The Coming Century
by Damien Broderick

Everything you think you know about the future is wrong.
           How can that be? Back in the '70s, Alvin Toffler warned of future shock, the concussion we feel when change slaps us in the back of the head. But aren't we smarter now? We have wild, ambitious expectations of the future, we're not frightened of it. How could it surprise us, now that Star Trek and Star Wars and Terminator movies and The Matrix and a hundred computer role-playing games have domesticated the 24th century, cyberspace virtual realities, and a galaxy far, far away?
          Actually, I blame glitzy mass-market science fiction for misleading us. They got it so wrong. Their enjoyable futures, by and large, are as plausible as 19th century visions of tomorrow, with dirigibles filling the skies and bonneted ladies in crinolines tapping at telegraphs.
          Back in the middle of the twentieth century, when the futuristic stories I read as a kid were being written, most people knew `that Buck Rogers stuff' was laughable fantasy, suitable only for children. After all, it talked about atomic power and landing on the Moon and time travel and robots that would do your bidding even if you were rude to them. Who could take such nonsense seriously?
          Twenty years later, men had walked on the moon, nuclear power was already obsolete in some countries, and computers could be found in any university. Another two decades on, in the '90s, probes sent us vivid images from the solar system's far reaches, immensely powerful but affordable personal computers sat on desks at home as well as work, the human genome was being sequenced, and advanced physics told us that even time travel through spacetime wormholes was not necessarily insane (although it was surely not in the immediate offing).
          So popular entertainment belatedly got the message, spurred on by prodigious advances in computerised graphics. Sadly, the script writers and directors still didn't know a quark from a cumquat, a light-year (a unit of interstellar distance) from a picosecond (a very brief time interval). With gusto and cascades of light, they blended made-up technobabble with exhilarating fairy stories, shifting adventure sagas from ancient legends and myth into outer space.  It was great fun, but it twisted our sense of the future away from an almost inconceivably strange reality (which is the way it will actually happen) and back into safe childhood, that endless temptation of fantastic art.
          Maybe you think I'm about to get all preachy and sanctimonious. You're waiting for the doom and gloom: rising seas and greenhouse nightmare, cloned tyrants, population bomb, monster global mega-corporations with their evil genetically engineered foods and monopoly stranglehold on the crop seeds needed by a starving Third World. Wrong. Those factors indeed threaten the security of our planet, but not for much longer (unless things go very bad indeed, very quickly). No, what's wrong with the media images of the future isn't their evasion of such threats. It's their laughable conservatism.
           The future is going to be a fast, wild ride into strangeness. And most of us will still be there as it happens.
          This accelerating world of drastic change won't wait until the 24th century, let alone the year 3000. We can expect extraordinary disruptions within the next half century. Many of those changes will probably start to impact well before that. By the end of the 21st century, there might well be no humans (as we recognise ourselves) left on the planet - but nobody alive then will complain about that, any more than we now bewail the loss of Neanderthals.
          That sounds like a rather tasteless paradox, but I mean it literally: many of us will still be here, but we won't be human any longer - not the current model, anyway. Our children, and perhaps us as well, will be smarter. In September, 1999, molecular biologists at Princeton reported adding a gene for the extra production of NR2B protein to a strain of mice. The improved brains of these `Doogie mice' used NR2B to enhance brain receptors, helping the animals solve puzzles much faster. Humans use an almost identical protein.
          Nor will we be the only intelligences on the planet. By the close of the 21st century, there will be vast numbers of conscious but artificial minds on earth. How we and our children get along with them as they arrive out of the labs will determine the history of life in the solar system, and maybe the universe.           I'm not making this up. Dr Hans Moravec, a robotics pioneer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, argues in Robot (Oxford University Press, 1999) that we can expect machines equal to human brains within 40 years at the latest. Already, primitive robots operate at the level of spiders or lizards. Soon a robot kitten will be running about in Japan, driven by an artificial brain designed and built by Australian Dr Hugo de Garis. True, it's a vast leap from lizard to monkey and then human, but computers are doubling in speed and memory every year.
          This is the hard bit to grasp: with that kind of annual doubling in power, you jump by a factor of 1000 every decade. In 20 years, the same price (adjusted for inflation) will buy you a computer a million times more powerful than your current model.
          At the end of the 1990s, the world's best, immensely expensive supercomputers perform several trillion operations a second. To emulate a human mind, Moravec estimates, we'll need systems 100 times better. Advanced research machines might meet that benchmark within a decade, or sooner - but it will take another 10 or 20 years for the comparable home machine at a notepad's price. Still, before 2030, expect to own a computer with the brain power of a human being. And what will that be like? If software develops at the same pace, we will abruptly find ourselves in a world of alien minds as good as our own.
          Will they take our orders and quietly do our bidding? If they're designed right, maybe. But that's not the kicker. That's just the familiar world of sci-fi movies with clunky or sexy-voiced robots. The key to future change comes from what's called `self-bootstrapping' - machines and programs that modify their own design, optimise their functioning, improve themselves in ways that limited human minds can't even start to understand. de Garis calls such beings `artilects', and even though he's building their predecessors he admits he's scared stiff.
          By the end of the 21st century, Ray Kurzweil expects a merging of machines and humans (The Age of Spiritual Machines, Allen & Unwin, 1999), allowing us to shift consciousness from place to place. He's got an equally impressive track record, as a leading software designer and specialist in voice-activated systems. His timeline for the future is even more hair-raising that Moravec's. In a decade, we'll have desktop machines with the grunt of today's best super-computers, a trillion operations a second. Forget keyboards - we'll speak to these machines, and they'll speak back in the guise of plausible personalities.
          By 2020, a Pentium equivalent will equal a human brain. And now the second great innovation kicks in: molecular  nanotechnology (MNT), building things by putting them together atom by atom. I call that `minting', and the wonderful thing is that a mint will be able to replicate itself, using common, cheap chemical feedstocks. Houses and cars will be compiled seamlessly out of diamond (carbon, currently clogging the atmosphere) and sapphire (aluminium), because they will be cheap appropriate materials readily handled by mints.
          Until recently, nanotechnology was purely theoretical. The engineering theory was good, but the evidence was thin. At the end of November, 1999, researchers at Cornell University announced in the journal Science that they had successfully assembled molecules one at a time by chemically bonding carbon monoxide molecules to iron atoms. This is a long way from building a beef steak sandwich in a mint the size of a microwave oven powered by solar cells on your roof (also made for practically nothing by a mint), but it's proof that the concept works.
          If that sounds like a magical world, consider Kurzweil's 2030. Now your desktop machine (except that you'll probably be wearing it, or it will be built into you, or you will be absorbed into it) holds the intelligence of 1000 human brains. Machines are plainly people. It might be (horrors!) that smart machines are debating whether, by comparison with their lucid and swift understanding, humans are people! We had better treat our mind children nicely. Minds that good will find little difficulty solving problems that we are already on the verge of unlocking. Cancers will be cured, along with most other ills of the flesh.
          Aging, and even routine death itself, might be a thing of the past. In October, 1999, Canada's Chromos Molecular Systems announced that an artificial chromosome inserted into mice embryos had been passed down, with its useful extra genes, to the next generation. And in November, 1999, the journal Nature reported that Pier Giuseppe Pelicci, at Milan's European Institute of Oncology, had deactivated the p66shc gene in mice - which then lived 30 percent longer than their unaltered kin, without making them sluggish! A drug blocking p66shc in humans might have a similar life-extending effect.
          As well, our bodies will be suffused with swarms of medical and other nano maintenance devices. Nor will our brains remain untouched. Many of us will surely adopt the prosthetic advantage of direct links to the global net, and augmentation of our fallible memories and intellectual powers. This won't be a world of Mr Spock emotionless logic, however. It is far more likely that AIs (artificial intelligences) will develop supple, nuanced emotions of their own, for the same reason we do: to relate to people, and for the sheer joy of it.
          The real future, in other words, has already started. Don't expect the simple, gaudy world of Babylon-5 or even eXistenZ. The third millennium will be very much stranger than fiction.