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Some Things Are Too Big To Plan For

Reading Ray Kurzweil's predictions about the enormous changes technology will bring in the next 15 years reminds me of how, for all the hype about how the Internet Changes Everything, in fact we live in a world where society has really not been changed much by technology in the past 50 years. While there have been sweeping social changes -- civil rights of ethnic minorities, equalizing gender roles, changes in how we view sexual relationships -- those haven't really been technology-driven.

But technology is going to start changing society, and even change what it means to be human, pretty darn soon, says Kurzweil, a tech entrepreneur, futurist, and author of the book The Singularity Is Near. Within 15 years we'll have the technology to enable us to live forever, he says. How's that for change?

Speaking to the keynote audience at last week's SCO6 Supercomputing Conference, Kurzweil described a near future where nanobots roam the bloodstream fixing health problems, and a $1,000 computer is 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain. Over the next 30 years, we'll have doctors making backup copies of the human brain, and computer displays are projected directly into our retinas and peripheral vision, so we can see information about the world around us as we are walking through it.

All of this is fairly familiar to people with even a passing knowledge of futurism and science fiction. But Kurzweil is saying this will happen pretty fast. In 15 years, the world will be fundamentally a different place than the way it is today.

That's hard for us to get our minds around, because, as described in a discussion on the blog of science-fiction writer Charles Stross (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), we're not used to that rate of change. The World War I generation was used to that rate of change, but we're not. The World War I generation was born in a horse-powered world still lit largely by gaslight, and died in a jet-powered, computer age when people occasionally walked on the moon.

A person from 1906 would find the world of 1956 nearly incomprehensible. But a person from 1956 could acclimate pretty easily to the technology of today. You'd tell him or her: "This is called a 'cell phone. Here's how it works. This is a 'microwave oven.' This is a 'DVD player.' This is a 'personal computer,' which connects to the 'Internet'--you'll have to take a one-hour class to figure that one out."

In six months, our time traveler from the 1950s will be complaining about spam and annoying his new friends by pelting them with a decade of embarrassing YouTube videos that he missed. Yes, 1950s Man, the Star Wars Kid. All Your Base Are Belong To Us. We saw those already. Can we go back to work now?

But if Kurzweil is right, we're about to see technology make fundamental changes to the world again. And not just changes in society -- changes to the fundamental meaning of what it is to be human.

Here's a funny thing about people, though: We can't plan for that kind of thing.

I interviewed science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge four years ago. Like Kurzweil, Vinge writes about the Singularity, a world where human beings live forever, minds can be uploaded into computer, and godlike artificial intelligences transform the Earth. He says this has a good chance of happening in the next five to 50 years.

I asked Vinge, if he really believes that, whether he lives his life as an ordinary person. Does he carry life insurance? Does he have a retirement account? He was 58 years old at the time, an age when ordinary people are planning for their old age -- was he doing that, if he expected he might live forever?

He said yes he did, for a couple of reasons. One: He might be wrong.

Another reason: In addition to being a science-fiction writer and college professor, Vinge also did some disaster-planning consulting for big corporations. He noted that big companies try to plan for every contingency: Cataclysmic earthquakes, fire, long-term power outages, major terrorist attacks.

But one thing that no company plans for is cataclysmic nuclear war that might bring about the collapse of civilization. Companies didn't even plan for that during the Cold War, when such things were considered likely.

Some things, he said, are just too big to plan for.

What do you think? How will the world of 2021 be different from 2006? Are you doing anything today to get ready to live in that world?

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