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Fantastika!: SF & The Weird: Our Descendants will be Frighteningly Incomprehensible
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I was reading an ethics discussion dressed up as a First Contact story thanks to Peter Watts' blog today and, in there, two of the future humans have this exchange:
Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?"
Akon wasn't sure whether to smile or grimace. "The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can't imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then
In the discussion thread that followed this chapter, many readers tried to come to terms with the meaning of this exchange. With the author's participation, what it seems to come down to is:Today nonconsenual sex is bundled with violence, fear of violence, and expectations of personal space. If the impossible possible culture is such that everyone expects their genitals to be part of the social space instead of their personal space, then no great sense of emotional violation will be felt even if the social interaction is unwanted.
They likely view the prohibition as just as shortsighted as we would view restrictions on 'free expression'.
- A readerI was able to go to some length to insert the disclaimer that "rape" in their world just doesn't mean the same thing to them as it does to us, and that rape in our world is a very bad thing of which I disapprove... the premise I was working from is "the boundaries of consent around your sexual self have been redrawn in different places" not "the boundaries have been eliminated"
-the authorIn certain older cultures the phrase "If at first you don't succeed..." would be finished with "kill yourself" whereas now we "try again".
-Another reader
This whole exchange is really fascinating - I think it goes without saying that in any imagined future in which human beings radically modify themselves biologically and/or cybernetically there will be some things we view now as moral baselines or absolutes which will be seen as quaint irrelevancies by our descendants.
Other than the flamebait example given in that story (please lets not argue that specific one!), what are some things that future people may find totally normal, understandable and desirable that the present day would be morally and aesthetically repulsed by? -
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeFeb 8th 2009
If you have multiple copies of your psyche running around in cyborg bodies, clones etc, destroying one of them is going to be a much lesser deal.
Ditto if you have a back-up copy stashed somewhere. -
Yes - I imagine the clone-world version of a practical joke, instead of ending with a soaking from a door-propped bucket, might instead involve limb or head loss. Instead of complex hazardous duty suits, expendable copies. Which leads to questions about the legal status of a copy... is it the property of the original? Is it effectively a slave?
There was a cool thing in a book called Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod where one of the characters in a hazardous situation becomes stranded and knows she will die. She also knows that at some point after her death, the organization that sent her will send another copy of her to figure out what happened, so she essentially writes herself a long, heartfelt impassioned letter of what life meant to her and what insights the immanence of death has given her. It's a beautiful letter. When her copy finally arrives and finds the letter on the corpse, she starts reading it, but once she realizes what it is she sort of goes "Meaning of life, blah, blah blah" and crumples it up and throws it away, completely uninterested.
Tragic, weird, and sounds sort of true. -
- CommentAuthorJames Cunningham
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2009
No, the clone-world version of death will be exactly the same as ours. Here, I'll prove it-
Ok, first up go make a clone of yourself. If you can't do that, just kind of picture in your head that you're standing side-by-side with your clone. Which one is you? Simple, the one looking at the clone. From the clone's point of view, of course, it's completely the other way around. Both you and your clone are two distinct individuals whose identities and will to live aren't even slightly interchangeable. I, looking at the two of you, have a completely different viewpoint, as now there's one of you and a spare, but that hardly helps you and your clone decide which one gets to sacrifice himself for the greater good, or the mission, or whichever. -
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2009 edited
James, yes but imagine, you upload the memories of both copies and combine them with input from other copies.
And now imagine that the you about to die remembers the deaths of previous clones. -
Or, like David Brin's Kiln People, the clones aren't genetic clones, exactly, but some kind of temporary constructed corpus into which a full or partial copy of your personality is implanted to carry out a specific purpose, after which the constructed copy will be decommissioned even if not destroyed in the conduct of it's mission, but the gathered experience added to the original source.
But by our current standards, even the copies would be sentient people with individual rights. But will that remain the general view, even if those copies can be casually made, and all are derived from (and sort of returned to) a controlling original?
Maybe the temporary bodies are grown like those cancer homunculi from that other thread. Maybe they aren't person-shaped. Maybe you can distribute a controlling consciousness over a swarm of rat-like creatures that can spread over a disaster site to locate victims. Each rat thing has a copy of your consciousness robust enough to be considered intelligent on the scale of maybe an idiot savant, good for doing one or two specific tasks, but if this same intelligence were in a born person today, that person would still be a law protected individual. But would the search rats? Would it be right by today's standards to create them for the sole purpose of sending them into harm's way, and then to destroy them afterward and subsume their stored experiences into a unified master controller, from which they were originally derived?
That's all pretty out-there science fictionally, granted. Do you have a closer to possible example of how future people might see something as acceptable that we would be appalled by? -
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2009
Consensual sex between adult siblings with genetic screening used to ensure any children don't suffer as a result of the inbreeding. -
If you can get past the fanservice the second Ghost in the Shell manga 'Man Machine Interface' does some interesting stuff with notion of the self when you can just move your mind about from one cyborg body to another.
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One thing I've been thinking a lot about is identity and privacy. Ultimately, the problems we have around identity management, identity theft and so on will be resolved by encryption - not to keep things secret, but to generate verifiable identity. This is an often-overlooked aspect of encryption the crypto-anarchist sorts often pass over, and I think one that will become increasingly prominent.
A "credit card," assuming there are still such things as cards (it will probably be your "phone"), won't be protected by a signature, but rather by a cryptographic hash of your fingerprint, iris print, DNA, etc. Carrying out a transaction will be a matter of using your keys to sign the transaction. You'll be able to do those things like walk into a grocery store and walk out again with your groceries without going through a cashier, because they'll be automatically scanned and charged to you, but the reason for this is that you are constantly broadcasting your identity. Our kids will constantly have a little balloon over their heads identifying them in the data cloud - totally unforgeable, and totally public.
So most people will live in a state where their every transaction and most movements will be systematically tagged and tracked, and won't think a thing about it because of how damn convenient it all will be. Your car will remember who you are. Your restaurants and hotels will automatically deliver your preferences. You can find your friends whenever you want. This won't come from a fascist government, but from credit and insurance companies concerned about fraud and pushing convenience and safety. Sure, you'll be able to turn off things like public GPS location and geotagging, until you access a service or make a transaction that requires it be turned on. Many people will just leave it all on by default.
Our unrecognizable children will be tagged with a crypto key from birth, recorded from their DNA and registered with their name. This will verify their identity for the rest of their lives. With the possibility of clones, DNA alone isn't sufficient of course, so plain old passwords will be used, but the constant geotagging and key-verification of real life transactions - with full video, audio, and environmental recording - will become popular just to be sure. Walking into the store and buying a pack of gum with your phone credit card will trigger a crytographically-signed snapshot of the entire environment, checked against the buyer's hash of their own recording and signed by your DNA, part of the record forever, and nobody will care. They or the authorities will be able to pull up their datashadow timeline and play back their entire lives transaction by transaction, including their physical movements. -
The one thing that I've been thinking about is not so much the idea of identity as people as a pure concept.
Recently, I was talking - no, text messaging - a friend. I used to see her pretty often, but she moved and now we only get together months apart and so almost all of our communication is online or via phone. I said, more or less, that while we're still valuable to each other, the disassociation causes us to boil each other down into our component parts, and we see each other more conceptually than interpersonally. Because location no longer dictates communication, and because of the limitations of most conventional forms of remote interaction, people won't really think of each other as entire people any more. Most online presence is faceless, and certainly discorporeal. Without their bodies, they'll be cooked down into the most relevant aspect by each other. The most obvious traits of a person will emerge as the only concept that other parties will be concerned with and absorb, rendering people more unto an intellectual commodity than a complete, unique being. -
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CommentAuthormister hex
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2009
Do you have a closer to possible example of how future people might see something as acceptable that we would be appalled by?
Pretty much anything sexual, I'd imagine. They'll laugh at our porn, same way we think Victorians were cuckoo for fetishizing women's ankles.
The fact WE used to fight the wars, not robots. The fact that we weren't fighting a war with the robots.
And paper money will seem like a stupid idea to them. And the pet-owner relationship will be radically different.
I hope they'll be as appalled by us as we are by people who owned slaves. -
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@Stygmata - privacy, I think, will basically not exist - and no one will mind. Think about current middle-school kids, who don't remember a time when everyone didn't have MySpace pages and blogs and Flickr photostreams, and ask yourself how they'll really feel about video cameras on street corners.
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Not even just that, but the fact that they will all readily accept that on those videocameras, they have a floating status balloon over their heads reading "JOHN SMITH: CREDIT RATING AA. CURRENT OPERATION: PURCHASING MARS BAR" or whatever all the time as they are being filmed. They not only won't *mind*, they will actively appreciate and support it, complain when it breaks, and generally rely on this trailing datacloud as their external memory, diary, addressbook, purchase ledger, &cetera...
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- CommentAuthorBrent Wilcox
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2009 edited
"You kids get off my lawn!"
(I tried to delete this post, which was a longer rant, but it basically boiled down to that phrase... ) -
Now I'm curious what was in the longer rant, as I missed it!
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- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeFeb 10th 2009 edited
In Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, people live more or less completely immersed in ubiquitous computing. Having your personal network hacked can be disastrous. Most forms of social interaction involve at least some degree of interaction between people's personal networks - their cellphone-equivalents swap profiles, web-addresses etc.
This means that contact with someone whose own network has been compromised can be disastrous.
People who don't know how to/can't be bothered to run adequate security protocols aren't just looked on as stupid or feckless - they're dirty; they're infected and they're ostracised as a result. -
Yeah, that was a great book. There was also a great bit in Charlie Stross' Accelerando where a character has his offline storage device stolen on the street, and he is so inter-connected to it that losing it is almost lobotomizing to him.
This Vinge/Stross thing isn't that far off, actually. I would lose a significant portion of my network of contacts and short-term offline memory if my cell phone were pick-pocketed, and I am already sort of annoyed if I meet an otherwise interesting person who has no web presence at all to follow up on.
Someone within a "trusted" network - (i.e. Facebook friends) who emails me a chain letter within that system immediately incurs my suspicion... like, did I make a mistake accepting this person into this circle?
The extension of personal space into certain aspects of online social networks is already well underway. -
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeFeb 10th 2009
An old sf standby Warren used in Transmet: if carniculture (growing meat in vitro) ever takes off, we'll end up with people happily eating long pig, dog, horse, cat and any other damn thing that takes their fancy so long as it's grown in a vat - and revolted at the idea of killing animals for meat. -
- CommentAuthorSilentObjector
- CommentTimeFeb 10th 2009
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the fact that wearable technology will be EVERYWHERE in the new age. Your jacket will have a screen and controls synced with your mobile device of choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if hooded sweatshirts and hats aren't turned into localized speaker systems. Clothes will be as much "how does it look?" as "what does it do?"