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by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
This is a presentation for my book signing at SLCC on 21 Oct 15.
My background is one of diverse experiences. And this diversity has a lot to do with my point of view on the topics which I present in this book.
I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. My father was a successful high-tech businessman. My mother helped him start his business then transitioned into becoming a sophisticated home maker and child raiser who raised me and my younger brother.
From there I went to college. I wanted to go to MIT, my father's alma mater, but only made the wait list when applying from high school. Instead I went to the University of Rochester for a year, and learned about upstate New York. Then I went into the army for three years. I learned to be an Air Traffic Controller (ATC). One of my three years was in Vietnam and one was at Dugway, Utah. This was my introduction to Utah, and I loved it. I loved the photogenic scenery, the easy driving, and the friendly people, and I added pilot to my ATC skills as I waited for my Army Time to run out. After that I spent a year at Dixie College getting good grades, and learning about southern Utah culture, and then I went to MIT for four years and learned about Chemical Engineering, and Boston culture. A dream come true, and, Wow! What a cultural difference!
From MIT I went to Southern California -- LA region -- and worked on making O-rings faster, better and cheaper. I was there a year, then I moved back to Utah and worked at what was then Morton Thiokol making rocket engines. (Now called ATK Launch Systems Group, I believe) (this is when I got to be a rocket scientist) One of the engines I worked on was the Space Shuttle Booster, and I got to see the first test firing of one of those.
But... I didn't like that style of work much. Rocket fuel is very dangerous, so you have to be very, very careful working with it. At that time in my life I didn't enjoy being that careful, so I switched to working with something more tangibly exciting -- the up-and-coming personal computers. The field was just getting started. (I knew about Bill Gates when he was still just a millionaire.) I opened ComputerLand, the fourth retail computer store in Utah.
From there I moved into something more complex -- PC-based local area networks -- and helped build that industry from scratch. I worked at Novell Inc. for ten years, then left when it underwent an organizational phase shift (my term) from innovation-centric to well-managed-centric. It had been an exciting time, and I wrote a book about my experiences there -- Surfing the High Tech Wave.
The next big change was traveling to Korea to teach English to Koreans. While I was at this I also I started my science fiction writing. And in 1996 I continued my high-tech pioneering by starting my web site -- White World.
So, lots of different activities, in lots of different places, working with lots of different people. And I was learning a lot about all of the above. As I put it these days, "I've been there, done that, and while I was doing it I was taking notes."
The writing result, to date, is thirteen different books, one of which has sold twenty thousand copies.
Which brings us to this latest book: Visions of 2050.
As a result of my years of marketing personal computers, and at Novell marketing computer networks, I think about science and technology from the marketing perspective. When viewed from this perspective, the root question for any science or technology breakthrough is: "OK. You've invented it. Now... what is it good for?"
And over the years I've uncovered lots of interesting ramifications that come from taking this perspective. One surprising place that this perspective adds insight to is how evolution happens, and how human thinking has evolved into what we experience today. These ideas get covered in my Business and Insight book series.
This book, Visions, is centered on the near future, the real one. Where are we headed?
The goal of this book is to accomplish a couple things:
o First, to extrapolate existing technology trends into the near future and describe what we will be experiencing
o Second, and more interesting, to describe how these new technologies and trends will be changing how we live and how we think
In our day-to-day living we take a lot for granted. This taking for granted dramatically changes what we think about. In the US in 1900 we thought a lot about horses. In the US in 2015 we think a lot about smart phone apps. It's very different.
And mixed in with the taking-for-granted is a whole lot of instinctive thinking. Instinctive thinking is basically ancient thinking. It has developed to quickly and comfortably solve routine problems of Stone Age living. Instinctive thinking is important because it is ready, willing and able to express itself, even when it is irrelevant to modern-day, technologically-advanced lifestyles.
The converse is analytic thinking -- things we learn. We are using analytic thinking when we learn to do math and ride a bike. We are using instinctive thinking when we adore babies and cute kittens and fall in love.
Forecasting what this mixing of new technology possibilities with old-fashioned instinctive thinking will create is the big challenge, and great fun, of putting this book together.
Next, let me give you some examples from the book.
Here are some highlights of what Visions talks about.
One of the easier elements of the future to forecast is that automation is going to push further and further into manufacturing, service and transportation activities.
The fun and interesting part is exploring the ramifications of that. As an example: the more computers are doing, the less people are going to have to know how to do. This is an element of the "taking for granted" discussed above. Most people aren't going to know how to do factory work any more than they know how to farm. Those who do know will be what I call dilettantes -- they will know but their knowing won't matter to overall productivity.
As an example: If you can make a table, that's wonderful... put it beside the thousand other tables the factory made at the same time.
Computer intelligence, which I call cyber in the book, is going to continue to grow rapidly. And, yes, it will become self-aware. But the interesting twist on this is to look at this transition not as a threat, but as a transcending. The higher cyber intelligences will have a relation to humans similar to what man has with cows. Now... that said... take a moment to think about how cows perceive humans. It is very different from how humans perceive cows. (This is covered in the book Prelude)
This difference is at the heart of my observations and stories about man interacting with the cyber of 2050. That said, there are going to be lots of interesting ramifications. One of the fun ones is what I call Cyber Muses, as in, "Behind every great man there is a good cyber muse." More on this later.
We aren't going to face any serious "Peak" or Malthusian crises. There are two reasons behind this:
One is that productivity is going to steadily improve so resources will constantly be providing more value per resource used. This is the pervasive, but unheralded, "green" that we are living with even today.
The other is that human population will reach a peak and start declining. This will happen because the population will become ninety percent urbanized, and even today prosperous urban communities don't produce enough babies to sustain the population. Witness what is happening in Japan.
It is ironic, but the population crisis of 2050 and beyond will be a "make enough babies" crisis, not a "too little resources" crisis.
Think of driverless cars, a high-profile up-and-coming technology. Think about the difference widespread driverless cars are going to make in how we think about transportation, as in, getting ourselves from Point A to Point B.
The big change is... getting there will be taken for granted. We won't have to learn to drive, which means a huge drop in pride of ownership feelings for cars. Instead we just call one up, get in, go, get out, and let the car go its way. In our thinking cars will become a lot more like furniture. They will no longer be part of our "rite of passage" into adulthood. (Something else will take that place.) This will change what we expect from cars, which will change how they are designed, how they function, and how we relate to them.
Smart wearables are going to proliferate, and they are going to change what we think about a whole lot. One of the big changes is that the wearables are going to become much more sensitive to human emotions because the emotions change human physiology -- think of wearables becoming sensitive first to "fight or flight" syndrome, and then more subtle effects. In effect, wearables will read human emotions. And, with the aid of human-oriented cyber (such as cyber muses) they will be able to respond to what they sense.
Here are some more specific, tangible, examples of changes.
Some self-aware cyber will pretty much ignore humans, and, likewise, their activities will seem incomprehensible and capricious to humans. But much cyber will be specifically designed to interact with humans in human-meaningful ways.
One of the interesting ways to do that is to replace humans as companions, and do the companionship faster, better and cheaper than humans and pets do. This is the heart of the "cyber muse" concept (my term). The expression of the concept will vary enormously. It will range from purely cyberspace entities who just talk through communications systems, to avatars who will also control physical (mechanical) bodies, to androids who control organic bodies.
And what the muses inspire in people will vary just as much. The first incarnations of inspiring are those with us now: computer games stroking entertainment emotions. Coming up shortly are sex toys and cuddly kitten emotion strokers. Entertainment, sex and cuddling are simple emotions to understand and stimulate. With more time and research the more subtle human emotions can get understood and stroked. Providing inspiration to accomplish great things in various endeavor styles -- such as business, sports and art -- are not as simple to figure out as sex and cuddle, but they will be developed, and humans will be inspired by them even better than they are currently by "good women".
Humans backed by good muses will become impressively more creative and productive than current humans are. I say good muses because these will be luxury items, as described in the TES section.
With manufacturing, service and transportation so automated, mankind will be living in the Total Entitlement State -- TES. TES has been an aspiration ever since the Industrial Age started. Think of Marx and "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
There have been lots of aspirations to reach TES, and soon, thanks to pervasive automation, we will be able to achieve stable forms of it. (There will be many forms. The book talks about this.)
What happens then is a splitting of the economy into two big categories: the necessity economy and the luxury economy. The necessity side will be much like contemporary food stamps, but with a simpler human interface side, and a much more elaborate behind-the-scenes side. The luxury side will be much like the contemporary consumer economy. This will lead to two styles of money: necessity money and luxury money. They won't mix easily.
There will be a third money style as well that humans rarely interact with -- investment money. This will circulate in cyberspace and be used by cyber to make investment decisions in the fully-automated environment.
"Pick a career where you can be passionate about your work." is common career advice given these days. Following this trend in large scale is going to lead to... Top 40 Jobs. (my term)
This concept came to me from watching the music played on radio evolve. As the recording industry started creating thousands of records, in theory, broadcast radio could also be playing thousands of selections. Instead, people wanted to listen to just a handful of favorites and hear them over and over -- Top 40 Radio.
As automation takes over more and more of the variety that manufacturing, service and transportation jobs call for, I envision human job-taking will undergo this same sort of evolution. People will indulge in small subsets of the total variety of workplace jobs that could be engaged in -- that subset that people are passionate about.
The nature of what humans do in a job will change just as much. Humans will become "dilettante workers" (my term) -- they will get very good at the tasks they choose to undertake, but those tasks will rarely be adding much to overall productivity of the economy -- adding productivity is the cyber's job. An example of this is becoming a sports person, another is crafting artisanal wares and services. Related to sports, and likely to be very popular, is entertainment in all its incarnations.
Another job I envision picking up a lot of human participation, and one in which human participation is adding productivity, is disaster response. Cyber is not at its best when solutions are on-the-spot, make-do solutions.
Mind altering is another area where things will be changing dramatically. The heart of this change is comes as a result of two factors:
As people spend less and less time doing dangerous activities, such as driving cars, the damage caused by making a mistake while in a mind altered state will drop dramatically.
When wearables are doing the mind altering, instead of ingesting chemicals, it can be turned on and off much faster, and when it is on it can be controlled much more subtly. If a person is getting into a hazardous state, the wearables can sense this and quickly sober the person up.
In sum, mind altering won't be as hazardous to the community as it currently is... but that doesn't mean the instinct to worry about it will go away. There will still be lots and lots of controversy in this arena.
A lot is going to be changing over the next thirty five years. A lot of the changes will be surprises... but not all of them.
Visions of 2050, and this presentation, is an attempt to describe some changes that can be predicted. And in particular, those changes that will affect how we live and what we think about. There will be surprises in what we think about, but they will not be as dramatic as the surprises in the technology of the world we will be living in... because human thinking has a lot more constants built into it than new inventions do at this stage in our inventing process.
--The End--