Invasive vs. Non-invasive Augmentation

The focus of biological technologies will remain on the understanding of ourselves and other lifeforms, treating diseases, and extending high quality lifespans. On the other hand, actual augmentation of our intellectual and physical powers will, for the most part, happen by proxy via non-invasive devices.

In addition to carefully applying existing and well-established trends for understanding the future, there is another characteristic to all of the future technologies in this blog. They are all noninvasive, that is, they do not rely upon directly "plugging in" to the human brain. There are several reasons for this:

1. It is unnecessary. The value-add of these technologies can be achieved without direct connections between the technologies in question and the human brain.

2. Although many aggressive technology enthusiasts (such as frequent futurist forums) seem to be enamored with this idea of direct tech-to-brain interfaces, I do not believe that the vast majority of the consumer base will be anywhere near so enthused. As Woody Allen said in Sleeper, "No one touches my brain - that's my second favorite organ."

3. Direct brain-to-technology interfaces will be subject to far greater legal penalties if something goes wrong. And it would not take many such suits to move the market from such devices.

4. The technologies discussed in this blog are intended to be utilized for an arbitrary period of time, from a few minutes to several hours or more. Even something as simple as 3D glasses start to annoy after a short while. So although the technologies in this blog are completely compatible with such things as 3-D glasses, virtual-reality helmets, etc., and the software would be virtually identical, they do not require such devices to fulfill their design purposes of utility and/or imagination actualization.

5. The technologies in this blog are meant to be utilized or enjoyed alongside "reality", not exclude the real world altogether. For example, a virtual reality-helmet in essence removes you from reality, it's difficult to impossible to know what's going on in the real world while wearing such an enveloping device. The technologies in this blog provide an extremely realistic virtual experience, without shutting out the real world entirely - you can still hear your baby cry, for instance.

6. For a given amount of computational "augmentation", a separate, stand-alone device will generally be more economical than one directly integrated into the human brain. The demonstration of this is somewhat problematic, because Kurzweil keeps what he means by direct augmentation of the human brain quite vague, using terms such as "smarter" that could mean a great variety of things. However, let's pick just one, specific example - calculation of the square root of 2 to 1,000 decimal places. A stand-alone device with little or no AI could do this for an effective cost of a few pennies or less, and is available with even today's computer technology. However, to augment the power of a human brain to allow the calculation of this "in their head" as it were, is an infinitely more arduous and expensive undertaking. It's unclear what the best way to achieve this is, in any case - via a silicon chip implant? This smacks of "unnecessary surgery", and even if established to be feasible, seems like a highly optional procedure. This leads to the next concern:

7. Brain augmentation - and for that matter, transhuman augmentation of any kind - even if proven safe and feasible, seems to fall into the class of "optional therapy" - ie, not life-saving in the sense of treating a chronic ailment that afflict the disease-stricken. Depending on the nature of the enhancement, it also seems like these kinds of augmentations could also be quite expensive. Extrapolating the current trend of the stinginess of health insurers, it seems reasonable, and in fact, quite reasonable, to suggest that they will NOT cover the expense of such optional procedures. This means that any transhuman enhancements will be out-of-pocket for those desiring such enhancements. If this quite likely scenario proves to be the case, this will mean that the economics will keep the procedures expensive and out of reach for all but the well-to-do. Kurzweil seems to suggest that these types of enhancements will become widespread and happily covered by insurers and/or demanded by the marketplace, but there is absolutely no evidence for this. That doesn't mean it's impossible, not saying that, but it is deeply improbable, and in any case Kurzweil gives no detailed explanation as to why this scenario would come to pass in the first place.

8. A standalone device provides greater scope for offloading of tasks and activities than one directly integrated into the human brain. This ties into the key consumer driver of "convenience" and "making life easier" that is a standard part of successful products, technological and otherwise. If it's directly integrated into one's brain, it may make thinking easier, but it's still the human doing most or all of the work.

9. Inputs and outputs can generally be better standardized and communicated via stand-alone technologies than those directly integrated into the human brain. For example, moving beyond the "square root of 2" scenario to something more involved, say, a detailed weather simulation. Again, this is something that current computers can do, even without appreciable AI as part of the software suite. The inputs for the simulation are input in a standard way, and are output to a screen or printer in a standard way (at least for a given software application). If all this is happening inside someone's head, how do you know the inputs are exactly right, and hence trustworthy? How does that person communicate the results of the simulation anyway - do they drive a monitor or a printer with their thoughts? These and other considerations help build a case that for a given computing task, direct integration into the human brain is in most cases vastly complicates the task, makes the results harder to communicate, less reliable, and much more expensive.

10. All of the above considerations are given even more gravitas with the eventual development of sophisticated AI software that has one of its key objectives successful communication with human beings. This is still forthcoming, to be sure, but will be far ahead of direct brain integration of these technologies. As such, by the time such direct integration is feasible, it will prove unnecessary, as well as suboptimal for the above reasons.

11. People, then as now, will value their privacy, and the privacy of one's most intimate thoughts will be guarded most jealously of all. Therefore, projections of a "global mind" composed of actual, commingling human minds is deeply misguided. A "one-off" global mind consisting of advanced, personalized AI systems that reflect the interests of their primary human interactant(s) but that can also precisely control what they share over such a global network will be far more desirable.

12. Assuming that things such as computer viruses still exist, the idea of an actual "global mind" of commingling human brains that gets infected with a computerized pathogen is a nightmare scenario. Far better to have a "one-off", non-invasive system that gets infected with such a virus, simply because it will be simpler to cleanse such a technology-only platform than to cleanse a composite technological-organic brain of such a virus.

Introduction to the Future Prediction Process

It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Similarly, ignoring the past and present when predicting the future dooms one to never know it.

The Future in Focus
Introduction to the main themes of this blog.

A Powerful and Comprehensive Process for Understanding and Predicting the Future
Description of the multi-pronged and complementary empirical approach underlying the predictions in this blog.

Imagination Actualization in the Noisy Future
Description of the key assumptions underlying the nature of the future, particularly from the individual consumer standpoint.

The Nature of Future Technologies
The many reasons for suggesting that key future technologies will retain a primarily distinct nature from their human consumers.

Imagination Actualization in the Noisy Future

Description of the key assumptions underlying the nature of the future, particularly from the individual consumer standpoint.

I have described the trends that will inform the future, and that frame and bound the predictions made throughout this blog; but to determine a refined clarity as to their specifics, a couple of cogent observations about the future are key. First, it will be noisier, in terms of sales messages, spam, and myriad other often unwanted bombardments from anywhere and everywhere, much noisier than today even. To escape this attention-eating noise, the nesting trend of today will strengthen, perhaps substantially.

In addition, traditional forms of home entertainment, such as TV, will still be around in some presumably more advanced form, but they will be getting tired. True on-demand programming will help, but only so far. Unfortunately, the promise of thousands of TV channels will not help much either. I have 300 or something channels now on cable, and spend much of time clicking through them, and say a "kumbaya" if I find one show worth watching. More channels means that a less rapidly growing advertising budget by companies is sliced thinner and thinner. Since original programming is expensive, with a thinner ad budget the temptation to show reruns is large, and even what original programming remains is of dimished quality, on average. This trend will become worse, maybe not tremendously worse, but in any case there is little reason to believe that it will improve markedly.

The real problem with TV programming, and even things like gaming, are that you are living in someone else's imagination, not your own. These traditional forms of entertainment will definitely still be around, and maybe a few or several forms we haven't thought of yet, but they will not be enough to satisfyingly soak up the free time of millions of consumers as much as the technologies following the trend I will describe next.

Given that we’ll be spending as much time in the home or more in a noisier world than now, where will we go for fulfillment, to feed the social, emotional, and mental needs that the maddening crowds outside cannot?

To fill this deepening need, in addition to doing useful work, much of the direction in consumer technologies will be in a trend that can be described as “actualizing the imagination” – i.e., helping us make our imagining “real” in the sense of pictures, movies, and at some point synchronized interactions between virtual reality systems and droids, for making what's in our heads stunningly realistic and interactive. People’s exploding repository of digital pictures, high-definition video, etc, will be a key input to these advanced systems for bringing those repositories to life for its owners or other’s enjoyment in dramatic new ways. I will describe these in considerable detail in a later post.

As the world becomes more noisy, we will become more nostalgic as well, to do as we’ve always done, look to a simpler past to bring us calm and quiet retrospection. Bringing the past to life, especially our own past, will be a killer application for advanced AI, droid, virtual reality, and other imagination actualization technologies, the uses limited only to – well, our imagination. That’s a big place that is hidden from the world most of the time, and is only vivid to ourselves in a limited way. A major trend in much of entertainment and visualization technology has this goal as the final objective: to see, hear, and touch artificially generated "realities" in photorealistic detail, generated in near-real time, that is so vivid you don’t have to work to suspend your imagination, it actually suspends your imagination for you.

The final introductory post explores the topic of non-invasive vs. invasive technologies to achieve these ends, and which seems more likely.

A Comprehensive Process for Understanding the Future

Description of the multi-pronged and balanced empirical approach underlying the predictions in this blog.

After having introduced the main objectives of this blog, let's get down to business. The estimates of the future in this blog are not the result of a "vision" so much as a process. This process considers several important trends and components in a way that is quasi-scientific – i.e., evidence-based, albeit obviously without rigorously controlled experiments, hence the quasi. To be as cautious as possible, I try to use techniques of historical analysis, where sometimes scant evidence is combined with other evidence in a conservative, balanced way to reconstruct a person, place, or time. In this case, the “history” is the present trends for each of the components considered.

The components that go into the process of predicting the future can be summarized as follows:

First and foremost, bring an open mind. Leave preconceptions of the future at the door, they contaminate the productive execution of the process. With an open mind you can go to the future with a clean slate, and see things that may surprise you.

Technological – based on past and present trends, the likely rate of advance of the technologies needed for the applications and products discussed. I will sometimes give estimated times of arrival for these techs, but often the range is quite wide, because many depend on the continued advancement and convergence of many different technologies, each with their own rates of advance and market dynamics.

Consumer demand – this is the pull for the techs discussed. This is both the likely adoption and/or lack thereof based on past and present trends. One of the key consumer demand trends that I use as an organizing principle is the “imagination actualization” trend I will describe shortly.

Market dynamics – the assumption that these products will be manufactured in the most cost-effective way to meet consumer demand, while being subject to the same forces as today, i.e. liability considerations, etc.

Legal, Ethical, and Moral – this is often overlooked, but the law will still be around in the future, and will be a hugely motivating force to the presumably large corporate entities making most of these products. Then as now, these firms will have substantial liability considerations that will maximize their attention to making products that are safe and controllable, while meeting the richness of consumer demand. Many of the ethical dilemmas encountered here are almost as strange as the technology itself, as we'll get into in another post.

Most of the predictions that I’ve seen seem to take just one or two of these components and consider them in relative isolation. This can provide an interesting perspective on the future, but tends to drape them in vagueness, and though I’m often excited afterwards, always have a bunch of gnawing questions. However, when considered holistically, as a set of interacting, loosely coupled drivers, using one to decide which path to choose at a fork in the road reached with another, predictions can become dramatically more specific and detailed, while remaining quite reasonable.

This process is behind every prediction in this blog, large or small, without exception.

Just as important as the trends shaping the future are the psychological pressures experienced by people living in the future. These can already be discerned today, and are described in the next post, Imagination Actualization in the Noisy Future.

The Future in Focus

At a most critical time, as we near completion of the first decade of the 21st century, futurism is in trouble - it is adrift on the shoals of concepts that have outlived their predictive utility.

There are two principal flavors of futurism - the social conscience type, which emphasizes addressing big problems like overpopulation and global warming; the second type is the forecasting of technological advancements, and their impact on humanity.

The social conscience type is in good shape, I think - that futurism branch is by its very nature strongly bounded by the clear evidence of the current problems that will become only bigger until they are addressed. It is not as rewarding to forecast wildly creative takes on these problems, that just makes them terrifying, and they are scary enough.

The second type, the technological projection type, is to me the fun branch, where I spend a great deal of time exploring. Especially consumer technologies, the tech manifestations that will enrich and transform our leisure time.

Unfortunately, there is an endemic, structurally suboptimal approach that is utilized almost universally by every other futurist who specializes in this branch. There is a near-universal tendency to have reasonable predictions 5 or 10 years out. But after a certain interval of time, it varies but a quarter century seems typical, the futurists compete with each other in a prediction arms race of spectacularly discontinuous technological transformations of society.

These are gimmicks to mask the fact that futurists, like everyone else, get lost in the possibilities of the future, and go for the hail mary - they are legion enough to be considered an epidemic impairment of judgment in approaching the far future.

Science fiction in some ways helps, but in some ways hurts far more than is commonly acknowledged in understanding likely futures. This is a complex subject, to which I may have occasion to return.

For this blog's predictions, the far future is about 100 years, give or take. Now, before you say that's not really the far future, I don't disagree. However, in the sense that there are no other predictions that go out that far that maintain their rigor and credibility, it is far enough for now. This blog's predictions will be unique in that they get the flavor and a very significant percentage of the details for the next 100 years right.

But we are not going to go straight to the end of the century - there will be checkpoints, intermediate expressions of these technologies, all along the way.

This is an attempt to discern the outlines of the real future, and it is built upon the solid foundations of empirically faithful and conservative steps, one leading to the other, at all times consistent and reasonable. No dramatic touches are introduced unless everything has logically led up that. These foundations are firmer by orders of magnitude than any other far future you have seen.

This blog addresses a focused set of future technologies, primarily consumer products for our future selves - advanced AI, virtual reality, and droid technologies. As it turns out, these techs more than any other do in fact define the future, make it distinctive. Without these, the future wouldn't feel much different from today. So it's a limited scope that is in fact vast.

Every other field that has submitted its ideas and techniques to the rigors of objective scientific practice has been enriched immeasurably. In fact, the only reason we have a cool future to imagine is entirely because of the scientific method. It is ludicrous that this field not be subject to the methods that yield the fodder for interesting predictions in the first place.

I will introduce these with exhaustive and objective evidence applied in a sober, logical way. For example, this blog will not arbitrarily introduce massive discontinuities in terms of institutional governance, if there is no reason to believe that will occur. Spectacularly creative forecasts do not let you off the hook in terms of explaining in detail how and why that would happen, with abundant evidence woven into the structure of those projections.

Next are the details for this process for analyzing the future.