The Noble Lie

If you want to know where this pale blue dot is being taken long-term, you should ask the guys who know the guys who make it happen. My comments are in italic.

The World Future Society - Top Ten Forecasts from Outlook 2008

1. The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025. (What will a million dollars be worth in 2025? Might keep a good fire in the fireplace going for a while if that's still legal by then.)
2. Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry. (This "fun news" seems so surreal on this list.)
3. The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States. (Welcome back to the white house, Mr. Brzezinski)
4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society. (I know... I know... ORDO AB CHAO)
5. The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. (...unless we hurry up and extinct ourselves, first)
6. Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century. (Thank you Bechtel, et al)
7. World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people. (One of the reasons they cite: "Slower than expected declines of fertility in developing countries and increasing longevity in richer countries are contributing to a higher rate of population growth."  C'mon guys, you're not supposed to TELL US that you're been dropping our fertility rate.. I guess the other fix is to stop giving the Proles that health care stuff, I know you want to help them but you're actually hurting them by letting them contribute to world population..)
8. The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080. (How tragic that they will be dying of thirst while this is happening..)
   
9. Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. (Thank you, Ms. Palin, even if you lose I don't think we've seen the last of you)
10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities. (You don't say.)

I love how the marketing machine doesn't stop churning out new eletronic crap in the future despite this apocylypse we're supposed to be heading towards. Eight terrifying predictions, but HEY, at least we'll be able to wear our computers soon. At least until they stick a chip in your brain and you BECOME the computer... but maybe that "prediction" will come out in Outlook 2009.

This is a prediction, not a prophecy, but it's one you can bet the farm on. I see humanity being pushed towards an international, robotized health care system in our lifetimes. Those are us who are my age, who manage to survive to old age, will likely be nursed and operated on by machines.

Is this a commentary on how removed and isolated from each other we are? Nobody to take care of our frail and elderly, so we need experts to build machines to do it for us? Sadly, most people are too busy working to see to their elderly, so they get "closeted" in a home.

My day job exposes me to the massive, mandated changes happening in the health care industry. Everything is going to computer. Chart rooms are giving way to server rooms, and doctors' dictation is being replaced by reportable fields in a database. It is obvious to me that these databases will one day be centralized, and probably tied to the biometric IDs of the future. It's a brave new world out there.

I know some of you are aware of the brain and body chip technology that is already out there. Some of the more innocent-seeming things they claim these chips can be used for is to monitor blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar, etc. When you have data in a database and a mechanism to get that information into the database (ie, a chip in the body), you can create a robot to work on that data set.

Does anybody think this is a good thing? A bad thing? If "good bedside manner" could be standardized and written into a program, would people prefer it to a human doctor? There are studies (which are a bit hard to swallow) with elderly people which have reported robotic dogs are just as effective and curbing loneliness as a real dog. If this were true (big if), this raises some fascinating points about human nature and human perceptions. Of course, I'm one of those weirdos who is rather comfortable with "lonely hours."

Knowing about predictive programming (we're prepared through fiction for the changes in society planned in our lifetimes), I've been looking at movies/books with sympathetic robot characters in a very different way now. Time to dust off my Asimov books.

Doctors are one profession that probably considered themselves safe, but the robotization of just about every job is something we will be seeing sooner rather than later. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? One unavoidable side-effect of this is massive centralization of power, and the removal of human conscience (such that it is) from the process of carrying out the decisions of the authority in question.

That's the background information. Now, here are some articles worth reading.

THE PROBLEM

• Average ER waiting time nears 1 hour, CDC says
• Surgical errors cause 10 percent of surgery-related deaths

SOLUTION ON THE HORIZON

• Surgical side effects cut with robotics
• Japan could save 2.1 trillion yen letting robots care for elderly
• Robot as good as real dog at easing lonely hours