4

Technology

When it comes to the future, there are so many things to fear (global warming, inequality, plastic, China and the man who runs America who I still won’t name), and obviously these items weren’t enough to quench our insatiable hunger for things that scare the pants off of us, so now, Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to … (drum roll) THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY!!

I’m talking about our fear of what’s in store for us, like that pretty soon robots are going to suck out our data, splat it on to a USB stick and shove it into a tin can version of ourselves. One of the reasons robots may become more popular than us is because they don’t complain, they work 24/7, don’t let emotions get in their way, don’t die and never get pregnant. They can recognize patterns and calculate possibilities far better than us, without emotions getting in the way. We make mistakes because we rely on a brain that’s partially left over from the Stone Age. Fear, frustration or anger trigger those primitive reactions and all rational thinking hits the dust.

By the way, this anxiety about change isn’t a new thing. Throughout history, every time we created a new tool, people thought it was the end of the world. Starting with Socrates, whining on, saying that writing would kill our capacity to remember anything and distance us from the truth. He wasn’t that smart, contrary to popular belief, he just had a good agent (Plato wrote his lines).

When books came along, people thought we wouldn’t be able to speak any more. When we developed the bicycle, train, car, plane, we all worried that it would be the end of walking. Some people thought the radio, TV and phone marked the end of face-to-face contact.

The History of Our Upgrades

My belief is that it was inevitable we would create this technology because our survival depended on us developing the know-how to make the tools we needed.

Throughout our history we’ve always evolved (genetically, biologically, neurologically, emotionally, psychologically and physically) to keep up with an ever-changing and over-challenging environment. Upgrading is in our DNA.

Millions of years ago, predators grew too big for us to strangle with our hands, so our brains developed an area that gave us the capability to defend ourselves. I don’t know which came first, brain growth or tool-making skills or if they were weirdly synchronized. We needed to get meat and, let’s not kid ourselves, punching something fifty times bigger than us with pointy teeth didn’t really cut it, so almost overnight we began to whittle spears. Because lions got fangs, bulls got horns, we got nothin’ to defend ourselves with. At some point we couldn’t digest raw meat and it was too tough to swallow so, with absolutely no instruction manual, we made fire.

The next big human upgrade happened when it became apparent that our communication methods, which were primarily grunts, couldn’t be understood by neighbouring tribes. Nit-picking wasn’t enough to show you cared so we invented language and from then on we never shut up. You couldn’t hear yourself think there was so much yabbering. At the same time, regions in our brain developed which allowed sounds to become words and words sentences. With language we could gossip (it was possible with hand signals but too public) and for a while everything was dandy, but because we had now migrated every which way across the globe, we couldn’t keep up with the latest scandals. So voilà: the written word. Not easy because at the start, writing was in tablet form and who knew how to chisel? Not many. And who could lift that thing? Even Moses put his back out trying. Luckily, someone invented papyrus in Egypt which spread like wildfire, no name because he forgot to sign his first work. By the way, a bit later someone else thought of using a feather for a pen and from then on no turkey was safe. It really caught on; Shakespeare, Milton and Jackie Collins all managed to create the greatest literature the world has ever known with a mere plume and no ‘delete’ button. Have you seen the Bible? Who the hell managed all those words without one mistake? But as you all know, this great literature wasn’t spreading fast enough, because how many times could you expect Shakespeare to copy the same play over and over again to make it on to the bestseller list, without his hand getting paralysed? So … enter the printing press. As luck would have it, in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg invented printing by movable type.

My point is we are first suspicious of new gadgets and then we love them.

My Story

I remember how happy I was when mobiles first appeared; hands free at last, free at last. You could talk anywhere, any time. We no longer had to run like slaves to pick up the phone anchored to a kitchen wall or perched on a side table. And best of all, mobiles have liberated us from needing to use payphones (telephone boxes to you). In the days I first got here to the UK (on the Mayflower’s return journey) they were on every street corner; red, coffin-sized and cracked windowed with phones that never worked. You had to shove a steady flow of coins into the slots like you were playing Vegas on a losing streak. I guess it didn’t matter that you never connected to anyone because the phone booths were mainly used for people to pee and vomit in on Saturday night. Now they’re in museums like great works of art. They were hellholes!

The Bad News

I know I said this book will try to show the good news in the future but I don’t want to appear naive, so I’m going to give you some bad news because someone else will tell you and it might as well be me. In the future, I don’t know exactly when – I’m not a psychic like everyone else seems to be – but in the next few decades it’s estimated that nearly 47 per cent of jobs, the equivalent of about 37.7 million people, may become redundant because of a robotic workforce. Start drinking the titanium.

But don’t worry … this isn’t the first time our livelihoods have been threatened. Just so you’re not shaking in your boots at this point, let me mention that on the eve of the 1900s over 40 per cent of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Now it is less than 2 per cent.

Jobs That will be Replaced by Robots

Accountants They have a 95 per cent chance of losing their jobs to automation in the future. I never loved accountants anyway – they charge too much and never give you good news.

Drivers Fleets of autonomous vehicles will replace human taxi drivers, truck drivers and other transportation jobs. Don’t get cocky, you’ll be made redundant too by driverless cars.

Chefs Chef Watson is a robot who can generate new recipes from scratch, and Miso Robotics’ burger-making Flippy can prepare meals and serve them up much quicker than humans. Then a table delivery drone can serve it to the customer. (Bye-bye, waitresses.)

Financial analysts Computers can spot patterns and make trades faster than humans. These guys predict 30 per cent of the banking sector jobs will be lost to AI within the next decade. Does that make me sad? No, I’d rather be ripped off by a machine than a banker.

Manual labour An automated bricklayer can lay up to 1,200 bricks a day, compared to the 300–500 a human can.

Farmers Cows can now mosey up to a robot when they want to be milked rather than you having to herd them and then piss them off. The robot is, hopefully, gentle on the udders.

Receptionists and phone operators A robot can just as easily say, ‘I’ll put you on hold.’ Or ‘Have a nice day.’

Pilots US Military are using autonomous drones that conduct surveillance and attacks without the assistance of humans. Do you feel safer now?

Safe Jobs That Can’t Be Replaced

Recreational therapists

Mental health and substance abuse social workers

Occupational therapists

Healthcare social workers

Masseurs

If I were you, I’d start studying to be a therapist now because clearly we’re going to need lots of them. I’m sure the reaction to redundancy is full-tilt horror. I’m not saying it isn’t, we need to survive, but running scared won’t solve the problem. Our fear of mass unemployment isn’t new either – in 1930 the economist Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 most people’s jobs would be replaced by technology and all we would have to do would be to find wonderful and fulfilling things to do with our leisure time. Flower-pressing, rock-collecting, mushroom-picking, etc. But what he didn’t predict was our insatiable addiction to wanting more stuff and the fact that in the last fifty years people’s jobs have become their identity. ‘How ya doin’?’ has been replaced by ‘What do you do?’ Most people don’t really seem to care how you are but they do want to know how much money you make. Babies and elderly people are probably the only ones not asked, ‘And what do you do?’ Though when my daughter, Marina, was five and told me she had a boyfriend, I asked, ‘What does he do for a living?’ See? I’m part of the problem. I’m so ashamed.

More About Robots

Anyway, back to robots … We are now entering the Second Machine Age. (The first one was when Scottish inventor James Watt came up with the steam engine. In those days we were using tech to save our muscles; now we use it to replace brain work.) New generations of robots are taking over. Ray Kurzweil (more on him shortly) says that by 2029 computers will be as intelligent as people. By 2045 they may be a billion times smarter than all human brains put together. You can kick and scream all you want about this technological revolution, but it was inevitable just like that spear that had to be whittled. And what’s more extraordinary is that along with these inventions, we’ve evolved specific parts of our brains simultaneously that not only help us make the appropriate tools but also learn how to use them. Just think, our kids are already genetically modified with faster reaction times to keep up with high-speed computers. Their motor cortex is thicker in the area of the brain that’s associated with the fingers, which is why they are so adept. Let me explain on the sciencey level because it’s my happy place. There’s a region in your brain (somatosensory cortex) with a map of all your body parts on it. The bigger the area in the brain, the more proficient you are when using the corresponding part of your body. Dancers have more real estate on the feet area. Porno stars have bigger terrain representing their genitalia (you probably can tell how well someone is hung just by checking on a brain scanner). Violinists, Chinese children who sew zippers into your shorts and kids who play a lot of video games all have a huge plot of property in Finger-ville. My generation will never have the dexterity of a four-year-old but don’t worry because we’ll have our revenge; our kids will be panicking like we did when their children come home with chip implants.

So our fear of technology is nothing new. When I was growing up, people reported sightings of flying saucers, and they thought aliens were going to hoover them into the mothership and make them slaves. (They still believe this in certain parts of Tennessee.) What we actually worry about is that robots are going to turn evil and annihilate our species and there is talk of people ‘getting uploaded’, which is the conversion of the human mind into software. I’ve read about something coming our way in the future called the ‘Omega Point’. (I’ll have to quote because you’ll think I’m making it up.) ‘It is a projection whereby intelligent life takes over all matter in the universe, leading to a cosmological singularity which will allow future societies to resurrect the dead.’ Leaf through a book called, The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. (Yes, it’s Ray again but now he’s on acid.) The book is so thick and complex that unless you’re a robot you won’t understand a word. You have to hack through a jungle of quantum physics, incomprehensible equations and mathematical scribble. At the heart of a billion words, I think he’s trying to say that in the year 2024 at 4.00 a.m. or thereabouts, our consciousness will be sent to the Cloud and we will all become cyborgs. Human Body Version 3.0. Post-singularity there will be no distinction between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. Ray knows all this because he is Google’s chief futurist and so he must be telling the truth.

A new group of people are calling themselves transhumanists, who define themselves as, ‘A liberation movement, advocating nothing less than a total emancipation from biology itself.’ The final frontier between the convergence of technology and flesh.

About a decade and a half ago, we worshiped those Ubergeeks of Silicon Valley, those titans of technology. Now we paint them with the same brush as we do Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler and our own loonie in the White House: The Trumpster.

Let’s remember, tech wasn’t forced on us. We lined up around the block for the latest iPhone, we feasted on more and more bytes until they became gigabytes which then became zillionabytes and maybe now a jillion, jillion bytes, squared. What’s so typical of human nature is that we’ve turned on the very people who invented these digital miracles. Now, when we’re not using our fingers to push keys, we’re using them to point at Silicon Valley, blaming them for destroying our minds and, even more, our children’s minds. May I make a small point here? If I’m not mistaken, we still have the power to literally pull the plug or just simply switch our machine or phone to ‘off’. The choice is still ours.

Where It Might Have Gone Wrong

Despite the bad press they get, I know that Facebook, Google and Amazon started off as meaning well; to give us connection with everyone, anywhere, and download us instantaneous information about everything that exists. With a simple click on the ‘buy what’s in the basket now’ icon, you can have it all; almost anything on earth delivered straight into your mouth or really any orifice of your choice. The net originally gave us peer-to-peer connections and free expression and turned us back into a collective, just like the old days when we sat around the fire, sharing gossip. I read that Zuckerberg created Facebook to link all his fellow students at Harvard so they could exchange ideas and gossip. Just as our ancient ancestors created language when they needed to dish the dirt, this guy built something that could send gossip to a billion people at once. To be exact, in 2019 he had 2.4 billion users worldwide, adding 500,000 new users every day. Six new profiles every second, that’s a lot of gossip.

I’ll bet Instagram’s Mike Krieger just wanted to share photos of nice vistas to make his friends feel happy. He didn’t think someday Instagram would be used by some asshole posing on a yacht framed by babes’ backsides. Even the guys who started Snapchat probably just wanted to send out photos of their genitals and, knowing that the image would disappear after thirty seconds, didn’t mean any harm. They all just wanted to spread a little goodness in the world, a little joy.

In 2009 Justin Rosenstein and Leah Pearlman were part of a small team at Facebook that designed the ‘like’ button, a little blue-and-white thumbs-up designed to give you a hit of confidence with a pinch of positivity. They had no idea that someday people would judge their own worth on whether a thumb went up or down nor that if they received too many thumbs-down it would seriously damage their health. (There should be a warning sign next to the down thumbs, like the ones they show on the cigarette packets of bleeding gums and people’s tarred organs.) I read in an article that Leah now makes Buddhist comics and says she regrets having ever unleashed that thumb on the world.

I’m sure the creators of tech didn’t imagine that the same net that connected us would now be isolating us from each other. But once these innocent little apps and icons took over the world, the creators sold out and turned their inventions into big business. I guess if you’re twenty and are sitting in your garage watching your bank balance go from zilch to millions, it is enough to make you crazy. Very few people ever say, ‘I have enough money, let’s stop here.’ Who knows when Zuckerberg got greedy. I guess it began when he thought he needed a bigger sofa and some new cushions; once he realized he could manipulate the user and also sell private information to advertisers, he knew he’d hit gold.

The Evil of Ads

Enter the advertisers and data hackers. As soon as you have advertising, manipulation steps into the picture to convince you (the sucker) to buy something you don’t need. When an advertiser tells us, ‘Oh come on, everyone wants sneakers that cost £700,’ I say to them, ‘You are the devil.’

Ad men (see Mad Men) in the 1950s just about got away with ads on television because you were aware of them and had a choice: to stay and watch or leave the room to raid the fridge. Now advertisers know how to sell you things no matter what room you’re in.

What began as an innocent ad has now morphed into continuous behaviour modification on a mass level. In my humble opinion, people online are under surveillance through their devices receiving calculated zaps of influence that gradually change who they are. If this is true, we’re as good as lab rats who, as we all know, will even learn to pole dance if they get electrically zapped enough. We aren’t aware of any of this, but even if the on-screen pop-up suggestions are innocent now (telling us what clothes to buy, based on our personal data), maybe in the future they will influence our decisions on who we marry, what religion to follow and who to vote for. Taking away our need to make decisions removes our meaning and free will. Can you imagine, Hamlet says, ‘To be or not to be?’ and his computer squawks out the answer (based on what colour jerkin he’s wearing and if he’s seen a ghost or not).

Tickling Our Addiction Buttons

Our phones and computers make us junkies, offering us a fix that never fixes and leaving us in a state of craving; we can never quite scratch this insatiable itch and on our brains there’s a tattoo that reads, ‘It’s never enough.’

Obviously certain drugs are habit forming, but today’s addictions to texting, sexting and instagramming, etc., though these things are not addictive in themselves, still stimulate the dopamine you manufacture in your brain to make you want to shoot up Twitter or snort Snapchat.

And you don’t need physical rewards, even an image can get you hooked as the advertisers cleverly understand. A smartphone game like Candy Crush uses shiny images of candy instead of real candy to get you craving; video games, like gambling machines, use images of coins or treasure chests and any sign of a positive emoji to reinforce your hunger. We look for solace in a square or rectangular piece of metal for a few measly hits of happiness. That’s why some people check their phone 1,467 times a day.

Social status and feedback from others online has therefore become a primal need; we’ve become slaves to a smiley face. I’m not being smug, I’m as befuddled as you are as to where to draw the line. I badly need the laptop which I’m typing on at this very moment to write this book. How else would I do that? With a plume and a pigeon to deliver it to your door? Forget it. I can’t write without this computer, but what makes me insane is that while I’m typing this very word, every cell in my body wants to check my in-box. The computer isn’t forcing me or flashing, ‘Check the emails,’ it’s habit and my fear of being forgotten, and the more I find in my in-box, the more loved I feel, even if it’s spam.

Back to Zuckerberg and his need for a bigger sofa … Besides selling your private thoughts, he brought in mathematicians and engineers to create algorithms. The definition, for those of you like me who have no idea what an algorithm is: ‘a set of mathematical instructions or rules that, given to a computer, will calculate an answer to a problem.’ These algorithms can create a portfolio of who you are by detecting patterns for figuring out your heart’s desires and then you can be monetized by ‘growth hackers’, who in the end will know you better than your best bestie. Then ‘data hackers’ harvest that information, put it in farms (don’t imagine cow stalls, imagine thousands of computers humming day and night) and sell it to opinion makers (see Cambridge Analytica) who pay a high price for your personal information. They can then modify which images to flash on to your screen, based on your desires, to make you vote how they want you to or to reach for your credit card.

This business model guarantees that persuasion will always be the default goal of every design. Every pixel on every screen has been tuned to influence users’ actions and create addictions. And here’s the rub: when we’re caught in online addiction, it lowers our quality of life, lowers our IQ and lowers our ability to focus. As I said, we little humans can’t win against these weapons of mass distraction. I don’t want to add to your fear, but I must. I read in a PC mag that on average in the UK people spend nearly 6 hours per day on media and 3.9 of that is on smartphones, checking them every 12 minutes. That means we spend a quarter of our waking lives on a mobile device. (I don’t know how they gather this data. Does someone run from house to house with a stopwatch?) There’s a word for our addiction: ‘nomophobia’ – fear of being without a phone.

It is your choice if you want to sell a kidney or some other vital organ, but your attention is being stolen without your permission. Attention will be the bitcoin of the blockchain of our currency in the future. Netflix too is an expert on making us addicts. I’m up all night, helplessly hitting the ‘next episode’ icon, and when a series ends, I have actual cold turkey withdrawal; Netflix is in our bloodstream now. When you socialize no one talks about anything except what series they’re hooked on. It’s like drug addicts exchanging tips on best methods for shooting up.

A Fantasy

Here’s a crazy idea for the future or, heck, even right now. Let’s imagine that Zuckerberg (pretend he has enough sofas) suddenly says:

‘Okay, Facebook is not going to be a listed business any more. We said we wanted to create this thing to connect people, but we’re actually making the world worse, so we’re not gonna allow people to advertise or allow any third party to have any influence on you. We’re gonna turn it into a non-profit; we’re gonna give it to each country; it’ll be nationalized.’

We can all dream.

So Finally Some Green Shoots: When Tech is Good, It’s Very, Very Good

On the plus side, technology is what’s saving lives and making education, knowledge, communication and connection accessible to everyone on earth. I have watched TEDTalks and scoured reports on new inventions (so you don’t have to) and here’s what’s coming down the line to make you feel better about the tech future.

In Medicine

In the near future, tattoos on your skin will transmit your biological condition directly to your doctor who can shoot you back medication wirelessly without you even being awake. It seems sci-fi at the moment but the technology to do this is already in development. I can only imagine what this will look like. Imagine being in serious trouble and an ambulance is remotely alerted to collect you or, in my worst-case scenario, a hearse shows up at your door. But seriously, scientists will be able to tweak your genes and deliver the right medication straight to you. Grains of sand-sized capsules will be able to roam your insides through the bloodstream, hunting for foreign objects that don’t belong there, and then shoot them down like an internal video game.

They can already analyse DNA in cancer cells and, using special algorithms, a computer can amalgamate your data and mix you a personalized bespoke medication, the drone can deliver it to your door (and maybe wax your legs or shoot you some Botox while it’s there). When you’re not using your 3D printer to make household appliances and car parts, you can make yourself a bespoke kidney, just in case, so you’ve got a spare.

The blind will soon be able to throw away the stick and dog (sorry, dogs, you’re out of a job too), and have a bionic eye made from a 3D printer in an hour. Eye lenses packed with biosensors will be engineered to pick up early detection of diabetes by measuring blood sugar in tears. If you happen to have a missing limb, they will make you a new improved one that guarantees you a place in the Paralympics. While you’re sleeping, electrodes in your pillowcase and sheets will collect information by monitoring brainwaves. Toothbrushes will be able to give you instant results by interpreting your saliva. Smart refrigerators will monitor food and record nutritional information. A smart bra will be able to detect breast cancer. A selfie from a smartphone app will be able to diagnose pancreatic cancer by analysing the whites of your eyes. Microsurgery is already being done by robotic arms that are more accurate than any human capability and they don’t shake. If you can imagine it, they’ve invented it.

And on the brain front: the use of implanted electrodes to deliver electric pulses known as deep brain stimulation, which is already having positive results with Parkinson’s, OCD and other mental illnesses such as depression. (Whoever has access to one of those electrodes: I’ll pay, please, I’m begging.) Also, smartphones will be able to detect depression or other mental illnesses and notify your doctor.

To me, this next one is a jaw-dropper of medical invention: Manu Prakash, physicist and inventor, makes microscopes out of paper. Most people in the world don’t have access to a lab with microscopes to test samples for diseases. Thanks to Manu, you get a piece of cardboard, embedded with every component in a microscope, and fold it, like making a paper doll (the instructions are colour coded so you don’t even need to read). This disposable origami-looking thing can identify tiny life forms that cause infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, and now the latest on the block, coronavirus.

If this is all on the horizon, I say bring in the robots, AI and apps.

Sustainable Innovations for Consumers and for the Planet

Daniel Goleman, author of Ecological Intelligence, talks about apps in the near future which will display data, as a simple readout, to give us the hidden impacts of what we buy, sell or make on the health of the environment. The name and age of the person who sewed the zipper into your pants, how many pollutants are actually in your new dog-hair blower or whether the chicken you’re eating was a criminal. When we know all this, then and only then will the power shift from those who sell to those who buy.

An emerging idea is to put stickers on products with a code, which if you punch it into your computer will give you direct access to both the farmer and the manufacturer who grew or produced it. And once we CAN find out who are the wrongdoers, we just tweet the bad guys to death with a ThisSucksandThisRules hashtag. This is ‘radical transparency’ at its best. The millennials are wired to each other unlike any other generation, that’s why a photo of a cat getting married can be seen by millions before the bride even gets to the end of the aisle.

Suzanne Lee does a great TEDTalk on biofabrication which she says is the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. She started her business by designing what she calls bio-couture; crossing fashion with biology. Instead of following the usual processing of plants, animals and oil to make consumer products, she grows materials using living organisms like bacteria, fungi, yeast and algae. So instead of having to grow cotton in fields, you grow microbes, over several months, to make a similar material. Suzanne then cuts out the pattern in this sheath of microbes for making shoes, bags and clothes. (I’m wondering, when you get tired of an outfit, can you just eat it?) You don’t need to ship or fly these materials all over the world, you grow them in a lab, making zero waste.

Mycelium is a kind of fungi which is multi-cellular and feeds off sugars and starches to grow. This can be rapid – after two weeks’ growth you can have a sheet (18′ × 12′ × 2′) that can then be manipulated into building anything you can imagine. If you take a 3D mould and fill it with waste products like corn stalks, add water and wait a few days for the mycelia to grow, you’re producing living organisms that can be turned into phones, buildings, furniture, flooring, etc. ‘Grow your own home’ would be my suggestion for a slogan. Fungi is a material that can grow with no chemicals added, it’s water absorbent, fire resistant and can be composted in your back garden. Instead of using cement to make bricks for building houses, causing 8 per cent of global CO2 emissions (more than planes and ships each year), you can grow bio-bricks which are three times stronger than a concrete block and store carbon. If we can replace the 1.2 trillion fired bricks made each year with their bio-brick brothers, it reduces CO2 emissions by 800 million tonnes every year.

We know the hazards of using plastic bags and yet almost everything we buy is already gift-wrapped in them. In the US alone, 8 billion are used each year, they’re blowing in the breeze from Santiago to Siberia. It’s like cigarettes, we all knew the warnings but kept on lighting up. And then one day, they were gone (except in France) and it suddenly wasn’t cool to smoke like it was in high school, when the most popular kids puffed in the toilets. There are already substitutes for plastic, but do we hear about them? No, we do not, unless we go trolling through websites.

Seaweed

In 2018, seaweed, which can grow 3 metres a day, has emerged as another alternative to oil-based plastic. As well as being abundant – just 0.03 per cent of the brown seaweed in the world could replace all of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles we get through every year – it can solve what is known as shelf-life gap, the difference between the biodegradability of a container and whatever is in it. For example, instead of using the demon plastic water bottle, how about Edible Blobs (they are really called that) filled with water? They look like rubbery bubbles and are made from this seaweed extract. You’re thirsty? You just pop one in your mouth, it’s that easy. And you can probably throw them at people to give yourself a laugh.

This begs the question, why aren’t these alternatives to plastic seen on every shop shelf? Why don’t they pop up on your computer screen, instead of portable Zimmer frames? Each new sustainable invention should be in the headlines of every newspaper, every day of the week, around the world, not what’s killing us next. I don’t want to write about conspiracy theories but I can’t help wondering whether big conglomerates are giving hush money or, dare I say, bribing politicians (who could probably reroute the eco disaster) to turn a blind eye and keep the ‘Good Ol’ Boys’ swimmin’ in oil. I don’t want to write about it because I don’t want to be bumped off.

Some World Changers

Quantum Computers

Nothing but nothing competes with this tech of all techs that’s going to change the future forever: quantum computing. (I have to make it simple because I don’t really understand it and failed at maths. But I do know Hartmut Neven, personally, who heads the Google quantum department and made one of the first quantum computers. We met at Burning Man which qualifies me as an expert now.)

He explained that the first actual quantum computer is being stored at NASA where it’s kept cold, as in ten ‘millikelvin’ (Hartmut knows what that is), to run the quantum processors, and it can do in 220 seconds what the world’s biggest supercomputer called Summit can do in 10,000 years. (It’s not a typo.)

The computers we use now reflect how our brains solve problems, imitating our neural relay system; just as our 86 billion neurons pass information via electrical currents, so too do they communicate through electrical impulses, each zapping the next. That’s why you can type in anything and up pops whatever you desire. Everything from how to do heart surgery on a racoon to finding a pizzeria in Tonga.

Quantum computing doesn’t emulate the processes in our brains, it mimics nature and nature knows everything. A tree knows how to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, it doesn’t need to go online. I’m told that in less than a decade, quantum computing will be able to crack the code of how a tree actually does that miraculous trick. Not to mention how these computers will be able to understand nature’s algorithms and create a battery that works like the sun without needing cobalt (something that’s only available in the Congo) or any other unsustainable material.

While medical research costs trillions, nature (which is free) knows how to make nearly every medicine in the world; you can heal practically anything from what grows on tree bark. If quantum computing can copy nature, we’ve hit the jackpot.

At this moment, the only way to discover a cure for a disease is to painstakingly, by computer simulation, create endless combinations of molecules, to find the one that binds with the receptor of, say, a specific cancer molecule. After that, some drug company, at great expense, has to develop that molecule which, after a long time, finally goes on to the market. A quantum computer will be able to instantly find what molecule binds with which receptor molecule, therefore finding cures for diseases in a zillionth of the time it takes now.

Evolving Tech to Make Us More Human

Okay, this is my area of interest and the point I’m trying to make is that the innovative technology is coming to relieve our ailing minds, bodies and hopefully the planet, but here’s the rub. No matter how great the tech, unless we learn to lower the fear in which we’re now saturated, our own stress will kill us by breaking down our immune systems so that we become open house for cancer, diabetes, dementia, strokes and heart attacks, etc.

Also, if we’re too fearful, we fall into our egomaniacal mode where we start using tech to gene splice smarter kids or steal stem cells to grow us a better nose. Remember, we’ll keep creating chaos if our minds are in chaos.

The only way for us to learn to manage our stress and be able to curb our addictive behaviours is if we change ourselves (not through an app). It can’t be done by some quick fix but by training ourselves in self-awareness and self-knowledge, with the same diligence we use when we learn a language.

I think that one of the reasons for our obsession with tech is that it’s distracting us from our anger and loneliness and fear of … the big one … death. For example, if we have insight and learn to calm our minds, we might be less susceptible to being manipulated by advertising. After all, studies have shown that socially fulfilled people need less money, experience less shame, behave less predictably and act more autonomously.

There is already tech for mindfulness; very successful apps such as Headspace and Calm which are used by millions (and worth billions, I’m happy to say) and, no question, these help lasso that mental bucking bronco and calm it down. But eventually you have to take off the training wheels and cold turkey yourself off from the instructions. As I’ve said, mindfulness is about being alone with your sometimes unbearable thoughts and, with friendly curiosity, observe them without judgement. The idea is ultimately to see them as mental phenomena, like sounds coming and going without any effort, not taking them personally. You can think of them as like a radio station that randomly plays in the background when you haven’t chosen the channel.

It’s so easy to get sucked into mass rage, which is the collective weather condition of our culture, making us feel all united in fury, but ultimately being destructive of ourselves and the planet. These mindfulness practices wake us up to the fact that our thoughts are conditioned by a world where our default mindset is materialism and competition. Mindfulness can get to the root of our insecurities that lie behind our fear and loneliness. I said earlier that so far our biology can’t keep up with the technology so what we need now are well-meaning coders to build hardware that can help us evolve our own software.

Yuval Noah Harari says, ‘For every dollar and every minute we invest in artificial intelligence, we need to invest a dollar and a minute in human consciousness. Otherwise we have upgraded machines which are being controlled by downgraded humans, wreaking havoc on themselves and on the world.’ He believes that losing mental autonomy to AI can partly be countered by cultivating mindfulness. In an era where our screens are watching us and stealing our data like digital vampires, he believes we need to be alert to the workings of our minds. Our personal freedom depends on how well we know ourselves because we need to be ahead of the governments or corporations that try to manipulate us. To think clearly is a form of social action.

So, to help us gain inner knowledge, outside of practising mindfulness (which isn’t for everyone), I’ve hand-picked some programmes which are examples of where, I think, tech is working for the good of our mental health.

Joseph Aoun, President of Northeastern University, agrees with me, predicting that we are entering the ‘age of humanics’, rather than an ‘age of robotics’, which he defined as: ‘An age that integrates our human and technological capacities to meet the global challenges of our time.’

The following apps are not to enhance our cognitive intelligence but our emotional intelligence (which I rate as more important).

Tech to Develop Emotional Intelligence (In My Opinion)

Woebot – Learning to ‘Know Thyself’

Alison Darcy at Stanford is the creator of Woebot, the latest technology for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. She created an interactive robot to help people suffering from depression, anxiety and burnout.

As a solution to CBT, she has created an on-screen bot therapist who gently encourages users to question their ‘distorted thinking’ by asking the same questions a real CBT therapist would. The bot asks the users to write down their moods, thoughts and emotions in specific situations and then helps them notice if those are old habits or appropriate reactions. Gradually, by becoming aware, you can let go of these unhelpful habits and create more positive ones. I can hear you saying, ‘What the fuck? I thought she said robots wouldn’t be able to replace therapists?’ But in certain situations, with certain therapies, here’s why robots aren’t such a ridiculous idea.

First of all, Woebot doesn’t pretend to be human when it chats to you. It doesn’t try to fool you by saying things like, ‘I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I like to work with humans.’ (It’s a no-bullshit bot.) This Woebot is free worldwide and in the first week made more than 50,000 interactions; more people than a human therapist could do in a lifetime. Nowadays, Woebot exchanges between one and two million messages a week with users, especially with young men who often don’t seek out therapy and often need it more than most; the highest rate of suicide is among men under forty.

Half the world doesn’t have access to basic health care and mental health care is completely inaccessible for many (because either they haven’t got money, don’t know where to find a good therapist or feel stigmatized).

One in ten people a few years ago had to wait for more than a year to get a mental health assessment and they say by 2030 around two million more people will have a mental health problem, so what’s your choice? It’s cost-effective, no waiting times and you don’t have to leave the house.

Video Games

On average, young kids between the ages of eight and eighteen rack up more than 70 minutes of video gameplay daily. This spike in gameplay happens at the age when kids are most vulnerable to first encounters with depression, anxiety and bullying. So video games generally have a very bad rap these days. Richard Davidson is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. (He was the first doctor to scan the brains of monks who had meditated for more than 10,000 hours and published the phenomenal results.) Now he’s doing research on gaming. He says, ‘Our long-term aspiration for this work is that video games may be harnessed for good and if the gaming industry and consumers took this message to heart, they could potentially create video games that change the brain in positive ways.’

His games are created for kids who love playing and parents who’d like to find an alternative that doesn’t stoke their addiction, keeping them wired up all night screaming, ‘Kill, kill, kill!’

Davidson’s team wanted to learn whether there were ways to use video games as a vehicle for positive emotional development during this critical period. They came up with Crystals of Kaydor, aimed at developing empathy and emotional intelligence.

A space-exploring robot crashes on a distant planet and in order to gather the pieces of its damaged spaceship and repair it, the player needs to build emotional rapport with the local aliens. The aliens speak a different language but their facial expressions are human-like and are programmed for the players to recognize the six basic emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, disgust and sadness. By watching the avatars’ facial expressions and head movements, the player can then respond and, through trial and error, receive feedback through changes in the expression of the avatar. If the avatar feels it’s being understood it smiles and continues repairing the spaceship. If it’s sad, it doesn’t do anything until the child changes his own expression.

As players progress through the game, they go on quests with the avatars and learn how the story impacts on the avatars’ emotions.

Davidson and his team researched whether these types of video games could boost kids’ empathy, and how that would affect the neural connections in the brain. The team obtained MRI scans and after two weeks of gameplay on Crystals, players had stronger connectivity in empathy-related brain networks. (VMPFC, DMPFC and RTP for any neuroscience buffs out there.) So, the more kids play the game, the more they develop those empathy muscles to eventually be able to use as social skills in real life.

Me: A Kid’s Diary by Tinybop was developed by a Brooklyn-based app design studio to encourage kids to look inside themselves to explore their emotional states in order to understand themselves better. For example, one of the games on Me depicts dark storm clouds and, after tapping on it, Me asks how the player feels and to give a colour to that fear. Then an emotional spectrum appears and the app asks questions about the fear, telling them to take a photo of an object that scared them, draw a picture of themselves when they feel fearful and draw a monster that looks like their fear.

Using Virtual Reality for the Good (Empathy Training)

The UN made one of the first virtual reality films to give us the experience of being inside a refugee camp. It is called Clouds Over Sidra, where a twelve-year-old Syrian girl takes us on a tour of the camp. We watch her at school, then playing football, and then meet her large family in a one-room tin tent without electricity or hot and cold running anything. She’s wonderful and you are charmed. The idea is to create empathy by witnessing a human life, up close and personal. Television just doesn’t cut it, a 2D image can’t bring it home as well as a 3D twelve-year-old can.

I watched another VR film where I saw Syrian kids running from a fighter jet. I was screaming at them to get down, then when I thought the bombs were dropping, I hunkered under my kitchen table. This is where tech can help to connect humans and move them from self-obsession to world-obsession. Such is the power of VR when used for the good.

Random Acts of Kindness (Connection to Others)

An app called Random App of Kindness (RAKi) helps increase empathetic habits in teens using interactive games designed for smartphones. The goal is that playing with RAKi will help teens develop skills for healthier and more positive social connections. This project is based on epigenetics, the study of how genes can change throughout your life when you change your experiences, so your biology is not your destiny.

This game, like previous ones, teaches empathy by helping players read emotions in others. Various parts of the face come up on the screen and the game asks players to match the eyes, nose and mouth area to an emotion: pain, fear, surprise, joy, etc. It is based on the research of mirror neurons in the brain which create ‘motor mimicry’, imitating each other’s expressions, creating empathy and prosocial behaviours. This also teaches them conflict resolution, a skill the world is badly in need of, while they learn anger management and impulse control to enable them to think clearly even when they want to rip their opponents’ throats out.

In the game, the players are faced with an angry man, and rather than flinging their own anger back (which is usually what we do), the players try to get into his shoes.

I think with these apps and games, the creators’ hearts and minds are in the right place. We have to start somewhere. The robots can’t replace us humans, but if they help stimulate feelings of compassion, it switches on our bonding juice: oxytocin. It’s like the foreplay to opening the heart.

No Isolation (Helping with Loneliness)

This is a Norwegian tech company whose stated aim is: ‘To reduce involuntary loneliness and social isolation by developing communication tools that help those affected.’ They’ve created a robot to help kids with mental or long-term physical illnesses who are isolated. A robot called AV1, a ‘telepresence bot’, takes the place of the child in the classroom, becoming their eyes and ears, communicating with the teacher and classmates. Okay, you may think this is horrifying, using robots as long-distance representatives for kids, but if they can’t get out of the house due to mental or physical illness, it’s a start. No Isolation has also developed KOMP, which is an easy-to-use smart device to assist the elderly in communicating with their friends and family. No more touch screens or complicated button-pushing, there is a single analogue button to press. It can receive photos and phone calls automatically and is set up in the house like a radio so they can’t say they lost it or can’t plug it in.

Paro (Pet Alternative)

Paro, developed in Japan by Takanori Shibata, is a robotic fluffy baby seal which recognizes voices, tracks motions and responds with cute little squeaks and whistles. It’s a pet alternative for the elderly or anyone who just wants something to cuddle without having to clean up its shit. It wiggles in your arms and is a few degrees warmer than a human. A real pet can scratch or bite whereas Paro only shows love and appreciation when you pet it. My daughter, who is so in love with seals she wants to marry one, almost fainted when she saw Paro. To recharge it, you put a dummy in its mouth just like you would a baby. Okay, I’m getting a little nauseous too … but it has amazing results for people with dementia because they may not be able to express affection but they can feel it. The reason it is so popular in Japan may be because of the Shinto belief that spirits can reside in inanimate objects. Need I remind you that we in the West also project love on to objects: a painting, a car, a pair of shoes. So why wouldn’t you feel love from and for a toy seal? The good news is it won’t ever leave you or die like everything else does.

Connect: Human to Human (I invented this app – if you’re an app developer, call me)

When you log on to this game, you’re randomly connected to another person (a stranger) who can be in any country in the world. The rules come up on the screen. For the first minute neither of you speak; you just look at each other, noticing the eyes, nose, mouth, skin texture, etc. Notice what likes and dislikes come up for you. The next instruction is for one of you to speak for three minutes (if it’s a foreign language there’s a simultaneous translation), the other just listens. Suggested topics come up on screen which may prompt the speaker or he/she can just speak spontaneously.

A sound goes off after three minutes and they change over. The listener now becomes the speaker and speaks uninterrupted for three minutes.

After the sound to mark the end, they again look at each other for one minute in silence, maybe noting how differently they think and feel about each other from the first encounter to now.

Next, for three minutes, the players give each other feedback. Not giving advice or getting on some political platform but how they resonated with each other’s story.

When the sound goes off, they say goodbye and the game ends.

Maybe this could be played once a day to really recognize that we’re all the same. And this is my gift for world peace.

Mindfulness Exercises

I’ve dreamt these up to help us use tech, rather than let it use us.

1. For Phone Addiction

When standing, start to notice your breathing; the rise and fall of your chest or abdomen with each in-breath and out-breath. Notice when the mind starts its thought stream and maybe even mentally note where it’s taken you. Your mind will always wander so this is simply noticing where it’s gone and, without judgement or acrimony, take the focus back to the breath. This will happen again and again as the mind never stops, so congratulate yourself each time you notice and return to the breath.

When you’re ready, pick up your phone and notice the feel of it in your hand; the weight, the texture. Start to walk, being aware of each movement, feeling the muscles that make walking happen. Notice the thoughts in your head, maybe how badly you want to check for messages, make a call or email. Walk to the nearest window and when you get there, open it, aware of the movements. Sense your arm lifting with the iPhone in your hand and, on an out-breath, releasing the phone through the open window. Watch as it arcs through the air and down, down, as it smashes on to the ground. Notice if you’re feeling or thinking about regrets, panic or sadness. This is normal. So now slowly close the window and bring the focus back to the breath.

The above exercise can also be done facing the sea or on a balcony.

2. Urge Surfing

Maybe once a day, stop and notice when your hand automatically reaches for the phone. (If you did exercise 1, it’s probably shattered. Never mind, even if it’s in pieces, you’ll probably reach for it anyway.) Tune in to the feelings in your body and investigate where and what ‘urge’ feels like. Is it in a specific area? Is it heavy or light? Does it pulse, stab, etc.? At some point, a thought will snare your attention – it could be justifying why it’s urgent to make a call, or that you’ll just do one call and then turn it off, or how much you hate yourself for being so desperate, or simply random thoughts. The exercise is to notice when your mind carries you away and then, gently, to take your focus to where you experienced the urge. After a few minutes, stop and notice if your feelings or thoughts have changed or not. Either way, you’ve done the exercise, so congratulate yourself because very few people on earth can pause before reaching for their digital drug.

Please note: a phone is a necessary tool for work, appointments or gossiping but, personally, I find myself talking for hours to people I don’t even like. I created this exercise so I could have a life. Only when you’ve calmed your mind can you make a clear decision whether you want to talk to someone or not, or just throw it out of the window again. Now you have choice rather than a compulsion.

3. Being Present With Your Computer

At a set time when you’re at your desk, send your focus to where your feet make contact with the ground, then widen the focus to the precise area where your body makes contact with the chair you’re on and now widen focus again to experience the sense of your whole body. Feel your breath filling your body like a bellows, in and out. After a minute or so lift both arms, feeling their weight and the motion of moving them to lift the lid of your computer. Slowly, with awareness, lower the tips of your fingers on to the keys, sensing them through each fingertip. Watch where your thoughts go – maybe nagging you to start or finish something or maybe you’re furious you’re doing this exercise.

Again, take your focus to your breathing, feeling the breath filling your body like a balloon, in and out. When a thought snares you, gently take your attention back to breathing or sensing the feeling of the keys on your fingers. After a few minutes, see if anything has changed or not. Either way, you’ve taken a few minutes to exercise your brain, to notice your habits of rushing, and that’s what breaks them.

When you go back to working and your mind is calmer, it makes it more likely you can enter that ‘flow’ state where the writing becomes effortless and a joy. Whenever you feel that hunched, jaw-clenched pressure to work, stop, breathe a few times into the whole body, wait and proceed with your masterpiece.

It’s not our academic brilliance, talent or success that defines a great human being, it’s our ability to feel compassion. We need to remind ourselves that individuals do not survive on their own. We’re human because of our social connections and anything that separates us makes us less human. We need to remember how to reconnect to one another, remaking society towards human ends rather than towards the end of humans.

‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has’

– Margaret Mead