Familiar future

People living at the start of the third millennium enjoy a world which would have been inconceivable to ancestors living in the previous 100 millennia during which our species has existed. Ignorance and myth have given way to a detailed understanding of life and the universe. Slavery, despotism, blood feuds and patriarchy have vanished from great expanses of the planet, driven out by the idea of human rights and the rule of law. Technology has shrunk the globe and stretched our lives and minds.

How far can this revolution in the human condition go? Will the world of 3000 be as unthinkable to us as the world of 2000 would have been to our forebears a mil-lennium ago? Will science explain the universe down to the last quark, thus extinguishing mystery and wonder? Will the internet turn us into loners, doing away with families, communities, cities? Will electronic media transform the arts? Will they transform our minds?

We laugh at the Victorian experts who predicted that radio and flying machines were impossible. But it is just as foolish to predict that the future will be utterly foreign-we laugh also at the postwar experts who foresaw domed cities, jet-pack commuters and nuclear vacuum cleaners. The future, I suggest, will not be unrecognisably exotic, because across all the dizzying changes which shaped the present and will shape the future, one element remains constant: human nature.



After decades of viewing the mind as a blank slate on which the environment writes, neuroscientists, behavioural geneticists and evolutionary psychologists are discovering instead a richly structured psyche. Of course, humans are ravenous learners, but learning is possible only in a brain equipped with circuits which learn in intelligent ways and with emotions which motivate it to learn. The mind has a toolbox of concepts for space, time, living things and other minds. It is powered by emotions about things-curiosity, fear, disgust-and about people-love, guilt, anger, pride, lust. It has instincts to communicate by language, gesture and facial expression.

We inherited this equipment from our ancestors; I suspect we will bequeath it to our descendants in the millennia to come. We won't evolve into bulbous-brained, spindly-bodied homunculi because biological evolution is not pushing us towards greater intelligence; it simply favours variants that out-reproduce their rivals. Unless people with a particular trait have more babies, worldwide, for thousands of generations, our biological constitution will not radically change.

It is also far from certain that we will redesign human nature through genetic engineering. People are repelled by genetically-modified soya beans, let alone babies, and the risks and reservations surrounding germ-line engineering of the human brain may consign it to the fate of the nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner.

If human nature does not change, then our lives in the new millennium may be more familiar than the futurologists predict. Take education. Some imagine technology-enriched Summerhillesque schools where literacy and knowledge will simply blossom, free from drudgery. Others hope that playing Mozart to the bellies of pregnant women will transform children into super-learners.

But an alternative view is that education is the attempt to get minds to do things they are badly designed for. Although children instinctively speak, see, move and use common sense, their minds may be ill at ease with many of the fruits of civilisation: written language, mathematics, the very large and very small spans of time and space which are the subject of history and science. If so, education will always be a slog.

Our mental apparatus may also constrain how much we can ever grasp the truths of science. Consciousness and decision-making arise from the electrochemical activity of neural networks in the brain. But how moving molecules should throw off subjective feelings and choices for which we can be held responsible remain deep mysteries to our Pleistocene psyches.

Our descendants will still ponder the age-old topics of religion and philosophy. Why does the universe exist, and what brought it into being? What are the rights and responsibilities of living creatures with different minds from ours-foetuses, animals, neurologically impaired people, the dying? Abortion, animal rights, the insanity defence and euthanasia will continue to agonise the thoughtful.

We can also predict that the mind will shape, rather than be reshaped by, the information technology of the future. Why have computers recently infiltrated our lives? Because they have been painstakingly crafted to mesh better with the primitive workings of our minds. The graphical user interface (windows, icons, buttons, sliders, mice) and the world wide web represent the coercion of machines, not people.

We have adapted our computers to simulate a world of phantom objects alien to the computer's own internal workings (ones, zeroes and logic) but comfortable for us tool-using, vision-dependent primates. Many other changes will come from getting our machines to adapt to our quirks-understanding our speech, recognising our faces, and so on.

Our emotional repertoire, too, ensures that the world of tomorrow will be a familiar place. Humans are a social species, with intense longings for friends, communities, family and spouses, consummated by face-to-face contact. E-mail and e-commerce will continue their inroads, of course, but not to the point of making us permanent antisocial shut-ins; only to the point where the increase in convenience is outweighed by a decrease in the pleasure of being with friends, relations and interesting strangers.

But human relationships also embrace conflicts of biological interests, surfacing in sibling rivalry, status-seeking, infidelity and mistrust. Conflicts with other people, including those we care most about, will dominate the thoughts of our descendants, animate their conversation and supply the plots of their fiction, whatever the medium.

If constraints on human nature make the future more like the present and the past than futurologists predict, should we despair? Many people, seeing the tragedies of today's world, dream of a future in which our descendants are infinitely good, wise and powerful. The idea that our future might be constrained by DNA shaped in the savannah and ice ages seems depressing-even dangerous.

Admittedly, many assertions of ineluctable human nature have proved wrong and harmful-the "inevitability" of war, racial segregation and the political inequality of women. But the opposite view, of an infinitely plastic and perfectible mind, has led to horrors of its own: Soviet "new man," re-education camps and the unjust blaming of mothers for the disabilities and neuroses of their children.

There are universal human needs which explain, among other things, why we enjoy the art and stories of peoples who lived in centuries past: Shakespeare, the Bible, the love stories and hero myths of countless cultures superficially unlike our own.

Futurologists should realise that their fantasies scare us. The preposterous world in which we interact only in cyberspace, merge with our computers, design our children from a catalogue, gives us the creeps and turns us off the genuine promise of technological progress. The constancy of human nature is our reassurance.