Emerging technologies lead to emerging possibilities. We are becoming more capable, both as a society and as individuals. We are able to do more than our ancestors, and even more than our recent past selves. Where is it all leading? And what are the most important and powerful capabilities that will soon be within our grasp?
In California, garages are being converetd into more or less permanent housing, while “temporary” restaurants (and other establishments) are popping up and disappearing at an astounding rate.
Meanwhile, the Dow once has again topped 11,000 in spite of scant good news in the jobs market. What’s going on?
Can today’s trends tell us much about tomorrow’s reality? It’s not just the economy: what can data points about life expectancy, personal income, costs of goods, rates of miniaturization of technology, and deforestation/reforestation tell us about the world we’ll soon be living in?
In the future, you may lose your job to a robot but at least if you get sick there will be other tiny robots who have taken over the doctor’s job and who will swim into your bloodstream curing you of all that ails you. And don’t worry — if the robots are not up to the task and they lose you, you can encase your brain in plastic and sleep through a few decades or centuries until the little robots are ready to fix you up.
These and other topics in this edition of FastForward radio.
An interesting tidbit from the Wall Street Journal last week:
America’s most privileged class are public union workers.
It turns out there really is growing inequality in America. It’s the 45% premium in pay and benefits that government workers receive over the poor saps who create wealth in the private economy.
And the gap is growing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), from 1998 to 2008 public employee compensation grew by 28.6%, compared with 19.3% for private workers. In the recession year of 2009, with almost no inflation and record budget deficits, more than half the states awarded pay raises to their employees. Even as deficits in state capitals widen and are forcing cuts in services, few politicians are willing to eliminate these pay inequities that enrich the few who wield political power.
Now, I know there are some conventional explanations for why this might be happening, but let’s leave those aside for a moment. (We’ll come back to them, I promise.) Let’s hypothesize a thoroughly unconventional explanation.
For example, what if public payrolls are going up in response to a dying private sector job market?
Wow, I can actually feel the knees jerking from here.
WHAT? The private sector job market can’t die. It can be damaged by government meddling / greedy globalizing corporations (take your pick) but ultimately it’s a constant. There can be no economy without a private-sector job market, therefore we will always have one
Okay, sure. Leaving that logic alone and assuming that we will always have a private job market, is there any guarantee as to what size it will be? Is there any reason to think that it might shrink in size? We have to consider what is implied by all this talk about a jobless recovery. (If you have an hour to spare, this particular gloom fest is pretty eye-opening.) We are currently looking at about 10% unemployment; we know that that figure is actually low, because it doesn’t include all those who have given up looking altogether; and of the folks who actually do have jobs, 1 in 5 claim to be underemployed.
So what do we mean by a jobless recovery? We mean that the economy begins growing again, but we have no new jobs. (The recent upward turn is encouraging, but still roughly 8 million jobs shy of getting us back to where we were 2-3 years ago — and btw, a lot of what was created are temporary government jobs.) From a strict standpoint of efficiency, a jobless recovery is the best way to go. Look at it from the standpoint of an individual business: supposing you realize your business can achieve the same revenue with a headcount of 90 or a headcount of 100. Which would you do? If you say you would go with the headcount of 100 because you’re so nice, you better hope your competitors are equally nice. But even if they are, the overall economy is not nice — it’s a heartless bastard.
The efficiencies that can allow a company to get by with 10% fewer staff or an economy to get by with a 10% smaller employment base are many — better management practices, longer work hours, more highly motivated or better trained staff. But the big one has got to be automation. Historically, automation boosts productivity and reduces the need for human workers. Over the past four decades, our economy has made a massive shift to a highly automated, digitized substrate. As recently as a decade and a half or so ago, economists were still scratching their heads over when the big productivity gains would emerge from this shift. Then about five or six years ago, those productivity numbers started showing up. Some of us took this to be unambiguously good news. And, in fact, I still think it’s excellent news. But it may have something to say about the future of employment, and the need for our thinking around employment to change.
One of the models for our future economy that we’ve bandied about on this site over the years is what John Smart calls “taxing the machines.” The idea is that once virtually all economically productive work is taken over by automation, government is funded directly by the remaining productive entities and becomes the distribution channel by which the public gets paid, jobs having all been swallowed up by the machines. This is more or less the scenario that Martin Ford laid out for us our interview with him a few weeks ago.
In Ford’s model, the whole notion of “employment” as we have known it disappears.
Now, this idea strikes most of us as being fairly radical. And there are alternatives. One would be to provide massive incentives for businesses to create jobs even though they don’t really need people working for them. In other words, ask the private sector to create non-productive jobs. Another alternative is to have the government provide the payouts, but only in the form of wages. In other words, ask the government to create non-productive jobs. This could be one area –the creation of non-productive jobs — where the government has an advantage over the private sector. After all, they’ve been excelling at that for decades.
And, in fact, it’s possible that the rise in public sector wages noted above reflects the early stages of this kind of shift — although the creation of more jobs, rather than higher-paying jobs, would be a stronger indicator.
Unfortunately, our current mainstream political and economic ideologies have no room for dealing with this kind of possibility. It’s not part of anybody’s template. If we observe that public employee wages are going up, the responses will fall along the following lines:
The Libertarian / Conservative take: This is a shocking example of statists feathering their nests. All these excessive public salaries show the undue influence of public worker’s unions and reflect nothing more than waste — which diminishes or even prevents more productive economic activity.
The Liberal / Progressive take: What you see here is a necessary rationalization of the labor market. Public service positions often have higher value than private-sector jobs and therefore should demand higher pay. As an added bonus, these higher salaries help to offset the absurdly high salaries that CEOs and other corporate execs make!
Neither group is likely to see what’s happening as a defensive measure against a shrinking private sector job base, even if that is part of the actual explanation. Such an observation doesn’t support anyone’s main line of argument. It isn’t part of anyone’s template.
So the problem is that — whomever you happen to agree with — if jobs are inherently disappearing, it might not matter all that much who wins out. The left can continue to be in charge and carry on with various stimuli and programs that create more public sector jobs, or the right can take over and start to slash taxes and spending. Whatever changes they bring about will be only temporary if the underlying reality is that going forward, whether the economy grows, shrinks, or stays the same, the number of private sector jobs is going to drop — especially if that reality is nowhere on either group’s radar.
Most of us would prefer to believe that what’s really happening is a shift in what we mean by “productive,” and that human beings will continue to have something to offer to the private sector both in the short term and the longer term. I certainly hope so. But hope, as it has been pointed out in recent years, is not a strategy. And if automation is going to come closer and closer to achieving human-level performance (intellectually as well as physically) we need to be ready to do some serious rethinking of how our economy works.
And we might, might, just need some new templates.
Phil and Stephen discuss utopias and dystopias — images of the world gone completely right, or horribly wrong. We find these ideas in fiction and in political discourse, among other places. Are they helpful? What can they really tell us about the future?
Wednesday evening I had a chat with a fellow futurist who told me about some exciting work that’s being done in cryonics. A new approach to the problem of preserving the human brain is being developed that does not rely on cold storage — which up to now has been the standard approach and is, as far as I know, the only form of suspension that anyone is currently using. The new approach relies on encasing the brain in plastic. And by that I don’t mean putting a plastic shell around the brain, but rather infusing all the brain tissue with a resin which will harden and perfectly preserve the brain’s cellular and neuron structure.
My friend explained that this approach will be a major game-changer because it won’t require anything like the infrastructure and investment involved in cryonic freeze. Plastination, he explained, will cost less than a casket burial. The economic argument is gone. The “yuck” factor may hang in as an objection, but this plastic approach has the advantage of being the second major model proposed. It will never be as shocking as the original “corpsicle” (and subsequent “headsicle”) ideas.
My friend also told me that he and a colleague are working on promoting this approach via multiple channels, including raising funding for financial incentives for researchers achieving defined goals towards full brain preservation. (I don’t recall that he actually used the phrase “push-prize,” but it sounded an awful lot like that.) He pointed out that the practice might be widely adopted even by those who for religious or other reasons aren’t interested in being revived. For example, memories retrieved from a preserved brain in “offline mode,” — meaning that there is no attempt made to restore the conscious brain function — might be of great value to family members, future historians, etc.
I’m not identifying this futurist because he told me that he’s not yet ready to go public with this effort, although I’m looking forward to having him on FastForward radio as soon as he is ready. Anyhow, I found it pretty interesting on Thursday, having had this conversation the previous night, to see this same idea being kicked around on Fight Aging!, Accelerating Future, and InstaPundit.
The discussion ultimately centers around this site, which argues for both the plastination method and a push prize. The site is owned and run by Kenneth Hayworth. I can’t say whether there is any connection between Hayworth and my friend. The best case would be no connection — meaning that there are several different groups and individuals working on this goal simultaneously.
Michael quotes a key piece from Hayworth’s site, which I will repeat here:
From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.
How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today — the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body — the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.
I think this approach, once perfected, could well be the technology that pushes cryonics more or less into the mainstream. Hayworth foresees a future in which uploading human personality from a carefully preserved brain is viewed roughly the way laser eye surgery is today. I think that’s about right, although the stakes are clearly higher with uploading.
Hayworth makes a passionate case that we need to overcome backward philosophical ideas in order to enable such technology in the near future. Michael reiterates that case. Both take a dim view of religion, seeing it as a primary culprit in blocking progress in this kind of research. I’ll deal with that issue separately somewhere down the road, but for now I’ll just state that I don’t think there is any real conflict between religious belief and brain preservation, any more than there’s a conflict between religious belief and this technology.
However, there is a philosophical discussion in the comments on Michael’s post which I think is quite interesting.
The debate comes down to this question: if you store my brain in plastic for a couple of centuries, then slice it up to create an uploaded virtual replica, then fire up the virtual replica…have you brought me back to life? My answer to that, assuming that everything works, is a qualified “yes.” (It’s a major qualification, though.) The replica will have my personality, my memories, and — from his standpoint — a continuous experience of being Phil Bowermaster, with this one interruption–which may be no more significant to him than a single night’s sleep. From his standpoint, and from the standpoint of the outside world, I have been brought back to life.
I can even go so far as to say that from MY standpoint, as the replica, I have been brought back to life.
In fact, there is only one standpoint from which anything looks amiss. And that, of course, would be my other standpoint, the standpoint of the original Phil Bowermaster. That Phil Bowermaster, it would seem to me, gets left behind in those discarded slices of plastinated brain. So even though the replica is me as far as he is concerned and as far as the world is concerned, in an important sense — from the point of view of the original — I am not there.
Hayworth argues quite eloquently that this sense of something being amiss is based on an illusion. I find the argument compelling but less than completely convincing or satisfying. Michael points out that consciousness is not continuous, anyway, that it is interrupted daily by sleep and can be more severely messed with by things like head trauma and coma. However, I’m not concerned with continuity of consciousness. My concern is continuity of substrate.
I prefer a digitization scheme in which the old substrate functions concurrently with, and is slowly replaced by, the new one. That is to say, I need to consciously experience moving from my brain to the computer in order to accept that I have in fact made the move. Michael and Hayworth would argue that this is illusory thinking and bad philosophy. I would counter that this is merely being careful.
I say rather than slicing up my dead brain and reading it straight into digital form, I’d like to hang in until nanotechnology actually enables deplastinating and reviving my brain in a nice new cloned or robotic body. From there, I’d be happy living in non-uploaded form for a brief time until a conscious, gradual upload can be arranged. In IT terms, we’re talking about warm standby rather than cold standby. It might be more difficult and more expensive, but having waited decades or centuries, I’m okay with taking a few extra steps to make sure that my survival is actually my survival.
Hayworth presents a mind-uploading bill of rights which reads in part:
Revival rights — The revival wishes of the individual undergoing brain preservation should be respected. This includes the right to refuse revival under a list of circumstances provided by the individual before preservation.
Bingo. My circumstances would include, among other things, the requirement that my suspended brain first be revived and that I be uploaded via a warm standby approach. Call me old-fashioned, but when I get brought back to life, I want to be there to see it.
Phil and family are living through a small dystopia tonight – no power. So, we have to postpone until next week.
See you then!
- Stephen
Okay, I promise this isn’t the beginning of a trend, and we won’t be doing a weekly Trololo video.
But this is the definitive cover. I think you’ll agree.
Phil and Stephen talk about what it means to look ahead. Why are we looking forward? And what are we looking forward to?
Click “Continue Reading” for the show notes:
This is pretty intense; some might even say emotionally wrenching. You’ll want to prepare yourself before watching.
Via Lileks.