Your average day, in twenty or so years’ time, will begin with you donning the latest designer suit, printed overnight on your 3-D printer. It will continue with a full English breakfast, the ingredients grown laboratories, the health consequences as good for you as a bowl of muesli. You will then slip into your solar-powered, driverless car, which will glide you to work without suffering commuter delays, whilst you immerse yourself in some pre-work preparation with your personal e-assistant, or maybe indulge in a cheeky full-immersion game of Grand Theft Auto before you arrive at the office.
Well, maybe it won’t be exactly like that – you may prefer Call of Duty – but this will be possible, at least according to Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, in The London Times on New Year’s Eve (sorry, subscription needed). In a short interview, he outlined a vision of the future that included self-driving cars (by 2017), the ability to switch off our fat cells (hence the full English muesli) (by 2020), the capacity to print designer clothes at home (by 2020), vertical meat and vegetable farms (by 2030), and 100% solar energy (by 2033).
Kurzweil is no crackpot with a good record of (particularly technical) forecasting but reading his predictions for our human future, I could not help wondering if we were thinking about the same species.
Humans have a long and not entirely glorious record of predicting the future, as the wonderful paleofuture blog shows. (“What's the biggest problem people [a century ago] thought we’d be facing in the 21st century? Mid-air jetpack collisions? Disobedient robot servants? No, the greatest problem of our futuristic world was supposed to be too much leisure time.”) The classic problem is the belief that changing/ improving technology will change/ improve human nature, when it rarely does and then only slowly, unpredictably and ambiguously.
One example: in 1964, the New Scientist magazine assembled over a hundred experts to explore the ‘likely developments of the next twenty years.’ In the process of their discussions the group basically predicted the internet. “An immediate situation will develop with private ownership of computers of limited capabilities which also serve as remote terminals to communicate with centrally located computers. The entire content of the large central files will be readily retrievable at a moment’s notice.”
This was impressive. Alas, their ensuing prediction of which areas of human life would be most affected by this momentous technological development was less so. “The consequences will be truly profound in many diverse fields, such for example as agronomy, jurisprudence and medicine.” As one government paper that examined the whole question of social forecasting noted of this prophecy, dryly, “Had the contributors taken account of the fact that what most people are really interested in… is social communication, market interactions (buying and selling) and sex, then they would not have been surprised to learn that the main uses of the Internet would be e-mail, e-commerce and pornography.”
It’s not, then, Kurtzweil’s technical prophecies that ring untrue. It’s the human presuppositions beneath them. Driverless cars will, apparently, reduce car-ownership: “you won’t need to own a car, there’ll be a pool of them circulating, and you’ll just call one from your phone when you need it.” 3-D printers will mean we will not only print out our clothes but, apparently, design them too, as “there’ll be an open source market of free designs.” And the existence of “computerised vertical factory building” will mean that people will naturally want to eat “computerised vertical factory” meat.
Perhaps, echoing the government paper, had Kurzweil taken more account of the fact that people tend to be possessive, relational and embodied, he might have given more consideration to the possibility that our children’s generation will still want to own their own self-driving car, will still browse through designer clothes shops with their friends, and will still prefer food that has spent at least a few months in a farm, rather than a few days in a petri-dish.
One mustn’t be too harsh. ‘Future largely similar to today’ is not exactly newspaper material. And Google forecasts are not, mercifully, as ominous as the political ones of a century ago, which confidently predicted the emergence of ‘new man’ and then used coercion when history failed to arrive on time. Google and their like only want to make money out of the future, not rule it.
Nevertheless, there is a similarity. Those earlier, political visions were essentially Christian, shorn of God, sin and the eschatology that long cautioned against hubristic (and sometimes any) human attempts to refashion the life and society. These de-Christianised Christian prophecies lived, killed, and then died in the 20th century. It is hard to see them returning in our time.
Ideas of this power do not die however, but, Doctor Who-like, regenerate, the dreams of salvation now taken up by the market. Salvation, earthly and eternal, is apparently now longer in God’s gift. Nor, is it in the munificence of our political masters. But, maybe the market, with the right investment, research, technological capability and, of course, regulation can call down to earth not one heavenly Jerusalem but 7 (or 10 or 20) billion smaller, personalised ones, offering everything we could wish for today.
And not just today, but tomorrow, and for ever and ever for Larry Page, Google’s CEO, has apparently also got Kurzweil “moonlighting” on another of his little pet projects. It is “solving death”. Amen.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
Image from wikipedia available in the public domain.
