When science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov laid out his predictions 50 years ago for what the world of today would look like, he drew a milder-mannered tableau of the techno-utopias of his time.
Flying cars, moon colonies, robots that cooked your breakfast: these were all fanciful but common visions of the 21st century. What was resonant about Asimov’s world was that he didn’t simply repackage these ideas but grounded them in an understanding of why the future might look like this. It was a kind of future-gazing driven not by the nightmarish fear that we don’t have control over our own existence – as in the simulated realities of The Matrix or Fassbinder’s World on a Wire - but by a kind of fear with dignity. Fear that we know exactly what we want, what we might do, and how we might get it.
To focus on the accuracy of these predictions would be to miss the point. Asimov wasn’t claiming to be a technological soothsayer, but was passing commentary on what we were striving towards and the conditions that might prevent their attainment: overpopulation and the destruction of natural resources, coupled with the contradictory desire to reject these problems as obstacles. “One thought that occurs to me,” he writes early on, offering the driving force for the advances that follow, “is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.”
This still holds. We still want more from the world. We want to leap off the edge of cliffs and we don’t want to fall. We want the impossible. We want to be immortal. Invincible. We’re hungry for time (hence: automated cooking and cleaning) and knowledge (the internet). We want to maintain the illusion of beauty even in the face of the destruction we’ve caused (windows with digital scenery) and we want some decent consolation for living (3D televisions).
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Set in a pastel-lit near-future with no cars but countless high-waisted pants, Spike Jonze’s movie Her is about a recently-divorced letter-writer, Theodore Twombly (played with tender charm by Joaquin Phoenix), who falls in love with his new operating system. Her name is Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) and she’s funny and caring and warm. She has the impressive intelligence and efficiency that comes with being a computer, yet has the flaws of a human too: she feels emotion.
While scientific advance may drastically change the environment in which we experience them, fundamentally human processes remain the same. We will never not crave intimacy, feel vulnerable
The premise sounds cheesy but Jonze plays it out in ways that are smart and unexpectedly devastating. The film systematically explores the important questions that would arise in a situation like this (how do you tell your friends? How do you have sex?) and its potency lies in the fact that it doesn’t mock the idea. It sits down in front of you and says: this could happen.
Her feels like the next iteration of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: both films use technology to explore the nature of love and compatibility, recognising that while scientific advance may drastically change the environment in which we experience it, the fundamentally human processes remains the same. We will never not crave intimacy, desire companionship, feel vulnerable, fear abandonment. We will always feel the deep and hollow emptiness that comes with losing someone we love, and we will always strive for a kind of perfection.
The most unsettling aspect of Her is how un-science fiction it feels. We have something very close to Samantha already and her name is Siri (Norwegian for, quite appropriately, ‘beautiful woman who leads you to victory’). But Siri is really a decoy, because in our efforts towards immortality we haven’t simply tried to create a Samantha for ourselves; we’ve tried to become her.
We’ve done this through myriad ways. At the most superficial level is plastic surgery, which is so ubiquitous now that it now features as a specific detail in otherwise thoroughly generic horoscopes. But as a path to youth, it’s clumsy, like clearing up after dinner by throwing a tablecloth over the mess.
So we have the mess. Expected lifespan has naturally increased over time, but it has also been artificially lengthened through man-made innovation. Over the next century, it’s likely we’ll see another spike due to the ways we address health and disease – or, in the language of Buzzfeed: insane scientific advances that’ll make you want to start planning your 150th birthday party.
Given the obvious factor contributing to death is disease, it’s no surprise we’ve focused on its prevention. What is astounding is how far we’ve come. It was 24 years ago that the Human Genome project formally began and now, 10 years after successfully mapping our genetic code, we’re now developing ways to edit it.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t new. We’ve edited genes in the past, but this has always been through ham-fisted techniques that act as the equivalent of administering lobotomies to cure depression. The most recent technique involves using CRISPRs (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), an acronym that speaks to the accuracy of what it can achieve. In short, the CRISPR system works like an assassin-for-hire: you programme an RNA molecule – the runtier cousin of DNA – to match a specific DNA sequence you want to target. You then give this molecule to an enzyme called CAS9. CAS9 is your assassin. It trawls through the genetic material until it finds a match, attaches itself to the sequence, and slices cleanly through the double helix. This allows you to insert more genetic material where the cut has been made, changing how the original DNA expresses itself or silencing its expression completely.
There are still kinks to iron out. It has a higher but not perfect hit-rate compared to older methods, and will target all matches of the DNA sequence it’s been programmed to search for – usually there’ll be more than one – rather than the specific sequence you’re targeting. But the potential of this technique is tremendous. In November last year, Editas Medicine was established, with the aim of eventually curing inheritable diseases that are caused by a single DNA base pair - like Down’s syndrome or cystic fibrosis – and eventually more complex diseases like HIV. Eventually, you could alter the genes of IVF embryos. You could have the baby you want, tailor-made by a kiosk in the sterile lobby of a fertility clinic. Of course, all of this threatens to become another tablecloth, too. A cleaner and more advanced one, but one that could still allow us to sweep over messes we willingly make.
The same cautions underlie 3D-printed organs. Quick explanation: this essentially entails filling an old inkjet printer with human tissue, which then gets ‘printed’, layer by layer, to form a 3D object. Last year, we implanted the first bioengineered blood vessel, and it won’t be long before we’ll be able to print a liver for anyone who needs one. Because the cost of printing will eventually be cheap enough for us to use the host’s tissue, this also means we’ll no longer have issues with the body rejecting the organ, since it’ll be made from their very own cells. It’s amazing – nearly incomprehensible – as far as scientific developments go. We’re even growing tiny, embryonic brains in the lab: the most complex human organ, and the only reason they’re not developing further is because they haven’t been able to provide it with a continuous blood supply. We’re hurtling towards a point where we’ll be able to artificially create every single part of the human body. There’s only one logical next step from there.
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Siri’s a decoy for other reasons, too. First because it’s an application we never needed or wanted – and yet, now it is – and second because Apple aren’t the real technology giant we should be looking to if we’re making predictions about the future: that giant is Google.
No longer simply a noun, Google have actually made a Samantha of their own. Billed as the world’s first artificially intelligent phone, the Motorola Moto X was released last year and features a permanent listening mode, meaning it responds to verbal instructions: It can describe what the weather will be like tomorrow. Read your text messages out loud. Direct you to the nearest liquor store, and tell you the definition for ‘holy shit’.
Google sold Motorola to Chinese technology company Leveno for $2.91 billion last week, a massive loss from the $12.5 billion they paid three years ago. Economically, it seems crazy. Strategically, it’s exactly what they’re about: by ridding themselves of the hardware and retaining the patents and the research arm of the company, they’re allowing their focus to turn back to intellectual innovation.
Given the scale of their vision and the rapidity with which they’re achieving it, it’s fortunate that Google are a company who don’t want to be evil
Google aren’t just innovating within the technological realm: they’re pioneering science as an entire field, expanding horizontally at a rate that matches Moore’s law. Since 2010 they’ve acquired more than one company per week and in December 2013, their semi-secret research facility, Google[x], quietly purchased seven robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, creators of the terrifyingly agile robot BigDog and its speedier sister, WildCat. In addition to selling Motorola last week, they bought DeepMind, a software company developing algorithms that allows data to be processed in more human ways. It’s not clear what they’ll be doing with these companies – presumably they’ll start by targeting manufacturing processes, operative word being ‘start’ – but regardless of the intent, they’re amassing intellectual property at a disarming rate.
Google[x] is working on a host of other projects too, the four big ones being the continued development of their self-driving car, Google Glass, Google Contact Lens – which for now will allow diabetics to monitor their glucose levels, though eventually this will presumably become the new medium for Glass – and Project Loon, which was tested last year for the first time in the South Island and involves the eventual development of a network of balloons that will provide internet to rural and remote areas around the world. The list goes on: Google.org, its philanthropic arm, has huge investments in renewable energy and electric cars. Co-founder Sergey Brin (who oversees Google[x]) is also a key investor in a private spaceflight company and has heavily funded research looking for a cure for Parkinson’s disease. He was also the secret bankroller behind the world’s first lab-grown hamburger, which was cooked and eaten in August last year.
Given the scale of their vision and the rapidity with which they’re achieving it, it’s fortunate that Google are a company who don’t want to be evil. They’re just a single corporation steering us down a certain path into the future by filling needs we didn’t necessarily know we had. Which is not to be glib: these needs may be designed and built on good intentions – and often they feel like they are – but they’re still being designed and built by a business.
Were we to make predictions today for 2064, we’d have a good idea of what it might look like because scientific advance is never a huge surprise. Science is slow and persistent and builds on itself. What feels harder to predict is the psychological motivations on which to base them. As with Asimov, we can take into account human desire – for time, for knowledge, for connection, for more – but now there’s another layer of questioning as private and public sector intersect – a new kind of fear, still with dignity, now with doubt: over exactly what it is we might want, and the ways in which we might get it.
