A look back from 2050

A look back from 2050

Introduction:

Introduction:

Five ruling forces are supposed to have formed the world that we inhabit today, in 2050. This paper offers a critical look at this truism. Readers are invited to call down a user interface will set these issues to them in a fresh light, expunging assumptions not prevalent in 2000. We ask what have we learned in fifty years and, perhaps, to grasp something of where we may be going.

Five forces shaping the present

five forces shaping the present

The utterly unprecedented world in which we now live is thought to have been shaped by five forces. These familiar concepts, known collectively as the Quincunx, may seem deceptively bland. They have, however, shaped what it is to be human, and what it may be to become trans-human. We stand poised upon the very lip of the unknown, both changed and changing in ways that elude the vocabulary of the early century.

Infant induction software imprints the Quincunx on every new-born mind. The bland terms - infrastructure, options, best practice, connectivity, exhaustion - are at work all around us. They are so familiar to us that it may be helpful to review what they would have meant - and what about them would have seemed so strange - to the people who lived half a century ago. To experience this directly, please call down the immersion interface, which will drop you into this perspective. As an example of the value of this approach, please consider the reality that the term 'hegemon', now so much a commonplace of operations and ambition, was nevertheless without meaning a century ago. Through the interface, you will experience the shock that people fifty years ago would have felt in grasping what this commonplace implies.

The five members of the Quincunx make a familiar list.

• 'Infrastructure' once meant physical transport and housing, energy supplies and crude telecommunications, the management of resource flows and waste products. By 2000, it had come to imply the then-unprecedented web of capability and skill on which business, in particular, could draw. There was great excitement at the turn of the century as this new infrastructure began to lift growth rates and suppress waste. Few could have seen what it means today: a reservoir of knowledge and capability, functionality and finance, all mapped together on demand to serve a volatile need. The unceasing eruption of knowledge and insight accelerates the shocking, discontinuous tectonic processes of creation and destruction.
• Life, for the majority, was once focused chiefly upon convention and necessity. 'Options' once implied something unusual: choice. Today, we have the world's capabilities at our hand. We can extend out life spans in ways limited only by our personal finances and by the rights which we have each won through public service. We can engineer our personalities to meet transient needs. We can choose our social milieu from an almost infinite spectrum, or mix examples of this to taste. The capabilities inherent in the infrastructure afford us the means to envisage limitless possibilities, and to do so in conjunction with simulacra of consumers, partners and those who might object to what we do. We can define an offering, have it given life and put it to market in hours or days, and - in the established world, at least - only those without imagination or taste need to be excluded from this.
• 'Best practice' is both our constraint and our spur. All can choose, and none willingly choose anything but the best. Every enterprise and political entity survives only through the constant satisfaction of volatile public choice. The choice which each agent exercises - on how to present and differentiate itself, on how best to balance complex competing demands - fills the time which delegation of operations to infrastructure and automation has released. The interests of each such agent is interwoven with many others, al exercising expert choice, each instantly critical of actions or policy which does not attain these high standards.

• 'Connectivity' once meant the ability to link remote agents together, point by point. Now, it implies a shifting, constant pattern of immersion. It offers us a new universe to inhabit. Similarly, those who one dreamed of artificial intelligence saw the natural home for this as the machine. Few recognised what commercial organisations and the fusion of military systems had already achieved until, at least, the first hegemon came spontaneously into existence.

• The complexity which these four members of the Quincunx have created could, if ill-managed, paralyse the machinery by which we survive. Each possibility throws up a myriad stakeholders, each armed with ideas, objections, alternatives to consider. This brings us to the last - and most multifaceted - of the five forces in the Quincunx: exhaustion.

We of the established world have been fortunate not to fight a major war, as it would assuredly be our last. Intelligence and active data-mined oversight has allows us to control the people capable of developing so-called "garage" weapons of mass destruction. The general spread of dangerous technologies did and does, however, seem certain to lead to a self-propagating accident. Providentially, those which have occurred to date have been contained or cauterised.

Stolen intellectual property has proven to be a scourge of the knowledge economy. Equally, tax systems which were once based upon geography have not survived. The new arrangements create what has proven to be a critical element of mutual dependence between para-statal governments. This is enforced at the level where governance pays most attention: in the cash stream.

Exhaustion is a stern member of the Quincunx, and it has another aspect. The range of options, the pace of change, the scale of personal challenge and difficulties of maintaining an edge in the collectivity exhaust even the best of us. Each year, more have either to take a softer option in their lives or undergo intrusive personality engineering. Many report that - however successful this may be in handling the immediate issues which confront them - it leads to a seemingly endless succession of further interventions. Last year, the Gershwin AI sang to us that:

Well, perhaps. The critics of the process point to a progressive depersonalisation of those involved. The advocates say that they are building stronger, more harmonious individuals. Perhaps both are right: we shall have a race of stalwart human constructs in charge, embedded in transpersonal systems far too complex for anyone to understand them, even were they to they to stand still in order to be understood.

The world is now segmented by economic circumstance and by access to networks, by geographical location, by elective affiliation and by innate predisposition. Many live their lives within many linked 'boxes', exercising different influence and taking on distinctive personal or hegemon-related properties in each. Many of us are fortunate, in being able to alter our relationship to any or all of these boundaries.

The majority who live even in the established world play no constructive role in its affairs, however, save through the exercise of consumer choice. Some elect to exclude themselves, often because they are unwilling to change their identity to meet hegemon standards, or because they object to the fusion of the personal with the collective. Others are excluded by circumstance, such as irremediable limits to their intellectual capacity, typically around issues of creativity.

We must feel equivocal in the face of this common issue. If we knew how to engineer creative engagement, then we would not need hegemons. We could pass essentially all of our affairs the artificial intelligence community, such as the Gershwin system, quoted earlier. These have long since replaced all former middle management functions. Anything that is routine can be done better by something that is not human. Only hegemonic links to the collectivity can allow an individual to attain a constructive role. There is no room for individuals in this, save as creative contributors.

Around 2 bn of the world's 9 bn have access to modern infrastructure, and some 4 bn are excluded by personal circumstance, by ethical or religious choice or by a rejectionist government. Three billion are, therefore, pounding on a door which those within are frantically attempting to keep locked. It is easy to see that the will not succeed: the Quincunx is battering with them, and its members have mighty fists.

Poverty has always flowed from poor institutions and weak insight. The dangerous consequences of poor institutions - to heath and safety, the knowledge economy, to the fragile living world and to natural systems - cannot be tolerated, and there has and will continue to be directive intervention. There may be a development surprise.

The past 150 years has seen exponential growth. The world output of 1900 was being delivered in around two working weeks in 2000. As a result of the many improvements to factor productivity and to the reinvestment of a wealth world's savings in knowledge, the same output took us three working days by 2025 and takes us a little over one day in 2050. A typical individual exchanges more data in an hour than did a city in the whole of 1900. Our annual output of knowledge exceeds the entire world's cumulative production to 2010. Where, then, shall we go next?

There are many problems to solve. There are many people for whom the world has nothing to offer, and yet more for whom it has nothing to offer but regulated fun. Our lives are overseen and interpenetrated as never before, yet - save where we impinge on others, which is everywhere - we are in command of more powers and choices than any historical aristocrat. Many, therefore, see the future as in some way transcendent: as a means by which we can escape the trammels of nine billion, of regulation, of stakeholder paralysis and exhaustion. Intensifying the pressures of the present, as defined by the Quincunx, is not, they say, helpful: what we need is completely new approach. Others decry this as a quasi-religious ideal. This said, the proof that the universe consists of nothing but patterns of self-reflexive information - 'super-symmetrical hyper-membrane theory' - has already allowed us to create sub-universes with their own 'designer' rule sets. Where we may go is both unimaginable and limited only by our capacity to imagine and instantiate our own destiny.