How will Augmented Reality change us?

Ferocious arguments rage between those who think the Internet and augmented reality powers will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of evolving creativity, vs. gloomy critics who see a kind of devolution taking hold, as millions are sucked into spirals of distraction, shallowness and homogeneity. The pessimists fear we are gradually surrendering what little claim we had to the term “civilization.”

Call it cyber-transcendentalists versus techno-grouches. But is this argument anything new? Certainly science fiction has tended to side with the grouches! Cyberpunk romances portrayed lavish, tech-enhanced realms in which citizens were clueless and the e-wonders were mostly tools for undercurrent battles between oppressive elites and demigod guerrilla hackers. 

Vernor Vinge broke with cynicism in his rather hopeful depiction of augmented reality, in RAINBOWS END. In my own EARTH (1989) kids and citizens wore Tru-Vu Goggles” that empowered them with overlays of useful information. Later, in EXISTENCE (2012), AR gets some updates and surprising uses.

But let’s step back in time. There is nothing unique about today’s quandary. Ever since the arrival of glass lenses and movable type, the amount that each person can see and know has multiplied, with new tools ranging from newspapers and lithographs to steamships and telegraphs, to radio and so on. And every time, conservative nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt, that such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, or perhaps renounced.

Meanwhile, enthusiasts zealously greeted every memory and vision prosthetic — from the printing press to lending libraries to television — with hosannas, forecasting an apotheosis of reason and light. 

Specifically, augmented reality overlays will be tools for instantly validating or questioning the input of our natural senses. Potential environmental hazards will flare at us as we walk. Your “peripheral vision” will include alerts sent to you by a gel lens, floating on a stalk over your head, giving you those proverbial “eyes in back.” Or images from that micro-drone you send ahead of you, down a street or alley.

And you will be tempted into addictions. Just as today’s youths must overcome the allure of endless hours of lavish video games, finely tuned to prevent anyone leaving to pick up a book or go outside…

In reality, the vision and memory prosthetics - ever since glass lenses and movable type - brought on consequences that were always far more complicated than either pessimists or optimists expected. Out of all this ruction, just one thing made it possible for us to advance, ensuring that the net effects would be positive. That one thing was the pragmatically generous mind set of the Enlightenment. 

Yes, for sure, some millions, perhaps billions, will become couch or Net potatoes. Unimaginative, fad-following and imitative. But there is a simple answer.

So what? Those people will matter as little tomorrow as couch potatoes who stayed glued to television mattered yesterday.

Meanwhile, however, a large minority — the “creative minority” that Toynbee called essential for any civilization’s success — will continue to feel repelled by homogeneity and sameness. They will wander away from the opinion echo chambers and the Nuremberg rallies of self-righteously reinforced rage. They’ll seek out the unusual and surprising. Centrifugally driven by a need to be different, they’ll nurture hobbies that turn into avocations that transform into niches of profound expertise.

Already we are in an era when no worthwhile skill is ever lost, if it can draw the eye of some small corps of amateurs. Today there are more expert flint-knappers than at any single point in the Paleolithic. More sword makers than during the Middle Ages. Vastly more surface area of hobbyist telescopes than instruments owned by all governments and universities, put together. Following the DIY banner of Make magazine, networks of neighbors have - among countless projects - started setting up chemical sensors that will weave into hyper-environmental webs.

Imagine how this explosion of hobbies and skills will accelerate when your AR glasses will offer you live tutorials, guiding your hands so that every step comes quickly and clearly? From home repair to lens-grinding all the way to “I know kung fu!” -- won’t this be the start of Neo’s downloaded abilities from the Matrix? Only in a good way?

Addictions? Or a tsunami of skill? It will (as always) be up to us.

(This appeared on Quora, as an answer to: What will be the most important social change that augmented reality will bring?)

== Bio tech insights ==

Using genes (instead of voltages), synthetic biologists design genetic circuits (arrangements of DNA components) that can perform new functions, like AND or OR logic gates, taking an analog input (say the amount of a particular chemical present) and make a binary decision. Note that all this can happen inside a living cell.  In other words Intracellular Computing, which many of us have suspected for decades. If Nature herself uses this approach, it means that there may be hundreds or thousands of “calculations” inside cells for every synapse flash we see on the outside.  Implications for (actually against) AI are huge.

Curious... having three genetic parents appears to make mice age better. 

Each cell in our body contains around 2 meters of DNA. But since our cells are so tiny, DNA strands have to be tightly wrapped into bundles called nucleosomes in order to fit. Now some physicists suggest that the way these lengths are folded also contains information which helps to control which genes get expressed, and when.

New research suggests why the human brain and other biological networks exhibit a hierarchical structure, and the study may improve attempts to create artificial intelligence.  The research findings suggest that hierarchy evolves not because it produces more efficient networks, but instead because hierarchically wired networks have fewer connections. That’s because connections in biological networks are expensive.  

DIY electrodes to the brain? Neuroscientists warn against unsupervised direct brain stimulation.

Sentient animals, machines... and even plants!

Oh, sure, politics is important and fun!  But science is even better.  So for our weekend posting... a rundown of cool things we never knew, till now!

== Intelligence: Smarter animals == 

Why the octopus is so smart: fascinating new research indicates that their DNA sequence is expanded in areas otherwise reserved for vertebrates: "It's the first sequenced genome from something like an alien," joked neurobiologist Clifton Ragsdale of the University of Chicago, in a report in Nature.

And now we have super-smart mice: When researchers altered a gene in mice to inhibit the activity of a particular enzyme, these mice showed enhanced cognitive abilities. They tended to learn faster, remember events longer and solve complex exercises better than ordinary mice. See this explored in Science or Science Fiction: Uplifting Animals in Yale Scientific.

Will the mice rise up? See the theme song for.... Pinky and the Brain! 

Meanwhile, evidence of social learning: New Caledonian crows have been observed to pass tool use from one generation to the next.

In the recently released book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Carl Safina reports on the intricate social interactions, family bonds and distinct personalities observed in mammals such as elephants, orcas, primates, dogs and wolves. Safina delves into the latest scientific research that reveals layers of complex thought and behavior throughout the animal kingdom

Why we're smarter than chickens: A single molecular event in a protein called PTBP1 in our cells could hold the key to how we evolved to become the smartest animal on the planet, University of Toronto researchers have discovered. 

Researchers find new insights into the impressive brain power of dolphins and whales... and how their intelligence evolved. And the variety of dialects (clicks called codes) among pods of the deep-diving sperm whales may indicate signs of cultural transmission of vocalization patterns.

It's long been believed that giraffes were silent creatures; it turns out that they hum to each other -- a low frequency drone, done only at night.

Now it's chimps against drones -- a smack down with a stick. There are increasing signs that drones are harassing wildlife and disrupting their natural patterns. Recently, the National Park Service banned the use of drones in California's Yosemite National Park.

And...sex would be simpler if we were bonobos!

In Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things, M. R. O'Connnor takes an in-depth look at the increasing numbers of animal species threatened with extinction, and the methods scientists use to try to save them, including habitat restoration, captive breeding and genetic management. O'Connor also considers the ethics and problems we face as genetics enables us to resurrect or bring back already extinct species. Will they live in zoos... or newly recreated ecosystems? What would they eat... and what would eat them?

Will humans continue to get smarter as well? See this video discussion of the dilemma of potential human enhancement.  

== Smarter machines ==

A rodent brain chip? A fascinating article describes IBM’s new “True North” chip architecture, which propels the “neuromorphic” revolution in computing, mimicking many of the pattern-recognition capabilities that seem to work so smoothly in the cellular brains of animals… like us.  

What about sentient machines? Oh but will Artificial Intelligence stay loyal?  That’s the quandary getting discussed ever-more, outside of science fiction nowadays. But here’s an interesting offshoot from that question. Will AI entities be subject to addictions?  This interesting article features experts claiming that would be “illogical.” But what are Asimov’s so-called “three laws” if not a kind of ingrained addiction process?  My brief bit in this piece answers.  “They had better be!”

Augmented Reality rolls along. For example, in EXISTENCE I portray a future time when advertisements and meta data about your surroundings will display in banners or postits or symbols, overlain on “reality.”  Now a virtual signage company Skignz can let you place a virtual pin on objects -- pop one above your car, for instance, and it will help you find it when you're in the supermarket car park. Or you can drop a roving pin on a friend at a festival to keep track of him via GPS. Or festival operators can offer signs above the concessions and toilets… or adverts, or rock videos and close-ups of the band, onstage. (See the chapter at the futurist conference, in Existence!)

Following up: in most sci fi depictions, this era will see a tsunami of noise and unavoidable adverts booming out at you, as in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.” That modality is “push” and I don’t think folks will put up with it.  In Existence… and earlier in Earth (1989) I portray this being a matter of “pull.”  You will select among a myriad realms or levels of AR space, picking one whose offerings and services and rules suit your current needs.

== Intelligent plants? ==

In Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandra Viola, make a case not only for plant sentience, but also plant rights. Interesting, though science fiction authors have been doing thought experiments about this for a long time, e.g. in Ursula LeGuin’s novel “The Word for World is Forest” and in my own “The Uplift War.” Jack Chalker's "Midnight at the Well of Souls" portrayed sentient plants, as did Lord of the Rings.

There is a level where I am all aboard with this.  Ecosystems are webs of health that combine fiercely interdependent predation/competition with meshlike interchanges of sight/sound/chemicals that clearly manifest types of cooperation, even communication.... as I elucidated in “EARTH.”  

On the other hand, I also step back to see the qualities of this book that transcend its actual contents, for it fits perfectly into the process of “horizon expansion” that I describe elsewhere.  A process of vigorously, righteously, even aggressively increasing the scope of inclusion, extending the circle of protection to the next level, and then the next. See also this Smithsonian talk I gave about the never-ending search for “otherness.”

None of this is to undermine the process! Only to help understand it. I fully expect our great grandchildren will all be vegetarians supplementing with tasty, dish-grown meaticultures… and their own rebels will demand that all food come from algae or Star Trek replicators, terrific!  Just pause and step back often enough to see the big picture.

== Biotech updates ==

Tree of Life

Biologists have drafted the first comprehensive tree of life covering 2.3 million species of named animals, plants, fungi and microbes, available for download and browsing.

A new study adds to evidence that viruses are living entities which share a long evolutionary history with cells, and might even be the oldest living creatures.

Might amputees regrow limbs, using their own stem cells laced through a scaffold… made either by 3D printing or using a denatured monkey-arm? It’s an idea explored in my short story “Chysalis” (before I get much, much weirder). But it is also being taken very seriously in labs across the planet. 

In fact, BioBots now offers a relatively inexpensive 3D printer that can print human tissue and skin...and potentially, replacement human organs. However, there are currently regulatory obstacles.

Pathogens travel between species

A disturbing -- and revealing -- look at how pathogens travel between species. A new paper in Scientific Data indicates that as many as three-fifths of human diseases may have been initially passed on by animals.

Everywhere you go... you emit your own unique microbial cloud -- a personalized signature of your own microbiome. Have  you had your microbiome tested? You can have it sequenced at μBiome, to gain insight into the multitude of microflora co-inhabiting your body.

MIT researchers have developed a low-cost, paper-based device that changes color, depending on whether the patient has Ebola, dengue, or yellow fever. The test is designed to facilitate diagnosis in remote, low-resource settings, takes minutes, and does not need electricity to read out results. “Color-changing paper devices that work like over-the-counter pregnancy tests offer a possible solution. “These are not meant to replace PCR and ELISA [lab tests], because we can’t match their accuracy,” Hamad-Schifferli says. “This is a complementary technique for places with no running water or electricity.” 

See this way-cool “spaghetti monster”creature at the borderline between coral-like colonies of cells and jellyfish and more complex styles of life.  A reflection on how more complex metazoans got started? Weird-looking, anyway.  

Augmented Reality in the Year 2040

 In honor of AWE  -- the Augmented World Expo at the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center – where I will speak Wednesday morning – I’ve decided to post this excerpt-chapter from my novel Existence.  It is set at a transhumanist convention in the year 2040. And the point-of-view character is using a LOT of augmented reality (AR) gear as she strolls the aisles, sampling hot new tech trends.  Not the most action-packed scene in the book… but still, I think you geeks, especially, will be amused.  Added Note: You can view my talk to AWE here. 

=====

        

As Tor Povlov entered the vast conference hall, she realized, right away, that she had entered Awz.

        A real-cloth banner, just inside the entrance, proclaimed --

        TOMORROW WELCOMES THE BOLD!

        To which, a tagger had attached, in lurid vrafitti, visible to anyone wearing specs --

        And Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!

        Beyond, for aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations and selforg clubs touted “transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augmented by garish VR. Even more than while s-trolling back in Sandego, Tor found her specs bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow repair kits. 

         From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.

        From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.

        Yes, robots. The quaint term was back again, as memory of the Yokohama Yankheand slowly faded, along with a promise that this generation of humanoid automatons would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too-cute, or dangerous. Or all three at once.

        “Every year, they solve some problem or obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,” she subvocalized for her report, letting the specs absorb it all, watching as one aindroid from a Korean chaebol showed off eastasian dance moves and a winning smile. The demonstration was impressive. But demonstrations always were.

        “Then, they always wind up bollixed by some simple task. An uneven flight of stairs. A muddled foreground or background. A semantic paradox. Something that wouldn’t bother a five-year old kid. And every year, the lesson is the same.

        “We are already marvels. A three kilo human brain still combines more amazing things than any computer model can yet emulate.

        “It’s been seventy years that ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps growing. AI can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds. Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took for granted.”  

         There it was, again. A theme, planted in her mind by Sato. The notion that something strangely spectacular had been wrought -- by God or evolution or both -- inside the Homo sapiens brain. About the same time as that chert core in her bag was the technological acme.

        “If anything, today’s Tower of Babel is flat but incredibly wide. This generation of godmakers isn’t thwarted by language -- that barrier is gone forever -- but the bewildering complexity of the thing they hope to copy. Our minds.”

        Of course, some of the products and services here had more modest goals. One body-sculpting booth offered the latest fat-dissolving technology, using targeted microwaves to melt lipids exactly where-u-want. Their slogan -- from Nietzsche -- Tor found ironic on about five different levels.

         “The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a deity.”

        She wondered what Sato would make of that. Well, one more humility-reminder bites the dust. When everyone can look good in spandex, will conceit know any bounds?

        Not everyone could wait patiently for all this progress.  Elderly believers in the Singularity grew worried, as it always seemed to glimmer twenty years away, the same horizon promised in the 1980s. And so, Tor passed by the usual booths offering cryonic suspension contracts. For a fee, teams would rush to your deathbed, whether due to accident or age. The moment after a doctor signed-off you were “dead,” skilled teams would swarm over your body -- or (for a lower price) just your detached head -- pumping special fluids to chill in liquid nitrogen, in relished confidence that some future generation would thaw and repair you. Decades ago, cryonics companies eked along with support from a few rich eccentrics. But the safe revival of Guillermo Borriceli changed all that, pushing the number of contracts past thirty million.  One of the offshore “seastead” tax-havens even allowed cryonic suspension before legal death, leading to a steady, one way stream of immigrants who were wealthy, infirm, and -- in Tor’s opinion -- certifiably crazy. 

        They never explain why future generations would choose to revive refugees from a more primitive time. Money alone won’t cut it. 

           Was that why many of today’s rich were converting to fervent environmentalism? Donating big sums toward eco-projects? To bribe their descendants and be recalled as karmic good-guys?  Or was it an expanded sense of self-interest? If you expect to live on a future Earth, that could make you less willing to treat today’s planet like disposable tissue.

        Meanwhile, some offered services aimed at the other end of life. Like new kinds of infant formula guaranteed to enhance early brain development. Or suture-spreaders to enlarge a fetus’s skull capacity, letting its brain expand in the womb – with a coupon for free caesarian section. The brochure showed a happy child with the smile of a Gerber Baby and the domed head of some movie alien… bearing a glint of unstoppable intelligence in big, blue eyes.

        Fifty-Genes Inc. offered a service that was legal at just three seastead colonies. Enhancing the few dozen patches of DNA thought to have been crucial in separating the hominid line from the other apes. Continuing along the evolutionary trail. All three of the people manning that booth wore dazzle makeup, hiding their identities from facial recog programs, making them painful to look at. As if the feds didn’t have ten thousand other ways to track a person.

           Farther along, she encountered yet another humanoid automaton, under a virt-blare that proclaimed Certified: Turing Level Three-Point-Three! in flashing letters. Proportioned like a body builder, it bowed to her, offering Tor a seat, some zatz-coffee and a game of chess -- or any pastime of her choosing. There was a flirtatious glint in the machine’s smile, either cleverly designed... or else...

        She was tempted to plunge a pin into that glossy flesh, to see if this one yelped. The old man-in-a-robot-suit trick.

        A subvocalized side note, for later: No cutsie animal or child-like bots, this year? All hunk-style males, so far. Why? A trend aimed at fem demographics?

        She couldn’t help but wonder. Men across the planet had been using robo-brothels for more than a decade, with hundreds of thousands of Luci, Nunci, Pari, Fruti and Hilti models purchased for home use. It didn’t exactly require artificial intelligence to mimic crude, servile passion, if that’s what some males wanted. Of course, the trend was bemoaned in the press. Women mostly stayed aloof, contemptuous of the unsubtle artificial lovers they were offered.

    

    Till now? While the hunk-bot flirted with her, Tor recalling Wesley’s onetime proposition -- to maintain a cross-continental relationship via dolls. Would it be more palatable to be touched by a machine, if it the thoughts propelling it came from someone she cared for? He was coming to DC in a few days, flying east to meet her final zeppelin, at this journey’s end. Did that mean he was giving such nonsense? Ready to talk, at last, about “getting real?” Or would he have a fist full of brochures to show her the latest enhancements? A modern way they both could have cake, and eat it too?

        Oh crap. The subvocal was on high-sensitivity. Her musings about sexbots and Wesley had gone straight into notes. She blink-navigated, deleted, and disciplined her mind to stay on-task. Spinning away from the enticingly handsome android, multi-tasking like a juggler, Tor kept reciting her draft report without breaking stride.

        “Oh, few doubt they’ll succeed eventually. With so many versions of AI cresting at once, it seems likely that we’ll finally enter that century-old sci fi scenario. Machines that help design their successors, and so on, able to converse with us, provide fresh perspectives, challenge us… then surge ahead.

        “At that point we’ll discover who was right, the zealots or the worriers. Can you blame some folks for getting nervous?”

        Of course, Tor’s aiwear had been tracking her word stream, highlighting for gisted meaning. And, because her filters were kept low on purpose, the Convention Center mainframe listened in, automatically making goorelations. Helpfully, the building offered, in her low-right peripheral, a list of conference panels and events to match her interests.

        My Neighbors Prefer Death: Easing the Public’s Fear of Immortality

        Yes. Out of five hundred program items, that one had good relevance to her “skepticism” phrase. The next one was also a good fit.    

    Risk Appraisal: Dangers on the Road to Transhumanity.

        But it got even better. Tor blinked in surprise at the next offering.

        Special invited-guest lecture by famed novelist Hamish Brookeman! “Reasons to doubt ‘progress’ -- and reasons to believe.”

        Tor stopped in her tracks. Hamish Brookeman? Here, of all places? The author of Tusk! and Cult of Science, coming to beard these extropians in their own den? Who had the courage -- or outright chutzpah -- to invite him?

        With a tooth click and scroll-command, Tor checked the conference schedule... and found the Brookeman talk was already underway!

        Oh my. This was going to be demanding. But she felt up to the challenge.

        Swiveling, she called up a guide ribbon -- a glowing path that snaked toward the lecture hall. Which, according to a flash-alert, was already full to capacity. So Tor sent a blip to MediaCorp, asking for a press intervention. It took a couple of minutes (after all, she was a newbie), during which Tor hurried past a publisher of biofeedback mind-training games and a booth selling ersatz holidays on realistic alien worlds.     

  

Smell Colors! Taste the Rainbow! See Music in the Air! -- hollered a booth offering synesthesia training. Next to another kiosk that proclaimed a kinky aim – to genetically engineer “furries,” cute-but-fuzzy humanoids. Tor shivered and hurried on.

        Abruptly, the guide ribbon shifted, aiming her instead down a different aisle, away from the back of the lecture hall, where standing room crowds waited. Now, it directed her toward the front entrance, closest to the stage. Wow, that was fast.

        I am so gonna love this job, she thought, not caring if that made it into the transcript. MediaCorp already knew. This was what she had been born to do.

        Along the way, Tor passed between stalls offering latest generation otto-dogs, lurker-peeps, and designer hallucinogens... the latter one was covered with vir-stickies on about a hundred levels, sneering “ignore these guys!” and “it’s a narc sting!”

        (As if anyone needed to actually buy drugs, anymore, instead of homebrewing them on a MolecuMac. Or using a meditation program to make them inside your own brain.  A dazer with a twin-lobectomy could hack the lame safeguards.)

        One booth offered a dietary supplement that seemed intriguing, but she didn’t slow down, merely click-noting it for further information, later:

        No More Lemons! blared the virt-banner. Bypassing Humanity's Broken Vitamin C Gene With New Gut Bacteria!

        
But, for the most part, Tor had little attention to spare for exhibits. Kicking her M-Tasking into overdrive, she called up a smart-condensed tivoscript of the Brookeman speech, from its start twelve minutes ago, delivered to her left ear in clipped, threex mode -- triple speed and gisted -- while preserving the speaker’s dry tone and trademark Appalachian drawl.

        “Thanks invitation speak you ‘godmakers.’ Surprised/pleased. Shows UR openminded.

        “Some misconstrue I’m anti-science. Anti-progress. But progress great! Legit sci -tech lift billions! Yes, I warn dangers, mistakes. Century’s seen many. Some mistakes not science fault.

        “Take the old Left-Right political axis. Stupid. From 18th Century France!  lumped aristos with fundies, libertarians, isolationists, imperialists, puritans, all on ‘right.’ Huh? ‘Left’ had intolerant tolerance fetishists! Socialist luddites! And all sides vs professionals. No wonder civil servant’s guild rebelled!

        “Result? Wasted decades. Climate/water crisis. Terror. Overreaction. National fracture. Paranoia. Blamecasting.

        “Shall we pour gasoline on fire?

        “Look. Studies show FEAR sets attitudes/tolerance 4 change. Fearful people reject foreign, alien, strange. Circle wagons. Pull in horizons. Horizons of time. Of tolerance. Of risk. Of Dreams.

        “You tech-hungry zealots answer this with contempt. Helpful?

        “New ‘axis’ isn’t left vs right.

        It’s out vs in!

        “You look outward. Ahead. You deride inward-driven folk.

        “But look history! All other civs were fearful-inward! R U so sure YOU are wise ones?”

        The front entrance to the lecture hall lay ahead, just beyond a final booth where several cleancut envoys in blue blazers passed out leaflets to educated and underemployed U.S. citizens, inviting them to apply for visas -- to the science-friendly EU. The brain-drainers’ placement was deliberate. They’d get plenty of customers, when Brookeman finished.

        Feeling a little eye-flick strain and attention fatigue, Tor clicked for a small jolt of adderall, along with a dash of provigil, injected straight into her temple by the leftside frame of her specs. Just a bit, to keep her edge.

        “Look at topics listed in this conference,” continued the ai-compressed voice of Hamish Brookeman, addressing the audience in the hall next door. “So much eager tinkering! And each forward plunge makes your fellow citizens more nervous.”

        The condensed tivoscript was slowing down and expanding, as it caught up with real time.

        “Ponder an irony. Your premise is that average folk can be trusted with complex/dangerous future. You say people = smart! People adapt. Can handle coming transformation into gods! How libertarian of you.

        “Yet, you sneer at the majority of human societies, who disagreed! Romans, persians, inca, han and others... who said fragile humanity can’t take much change.

        “And who shares this older opinion? A majority of your own countrymen!

        “So, which is it? Are people wise enough to handle accelerating change? But if they are wise... and want to slow down... then what does that imply?

        “It implies this. If you’re right about people, then the majority is right... and you’re wrong!

        “And if you’re wrong about the people... then how can you be right!”

        Even through the wall and closed doors, Tor heard laughter from the audience -- tense and reluctant. But she already knew Brookeman was good at working a crowd. Anyway, most of this bunch had grown up with his books, movies and virts. Celebrity status still counted for a lot.

        “All I ask is ... ponder with open minds. We’ve made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice. But others by men and women filled with fine motives! People like you.”

        An aindroid stood by the door, smiling in recognition as Tor approached. This one featured a hole, penetrating straight though its chest, large enough to prove that the entity was no human in disguise. An impressive highlight. Till the automaton gave her a full-length, appreciative eye-flick “checkout” that stopped just short of a lustful leer. Exactly like some oversexed, undertacted nerd.

        Great, Tor thought, with a corner of her mind MT’d for such things Another realism goal accomplished. One more giant leap for geek-kind.

        The robot opened the door, just enough for Tor to slip through without disturbing speaker or audience. Her specs went into IR mode and a pale green ribbon guided her, without stumbling, the final few meters to a VIP seat that someone had just vacated, on her account. She could tell, because the upholstery was still warm. A wide imprint, and her spec-sensors gave a soft diagnosis of fumes from a recent meal, heavy in starches. If it need be, she could track down her benefactor, from those cues alone, and thank him.

        But no, here was Hamish Brookeman, in the flesh at last, tall and angular, elegant and expensively-coifed. In every way the un-nerd. Leaning casually against the lectern and pouring charm, even as he chastised. The tivoscript faded smoothly, as realtime took over.

        “Look, I’m not going to ask you to restrain yourselves for the sake of holiness and all that. Let others tell you that you’re trodding on the Creator’s toes, by carping and questioning His designs; that’s not my concern.

        “What troubles me is whether there will be a humanity, in twenty years, to continue pondering these things! Seriously, what’s your damned hurry? Must we rock every apple cart, while charging in all directions, simultaneously?”

        Brookeman glanced back down and ruffled some sheets of paper, though Tor’s zoom-appraisal showed that he wasn’t looking at them. Those blue irises held steady, far-focused and confident. Clearly, he already knew what he was about to say. In public speaking, as in music, a pause was sometimes just the right punctuation, before striking a solid phrase.

        “Take the most arrogant of your obsessions,” Brookeman resumed. “This quest for lifespan extension! You give it many names. Zero senescence. Non-morbidity. All of it boiling down to the same selfish hope, for personal immortality.”

        This goaded a reaction from the crowd -- hisses and muttered curses. Tor commanded her specs to deploy a slender stalk wafting upward with a tiny, omnidirectional lens at the end, surveying members of the audience, joining dozens of other gel-eyes floating, like dandelions, up to a meter above the sea of heads.

        “Did I strike a nerve with that one?” Hamish Brookeman chuckled. “Well, just wait. I’m getting warmed up!”

        Clearly, he enjoyed the role of iconoclast... in a hall filled with self-styled iconoclasts. A kindred spirit, then? Even while disagreeing with his hosts over every specific issue? That kind of ironic insight could make her report stand out.

        “For example, it’s easy to tell which of you, in the audience, believes in the magic elixir called caloric restriction. Sure, research studies show that a severely reduced, but wholesome diet can trigger longer lifespans in bacteria, in fruit flies, even mice. And yes, keeping lean and fit is good for you. It helps get your basic four-score and ten. But some of the fellows you see around here, walking about like near-skeletons, popping hunger-suppression pills and avoiding sex.... do these guys look healthy? Are they enjoying their extra years? Indeed, are they getting any? Extra years, I mean.

        “Alas, sorry to break this to you fellows, but the experiment was run! Across the last four millennia, there must have been thousands of monasteries, in hundreds of cultures, where ascetic monks lived on spare dietary regimens. Surely, some of them would have stumbled onto anything so simple and straightforward as low-calorie immortality! We’d have noticed two-hundred year old monks, capering around the countryside, don’tcha think?”

        This time, laughter was spontaneous. Still-nervous, but genuine. Through the stalk-cam, she saw even some of the bone-thin ones, taking the ribbing well. Brookeman really was good at this.

        “Anyway, remember that age and death are the great recyclers! In a world that’s both overpopulated and unbalanced in favor of the old, do you really think the next wave of young folks is going to want to follow in your shadows... forever?

        “Putting things philosophically for a minute, aren’t you simply offering false hope, and thereby denying today’s elderly the great solace that every other ageing generation clutched, when their turn came to shuffle off this mortal coil? The consolation that at least this happens to everyone?

     “During all past eras, this pure and universal fact -- that death makes no exceptions -- allowed a natural acceptance and letting-go. Painful and sad, but at least one thing about life seemed fair. Rich and poor, lucky or unlucky, all wound up in the same place, at roughly the same pace. At risk of quoting a fellow you transhumanists love to hate, Leon Kass claimed that our lives only become meaningful when we are aware of our mortality.

        “Only now, by loudly insisting that death isn’t necessary, aren’t you turning this normal rhythm into a bitter pill? Especially when the promise (all-too likely) turns into ashes, and people wind up having to swallow it anyway, despite all your fine promises?”

        Brookeman shook his head.

        “But let’s be generous and say you meet with some partial success. Suppose only the rich can afford the gift of extended life. Isn’t that what happens to most great new things? Don’t they get monopolized, at first, by the mighty? You godmakers say you want an egalitarian miracle, a new age for all. But aren’t you far more likely to create a new race of Olympians? Not only privileged and elite, but permanent and immortal?”

        Now the hall was hushed. And Tor wondered. Had Brookeman gone too far?

        “Face it,” the tall man told three thousand and twelve listeners present in the hall... plus nine hundred and sixteen thousand, four hundred and eight who were tuned in, around the planet. “You techno-transcendentalists are no different from all the millennial preachers and prophets who came before you. The same goggle-eyed, frenetic passion. The same personality type, yearning for something vastly better than the hand that you were dealt. And the same drive to believe! To believe that something else, much finer, is available to those who recite the right incantation. To those who achieve the right faith, or virtue. Or who concoct the secret formula.

        “Only, those earlier prophets were much smarter than you lot! Because the redemption they forecast was usually ambiguous, set in another vague time and place, or safely removed to another plane. And if their promises failed? The priest or shaman could always blame it all on unbelievers. Or on followers who were insufficiently righteous. Or who got the formula wrong. Or on God.

        “But you folks? Who will you duck behind, when disillusion sets in? Your faith in Homo technologicus -- the Tinkering Man -- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

        “When your grand and confident promises fail, or go wrong, who will all the disappointed people have to blame?

        “No one... but you.”

Want more?  Check out the amazing video preview-trailer for Existence, with incredible art by Patrick Farley!