Shaping the future
(One of the things that goes with being an SF writer is that people expect you to talk about, well, the future. Last week, engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting invited me to Munich to address one of their technology open days. Here's a transcript of my talk, which discusses certain under-considered side effects of some technologies that you're probably already becoming familiar with. Note that this is a long blog entry — even by my verbose standards — so you'll need to hit on the "continue reading" link to see the whole thing.)
Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me here today. I understand that you're expecting a talk about where the next 20 years are taking us, how far technology will go, how people will use the net, and whether big shoulder pads and food pills will be fashionable. Personally, I'm still waiting for my personal jet car — I've been waiting about fifty years now — and I mention this as a note of caution: while personal jet cars aren't obviously impossible, their non-appearance should give us some insights into how attempts to predict the future go wrong.
I'm a science fiction writer by trade, and people often think that means I spend a lot of time trying to predict possible futures. Actually, that's not the job of the SF writer at all — we're not professional futurologists, and we probably get things wrong as often as anybody else. But because we're not tied to a specific technical field we are at least supposed to keep our eyes open for surprises.
So I'm going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects — global warming, bioengineering, the green revolution, the intellectual property wars — and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia. And I'm going to get us there the long way round ...
Speed
The big surprise in the 20th century — remember that personal jet car? — was the redefinition of progress that took place some time between 1950 and 1970.
Before 1800, human beings didn't travel faster than a horse could gallop. The experience of travel was that it was unpleasant, slow, and usually involved a lot of exercise — or the hazards of the seas. Then something odd happened; a constant that had held for all of human history — the upper limit on travel speed — turned into a variable. By 1980, the upper limit on travel speed had risen (for some lucky people on some routes) to just over Mach Two, and to just under Mach One on many other shorter routes. But from 1970 onwards, the change in the rate at which human beings travel ceased — to all intents and purposes, we aren't any faster today than we were when the Comet and Boeing 707 airliners first flew.
We can plot this increase in travel speed on a graph — better still, plot the increase in maximum possible speed — and it looks quite pretty; it's a classic sigmoid curve, initially rising slowly, then with the rate of change peaking between 1920 and 1950, before tapering off again after 1970. Today, the fastest vehicle ever built, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, en route to Pluto, is moving at approximately 21 kilometres per second — only twice as fast as an Apollo spacecraft from the late-1960s. Forty-five years to double the maximum velocity; back in the 1930s it was happening in less than a decade.
One side-effect of faster travel was that people traveled more. A brief google told me that in 1900, the average American traveled 210 miles per year by steam-traction railroad, and 130 miles by electric railways. Today, comparable travel figures are 16,000 miles by road and air — a fifty-fold increase in distance traveled. I'd like to note that the new transport technologies consume one-fifth the energy per passenger-kilometer, but overall energy consumption is much higher because of the distances involved. We probably don't spend significantly more hours per year aboard aircraft that our 1900-period ancestors spent aboard steam trains, but at twenty times the velocity — or more — we travel much further and consume energy faster while we're doing so.
Information
Around 1950, everyone tended to look at what the future held in terms of improvements in transportation speed.
But as we know now, that wasn't where the big improvements were going to come from. The automation of information systems just weren't on the map, other than in the crudest sense — punched card sorting and collating machines and desktop calculators.
We can plot a graph of computing power against time that, prior to 1900, looks remarkably similar to the graph of maximum speed against time. Basically it's a flat line from prehistory up to the invention, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, of the first mechanical calculating machines. It gradually rises as mechanical calculators become more sophisticated, then in the late 1930s and 1940s it starts to rise steeply. From 1960 onwards, with the transition to solid state digital electronics, it's been necessary to switch to a logarithmic scale to even keep sight of this graph.
It's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines.
Speaking of engineering practicalities, I'm sure everyone here has heard of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of Intel coined this one back in 1965 when he observed that the number of transistor count on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. This isn't just about the number of transistors on a chip, but the density of transistors. A similar law seems to govern storage density in bits per unit area for rotating media.
As a given circuit becomes physically smaller, the time taken for a signal to propagate across it decreases — and if it's printed on a material of a given resistivity, the amount of power dissipated in the process decreases. (I hope I've got that right: my basic physics is a little rusty.) So we get faster operation, or we get lower power operation, by going smaller.
We know that Moore's Law has some way to run before we run up against the irreducible limit to downsizing. However, it looks unlikely that we'll ever be able to build circuits where the component count exceeds the number of component atoms, so I'm going to draw a line in the sand and suggest that this exponential increase in component count isn't going to go on forever; it's going to stop around the time we wake up and discover we've hit the nanoscale limits.
The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s — everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about "air-mindedness" as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it's the politics of internet governance.
All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.
Bandwidth
I don't expect I need to lecture you about bandwidth. Let's just say that our communication bandwidth has been increasing in what should by now be a very familiar pattern since, oh, the eighteenth century, and the elaborate system of semaphore stations the French crown used for its own purposes.
Improvements in bandwidth are something we get from improvements in travel speed or information processing; you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of magnetic tapes driving cross-country (or an Airbus full of DVDs), and similarly, moving more data per unit time over fiber requires faster switches at each end.
Now, with little or no bandwidth, when it was expensive and scarce and modems were boxes the size of filing cabinets that could pump out a few hundred bits per second, computers weren't that interesting; they tended to be big, centralized sorting machines that very few people could get to and make use of, and they tended to be used for the kind of jobs that can be centralized, by large institutions. That's the past, where we've come from.
With lots of bandwidth, the picture is very different — but you don't get lots of bandwidth without also getting lots of cheap information processing, lots of small but dense circuitry, hordes of small computers spliced into everything around us. So the picture we've got today is of a world where there are nearly as many mobile phones in the EU as there are people, where each mobile phone is a small computer, and where the fast 3G, UMTS phones are moving up to a megabit or so of data per second over the air — and the next-generation 4G standards are looking to move 100 mbps of data. So that's where we are now. And this picture differs from the past in a very interesting way: because lots of people are interacting with them.
(That, incidentally, is what makes the world wide web possible; it's not the technology but the fact that millions of people are throwing random stuff into their computers and publishing on it. You can't do that without ubiquitous cheap bandwidth and cheap terminals to let people publish stuff. And there seems to be a critical threshold for it to work; any BBS or network system seems to require a certain size of user base before it begins to acquire a culture of its own.)
Which didn't happen before, with computers. It's like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h and are used by millions of people every month. There will be social consequences, and you can't easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.
Unintended Consequences
It typically takes at least a generation before the social impact of a ubiquitous new technology becomes obvious.
We are currently aware of the consequences of the switch to personal high-speed transportation — the car — and road freight distribution. It shapes our cities and towns, dictates where we live and work, and turns out to have disadvantages our ancestors were not aware of, from particulate air pollution to suburban sprawl and the decay of city centers in some countries.
We tend to be less aware of the social consequences, too. Compare that 1900-era figure of 360 miles per year traveled by rail, against the 16,000 miles of a typical modern American. It is no longer rare to live a long way from relatives, workplaces, and educational institutions. Countries look much more homogeneous on the large scale — the same shops in every high street — because community has become delocalized from geography. Often we don't know our neighbours as well as we know people who live hundreds of kilometers away. This is the effect of cheap, convenient high speed transport.
Now, we're still in the early stages of the uptake of mobile telephony, but some lessons are already becoming clear.
Traditional fixed land-lines connect places, not people; you dial a number and it puts you through to a room in a building somewhere, and you hope the person you want to talk to is there.
Mobile phones in contrast connect people, not places. You don't necessarily know where the person at the other end of the line is, what room in which building they're in, but you know who they are.
This has interesting social effects. Sometimes it's benign; you never have to wonder if someone you're meeting is lost or unable to find the venue, you never lose track of people. On the other hand, it has bad effects, especially when combined with other technologies: bullying via mobile phone is rife in British schools, and "happy slapping" wouldn't be possible without them. (Assaulting people while an accomplice films it with a cameraphone, for the purpose of sending the movie footage around — often used for intimidation, sometimes used just for vicarious violent fun.)
Convergence
It's even harder to predict the second-order consequences of new technologies when they start merging at the edges, and hybridizing.
A modern cellphone is nothing like a late-1980s cellphone. Back then, the cellphone was basically a voice terminal. Today it's as likely as not to be a video and still camera, a GPS navigation unit, have a keyboard for texting, a screen for surfing the web, an MP3 player, and it may also be a full-blown business computer with word processing and spreadsheet applications aboard.
In future it may end up as a pocket computer that simply runs voice-over-IP software, using the cellular telephony network — or WiFi or WiMax or just about any other transport layer that comes to hand — to move speech packets back and forth with acceptable latency.
And it's got peripherals. GPS location, cameras, text input. What does it all mean?
Putting it all together
Let's look at our notional end-point where the bandwidth and information processing revolutions are taking us — as far ahead as we can see without positing real breakthroughs and new technologies, such as cheap quantum computing, pocket fusion reactors, and an artificial intelligence that is as flexible and unpredictable as ourselves. It's about 25-50 years away.
Firstly, storage. I like to look at the trailing edge; how much non-volatile solid-state storage can you buy for, say, ten euros? (I don't like rotating media; they tend to be fragile, slow, and subject to amnesia after a few years. So this isn't the cheapest storage you can buy — just the cheapest reasonably robust solid-state storage.)
Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money. fast-forward a decade and that'll be 100Gb. Two decades and we'll be up to 10Tb.
10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I'm awake. All the time. It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it's actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)
Why would anyone want to do this?
I can think of several reasons. Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis.
Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. "What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?"
Think of it as google for real life.
We may even end up being required to do this, by our employers or insurers — in many towns in the UK, it is impossible for shops to get insurance, a condition of doing business, without demonstrating that they have CCTV cameras in place. Having such a lifelog would certainly make things easier for teachers and social workers at risk of being maliciously accused by a student or client.
(There are also a whole bunch of very nasty drawbacks to this technology — I'll talk about some of them later, but right now I'd just like to note that it would fundamentally change our understanding of privacy, redefine the boundary between memory and public record, and be subject to new and excitingly unpleasant forms of abuse — but I suspect it's inevitable, and rather than asking whether this technology is avoidable, I think we need to be thinking about how we're going to live with it.)
Now, this might seem as if it's generating mountains of data — but really, it isn't. There are roughly 80 million people in Germany. Let's assume they all have lifelogs. They're generating something like 10Tb of data each, 1013 bits, per year, or 1021 bits for the entire nation every year. 1023 bits per century.
Is 1023 bits a huge number? No it isn't, when we pursue Moore's Law to the bitter end.
There's a model for long term high volume storage that I like to use as a reference point. Obviously, we want our storage to be as compact as possible — one bit per atom, ideally, if not more, but one bit per atom seems as if it might be achievable. We want it to be stable, too. (In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.)
My model of a long term high volume data storage medium is a synthetic diamond. Carbon occurs in a variety of isotopes, and the commonest stable ones are carbon-12 and carbon-13, occurring in roughly equal abundance. We can speculate that if molecular nanotechnology as described by, among others, Eric Drexler, is possible, we can build a device that will create a diamond, one layer at a time, atom by atom, by stacking individual atoms — and with enough discrimination to stack carbon-12 and carbon-13, we've got a tool for writing memory diamond. Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one. To rewrite a zero to a one, you swap the positions of the two atoms, and vice versa.
It's hard, it's very stable, and it's very dense. How much data does it store, in practical terms?
The capacity of memory diamond storage is of the order of Avogadro's number of bits per two molar weights. For diamond, that works out at 6.022 x 1023 bits per 25 grams. So going back to my earlier figure for the combined lifelog data streams of everyone in Germany — twenty five grams of memory diamond would store six years' worth of data.
Six hundred grams of this material would be enough to store lifelogs for everyone on the planet (at an average population of, say, eight billion people) for a year. Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.
In more familiar terms: by the best estimate I can track down, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2500 petabytes — 2.5 x 1018 bytes — of data. That's almost ten milligrams. The Google cluster, as of mid-2006, was estimated to have 4 petabytes of RAM. In memory diamond, you'd need a microscope to see it.
So, it's reasonable to conclude that we're not going to run out of storage any time soon.
Now, capturing the data, indexing and searching the storage, and identifying relevance — that's another matter entirely, and it's going to be one that imprint the shape of our current century on those ahead, much as the great 19th century infrastructure projects (that gave our cities paved roads and sewers and railways) define that era for us.
I'd like to suggest that really fine-grained distributed processing is going to help; small processors embedded with every few hundred terabytes of storage. You want to know something, you broadcast a query: the local processors handle the problem of searching their respective chunks of the 128-bit address space, and when one of them finds something, it reports back. But this is actually boring. It's an implementation detail.
What I'd like to look at is the effect this sort of project is going to have on human civilization.
The Singularity reconsidered
Those of you who're familiar with my writing might expect me to spend some time talking about the singularity. It's an interesting term, coined by computer scientist and SF writer Vernor Vinge. Earlier, I was discussing the way in which new technological fields show a curve of accelerating progress — until it hits a plateau and slows down rapidly. It's the familiar sigmoid curve. Vinge asked, "what if there exist new technologies where the curve never flattens, but looks exponential?" The obvious example — to him — was Artificial Intelligence. It's still thirty years away today, just as it was in the 1950s, but the idea of building machines that think has been around for centuries, and more recently, the idea of understanding how the human brain processes information and coding some kind of procedural system in software for doing the same sort of thing has soaked up a lot of research.
Vernor came up with two postulates. Firstly, if we can design a true artificial intelligence, something that's cognitively our equal, then we can make it run faster by throwing more computing resources at it. (Yes, I know this is questionable — it begs the question of whether intelligence is parallelizeable, or what resources it takes.) And if you can make it run faster, you can make it run much faster — hundreds, millions, of times faster. Which means problems get solved fast. This is your basic weakly superhuman AI: the one you deploy if you want it to spend an afternoon and crack a problem that's been bugging everyone for a few centuries.
He also noted something else: we humans are pretty dumb. We can see most of the elements of our own success in other species, and individually, on average, we're not terribly smart. But we've got the ability to communicate, to bind time, and to plan, and we've got a theory of mind that lets us model the behaviour of other animals. What if there can exist other forms of intelligence, other types of consciousness, which are fundamentally better than ours at doing whatever it is that consciousness does? Just as a quicksort algorithm that sorts in O(n log n) comparisons is fundamentally better (except in very small sets) than a bubble sort that typically takes O(n2) comparisons.
If such higher types of intelligence can exist, and if a human-equivalent intelligence can build an AI that runs one of them, then it's going to appear very rapidly after the first weakly superhuman AI. And we're not going to be able to second guess it because it'll be as much smarter than us as we are than a frog.
Vernor's singularity is therefore usually presented as an artificial intelligence induced leap into the unknown: we can't predict where things are going on the other side of that event because it's simply unprecedented. It's as if the steadily steepening rate of improvement in transportation technologies that gave us the Apollo flights by the late 1960s kept on going, with a Jupiter mission in 1982, a fast relativistic flight to Alpha Centauri by 1990, a faster than light drive by 2000, and then a time machine so we could arrive before we set off. It makes a mockery of attempts to extrapolate from prior conditions.
Of course, aside from making it possible to write very interesting science fiction stories, the Singularity is a very controversial idea. For one thing, there's the whole question of whether a machine can think — although as the late, eminent professor Edsger Djikstra said, "the question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim". A secondary pathway to the Singularity is the idea of augmented intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence: we may not need machines that think, if we can come up with tools that help us think faster and more efficiently. The world wide web seems to be one example. The memory prostheses I've been muttering about are another.
And then there's a school of thought that holds that, even if AI is possible, the Singularity idea is hogwash — it just looks like an insuperable barrier or a permanent step change because we're too far away from it to see the fine-grained detail. Canadian SF writer Karl Schroeder has explored a different hypothesis: that there may be an end to progress. We may reach a point where the scientific enterprise is done — where all the outstanding questions have been answered and the unanswered ones are physically impossible for us to address. (He's also opined that the idea of an AI-induced Singularity is actually an example of erroneous thinking that makes the same mistake as the proponents of intelligent design (Creationism) — the assumption that complex systems cannot be produced by simple non-consciously directed processes.) An end to science is still a very long way away right now; for example, I've completely failed to talk about the real elephant in the living room, the recent explosion in our understanding of biological systems that started in the 1950s but only really began to gather pace in the 1990s. But what then?
Well, we're going to end up with — at the least — lifelogs, ubiquitous positioning and communication services, a civilization where every artifact more complicated than a spoon is on the internet and attentive to our moods and desires, cars that drive themselves, and a whole lot of other mind-bending consequences. All within the next two or three decades. So what can we expect of this collision between transportation, information processing, and bandwidth?
Drawing Conclusions
We're already living in a future nobody anticipated. We don't have personal jet cars, but we have ridiculously cheap intercontinental airline travel. (Holidays on the Moon? Not yet, but if you're a billionaire you can pay for a week in orbit.) On the other hand, we discovered that we do, in fact, require more than four computers for the entire planet (as Thomas Watson is alleged to have said). An increasing number of people don't have telephone lines any more — they rely on a radio network instead.
The flip side of Moore's Law, which we don't pay much attention to, is that the cost of electronic components is in deflationary free fall of a kind that would have given a Depression-era economist nightmares. When we hit the brick wall at the end of the road — when further miniaturization is impossible — things are going to get very bumpy indeed, much as the aerospace industry hit the buffers at the end of the 1960s in North America and elsewhere. This stuff isn't big and it doesn't have to be expensive, as the One Laptop Per Child project is attempting to demonstrate. Sooner or later there won't be a new model to upgrade to every year, the fab lines will have paid for themselves, and the bottom will fall out of the consumer electronics industry, just as it did for the steam locomotive workshops before them.
Before that happens, we're going to get used to some very disorienting social changes.
Hands up, anyone in the audience, who owns a slide rule? Or a set of trigonometric tables? Who's actually used them, for work, in the past year? Or decade?
I think I've made my point: the pocket calculator and the computer algebra program have effectively driven those tools into obsolescence. This happened some time between the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Now we're about to see a whole bunch of similar and much weirder types of obsolescence.
Right now, Nokia is designing global positioning system receivers into every new mobile phone they plan to sell. GPS receivers in a phone SIM card have been demonstrated. GPS is exploding everywhere. It used to be for navigating battleships; now it's in your pocket, along with a moving map. And GPS is pretty crude — you need open line of sight on the satellites, and the signal's messed up. We can do better than this, and we will. In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is.
Think about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.
We're also in some danger of losing the concepts of privacy, and warping history out of all recognition.
Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.
Now, in this age of rapid, transparent information retrieval, what happens if you've got a lifelog, registering your precise GPS coordinates and scanning everything around you? If you're updating your whereabouts via a lightweight protocol like Twitter and keeping in touch with friends and associates via a blog? It'd be nice to tie your lifelog into your blog and the rest of your net presence, for your personal convenience. And at first, it'll just be the kids who do this — kids who've grown up with little expectation of or understanding of privacy. Well, it'll be the kids and the folks on the Sex Offenders Register who're forced to lifelog as part of their probation terms, but that's not our problem. Okay, it'll also be people in businesses with directors who want to exercise total control over what their employees are doing, but they don't have to work there ... yet.
You know something? Keeping track of those quaint old laws about personal privacy is going to be really important. Because in countries with no explicit right to privacy — I believe the US constitution is mostly silent on the subject — we're going to end up blurring the boundary between our Second Lives and the first life, the one we live from moment to moment. We're time-binding animals and nothing binds time tighter than a cradle to grave recording of our every moment.
The political hazards of lifelogging are, or should be, semi-obvious. In the short term, we're going to have to learn to do without a lot of bad laws. If it's an offense to pick your nose in public, someone, sooner or later, will write a 'bot to hunt down nose-pickers and refer them to the police. Or people who put the wrong type of rubbish in the recycling bags. Or cross the road without using a pedestrian crossing, when there's no traffic about. If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal. In the UK, today, there are only about four million public CCTV surveillance cameras; I'm asking myself, what is life going to be like when there are, say, four hundred million of them? And everything they see is recorded and retained forever, and can be searched retroactively for wrong-doing.
One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.
And then there's history.
History today is patchy. I never met either of my grandfathers — both of them died before I was born. One of them I recognize from three photographs; the other, from two photographs and about a minute of cine film. Silent, of course. Going back further, to their parents ... I know nothing of these people beyond names and dates. (They died thirty years before I was born.)
This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn't happened yet — we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.
And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.
Total history — a term I'd like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven't experienced yet. I'm really not sure what its implications are, but then, I'm one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants' relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.
Meet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word "privacy", and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.
And yet, these trends are emergent from the current direction of the telecommunications industry, and are likely to become visible as major cultural changes within the next ten to thirty years. None of them require anything but a linear progression from where we are now, in a direction we're already going in. None of them take into account external technological synergies, stuff that's not obviously predictable like brain/computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, or magic wands. I've purposefully ignored discussion of nanotechnology, tissue engineering, stem cells, genomics, proteomics, the future of nuclear power, the future of environmentalism and religion, demographics, our environment, peak oil and our future energy economy, space exploration, and a host of other topics.
The wrap
As projections of a near future go, the one I've presented in this talk is pretty poor. In my defense, I'd like to say that the only thing I can be sure of is that I'm probably wrong, or at least missing something as big as the internet, or antibiotics.
(I know: driverless cars. They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy. Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all. But because cars have until now been marketed to us by appealing to our personal autonomy, there are going to be big social changes when we switch over to driverless vehicles.
(Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they're not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi. If I was malicious, I'd suggest that the move to autonomous vehicles will kill the personal automobile market; but instead I'll assume that people will still want to own their own four-wheeled living room, even though their relationship with it will change fundamentally. But I digress ...)
Anyway, this is the future that some of you are building. It's not the future you thought you were building, any more than the rocket designers of the 1940s would have recognized a future in which GPS-equipped hobbyists go geocaching at weekends. But it's a future that's taking shape right now, and I'd like to urge you to think hard about what kind of future you'd like your descendants — or yourselves — to live in. Engineers and programmers are the often-anonymous architects of society, and what you do now could make a huge difference to the lives of millions, even billions, of people in decades to come.
Thank you, and good afternoon.
Comments
Bravo!
Posted by: Till Westermayer | May 13, 2007 11:42 PM
I linked this and wrote "One of the things I like about Charlie is that he can, as E.E. Smith was so fond of exhorting us all to do, really think."
And then I thought..."Lensman Stross". Tee=hee, Charlie will kill me. What a mental image.
Regards, C
Posted by: Cernig | May 14, 2007 12:59 AM
Your final point actually ties into the jet car thing. One of the main arguments against jet cars is that to have large numbers of people of varying competence in charge of jet-powered aircraft would be a lot more dangerous than the present road situation, and the consequences of accidents would outweigh the economic benefits. Eliminate human drivers and link the vehicles into some sort of distributed traffic control system, and that obstacle goes away.
(Of course, there is also the question of the availability of oil, though perhaps some means of electric propulsion could be developed that would work.)
Posted by: acb | May 14, 2007 1:01 AM
Owing your own driverless car. It has been done before, via a still extant, albeit now rare, mechanism called a "chauffeur". (yes, well not driven by you.)
And when the time comes to sell the concept to the punters, that is how it will be done.
Posted by: JHomes | May 14, 2007 1:34 AM
Charlie wrote: "what is life going to be like...when everything...is recorded and retained forever, and can be searched retroactively for wrong-doing."
Privacy technologies, allowing SELECTIVE REVELATION as in the work viewable via the links below to the Carnegie Mellon Data Privacy Lab, should be built into the civil data infrastructure.
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/selectiverevelation/index.html
For instance, in the case of CCTV camera networks, the Privacy Lab have developed an algorithm, named k-Same, to protect individuals’ privacy while they're under video surveillance. It turns out that the usual methods that thwart human recognition of an individual’s features on video – for example, those pixelated fields covering faces, body parts and brand-name consumer items on Reality TV – won’t necessarily fool face recognition software, which is advancing rapidly. Completely blacking out each face in a video clip would do the job, but also be of limited use if government agencies wanted to follow up evidence of suspicious behavior once they had a court warrant.
And so what k-Same does is automatically take the average values of individuals’ faces and from those values synthesize new facial images, then superimpose those over the original images. (It's a bit like the scramble suit in PKD's A SCANNER DARKLY.)Subsequently, if a crime occurs or criminals need to be tracked (and the time is likely coming when it will be possible for face recognition software to data mine very large-scale networks of webcams for individuals) then law enforcement or security agencies will be required to get warrants before de-anonymizing the faces on the relevant footage.
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/video/index.html
More privact technologies---
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/people/sweeney/index.html#work
Sweeney's Privacy Lab is probably the most advanced example. But similar work is under way at Xerox PARC, UC Berkeley, and other places.
Posted by: Mark Pontin | May 14, 2007 1:48 AM
Charlie wrote: "what is life going to be like when ... everything they see is recorded and retained forever, and can be searched retroactively for wrong-doing...One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so."
That's in a sense NOT the biggest danger and maybe you're still thinking a bit like a 20th century guy. Let me try to explain. Privacy technology -- and especially the concept and mechanics of selective revelation -- mostly began as a component of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, which was officially killed in 2003 by US Senate bill. When the politicians did that, they simultaneously wrote a secret annex of that bill continuing government funding of every technology EXCEPT TIA's privacy component, either making the relevant technologies into black projects at places like NSA (e.g. the advanced data mining efforts) or else outsourcing them to the private sector companies like ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and AcXiom (e.g the more prosaic data collection side).
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0206/022306sh1.htm
As it happens, there were and are, anyway, hundreds of other data mining projects being carried on by the US government.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0606/061606nj1.htm
But TIA is useful to look at as the first publicly transparent effort to integrate all the plausible surveillance technologies into one comprehensive project. One specific TIA effort gives a taste of what could be done using advanced machine learning, neural networks, etc. TIA was called in to help the Guantanamo interrogators, who were a limited number of workers overwhelmed by the numbers of detainees and their data. Very briefly, at Guantanamo they applied a Bayesian classification system on the data of a small, select group of detainees who the interrogators were sure were al-Qaeda. Once the system was trained to recognize the profiles of al-Qaeda members, the interrogators used it on the data emerging from interrogations of all the other detainees. Claims from the interrogators, for what it was worth, were of 100 percent success.
http://www.computer.org/portal/site/security/menuitem.6f7b2414551cb84651286b108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=security_level1_article&TheCat=1015&path=security/2006/v4n6&file=popp.xml&;jsessionid=GHsDvQS19CTsCCQSC0tSVvP9LXWmX06fFR16NphnQhhjbRLTHmyg!-784803638
Privacy activists are making various arguments to prove the a priori assumption that this stuff can't work (false positives, etcetera). The best arguments against neural networks and advanced machine learning technologies tend to be those based on the notion that neural nets are:
(A) good at recognizing common patterns like those associated with fraud, etcetera, but not so good at recognizing uncommon or absolutely singular ones like those associated with mega-terrorism;
(B) a "black box" from a social policy viewpoint, because you might not know why the neural net is profiling a given individual. Thus, it's not justifiable.
In the real world, though, some of this stuff does work and some of it doesn't so far. One of the high-up ex-TIA guys has sworn to me that they had technology that recognized terrorist activity with 100 percent success. They would say that, of course. However, TIA was four years ago now; vast amounts of money and effort have continued to be poured in this direction. Some of this stuff has been appearing and producing successful results on state and municipal levels of law enforcement.
So let's move on from using data surveillance to profile terrorists. How about profiling paedophiles, for instance? After all, such folks probably have websites they go to, specific behaviors, etcetera. And if you can profile paedophiles, what about tax evaders? Pot smokers? In terms of profiling technologies, where do we draw the line? (Here the relevAnt PKD might be MINORITY REPORT.)
Posted by: Mark Pontin | May 14, 2007 1:53 AM
An excellent speech, truly thought provoking. I've been concerned for some time now that when I read something about the activities of Paris Hilton et al I am seeing an echo from the future, and that terrifies me!
As to the driverless automobile, I think this will take even longer to happen than it has already -- the lawyers will see to that. Even if they have only 1% as many accidents as manually driven cars they'll generate 10 times as many lawsuits. I just can't see your average car company spending as much money on car control software as Boeing and Airbus do on flight control software, and even if they did it probably wouldn't be enough. Despite the potential to reduce auto accidents by 90-99% we'll just *feel* less safe in a driverless vehicle. And of course they'll be hacked...
Posted by: David S. | May 14, 2007 2:16 AM
Another consequence of the lifelog, total history, and the always-on connection of increasing numbers of people will be the rise of reputation economies. Over centuries, the idea of "reputation" will transform society as radically as the concept of money has over the last 3,000 years. I wrote about this last year in an article for the online gaming magazine The Escapist, "Game Design in the Transfigured World."
Posted by: Allen Varney | May 14, 2007 2:28 AM
Nice.
One thing that occurs to me is that often a technological advance will fail in the face of social pressures; thus, nuclear power, which was our savior in the 50s, is still in decline as a dangerous proposition.
So maybe instead of lifelogs, stored on cheap, ubiquotous 1tb storage sticks, we end up with laws governing and restricting the use of personal memory devices.
My thinking is this: the presence of 'the internet' into every facet of life has made it harder and harder for some people to get away with what they used to. Recently, a political figure failed to get re-elected because someone was not only present at a speech with a camera, but posted to a political blog that spread it far and wide. His own comments damned him, but they had help from the internet.
Considering that all records are making thier way to digital format, it's not too big a stretch to consider that most politicians and other people of power (CEOs, etc) are going to wish that they didn't exist.
Also assume that organizations like the RIAA and MPAA have a hand in this; getting concessions from governments to avoid the non-stop flow of pirated movies and songs over off-the-grid storage devices (assuming they don't come with an 811n link embeded).
Personal jet cars, or personal flying cars fell prey to social pressure. Such devices were certainly possible for the past decade or two. Making them safe enough for the average Joe, not so much. Still, you can avail yourself of a personal flying car today, but it requires you to drive down to the local airstrip to use it. The futurists of the past failed to consider the FAA. If it flies, the FAA wants a piece of it.
Your comments about driverless automobiles comes to play in this; once driverless cars are the norm, flying driverless cars could be right around the corner since, as you stated, the requirement for the owner of said vehicle to actually know how to FLY would be academic.
(Note the USA-centric view on this; substitute one's own governing agencies where applicable)
Then again, I never considered the possibility of intelligent lobsters on the internet (or the future incarnation, as it were), so it's only so much nonsense until it happens.
What is that old saying? "The future isn't what it used to be."
Posted by: Jeff | May 14, 2007 2:39 AM
It has occurred to me that most of us will have to manage a number aliases, if we are to maintain anything resembling privacy or freedom.
If there exists any way to uniquely identify an individual, then there is the potential to connect any datum about that individual to all other data. Connect web surfing history with cellphone GPS tracking with supermarket purchases with credit/debit card purchases with employment associations with health care and treatment history with genetic code with . . .
The only defense I can see is the individual ability to break that identification chain with aliases, which cannot be connected without legal authorization. That, and a lot of disinformation.
Maybe, we will need several more kilograms, for all the fictional stories we make up about our alternative camouflauge selves.
Posted by: Bruce Wilder | May 14, 2007 3:10 AM
Most of what you guess may well be true, but I think it's irrelevant. As Bill Joy put it, the future doesn't need US.
Many architectural and programming details still need to be worked out, but it's pretty clear that the hardware for superintelligent computers already exists. How long will it be before the computers decide we are an irrelevant nuisance?
Only a heroic and improbable effort by the human race is can present that from happening, and probably quite soon.
Posted by: CapitalistImperialistPig | May 14, 2007 3:19 AM
In "putting it all together" you say "there are roughly 10 million seconds per year." You might want to change that to, "there are on the order of 10 million seconds per year." On the otherhand a factor of 3 does not change the validity of the argument.
Posted by: chris fedde | May 14, 2007 3:32 AM
Caught an excerpt of your speech on BoingBoing. The 10Tb number in relation to 24/7 video, 365 days a year made me think immediately of San Francisco's Justin Kan... and other people well on their way to "lifecasting" everything they do and see on the web. Everyday applications of the things you've spoken about are not too far off!
Posted by: Ryan | May 14, 2007 4:43 AM
Why do you hate America?
Posted by: Internet Troll | May 14, 2007 4:44 AM
In Soviet Russia, America hates you!
(Sorry, had to - couldn't resist.)
Posted by: Metlin | May 14, 2007 5:42 AM
In some ways, it's a step backwards to an earlier time. An average medieval peasant wouldn't have had the same concept of privacy we do -- he most likely lived in the same room as his whole family and some animals. All of his neighbors new what was going on, and he regularly confessed to his priest. He didn't get lost, because he had lived in the same place most of his life.
Even nobility in the Dark Ages wouldn't have had the same ideas about privacy we do -- their servants would have likely slept in the same room as them, or they would all be in the great hall.
Posted by: Andrew G. | May 14, 2007 6:05 AM
The future is not further than you think.
Love Across Borders
Posted by: Shaun Apple | May 14, 2007 6:08 AM
I think that the NEXT BIG THING will be energy; The increasing cost of petroleum first of all. The last 150 years have also been predicated on a steeply decreasing cost of energy. No more. (the CO2 problem will feed into this, as well). What will happen? I don’t know, but it’s bound to be weird.
Posted by: M. Carey | May 14, 2007 6:34 AM
As for ways our kids are more fundamentally alien than we can imagine: They will have no idea what it means to be *alone*. Not really alone. Mobile phones connect people, MySpace connects people, Twitter (basically an SMS text message broadcast channel) and IM's connect people, and with the currently underway spread of the "Smart Phone" and unlimited mobile data plans (which combines all of these socially disruptive technologies into one portable package), the *next* crop of kids is going to have absolutely no idea what it's like to *not* be immersed in your peer group at all times.
Forget privacy, just not being connected all the time to your social circle is going to be a rare and tramatic event. Having anything we would call a "private" life isn't going to be a quaint notion, it's going to be a terrifying perversion.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | May 14, 2007 7:50 AM
Let me expound on this: Do you remember high school "peer pressure"? The idea that you had to think, act, dress, and in every way conform to the expectations of your social group, who you became part of mostly through common birthyears and geographical proximity, or be ostracized? Probably most of you remember it as something other people did, those of us from GenX that are still hanging on to relevance and currency by our bleeding fingernails got out in front of the social wave 20 years ago by ignoring the expectations of our peers, eventually finding different peers as adults.
Welcome to the brave new world, where your "peer group" can be selected from anyone in the world you share a language with. Where you are *never* away from them, unless you're a (presumed dangerous) loner. So on the one hand, you are liberated from peer pressure, able to find common interest and make common cause across geographical distances of not blocks, not miles, but continents. But then are part of a group mind, one node in an "always on" network, not an individual anymore as we would define it. Even your ideas and thoughts are of uncertain authorship in a world where knowledge comes not from books, but from a Wiki.
I have seen the future. It's full of pod people. "Borgs", in the Star Trek TNG sense. Resistance is futile, you will be made irrelevant.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | May 14, 2007 8:29 AM
This sorta feels like what we had back in the prehistory of the web. "Postulate that lots of people will publish things about their cats, and then postulate that search will not inevitably suck like Archie does."
The funny thing is that the first half of that is already covered by classic SF. Asimov's 1956 "The Dead Past"
spoiler alert through the end of this message
points out that any "look back on history" device that any author cares about can be turned into the perfect CCTV by just setting the distance into the past to about 10ms. And by the nature of historic viewing, you don't actually need to store anything. (I'm sure that there are plenty of fascinating things one could compuationally do with such a past-viewing device; mercury delay lines are just the entry.)
What Asimov *didn't* do half a century ago was connect such total information awareness with any efficient means of trawling through that. Well, here we are.
Since many classic SF short stories are in fact instances of horror, it's inevitable that Asimov's secret of viewing the past was leaked before anybody figures out how bad that is---and that's without search! All that's left is for the good guy to make some suitably noir remarks; IIRC, "let's see you put that mushroom cloud back in the shiny uranium sphere."
And then: "Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded."
Ah well. We're all headed for the hive. Let there be image macros.
Posted by: Jay Carlson | May 14, 2007 8:32 AM
Charlie,
Your analysis is spot on; as usual, the only thing I can find to argue about is the exact values of the time periods involved and the precise limits of the technologies. But, hey, what's an order of magnitude among friends?
In the vein of looking for the advances beyond that we haven't yet thought of, there's a hint of the next trend after the current one poking out of your speech. The technologies you're talking about are intelligence and/or memory-enhancing techniques; you talk specifically about memory prosthesis, for instance. Part of that constellation of technologies is communication. The growth of communication beyond bandwidth and routing efficiency could be another level of intelligence in what is communicated, how it's communicated, and who it's communicated to. That is, instead of an enhancement to individual capability, we can have enhancement of social capability, by intelligently directing communication to and eliciting communication from members of a social group. And that social group can be dynamic in constitution, purpose, and communication structure on much smaller timescales than ever before. You can think of it as extrapolating Web 2.0 into Web N.0, based on automating more and more of the mechanisms of contacting and communicating with people, even people you didn't know beforehand.
One concrete outcome of these enhancements might be the formation of truly individual corporate entities: intelligent, perhaps superintelligent beings composed of intelligence-enhanced, but not necessarily transhuman, human beings embedded in communication-enhanced social networks that have enough intelligence to implement policy set by humans on timescales and over distances that even enhanced humans wouldn't be capable of using unenhanced communications. I'm not talking about hive minds in the normal sf sense; I'm talking about an extrapolation of eusocial organisms to a form in which the individual component beings are intelligent and self-willed, not subservient but a part of a social unit that's better integrated than any we know of now. Think of Karl Schroeder's "churches", only the individual members aren't spending conscious energy to perform their parts of the simulation. Instead, they are a part of the simulation in the same way that we are parts of the various social groups to which we belong.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | May 14, 2007 8:36 AM
Very interesting article. Reading it made me think and I make two predictions of my own:
1. people will learn how to develop and conceal their privacy completely inside their minds, without ever speaking or leaving any trace. that would be like a discipline they'll have to learn. the ultimate refuge. the only safe place.
2. learning will become very different. we don't need to make mathematical calculations by hand, we don't need to carry full paper version encyclopedia when we can browse wikipedia from the cell phone anywhere. so learning will become a permanent process, a cocoon enveloping us and opening up infinite possibilities for anyone; I for example am learning Japanese even tough I don't know any Japanese person IRL, just by relying on TV content. I can hold a pretty complex conversation and had no real contact with Japanese speaking people. Anyone will have access to any culture, any art, anywhere.
Posted by: Visarga | May 14, 2007 8:37 AM
I liked the diamond-based storage idea, could you read it out using some sort of x-ray diffraction or some sort of NMR?
Posted by: tim | May 14, 2007 8:54 AM
It's hard to maintain a secondary, private, identity, and it needs some mental skills that not everyone will have. It's a little like being an actor, or a writer.
And here's a couple of other things to think about.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has the Laughing Man affair: a "cyberterrorist" who can hack lifelogs, hiding his face from every observer and erasing people's memories of him.
And there's been a flap this week about a feature of IPv6, and a technical feature that carried over from IPv4. And it was apparently enabled by default. Things are going to be screwed up by legacy defaults. Charlie mentioned old laws. Is that the only sort of legacy that can trap us?
Oh, and final passing thought: some people already think that an IP address is linked to a person. Mine is linked to my broadband line, with a router that is doing NAT. Will IPv6, fully deployed, change that?
Posted by: Antonia T. Tiger | May 14, 2007 9:25 AM
My brother reckons he has an advantage in his work (statistician) from learning to use a slide rule, which means you have to be able to do some rough calculation in your head to track the decimal point.
Posted by: Dave Bell | May 14, 2007 9:34 AM
If you want to stay anonymous or private, you don't simply need to hack lifelogs -- you need to hack the lifelog of everybody who sees you. And every CCTV camera you go past. And every shop or bank you do business with. Otherwise, data mining will turn up inconsistencies fairly rapidly -- the kind of inconsistencies that point to skulduggery, because they don't happen spontaneously.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 14, 2007 9:50 AM
Because in countries with no explicit right to privacy — I believe the US constitution is mostly silent on the subject -
Griswold v. Connecticut, Charlie.
Posted by: Andrew L. | May 14, 2007 10:05 AM
Andrew L: Griswold v Connecticut asserts that there's an implicit right to privacy. That's a lot weaker than the right in the European Declaration of Human Rights (which is pretty much constitutional bedrock in the EU -- member states have to implement it in law); and even then, I think that the Declaration is too damn weak for the kind of abuse we're going to be handing out to the concept of privacy later this century.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 14, 2007 10:45 AM
Great stuff as usual.
Two things that you don't really get into here are authentication and identity. How can you know that the information you are looking at was generated by a specific person (or device) and that it is authentic. One interesting "solution" to this would be to dump your lifelog in real time to other people, and possibly to publicly accessible channels. This would make it virtually impossible for someone to alter the past record without causing obvious inconsistencies between copies. Just an idea, but one that seems to be happening today for data that people are afraid will be hidden for one reason or another (just look at the current attempt to suppress the leaked HD-DVD key). Just think what that would do to the idea of personal privacy.
Posted by: Queegmire | May 14, 2007 10:54 AM
That's brilliant.
You know, I read things like this and it just reinforces the fact that there are folks who are much, much smarter than me.
Fascinating essay/speech, much thanks.
Posted by: Rob | May 14, 2007 10:56 AM
Great article. I agree with the comment about medieval villages. I think that the anonymity of the industrial era city is an abberation. That said, you could hide things in a medieval village and people will do likewise in this new era.
If the safety of autonomous cars would make them required, why does the law currently allow cars that can do 300kph or even 190kph (sorry, don't know my mph conversions :( )? The status symbol pressure and the vastness of the industry lobby will make life saving legislation take a lot longer than rationality would suggest I suspect.
Posted by: Alan | May 14, 2007 11:03 AM
David S., well, that's what hard realtime systems are for. At least for the safety parameters.
And yes, I think the singularity is hogwash. Or at least, by the time we get there we won't recognise it AS the singularity - I'm thinking of three lines in Ken McLeod's _The Sky Road_ here, something like...
"I thought the singularity was supposed to be quick"
"It was"
"Oh"
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | May 14, 2007 11:26 AM
I enjoyed this a lot. Interesting read.
Posted by: Dan | May 14, 2007 12:53 PM
Interesting read... the end of science has been done before though, Lord Kelvin said around the turn of last century:
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
Posted by: Daniel | May 14, 2007 1:29 PM
Like Dan says, I enjoyed reading that a lot. I can't help but think that things will never quite reach the level of technology we've dreamed of. The internet is an amazing thing, but at our core - humans still do very human things away from technology, like walking the dogs, running round parks... more so in the 3rd world where technology (abundant electricity?) hasn't got a grip. I still think that because of 'blurry edges' where technology doesn't fit on its own, there will never be a complete overhaul of something we take for granted - (running water, personal cars, never being lost...?) until technology has spread so far and wide that it is inescapable. Just how far does technology have to spread until its inescapable?
There's no reason why you couldn't drop your GPS phone off in storage and wander out in to African wilderness never to be found for days... if you wanted... short of having it implanted, right?
Still, a great read; food for thought.
Posted by: John Beech | May 14, 2007 1:32 PM
My view on AI is that we'd be too nervous about how an evolved-from-scratch intelligence would react to humanity, especially if it were embodied and capable of interacting with us, so that homegrown AI would be banned in favor of bootstrapping our own intelligences to be the first emotional machines. Lifelogs would be the beginning of this.
That means we'll take our human quirks and foibles with us as we transfer from organic wetware hanging on bony frames to machine intelligence. But as we do, I think one of the things to go with us will be privacy. Rather than less expectation of privacy, we'll have more of it... as we "sleepwalk into a police state" more and more people will come to value their privacy and it will become a Major Issue campaigning politicians can seize on where the popular vote is for more privacy, not less.
Posted by: Donny | May 14, 2007 1:41 PM
I often describe the unexpected social consequences of technology for people. The industrial revolution is really about making power available - in fixed locations - to do work. It caused large factories, labor unions and laws to limit exploitation by greedy people.
There was similarly a transportation revolution started by steamships and railroads. It is about making power transportable so we can move people and goods. You described the effect that people travel more. I think the more interesting effect is the development of the suburbs. We have shopping malls, people live in villages that have no services. In 1950, there were no shopping malls or suburbs.
The communications revolution starts with Marconi. It takes off with the development of the internet and because of increasing storage capacity, our connectedness is expanding rapidly. Social consequences are still not completely identified but there are many. online shopping, MySpace, blogs...
Connectedness by itself is threatening and not so interesting. You mentioned the Singularity. I'll relate it to "knowledge." DNA is a relatively permanent form of knowledge. It transmits significant knowledge from generation to generation. Periodically, it tries new things. After a few thousand years, the new things are kept if they work. Old things, however, are rarely discarded. Rather, they are ignored and never turned on.
Tools contain knowledge also. I have see a paleolithic hand axe. It is on the order of 100,000 years old. As soon as you pick it up, you will grasp it so it fits in your hand. You will recognize almost instantly as a tool used for chopping. This type of knowledge is also very permanent but it cannot change. Our brain is a wonderful repository of knowledge. It can be changed and refreshed with great speed. However, brain storage is temporary and volatile.
Your "diamond storage" is non-volatile but easy to change. It has great capacity. The vehicle for storage and retrieval will play a great role (software). Certainly the nature of the social change will far surpass the combined changes of industrial revolution, transportation and communications of the past 3 centuries!
Good speech.
Bob Ferguson
Posted by: Bob F | May 14, 2007 1:42 PM
A very stimulating discussion - and stimulating responses too. It should be compulsory reading.
I investigate traffic accidents for an insurance comnpany and I put 100% down to driver error (a kind way of putting non-terminal stupidity, which describes most of us behind a wheel) and anyone who thinks they can resist no-driver vehicles should have a word with your insurance company (which will mean nothing to some 10-25% of us over here who choose to drive uninsured)
That said, I wouldn't like to be a paramedic on the M25 after a traffic control systems failure.
Passing notes in class is going to have a whole different meaning in the future.
Posted by: Martyn Taylor | May 14, 2007 1:48 PM
quick note re ubiquity of cellphones: Austria has now reached the point where there are _more_ active cellphone-contracts than inhabitants. Just as a datapoint.
Posted by: Michael Hellwig | May 14, 2007 2:07 PM
Ah, memory crystals... Now all we need is an underclass to lord it over with a big flying stone head and we're all set for the future :)
Enjoyable reading, thanks Charlie.
Posted by: NMN | May 14, 2007 2:10 PM
Donny@37 --- careful about that "we". If you google on the term "extropian", you'll find people (some with serious money) taking a remarkably casual attitude towards the discipline of dealing with constructed superhuman intelligences --- which is more or less the same discipline that Vinge (in A Fire Upon The Deep) referred to as "applied theology".
One such fellow of my personal acquaintance has repeatedly told me, in all apparent seriousness, that any threat to humanity from such an entity can be neutralized if we just toss in something along the lines of Asimov's three laws. But even if you believe such an entity would stick to the rules we initially gave it, and assume that "first constructed god wins", so you don't have to worry about what the others will be like, there's still the cautionary note provided by Williamson's stories of the Humanoids...
Posted by: "Charles Dodgson" | May 14, 2007 2:26 PM
A brilliantly realised essay but still I will presume to make one comment. The major thing Charlie (that felt weird) did not mention which I expected him to, was the commercial/economic use of such widespread information of personal activities: Advertising. Most of the future predictions of the past century failed to recognise that the driving force behind most technological advances would be simply capitalistic gain at a retail level: Google owns very little compared to its value, it owns portions of an abstracted cyberspace but mainly it owns the ability to place semi-personalised adverts upon millions of screens. Many market chains and internet companies already spend a lot of time and money collecting and collating data upon their current and potential clients, if such large amounts of information as Charlie (it gets easier with use) details become available then targeted advertising a la 'Minority Report' will become common place.
There are some more subtle effects of such personalised advertising than annoyance: If the data available upon your personalised memory chip is a recording of the things which you thought about over a period of time then the advertising can be designed to get around your developed consumer cynicism: Your own particular defense mechanisms against advertising will be available to the advertisers and a relatively simple while loop will allow a bot to feed to your retinas, or worse still your memory chip, the idea that you want (or recall wanting) to buy something. This raises questions about the sanctity of the data stored upon your chip. Spamming will develop a counterpart; data mining of people's thoughts and desires as recorded in their memories. If you can't tell what you thought yourself and what might have been planted by a bot editing the content of your internal hard drive who knows what might happen? More likely, certainly initially, would be the case where the electronic memory does not quite correlate with the wetware memory with what consequence? Mental illness exacerbated or even initiated? I am no psychologist but a reliance upon a source of information about something as potentially personal is seductive and most jarring when it misleads or lets one down. Presumably the security industry would modify itself to deal with such invasions 'Make sure you're memory is protected by ...' but based upon the current dearth of effective security, which lets face it, should be written in at the operating system level, it seems we can extrapolate, after Mr. Stross.
All of the above presupposes that there is external access to the data recorded on your memory chip. Either the memory chip is inaccessible until physically removed from a specimen and placed physically into a computer. If this were genuinely the case then they may well be tamper proof. Humans have a wonderful ability to convince itself that bad things happen to 'other people', this thinking allows us to take risks and not spend all of our time worrying about dying. Similarly it allows us to think 'sending this sensitive information over email won't hurt', or more accurately not think 'sending this sensitive information over email might hurt'. Extrapolating, if the technology for wireless information transfer and the culture of not expecting personal information to be private follow the trends suggested in Charlie's essay then perhaps we have a situation as suggested by Queegmire above, that people can and will choose to dump portions or even the entirety of their life log onto public safe storage or to friends and aquaintances. 'You weren't at Robert's party? Well Sarah did this amazing trick you should have seen it, hang on I'll send you the memory.' Now you have seen it, through someone else's eyes. You haven't watched it but your recall doing so, almost. If such wireless transfers occur then they can be tapped, perhaps other information leaks through and no matter whether such things are illegal or not someone will be interested in their content.
Wandering into a police state is a worrying possibility of which we should all be aware but wandering into a capitalist new world where the notion of protected privacy was never conceived to have included the ability of advertisers to tap into your almost secret desires and momentary whims seems to me at least equally likely.
Comments welcome.
Posted by: Matt | May 14, 2007 2:28 PM
I'd like to direct attention to a small, not well-known, anime series called "Platonic Chain", which deals with just this theme complex. Take modern youth (Tokyoite teenagers), camera-and-web-cell phones, and a very progressive search engine. The series explores, in 24 15minute clips, what can be done with something like this, with particular detail on the social consequences.
Posted by: Toebbens | May 14, 2007 2:32 PM
>Ah, memory crystals..
Actually there are abundant presolar (nano)diamonds. They also have quite a range of carbon isotope ratios...
Andreas Morlok
Posted by: Andreas Morlok | May 14, 2007 2:35 PM
Matt: I dunno about you, but when I browse the web I do so with about four different layers of advertising blocker in the way ((a) I use Firefox, getting rid of most IE-specific nonsense, (b) I use Privoxy as a filtering proxy, (c) I use the Adblock ad-blocking plugin, (d) I disable Javascript and Flash by default and only enable it if there's something I specificially want it for). It doesn't nuke *everything* but it helps, and I suspect in a lifelogging world, a lot of us are going to be spending significant CPU cycles on keeping intrusive spammers out of our sensoria.
Cory Doctorow has, IIRC, opined that if we get AI, it will be the end product of the spammer/spam filter arms race: spam filters are effectively administering a Turing test, after all, in trying to weed out machine-generated junk advertising; so a spam generator that can get past them is one that can pass a Turing test.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 14, 2007 2:37 PM
Martyn Taylor: Not only passing notes, but also exams.
Once online resources are a primary tool that we use, like calculators or slide rules, the nature of exams is going to be very different. If we really are trending to collaborative rather than independent work, then we're going to see evaluation of people as 'team members' be of significantly greater importance than their individual value. Maybe automatic assesment of lifelogs will be the basis for future evaluation, rather than one-off exams.
Posted by: Random newbie | May 14, 2007 2:43 PM
Hi,
I had high expectations when you anticipated on the relevance of mass storage and high speed bit transportation to decline, much as the relevance of high speed human transportation has declined, either or not representable as a sigmoid curve. Yet the article mostly talks about the social impact of increased storage and information transfer speed. Very interesting indeed, but I do think that the real shock will come from the breakthroughs in biological research and the technologies that come with it.
Cloning, human extensions of machines and machinal extensions of humans, wiring human brains together to form superbrains ...
My quick rich scheme for the near future involves a device that recognizes a relative accross the street by coinciding DNA.
The concept of identity may radically change - we may never be lost anymore and always know where we are, but not be so sure anymore who we are.
Age will be recategorized. With a life expectancy of 120, a 60-year old will be middle aged. New economies are already arising from active age categories beyond current professional limits.
As most failures of the body will be (easily) curable, suicide caused by depression will become the prime cause of death.
While the information revolution caused people to form communities along common interests, genetic revolution will throw them back to the ancient bloodlines.
I could go on.
Posted by: Dieter | May 14, 2007 2:45 PM
Driverless vehicles were commonplace up until WW2; they were called horse-drawn carriages. I have relatives born in the Twenties who tell of napping while driving home from a party or something. "The horse knows the way / to carry the sleigh / through the white and drifted snow." Driving while intoxicated was a non-issue, ditto underage drivers; perhaps we'll see greater toleration for public drunkenness once MADD doesn't have anything to complain about any more.
Posted by: Sam Denton | May 14, 2007 3:00 PM
The phrase "binding time" is very expressive. I would even go so far as to call it "clinging desperately to time as it slips through our fingers."
Oddly, although few of us have anticipated "total history" to the degree that Charlie implies, I would venture that many of the Baby Boomers' children have the sense that we are shadows on the edge of some great change. Maybe it comes of having lived through the great transformations wrought by the advent of the Internet, of seeing a vast cultural shift pull the rug out from under our parents' world views. We don't know what's coming, but we know it will make us obsolete.
Posted by: Adam Kenney | May 14, 2007 3:02 PM
> Interesting read... the end of science has
> been done before though, Lord Kelvin said
> around the turn of last century:
>
> "There is nothing new to be discovered in
> physics now, All that remains is more and
> more precise measurement."
In SF it was done i.e. by Stanislaw Lem in "Wizja lokalna" (1982). Science done by humans is still done, but only as a hobby. Abundant nano-computers solve any real problem by simulation. And since the nanos can deal with problems so complex, that any human would have to study it for a lifetime just to understand the answer derived by the computers, nobody does anymore. Unfortunatelly, this is one of the book never translated into English.
Posted by: Toebbens | May 14, 2007 3:11 PM
I'm having trouble with "10 million seconds in a year".
Handy way of remembering this is "pi seconds == 1 nano century".
Posted by: William Ruben | May 14, 2007 3:15 PM
Hmmm... spam filters are a limited form of Turing test, but NPCs in MMORPG environments are routinely subjected to something a whole lot closer to the real thing...
Posted by: "Charles Dodgson" | May 14, 2007 3:25 PM
The mostfrightening aspect is actually emerging AI. Machines that are smarter than us will eventually control all this information, and may put use it for purposes we cannot even imagine. These purposes may be benign, but heaven help us if we are viewed as a threat. Et tu, Terminator?
Posted by: Danny | May 14, 2007 3:25 PM
Interesting thoughts on driverless cars. As someone who doesn't own a car, I've often wondered why people are so obsessed with them, and so against public transport. Your mention of the four-wheeled living room is something I've thought of myself, talking to people with cars, and watching the hordes of people on the main road outside my house, who would rather sit in their own car in a traffic jam than go on the bus. But if, as you say, the next generation as to be less fussy about privacy, maybe they won't feel the need for a car, as long as there's public transport going their way. Or maybe the only sort of privacy remaining will be the personal space sort of privacy -- your whole life is searchable on the net, but you don't let strangers touch you.
Posted by: Ken Walton | May 14, 2007 4:07 PM
You have ignored some actual facts.
The cell revolution will be killed when folks realize they are microwaving their brains..
http://tinyurl.com/ttotl
Posted by: root man | May 14, 2007 4:41 PM
It makes me sad to hear about the lack of jet cars, the levelling off of the increasing curve of personal travel speed, the continued dependance on oil, etc. I say with a fair bit of confidence that all of these things and more were possible, were invented, but were killed at the outset by the Kings of our age.
History is full of scientists who were ostracized by their peers, who were disbelieved by the public, oppressed by the church, hounded by the government, whose work was co-opted by the military, and who were killed or suppressed for inventing a threat to the economic powers.
The phrase "free energy", or "zero-point energy" invites ridicule from most, but that does not change their grounding in the proof of scientific experiment.
Yes, many things claimed as true are in fact disproved. Not all who are ridiculed deserve praise. But there are mountains of evidence that at least some of the free energy claims are in fact experimentally verifiable. Just try and sell it to the public, and you will find yourself visited by a few unfriendly thugs who will let you know your options--die, or go quietly and much enriched. After all, this happened, more or less, to Galileo, who ended up recanting his theories and living under house arrest for the remainder of his life. The publication of his works was banned for a century.
In short, many many things have been possible. All of our cars could be running off of essentially nothing. Like non-poluting, non-radioactive nuclear power plants, with no toxic waste and no need to refuel. But everytime this comes out, it is stopped before it makes it to the assembly line (or sometimes as the assembly line is being built).
So, the defeatism of having had our sci-fi hopes dashed isn't based on the actual possibilities inherent in our humanity. It is based on oppression. The kind of oppression that sees whole nations succumb to an empire. The kind of oppression that enslaved entire continents and forcibly made them worship foriegn gods. The kind of oppression that kept the poor, or the women, or the black or brown, from voting and having basic human rights.
What I'm trying to say is that: Humanity has a basic right to fantastic technology. That right is severely limited by the powers that be. When humanity claims and receives that right, whether through peaceful or violent means, humanity will have everything that science fiction can dream of, and everything that scientists discover.
...
Also, in looking at the technologies of today and tomorrow, etc, we usually miss what could be called the spiritual technologies. There are now, have always been, and will always be people who accomplish fantastic things through the power of their mind only. That is simplifying it a great deal, but the power of a lone human, without the aid of technology, probably surpasses anything we've come up with till now, and will for some time.
Few humans opt for this route of study, and few believe that it is possible for others to do, let alone possible for themselves, but nevertheless, this too is grounded in experiment.
Here's a possible explanation for why this is:
Science went wrong when it forked from alchemy. Alchemy was concerned with the material and the spiritual. With the experiment and the faith. With uniting all opposites. At some point it became forbidden for science to explore the "soul".
There are those who, in modern and ancient times, experiment with the life force--with what ancient religions and spiritual disciplines called "chi", "prana", or mana.
That old science of the study and technological cultivation of mana is undergoing a gigantic revival currently. Imagine an exponential curve of the technology of magic alongside the curve of the technology of computers. And if we claim our right, imagine an exponential curve of the technology of free energy, free travel, and every other fantastic thing imaginable.
Posted by: Mark | May 14, 2007 4:41 PM
I think the social aspect of communicating on the web is destructive to creativity because every idea has a name next to it.People are competing for group recognition and you can't just walk in and plop down a brilliant idea . We need more anonymous creativity .I'm not much of a coder but I have "spime" . Sites should be made where a person can add an idea anonymously and each idea after that is anonymous .That way no one comes in trying to charm the group. The idea could be represented as tree.Maybe user names could be kept by the administrator ,that way he could block disruptive users and maybe reward productive ones.
Posted by: anonymous | May 14, 2007 4:47 PM
Root man @56: hah. I don't think so; if sufficiently convincing evidence emerges, folks will just switch to using low-power bluetooth headsets, or even infrared connections, to a radio stage at a safe distance. The industry will love it -- a chance to sell new "safer" phones to everyone, all over again.
Mark @57: I'll believe in magic when I see the replicated peer-reviewed reports of double-blind crossover studies confirming it. Ditto the "soul".
Posted by: Charlie Stross | May 14, 2007 4:50 PM
I'm prepared to bet that long before the world reaches this horrifying state, there will be a booming market for gizmos which alter,falsify all such data at whim.
The fact that that alien invaders have managed to infect much of the population with ant DNA, thus rendering them dependent upon being in constant touch with the hive does not mean that the infection will not die off, or mutate.
I mean your movements can be tracked by your mobile phone --- but only if you leave the damned thing turned on when not in use.
Posted by: peter hindrup | May 14, 2007 5:18 PM
Fascinating stuff. Transportation changed the world in a similar fashion that Information is now changing the world. Much like the previous transformation, the majority of the 1st world will be affected in this transformation but will leave out the 3rd world. One suspects that brand new economies will be built and that old ones will be changed due to the emerging energy sciences and nanotechnology.
The optimist envisions a future where new technologies will provide clean renewable energy, information on demand, safe/fast trans