We live in an era of accelerating change, when
scientific and technological advancements are arriving rapidly. As a
result, we are developing a new language to describe our civilization as
it evolves. Here are 20 terms and concepts that you’ll need to navigate
our future.
Back in 2007 I put together a list of terms every self-respecting futurist should be familiar with.
But now, some seven years later, it’s time for an update. I reached out
to several futurists, asking them which terms or phrases have emerged
or gained relevance since that time. These forward-looking thinkers
provided me with some fascinating and provocative suggestions — some
familiar to me, others completely new, and some a refinement of earlier
conceptions. Here are their submissions.
1. Co-veillance
Futurist and scifi novelist David Brin suggested this one. It’s kind of a mash-up between Steve Mann’s sousveillance and Jamais Cascio’s Participatory Panopticon, and a furtherance of his own Transparent Society
concept. Brin describes it as: “reciprocal vision and supervision,
combining surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance.” He
says it’s “scrutiny from below.” As Brin told io9:
Folks are rightfully worried about surveillance powers
that expand every day. Cameras grow quicker, better, smaller, more
numerous and mobile at a rate much faster than Moore’s Law (i.e. Brin’s corollary).
Liberals foresee Big Brother arising from an oligarchy and faceless
corporations, while conservatives fret that Orwellian masters will take
over from academia and faceless bureaucrats. Which fear has some
validity? All of the above. While millions take Orwell’s warning
seriously, the normal reflex is to whine: “Stoplooking at us!” It cannot
work. But what if, instead of whining, we all looked back? Countering
surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance — or scrutiny
from below? Say by having citizen-access cameras in the camera control
rooms, letting us watch the watchers?
Brin says that reciprocal vision and supervision will be hard to
enact and establish, but that it has one advantage over “don’t look at
us” laws, namely that it actually has a chance of working. (Image
credit: 24Novembers/Shutterstock)
2. Multiplex Parenting
This particular meme — suggested to me by the Institute for the Future’s Distinguished Fellow Jamais Cascio — has only recently hit the radar. “It’s in-vitro fertilization,” he says, “but with a germline-genetic mod twist.” Recently sanctioned by the UK, this is the biotechnological advance where a baby can have three genetic parents
via sperm, egg, and (separately) mitochondria. It’s meant as a way to
flush-out debilitating genetic diseases. But it could also be used for
the practice of human trait selection, or so-called “designer babies”.
The procedure is currently being reviewed for use in the United States. The era of multiplex parents has all but arrived.
3. Technological Unemployment
Futurist and scifi novelist Ramez Naam
says we should be aware of the potential for “technological
unemployment.” He describes it as unemployment created by the deployment
of technology that can replace human labor. As he told io9,
For example, the potential unemployment of taxi drivers,
truck drivers, and so on created by self-driving cars. The phenomenon is
an old one, dating back for centuries, and spurred the original Luddite
movement, as Ned Ludd is said to have destroyed knitting frames for
fear that they would replace human weavers. Technological unemployment
in the past has been clearly outpaced (in the long term) by the creation
of new wealth from automation and the opening of new job niches for
humans, higher in levels of abstraction. The question in the modern age
is whether the higher-than-ever speed of such displacement of humans can
be matched by the pace of humans developing new skills, and/or by
changes in social systems to spread the wealth created.
Indeed, the potential for robotics and AI to replace workers of all
stripes is significant, leading to worries of massive rates of
unemployment and subsequent social upheaval. These concerns have given
rise to another must-know term that could serve as a potential antidote:
guaranteed minimum income. (Image credit: Ociacia/Shutterstock)
4. Substrate-Autonomous Person
In the future, people won’t be confined to their meatspace bodies.
This is what futurist and transhumanist Natasha Vita-More describes as
the “Substrate-Autonomous Person.” Eventually, she says, people will be
able to form identities in numerous substrates, such as using a
“platform diverse body” (a future body that is wearable/usable in the
physical/material world — but also exists in computational environments
and virtual systems) to route their identity across the biosphere, cybersphere, and virtual environments.
“This person would form identities,” she told me. “But they would
consider their personhood, or sense of identity, to be associated with
the environment rather than one exclusive body.” Depending on the
platform, the substrate-autonomous person would upload and download into
a form or shape (body) that conforms to the environment. So, for a
biospheric environment, the person would use a biological body, for the
Metaverse, a person would use an avatar, and for virtual reality, the
person would use a digital form.
5. Intelligence Explosion
It’s time to retire the term ‘Technological Singularity.’ The reason, says the Future of Humanity Institute’s
Stuart Armstrong, is that it has accumulated far too much baggage,
including quasi-religious connotations. It’s not a good description of
what might happen when artificial intelligence matches and then exceeds
human capacities, he says. What’s more, different people interpret it
differently, and it only describes a limited aspect of much broader
concept. In its place, Armstrong says we should use a term devised by
the computer scientist I. J. Good back in 1967: the “Intelligence explosion.”
It describes the apparent sudden increase in the
intelligence of an artificial system such as an AI. There are several
scenarios for this: it could be that the system radically self improves
itself, finding that as it becomes more intelligent, it’s easier for it
to become more intelligent still. But it could also be that human
intelligence clusters pretty close in mindspace, so a slowly improving
AI could shoot rapidly across the distance that separates the village
idiot from Einstein. Or it could just be that there are strong skill
returns to intelligence, so that an entity need only be slightly more
intelligent that humans to become vastly more powerful. In all cases,
the fate of life on Earth is likely to be shaped mainly by such “super-intelligences”.
6. Longevity Dividend
While many futurists extol radical life extension on humanitarian
grounds, few consider the astounding fiscal benefits that are to be had
through the advent of anti-aging biotechnologies. The Longevity
Dividend, as suggested to me by bioethicist James Hughes of the IEET, is
the “assertion by biogerontologists that the savings to society of
extending healthy life expectancy with therapies that slow the aging
process would far exceed the cost of developing and providing them, or
of providing additional years of old age assistance.” Longer healthy
life expectancy would reduce medical and nursing expenditures, argues
Hughes, while allowing more seniors to remain independent and in the
labor force. No doubt, the corporate race to prolong life is heating up in recognition of the tremendous amounts of money to be made — and saved — through preventative medicines.
7. Repressive Desublimation
This concept was suggested by our very own Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of io9 and author ofScatter, Adapt And Remember.
The idea of repressive desublimation was first developed by by
political philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his groundbreaking book Eros and Civilization. Newitz says:
It refers to the kind of soft authoritarianism preferred
by wealthy, consumer culture societies that want to repress political
dissent. In such societies, pop culture encourages people to desublimate
or express their desires, whether those are for sex, drugs or violent
video games. At the same time, they’re discouraged from questioning
corporate and government authorities. As a result, people feel as if
they live in a free society even though they may be under constant
surveillance and forced to work at mind-numbing jobs. Basically,
consumerism and so-called liberal values distract people from social
repression.
8. Intelligence Amplification
Sometimes referred to as IA, this is a specific subset of human enhancement — the augmentation of human intellectual capabilities via technology.
“It is often positioned as either a complement to or a competitor to
the creation of Artificial Intelligence,” says Ramez Naam. “In reality
there is no mutual exclusion between these technologies.” Interestingly,
Naam says IA could be a partial solution to the problem of
technological unemployment — as a way for humans, or posthumans, to
“keep up” with advancing AI and to stay in the loop.
9. Effective Altruism
This is another term suggested by Stuart Armstrong. He describes it as
the application of cost-effectiveness to charity and
other altruistic pursuits. Just as some engineering approaches can be
thousands of times more effective at solving problems than others, some
charities are thousands of time more effective than others, and some
altruistic career paths are thousands of times more effective than
others. And increased efficiency translates into many more lives saved,
many more people given better outcomes and opportunities throughout the
world. It is argued that when charity can be made more effective in this
way, it is a moral duty to do so: inefficiency is akin to letting
people die.
10. Moral Enhancement
On a somewhat related note, James Hughes says moral enhancement
is another must-know term for futurists of the 21st Century. Also known
as virtue engineering, it’s the use of drugs and wearable or implanted
devices to enhance self-control, empathy, fairness, mindfulness,
intelligence and spiritual experiences.
11. Proactionary Principle
This one comes via Max More, president and CEO of the Alcor Life
Extension Foundation. It’s an interesting and obverse take on the
precautionary principle. “Our freedom to innovate technologically is
highly valuable — even critical — to humanity,” . “This
implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed:
Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not
popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions
themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are
proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that
have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment,
innovate, and progress.”
12. Mules
Jamais Cascio suggested this term, though he admits it’s not widely used. Mules are unexpected events — a parallel to Black Swans
— that aren’t just outside of our knowledge, but outside of our
understanding of how the world works. It’s named after Asimov’s Mule
from the Foundation series.
13. Anthropocene
Another must-know term submitted by Cascio, described as “the current
geologic age, characterized by substantial alterations of ecosystems
through human activity.” (Image credit: NASA/NOAA).
14. Eroom’s Law
Unlike Moore’s Law, where things are speeding up, Eroom’s Law
describes — at least in the pharmaceutical industry — things that are
slowing down (which is why it’s Moore’s Law spelled backwards). Ramez
Naam says the rate of new drugs developed per dollar spent by the
industry has dropped by roughly a factor of 100 over the last 60 years.
“Many reasons are proposed for this, including over-regulation, the
plucking of low-hanging fruit, diminishing returns of understanding more
and more complex systems, and so on,” he told io9.
15. Evolvability Risk
Natasha Vita-More describes this as the ability of a species to
produce variants more apt or powerful than those currently existing
within a species:
One way of looking at evolvability is to consider any
system — a society or culture, for example, that has evolvable
characteristics. Incidentally, it seems that today’s culture is more
emergent and mutable than physiological changes occurring in human
biology. In the course of a few thousand years, human tools, language,
and culture have evolved manifold. The use of tools within a culture has
been shaped by the culture and shows observable evolvability-from
stones to computers-while human physiology has remained nearly the same.
16. Artificial Wombs
“This is any device, whether biological or technological, that allows humans to reproduce without using a woman’s uterus,”
says Annalee Newitz. Sometimes called a “uterine replicator,” she says
these devices would liberate women from the biological difficulties of
pregnancy, and free the very act of reproduction from traditional
male-female pairings. “Artificial wombs might develop alongside social
structures that support families with more than two parents, as well as
gay marriage,” says Newitz.
They are dependent on certain (mild) assumptions on how
the brain works, and requires certain enabling technologies, such as
scanning devices to make the original brain model, good understanding of
biochemistry to run it properly, and sufficiently powerful computers to
run it in the first place. There are plausible technology paths that
could allow such emulations around 2070 or so, with some large
uncertainties. If such emulations are developed, they would
revolutionise health, society and economics. For instance, allowing
people to survive in digital form, and creating the possibility of
“copyable human capital”: skilled, trained and effective workers that
can be copied as needed to serve any business purpose.
Armstrong says this also raises great concern over wages, and over the eventual deletion of such copies.
Imagine the fantastic prospect of creating interfaces that connect
the brains of two (or more) humans. Already today, scientists have
created interfaces that allow humans to move the limb — or in this case,
the tail — of another animal. At first, these technologies will be used
for therapeutic purposes; they could be used to help people relearn how
to use previously paralyzed limbs. More radically, it could eventually
be used for recreational purposes. Humans could voluntarily couple
themselves and move each other’s body parts.
20. Computational Overhang
This refers to any situation in which new algorithms can suddenly and
dramatically exploit existing computational power far more efficiently
than before. This is likely to happen when tons of computational power
remains untapped, and when previously used algorithms were suboptimal.
This is an important concept as far as the development of AGI
(artificial general intelligence) is concerned. As noted by Less Wrong, it
signifies a situation where it becomes possible to create
AGIs that can be run using only a small fraction of the easily
available hardware resources. This could lead to an intelligence
explosion, or to a massive increase in the number of AGIs, as they could
be easily copied to run on countless computers. This could make AGIs
much more powerful than before, and present an existential risk.
Luke Muehlhauser from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) describes it this way:
Suppose that computing power continues to double
according to Moore’s law, but figuring out the algorithms for human-like
general intelligence proves to be fiendishly difficult. When the
software for general intelligence is finally realized, there could exist
a ‘computing overhang’: tremendous amounts of cheap computing power
available to run [AIs]. AIs could be copied across the hardware base,
causing the AI population to quickly surpass the human population.
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