I think most of the time I’m fairly pessimistic about it.
What I foresee, say a couple hundred years from now, maybe three hundred, is an authoritarian society. As best I understand it, the classical authoritarian world-view is modelled as follows:
Epistemology: The State
Metaphysics: Nature
Ethic: Obedience
Aesthetic: Order
Politics: Collective cooperation
If that’s the model of the future (and I kind of believe it is) then here are some conclusions that I would draw about it.
The State will control all information. You will be unable to exchange information except through agencies of The State. It’s not really as drastic a change as it sounds like at first blush. The Internet will simply evolve into a The Omninet, and all content will be filtered through The State’s information bureaucracy.
Genetics will take over space exploration as the hot technology du jour. Continued frustrations with the daunting task of traversing the vast distances of space, combined with failures of moon and Martian colonies due to sociopolitical complications and one or two disastrous catastrophies, will prompt The State to direct science into genetics, with emphasis on research that is beneficial to the society as a whole. Biological organisms will be routinely manufactured in laboratories from raw material.
The Constitution will be ammended maybe a dozen times or more until finally it will be rewritten altogether. It will define both the rights and obligations of citizens of The State. It will be several volumes consisting of tens of thousands of pages. There will develop a sort of caste system, predicated on your degree of political clout. There will be a semblance of democracy as people cast votes on the Omninet. But the votes will be taken basically as polls, ostensibly to advise The State about the will-o’-the-people, but in reality to monitor for dissenters and other troublemakers.
There will be an obsession with order, and therefore with law. There will be literally billions of laws as legislation becomes automated. The Algorithm will be applied to monitor and analyze The Omninet and draw up appropriate legislation automatically. If, for example, The Algorithm determines that a discussion about hemming dresses has led to some line of conversation questioning the authority of The State, it will immediately draft a law, or several laws, regulating conversation with respect to dress hemming. The citizenry will be informed of all new laws on the Omninet, with the holgraphic text scrolling at an unreadable speed, so fast that, when played through the voice chip, sounds like high pitched hisses and whistles.
History’s accounting of our age would be almost unrecognizable to us. We would see names and places that we knew, but the events would look other-worldly. Our time will be cast as the last fitfull days of the freedom experiment. We will be seen as lawless and barbaric. That will be why The State will do away with the united and the plural; it will reason that they were factious and implied an intrinsic separation that needed uniting. Thus, the United States will become The State.
I don’t think any of that will happen overnight, of course. It will evolve over time as it rolls down the slippery slope. It will all seem quite rational and natural, right for the time, and of course, for the common good. I think all that will happen because people are so easily spoiled, and the vigilance necessary to maintain freedom is so thoroughly exhausting.
Well, item #2 would put the kidney thieves out of business.
Seriously, if the genetic research has an emphasis on being beneficial to society, why is this bad ? Is it because that would erode personal liberties ? Would parents be forced to have perfect offspring (via genomecines) for the good of ‘The State’ much like children receive vacines today ?
Everyone knows that in the Future, we’re going to drive bubble-canopy sky cars that fold up into a briefcase at the touch of a button, work three-hour days, live in apartment buildings joisted up on columns half a mile high, and have robotic housemaids.
We will still have to deal with company presidents that arbitrarily fire us and promote us to vice president on alternate days, though.
Probably not. The inferior children will be useful for The State’s research.
Tracer:
I remember seeing an old copy of Look magazine (or maybe Life) from some time in the early 1930s. It was about the future and the budding new science of futurology. There was a drawing of a woman with something like a shower cap on her head. The caption read, “Women of the 1960s will wear helmet shaped hats made of celluloid.”
There’s a difference between requiring your kids to be vaccinated and requiring your kids to have perfect health. Vaccinations aren’t required because they keep your kids healthy, they’re required because they keep your kids from catching contagious diseases which they can then spread to others.
I’m wondering, Lib - would you have made these same predictions 20 years ago? Have recent developments in various fields (technology, medicine, government) caused you to develop this model or have you had it as long as you can remember? The reason I ask is that while I think predicting the future can be an interesting amusement, I never take it seriously as there are far too many unpredictables that could destroy the model.
The way I see it, no state – not even a totalitarian one – can exist for long without popular support. Any state policy that the average person believes might take away his children will receive so much opposition that it will simply not stand.
Unless the state can successfully make it sound like the average person’s children won’t be placed in the “experimental subjects” camp, and can successfully hide the true number of children taken away for experimentation and make it look like it only happens to a handful of kids (which is extremely difficult to do – if one person’s kids are taken away, his whole neighborhood will know about it before the day is out), the public outcry will topple such a program.
Yeah, but it will be more subtle than that. Kind of like a part of the school day. Like I said, it will all be implemented incrementally and will be made utterly palatable.
Gilligan:
I realize, now that you ask, that I’ve always thought this way. The only difference is that twenty years ago, I thought it would be a good thing.
It occurs to me that that wasn’t what you were getting at. You’re right. Twenty years ago, I didn’t envision The Omninet, per se, but something more naive and primitive. But I think that the more advanced the technology becomes, the easier the task becomes for The State.
Yes, I knew the difference. I was thinking that the State would require perfect or perhaps ( being less ominous ) healthy genes before they were transmitted to the next generation. [Huxley sarcasm]Can’t have those pesky Epsilons soiling the gene pool ya know.[/Huxley sarcasm]
Everything is cyclical. Entropy guides governments and society. I see anarchy long before we have an Orwellian totalitarian regime in America or Western Europe.
I suppose the question for Americans is: How much longer will the U.S. “Empire” last?
223 years and counting (or about 54 if you count total dominance).
I thought Epsilons (and in fact all non-Alphas) were created by taking embryos with “normal” human genes and putting them through a gestation process that would leave them mentally impaired. The state seemed willing to take ovaries donated from any woman, no matter what Greek letter she belonged to, and make any kind of person out of them they chose.
It’s been quite awhile (~25yrs) since I read BNW, perhaps I should not have hijacked the concept without a review. Thanks for clearing it up. Were the Alphas created by not permiting mental impairment during gestation ? i.e. Could an embryo become any social class by manipulation of the process of gestation. And so as not to hijack the OP too far, does anyone see this scenario as a possible outcome of genetic engineering ?
