If you've been convicted of a harsh enough crime, you would be fitted with an electronic tracking device which will watch all your comings and goings, reporting them in real time to the police. Tampering with them would only land you in jail. So while your body might technically be free and out of a prison bed, your mind isn't, and you would in effect live in jail without ever setting foot in it, knowing that one false move is guaranteed to bring down the wrath of the law. It's already happening in jurisdictions across the country to track sex offenders and drug addicts who could be kept out of jail but still need plenty of supervision. And there may one day be even more to it than simply monitoring their whereabouts, as Wood considers the high tech future…

Right now the electrostatic patches made by BI and others monitor the sweat of parolees only for alcohol. But why stop there? Despite some practical hurdles, they could perhaps be upgraded to taste other substances, such as amphetamines or other drugs. And if patches can ensure that certain foreign substances remain out of the bloodstream, why not ensure that others are added  to it — pharmaceuticals, say, to inhibit libido or muzzle aggression or keep psychosis at bay.

They could even, again in theory, police the natural substances in our sweat, our hormones and neurotransmitters, the juices that determine our moods and desires. No machine currently exists [capable of] sniffing out criminal intent, or schizophrenia, or sexual arousal, from the armpits of a parolee or probationer, but the forward march of technology suggests that such devices are far from impossible, and that perhaps someday routine monitoring by authorities could be used to map convicts not just geographically but emotionally as well.

And he has a point, to an extent. While monitoring neurotransmitter levels would require a plug into the brain, detecting emotions based on respiration, sweating, or body heat are very plausible. Just as it would be to hit an out of control offender with an electric shock should he or she fail to comply with police orders. In fact, the technology is almost there already and could easily be implemented in the near future. And what's to say that the very same politicians who introduced laws that filled American jails to bursting wouldn't allow all of these applications for remote tracking devices to then present themselves as being truly tough on crime, following fiery campaign speeches terrifying potential voters about hordes of criminals prowling the streets a night with too few restrictions? The end result might actually be even more severe than being incarcerated, although far more likely to keep criminals from re-offending.

Essentially this virtual jail is borrowing from behavioral psychology, where a system of negative and positive reinforcements effectively modifies your habits over time, something that you can't really accomplish in gang- dominated, violent prisons where inmates run businesses, assault about a fifth of their fellow inmates, and territorial battles spill over into cells and exercise yards. Still, even if we monitor every moment of the wired-up offenders' days, read their e-mails, listen to their phone calls, enforce their behavior with electronic systems, and throw them in jail minutes after they step out of bounds, I'm sure there will sill be people who will eye all those around them for any sign of a tracking device, terrified of running into an unruly criminal mentioned by a pundit, or someone running for office and in need of scaring up some votes. And that fact may slow adoption of this substitute for jail time across the nation and keep our prison populations close to current levels for the foreseeable future. Change tends to come very slowly to a realm where fear and anger reign.

Now, trying to predict the future with statistical analyses isn’t quite like breaking out the Ouija board and trying to become one with the spirit of the average representative of your target demographic. You’re working with an actual data set and writing all sorts of tools to better parse it in a search for insight. But the problem is that a very large data set about consumer behavior really only tells you what consumers like at the moment and the emerging fads of the day rather than alert you to what’s going to be really popular and marketable in the next six months to year, giving you enough lead time to develop and test your product, as well as its marketing. The idea of looking for statistical patterns in complex data sets has been tried before on the stock market with very mixed results. Pretty much all systems that billed themselves as excellent predictors of where the market will move tomorrow, or that week, have failed. Even the best, most treasured, and most sought out systems you’ll have to pay thousands of dollars to order, are generally very conservative bets almost guaranteed to slowly go up over time and outperform virtually any get-rich-quick scheme which relies on predictable trader behaviors, fair and equal distribution of relevant information, and total transparency, things the market doesn’t have.

Ok, the stock market is one thing. Why couldn’t we use a stream of consumer data to make predictions? The prescient wonk approach to data analysis assumes that humans are more or less rational, and what they do and say now, can be extrapolated into the near future. However, we’re far more messy than that, and what we say in public isn’t always what we do in private. No data mining is going to explain why the very same people who post a long winded rant on their personal blogs about the demise of good literature own, and love, every single book of the Twilight series. Or why so many mediocre, widely panned creative works gain the success they do. All you’ll see are the double standards and contradictions writ large across your data set, tampering with all your significance tests. In effect, you would be trying to predict the actions of people who change their minds day in, day out, quickly embrace and abandon trends and fads based solely on how they feel over the last several months, indulge in guilty pleasures, and jump on bandwagons depending on how close they are with certain friends, whose relationships can change at any moment. Considering these challenges in trying to predict the human psyche, it may be easier to simply try and ride the current fad rather than try to catch the future by the tail, or just try and launch a trend of your own to ride the resulting s-curve of demand.

This may seem like a rather conservative list by the standard of most futurists, but let’s keep in mind that we’re dealing with new technology which has either barely been tested, or just starting to really catch on, and that all tools have their limitations and caveats. So with this disclaimer out of the way, here are the three broad areas of current technical advancement I think could be poised to make a big impact in the next several decades…

3. Nanobots and nanoparticles. Since the human body has trillions of cells which would need tens of billions of nanobots to maintain up to transhumanists’ lofty standards, it’s very unlikely that we’ll actually be able to get our own private army of smart, cell-repairing robots in our bloodstream. It would simply take too much money and resources. However, very simple nano-machinery capable of targeting specific cells to combat infections, or even suppressing the spread of cancerous tumors, are a very real possibility. They wouldn’t need to have any supervision or programming to do their job and very quick and easy to manufacture in industrial quantities for clinical trials and widespread treatments. Within just a few decades, your doctors may be using them for a painless, yet aggressive treatment against life threatening conditions, and perhaps even primitive attempts at genetic engineering for embryos, though we should make sure this kind of power is used wisely. Of course, the big challenge will be making sure that all those actions on a nano scale really do have a positive impact in the macro world and refining the technology to get more and more return on our investment.

2. Cyborgs. Once the stuff of science fiction, cyborgs are now an everyday reality. Not only are we creating high tech replacements for lost limbs, were also retuning speech to the mute, and offering the promise of mobility via mind-controlled computers. Even artificial organs are starting to appear on the horizon to meet a growing need for organ donors, and while today’s artificial hearts are being created to give patients more time to get a real one, it may be worthy goal to create a highly durable artificial heart that could eliminate transplant waiting lists, saving countless lives in the process. As we start replacing our joints, limbs an organs with their robotic equivalents, we may even feel temped to upgrade them to give us superhuman abilities. Now, there is a very strict limit to how strong and fast cyborgs could get, but there is definitely room for improvement. And more interestingly, enough technical modifications could even make travel to other worlds much easier, though this too comes with its ethical and scientific caveats. Nevertheless, there is a very real and legitimate need for more and more sophisticated cyborg technology, and more and more of it is constantly being built and tested to help more and more patients survive dire medical predicaments.

1. Intelligent computer agents. Very general and high level artificial intelligence might be aiming rather high for anyone other than the most devoted computer theorists, but software that can learn and spot very complex patterns in the world around us has a very promising and much more immediate future. These machines can be used tease out a complex medical condition from a string of bizarre patient symptoms, or to control robotic fighters and bombers during complex military operations, or even to spot manufacturing defects humans may miss on an assembly line, and they’re already in huge demand even as primitive prototypes. They may not be our friends or pets with personalities and feelings, but then again, that’s not for what they’re built. Their goal is much more relevant to our everyday lives: to make all the machines around us more efficient and more helpful so we have to deal with fewer technical problems on a daily basis. Although one could argue that computers built to be smart might pose a while new range of technical problems of their own…

For a good example of this attitude, take Bill McKibben. He wrote a rebuttal to Kurzweil’s musings on how the moment of the Singularity will come by the mid-2040s centered around the idea that transhumanists are on a mission to change what makes us human and how this will bring about the end of humanity. After giving most of his readers a scare taken from sensationalistic headlines in newspapers and popular science articles, he remembers to drop a caveat, saying that he just wants to be cautious that we don’t end up hurting our species by simply leaping into whatever new discovery in the world of AI or genetics. Of course this defense falls flat on its face when we note that he’s fighting with his fears and media hype of technologies which are really much more complex and are actually incapable of being used the way McKibben sees in his nightmares. While he’s afraid the genetic engineering will be used for eugenics, actual biology says that every eugenic experiment is going to end in failure simply due to the nature of how our genomes work.

There’s no intellect gene that will switch on and make a child a genius and there’s no strength gene that could give someone superhuman strength. Making a Nazi-eqsue master race of attractive, atheletic geniuses isn’t a scientific possibility and trying to make it happen will result in an inbred, highly vulnerable population. We can say the same about making a super-species of cyborgs. While there are very legitimate ethical and medical concerns in using mechanical parts in healthy humans, you won’t necessarily come up with a superhuman species due to our bodies’ physical limitations. Cyborgs who could be appreciably faster and stronger than a normal, average human would need to be almost entirely machine, and even then, their joints would wear out far faster than ours because we can repair the damage from everyday stress while machinery can’t. McKibben essentially composed a sermon on the morality of what amounts to comic book science applied to the world as we know it. He might as well have written an essay about the need to secure our closets against whatever boogeyman invades it. It would’ve been equally factual and accurate.

Unfortunately, the fears of nonexistent of impossible technological horrors is rampant on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. Many liberals are afraid of anything that tinkers with nature because they see themselves as custodians of the environment. Many conservatives rebel against major advancements in genetics and certain technologies due to their religious beliefs, viewing any attempt to actually alter genes or change the human species’ status quo as going against God’s plans. Both of these attitudes aren’t helpful to society at large, not only because they’re often based on ignorance of the relevant subjects, but due to the very harmful effect they have on scientific and engineering R&D. When people become more concerned about the feeling they get when they read an overhyped, ridiculously poorly researched story with headlines breathlessly describing how a mad scientist cloned a sheep to practice creating human clones for organ harvesting in the near future, than the actual facts involved in things like cloning or genetic engineering, they cut R&D budgets, kill scientific jobs and derail promising lines of research out of irrational paranoia. And writers who can’t tell a pseudoscientific world salad from a real scientific paper are only fueling these waves of Luddism…

[ illustration by Paul Hostetker ]

Now what could be wrong with this line of reasoning? How about the idea of using a random verse torn out of a narrative and used to define a recent event, then making the leap that it must be evidence of precognition? I a number of comments and e-mails that ding me for ignoring the supposedly obvious predictive powers of a Biblical verse. For example take this recent example of the holy book telling us the future of warfare…

Jeremiah 50 verse 9 predicts that in a future battle, it will be the arrows themselves that will do the aiming, not the person firing them. Guided/homing missiles? How were people back then meant to know about homing missiles and the future hundreds of years ahead of their time?

Good question indeed. But who says they were actually describing modern missiles? Wouldn’t an omniscient deity showing them the future of the world explain what a missile was? Sure, you can describe a missile as a big arrow that sometimes aims itself, but that’s actually a rather oversimplified description of it. The guidance system of a missile isn’t self-aiming but rather, takes commands from human handlers and uses GPS or the laser signal from a bomber to its target to guide itself. Some missiles can use heat to track down aircraft or a surface target but they still rely on a human to point them in the right general direction, even with fire and forget technology which outsources the task of target tracking in flight to the missile itself. Likewise, missiles have a powerful engine which spews fire and smoke in a trail behind them. They’re not flaming arrows, but rather big arrows with flames shooting out of their tails as big as the ancients’ biggest siege machines. One would think a weapon that powerful would get a more detailed write-up.

However, we’re still making a basic flaw in our assumptions here. We’re going by the word of the person who claimed that Jeremiah 50:9 predicted homing missiles in the form of arrows that aim themselves. In reality, if we look up the actual verse, it says nothing of the sort. Instead it reads…

For, lo, I will raise and cause to come up against Babylon an assembly of great nations from the north country: and they shall set themselves in array against her; from thence she shall be taken: their arrows shall be as of a mighty expert man; none shall return in vain.

So in other words, every arrow will deliver a blow to the enemy. The idea of these arrows homing in on enemy targets seems to be in the imagination of the reader who wants to envision the verse foretelling the future. It’s even more unlikely that this quote relates to a modern event when we consider that Jeremiah 50 starts with a furious promise of revenge against the Babylonian hordes and describes an event not at some point in future warfare, but a very immediate concern in the ancient Hebrew world. How can one just take what’s supposedly the world of God, break it up into quotes stripped of all context, and build far reaching conclusions out of that? I would be impressed if there was a chapter in the Bible devoted to discussing the dynamics of the World Wars or the MAD doctrine while explaining the basic mechanics of thermonuclear warheads, events that would deal with the modern world and its problems, not with the very typical punditry of the ancient world about something happening around the time the texts were written. Vague, out of context verses given meaning by the faithful in the quest to prove their faith to others just don’t do it for me, especially when they’re presented to contain a wealth of scientific information which modern science is only beginning to discover…

[ photo by the eRomantica Imagery studio ]

There’s another thing I like about this robot and that’s how it’s designed by the animators. Instead of the highly problematic bipedal system that requires lots of maintenance, sensors and computing overhead, it’s using a big wheel. It’s gentler on the machine and actually would make it more maneuverable. Granted, it wouldn’t be able to navigate stairs on its own, but we could assume that future house designs would probably consider if there’s a robotic helper in the house and maybe even install elevators, or escalator like stairways for them. Its biggest hurdle though would be the required level of intelligence and comprehension of human commands. Considering that the first generation of cybernetic butlers and caretakers would probably be assigned to help senior citizens or for basic medical assistance in hospitals, they would need to understand what they’re told and be able to recognize when the human is feeling cranky, upset or is in pain so they can react appropriately, just like “Jeffrey” did in the commercial when a careless employee negated its importance.

This is where something interesting might happen. Because the robot looks so playful and a lot of work gave its digital brain the ability to read and react to human emotions, people may actually consider them intelligent and form an emotional attachment to them, just like they would to a pet. Would that make these robots a valid success in AI development? Would it matter that it’s just following code constructed by humans and can’t feel any emotions, or are its good looks and ability to work with humans enough to qualify it as intelligent?

Our story centers around an astronaut who found himself and his team in a very unusual set of circumstances and had to make the best of a very strange situation. After a long time in space and only vaguely resembling a human being, he returns to Earth to help the planet fight off an alien invasion it doesn’t even know is coming, setting in motion a chain of events that traps humans between two powerful alien species vying for control of our galaxy. As secret arrangements and a political debacle of epic proportions unfold overhead, the humans are starting to wonder if their self-appointed saviors are telling them the whole story, and whether their planet and their civilization as they know it, will survive when two titans fight in thier backyard…

In the story, I try to explore some of the themes frequently brought up on this blog like transhumanism, space exploration, the search for alien life, conflicts between faith and science, and the evolution of new religions as we learn more and more about our universe. One thing to keep in mind is that any sci-fi story requires at least some suspension of disbelief and there are some quasi-scientific leaps I had to make so some of the points in the plot would be possible and the story could keep on going. So if you see something that seems a little off from a scientific standpoint, please try to hold your fire. It’s ridiculously hard to make space operas with a few elements from Lovecraftian horror stories without a few literary magic tricks. So if you’re interested, download the first five chapters and let me know what you think. If you like it, I’ll keep posting.

The previous century gave us television, modern medicine, computers, aircraft, spaceflight and our academic knowhow has grown exponentially. We constantly cite that as living proof that the future holds amazing things and that doubts about a sophisticated piece of future technology is like being one of the naysayers who said that powered flight was a fanciful dream or that human spaceflight is utopian insanity. At the same time, how quickly did we forget about all the promises of the 20th and 21st century which haven’t come true? How many promises given to us by overzealous scientists and CEOs have fallen through when they found that research into a very promising area turned out to be a lot more complicated than they thought. We’re supposed to have cures of cancers and use stem cells to grow new organs but we’re still many years away from both. Ditto for space tourism, lunar vacations, interplanetary colonies and cheap, efficient power from nuclear fusion. One of these days, we just may get all of them, but they were a lot harder to make into reality than we thought.

Likewise, all our newly invented communication tools were supposed to expand our knowledge, exchange an immense amount of profound information, make our lives more convenient, allow us to work less and enjoy our lives more. Instead, while we do exchange a lot of very important information on the web and our work is a great deal easier and more convenient, the web and our instant communication technologies hit us with a fair number of very unpleasant surprises. We have to worry about spam, which unfortunately makes up 97% of all e-mails sent every year, hackers, identity theft and rampant viruses. The average user spends a lot of time to defend a computer from the internet instead of simply enjoying it. And as for all those smart phones and tools that let us work anytime, anywhere? Employers quickly figured out that they’re a great means of continuing the work day long after the usual shift is over. Instead of working less, we’re working more than ever. Oh and what happens to be most popular stuff on the internet? Random videos, porn and funny pictures of animals.

Another major hurdle towards the kind of future we keep hoping to see are we and our governments. For every inventor, designer and visionary who wants to make the world a better place there are a thousand of incurious, glib bureaucrats who care nothing about the future and politicians who only care about how to repay favors in office rather than fund the kind of research and development that will make out world a better place. That’s why we have a space program decades behind where we hoped it would be today and all the technologies it could provide us through high tech gadgets and materials is also nowhere to be found. Just like the spammers and hackers eagerly turned the web into a double edged sword and filled it with hidden dangers, there are hordes of those who are just waiting to screw up the Next Big Thing for fun and profit or even worse, want to use it and benefit from all it has to offer without lifting a finger to help.

So just like we have to soberly assess our world and realize that the promises of the future don’t always come true and that our utopian dreams often come with, or develop, many caveats, we have to look at the probability of alien life the same way. For an alien species to survive, thrive, develop intelligence, build a civilization, crawl from its cradle and explore space is already an impressive feat. And it’s very likely that they’re already out there and searching for other intelligent beings across the cosmos much like we do. But to assume that they’ll be a species of demigods free from the problems that plague us, with unlimited resources, wisdom and the drive to do everything we want to do with technology we’d call magical following Clarke’s Third Law, seems a bit like wishful thinking. When we do that, we’re essentially projecting our hopes and dreams on the aliens and hope they’re going to do what we lack the knowledge, money, vision and willpower to do today. Real aliens may be every bit as fallible, aggressive and narrow-minded as we are because they’re under no obligation to live up to the utopian potential we set for them. They just have to survive. Everything else is secondary.

I know all this seems like a major downer and trust me, I’m not having much fun admitting how far is left for us to go and how far behind some of our most promising projects have fallen. But unfortunately, we need to keep in mind that dreams only get us so far and reality can be a very harsh mistress. Building a world of hopes and dreams in which clever aliens will make up for all our lost time and push us into space, or that some new law of physics will fall into our laps sometime next century and make warp travel a breeze ultimately doesn’t make it happen. Sometimes, you have to take a long, skeptical look, roll up your sleeves and get to work on building the future you want rather than just dreaming about it and dismissing concerns about the feasibility of a novel idea as simple naysaying of someone who doubts the potential of the future.

[ illustration by Joseph Barton ]

Ok, so it’s not very optimistic but there has to be a twist to make the story interesting and thought provoking. If you really think about it, really good science fiction is about putting today’s worries and ideas in a new context and despite captivating millions and inspiring scientists and engineers for generations, it never quite got its due, often snubbed by haughty literary critics as somehow less important than historical fiction, romance and gritty first hand accounts. And that’s really a shame. Maybe today, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have millions of people looking into the future for inspiration rather than dwelling in their dissatisfaction with the here and now.

If function is more your thing, take a look at this video from 1969 which seems to have a very good grip on the technology we use everyday. Security and surveillance systems accessed via computer terminals, electronic banking and e-mail, they’re all there in hauntingly accurate detail. The only slight flaw in this video’s otherwise impressive predictive powers is the lack of computers with graphical interfaces. But then again, computers of that time were a far cry from the technology we know today and it wasn’t until the 1980s when PCs were used in mainstream business and at home.

And speaking of technology, could this machine from London, England circa 1935 really be a foreshadowing of Twitter? Take away the two hour time limit on the public messages it displays and the per message charge, and it sure does seem an awful lot like a primitive version of twittering.

Maybe not, but its very likely to be all wrong as the evolutionary adaptations we imagine are all things were designing. Actual evolution will come up with very weird things and will be messy and unpredictable because its not designing adaptations, but animals who happen to be able to survive in a given environment at a given time. These programs are interesting, fun but very doubtfully will be able to give us an accurate idea of the future, even with a large panel of highly distinguished scientists on board. The way evolution is shown in popular science now, makes it seem guided and purposeful as we try to cover every possible stage of development. However, what were doing is missing the sheer messiness of it all and sudden changes that catch on and eventually make new species.

So what happened? After the United States pulled ahead in the Space Race and its main reason for putting so much money in R&D, the USSR, began to stumble and groan under the stress of monetary problems and the Afghan War, it seems that science and technology became less of a priority. Booming financial institutions and the idolization of brokers and executives overtook the admiration previously granted to scientists. There was also a huge disillusionment with the US government during the Vietnam War and Watergate. The culture of the 1950s and 1960s, a belief that people in lab coats would give us a brighter and ever more advanced tomorrow with starry eyes and an open mind, changed to that of pragmatic, skeptical consumers.

By the standards of a half century ago, were behind. Instead of all the machines and flying cars we have the good old internal combustion engine, high energy costs and a space program that progresses in fits and bursts, often using the relatively meager funds its given in a much less than optimal way and which insists on rebuilding old technologies that keep us confined to our own solar system. But at least we have computers far more powerful than anything imagined before and of course, the internet. And we have banks with money. Well, had until recently…

Watching Aftermath, I learned something new for myself. I never knew what would happen after nuclear reactors ran out of power. I naively assumed that they would just shut down and all the spent fuel and waste would quietly decay in concrete walls with an occasional radiation leak in a few plants here and there. Nope, no such luck as this teaser kindly explains.

So why the fascination with what will happen to the planet after were gone? All of us know that almost no trace of us will be left if any. But yet we watch how our ruins decay in graphic detail, taking in every detail of a macabre doomsday erotica. Could it be a manifestation of our unique ability to realize our own mortality and think about what will happen after were dead and gone?

After watching the show again, its final note struck me as very odd. Weve spent about 60,000 years on planet Earth as a species, but the only place capable of preserving our creative and technological legacy for millions, if not hundreds of millions of years, is the Moon. If we vanish tomorrow, our greatest legacy will be what was once deemed as a multi-billion dollar publicity stunt of the Space Race. Isnt that something?