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The future - major drivers in the 21st Century

August 2000

The future looks more exciting every month. We often hear about the good old days, but the evidence suggests they haven't arrived yet. In the last century, we learned a lot about the basic science governing the world around us. We are just beginning to exploit this knowledge but there is much more to learn. In the next century we will make more technological progress than we have since we invented the wheel and will begin to truly master our environment. People sometimes argue about what is the most significant future technology - IT, materials, biotechnology, space? The argument misses the point. Technologies are converging. Biotechnology already relies heavily on IT and materials technologies, and will further develop as we explore space. Many new materials and information technologies have already arisen from discoveries in biology. Let's take a look at some likely developments, bearing in mind that I can't possibly imagine what might be invented by some 21st century genius.

Today information technology is the major driver of change. In a few decades, with cheap chips and easy networking, everything that should be connected will be connected. Ubiquitous networks will mean that everything is in communication all the time, everywhere. The chips-with-everything lifestyle will make the world much easier to live in. Things will sort themselves out most of the time and be easier to use, thanks to improving interfaces. In fact, rather like on Star Trek, we will just take it for granted that technology can hear us and knows what we are talking about. It rapidly becomes invisible. The many boxes we have today will gradually vanish, replaced by discrete sensors and displays built into our environment.

Machines will probably surpass overall human intellectual capability by 2020, and have an emotional feel just like people. At some point they will develop genuine self awareness and consciousness, and we will have to negotiate their rights. By the end of the 21st century, they will have far superior intelligence to people, but probably also have more attractive personalities, so relating to machines will be more pleasant than dealing with other humans. We have to hope that they will want this pleasant relationship to continue, because the least feasible part of the Terminator scenario is that the people win. As a precaution, we will have to learn how to make transparent links from our machines to the human brain, with full thought recognition, and will have to achieve this in the first half of the century. This will allow us to directly harness machine intelligence as a virtual brain extension. Then machines won't outsmart us. Doing this will catapult mankind into the evolution fast lane. We will decide which way we want to go and often have the technology to make it happen. Darwin out, Lamarck in. We will have vastly superior intellectual ability and technology development will accelerate until it nears physical limits.

Because of this progress, every human institution will be disassembled and reconstituted to serve people better, as geography becomes irrelevant except for physical processes. Politics, business and society will be totally restructured. Every institution we know today will be changed dramatically. We will become used to rapid change, but by the end of the 21st century, the human world will be barely recognizable.

Accelerated development through machine enhanced intelligence will drive huge breakthroughs in biotechnology, materials, genetics, nanotechnology, energy and travel. Biotechnology is progressing nicely at the moment but will accelerate in the coming decades. When my daughter was born in 1994, she was estimated to have a life expectancy of about 87. Less than six years later, doctors now suggest she might well live to 130, thanks to greater understanding of the human genome, and potential nanotechnology medical advances. Never before has life expectancy increased faster than people get older. By the time she dies, she will in all likelihood be able to have her mind backed up on the network, and upload into an android body. Her natural death will not be so traumatic for her children, and won't even be a significant career problem.

Nanotechnology will certainly make headlines in biotechnology, with micro-machines wandering around our bodies, fixing damage, extending our lives, maybe even keeping us young looking. But by the end of the century, we may well have mastered this technology, which allows us to manipulate matter at the atomic level. We could eat roast beef synthetically prepared from mud, water and air, recreating the processes normally done by grass and cow cells. We could grow houses by dumping materials and instructions and letting assembler microbots get on with it.

Our understanding of genetics will enable us to have customized pets or living dolls, just like on Blade Runner. We could customize children too. And remember these are just the things we already know in principle how to do. All of which highlights a problem. This mastery of our world should have a warning sign attached. Just as some toys are not suitable for children under 3, we should ask whether mankind is yet mature enough to play with these tools. But the problem is deeper still. People can affect and direct change to some degree, but they can't easily halt it. Barring worldwide catastrophe, there are no existing human institutions that can prevent these things from happening. We are deluded if we think these are only possibilities - some people will want to go down these roads, and have an increasing choice of countries in which to do so. When anyone decides to use a technology, the rest of us often have no choice but to follow.

Having said that, and even allowing for the fact that politicians often ignore things until they are already problems, most futurologists believe that we will mostly make reasonably sensible decisions. We will muddle through as we always do. We will keep most of the benefits, with just some of the problems. It won't be a utopia, but compared with today, it will be the good old days.

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