The future of…

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The future of babies

Ian Pearson, Jan 2005

Last summer, my good friend and futurist Amy Oberg and I were thinking about the future of sex for the World Futures Conference in Washington DC. We wondered what would happen next in the genetic manipulation and cloning saga. Clearly, people would one day be able to genetically customise their offspring, initially to protect them against genetically linked diseases, and maybe after a few years, to optimise their chances in life by giving them as many genetic advantages as possible. So far, all pretty common knowledge.

What fewer people realise is the nature of slippery slopes. Eventually, people who chose not to genetically improve their children might well be considered unfit parents. Society would thus develop different strains of people, from totally natural, to highly optimised. The natural ones might well be considered an inferior subspecies.

So one day it should be feasible to design more or less any genome you like and then build it. This seems very far away to most of today’s geneticists, but it is probably achievable eventually. And far from being a rarity, it might actually be the norm.

But then we realised that something much more interesting has already happened, and it seemed that no-one had really noticed. Already, it is possible to get a listing of your own genes on a CD, for just a few hundred dollars. And any of your friends could too. Then you could take both listings, feed them into your home PC, select one chromosome from each pair at random, and mix them to create random genetic listings for potential babies, or even mix them gene for gene if you are careful (genetic crossover between chromosomes occurs when gametes are formed, but some genes groups are best kept together). This is essentially digital breeding. You could randomise as many virtual offspring as you like, limited only be the computer’s storage and processing speed (which will fall far short of the theoretical maximum genetic variation possible). And then you’d effectively have a whole population of potential people. It is this potential will seems to have gone un-noticed. Technology will one day allow us to make them.

Today, these potential people have no legal significance, and aren’t alive in any sense. So you could trade them on e-Bay! So let’s call them e-Baybies, with all due respect to e-Bay and acknowledgement of their trademarks.

A couple of popular celebrities could make a living by having their fans buy and adopt some of their e-Baybies. Later, protein simulation technology might be able to simulate their existence inside the computer, albeit very slowly at first. Once their emergent characteristics are more apparent, detailed protein simulation would no longer be needed and the computer could start emulating their personality and behavioural characteristics, and giving them a platform on which to run their consciousness. Moving from simulation to emulation is essentially a digital birth, where the virtual human becomes an actual entity, aware of its own existence and starting to behave under its own decisions. It could be a fully conscious human in every sense except that it wouldn’t actually have a real body. A very powerful computer might be able to give virtual humans a life inside the computer. It could simulate a virtual environment for the virtual people to live in. The virtual population might even be kept unaware of their condition, believing they are real. The computer operators would be equivalent to gods, able to control anything in their world.

But they need not remain captive in a virtual world. There is every reason to expect that later this century we will have the capability to make sophisticated android bodies, with skin and polymer muscles, that would look and feel pretty much like real people. These virtual humans could be uploaded into such androids to achieve a real existence in the real world (it is real isn’t it, we’re not just locked in a big computer, are we? – scientists are once again asking that old question).

By 2025 or so, we would also expect that any of the e-Baybies could be organically assembled by taking the appropriate genes off the shelf and assembling them, injecting the resultant DNA into a host ovum, and then see an actual real live human being grow. The virtual baby of 2005 could become an actual baby in 2025, or soon after. It would be an adult in 2043.

The genetic assembly route to achieving reality would probably happen earlier than the ‘electronic emulation and android encapsulation’ means, but is more limited in some ways. Real organic humans have a real cost. They need food, clothes, houses, money and so on. They would have an impact on the environment, and only so many could be allowed to live. Otherwise we could have a population explosion.

And they need to live in real time too, which is a bit of a nuisance. They can’t just whiz through bits of life that are boring and on to the next interesting bit. And they can’t stretch time during the nice bits either. That wonderful holiday would have to end one day. And worst of all, they would have to endure 18 years of growing up before they are adults. (OK, lots of that phase is fun too.) And they will die, at least organically, though they could reincarnate easily in the electronic domain by using their mind backup, and pick up an android from the robot shop, and carry on living that way, so death isn’t a career problem for them. They would lose a day attending their own funeral though.

Even with android-encapsulated humans, there has to be some limit on population, and there will undoubtedly be problems between organic humans and android humans, and non-human androids too, and genetically enhanced humans…

So it may be that the vast majority of virtual humans will have to stay trapped in virtual worlds. But for them it will seem real, unless a cruel operator tells them.

A powerful computer may be able to support large populations of virtual people, maybe even billions. (If that sounds an exaggeration, and I know it does, just think about some real facts. The human brain stores a lot of data and is extremely powerful compared to today’s computers. But if a computer could store information at one atom per bit, which is only a matter of time, it could hold the contents of 10,000 human brains in the same volume as a pinhead. And a pot of yoghurt in the future could eventually provide enough processing power to emulate a billion people.) Their civilisation might be every bit as sophisticated as our own. They might even have computers that they run populations of simulated beings on… What sort of relationship would develop between our civilisations, if any? Would we trade with them? Would we take part in their culture, and vice versa? Will they have real world finance, staff real world companies? Will they commission space travel to let them explore other worlds, and maybe set up a physical colony somewhere?

Anyway, back to the point, the fact that future people could be traded today on e-Bay as e-Baybies is quite disturbing. We have passed a very significant legal milestone without anyone apparently noticing. But the more you think about that, the more complex it becomes. A whole Pandora’s Box has just been opened, though we will only see the nightmares emerge gradually as technology moves on.

For example, police authorities (e.g. in the UK) have taken samples of DNA from large numbers of people. On-line access to the police database gives an officer the ability to create virtual offspring with anyone on the database. Since a few police are corrupt, the database is leaky, and almost anyone can in principle get access to anyone else’s DNA, albeit by bribery and corruption. So we are all vulnerable whether we like it or not.

Also, this form of producing babies does not have the same physical constraints as biological sexual reproduction. There is nothing to stop children breeding digitally, maybe in computer games. Home DNA analysis kits will let them go much further than uploading their avatars into The Sims. Future software may let them upload their genomes. They might look after a whole colony of virtual people, just as a computer game. But depending on the game, the virtual people could be anything from just dumb graphics, all the way up to living thinking conscious beings, who just happen to live inside the computer.

At what point do these virtual beings get rights? Can real children just mess about with their lives for fun? And adults will play these games too. What happens when players fall in love with virtual people? Can they import them into the real world in the same way as someone might use immigration law today to import someone they love from another country? And can virtual people apply for immigration to the real world by themselves? Should we import only the elite?

This isn’t as frivolous as it might sound An important issue is that bypassing biological limits will allow any couple to have children. Many couples can’t have kids for all sorts of reasons. Maybe one of them is sterile, or they are too old, or they are both the same gender. But any couple can mix their genes and create virtual offspring, and maybe future licensing laws will give each couple a permit to make a certain number of virtual offspring real. Same sex couples have a small barrier with Y chromosomes of course, since either both have one or neither, but a public gene bank could easily circumvent this, especially when genetic customisation will be the norm in this time frame anyway.

The fact that this would give gays and lesbian the ability to have children might stimulate a demand from their community that the technology be developed, so that they can have the same rights as heterosexual couples. If there are limits on how many people could be created in this way, then they might argue that they should have a higher quota since they can’t breed biologically.

Finally, we must also consider those couples where one or more of them are virtual, or an android. What limitations, if any, should be imposed on their legal rights, to live and to breed, and to create virtual or real people. Should computer game characters be allowed to generate real living humans? What if one party is a real human and the other is virtual, is that OK? Or two android humans that used to be alive and are now carrying on their extended lives after their bodies died a few years back.

We may think we have too many lawyers today. We will need so many tomorrow, we might have to consider creating virtual ones.