Looking Ahead to 2055

(An essay I have to write for an English Composition class - I need to chop off almost half of it, reduce it to 600 words, but I wanted to post it here before I do.)

Interpreting the signs of the times is just as important as reading history if society desires to avoid repeating the same errors. On the eve of 1984, in response to George Orwell’s Dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949), Isaac Asimov wrote Asimov’s New World (Toronto Star) which looks 35 years ahead to 2019.  Looking ahead once again to 2055, three themes that have the power to influence the world for good or for evil need to be taken into consideration: technology, ideological polarization and a desire for human perfection.

The kind of technology that is being developed and put into our devices and homes gives us the both the potential to learn and to control things around us. Alexa and Siri will turn lights on, help us find resources for homework and lock the front door. Smart TVs are equipped with video cameras and voice recognition. In a few years, nanotechnology inserted into humans would allow them to directly access the internet. By 2055 Virtual Reality (VR) could very well have us taking virtual trips to the Louvre or Iguazu Falls without leaving our living room.  We could conduct business meetings or visit friends and family. Face recognition technology, voice activation and recognition technology, GPS tracking and movement-activated video will have infiltrated every corner of our lives.  Our houses could recognize every person who lives there, making keys obsolete and personalizing each person’s experience at home. This kind of technology could very well have us living in a wonderful, positive world like the one Asimov saw, where anyone can educate themselves, life is vastly improved, mundane jobs are done by bots and everyone has access to anything they might want or need. On the other hand, it also has the potential to create an Orwellian world, in which a ruling elite controls the information we see, censors not only speech, but thought, knows exactly where we are and what we are doing at all times, and either swiftly punishes or distracts anyone who is out of line. How much power are we willing to give others over ourselves in order to make our lives “easier”, especially with the threat of increased ideological polarization also looming?

If there is one thing that has changed in recent years in politics, especially American politics, it is polarization. We live in a world of fragile egos that cannot deal with critique or differences of opinion. We refuse to recognize that the other side has anything to say. We have become increasingly more extreme in our positions on issues. We are no longer able to openly discuss controversial issues. More and more of us “cancel” those we disagree with, censor “politically incorrect” viewpoints, shout down our adversaries and act like victims if someone contradicts on us on even just one point. The imposition of “correct thinking” as seemingly benign as employee training or workshops could easily end up like China’s re-education centres or the former Soviet Union’s Gulag. Already, people disenchanted with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are increasingly looking for optional social media that will not censor them. By 2055, technology will have made it increasingly easier to control, censor and punish “incorrect thinking”. If the trend continues, groups of like-minded people will start to seek each other out and go underground. There could very well be an underground “resistance” that refuses to go with the Status Quo, people hiding in remote areas, going off-grid, steering clear of new vaccines or implants and refusing to use computer technology in order to avoid being traced. We all have different and sometimes contrary needs hence dialogue and compromise are necessary. We can only strive for a decent world for everyone, the perfect world does not exist.

It seems that the more we advance in the health sciences, the more we idealize perfection. We want to stay young, beautiful and healthy. We are afraid of illness, suffering, disability, deformity and death. Life is deemed unworthy if we are disabled in some way, and we want to control death.  We want to chose when and how and with whom it will happen. 200 years ago, death was very much a natural part of life. Now we sanitize both life and death. Never have we had a world so sanitized as in 2020 with Covid19. We would rather not see suffering. Our parents are often “forgotten” in old age homes. We prefer to abort children with Down’s Syndrome even though they definitely can and do live happy, fulfilled lives. We offer assisted suicide to those who have become too ill, too old, or too disabled. Restrictions on assisted suicide continue to slide. It is a lot easier for a society with an ageing population to fix the problem of who will care for the elderly by providing the option of assisted suicide. By 2055, the pressure that the elderly already feel to “not be a burden” will become increasingly stronger. We could very well be looking at the compulsory euthanasia of anyone who is no longer be able to care for themselves. Like people with Down’s Syndrome, the elderly will disappear. Parents of children with Down’s Syndrome or Autism receive hate notes from people who are incensed that the latter exist. We could be looking at a future where aborting those children is compulsory. Forced abortion already exists in China. In 2055 we will likely have the technology and the medical resources to make people’s lives easier. We will have technology that could make it easier to do things independently, that would allow people with disabilities to work, play and socialize, artificial limbs that respond to mental controls, medical advancements that would relieve or at least manage suffering. Virtual reality would allow people to not only forget their suffering for awhile, but to do things they couldn’t do in real life. Imagine quadriplegics playing virtual soccer! On the other hand, we could also be looking at test-tube babies; choosing babies’ DNA or even genetically modified humans. We could be looking at people going underground or off-grid in order to hide their ageing parents or disabled children from the authorities.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was a prophetic warning. Asimov’s New World, on the other hand, was much more positive and closer to reality.  While the year 1984 did not see the kind of technology that an Orwellian world would need to exercise that kind of control over people, in 2020, we are well on our way to developing it. We have choices to make. Do we use technology to make life easier for the individual, or to make it easier for a ruling elite to control individuals? Do we make ourselves dialogue with people who disagree with us, or do we play the victim and refuse to take other points of view into consideration? Do we make death an escape from suffering, caring and responsibility, or do we focus on making it easier to choose life even if it is not perfect? The choices we make will determine whether we find ourselves in a bright, exciting future along the lines of Isaac Asimov’s vision for 2019 or a dark, controlled future like the one George Orwell describes in 1984.