Annalee Newitz - What Will Human Cultures Be Like in 100 Years?

From io9, futurist Jamais Cascio offers some ideas on what human culture might look like in 100 years. Interesting stuff . . . and some of the other futurists in this article also have intriguing notions of the future.

What Will Human Cultures Be Like in 100 Years?

Get ready for etiquette books on when it's OK to reboot your sinuses in public, and the teenager-ization of senior citizens. Here are some predictions from the experts on how human cultures will transform over the next hundred years.

You hear a lot about "next gen" science and technology, but not so much about will happen to human societies and cultures in the future. To fill the gap, we asked three futurists and one science fiction writer what social changes we should expect to see in the next century.

Burning Man vs. Walking Dead

One of the biggest questions is whether human civilization will even be around in a hundred years. As futurist Jamais Cascio put it, we may be facing a Walking Dead future full of blasted cities and zombie pandemics. But if we manage to survive plagues, nuclear destruction, famine and environmental collapse, our social landscape might look like something ripped from the annual desert art festival Burning Man.

Cascio told io9 via email that the Burning Man future is often the "default" scenario for tomorrow's culture among many futurists. It's one of "expanded rights," with mainstream acceptance for everything from gay marriage and group marriage, to human-robot romances and even more unusual relationships. It would also involve "acceptance of cultural experimentation, and the dominance of the leisure society [where] robots do all of the work [and] humans get to play/make art/take drugs/have sex." In some ways, this vision hasn't changed much since Aldous Huxley wrote about a hedonistic pseudo-Utopia in his 1932 novel, Brave New World. Freed from necessity, humans can experiment with new kinds of social arrangements and turn life into a game.

But now it's time for us to update our visions of the future.

New Kinds of Tribalism

A more realistic scenario than blissed-out free love cities involves people coalescing into communities that have never existed before. These communities might be like internet forums writ large: groups of like-minded people who come together because of shared interests rather than shared geographical spaces, religions, or ethnicities. If we assume that humanity progresses toward civilizations of abundance, then these groups might be able to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. But they wouldn't have to do it by building an island or setting up an underground city. They might do it using information filtering technology.

Cascio suggests that super-advanced versions of Google Glasses might allow "reality manipulation" of the everyday world. He said:

Imagine a city street where not one of the hundred people around you sees the same version of reality, the interface systems translating the physical and social environment into something interesting and/or culturally acceptable. (This would also be a remarkable tool for mind control in a totalitarian regime.)

So you might share a physical space with a bunch of people whom you never see. Instead, you'd only see your fellow robot enthusiasts, or frog worshipers, or members of your gaming guild. With brain implants that tweak our senses, we could even manipulate the smell and feel of the world to be acceptable to different groups. A building that feels dry and warm to one person could feel cool and damp to another.

Science fiction writer Maureen McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse, added that such a scenario doesn't necessarily mean people will never experience diversity. She told io9:

In some ways we can become more insular — libertarians will talk only to libertarians, for example. On the other hand it puts us in constant contact with people outside our same background. I might only be listening to liberals, but some of them are Korean Americans. Their politics may be similar, but there are other differences. They are of my tribe when it comes to issues that are important in one way, but not of my tribe in ways that I have to adjust for. I may start excusing ways that they are not of my tribe because I'm so interested in the ways they are.

In a sense, these new, isolated communities based on shared interests might help eradicate painful differences that have caused friction between groups in the past. People who band together because they only want to eat raw food may learn to overcome racist feelings about people in their tribe who are of different races. But McHugh warns that this is far from a Utopian scenario. "We end up denying a lot of differences and doing the same thing we've always done: ignore everything that makes us uncomfortable."

The new tribalism won't be a great moment in human togetherness. It will just allow us to create new kinds of communities that thrive only because we've agreed to ignore each other's differences.

New Brains and New Etiquette

We'll still be the same old clannish monkeys, but what if we start modifying our bodies with technological implants and biological tweaks? Human culture will have to change if Cascio is right about a scenario where wearable computers can change our perception of reality. And University of Oxford futurist Anders Sandberg has suggested that humans might even rewire our brains to make ourselves feel more love and altruism for each other.

McHugh is dubious that rewiring our brains will really change us all that much. "We've been screwing with our brains since the beginning of time," she scoffed. "I use my forefinger to tap out letters when I send a text. People who grew up using consoles use their thumbs. They have more neurons mapped to their thumbs and I have more mapped to my forefingers — our brains are that much different. It's small but real." Our brains are plastic, but our basic goals for ourselves not. The more we alter ourselves, she continued, the more "we'll reinforce a lot of who we are tribally." She believes that people won't want to change our brains so that we're more willing to accept outsiders. "We won't like that idea," she asserted.

Still, we may have to change our etiquette a lot as our bodies become more and more packed with technology. Cascio said:

By 2113 we'll have gone through a dozen or so technosocial-fashion generations. Smartphones give way to tablets to phablets to wearables to implantables to swallowables to replaceable eyeballs to neo-sinus body-nanofab systems (using mucous as a raw material) to brain-webs to body-rentals . . . and those are increasingly considered "so 2110." And with all of these (or whatever really emerges), there are shifting behavioral norms. Don't look at your phone at the dinner table. Don't replace your eyeball in public. Don't reboot your neo-sinus in church . . .

We may become cyborgs, but we're still going to care about behaving politely in public. In some ways, this idea dovetails with what McHugh said about clinging to our tribal ways even when we have the opportunity to engineer ourselves to be less clannish. The main reason we have rules of politeness is to govern social interactions between people who are not part of our immediate group. If everybody shares the same social assumptions you don't need to watch your behavior and use your inside voice.

Sinus rebooting etiquette is only necessary in a world where you expect to be in church with people who don't really like the idea of mucus-based technology. Your tribe may be OK with it, but when you're out in public you have to mind your manners.

The Teenager-ization of Old People

One thing seems certain about the future. There will be a lot more people in it who are over the age of 70, and probably over 100, too. Futurist and Carnegie-Mellon University public policy researcher Denise Caruso believes there will have to be a radical shift in the way elderly people live. She told io9 "there will need to be some kind of movement for a new social arrangement at least, a new kind of retirement planning maybe, that provides a way for groups of people to pool their resources and create their own "assisted living" homes." Caruso talked about how one of her friends wants to rally a bunch of older people to do this right now by taking over a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge. They'd fill the entire place with seniors who love the cheap rates, the cleaning services, the affordable restaurant, and the company of other retirees like themselves.

This Howard Johnsons idea sounds a lot like a boarding school or a college dorm, and that's the point. As more people are living long past their childrearing and working years, they're going to be like teens again. They'll have less money, but more time — and probably more energy for mischief than any previous generation of retirees. What will we call this new group of people who live like college students but have a lifetime of experiences? Maybe centurions. Or oldagers.

Caruso is pragmatic about how oldagers will create their new communities:

I don't expect we will get the government to support any of this, but I can imagine that some clever and compassionate baby-boomer financial types will find some loopholes in the tax code that will support these kinds of group living arrangements. Kind of a tenants-in-common thing, but on a large scale and maybe protected by nonprofit-type laws or something. I'm envisioning that people get some big tax break if they create their communities when they're, say, 50-ish. Then they're established, and they can get all the systems set up. Where my mom lives, for example, there's a really good doctor who comes every two weeks to check up on all the residents. You could do the same thing with shopping, too.

Transhumanist philosopher Natasha Vita-More thinks these oldagers are going to be even weirder than tomorrow's eyeball-removing teenagers. They'll be backing their brains up onto computers all the time, so they will exist simultaneously in the real world and in digital simulation space. She told io9 that in a century, this kind of backup technology will put us in the strange position of being able to choose to die when we want — or to die for just a little while, like taking a much-needed vacation:

All indicators are pointing toward people living well past 100 years, and in good health and vitality. Aging is slowing down and will be reversed to a large degree . . . And during this timeframe, it will be not only customary but highly consequential to back up our brains on a moment-to-moment basis. Further, transferring and/or copying a person’s brain, including consciousness and mind, onto computational systems will become a trend. At this juncture, it will be optimal for a person to co-exist in real time (the physical world) and within simulations (virtual environments, for example). 

In light of these changes, the very notion of death will be redefined to include new criteria for death, including a person who wants to drop out of society for a span of a year or tens of years and then reenter life. The very notion of time will be changed and become less linear and more exponential. This particular change – the change of the human predetermined biological and genetically programed life span – will be a major shift in consciousness for all humanity . . . A person could select to live longer or not. That will be an individual choice.

We won't banish death, we'll just choose it. Though I'm not sure why anybody would want to die when you could just hang out with a bunch of oldagers and play videogames all day with your sinus implants.

Top image by carlos castilla via Shutterstock. Burning Man photo by Keith Carlsen via Getty. Shiny human upload image by Steven A. Johnson.

You can read Cascio's full comments to me on IEET.

Shame - The Story of Mukhtaran Mai

Incredible courage from this Pakistani woman - this documentary, Shame (2006), tells the story of her rape and her decision to stand up and seek justice for herself, and eventually for other women as well.

 

Mukhtaran Bibi (Punjabi, Urdu: مختاراں بی بی‎, born circa 1972,[1] now known as Mukhtār Mā'ī,[1] مختار مائی) is a Pakistani woman from the village of Meerwala, in the rural tehsil (county) of Jatoi of the Muzaffargarh District of Pakistan. In June 2002, Mukhtār Mā'ī was the survivor of a gang rape as a form of honour revenge, on the orders of a tribal council of the local Mastoi Baloch clan that was richer and more powerful as opposed to her Tatla clan in that region.[2][3]

Although custom would expect her to commit suicide after being raped,[4][5][6] Mukhtaran spoke up, and pursued the case, which was picked up by both domestic and international media. On 1 September 2002, an anti-terrorism court sentenced 6 men (including the 4 rapists) to death for rape. In 2005, the Lahore High Court cited "insufficient evidence" and acquitted 5 of the 6 convicted, and commuted the punishment for the sixth man to a life sentence. Mukhtaran and the government appealed this decision, and the Supreme Court suspended the acquittal and held appeal hearings.[7] In 2011, the Supreme Court too acquitted the accused.

Though the safety of Mukhtaran, and her family and friends, has been in jeopardy[8] she remains an outspoken advocate for women's rights. She started the Mukhtar Mai Women's Welfare Organization to help support and educate Pakistani women and girls. In April 2007, Mukhtar Mai won the North-South Prize from the Council of Europe.[9] In 2005, Glamour Magazine named her "Woman of the Year".[10] According to the New York Times, "Her autobiography is the No. 3 best seller in France , and movies are being made about her. She has been praised by dignitaries like Laura Bush and the French foreign minister".[11] However, on 8 April 2007, the New York Times reported that Mukhtar Mai lives in fear for her life from the Pakistan government and local feudal lords.[12] General Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, has admitted on his personal blog[13] that he placed restrictions on her movement in 2005, as he was fearful that her work, and the publicity it receives, hurt the international image of Pakistan.

Shame

This stun­ning Special Emmy winning doc­u­men­tary tells the true sto­ry of in­ter­na­tion­al hu­man rights icon Mukhtaran Mai, a Pak­istani peas­ant who was gang-raped and pub­licly shamed in her vil­lage, but used her trau­ma to spark a le­gal rev­o­lu­tion that ex­posed cen­turies of bru­tal trib­al con­flict and gov­ern­ment mis­man­age­ment.

Lenny Moss - Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our “Inner Tribe”

This article from Professor Lenny Moss is in the new issue of the Hedgehog Review. This interesting article looks at how we "hard-wired" to be social creatures, dependent on others for our survival - but we are also fairly "tribal" (ethnocentric) and we often group ourselves into "us vs. them" perspectives.

It's a long and serious piece - this is only the first few paragraphs.

Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our “Inner Tribe”

Lenny Moss

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 15.1 (Spring 2013). 

The Hedgehog Review

An Ethos of Ambiguity

We are almost certainly on the threshold of a new understanding of our nature as social beings, which is being provoked and informed by developments in psychology, biology, and the social sciences. Just how we interpret and assimilate these new findings has become a topic of considerable controversy. Inasmuch as morality, however one defines it, has to do with how we treat each other, the stakes of this controversy are raised by its ostensibly moral and thereby also political implications. Less obvious, especially to the public, is the extent to which academic disciplinary statures and commitments are also hanging in the balance.

Our nature as social beings is ostensibly paradoxical. On the one hand, we are unquestionably social in nature. We are born dependent upon the care of others; we crave companionship and often go to great lengths to avoid loneliness. Short of death or physical torture, enforced solitary confinement is considered the most severe and hateful punishment that can be inflicted upon a human being. On the other hand, perceptions of individuality govern our life choices—we are seldom far from consulting our private interests when it comes to making decisions of any consequence. We find ourselves, as individuals, in an ongoing, pervasive, and often strenuous competition with the multitudes for status, recognition, and every good we seek and desire up to and including walking space on a busy urban sidewalk. We thus experience most of our fellow humans, most of the time, as potential impediments to outmaneuver and outdo in order to achieve our ends. The Enlightenment’s late-eighteenth-century “Sage of Königsburg,” Immanuel Kant, pithily referred to this seemingly contradictory state of affairs as our “unsocial sociability.”

How we understand our unsocial sociability, even if just implicitly, is of no small consequence. Those for whom social life is nothing but some minimally constrained expression of Hobbes’s “war of all against all” are prone to act accordingly. For Kant the very possibility of having rational hope for the future of humanity required a story to tell about the place of our unsocial sociability, and all of the historical sufferings and depredations wrought by it, within a framework of possible human “development.” More simply stated, we need a way of understanding “human nature” that allows us to make sense of the evils in human history without foreclosing the possibility of seeing ourselves as moving toward improvement in general, and more specifically toward something like global peace and general human wellbeing. Kant helped himself to a providential outlook but in the form of a theoretical teleology. Kant analogized the human species with an organism that, in effect, undergoes “growing pains” on its developmental path toward maturity. Just as the parts of an organism are always responding to the forces and factors of their immediate environment, and yet all told are contributing to the developmental ends of the organism, individual people live for the most part in their local world pursuing individual ends constitutive of a developmental trend in human history. Kant’s idea was that our unsocial sociability, our individualistic will to get ahead of each other, played out at the macro-level as an impetus for the further cultivation of the species, technologically, culturally, etc. The down side of course was that our unsocial sociability also resulted in massive amounts of human cruelty and immiseration. For Kant, these events, while morally uncondonable, were, as learning experiences, unavoidable parts of human self-development. Only by force of painful experience would humanity learn the value of peaceful co-existence. Sadly, the two-plus centuries since have not easily lent themselves to confidence in a steady, progressive, human learning curve.

Two of the key elements of Kant’s story—the idea that our social behavior is driven by inherent species proclivities and his providential/teleological assumption that we are invested with these proclivities for a reason—may not, on closer examination, look as foreign as one may initially have imagined. In place of talk about inherent proclivities, we now have talk about genes and chemical messengers. In place of a providential account of why (and to what end) we have the proclivities we do, we now have evolutionary arguments about why (and to what end) we have the genes and chemical messengers that we do. How to best interpret the significance of evolution, genetics, and neurochemistry for our understanding of human sociality, morality, and the implications for human conduct, however, is where present controversies first begin.

Read the whole article.

TEDxHendrixCollege - Us and Them . . . and Beyond

Hendrix College recently hosted a TEDx event, and among the speakers was David Berenby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity (originally subtitled, Understanding Your Tribal Mind), and Terrence Roberts, a member of the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.

Each of them gave nice talks, with Berenby explaining the model he uses in his book and Roberts offer hope for a world beyond Us and Them.

David Berreby - Us and Them: A story we can't help telling

David Berreby is the author of "Us and Them: The Science of Identity", and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and many other publications. David also writes a blog called Mind Matters at bigthink.com. Having already written a book on the topic, David talks about some of the science behind our natural tendency to form us and them groups and how us and them have value for our lives but need to be handled properly. 

Terrence Roberts - Beyond Us v Them: An eye toward a hopeful future

Dr. Terrence Roberts is a civil rights activist, diversity consultant, and member of the 'Little Rock Nine' who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Dr. Roberts looks at how Us vs. Them impacts racial relations today and has been doing so longer than the US has been a country. He sees reason to hope for the future and a day when Us vs. Them is removed from human interactions between groups of individuals that differ based on skin tone.

David Ropeik - How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous

From Big Think, this is a brief meditation on the ways that tribalism and in-group alliance can generate behaviors that are otherwise unthinkable. Perhaps the most outstanding example is the Nazi atrocities of the last century. But we can be incredibly insular in our allegiance to religions (as this article highlights), sports teams (Tucson has a lot of team bars, as I'm sure other cities do as well), and quite obviously in this election year, political parties (see Jonathan Haidt's work).

Here is an example of how this works in the climate debates:

Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus

Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study, published in the Journal of Risk Research, presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.

Anyway, here is the Big Think article - this is a topic I want to explore more in the coming weeks and months. By the way, the image at the top is David Berreby's Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (clearance priced at this Amazon link) is one of the best non-academic books I have read on this subject.

How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous

David Ropeik on May 14, 2012

       When I was a kid, my synagogue was right across the street from a Catholic church. Bellevue Avenue made such a clear dividing line between us – The Chosen People – and them…the enemy. No doubt the view from the other side of the street was the same. I had no idea at the time what a powerful metaphor those few lanes of asphalt made for one of the most significant aspects of human behavior…the powerful instinct of tribalism. It’s everywhere, protecting us by readily overriding reason, and morality, and pretty much anything else that could dim our chances of survival. And it's threatening us at the same time.

       Maybe you read about one recent manifestation in The New York Times, about the  Orthodox Jews of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn who shunned a neighbor after he told police about a man – a fellow Jew - who was sexually abusing his son. You’d think that a father protecting his son would be the sort of behavior that would be honored. Nope. Not if it is disloyal to the tribe.

      That’s the synagogue side of the street. How about the long loathsome record of Catholic Church authorities abandoning their morals and forfeiting the safety of vulnerable children by covering up, ignoring, or denying extensive evidence of child abuse by a small number of priests. Same thing. Tribe first. Morals second.

     It’s not just religion, of course. We identify ourselves as members of all sorts of tribes; our families, political parties, race, gender, social organizations. We even identify tribally just based on where we live. Go Celtics, go Red Sox, go U.S. Olympic team! One study asked people whether, if they had a fatal disease, would they prefer a life-saving diagnosis from a computer that was 1,000 miles away, or the exact same diagnosis from a computer in their town, and a large majority preferred the same information if the source…a machine…was local.

     Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically, tribalism. Genocides are tribalism - wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different faith or color, denial of evolution or climate change or other basic scientific truths when they challenge tribal beliefs. What stunning evidence of the power of tribalism! (By the way, it wasn’t just geocentrist Catholics in the 16 and 1700s who denied evidence that the earth travels around the sun. Some Christian biblical literalists still do. So do a handful of ultra orthodox Jews and Muslims.)

     Yet another example is the polarized way we argue about so many issues, and the incredible irony that as we make these arguments we claim to be intelligent (smart, therefore right) yet we ignorantly close our minds to views that conflict with ours. Dan Kahan, principal researcher into the phenomenon of Cultural Cognition, has found that our views are powerfully shaped so they agree with beliefs of the groups with which we most strongly identify. His research, along with the work of others, has also found that the more challenged our views are, the more we defend them…the more dogmatic and closed-minded we become...an intellectual form of ‘circle-the-wagons, we’re under attack’ tribal unity. Talk about tribalism overruling reason.

      As irrational as genocide and science denial and immorality may be, it makes absolute sense that tribalism can produce such behaviors. We are social animals. We have evolved to depend on our tribes, literally, for our safety and survival. As Jane Howard, biographer of anthropologist Margaret Mead, put it “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” We may not be aware at the conscious level of the influence tribalism has on us, but then, most of human cognition happens below the radar of consciousness, and is driven not so much by the goal of getting good grades or winning Nobel Prizes as it is, first, to survive. Small wonder that this ultimate imperative dominates so much of how we behave, how we think and act, and how we treat each other. And it’s hardly surprising that the more unsettled and uncertain we feel and the less we feel we have control over how things are going - feelings that make us feel threatened -  the more we circle the wagons and fiercely fight for tribal success, looking to the tribe to keep us safe.

     It’s a sobering reflection on this inherent but potentially destructive aspect of human nature, in these unsettled and threateningly uncertain times.

Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation with Richard Sennett

UCSD recently hosted New York University sociologist and historian Richard Sennett for a discussion on why people form in-group/out-group divisions, even in large population centers, resulting in small tribal populations within metropolitan cities.




Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation with Richard Sennett

New York University sociologist and historian Richard Sennett addresses the phenomenon of why people tend to avoid engaging with others who are different, leading to a modern politics of the tribe rather than the city. In this thought-provoking talk, Sennett offers ideas on what might be done to encourage people to live with others who are racially, ethnically, religiously or economically unlike themselves. [3/2012]

Bookforum - The Tribal Psychology of Politics

Yet another cool collection of links from Bookforum's Omnivore - this one looks at the nearly gang-like, tribal warfare between the political factions in this country..

The tribal psychology of politics

Feb 9 2012
9:00AM

 

• What the Right gets right: What insights, principles, and analyses does this movement have to offer that liberals and Democrats might want to take into account? (and more: What does the Left get right?) 
• Liberty, Equality, Hostility: The inability of conservatives and liberals to get along may be traced back to the French Revolution. 
• Jonathan Haidt decodes the tribal psychology of politics: "Liberals need to be shaken [and they] misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around". 
• Conservatives are from Mars, liberals are from Venus: Thomas Edsall on how research in political psychology explains the fierce clashes between Republican and Democrats in our polarized system.
• Conservatism is linked to low intelligence; but the real idiots are the progressives letting it win. 
• The biology of politics: Liberals roll with the good, conservatives confront the bad. 
• Nature, nurture and liberal values: Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge, but people — and politics and morality — cannot be described just by neural impulses.
• Do people become more conservative as they age?