by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2016
These are thoughts on topics for the Visions of 2051 book. This is the second book in the Visions series, and the third will be a review and rewrite of Child Champs -- that one becomes the Visions of 2052 book (Babymaking in the year 2052).
The center of this 2051 book will be wearables and pervasive surveillance.
He's the one? -- [already written] romance in 2050 when wearables can control emotions. One problem with the current story is wearable emotion controlling is not being used. This may call for a second story.
A war story? -- What is a human soldier's role going to be? What will it be on the side that is "on top"? This is the side that can employ aircraft and drones at will. What will it be on the side that is "guerilla" and terrorist? This is the side that routinely gets shot at by the aircraft and drones.
A person deep into TES lifestyle -- This is the parent's basement dweller in the TES environment. This person doesn't have a job in the current sense. What will they be doing instead? What will keep them enfranchised so they don't cause trouble, and support the current social environment they live in? If they are trouble makers, what kind of trouble will they cause? Keep pervasive surveillance in mind. There will be "OK" and "crossing the line" forms of trouble making. As an example, peaceful protesting may be an OK form. People will be constantly searching for loopholes in the surveillance so they can make trouble where "the line" hasn't been drawn yet. How will hacking add to this?
What will human government be doing, as versus what cyber government will be doing? Related (and written) Electioneering in VR. What will human elected officials still be in charge of? It is likely that cyber will steadily take over more and more of the routine bureaucratic functions. Those that will remain human will do so because humans want the ritual that goes with them. An example of wanting the ritual is conducting criminal trials, those will stay human-oriented for a long time, think of how popular courtroom drama is as entertainment. Conversely, business dispute trials, the sort that are currently arbitrated rather than judged, will move into cyber so that decisions can be quickly made and the parties can move on with their lives.
What other political issues will stay in human hands? Those that social justice warriors (SJW) want to mess with will likely stay human. Contemporary issues of SJW interest are helping the poor and climate change. And on the silly side, atoning for what great grandfathers did. What will the issues be in 2050?
Helping the poor, if it is still around as an issue, will be about helping those who entertain others by acting like they are poor and homeless. (Keep in mind, that TES is providing basics for everyone, so these people have basics.) In today's world these entertaining types are the people who hold signs at street corners. What will these kinds of people be doing to show off their poorness in 2050? With ubiquitous driverless cars, being stopped at a streetlight will be rare, so the cardboard sign carrying there will no longer be profitable. Where can these people hang out instead? At stadium games? In Pokemon spots? On the internet somehow?
What will the Tattoos and T-Shirts effect be affecting in 2050? -- What will humans keep endulging in because it supports personal expression? Tattoos and other fashions will be one form. Top 40 Jobs will be another. Marriage and child raising will be two more. What else? Books seem to have a lot of this. Will they still in 2050?
What will be End of the World issues in these times? Climate change is powered by the End of World instinct. Some other incarnation of "Peak something" could replace it in 2050. Is there a good story to be had about this? How will cyber get involved in handling SJW and EOW issues that capture human concern?
How to handle Social Shaming? -- Social shaming will become an even hotter topic in this TES environment. Without the discipline of a daily job to keep people's attention, social shaming will become an even bigger attention getter. In addition to forceful, it will get quite elaborate in how it is triggered and how the shaming is implemented.
What about the Pokemon Go phenomenon? -- This is a surprisingly hot item these days. Will it stay hot? What will be its 2050's evolution? Will that version still be getting people out of their basements? Conversely, will it be getting them exercise while in their basements? Will they be getting on treadmills or stationary bikes to play Pokemon? Related: With wearables becoming so subtly powerful, will actual exercise be helpful to health?
How to tell a mystery/detective story in this environment? -- This isn't going to be easy. Lots of ground rules will have to change. Likewise, action, adventure and thriller are all going to be hard to tell as well. [Sigh] This is a brave new world, all right.
And here are more thoughts specifically on the wearables, surveillance and shaming topics.
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. (this is getting drunk and high in 2050's ways) They can first experiment with many ways, and then choose those they wish to routinely enjoy. For instance, they can choose to roller coaster during party time, and then sober up with just a few minutes of recovery when party time ends. 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? (This second answer is the Dealing With Personal Problems Answer.)
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. And I'll get over it on my own." 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 deeply traumatic times, or all the time? When can the user reasonably object to community control?
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 -- they want to dodge responsibility. 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 -- feel like the leaders are doing the right things?
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 high degree of 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... of some sort.
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 will do so 99% of the time) 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 (which humans will deal with better than cyber) and human shamable 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 -- wrist slapping -- human shaming is much more likely to turn into high-profile "turn this into a federal case"-style 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.
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?
Doing so 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.
As these 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.
In an environment with pervasive surveillance and pervasive social media, social shaming is going to become higher profile in everyone's lives. In the 2010's the converse of all this being watched is called privacy -- it is being able to do socially shamable activities without the shaming happening.
If new styles of privacy rules and ethics are not created and seriously implemented, social shaming is going to become a lot more pervasive as surveillance becomes a lot more pervasive.
Implementing new privacy rules is going to be tough for two reasons. The first is that some humans love to snoop on others. This is an instinct, and it is a popular one. In its mild form this is an entertainment gossip column in a magazine or newspaper, in its strong form it is a child molster registry. The second is, as has already been pointed out, there is going to be a whole lot more surveillance and a whole lot more cyber watching it. Part of the new rules and ethics will be establishing some kind of boundary between what cyber sees and what it reports to humans.
The human-cyber boundary is only part of the challenge. The other part is differences between various social groups in what is socially acceptable behavior, and what is shamable behavior. One of the current high profile examples of this is prostitution -- the people engaging in this find it socially acceptable while those who want to shame those engaging in it don't. And you have plenty of hypocrites.
How to reconcile these kinds of differences in opinion is going to be challenging. But it will become very important to do so because social shaming is going to become so important.
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. This is why they will become pervasive. But, there will be many other changes that are mixed blessings, and many that are surprising.
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--