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)
Despite the title, this is not an overview but a few thoughts, in preparation for the APF Twitter chat on the topic today.
Transparency
Increasing transparency may be revealing how power is wielded, but it has a very long way to go. Most people, even in open societies such as the United States, have only a vague sense of which people and organizations hold and use power over them, and what they are doing with it.
Complexity
Complexity obscures power, even to its wielders — witness the 2008+ economic implosion, in which no one, even the powerful, actually knew what their actions meant.
It may also place it in unexpected locales. The maid who has accused the now-former IMF head of sexual attack may -– through no fault of her own –- damage the economy of Europe and even the world.
Machine power
We are passing power to machines. Obscure algorithms were key to the Great Recession, and increasingly determine wide swaths of our lives, such as what we see through search engines and other information portals. These algorithms may or may not reflect the actual intentions of those who created them, and those who use them.
State power
On the whole, states may be increasing their power. Especially in emerging markets, they have more money, technology, and skills in their hands, enabling them to do things that they couldn’t a couple of decades ago.
At the same time, the rawest use of state power, violence, is more constrained that it was. The ordinary repression of the 1980s is now beyond the pale for all but a few states, and can easily get a regime — at least one without power — referred to the International Criminal Court. This is the case nearly across the board: even today’s severe human rights violators tend to be restrained by the standards of the past.
Time Magazine has done a slideshow of 20 apocalyptic visions on film.
Charted by plausibility and likelihood, they come out like this:
- Plausibility — The plausibility that this kind of event would unfold in this way.
- Likelihood — The likelihood that this kind of event will happen.
There are three broad categories in this list worth heeding:
- The likely — We are already well on our way to aspects of “The Inconvenient Truth.”
- The plausible accidents — “Children of Men,” “28 Days Later,” and some of the other bio-disaster movies are disturbingly plausible, even if the exact circumstances are unlikely. Our ubiquitous chemical experiments on ourselves and our growing biotech capabilities mean that we could simply stumble into one of these apocalypses, with no one intending such an outcome.
- Low likelihood but inevitable — Asteroid disasters are unlikely to happen in any short span of time, but inevitable in the long run, unless we do something about them.
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As tiny unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of all kinds proliferate — here’s one the size and layout of a hummingbird — one can imagine that they could inspire a curious revival.
For some time to come, the best countermeasure against small UAVs might be a living creature. Specifically, a bird of prey such as a falcon, which could be trained to detect and destroy such devices. I doubt that the US military is going to have the specialist job 14F–Falconer, but one can hope.
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A number of analysts have called for humanitarian intervention of some kind in Libya — a no-fly-zone at least, as suggested by the International Crisis Group, with others implying something more.
While such an intervention might become morally essential, several factors should give us pause:
- The anti-imperialist card — Any military intervention would greatly enhance the “foreign conspiracy” narrative in the region. All protesters would be more readily tarred with the accusation that they are agents of Western plots, seeking to invite in foreign domination. Given that even Mubarak brought up the theme, it would certainly be used to the fullest in Iran or Syria.
- Secondary costs — Western forces operating anywhere in the Muslim world would be seen by at least some fraction of Muslim publics as engaged in part of the “war on Islam,” no matter what the facts are.
- Encouraging passivity — That Arab publics believe they themselves can change their countries for the better is a crucial aspect of recent events. It is a backstep if outside intervention comes to be seen as necessary.
- Moral quagmire — Remember Somalia in the 1990s: moral certainty can rapidly evaporate on the ground. An intervening force might simply find itself backing one side in a tribe-on-tribe civil war.
- Difficulty — It appears that interventionists think an intervention is doable at little cost. That might be true with a no-fly zone (which is not likely to be very effective), but sending in troops might not go well. A few million Sunni in Iraq fought the main effort of the US military to a standstill for years, and some fraction of the populace might remain loyal to the former regime, even forming majorities in some areas. Recall also that only a few years after Saddam was overthrown, a majority of Iraqis approved of attacks on US forces.
This is not a one-sided calculus. Other factors could overwhelm the considerations above:
- Human rights violations could reach the scale of a true mass-atrocity event.
- It could become clear that Libyan opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of intervention — there are already people calling for it on the streets.
- The Arab world could clearly and decisively endorse such an intervention.
With luck, this will all soon by moot, and the regime will disintegrate, with something less than civil war on the other side.
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