The end of liberal democracy

At the Intelligence Squared event last night at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS), presenters from Oxford University’s James Martin 21st Century School had lots of interesting eutopic and dystopic views of The World in 2050.

Particularly interesting was Porfessor Julian Savulescu’s comment that comes from a book he’s writing now. 

Civilisations that last, says Savulescu, are either small states or totalitarian ones. So where does that leave the liberal democracy we know and love today, where we’re tolerant to different ways and values?

To deal with the challenges of the 21st century, he says, ‘we may have to give up our commitment to liberal democracy’ – and some of its essential traits.

Three key ones include:

(1) increased surveillance; 

(2) give up our privacy;

(3) we may have to look at influencing people’s moral dispositions, their behaviour through education; government will shift from holding a liberal, neutral position towards values, to giving people certain, specific values.

Given that we already have 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK and our behaviour, from the amount of rubbish we throw out to how much electricity we use is increasingly being monitored, I’d agree and say we’re heading that way.

After the talk, I asked Savulescu if this all sounded like a shift towards using the sort of influence Sunstein and Thaler propose in their book Nudge, and a shift from a liberal democracy to a paternalistic libertarian one. He agreed that it was.

The end of liberal democracy then? The beginning of the end, certainly. And don’t worry, it is a good thing.

A mad, ostentatious future

Remember what people thought the world would look like now, in 1959? If they’d been right, we’d be flying cars and living on the moon. Predicting the gadgets we’ll be drooling over 50 years from now is just as tricky.

But it’s what my editor at T3 asked me to do, so…

The big hairy problem is that while progress usually shuffles along predictably – a bigger screen here, better battery life there – really big steps forward come from disruptive innovations. They’re the ones that creep up and catch clever people out.

Talking about computers in 1943, IBM’s chairman said: “There is a world market for maybe five.”

That was before some bright spark made them smaller than a house and able to run games.

Bill Gates’s response to the internet in 1993? “Not interested.”

It isn’t just clever people who get caught out though. Who in the 1980s thought mobile phones were anything but a tool for braying Yuppies?

A 1980s Yuppie with mobile phone

That email wasn’t just a geek’s way of getting in touch in the early 90s?

“If you’re looking for tomorrow’s big ‘un,” says Jonathan Margolis, the FT How to Spend It techspert. “It’s probably the stuff that sounds unremarkable, ostentatious or mad right now.” 

Here’s one mad idea: no more gadgets.

“If by gadget you mean discrete, single-purpose high-technological devices, they’ll be gone,” says Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction.

In his book Everyware, Greenfield describes a future, not far from now, when computing power will be so powerful and cheap it’ll be installed everywhere. There are two important results of this. One, your fridge will outsmart you and, two, there’ll be a ubiquitous network.

Then, gadgets will be commoditised tools that tap into that network. We won’t care about the best gadget anymore – it’ll all be about the latest killer app.

By 2059, there’ll be other things missing too, like wires. They’ll only exist in the Museum of the Computer (which will also keep keyboards, PCs and joysticks – remember those?).

Wireless will mean electricity then too. Using Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL), scientists at Intel can already power a 60-watt light bulb– that’s more power than most laptops use today.

Instead of touch screens, we’ll communicate with the network through 3D motion sensors –

similar to the way Scientology Tom does in Minority Report.

By 2059, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might have taken over. They’re already in the formative stage. Take Emotiv Systems’ EPOC headset. Currently in Beta, it can identify 30 different brainwave patterns to tell a game what the player wants to do.

Tapping this idea, Margolis thinks we’ll be using Life Recorders in the 2050s. They’ll record everything we see, hear and do. Pay for the 2059 upgrade and they’ll record your dreams and auto-upload them to 3Dreamtube.

That’ll be competing with 2059’s other piece of must-have tech: Intel’s ShapeShifter, which the company is already working on. Still in its early stages, it’ll be made up of microscopic robots called “catoms” which collectively change their arrangement to become something else.

By 2059, your catomised mobile device will instantly morph into a coffee cup, a paper-thin OLED screen, a birthday card, a Darth Vader mask… whatever you want it to be. If that doesn’t sound mad and ostentatious, I don’t know what does.

The future of TV: like Martini

 

1950s General Electric TV Set

What’s Martini got to do with telly? Patience… The role of TV in Britain was defined by the BBC’s first director general, Lord Reith: to educate, inform, entertain. More than 80 years later and in an increasingly fractured media world, the telly is still doing that and still number one.

 

“TV viewing has actually increased in recent years,’ Ofcom’s director of research James Thickett told me. “It’s about 27 hours per week – up by about 30 minutes in the last 5 years.”

In the future though, won’t the digital generations, brought up with Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, Blogger, Twitter, Wiis and PSPs, be too active and creative to sit goggle-eyed in front of the TV, whether it’s HD, 3D, holographic or an immersive entertainment cave? In the future, will they switch off the TV set and go and do something less boring instead?

Well, no, because stories are as old than the hills, an essential part of what it is to be human, so passive, sit-back-and-watch TV-style story entertainment is resolutely here to stay.

And, well, yes too, because what’s going to change is how and where we watch TV. In the future, watching TV will become less the family-sit-round-the-telly experience, it’ll be more personalised and time-shifted, that is, instead of watching at scheduled primetime, we’ll watch anytime that suits us. It’ll be like ordering a Martini in the 1970s.

The digital/Twitter/Bebo generation is already doing that. Instead of rushing home to watch Grange Hill like we did, they’re watching Beyond the Rave webisodes or Lost: Missing Pieces style mobisodes on their laptops and mobiles. And as we increasingly watch TV on devices originally conceived as interactive, shows will incorporate ever more interactive enhancements into the original. Strategic advisor to Channel Four, Steve Moore is already working on “bringing social networking to the TV experience”. BAFTA-nominted director Basi Akpabio suggests TV shows will have more external enhancements in the future, “like The Apprentice predictor”. The next step major step will be the convergence of the PC and TV.

“With Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), TV will go from a linear to a non-linear medium, like how news went from linear in newspapers to non-linear on the web,” the BBC’s chief advisor to the deputy director general, Richard Addy, told me. “Imagine how it’ll be when you can access any piece of video ever made from any device you like. The questions then become: what do you want to watch, where do you want to watch it – and how do you find the stuff you like?”

GoogleTV anyone? It may be a hoax till now but don’t bet against the concept. After all, aren’t today’s Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) a bit limiting? Wouldn’t it be great to have Google-style search when you want to find something to watch? There’s a design challenge here: computer search works with a keyboard, a TV with a remote. One solution launching in the US next year is from a company called Rovi: a unified media guide that will allow users to search and even offer and see social recommendations of broadcast TV and channels like YouTube XL, a version of the website but with videos optimized for watching on a big screen.

The internet, mobile and whatever’s coming next will not kill the TV star, they’ll enable and enhance it. Wherever people watch – on the beach, skating or even at home , TV will continue to do what it’s supposed to do: educate, inform, entertain. Lord Reith would be happy.

I-ntimacy today

 

10 levels of intimacy from Ji-Lee in NYC

I came across this through Dan Chapman’s blog. Created by NY-based Ji-Lee I think it’s brilliant in its simplicity, and shows how relationships and intimacy have changed in our connected world. I don’t think it goes far enough though. What about when someone posts something on Google Maps or Mapr? Or geo-tags a picture in Flickr? Or shares a photo album on Flickr? Or sends a text message to many people? And blogging/micro-blogging? When I write for magazines & newspapers, even if though I know who the audience are, it feels much less personal than writing here, or Tweeting.

I know what you’re thinking: why make something simple so much more complex when the idea was just to make a point? Because in our connected world, there’s an increasingly complex set and subset and subsubset of communications and levels of intimacy. I’d love to see and use a diagram that showed how those fit together.