In the future, after we’ve started integrating computers into our brains to enhance them, we’ll develop a concept of aug and naug (augmented, non-augmented), pronounced and likely spelled: og and nog.

The terms will apply to the measure of human mental achievement, specifically to specify whether a particular mental feat or accomplishment was attained with or without the help of computers.

Jason: Hey, I scored a 2043 on my MART exam today…
Daniel: Nice, but that was aug, right?
Jason: Yeah, no shit. If I did over a 2000 naug I’d be a God.

These terms are likely to be adopted for a few reasons:

1. They clearly describe the concepts of natural vs. supplemental
2. They’re both only one syllable
3. The “n” sound in front of “naug” or “nog” is fairly easy to differentiate from “aug/og” when spoken

A worthy way to spend a few minutes.

[ 19.20.21 ]

First off I’ll just say that I’m really bad at this. I seem to fail to take into account the most important variables while latching on to the most inconsequential. That being said I’m going to have a go anyway. I’m seeing a number of trends that I want to try and hash out.

Be aware: this is me thinking out loud. An academic paper this is not.

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• A massive move toward social division along class lines. And yes, this divide has always existed; I’m saying it’s about to get a whole lot more pronounced. This is coming not so much from the rich getting richer, but more from larger and larger groups of people becoming poorer. The key there is that this already large group is reproducing at a very fast pace. This is going to introduce extreme pressure on our already faltering system.
• I see crime in 5-10 years becoming extremely rampant and increasingly violent, with the only counter being an overt militarization of our police forces. I envision a major upsurge in large-scale riots — many of which will be race/class related. I see a culture of revolt rising up in the lower classes, essentially, with this being exacerbated by the fact that much of the middle class is going to be pealing down into the lower class.
• One manifestation of this will be large areas of our country that are simply not safe to be in. This is already the case now to some extent, but I see this becoming dramatically magnified. I see entire halves of cities being partitioned off as hostile — complete with increased security at the boundaries, etc. This of course will add to feelings of isolation and preference. The perception (and reality) will be that the paramilitary police forces will be protecting the rich people from the poor people. And since this will largely be divided down race lines in addition to class lines, that will lead to additional unrest.
• I essentially see dramatic social separation in our future — to the point of the constant threat of riot-level violence. The rich people will isolate themselves off in certain communities and gain the rights to protect themselves with handguns. There will be many more shootings — many justified, many not — all adding to the perception that the rich are able to kill the poor and get away with it.
• Further out we’ll start to see new drugs enter the markets. Drugs that will magnify the differences between the classes even more. Some drugs will be used mostly by the lower classes and will keep them there, i.e. gentle drugs that give a feeling of well-being and still allow you to function. Other drugs will enhance mental abilities such as memory and intelligence. These will largely be too expensive for the lower classes and as a result only the upper class will have them.
• These things will all be accompanied by increased disparities between the groups receiving education. Even fewer of the lower income levels will go to school, and even more of the upper level will. And the ability to gather information will be GREATLY enhanced for the privileged. Not only due to improved technology but because of the cognitive supplements as well. In short, the ignorant will become more ignorant while the smart become smarter.
• What this ultimately leads to is revolution. It leads to civil war. It leads to the massive numbers of the weak revolting against the strong — only to be massacred by the army/police that are wielded by the rich.

So what’s the solution? The solution is one that we don’t have the ability to implement. We, as a society are too encumbered by liberal-minded weakness. We lack the strength to make uncomfortable decisions that will benefit our society as whole.

The solution is to maintain standards for the citizens of our republic. The solution is to temporarily stop bringing more people into this country. To raise everyone who’s on the bottom up to the middle. To say to them that they are American and that we expect much from them. To synchronize our country on a single vision. We need to re-inject the concept of personal responsibility into our discourse. We need to shun those who act like children when they are adults.

We need to stop encouraging children to have children. We need to chastise those who would complain on one hand about not having enough in life, and then go to the club and make a baby. These people need to be humiliated. Don’t pass laws. Don’t punish them legally. Make them feel shame for the disservice they are doing to this country. We must put a stop to it.

Kids raising kids leads to poor parenting. Poor parenting leads to poor education because the teachers fear the parents’ ability to sue. This erodes the entire educational system. It essentially means that our entire country is being filled full of absolute morons. Morons who are easy to manipulate and stir into a frenzy.

A country full of morons who are easy to manipulate means that our political system is useless. Our system is based on informed, intelligent, responsible citizens who think for themselves. Without this democracy is a sad joke. Without an educated and independent voting base politicians will become unable to make REAL decisions that hinge on complexity. They’ll be forced to placate the masses via deception and trickery. Oh wait, that’s already happening.

Essentially the country is becoming a giant shit hole. We’ve relaxed our standards. We don’t demand excellence. We don’t have an identity. And if someone doesn’t figure this out very soon our precious America is going to devolve into a class-divided police state full of illiterate masses managed by a hyper-elite upper class with an eye for extermination.

Sad times are upon us.:

A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars. Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C. Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.

[ Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world ]

(artlung.com)

Google is within a year or two of launching their network. Imagine an open, high-speed wireless network that allows you to largely bypass your current communications provider.

Ok, now that picture in your mind, now imagine the iPhone and other network-friendly devices making calls over VOIP as a default, and only using a carrier like AT&T or Verizon as a fallback (kind of like a dial-up modem when your broadband goes out).

If you think this is fantasy then you haven’t been paying attention. Research it. It’s happening. The telcos are about to be usurped. Everything’s going to ride the Gnet. VOIP is the new cellular.

I was just taking a shower and had a frightening idea. With all this talk of the National ID program, and the inclusion of biometric identification into the system, I started thinking about other trends in technology that could impact it.

So the main danger, critics argue, of the National ID system is that as it becomes prolific it will get used for more and more purposes. I think this will include private industry before too long. We already send copies of drivers licenses to do credit checks, for example.

Well imagine what will happen when we understand genetics better — all the way to the point where one could have a test done and a computer could map out the person’s tendencies and weaknesses. We’ve all heard about the fat gene, a propensity for violence, being vulnerable to alcoholism, depression, etc.

Well what if that data were to be stored in people’s files? What if it were to be converted into an individual risk matrix (IRM). So on your card (and in the database) would be everything about you up until that point. Obvious things like age, race, height, weight, etc. But also things like country of origin, who your parents were. What affiliations they had (think semantic web), etc.

Now imagine this information being at the disposal of local law enforcement. They stop the Arab kid down the road and run a “query” on him. Hmm…missing school a lot. He’s been going to the local Mosque quite a bit. Oh, and he’s genetically prone to religious devotion by a margin of 2.6 deviations. And he’s walking out of a hardware store with a bunch of mechanical-looking stuff.

Or how about your insurance agency doing a “query” on you. Credit score, genetic risk factors for suicide, depression, heart disease, current health records, etc. And all this information gets run through an algorithm that decides whether you get a policy and how much you’ll be charged.

Or a local redneck at a bar late at night when the cops show up. Ok, he’s at a bar. His father died in a drunk driving accident, he’s divorced, and he has no ride home. Genetics indicate he’s likely to fight if we attempt to arrest him. Call for backup.

The scary thing is that all of these things could be used for good. Some other ideas that open up once the genetic material is easy to attain and replicate:

college admission, dating sites, ordering brides…

Thoughts?

The first thing it makes me realize is that we won’t be around for long. Why? Because the ease in which a single person can harm the entire world is going up exponentially. I’m going to name this value, actually (if it doesn’t have one already).

That factor, combined with increasing inequality will yield not just individuals, but entire groups bent on destroying the world. And when you can polymorph a human pathogen that can kill millions with the same ease as creating photo album on your computer, uh…we have a problem.

Doom and gloom. We need something more positive than this. How about this. How about you guys tell me what forces will counter these rogue elements and their ability to inflict massive harm at will.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately. A couple days ago I started fantisizing about what nanotechnology could mean to the medical field, and ultimately to the lives of humans. I’m sure the majority of this stuff is assembled from dozens of tidbits I’ve read over the years on the topic, but I’ll indulge anyway.

Basics

The main idea for nanotechnology and medicine is a microscopic “robot” that can carry instructions given to it by its controller. In this case it would be the doctor/technician doing the treatment. The concept is that rather than being primitive and pumping a body full of general drugs that also target something undesirable in the body (while simultaneously tearing up countless other bits), a nanobot would see things at the celular level.

This perspective, combined with superior instructions and the ability to manipulate its environment, would allow such an entity to simply remove, deconstruct, and essentially assassinate known pathogens.

Imagine for a second that there is a bomb in a 50 story office building, and the bomb is capable of blowing up like half of the city. Well, current medicine, for the most part, releases a “death ooze” into the entire city that connects to everything. The upside is that when this ooze binds to bombs it’s able to disable them to a large degree, after which time if the bomb goes off it only takes out a room or two rather than the whole building.

The bad news is that the death ooze released to defuse the bomb also binds to other things. Cars, children, and everything else. Unfortunately, most of these things don’t react to well to the ooze. Some get violently ill; some die. Even when it’s not this extreme, it kills all the plants in the city, and it makes the whole place stink for 6 months.

The biggest problem with this technique is that little is actually known about the ooze. Essentially, somone figured out one day that the ooze works against bombs. And since it doesn’t seem to kill people immediately, it can probably be sold for large sums of money to those with a bomb problem.

The ooze I speak of is the pharmaceutical industry’s response to everything — drugs. It’s the crap that get pushed into one’s body in hope of the result being slightly better than the side effects.

A Better Way

Nanotechnology offers an alternative. Instead of releasing a myriad of mostly unknown toxins into the body in hopes of killing something worse than the toxins, why not just go and find the problem?

This is what nanotechnolgy promises — the ability to identify and counter any known pathogen.

Seek and Destroy

So imagine something like HIV. What if we could inject someone with an army of nanobots designed to do nothing but destroy HIV? They would course through the like a driver moving through traffic. So, using the car analogy, let us say that the nanobot knows that any car with 4 antennas on its roof is an HIV virus, and that it’s ability to harm other cells is due to its having a wench on the front bumper.

Well, at that point it simply finds all cars/virii with 4 antennae on them, and then it violently strips them of their wenches. Voila! Now the virus can do no damage. This happens on a mass scale through the whole body, until a certain predefined point is reached. Then the master-bot reports back to the doctor that x number of virii have been killed, and that the infection is under control.

Repair

So that’s how the basics work — you can go in and manipulate things on the sub-cellular level. This presents some very interesting possibilities in terms of fixing existing problems. Let’s say that in 10 years we know what causes aging, or what causes cancer. And using the car analogy, it turns out it’s cars that have a certain kind of tint on the windows in addition to having too little air in the front right tire.

Well at that point we could send in a special team of bots to start fixing cars. Take the tint off the windows. Put some air in those tires. Or, if there’s a problem, just destroy any car that you see with those issues.

I can see someone going into the doctors office in the future and watching with the physician as the number of cancer cells in their body is reduced from 2 million to 2,000 in a matter of hours. They watch this happen on a screen — a screen showing vitals and receiving reports from the controller-bot within the patients body.

Active Defense

That’s all cool and everything, but the most exciting thing for me (maybe because I’m in information security) is the notion of maintaining an active defense using these nanobots.

We’ve all heard of antivirus, right? Like on a computer? Well, imagine this. When you are born you get your “nimunization” (nano-immunization). It’s a set of bots that monitor for what we receive vaccines for now. Polio, Anthrax, Mumps, whatever. They sit in the infants body and wait for their enemies to show up. When they do, they attack with impunity.

I envision a doctor having alerts coming to his personal computing device on his hip — reports on all his patients as updated via the bot controllers. So when an outbreak of measles happens in his area, and like 400 of his kids suddenly get faced with the virus, the bots within his patients will attack the intruder and then report (via their own personal computers that interface with the bots via short-range wireless) to their doctor the status of their body.

So the doctor’s sitting there eating lunch and his device alerts him that this morning 46 of his kids were exposed to measles (which their bots then killed). So at that point he knows there’s an outbreak. The interesting part comes when the bots’ analysis engine also reports that the virus was not as easily killed as before, and that based on current projections the next variation will be resistant to the bots’ attack. :)

Misuse, Terrorism, and Warfare

The most frightening implications of this technology are that it would be utterly trivial, if in control of this technology, to harm and/or kill people in a very granular fashion. It’s not so much the speed of killing — many poisons can do that already — it’s the fact that one could decide who to kill, and could program the killing-bots to make the decision on very specific attributes.

Someone could, for example, decide to kill everyone with blue eyes, or with black hair. Or perhaps everyone with a gene that’s linked to a disease or disability later in life (if the creator was trying to grow a “healthy and strong” future. Or in the case of war, how about designing bots to kill a specific race (and then giving the counter/antivenom to those of that race loyal them). This would probably be very hard to do given the splash damage, but it’s only psychopaths that’d be considering it in the first place.

Random Ideas

So anyway, here are a few random thoughts along these same lines. I’d love to hear more if you have them, and/or other tangents in the same vein:

• Heuristic Bots Due to the quickly-mutating nature of the threats of the day, bots are then coded with a separate mechanism for identifying attackers that they are not specifically coded for and then “learning” to defend against them without being specifically programmed to do so.
• Realtime Updates Imagine new organisms being uploaded instantly to a massive, centralized computer that determines whether or not it’s hostile or benign, and then writes new counter-attack strategies if it turns out to be hostile.
• The Class Gap What if the cost was prohibitive for all but the wealthy? What if simple illness became a non-issue for those who had money, while it could wipe out huge swaths of the poor?
• Technology Genocide “If you can’t afford bots, you don’t deserve to live.” This mentality could lead to a generated pathogen being made to attack the poor. Probably not the best idea, though, since the rich make money only if the poor exist. Good sci-fi, though.
• Realtime Mass Health Monitoring What if we could, over the course of 5 years, monitor the national health effects of a new diet fad? So, in 2046 bots had to do x amount of heart repair in the United States, but after the release of so and so book, it dropped to y amount. As such, this diet made the country z more healthy.

Hmm…

Anyway, let me know what you guys think.: