Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of the dark side

May 2001

Most of you will have seen one or more of the Star Wars films and therefore understand some of the appeal of the dark side. Bad news sells. I chaired a session recently on the dark side of the information revolution, and we spent over two hours without any repetition, looking at some of the potential nightmares ahead. It was fun. I'm not sure what that says about our psychology, but I'm fairly confident that most people are more interested in the problems that may result from our intended techno-utopia than the hype that we're normally fed. Simply put, the future will not be a techno-utopia, ever.

We're already seeing the beginnings of a social backlash against new technology, from GM foods to cellphone masts. Whether the protesters are well informed or not is irrelevant, they are having an effect. The result is that many future developments will be more secretive, more cunningly disguised, better marketed and packaged so that we accept them into our lifestyles with less protest. Public accountability will fall rather than rise as a result. It is all but impossible to find unbiased information about any new development, so informed public debate is impossible.

Trying to fix things is another source of problems if you don't understand either the toolkit or the thing you're fixing. When it comes to trying to cure social ills or environmental problems, we are novices, and worse still , some of the novices think they're experts. The supposed global warming problem is a classic. Many eminent scientists aren't convinced global warming is happening, and yet others are claiming not only certainty, but giving supposedly accurate estimates of the rates, and details of how to fix it. I hear environmentalists saying we need to educate people in the developing world or they will wreck the environment, but surely educating them will quickly make them richer and they will have greater environmental impact. Like most of you reading this, I don't have enough knowledge myself to take sides, but when we have as little understanding of socio-environmental systems as we have, there is no such thing as playing safe. We are as likely to make it worse as to fix it. I don't believe anyone is an expert in this field.

We will make many mistakes, and as our toolkits become more impressive, so will the magnitude of those mistakes.

In information technology there are many facets to the dark side. The terminator problem is probably the best known. At some point, maybe as early as 2010, probably 2015, or if we're really slow, maybe 2020, computers will overtake humans in overall intelligence. Not long after that they will be so much smarter than us that they will be a threat to our existence. We will have very little input to computer design by 2010 - they will mostly design their own offspring in evolutionary environments that result in creations we aren't capable of understanding. Before then, we will have automated crime, evolving and adapting viruses, inherent network instability and of course widespread malicious attacks on systems to further the interests of pressure groups of all kinds.

Even the good side has a dark side. Virtual environments will allow us to live in fantasy worlds and enjoy ourselves immensely without harming anyone else at all. In fact we might stay in them so much of our time that our real world relationships suffer. If all the virtual girls in my cyberspace always say yes, what will that do to my behaviour in the real world when a real girl says no? When I've killed 100 people today in a totally convincing three dimensional, full sensory cyberspace environment, what will happen when someone pulls out in front of me on the way home? There will certainly be a social penalty to pay for the benefits that cyberspace will bring us.

But I think there is a more fundamental dark side to all this techno-advance. Five minutes after we get a new toy, we have lost our ability to think in the old way. We quickly become used to the new functionality and become lazy. When it goes wrong, we can't cope. If my email server is down when I come into work, I quite literally can't do any work. Not being connected is such an impediment that all I can do is read the paper until the network comes on-line. Well our future systems will fall over sometimes, and we won't always understand how they work, so getting them back on-line might occasionally take a long time. Our vulnerability increases, and in a world where some people don't like us, that is a dangerous state to be in.

So the future won't be a utopia. If we survive at all, we will have a balance of good and bad things in our lives that may not be that different to today. I find all this fascinating, but I don't lose any sleep over it. We'll probably muddle through in the end like we always do, but at least from a distance it looks like interesting times lie ahead.