Review by Doug Cocks of Tomorrow’s People: How 21st
Century Technology Is Changing The Way We Think And Feel by
This
is a book about how new technologies emerging in the 21st century
‘might change our thoughts, feelings and personalities’. It is written by Susan Greenfield, Professor of
Pharmacology at Oxford University and ‘a distinguished neuroscientist,
broadcaster, writer and best-selling author of The Private Life of the Brain
and The Human Brain: A Guided Tour ‘
Each
of the book’s ten chapters poses and then discusses a question, starting with The
Future: What is the Problem? The
problem is not that science could change ‘everyday life’. It is not that new technologies have ‘ colossal potential for good and evil’. The problem with the future is that emerging
technologies ‘could all conspire together to ‘challenge how we think, what kind
of individuals we are, and even whether each of us stays an individual at all.’
Chapter
2 asks What will we see as reailiy? ‘…the
human mind could be on the brink of a makeover even more cataclysmic than that
which separates the attitudes of (these) earlier generations from our own
new-millennium view.’ We may well ‘spend
far more time at home…changes in the way we use space …might sound like science
fiction now but could have clear practical advantages in an overcrowded or
ecologically compromised planet.’ The
chapter moves through home technologies to clothing technologies to having
‘cyber-friends’. The minutiae of everyday
life will be available as an electronic story line of the individual’s
life. Plausibly, we would ‘no longer
have private thoughts, rather we would effectively be part of a larger network,
a mere node in a thinking, conscious system that goes way beyond an individual
mind.’ Blurring of the interface between
artificial systems and humans will be a recurrent reason why our descendants
will see reality in a very different way.
Chapter
3, on robots, asks How will we think of our
bodies? The lives of future
generations will involve more interactions with computers and fewer with
people. In particular, robots will
become more capable and, perhaps even conscious. Conversely, prostheses for expanding and
improving bodily capabilities will become more effective (eg
better artificial eyes) and more diverse, eg brain
implants for stimulating consciousness or the emotions. There will be a blurring of the distinction
between body and non-body. The chapter segues into a discussion of contemporary
research into how the brain works and possibilities for manipulating such
workings, even as far as the artificial brain. Overall, an increasing fraction
of the information people process will come from computers.
Chapter
4, on work, asks What will we do with our
time? It begins with a long
discussion on prospects for computing power and the energy sources that will
serve tomorrow’s high-speed computers.
The chapter is largely concerned with how this information technology
revolution will change people’s working lives. Workforces and company sizes
will shrink. Many will work from home.
Work for many could be very much routine and boring. In compensation there will be much more
leisure, which we may or may not know how to use. As with earlier chapters, the overall message
is that traditional boundaries in our lives will be breaking down. Adapting to constant change will make it
harder to build a smoothly evolving persona and life story. Who am I?
Chapter
5, on reproduction, asks How will we view
life? It starts by quoting Francis Fukuyama’s warning that biotechnology
might alter human nature and move us into a ‘posthuman’
epoch. The chapter reviews what is known
about genes and diseases, genes and phenotypic traits. There is a straying towards but not a plunge
into the pit of sociobiology; rather a ‘subtle dialogue between nurture and nature’. Prospects for various reproductive
technologies (eg non-human surrogate mothers) and
gene therapies (eg genetic enhancement) are
discussed. Cloning will be possible and
acceptable within ‘the next few decades’. A blurring of parenthood, generations
and gender and a narrowing of the species’ genetic variability becomes
possible.
Chapter
6, on education, asks What will we need to
learn? It first reviews physical and
functional brain development., particularly the
plasticity of this process according to environment. The possibility of using
such knowledge to manipulate learning is raised.---helped
by toys that learn perhaps. Literacy and
abstract thought will be less important in a culture of screen-based
experience. Learning to adapt to
accelerating technological change will be critical. Required skills will
usually be IT related. Homogenised individuals being socialised
in diverse family structures is another scenario. Overall, education will begin blurring with
everyday life..
Chapter
7 is about science---What questions will we ask? Computers, nano-science
and genetics are identified as the pivotal sciences which will drive the
technological advances this book sees as determining how tomorrow’s people will
think and feel. Over coming decades, disciplinary
boundaries will blur, synthesis will jostle reductionism. Then comes a discursive list of fairly
conventional ‘big questions’, from space-time cosmology to quantal
and nano (molecule by molecule) processes. Human science will focus on the body’s three
‘control’ systems---hormones, emotions and the central nervous system. Consciousness, not unexpectedly, gets a solid
workout.
Chapter
8 uses terrorism as an entry point for the question Shall we still have free
will? ‘Yet surely the march of technology
will eventually work against the narrowing of the mind that defines the
heart-and-soul fanatic’ (!!). Military
and terrorist technologies (biological, chemical, informational etc) are
reviewed. The psychology and purpose of
terrorism are outlined. Indeed,
terrorism is viewed primarily as a psychological malfunction. The scary importance of our need to belong is
stressed.. The behaviouristic challenge is to learn how to make terrorists
happy. Finally, in a terrorised
world, the boundaries between war and peace will blur.
Now
we are coming up the straight. Chapter 9
asks of human nature, How robust will it be?
and Chapter 10 asks What are the options for
managing a degraded, overpopulated, poverty-ridden world? Professor Greenfield is accepting of EO
Wilson’s definition of human nature as ‘those deeply embedded laws of behaviour that shape society, technology and culture’. Nonetheless, she goes on to argue for
‘…human nature (as)…a generalised umbrella term for behaviours that depend on status and social values. The cultures and values may vary, but the behaviours do not. The really important distinction to grasp is that diverse cultures and values determine when and how the behaviours manifest themselves, but the behaviours themselves are recognisable as uniform, above and beyond the particular context in which they occur’.
If behaviour (observable activity) is context-dependent, what are the context-independent determinants of that behaviour, the foundations of human nature? Beyond genes, emotions, drives and Wilsonian ‘traits and tendencies’, it is suggested that the ‘concept of the self’ is ‘central to human nature’. It is implied that, within hir own social context, each individual is working to create a significant self. And it is that project which Professor Greenfield sees as being threatened by those emerging technologies which ‘drug’ the brain into pre-consciousness as they meet our every need or which stimulate the brain so frenetically that persisting elements of a significant self have no time to develop.
. ‘…the new technologies might jeopardise the very existence of human nature, permanently’.
Or, just to muddy the waters, an alternative scenario is suggested. We might be so interconnected in a Web-like technological ‘noosphere’ that a collective identity, a crowd mentality, emerges and constrains the expression of individual identities. The danger suggested here is the growth of fanaticism and fundamentalism and a world of ‘large-scale death and suffering’.
Chapter 10 explores options for the future, or, more accurately, explores possible global-scale futures. It starts by recognising that the ‘vast majority’ of people in our degraded crowded world will not have to worry about technological challenges to their ‘human nature’. Fanaticism and fundamentalism stand to flourish in the world’s great urban slums, without a smidgin of help from any noosphere. Not to worry though, ‘…the ecological, political, financial and sociological implications of a multicultural, enriched world on the one hand and an ever poorer world that has been deserted by the young and able on the other are outside the scope of our discussions here’ (Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?). While it is likely that the first and third worlds will continue to move further apart, there are many ways in which our powerful new technologies could be harnessed ‘to bring the material quality of life in the developing world to a level commensurate with that in first-world countries’, eg electronic news kiosks. The book ends with a plea to protect ‘the most precious thing we each have’, our private egos, that part of the mind which is most conscious of self.
Enough of striving to be fair. This is a poorly-argued and poorly-constructed book. On the latter, the book is a ramble (yes) through a landscape with no signposts. Despite the fact that every chapter has multiple themes, often connected by little more than free association, there are no chapter sub-headings.
The book’s core message is that, if widely applied, this century’s emerging technologies might produce a world where people think, feel and spend their time differently. But has it not ever been so? Certainly for sociology’s cultural materialists, changes in technology first change the economic system of production and then people adapt or are adapted to the new system.
As Eric Fromm puts it in Fear of Freedom, all societies socialise people so they want to do what must be done to keep society functioning. Thus, a society’s social character ( a more useful concept here than human nature) is those motivators/drivers of actions and feelings which are common to most of its members. Social character is shaped primarily by the system of production and the sort of work available simply because this is what the individual has to accept and adapt to in order to live. This is also why certain definite changes in social character take place at certain historical epochs. For example, Protestant doctrines prepared people to accept the roles they were required to play under industrialism. Or, another example, after the renaissance economic activity became respectable whereas in medieval times salvation was the primary concern. Putting it this way, the modern individual emerged from the destruction of the medieval social structure. And the process continues. The success of industrial capitalism requires consumption and, presto, a social character with accumulation as its central concern has emerged (with, as Postman, Chomsky and others contend, a little help from the advertising industry).
As the capitalist world enters a new ‘long wave’ of economic activity based on the technologies Professor Greenfield identifies, it would be surprising if social character in the core economies did not respond. But, and this is the author’s $64 question, will it be fundamentally different this time? Will people lose their capacity to reproduce society? Stupefied by somatic comforts and brainwashed by an overload of virtual experience, will westerners lose the sense of self and the drive for self-realisation which ultimately powers the reproduction and evolution of social organisation?
This is where the book falls down. So much space is devoted to an eye-glazing multitude of ‘Jesus, fancy that’ technological possibilities (make that an A for homework) that not much is left for exploring why the next change in social character could be disastrously dysfunctional. Or, if not societally dysfunctional, just plain unappealing. Instead of plausible arguments as to why particular types of technologies produce particular types of mental adaptations, grounded in an historical framework which the author probably lacks, it is rhetorically asserted that human nature may be insufficiently robust to survive what is in store for it. The suggestion is that the rate of change could exceed the capacity to adapt.
And she could be right. Much have I read about the inadequacies of the human mind for coping with its own products---from the problems of the ‘big brain’ as an evolutionary experiment through Spengler’s The Decline of the West to Toffler’s Future Shock. For all sorts of reasons, one of which is brains that are not up to the task, it would not surprise me if the species hits the wall.
But not under the