valoll on siis tekemista energian ja massankanssa

miten valo vaikutt massaan. miten sinä vaikutat massaan miten minä vaikutanhttp://www.reumanhoito.fi/selkarankareuma/elamaa-reuman-kanssa/sairastuminen-alkuoireisto/ telee 24.5.2017 kello 12 Helsingin yliopiston kasvatustieteellisessä tiedekunnassa aiheesta "Kuvatulkinta ja maantieteellinen tarkkaavaisuus - Semioottinen ajattelutapa nuorten visuaalisen lukutaidon osana" (The Interpretation of Photographs and Geographical Vigilance: A Semiotic Way of Thinking as Part of Young People's Visual Literacy Skills). Väitöstilaisuus järjestetään osoitteessa Päärakennus, Pieni juhlasali, Fabianinkatu 33. Vastaväittäjänä on professori Janne Seppänen, Tampereen yliopisto, ja kustoksena on professori Sirpa Tani. Väitöskirja julkaistaan sarjassa Kasvatustieteellisiä tutkimuksia.Kuntosaliohjaaja: Tämä on hyvä laite ulkoreisille ja pakaroille. Minä: Onko vaarana, että alienit sieppaavat minut? #scifi #kuntoutuslive

https://www.suomirakentaa.fi/omakotirakentaja/laemmitys/laemmityksen-valinta CAKE by Accelerize Continues International Momentum with Growing Revenue from the EMEA Region CAKE's SaaS Solution Tracks,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fornj%C3%B3t https://www.facebook.com/%CE%89-%CE%9A%CE%BB%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%AC-%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%B4%CE%BF%CF%83%CE%B9%CE%B1%CE%BA%CF%8C-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%86%CE%B5%CE%BD%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%BF-%CE%A4%CE%B1%CF%80%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%82-115389865158361/ ja sinulle. Olit kaikkia muita lähempänä, vaikka pystyin tavoittamaan sinut päivittäin vain puhelimella. Vähitellen myös matkamittariin kertyi kilometrejä, mutta lokakuun puolenvälin jälkeen auto vaihtui junaan, koska suru kavensi maantietä. Matkatessani luoksesi join kahvia ja tein töitä, enkä halunnut ajatella väistämätöntä. Paluumatkoilla poistin käsien vapinan yhdellä tummalla oluella ja jatkoin työskentelyä, mutta ajatukseni palasivat koko ajan sinuun. Viisaampieni mielestä olin aina väärässä paikassa. Kun istuin seurassasi, olisi minun pitänyt olla työpaikalla ja päinvastoin. Sanat lohduttavat, mutta yhtälailla ne kykenevät repimään uusia haavoja. Sinä et tuominnut, vaan huolehdit, että ehdin ajoissa junaan ja yöksi kotiin perheeni luokse. Kielsit käymästä luonasi, kun flunssa vei voimani. Ne olivat lohduttomia päiviä, koska samaan aikaan lauseesi lyhenivät entisestään. Kolmisen viikkoa sitten, lähetti VR minulle tiedon ansaitsemastani matkasetelistä ja mahdollisuudesta ostaa sarjalippuja. Muutamaa päivää aiemmin oli määränpää jo ehtinyt kadota. Nimipäiväsi vastaisena yönä kaadoin lasiin kesällä ostamaani viskiä, istuin työhuoneeni lattialle ja kuuntelin aamun asti Bruce Springsteenin live-albumia, jonka sinä ostit tukholmalaisesta levykaupasta marraskuussa 1986 joululahjaksi minulle. Et todennäköisesti tunnistanut yhtään albumin kappaleista, mutta tiesit aina, mitä lahjasi ja musiikki minulle merkitsivät. Eilen kanttorin jykevä ääni kantoi Karjalan kunnailla –laulua hallitusti eteenpäin, mutta minä en kyennyt yhtymään sanoihin kahden ensimmäisen säkeen jälkeen. Enkä voinut enää totella viimeistä antamaasi ohjetta: älä itke. Teksti heräsi eloon ja kuljetti takaisin hetkeen, jolloin nautimme venäläistä kuohuviiniä lapsuudenkotisi portailla. Sieltä historia heitti sinut loputtomalle evakkotielle ja sotalapseksi Ruotsiin. Sen jälkeen ei lähteminen ollut sinulle vaikeaa. Muuttokuormat kulkivat yhdeksällä vuosikymmenellä, ja sinä niiden mukana. Kun laskimme sinut viimeiseen leposijaasi, oli kantamuksemme kevyt, mutta paino mittaamaton. Rakas äitini, valehtelisin jos väittäisin, että jokaiseen tänään kirjoittamaani sanaan sisältyy kyynel. Niitä on paljon enemmän eikä vitsini naurata enää.

2065: "Moderate" American rebels fighting Eric Trump regime express gratitude for Chinese coalition airstrikes.

анкт-Петербурга прогремели взрывы По предварительным данным, на синей ветке петербургского метро на станции «Садовая» прогремел взрыв в вагоне. Есть жертвы. На станциях синей линии петербургского метрополитена — «Технологический институт» и «Сенная площадь» — прогремели два взрыва. Очевидцы сообщают, что закрыты станции «Маяковская», «Владимирская» и «Площадь восстания». Сотрудники силовых ведомств выехали на место, сообщает Life. Как утверждают очевидцы, много пострадавших. На появившихся в интернете фотографиях видно, что дверь вагона сильно повреждена, а платформу заволокло дымом. Об этом сообщает РосБалт. МАТЕРИАЛЫ ПО ТЕМЕ БЛОГИ Взрыв в Петербургском метро. ОНЛАЙН Не менее 10 погибших, около 20 раненых… 5 61 6 35060 7 14:57 Напомним, что в Санкт-Петербурге сейчас находится президент Владимир Путин. Он участвует в работе форума ОНФ. Закрыты три станции — «Садовая», «Площадь Восстания» и «Технологический Университет». Об этом сообщает РИА со ссылкой на источник. Со станции метро в Петербурге, где произошел взрыв, идет эвакуация, в том числе из тоннеля, сообщает ТАСС. Президенту РФ Владимиру Путину уже доложено о взрыве в метро Санкт-Петербурга, сообщил «Интерфаксу» пресс-секретарь президента Дмитрий Песков. «Да, доложено», — сказал он. На вопрос о том, может ли это происшествие отразиться на планах пребывания В.Путина в Санкт-Петербурге, Д.Песков сказал: «Президент работает в Стрельне (где у него проходит встреча с президентом Белоруссии — «Интерфакс») Правоохранительные органы подтверждают, что в вагоне на станции метро «Сенная площадь» в Санкт-Петербурге произошел взрыв. Об этом рассказал корреспондент радиостанции «Эхо Москвы». Очевидцы сообщают о большом количестве пострадавших. Платформу заволокло дымом. По некоторым данным, еще один взрыв прогремел в вагоне на станции «Технологический институт», однако официальных подтверждений этому пока нет. На данный момент обе станции закрыты на вход и выход. В Санкт-Петербурге сейчас находится президент РФ Владимир Путин. Он участвует в работе форума ОНФ. Идет эвакуация пассажиров с петербургских станций метро «Сенная площадь» и «Технологический институт», где произошли взрывы. Закрыты станции Парк Победы, Электросила, Московские ворота, Фрунзенская, Технологический институт, Сенная площадь, Гостиный двор. Следователи находятся на месте ЧП в Петербурге, организованы следственные действия. Часть пострадавших приходится извлекать из искореженного взрывом вагона при помощи спецтехники. В московском метро усиливаются меры безопасности. Это сообщили «Интерфаксу» в понедельник в пресс-службе Московского метрополитена. Путин сообщил, что правоохранительные органы выясняют причины взрыва.

http://www.anthropic-principle.com/?q=book/chapter_8#8c

The World in 2050 [Broadcast by BBC Virtual Reality, August 14th, 2050] (c) 2000, Nick Bostrom SUMMARY This essay explores some of the social, political, economic and technological issues that the world may have to face in the mid-21st century. A central theme is the need to regulate molecular nanotechnology because of its immense abuse potential. Advanced nanotechnology can be used to build small self-replicating machines that can feed on organic matter - a bit like bacteria but much more versatile, and potentially more destructive than the H-bomb. The necessity to prevent irresponsible groups and individuals from getting access to nanotechnological manufacturing capability is a prime concern in 2050. The essay shows how this quest for containment shapes many aspect of society, most notably via the institution of a global surveillance network. A dialogue format is used for two reasons. First, in order to enable several conflicting views to be discussed. And second, to illustrate how public debates may be conducted at that time. [P.S. This essay was written under various external constraints, including that it should deal with the in 2050, so not too much weight should be put on the time line and some other details.] Host: Much has happened over the past fifty years, but what are the changes that really matter? Have they been for better or for worse? And where are we heading in the next fifty years? With us tonight to discuss these questions are three very distinguished polymaths: Emily Brown, CEO of Cisco Systems; Dr. Chun Ten, technology editor of The Economist; and Neil Brigge, professor of philosophy at New York University and a director of the Foresight Institute. Neil, do you think that the human condition has changed over the past half century? Neil: We live longer and healthier lives. We are much richer. We have the ability to choose our sensory experiences to a much greater extent than ever before. Right now, you are watching a smooth-skinned, well-groomed Neil, but the real physical Neil sitting here in my VR-box may be a much less appealing sight - I may not have shaved or washed for a week! Emily: People are still concerned with how they present themselves, both in physical space and in cyberspace. The fraction of our income that we spend on personal presentation has been increasing steadily throughout the century. As it becomes easier to satisfy our material needs, we seem to focus more on what we are in relation to others - there is great demand for what the economists call "positional goods". Host: We are the vainest people ever? Emily: Or the most "people-centered", depending on how you want to see it. Chun: I now see a backlash against conspicuous consumption in some communities. High-status people try to signal their superiority by shunning cosmetic filters and other conveniences that the less well endowed cannot afford to do without. But this "nudism", as they call it, is very partial. It is only a few selected enhancement-options that are being stripped off. Host: At the turn of the century, many were concerned about global warming and other ways in which humans were damaging the environment. Global warming turned out not to be a significant problem, but did this early environmentalist movement have any lasting effects on how things developed? Emily: Environmentalist thinking opened a lot of minds to the idea that we are living on this finite planet and that what is done in one part of the sphere can affect what happens on the other side. "Global conscience", was perhaps the most beneficial lasting effect. Remember that it is only in the last twenty years that widespread undernourishment has finally been eliminated. Of course, bioengineering and nanotechnology were essential tools in achieving that, and this helped reshape environmentalist thinking. At the turn of the century, many environmentalists were very suspicious of new technology. Now most people accept that it is thanks to technological progress that we are able to sustain a world population of eleven billions and still preserve significant parts of the natural environment. Neil: What also happened was that the early focus on the environment gradually widened to include all aspects of human life. Today we have the debate between transhumanists, who are enthusiastic about transforming the human condition, and naturalist conservatives who are happy about technology as long as it doesn’t change human nature too much. While most naturalists will take life-extension supplements, they don’t approve of the use of mood-drugs or cosmetic psychopharmacology. Chun: The emergence of law and order in the international plane - "global conscience" as Emily calls it - is probably the reason why we are still here today. There is still no effective global immune system that could defend against malicious self-replicating nanomachines. Without the steadily improving global surveillance network, some terrorist group or scientifically-literate madman might long ago have made their own nanotech assembler and manufactured a "virus" that could have destroyed the biosphere and eradicated intelligent life from this planet. Neil: Indeed, and this could still happen. It just takes an ill will and a single security breach somewhere. We must just hope the surveillance network improves rapidly enough that this will never happen. Host: How was it possible for the surveillance network to be put in place so quickly? Chun: Well, a lot of the infrastructure was already there. Companies monitored customers, the police monitored public places, the military monitored foreign countries. Once gnat-cameras became cheap and you could link everything up to data bases and face-recognition software, surveillance networks began covering larger and larger territories in more and more detail. The other part of the explanation is that policy-makers could become persuaded by the necessity to regulate nanotechnology. And here I think better collective decision-making institutions played a key role. Idea futures is a good example of this. As you know, idea futures is the market where speculators place bets on hypotheses about future scientific or technological breakthroughs, political events and so forth. Trading prices - the odds - in idea futures markets gradually became recognized as authoritative estimates of the probabilities of possible future events. In the twentieth century, policymakers would sometimes commission the opinion of bodies of experts that they appointed, but it turns out that the market is much better at making these predictions than politically selected committees. Such markets were once banned under anti-gambling laws in most places. Only gradually were exceptions granted, first for a stock market, then for various commodities and derivatives markets, but only in this century did we see the rise of wide-ranging free markets with low transaction costs, where speculators could trade on most any claim. It’s hard to overestimate how important this was in making society’s decision-making a bit more rational. Neil: I agree that this was important. The tragedies of the tens and twenties, where genetically engineered biological viruses were used to kill millions, also helped prepare the world. People have seen the damage that a malicious guy can do with self-replicating organisms. And nanotech is much, much more powerful. I think we have been incredibly lucky so far. Maybe we are witnessing the result of what philosophers call an observational selection effect. Maybe most civilizations in our infinite universe destroy themselves when they develop nanotechnology, but only the lucky ones remain to wonder about their luck. So our success so far should not make us complacent. Emily: It’s amazing how quickly people have got used to the idea that everything they do can now be known by anybody who is interested in finding out. When you are going on a date with someone, you can check out their previous relationships, and so on. If you had suggested this to somebody fifty years ago, they’d have been horrified! They would probably have referred to it as Brave New World, or Orwell’s 1984, with Big Brother watching you all the time. But it’s like a nudist colony: when everybody is naked, the embarrassment quickly wears off. So we had all these little secrets that we thought were so important, little vices. But when we can see that everybody has similar little vices, our standards adapt and we become more tolerant. As long as you’re not doing anything really bad or break the law, you don’t have to worry. And the streets are much safer now. Chun: The key to preventing global surveillance from turning into global suppression is to always insist on basic liberties and to keep government and law-enforcement agencies under constant scrutiny. It is crucial that we make sure that the system is transparent in both directions, so that we can watch who’s watching us. Emily: Yet there are still rumblings about it being a plot by the technologically advanced countries to monopolize the power coming from the nanotech revolution. Chun: The logic is crystal clear to every honest thinker. Since there is as yet no general defense against nanotech attacks that could potentially destroy the biosphere, such attacks must be prevented at any cost. The only way to do that is to limit the number of powers who have nanotechnology. If a single evil madman gets it, then it’s "game over". Emily: I agree that is a good argument, and that we have to limit access to nanotechnology until we have developed reliable defenses. But that doesn’t mean that the leading powers don’t derive an unfair advantage from this technological monopoly. The people who are excluded from building nano-assemblers have a right to be compensated. Current transfer payments are nowhere near what they are entitled to. Chun: It is also a problem of intellectual property laws, which has been a burning issue for quite some time now. - [Emily Brown disappears] Host: It appears that we have lost transmission from Emily - she was on her yacht. Hope she hasn’t run into bad weather - Ok, let’s turn our gaze towards the future. What lies ahead? Neil, I know that you have expressed pessimism about the future - Neil: I’m not a pessimist, but I’m concerned that we might have underestimated the risk that nanotech could proliferate before we can build defenses. There has been a series of incidents already. As technological know-how spreads, it may be harder and harder to make sure that no rogue group develops an assembler. Building an effective global immune system for self-replicating nanomachines is a very, very difficult challenge. It has to be present everywhere, on land, sea, and in the atmosphere. It must avoid attacking biological life forms. And it has to work 100% of the time. We are very far from being able to do that at the present time. Chun: Surveillance technology is improving rapidly, however. Neil: Yes, but what if someone develops a good counter-surveillance technology? Intelligence agencies are now discussing proposals for monitoring and preventing research in that field as well. But the problem is that the task is so ill-defined. Who can say what research might potentially lead to some way of tricking the global surveillance network? Host: Are there any idea futures claims that measure the probability of these things? Neil: Yes, but they don’t really tell us much. You see, who would want to bet on the hypothesis that civilization will be destroyed? If you are right, you would not get paid! It is disconcerting to note that what economists call the time discount factor seems to have been going up. (The time discount factor is a measure of how much more value people place on a present good compared to having the same good at some point later in the future.) That could be interpreted as people being worried about whether they will be around to benefit from their savings. [Emily Brown reappears] Host: Welcome back, Emily! Emily: I’m terribly sorry! I’m on a yacht here, and my son was playing with the antenna - I’m so sorry! Host: Don’t worry. My attention-meter shows that the intermezzo increased our eyeball-count. That’s why we are doing this live. Our viewers like it when things go wrong! You should give your kid a bonus! Emily: I don’t think so! Host: We were talking about the future. Neil was just trying to convince us that he is not a pessimist, and he went on to explain all the excellent reasons we have for thinking that there is a great risk that we will all be turned into gray goo by nanoreplicators running amok. Is that a fair summary, Neil? Neil: I suppose so. But on the other hand, if we do manage to avoid doomsday, things could turn out really nice. That’s why I don’t call myself a pessimist, because if we are careful we might achieve a great outcome. Chun: My grandfather is 102 years old and he is quite active. This is all thanks to life-extension. We can only dream of all the wonderful things that will become possible when we learn to redesign and expand our minds. There is more to lose than ever before. Having got this far, we really must try to make sure that we don’t destroy ourselves with rogue nanotechnology, even if it means holding some types of developments back temporarily. Neil: There are many people who won’t make it. Over a hundred thousand people deanimate everyday, many due to aging-related ailments. More than two thirds of the world’s population still don’t have a cryonics contract! When they deanimate, instead of having the information in their brains preserved by freezing or vitrification, they are just cremated or buried. For worms, there certainly are such things as free meals! And this at a time when in the idea futures market there is more than a 50% chance of reanimation of a human brain within three years! This preventable loss of human life, day after day, year after year, almost makes the two world wars or the Baghdad flu insignificant by comparison. Chun: The difference is that this is largely self-selected death. It’s a price you pay for freedom of religion. Neil: For some people that is true. But there are millions who simply cannot afford a cryonics contract, or don’t have enough education to understand what the options are. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should force anybody to have themselves frozen when they deanimate, but I think we have a duty to provide enough information and financial help so that each individual can at least make an informed decision. Host: Won’t overpopulation be a big problem if all the people who are currently in cryonic suspension are suddenly reanimated? Chun: Actually, there aren’t that many of them. About three billion people have made arrangements to have themselves suspended when they deanimate, but only about 150 million people have been suspended to date. Neil: Idea futures indicate that if these people are reanimated, it will be through being uploaded into computers. It looks much more feasible to disassemble these vitrified brains cell by cell, molecule by molecule, scanning off the neural network, and then run an emulation of that neural network on a computer. In vitro repair is harder than in silico repair - that is, doing it in a computer simulation. And I, for one, would much rather be uploaded than having my biological brain repaired. I already spend most of my time in virtual reality, and I’d like the security of being able to make a back-up copy of my mind every hour or so. If for some reason I want to manipulate physical objects, I would rent a robot body that was suitable for what I wanted to do. Emily: I can understand those who are scared of uploading. I’m scared of it myself. Who can guarantee that a brain emulation would truly be conscious? And even though our virtual reality is pretty good at vision and sound, I still think it can’t compete with the meatspace in the other sensory modalities. Virtual sex is great, but I prefer to touch my husband’s body directly. Neil: The other sensory modalities of virtual reality will work much better for uploads. It is easier to do it for uploads, because you can directly activate neurons in their sensory cortices. You don’t have to build these complicated mechanical devices we have now to stimulate our body surfaces. Emily: I still see it as a last resort. I would rather be an upload than be dead, but I think that as long as my biological body is functioning well, I’ll stick with that. Neil: There could be huge advantages to being among the first uploads. I was attending a neurocomputation conference last week, and I was talking to several groups there who are studying hypothetical ways of enhancing the intellectual abilities of an upload, by adding new neurons and new connections and so forth. If uploads could become more intelligent than humans, I would prefer to be an upload. Also, computing power increases. There is an idea futures claim that within two years of the first human upload, there will be an upload running at a clock speed one hundred times greater than a biological brain. That means the upload will think a hundred times faster than we do! Last time I checked, this claim was trading at better than even odds. Chun: Since uploads are software, they can easily make copies of themselves. We could see a population explosion with a vengeance, and we might have to brush up on Malthus again. Malthus was a late eighteenth century political economist who argued that unless population control is instituted, then population growth will eventually annihilate any improvement in the standard of living for the masses that economic growth has brought about. Even rapid space colonization, which hasn’t been economical so far, but which idea futures indicate is likely to begin within a decade, will not be able to keep up with a free-breeding population of uploads. Emily: Uploading raises huge ethical and political issues. Not to speak of the legal challenges. If you are an upload and you make a copy of yourself, so there are now two almost identical implementations of you, who is married to your husband? We have only scratched the surface of this problematique. I would like to see a moratorium on uploading experiments and some form of artificial intelligence research until we have a better understanding of where we are going. We are playing with fire. Host: I’m afraid we’re out of time. It’s been fascinating. I suppose we’ll see over the next few years how this plays out. Thank you all for participating. Neil, I leave the final word with you. Neil: We are in the process of crossing a road. The one thing we must not do is stop in the middle. We need greater-than-human intelligence to build defenses against nano-attacks. We would not reduce the danger by slowing down; on the contrary, that would make the risks even bigger. The best we can do is to press onward with all possible speed, using as much foresight as we can muster, and hope that there is an other side that we can get to.

Letter from Utopia Nick Bostrom Oxford University (Version 1.6) www.nickbostrom.com [Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008): pp. 1-7] A improved version (1.10) is available here (pdf) [Nexus Journal (2010), forthcoming] Translations: | | Dear Human, Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity! Forgive my writing to you out of the blue. Though you and I have never met, we are not strangers. We are, in a certain sense, the closest of kin… I am one of your possible futures. One day, I hope, you will become me. Should fortune grant this wish, then I am not just a possible future of yours, but your actual future: a coming phase of you, like the full moon that follows a waxing crescent, or like the flower that follows a seed. I am writing to tell you about my life – how marvelous it is – that you may choose it for yourself. Although this letter uses the singular, I am really writing on behalf of my all my contemporaries, and we are addressing ourselves to all of your contemporaries. Amongst us are many who are possible futures of your people. Some of us are possible futures of children you have not yet given birth to. Still others are possible artificial persons that you might one day create. What unites us is that we are all dependent on you to make us real. Think of this note as if it were an invitation to a ball – a ball that will take place only if people show up. We call the lives we lead here “Utopia”. * How can I tell you about Utopia and not leave you nonplussed? What words could convey the wonder? What inflections express our happiness? What points overcome your skepticism? My pen, I fear, is as unequal to the task as if I had tried to use it against a charging elephant. But the goal of understanding is so important that that we must try even against long odds. Maybe you will see through the inadequacies of my exposition. Have you ever known a moment of bliss? On the rapids of inspiration, maybe, where your hands were guided by a greater force to trace the shapes of truth and beauty? Or perhaps you found such a moment in the ecstasy of love? Or in a glorious success achieved with good friends? Or in splendid conversation on a vine-overhung terrace one star-appointed night? Or perhaps there was a song or a melody that smuggled itself into your heart, setting it alight with kaleidoscopic emotion? Or during worship? If you have experienced such a moment, experienced the best type of such a moment, then a certain idle but sincere thought may have presented itself to you: “Oh Heaven! I didn’t realize it could feel like this. This is on a different level, so very much more real and worthwhile. Why can’t it be like this always? Why must good times end? I was sleeping; now I am awake.” Yet behold, only a little later, scarcely an hour gone by, and the softly-falling soot of ordinary life is already piling up. The silver and gold of exuberance lose their shine. The marble becomes dirty. Every way you turn it’s the same: soot, casting its veil over all glamours and revelries, despoiling your epiphany, sodding up your white pressed collar and shirt. And once again that familiar beat is audible, the beat of numbing routine rolling along its tracks. The commuter trains loading and unloading their passengers… sleepwalkers, shoppers, solicitors, the ambitious and the hopeless, the contented and the wretched… like human electrons shuffling through the circuitry of civilization. We do so easily forget how good life can be at its best – and how bad at its worst. The most outstanding occasion: barely is it over before the sweepers move in to clean up the rice. Yellowing photos remain. And this is as should be. We are in the business of living, and the show must go on. Special moments are out-of-equilibrium experiences in which our puddles are stirred up and splashed about; yet when normalcy returns we are usually relieved. We are built for mundane functionality, not lasting bliss. So you allow the door that was ajar begins to close, disappearing hope’s sliver behind an insensate scab. Quick, stop that door! Look again at your yellowing photos, search for a clue. Do you not see it? Do you not feel it, the touch of the possible? You have witnessed the potential for a higher life: you hold the fading proof in your hands. Don’t throw it away. In the attic of your mind, reserve a drawer for the notion of a higher state of being, and in the furnace of your heart keep at least one aspiring ember alive. I am summoning this memory of your best experience – to what end? In the hope of kindling in you a desire to share my happiness. And yet, what you had in your best moment is not close to what I have now – a beckoning scintilla at most. If the distance between base and apex for you is eight kilometers, then to reach my dwellings would take a million light-year ascent. The altitude is outside moon and planets and all the stars your eyes can see. Beyond dreams. Beyond imagination. My consciousness is wide and deep, my life long. I have read all your authors – and much more. I have experienced life in many forms and from many angles: jungle and desert, gutter and palace, heath and suburban creek and city back alley. I have sailed on the high seas of cultures, and swum, and dived. Quite some marvelous edifice builds up over a million years by the efforts of homunculi, even as the humble polyps amass a reef in time. And I’ve seen the shoals of colored biography fishes, each one a life story, scintillate under heaving ocean waters. The whole exceeds the sum of its parts. What I have is not merely more of what is available to you now. It isn’t just the particular things, the paintings and toothpaste-tube designs, the record covers and books, the epochs, lives, leaves, rivers, and random encounters, the satellite images and the collider data – it is also the complex relationships between these particulars that make up my mind. There are ideas that can be formed only on top of such a wide experience base. There are depths that can be fathomed only with such ideas. You could say I am happy, that I feel good. You could say that I feel surpassing bliss. But these are words invented to describe human experience. What I feel is as far beyond human feelings as my thoughts are beyond human thoughts. I wish I could show you what I have in mind. If only I could share one second of my conscious life with you! But you don’t have to understand what I think and feel. If only you bear in mind what is possible within the present human realm, you will have enough to get started in the right direction, one step at a time. At no point will you encounter a wall of blinding light. At no point will you have to jettison yourself over an end-of-the-world precipice. As you advance, the horizon will recede. The transformation is profound, but it can be as gradual as the growth that made the baby you were into the adult you think you are. You will not achieve this through any magic trick or hokum, nor by the power of wishful thinking, nor by semantic acrobatics, meditation, affirmation, or incantation. I do not presume to advise you on matters theological. I urge on you nothing more, nothing less, than reconfigured physical situation. * The challenge before you: to become fully what you are now only in hope and potential. New capacities are needed if you wish to live and play on my level. To reach Utopia, you must first discover the means to three fundamental transformations. The First Transformation: Secure life! Your body is a deathtrap. This vital machine and mortal vehicle, unless it jams first or crashes, is sure to rust anon. You are lucky to get seven decades of mobility; eight if you be fortune’s darling. That is not sufficient to get started in a serious way, much less to complete the journey. Maturity of the soul takes longer. Why, even a tree-life takes longer. Death is not one but a multitude of assassins. Do you not see them? They are coming at you from every angle. Take aim at the causes of early death – infection, violence, malnutrition, heart attack, cancer. Turn your biggest gun on aging, and fire. You must seize the biochemical processes in your body in order to vanquish, by and by, illness and senescence. In time, you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable media. Then continue to improve the system, so that the risk of death and disease continues to decline. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good. Oh, it is not well to live in a self-combusting paper hut! Keep the flames at bay and be prepared with liquid nitrogen, while you construct yourself a better habitation. One day you or your children should have a secure home. Research, build, redouble your effort! The Second Transformation: Upgrade cognition! Your brain’s special faculties: music, humor, spirituality, mathematics, eroticism, art, nurturing, narration, gossip! These are fine spirits to pour into the cup of life. Blessed you are if you have a vintage bottle of any of these. Better yet, a cask! Better yet, a vineyard! Be not afraid to grow. The mind’s cellars have no ceilings! What other capacities are possible? Imagine a world with all the music dried up: what poverty, what loss. Give your thanks, not to the lyre, but to your ears for the music. And ask yourself, what other harmonies are there in the air, that you lack the ears to hear? What vaults of value are you witlessly debarred from, lacking the key sensibility? Had you but an inkling, your nails would be clawing at the padlock. Your brain must grow beyond any genius of humankind, in its special faculties as well as its general intelligence, so that you may better learn, remember, and understand, and so that you may apprehend your own beatitude. Mind is a means: for without insight you will get bogged down or lose your way, and your journey will fail. Mind is also an end: for it is in the spacetime of awareness that Utopia will exist. May the measure of your mind be vast and expanding. Oh, stupidity is a loathsome corral! Gnaw and tug at the posts, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you’ll break the fence that held your forebears captive. Gnaw and tug, redouble your effort! The Third Transformation: Elevate well-being! What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill, despair and bliss? Pleasure! A few grains of this magic ingredient are worth more than a king’s treasure, and we have it aplenty here in Utopia. It pervades into everything we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea. The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life. It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled on since the beginning of time. There is a beauty and joy here that you cannot fathom. It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow. I reach in vain for words to convey to you what it all amounts to… It’s like a rain of the most wonderful feeling, where every raindrop has its own unique and indescribable meaning – or rather it has a scent or essence that evokes a whole world… And each such evoked world is subtler, richer, deeper, more multidimensional than the sum total of what you have experienced in your entire life. I will not speak of the worst pain and misery that is to be got rid of; it is too horrible to dwell upon, and you are already cognizant of the urgency of palliation. My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that are currently out of reach. The roots of suffering are planted deep in your brain. Weeding them out and replacing them with nutritious crops of well-being will require advanced skills and instruments for the cultivation of your neuronal soil. But take heed, the problem is multiplex! All emotions have a natural function. Prune carefully lest you accidentally reduce the fertility of your plot. Sustainable yields are possible. Yet fools will build fools’ paradises. I recommend you go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right. Oh, what a gruesome knot suffering is! Pull and tug on those loops, and you will gradually loosen them up. One day the coils will fall, and you will stretch out in delight. Pull and tug, and be patient in your effort! May there come a time when rising suns are greeted with joy by all the living creatures they shine upon. * How do you find this place? How long will it take to get here? I can pass you no blueprint for Utopia, no timetable, no roadmap. All I can give you is my assurance that there is something here, the potential for a better life. If you could visit me here for but a day, you would henceforth call this place your home. This is the place where you belong. Ever since one hairy creature picked up two flints and began knocking them together to make a tool, this has been the direction of your unknown aspiration. Like Odysseus you must journey, and never cease to journey, until you arrive upon this shore. “Arrive?” you say; “But isn’t the journey the destination? Isn’t Utopia a place that doesn’t exist? And isn’t the quest for Utopia, as witnessed historically, a dangerous folly and an incitement to mischief?” My friend, that is not such a bad way for you to think about it. To be sure, Utopia is not a location or a form of social organization. The blush of health on a convalescent’s cheek. The sparkle of the eye in a moment of wit. The smile of a loving thought… Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life. The kind of life that yours should have been. I fear that the pursuit of Utopia will bring out the worst in you. Many a moth has been incinerated in pursuit of a brighter future. Seek the light! But approach with care, and swerve if you smell your wingtips singeing. Light is for seeing, not dying. When you embark on this quest, you will encounter rough seas and hard problems. To prevail will take your best science, your best technology, and your best politics. Yet each problem has a solution. My existence breaks no law of nature. The materials are all there. Your people must become master builders, and then you must use these skills to build yourselves up, without crushing your cores. * What is Tragedy in Utopia? There is tragedy in Mr. Snowman’s melting. Mass murders, we have found, are not required. What is Weakness in Utopia? Weakness is spending a day gazing into your beloved’s eyes. What is Imperfection in Utopia? Imperfection is the measure of our love for things as they are. What is Dignity in Utopia? Dignity is the affirming power of “No” said discriminately. What is Suffering in Utopia? Suffering is the salt trace left on the cheeks of those who were around before. What is Courage in Utopia? Courage is the monarchy of the self, here constrained by a constitution. What is Solemnity in Utopia? Solemnity is the appreciation of the mystery of being. What is Body in Utopia? Body is a pair of legs, a pair of arms, a trunk and a head, all made of flesh. Or not, as the case may be. What is Society in Utopia? Society is a never-finished tapestry, its weavers equal to its threads; the parts and patterns an inexhaustible bourne of beauty. What is Death in Utopia? Death is the darkness that enshrouds all life, and our guilt for not having created Utopia as soon as we could have. * We love life here every instant. Every second is so good that it would blow your mind had its amperage not been previously increased. My contemporaries and I bear witness, and we are requesting your aid. Please, help us come into existence! Please, join us! Whether this tremendous possibility becomes a reality depends on your actions. If your empathy can perceive at least the outlines of the vision I am describing, then your ingenuity will find a way to make it real. Human life, at its best, is fantastic. I’m asking you to create something even greater. Life that is truly humane. Yours sincerely, Your Possible Future Self

identity automation

Because work and profession are traditionally important attributes of individual and social identity, these trends and changes in the character of employment are of considerable significance for the future of identity. People who have spent their carrier working in one profession, and achieving skill and standing in that profession, may perceive that their identity has been undermined or devalued when their profession becomes obsolete, especially when the work they did can be performed by machines. This is most likely to be an issue for those that have taken pride in their line of work and who have invested years or decades attaining a high level of mastery in their profession. Those who mainly see their work as a necessary evil that must be endured in order to earn a livelihood may be less affected provided they can secure an alternative source of income. http://www.nickbostrom.com/views/identity.pdf

Advances in computer image recognition and measurement are likely to make the identity of objects detectable over distance using camera or laser systems31 even when they have not be specifically prepared. Similarly biometric identification and data fusion – the combination of evidence from several ‘senses’ – will make automatic remote identification of people easier (especially since they might carry a recognizable constellation of RFID tags and a smartphone). Thanks to rich databases and new probabilistic algorithms identity resolution (constructing a persistent identity from various records, which may be incomplete or conflict) is increasingly feasible32. Such systems are currently used in security, but are likely to spread into commercial and private use. Sources of error (and deception) will persist, but overall it is likely that in many domains 2025 the identity of actors and objects – as well as implied properties such as ownership – can be automatically monitored with a high precision. Anonymity would require deliberate social/legal decisions, cumbersome workarounds or avoiding many areas of life. This augmented world poses challenging new possibilities and demands in the force field between transparency, privacy, and secrecy. It allows unprecedented forms of transparency through automated documentation – in everyday life, in government, in business. Privacy is harder to maintain due to the ease of documentation, but might hence be regarded as a far more valuable commodity than today. By a similar token secrecy becomes harder to maintain – even the best encryption cannot protect from nearby sensors documenting passphrases and biometrics, and once something has been leaked into the public it is impossible to erase. To strike the proper balance between these factors in different domains will be a major social, legal and political undertaking for the next decade. 31 An interesting demonstration is how packaging can be ‘fingerprinted’ by the speckle pattern produced when a laser scans the individual irregularities of the surface, a pattern that persists after crumpling, scorching, wetting and being scribbled upon. James D. R. Buchanan, Russell P. Cowburn, Ana-Vanessa Jausovec, Dorothée Petit, Peter Seem, Gang Xiong, Del Atkinson, Kate Fenton, Dan A. Allwood & Matthew T. Bryan, Forgery: ‘Fingerprinting’ documents and packaging, Nature 436, 475 (28 July 2005) Russell Cowburn, Laser surface authentication - reading Nature's own security code, Contemporary Physics, Volume 49, Issue 5 September 2008 , pages 331 - 342 32 Jeff Jonas, Threat and Fraud Intelligence, Las Vegas Style, IEEE Security & Privacy, November/December 2006 28-3

Legal protections for users of online sites are often weak. To access online software and services, a user is often required to read and approve a long legal consent form that is presented on the screen. Because of the ubiquity of these forms, their length, and their obscure legal terminology, most Internet users have formed the habit of immediately scrolling to the bottom of these forms and clicking the “I accept these conditions” button, without reading or understanding the text. When the software is updated, the user is often required to indicate their agreement to a new consent form. It becomes impractical for the average user carefully to review everything they agree to in this manner. Rather than relying on these online consent forms, most users probably rely on the reputation of the service provider as the main guarantor of honesty and service reliability. Major software and Internet firms can be expected to be protective of their reputational capital, and may therefore choose to refrain from openly deceiving or exploiting their user base. However, firms that face decline will sometimes choose to “harvest” their reputational capital by reneging on their implicit contract with their users in order to eke out as much profit as possible before their time is up. Again, the ‘shadow of the future’ is a relevant problem: while current values and practices are acceptable, they might not remain so. It is interesting to consider whether the same need for maintaining openness, accountability and user rights as holds for governments applies to social space providers. While it can be argued they are merely providing a commercial service controlled by contract law, the importance of online identities and social spaces might be growing to such an extent that they are equivalent to social goods that must be protected by law. If, for example, one’s Facebook or Google identity is necessary for living a normal life in society, then being deprived of it might be equivalent to depriving somebody of a driver’s licence or Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights “We the users expect social network sites to provide us the following rights in their Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and implementations of their system: 1. Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service 2. Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand 3. Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification 4. Empowerment: Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility 5. Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies 6. Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others 7. Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first 8. Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data. 9. Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data 10. Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised 11. Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it. 12. Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission. 17 bank accounts – acts that properly are surrounded by legal rules and methods of appeal. Another situation in which users are vulnerable is when the use of a service creates a strong “lock-in”. Identity providers are often in a situation to create considerable lock-in for their users. Once an individual has invested years in developing an identity, adding content to their online profile and building a deep network of friends within the system, it becomes costly for that individual to quit or move to a competitor. Due to natural monopolies for social spaces there might not even be a competitor16. Governments sometimes seek to protect their citizens against the dangers of such lock-in and the opportunities for exploitation that it creates. Thus, for example, there are legal protections for tenants, who could face a degree of lock-in once they have moved their belongings and settled into a rented property. There is also legislation, aimed at protecting consumers and stimulating competition, that forces cell phone providers to cooperate with customers who wish to switch provider, making it possible for the customer to keep their telephone number. With the growing importance of online identity providers, demands may arise for similar protections for this new sphere of human activity. (An economic analysis or exploration of possible policy options is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.) The globalized identity The potential for alienation from the consequences of our actions is not an issue that pertains specifically to robotics or mediated interaction, but is rather a ubiquitous feature of modern life. To some extent, it may be counteracted by the proliferation of reporting and media, including live streaming video from all parts of the world and social media allowing international social relations. Modern man is tied into a network that spans the world. Our actions as voters, taxpayers, and consumers have consequences that reverberate across the globe; and at the same time, we are to an unprecedented degree able to become aware of this fact. The increasingly common perception of people that they are citizens not just of a city and a nation, but also of an international community is an important change in the self-perception aspect of identity. It is possible that developments in media and social networks, as well as ideological movements, will continue to give increasing salience to this dimension of our existence. Online identities are often already border-crossing: the identity providers are often foreign companies or organisations, and the actual data storage and processing increasingly occurs in widely dispersed cloud computing. This trend will continue and intensify as the world grows more globalized, barriers of language are weakened by improved automatic translation, and people find new kinds of long-range social relations to fulfil their needs and desires. However, this poses challenges for the current legal system since it tends to assume that people have their activities and identities focused in their country of residence. When these become internationalised many aspects of everyday life fall under foreign or international law, potentially causing hard problems. Besides having private citizens possibly unknowingly performing legally relevant acts in foreign jurisdictions (from trade to sedition), a wide variety of identity providers and relying parties will be handling elements of private identity that in the UK and EU enjoy special legal protections (such as medical information: both Google and Microsoft are running electronic health record services), quite possibly in jurisdictions where they lack protection. Recent instances of libel-tourism in the UK where foreign plaintiffs file libel suits in the UK against people abroad that have only tenuous links to the UK (such as an online publication accessible to the UK public) illustrate how identities and activities suddenly have become global. These issues are by no means new, but the rapid increase in globalized identities means they will likely become a key point in developing future international agreements. It might simply be that a truly transnational internet and national laws are fundamentally irreconcilable: although some conflicts can be handled (e.g. through country-of- 16 Most social spaces – games, dating sites, networking services - become more appealing the more members can be reached through them, giving the larger spaces much advantage over smaller ones. The exception is spaces based on exclusivity: here the appeal lies in being a member of a small club it is hard to get into. 18 destination approaches) the eventual choice will be between globalizing law or breaking up the globalization (and hence much of the utility) of the Internet17. Would globalized identities shaped by self-selected peer groups mean weaker loyalties to one’s country? At present there is no clear evidence for or against this possibility. Modern communications media allow both longdistance nationalism and transnational lifestyles. Historically nationalism appears to have become a weaker motivator in Western Europe for most people: while people appear to enjoy identifying with groups more than ever, this is more about social affiliation and signalling than traditional loyalty to a social group and its institutions. Everyday life and security is no longer dependent on a strong personal stake in the group, but rather on impersonal formal rules that rarely impinge on life. The challenge for the national state might be that it has to compete with numerous other affiliations on the emotional and social side, and is reduced to a guarantor of legal rights and provider of services on the practical side. It should be noted that a trend towards weaker nationalism on average does not mean it declines evenly. Some groups may become more nationalistic or loyal to various institutions. The real policy challenge may be to handle a mixture of nationalisms and loyalisms rather than a homogeneous population. The virtual worlds Virtual worlds have been predicted for a long time, but unlike the early 90’s visions of full immersion virtual reality the virtual worlds that are currently expanding in importance are based on fairly traditional ICT hardware. Social media, online gaming, teleconferencing and other software fields are de facto creating virtual worlds right now, and they are increasingly playing a key role in peoples’ lives. They are not so much virtual spaces in the sense of collections of ‘places’ where one might geometrically move around, but rather social spaces: shared environments of interaction. These can be as simple as the text messages used on online bulletin boards where people maintain local identities as discussion participants, over the fanciful characters inhabiting online games, to business avatars used for teleconferencing virtual environments (such as Second Life and Teleplace) or video meetings sustained with teleconferencing (or more cheaply, Skype). In each such space participants have at least one digital identity, more or less strongly linked to their core identity. These virtual identities, despite possibly being merely a textual description, can still hold a powerful resonance with their users. Julian Dibbel’s by now classic essay “A Rape in Cyberspace”18 describes how users of an early 17 Uta Kohl, Jurisdiction and the Internet: , Regulatory Competence over Online Activity, Cambridge University press, 2007 Who sets the Facebook rules? As a global social space, Facebook is faced with many conflicting demands. The “Saudis in the US” group, a group for Saudi Arabian students in the US was split by gender into a male and a female group after some female members wanted the extra privacy. However, not all members agreed on the split and some felt it infringed on their freedom of expression http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article256543.ece?com ments=all. The Facebook decency code bans exposed breasts, which have led to removing photos of breastfeeding and cancelling the accounts of mothers posting pictures. This is somewhat ironic given the less than zealous removal of a paid advertisement with a topless model. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article- 1102950/Mothers-protest-Facebook-ban-offensivebreastfeeding-photos.html Overall, one of the great challenges to a service such as Facebook is that it will serve material to people from cultures that will have significantly different codes of decency, and is 19 text-based virtual environment (a “MUD”) were emotionally violated when another user forced their virtual characters into humiliating and explicit situations. “…what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true.” Maltreatment of virtual characters can matter in the real world, since there is an emotional link to the “real” person. Virtual worlds have their own rules set by the software and moderators, but also partially emergent from the social interactions of participants. Rules about identity and presentation are often important: what kind of names may be used, how easy it is to get the real identity of users, what kind of avatars that can be used and the proper procedure for dealing with breaches of the rules (Dibbel’s essay also describes the aftermath of the incident, where the virtual community debates the proper punishment for the perpetrator and the “constitutional” implications for the virtual environment). Often a good relationship between moderators and users is essential for a successful system, especially as the users need to view the actions of the moderators and owners as legitimate. These relationships are local to the particular social space, yet the participants might be widely dispersed and subjected to numerous conflicting legal, economic and cultural demands. Online economies are starting to have real-world effects; just as new forms of communication and personal identity-creation are emerging. Online gaming is becoming a massive industry. People are paying real money for virtual objects or characters. It has been estimated that virtual goods – useful only within particular digital realms – were exchanged to the value of over 2 billion dollars in 200919. Due to the demand a secondary market of “gold farming” has developed: workers in developing countries playing games in order to produce virtual goods that are then sold for real world money20. People are getting into legal wrangling over the goods – virtual thefts, property rights, inheritance, currencies and taxation are becoming pertinent issues21. Even outside games we have a sizeable number of virtual possessions – family photos, emails, texts, blogs, websites, etc.– that have important emotional value to us and form part of our online and real identities. Many are distributed in social spaces or the cloud worldwide, vulnerable to what the space providers do to them. Digital property rights will likely become a matter of popular concern simply because their aggregate value is rapidly increasing. The augmented world Current trends in ICT is leading to a world of wireless, global 24/7 broadband connectivity accessible through portable devices and smart environments where many everyday objects have been supplied with networked abilities (”the internet of things”). In the words of author Charles Stross, the generation growing up right now will “never be alone, never lost, never forget”22--- the connectivity holds together social networks regardless of location, users are always findable 18 Julian Dibbel, A rape in cyberspace, chapter 1., My tiny life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, Henry Holt Inc. 1998 http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_print.html 19 Tuukka Lehtiniemi, How Big Is the RMT Market Anyway? Virtual Economy Research Network, http://virtualeconomy.org/blog/how_big_is_the_rmt_market_anyw 20 Richard Heeks, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”: Real- World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games, in Development Informatics working paper, no. 32 Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester 2008, 21 See Castronova, Edward (2005). Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, as well as http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2008/10/protectionist-deities-vs-the-economy-of-fun-ownership-of-virtual-possessions/. 22 Charles Stross, LOGIN: 2009 Seattle keynote speech. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login-2009-keynotegaming-in-t.html 20 and know where they are thanks to location services such as built-in GPS, and the devices are increasingly logging and documenting everything that happens. This later property is powered by three strong trends: our devices are increasingly recording our lives without our deliberate decision, thanks to the ubiquity of cheap digital sensing and recording mechanisms from digital cameras and email over the accelerometers and other sensors in smartphones to the automatic logging of most computer systems. Cheap storage makes it easier to record everything that could ever be of interest than to try to determine what to store. Retrieval is facilitated by improved technologies for search, analysis, presentation, and sharing of the data23. The resulting extended memory is likely to have profound effects on personal identity: parts of identity will reside in a persistent “exoself” of information and software. Some people have taken up lifelogging, the use of wearable computers to capture continuous data from their lives – video feeds, location, physiological information, etc. Some lifeloggers also store and share their life events on public forums, “life caching”24, while others are living the “data-driven life”25 where the ability to measure and monitor performance allows them to become aware of or to change their habits. When the idea originated in the 1990’s it required cumbersome and expensive special equipment: today many of these functions can be done by amateurs using slightly modified smartphones; and by 2025, it will likely be an application anybody who chooses can activate. Lifelogging offers many benefits: continuous time monitoring of health, a digital memory that complements the natural memory (being photographic, searchable, and shareable), self-monitoring, and possibly producing a cognitive inheritance. 23 For a popular overview, see Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, Total recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything, Dutton, 2009 24 http://trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE_CACHING.htm 25 Gary Wolf, The Data-Driven Life, New York Times, April 28 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02selfmeasurement-t.html?_r=1 Living the logged life The Microsoft research project MyLifeBits is an experiment in lifetime storage, where Gordon Bell has scanned the articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, photos, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures and voice recordings and stored them digitally. His ongoing information flows (phone calls, instant messaging, television and radio) are being added to this database. The project aims at develop software methods of managing this kind of lifetime data, making it easy to capture, annotate, and integrate it with other software. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell (2009). Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Penguin 21 At present researchers are beginning to study the “exposome” - the air pollutants, physical activity and diet of people - using life recording devices26. Since self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, direct recording might open new possibilities for epidemiology and environmental medicine as well as self-experimentation. A perhaps even more dramatic example is Professor Deb Roy at the MIT Media Lab, who used cameras and microphones in every room in his home to document when and where every word was said in the vicinity of his infant son. Using this massive corpus of data he is able to visualize and annotate the first two years of the child’s life, demonstrating intriguing aspects of language development as well as producing a total home video27. Life recording will also likely to synergize with social networking to seamless “life sharing”. The limits of privacy are likely to be pushed as a generation grows up with this technology. Even if the average person in 2025 is not using full lifelogging many of the functions being explored today will likely exist in the background of their technology. While lifelogging may promise many desirable forms of personal enhancement and selfknowledge, it also has serious privacy implications. It makes personal lives traceable and might challenge many rules on control over personal and public information. A lifelogger walking down a street is making copies of copyrighted information, silently documenting third parties, and possibly acting as a sensor in a distributed network of whose existence he might not even be aware. Police and other authorities might have reason to demand access to part or the whole of life recordings, which might not only raise privacy concerns but actually correspond in the user’s experience to an invasion of mental privacy. Employer-mandated (or encouraged) lifelogging during work hours might be required in order to avoid liability. Issues of ownership, spreading and use of lifelog data will expand from the current problems with public photography, cellphone tracking, personal data storage and smart meters. 26 Brendan Borrell, Epidemiology: Every bite you take, Nature 470, 320-322 (2011) http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110216/full/470320a.html 27 http://web.media.mit.edu/~dkroy/ Please turn off your exoself during start or landing February 18 2002 Professor Steve Mann at University of Toronto ran afoul of the tightening of airport security in the wake of 911. Professor Mann is one of the pioneers of wearable computing and has for more than 20 years lived with an extensive rig of sensors, computers, displays, and wiring he uses to document his life. The security guards at St. John's International Airport in Newfoundland required a strip-search that led to electrodes being torn from his skin and the disassembly of many components of his rig, leading to the disruption of his “exoself”. This in turn led to psychological problems such as concentration difficulties and behaviour changes, according to Professor Mann . While in this case the conflict was triggered by the unfamiliarity of his equipment (see also (Borrell 2011) for police concerns over visible devices for measuring air pollution in subways) the increasing use and reliance on cameras, smartphones, RFID-, wifi- and Bluetooth-enabled equipment is creating struggles over who has authority to determine the standards of what augmenting technologies are allowed in a space. 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7 Personal names on the surface may appear to be well defined and legally regulated, but in practice they show an amazing diversity (especially in multicultural settings) that make formalizations deeply problematic. See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ for an interesting discussion about the real-world problems of assuming anything about what a personal name “is”. 2. Inform The adage “ online medi new forms o setting of hu Online id Social networ just 25 contac but it is relati they were sho Online iden accounts an addresses, a other online Many of the of different eBay profile The Facebo reflecting di persona may known to B mation an “on the Inter ia allow a hig of identificat uman face-to dentities rk of contacts a cts, they in turn ively easy to de ot, and commen ntities are bec nd online per a Facebook o e products an ese identities online servic e, showing th ook account m ifferent aspe y be less inte Blizzard Enter nd commu net nobody k gh degree of tion, docume -face commu and contacts-of n have 4442 co educe much p nts made on va coming incre rsonas. For or Google+ a nd services, s are interlinke ces. A PayPa e transaction might serve t cts of her li egrated with rtainment; an unication knows you ar anonymity a entation and unications and f-contacts of on ntacts. Within ersonal inform arious topics. easingly impo example, an account, an iT uch as the m ed. An email al account wi n history of th to tie togethe fe – hobbies an individua nd the gaming technolog re a dog” has and the possi tracking. No d private/pub ne of the autho this forum ide mation from the ortant. Man n individual Tunes accou massive multip l address may will be linked he user and t er many diffe s, sports, frie al’s offline id g persona ma gies s always been ibility to set u ormal intuitio blic environm ors on the phot entity is mostly e content of th ny people in might have unt, an eBay player online y be used as a to a bank ac he reputation erent commun ends, family, entity, but is ay itself have n of doubtful up alternate i ns about ide ments, are unr to-sharing site y defined by sh he images, loca today have a PayPal acc account, and roleplaying g a username o count, and it n she has acq nities of whic and work. at least tied e various disti l veracity. W identities, th entity, honed nreliable onlin e Flickr. While hared photogra ation and time a variety of count, a cou d subscription game World or password f t might also quired as a bu ch a person i The World d to the custo tinguishable i 10 While modern ey also allow in the social ne. the author has aphic interests, data of where distinct user uple of email ns to various of Warcraft. for a number be tied to an uyer or seller. is a member, of Warcraft omer identity dentities as a 0 n w l s , e r l s . r n . , t y a 11 participant in guilds and other friendships within the game.Some identities are deliberately fragmented. People regularly try to separate their work email account from their private account, often extending this to phone numbers and other ways of gaining access. Parents often instruct their children to never reveal their real names and addresses online. Online game characters or forum identities may be ways of ‘letting off steam’, and hence may require keeping them distant from the main social identities of their creator. This is in many ways a natural extension of our existing separate social personas, projected into online media. Maintaining this kind of separation requires not only the right technology but also some social and mental discipline, keeping the personas distinct. With the proliferation of identities – online as well as offline – growing demands are being placed on identity management systems and on the skills of the citizen. Identity management systems are the software (and institutional) systems that create and keep track of digital identities, as well as connect them to the attributes of their identity (such as resources they can access). These systems can range from simple password protections to complex systems maintaining traceability, data integrity, privacy, preferences, parental and institutional controls and interfaces to other identity management systems. However, unlike social identity management (i.e. how we act among other people) such systems are often inflexible and completely prohibit unplanned uses of identity (which often leads to users finding workarounds that might undermine security) while at the same time missing undesirable activities: they are ‘brittle’. There is little doubt that finding better forms of identity management is going to be a major research and investment area over the next decade as more and more people come online across the world and use new kinds of services. There might not just be competitive advantage in the right kind of identity management, but important social effects. For some identities, it is important that they can be tied in a verifiable way to the legal identity of a person. A PayPal account needs to be linked to a bank account, and the user must verify their identity and that they are the holder of the bank account in question. For other identities, the user might prefer that they be dissociated from their legal identity or entirely anonymous. Online anonymity can be an important component of personal privacy. For example, an individual maintaining a blog in which they expresses politically unpopular views, suffering a serious disease, or opinions that are critical of their employer may suffer grave repercussions if they lose the veil of anonymity. Hiding an identity is an aspect of privacy, but privacy is actually about controlling who can access an identity, not prevent all knowledge of it. Privacy is not absolute – there are sometimes ethical or legal reasons to limit it – but it is often highly desirable that people can control how their identity can be observed or used. Yet, from a practical standpoint enforcing privacy protection can run into the problem of getting the designers of new systems to build it in, making existing widespread systems privacy compliant, handling data that exists in a distributed but collectable form, enforcing the intended protection, avoiding making enforcement so costly that it prevents technological innovation (while Google can afford privacy compliance officers it is unlikely that a small start-up or open source hobby project can), and – perhaps most problematic – making the privacy protection fit the actual social norms of privacy. Given that actual privacy norms vary enormously between groups and develop organically it is likely that any formal system of privacy protection will be lagging social and technological change. “NightJack”: police blogger unmasked The police blog “NightJack” won the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing 2009. The blog often expressed critical views related to the police and justice system. The author, a Lancashire detective constable, was unmasked by The Times after a landmark High Court ruling that stated that blogging was “essentially a public rather than a private activity” and that it was in the public interest to know who originated opinions and arguments. As a result, the constable was disciplined by the police force. This case illustrates the complicated relation between freedom of speech, accountability, anonymity, and risks of reprisals. 12 Trouble can also arise from inappropriate linkages between different snapshots of a single identity across time. A teenager may post pictures and make statements that later prove embarrassing – and, as recruitment officers increasingly Google job applicants, even career-hampering. In this case, a problem arises if people regard the earlier online expressions as relevant manifestations of an unchanging character. While information gleaned from researching a candidate online can often be relevant and highly useful, there is also a risk of self-fulfilling prophecies. If the person is shunned by employers because of something they have said or done, they may be unable to establish a track record to rehabilitate their reputation as a good employee. Furthermore, with the increasing persistence of identity-relevant information online, one cannot rely on the past being forgotten; it will, in some cases, instead have to be forgiven8 . These linkages also include the shadow of the future: in the future much of our present information will be available to people with vastly larger computational resources (making many current forms of encryption or security weak) and different values. While some of the uses they will put our personal information to will be neutral or positive from our perspective, others might not be so benign. Long-lived politicians today have to explain past policies that seemed to make sense at the time they were made but today appear deeply racist; in the future we might be similarly be held accountable for views or activities we currently find entirely moral. Worse, there is no guarantee that this information will not eventually be used by future governments or groups of ill intent. The claim that “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about” presupposes that the accepted criteria for ‘wrong’ will remain the same. The response to this problem might not be to attempt to amplify privacy, but rather to recognize that the need to safeguard open societies and human rights grows with government power over individual lives. One particularly pernicious current possibility is online character assassination. The practises of libel and slander are as old the human species, but the online world offers new opportunities for their efficient implementation. It is easy to post material online anonymously, and material thus inserted may remain available for a very long time and the proficiency of the search engines will ensure that anybody who looks for information about the victim will be presented with the slanderous assertions. Even if the victim obtains a court injunction it may be difficult to remove the offending material, which might be posted on servers located in foreign jurisdictions. If the false information has spread it may even be impossible for the perpetrator to remove it from the net. There is, however, at least one important mitigating factor: just as the Internet makes it easier to disseminate slander, it also makes it easier to publish a rebuttal and to ensure that it will be seen by the relevant people. Unfortunately smears can be stickier than the truth: developing technologies and habits that help uncover slander is a major challenge for future social technology. Identity metasystems 8 The EU Commission draft framework for data protection policies famously states that people have a “right to be forgotten” (or rather, their personal data). The “Social network users’ bill of rights” http://cfp.acm.org/wordpress/?p=495 also includes “the right to withdraw”. Both documents however assume the personal data resides within the domain of some actor who can obey legal or customer demands. If personal information can be collected or inferred from the other information available online these rights may be of little use. The current legal case against Google in Spain where plaintiffs demand references to them to be removed from the search database is a case in point: even if it succeeds, it will not remove the references from other search engines, or from emerging future tools. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_internet_right_to_be_forgotten 13 While digital identities within single systems are useful, it is common for people to wish to maintain their identities across many systems and institutions, ideally without having to authenticate themselves in countless different ways (consider the issue of password-re-use). Identity metasystems are interoperable architectures that allow users to manage collections of digital identities. Key roles within the metasystem are identity providers (issues digital identities), relying parties (entities that require identities, such as online services) and subjects (entities about whom identity claims are made, such as users, companies and organisations)9 . Existing examples are the identification systems sponsored by Microsoft (Passport), Yahoo, Facebook and Google where a single login gives access to many web services. A possible future example would be a metasystem linking a person’s legal identity, various email addresses and a bank account so that commercial and government relying parties could transact official business (e.g. paying taxes, making official requests, signing online contracts). At present few widespread identity metasystems exist. There are economic, technical and legal problems that need to be overcome. A likely scenario is that as society becomes more integrated online the demand for identity metasystems increases (due to the cumbersomeness of fragmented digital identities) and, since there are clear economies of scale, consolidation and competition leads to a few or a single metasystem. These global metasystems could very well be under the control of private foreign companies who would have unprecedented control over digital identity. Government-sponsored metasystems also pose interesting problems, as the globalisation of the digital world would mean many non-citizens would wish to join the national metasystem, essentially becoming digital subjects. However, past attempts at creating “federate authentication” have often failed, largely due to mismatched incentives between the stakeholders. In particular identity providers need to assume some liability, relying parties need to benefit from the system and users had legitimate worries about a single point of failure – if their master online identity was subverted, they would risk significant trouble10. If these issues can be solved (perhaps more a business problem than a technological one11) we might see the emergence of global metasystems; if not, online identities will continue to be fragmented. 9 While this structure was originally proposed by Kim Cameron at Microsoft Corporation (The Laws of Identity, 2005, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms996456.aspx ) and is currently used in various implementations, the concepts of identity providers, relying parties and subjects is useful for our discussion regardless of their origin. 10 Ross Anderson, Can we fix the security economics of federated authentication? http://spw.stca.herts.ac.uk/2.pdf 11 J.D. Lasica, Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The next-generation Internet's impact on business, governance and social interaction, The Aspen Institute, 2009 Sorry, we’ve spilled your secrets The October 2007 loss of two disks containing child benefit data is just one example of how large data breaches can occur relatively easily. The discs, containing names, addresses, dates of birth of children, National insurance numbers, and bank details of approximately 25 million people in the UK, were sent by junior staff at HM Revenue and Customs to the National Audit Office as internal mail and were lost. No data fraud or identity theft appears to have occurred as a result of the loss. In January 2009 a security breach in Heartland Payment Systems (a US company) compromised up to 130 million credit cards. In this case a computer criminal was indicted for the attack, which had a clear profit motive. 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Online identities will be growing rapidly in importance and will raise a plethora of issues. They are sometimes formalizations of social identities but are fundamentally more rigid. This (and the large number of online services) leads to people using multiple identities. Linking multiple identities to a legal identity and across time and domains can cause problems, in the form of breaches of privacy, risks of identity theft, damage to reputations, and reprisals. Gathering identities into identity metasystems can solve some of these problems but at the expense of posing new challenges such as border-crossing identity systems of unclear jurisdiction, massive data breaches, and expanding the power of identity providers over the identified and their social interactions. Virtual worlds – be they online games, social spaces or teleconferencing, will grow in reach and use. Users feel strongly about their online identities and want control over them despite weak legal protections. Successful social spaces allow negotiation between users and the maintainers. As online identities become more important it is likely that formal legal protection for them will be needed, yet it will be hard to implement effective enforcement and avoiding strangling social and entrepreneurial creativity. The augmented world and exoselves: In the words of one author, the generation growing up now will “never be alone, never lost, never forget” – the constant connectivity holds together social networks regardless of location, location services makes everything findable, and life recording allows the storage of representations of a large part of life. The resulting extended memory is likely to have significant effects on personal identity: parts of identity will reside in a persistent “exoself” of information and software. Life recording will also likely to synergize with social networking into seamless “life sharing”. The limits of privacy will be pushed as a generation grows up with this technology. Even if the average person in 2025 is not using full lifelogging, many of the functions being explored today will likely exist in the background of their technology. Identity technology: Not only humans but objects are gaining persistent, traceable identities. RFID-tags and other methods will give many objects a much richer identity, allowing them to be identified not just as belonging to a category but also as individual objects, possibly without direct touch. Similarly, biometric identification and data fusion – the combination of evidence from several “senses” – will make automatic remote identification of people easier (especially since they might carry a recognizable constellation of RFID tags and a smartphone). Thanks to rich databases and new probabilistic algorithms, identity resolution (constructing a persistent identity from various records) is increasingly feasible. Such systems can allow wide-ranging transparency and accountability, but also threaten privacy and secrecy. Finding the proper regulation and social norms for a nearly totally identifiable society will be a major process over the next 15 years. Automation and robotics will have broad but diffuse impacts on various aspects of identity, mainly by gradually changing the nature of work and impacting labour markets. These effects will represent a continuation of long-term trends that have led to urbanization and to a remarkable growth of the service sectors of advanced economies. Both IT skills and people skills will be in demand on the labour market. Careers will become 5 more fluid, and it will be important for the country to have a work force that is adaptable and that can master new skills as need arises. A major breakthrough in artificial general intelligence could have extremely profound implications for society and for many aspects of identity; however, this must be regarded as a unlikely possibility within the given 15 year timeframe. Medicine and personalized health are not only about health but also about the expression of social identities. This function will become increasingly prominent as preventive, diagnostic, and enhancement medicine grow in importance. Eating healthy and exercising – or not – are choices that people make not only because of health effects but also to maintain a certain social identity. Diagnostic medicine (and genomics) will expand the medicalization of self-conception. Enhancement medicine, too, is focused very much on social identity and self-expression rather than merely on health and biological capacity narrowly construed. It is paramount to consider these identity-related dimensions of medicine if we are to understand how and why people will be consuming health care resources in the future. Life extension may lead to new forms of age identities, where people no longer identify with traditional age groups. Genomics raises many important identity-related issues; in fact, an entire report could be written on these issues alone. Some of the main issues include: (1) changes in self-conception as a result of knowledge about the personal genome and how it correlates with life outcomes; (2) general changes in conceptions of human nature and human identity as a result of better understanding genetic causation (advances in neuroscience also act in the same direction); (3) the possibility that genomics will reveal significant differences between ethnic groups (or differences that some will interpret to be significant) - this could have important implications for ethnic identity; (4) genetic privacy will become increasingly hard to safeguard, thanks to cheaper gene sequencing and methods such as PCR amplification that allow even a small sample (such as a skin flake or a hair follicle) to produce enough genetic information. This latter implication is especially worth highlighting. The medicalization of conception, embryo selection, and (over time) genetic modification will have important effects on individuals - most obviously on individuals who would not have come into existence were it not for these procedures, but also on parents whose reproductive lifespan is extended, and eventually on wider society. The more radical possibilities of genetic modification are unlikely to come into significant use within a 15-year timeframe; however, they may become extremely important over the longer term. Drug-use will continue to be a significant identity-related issue, and it may be joined by new concerns over novel pharmaceutical neuroagents. There are speculations that e.g. neuropeptides could be developed that could be distributed as aerosol and used for neurological manipulation. Invasive brain-computer interfaces are unlikely to have widespread impacts on identity within a 15-year horizon. Non-invasive interfaces, such as various brain-scanning techniques, could have important effects if reliable and practicable techniques for detecting deception were to be developed (though this appears somewhat unlikely within the given timeframe). In addition, brain scanning technologies might have effects on public perception through fears about loss of neural privacy and as a result of mistaken “neurohype”. A long lived, multigenerational society: Longer lifespans will lead to changes in how people regard their identity as aged people, as well as increased diversity in how age-related aspects of identity are managed and in cultural expectations. Intergenerational conflicts can erupt if institutions and social norms do not adapt to a generationally, culturally and technologically diverse society. New technologies may accentuate the vulnerability of certain groups: people who are outside identity systems, people who need certain forms of privacy, people unable to handle the growing complexity of identity, people who are victims of identity theft, and people with persistently ruined reputations. Developing methods for identity rehabilitation might be important in order to reduce the risk for vulnerable groups. 6 7 1. Introduction This paper reviews some of the possible impacts on identity from three broad fields of technological advancement: biotechnology; automation and robotics; and information and communications technologies. We consider a time horizon of 15 years, with the occasional glance towards development further down the road. For each of the three areas covered, we briefly review and evaluate technological advances that might plausibly be expected within the 15 year time frame. We then seek to illuminate the potential impacts that these development might have on social identity, and we identify and highlight developments that are of particular relevance for governmental policy and that present novel risks or opportunities for policymakers. Personal identity being an extremely multifaceted concept, we will not attempt here to furnish an exact definition. We will use the term “identity” to cover a number of loosely related notions, including the selfimages and reputational capital of individuals, social and formal identifications, perceptions and prejudices related to social group membership, software representations of identity, and more broadly changing views of human nature. We will accept a degree of indeterminacy in the concept of identity itself, and put the focus on presenting what seems to us the most interesting and policy-relevant insights in the general neighbourhood of the concept of social identity. The concepts of identity Identity has many meanings in different domains, and in this report the following are relevant: Much analysis of identity has been done in philosophy, in particular focusing on identity as persistence of something, as being definable, recognizable and in particular the issues surrounding personal identity. The philosophy of personal identity is a large field, but some of the key questions include whether there is a persistent identity over time, how important personal continuity is, the relation between numerical identity (being the same person) and qualitative identity (being similar to a past or future self), the links between our minds and bodies, and whether there even exists a self. In psychology personal identity is linked to our experience of being someone (a “core self”) and our sense of being a particular person with a past, future and various attributes (a “narrative self”). The narrative identity is gradually built up over the lifespan and plays an important role both in living a meaningful life and fitting into a social context. Both kinds of selves can be impaired or modified in different ways: meditation, certain drugs and the Cotard delusion2 can change the sense of core self, while amnesia and false memories can transform the narrative self. Deliberate modification of the self, using internal and external means is an important part of human life and adapts new technologies rapidly3 . In fact, it may often be a driver for new technologies – cosmetics, plastic surgery, social media etc. Psychological identity shades over into social identity. Social identity involves aspects such as the different personas (social roles) people take on in different contexts, how people identify with group identities (as well as sexual, gender, and cultural identities) and how these are used in various forms of expression and affiliation. People maintain a rich structure of social identities, often keeping them separate. Each of these identities has attributes, roles and norms within their social contexts4 . 2 A rare neuropsychiatric disorder where the victim believes that they are dead or do not exist. 3 Robert J. Weber, The Created Self, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 4 Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 132 A particular formal rules in more than Another imp person is of fully guaran biometric p twins sharin authenticatio their freedom information Digital iden a computer that the user the online n Digital ident aspect of dig claim to be identities, a identifier. authenticatio 5 Different fa something you that for a posit J.B. 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As society becomes more reliant on digital processing the distinction between social and digital identities might also diminish. A key issue is whether this allows the digital identities to become as flexible as social identities, or whether there is a risk of social identities to become formal and rigid, forcing us to live in a way we might not desire. There is hence a strong public policy concern that technologies and policies that affect personal identity should allow people to maintain flexible social identities, even if it might be technologically and administratively easier to create systems that forces fixed identities.