Neglected Cool Future Technologies
I’ve seen and read many science fiction stories. They feature a lot of cool future technologies (as well as some weird and totally impractical social arrangements, as in the Divergent series). The most popular sci-fi technologies are perhaps interstellar space travel and time travel. It’s understandable why authors would imagine those, since they open the way for many amazing adventure stories. But neither of those technologies is coming any time soon. Space travel is possible, but, since nothing can move faster than light, we’d have to be way more advanced to contemplate it. We’d have to be so advanced that we would be interested in sending off multi-century or multi-millennia exploratory missions. And time travel, of course, is completely impossible.
But there are other technologies that I’ve been a little surprised to not see more of in people’s imaginings of the future. These are things that are both interesting and plausible to occur in the not-too-distant future. We should spend more time contemplating these advances . . .
1. Anti-Aging Technology
I’m a little surprised that characters living in extremely advanced societies are imagined as still growing old and dying, apparently on roughly the schedule we do now. Come on, surely that’s one problem that we would solve long before we discover time travel. We already know why people age, it’s not something made inevitable by the laws of nature, and there is extremely strong reason to want to combat it – it’s the number one cause of death worldwide, by a large margin. I’m surprised that we aren’t doing more to cure it right now, but surely over the next few centuries we’ll take care of that.
The Cure for Aging would have interesting consequences. You could have a 200-year-old who looks just like a 20-year-old, so you could no longer guess anything about a person’s age or experience from their face.
Perhaps governments would adopt severe restrictions on procreation to avoid ‘overpopulation’. Maybe you’d have to wait centuries to be allowed to have a child.
The distribution of income might become more skewed. The Warren Buffetts of the world would just keep investing and accumulating more wealth, century after century. Most middle class people would invest a little bit and so become wealthier over the centuries too. Meanwhile, some people would just stay poor for centuries, never saving or investing. So the income distribution might separate into fabulously wealthy people and poor people who keep living paycheck to paycheck forever.
Political power might also become more concentrated. Vicious dictators would no longer be removed from power by nature, by old age. Someone like Putin might continue to consolidate his power over centuries, becoming virtually invincible within his society. In the end, the Cure would be wonderful for a lot of people, but maybe miserable for a significant minority.
I wonder also what would happen to people’s memories. With the cure for aging, our brains would continue to operate at peak efficiency, as in our 20’s. Alzheimer’s and senility would be nearly eradicated, as they are diseases of old age. Nevertheless, presumably the brain has finite information storage capacity. Somehow, something has to stop you from adding an unlimited amount of information to it. Would we at some point stop being able to form new memories? Or more likely, would we progressively forget more and more of our early years? Perhaps you would meet some old people who had no idea what any of their childhood was like. Those who were alive when the cure was invented would gradually forget everyone who died before the Cure.
And what would be the effects on culture and the pursuit of knowledge? On the one hand, great thinkers could continue their work, building upon centuries of accumulated knowledge and wisdom and perhaps making amazing discoveries that could never have been made by a person who had only 80 years to live. On the other hand, progress might be stymied by old guard intellectuals who refuse to consider new ideas, century after century. Perhaps we’d discover that the deaths of old scientists were necessary for scientific progress.
I wonder what would happen to my job, that of university professor. Maybe the number of professor jobs would drastically decline with the reduction in procreation, since there would be very few new people entering adulthood each year. Maybe a small number of professor jobs would remain, for the occasional people who want to go back to school and learn a new subject – including the people who studied a subject centuries ago and no longer remember anything about it. (Though in all honesty, most students hardly remember anything 5 minutes after they get their degrees.) A bunch of high-IQ people with PhD’s would be out looking for work. Maybe they’d do useful things for industry. Or maybe they would just couch surf in their friends’ houses.
2. More Expert Systems
Science fiction often portrays robots – they’re almost as popular as spaceships. And they are a realistic technology for the present and near future (though a lot of what happens with them in stories is highly improbable). But I think they’re underused in most imagined future societies. Everyone’s doctor should be a robot. There are some robot doctors in scifi, like the EMH doctor on Voyager, but really not that many, and they’re not portrayed as being obviously superior to human doctors as they should be.
Why do I say that? Medicine is extremely complicated. Current medical knowledge is already too large and complex for a normal human brain to hold more than a tiny fraction of it. And it’s clearly going to grow much more in the future. Quality medical diagnosis of the future would also probably require doing complex calculations from lots of statistical evidence. Choosing a treatment might require more complex calculations taking into account myriad features of the individual patient (exact gene sequence, etc.). An advanced society is going to need computers for this.
Maybe there would be human doctors there to make patients feel good, sort of like Walmart greeters, but the human doctors would use computers for the bulk of the work (with or without telling the patients that this was the case).
When you think about it, nearly all jobs are like this. Almost everything could be done better by a machine than a human, with the possible exception of some service jobs, like waiter & waitress, because humans have a prejudice in favor of other humans and so prefer to interact with them. (But maybe not even those jobs -- maybe robot waiters would even be more social and more pleasant than human waiters!) Maybe the people of the future will mainly be tourists and gamers, and they’ll just own bunches of robots to do all the real work of the world.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could replace politicians with robots? I, for one, welcome our robot overlords! Some science fiction stories portray a nightmare scenario in which robots try to take over the world and/or exterminate humanity. But really, robots would probably be much safer than the humans we currently have running things.
Of course many humans, being what they are, would not be content with lives of recreation. They might long for meaningful work or, failing that, pseudo-meaningful struggle. Perhaps some crazy terrorists would be wantonly destroying valuable robots, while other humans would just lie around in a drug-induced stupor (as many are already doing, but more so).
3. Genetic Enhancement
Sure, you can find stories about genetic engineering, such as the classic Gattaca. But apart from that, most imagined future societies have little or no genetic enhancement. In Star Trek, they decided to have genetic engineering banned in the Federation. I suppose the writers just didn’t want to have all the characters have vastly superior abilities to the ordinary human viewers of the show. But it’s surprising how few alien species have genetically engineered themselves (apart from the Dominion), which would have given them a crushing advantage over the Federation.
If midichlorians were real, in a society that has mastered interstellar travel and can build space stations the size of small planets (as in Star Wars), wouldn’t someone have started engineering people with extremely high midichlorian counts, long before Grogu? You mean to tell me that this interstellar civilization was aware of the Force for thousands of years before someone got the idea of trying to artificially increase midichlorian counts?
Even without amazing powers like Force sensitivity, the motives for genetic enhancement are huge, and we’re pretty close to having the technology already, in the actual world (or rather, we have some of it, and will be developing more soon). General intelligence produces all sorts of benefits, both to the individual and to the society of which they are a part. (It makes you better at nearly any job, it lowers crime, it makes you plan your life better, etc.) A society a few centuries in the future should be filled with geniuses.
Given the general benefits of intelligence, why haven’t we all evolved to be geniuses already? Presumably because the genes that predispose you to higher IQ also had some disadvantages in our evolutionary past. Ex.: there is a limit to how large a fetus’ brain can be if the fetus is to be born without killing the mother. That particular disadvantage would be made moot in an advanced society (they would deliver large babies by C-section, or even gestate them in artificial wombs from the start). But perhaps there would be other disadvantages. E.g., maybe some of the genes that tend to increase IQ also tend to decrease physical strength (I don’t know if that’s true, but there’s a stereotype that smart people are bad at athletics and athletes are bad at intellectual pursuits, so it might be true.) In that case, you could understand why natural selection favored a balance between intelligence and strength.
The society of the future would consciously make different tradeoffs from those that mother nature made. So perhaps it would be populated by people who were extremely intelligent but who could not physically survive without constant use of technology. Maybe advanced humans would no longer be capable of natural birth, relying on surgery or artificial wombs in all cases. Maybe the babies would all require lasik eye surgery shortly after birth in order to be able to see anything. They’d need various other surgeries and prosthetic enhancements early in life in order to function. But they’d all be geniuses, and with the technological enhancements, they’d be better at everything than “natural” humans. But if they were ever somehow separated from their technology, they’d be lost.
Probably some groups of humans will refuse to accept genetic and technological enhancement, so they’ll form separate societies of people born “as nature intended”. (As in Brave New World, but the enhanced people would be much more different from the natural people than that novel depicts.)
Most science fiction stories, if they depict AI and genetic enhancement at all, tend to depict these as something between oppressive (Gattaca) and catastrophic (Terminator). But really, these technologies are more likely to be amazingly wonderful.
4. Etc.?
What other technologies are realistically expectable in the near future that would make big, interesting changes in our society? Comment below.