You look towards the industrialized world. By 2050 in developed countries such as Japan, Germany and Italy 40 per cent of the population will be over sixty-five years of age, whilst in the USA even twenty years earlier (2030) 70 per cent will be senior citizens. By 2050 22 per cent of the global population will be over sixty, as opposed to only 10 per cent at the moment, and by the end of the century this figure will have risen to 34 per cent as the industrialized world ages.
But you, the hypothetical young slum-dweller in the developing world, have energy, perhaps some training, no extended family ties, and no work. An obvious, and already much discussed, single solution to the problems of both worlds would be migration to the industrialized countries. This consequence is neither original nor surprising: indeed, it is clearly upon us already. But the ecological, political, financial and sociological implications of a multicultural, enriched world on the one hand and an ever poorer world that has been deserted by the young and able on the other are outside the scope of our discussions here.
Another possibility – albeit remote – is that Western governments succeed in their struggle to establish a streamlined and workable bureaucracy that can differentiate economic migration from asylum-seeking. Some have even suggested gunboats in the Mediterranean, the establishment of a Fortress Europe to keep out The Vast Majority – though no one could seriously buy into this as a viable or acceptable solution. But just imagine such a scenario: behind the bastion of Fortress Europe it is business as usual – and The Vast Majority stay put as the poor relatives of a dwindling and ageing techno-elite far away.
But whether or not large-scale economic migration continues, the problem is the same. If we in the first-world countries continue to develop as we are, with our emails and instant knowledge-base, our Prozac and decriminalized cannabis, our postmenopausal parturition and longer lives, our genetic screening and transplant surgery, our GameBoy thumbs, Botox injections and Sex and the City bachelor lifestyles, then we will have progressively less and less in common with those who have access to none of these things whoever has been left behind in, or sent back to, the euphemistically labelled developing world. One dire prospect is that we might so diverge as a society that exploitation becomes even more the norm than it is now – even before we factor in the impact of gene therapy, artificial wombs, brain implants, virtual universities and virtual friends, and longer lives crammed with much more leisure yet emptied of any obvious purpose.
The Vast Majority will be increasingly alienated not just socio-economically and culturally but in ways, due to the pace of scientific change, that are so pervasive that we eventually could diverge into ‘naturals’ versus a gene- and silicon-enriched species. This process of speciation has been a basic feature of the development of lifeforms on Earth throughout evolution. However, as Freeman Dyson writes: ‘Speciation in nature occurs with a timescale of the order of a million years. Human speciation pushed by genetic engineering may have a timescale of a thousand years or less. Compared with the slow pace of natural evolution, our technological evolution is like an explosion. We are tearing apart the static world of our ancestors and replacing it with a new world that spins a thousand times faster.’
The interactive, personalized technology that is emerging could, as we have seen, transform humanity on a scale and at a pace far greater than it has ever experienced heretofore; not even the fall of the Roman Empire, the invention of the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, or the large-scale slaughter of the 20th-century world wars has had such an impact. Moreover, in the face of the lifestyle revolutions wrought by bio-, info- and nanotechnologies, The Vast Majority could suffer far more uncompromisingly and completely than the first-world Technophiles, Technophobes and Cynics; they are in danger not only of being disenfranchised from a vastly more comfortable way of life but also of being exploited and abused in ways more sinister, pervasive and cruel than even that witnessed by the worst excesses of the colonialist past.
But there is a third possibility: to harness the ubiquity and accessibility that are the hallmark of the new technologies, to bring the material quality of life in the developing world to a level commensurate with that in first-world countries. Freeman Dyson has suggested that genetically modified trees could generate fuel. This fuel, in combination with solar energy, could be used to power high-tech cottage industries that enable people to remain in the countryside whilst contributing fully to the world economy. Everyone could access all information immediately, independent of location, via the internet; no one need exist in isolation.
Another example of the globalization of technology could be with us as early as 2006, predicts Dick Brass, vice president of technology development at Microsoft: electronic news kiosks that allow people to download newspapers and magazines onto electronic reading devices. By 2010 even this facility will be superseded as lightweight devices with flexible screens and 24-hour batteries render news-on-paper extinct. With increasingly sophisticated hand-held computers, books will be available on screen, and priced at a mere $5, say, compared with $30. One immediate advantage is that the cost of literacy would drop dramatically – every village could have its own electronic library.
And there must be many, many more ways of applying our powerful new technologies, and our still imaginative and proactive minds, to this end. When I served as a judge on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise I was stunned by the ingenuity with which scientists and non-scientists alike have come up with schemes for low-cost electric light, prevention of soil erosion and preservation of vegetables without refrigeration, to cite just a few examples. The increasing access to the new technologies as part of our everyday lives will surely enhance the potential for enterprise and ingenuity enormously – so long as we keep the motivation to let it. Scientists from the developed countries could form a kind of ‘Science Peace Corps’, and work to harness all the advances we have been surveying to enable the swelling numbers still living a 19th-century, or even medieval, lifestyle, to leapfrog the last hundred or so years and join us in the 21st century.
And there is a less obvious but still more fundamental issue. If we direct technology to these goals, we in the first world might benefit every bit as much as the less technically advanced recipients – perhaps even more so. By taking on stark reality, by tempering the facilities we have in the developed world with the age-old issues of drought, flood, famine, infection, corruption and contraception, we might be able to stave off the more alarming excesses of the new technologies that could corrode our human individuality. In so doing we might improve the lot, the private lives, of those who might otherwise succumb to the glamour of the more public mindset of fundamentalism. The real-life, practical application of new technologies might offer a lifeline out of the dilemma of choosing between subsuming one's identity to a harsh public ego or losing it altogether to the passive sensuality that could rob us of our humanity.
But not everyone will be able or willing to join a Science Peace Corps – indeed it could only ever be formed by a minority of exceptional individuals with innovative minds, huge resources of energy and a deep sense of commitment. For the rest of us, wallowing in techno-luxury, there will be the huge challenge of facing up to the big question of what we want out of life, and ultimately who we are. Initially, each of us will strive, perhaps, to cling to our own personal timetable, our own schedule of goals and achievements, our own life narrative – our own private ego. But… ‘In the long run, the central problem of any intelligent species is the problem of sanity. We shall be free to choose our values and our purposes. There will be no absolute standards by which to judge one set of values right and another wrong.’ Freeman Dyson continues, ‘For a society with a technological control of human emotions, addictions to artificial emotional experiences may be fatally easy to induce. A society addicted is this way to dreams and shadows has lost its sanity.’
We shall have to work out how best to set a course between the technophilic Scylla and the technophobic Charybdis. The Technoph
obes, afraid more of what we might do with technology than of technology itself, see salvation in talking the issue through first. Bill Joy suggests that ‘If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous – then we might understand what we can and should relinquish.’ He argues that we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth.
Meanwhile a technophobe website urges, ‘It would be good if politicians study physics… Often it is only specialists in a narrow field that are usually in the know, and even in this case, there are always discrepancies. In the situation at the turn of the millennium, society and politicians will have to make much more effort to comprehend what is happening, possible perspectives and take steps to prevent potential hazards.’
The idea of everyone simply sitting down and talking is admirable, as is the notion of politicians understanding more about science. But it is not a plausible solution. If we cannot agree, even now, on the pros and cons of some of the nascent technology, say, stem-cell research or GM foods, we would be deluding ourselves to think that we could universally agree on the complex issues that are about to beset society. But rather than picking off, one by one, specific and multifaceted scenarios ‘top down’, we should work from the bottom up. What single common factor might there be, what single issue is most important in our lives, which we wish to preserve at all costs?
The bottom line of this book is that the private ego is the most precious thing we each have, and it is far more vulnerable now than ever before. It is not an automatic, robust corollary of being born human, but rather depends on the availability of an appropriate environment. We can no longer take such an environment for granted; instead, we need to design and plan for it. Because, at the moment, we each have our own unique manifestos and agendas we shall never reach consensus on all the diverse policy implementations and strategies relating to science and technology. But perhaps we could agree on the ultimate priority to which those policies should be directed – not just the preservation, but also the celebration of individuality.
Naive, of course; how easy and attractive to shrug and join the ranks of The Cynics. But then look back at the ground we have covered, starting with domestic gadgets but ending with terrorism, and consider what life might be like if only a fraction of some of the scenarios we envisaged are realized. Remember we are all looking back on the journey with minds shaped by the previous century, but we may soon lose the luxury of cynicism and complacency that that may have engendered. If you are immobilized in the world of ‘dreams and shadows’, if you are free of pain yet mentally standardized, if you are living principally in a cyber-world or a chemical oblivion, then it may be only of secondary importance whether the rich countries alone undergo this transformation, or the developing world too. And it would no longer matter whether you, or they, had minds of their own. Time could be running out on the luxury of considering any options at all – who knows, we may be the last generation of individuals able, or willing, to have them.
Further Reading
The following will by no means provide exhaustive background to the material covered in the book. However, each discusses specific subjects mentioned in the text in much more detail.
The book has drawn extensively from websites which, due to their instability, cannot be credited precisely.
Aleksander, Igor, How to Build a Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
Ashton, Heather, Brain Function and Psychotropic Drugs, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Atkins, Peter, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Baker, Robin, Sex in the Future: Ancient Urges Meet Future Technology, London: Macmillan, 1999.
Bloom, Floyd E., Flint Beal and David J. Kupfer (eds.), The Dana Guide to Brain Health, New York: The Dana Press, 2002.
The Century of the Self, BBC television series, directed by Adam Curtis, first aired on BBC2 in March 2002.
Claxton, Guy, Wise-Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning, London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Crick, Francis, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, London: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Davies, Paul, How to Build a Time Machine, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2001.
Deacon, Terrence W., The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, London/New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Devlin, B., M. Daniels and K. Roeder, ‘The heritability of IQ’, Nature 388 (July 1997), 468–71.
Dyson, Freeman J., Imagined Worlds, Cambridge, Mass/London: Harvard University Press, 1997.
—, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Evans, P., F. Hucklebridge and A. Clow, Mind, Immunity and Health: The Science of Psychoneuroimmunology, London: Free Association Books, 2000.
Frohlich, H., ‘The extraordinary dielectric properties of biological materials and the action of enzymes‘, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 72 (1975), 4211–15.
Fukuyama, Francis, Our Post-human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, London: Profile Books, 2002.
Gershenfeld, Neil A., When Things Start to Think, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999.
Goldstein, Avram, Addiction: From Biology to Drug Policy, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gosden, Roger, Designer Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology, London: Gollancz, 1999.
Grand, Steve, Creation: Life and How to Make It, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
Greenfield, Susan, Journey to the Centers of the Mind: Toward a Science of Consciousness, New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995.
—, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.
—, ‘Brain drugs of the future‘, British Medical Journal 317 (1998), 1698–1701.
—, The Private Life of the Brain, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2000. Greenough, W. T., J. E. Black and C. S. Wallace, ‘Experience and brain development’, Child Development 58 (1987), 539–59.
Gribbin, John, The Birth of Time: How We Measured the Age of the Universe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.
—, Science: A History 1546–2001, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2002.
—, et al., The Future Now: Predicting the 21st Century, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
Haffner, Sebastian, Defying Hitler, trans. by Oliver Pretzel, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
Haldane, J. B. S., Daedalus, or, Science and the Future, a paper given to the Heretics Society in Cambridge in 1923. First published in London in 1924 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.; now out of print. The transcribed text is available, however, on the internet.
Hameroff, Stuart, ‘Quantum coherence in microtubules: a neural basis for emergent consciousness?’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 1 (1994), 91–118.
Horgan, John, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, London: Little Brown, 1996.
—, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Brain Defies Explanation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.
Howe, Michael, Sense and Nonsense about Hothouse Children: A Practical Guide for Parents and Teachers, Leicester: BPS Books, 1990.
Huttenlocher, Peter R., Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, London: HarperCollins, 1994 (first published by Penguin in 1932).
James, Oliver, Britain on the Couch: Treating a Low Serotonin Society, London: Century, 1997.
Joy, Bill, ‘Why the future doesn't need us‘, Wired 8.04 (April 2000).
Kaku, Michio, Visions: How Science will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kirkwood, Tom, Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Ageing, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.
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Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines: How We will Live, Work and Think in the New Age of Intelligent Machines, London: Phoenix, 1999.
MacLean, Paul, ‘The triune brain, emotion and scientific bias’, in F. O. Schmitt (ed.), The Neurosciences: Second Study Program, New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1970, pp. 336–49.
Martin, Paul, The Sickening Mind: Brain, Behaviour, Immunity and Disease, London: HarperCollins, 1997.
McGee, Glenn (ed.), The Human Cloning Debate, 3rd edn, Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books, 2002.
Minsky, Marvin, ‘Will robots inherit the Earth?’, Scientific American 271 (1994), 86–91.
Mithen, Steven J., The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Moravec, Hans, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Penguin, 2000 (first published 1949).
Pearson, Ian, www.btinternet.com/~ian.pearson/.
Penrose, Roger, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Pert, Candace B. and Deepak Chopra, Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, New York: Scribner, 1997.
Pesce, Mark, The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, New York: Ballantine Books, 2000.
Pinker, Steven, How the Mind Works, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 1998. —, The Blank Slate: Denying Human Nature in Modern Life, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2002.
Rees, Martin, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival, London: Heinemann, 2003.
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