Image: FutureAtlas.com (usable with credit)
As the future part owner of
$347 billion in nuclear missile submarines, I had to wonder about the implications of this little autonomous underwater drone a science expo last week.
The scientist who used it described how it can operate semi-autonomously and carry a variety of sensor packages in its nose.
I was left with a simple question: how many $20,000 underwater drones would it take to hunt down $347 billion worth of submarines? With the capabilities such a drone could have in 20 years, I’m guessing that number is an order of magnitude fewer than the 1.7 million such drones you could buy for only $34.7 billion.
After all, with Moore’s Law in the drones’ corner, a submarine becomes a larger and larger piece of information to hide.
China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, visited the former German extermination camp at Auschwitz, Poland, last week. In his remarks, he suggested that “The tragedy of Auschwitz, is the tragedy of the entire human race. This history teaches us that we must oppose war, discrimination and crimes, to protect liberty, security, happiness and human dignity.”
This is a small but significant indicator, for three reasons:
- China is acknowledging universal human values that include human rights. (The ironies are obvious, but hardly unique: the United States found itself in awkward positions through the mid-1960s as it spoke of freedom while a third of the country lived under racial authoritarianism.)
- It is placing some kinds of governmental savagery outside the boundaries of acceptability — boundaries that China itself transgressed during the 20th century.
- By commenting on other people’s history, Wen is in effect opening the door another crack to the idea that human rights anywhere are everyone’s business; the willingness to acquiesce to intervention in Libya in 2011 was another sign of this.
This may be another indicator that a rising China may not overthrow global human rights norms, but instead partially integrate itself into them (while bending the rules to fit its interests and sympathies, like all great powers.)
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Follow on Twitter: @Geofutures
Image courtesy Simone Onofri (Flickr)
The new nation of South Sudan has been recognized by most of the international community, but there is one great power that denies it this status: Facebook.
The social media site — population 900 million or so — is being petitioned to recognize South Sudan, though perhaps “notice” is the more accurate term.
Meanwhile, the US Postal Service is conducting its own diplomacy, at least on its postal rate dropdown menus. While you can learn what it costs to send your package to Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera or the Zafarani Islands — both inhabited only by small Spanish military garrisons — you are out of luck if you want to mail something to the West Bank, Gaza, or (heaven forbid) Palestine. That’s fortunate for the one Spanish-American whose nephew is serving on the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, but the thousands of Palestinian-Americans sending things to relatives just have to wing it. 
The Postal Service has gotten well ahead of the rest of the US government on Asia policy, however: you can mail to “Taiwan,” and not “Taiwan (China).” Alert the Taiwanese not-embassy (which you can find by searching Google for “Taiwanese embassy”).
Perhaps the USPS will soon be hearing that it has “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”
At the individual level, personal information used to be decentralized and at least somewhat resilient: it was held on paper, which could last for centuries if looked after. Knowledge of the outside world, if it was kept, typically resided in books. Many families owned a store of reference books, often including encyclopedias. Civilizational information was decentralized too, residing in libraries, archives, and government document stores in countless places.
Now we think of information as decentralized, as it comes to us through any networked device, and we can even contribute to the total store of information ourselves, at least at the margins. We are, however, mistaking access for location; we typically don’t know where the information we are using actually resides.
I was reminded of this today, when we learned that Encyclopedia Britannica is going to stop being printed, changing to a Web-only format.
Does it matter that that people have access to huge amounts of information, but only remotely? Personal and civilizational information is becoming more centralized, and thus vulnerable, as it concentrates in vast server farms. An act of sabotage or war, or even a tech glitch, could endanger an increasing proportion of the world’s knowledge. (Political manipulation and distortion are also growing risks, but more on that later.)
The situation is more dire if you expect civilization to collapse or degrade, as many in the resilience community seem to: all that information will be as good as gone without computers, networks, and electricity. This seems low-probability, but I am still tempted to keep my three-volume set of The Boy Mechanic (1919), with projects like “a small working pile driver.”
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Photo courtesy gfpeck (Flickr)
Polling suggests many Americans fear these things:
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Their children’s life will be worse than their own (28%, 2011 Kaiser-Washington Post poll)
- The American economy is in long-term decline (63%, 2008 Washington Post)
- Global warming is a very or somewhat serious problem (65%, 2009 Pew poll)
- The 21st century will be more Chinese than American (41%, 2010 Washington Post poll)
- Another world war will occur by 2050 (58%, 2010, Pew / Smithsonian in GOOD)
- There will be a major nuclear terrorist attack by 2050 (53%, 2010, Pew / Smithsonian in GOOD)
- Jesus Christ will return to Earth and the world will end by 2050 (41%, 2010 Pew polling)
(This is for a Twitter-based chat today, which you can follow with the hashtag #futrchat.)
This may all mean less than it appears, however, due to a bias toward optimism in applying the future to ourselves. People may hold these beliefs casually or temporarily, or may think that somehow things will still be good in their own lives — as some of the same polls in fact show.
More fundamentally, when it comes to fear, the proximate and the personal — fears around money, family, jobs, health, etc. — may swamp theoretically larger issues like these.
Can fear even have a constructive role in thinking about the future? Or do we want only concern, as true fear is too raw an emotion, inevitably obstructing constructive responses? How does this jibe with the fact that their are outcomes in technology or geopolitics that we should truly fear?
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Image: Irargerich (Flickr)
Thomas Barnett noted this map in a recent New York Times story, overlaying it with the boundaries based on his core-gap theory.
A few comments:
- Gay rights are a strong indicator of values progression, as theorized by Ronald Inglehart; “postmodern” societies tend to have strong gay rights.
- Barnett supposes a causal connection between global connectedness and acceptance of gays. I suspect the connections are secondary, with connectedness driving prosperity, which boosts the kind of societal security which breeds acceptance of nonconformity.
- This gay right map illustrates a broader pattern: religiosity generally varies inversely with morality at a societal level, if by morality one means how well people are treated. This is likely not a direct link, but more that poverty drives both intolerance and fervent religiosity (per Inglehart).
Image: New York Times / Thomas PM Barnett
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Another step toward journalistic use of unmanned aerial vehicles: Polish media have been using mini-helicopters to cover protests.
As I’ve said before, it is highly likely that UAV journalism will expand to include sustained, sometimes-live coverage of otherwise inaccessible news, such as massacres in the Congolese jungle.
Facilitating conditions are likely to include:
- situations with no one in charge — Somalia or eastern Congo, for instance, where there is only nominal government authority
- places where great powers are sympathetic — even if a government objects to “illegal” use of UAVs within its borders, if powers such as the US disapprove of a regime, media organization are likely to get away with their use; the Libyan uprising is an example
It is also simply unclear how adept even great-power militaries will be at finding and destroying small, stealthy, cheap UAVs.
Some of the same issues apply to use of UAVs for human rights work.
Militaries and their governments need to devise policies for how they are going to interact with this kind of coverage; it will not be easy to prevent, and taking action against such private UAVs may have legal consequences, in addition to public relations repercussions.
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Image courtesy expertinfantry (Flickr)
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For the Twitter futrchat on the future of human rights today, here are some resources and links. (Follow the conversation with #futrchat.)
- Freedom House checklist of political and civil rights — This is a good list of what might be called core human rights, though that designation is subject to a variety of debates.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which codifies many political, civil, and social rights, and is accepted by most countries in principle, if not in practice.
- “A History of Violence” — An essay by Steven Pinker arguing that violence and brutality of all kinds have been decreasing for a long time.
- A report on fighting human rights abuses using technology.
- Ronald Inglehart on the relationship of social conditions and wealth to values, including values that shape attitudes toward human rights.
- Pew polling data on the attitudes of middle classes toward democracy; culture and class matter.
- In thinking about future drivers, what happens if the world becomes much more wealthy? This Asian Development Bank report offers a scenario in which both China and India have per capita incomes over $40,000 by 2050 — see pages 124 and 120.
- Some thoughts from Hplus on the relationship of transhumanism and human rights — see especially scenarios 3 to 5.
- Other human rights-related posts on this blog.
I used to wonder whether a society that became so networked that it could support a ubiquitous monitoring system would end up not using such a system for oppressive political control, both because of the flows of relatively free information that the networks would enable, and because the ability to run such a system implied a high level of socioeconomic development.
China appears to be answering this question, by building an immense surveillance system that will “cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles,” using as many as 500,000 cameras reporting to a central system, David Brin notes (from an NPR report). The monitoring system is ostensibly targeting crime, but could clearly be redirected for political surveillance — and in any case the line between crime and politics becomes blurred in China, for instance when social order is seen to include suppressing dissent by Tibetans or Uighurs.
Still, while China puts immense efforts into controlling expression on the Internet and mobile networks, these technologies have still provided new outlets for expression that have changed the role of public opinion in Chinese society. China runs a highly oppressive high-tech monitoring system, by some definitions, but it is also clear that new information networks are changing the nature of China’s politics.
So I won’t dismiss my original question about the role of technology. Its oppressive aspects will vie with its liberating qualities in coming decades, shaping human rights this century.
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President Obama’s drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan is a step toward addressing a large gap between US effort in Afghanistan — we are now spending a trillion dollars a decade in immediate costs alone — and the actual importance of Afghanistan. As Richard Haass put it on “Charlie Rose” yesterday, there is a “strategic misalignment” in this policy that will leave future historians puzzled as to why were were so devoted to a sideshow.
As a futurist, I simply don’t see much relationship between what we do in Afghanistan over the next few years and outcomes a couple of decades down the road — and yet we are expending lives and dollars as if something huge is at stake, increasingly against the will of the American people.
The reasons for continuing the war at present levels are not convincing:
- Terrorist havens — Afghanistan is and will be something of a terrorist haven whether we are there or not. A counterterrorism strategy with a much reduced force can ameliorate this, but there are other refuges for al Qaeda, whatever we do in Afghanistan. Additionally, fighting Muslims in Afghanistan in itself bolsters the militant jihadist narrative.
- Afghan society — Afghanistan will be illiberal, corrupt, and cruel by Western standards whether we stay or go. We do not want the worst excesses of the Taliban to return, but that in itself is not worth a full-scale war.
- Regional stability — Afghanistan is a cockpit in which Pakistan, India, Iran, China, and Central Asian nations may collide in various combinations in the future, but that will eventually be true whatever the US does. We can merely tweak the timeframe by a few years. Pakistan’s stability is important to us, but the relationship of that stability to what the US does over the next few years is unclear — and the US role has helped convince the great majority of Pakistanis that the US is their enemy.
- US credibility — Again, we are leaving eventually. Better to do it on our own terms rather than because we are truly exhausted. World public opinion is largely in favor of rapid withdrawal, and elite opinion will be more impressed by sensible strategy than sheer doggedness.
In short, a relatively quick departure seems in order.
(A sidenote: In the short term, Karzai’s erratic threats to turn against NATO forces should remind us of how the Soviet Union ended up in a pseudo-invasion of that country. It didn’t just suddenly swarm across the border; Soviet troops were already fighting alongside the Afghan government against an insurgency. The Soviets came to view their ally with distrust, and the Afghans began to distance themselves from their patrons, and so the Russians moved to replace the government, partly with forces already in place. One can now imagine that circumstances might provoke the US to stage a similar “invasion,” except that we would already have the forces within the borders. At this point, though, we might simply not care, and use it as an excuse to leave even faster.)
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Image: Courtesy ISAFmedia (Flickr)