You think life is crazy now? Rick Rosner points out how much more crazy we have to look forward to.
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We don’t really care about the future. We care about our kids and their kids, but beyond that, we don’t really give a dang. We’re puppets of evolution, which wants us to care about making and raising children, but evolution hasn’t filled us with any more concern for our great-great-grandkids than rabbits have for theirs.
We’re bad at thinking about the future—we just don’t do much of it. It’s like, “200 years from now? Captain Kirk and weird clothes,” and we’re done. And for most of human history, this was fine—things didn’t change much. You’re a farmer, your kids and their kids will be farmers, eventually the stone masons finish building the cathedral.
But this isn’t the 1400s. The future is here, and it’s getting ready to kick our asses. We all know what terrible futures look like from a zillion lazy science fiction movies – the world is flooded, a virus gets loose, robots kill everybody. But even the very best futures will obliterate the world we know in our or our children’s lifetimes.
So far, the future has been a good deal. We’ve pretty much lost our faith in a spiritual world, but in exchange, we’ve gotten fantastic technology. That is, we now know the world isn’t a magical place, that everything happens because of physics. Instead of magic and wonder, we have endless information and entertainment and connectedness at our fingertips. It’s a decent bargain.
The bargains to come, however, will be more brutal.
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Brutal Bargain #1: We’ll have to become our own robot overlords or live as second-class citizens. Scary-level artificial intelligence is coming. The only way to stay on top of AI will be to merge with it. We will be augmenting our brains with all sorts of tech. People who don’t will find themselves at an increasing disadvantage.
Brutal Bargain #2: So many things that we enjoy or value or are simply used to will go away. Marriage ‘til death do us part – unlikely, when people are living to 120 and beyond. Professional sports will become weird or obsolete. Driving a vehicle, privacy, solitude without dozens of smart chips embedded in everything squirting bursts of information at you – they’re all going away.
Brutal Bargain #3: The end of consciousness and basic human drives as we know them. Two or three decades from now, human thought will be entirely figured out, and a couple decades after that, consciousness will become entirely mess-withable. The biological drives we’ve had as long as there have been humans will be tweaked. Brains will be just parts of information-processing systems. Consciousness will be freed from human skulls, will be replicated, will be directly linked to other consciousnesses, and a zillion other weird things. We’ll have incredible thinking power, but individual human identity will be eroded.
Human existence has been roughly the same for thousands of years. It’s crazy that we’re living in the last couple decades of unmodified humanity. It’s also crazy that people aren’t freaking out about it. This is it—the end of normal human life as we know it. By the end of the century, people will be fantastically modified or living in Amish-like communities, shielding themselves from too much tech.
My rule of thumb is: the percent weirdness of 21st century life equals the last two digits of the year. Here in 2015, life is 15% weird. We’re addicted to our devices, but beyond that, life isn’t too strange yet. In 2025, life will be 25% weird. By the year 2090, life will be a bizarre mix of futuristic clichés, tattered shreds of traditional life, and stuff we can’t imagine yet, designed by hella-smart augmented folks.
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What should we do?
1. We should be wary of tech, keeping a sharp eye on AI. We need to understand what it and its creators are up to, so malicious or incompetently designed AI doesn’t go on a rampage. For the past 20 years, the rise of AI has been treated as science fiction foolishness or somebody else’s business, but now, respectable, knowledgeable people—Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, to name a few—are saying they’re worried. Right now, any idiot can buy a drone. What happens in 19 years when any idiot can buy an assistant bot with a 275 IQ?
2. Look around—appreciate the world that’s going away. The modified people looking at the rejiggered world a century from now will be seeing it from half-robot eyes. We’re gonna keep messing up the world. Then we’ll restore it into some Disneyfied version of its former self. Natural nature will be long-gone.
3. Think about the future. Don’t just take whatever gadgets the Tech Gods give us without thinking about what they portend. And what they portend is our world is sitting on quicksand – nanobot quicksand.
4. Educate yourself. Strive to know at least as much as your teenage kids do about TechLand. Don’t be the grandma or grandpa who can’t work a remote.
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The Future: What’s Probably Going Away
Privacy – Not only will our actions be an open ebook, so will our very thoughts. Work on not caring about what other people think.
Driving – Think you’ll still be personally steering your car by 2030? Nah.
Normal aging – Born in 1980? You’ll probably be living to 110. Born in 2000? You have a shot at 200. There will be lots of really old people who look young in some weird, lizardly way.
Sensory underload – You’ve heard about the Internet of Things, where every little thing from toaster ovens to sidewalks gets a chip so it can tell the world how it’s doing. Good luck avoiding that.
Sex – As everything becomes awesome and we gain control over our biological drives, sex will quit being the most awesome thing. Sorry, biology.
Free-Range Dumbness – As the world becomes increasingly information-flooded, will people be able to hide in their little biased bubbles of ignorance? I hope not.
Normal Economics – The world is accelerating right out from under our financial systems. Money, jobs, investing, concepts of value – they’ll all be transformed.
Children – As lifespans increase, the percentage of people having kids will decline precipitously. Why carry on your legacy through your descendants when you can carry on your legacy by living forever?
Death – A century from now, there will be many options to death, including bribing a grandchild to let you live in her head or being downloaded into a cyber-slum because you’re broke.
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Photo: Getty Images
Hey, Rick! Very interesting article. Nina forwarded it to me and I’ll show it to my mom (Kathryn) for her to read). I think you’re right and most of us “common folk” haven’t really given deep thought to what you suggest. In some ways, it makes me glad I’m in my 60s because the future holds some dire scenarios that must be considered. Drones are a huge issue in privacy, security, safety, and a myriad of other areas.
Hey Ron!
I take a zillion vitamins because I think the cool stuff will outweigh the dire stuff.
In my neighborhood, the last remaining video store was just replaced by a drone shop (which will be replaced in 2023 by a robot butler showroom and in 2031 by a discount brain-boosting neural chip implant clinic).
Whoa, Silke –
Where did I say that climate change isn’t a huge problem? It’s big as heck, and the fixes for climate change will cause problems, too. Eventually, we’ll turn the earth into a weird nanotech Disney paradise, but not before all sorts of wretchedness for big swaths of the population. Just because I wrote about other stuff doesn’t mean I don’t think climate change is a thing.
Rick
What scared me the most reading this is that you seem to think we do not have problem with climate change,