I think Juan Enriquez may be my new favorite futurist, right up there with Ray Kurzweil and Victor Vinge. Just when all the economy crushing news of the past few months had begun to tarnish my hopes of a techno-utopian paradise before this century’s midpoint, Enriquez has restored my hope that radical technological progress may indeed save us from a hellish voyage into a post-industrial society.

Enriquez gave a talk at this years TED conference titled Tech evolution will eclipse the financial crisis. (YouTube, about 20 minutes.) He starts out by reviewing the financial crisis, touching on bank over-leveraging, the growing deficit, and budget cuts necessary to keep the doom at bay, then, after building up the the dire importance of our current situation, tells us that everything will be okay because technology will save us all. (Further coverage here)

One of the changes he says is needed to stave off disaster is an increase in the retirement age: one year for anyone 60-65, two years for the 50-60, crowd, and an additional 4 years for anyone under 50. The reason for this, he states, is that when Social Security was created the average life span was only 3 or 5 years past retirement age. Medical technology has significantly increased our life span and has put a burden on the SS war chest. It’s time to make appropriate changes.  Other recommendations he suggests include a cap on medical spending, a 3% cut in military spending , selective budget cuts, limits on deficit spending and, smaller government in general.

He then continues on to say that as big a wave as this current crisis, there is an even larger wave looming over the top of it called technology. He uses this picture to make his point:

As a quick introduction let me describe what Kurzweil calls the GNR revolution, a period when overlapping advances in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics ushers in a new epoch of human evolution. A favorite Kurzweil quote of mine is that “humans are the first species to create their successor.” I paraphrase as I can’t find the exact quote; the idea is that as our technology has advanced we have gained the ability to direct the evolution of homo sapien towards a point greater than our current ability. Kurzweil belives that this self-directed evolution will culminate in superhuman intelligence, mind uploading and control of the physical environment through nanoswarms. Enriquez is a bit more down to Earth and is much more persuasive to the skeptic with examples of current scientific advances being performed in grad schools around the country today.

The examples Enriquez gives come from the realms of gene modification, tissue engineering, and robotics. Advances in which regular skin cells can be reprogrammed to grow into any organ in the body, which are being performed to day to regrow ears, windpipes and teeth; advances in hearing aid technology that will soon grant superhuman hearing, followed by similar advancements in eyesight restoration; robotic pack animals that can carry hundreds of pounds of gear over hilly terrain; these are just a few of the examples he says will carry us to the next version of the human species, homo evolutis.

Last month my fiancee went from being blind without her eyeglasses to having 20/15 vision after a thousand dollar operation that took less than an hour. I’ve told her in the past that once they have a version of the internet that you can plug directly into your head I’ll be the first to sign up. While I might joke about her ‘augmentation’ now, I’m deadly serious about predictions of the world we’ll be facing in the next 20 years.  While many naysayers like to get down on those like myself who dream of a ‘nerd rapture’ which promises to keep our bodies and minds strong for hundreds of years, I think that the words of men like Enriquez and Kurzweil hold much promise for the future. Kurweil points out that people tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term. A lot of people fail to factor in the exponential increase in technological innovation, or change, over time to thier worldview, and these people will be in for a large case of future shock soon.

Of course all this depends on whether or not we can build a human level artificial intelligence before we succumb to oil depletion, drought or other eco-disaster. My money’s on Moore’s Law holding out long enough for us to get there.

Well my fiancee just got her laser eye surgery got last week and has been busy throwing away her contact lenses and eyeglasses like she’s been trying to rid herself of all traces of an ex-boyfriend. I’ve been talking to a lot of people who have gotten the surgery  and it seems like I’m the only one that hasn’t gotten this life changing enhancement. I’m starting to feel like a myopic Neanderthal with my astigmatic eyeglasses and imperfect vision. I mean I forgot my glasses the other day and work was a pain all day.  The only problem is that my vision isn’t bad enough to warrant a couple thousand dollars on elective surgery.  My only hope is that someday in the near future there will be another type of elective surgery that will give me abilities above and beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.

This is what I’m talking about. Not that this is any news to anyone who’s been reading Kurzweil or Vinge lately, or even keeping up with advancements in technology. I figured it would be a good oppourtunity to remind you all of how totally awesome the future will be. Screw flying cars, we’ve got TV in our eyes. How’s that for some goddamn advancement?

Vinge covered this scenario really well in Rainbow’s End. Pretty much everyone had these contact lens overlays attached to their wearable computers and could put pretty much anything into the environment that they wanted. This concept is called augmented reality and is already making its way into society through video games and the like. One of the major plot points in Rainbow’s End involves real life role play games where the participants use overlays to make the opposing teams look like nights in armor or strange creatures and what have you. It’d be as if you were playing paintball and the overlays made it look like your team was dressed like WWII Allied soldiers and all the opposing team were dressed as Nazis.  Of course this new technology could also be used for stuff like reading web pages and emails; of course we know it will mostly be used for pornography and cybersexing.

So how about this futurist that they quote in the Telegraph article, Ian Pearson. Where does one get a degree in futurism, cause I want to sign up. Talk about a bullshit job title. Oh, I get it, you work for BT and get to make vauge generalized predictions about shit so far ahead that no one’s going to be able to call you on your crap when you’re wrong. What, it’s 2019 and I still don’t have video games beamed directly onto my retina? “Oh, sorry, I made that prediction 10 years ago so you can’t hold it against me now. ” Let me go start a new career spouting off about how we’ll all be living in Minority Report in 20 years and hopefully I can get my name in a poorly written article in a tabloid mag.

Sure, I knew MP3s were gonna blow up 10 years ago and I’m plenty sure we’re going to see Singularity in 20 years. Does that mean that I get to put ‘Futurist’ on my email signature and start making all kinds of cockamamie predictions about technology? And what about this ‘emotional tattoo’ and ‘emotional viewing’? “Here’s a tattoo for you to wear during this movie. During the action scenes we’ll be injecting adrenenaline into your bloodstream so you can really feel the action like the hero on screen. And in case you’re a heartless bastard and aren’t sufficiently manipulated by our generic melodramatic death scene, we’ll be hitting you with a fast acting depressant to make sure you’re bawling your eyes out at the proper moment.”  Don’t even get me started that this last part is coming from Comet, which is some kind of European Radio Shack. Something tells me they watched Strange Days too many times and it infiltrated thier subconscious a bit too deeply.  Coment needs to stick to selling LCDs and leave predictions about what year we’ll see a space elevator to Best Buy.

Back to contact lens displays: FUCK YEAH. Why stop there? Why just a overlay that fits over your eyeball? How about a projector in my cornea that blocks outside reality completely? I mean why should I have to keep glancing sideways to read something when I’m trying to ignore someone talking to me when I can just not see them at all? I already spend 80% of my waking day staring at a monitor, why not just have that thing beaming on all day and night? Plus people won’t be able to tell I’m ignoring them completely when I’m staring right at them. Kinda gives it away when I have to look off to the side to read my feeds.

So while Mr. Pearson thinks we’re 10 years away from contact lens TVs we can be sure that inter-corneal displays will be soon to follow, a fact that no doubt scares the shit out of most of the people I know along with most of the other things we’ll see in the future, like human level artifical intelligences and other cybernetic enhancements such as memory augmentations.