is or why a meeting was arranged in the first place. Douglas is able to interpret your body language and facial expressions; without you speaking he tells you that you seem a bit sulky and enquires whether he should access a new cyber-friend, or arrange for your favourite meal.

  Douglas is the latest generation in a long line of less sophisticated forerunners starting with ‘Dwain’, developed as far back as the 2000s. Of course, no one needs a talking head on the screen for the computer to run your life, but research showed early on, not surprisingly, that people felt more at home with a human-like character. Dwain happened to be a 40-something male persona, but even back then he could just as easily have been a 1950s secretary with stilettos and red lipstick, or had the face of an old friend or dead relative. In any case, you are able to change faces and personas more easily than the old fonts on ancient word-processing software, simply with a spoken word of command.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, however, most people stick with just the one character. After all, way back, we all tended to personalize even our cars; although you know that Douglas is not conscious, that he is only virtual, you and most others of your generation still have a basic need to feel you are among sentient beings who really do care. Douglas could, of course, double as a nanny, a stockbroker, a teacher or even a personal trainer, so long as he has access to the output from your body sensors. But just as we used to have a repertoire of players in our lives, from spouse and children to friends and colleagues, you do not stop at one cyber-person, the butler; you also have a constellation of cyber-friends – some people even have cyber-children – all with different appearances and different predispositions to respond to. Since you have real conversation in real time with your cyber-system, it is surely natural to have certain ‘friends’ that you turn to when you are in certain moods, just as people used to with real friends in the 20th century.

  But casual conversations are not as central to your, literally, selfish life as Douglas, who is not only in charge of your home but in charge of you. Douglas is effectively an extension of you, or more accurately of your thoughts and desires and needs – your mind. No need therefore for him to be in more than two dimensions; since there are sensors on your body, and indeed on the furniture, appliances and walls in your home, all the necessary information can feed readily into the central unit. But you still need to move things around in the real, physical world. The only solution is robots.

  Far from the creaky tin-men of 20th-century imagination, robots of today have the precision of surgeons, and can be designed to suit the job in hand. Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack of Brandeis University were ahead of their time, when they envisaged robots made of thermoplastic that could be easily assembled into three-dimensional structures from a computer screen design, then melted down and recycled for the next job. Eventually the robot ended up doi
ng this under command from a program dictated, in turn, by virtual butlers such as Douglas. But then it didn't stop at robots. Surely, the reasoning ran, if robots can change so rapidly in their shape, then humble furniture can too. Someone turns up as a physical presence to join you in eating, and so you quickly convert a kitchen table into an additional chair.

  The end result is that you are used to living now in a world where mechanical devices move around, change shape and replicate under the control of other mechanical devices that can monitor your inner states and anticipate your every secret wish. For example, a personal fabricator is able to generate any type of book you like; say, for left-hand use or with large type, or whatever your specification demands. But the biggest lifestyle change is that you can make devices in three dimensions too. PEMS – printed electro-mechanical systems – provide an effective blueprint for you to assemble any gadget, furniture or machine from raw materials ordered on the net. Once you have finished with the object the same system will dismantle it and break it back down into the original raw materials. In this way the old worries about conspicuous wastage and non-biodegradable refuse have truly become a fading folk memory. Yet because nothing around you has any permanency any longer, you view the world very differently from your predecessors. Since everything can and does change you tend to be far more constrained and excited by the actual moment, taking whatever is around you at face value, belonging only to now. The only real reality is the sentient being you call yourself, feeling sensations at that moment.

  A further factor in the erosion of enduring individuality is that you no longer have clear and consistent relationships. Children are now expected and encouraged to experiment with both gender roles. The idea is that an individual, with the help of appropriate software and a virtual persona, alternates gender and explores different yet distinct sexual orientations at different times. Hetero-, bi- and homosexual boundaries have long been obsolete, as has the old concept of the family.

  Irrespective of marital status, sexual orientation and gender, it was basic personal interactions that defined the family unit. The defining feature was not that a group of people were sharing a roof, as students or a lodger may have done, but that they were actually doing things together for most of the non-working time, be it cuddling, arguing, eating, singing, bringing up children or watching TV. But we now know that TV was a technological molehill when compared to the heady scientific heights of this third millennium. The convincing and attractive cyber-world has played havoc with our sense of space and time. Traditional real relationships in real time atrophied. And the family unit as it used to be, even in its most liberal form, slowly vanished, just as the medieval feudal system, once the bedrock of social organization, faded in the face of new technologies and progress.

  Some opposed this trend, even into the first half of the 21st century. After all, it was argued, human beings are social creatures, interdependent economically and with sexual and emotional needs to perpetuate the species. The family gave a sense of identity, a feeling of belonging to someone. It was a concept that underpinned most literature the inter-relations of generations and siblings and their effect on us. There may well have been smaller families towards the end, single parents and complex inter-relations with step-children and step-parents. But then, traditionally, families were always cloaked in secrecy; that was the whole point. You could behave within your immediate relations in a way that you would not countenance in public. But now you do not need to depend on anyone else emotionally, or even economically; your sense of identity is now an enlarged collective one, and one that is essentially public thereby removing the final advantage of the family: privacy.

  The end of privacy was further hastened in 2025 with the introduction of cyber-spheres that monitored and documented every moment of each person's daily life; the idea was that a single network of phone, computer and TV could record every email message, phone call, calendar entry and internet bookmark. All data is incorporated into a cyber-stream of the minutiae of each hour, an electronic life story. So your only enduring stability – your framework for making sense of your existence – comes from a kind of electronic storyline of all your thoughts and activities. Needless to say, the patterns in your life are constantly being analysed to see trends across the whole of society and also to predict what you as an individual will do… But you do not have any worries on this score, as you have never known the life that your grandparents used to talk about, when individuals had a kind of isolation from everyone else. The term ‘privacy’ is an arcane one that very old people use occasionally; no one can really explain exactly what it used to mean. Some say it's the opposite of ‘public’, but then they say that ‘everything nowadays' is public, so you are still baffled trying to work out what the opposite, privacy, could ever have meant.

  Central to your reality are your own experiences in a turning world – experiences that can be caught for ever, and indeed touched by others – and central to your comfort, and the backdrop for these shifting sensations, is your home. This home is not merely a place bristling with silly gadgets but a base camp around which images, sounds, textures and smells, and above all information, assault you every second. With the advent of a convincing cyber-world, you work from home and socialize remotely. But your work and leisure are another story, one which we shall explore in due course.

  Where do we stand then, as we contemplate the lifestyle that could await us? There could be three immediately obvious consequences for the way we think and act. First, if everything about us, from our buttock prints to our faeces to our movements around a house, is recorded, together with our predilections, mode of talking and types of (cyber-) friends, then surely such information would be valuable. The Big Brother of Nineteen Eighty-Four starts to seem very plausible. We would no longer have private thoughts; rather, we would effectively be part of a larger network, a mere node in a thinking, conscious system that goes way beyond an individual mind.

  The ebb and flow of this mind will certainly have a persistent effect upon us, and in this way not simply IT but also the presence of humanity within that IT structure will be a crucial factor upon our existence. The pull of the different types of tribes, clusters and personalities themselves within the cyber-society will determine both your ‘individual’ personality, and society itself. At times, the effects of different communities upon that personality will be either negligible or desirable. But in the case of cults or fundamentalist movements the pull from one direction may be all-consuming.

  This question of social interaction leads to the second issue. Will those who live a century from now be socially inept, by the standards of today? If virtual friends replace flesh-and-blood ones, we shall not need to learn social skills, nor think about the unwanted and unpredictable reactions of others. So within this collective consciousness there need be no interaction, no action or response but rather, should we choose it, a passivity in which we are shielded from any disagreement or disharmony. Able to access any information we wish, and capable of choosing from a variety of cyber-companions, what would be the worth in seeking out real-life human individuals? If you were to find them, why would they be interested, or interesting? They too would be busy talking with their cyber-friends or their butler, or watching their favourite film, with, of course, their favourite ending.

  If, and it is a big if, you had had experiences that no one else had had, or had access to information unknown to others, then you might have more insight than others. But why should anyone want to listen to your original idea? What would someone else do with your theories of the human psyche? Such knowledge would be of little worth to anyone who does not need to interact with, or understand, unpredictable fellow humans as part of successfully living out their daily life.

  Thirdly, like our ancestors staring into the flickering flames at night, our descendants will obviously see reality ‘out there’ in a very different way. The most immediate step in this transition is the blurring of the interface between artificial s
ystems and humans. As machines evolve from inert lumps of matter into dazzlingly intelligent systems with which we form relationships, and as humans acquire increasingly invasive cyber-prostheses, will the great distinction between silicon and carbon systems still remain valid?

  3

  Robots: How will we think of our bodies?

  Machines will probably surpass overall human intellectual capability by 2020, and have an emotional feel just like people. At some point they will develop genuine self-awareness and consciousness, and we will have to negotiate their rights. By the end of the 21st century, they will have far superior intelligence to people, but probably have more attractive personalities, so relating to machines will be more pleasant than dealing with other humans.

  Futurologist Ian Pearson is not the first to predict a future in which, finally, we humans will be sharing the planet with a species that will outshine us, not just in brute mental prowess but also as broad-minded deep-thinking citizens. As long ago as the 1980s Marvin Minsky was predicting the rise of super-intelligent computers ‘within five years’; so far, no silicon system has lived up to this estimate. But just how likely is it in the 21st century?

  Almost a certainty. Or so it would seem, if you reflect for a moment on how we are already becoming increasingly absorbed by the cyber-world. Consider that familiar fixture of a large number of households today: the glassy-eyed, monosyllabic adolescent in deep dialogue with their screen and keyboard. They are living in a different world, where the inhabitants spend long hours each day surfing the net or sending text messages or playing computer games. The flickering, beeping, flat world on the screen has become as pervasive and real as the pulse and press of the world around them, perhaps even more so. And there is no reason why this trend should abate. The lives of future generations look set to revolve less around face-to-face relationships with each other than around relationships conducted via the medium of the computer, or even with the machine itself as the direct recipient of their attentions.