There's been quite a lot of talk about the 'Singularity' among certain online nerds: a subtle sign the world sucks right now.
Technological progress has been rather disappointing so far. The problem is that despite all the hype, information has not become more accessible. Getting educated takes longer than ever, with more government restrictions and hidden fees than before. Millions of services are designed to be almost as stressful as possible. Software is full of artificial barriers, with expensive programs designed to be extremely hard to use, to make it harder for their users to switch to their competitors.
The most powerful and potentially useful ideas, like evolution and birth control, are suppressed by limiting how and where they can be discussed and applied.
The world is becoming even more lopsided. Billions own no legal property, while a lucky handful end up super-wealthy without doing much useful.
Of course the world isn't meant to be pleasant. It took an incredible amount of effort to reach the level of total crap. The world makes about as much sense as an ant colony.
Things are the way they are because the majority allows them to be so, with rock-solid, unwavering passivity. The decision has been ratified by near-universal, unspoken assent, by victim and exploiter alike. In a sense, every country is a democracy, even North Korea.
A powerful force prevents almost everyone from completing certain insights and thinking one step further. If this force didn't exist, everyone's personality would keep changing throughout their lifetimes, but this rarely happens.
The crucial insight is as simple as flipping a switch: the world sucks. All of history right up to the present time should never have happened.
This article was written from the minority political viewpoint that the whole world is ruinously bad, if not downright evil.
Sometimes, change is needed for its own sake.
The world's problems would require almost unimaginable reforms: international cooperation, new forms of self-defense for the powerless, and even mind-altering drugs, but one thing is clear (at least to this author): radical change is called for. Like previous revolutions, it would be mostly destructive change, weakening existing power abusers, only this time they would not have to be eliminated entirely.
Step One: make the world transparent, reducing opportunities for deception.
- Despots who exploit their lessers need to be exposed. At the very least it would make their depredations more predictable.
- A worldwide property registry would record every piece of real estate and land use right. Evil governments would still have the authority to steal people's meager possessions, but it would be harder for them to hide the theft.
- An optional World Passport for those areas that require identification documents (currently all of them).
Civilization has partly evolved by learning to gain pleasure from avoiding pain. This sensation is a necessary part of most dangerous activities, from hunting to driving to woodworking. Delayed gratification for its own sake may be the real secret to long term success. The West has even managed to reduce the aspect of physical danger. The most evolved societies are based on creating highly elaborate organizations, with real-world order as a byproduct. Switzerland and Japan come to mind.
Often this process goes too far, which helps explain the 2010 economic collapse. The most insane example is probably long-term care insurance (paying in advance to be kept alive as a living corpse at the cost of ten lifetimes wages), followed by various tortuous tax laws, not to mention frivolous lawsuits.
Like technology itself, society's rules have become too complicated - towering edifices as unpredictable as solar prominences. Most citizens mindlessly accept the ruthless money race, the inscrutable healthcare matrix, the insatiable tax vortex. They unthinkingly tolerate immense restrictions in all fields, since everyone pretends it's normal.
The biggest problems are often the hardest to see.
Capitalism has an obsessively detailed long-term memory, but it's surprisingly bad at figuring out social interactions. That's why there are no unsolicited job offers in the mail, except for work-at-home schemes and other scams.
One of the most useful social improvements would be to find new ways to use marginally talented people, allowing them to perform tasks with low economic value while slightly increasing their skills. This would require the development of a real social science, willing to ask hard questions.
The motivation problem
Why are there so few or none Arab or African airplanes or other advanced technology products (Egypt does manufacture pirated surface-to-air missiles)?
There may be a good reason for the delay: it's just too depressing to pursue fantastic goals when the competition has a ten-decade head start.
Other people have already shaped the world, and are perfectly adapted to its present configuration. The path ahead has been methodically picked clean.
There's no reason to develop kites, balloons, airships, biplanes, or rotary engines. It can take decades to build a world-class industry from scratch - far beyond the horizon for countries that don't even allow long-term investment.
Developed countries would rather pay them to stay out of the way altogether, or to become cheap subcontractors. No vision means no purpose.
The solution is to encourage more diversity to stimulate more options, a grassroots effort rather than a top-down process.
Government schemes are unpopular, because people can't predict the effects on themselves.
Peasants being 'relocated' to build the Chinese Three Gorges Dam know others will benefit at their expense. This also explains the resistance to NAFTA, and why Latin America and the Middle East remain fractured despite common languages and cultures.
People have no time for bold experiments when their lives are part-time emergencies.
When they do find the time to consider their circumstances, Third Worlders want to reform and revolutionize their societies. They're usually prevented from acting by traditions, despots and obsolete economic theories.
It's hard to overhaul a culture from within. Even the most self-evident changes require massive sacrifices. This is especially true in areas with limited resources, which happen to be most of them.
Famine, unemployment, and disease tend to increase in the early stages of most reform efforts. Societies that resist change usually last longer, until their environment changes.
Once civil institutions become established, they tend to remain in place no matter what. Their inflexibility is what made them attractive in the first place.
Divide and organize
Most of our art, fashion, and innovation comes from countries with just 10% of the world's population, where creativity is encouraged. The rest is too busy surviving.
The right kind of chaos (exciting rather than threatening) leads to diversity. Instead of the emerging monoculture, the world needs more distinct regions that compete with each other, and encourage regional specialization in a worldwide free trade zone. At least initially, competition is more important than efficiency.
Global market integration will lead to more, not less, culture clashes. No one can predict who'll make the next big breakthrough. The best solutions involve small groups of people working independently. That's how every great company got started. Smaller groups also encourage more useful rivalries.
The potential is immense. In a hundred years the world could seem richer than we can imagine, like when East-Germans first visited West Berlin in 1989.
Increased diversity will lead to more small, autonomous micro territories, where every virtual tribe can find a home. For a while, there may be more nations than ever, including non-geographical and even online ones. They'll have to learn to cooperate. Most will soon vanish.
At the moment, large areas of the planet are underutilized. A lot of valuable real estate is going to waste. Some of the most fertile and attractive areas are also among the poorest.
Many wealthy people would retire to the equator if it were possible and safe to do so.
Some regions will always be inefficient, and tend to absorb outside subsidies.
Freedom of movement and employment should be encouraged, but migration always causes trouble.
- The Parity Principle: where possible, encourage equal or balanced migration between regions. In the future, as many Americans should move to Mexico as vice versa, or at least a reasonable ratio.
Creative loans
The world needs more ways to create 'trust' and accountability, to stimulate more elaborate forms of cooperation.
Billions of medium-sized loans have allowed many nations to build up their industrial capacity, but half a century of megaprojects financed by the World Bank and Cold War rivals have failed. Waste, deceit and exploitation always win in the end. Micro-loans don't go far enough. International loans may require international collateral, including foreign real estate, complete with private armies to enforce 'foreclosure' verdicts. More likely, future debtor nations will be required to completely reorganize their governments in ways that can be shown to benefit their citizens, while surrendering their most violent sovereign rights.
The only way to set up a world state would be to buy the whole world.
Properly configured, an ultra-long-term bank could replace all government functions, even paying for schooling, infrastructure, and defense.
Such a bank could only function if it controlled most of the wealth of society, incorporating almost all private banks.
To survive, it would need to be amoral, not immoral. A loan application would be automatically denied if there was no expected benefit to society - which would be most loan requests. An immense charity consortium would fill the gap, replacing many forms of insurance.
Created with a forty-year or longer investment horizon, the bank would provide lifetime education loans, to be paid back in the form of automatically deducted payroll taxes. The recipient's employer or contractor would transfer the borrower's salary through the bank. It would perform a ruthless cost/benefit analysis, but have no authority to imprison debtors, or even garnish their wages. Defaulters would just find it a lot more difficult to function in conventional society, or to accumulate significant wealth.
All the numerous gaps in the above plans would have to be filled by technology.
Here the biggest problem is energy management. Western-style civilizations are incredibly wasteful.
Because of the slow investment cycle, we still use thirty year-old car engine designs, and a century-old power grid. Fuel cells and small power plants could revolutionize the Third World, but they're too expensive. Smaller and less wasteful devices are essential. There should be fewer restrictions on technology transfer.
Creative long-term loans are an immensely powerful tool, but they will eventually have to be repaid. Such loans will require constant monitoring. To prevent future defaults, lenders will become a lot less friendly than they have been, even downright scary at times.
Ease of maintenance
The Western lifestyle is supremely inefficient and wasteful. Too many unscrupulous manufacturers rely on planned obsolescence and expensive after-sale services.
Third world consumers will eventually demand:
-Modular homes with removable power and plumbing conduits and even structural supports (and photovoltaic surfaces), that the owner could easily repair and replace without requiring outside help that may be unaffordable.
-Small and simple vehicles.
-Enclosed and hydroponic farms.
-Network infrastructure to allow distributed manufacturing.
The Age of Plenty
It's time to graduate to the third dimension, from virtual to reality. Cheap computers and communication devices represent their data as chains of bits or 2-D screen images. Next will come miniaturized 3-D factories that can 'print' the smaller components of ultralight cars and mass-produced housing. Another way to build complex devices is to let them 'self-assemble' from semi-rigid plastic 'strings' programmed to fold at certain points like DNA. This would require true artificial intelligence.
Once semi-intelligent software and robots reach the self-improvement threshold (still an extremely remote prospect), they will generate more wealth than they absorb. The benefits are beyond imagination.
As long as the sun keeps shining, there is ample energy. It only needs to be transformed and exploited. Most of the light energy absorbed by buildings and roads is wasted. Thin film photovoltaics could give every area local autonomy.
Everything by the manual
Society should have clearly defined, formalized rules and instructions at every level. Anyone could follow them if they wanted to achieve a certain result.
Such a society might not even need advanced social skills, full of hidden rules and taboos.
Elements already mentioned in some of the authors' SF stories (and a few entries from the non-fiction speculations of Robert Heinlein) include:
-The potentiality matrix: a map of world relations and systems.
-The List: a public database of everyone alive, with a brief biography.
-The first step to improved healthcare is to pay intense attention to whatever the patient is doing. Only AI software will have the necessary time and patience.
-Cheaper and more efficient manufacturing: We still haven't exploited all the benefits of mass production. This may be the information age, but the world needs more old-style assembly lines, temporarily bringing back traditional industrial jobs. Most of humanity remains trapped in primitive poverty, requiring simpler solutions.
-The need for new power stations, roads, industrial parks, robotics, management services, and basic healthcare could lead to a worldwide Manhattan project to solve all basic economic problems at once.
-A world state should be as inoffensive as possible. Once started down this road, it will be hard to stop. An intermediate step will be regional unification efforts, like the European Union, Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, and South America.
-Laws will slowly be standardized. As people cross borders, their arbitrary nature will become increasingly evident. The only remaining differences will be language and culture, but those differences already exist within most countries.
-The World Police: The alliance of every legal armed force on Earth, responsible for enforcing the universal rights of Inspection and Location. Wherever they're stationed, agents also help enforce the local laws, whatever they are. Their ultimate task is to protect nations from each other, up to and including military action.
-In an unexpected reversion, money could be replaced by efficient online bartering.
-Groups of people can better anticipate the future than individuals. We need a way to gather and combine everyone's insights, using online voting and wager-based 'prediction exchanges'.
-Everyone should own a diverse stock portfolio selected on the basis of their electronically determined preferences.
-Shareholders could influence every aspect of the economy in a new form of democracy: a more genuine, if still unequal, type of communism (the 'Ownership Solution'). It won't solve everything. The stock market repeatedly demonstrates that large numbers of people can be easily fooled. If everyone took part, the sum total of all human desires should cause the most arbitrary ones to cancel out, and also identify some deep similarities. Software can unearth many preferences and trends that would otherwise remain hidden. The potential wisdom of billions of people is immense, given enough time.
-Despite dire predictions, the twenty-first century won't be defined by vast environmental disasters. Climate change and rising sea levels are slow and relatively steady processes, even though the human response won't be. Recycling and adaptation have always been ways of life in poor lands. A silent, barely noticed process, habitat loss and the decline in the number of species can't be avoided, unless babies are outlawed. Most losses will be due to 'fracturing' of the environment, as people move into previously uninhabitable areas. Only opportunist species will thrive, and even they will suffer, but the crucial insight is that a simpler environment won't necessarily be a bad thing for mankind.
-The only way to save nature is to understand it. There will be inadequate efforts to preserve plants in parks, bio-domes, and even in backyards. Conservation will finally get profitable. Robots will gather DNA samples from the rainforest.
-Knowledge is everything. The right information can locate and exploit hidden resources, especially unused labor. Information brokers will get super wealthy buying and selling insights and hot tips.
-Status spurs competition, leading to surplus growth. Sometimes jealousy is a good thing (the same is true for all other emotions). A few people should be unreasonably wealthy to inspire many others, even if this is completely unfair in a moral sense.
-Understanding the mind will have an impact as great as changing the laws of physics.
-As all control functions are decentralized and go online, people will quite suddenly stop traveling around 2030.
-A world language: Will everyone speak English or Esperanto in the year 2040? It would be better to start over and design or evolve the most efficient artificial language from scratch, provided it's not too simple.
-Rather too much intellectual capital is left unused. There are fewer patents coming out of Bangladesh than Luxembourg. Africa will need to start pulling its weight, including conduct some scientific research, hard as it is to imagine such a change.
-Never abolish existing institutions, even if they're stupid or wrongheaded. At worst, prevent them from using force to carry out their aims.
-A worldwide free trade zone or common market could create economies of scale, but large monopolies would inevitably arise.
-Alternative currencies tend to stimulate the economy when first introduced.
-Underground apartments: Warehousing populations in spacious, efficiently laid out living vaults, illuminated by light tubes and indirect LED's, could be much cheaper than traditional housing, and allow farming and recreation on the surface and ease transportation problems.
-Automatic education: Interactive programs using hi-def screens and AI interfaces could make learning easier, or at least faster.
-Open source corporations: Every employee would be paid a percentage of the profit they generated. They would earn the right to perform more important jobs. Qualified individuals could be hired or contracted by other employees, who would share in the contractor's commission.
-Humanity's ultimate dream is to go on an endless vacation.
-Flexible public transportation: Fleets of microbuses that 'know' and adapt to their passengers' schedules (eventually self-driving).
-Deregulated healthcare: Allow anyone to buy any experimental drugs they want (non-mind-altering only), provided they are fully educated about the risks.
-Artificial conflicts: It appears that conflict and pain are necessary components of human development. Happiness levels in primitive societies can be almost as high as in the West. In extinct stone age tribes they may have been higher. Sports and games are one way to let off pressure, but artificial contests and rivalries between competing groups need to be encouraged.
-Some groups less able to function in modern society will choose to recreate a semi-nomadic, seasonal, extended-family lifestyle using much less space. Before the dawn of agriculture, every human could have claimed an area the size of Central Park. By mid century, we'll have to settle for thousands of times less than that.
-There could be one last, huge population explosion before 2050, as a percentage of humanity finally realizes that humans are likely to be transformed beyond recognition by the end of the century.
-Robot bases on the Moon and asteroids could test new AI and automation tools before they could be used on Earth.
-Food production should be increased at the local level, with mass-produced automated greenhouses, genetically engineered garden plants, mushrooms, algae, etc.
-Waste reduction: shipping in bulk, less packaging, more recycling.
-To create the illusion of greater choice and wealth, poorer consumers would order their groceries months in advance.
-As dangerous technologies proliferate, redundant dispersal will become essential for long-term survival. People will spread out evenly over the Earth's surface, forming the ultimate world suburb.
-It took northern Europe thousands of years to raise itself from bronze-age levels, while Africa remained there. The stable (and painful) influence of the Roman Empire and later trans-national empires was crucial. In the future, the forceful 'civilizing' role may be played by China. Other possible 'mini empires' include South-Africa, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. They are already forming worldwide trade networks independent of the West.
-Arab countries are half a dozen centuries overdue for a renaissance. They will finally allow entrepreneurship, or they will not survive.
-The abolition of the USA: The US is almost unique in history. Most of its recent wars were not triggered by population pressures, but by ideology. However, mankind's greatest experiment has served its original purpose: the creation of a functional free-market democracy, the 'bourgeois' ideal. A new and more ambitious goal may not emerge. There could eventually be a movement to replace the US with a complex, strictly functional 'reverse nation'. It would have no sharp internal borders, but gradients. People would have 'negative rights', to be left alone to varying degrees.
-Sometimes orphanages are better than brutal, dysfunctional families; provided they're stable, and allow their occupants freedom and even periods of isolation. They could also form the equivalent of artificial tribes. This would require an environment more ordered than a maximum security prison. Humans are not necessarily more civilized than rats, just smarter.
-Drugs could become more powerful than religion, and create even more profound and life-changing perceptions.
-Every government agency could be privatized, even if they were to be converted into charitable monopolies with mandatory participation.
-Some people will need more freedom than their government is willing to give them. In the future, it may be possible to 'buy' a small country, or its legal equivalent.
-A world suggestion box: new software to sort, combine, and display ideas from everyone alive, to be occasionally voted on by everyone else.
-On a small scale, the UN should be involved in as many decisions as possible in a strictly advisory capacity - even if their help is useless. Simpler is better. It should not try to create grand new rights that repressive governments would ignore anyway.
-Preconditions for various types of welfare aid could include mood stabilizing drugs or tranquilizers, making dangerous people less violent. Many homeless individuals may need extremely potent drugs to quiet their inner demons. The drugs might even kill them sooner, but their lives would be much less agonizing.
-If everyone were to receive a monthly welfare check simply for being alive, many people would promptly quit their jobs. Their work sucks that much. Real salaries, after all the hidden costs have been deducted, are often much lower than the salaries their employers claim to pay them. Taxes, transportation and other expenses, the opportunity costs of shortened lifespans, work uniforms, Starbucks, the aggravation of it all . . . The real take-home pay often adds up to as little as $2 per hour. It's just not worth it. The world could improve in almost every way with a much higher unemployment rate.
-Philosophically speaking, perhaps everyone should live their lives as if they're trapped in a cycle of 'eternal recurrence'. Every hour should be experienced as if it will be repeated an infinite number of times.
-The most interesting revolution of the twenty-first century may begin when spirituality and ethics become formalized, self-consistent sciences. We may not like what we learn then. For example, it may turn out Sartre was right and the universe really is incorrigibly absurd.
-Society requires incentives and penalties. Some aspects of life that are currently considered 'untouchable' need to be made more painful, depending on your political beliefs. For example, if the goal is to break the poverty cycle, some people should be encouraged and even pressured to get abortions, as in China. Of course this would be anathema to all the most powerful religious factions.
-Voluntary euthanasia: Some people would definitely be better off dead. Some of them are even in good physical health, but suffer from a mental illness that can't be treated or alleviated by any known method. Unfortunately there are many such people.
-Passive behavior should be encouraged more often. It's almost always easier not to do something: paying people not to set up extortion roadblocks or to interfere with farming, plus bribes to local officials to provide better security.
-The condition that no group within society have a special, exalted status above other groups is useful, but apparently not necessary. This explains why black people were extremely unhappy under Apartheid, yet there was massive illegal immigration into South Africa.
-New interface software could help people think better. Aware of its owner's preferences, the program would become a filter, an assistant to pre-digest confusing information. Soon, the mind extension will develop a life of its own. Since education is most effective at an early age, older interface users will fall behind in their skills and adaptability. The future may bring serious generational conflict.
-By 2040, humans of all ages will begin to feel obsolete, as their skills are being overtaken by artificial intelligence. They will try to keep up. Drugs may open up new perceptions, but the change will have to go deeper than that. To experience the big picture, humans will need to invent a direct brain/machine interface.
-An important but unacknowledged truth is that no human is rational. People choose to do things they know will hurt them. The best solution to the world's problems is not charity. It would be to make public everyone's detailed personality profile. New software could allow everyone to go through a form of mind-altering therapy, perhaps sub-consciously.
-By mid-century, new dangers will become intolerable. Genetic engineering, micro-factories and fundamental physics (superstring research could generate new ways to create immense explosions) may unleash their destructive power. There will be some horrible terrorist attacks. This struggle will be won or lost with information. An overreaction to any crisis is inevitable. People respond to strong personalities. The politicians of the future may destroy democracy for the last time as human history ends.
-In some ways, the future will bring less freedom than exists now. Individual humans are too simple and specialized to accurately respond to every possible event. Therefore, no human should have the power to do so. There needs to be a higher level of joint decision making, involving all of civilization. A new form of intelligence could emerge, perhaps a higher type of awareness. All humans and computers would be connected, contributing a small percentage of their capacity. Perhaps this new order will oversee an entertainment-based economy, with entire lifetimes spent inside increasingly elaborate virtual dreams.
The world needs more cynicism. Eventually, a time may come when it will be possible and even socially acceptable to abandon some of today's most cherished ideals. According to the laws of chance alone, many common beliefs must be wrong. Perhaps there should be no more taxes. (Or alternatively, everyone should receive a guaranteed income.) Only a few principles may remain, the absolute minimum. The rest can be derived or discarded.
-Ultimately, science is the ONLY answer. While vastly inadequate, it can still provide more truth than all the shamans and philosophers ever could.
-Future concepts will become so complex that future minds won't understand their geometrically increasing implications until the insights have already become obsolete. Integrating new knowledge will be so difficult that ignorance may forever increase faster than the rate of progress. The Singularity will always be infinitely far away.
Quite possibly the best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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