Category Archives: Transhuman News

Heres an interesting thought experiment for you: What happens to life imprisonment for murder and other heinous crimes if the human lifespan is increased? If we live until 150 or 250 or 350 (which is very possible, given the direction of recent efforts into life extension) how many more prisons will we have to build to hold all of those murderers and rapists who just wont die? Even if we can build enough prisons to hold them, will it be economically viable to do so? What about parole? Right now, many life sentences are up for parole after 15 or 20 years but if we live for 350 years, doesnt a 15-year incarceration seem a little bit on the lenient side for a serious crime?

As a futurist, this is the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about and the kind of thing that we, as a society, need to sit down and discuss, before its too late. Incarceration is just a tiny piece of the life extension discussion, too: What about pensions? And healthcare? And employment? And education? These four factors combined have essentially dictated the framework upon which all of modern society is based and theyre all based on the idea that humans are born, become adults around the age of 18, retire around the age of 60, and then die fairly soon after that. In the US, average life expectancy has risen from 69.77 years in 1960 to 78.64 in 2011 a fairly small gain on paper, but a difference of billions of dollars in healthcare and social security spending. Imagine if we all start living to 90, or 100, or 110 or 200. You begin to see how indefinite life extension could cause some problems. (Read: Googles Project Calico wants to make your lifespan its business.)

Because there are so many factors that determine the longevity of a human life, hard figures for life expectancy from birth and life extension in your later years are hard to come by. Generally though, in developed countries, the average life expectancy has been creeping up by around one year for every five years that pass. So, if youre born today, you can expect to live around 80 years; but if youre born five years from now, you might live until youre 81. In general, as weve started to gain more control over cancer, heart disease, and smoking, this figure has been trending upwards. One theory suggests that life extension will actually slow down, because there just arent that many gains to be had by conquering heart disease and cancer wed get a few more years on average, but then old age will probably get us. The other theory, of course, is that our average life expectancy is about to shoot forward, thanks to gene therapy, replacement organs, and other advanced transhumanist approaches. (Read: What is transhumanism?)

But lets get back to the original point of this story: If we do start to live until were 100 or 150, where does that leave our justice and jail systems?

In the future, jail sentences might be spent with your mind trapped inside a computer for a thousand years.

Its fairly obvious that we cant significantly increase the duration of prison sentences its just not economically (or societally) viable and so we have to look at other possible solutions. This isnt as easy as it sounds humanity has spent a large portion of the last 10,000 years trying to work out how to fairly deal with criminals, and yet plain old prison still seems to be the correctional method of choice. Execution is one very obvious method of solving the problem of over-full prisons but of course thats a non-starter. Another option is downscaling the number of people that get sent to prison, through crime prevention and different, non-prison sentences (rehabilitation, house arrest, etc.)

And then, of course, there are the terrifying, futuristic, technological solutions. After all, if we leverage advanced technology to extend our lifespan, why shouldnt we also use it to deal with criminals? Thats the theory put forward by Rebecca Roache, anyway, who leads a group of scholars at Oxford University that are looking at how futuristic technology will transform punishment. Roache says that there are already psychoactive drugs that can distort your sense of time and that it probably wouldnt be hard to develop a dedicated time dilation drug, which when given to prisoners would make them feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence.

A precog from The Minority Report, tasked with predicting crimes before they happen.

Another equally terrifying biotech solution, Roache writes on her blog, would be to upload the mind of a criminal to a computer and then speed up the rate of the simulation by a factor of a million then 1,000 years of imprisonment could be experienced in just eight and a half hours. Showing her slightly more humanitarian side, Roache also says that the last hour or two of the simulation (i.e. a few hundred years) could be spent on treatment and rehabilitation. Voil: Eight and a half hours in a Matrix-style chair, and out comes a suitably chastised and rehabilitated criminal. How kind.

Personally, rather than devising ingenious ways of tormenting fellow humans, I think futurists and technologists should probably focus their efforts on making the world a better place, through crime prevention and education. Lets start with pre-crime, a la The Minority Report, and go from there.

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Immortality, biotechnology, and the woefully unprepared criminal justice system

I take it back I take it all back.

The Beam teleconference robot is not the douchiest product of all time, as I so cynically claimed after seeing it in action during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show. In fact, its amazing so amazing that its use by NSA whistleblower and eloquent fugitive badass Edward Snowden at this weeks TED Talks made me realize an idea that is both astonishing and, somehow, already a normal part of 21st century life: Thanks to technology, we are not longer merely humans at all. We are cyborgs. The line has been crossed.

Using Beams keyboard-powered interface, Snowden wheeled around the stage, giving himself a better look at the audience.

Beam, if you havent yet encountered it, is a remote presence system made by Suitable Technologies, and first launched in 2012. The $16,000 contraption has an iPad-like screen for a face, multiple Internet-connected cameras, and has wheels that allow users to pilot around a room (or, in Snowdens case, a conference center).

The company touts many uses for Beam eliminating the need for business executives to travel to international offices, allowing doctors to better treat quarantined patients, remote learning for university students all of which I dismissed as secondary to Beams eerie presence after experiencing it on the show floor of CES. In retrospect, I realize that I was simply being an unimaginative jerk.

The next time I came across a Beam was this week, while streaming TED Talks to my TV with Google Chromecast. (Highly recommended, FYI.) Thanks to the Beam, Snowden appeared on stage in Vancouver for a 35-minute interview with TED head Chris Anderson. Using Beams keyboard-powered interface, he wheeled around the stage, giving himself a better look at the audience. He shifted his digital gaze to have a quick chat with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, who had a brief on-stage cameo. He wore, below his screen, a big name tag that read Edward Snowden, citizen.

Seeing as this is a TED, home of next-generation ideas and thinking, it is easy to take this futuristic scene for granted. But lets just pause for a moment to reflect on what took place: From a secret remote location in Russia, Snowden, one of the most sought-after fugitives from the U.S. government, gave an interview, chatted with the inventor of the Web, tooled around on a stage some 5,000 miles away, then mingled with the TED crowd, and even had his picture taken with Googles Larry Page.

That is goddamn incredible.

Without the Beam, most of that would have been impossible. Yes, he could have still done the interview part, like he did at SXSW. But he certainly couldnt have taken selfies with TED-goers. And, I imagine, it wouldnt have felt like he was really there. Even from my remote location (on my couch), Beam-Snowden seemed like a person, like a living being occupying space around other living beings. He wasnt just a face on a screen.

This idea that we are already cyborgs an interdependent mix of man and machine is not new. But it is part of our reality. Just snatch a smartphone away from a 16-year-old, and youll see that neither function well without the other. Nor is it novel that technology allows us to do things that were previously impossible thats the point. But Beam-Snowden is something different; he (it, whatever) existed in a place outside his body. He did, in fact, go to Canada.

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As Snowden roams free in robot form, our cyborg future has arrived