Watching this documentary about the year 2057 last night on Discovery I got to thinking about the future of philosophy and the intrinsic questions that will plague our culture in the decades to come. I feel the program was imaginative and well put together but verged on the hokey when talking about old 21st century computers infecting the machines of the 2057 present. I liked the holographic pets for kids with built in GPS, and the smart shirts that monitored your physical wellbeing. But I didn’t like the complete lack of privacy some of these advancements are sure to incur. Flying cars and build your own organs are certainly cool, but what about people who do not want the mechanized equivalent of modern innovation?
My wife and I are working with a local architect who was explaining to us that Autocad and ArchiCad are taking over the industry. He is one of the few [mind you the few] architects who still do hand drawn work. We are paying a little more for the hand drawn artistry that will come with our finished project – an addition to our home.
Architecture is only one profession where technology is butting it’s head into. Surgeons are increasingly utilizing robotic innovations to help with surgeries, I don’t find anything intrinsically wrong with this, but will doctor’s in the future not learn the hands on techniques? Will a future surgeon say “Oh shit our robotic arm is malfunctioning – I may have to do this by hand?”
Could these be things that we will encounter in our future?
Let’s say modern medicine comes full circle and world mortality goes from the high 70’s and 80’s to living to be 187? What then?
“Well Hayden, I’ve had three livers cloned and I’m about to get the fourth…Sure are glad they came up with this technology…”
This is an all well and good achievement for our physical bodies, but it does nothing for our mind. A depressed 70 year old could live with it for another 100 years in the future. Do we really want that? What will this mean for the future of psychology? Will society simply adapt?
MODS Please delete the gobbled up first thread from a few hours ago…
At that point we will have hopefully passed the technological singularity, where we would have a flood of nanobots in our bloodstream and macro-mechanical implants in our brains and bodies. We can be our own cyborg overlords.
One nitpick with your thread title. I’d be shocked, shocked, if tigers were extinct in 2057. The problem for tigers is habitat destruction, forests getting cut down for farms and such. But tigers breed like crazy in captivity, in fact the problem is finding room for all the captive tigers. Backyard breeders have lots of surplus tigers, but zoos and reputable wildlife sanctuaries won’t take them because they just don’t have the room. So while tigers might go extinct in the wild, the only barrier to captive species survival is money, the amount of money and space that is allocated to captive big cats.
If tigers were on the verge of extinction we could easily support hundreds of captive tigers with just a small increase in the amount of money allocated to captive tiger maintanence.
So we might find almost no wild tigers in 2057 but the prospect for tiger extinction is remote. Barring a world-wide economic collapse of course.
Isn’t modern innovation already mechanized? For about two centuries now?
What about hand-drawn is preferrable over computer-generated?
Isn’t this pretty much implicit in any scientific advance? Older techniques will become obsolete and less practiced as they are supplanted by newer, more effective, safer techniques.
Also, saying that technology is “butting into” these professions sounds loaded to me, like its being forced into a situation where it’s not wanted. Advances in technology are giving us new, safer, more effective treatments for an endless variety of ailments, and advances in building materials make all sorts of new designs possible in architecture. You seem to be indicating that there is some sort of a trade-off with technological progress, like we’re losing something by advancing our knowledge in these areas, but I’m not entirely certain what you think we’re giving up.
How is that “full circle?” Medicine going “full circle” would mean we’d go back to having barbers cure us with leeches and dying before we turn forty. Adding a hundred years to the human life span would be a fantastic, unprecedented advance for medical science, not any sort of a return or regression to older practices or situations.
Why are you assuming that such incredible advances in age-retardent treatments, cancer, heart disease, alzheimers, and other ailments associated with old age would occur without commensurate advances in the fields of psychology and neurology? Just in the last few years, we’ve made significant advances in the treatment of mental disorders through adjusting brain chemistry. I don’t see any particular reason to assume that field of research would stagnate at our current level, when virtually every other field of medicine is making the enormous strides necessary to more than double human life expectancy.
A newspaper story the other day talked of an antidepressant pacemaker. Tiny jolts of electricity would be applied to the vagus nerve in the left side of the neck. The sender was pictured under the skin of the left side of the chest. The testing so far is promising.
We have airliners today that can fly departure runway centerline to arrival runway centerline on autopilot alone without much human intervention alone. If you fly a lot, you may have been on a flight where the pilots used the autoland capability on the plane. They have to use it for approach in some weather and they have to test it regularly.
Does that make pilots less skilled and lackadaisical? Of course not. They have thousands of hours of flying time and the hand fly to keep themselves proficient when the situation dictates. The technology gives them the option of taking a relieving the monotonous parts of the flight, helps give passengers a smoother ride, and permits landing in weather that was considered too marginal before. Manipulation of the yoke and pedals is only a small part of the job of flying a large airliner and that option is still there.
Likewise, technology can help doctors concentrate and learn more about the strategy and advanced techniques of surgery rather than focusing on hand steadiness and sharp knife control.
My junior high teachers always said that we couldn’t depend on calculators to do even the most monotonous calculations because we may need to do one sometime when a calculator isn’t available. That has yet to happen for me and I think my learning to program complex problems is more useful than one being one of those people that can work an abacus at a lightning pace.
I always thought the depression in the aging community was due to decreased movement, nothing to do, and the realization that you aren’t the man or woman you once were. Death also looms over you, and the world changes in ways you aren’t comfortable with.
Seniors of the future won’t have this problem. Increasingly fast paced change will be a part of the later generations from the time they are born to the time they die. They will have medicine to keep them going, and they can therefore stay active, physically and mentally. With death being much further away if at all, pretty much nothing remains to make you depressed.
I hear all the time about how people "don’t want to live to be 120 because their grandma was miserable at 80. Well, your grandma didn’t have access to knowledge and technology that you will have. Being infirm might be a thing of the past. Where could there possibly be a negative in that?
I do notice many Luddites have this strange view of the world in which the future MUST be exactly like the past. This is all new, uncharted territory.
Many things: the paper used, the marks from the french curve, a slight smudge line, a signature not computer generated. Many things people do with their hands cannot be emulated by a machine. People zsuch as my wife and myself like the added touch of framing the plan view when complete. I personally wouldn’t want to frame something off a graphic plotter. Not that it isn’t a nice, but to me it’s not as genuine. The architect we are working with tells us there are more and more people wanting this.
I agree completely, I thought while writing “butting into” I should use a different phrase for what I was trying to say.
One more thing, advances in psychology and physiology are not equal, they are quite far apart. Therapies change, and new drugs are introduced, but huge leaps like cloning your organs are hard to match in the field of psychology. I should know, I got into the field of Environmental Psychology in the early 90’s when it was in it’s infancy - only practiced for 15-20 years at that time - got my Phd and ended up teaching… I have since moved on and out of academia but psychology certainly does not have the huge leaps in advancement as medicine does.
I choose to use my resources now on environmental issues that will affect us in the future, and don’t get me wrong I am amazed and in awe of medical advances, I just hope we as a culture do not let technology surpass our humanity.
Eh, humanity is overrated. If by surpassing my “humanity” I shed ill founded fears, prejudices, phobias, hatreds, and all the other weaknesses and gain respect for sentient life and an empathy with my fellow sentient beings, I welcome losing my humanity.
You can keep your Hitlers and your China’s and your religious zealots, thank you very much.
An architectural drawing is supposed to be a functional blueprint and a way to work out the design first and foremost. That is nice that hand drafting looks quaint when it is framed but that has nothing to do with the intended use itself. CAD can easily be used to view things in 3-D, model the engineering needed, move things around easily, and even let you take a virtual tour as the end customer to see if you like it.
I’ll take the personal artistic touch when I buy my greeting cards but I don’t want it on a new house or, God forbid, a modern skyscraper.
My misunderstanding. There is nothing wrong with an artist’s rendition of what your property will look like. However, don’t you agree that most of the design and engineering, including the parts that give the client a thorough view of what the property will be, are better done by CAD software?
But that’s simply your aesthetic choice. Sure, it’s a nicer looking picture, but it doesn’t result in a nicer looking house. And some people might prefer the computer generated image, so it’s not like that’s automatically a disadvantage to technological progress.
I see in your response to Shagnasty that you’re talking about the plan view, and not the actual blueprints themselves. Are architects using AutoCAD for the plan view now? Seems odd, as I can’t imagine doing that on a computer would give you many advantages over a hand-drawing. But regardless, this seems like a pretty minor concern. If you can’t find an architect who can give you a hand-drawn plan view when you’re hiring him, wait 'til he’s done and higher a regular artist to just draw you a picture of the finished product.
Well, I’m definitly coming from a layman’s perspective on the subject, but there sure seems to have been an explosion in chemical psychological treatment in the last few years, and it sounds like a lot of these new drugs are providing relief for ailments that were previously largely untreatable. Could be that I’ve got a distorted view of progress in that field, though. I’m curious about what “huge leaps” in medicine you’re comparing psychology to. Cloning and stem cells and such show a lot of promise, but haven’t really delivered on it yet. It could all fizzle out, or not be as revolutionary as we all hope. Goinf from the current state of medical knowledge to “We’ll all live to be two hundred!” seems like a huge leap, even considering best case scenarios for current research. It seems odd to assume that psychology would stay completely stagnant, while several other fields of medicine would have to make quantum leaps to get catch up to your hypothetical.
Your bolded sentence does not seem particularly linked to anything you’ve said in the OP, though. None of the examples you gave have anything to do with technology supplanting our humanity. I don’t think not having a hand drawn picture of your house to hang on the wall inside your house is particularly dehumanizing. The prospect of clinically depressed people having to live another century while depressed is certainly unfortunate, but setting aside the flaws in your hypothetical, a medical advance that would be a boon to millions does not strike me as dehumanizing because there exists a minority for whom it would be, at worst, a mixed blessing.
While I agree with much of what you are saying, I think that with all the advancement will come some inevitable risks that will need to be addressed, and mental health will be one of them.
Just kidding, and yes of course - as well as get the project done in a third of the time.
