From: Dan S [dan@southeast.net]
Sent: Sunday, December 20, 1998 9:26 AM
To: isml
Subject: [isml] Brain implants & virtual pals
From:
http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/981228/28futu.htm
-
Plugging in Einstein: Seers envision a future with brain implants,
virtual buddies
BY BRENDAN I. KOERNER
It's 9 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2049, and I feel like a billion electronic credits.
Beatrice, my virtual companion, appears on wall screen No. 3 of my live-work
space and asks if I'd like a breakfast treat–nanoproduced steak and eggs,
and hot chocolate spiked with a memory enhancer. I
figure, "Why not?" At 74, my middle-aged body can still tolerate the
occasional fatty indulgence. Besides, the computerized toilet just analyzed
a urine sample, and its cheery voice gave me a clean bill of health–a regular
occurrence since the holographic doctor embedded that anti-Alzheimer's
microchip in my brain in 2047.
While Beatrice manipulates molecules to create my meal and prepares an update on NASA's manned mission to Jupiter, I close my eyes and access the Internet with a mere thought. In virtual reality, I sip coffee with my son, a concert pianist who owes his vast talent to the baby designer I hired in 2011. He instructs the computer on his belt buckle to create a virtual orchestra, and within seconds a string section serenades us with Brahms. His wife, born in Beijing, leans over and whispers to me in Mandarin; the neural implant I got last Christmas allows me to respond with a native's fluency. We discuss their lovely new house in the no-tax, 2,000-person nation of Neo-Aruba, a "platform country" in the Caribbean Sea; they used to live in London but left just before the Great Thames Floods of 2041 to 2048. When Beatrice beckons me back to physical reality, I give my son a farewell embrace, and I can feel his warm breath on my neck.
No bets. Though my splendid New Year's morning could easily come to pass in 50 years' time, no one is willing to offer anything close to a guarantee.
Today's futurists are notoriously leery of making too many fantastical promises. With such now laughable prognostic gaffes as hovercars, domed cities, and lunar resorts on their profession's track record, they are wary of betting the farm on forthcoming technological marvels. "When you're talking about predicting the future that far out, well, you can't," says James Halperin, author of The Truth Machine: A Novel of Things to Come. "It's like trying to predict what the weather will be in Dallas exactly five years from today."
Despite the disclaimers, there is no shortage of future-minded types who are eager to craft "scenarios"–a noncommittal euphemism for "predictions." And their scenarios for 2049 involve everything from the mundane (rings that monitor health and fuel-efficient cars made of carbon resins) to the jaw-dropping (chip-enhanced brains, the end of aging, and paper-clip-size machines with genius far beyond that of Einstein and Mozart combined).
That computers will be omnipresent seems to be one sure thing. Michio
Kaku, a professor of physics at the City College of New York and author
of Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, foresees computer
chips–soon to be "cheaper than bubble gum wrappers"–embedded in everything
from tie clasps (where they'll serve as private secretaries) to lane markers
on roads (where they'll monitor traffic flow to alleviate gridlock). "If
you're on the street and you bump into somebody
you don't remember, your glasses will scan his face and say, 'It's
Jim, stupid,' " Kaku says. Silicon Valley, he adds, "will be a Rust Belt,"
and Bill Gates will be "selling pencils out of a tin cup." After 2020,
microchip elements will be the size of molecules, rendering silicon components–which
cannot be shrunk to such infinitesimal dimensions–obsolete.
Ray Kurzweil, principal developer of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and author of the forthcoming The Age of Spiritual Machines, believes that, by 2049, a device with the computational power of 1 billion human brains (1023 calculations per second) will cost $1,000; today, the same cash will only buy you the equivalent of an insect brain (108). Such machines will be designed by "reverse engineering"–studying the brain with advanced scanning techniques and then mimicking its function. "Computers will have amassed all of the world's accumulated knowledge; they'll have read all of the world's works," says Kurzweil, who accurately forecast the emergence of the Web over a decade ago. "They'll be sufficiently conscious to claim that they are human."
Biohackers. Smart machines may not be the only newcomers to life's rich pageant. The increasing ability to tinker with genes, the molecular blueprints for life, will allow scientists to create a nearly limitless array of new species–from high-yield "microlivestock" to satiate the world's hunger to wondrous crossbreeds. The ethical conundrums posed by these breakthroughs pale in comparison with the changes envisioned by some futurists.
Frank "Dr. Tomorrow" Ogden, a futurist gadfly and author of the forward-looking classic The Last Book You'll Ever Read, speaks of "biohackers," reckless kids using gene blasters–"the chemistry sets of tomorrow"–to create new life forms in the family bathtub. Joseph Coates, coauthor of 2025, sees gene hackers raiding laboratory databases to create three-headed frogs and lethal microorganisms.
Fiddling with genes might also allow science to finally provide the
long sought-after Fountain of Youth; turning off the genes responsible
for aging could make the so-called golden years obsolete.
"When our children hit 30, they may decide they want to stay at 30
for a couple of decades," says Kaku.
For those who let nature take its course, joining the century club will no longer be worth special mention on the local news, thanks to cures for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other prolific killers.
Glen Hiemstra, host of the Web site futurist.com, estimates that "once
you hit 50, you'll have a 90 percent chance of living to be 100." Edward
Barlow, president of the strategic planning firm Creating the Future Inc.,
believes that as early as 2015, we will have started to reverse the aging
process.
Mankind's mastery of DNA splicing could also rid people of many diseases
while they are still in the womb. Out on the ethical edge, baby designers
could reproduce the looks of Brad Pitt or Picasso's gift for painting.
Cloning an entire human, says Kaku, although feasible, will be far less
common–probably the domain of "rich people who want to leave all their
money to themselves as children."
Neural implants and genetic alterations could blur the line between
man and machine. "Human enhancement is the marketplace of the 21st century,"
says James Canton, president of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global
Futures. "Who won't pay to live an extra 50 or 60 years with the vitality
of a 25-year-old or have a computer embedded in your body to learn how
to play the violin in an hour?" Or to speak five dozen languages and download
years' worth of classroom lessons with a
blink? The possibilities seem nearly endless.
"We could restructure our DNA to give ourselves almost any quality we wanted," says Halperin.
"Maybe the ability to think at electronic speed instead of nerve-impulse speed."
Crowded. Eventually, humanity could be divided into the enhanced haves and the unenhanced have-nots. Unless there's an asteroid strike or a thermonuclear war, those two camps promise to be enormous in number; the world's population could easily top 10 billion in a half-century. Underground dwellings could be common in the world's great cities, where real-estate prices will exclude all but the fabulously wealthy. Fortunately for the commute-weary, most jobs will probably be work-at-home affairs. Meetings will take place via wall screens, and "knobots"–knowledge robots–will handle the grunt work. "You'll say, 'Margaret, do a search–English only–on the effect of termites on housing,' " says Coates. " 'I'll be at screen No. 7 at 4:30. Give me a report then.' " For those who must occasionally put in face time at an office, at least the drive to work might be less troubling; on freeways, fuel-cell-powered cars could tap into magnetic guidance systems, freeing the driver to play a round of virtual golf with a buddy 5,000 miles away.
There are also some improbable wild cards to consider. Room-temperature superconductors, aside from earning their discoverers a Nobel Prize, would allow the construction of levitating trains and cars–"we'd float to work," says Kaku.
Nanotechnology, the power to manipulate individual molecules, could give us true Star Trek powers: the ability to create anything we desire, atom by atom, or to teleport ourselves around the world and cosmos. On the downside, global warming could lead to massive floods and rapid desertification.
And one vicious virus–perhaps mutated by a careless preteen biohacker–could scour the planet clean of humans.
At least some basics, futurists assure us, are unlikely to change. Family, love, and companionship will all remain top priorities on everyone's list. The food may be nanoproduced, but a good meal will still be a joy. Men and women will still work for a living. And, yes, barring an unforeseen catastrophe, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. No intelligent computer, neural implant, or eternal 30-year-old will be able to change that. At least not by 2049.
THE FUTURE THEN
A backward look ahead
Americans have always cared more about visions, even flawed visions, of an unknowable future than for hard-eyed appraisals of the past or present. If a happier, safer, easier world could be willed into being, Americans would do so. The midpoint of this century prompted an outpouring of such speculation about the way life might be by the year 2000–with mixed results.
Gerald Wendt was one scientist whose fantasies outran reality. He informed the nation's teachers in 1951 that he could confidently predict a 24-hour work week, a life span of 85-90 years, auto engines as small as typewriters, and rocket planes carrying Americans on space voyages.
Wendt did anticipate the advent of "electronic thinking machines." But
few midcentury seers identified those room-sized precursors to the computer
(IBM's World War II era Bessie or a 1950 offspring, the
$500,000 Mark III) as foreshadowing a revolution. One who did was the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Prof. Norbert Wiener, who declared
that the computing tools were harbingers of a new science of communication
and control named "cybernetics."
When Waldemar Kaempffert, science editor of the New York Times, polished
his crystal ball for Popular Mechanics in February 1950, he saw a remarkable
new metropolis. He forecast the creation of metropolitan suburbs built
in concentric circles around the hub of airports, with the first rings
occupied by businesses and factories, and outer rings by residential districts.
Those cities would be fueled primarily by solar power, and homes would
be constructed of sandwich-style walls of metal,
plastic, and aerated clay–"by 2000 wood and brick are ruled out because
they are too expensive." An air-conditioned eight-room house built to last
for about 25 years would cost only $5,000. Residents would use an electronic
stove to cook a steak in two minutes, depilatory creams instead of razors
to shave, and throwaway plastic plates. Housecleaning would be done with
a water hose, spraying down everything from furniture to rugs to drapes–all
synthetic and quick-drying.
Husbands would do much of their work by teleconferencing and wives their shopping the same way. Naturally, they would use the family helicopter for longer trips, reserving the family car, fueled by alcohol, for journeys of under 20 miles. While Kaempffert envisioned major medical advances–including the conquering of viral diseases such as the flu, the common cold, and polio–cancer would still have no cure.
One prediction from the time, happily, never came to pass. In July 1950,
Popular Science wrote that budding nuclear engineers might soon be playing
with atoms on the kitchen table. "Your own 10-year-old may take a peek
into his future in the murky ball of a midget Wilson cloud chamber, while
you borrow his Geiger counter to go prospecting for uranium." One toy maker
proposed to mass-market a Geiger counter for $18.50 and a kit for
atomic energy experiments for $42.50. The
government, it said, would pay a bonus of $10,000 if Dad or Junior
found a rich source of uranium.–Joseph L. Galloway
dan@southeast.net
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