Future’s Game – Utopia or Dystopia
Because I am finishing editing my book, Fixing Food, this week, I am in the mood for a game so I thought I would create one. The structure of the game comes from Maurice McTigue, senior scholar at the Mercatus Center and former Minister of Labor in Australia (and numerous other achievements). Maurice looked at policies that used inputs and outputs to achieve outcomes. That’s the structure of the Future’s Game.
Let’s start with inputs. In this game you start by choosing two or more inputs. Inputs in this game are new science and technologies. Each of the four inputs I selected are already here and they are going to be used to, for example, make better products, to cure diseases, but they will also replace jobs and create new risks. You may add other inputs that you know about.
Next, let’s go to outputs. Here you choose two or more of the inputs to make something new This is exactly what is happening today. Scientists and engineers are using nano technologies to create tiny robots that will scour our bodies to find and perhaps fix diseases. Most of the inputs are going to be available to everyone, including kids tinkering in their garage and insane megalomaniac with their entire country’s wealth at their disposal. As for kids, imagine an ad that says, “Hey kids, getting tired of getting bullied in school? Now, with CRISPR (which is what you use to edit genes) you can have bigger muscles, be faster and more aggressive. DIY Crispr Kits are available right now for anyone on the Web.
Right now, these technologies are mostly used by thoughtful, serious engineers and scientists in universities and responsible firms but that’s going to change as the use becomes “democratized.” So, what are examples (outputs) of things you can make using one or more of those inputs?
Perhaps we can use gene editing to create new robot weapons that are smart and extremely lethal, able to distinguish friends from enemies and can create defensive maneuvers. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on who is using it. Or we could make food machines that use artificial intelligence to personalize our diets to completely avoid any nutritional issue that leads to chronic diseases. Those machines may replace chefs but, if programming is wrong, could kill us. As mentioned above, another possible output is using nano sized organic robots to scour our bodies for any issue, like cancer or heart disease, needing remediation or repair. A good thing unless these tiny robots are monitored by people who wish to do us harm, monitor our movements or even control us? Suppose we end boredom and the desire for mischief by creating artificial reality that becomes embedded in our brains instead of on our computers. It’s easy to see the downside of that. Finally, perhaps we can use all of these technologies to create superhumans. It might be fun but you only need to watch Marvel movies to see downsides of superhumans warring with each other.
Make a few outputs of your own and write them down. You can cheat. There are lots of websites and books where others are speculating on these outputs. In the past this was called “science fiction” like Jules Verne’s submarines and rockets. You can read about some possible outputs in a book that has just hit the shelves, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race.
What kind of a world will these new inventions bring us? Some welcome it, some fear. It will either bring us a utopia, where everything is wonderful or dystopia, where everything is horrible.
Of course, there could be other outcomes that include both types of topias with some outcomes being absolutely wonderful and some being horrible. Some outcomes could be utopia for some and dystopia for others or, possible, at least unequal.
How we think about future inputs, outputs and the resulting society is likely to be one of the great divisions in our own society and perhaps even between countries. They may not fall along traditional political party lines, optimists or pessimists, or gender.