Month: July 2016

I dedicate this post to the late Alvin Toffler, who helped to popularize the phrase “future shock”. By the end of this post, you will either despise or adore the phrase.

What is “future shock“? In simple terms, it’s what happens to a person when the rate of sci-tech development outstrips their mental ability to handle it. Mr. Toffler defined it as “too much change in too little time”. Though that is a fine description, I feel it also presents a tinge of vagueness.  If I were to change houses fifty times in a month, would the weariness and anxiety of all the change be considered future shock? Not at all. As a phrase, it’s always been used to describe our response to sci-tech, and that’s how Mr. Toffler meant for it to be regarded.

The damnedest irony of it is that Mr. Toffler popularized the phrase in 1970, a phrase that had already been floating around for roughly a decade by that point. Yet when I think of that time period, I think of an almost laughably primitive state of technology— with all its cathode ray-tube TVs, Kodak cameras, and rotary phones. This stems from my privilege of living in the Future™*, having reasonably fast internet in my pocket and all. With this in mind, it becomes amazing to think that people in the 1960s— the early ’60s at that— were experiencing future shock.

What happened in the early ’60s that beckoned sci-tech anxiety? We experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened all of human civilization thanks to the existence of atomic weaponry…. The world’s first industrial robot, Unimate, was unveiled….  We created the first supercomputer, the CDC 6600 (whose top performance was 500 kiloFLOPS)— my IoT-capable washing machine is thousands of times more powerful than that thing…

So from my perspective, the 1960s were a hellish time to be a futurist. The idea that you could be overwhelmed by the technology of the day sounds comical, and yet as I mentioned, I’m coming from an era where washing machines are orders of magnitude more powerful than the era’s top supercomputer.

I want to go on about this, about how my imagining of the ’60s and ’70s paint them as the last ‘Luddite’ decades due to them possessing so little computing power across so few computers. But I won’t. That isn’t what this post is about.

No. I want to raise the point that the fact people were shocked by sci-tech in the early ’60s only means we are going to be in for a hell of a time in the coming years.

It used to be that a person experienced such great changes in their lives only ever so often, even as late as the ’70s. Nowadays, we’ve turned it into a meme. The iPhone 30SE -1000 is the latest hot thing— now it’s the iPhone 95DR006. You blinked, and now we’re all using the Samsung Omniverse ∞. Last year, we were into 3D TVs. This year, the Oculus Rift is the hot new thing. But you’d better hurry, because cortical modems are on their way. And now you’re a ball of pure super sapient energy.

This shocking rate of change can prove to be too much for some people.

I know people who are still living in 2006. No, no, they haven’t invented time travel— they just don’t care enough about the latest gadgets to keep up with them. While futurists like myself are jizzing over augmented reality glasses and domestic robots, they’re not even aware that 3D TVs are a thing. Some may have only recently upgraded to Blu-Ray, and that’s considering they’ve not yet noticed that Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos are extinct.

Should you present them with something like, say, the Guinness Book of World Records: 2006, and flip to its technology section, they would be impressed by developments from over 10 years ago.

The last time I was impressed by ASIMO was in 2014, and that was only because I was a Born-Again Singularitarian.

Such technologically retarded people have been sheltered by the relative inability of truly futuristic sci-tech to penetrate the mainstream. They’re not shocked by the iPhone nor are they exceptionally interested in social media. These things came gradually, more as conveniences than shocks.

This won’t last. We’ve begun seeing virtual reality headsets infiltrate the shelves of warehouse stores across America, and Aldebaran’s social droid, Pepper, is about to go on sale across the world. Passenger drones and hyperloops are being teased by companies and governments, while augmented reality glasses are drowning in investor money. All of these things are coming all at once, and they’re merely the first wave of a massive sea change in the mainstream.

Not to mention the stupidly fast progress in the field of artificial intelligence. Billions are being poured into this industry, keeping it in a perpetual AI Spring. Once upon a time, the best AI could not so much as navigate a 2D maze. Now, they’re defeating humans in games we’ve dominated for millennia.

The biggest limiting factor for utility droids has been the ability to navigate 3D space autonomously. This is why ASIMO rediscovered gravity back in 2008 while attempting to walk up stairs, despite all the progress the robot had made in its previous 20 years. Now that we have the proper algorithms and sufficient computing power, this isn’t a problem anymore— all we have left to do is to fuse the likes of Google DeepMind with a robot like Boston Dynamic’s Atlas or Honda’s ASIMO.

What happens when all of these things converge on the common man, something that most expect to occur sometime between 2018 and 2022?

Future shock. The world’s most sweeping and intense case of future shock is upon us. Not only that, but I feel that there will be a trigger for this grand cybernetic anxiety, and it involves the world’s biggest sporting event.

 

In 2020, Tokyo will hold the Olympics. As you may know, Japan is commonly considered to be the most technophilic country on Earth, and their love for the synthetic and digital is not hampered by Western notions of creepiness— hence why Japanese news sites never have to bring up the likes of Terminator even when discussing humanoid droids, whereas American ones will eagerly call a medieval suit of armor a ‘Terminator.’ Prime Minister Abe isn’t holding back punches— his exact words were “I want a Robot Olympics.” Likewise, Tokyo 2020 is fast developing into a spectacle of advanced technology rather than a mere contest between the world’s finest athletes. It is where and when most average people will first see autonomous vehicles and personal robots in action.

If that isn’t enough, also consider that the World Expo 2020 will be held in Dubai, which is perhaps the world’s most futurism-obsessed city-state that has based its whole tourism industry off being our closest replica of a cyberpunk cityscape.

Never mind the very sound of the year being futuristic— “2020” is usually seen as being far in the future, not three and a half years away. One of my favorite video games, 2000’s Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64, was set in 2023. We’re closer to the year it’s set than its release! As time continues its relentless forward march, as children grow into adults and adults into geriatrics, we will be ever more reminded by how quickly things are changing.

One day— one day soon— we will grow used to the sight of utility droids, passenger drones, and cyborgs, and then some of us will wonder “When did the Future™ arrive?”

Such changes will have come so quickly that there will be people in need of medical attention in order to cope. People who need to be institutionalized, or at the very least need a counselor. Some will desire the old world, a world before all of these changes. Some will experience an intense hiraeth for the old days, not understanding change was always happening even when they weren’t paying attention.

We’re transitioning from a Post-Industrial Society to a Singularity Society. This period we’re living in right now, codified by the existence of strong-Narrow AI and social media, can best be described as “Pre-Singularity Society”. All of these societal shifts bring with them psychological upheaval. However, never have these changes been so rapid. They’re coming so fast that we’re becoming blind to them, or perhaps we’re coping by entering a delusional state where we believe nothing has changed in years. Clearly life now and life in 1996 are not the same, but we’re willfully blind as to how and why, thus inflicting upon ourselves the illusion of stagnation.

It won’t last. It won’t last at all. As I’ve said, future shock will smack us all some time within the next 5 years, and I will put money down that it will be in 2o2o. After 2020, the concept of people needing mental help to cope with rapid sci-tech change will become more and more common.

---

*The Future™ is a term describing the commonly accepted tropes of what a sci-fi future is supposed to look like; i.e. flying cars, robot butlers, AI, techno music, space colonies, starscrapers, etc.

Whenever you get into an argument with a socialist over what socialism means, they always claim that it means “worker ownership of the means of production.” Yet when the argument is over and everyone’s back where they were beforehand, the socialist will frequently claim that it’s the State— not the working class— that should possess the means of production.

I’ve noted this many times and it’s been a bit hilarious to keep seeing socialists flip back and forth over what actually qualifies as socialism. That’s not to say that all socialists behave this way— there are some who never claim it’s anything other than State ownership of the means of production, and there are others who never claim it’s anything other than worker ownership of the means of production. Those in the latter category have largely been forgotten in popular discourse because of how socialism has become to mean “any form of Big Government.”

Naturally, I’m keen on wondering what’s so great about Big Government. It’s said that the government needs to regulate industry in order to prevent abuses, and without this regulation, the working class would be a downtrodden, abused, and impoverished underclass without any rights. Yet whenever I look to nations that have the most oppressed working classes, it’s always those with authoritarian or totalitarian governments that attempt to control every facet of the economy.

Of course, is this a damning condemnation of government? Not at all. I can’t say I’d like more privatized prisons, after all. However, there is an aspect of this that I’m starting to realize may prove the socialists right— of course, it’s proving them right in a manner that works against them.

Businesses do need to minimize expenses and maximize profits. That’s just how it works. And often, that will mean that the workers get the short end of the stick. Not always, but that’s how it’ll usually happen, and when most businesses manage to lower wages for workers, they wouldn’t want anything to happen to destroy their hegemony. Just look at what happened with Henry Ford— some of his rivals called him a socialist all because he paid his workers so well.

But that’s not what I’m getting at. No, my point is that socialists are very much right when they call socialist countries “State Capitalist.” And why? Because, as they say, the State takes the role of the capitalist enterprise. Most businesses are run by the State, after all.

However, I’m going deeper than that. It’s not just that the State runs most businesses— it’s also that the State itself has become a business. In order for it to be successful, it needs to be run like a business, like a corporation. However, whenever socialists overthrow the bourgeoisie and implement the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, they see themselves as revolutionary Marxist heroes, not bourgeois businessmen. That’s one reason why socialist nations always fail— those running it fail to realize they’ve essentially turned their parent nation into one giant corporation.

Imagine if wide-eyed idealists tried running Microsoft. Rather than engaging in traditional business practices, they did everything according to some outdated pamphlet or religious document that has no bearing on modern society. Would Microsoft last long? No, it wouldn’t. It would suffer yearly deficits that got worse and worse, with the workers going unpaid and the higher ups reaping any and all money that can be made.

So it seems like you have a choice between one corporation or several corporations. Is there any way out of this matrix? To be blunt, not really. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat anything, because no matter what happens, we’re going to return to a somewhat similar set up in society. However, I do have one hypothesis.

It goes that there is a conflict between authoritarianism and democracy. Democracy is inherently more successful than authoritarianism, as all examples of authoritarianism will eventually collapse in on themselves due to the centralization of power. However, authoritarianism is a dominant gene, whereas democracy is a recessive gene.

Anyone who has ever gone through 8th grade biology class knows these terms, “dominant” and “recessive.” Dominant alleles can show themselves even if they came from only one parent and it is a minority of a person’s alleles. Recessive alleles must come from both parents, and even then they will rarely appear.

This holds true for sociopolitics and economics. You can’t have authoritarianism and democracy. That’s one reason why I feel anarcho-capitalism and Chavismo are doomed ideologies— one claims to respect sociopolitical democracy, and yet all but demands economic authoritarianism. The other claims to pursue economic democracy, but did so by abusing sociopolitical authoritarianism— and as we’re seeing in Venezuela, it’s led to disastrous results.

This is because you need both to be democracies if you want success. If one is authoritarian, soon enough both will be authoritarian. An authoritarian government will never keep its hands off the economy, and authoritarian business structures will always want to corrupt government. You need government in order to create a monopoly, and you need a business powerful enough to get government to create a monopoly in its favor. That’s why the argument over whether monopolies are the result of Big Business or Big Government is a pointless argument that’s very obviously divided along political lines— you need two to tango. If there’s a monopoly, breaking up the business with bigger government won’t solve anything. Likewise, shrinking the government wouldn’t solve anything either. You’d need to do both if you wanted to prevent it from happening again. However, as long as both are authoritarian structures, it will happen again. It’s just something we’d have to deal with time and time again.

That’s one reason why I’ve been extolling the virtues of worker cooperatives, worker self management, decentralized business models, and fully automated businesses (technates).

We probably won’t see the rise of decentralized democracy anytime soon, not unless there were an aggressive move towards it. Digital technologies can aid this movement, as we’ve seen with the likes of the DAO, but it’s still too early to see which way we’re heading.

 

I want to coin a new term: “Yuli’s Law“. Yuli’s Law states that any attempt at discussing futurology or emerging technologies will always result in someone expressing skepticism or pessimism based on past developments and failures.

For example: most discussions about the capabilities robots in the future always fall back on the limited abilities of robots in the past. How often have you read a news story about artificial intelligence only to find in the comments someone saying something to the effect of “You still need to program every action, and that’s why AI will never happen”? Or perhaps when you try discussing technostism— when the world is fully or nearly-fully automated? What’s the standard rebuttal? “It didn’t happen with looms, spinning jennies, tractors, and computers, so it won’t happen now.”

Another example, one I’ll use to go in depth= flying cars. Flying cars have been a staple of futurist optimism for nearly a century now, and yet they’ve never materialized. We’ve had planes for over a century, and helicopters have been around for almost as long. Fuel isn’t a problem— there are a plethora of fuels to use, even if some aren’t as savory as others (i.e. nuclear-powered cars). We’ve even seen an electric plane circumnavigate the globe. So what is keeping a flying family sedan out of your driveway? You are. Not you in particular, but humans in general. We humans evolved to navigate a 2D plane— we move forwards, backwards, side to side, diagonally, and little else. We didn’t evolve to move up and down. The limits of our 3D movements involve standing up, sitting down, squatting, falling down, and the like— not flying through the heavens at lightning speed. And even then, we were never meant to traverse 2D planes at high speeds either, hence why car accidents claim the lives of over a million people each year globally.
Flying cars just aren’t going to happen beyond those novelties like the Avrocar unless you address the pilot problem. What’s an innovation in that field?

 

Passenger drones. At CES 2016, a Chinese drone company, Ehang, unveiled the Ehang 184. It’s not the first passenger drone, but it’s arguably the most famous.

This technology is nascent, but it’s already proving itself— Ehang tested their passenger drone in Nevada during the summer of 2016, apparently with success. They may not be the first to usher in passenger drones to the masses, however, as Alphabet’s Larry Page is investing in the development of flying cars. Surely he’s well aware of the crippling limitations of flying cars (which turns them into roadable planes). After all, his company is leading the way in the field of autonomous vehicles. Adding a third dimension to the Google driverless car won’t be a problem because it will be computers that have to deal with it.

And that brings me to my next example. Some people might still say that flying cars won’t ever appear because they haven’t appeared on the market yet, but once you introduce them to passenger drones, and interesting thing happens— they begin to ponder why we didn’t create passenger drones before now.

One thing that every futurist knows (or should know) is that many of our beloved and desired technologies will only be possible with greater computing power. This hasn’t always been the case— we didn’t need computers to create airplanes or automobiles or even atomic bombs and space-faring rockets. However, once we did create these things, we hit a plateau. It’s a plateau that’s been the bane of futurists, sci-fi fans, Singularitarians, transhumanists, everyone with an interest in technology in general. All the low-hanging post-industrial technology fruits have been plucked, and in order to progress further (and to use video game terminology), we need to unlock the AI upgrade. We can still develop futuristic technologies without AI, but it will take exponentially longer timescales to do so, especially considering we aren’t funding sci-tech at anywhere near the levels some people think we are (i.e.: we’re funding fusion energy at a “Fusion Never” level, and NASA’s budget in 2016 is one of their ten lowest funded years ever).

However, even then we still won’t be able to develop some technologies such as domestic robotics and augmented reality. These two technologies are wholly dependent on algorithms that can decipher the incredible amounts of data fed to them by the world at large, and without sufficiently powerful algorithms, they will never take off like we imagined.

When I use the term “AI”, I’m not necessarily referring to artificial superintelligence (ASI) or even artificial general intelligence (AGI). I mean any algorithm, no matter how narrow. With sufficient computing power, even narrow AI becomes impressively capable.
And they need to be capable if we want the futuristic fantasies we’ve always desired.

In the early days of science fiction, we were amused by visions of robot butlers. So amused that we tried making them ourselves. However, every attempt thus far has failed. Does it stand to reason that every attempt will fail, or will there come a day when every middle class family possesses their own automaton slave?

I won’t even let you answer that question— of course that day will come.

There’s a wonderful infogif from Mother Jones that shows why we’re about to get our own domestic droids sooner than many think.

For a slower version, click here.

In the 1960s, our computers had so little computing power available that you might have gotten better results with a wind-up toy. Things didn’t improve much in the ’70s, though we were doing the best we could with what we had. It was depressing, to say the least. That there were proto-Singularitarians from that era is remarkable, as I cannot imagine how awfully little hope they had.

I say this from the comfortably robotic year of 2016. I’ve talked about my late Roomba, though I don’t believe I’ve mentioned how frustrating the little bugger really was. Even a 2010 model Roomba felt like a glorified McDonalds toy. Thus, it makes sense why people high on the Jetsons and Star Wars back in vintage decades would be disillusioned by the seemingly stagnant rate of progress in robotics.

But things are changing.

Now that we’re developing computers powerful enough to run the algorithms necessary for a robot to navigate a real life space— as well as wireless networks fast and sturdy enough to drive Cloud computing— we are witnessing a robotics boom time.
How is it that ASIMO went from falling on itself trying to navigate stairs to being able to hop on one leg stably? Better algorithms that could process more information at a much quicker pace. How is it that Boston Dynamics went from the awkward PETMAN to the creepily impressive Atlas 2.0? Better algorithms that could process more information at a much quicker pace. Not forgetting more efficient robotic design, of course— design that still needs to be utilized by said algorithms.

We may have had the necessary algorithms in the ’70s and ’80s, but computers were far, far too weak to exploit them. Thus, if you brought home something that was marketed as a home robot butler for Christmas ’78, you were going to be sorely disappointed. And if you were a 6 year old who had high hopes for robot butlers, the failings of one would scar you for life. Imagine living the rest of your life, working at a decent job and starting a family, and then in 2018, you hear that Honda is selling its first home-ready ASIMOs while Google is readying a passenger drone. Chances are you wouldn’t believe them. Sure, technology’s gotten better, but there’s no way it could have gotten that much better, right…?

And yet it has.