Those who imagine a dark future are trying to scare the bejesus out of us so we do what is necessary not to end up in a world gone black swept away by the flood waters.  Problem is, extreme fear more often leads to paralysis rather than reform or ark building, something that God, had he been a behavioral psychologist, would have known.

Those with a Pollyannaish story about tomorrow, on the other hand, are usually trying to convince us to buy into some set of current trends, and for that reason, optimists often end up being the last thing they think they are, a support for conservative politics. Why change what’s going well or destined, in the long run, to end well? The problem here is that, as Keynes said “In the long run we’re all dead”, which should be an indication that if we see a problem out in front of us we should address it, rather than rest on faith and let some teleos of history or some such sort the whole thing out.

It’s hard to ride the thin line between optimism and pessimism regarding the future while still providing a view of it that is realistic, compelling and encourages us towards action in the present. Science-fiction, where it avoids the pull towards utopia or dystopia, and regardless of it flaws, does manage to present versions of the future that are gripping and a thousand times better than dry futurists “reports” on the future that go down like sawdust, but the genre suffers from having too many balls in the air.

There is not only a problem of the common complaint that, like with political novels, the human aspects of a story suffer from being tied too tightly to a social “purpose”- in this case to offer plausible predictions of the future, but that the idea of crafting a “plausible” future itself can serve as an anchor on the imagination. An author of fiction should be free to sail into any world that comes into his head- plausible destinations be damned.

Adrian Hon’s recent The History of the Future in 100 Objects overcomes this problem with using science-fiction to craft plausible versions of the future by jettisoning fictional narrative and presenting the future in the form of a work of history. Hon was inspired to take this approach in part by an actual recent work of history- Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects. In the same way objects from the human past can reveal deep insights not just into the particular culture that made them, but help us apprehend the trajectory that the whole of humankind has taken so far, 100 imagined “objects” from the century we have yet to see play out allows Hon to reveal the “culture” of the near future we can actually see quite well,  which when all is said and done amounts to interrogating the path we are currently on.     

Hon is perhaps uniquely positioned to give us a feel for where we are currently headed. Trained as a neuroscientist he is able to see what the ongoing revolutionary breakthroughs in neuroscience might mean for society. He also has his fingers on the pulse of the increasingly important world of online gaming as the CEO of the company Six-to-Start which develops interactive real world games such as Zombies, Run!

In what follows I’ll look at 9 of Hon’s objects of the future which I thought were the most intriguing. Here we go:

#8 Locked Simulation Interrogation – 2019

There’s a lot of discussion these days about the revival of virtual reality, especially with the quite revolutionary new VR headset of Oculus Rift. We’ve also seen a surge of brain scanning that purports to see inside the human mind revealing everything from when a person is lying to whether or not they are prone to mystical experiences. Hon imagines that just a few years out these technologies being combined to form a brand new and disturbing form of interrogation.

In 2019, after a series of terrorists attacks in Charlotte North Carolina the FBI starts using so-called “locked-sims” to interrogate terrorist suspects. A suspect is run through a simulation in which his neurological responses are closely monitored in the hope that they might do things such as help identify other suspects, or unravel future plots.

The technique of locked-sims appears to be so successful that it is soon becomes the rage in other areas of law enforcement involving much less existential public risks. Imagine murder suspects or even petty criminals run through a simulated version of the crime- their every internal and external reaction minutely monitored.

Whatever their promise locked-sims prove full of errors and abuses not the least of which is their tendency to leave the innocents often interrogated in them emotionally scarred. Ancient protections end up saving us from a nightmare technology. In 2033 the US Supreme Court deems locked-sims a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore constitutionally prohibited.

#20 Cross Ball- 2026

A good deal of A History of the Future deals with the way we might relate to advances in artificial intelligence, and one thing Hon tries to make clear is that, in this century at least, human beings won’t suddenly just exit the stage to make room for AI. For a good while the world will be hybrid.

“Cross Ball” is an imagined game that’s a little like the ancient Mesoamerican ball game of Nahuatl, only in Cross Ball human beings work in conjunction with bots. Hon sees a lot of AI combined with human teams in the future world of work, but in sports, the reason for the amalgam has more to do with human psychology:

Bots on their own were boring; humans on their own were old-fashioned. But bots and humans together? That was something new.

This would be new for real word games, but we do already have this in “Freestyle Chess” where old-fashioned humans can no longer beat machines and no one seems to want to watch matches between chess playing programs, so that the games with the most interest have been those which match human beings working with programs against other human beings working with programs. In the real world bot/human games of the future I hope they have good helmets.

# 23 Desir 2026

Another area where I thought Hon was really onto something was when it came to puppets. Seriously. AI is indeed getting better all the time even if Siri or customer service bots can be so frustrating, but it’s likely some time out before bots show anything like the full panoply of human interactions like imagined in the film Her. But there’s a mid-point here and that’s having human beings remotely control the bots- to be their puppeteers.

Hon imagines this in the realm of prostitution. A company called Desir essentially uses very sophisticated forms of sex dolls as puppets controlled by experienced prostitutes. The weaknesses of AI give human beings something to do. As he quotes Desir’s imaginary founder:

Our agent AI is pretty good as it is, but like I said, there’s nothing that beats the intimate connection that only a real human can make. Our members are experts and they know what to say, how to move and how to act better than our own AI agents, so I think that any members who choose to get involved in puppeting will supplement their income pretty nicely

# 26 Amplified Teams 2027

One thing I really liked about A History of the Future is that it put flesh on the bones of an idea that has been developed by the economist Tyler Cowen in his book Average is Over (review pending) that employment in the 21st century won’t eventually all be swallowed up by robots, but that the highest earners, or even just those able to economically sustain themselves, would be in the form of teams connected to the increasing capacity of AI. Such are Hon’s “amplified teams” which Hon states:

 ….usually have three to seven human members supported by highly customized software that allows them to communicate with one another-  and with AI support systems- at an accelerated rate.

I’m crossing my fingers that somebody invents a bot for introverts- or is that a contradiction?

#39 Micromort Detector – 2032

Hon foresees our aging population becoming increasingly consumed with mortality and almost obsessive compulsive with measurement as a means of combating our anxiety. Hence his idea of the “micromort detector”.

A micromort is a unit of risk representing a one-in-a-million chance of death.

Mutual Assurance is a company that tried to springboard off this anxiety with its product “Lifeline” a device for measuring the mortality risk of any behavior the hope being to both improve healthy living, and more important for the company to accurately assess insurance premiums. Drink a cup of coffee – get a score, eat a doughnut, score.

The problem with the Lifeline was that it wasn’t particularly accurate due to individual variation, and the idea that the road to everything was paved in the 1s and 0s of data became passe. The Lifeline did however sometimes cause people to pause and reflect on their own mortality:

And that’s perhaps the most useful thing that the Lifeline did. Those trying to guide their behavior were frequently stymied, but that very effort often prompted a fleeting understanding of mortality and caused more subtle, longer- lasting changes in outlook. It wasn’t a magical device that made people wiser- it was a memento mori.

#56 Shanghai Six 2036

As part of the gaming world Hon has some really fascinating speculations on the future of entertainment. With Shanghai Six he imagines a mashup of alternate reality games such as his own Zombies Run! and something like the massive role playing found in events such as historical reenactments combined with aspects of reality television and all rolled up into the drama of film. Shanghai Six is a 10,000 person global drama with actors drawn from the real world. I’d hate to be the film crew’s gofer.

#63 Javelin 2040

The History of the Future also has some rather interesting things to say about the future of human enhancement. The transition begins with the paralympians who by the 2020’s are able to outperform by a large measure typical human athletes.

The shift began in 2020, when the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) staged a technology demonstration….

The demonstration was a huge success. People had never before seen such a direct combination of technology and raw human will power outside of war, and the sponsors were delighted at the viewing figures. The interest, of course, lay in marketing their expensive medical and lifestyle devices to the all- important Gen-X and Millennial markets, who were beginning to worry about their mobility and independence as they grew older.

There is something of the Daytona 500 about this here, sports becoming as much about how good the technology is as it is about the excellence of the athlete. And all sports do indeed seem to be headed this way. The barrier now is that technological and pharmaceutical assists for the athlete are not seen as a way to take human performance to its limits, but as a form of cheating. Yet, once such technologies become commonplace Hon imagines it unlikely that such distinctions will prove sustainable:

By the 40s and 50s, public attitudes towards mimic scripts, lenses, augments and neural laces had relaxed, and the notion that using these things would somehow constitute ‘cheating’ seemed outrageous. Baseline non-augmented humans were becoming the minority; the Paralympians were more representative of the real world, a world in which everyone was becoming enhanced in some small or large way.

It was a far cry from the Olympics. But then again, the enhanced were a far cry from the original humans.

#70 The Fourth Great Awakening 2044

Hon has something like Nassim Taleb’s idea that one of the best ways we have of catching the shadow of the future isn’t to have a handle on what will be new, but rather a good idea of what will still likely be around. The best indication we have that something will exist in the future is how long it has existed in the past. Long life proves evolutionary robustness under a variety of circumstances. Families have been around since our beginnings and will therefore likely exist for a long time to come.

Things that exist for a long time aren’t unchanging but flexible in a way that allows them to find expression in new forms once the old ways of doing things cease working.

Hon sees our long lived desire for communal eating surviving in his  #25 The Halls (2027) where people gather and mix together in collectively shared kitchen/dining establishments.

Halls speak to our strong need for social interaction, and for the ages-old idea that people will always need to eat- and they’ll enjoy doing it together.

And the survival of the reading in a world even more media and distraction saturated in something like dedicated seclusionary Reading Rooms (2030) #34. He also sees the survival of one of the oldest of human institutions, religion, only religion will have become much more centered on worldliness and will leverage advances in neuroscience to foster, depending on your perspective, either virtue or brainwashing.  Thus we have Hon’s imagined Fourth Great Awakening and the Christian Consummation Movement.

If I use the eyedrops, take the pills, and enroll in their induction course of targeted viruses and magstim- which I can assure you I am not about to do- then over the next few months, my personality and desires would gradually be transformed. My aggressive tendencies would be lowered. I’d readily form strong, trusting friendships with the people I met during this imprinting period- Consummators, usually. I would become generally more empathetic, more generous and “less desiring of fleeting, individual and mundane pleasures” according to the CCM.

It is social conditions that Hon sees driving the creation of something like the CCM, namely mass unemployment caused by globalization and especially automation. The idea, again, is very similar to that of Tyler Cowen’s in Average is Over, but whereas Cowen sees in the rise of Neo-victorianism a lifeboat for a middle class savaged by automation, Hon sees the similar CCM as a way human beings might try to reestablish the meaning they can no longer derive from work.

Hon’s imagined CCM combines some very old and very new technologies:

The CCM understood how Christianity itself spread during the Apostolic Age through hundreds of small gatherings, and accelerated that process by multiple orders of magnitude with the help of network technologies.

And all of that combined with the most advanced neuroscience.

​#72 The Downvoted 2045

Augmented reality devices such as Google Glass should let us see the world in new ways, but just important might be what it allows us not to have to see. From this Hon derives his idea of “downvoting” essentially the choice to redact from reality individuals the group has deemed worthless.

“They don’t see you, “ he used to say. “You are completely invisible.I don’t know if it was better or worse  before these awful glasses, when people just pretended you didn’t exist. Now I am told that there are people who literally put you out of their sight, so that I become this muddy black shadow drifting along the pavement. And you know what? People will still downvote a black shadow!”

I’ll leave you off at Hon’s world circa 2045, but he has a lot else to say about everything from democracy, to space colonies to the post-21century future of AI. Somehow Hon’s patchwork imagined artifacts of the future allowed him to sew together a quilt of the century before us in a very clear pattern. What is that pattern?

That out in front of us the implications of continued miniaturization, networking, algorithmization, AI, and advances in neuroscience and human enhancement will continue to play themselves out. This has bright sides and dark sides and one of the darker that the opportunities for gainful human employment will become more rare.

Trained as a neuroscientist, Hon sees both dangers and opportunities as advances in neuroscience make the human brain once firmly secured in the black box of the skull permeable. Here there will be opportunities for abuse by the state or groups with nefarious intents, but there will also be opportunities for enriched human cooperation and even art.

All fascinating stuff, but it was what he had to say about the future of entertainment and the arts that I found most intriguing.  As the CEO of the company Six-to-Start he has his finger on the pulse of the entertainment in a way I do not. In the near future, Hon sees a blurring of the lines between gaming, role playing, and film and television, and there will be extraordinary changes in the ways we watch and play sports.

As for the arts, here where I live in Pennsylvania we are constantly bombarded with messages that our children need to be training in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). This is often to the detriment of programs in “useless” liberal arts such as history and most of all art programs whose budgets have been consistently whittled away. Hon showed me a future in which artists and actors, or more clearly people who have had exposure through schooling to the arts, may be some of the few groups that can avoid, at least for a time, the onset of AI driven automation. Puppeteering of various sorts would seem to be a likely transitional phase between “dead” humanoid robots and true and fully human like AI. This isn’t just a matter of the lurid future of prostitution, but for remote nursing, health care, and psychotherapy. Engineers and scientists will bring us the tools of the future, but it’s those with humanistic “soft-skills” that will be needed to keep that future livable, humane, and interesting.

We see this with another of  The History of the Future’s underlying perspectives- that a lot of the struggle of the future will be about keeping it a place human beings are actually happy to live in and that much of doing this will rely on tools of the past or finding protective bubbles through which the things that we now treasure can survive in the new reality we are building. Hence Hon’s idea of dining halls and reading rooms, and even more generally his view that people will continue to search for meaning sometimes turning to one of our most ancient technologies- religion- to do so.

Yet perhaps what Hon has most given us in The History of the Future is less a prediction than a kind of game with which we too can play which helps us see the outlines of the future, after all, game design is his thing. Perhaps, I’ll try to play the game myself sometime soon…