Welcome to the machine

In the last issue I discussed the imminent emergence of H2, the next generation of human.
In our next stage of evolution we will be increasingly engineered. This engineering will be biological and physical and will combine genetic and other technologies. We might even have little ports in our heads into which memory sticks can be inserted so we don’t forget the things we usually can’t remember. As parts fail they will be replaced. We may start to live very long lives indeed.
You could spend time worrying about this. And sometime soon perhaps we will. But what a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that change is already all around us and that, in effect, Big Brother really is watching you.
As you’ll already know, the US Congress passed legalisation in 2002 that required countries in the visa-waiver programme to start issuing high-technology passports. These are so-called biometric-chip passports.
Biometric chips are capable of holding biographical information on people like fingerprints, facial dimensions and iris scans. The US Department of Homeland Security wanted the chips installed by October in passports of European citizens who can travel to America for short-term visits without a visa.
They were concerned with tracking terrorists but their proposal was resisted by civil liberty groups. It now appears that the US is relaxing its stance and that the new Irish passport, which features a very secure digitised photograph, may be accepted.
But don’t relax. Iris scans aren’t going away. Neither are biometric chips. Furthermore, while these are usually advanced on the basis of security, they also facilitate tracking. And there’s a lot of that about too. Global satellite positioning systems don’t just track ships and planes.
We are already familiar with the degree to which our mobile phones leave shadows and how police have used signal records to establish very precisely where individuals were at specific moments. But our credit and debit cards leave similar trails. Your bank can tell vast amounts about you from your transactions, including what and where you eat, drink and make merry.
And that’s not all. What do you reveal with emails and internet browsing? I’m not talking about where you visit when you’re supposed to be working. I’m talking about where you visit in general. And while you already knew that your computer kept a log that was not erasable, did you know that US government agencies also track visits to certain websites?
It’s an irony. Our world is more individualised than any before. We have incredible capacity for personalising almost all aspects of our lives. But at the same time we are also just as watched and scrutinised as our great grandparents, most of whom lived their lives within ten kilometres of where they were born.
This enormous level of monitoring is made possible by the enormous capacity of technology to find, amass and process information, the same phenomenal technology that will make possible all the advances I mentioned last issue.
And it gets more scary. Whereas we are at the limits of how much information we can process, machine systems are not. They will grow more capable at an exponential rate, certainly to the point where they will be able to out-think humans. This will happen within a lifetime, and certainly before 2050.
That will mark the ‘post-human’ or H2 phase of evolution. We will increasingly be a mix of old human and new technology. That this will be especially true of the rich is just another of life’s injustices.
But it will also be increasingly difficult to separate the real and the virtual. It isn’t just the advances in computerised graphics, though face it, even a cursory engagement with the latest consoles like X-Box shows that the graphics are amazing. No, it’s also the massive growth in virtual worlds with which we interact and in which we spend a lot of time.
Second Life (www.secondlife.com) is an example. Try it out. But when you see how much of our life is already spent interacting with computers and mobile technology, it’s clear that there’s now considerable seepage between real and virtual and that this is likely to increase, possibly to the point that we will exist in both.
The implications are huge. I’ll come back to them next issue.b