20 Crucial Terms Every
21st-Century Futurist Should Know
By George
Dvorsky on 29 Mar 2016 at 8:00PM
We live
in an era of accelerating change, when scientific and technological
advancements are arriving rapidly. As a result, we are developing a new
language to describe our civilisation as it evolves. Here are 20 terms and
concepts that you’ll need to navigate our future.
Back in
2007 I put together a list of terms every self-respecting
futurist should be familiar with. But now, some seven years later,
it’s time for an update. I reached out to several futurists, asking them which
terms or phrases have emerged or gained relevance since that time. These
forward-looking thinkers provided me with some fascinating and provocative
suggestions — some familiar to me, others completely new, and some a refinement
of earlier conceptions. Here are their submissions, including a few of my own.
1. Co-veillance
Futurist
and sci-fi novelist David Brin suggested this one. It’s kind of a mash-up
between Steve Mann’s sousveillance and
Jamais Cascio’s Participatory Panopticon,
and a furtherance of his own Transparent Society concept.
Brin describes it as: “reciprocal vision and supervision, combining
surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance.” He says it’s “scrutiny
from below.” As Brin told us:
Folks are
rightfully worried about surveillance powers that expand every day. Cameras
grow quicker, better, smaller, more numerous and mobile at a rate much faster
than Moore’s Law (i.e. Brin’s corollary). Liberals
foresee Big Brother arising from an oligarchy and faceless corporations, while
conservatives fret that Orwellian masters will take over from academia and
faceless bureaucrats. Which fear has some validity? All of the above. While
millions take Orwell’s warning seriously, the normal reflex is to whine:
“Stoplooking at us!” It cannot work. But what if, instead of whining, we all
looked back? Countering surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance
— or scrutiny from below? Say by having citizen-access cameras in the camera
control rooms, letting us watch the watchers?
Brin says
that reciprocal vision and supervision will be hard to enact and establish, but
that it has one advantage over “don’t look at us” laws, namely that it actually
has a chance of working. (Image credit:24Novembers/Shutterstock)
2. Multiplex Parenting
This
particular meme — suggested to me by the Institute
for the Future’s Distinguished Fellow Jamais
Cascio — has only recently hit the radar. “It’s in-vitro
fertilization,” he says, “but with a germline-genetic mod twist.” Recently sanctioned by the UK,
this is the biotechnological advance where a baby can have three genetic parents via
sperm, egg, and (separately) mitochondria. It’s meant as a way to flush-out
debilitating genetic diseases. But it could also be used for the practice of
human trait selection, or so-called “designer babies”. The procedure is currently being reviewed for use in
the United States. The era of multiplex parents has
all but arrived.
3. Technological Unemployment
Futurist
and sci-fi novelist Ramez Naam says we should be aware of the
potential for “technological unemployment”. He describes it as unemployment
created by the deployment of technology that can replace human labour. Per
Naam:
For
example, the potential unemployment of taxi drivers, truck drivers, and so on
created by self-driving cars. The phenomenon is an old one, dating back for
centuries, and spurred the original Luddite movement, as Ned Ludd is said to
have destroyed knitting frames for fear that they would replace human weavers.
Technological unemployment in the past has been clearly outpaced (in the long
term) by the creation of new wealth from automation and the opening of new job
niches for humans, higher in levels of abstraction. The question in the modern
age is whether the higher-than-ever speed of such displacement of humans can be
matched by the pace of humans developing new skills, and/or by changes in
social systems to spread the wealth created.
Indeed,
the potential for robotics and AI to replace workers of all stripes is
significant, leading to worries of massive rates of unemployment and subsequent
social upheaval. These concerns have given rise to another must-know term that
could serve as a potential antidote: guaranteed minimum income. (Image credit: Ociacia/Shutterstock)
4. Substrate-Autonomous Person
In the
future, people won’t be confined to their meatspace bodies. This is what
futurist and transhumanist Natasha Vita-More describes as the “Substrate-Autonomous
Person”. Eventually, she says, people will be able to form identities in
numerous substrates, such as using a “platform diverse body” (a future body
that is wearable/usable in the physical/material world — but also exists in
computational environments and virtual systems) to route their identity across the
biosphere, cybersphere, and virtual environments.
“This
person would form identities,” she told me. “But they would consider their
personhood, or sense of identity, to be associated with the environment rather
than one exclusive body.” Depending on the platform, the substrate-autonomous
person would upload and download into a form or shape (body) that conforms to
the environment. So, for a biospheric environment, the person would use a biological
body, for the Metaverse, a person would use an avatar, and for virtual reality,
the person would use a digital form.
5. Intelligence Explosion
It’s
time to retire the term ‘Technological Singularity.’ The reason, says theFuture
of Humanity Institute’s Stuart Armstrong, is that it has accumulated
far too much baggage, including quasi-religious connotations. It’s not a good
description of what might happen when artificial intelligence matches and then
exceeds human capacities, he says. What’s more, different people interpret it
differently, and it only describes a limited aspect of much broader concept. In
its place, Armstrong says we should use a term devised by the computer
scientist I. J. Good back in
1967: the “Intelligence explosion.” Per Armstrong:
It
describes the apparent sudden increase in the intelligence of an artificial
system such as an AI. There are several scenarios for this: it could be that
the system radically self improves itself, finding that as it becomes more
intelligent, it’s easier for it to become more intelligent still. But it could
also be that human intelligence clusters pretty close in mindspace, so a slowly
improving AI could shoot rapidly across the distance that separates the village
idiot from Einstein. Or it could just be that there are strong skill returns to
intelligence, so that an entity need only be slightly more intelligent that
humans to become vastly more powerful. In all cases, the fate of life on Earth is
likely to be shaped mainly by such “super-intelligences”.
6. Longevity Dividend
While
many futurists extol radical life extension on humanitarian grounds, few
consider the astounding fiscal benefits that are to be had through the advent
of anti-ageing biotechnologies. The Longevity Dividend, as suggested to me by
bioethicist James Hughes of the IEET, is the “assertion by biogerontologists
that the savings to society of extending healthy life expectancy with therapies
that slow the ageing process would far exceed the cost of developing and
providing them, or of providing additional years of old age assistance”. Longer
healthy life expectancy would reduce medical and nursing expenditures, argues
Hughes, while allowing more seniors to remain independent and in the labor force.
No doubt, the corporate race to prolong life is
heating up in recognition of the tremendous amounts of money to be made — and
saved — through preventative medicines.
7. Repressive Desublimation
This
concept was suggested by Annalee Newitz, author of Scatter,
Adapt And Remember. The idea of repressive desublimation was
first developed by by political philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his
groundbreaking book Eros and Civilization.
Newitz says:
It refers
to the kind of soft authoritarianism preferred by wealthy, consumer culture
societies that want to repress political dissent. In such societies, pop
culture encourages people to desublimate or express their desires, whether
those are for sex, drugs or violent video games. At the same time, they’re
discouraged from questioning corporate and government authorities. As a result,
people feel as if they live in a free society even though they may be under
constant surveillance and forced to work at mind-numbing jobs. Basically,
consumerism and so-called liberal values distract people from social
repression.
8. Intelligence Amplification
Sometimes
referred to as IA, this is a specific subset of human enhancement —the augmentation of human intellectual
capabilities via technology. “It is often positioned as either a
complement to or a competitor to the creation of Artificial Intelligence,” says
Ramez Naam. “In reality there is no mutual exclusion between these
technologies.” Interestingly, Naam says IA could be a partial solution to the
problem of technological unemployment — as a way for humans, or posthumans, to
“keep up” with advancing AI and to stay in the loop.
9. Effective Altruism
This is
another term suggested by Stuart Armstrong. He describes it as:
the
application of cost-effectiveness to charity and other altruistic pursuits.
Just as some engineering approaches can be thousands of times more effective at
solving problems than others, some charities are thousands of time more
effective than others, and some altruistic career paths are thousands of times
more effective than others. And increased efficiency translates into many more
lives saved, many more people given better outcomes and opportunities
throughout the world. It is argued that when charity can be made more effective
in this way, it is a moral duty to do so: inefficiency is akin to letting
people die.
10. Moral Enhancement
On a
somewhat related note, James Hughes says moral enhancement is
another must-know term for futurists of the 21st century. Also known as virtue
engineering, it’s the use of drugs and wearable or implanted devices to enhance
self-control, empathy, fairness, mindfulness, intelligence and spiritual
experiences.
11. Proactionary Principle
This one
comes via Max More, president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
It’s an interesting and obverse take on the precautionary principle. “Our
freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable — even critical — to
humanity,” he told me. “This implies several imperatives when restrictive
measures are proposed: assess risks and opportunities according to available
science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions
themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favour measures that are
proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high
expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and
progress.”
12. Mules
Jamais
Cascio suggested this term, though he admits it’s not widely used. Mules are
unexpected events — a parallel to Black Swans — that
aren’t just outside of our knowledge, but outside of our understanding of how
the world works. It’s named after Asimov’s Mule from the Foundation series.
13. Anthropocene
Another
must-know term submitted by Cascio, described as “the current geologic age,
characterized by substantial alterations of ecosystems through human activity.”
14. Eroom’s Law
Unlike
Moore’s Law, where things are speeding up, Eroom’s Law describes — at least in
the pharmaceutical industry — things that are slowing down (which is why it’s
Moore’s Law spelled backwards). Ramez Naam says the rate of new drugs developed
per dollar spent by the industry has dropped by roughly a factor of 100 over
the last 60 years. “Many reasons are proposed for this, including
over-regulation, the plucking of low-hanging fruit, diminishing returns of
understanding more and more complex systems, and so on,” he told me.
15. Evolvability Risk
Natasha
Vita-More describes this as the ability of a species to produce variants more
apt or powerful than those currently existing within a species:
One way
of looking at evolvability is to consider any system — a society or culture,
for example, that has evolvable characteristics. Incidentally, it seems that
today’s culture is more emergent and mutable than physiological changes
occurring in human biology. In the course of a few thousand years, human tools,
language, and culture have evolved manifold. The use of tools within a culture
has been shaped by the culture and shows observable evolvability-from stones to
computers-while human physiology has remained nearly the same.
16. Artificial Wombs
“This is
any device, whether biological or technological, that allows humans to reproduce without using a woman’s
uterus,” says Annalee Newitz. Sometimes called a “uterine
replicator,” she says these devices would liberate women from the biological
difficulties of pregnancy, and free the very act of reproduction from
traditional male-female pairings. “Artificial wombs might develop alongside
social structures that support families with more than two parents, as well as
gay marriage,” says Newitz.
17. Whole Brain Emulations
Whole
brain emulations, says Stuart Armstrong, are human brains that have been copied
into a computer, and that are then run according to the laws of
physics, aiming to reproduce the behaviour of human minds within
a digital form. According to Armstrong:
They are
dependent on certain (mild) assumptions on how the brain works, and requires
certain enabling technologies, such as scanning devices to make the original
brain model, good understanding of biochemistry to run it properly, and
sufficiently powerful computers to run it in the first place. There are
plausible technology paths that could allow such emulations around 2070 or so,
with some large uncertainties. If such emulations are developed, they would
revolutionise health, society and economics. For instance, allowing people to
survive in digital form, and creating the possibility of “copyable human
capital”: skilled, trained and effective workers that can be copied as needed
to serve any business purpose.
Armstrong
says this also raises great concern over wages, and over the eventual deletion
of such copies.
18. Weak AI
Ramez
Naam says this term has gone somewhat out of favour, but it’s still a very
important one. It refers to the vast majority of all ‘artificial
intelligence’ work that produces useful pattern matching or information
processing capabilities, but with no bearing on creating a self-aware sentient
being. “Google Search, IBM’s Watson, self-driving cars, autonomous
drones, face recognition, some medical diagnostics, and algorithmic stock
market traders are all examples of ‘weak AI’,” says Naam. “The large majority
of all commercial and research work in AI, machine learning, and related fields
is in ‘weak AI’.”
Naam
argues that this trend — and the motivations for it — is one of the arguments
for the Singularity being further than it appears.
19. Neural Coupling
Imagine
the fantastic prospect of creating interfaces that connect the brains of two
(or more) humans. Already today, scientists have created interfaces that allow
humans to move the limb — or in this case, the tail — of
another animal. At first, these technologies will be used for therapeutic
purposes; they could be used to help people relearn how to use previously
paralysed limbs. More radically, it could eventually be used for recreational
purposes. Humans could voluntarily couple themselves and move each other’s body
parts.
20. Computational Overhang
This refers
to any situation in which new algorithms can suddenly and dramatically exploit
existing computational power far more efficiently than before. This is likely
to happen when tons of computational power remains untapped, and when
previously used algorithms were suboptimal. This is an important concept as far
as the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is concerned. As
noted by Less Wrong, it:
signifies
a situation where it becomes possible to create AGIs that can be run using only
a small fraction of the easily available hardware resources. This could lead to
an intelligence explosion, or to a massive increase in the number of AGIs, as
they could be easily copied to run on countless computers. This could make AGIs
much more powerful than before, and present an existential risk.
Luke
Muehlhauser from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) describes
it this way:
Suppose that
computing power continues to double according to Moore’s law, but figuring out
the algorithms for human-like general intelligence proves to be fiendishly
difficult. When the software for general intelligence is finally realized,
there could exist a ‘computing overhang’: tremendous amounts of cheap computing
power available to run [AIs]. AIs could be copied across the hardware base,
causing the AI population to quickly surpass the human population.
