The Blind Giant (2 page)

Shining, healthy people move through a sunlit space filled with birds, plants and slick technology. They are very fit, because they monitor their own health and pay attention to what they eat. Informed by a mass of expert opinion and scientific testing checked against the real world in one vast crowd-sourced human experiment, they know the pattern of their own DNA and the risks that are peculiar to them. They take steps to make sure they do not increase genetic predispositions to cancer or Alzheimer’s; they work out and eat well, knowing the precise benefit of each effortful hour. They are rewarded for their efforts not only by a longer, better quality life, but also by their healthcare provider, which offers rebates on insurance or tax for a healthier lifestyle. Their employers, knowing that healthier people are happier and more productive, make facilities for exercise available and do not object to their workforce taking the time to use them.

The space around them is vibrant because the city itself is alive: filters and molecular technologies and even micro-organisms have been integrated into the fabric of buildings to clean the streets and the air, making the entire place carbon-negative. Even the stones are networked and augmented to understand the needs of those walking on them, to measure traffic flow and suggest alternative routes in the event of congestion. Each block communicates with the next so that the street knows when it requires repair, when the infrastructure of pipes and cables beneath the ground is failing. Air quality is tested and if necessary improved, and when it gets dark, lights come on so that there are no dark, alarming corners or grimy alleys. The people never get lost,
never worry that they’ve wandered into a strange neighbourhood, because they know exactly where they are – the city tells them. In any case, there are no really bad neighbourhoods any more. Opportunity, communication and familiarity have made financial and ethnic tensions fade away.

Through this paradise, the inhabitants and visitors walk, greet strangers in the street as friends because – thanks to their always-on, augmented-reality link-up – they actually do know things about one another at first glance. No one has to ask ‘Where do you work?’ or ‘What do you like to eat?’ because those facts are discernible, coded on their skin or clothing markers, or just gleaned by software from face-recognition profile tools. Instead, people talk about matters of substance, continuing conversations they’ve been having online, or finding shared interests to make a connection. In groups, they discuss politics, ethics, science and literature. They are voracious, interested in everything. They remember what they need, but store great quantities of information in digital form – on wearable computers or in the Cloud, the shared digital storage and processing space which is accessible to everyone – for later access and perusal. Detail is always available, but trying to hold it all in the mind is futile and takes up attention needed for actual synthesis and creation – although there are rumours of actual extensions to the brain itself, in a few years.

In the meantime, a casual chat may rapidly lead to a new business venture or an artistic project: each person feels able to exercise his or her talents. There are no barriers to innovation; the culture has adopted an approach which – in the old vernacular – ‘comes from yes’. Requests for copyright clearance and licensing are flashed around the world, processed under standard terms and agreed immediately so that new sales channels can open, new exploitations of old material can be begun while the energy is there. Digital start-ups happen in a day, are deemed successful and swallowed by larger entities in a week, and become as commonplace as a corkscrew (or discarded as a nice thought without
stamina) in a month. There is no stigma attached to failure, and many well-respected innovators have never created an uncomplicated hit, but their work has led others to produce something brilliant, and this contribution is understood and rewarded as vital. No one is considered a plodder or a hack. Everyone has a role to play.

Even projects that work with actual physical objects can be up and running in a matter of hours, courtesy of 3D printing technology, which allows designers to create a prototype object from a digital sketch in mere moments, printing it in layers with machines costing less than a microwave oven: complex mathematical shapes are easy, and printed circuits and moving parts can be managed by those with the right skills. The time slip between concept and creation has been reduced to hours, or days; true unemployment is low, and no one is regarded as unskilled, because everyone is learning new skills all the time. This climate of innovation and distributed manufacture has produced a thriving, decentralized economy. The ‘lottery culture’ of the one big score in business has been replaced by a far healthier knowledge that hard work and a good idea will ultimately provide a decent life.

Friendship, too, is easy to come by. Trusting the systems around them and the assessments of those they already know, people are relaxed about making new acquaintances. They see no distinction between friends discovered online and those met in the flesh, frequently converting one form of relationship into another. There is no question of ‘digital’ and ‘real’; this is a society that is quite at ease with the differences between physical and mediated communication, and has learned how to read the semiotics of the second as readily as the first. At the same time, the technology has improved to allow more accurate impressions to form from voice, eyeline and body language when meeting someone online.

Almost the only feature in the social whirl which remains
tricky is
romance. You can find someone with matching interests without difficulty, but the precise combination of body chemistry, wit, compatibility and hitting upon the right moment in two lives (or more) is more elusive. Sometimes what look like impossible matches come off, and perfect partnerships go nowhere from the start. It’s perversely reassuring, and the subject of a lot of comedy: human love is still essentially as opaque as it ever was. Even so, the divorce rate is down: everyone expresses themselves more freely, sex is less a taboo topic and more something you discuss with a specific group – those who go on and on about it tend to rate nothing more than a yawn – and fewer people make ill-advised leaps into serious relationships, so misunderstandings are rarer. Committed relationships, in various forms, are actually more stable than they have been for decades.

Many administrative and commercial matters are managed from moment to moment – and very few companies or government departments are ever unavailable, at any hour of the day or night – but even now it’s easier to have a degree of scheduling so that everyone has a shared sense of time: it helps social cohesion. So midway through each afternoon, the whole society pauses in what it is doing to vote in a series of plebiscites, each individual drawing on his or her own expertise and experience to answer today’s pressing questions: a perfect, ongoing participant democracy in which reason prevails, moderated by compassion and goodwill, and the strong, measured centre holds sway. Anyone doing something too engrossing to participate – be it surgery or scuba – need not vote, but frequent abstention is considered odd. No one has to vote on everything, but it is generally accepted practice to vote on issues in which you are disinterested as well as those that directly affect you, because the network of connection and consequence is such that nothing takes place in isolation. With access to all the information in the world, both curated and raw data, people are well able to make informed choices and, through their combined intelligence, solve problems which
seemed intractable to the old style of government which relied on notionally expert leaders. No one goes hungry, no one is alone, no one is unheard.

This is the happy valley, the high plateau of technological culture.

We are culturally and perhaps as a species predisposed to give more attention to bad occurrences than good ones – possibly because, in a survival environment, from which none of us is many generations removed and through which we all to some extent move all the time – being relaxed about serious threats results in death. A predisposition towards watchfulness is a survival trait. In other words, if you find yourself thinking that the nightmare I’ve drawn is infinitely more plausible than the happy valley, take a moment to consider whether that’s really the case. Both draw on trends and technologies that already exist; both would require significant shifts in the way we live to come true. It’s hard to balance a horror and a dream without making the latter look specious or diluting it to the point where it is no longer as positive an outcome as the nightmare is negative.

Detractors of the digital technologies with which we live lament the practice of digital skim-reading, and worry that while it is in its own right a useful skill, it does not substitute for ‘deep reading’, the more focused, uninterrupted form of information intake and cognition which was common twenty years ago.
Hypertext – text with connections to other texts and data built in, in the style of the World Wide Web – is apparently a lousy medium for focusing on what’s written in a given piece; some studies show decreased comprehension in readers of a document with links as opposed to those issued with a plain text version, because, among other things, the brain apparently has a maximum ‘cognitive load’ of a relatively small number of topics which can be held in the working memory at a time. Hypertext,
with its multiple pathways, simply throws too much at the working memory, and comprehension and retention suffer. Since the reading brain and the habits of thought which go with it are central to our present human identity, the question of how this affects us is an important one: if our reading habits change – the written and read word being arguably a defining aspect of our cultural evolution and the formation of each of us as individuals – what change will be wrought on us and our world? On the other hand, if we resist that change, will we be unable to cope with the information-saturated environment we have made? Is it a question of losing who we are whatever we do?

Meanwhile, the world we live in – despite being by some measures an extraordinary place – has some serious unsolved problems. Some of these, in specific sectors, are bound up with technology, but the majority and the worst are not – at least not directly. In 2008 we discovered that our financial markets had become so cluttered with bad loans that we’d inflated the system into a – historically familiar – giant bubble, which had burst. It then turned out that we couldn’t simply let the sin of hubris punish itself, because the same institutions which created this idiocy were deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day business of living. Banks had to be rescued, because their failure entailed the failure of industrial heavyweights on whom millions if not billions of jobs depended. Those banks were not too big to fail, but too embedded. The fairy-dust economics of the 2000s – in which global debts rose from $84 trillion to $185 trillion (yes, really) – is turning to stone in the cold light of dawn, but by some strange miracle it’s still impossible to regulate the sector to preclude a recurrence of the 2008 crisis without instantly provoking exactly that. The social media and even the conventional press buzz with frustration, and the
Occupy movement has emerged, an international phenomenon made possible in part by rapid communication and self-identification; but no solutions are obvious yet, and the reaction from many quarters to the
Occupy camps has been negative to the point of alarmingly oppressive.

At the same time, many nations are seeing a decline in manufacturing, and while some thinkers herald this as the dawn of the Information Age and the Knowledge Economy, others are rather more cautious. Knowledge has always been the basis of industry, but by itself, it doesn’t actually make anything or put food on anyone’s table. As far as I can see – in the UK, at least – ‘post-industrial’ is shorthand for a finance-based economy like the one which recently imploded so excitingly when we accidentally established that it was made entirely of financial smoke and mirrors. Meanwhile, we face the curious spectacle of
Warren Buffett telling the US President that the mega-rich in his country do not pay enough tax, and Google CEO
Eric Schmidt agreeing that Google would happily pay more tax in the UK in order to operate here. On the flipside, charities in my home city say they are seeing a rise in homelessness, and some evidence seems to suggest that many of those made homeless are well-qualified people who cannot find enough work to live on.

Overseas, Europe and the US are enmeshed in any number of small-to-medium violent conflicts, in most cases to protect our access to oil and rare earths needed to sustain our mode of living – a mode that is mostly mid-twentieth century, constructed around the automobile rather than the Internet. That petroleum lifestyle is killing the biosphere on which we depend (the only one to which we have access) while making us radically unpopular with large portions of the global population, who feel – not without some justification – that we export poverty, waste and violence and import money and resources. Some of the states in this relationship with us have begun to re-export violence in the form of terrorism, a bleakly ironic twist on conventional economics.