by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2016
These are thoughts on what wearables and surveillance are going to evolve into by the 2050's, and the big social issues this evolution is going to bring to the fore.
Wearables are going to evolve into emotion controllers and surveillance is going to become quite pervasive. The result: They will have big effects on how we live and think, and how they should be used is going to be a hot-item topic of the 2050's.
When wearables can adjust a person's emotions, who should be able to control wearables?
This is going to be a hot-item question of the 2050's, as wearables first begin to do this emotion controlling, and then get really good at it. They will become fast, powerful and subtle at the controlling they do.
The easy first answer is: the user. The user should be able to dial up and down various emotions such as fear, love, and respect for a person. This will help eliminate the emotional roller coasters that are so much a part of day-to-day living for many people. A person can become a stoic without a lot of discipline, or they can become enthusiastic without having to really like something. These are some impressive abilities.
Likewise, the person can engage in all sorts of mind altering in many ways they first choose to experiment with, then routinely enjoy. Conversely, when they want to roller coaster, they can, wildly, then get off with just a few minutes of recovery. Net effect: life can get a whole lot easier to enjoy, and can be enjoyed in many new ways.
Who besides the user should be controlling the wearables? There are some deeply compelling reasons to let other people join in on the control. Here is an example.
What if the user is having mental problems? What if tweaking the user's hormones can bring some relief from those problems? What if he or she chooses not to bring on that relief?
An example of this would be suffering from depression. Lets say the user is suffering from depression because one of their children got killed in a car accident. The user says, "Yes, I'm sad, but I can live with it." But the healthcare advisor to this person says, "No. This person is so sad they should have their emotions tweaked." (In the 2010's this would be done by giving the person a pill, such as Prozac.)
In such a case the second answer becomes: The community should have control, in the form of health care advisors. And with that comes the ethical question: When should the community have the control: Just at some times, or all the time? When can the user reasonably object to community control?
This second answer is the Dealing With Personal Problems Answer.
Now lets mix in politics: What if the community is having serious political and economic problems, and the ruling party wants to "Blame Them" (other people) for the problems. A 2010's example of this happening is Venezuela under Hugo Chavez's successor, Nicolas Maduro. He's been doing a whole lot of Blame Them for years now as Venezuela's economy has been trashed by decades of following the Bolivarian Socialism policies first enacted by his populist predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
In the 2050's one way of keeping support in such trying political circumstances is having the community's wearables support this Blame Them emotion the government is relying on.
So, yes, politicians are going to be very interested in controlling wearables too. Should they be able to use wearables to make citizens feel more patriotic?
Blame Them is the bad side. But there can be a good side: The Big Vision side. Big Vision is an alternative to Blame Them that can produce lots of big benefits. The acrimony version (Blame Them) is something we are experiencing a lot of in 2010's. Acrimony is when community leaders do a lot of arguing and don't come up with solutions they can agree upon -- lots of angry talk and little gets done. The converse -- everyone working together -- comes up when a Big Vision is in place.
A common example of a Big Vision being in place is when a popular war being fought, such as World War Two. When a Big Vision is high priority in a community, people put aside their differences and do a lot of cooperating -- in the popular war example the cooperating is to Win the War. Note that in World War Two this happened on all sides of the war. People will still argue, but they cooperate a lot while they are doing it. This cooperating is what makes Big Vision times different from Acrimony times.
When wearables are helping make a Big Vision happen instead of acrimony, then they are supporting progress.
Who else would like a boost from emotion controlling?
Religion, charities, social justice causes, and selling products and services to name a few. These are activities that are all in the business of convincing people that they are right and many people should invest time, money and effort to support their cause. Emotion controlling can sure help this convincing happen.
This means that influencing wearables is going to become a potent supplement to advertising.
So... what are going to be the standards and ethics for influencing wearables? As I stated earlier, this is going to become a hot-item topic for the 2050's.
The right answer will not be a simple one, or easy to discover.
Surveillance is going to become pervasive because it saves the community so much money and resource. It increases the efficiency and effectiveness of all kinds of devices which influence the physical environment. If something isn't working well, and something is watching it, then it can get adjusted quickly or fixed quickly, which saves lots of time, money and attention.
In the 2010's the Internet of Things (IOT) is the beginning of pervasive surveillance.
As with wearables, the big question becomes who gets to see, and who gets to influence, what all this surveillance is showing?
The first thing to keep in mind is that watching things is an incredibly boring activity -- almost all the time nothing interesting is happening. Think of watching a tire to see if it is getting soft and needs air or getting worn out and needs replacement.
A surprising exception to this complete boringness is agriculture -- watching plants grow is going to be watching something with a lot more interesting variety than most other surveillance activities. Compare watching a plant growing to watching the above mentioned tire.
The first thing to keep in mind is that watching people is going to be about one millionth of the activity surveillance is up to -- almost all of the activity will be machines watching machines.
The people watching is going to be like machine watching in that it is also incredibly boring. But there is a difference. The big difference between watching machines and watching people is social shaming. It is hard to shame a machine, but many people enjoy looking for ways to shame other people, and many more find it interesting when shame-worthy activities are discovered.
For this reason the ethics of surveillance is going to be just as hot a topic as the ethics of wearables.
Artificial Intelligence is going to be doing ninety nine percent of pervasive surveillance. Humans will be directly monitoring very little. This means that the ethics of cyber monitoring (as I will call it) will be much more influential than those of human monitoring -- even with humans doing most of the shaming and other forms of human-oriented intervening activities.
Cyber monitors can both take action on their own and report interesting activities to humans who are up the command chain. Much of the action taken in response to what surveillance uncovers will be to adjust, repair and replace machinery. Taking action to deal with surprises and human activities will be just a tiny part of the surveillance activity.
Shaming is going to be the most common high-profile consequence of humans doing something out-of-line while under the eye of pervasive surveillance. Both humans and cyber will be doing the shaming, but the styles will be quite different.
Cyber shaming will be low-key and feel routine, human shaming is much more likely to turn into high-profile "turn this into a federal case"-style shaming. It's the difference between traffic ticket shaming and sex offender shaming.
Surveillance is going to steadily become a much bigger part of our lives. Much of it will be happening behind the scenes because it will be devoted to keeping machines well adjusted and well maintained. But a small part of it will be devoted to watching people and that part will become very high-profile because it will support social shaming in various forms.
This 24 Apr 16 WSJ article, Singapore Is Taking the ‘Smart City’ to a Whole New Level Government-deployed sensors will collect and coordinate an unprecedented amount of data on daily life in the city by Jake Maxwell Watts and Newley Purnell, talks about Singapore taking another step on the road to pervasive surveillance. It also points out how much is still to be learned about the road this journey will travel on.
From the article, "Officials say the program is designed to improve government services through technology, better connect its citizens, and encourage private-sector innovations. For instance, sensors deployed by private companies in some elderly people’s publicly managed homes will alert family if they stop moving, and even record when they use the toilet in an attempt to monitor general health.
Yet the government also says it isn’t certain what kinds of applications might be possible once the system is built, and hasn’t decided where all the sensors will be located, raising privacy concerns.
The project appears to be popular in Singapore, where faith in the government is high and citizens have accepted limits on behavior, including restrictions on public speech and the press, in return for a more efficient state."
One of the key issues -- as far as story telling and being fearful are concerned -- is how a person (or cyber for that matter) can do something seriously bad in this environment? How can they commit a crime? Related but not the same, how can they get away with it if they do? This is the difference between being a suicide bomber and a Jesse James or Robin Hood.
Crime committing will be a challenge -- there is so much watching going on. Plus, if the criminal wannabe's wearables detect commit-crime-style excitement building, they can alert both the surrounding surveillance and criminal-preventing authorities that "risk is rising", and various styles of preventive action can be taken.
The only way for crime to be committed undetected is for the criminal to trick the system in powerful, sophisticated and subtle ways. That's the hope, anyway. How close reality comes to reaching this goal remains to be seen, and will vary with both time and circumstance.
Related but not the same will be someone trying to commit Robin Hood style crimes where they steal from the unpopular and "give to the poor". Because this is a TES environment, there are no real poor, but because of SJW instinctive thinking there will still be people who are considered deserving. Finding who is considered deserving will be part of the challenge of being a Robin Hood.
In the TES environment there are no poor to speak of. It may be in the 2050's that those who are considered deserving (the homeless equivalents of today) are the professional beggars of the day, the equivalent of those who in the 2010's are holding cardboard signs on street corners. In addition to those there may be others. One group may be those who many SJW types think do not deserve to be as seriously socially shamed as they are.
In the 2050's it may be that deserving becomes equated to shame style rather than poverty style.
As these surveillance systems are first developed and then improved, there will be lots of experimenting going on to see if these systems can be gamed. Much of it will be done by teenagers and young adults because they have a lot of instinct to question systems and look for loopholes. Another group will be amateur and professional researchers looking for loopholes in what others have designed -- these can be both "white hat" and "black hat" types.
Over time, all groups should have harder and harder times finding loopholes as the skills of the mainstream developers keep improving. Both wearables and surveillance are going to be activities that constantly get better with time.
The mix of wearables and pervasive surveillance is going to become one of the big lifestyle changers in the 2050's. They are going to change things for the better because things going wrong are going to be detected so much more quickly.
Two other areas of human activity that also will change dramatically are social shaming and criminal activities. The shaming is going to become a lot easier because so many more activities are seen. The crime committing is going to get a lot harder for the very same reason.
It's going to become a very different world from the one we are currently experiencing in the 2010's.
--The End--