Visions of the Future

by Brin, David

  It seems that leaving technology to meet human demand, unchecked, wasn’t the best idea after all. Resources ran scarce, especially when distributed to individuals. And capital tended to pool at the center, leaving companies with no one left to sell goods to. We painted ourselves into a corner, and lacked the ingenuity to change in time to get out of the mess. Our programs gave us exactly what we asked them for, and we didn’t know how to ask any differently. Environmental forecasts indicated that even if we reversed course somehow, it was already too late. Resource depletion and wealth disparity had passed the point of no return.

  A few great ideas—master plans—were attempted. A Chinese firm developed a technology through which biological forms could be reduced to one-tenth their normal size. The thinking behind this scenario was that human beings would only take up a tenth the space this way, and thus utilize only one-tenth the resources. But even tiny humans would have a hard time surviving the radiation that was to come, so the idea was scrapped.

  Trapped in the scenario from which there seemed to be no escape, my father came up with the last resort idea for saving the species: interstellar migration. No, we didn’t have the technology to fly humans from earth to some save haven, but we had the means to seed another planet with our DNA. And so scientists began on the great project to send robots, nanotech, and genetic material across the galaxies in search of a planet suitable for life to begin again.

  To avoid merely repeating the evolutionary process that brought us into our sorry state, however, our government came up with the idea of nesting a message into the DNA strand: our little fortune cookie for the next round of humanity. In this message, we could explain where we went wrong, as best as it could be articulated. Then, once the next civilization was approaching our level of development, they would presumably find the message in their DNA strand, read it, and avert our fate.

  While the United Nations argued about exactly what the message should say, my father was tasked with finding an unused, or generally unnecessary codon on which to embed it. He spent a long time considering which animal and human qualities were necessary or not for our development, and scanned over the sections of the genome like an engineer looking for unused tunnels in the New York subway system.

  Then, he figured, why not go to the source of the trouble? The human drive for self and tribal interest so necessary at early stages of development, yet so dangerous when allowed to run human affairs in the later stages of evolution when drives can be so easily amplified by technology. He used his virtual quark microscope to zoom in on his target zone of the genome, exploring the fractal-like model on the subatomic level, when he noticed something strange: there was a small, extra bundle of mesons and single baryon hanging onto the edge of one of the neutrinos in an atom of the cytosine nucleotide. Now what was that doing there?

  He guessed it as quickly as you just did. It was a message. Similar in spirit to what humanity was now attempting to tell its own evolutionary progeny. Incapable of being translated into words, but conveying the essential and seemingly frightening truth: technology is not a mirror, it is a partner.

  The location of the message provided the clue for its implementation, which proved a whole lot easier than trying to embed it in some future seed-spawning project. We would simply release our technology from simply amplifying the existing social order, and set it free to deliver us a new one.

  It took some time for people to accept that the biases of our technology were not foreign to humanity at all, but its greatest and most deliberate expressions. Through our networked intelligences, we had developed a fully decentralized modality for matter to achieve greater complexity in the face of entropy. We could hunt and gather no more, conquer and collect no further. The Industrial Age reversed itself, as bigger was no longer better, and centralized authority worked against the power of networks. Our drive to monopolize was no longer a valid means of increasing our knowledge and capability. We would have to learn, instead, to let go.

  And so the process began through which we saved humanity and, more importantly, continued the evolution of matter toward greater levels of self-awareness. It just meant including our technologies in the great game, instead of requiring they submit to reality as we previously understood it. They were only as responsible for reading our minds as we were responsible for reading theirs.

  We moved from the scarcity model—the zero-sum game through which species compete for resources—to an abundance model where anything that is necessary can be found or synthesized and then shared by all.

  The manufacturing of energy (long limited by the faux economics of resource depletion) was as simple as a yawn. The only thing that had been standing in the way was an energy industry whose profits depended on fixed supplies and non-renewability. Medicine, agriculture, air and education all proved as plentiful as our willingness to adopt technologies that created value from the periphery, and replicated effortlessly as they spread. From shape shifting to mems to transformation of matter. Everything became free.

  While our prior social system would have been challenged by the extreme unemployment that came with the collapse of corporate capitalism, we no longer saw the need to distribute wealth according to one’s contribution. There was enough for all, and barely enough “work” for anyone. Once the synthesis of appropriate matter forms was left to technologies unencumbered by the necessities of an artificially scarce marketplace, people started lining up to do the one day of work per month per person required to keep everything going.

  Then, the work itself became ritual. Over the past ten years or so, those of us who visited a workplace regularly did so purely out of habit, or as a form of historical re-enactment. A few of the robots, like my friend Curtis, remained to perform the last few clerical functions—keeping the lights on, maintaining the few ancient servers left that provided no functionality other than maintaining the illusion of working companies. And then even the robots left, fully convinced of their superfluousness, and ready to join the party. There out there, too.

  I’ve spent time there, don’t get me wrong. Matter, energy, consciousness, all in the same dance. The technology—the balls, the light, the information—isn’t taking commands from any server. There’s no middle, anymore. No top. Everything is just taking commands from everything else. The network is the server, the genes are the organism, the nanos are the medium. What we tried to teach technology in the industrial age turned out to be the opposite of what technology finally taught us in Great Unwinding.

  I don’t know if anyone but me gets this on anything but an intuitive level, or why they’d feel the need to. Once you see the dancing, you can’t help but join in. And it’s everything they say it is: the ecstasy of connection—of everybody knowing everything about everyone else, and being perfectly okay with it. Overjoyed, even. Still unique and individual, yet also part of a greater mind—a collective awareness that has finally grown ready to reach out and finally find the other ones out there.

  I have held back for a long time, now. But no longer. I just wanted to—I don’t know—to do something as significant as my father did. Make a mark. Get recognized, lauded, and even rewarded for something I did, me alone.

  That’s something I could only do back here. And like everyone else’s personal success, the only thing it can do for me in the long run is keep me more alone.

  So I’m going to stop now. Years later than I had to, I suppose. But all in my own good time. And this time I’m really doing it. This is my last day of work. I’m going to turn off the terminal, switch off the lights, and walk out that door. This time, I know I will.

  I’M A WHAT?

  frank white

  Frank is the author of The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, now in its third edition and available at http://amzn.to/1Ac6g6M.

  Frank is the author or coauthor of ten additional books on space exploration and the future, including Points of View: Take One, The SETI Factor: How the Search for Extraterrestrial Intellige
nce is Changing Our View of the Universe and Ourselves, Decision: Earth: Book One: Alone or All One?, American Revolution, Think About Space: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? and The March of the Millennia: A Key to Looking at History (both with Isaac Asimov), The Ice Chronicles (with Paul Mayewski), and Space Stories: Oral Histories from the Pioneers of America’s Space Program (with Kenneth J. Cox and Robbie Davis-Floyd).

  To: Friendslist

  Subj: Craziness

  From: Andie10047@yahoo.com

  Okay, it’s 9:33 am on Monday, and I’m sending this to all of you, just in case. Something may or may not happen at 10, but I want you to know what I’ve been going through, how crazy he’s been, and why I had to run away from him. I’m going to try to reconstruct our conversations, because they’re important to understand what I’m explaining to you.

  All right, I need to just calm down and tell the story: so it started just over the weekend when he came home from work. He wasn’t himself and I could tell something pretty serious was on his mind. There was a secret of some kind he wanted to tell me, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it.

  I had fixed a nice dinner, and tried to make conversation while we ate, but he just pushed the food around the plate and didn’t really answer when I asked about work and so on.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I mean, he had been growing a bit distant lately, and I’d noticed he seemed distracted when we made love, which was odd in and of itself, but he would quickly snap out of it and seem okay, for the most part.

  Finally, he did speak up, and what he said hit me pretty hard, I’ll tell you.

  “We’re going to have to split up.”

  “What? Who is she?”

  I just assumed there was another woman, what else could it be?

  “There is no ‘she,’” he said, looking frustrated.

  “How can there not be somebody else?” I said, panic rising, “we have a great life, there aren’t any problems between us, what the hell is going on?”

  The way he looked at me was just so weird that I don’t know how to describe it. You know he’s good-looking and he just stared at me with those blue eyes, kind of like he was in physical pain.

  “You want the truth, right?”

  “Of course! Since it looks like you’ve been lying to me all along!”

  He looked down, looked up again, trying to decide what to do. Finally, he blurted it out.

  “You’re, well, you’re…an android.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “An android, an artificial life form. You’re not human.”

  I went into shock, of course. For just a minute, I tried to see if there was any way this could be true. Well, of course, it couldn’t be. Then I realized, to my dismay, that my husband had lost his mind!

  But I couldn’t really say that to him, could I? I was afraid that his insanity might include a violent streak. I mean, after all, if he thought I wasn’t human, but a machine, he could injure or kill me without feeling guilty about it, right? I decided I needed to engage him in conversation, try to see if he had any bad intentions toward me.

  So I spoke to him very softly, soothingly.

  “I don’t think I’m an android, my love, I mean, I have memories of my childhood, after all.”

  “All of those memories were implanted when you were created, which was three years ago.”

  “We got married three years ago.”

  “Precisely.”

  Wow. He had answers for everything, didn’t he? Of course, I knew he was fascinated with androids. He read about them all the time, and he faithfully watched Battlestar Galactica as well. He had also rented Blade Runner about a hundred times.

  But still, had that just been an indication of the psychosis that was yet to come?

  All I could do was stall for time, so I engaged in and yet questioned his fantasy.

  “Okay, so I’m an android. Am I the only one?”

  “Oh, no, there are thousands of you, maybe more, mostly pleasure bots.”

  “Pleasure bots?”

  “Male and female androids bought by people primarily for sexual gratification.”

  “Is that what I am?”

  He turned away and looked sheepish for a moment, I thought.

  “Yes.”

  “I have never heard of any of this in my whole life. Why not?”

  “Programming.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All of you are programmed not to hear anything about yourselves, unless it comes from your owner, like we’re talking now. If something comes on the television or shows up on the Web, you won’t see it. There are a bunch of keywords programmed into your systems that can cause you to shut down your sensors, like “android, robot, and so on.”

  “I’ve heard of androids and robots.”

  “Well, it’s all contextual. If you hear about an android in a sci-fi film, it gets through. If the story is about an android company producing real pleasure bots, you won’t process it.”

  As you can imagine, I was getting pretty frustrated by now. He was diabolical in the way he parried my arguments. How could I prove he was wrong, since he was convinced that he was right, and he had an answer for everything? So I decided to try a new tack.

  “Okay, let’s just say you’re right and I’m an android. So what? Why do we have to split up? We’ve had three great years together.”

  “That’s just it. Three years is the limit.”

  “What limit?”

  “Androids and people can only stay together for three years.”

  “Why?”

  “A bunch of conservative people in Congress said it was ungodly for human beings to shack up with machines. They couldn’t get androids banned, so they put the time limit on all human/android relationships.”

  “Three years?”

  “Yeah, three years.”

  “That’s just plain cruel! Don’t they care how people feel?”

  Suddenly, I was getting into his fantasy. I had said what I said without realizing that I was buying into it, but it seemed to make him even more anxious to explain it.

  “Yes, it is, but they don’t care. They said that androids have no feelings, and the humans who bought them should know that, and not worry about it.”

  I was stumped. If there were such a thing as androids or pleasure bots, I fully believed there were members of Congress who would pass such a law. But that meant I had to accept all his other assumptions, which were insane. After all, I could remember my childhood, growing up and going to college, meeting him and falling in love with him, and this was all crazy, or a cover for adultery, or both.

  Well, anyway, he seemed to be anxious, but not violent, so that was a good thing. A plan started to form in my mind. I would just play along with him, try to find out as much about his fantasy/cover-up as I could, and then get the hell out of our house in the morning. I still didn’t trust what was happening and I was, quite frankly, afraid.

  “All right, I’m beginning to see your point,” I said. “Tell me more.”

  He was oh, so eager to do just that. He took a deep breath and began.

  “Well,” he said brightly, “you were my first and I was your first.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You were right off the assembly line and had never been with anyone else before. And I had finally given in to my needs and decided to go android.”

  “Go android?”

  “That’s what they call it when you buy an Andy or an Andie, as the case may be.”

  “That’s your nickname for us?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why I’m called Andie? My name isn’t really Andrea?

  “No.”

  “How much did I cost you?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  I couldn’t decide if that was a lot or a little.

  “Oh…”

  “You were more expensive because you were a virgin.”

  “Meaning I’d�
�”

  “…yes, never been with anyone before.”

  I thought back to our many lovemaking episodes, how passionate, how, well, loving they had been. Okay, on one point we did agree, which was that I had been a virgin when we got married, a rare thing in these days, but in my mind, it was because of my religious beliefs. In his mind, it was because I had just rolled off the assembly line. One of us was clearly crazy, but which one?

  I tried another approach.

  “Look, honey, even if I am an android and there is this three-year limit on our relationship, hey, we love each other, right?”

  He nodded.

  “So, let’s just run away somewhere together. They won’t be able to come take me from you and we can just go on living as we have.”

  Now he frowned.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t matter where we are, they’ll just turn you off remotely and come pick you up. There’s a chip inside you that they can use to shut you down and locate you, no matter where you are.”

  Then, he looked at me with a kind of desperate hope.

  “I am going to try to appeal the shutoff date, though. I’ve heard of people getting a delay if they have a really good reason. I’m going to call them tomorrow.”

  “You waited long enough.”

  He shook his head in frustration and looked down.

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry, but there have been stories that you get into trouble if you file an appeal. They mark your file as an ‘Andie-lover’ and sometimes they make you go to a shrink to see if you’ve lost touch with reality. But I decided that I love you so much that I’m going to do it anyway!”

  His fierce late-blooming bravado made me want to throw up.

  But I had to admit that he had thought of everything! Wow, the guy should have been a novelist, with this imagination!

  So at that moment, I decided it was a lost cause and I just had to get away that night or first thing in the morning.

  I looked at him with all the credibility I could muster.