The future of…

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The future of people

Adapted from The Atlas of the Future

World opinion on population growth has changed somewhat in recent years and make a welcome change from some of the nightmarish projections we had seen until a few years ago. We may expect to see the biggest growth rates in Africa. By contrast, Europeans are declining rapidly in numbers, hinting perhaps that they have had their day on the world stage and will be a much smaller force relatively in the future. Population growth is often cited as a problem, but there is a counter argument that suggests that the more people we have, the more great people there will be and the more chance we have of solving our problems and making the world a better place for all. Physical resources will become less significant in wealth generation, and geography will reduce in status through the provision of world communications, so people will be the key asset of a country, generating the wealth in the information, storyteller and then the care economies which will characterise the next several decades.

With all these billions of people, with a diverse gene pool, we seem set for a long term on the planet as a species – at least if we take care. However, while we may care about humanity as a whole, we are all probably more interested in how long we have here as individuals. As medicine improves and as we become better nourished, we tend to live longer, and part of the population explosion is accounted for by the reduced number of people dying. In the developed world, something of a problem is developing as there are fewer young people coming on stream to look after an increasing elderly population. One possible solution to the resulting care problem is to import care over telecommunications networks from other countries where there is an abundance of young people. As a man, I must admit to some frustration that women will still live much longer than men in the future. Life just isn’t fair. However, spare part surgery already hints at a synthetic future when we can make a good attempt at living for ever.

However, life is not all roses, and we are suffering many problems with new diseases. We live more in cities now than ever before, and we travel internationally in large numbers. Consequently, we are exposed to many diseases that we would never have come into contact with a few hundred years ago. In addition, as we put increasing stress on the environment, chopping down rainforests and so on, we are perhaps increasing the evolution rates of many species of bugs. Overly enthusiastic use of antibiotics, even to the extent of putting them into everyday animal feed, has caused the evolution of new strains of disease causing bugs that are resistant to almost all antibiotics. Soon we will have no cures for some diseases. We may have to resort soon to quarantining people who catch diseases such as TB until they have finished the whole course of treatment. The alternative may be that it will mutate beyond our ability to treat it. One form of bug we thankfully don’t see yet is the result of biological warfare, which is always a potential threat for the future, and another is the nightmarish result of genetic engineering gone wrong. As we tinker with the very stuff of life, I think we are like a child playing with fire, able to burn itself badly without understanding fully how to control the fire. However, we are winning many of the battles against infectious disease too. Against all the odds, it looks like we will win through.

We have to die of something, and as infectious disease becomes less of a problem, we suffer proportionately more from diseases and ailments that result from our lifestyles. Sadly, smoking is set to kill far more people in the future, mostly in poor countries. For many people quality of life will be lower too due to ailments such as stress, depression and diabetes. It is tempting assume that technology will find solutions, but this would be unrealistic. Such developments probably wouldn’t help many people in poor countries, and in any case, other ailments may simply take over. We will always find something that isn’t quite what it should be. Our expectations constantly increase and there is a limit to the money in the pot to finance perfection for everyone.

High technology impacts greatly in health in the developed world though. Telecomms brings with it the expectations of telemedicine, allowing doctors to effectively be present elsewhere, even right across the planet. An interesting statistic is that it takes the same time for a nerve signal to get from a surgeon’s fingertip as it does for a signal to cross the Atlantic on an optical fibre. So a surgeon can carry out a remote operation using virtual reality with the sensory effect of having an arm twice as long!

A new form of medicine is almost with us – the use of microscopically small devices to maintain or repair our bodies. Whether these devices will all be entirely man made in the long run, or whether we will use genetic engineering to manipulate biology to build some things for us is a matter of debate. Certainly, in other areas of technology, we are borrowing ideas from nature and it would be surprising if we can’t do the same with nanotechnology too.

The most exciting short term goal in medicine is mapping out the human genome, due for completion in 2003, after which we can make use of a variety of technologies such as gene identification and detection chips to screen us for vulnerabilities. We can then have custom designed lifestyles which minimise our risks, or use our profiles to help us eat the right foods to maintain good health. Some of these foods may even themselves be custom products of genetic engineering designed to produce foods to treat specific ailments.

A couple of years ago, I calculated that about 98% of body weight could be replaced by artificial body parts by about 2030. Terry Pratchett amusingly calls such activity ‘death by instalments’. Only the brain is out of the question in that time frame. Of course, we are a long way from having an android that we can put our brains into. Some quite surprising developments have taken place in the last few years though. We have see the production of real organic ears, cultured from real human cells in a special matrix that dissolves away when the ear is complete. Since then we have seen replacement breasts grown in the same way. Electronics is making a huge impact in synthetic body parts. Electronic cochlea implants have greatly improved quality of life for thousands of people, and even electronic retinal implants are progressing in resolution to allow previously blind people to read large text. By 2020 we may have artificial eyes as good as the real thing. Probably after 2030, we will be able to link transparently between our brains and external electronic devices such as computers. This will initially be one way, based on thought recognition, but there is hope that these future computers may one day act effectively as extensions of our brains. If we have received minor brain damage, they may even be able to take over some brain functions.

Perhaps optimistically, we can anticipate that progress in artificial intelligence may culminate in an artificial brain by 2035. It has to be said that such dates are very much guesswork, but we think we have some idea of the sorts of technologies that may be used to achieve such a goal, so it is not entirely science fiction. Certainly, conventional medical advances don't hold out much hope for immortality on their own. If you want to live forever, you will have to hope that bioinfotechnologists have some success so that you can back yourself up before your body dies. However, it is unlikely that you would be happy to be confined just to the memory inside a computer, so you need also to consider the development of androids. Many of the required technologies already exist in embryonic form, but we will need a lot of development before they can all be linked together to make such a creature. In the meantime, there are many down to earth applications of artificial intelligence which should make all our lives a lot easier, more fruitful and fulfilling.

Finally, infertility. As with other medical treatments, expectations are increasing all the time as people consider it normal to demand children whether nature co-operates or not. There seems to be no limit to how far we are prepared to go to reproduce. It remains to be seen how much the prospects of designer babies materialise as we crack the human genome in the next few years. While there will undoubtedly be resistance to mass customisation of babies, there are so many grey areas where the ethics can be more easily manipulated that we will inevitably see some abuses. Let’s hope it stops short of insurance companies refusing to support treatment of babies that are born despite genetic screening having shown they were vulnerable before birth.