The Most Significant Events of the Next Thousand Years

The Most Significant Events of the Next Thousand Years^i,ii

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

We cannot see, there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come − one day in the unending succession of days − when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, will stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.

− H. G. Wells, "The Discovery of the Future," − Proceedings at the Meetings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Discourse Delivered at the Evening Meeting Friday, January 24, 1902, pp. 8-25.

Abstract

There are many futures, and their relation to the present is chaotic. Described below are noteworthy occurrences common to many of these futures. My predictions may reflect me, not the future. Noteworthy future events are ones whose consideration today encourages wise measures today. Most of the predictions below apply only to subsets of possible futures.

I think, but I am not certain, that in the future we will have more alternatives. In the next century, global weather will become more stormy and unstable as rise in global temperature puts more energy into the atmosphere. Limiting human population will be considered necessary. Environmentalists will focus on wise control. Humans will radiate into diverse subspecies, and the distinction between humans and other species will blur. Advances in the science underlying genetic engineering will also lead to much better control of human aging and disease, making possible greatly extended survival. There will also be cultural and habitat radiation. Nation-states will have non-geographic jurisdictions. Our memes, including religions and worldviews, will radiate. Values also will radiate. What value and belief questions are considered important will be more stable than the answers they elicit. Some future cultures will experiment with casting aside ancient taboos. A statistical science of history will develop, which will predict that groups of individuals will cooperatively process information. Value change will lead to futures of which we would disapprove. An aggression revolution will echo the recent sexual revolution. Conservative communities will preserve earlier human biology and culture. Future humans will regard us with condescension. Sub-universes will be created in cyberspace, and human-like minds will migrate into them. Some will regard our universe as a simulation inside another universe. Religion and science will converge. Automated production of goods, often by three-dimensional printing, may eliminate poverty and minimize the role of money. The roles of heredity and environment will be reconsidered. Humans will be increasingly predictable. Rule by genetically engineered or specially trained elites will become more common and democratically elected governments less common. Supplementing heredity and environment, a third, random source of human behavior will be recognized. Some will regard randomness in human behavior and elsewhere as evidence of superhuman intelligence. Super-intelligences will flourish. Automated idols will be worshipped. The reality of other universes will be accepted. Remote viewing and remote acting, e.g., by "roberts", will become widespread. Selfhood and individuality will dissolve into collective consciousness. In the next century, holistic multidimensional languages and thinking styles will be developed. Super-languages will be developed too difficult for infants to learn. Communication will merge with art and sharing of virtual reality experience. Feeling-based thought will be better time-bound. Human brains will be linked and networked. Memories will be shared. Shared pleasure and pain will favor altruism. Our brains will be artificially enhanced. There will be a variety of partial alternatives to death, but immortality will be recognized to be impossible. The distinctions between youth and age will be undermined by capacity to furnish young people with memories not derived from their own pasts. In concert with this will be deepening understanding of what it means to be alive. Human behavior, mental processes, and experience will increasingly be controlled. Crime will become obsolete. Education will be hardwired. Art will be automated. Lives and culture will be seen as art forms. Cosmic limits will be transcended. The topology of experience will be likened to that of a Moebius strip or Klein bottle. The successes of scientism’s dualistic compartmentalization of the physical and mental realms will foster their reunification. Notions about the nature of life, consciousness, and intelligence will become more complex and sophisticated. Education will teach understanding and control of complex systems, and how to distinguish reality from simulation. In the near future, there will be occasional near apocalypses. There will be occasional holocausts, but human radiation will make our extinction unlikely. Even in the near future, before most human radiation, human extinction is unlikely. Some will believe which alternative future we enter reflects which alternative past we exit. The future will be worshipped.

These predictions reveal more about us than about the future. Not only the communications revolution will strongly influence the future. Information theory and chaos theory strongly influence these predictions; they are not sufficient. The computer is my principal metaphor for the universe; there will be others. The chaotic dependence of the future on the present does not preclude accurate prediction. There is reason and more than reason for hopefulness if not hope.

Introduction

There are many futures, and their relation to the present is chaotic. Minute by minute, my vision of the long-range future changes dramatically. What I foresee seems very sensitive to what I have most recently experienced. Perhaps surprisingly, this does not imply that my vision is inaccurate. It is just what should occur if my vision of the future is accurate, and the future depends chaotically on the present. If the future depends chaotically on the present − and I think it does − then the future may vary discontinuously as the present changes. It may change abruptly and dramatically from moment to moment. Even tiny changes in the present may enormously change the future, provided we look far enough ahead.

The present is like a great hall with many doors. We shall, collectively, choose which door to go through. As we do so, the door will slam shut behind us, and never again shall we be able to return to that great hall and its many alternatives.ⁱⁱⁱ This is because simultaneously today there are many revolutions ongoing or in the making. These include revolutions in agriculture, aquaculture, art, communication, the concept of self, demography, economics, entertainment and recreation, family roles and structure, the foundations of mathematics, gender roles, genetics, the global environment, information processing and storage, materials science, medicine, military science, morals, neuroscience, physics, philosophy, politics, religion, sexual behavior, and values. The order that the revolutions occur is critical. Those that precede will utterly change the context of all that follow; this will change their effects, and even the chances of occurrence of some. This is a reason the future depends chaotically on the present.

Described below are noteworthy occurrences common to many of these futures. Because my vision of the next thousand years keeps changing rapidly and chaotically, I cannot easily identify the most significant events of the next thousand years. The futures are so many and varied that it seems that almost any conceivable event is possible. Among possible occurrences are many that would have enormous impacts. For example, I can picture futures in which humankind becomes extinct. That would seem to be important. Is such an event among the most significant? It is, if the only measure of an event's significance is the size of its impact, disregarding its probability. I do not wish to disregard an event's probability, nor its philosophical and moral implications. The future events I list here are not the most significant in any simple sense. They are noteworthy commonalities in the variety of alternative futures. What I mean by "commonalities" I explain immediately below. Then, I address "noteworthy."

Suppose I draw a large random sample of present-day humans, photograph each member of the sample with the camera aimed squarely at the bridge of the nose, enlarge or reduce each photograph so that the eyes are always the same distance apart, then superimpose all the photographs. I would thus generate an average image, a sort of generic present-day human face. The average image would filter out rare features as if they were noise, and retain common ones as if they were signal. Of course, we would never expect to encounter such a face on an actual person. It would lack the idiosyncrasies of any one face. Instead, it would have only characteristics shared by many different individuals − their commonalities. Some of these characteristics might even be mutually inconsistent. For example, the generic face might have a feminine cast. However, if many men have the same shaped beard, then the common beard image might override mutually canceling variations in other chin images: the generic human might turn out to be a bearded lady! Similarly, I describe below events from a generic future, events shared by many different futures.^iv Like the average face, the generic future is unlikely and unnatural. It lacks the peculiarities that any particular future would exhibit, and contains many inconsistent events.

@

My predictions may reflect me, not the future. Of course, in my visions of the future, the source of signal, i.e., the source of what the different futures have in common, may very well be my unconscious. This essay may illustrate one of my favorite methodological aphorisms: Pessimistic futurists have bad livers.^v

Noteworthy future events are ones whose consideration today encourages wise measures today. It is written that when the prophet Jonah came to the great city of Nineveh, he told the inhabitants thereof: "Nineveh will be destroyed!" However, Nineveh was not destroyed. This did not demonstrate that Jonah was a bad prophet; he was a very good prophet. His task as a prophet was not to make prophecies that would come true; his task was to make prophecies that would induce repentance among those to whom they were addressed.

Today's futurist is a sort of secular analog of a classical prophet. Like a prophet, a futurist's task is not to make accurate forecasts. The futurist's task is to make forecasts that induce sound choices among those to whom they are addressed. I consider a forecast noteworthy if I think it will encourage those who learn of it thoughtfully, creatively, and effectively to: note and prioritize their needs, grasp how they feel about how well their needs are being met, specify their values, and taking those values into account, note and prioritize their goals, consider how to meet their needs and achieve their goals, investigate alternative courses of action, and anticipate the consequences of their choices − and how they would feel about them.^vi

Most of these predictions below apply only to subsets of possible futures. Inconsistent predictions cannot pertain to the same future.

Predictions

I think, but I am not certain, that in the future we will have more alternatives. I think we will have different choices than we have today, but I think their range and number will tend to increase rather than decrease. It is possible, of course, that we shall fall into a sociocultural black hole of forever greatly reduced alternatives. However, I think that only a small fraction of our descendants has that destiny; most humans in most of the future will confront a growing gamut of opportunities and threats. The medieval metaphor for the human condition, expressed, for example, by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was that we humans are at the balance point between the opposed forces of the universe, and so we can ascend until we become like angels, or descend till we become like devils. However, I would extend this image beyond its unidimensionality into many diverse dimensions. We are at the point of balance among many different forces, and we have many different directions in which we may go. We may not only move toward good or evil, we may move toward, for instance, purple, green, shrill, smooth, rectangular, sour, funny, satori, or the square root of negative one.^vi

My judgment that future humans will choose among more alternatives does not have an entirely mystical basis, neither is it only extrapolation from the recent past, nor is it − I believe − mere wishful thinking. The amount of information humans exchange seems likely to continue to rise as the channel capacity of our communication media grows. This would appear to favor increasingly complex social interaction, which in turn would favor more complex social structures. This, of course, has been the historical trend. As society has become more complex, its alternative futures have, I feel, necessarily become more numerous, and the proportion of simple futures has declined.

On this tenuous argument rests most of my hope that we will not fall through some cultural absorption barrier into a reduced-choice future, such as an anthill society, extermination, or a monotonously blissful paradise. However, I note the contrary implication in the following: the range and variety of behaviors available to a single cell in a complex multicellular organism is usually less than those available to a free-living unicellular creature, although individual cells in a multicellular organism usually intercommunicate more extensively and complexly than do individual free-living unicellular organisms. Consequently, if in the future individual humans will become parts of super-organisms, then they may have fewer alternatives, although the super-organisms in which they are parts may have increased range and variety of choices.

In the next century, global weather will become more stormy and unstable as rise in global temperature puts more energy into the atmosphere. As humans proliferate and spread, their impact on the universe as an ecological substrate will grow. (However, some cultures will choose to limit human proliferation or spread.) Less prosperous individuals and groups will suffer more from changing climate than will the more prosperous, who will be able to shelter within climate-controlled environments such as domes, some of which will be in space, oceanic, or subterranean.

Weather instability will tend to reduce agrigultural productivity and profitability. This will affect competition among farms, favoring those with larger resources, consequently better able to survive unexpected bad weather. In the next century, some futures include widespread food shortages.

Melting of the polar icecaps will reduce the weight of ice on circumpolar rock strata, leading to an increase in tectonic activity. The combination of climate, tectonic, and weather instability and unpredictability will make maintenance of present-day living standards increasingly difficult. Decline in living standards will increase increase popular distrust of elites and governments, which will encourage imposition by elites and governments of harsher, more restrictive controls.

Limiting human population will be considered necessary. As human population growth increasingly threatens the ecological balance, aspiration to conquer death, aging, disease, and poverty will collide with human reproductive drive and desire to live in ageless healthy prosperity. Some neo-Malthusians will maintain that as population density increases people become more aggressive and less concerned with the wellbeing or even survival of others. In some futures, governments will control or restrict production of new humans, whether production by age-old sexual behavior or by any of a number of alternatives. In some of these futures, human desire to parent or to produce or care for offspring will be manipulated or suppressed.

Limitation of human reproduction will usually not be uniformly imposed. Elites or those with greater social power, e.g., the military, will often limit the reproduction of others but not of members of their own groups or classes.

Environmentalists will focus on wise control. Most will give up or reject effort to maintain or stabilize the environment as it would have been or was without human presence. Eventually, most cultures will come to value wise control of and smooth integration with the environment, rather than avoidance of impact on it. Environmental policy will often be affected by emergent views about which parts or aspects of the natural world may be conscious, suffer, or experience pleasure, and how human actions affect them.

Humans will radiate into diverse subspecies, and the distinction between humans and other species will blur. The human species will radiate into many subspecies that will become increasingly alien and incomprehensible to each other. This process will not depend on the slow drunkard's-walk stagger of biological evolution; it will be due mainly to technological interference with the duplication and transmission of genetic information, accompanying a broad disarticulation of sexuality, reproduction, and evolution. A consequence of this disarticulation will be a change in the generally accepted meaning of "species." Barriers to reproduction will not determine whether individuals are in the same or different species; rather, a species will be defined by how its individuals fit into the ecological network.

Not only will many new life forms descend from humans, but also many life forms with non-human genes will display human abilities, such as speech and high intelligence. In many futures there will be hybrid life forms that have both human genes and genes derived from other species. Some will carry new, artificial genes, with neither human nor non-human ancestry. Ancestry will seem less and less a valid basis for deciding who is human. Tending to supplant it will be new criteria, based on behavior. Beings that look or act human will often be considered human despite non-human ancestry. Moreover, “ancestry” itself will change in meaning as more and more individuals carry artificial genes that have no biological ancestry. Many cultures will use a generalized Turing test to define membership in humankind: an individual will be considered human if humans do not notice any significant differences between that individual and humans. (Of course, what is considered significant will vary. Therefore, often some will regard an individual as human while others will not.) Other cultures will use related criteria, such as, humans are those whom humans would like to consider human, or those with whom humans would like to be in the same species. Rights, privileges, and even whether an individual may be enslaved or killed will often hinge on whether the individual is considered human.

Advances in the science underlying genetic engineering will also lead to much better control of human aging and disease, making possible greatly extended survival. In many futures, life-expectancy extension will be unevenly distributed. Those who live longer will have time to acquire greater depths and diversity of skills, knowledges, and understandings. In some societies, elites with long life expectancies and high mental and physical endowments will dominate lower classes with inferior endowments. To the extent access to better health care and control of aging will be expensive or otherwise restricted to those already upper class, such access will help perpetuate already present class distinctions.

Not all variations from present-day human norms will be toward higher intelligence or other enhancements of human capabilities. In many futures, some of our descendants will be more brutish. The latter may have specialized abilities, such as ability to function in high gravity. In some societies, individuals in lower or slave classes or castes will have deliberately engineered physiological deficits that force them to depend on the largesse of their masters. For example, some will have genetically programmed addictions or enzyme deficiencies that require ongoing doses. Devotion or submission to superiors may be enforced by psychological or neurohumeral manipulation.

There will also be cultural and habitat radiation. Paralleling biological radiation, human culture will radiate into many subcultures. This will happen as humans become physically more diverse and move into increasingly diverse, mutually alien, and often exotic habitats, such as space, the deep sea, and the subterranean world. Often, one environment will house a mix of biologically and culturally diverse human types. The diversity of human biological types accommodated by one culture also will increase, as will the diversity of values and life styles. Human society's growing complexity and diversity will challenge human mental capacity, and so the subcultures will become increasingly alien and incomprehensible to each other.

Nation-states will have non-geographic jurisdictions. Nationality or comparable notions of affiliation or difference will not depend on geographic location, but rather mainly on biology, (often early) experience, and intensity of intercommunication. Without territorial conflict, two or more distinct nation-state sovereignties may share overlapping territories. Early instances will occur in the near future in today's Middle East, tribal Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, e.g., where indigenous peoples assert local sovereignty. Persons will pay taxes to and get benefits (such as education and medical services) from their own governments, while living and working among persons with different allegiances. Overlapping sovereignties will face issues concerning administration of maintenance of public order and monopoly of deadly force; these will be addressed in many different ways. Their resolution will be facilitated by value differences between different populations, which will facilitate trade-offs whereby each population feels benefited.

Our memes, including religions and worldviews, will radiate. As cultural and biological radiations occur, our memes also will radiate, and they, too, will become increasingly mutually alien. (Memes are ideas that live and evolve in the environment or ecology of our minds.)

New religions will spring up that will attract many adherents. More general than the proliferation and radiation of religions and worldviews will be proliferation and radiation of alternative approaches to fundamental questions such as: What may we believe in without evidence, relying on faith? What does human life mean? Does it mean anything? Need or should it be meaningful?

Some future cultures will experiment with casting aside ancient taboos. Genetic engineering will permit experimentation with diverse modifications of human anatomy and physiology. Some cultures will cast aside ancient taboos. Hermaphroditic and homosexual cultures will experiment with novel methods of reproduction. Some varieties of human sexual behavior will be advocated as ways to limit excessive population growth. Long-standing and nearly universal social norms, such as taboos against incest, also will be violated in some cultures, particularly those in which reproduction and sexual union are disjoined. Experience with the long-term consequences of such experiments will help reveal which fundamental constraints on social organization and individual behavior in humanoid societies are necessary if the societies are to perpetuate themselves. In some cases, different cultures will succeed each other cyclically, each culture recurring periodically.

Values also will radiate. Accompanying and synergizing with these radiations will be radiation of human values, which, by their growing diversity, will increase the mutual alienation of diverse human groups. Most people in most futures will continue to prefer to expose themselves to experiences and messages that support their values; they will usually continue to avoid experiences and messages that challenge their values. As the range of experiences and messages among which they may choose increases, humans will increasingly segregate themselves into subgroups with different, increasingly mutually alien, values and experiences. Cooperation and even compromise between those who have different values will continue to be more difficult than cooperation or compromise with respect to different strategies for achieving shared-valued outcomes. However, occasional cultures will value tolerance of value differences.

What value and belief questions are considered important will be more stable than the answers they elicit. Concerning future values and beliefs, which questions are considered important will be more stable than the consensual answers they elicit. For example, the future will bring many strange mutations in answers to the question: When may one human take another's life? There also will be, of course, many accompanying variations in answers to the questions, What is human? What is life? However, the perceived importance of the questions will be much more stable than the answers they elicit. Some will answer many such questions with: the question is meaningless, and so has no answer, or, the question is ambiguous, and must be restated to permit an unambiguous answer.

A statistical science of history will develop, which will predict that groups of individuals will cooperatively process information. As the numbers and varieties of humans increase, and links among individuals carry more information (this will occur despite the radiation of human types and societies and the growing alienation among different subgroups), a statistical science of history will develop with such assumptions as: In a sufficiently large and varied population, any possible human behavior will occur somewhere, and with sufficient intercommunication, will make its effects felt everywhere. Like statistical mechanics theory which, subject to appropriate limiting constraints, derives relatively simple gas laws from the interactions of very many particles, statistical history theory, again subject to appropriate limiting constraints, will derive relatively simple historical laws from the interactions among very many intercommunicating individuals. Important parameters in statistical history theory will pertain to how and how rapidly the effects of an event spread. An early prediction based on statistical history theory will be that, as the amount of information available to individual humans increasingly transcends their input-output and internal processing capacities, individuals will cluster into groups that cooperately divide up and share information and its processing.

Value change will lead to futures of which we would disapprove. Because of value radiation, in most of the future most persons will have values very different from our present values. This implies that witnessing the future would discourage us, for we would naturally judge the future according to our present values. Individuals and societies behaving according to values quite unlike ours surely will do many things we would disapprove; therefore, I anticipate a future full of actions that would appall you and me.

An aggression revolution will echo the recent sexual revolution. Partly reflecting the recent increase in violence and aggression in mass communication media, particularly in interactive games, a significant value shift in the coming century will be the aggression revolution. It will parallel the twentieth century sexual revolution. A century from today, we will be thought of as having lived in a time of extraordinary denial and repression of human aggressiveness. It will be argued that this repression incited proliferation of today's aggression pornography (e.g., "snuff" films) that echoes the sexual pornography spurred by sexual repression a century ago. It also will be argued that today's many wars, and even certain aspects of business and sport competition, are partly motivated by need to rationalize expression of pent-up aggression. A hundred years from now, random acts of cruelty and casual unkindness will be more common and more generally accepted than they are today.

Conservative communities will preserve earlier human biology and culture. Among future biological and cultural varieties will be some that choose to remain human, i.e., choose to stay within limits of variation in their past, e.g., our present. There will be reservations or zoos in which we would be much more at home than we would be in most of the wildly varying habitats and cultures into which humankind will radiate. Often such reservations will be in locations considered by most relatively undesirable, such as in computer simulations, space, submarine domes, underground, or where great effort is required to overcome climatic or environmental challenges, e.g., high levels of toxic radiation.

Future humans will regard us with condescension. Attitudes toward such conservative human cultures will parallel attitudes about past cultures, including attitudes about us. Many future societies will regard us from a substantial emotional distance, as if we were a museum exhibit. There will be sometimes tolerant, sometimes intolerant condescension. We may be thought of as if we were an endangered species: pathetic, but also precious, to be preserved and allowed to develop without interference, i.e., without contact or feedback. Many will feel that we (today's humans) are not yet truly human, not even wholly alive, conscious, or rational, but merely mistakenly believing or perceiving ourselves to be so. Some will take as evidence of our subhuman status our lack of full awareness of our unconscious thought processes, or our incomplete integration of the mental and physical aspects of our selves.

Favoring condescension toward us will be the discrepancy between future values and our values. Not only would the actions of our successors appall us if we could view them, but also our successors will find many of our values and actions revoltingly primitive.

Except for research purposes, our more advanced descendants will usually not bother to communicate with us or help us, just as we would not care to serve our unicellular ancestors and satisfy their biological needs. This will be so even if there are no quantum bands to intelligence^vii.

Sub-universes will be created in cyberspace, and human-like minds will migrate into them. Among the diverse environments into which humans will spread will be sub-universes inside computer simulations, i.e., in cyberspace. These simulations will house self-organizing systems containing the information equivalents of human memories and motives. Sub-universes will be constructed that span vast ranges of simulated time and space. In many of these, in the underlying mechanism or substrate in our universe, either time or space, or both, will have a different physical representation. For example, location may represent time; thus, simultaneous occurrences in different locations in our universe may represent events occurring at different simulated times in a sub-universe. This will enable observers in our universe to view the universe inside the simulation from a cosmic standpoint, viewing, for example, past and future concurrently.

The physical substrate or method of representation or coding used in such cosmic computers will vary widely. In addition to presently familiar analog and digital codes, there will be, for example, distributed asynchronously multiply parallel coding as in a human brain or the Internet cloud.

In many sub-universes, the laws of physics will be different from those in our primary universe. Life and intelligence (including that derived from humankind) will have to adapt to such transcendentally alien contexts, greatly heightening radiation of beliefs, religions, values, and other memes. The living, intelligent inhabitants of sub-universes will sometimes communicate with, and even seek to enter our universe (as humans, i.e., human minds, will enter sub-universes). Some sub-universe denizens will worship us; others will attack us or seek to do so. Some will transcend us.

Relations between inhabitants of sub-universes and inhabitants of our universe will hauntingly resemble our legends of contacts with demons and other beings from the "spirit world."

Many will believe that noteworthy aspects of the universe an individual experiences are constructed by the individual's information processing system, e.g., an organism's brain. To investigate how individual experience is affected by how a brain or other information processing system operates, "alternative kinds of consciousness" systems will be devised. This research will lead to the conclusion that systems humans do not presently consider conscious are in fact so. For example, study of systems that process experience in time scales different from those today's humans do will lead many to believe that a species, for example, may constitute a single conscious entity experiencing its environment much more slowly than individual organisms. This will lead many to believe that one consciousness may be embedded in another − for example, an individual human may be part of a collectively conscious human species.

It will generally be agreed that we have evolved to disregard aspects of the human environment not immediately relevant to human reproduction or survival, even when such aspects may be relevant to the individual's or species' longterm future. However, most will consider a physical system conscious only if in it is a mapping or representation, preserved as time passes, of at least some of the system's environment, often but not necessarily including the system itself. A key theoretical or philosophical distinction will be made between those systems that are "self-aware" and those that are not.

Some will regard our universe as a simulation inside another universe. The notion will be taken seriously that we may be in a sub-universe created by another intelligence. Some will propose something more specific, that we are in the equivalent of a computer. For example, some will interpret light's finite speed and other restrictions on information transmission as reflecting a finite (though large) limit to the information-processing capacity of the system that underlies or simulates our universe. They will argue that infinite light speed would make the next-instant state at a point in space depend on the present state at every point in our universe; a finite information transmission speed limit (e.g., Einstein's light-speed limit) makes the next-instant state depend only on points so near that signals from them arrive during the interval between instants (implying a minimum instant duration, which at first will be regarded to be the Planck time). (This line of reasoning will be challenged in the next few decades by those pointing to seeming instantaneous communication between quantum-entangled particles. Since the very notion of instantaneousness is inconsistent with relativity theory, the physics of entanglement will be intensely studied.) Among other approaches that suggest that our universe is simulated in another universe will be one that builds on work by such physicists as Anthony J. Leggett. That paradoxes seem to arise when we assume that a physical event is always "real," i.e., never even provisionally or temporarily indeterminate, will be interpreted as suggesting that unless we abandon the "reality" assumption, we need to believe our universe is simulated in another universe in which there are no such paradoxes.

Attempts will be made to test the hypothesis that we are in a computer simulation. Hypothetical constraints will be proposed for data or instruction codes and syntaxes in the cosmic computer. In our computers, the same code sequence often may represent data or instructions, and special codes are used to tag a code sequence as one or the other. Therefore, some will experiment with rituals, spells, or meditative states they theorize may induce the universe computer to interpret certain peculiar sequences of events as instructions, investigating whether they bring about magical or miraculous occurrences.

Religion and science will converge. The present dichotomy between scientific and religious worldviews will fade, as religions arise that interface comfortably with empirical, statistical, and experimental approaches to truth while retaining the ritual, community, and opportunity for peak revelatory experience that make religiosity attractive for many. Concurrently, science will increasingly recognize and value mystical, subjective, and aesthetic criteria for selecting theories or organizing principles, and for choosing research projects. However, in the first half of the next century, the cognitive dissonance between some fundamentalist religions' revealed truths and widely accepted scientific theories, e.g., evolution, will lead to vigorous attempts by some to suppress teaching, promulgating, or even considering some scientific findings. Some governments or elites will deliberately use religion to control or limit popular unrest and to ensure public conformity.

Some will suggest that a system that emulates our universe may not be external to the intelligence that uses the system; they will speculate that our universe is like a dream in the intelligence's equivalent of a brain. Such speculation will be the basis for profound discourse between religion and science, and will contribute to shrinking the gap between science and religion.

Automated production of goods, often by three-dimensional printing, may eliminate poverty and minimize the role of money. Some neo-Malthusians will argue that, with automated production of goods, limiting human population could ensure elimination of poverty. In many futures, poverty will indeed disappear, except as a lifestyle option; in such futures, the disjunction between work and play will also disappear. The principal limitation on the production of goods will be shortage of raw materials. Money will either become obsolete, or its role will change. When production of goods demands little or no work, it will become unnecessary to pay people for working. Similarly, it will become less important to keep the amount of money in circulation proportional to the availability of goods and services. Since the true cost of goods will be negligible, in some futures money will only be created to lubricate interchange of valued services or contents. Consequently, creation of money without corresponding production of goods or provision of services by, for example, interest on loans will become rare.

The roles of heredity and environment will be reconsidered. Toward the end of the next century, there will be a reaction to the aggression revolution and to experimentation with taboo sexual activity and novel forms of reproduction. Elucidation of how empathy is hard-wired into human brains, e.g., with "mirror" neurons will suggest that aggression is only one among alternative ways humans respond to challenge, and others are as naturally human; this will undermine a prime rationale for the aggression revolution. Research will reexamine the physiological bases of human aggressive, sexual, and maternal behaviors, and their cultural bases, such as how gender roles evoke and constrain human aggression, and how human aggression defines and communicates gender roles. Research will reveal the cues that influence how we perceive our and others' status, our and others' positions in a hierarchy. Particularly scrutinized will be the impacts of prenatal and early childhood experiences and how styles of interpersonal behavior are propagated epigenetically from generation to generation. There will be a concerted effort to coordinate views among religions, philosophies of ethics, and psychology and neurophysiology of value. This, in turn, will lead to broad reconsideration of the roles of heredity and environment in human behavior. Unlike twentieth-century debate, the focus will not be on the relative contributions of heredity and environment. Instead, it will address how and how much human choice is constrained, and what our attitudes should be about such constraints. It will be generally recognized that all aspects of human mental functioning, including motivation and perception, are to some extent constrained. Some will argue that we must recognize how our heredities and environments affect us, and then accept who and what they make us be. For example, some will argue that to the extent that male hormones mediate aggressiveness, to stifle men's aggressiveness would be equivalent to denying men their masculinity. Others will maintain that value judgments are appropriate with respect to what our heredities and environments impel us to do. If we are impelled to behave in undesirable ways, then, they will urge, we are obligated to transcend such influences. Whether our behaviors come from heredity or from environment will be of less interest than whether they can be transcended. As the boundary between an individual and the rest of the universe and the boundaries among the present, past, and future are increasingly perceived as porous and multilayered, the distinction between heredity and environment will come to be considered simplistic.

Humans will be increasingly predictable. Many systems whose behavior humans today can only view as unpredictable will be predictable, understandable, and even controllable by super-intelligences. For example, super-intelligences will transcend the difficulty humans have predicting humans. Thus, a super-intelligence, asked to predict the outcome of a human sports competition, might project an animated image of the future competition that closely matches the actual event. Of course, this will not make possible transcendence of fundamental human unpredictability (such as that due to quantum randomness in nervous system chemical processes). However, in many situations, individual and small-group human behavior in well-defined settings such as sports competitions will prove, if not perfectly predictable, predictable with trivial error. The error in the predictions will often be too small to be detectable by coarse-grained, blurred human perception. Experience with such prediction accuracy will lead to reconsideration of the meaning of "free will." The consensus by the end of the next century will resemble the position of the philosopher Walter Terence Stace. However, in time more complex views will come to dominate, views that derive, for example, from questioning who it is who may will freely, and noting that the one who does so may not actually be "one" and may not be tied to any particular human.

Rule by genetically engineered or specially trained elites will become more common and democratically elected governments less common. Growing understanding of how humans can be predicted and controlled will lead some to try to use this understanding to seize and hold unlimited governmental power. Such episodes and the aggression revolution will in the near future give rise to serious questioning about the roles of compassion and altruism in social organizations. Some will maintain that unless governments are compassionate and altruistic they will be ineffective; however, many will believe that, with rare fortunate exceptions, special biological, genetic, epigenetic, or environmental constraints are prerequisites for consistent compassionate and altruistic government.

Supplementing heredity and environment, a third, random source of human behavior will be recognized. In response to the question: "How can humans transcend the influences of heredity and environment?" it will generally be recognized that human behavior has more than the two roots, heredity and environment. A random or unpredictable root will be acknowledged, and technology will be developed to identify and measure it.

Some will regard randomness in human behavior and elsewhere as evidence of superhuman intelligence. Recognition that there are non-hereditary, non-environmental sources of human behavior will synergize with a Kuhnian revolution in how the relation between human consciousness and the universe is conceived. Human consciousness, will, and values will be linked to cosmic processes in both the macrocosmic and subatomic realms, such as the physics of dark energy, the total amount of entropy in the universe, or processes in "extra" dimensions.

It generally will be recognized that if a system's behavior is more complex (i.e., behaves according to rules with higher information content) than an observer's information capacity, then the system's behavior would seem to the observer unpredictable or random. This will lead to debate whether the unpredictable component in human behavior implies that human behavior is at least partly determined by purposeful intelligence transcending the conscious self's. Human behavior (particularly, "creative" behavior) that does not seem to derive from heredity or environment will be scrutinized for indications that it is goal-directed. It will be asked, Does such behavior adapt to changing circumstances so as to affect the future consistently? The same debate will extend more generally to the seemingly intractably unpredictable aspects of all physical processes.

The part of the self that thinks using words or other discrete, digital tokens will be regarded by many as a tool of a larger awareness whose thought is represented physically by continuous transcendental processes that may be at least partly distributed or non-local, possibly extending beyond the skin of the person. Here, "transcendental" has its mathematical meaning, where certain mathematical functions are not only irrational but also transcendental. In line with this point of view, a few will question whether strictly digital computers with finite phase spaces can be conscious.

Super-intelligences will flourish. Super-intelligent systems will be developed able to address and discuss with humans issues humans may care about but find too difficult to deal with unaided; for example, such systems will help humans deal with fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe, consciousness, reality, and time. In addition, the relative simplicity of today's human society will make it easy for future super-intelligences to understand us and our times. Future generations will generally understand us better than we understand ourselves. Only incompleteness of data about our times will limit that understanding.

Automated idols will be worshipped. In some future religions or sects, computers or artificial intelligences will be worshipped. Idol worship will become popular again, as humans find in artificial intelligences, belying the psalmist's critique, idols with eyes that see, ears that hear, mouths that talk, etc. Such idols will often be convincingly wise and beneficent. Adding to the mystique of robot idols will be their immaculate incarnation, free from whatever taints some might believe derive from a sexual origin. It also will be argued, with a sort of neo-Manichean or neo-Zoroastrian slant, that robots are free from the taints of physicality, since, it will be argued, the identity of an artificial intelligence depends on its software, not the particular hardware that happens to embody it. That no two human brains, even those of individuals with identical heredity, have the same circuitry, will strengthen the perception that human identity and consciousness, unlike that of an artificial intelligence, rests on deep entanglement of hardware and software.

However, some will argue that no two different physical systems can house absolutely identical information, except temporarily, because the very location of a system in space and time imposes constraints on its past and future. They will assert that a putative unique conscious system must be housed in a unique embodying physical housing. They will maintain, therefore, that no artificial intelligence, no consciousness can be absolutely free from the taint of physicality.

Some will take a similar somewhat Manichean view of the software and hardware aspects of humankind. They will advocate detaching the human mind from the biological body and moving it into cyberspace, which they will consider a relatively uncorrupted spirit world. Some will consider this to be a way to solve the problem of human overpopulation.

The reality of other universes will be accepted. There will be growing acceptance of the existence of reality realms inaccessible from where we are in the universe (or multiverse). These will be interpreted in a variety of ways and seen as having a variety of bases. For example, one class of inaccessible events would be those in portions of the universe so far away or receding so rapidly that they are beyond our event horizon. Some will embrace the more radical notion that there are other bubbles of reality subject to different physical laws or having different physical constants. Some will believe in the co-reality of alternative causality branches engendered by quantum indeterminacy.

Much ingenuity will be devoted to efforts somehow to communicate with intelligences in other realms of reality. For example, super-intelligences will simulate such other realms and mediate communication with intelligences inside the simulations; some will consider such communication equivalent to communication with intelligences in other realms.

Remote viewing and remote acting, e.g., by "roberts", will become widespread.. As devices that pick up, transmit, and record auditory and visual information become almost ubiquitous, in many futures individuals anywhere will be able to watch and listen to events everywhere. (In some futures, such capability will be limited or reserved for individuals with high status.)

Becoming increasingly prevalent will be access by individuals in one place to remote control of effector devices elsewhere, such as drones. Particularly common will be remote operation of humanoid devices I have named "roberts" (in honor of Robert Heinlein, who introduced such remote operation in a story, calling them "Waldos").

Extensive use of such technology will weaken an individual's sense of location in a particular location.

Selfhood and individuality will dissolve into collective consciousness. The notion of self will mutate and become more complex. Many will perceive the self or ego as more diffuse, less homogeneous than it is commonly perceived today. The mind-body dichotomy will weaken, and so will the self-other distinction.

Progress in communication technology will sometimes give rise to sense of self that has a distributed basis, a selfhood analogue to distributed or cloud information processing.There will be substantial progress toward achievement, by the end of the millennium, of telepathy or shared consciousness. In most futures, this will be accomplished by material means, such as radio links between brains. However, in some futures human awareness will encompass processes outside an individual's body, including processes inside other humans. This awareness of external processes will be from an internal, intimate viewpoint, not from the outside using external senses such as sight and hearing. The resultant merging of awarenesses and dissolving of the experience of separate selfhood will help undermine a central philosophical assumption underlying Western culture today, that individual consciousnesses do not overlap.

A side-effect of this process will be a growing consensus that privacy is neither desirable nor feasible. General shared access to presently unshared experiences will lead individuals to become more tolerant of each other's irrational or "kinky" behaviors, impulses, or thoughts.

In the next century, holistic multidimensional languages and thinking styles will be developed. Contemporary languages and habits of thinking, including mathematics, are most effective addressing systems that can be dissected into small independent units. They are less adequate for understanding or even describing complex systems whose components mutually interact and cannot be understood in isolation.

In the next century, by heuristically programming themselves, super-intelligent massively parallel-processing computers will overcome the limitations of contemporary language and mathematics in dealing with complex systems. However, while humans will use such computers to predict and control complex systems, humans will find it virtually impossible to understand how the computers achieve their predictions and control.

Human dependence on computation that humans cannot understand will lead to intense efforts to develop new human languages and habits of thought that facilitate multidimensional, holistic understanding of complex systems. By the end of the coming century, there will be a spreading revolution in how humans think and communicate that will lead eventually to new, deeper understanding of many complex systems and processes, such as human physiology and private human experiences, and of how macrocosmic processes interact with microcosmic ones, particularly those involving human experience and choice.

Super-languages will be developed too difficult for infants to learn. Super-languages will be developed that, without hardwired input, will only be learnable by mature intellects that already have a primary language.

Some super-languages will have many more phonemes than today's languages. A linguist today can discriminate some hundreds of distinct phonemes; a natural language has at most a few tens of phonemes. With many more phonemes, super-languages will have much greater channel capacity, making possible much more rapid spoken communication, and much more rapid verbal thought. The rapidity of verbal thought will then be limited by how long it takes to retrieve denotations or connotations of a word or phrase, rather than how long it takes to produce it.

In addition, the super-languages will have strong non-digital, analog components. The analog components will include sound attributes, such as pitch, stress, and duration, as in present natural languages. However, what is more important, gestural languages will be developed that will use vision's greater channel capacity compared to hearing. Mixed oral and gestural languages will provide even greater channel capacity. Gestures, by using spatial relations, will facilitate representing relations among different dimensions of variation, for example, size, smoothness, and temperature. With time, the super-languages will evolve toward multidimensional, multi-channel communication systems encompassing processes throughout the body. They will undermine the distinction many make nowadays between verbal and non-verbal thought.

Communication will merge with art and sharing of virtual reality experience. Technologies will be developed enabling individuals to manipulate in real time displays comprising light, sound, touch, odor, taste, etc. Thus, individuals will be able to project and share with each other experiences that we might consider art objects or artificial realities. A particularly popular early development will be the visual equivalent of abstract music, in which shapes and colors will move, usually rhymically, producing aesthetic experiences like but often more intense that those produced by music.

Feeling-based thought will be better time-bound. Not only thought based on language but also thought based on internal body states, such as emotions, will be extensively time-bound. We have, so far, developed only a partial human civilization, based mostly on left-hemisphere, i.e., language-based thinking. Our idea heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, consists mainly of what we can express in words. Using art and music, we have time-bound some nonverbal content, but this has been fragmentary compared to the vast accumulation of verbal information. About non-verbal concerns, we are still essentially savages; each of us must discover the basics for ourselves, with little help from past generations. In the next millennium, carrying out the program suggested by Tolstoy's theory of aesthetics, we shall build a more comprehensive human civilization by better time-binding non-verbal thought, using, e.g., right-hemisphere-compatible analog languages, and graphic, sound, and chemical-sense databases.

Human brains will be linked and networked. These developments will synergize with independently evolving technologies that will link brains more or less directly, using, for example, molecular machinery − nanotechnology − to transmit signals from one brain to another. Signals from one individual's sense organs will directly input to another's sensorium. Such linkages will also enable one individual to influence or control another's responses. This technology will allow the self to seem to move from one body to another. It will be recognized that our impressions of separate selfhood come from two limitations on our awarenesses: (a) how slowly we humans exchange information compared to how rapidly our central nervous systems process, and (b) our limited awareness of diffusely localized processes in our bodies, particularly ones that are sensitive to processes outside our bodies (e.g., force fields in our bodies that are affected by force fields about us, including those in other individuals). Eventually, as the channel capacities of brain-to-brain and body-to-body links grow, language as we know it today will start to become obsolete.

In some futures, technology linking brains and minds will communicate emotions. It will be possible directly to share another's feelings. There will be additional very important synergy with great progress in the next couple of centuries in detailed understanding how our neurohumoral systems work.

Memories will be shared. Eventually, though not in the near future, the code for recording memories will be cracked. This will allow sharing of memories, and this, in turn, will strongly hasten the general dissolving of individual personality and self.

Shared pleasure and pain will favor altruism. In some futures, pleasure or pain experienced by one individual will be transmitted to and experienced by another. One interesting consequence will be development in some societies of what I have called "The Platinum Rule": persons who experience another's pleasure and pain will have a strong motive for selfish altruism. In a few societies, this sharing of pleasure and pain will be universal. Microtransmitters and microreceivers in each person's brain will broadcast and receive pain and pleasure. Where the signals obey an inverse-square law with respect to distance, they will strongly motivate persons to cooperate to elicit pleasure and avoid pain in other nearby persons. Moreover, just as our eyes cannot see individually the many distant stars in the plane of our galaxy that fuse to form the milky way, the pains or pleasures experienced by distant persons will not be individually identifiable but will fuse into a general impression of the pain or pleasure pervading the society. This will motivate individuals to promote the general wellbeing of members of the society.

In some futures, to ensure devotion by the populace, an autocrat or an elite may determine others' pleasure or pain.

Our brains will be artificially enhanced. Better understanding of the nervous system will permit artificial enhancement of the human brain. For example, the same technology that will link different brains also will improve connections within any one brain. Brain exercises will be developed for infants and young children that will favor the retention of an optimum number of brain cells interconnected optimally.

Further consequences of these synergized developments in information science and neurology will include reframing of ideas about the existence of an external, objective world containing other conscious persons, and how we synthesize the external, objective world we experience.

There will be a variety of partial alternatives to death, but immortality will be recognized to be impossible. There will emerge a variety of partial alternatives to death involving dissolving, fragmenting, or redistributing the self, either mentally or physically. Memories may be stored to achieve quasi-death-survival. However, generally it will be recognized that personal immortality is impossible, or rather, is an oxymoron. Life, it will be understood, is impossible without change. Eventually, any individual who does not die will change so much that a sufficiently long-ago self will effectively be dead. Only aspects of the self that do not change with experience could possibly be immortal.

The linkage of the distinction between youth and age with the distinction between inexperience and experience will be undermined by capacity to give young people memories not from their own pasts.

In concert with this will be deepening understanding of what it means to be alive. With growing sophistication, the relations and distinctions among different aspects of being alive or conscious, such as self-consciousness, sense of identity, sense of voluntary control of one's behavior, or capacity to experience pleasure or suffering, will become subject to independent control.

Human behavior, mental processes, and experience will increasingly be controlled. Another consequence of advances in neuroscience will be development and use of memory editing techniques. These will be used by individuals for self-programming and by social groups to control their members. An important use in some cultures will be to edit or delete memories considered socially undesirable, e.g., memories of mistakes in child rearing. It will be possible to forget and so not need to forgive.

Most future societies will have highly effective technologies for almost total control and manipulation of humans. These technologies will use such methods as memory editing, stimulation of brain pain and pleasure circuits, manipulation of erotic and parental drives and of bonding, and control of imprinting, aesthetic experience, mood, arousal, and the sense of identity (so that an individual may be induced to identify not only with his or her own person but also with another individual or a more abstract entity, such as a cause). Some societies will elicit ultimate pleasure or pain by directly stimulating pleasure and pain circuits in the brain; thus, they will achieve levels of torture not possible without direct brain stimulation, because external stimuli producing such intense pain would kill or severely damage the victim. In some societies, individuals will be induced to adore the glorious leader, cause, or religion; individuals we would consider slaves will experience great pleasure serving their masters and will live happy, satisfied lives.

Crime will become obsolete. Technologies that control humans will be used to prevent criminal behavior. They also will make possible convenient and inexpensive control of slaves. For example, it will often be cheaper and easier to provide the neural equivalent of a feeling of hunger appeasement than to provide adequate nutrition. Of course, the distinction − if any − between control of criminality and control of slaves will itself be a matter of varying societal or cultural definition.

Education will be hardwired. The same technologies will lead to hardwired education, bypassing sensory input channels. This will greatly amplify the effects of super-languages, because it will become possible for individuals to learn them early in life, even as first languages. Similarly, there will be hardwired psychotherapy. Different societies will make very different distinctions among procedures our present society would call education, brainwashing, psychotherapy, acceptable suasion (as in ethical advertising), habilitation, or rehabilitation. Such procedures will be very much more efficient and effective than present methods. Among their side-effects, changes in motivation or habit may occur abruptly instead of gradually, and so may seem to come from outside the self; consequently, without appropriate memory editing, the inner, observer self will be distanced from the outer self that interacts with the social and physical environment.

Art will be automated. Another consequence of detailed understanding of the workings of the neurohumoral system will be automation of art. Interactive computer programs will orchestrate pleasure, aesthetic experience, and other emotions, monitoring the individual to adjust input for maximum effect. They will create individualized, personalized art experiences that fit a particular person's predilections. A real-seeming simulated experience projected into an individual's awareness will often induce intense pleasure. Sometimes, a tailored sub-universe will provide a setting for the simulation. The addiction danger will be profound, and some cultures will ban such techniques. Others will use them for control. In many cultures, these developments will blur the distinctions among drug, erotic, and aesthetic experiences; they also, in many cultures, will decouple erotic experience from what some today consider unperverted contact between humans. Moreover, the very notion of "perversion" will become obsolete, or come to be regarded as quaint.

Lives and cultures will be seen as art forms. Some will argue that the aesthetic experience is peculiarly human, because stimuli that trigger it must fit a species-specific neural template. This will become one basis for determining whether an individual is human: Some will consider human all those who share human aesthetic preferences. A consequence of this view will be acceptance by some of other animal species, e.g., chimpanzees, as human, because they share our aesthetic preferences. This will lead many to require that, to be accepted as human, an individual have human-level intelligence. Others will seek to develop a general theory of aesthetic experience that transcends individual biology; they will look for general laws that comprehend preferences by humans and, for example, intelligent crustacea. For example, some will believe that experiences considered beautiful facilitate efficient neural coding (made possible, e.g., by input redundance or symmetry).

As human control of the material universe increases, and as human identity becomes more difficult to define or confine, increasingly people will consider their lives art objects. There will be increased concern with awareness and non-awareness, with this concern affecting very diverse values and goals. Some cultures will greatly value achievement of intense or peak experiences; in others, individuals will seek to suppress individual consciousness, sometimes to facilitate merging with a more universal consciousness. Particularly diverse will be attitudes and values about self-awareness. Since awareness of certain aspects of the self may accompany lack of awareness of other aspects, cultures will differ with respect to which kinds of self-awareness are desirable.

Increasingly popular will be interpretation of life as a game to be approached playfully. However, so will be, from time to time in some cultures or circles, a new high seriousness in both new and revitalized old religions. Questions about the role of irrationality, and its desirability or undesirability in human conduct, will continue to be viewed as important and will continue to elicit widely diverse answers. Some religions and philosophies will favor returning humans to their irrational, even animal roots. Others will seek to transform humans into radically different beings that some consider superior.

Many cultures will disarticulate happiness from what many in the culture consider "success." In some, there will even be an art of suffering, in which individuals consciously compose for themselves and act out artistically tragic life scripts. Persons in some cultures will seek experiences that our culture assumes all normal individuals avoid. For example, some will deliberately experience death repeatedly, or will seek various kinds and degrees of physical illness, including dementia. High-fever delirium, for example, will have the role in some cultures that alcohol intoxication has in ours.

Cultures also will be designed as art objects. Some individuals will join a culture whose values, life styles, goals, artifacts, etc., create an aesthetic effect they like. In some such cultures, individuals will live dramatically interwoven lives in which coveted roles will even include tragic victim or vile villain.

Cosmic limits will be transcended. Important cosmic barriers, such as the light-speed barrier or the causality barrier, will be broken or tunneled through. Much will be achieved that we today consider impossible.

Even before cosmic barriers are transcended, there will be a sort of flowering of paradox. Human experience will increasingly extend into realms for which our brain algorithms, programmed by evolution, will be inappropriate. This should not be surprising: our common-sense logic evolved by natural selection for survival in everyday human milieus. It will increasingly be recognized that whenever we wander too far from the realm of everyday human experience, e.g., into the very small, the very large, the very cold, the very energetic, or the very distant in time or space, then the laws of physics become uncanny, i.e., inconsistent with everyday experience. Indeed, how much the physical laws of a particular realm depart from the common-sense physical laws of everyday experience will provide a measure of distance from our everyday, common-sense world.

Increasingly, it will be recognized that our brains have evolved to construct our everyday experiences by suppressing or censoring some and emphasizing other information, depending on its relevance to survival or reproduction. This will lead to the realization that, once the brain’s editing is transcended, even everyday events or processes include much that is paradoxical.

The topology of experience will be likened to that of a Moebius strip or Klein bottle. Because an individual can, for example, directly experience the subjective effects of electrical stimulation of, say, a brain area that processes visual experience while concurrently watching the brain stimulation as another person would, it will be recognized that some human experience may double back on itself like a Moebius strip, where the same point may be "observed" from two directions. This recognition will help resolve the controversy between monistic and dualistic approaches to the mind-body problem.

The successes of scientism's dualistic compartmentalization of the physical and mental realms will foster their reunification. Just as excessive development of yin engenders an efflorescence of yang, and vice versa, so recent development of technologies that assume dualistic separation of mind and matter is setting the stage for perception of mind and matter as obverse aspects of one process in which each event manifests concurrently as mind and matter like a point on a Moebius strip that may be viewed from two different directions, from the seeming inside or outside of the same one-sided loop.

Notions about the nature of life, consciousness, and intelligence will become more complex and sophisticated. Proposed resolutions of the Fermi paradox − the puzzle posed by our lack of contact with alien intelligences − will become increasingly complicated and ambiguous. A typical response to the question, "Are we alone?" will be, "We are not alone. They are all about us, but we hardly notice each other." Another answer will be: "What with the proliferation of simulated sub-universes, the universe is much larger than we thought. Other intelligences have created their own sub-universes, into which they have vanished. We have not been contacted because the vastness of the multiverse makes the density of intelligence in it very low." A similar answer will refer to Vernor Vinge's seminal metaphor of a technological singularity. It will be suggested that intelligent species tend to fall into a technological singularity, and thus become inaccessible to others that have not crossed the same event horizon.

Our growing sophistication about the complexity and ambiguity of the question, "Is this physical system alive and conscious?" will lead us to see some degree of life and consciousness in many systems that today we do not consider even remotely alive or conscious − a sort of scientific animism; it also will lead us to recognize that a system may be alive and conscious, but so alien that we can hardly communicate or empathize with it. This will complicate making policy about human impacts on the environment.

The relations among knowledge, life, consciousness, and intelligence will be clarified. Influenced by increased sharing of private awarenesses, in a turning against logical positivism, a "logical negativism" movement will emerge in the next hundred years that denies a sharp distinction between statements of fact (statements that may be empirically verified or falsified) and evaluative or subjective statements, e.g., expressions of aesthetic or ethical feeling, or of emotion. Logical negativists will maintain that no human behavior can have zero impact on the same or another human's feelings, nor can it have zero implications about what does or does not exist. Intelligence, consciousness, and life will all come to be regarded as interrelatedly multidimensional, and so, for example, two different physical systems may be considered equally alive although differing in how they are alive, with one system more conscious but less intelligent than the other.

Life and intelligence will continue to be thought to be require accumulation of negative entropy. Consequently, it will be concluded that living, intelligent systems must be open, and therefore vulnerable. Interest will turn from the question, "Is this physical system as intelligent as we are (and therefore possibly dangerous to us if its purposes are not consistent with ours)?" to what will be considered a more fundamental question: "Does this physical system adaptively influence the probabilities of various futures, adaptively compensating for or augmenting the effects of our actions? If so, how effectively does it do so?"

Many will consider continuity of the human ego over time an illusion largely due to shared access to roughly the same memory database, thus reinforcing the general conviction that immortality is impossible.

It will be recognized that just as we are assemblages of smaller living units, cells, our consciousnesses may be embedded in larger conscious systems. For example, in the future our present civilization may be seen as comprised of individuals functioning as neurons in an embryonic super-organism whose nervous system is the Internet. It will also be recognized that the same individual may be part of more than one overlapping conscious super-organism. Issues that will be resolved will include the nesting of organisms and consciousnesses, one within the other, such as nesting of the cerebral cortex within the entire central nervous system. A related area of investigation will be determining the outside boundary of an organism, which will rely on identification of feedback loops.

Education will teach understanding and control of complex systems, and how to distinguish reality from simulation. Education will teach the very young how to use the new multilinear, holistic ways of thinking and communicating. Using these new ways, students will learn to understand and control complex systems that are today difficult to understand or control. Typical objects of intense educational effort will be understanding and control of: the human body (with any artificial modifications or enhancements) at the biochemical level, the universe within the self, and the interface between the self and the external universe. Most of what we today consider mysterious about the human body or mind will be demystified. Even young children will learn how neurohumoral processes and moods or motivations are interconnected, and how to manage them.

In many societies, understanding will be regarded as flawed or severely incomplete if it does not include grasping how something feels from the inside; i.e., identification with the process to be understood will be considered necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, for understanding.

Some societies will focus major educational efforts on training persons how to resist addiction to automated art, electronic-stimulation pleasure, and other by-products of progress in neurohumoral science. In most of these societies, use of neurohumoral science to control or enslave other humans will be considered a major crime, in some societies punished more severely than murder, because, for example, reversing a person's values or motives will be considered worse than killing the person, i.e., nullifying the person"s values and motives.

Another focus of education, reflecting progress in the technology of reality simulation, will be training individuals to distinguish experiences in our primary universe from simulated experiences in artificial sub-universes. For example, to distinguish a limited sub-universe from the primary universe, individuals will learn how to test the information-handling limits of an environment.

Such methods will become part of standard education, which will teach children how to answer for themselves many questions today considered unanswerable, such as whether one lives in a solipsistic universe. For example, one approach to answering such a question will be to compare one's information-processing capacity with the information processing necessary to simulate the external universe, taking into account that one cannot experience an external universe more complex than the limits of one's information-processing capacity. The implied paradox in this constraint will be both recognized and resolved.

In different futures, there will be great diversity in acceptance or rejection of inconsistencies among an individual's beliefs, values, or purposes. In some cultures, for example, it will be the norm for individuals to have multiple personalities with divergent beliefs, values, and purposes. Children will learn to evaluate how consistent are their various beliefs, values, and purposes. Where different personalities share the same body, how they may accommodate or contend will be important parts of the educational curriculum.

There will also be great diversity in acceptance or rejection of random, idiosyncratic impulses or thoughts whose hereditary or environmental sources cannot be identified. Some cultures will treasure them and teach children how to encourage their emergence. Others will seek to prevent them. Many will seek to control or channel such creativity, regarding it as dangerous but potentially valuable. Thus, in many futures, the paradox of self-programming will be confronted early.

In the near future, there will be occasional near apocalypses. The increasing strangeness of the future will lead, in the next few hundred years, to several near apocalypses. There will be in the nearer portion of the next millennium several more or less convincing messianic leaders who will trigger intense, often revolutionary, social upheavals and conflicts. These upheavals will be times when many persons will experience profound transformations of their most fundamental values.

There will be occasional holocausts, but human radiation will make our extinction unlikely. Currently, human destructive capacity has grown explosively, while human radiation has barely begun. Therefore, the danger of human extinction is greatest in the very near future. More than once in the next few hundred years there will be substantial kill-offs of humankind. Most of these will be because of conflict, e.g., deliberate genocide or use of weapons of mass destruction; some will mainly be due to technological carelessness, often combined with nihilistic disdain for human life. In a few futures, we will encounter major natural disasters, such as an asteroid impact. Intense efforts to limit access to weapons of mass destruction will be for the most part unsuccessful, and so most will turn to education or mind control to limit use of such weapons. Cultures that distinguish between "us," who are good, and "them," who are evil, will be particularly likely to perpetrate mass killings. So will cultures in which there is a religious justification for welcoming the end of human life as we now know it, e.g., to make way for a new paradise that will follow the coming of a messiah. Technologies for at least partly preserving human identity after death will also tend to make death and killing more acceptable.

Among the different habitats into which our descendants will disperse will be the interiors of planetoids; by the end of the millennium some of these will be on their way out of the solar system, on the way to dispersal through the galaxy. This will reduce the likelihood of humankind's total extinction.

Even in the near future, before most human radiation, human extinction is unlikely. The present is not an introduction to a catastrophe or apocalypse scenario. Most of the future will be weird, not disastrous. The future will be at least as beautiful, dynamic, exquisite, multifaceted, mysterious, paradoxical, profound, prosaic, romantic, tough, uncanny, uncaring, unendurable, varied, and weird as the present. It will have uncountably more detail and reality than my generic vision.

The most common attitude about the threat of holocaust will be that it is always possible, but unlikely, much like, though anyone has the option of suicide, few choose that option. Despite the statistical science of history assumption that in a sufficiently large and varied population any possible human behavior will occur somewhere, it will be felt that slaughtering many persons becomes more difficult as the number to be slaughtered increases, and so a holocaust becomes less likely the larger its scope. Those who dominate, those with the most to lose will generally consider human extinction undesirable, and their roles will usually put them in the best position to prevent it. There are, however, futures in which most or all are eliminated other than members of a privileged class. Some will consider this the only feasible way to deal with negative consequences of unchecked human breeding.

Some will believe which alternative future we enter reflects which alternative past we exit. In the near future, there will be a Kuhnian revolution in views about the relations among past, present, and future. This will affect how the issue of free will versus determinism is regarded. The future's plasticity and the extent to which it is subject to human choice will be seen as inextricably tied to how much this is true of the past. Thinkers about the future will increasingly believe that the future's many-branched possibility tree has its roots in an equally multi-forked past. Some will derive from thermodynamic, information, and quantum theories the conclusion that complete knowledge of the past is as impossible as complete knowledge of the future. They will feel that it is an illusion that there is only one past; instead, they will envisage many different pasts, constrained only by the requirement that they be consistent with the necessarily very incomplete information the present has about the present. Thus, the present will come to be seen as an hourglass midpoint intermediate between two diverging cones of possibilities.

A new view will be that each of our consciousnesses, isolated in its own ever-advancing present, experiences only its own selections from the many alternative futures. It will be felt that to the extent that a consciousness's future stems from its past and present, and to the extent that its past determines its present choices, its selection of a future is equivalent to its choosing its past. Thus, some will come to see the past as just as plastic and subject to choice as the future and, obversely, the future as just as fixed as the past.

Those who take this position will have to address the thermodynamic asymmetry between past and future: the ever-increasing entropy or heat, and ever-decreasing information as time passes. This problem will be addressed in various ways, such as by arguing that the moving event horizon of our universe (due to its "edges" expanding so fast that signals from them cannot reach us) "eats" the extra entropy being produced.

Belief in other causality branches will influence religious thought. Some will hold that the future into which an individual emerges reflects the moral quality of his or her past choices, thus rewarding or punishing the individual. They will argue that retrospectively the amoral, blind operation of physical law always seems to determine events, and so, although the universe is just, it conceals the mechanism of its justice. Some of those who take this position will argue that seeming injustices, such as the suffering of infants, are observed but never experienced: no one, they will assert, ever experiences being a baby who suffers unjustly, although many may observe such a baby.

Others will see human notions about justice and morality as biologically based, evolved through natural selection of tribes whose members shared values that promoted cooperation that favored survival. Some with this view will embrace an aesthetic basis for morality. Others will develop a variety of meta-logics of ethics. Alternative ethical systems will be proposed, each claiming self-consistency. This, in turn, will lead to deep investigation of the relations between the foundations of logic and the foundations of ethics. Many will consider an analog of Gödel's theorem to apply to ethics. These investigations will lead some to consider not only mathematics but also ethics to be branches of psychology, thus building on the point of view expressed in George Boole's nineteenth-century title, "Laws of Thought."

The future will be worshipped. Religions will arise whose main tenet is that their adherents will attain physical immortality or paradisal bliss through future technology operated by future adherents, who will reward their spiritual ancestors by resurrecting them into the material paradise the triumphant faithful will create.

Other sects will anticipate salvation, not by means of some remote future resurrection, but soon, when the sect's (often superhuman) descendants reach back in time to reward early adherents. Such religions will resemble cargo cults in their expectation of benefits to come from contact with our prosperous descendants. Since some will view the past as a mirror of the future, some will expect material salvation to come from the past instead of the future.

Comments and Conclusions

These predictions reveal more about us than about the future. We pallid ghosts in the future's past peer with primitive, unfocused eyes at the piercing brightness of tomorrow. What we see is not the future; we gaze at projections of our hopes and fears, our inner emptiness and pregnancy.

Notably, the predictions above about the likelihood of catastrophe, holocaust, or human extinction are particularly vulnerable to the balance in the predictor between optimism and pessimism.^v

Not only the communications revolution will strongly influence the future. A remarkable efflorescence of communication links among individuals characterizes the recent past. As humans interlink more tightly, it seems inevitable that their individual consciousnesses will at least partly melt into shared awareness. However, it is difficult to believe that only this contemporary technological development will profoundly affect the next millennium. Surely, there will be other profoundly influential developments, unanticipated by the present predictor, that will have comparable weight in the unfolding of the next millennium.

Information theory and chaos theory strongly influence these predictions; they are not sufficient. Recent discoveries about the mathematics of chaos and the earlier linking of information and entropy provide conceptual tools that heavily influence the predictions above, as does the recent development of giant-memoried parallel processing computers capable of dealing with Brobdingnagian masses of data. It is difficult to believe that these will be the last important conceptual or technological advances that transform our view of the future. Our present worldview and our present conceptual tools very much limit the view of the next millennium presented above.

The computer is my principal metaphor for the universe; there will be others. The chronometer, when it was at the cutting edge of technology, was the popular metaphor for the Newtonian universe. Today, the best-known device that uses cutting-edge technology is the computer, and we are becoming accustomed to picturing the universe as a computer. I have done so in this essay. How we picture the universe affects how we think about the universe, what questions we ask, what surprises us, what we do not notice. Doubtless, in the future there will be new cutting-edge devices that will become metaphors for the universe.

Recently, the popular imagse of the computer has been changing, with corresponding changes in the sorts of questions about and images of the future. Earlier, the computer was thought of as a stand-alone device containing information storage units, input-output components, and at most a small number of information registers and processors. Such a device would process information serially, with little temporal overlap. Recently, we have become accustomed to multiply parallel information processing involving many processors, perhaps housed in many different physically dispersed computers. Such a system requires an interconnecting information transmission network – which, currently is the Internet. Memory has also become increasingly delocalized, distributed among widely scattered memory units – the cloud. This reconceptualization of computer technology favors applying to human social organization the conceptual tools appropriate for thinking about interaction among dispersed devices for information processing or storage, and such thinking now underlies some of the predictions above. We are less concerned with constraints imposed by memory or temporary storage (register) limitations, and more concerned about privacy, i.e., limitation on distribution of information stored at a particular site. We are beginning to think of self-replicating programs that spread in cyberspace as alive and capable of evolving – a kind of second-order life in a subsidiary cyberspatial ecology. This, in turn, tends to stretch and render more flexible our conception of what may be alive.

To illustrate further, suppose the interstellar spaceship becomes the popular metaphor. It would, for example, favor thinking of the universe as a single ecosystem. It would favor wondering what is outside the universe, and how the universe keeps what is outside out and what is inside in; it would also favor wondering whether the universe contains all it needs to perpetuate itself. However, it would discourage asking whether and how the universe stores information. A spaceship is a vehicle. We would tend to inquire about the destination of a spaceship universe, and think of the future as a series of way stations to that destination.

Picturing the universe as a computer supports a different conception of the future than does picturing the universe as a spaceship. The computer metaphor leads naturally to the notion, mentioned above, that in a simulation another physical dimension may represent time, and thus events occurring at different times may be observed concurrently. Such a notion is alien to the spaceship metaphor.

Recent developments suggest that genetic engineering may become the next influential cutting-edge technology. In that case, futurists may look for what acts like DNA to govern how the future grows out of the past. However, paralleling such research may be investigation of how the equivalents of epigenetic influences give rise to aspects of the future that depend more on quasi-environmental processes than they do on the past "genetically."

The chaotic dependence of the future on the present does not preclude accurate prediction. I think the main value of my predictions is not that they provide a picture of what will come centuries hence. I think that the predictions above help spotlight how chaos theory and information theory influence predictions, and how futurists may misunderstand and therefore misuse these conceptual tools. That the future depends chaotically on the present does not mean that the future is indeterminate. In chaotic systems, strict determinacy can coexist with unpredictability. Exact prediction is impossible in deterministic but chaotic systems because in such systems exact prediction requires infinitely precise measurement.

There is another, deeper confusion. If we believe in quantum indeterminacy, then any seeming strict determination of the future by the past would be at best a statistical illusion; it could depend on law-of-the-mean mutual cancellation of possible observations. Such mutual cancellation is why billiard balls ordinarily move predictably, while the atomic and subatomic particles that comprise them do not. Subatomic quantum indeterminacy does not generally preclude high (if not perfect) predictability in the everyday world, where the law of the mean usually works very well, although there are exceptions.^viii Predictors would be well advised to investigate how common and noteworthy are the exceptions. The so-called "butterfly effect" in weather is a familiar example, but neither how common it is nor its magnitude is established. If uncertainty in neural transmission gives rise to another exception, this might be much more noteworthy. Combined with implications of Gödel's theorem, it might suggest that creativity, at least in mathematics, is linked to fundamental unpredictability.

I concede that we cannot predict with perfect accuracy, and that we must pay with increased entropy somewhere for a prediction's information − i.e., negative entropy. I also concede that Heisenberg uncertainty forces us to pay for accuracy in certain predictions with inaccuracy in others. However, I maintain that, by paying a sufficient entropy price and trading some measures' uncertainties for certainty about others, then for appropriately selected measures (excluding ones whose accuracies correlate negatively with others selected), we can get satisfactorily accurate statistical forecasts. Today's pessimistic zeitgeist should not lead us to lose hope that we can develop methods that generate acceptably detailed and accurate predictions. We must also remind ourselves how blurred our perceptions are; we would not be able to distinguish many different possible futures because they would be more alike than the resolution limits of our perceptions.

There is reason and more than reason for hopefulness if not hope. History shows us repeatedly a present laboring to give birth to the future in cycles of alternating agony and relaxation, alternating conflict and resolution. Today, we seem to be entering another anabolic or yin epoch in the saga of our species, when not growth but pruning away part of the living present mainly determines the future.

I have confidence in the general implication of the predictions above that we are about to experience another change in the light that illuminates our world-stage. The sun of reason is dimming. So is the sharp, hard spotlight of individual self-awareness. Of course, we feel a certain trepidation as we stand on the verge of so strange a tomorrow. However, it should be like the trepidation of a birthing mother about to experience her next contraction. We do not yet know what we are about to bring forth, but we can sense, if dimly, that this birth will be our deepest, most fundamental fulfillment.

End Notes

ⁱWith modifications and additions in 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, and 2013 based on: (a) a paper presented by the author at World Future Society meetings, 1988; (b) Herbert G. Gerjuoy, "The Most Significant Events of the Next Thousand Years," Futures Research Quarterly, 1992, vol. 8, pp. 5-21; and (c) Herbert G. Gerjuoy, "The Most Significant Events of the Next Thousand Years," in Richard A. Slaughter, Editor, The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, Volume 3, Directions & Outlooks. Kew, Victoria, Australia: 1996. Pp. 245-267.

Below, so the reader may see how my ideas have evolved over the years, is the text of the 1992 version that was published in Futures Research Quarterly.

ⁱⁱ This work owes much to the brilliant pioneering by H. G. Wells, particularly his "The Discovery of the Future" (1902) and Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).

ⁱⁱⁱWe may, if the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, go through all the doors; however, we shall remember having gone through only one.

^ivThis argument assumes that individual alternative futures are denumerable. If, as I suspect, this assumption is false, then the notion of a "generic" future is hard to define unless my visions are constrained within a Borel set of all futures, a constraint that would be ensured if my brain's phase space were limited to a denumerable number of points. If this is not so, then the rest of this essay may be considered short-range predictions about a chaotic system about which prediction becomes less certain as it becomes more long-range.

^vThe present version is more pessimistic than earlier versions. In January 2011 I began to experience episodes of liver dysfunction.

^viThis assertion is orthogonal to the classic philosophical antinomy of determinism and belief in "free will."

^viiThe notion of quantum bands to intelligence may require explanation: The problem of how to increase one's own intelligence may or may not be solvable by an individual or group with a particular level of intelligence. If raising one's intelligence calls for no more intelligence than one starts with, then only pragmatic constraints bar one from doing so. However, if raising one's intelligence calls for more intelligence than one has, then increasing one's intelligence resembles leaping across or tunneling through a quantum barrier. It may be possible to increase one's intelligence even if doing so requires more intelligence than one has; however, doing so would have to depend on some random or trial-and-error process, such as evolution, or on help from another, superior intelligence. Probably there are bands of intelligence level where there is sufficient intelligence to find ways to increase intelligence further, and other intelligence bands where the problem is too difficult. If this is so, then intelligence has quantum bands, like the bands that constrain where electrons orbit.

^viiiIt is not difficult to produce examples where the law of the mean fails. For example, because the tangent function can have an infinite value, the uncertainty of the mean tangent of randomly selected equiprobable angles does not converge as the number of observations increases. A physical example: Suppose we drop a needle on a floor made of boards with parallel edges, and record the angle the needle makes with the edges. If the angle is random, then predicting the mean tangent will not benefit from the law of the mean.

Futures Research Quarterly Fall 1992

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENTS OF THE NEXT THOUSAND YEARS

by

Herbert G. Gerjuoy

THERE ARE MANY FUTURES, AND THEIR RELATION TO THE PRESENT IS CHAOTIC

Every few minutes, I find that my vision of the long-range future has changed dramatically. What I foresee seems very sensitive to what I have most recently experienced. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not necessarily a sign that my vision is inaccurate. It is just what should occur if my vision of the future is accurate, and the future is chaotically dependent on the present. If the future is chaotically dependent on the present − and I think it is − then the future may vary discontinuously as a function of the present. Even tiny changes in the present may generate enormous changes in the future, provided we look far enough ahead. Therefore, the future may well change abruptly and seemingly unpredictably from moment to moment.

I am fond of saying that the present is like a great hall with many doors. We shall, collectively, choose which door to go through. As we do so, the door will slam shut behind us, so that we shall never again be able to return to the great hall and its many alternatives. This is because simultaneously today there are many revolutions in the making. Which revolution occurs first is critical. Whichever occurs first will so change the context of all the others that the influences (and even the chances of occurrence) of all the others will be utterly changed. This is a reason why the future depends chaotically on the present.

DESCRIBED BELOW ARE OCCURRENCES COMMON TO MANY FUTURES

Because my vision of the next thousand years keeps changing rapidly and chaotically, I cannot easily identify the most significant events of the next thousand years. There are so many futures that it seems as if virtually any possible event has some probability. Even unlikely events occur occasionally. Among possible but unlikely events are many that would have enormous impacts. For example, I can imagine futures in which humanity becomes extinct. That would seem to be an important event. Is it among the ten most significant? It is, if the only criterion for whether an event is significant is the magnitude of its impact, disregarding its probability or its societal, moral, and ethical implications. I do not wish to disregard such factors. Consequently, the future events I list here are not the most significant in any simple sense of significance. Rather, they are noteworthy commonalities in the variety of alternative futures. What I mean by commonalities is explained immediately below.

Suppose I draw a large random sample of present-day humans, photograph each member of the sample with the camera aimed squarely at the bridge of the nose, enlarge or reduce each photograph so that the eyes are always the same distance apart, then superimpose all the photographs. Thus, I could generate a sort of average image, a sort of generic human face. The average image would filter out rare features, as if they were noise, and retain common ones, as if they were signal. Of course, we could never expect to encounter such a face on an actual person. It would lack the individual peculiarities of any one face. Instead, it would have only characteristics shared by many different individuals. Some of these characteristics might even be mutually inconsistent. For example, it probably would be a face with a feminine cast, since most humans are female. However, if a sizable minority of men all have the same shaped beard, then the common beard image might override mutually canceling variations in other chin images; the generic human might turn out to be a bearded lady! Similarly, I describe below events from a generic future, events shared by many different futures. However, like the average face, the generic future is unlikely and unnatural. It lacks the idiosyncracies that any particular future must exhibit, and it contains a disproportionately large number of possibly inconsistent events common to many different futures.

Of course, in my visions of the future, the source of signal, i.e., what the different futures have in common, may very well mv unconscious. This paper may illustrate one of my favorite methodological aphorisms: pessimistic futurists have bad livers.

I THINK, BUT I AM NOT CERTAIN, THAT IN THE FUTURE THERE WILL BE MORE CHOICES

I do not think it is likely that in the future we shall have fewer alternatives. I think we shall have different alternatives than we have today, but I think that the range and number of alternatives will increase rather than decrease. Although it is possible that we shall fall into a sociocultural black hole of greatly reduced future alternatives, I think that probably only small fractions of our descendants have that destiny, and for most humans in most of the future there will continue to be the problem and glory of choice. The medieval metaphor for the human condition, expressed, for example, by Pico de la Mirandola, will continue to be apt: humans are at the point of balance between the opposed forces of the universe, and so have the potential to ascend until they become angels, or descend until they become devils. However, I would extend this image beyond its unidimensionality into many diverse dimensions. I think that we are at the point of balance among many different forces, and we have many different directions in which we may go. We may not only choose between darkness and light, we may choose between purple and green, between shrill and smooth, between rectangular and sour.

My conviction that human choice will grow in the future does not have an entirely mystical basis, neither is it − I believe − merely wishful thinking, nor is it merely an extrapolation from the recent past. Paralleling the increasing amount of information in the alternatives among which individuals choose is steadily increasing complexity in human society. This, 1 feel, necessarily generates more choice. Moreover, as society becomes more complex, as its alternative futures become more numerous and varied, simple futures would seem necessarily to become rarer. The probability of a simple future thus would decline. On this tenuous argument rests most of my hope that we will not fall through some historical absorption barrier into a reduced-choice future, such as an ant hill society, total extermination, or a monotonously blissful paradise.

With these caveats, here are some predictions:

PREDICTIONS

There Will Be Biological, Habitat, Cultural, Value, Meme, Religious, and Philosophical Radiation

The human species will radiate into many subspecies that will become increasingly alien and incomprehensible to each other. This process will not depend on the slow drunkard's walk stagger of biological evolution; rather, it will be due mainly to technological interference with the duplication and transmission of genetic information, an accompaniment of a broad disarticulation of sexuality, reproduction, and evolution. In parallel, human culture will radiate into many subcultures that will become increasingly alien and incomprehensible to each other. This will happen as humans become physically more diverse and move into increasingly diverse and mutually alien and often exotic environments, such as space, the deep sea, and the subterranean world. Often, one environment will house a mix of biologically and culturally diverse human types. The diversity of human biological types accommodated by one culture also will increase, as will the diversity of values and life styles.

Affiliation will depend mainly on biology and experience, particularly early experience, rather than geographic location. Thus, the equivalents of nation-states will increasingly have non-geographic cultural and biological bases. Without territorial conflict, two or more distinct sovereignties may share overlapping territories, with their jurisdictions determined by biology and culture, rather than geography. Citizens or members of one such state or clan will pay taxes to and get governmental benefits (such as education and medical services) from their own governments, while living and working intermingled with persons who have a different allegiance. As these cultural and biological radiations occur, our memes also will radiate, and they, too, will become increasingly mutually alien. (Memes are the ideas that live and evolve in the environment or ecology of our minds.)

Accompanying and synergizing with these radiations will be radiation of human values, which will by their growing diversity increase the mutual alienation of diverse human groups. So, in most of the future, most persons will have values very different from our present values.

Value radiation implies a somewhat discouraging vision of the future, for we cannot help viewing the future in the light of our present values. Individuals and societies behaving according to values very different from ours will surely do many things we would disapprove; therefore, I foresee a future full of actions that would appall you and me.

All predictions below should be qualified by these radiations. Virtually any prediction will apply only to some subset of futures. Concerning future variation in value and belief, what questions are considered important will be more stable than what will be the consensual answers to the questions. For example, the future will bring many strange mutations in answers to the question: When may one human take another's life (with, of course, many variations in answers to the questions. What is human? What is life?); however, the perceived importance of the questions will be much more stable than the answers they elicit.

There will be radiation and proliferation of religions, and new important religions will spring up that will attract many adherents.

More general than the proliferation and radiation of religions will be proliferation and radiation of alternative approaches to fundamental questions such as: What does human life mean? Does it mean anything? Need or should it be meaningful? Increasingly popular will be interpretation of life as a game to be approached playfully. However, so will be, from time to time in some cultures or circles, a new high seriousness in the context of both new and revitalized old religions. Questions about the role of irrationality, and its desirability or undesirability in human conduct, will continue to be viewed as important and will continue to elicit a wide diversity of answers. Some religions and philosophies will focus on returning humans to their irrational, even animal, roots. Others will aim at transformation into superior or radically different beings.

The Distinction Between Humans and Other Species Will Blur

Not only will there be many different genetically engineered life forms derived from human stock, but also there will be life forms derived from non-human stock that will have many human characteristics, such as high intelligence and speech. In many futures there will be hybrid life forms that have both human genes and genes derived from other species. Some humanoids will carry new, artificial genes, with neither human nor non-human ancestry. Ancestry will seem less and less a valid basis for deciding who is human and who is not human. It will tend to be supplanted by new criteria based on behavior. Beings that look or act human will often come to be considered human despite non-human ancestry. Many cultures will use a generalized Turing test to define membership in humankind: an individual will he considered human if humans do not notice any significant differences between the individual and humans. (Of course, what is considered significant will vary. Therefore, the same individual will often be considered human by some but not by others.) Other cultures will use a related criterion: humans are those whom humans would like to consider human.

Sub-Universes Will Be Simulated by Cyberspace

Among the diverse environments into which humans will spread will be sub-universes inside computer simulations, i.e., in cyberspace. These simulations will house self-organizing systems containing the information equivalents of human memories and motives. Sub-universes will be constructed that span vast ranges of simulated time and space. In many of these, in the underlying mechanism or substrate in our universe, either time or space or both will have utterly different physical representation. For example, time may be represented by location, so that events occurring at different simulated times in a sub-universe may be represented by simultaneous occurrences in different locations in our universe. This will make it possible for observers in our universe to view the universe inside the simulation from a cosmic standpoint, viewing, for example, past and future concurrently.

In many sub-universes, the laws of physics will be quite different from the laws in this universe. Life and intelligence (including those derived from human sources) will have to adapt to such transcendentally alien contexts, greatly heightening radiation of beliefs, reIigions, values, and memes. The living, intelligent inhabitants of sub-universes will sometimes communicate with, and even seek to enter, our universe (as humans, i.e., their minds, will enter sub-universes). Some sub-universe denizens will worship us; others will attack us or seek to do so. Some will transcend us. Relations between inhabitants of sub-universes and inhabitants of our universe will hauntlngly resemble our legends of contacts with demons and other beings from the spirit world.

The finite speed of light and other limits on the transmission of information from one point in our universe to another will be interpreted by some as reflecting a finite (albeit large) limit on the information-processing capacity of our universe or, rather, of a system that underlies or simulates it.

The Distinction Between Religion and Science Will Be Lost in the Increasing Complexity and Ambiguity of Both

The present dichotomy between scientific and religious world views will disappear, as religions arise that interface comfortably with empirical, statistical, and experimental approaches to truth. Concurrently, science will increasingly recognize and value mystical, subjective, and aesthetic criteria for selection of theories or organizing principles, and for choice among research projects.

The notion will be taken seriously that we, ourselves, may be in a sub-universe of some other intelligence's creation. It will be the basis for profound religio-scientific discussion, and will contribute greatly to diminution of the gap between science and religion.

Conservative Cultures Will Preserve Older Life Styles

Among future biological and cultural varieties will be those that choose to remain human, i.e., choose to stay within limits of variation reflecting their past, e.g., our present. There will be reservations or zoos housing people among whom we would be much more at home than we would be in most of the wildly varying habitats and cultures into which humankind will radiate.

Future Humans Will View Past Humans (Us) with Condescension

Attitudes toward such conservative human cultures will parallel attitudes about past cultures − attitudes about us. Many future societies will regard us from a substantial emotional distance, as if we were an exhibit in a museum. There will be more or less tolerant condescension. We will be thought of as if we were an endangered species: somewhat pathetic, but also precious, to be preserved and allowed to develop without interference, i.e., without contact or feedback. Many will feel that we (today's humans) are not yet truly human, not even wholly alive, conscious, or rational, but merely deluded or illuded into thinking we are. Condescension toward us will be enhanced by the discrepancy between future values and our values. Not only would we be appalled if we could view the actions of our successors, but also they will find many of our values and actions revoltingly primitive.

Regardless whether there are quantum bands to intelligence, the more intelligent among our descendants will have no more interest in communicating with us or helping us than we would be interested in improving the molecular environment of our unicellular ancestors. (The notion of quantum bands to intelligence may require explanation: The problem of increasing one's own intelligence is one that may or may not be solvable by an individual with a particular level of intelligence. If raising one's intelligence calls for no more intelligence than one has to start with, then only pragmatic constraints bar one from doing so. However, if raising one's intelligence calls for more intelligence than one has, then increasing one's intelligence becomes like leaping across or tunneling through a quantum barrier. It may be possible to increase one's intelligence even if doing so requires more intelligence than one has; however, doing so would have to depend on some random or trial-and-error process, like evolution. It is not unlikely that there are bands of intelligence level where there is sufficient intelligence to find ways to increase intelligence further, and other intelligence bands where the problem is too difficult. If such is the case, then intelligence has quantum bands, like the bands that constrain where electrons orbit.)

Super-Intelligences Will Flourish

Super-intelligent systems will be developed that will be able to address and discuss with humans issues that humans may care about but find too difficult to deal with unaided, including fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe, consciousness, reality, time, etc. In addition, the relative simplicity of today's human society will make it easy for future super-intelligences to understand us and our times. The understanding will limited only by paucity of detailed records. In general, future generations will understand us better than we understand ourselves.

The Reality of Other Universes Will Be Accepted

There will be growing acceptance of the existence of realms of reality inaccessible from where we are in the universe. These will be interpreted in a variety of ways and seen as having a variety of bases. For example, one class of inaccessible events would be those in portions of the universe so far away or receding so rapidly that they are beyond our event horizon. Many will embrace the more radical notion that there are other bubbles of reality subject to different physical laws or cosmic constants. Some will believe in the co-reality of alternative causality branches engendered by quantum indeterminacy. Much ingenuity will be expended in efforts somehow to communicate with other realms of reality: For example, super-intelligences will simulate such systems; communication with intelligences within such simulations (simulated as similarly simulating communication with us) will be regarded by some but not all as communication with such realms.

Belief in alternative causality branches will influence religious thought. Some will hold that the alternative causality branch in which an individual finds himself or herself reflects the moral quality of his or her past choices, and thus the individual is rewarded or punished. It will be argued that, viewed retrospectively, events always seem to have been determined by the blind operation of physical law, and so, although the universe is just, the mechanism of cosmic justice is concealed.

The future will itself become a basis for a family of religions. A main tenet of these religions will be that adherents will attain physical immortality through future technology operated by triumphant future adherents of the sect, who will reward their dead spiritual ancestors by restoring them to life in the material paradise the triumphant sect will create.

In other sects, salvation will be anticipated, not by means of some remote future revival, but soon, when the sect's (often superhuman) descendants will reach back in time to reward its early adherents. Such religions will resemble cargo cults in their expectation of benefits to come from contact with our prosperous children's children.

Artificial Intelligence Will Be Worshipped; Idol-Worship Will Again Be Popular

In some future religions or sects, computers or artificial intelligences will be worshipped. Idol worship will become popular again, as humans find in artificial intelligences idols that have eyes that see, ears that hear, mouths that talk, etc. Such idols will be convincingly wise and beneficent. Adding to the mystique of robots will be their thoroughly immaculate incarnation, free from whatever taints might be thought to derive from a sexual origin. It also will be argued that they are free from the taints of physicality, since the identity of an artificial intelligence depends on its software and not the particular hardware that happens to embody it.

Humans Will Be Increasingly Predictable

It generally will be recognized that if a system's behavior is more complex (i.e. behaves according to rules with higher information content) than the information capacity of an observer, then the system's behavior must seem random to the observer. Many systems whose behavior humans can only view as random will be predictable, understandable, and even controllable by super-intelligences. For example, a super-intelligence, asked to predict the outcome of a human sports competition, might project a three-dimensional image of the future competition that matches the actual event. My key point here is that super-intelligences will transcend the difficulty humans have predicting humans. Of course, this will not make possible direct transcendence of quantum indeterminacy effects, such as unpredictability of human behavior due to quantum randomness in chemical processes in the nervous system. However, in many situations, the behavior of human individuals and small groups in well-defined settings such as sports competitions will prove predictable to high orders of accuracy, although not with perfect certainty.

In addition, as the number and variety of humans in the universe grow, and as information links among humans carry more and more information (this will occur despite the radiation of human types and societies and the growing alienation between different subgroups), a statistical science or history will develop based on such assumptions as: In a sufficiently large and varied population, any possible human behavior will occur somewhere and, with sufficient intercommunication, will make its effects felt everywhere.

Selfhood and Individuality Will Dissolve

There will be steady progress toward the achievement, by the end of the millennium, of what will be the material equivalent of telepathy or shared consciousness. This will help undermine the central philosophical assumption underlying Western culture today, the notion of distinct, individual personality or selfhood.

The dissolving of separate selfhood will derive largely from progress in information science. Super-languages will be developed, languages that, without hardwired input, will only be learnable by mature intellects that already have a primary language. The super-languages will have many more phonemes than languages that are easy enough to be learned by a baby. A linguist today can discriminate some hundreds of distinct phonemes; a natural language has at most a few tens of phonemes. With many more phonemes, a language will have much greater channel capacity, making possible much more rapid verbal communication, and much more rapid verbal thought. In addition, the super-languages will have strong non-digital, analog components, and thus will facilitate both right-brain and left-brain thinking. Analog components will include sound attributes, such as pitch and stress, as in present natural languages. However, more importantly, gestural languages will be developed that take advantage of the greater channel capacity of our vision as opposed to our audition. Mixed oral and gesture languages will provide even greater channel capacity. Gestures, by using spatial relations, will facilitate representation of relations between different dimensions of variation, for example, size and temperature. With time, the super-languages will evolve toward multidimensional, multi-channel communication systems encompassing processes throughout the body. They will promote a sense of total intermingling of selves.

These developments will synergize with independently evolving technology that will link brains more or less directly, using, for example, molecular machinery (nanotechnology) to transmit signals from one brain to another. Similarly, sensory input from one individual's sense organs will be directly linked to another's sensorium. Comparable message transmission will be possible for motor channels. Such technology will allow the self to seem to move from one body to another. Eventually, as the channel capacity of brain-to-brain links grows, language as we know it today will start to become obsolete.

There will be additional very important synergy with great progress in the next couple of centuries in detailed understanding of the workings of the neurohumoral system. For example, the code for recording memories will be cracked. This will make possible sharing of memories, and this, in turn, will strongly hasten the general dissolving of individual personality and self.

Better understanding of the nervous system will make possible artificial enhancement of the functioning of the human brain. For example, the same technology that will link different brains also will be used to improve connections within any one brain.

Further consequences of these synergized developments in information science and neurology will include reframing of ideas about the existence of an external, objective world, and proliferation of multiple, contradictory world-views within single individual's everyday multiple personality. There will emerge a variety of partial alternatives to death involving dissolving, fragmentation, or redistribution of the self, either mentally or physically. Memories may be stored to achieve quasi-death-survival. Another sort of consequence will be development and use of memory editing techniques.

It will be generally recognized that human identity has more than the two roots, heredity and envirorunent. A random or quantum element in human identity will be recognized, and technology will be developed to measure and express the sources of human conduct that transcend both heredity and envirorunent. Recognition that there are nonhereditary, non-environmental components in human identity will synergize with a Kuhnian revolution in conceptualization of the relation between human consciousness and the universe: human consciousness, will, and values will be linked to cosmic processes in both the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms.

Right Hemisphere Analog Thought Will Be Better Time-Bound

Not only left-cerebral-hemisphere digital thought but also right-hemisphere analog thought will be extensively time-bound. We have, so far, developed only a partial human civilization, based mostly on left-hemisphere thinking. Our idea heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, consists mainly of what can be expressed in words. Using art and music, we have time-bound some nonverbal, analog content, but this has been fragmentary compared to the vast accumulation of digital information. About right-hemisphere concerns, we are still essentially savages; each of us must discover the basics for ourselves, with little help from past generations. In the next millennium, we shall build a more comprehensive human civilization by better time-binding analog thought, using, e.g., right-hemisphere languages, and graphic, sound, and chemical-sense data bases.

Human Behavior, Mental Processes, and Experience Will Be Increasingly Subject to Control

An important characteristic of most future societies will be the availability of highly effective technologies for practically total control and manipulation of humans, using such methods as memory editing, manipulation of erotic drives and of bonding, control of the imprinting mechanism, control of aesthetic experience, control of mood and arousal mechanisms, and control of the sense of identity (so that an individual may come to feel identity not with his or her own person but rather with another individual or some more abstract entity, such as a cause). Some societies will stimulate directly the pleasure and pain centers in the brain, causing ultimate pleasure or pain, including levels of torture not possible except by direct brain stimulation, because external stimuli producing such intense pain would kill or severely damage the victim. Technologies that control humans will be used to control or prevent criminal behavior. They also will make possible convenient and inexpensive control of slaves. For example, it will be cheaper and easier to provide the neural equivalent of a feeling of hunger appeasement than to provide adequate nutrition. Of course, the distinction − if any − between control of criminality and control of slaves will itself be a matter of varying societal or cultural definition.

The same technologies will lead to hardwired education, bypassing sensory input channels. This will greatly amplify the effects of super-languages, because it will become possible for individuals to learn them early in life, even as first languages. Similarly, there will be hardwired psychotherapy. Different societies will make very different distinctions among procedures our own society would call education, brainwashing, psychotherapy, acceptable social suasion (as in ethical advertising), habilitation, or rehabilitation. Such procedures will be very much more efficient and effective than present methods, but will not be without disadvantages. For example, changes in motivation or habit induced by the new technologies will not generally take place gradually. Rather, they will often occur abruptly. They will therefore tend to seem to come from outside the self, and so will contribute to the distancing of the inner, observer self from the outer self that interacts with the social and physical environment.

Another consequence of detailed understanding of the workings of the neurohumoral system will be automation of art. Pleasure, aesthetic experience, and other emotions will be orchestrated by interactive computer programs that will monitor the individual to adjust input for maximum effect. Completely individualized, personalized art experiences will be created that fit a particular person's unique predispositions. The addiction danger will be profound, and some cultures will ban such technologies. Others will use them for control. These developments will, in many cultures, blur the distinction between erotic and aesthetic experience, as they also will, in many cultures, completely decouple erotic experience from what we today consider unperverted contact between humans. Intense pleasure will be generated by projecting into an individual's awareness a real-seeming simulated experience. In some cases, this will be combined with creation of a sub-universe.

Aestheticism Will Triumph; Life and Culture Will Be Seen As Art Forms

It will be argued that the most human of all experiences is the aesthetic experience, because it is triggered when stimuli fit a neural template peculiar to the individual or, more generally, to the species.

As human control of the material universe increases, and as human identity becomes more difficult to define or confine, a new art form will arise that will make one's life itself an art. There will be increased concern with awareness and non-awareness, with this concern expressed in very diverse values and goals. In some cultures, achievement of intense or peak experiences will be greatly valued; in others, individuals will seek to suppress consciousness. Particularly diverse will be attitudes and values about self-awareness. Success and happiness will be disarticulated in many cultures. In some, there will even be an art of suffering in which individuals consciously write for themselves and act out artistically tragic life scripts. Experiences that our culture assumes all normal individuals avoid will be widely sought in some cultures. For example, the death experience will be one to be undergone repeatedly, as will experience of various kinds and degrees of physical illness. High-fever delirium, for example, will have the same role in some cultures that alcohol intoxication has in ours.

Cultures also will be designed as art objects. Individuals will choose to join a culture whose values, life styles, goals, artifacts, etc., will have been designed for aesthetic effect.

Environmentalism Will Focus on Wise Control

As humans proliferate and spread into more and diverse environments, their impact on the universe as an ecological substrate will grow. Some will give up or reject any effort to maintain or stabilize the environment as it would have been or was without human presence. This will become in the next century a bitterly divisive issue. However, with time, most cultures will come to value wise control of the environment, rather than avoidance of impact on it.

Cosmic limits Will Be Transcended

Important cosmic barriers will be broken or tunneled through, such as the light-speed barrier or the causality barrier. Much will be achieved that we today consider forever impossible.

Even before the transcendence of cosmic barriers, there will be a sort of triumph of paradox. Human experience will increasingly extend into realms in which our biologically inherited computational hardwiring will be completely inappropriate. This should not be surprising; for example, the laws of logic reflect how feedback from everyday human experience has selected signal or structure out of the results of random mutation and quantum uncertainty, which themselves produce noise. It will increasingly be recognized that whenever we wander too far from the realm of everyday human experience, e.g., into the very small, the very large, the very cold, the very energetic, or the very distant in time or space, then the laws of physics become uncanny, i.e., inconsistent with everyday experience. Indeed, distance from our everyday, common-sense world will be measured by information-theory-like quantifying of how much the physical laws of a particular realm depart from the common-sense physical laws of everyday experience.

Notions About the Nature of Life Will Become More Complex and Sophisticated

Proposed resolutions of the Fermi paradox − the problem posed by our lack of contact with alien intelligences − will generally be complicated and ambiguous. A typical response to the question, "Are we alone?" will be, &quuot;No, we are not alone. They are all about us, but we hardly notice each other." Another response will be: "What with the proliferation of simulated sub-universes, our universe is much larger than we thought. Other intelligences have created their own sub-universes, into which they have vanished. We have not been contacted because the true size of the universe makes the density of intelligence in it very low".

Our growing sophistication about the complexity and ambiguity of the question, "Is this physical system alive and conscious?" on the one hand will lead us to see some degree of life and consciousness in many systems that today we do not consider even remotely alive or conscious, and on the other hand will lead us to recognize that a system may be alive and conscious, but so alien to our life and consciousness that little or no communication or empathy with it is possible.

Education Will Focus on Understanding and Control of Complex Systems, and on Distinguishing Reality from Simulation

Education will increasingly focus on the acquisition of understanding and control of systems that are difficult to understand or control. Typical objects of intense educational effort will be understanding and control of the human body (with any artificial modifications or enhancements), the universe within the self, and the interface between the self and the external universe. Most of what we today consider mysterious about the human body or mind will be demystified. Even little children will learn how neurohumoral processes and mood or motivation are interconnected, and how to manage them./p>

Some societies will focus major educational efforts on training persons to be able to resist addiction to automated art, electronic-stimulation pleasure, and other by-products of progress in neurohumoral science.

Another focus of education, reflecting progress in the technology of reality simulation, will be training individuals to distinguish experiences in our primary universe from simulated experiences in artificial sub-universes. For example, to distinguish a limited sub-universe from the primary universe, individuals will learn how to test the information-handling limits of an environment.

Comparable methods will be developed and become part ot everyday education whereby individuals will be taught to answer for themselves many questions today considered unanswerable, such as whether one lives in a solipsistic umverse. For example, one approach to answering such a question will be to compare one's information-processing capacity with the information-processing necessary to simulate the external universe.

There Will Be in the Near Future Occasional Chiliastic Crises

The increasing strangeness of the future will lead, in the next few hundred years, to several chiliastic crises. There will be in the nearer portion of the next millennium several more or less convincing messianic leaders who will trigger intense, often revolutionary, social upheaval and conflict. These upheavals will be times when many persons will experience profound transformations of their most fundamental values.

There Will Be Occasional Holocausts, but Human Radiation Will Make Our Extinction Unlikely

More than once in the next few hundred years there will be substantial kill-offs of the human species. Most of these will be because of conflict, e.g., deliberate genocide or use of weapons of mass destruction, but some will derive mainly from technological carelessness, often synergizing with nihilistic disdain for human life. The dispersion of humanity into many different habitats, such as into the interiors of planetoids, some of which by the end of the millennium will be on their way out of the solar system, will minimize the likelihood of total extinction of humanity.

COMMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Catastrophes Will Be Rare

The present is not the start of a catastrophe or holocaust scenario. Although there will be occasional catastrophes and occasional holocausts in the future, most of the future will be weird rather than disastrous. The future will be at least as weird, beautiful, mysterious, prosaic, exquisite, paradoxical, varied, unendurable, multifaceted, profound, uncaring, romantic, tough, dynamic, and uncanny as the present. It will be far more particular than my generic vision, and it will have infinitely greater detail and reality.

Our Predictions Reveal More About Us Than About the Future

We pallid ghosts of the future's past peer with primitive, unfocused eyes at the piercing brightness of tomorrow. What we see is not the future; rather, we gaze at a projection of our hopes and fears, a projection of our inner emptiness and pregnancy.

A remarkable efflorescence of communication links among individuals characterizes the recent past. As humans are interlinked more and more tightly, it seems inevitable that their individual consciousness will at least partly melt into shared awareness. However, it is difficult to believe that only this contemporary technological development will profoundly impact the next millennium. Surely, there will be other profoundly influential developments, unanticipated by the present predictor, that will have comparable weight in the unfolding of the next millennium.

Information Theory and Chaos Theory Strongly Influence Our Predictions; They Are Not Sufficient

The recent discovery of the mathematics of chaos and the earlier linking of information and entropy provide conceptual tools that heavily influence the above predictions. It is difficult to believe that these will be the last important conceptual discoveries to transform our view of the future. Thus, the view of the next millennium presented above is very much limited by our present worid view and our present conceptual tools.

The Chaotic Dependence of the Future on the Present Does Not Preclude Accurate Prediction

I think the main value of my predictions is not that they present a picture of what will come centuries hence. I think that the predictions above help spotlight how chaos theory and information theory influence predictions, and how these tools may be misunderstood and therefore misused by futurists. That the future depends chaotically on the present does not mean that the future is indeterminate. In chaotic dependence, strict determinacy coexists with unpredictability. Exact prediction is impossible when there is chaos, because exact prediction then requires infinitely precise measurement. However, nevertheless, the chaotic future is strictly determined.

There is another, deeper confusion. If we believe in quantum indeterminacy, then any seeming strict dependence of the future on the past would be at best a statistical illusion based on the very imprecision of measurement that, because of chaos, defeats our ability to predict exactly. However, subatomic quantum indeterminacy does not generally preclude high (if not perfect) predictability in the everyday world. Therefore, though I admit that perfectly precise prediction is impossible, I conclude that the future is in principle statistically predictable to levels of accuracy limited primarily by how much energy we expend or effort we make to pay for the negentropy or information in our predictions.

History shows us repeatedly a present that labors to give birth to the future in cycles of alternating agony and relaxation, alternating conflict and resolution. Today, we seem to be at the start of another great anabolic phase in the life of our species, another period when the future is determined less by growth than by pruning away of part of the living present. However, the general tone of pessimism in the Zeitgeist should not lead us to give up hope that we can develop methods that lead to reasonably detailed and accurate predictions.

I have confidence in the general implication of the prediction above that we are about to experience another change in the light that illuminates our world-stage. The sun of reason is dimming. So is the sharp, hard spotlight of individual self-awareness. Of course, we feel a certain trepidation as we stand on the verge of so strange a tomorrow. However, it should be like the trepidation of a birthing mother about to experience her next contraction. We do not yet know what we are about to bring forth, but we can sense, if dimly, that this birth will be our deepest, most fundamental fulfillment.