The Future

My predictions for our long-term future evolved over the years, influenced by technology, experience and observation. My ‘worldview’ today is informed by my perspectives on tribes, empire and technology. From these I have synthesized my personal prediction of a near future that I hope to live to see.

Tribes: Humans in their current form have lived on Earth for around 200,000 years, in what Paul Seabright called a society of ‘murder, reciprocity, trust, hoarding and stealing’ that arose when early man was forced from the trees into the more brutal environment of the savannahs. To understand the soap opera enveloping modern politics, academe, celebrity gossip, and war, look no further than these societies of 150 or so naked apes. Take away the technology and little has changed today. Our brains have shrunk about 10% over this period, so if anything we are a bit stupider than our forebears. If we had truly advanced beyond primitive society, we would be solving our problems and looking for efficient ways to implement those solutions. Instead, our first choice as the arbiter of social problems is tribal warfare. Mechanized war gives us the power to act out our grievances from the comfort of our La-Z-Boy. We declare war on countries, but also on arbitrary “terrorists and criminals” who somehow inconvenience us, and even bizarrely, on abstractions (cancer, drugs, foreign religions). Our greatest and most expensive innovations have been arbitrary, amorphous and ever more bloody conflicts of choice. In the boredom of modern life, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

Empire: Humans are naturally tribal creatures, sharing this trait with all social animals. Tribalism arises as a coping mechanism for inadequate brains and as a way of internalizing the trust that lubricates reciprocity. But to move beyond Dunbar’s number – to create empires – we needed inventions to overcome the limits of human consciousness. That was religion, probably first practiced on an industrial scale by the Pharaohs. Egyptian and Babylonian priests created elaborate cosmologies to predict crop cycles and used them to maintain order in large societies. Ancient religions were the arbiters of law, science, and behavior, specializations that have since unbundled into their own professions. They were as attractive for the entertainment they provided, as for the enlightenment they promised. Religions offered tribal identity, which in large-scale societies could be fluid, with beliefs that were fickle and varied. Constantine the Great went through four religions before choosing Christianity as his tool to command the Roman Empire. In a world where travel and communication were scarce, expensive, and time-consuming, religions were suggestive rather than absolute. Pope Innocent IV’s papal bull Ad Extirpanda was a clever innovation that changed that, allowing the Church to torture heretics (however defined). The truly devoted were enthusiastic practitioners, inventing many artful instruments of edification as the Protestant Reformation took off. Religions have always been bloody affairs, and modern religions weaponize available technology for mind control – very successfully. Niel Gaiman found a host of seductive new Gods to worship, manifestations of modern life and technology – Internet, media, modern transport. Religion is the defining technology of tribalism writ large and the handmaiden of empire. Those who would be emperors delegate clergy, and tailor religion to serve their ambitions.

Technology: Tool use has been in vogue throughout the animal kingdom since before humans. But two human innovations propelled technology to the forefront – speech and social groups. Speech arose perhaps 60,000 years ago, initially mimicking animal sounds and depicting routes and waypoints (the speech areas in our brain were repurposed from pathfinding duties). Human groups that could communicate and synchronize their actions could overpower edible creatures many times human size. Good thing, as human brains require a lot of fat and protein to operate. Only in the past 10,000 years have humans overcome the Gossip Trap to harness and disseminate innovations. Our wild ride started then, with new technologies serving up an exponential growth in efficiency and a kaleidoscope of capabilities. Track through any history of the world and you see that family and tribal aspirations are thwarted by a three-generation curse but a new invention can’t be un-discovered. Technology dictates the trajectory of human evolution, not families, or nations, or tribes.

In the 1950’s I. J. Good postulated the emergence of superintelligence surpassing human intelligence, which John von Neumann termed “the singularity.” Vernor Vinge popularized the idea and Raymond Kurzweil gave it a date of 2045 – that’s 20 years from now. I believe this is accurate, but what exactly would this mean? A “singularity” is a term that mathematicians use to describe the collapse of a theory, e.g., a black hole. The popular press, probably which has studied this no further than rerunning James Cameron’s apocalyptic Terminator films, concludes the worst – collapse of civilization, inhuman abuse by untethered machines, and (horrors) the death of God. This type of sensational nonsense sells copy but fails to acknowledge that we are already segueing into the singularity. It’s not just the much ballyhooed ChatGPT, but we see driverless Waymo cars carrying their riders, behaving better than 90% of the drivers on the road, working 24 hours a day without getting drunk or tired. Robots, humanoid or not, increasingly find jobs at the warehouse or assembly-line, relieving humans of tedious or dangerous tasks. At some point, it will become feasible to move all of the humans out of a corporation and have the corporation just run itself – Elon Musk’s ‘Alien Dreadnought’. If companies can run themselves profitably and efficiently, why not governments. Governments, which are notoriously inefficient and dysfunctional, will run much, much better when machines make the decisions.

Where will this lead? It doesn’t sound bad – a world where everything that we don’t like doing is done by machines, and everything we do like is facilitated by pleasure-enhancing technologies. There will be agonizing over ‘free will’ but if you are comfortable being mindlessly led around by media and religion, who cares?

We will be ‘pets’ indulged by machinery. We already are. Brian Hare argues that we’ve sealed our Faustian bargain, self-domesticating through a process that’s left us more cooperative than our now extinct human cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. His hypothesis was inspired by Belyaev’s foxes, which underwent artificial evolution through breeding. Darwin observed that domesticates sport floppier ears and curlier tails, are smaller, and have recessed jaws and little teeth. Domestication also shrinks the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, leading to a reduction in aggressive, fearful reactions. Human self-domestication has been good for us, as our more agreeable demeanor is responsible for our success and propagation across the planet.

The future will not be a Star-Trekkian space opera that reenacts seafaring discovery myths from the 19th century. Space is not the ocean; it’s devoid of life; we can not swim in space; distances are limited by the speed of light, with no Warp Drive in sight. Space travel is boring and dangerous to boot. In a realistic future, human insecurity and war will play reduced roles, and creativity and self-expression expanded roles. Humans with their machines will become Gods, creating and ruling their mini-worlds. The ultimate science will be art, and artists will rule. Plastic surgery and tattoos are the crude shadows of future self-improvement; we will innovate on ourselves with gene editing, 3D biological printing, machine learning, and numerous other technologies that we can’t even imagine. We will be forever creating, forever learning, forever young.

Post-singularity, this is how life will look. I am fortunate that I will, with any luck, witness the beginning of this new and improved world during my lifetime.