(Image: Jonny Wan)
Eternal health, brain uploads, the end of privacy… with technological innovations coming at breakneck speed, how will they affect our evolution?
What’s next?
TWO million years of innovation has changed our bodies, brains and behaviour. An unassuming ape became a species with symbolic thought and sophisticated language. We covered the Earth and carved out complex relationships with each other and the natural world. Our inventive ingenuity has allowed us to shield ourselves from the worst of nature’s slings and arrows and step beyond the biological constraints of our ancestors.
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But it’s not going to stop here. As our rate of innovation continues to increase, what we invent will continue to change who we are in ways we can only begin to imagine.
End of ageing
Perhaps we will pop pills. Or perhaps doctors will become more like mechanics who we’ll visit for regular genetic maintenance. Either way, many think we’re close to a breakthrough in radically delaying ageing, if not halting it entirely. Some people alive today could live well into their second century and beyond. “The nice thing about life extension is that we are already in the middle of this revolution,” says of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
When death by age-related causes becomes uncommon, accidents and acute diseases will be the biggest threats and so our environment will probably grow increasingly safe and sanitised. How else will our lives change? For a start, the rhythm of life will be altered. “The seven ages of man will become six, with the first five unchanged and the sixth one extended indefinitely,” says gerontologist , co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation in Mountain View, California, which investigates rejuvenation technologies. For the first 50 years or so, life may be similar to today, with common milestones like puberty, adolescence and declining fertility. After that, biological changes will be put on hold. “The division into chapters will be delivered not by changes in our health and vitality, but by our own choices, whether in career, relationships or whatever,” says de Grey.
Maintaining a sense of identity over so long a life will depend on how far we can stretch our memory, which evolved to cover briefer timescales. in Evanston, Illinois, is optimistic. “I don’t think there’s any sense we are going to hit an information limit,” he says. Childhood memories, especially, seem to get etched in for life. It’s the years between childhood and recent events that sometimes come up blank, but that’s due to bottlenecks in the creation of new memories. “The process is too slow for real life,” says Reber. Recording, or life-logging, systems will no doubt help. We may just need a reboot every now and again, says Sandberg.
Family structure will change too, from nuclear to linear. With not just grandparents, but our grandparents’ grandparents still alive, families will be skewed towards older adults. With older generations supporting us for longer, our youth might extend too – perhaps with a focus on child-rearing earlier on and education later. These linear families could also be more changeable. Will we remain in a relationship with the same person for a century or more?
Living alongside people of very different ages will expose us to a wider range of experiences and opinions. And long lives could make people more caring, not just towards each other but also to things like their environment. “Your decisions will come back to haunt you,” says Sandberg. Catherine de Lange
“Longer lives could make people more caring, not only to each other but to their environment”
Decision-making machines
Many of life’s little dilemmas are already dealt with by personalised algorithms. What to read, what to listen to, who to connect with socially. Maps suggest where to go, apps suggest what to do when we get there. As machines get to know us even better, the trend will accelerate. Our lives could be managed by virtual assistants that anticipate our every whim.
“Our lives could be managed by virtual assistants that anticipate our every whim”
Sound like bliss? Perhaps. There is evidence to suggest we will welcome being freed from the tyranny of choice. Making decisions can be cognitively taxing. Studies have shown that we prefer to choose from a limited number of options and are less satisfied with choices when we know they can be changed. “Not having that worry is probably going to be beneficial in terms of mental health,” says psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London.
What will we do to occupy our minds instead? “We’re inherently social,” Dumontheil says. “Parents might play more with their children, couples could have more time together and so on. These social aspects could become more important.”
But , a neuroscientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to give over decision-making to machines. The experience helps us develop self-control and teaches us how to assess risk, for example. That’s partly why adolescents incarcerated at a young age – and thus prevented from making the same life decisions as their peers – are more likely to act impulsively and commit crimes like shoplifting. In a choice-free future, our lack of learned inhibition might get the better of us.
People’s ability to make choices is fundamental, says Reyna. “If you take that away I think people will feel that they’re missing something and attempt to compensate.” Self-expression could offer one outlet. Manipulating body image, for example, might let people assert a degree of control that is lacking elsewhere. Chris Baraniuk
Customisable bodies
As consumer technology becomes ever more indispensable for day-to-day life, many people may choose to augment their “biological baseline” with implants. The age of customisable humans will have come.
The best place to start examining what this future might look like is with people society views as disabled or infirm today – ironically exactly those groups excluded by past eugenics movements that aimed to “improve” the human race.
For better or worse, our attempts to treat people with permanent disability often become attempts to recreate their bodies according to a “normal” template. “When you get treatment, you lose your individuality,” says Nigel Ackland, who lost his right hand in an industrial accident. “The doctors have a one-size-fits-all mentality.”
Some now reject that idea, and see no reason why their prosthesis should look like a natural arm or leg. That’s the rationale, for example, behind the , run by prostheticist Sophie de Oliveira Barata in London. Her workshop can make you a jewel-encrusted leg, or a feathered arm.
Future prostheses will explode the limits of the human body (Image: Fadeichev Sergei/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis)
Where might such a philosophy lead us when the functionality of human prostheses becomes a playground and prostheses, whether artificial limbs or brain chips, become enhancements? Once we can build an arm that is as good as a human one, why stop there? Why shouldn’t you have one twice as strong, or three times as fast?
“Every prosthetic limb should have something a human limb can’t do,” says Ackland, who now uses an advanced bionic hand (pictured below). “When I rotate my wrist 360 degrees, people are blown away. They don’t see the fact I’ll never play piano, or be a speed typist, or feel my wife touch my hand. They see me do something they can’t. It’s a tiny thing, but I can stand a little straighter. It makes me feel like an individual again.”
There are concerns that this kind of human augmentation will lead to an arms race between the haves and have-nots, leaving behind those who cannot or will not adapt. This fear is not entirely without grounds. Literacy is both a technology and a widespread human augmentation, for example. It raised the bar of what we expect a person to be able to do, and illiteracy in modern society goes hand-in-hand with disenfranchisement.
“Human augmentation might lead to an arms race between haves and have-nots”
But the advent of mass literacy was also a mass democratisation of ideas. Similarly, greater human augmentation could see a greater diversity in what it means to be human. Frank Swain
End of privacy
The old boundaries of privacy have shifted. The more technology has allowed us to share, the more we’ve embraced it. Social media brings out confessions, while photo and video sites are awash with candid self-promotion. We can even adorn ourselves with . Soon, we could be reading off the histories and proclivities of people we meet via pop-ups on augmented-reality displays. The veil between our private and public lives is growing thin.
Many respond by proactively managing their online presence. On his website , a mathematician and biographer of Alan Turing, gives his personal and professional lives an equal footing. Hodge’s online openness about his homosexuality is there to make a political point: “Everything is connected with everything else.”
But while not having secrets can be liberating, it is getting harder to control the flow of information. Share your likes on Facebook, for example, and you reveal things about yourself you might not even know. Do you like curly fries? Then you’re a measurable number of IQ points brighter than the population at large.
Other jarring correlations predict sexual preference and political affiliation. at the University of Cambridge, who led the study showing these correlations, designs systems that mine online trivia for personality traits, helping recruiting agencies identify suitable applicants. “It’s a great commercial prospect, as long as it is used ethically,” he says. But ethics moves with the times. The photos you post today will be analysed by the algorithms of tomorrow. What might they reveal then?
And more is coming all the time. We are flooding the world with surveillance technologies to the point where everyone sees everyone. Cameras already capture – and share – everything, from the conduct of state power at public protests to the contents of politicians’ pyjamas. In a world of , where everyone carries monitoring devices, the truth will out.
“In a world where everyone carries monitoring devices, the truth will out”
There is some evidence to suggest an open society will be a better one, but openness does not equal freedom. In China, “big mamas” work quite openly to . And in East Germany, at the height of the cold war, . In a global village, there will be gossips. Simon Ings
An abundance of everything
If we get things right, we’re heading for a future of abundance. Used materials will be recycled by 3D printers that churn out everything from consumer electronics and building supplies to food and synthetic organs. Advances in molecular engineering will let us make anything out of anything, remoulding the molecules of one material into another. We’ll have everything we need, and want for nothing.
Or will we? “Once we have the ability to print whatever we want, things will become customisable ad nauseam,” says of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “Creativity will be more valuable than manufactured goods.” We may also come to value old things over the new, as antiques become increasingly rare in a world of super-efficient recycling.
In such a future our ties with the natural world are likely to loosen further. If meat and vegetable matter can be produced synthetically, agriculture will disappear. Will we then shun or embrace rural spaces? Present trends suggest that rather than isolating us from the environment, technology can bring us closer to it. “Biodiversity and ecosystems are not a fad,” says based in San Francisco.
Richer countries today have the luxury of putting more emphasis on conservation, and visits to national parks and reserves are generally on the rise. “The majority of human beings have a general curiosity and awe for at least some form of nature,” says Novak. “People want to be immersed in it.” Vast tracts of reclaimed farmland may be set aside for wildlife.
Some of that wildlife may be revived. De-extinction projects are under way to resurrect the passenger pigeon, dodo and many other species. “The biggest reason we want to conserve biodiversity is that it represents the universe’s most complex and extensive source of information; the most interesting puzzles to solve,” says Novak.
All that won’t necessarily make us happier. “One part of the human condition is dissatisfaction – in a sense, this is what drives technological advances,” says , a palaeoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Even if we could have anything we want, we won’t stop wanting what we don’t yet have. “No matter how much you modify the external environment, our species’ nature is not going to change enormously,” he says. “That’s the curse of our imagination.” Rachel Nuwer
Crytpocurrencies
Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency: its technology allows any kind of transaction to be carried out and a public record stored across millions of computers around the world, out of the hands of any centralised authority. The blockchain, as this global ledger is known, enforces fairness and transparency in the exchange of any goods or services. But the legacy of cryptocurrencies will go far beyond money. Some think they are the start of fully autonomous companies trading among themselves – without humans in the loop.
Virtual reality
Supplementing or even supplanting the real world’s impact on our senses through augmented and virtual reality will let us slip between digital and physical realms seamlessly. We may find new ways to manipulate data and conceptual puzzles by visualising them in a virtual environment. With our senses hijacked, any experience we can dream of will be possible. Or are we already living this dream, as inhabitants of a simulation created by more advanced humans?
Brain uploads
Who do you want to be today? As we unravel the brain’s structure, some believe we will be able to simulate its function in silicon. If that’s possible, many will seek immortality by uploading their minds to a computer. Why stop there? Running our brains digitally may let us load up past versions of ourselves – or “try on” other personalities entirely. We could copy ourselves, living out multiple lives simultaneously. We could even run some of those lives at different speeds, experiencing a lifetime in minutes.
Genetic engineering
Future technology will be wetter than it is today, as biological and computer sciences merge. By programming genes, controlling living things as we now control computers, we will grow new types of machine, develop new medicines and even create new organisms. The lines between the worlds of information and matter will blur.
Space colonisation
If billionaire technologist Elon Musk is right, in a hundred years time a million people will be living on Mars. Most would say that’s overoptimistic, but in the long term, the survival of our species depends on our colonising other planets and one day other solar systems. In a few billion years our sun will die and we will be forced to find other homes. This is one innovation that Homo sapiens – or whatever our species becomes – will not live without.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The next 1000 years”
