All the Flavors of Immortality
(This was originally written in 2002. I’m reposting it here as part of decommissioning my old website, and because I might want to refer to it later.)
Written March 14, 2002.
Major revisions October 10, 2002 suggested by Frink.
As an exercise, I thought I would try to enumerate all the different classes of immortality I have heard or read about, and give some discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in each and in the idea of immortality itself.
Some of these are real, some are fictional, and some are on the move from fiction to reality thanks to medical advances. I hope I don’t need to point out which are which.
Everyday Immortality
Immortality through Genetics
If your branch of your family tree doesn’t dead-end, you have this kind of immortality. Your genetic code, which defines characteristics of your body and health, will live on in your progeny, albeit in slightly altered forms. Unfortunately, your DNA doesn’t define your persona and after a few generations the part of it that is you will be severely diluted.
Another kind of genetic immortality would be having a sample of your DNA permanently recorded so that you could be cloned in the future. Sadly, as with your offspring, your clone is not you.
Immortality through Deeds
This is the romantic kind of immortality where you live on in the minds of others. Adults often try to sell this kind to kids when awkward questions about death come up. It can be as simple as being remembered fondly by family members or hallucinated by crazies. It can be as grand as being named a world hero for having accomplished some great work, and having numerous books and films made about you. The problem is that, as with DNA, memories get diluted over time. Even if your name is well-known enough to survive as part of world history, people will care less as time moves on, and you’re still vulnerable to being erased by some sort of global cataclysm. We remember the Caesars, but we’ve forgotten who invented fire and the wheel since they lived in a time when the worldwide disaster of not-having-a-coherent-written-history was going on.
Zombification
Sometimes when people die, they come back to life a short time later as zombies. Possible causes of this are many and varied – it can be the result of radiation from space, the summons of a wizard or deity, general cursedness etc.
There are a lot of drawbacks to being a zombie. Zombies stink, have horrible skin conditions, shamble everywhere, moan a lot, and feed upon the brains of the living. That really cuts down on your enjoyment of immortality. Your social life will be restricted to other zombies, your hopes of an athletic career will be dashed, and some people simply don’t enjoy cracking skulls open to feast upon the goo inside.
Furthermore, not all zombies have the ability to pull their bodies back together when smashed by zombie-haters (zombies are subject to much hatred from jealous non-zombies), which means that once your skeleton is broken into little bitty pieces, you have to spend eternity in one place. Very boring, and probably painful too.
This is Your Brain on Ice
There has been a lot of interest in cryonic preservation lately. It was in the news a fair bit in 2002 because of some baseball player who got frozen. Surprisingly, there are many people who object to allowing others to have themselves frozen. When examined, most of their arguments turn out to be hollow. The best debates arise out of the legal and ethical issues surrounding your existence after being frozen – what are your rights on ice, and what does the future owe you?
Cryo is currently the best chance we have of becoming immortal. There are lots of risks; it relies on keeping you frozen solid long enough for medical science to advance sufficiently to not only reverse the freezing damage but also fix whatever killed you and, if you only had your head frozen, grow you a new body. It’s impossible to estimate the probability that you’ll be awakened after having died and been frozen, but no matter how small it is, it’s still bigger than the chance of being revived after being buried or cremated. And even if being frozen turns out to be completely hopeless, you’re no worse off than you would be if you weren’t frozen.
Spiritual Immortality
There are many and varied cults in the world whose doctrines insist that death is merely a transition, and that afterwards our minds are freed from our bodies and either go on to another world, or are reincarnated into new bodies. Some believe that the other world involves some sort of eternal punishment or reward for deeds done while living, which sounds extremely boring.
Of course, nobody has found a single shred of evidence that these beliefs may be true, and some of them sound downright scary; for instance belief in reincarnation implies that the reincarnated person loses their memory and identity when reborn (since nobody can reliably recall a past life), and that sounds more like permanent death of the individual than immortality.
Immortality through Not Dying
A major shortcoming of the above listed forms of immortality is that they all involve dying. Besides seemingly violating the very definition of the word immortality, this is a big problem because if you want to be immortal, you probably don’t want to have to die to accomplish it. Too risky.
Tour the Fourth Dimension via Stasis
If you’re worried about dying, you can always stick yourself in some sort of time-stopping machine. You could do this in the hope that the future will have a cure for death ready for you when you step out, or you could just use it to spread your lifetime out over a longer range of real time in order to see what the future has in store.
The biggest problem with this plan is the risk that someone will mess with your preservation apparatus and kill you in your sleep. A certain amount of hedging can be done to prevent that, but you will still be at the mercy of environmental disasters.
Slow Aging with Relativity
That funny-looking man with the frizzy hair told us that as you move faster and faster, time slows down for you relative to the rest of the universe. The effect becomes most pronounced when you approach the speed of light.
This is better than the stasis idea because you can remain conscious and somewhat in touch with what’s going on in the universe. At a minimum, you can watch the stars move and get a time-lapse view of any nearby macro-engineering projects.
There are slight technical difficulties here; to avoid hitting something, you pretty much need to do this in space, which means you need a spacecraft capable of sustaining you for however long you intend to employ relativistic time dilation. Furthermore, it takes a hell of a lot of energy to get up near light speed, especially if you want to do so within your mortal lifetime. Life extension via relativistic effects is therefore outside most peoples’ budget – at least for the time being.
Medical Immortality
Body Swapping
Medical science has already made great strides in using organ transplants and other treatments to extend life. Cloning technology is being born right now. It is not hard to imagine having a fresh copy of your body cloned every few decades, and having your brain transplanted into it.
Brain deterioration would still be a problem, but progress is being made in treating that too. The major risk here is that your surrounding society may collapse and lose the ability to clone bodies for you. It’s safer for an immortal to be self-sufficient.
Instead of having the same old brain transplanted into a cloned body, sufficiently advanced technology could copy your neural wiring into a cloned brain. This raises the same identity questions as uploading and matter transporters.
Boosterspice
Another route to medical immortality lies in finding out why aging happens, and finding a cure for it and for the various types of deterioration that afflict the elderly. In the literature this is often posited to take the final form of a drug, treatment or dietary supplement that prevents one from dying of natural causes. It does not necessarily prevent virulent disease or death from preventable poor health (like extreme obesity or malnutrition). Again, there may be a self-sufficiency problem here.
A related idea is that of curing the disease called old age. We’re giant machines for helping genes make more genes, and our bodies are designed to have a reproductive peak. Once we’re no longer fit for reproduction, our genes could care less about us and everything starts falling apart. With a sufficient understanding of how genetic molecules work, we could reprogram them to make the priority keeping the organism alive and healthy instead of simply reproducible.
Cyborgism
Some people find the ideas of organ transplantation and cloning disturbing. Fortunately for them there are a wide range of mechanical body part replacements available. When something wears out, replace it with a machine. The logical end result is a machine with a human brain controlling it directly.
The problems of brain deterioration must still be faced, of course, unless you also replace it with a better thinking device. Furthermore, some current mechanical organ replacements are quite crude and cumbersome. You have to ensure your machine parts are well-maintained and receive enough power, or else you run the risk of becoming a statue.
There are a lot of potential advantages too, including the ability to interface digitally with computers, enhanced strength and speed, and resistance to hostile environments.
Immortality through Transformation
If humans can’t be immortal, maybe they can be changed into something that can.
Vampirism
For those of you born in the last five seconds, vampires are people who drink the blood of others in order to stay alive and young. Various additional powers are often attributed to vampires, along with some curious weaknesses.
The origin of vampirism is unknown, but the condition is believed to be a disease transmitted by bodily fluids. Vampires can transform humans into vampires by administering a non-fatal bite. This sometimes happens by accident when a vampire fails to drain enough blood to kill the victim.
The advantages and disadvantages of being a vampire are open to debate. There is a huge amount of variation in the powers and weaknesses ascribed to vampires.
Example powers include flight, limited invulnerability, superhuman strength and speed, limited shape-changing ability, uncommon attractiveness, ability to teleport via shadows or doorways, ability to mentally control animals or demons, and automatic ownership of outrageous castles in European mountain ranges.
Example weaknesses include weakness in the presence of garlic or religious symbols, death upon exposure to sunlight, ability to enter homes only when invited, extreme vulnerability to slivers, a requirement to sleep in a coffin, and a propensity for being followed around by angry mobs of peasants carrying torches and pitchforks.
Transcendence
Some people believe that humanity is just the larval stage of some kind of non-corporeal being. Others believe that when we die, our minds are freed to roam the universe. There are lots of variations on these themes, most of which end up with the mortal subject being transformed into some sort of pretty energy creature able to go where it wills.
Unfortunately there is no supporting evidence for such claims, and indeed we have plenty of reason to believe that a pure-energy life-form is physically impossible.
Another kind of transcendence involves becoming something godlike yet still rooted in matter. This can range all the way from unlocking the hidden secrets of the human brain and making full use of it, to being artificially “evolved” into a more advanced kind of life form, to uploading (see below) and expanding your consciousness to fill all available computing resources. Of course if you’re still matter you can still be destroyed, but presumably if you’re something much better than human you’ll also be better at avoiding danger.
Uploading
With computing power growing at a fantastic rate, it is becoming practical to digitally simulate the behavior of the neurons that make us think. We’re still a long, long way from being able to simulate a human brain in any practical way, but it could happen. Combine that with advances in medical scanning technology, and hopefully a breakthrough in understanding how neurons work together to produce thought and memory and consciousness, and you have an obvious conclusion: Why not transcribe our brains into computers?
The potential advantages are mind-boggling. Immortality. Making extra backups of your mind just in case. Cheap space travel and exploration. Cheap travel anywhere there’s a network. Ability to multi-process; create a second copy of yourself to handle annoying people or tackle dangerous jobs. High-speed thought. Ability to slow thought to wait out boring events. Increased memory capacity and accuracy. Seamless interaction with computers. Enhanced communication abilities.
Along with this come heavy philosophical questions. If you upload yourself into a computer, is it still you, or have you died? Is the you in the computer really conscious and sentient, or is it just a flawless simulation? Does it even matter? Do you have continuity of consciousness? If the meat version of you remains alive, which one is legally a person or are both? Does this count as reproduction? Similar questions also apply to brain modifications.
Magical Means
Assuming the existence of magic, there are many and varied means to use it to keep oneself alive. Magic is often portrayed as having a Do-What-I-Mean interface, which is a big plus because it reduces the likelihood that you will accidentally curse yourself.
The wise magic-user will be cautious and flexible. Start with the basics, like protection from all sorts of harm (violence, poison, disease), then add self-regenerating health and vigor, create a set of quick-escapes from especially dangerous scenarios, and take steps to ensure that you will always be able to revise, strengthen or add to these spells in the future. Also, avoid placing trust in others to procure your survival supplies, because forever is plenty of opportunity for your side-kicks to change their minds and betray you.
For non-spellcasters, wish-granting genies and deals with demons are popular ways to gain magical immortality. Such entities tend to be capricious and overly literal in their interpretation of wishes, and they have good lawyers. If one is not exceedingly precise in the wording of a wish, it can become a curse. For example, wishing simply for eternal life might not save you from the ravages of disease and decay. You could end up an immortal mind trapped forever in a useless, rotten body. Not fun.
Of course, one can also become immortal as the result of a curse placed upon oneself by an enemy. This is often done to earthy characters who value their friends and family, because it subjects them to the torture of watching all their loved ones grow old and die, and deprives them of the chance of reaching whatever afterlife they might believe in. In this case, all you can do is make the most of it. No sense being depressed for all eternity.
Immortal Plus
Most of the previously mentioned forms of undying immortality only offer safety from common forms of death like old age and disease, but there are many ways to die. Here are some additional factors you might want to consider.
Permanence. Do you want to be absolutely immortal, or do you want the option of ending your own life if you get bored? Can you trust yourself to make a sound judgement of when to end it? A thousand years of depression might make it tempting, but a million years of bliss could be right around the corner.
Food. Do you want to have to continue eating? Consider how much food you’ll need to eat over the next 15 billion years. Granted it doesn’t take much more than a large, well-maintained garden to feed one person, and a garden is a renewable food source. Well, renewable barring extinction of the light source or mutation of the plants into something inedible and no doubt intent on the extermination of all animals. An immortal may no longer be subject to the forces of evolution, but his food supply still is.
However, if you want to take long trips you have to ensure food will be available, or lug some with you. And what about bad food? If you’re the adventurous type, you’ll probably want to sample the local delicacies wherever you go, but that almost guarantees you’ll be poisoned at some point. It would be really embarrassing to keel over at the local fast food joint while sharing your accumulated wisdom with the natives.
Invulnerability. No matter how much of a hermit you are, if you live forever you’re bound to get into altercations ranging from fisticuffs to interstellar wars. Do you want protection from physical harm? Probably, but what kind? Being completely impervious to harm will make you cocky and more likely to endanger those around you, while at the same time boring you in the long run. Suffering an injury can be a positive personal growth experience, so maybe what you want is something along the lines of protection from death combined with total body regeneration ability.
Of course, even the ability to completely regenerate your body can cause problems. What if someone tosses you into a star? You’ll be floating there constantly growing new flesh only to have it instantly burned to a crisp. Mmmm… bacon… where was I? Oh yes, this little scenario leads to:
Protection from traps. Some people resent immortals and will set nasty traps for them. There is also always the risk of doing something stupid and trapping yourself. This could be really bad, because if you’re immortal and fall into an inescapable trap, you’re going to be really bored for a really long time. Probably the most practical way to avoid this problem is to also have the ability to teleport yourself arbitrarily.
Even so, escaping traps is a major problem for invulnerable types. As Frink pointed out to me after reading the first version of this article, what if someone tosses you into a singularity? It would really suck to be able to survive that because it’s pretty far-fetched to imagine a way of getting out again. You’d pretty much have to hope that Hawking was right and wait for the thing to evaporate.
Travel ability. Not a major problem really, but worth thinking about. You will eventually get bored of whatever planet you start on, and will want to explore other worlds. How will you get there?
Common Misconceptions about Immortality
It’s Boring.
Could very well be, if mishandled. Fortunately humans are amazingly good at finding ways to rationalize remaining alive in bad situations. If it gets too boring, you can make it more interesting by playing games with yourself, like deliberately forgetting things, or becoming an investigator or a collector of the rarest of the rare. If you’re bored forever, you’re doing something wrong.
Nobody Wants to Live Forever!
Wrong. I do. I want to see what happens next. Then what happens after that, and so on. I want to be able to travel the universe and see the sights. I want to see how the universe ends. As I said to Frink once, I’d like to be able to point at a distant galaxy and say, “I think I’ll go see who lives there, but I’ll take my time and see all the sights along the way,” and be able to actually do it.
It’s Selfish.
Damn right it is; nothing wrong with that. However, an immortal can also be of enormous benefit as a carrier of knowledge. Having a friendly immortal on your planet is a great safeguard against long-term dark ages; that person can help civilization rebuild quickly after large-scale disasters.
Why Deny Yourself Your Eternal Reward?
There is no evidence to support the belief in an afterlife, therefore it is logical to put off death as long as possible to maximize enjoyment of life. If there is an afterlife, it will still be there for you when you get tired of immortality.
It can also be argued that dying is irresponsible because it denies the benefit of your future works to your society. You might think to counter-argue that a given immortal might be more of a burden than a benefit to society, but that argument breaks down when you talk about immortality because immortality practically guarantees that the person will change many times over, and at some point will be greatly productive.
I would go so far as to suggest that even believing in an afterlife is socially irresponsible, because it cheapens the lives of others. Life becomes more precious if you believe that death is The End.
What I’ve Been Reading: Christopher Alexander
This post is a bit delayed. Over the course of two years, ending last year, I read Alexander’s three-volume set:
Volume 2 is somewhat famous in computer science as presenting an alternative way of thinking about design patterms, and there are people who wish for a way to apply similar thinking to software patterns.
I decided to read the book to see what the fuss was about, and I have some interest in architecture myself anyway. I decided to read all three volumes to get the complete picture. It was a lot of work – interesting as they are, these are voluminous and dense books.
Volume 1 makes the case for the need for a design language in architecture, with which to discuss the design of all types of buildings and human environments. Volume 2 builds the vocabulary of the language by proposing hundreds of design patterns, which are sort of the words and phrases of this language, and volume 3 discusses an attempt to put this all into practice.
I can’t really say anything meaningful about how this all applies to computer science. In a way I’m still digesting the philosophy presented in this work and it may be that I’ll never “get” how it might best be applied to my own profession, but I totally get how it applies to architecture because it’s presented largely in opposition to the architectural mistakes of the previous century. It’s all about making work and living spaces that are functional, versatile, and above all, comfortable and not dehumanizing. Putting the people who use a space ahead of flashy design or cheap construction.
I do recommend reading volumes 1 and 2; just realize doing so is a big project that requires contemplation. Volume 2 could actually be toilet reading for a year – most of the patterns are about 3 pages.
Now I’d like to share some quotes, summaries and excerpts from volume 2 that resonated with me. Some of these are practical and some are more philosophical.
On the subject of learning environments for children: “In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students – and adults – become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.” (Page 100) This feeds my feelings about public education and the difference between force-fed learning and natural, curiosity-driven learning.
On room placement in a house: “[In the Northern hemisphere] place the most important rooms along the south edge of the building, and spread the building out along the east-west axis.” (Page 617) This, combined with another pattern that requires sunlight access from two walls of each room, increases the amount of sunlight in the most lived-in rooms, which is good for improving the mood of the home.
Rule 129 (page 618): “Common Areas at the Heart” (with pathways tangent). This rule says that the common areas of a home or workplace, such as the living room or break room, should be near a central point of convergence of the walkways, but should not actually overlap a walkway – it should be possible for people to walk by and see what’s going on without becoming involved or interrupting anyone.
Rule 130 (page 622) describes the importance of having an entrance room – a room that you pass through when entering and leaving the house, where you put on or take off outdoor clothes and do your greetings and farewells. I think this is really important because I’m often frustrated by home designs that don’t have this – I need space to sit down to take off my boots or tie up my shoes, and there should always be room to place an empty coat rack, shoe rack and umbrella stand so your guests don’t have to root around in your overstuffed hall closet.
“The movement between rooms is as important as the rooms themselves; and its arrangement has as much effect on social interaction in the rooms, as the interior of the rooms.” (Page 628); “As far as possible, avoid the use of corridors and passages. Instead, use public rooms and common rooms as rooms for movement and for gathering. To do this, place the common rooms to form a chain, or loop, so that it becomes possible to walk from room to room – and so that private rooms open directly off these public rooms. In every case, give this indoor circulation from room to room a feeling of great generosity, passing in a wide and ample loop around the house, with views of fires and great windows.” (Page 631). I agree with this – corridors are sometimes necessary but they’re also often a waste of space.
Page 639: “Place the main stair in a key position, central and visible. Treat the whole staircase as a room (or if it is outside, as a courtyard). Arrange it so that the stair and the room are one, with the stair coming down around one or two walls of the room. Flare out the bottom of the stair with open windows or balustrades and with wide steps so that the people coming down the stair become part of the action in the room while they are on the stair, and so that people below will naturally use the stair for seats.” Ever watched a movie where people in a posh house are having a conversation while some of them are sitting or standing on a nice staircase, and secretly wished for such a nice room? Yeah, they don’t make staircases like that anymore – in most modern houses I’ve seen, the main stairs are only as wide as they need to be and are only intended for climbing, and tend to be part of hallways rather than rooms. The stairways we want are in a room, are not blocked off halfway up by part of the second floor, and have a flared bottom that invites sitting and also is convenient for heading to and from the stairs in a variety of directions.
Page 646: “Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty, and make other areas darker, to increase the contrast.” Hell yeah. I can’t say I often see cases where lighting is done horribly wrong, but this makes so much sense that it should be kept firmly in mind when designing your lighting.
Page 657: “Sleeping to the East: This is one of the patterns people most often disagree with. However, we believe they are mistaken.” It goes on to make the case that being awakened by sunlight and having the sleeping place dark in the evening is probably good for our health, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I can’t put it into practice because of the timing requirements of the lifestyle I’m currently in, but I would like to give it a try some day, like when I’m retired or self-employed.
Pattern 140, “Private Terrace on the Street”, on page 667 presents a surprisingly simple bit of landscaping that can increase your privacy in your yard and your front room: Raise the the base ground level of your yard a foot or two above street level, and then add a low fence to that. The net effect is that your eye level will be above the fence and above street level so you can see what’s going on, but the fence will be at or above eye level for pedestrians and drivers, so they won’t have as good a view of you.
Page 734: “The experience of settled work is a prerequisite for peace of mind in old age. Yet our society undermines this experience by making a rift between working life and retirement, and between workplace and home.” Yes. To me, a joyful retirement means getting to work on what I want, when I want – not just sitting around or traveling to kill time. A home for a happy old person is one that has space to be creative, not a box where you wait to die.
Page 834: “Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them.” Very important. In almost all the homes I’ve seen that have big bay windows off the living room, they’re ignored and unused, and the windows are kept closed. They tend to be set up such that opening the big windows reduces your privacy too much, and most people organize their living rooms around the TV so there’s no room left for a comfy reading chair by the window.
Rule 196: Corner Doors (page 904): “The success of a room depends to a great extent on the position of the doors. If the doors create a pattern of movement which destroys the places in the room, the room will never allow people to be comfortable. […] Except in very large rooms, a door only rarely makes sense in the middle of a wall. It does in an entrance room, for instance, because this room gets its character essentially from the door. But in most rooms, especially small ones, put the doors as near the corners of the room as possible. If the room has two doors, and people move through it, keep both doors at one end of the room.” I think this makes a lot of sense – you can’t really get settled in a room if other people are always walking through your space, regardless of what you’re doing.
Another problem that I’ve noticed with current Western house design, which touches on several of these patterns, is that the main entrance is often unused. This is especially true on the prairies – people use the kitchen door, garage door or back door for entering and exiting and almost never use the main front entrance because it doesn’t serve their practical needs. Any home design where a major feature is unused is a major failure because it fails to consider the needs of its occupants.
The Panopticon is here, and it’s us
You may have heard about some so-called riots that occurred in Vancouver recently, following the Stanley Cup playoffs. What I found interesting about this event is that there was no need for police surveillance to identify the people committing acts of vandalism. The crowd did it. Almost everyone carries some form of digital camera these days; millions of photos and videos were taken that evening, some of them by the vandals themselves.
Many of the people who were there were displeased by the actions of the rioters and were only too happy to post their photos on public websites and share them with the police in order to help identify the wrongdoers. Some of the perpetrators were positively identified, named in public, and themselves and their families shamed. They squirmed uncomfortably in the public spotlight. Some of them dug themselves in deeper by making stupid comments in response. I can’t help but think that the repercussions of all this for those who were identified will dog them for some time, and though that seems good in some cases, in others it might be unfair. Will some kids find it difficult to get a job just because they happened to be caught in a photo with someone much worse?
But what disturbs me about this sort of public self-surveillance is that I kind of approve of it, at least as exercised during the riot. I would much rather have random strangers taking pictures of each other and me than have the police taking pictures of them and me. I find this hard to reconcile with my self-image as a rabid privacy advocate, though that was already somewhat in conflict with my photographer status. What I don’t want to see happen is people using this sort of data to fuel vigilante justice.
Oh, and: This is a hell of a lot cheaper than the British solution of having manned surveillance cameras every five feet.
A cow-orker showed me this ten gigapixel composite photo of downtown Vancouver. It’s really nice. But if you zoom right in, you can easily recognize people driving cars in the foreground, and you can see into hundreds of living rooms in the apartments and condos downtown in the City of Glass. While this is all perfectly legal (and as a photographer I’m glad it’s so), it does sort of bother me. What if someone in one of those cars was not supposed to be there at that time? What if someone in one of those living rooms was caught doing something embarassing? If it were me taking that picture, I would have blurred out all the faces and license plates, and checked the condo windows.
And indeed I have done and will do something similar; I sometimes record timelapse movies of my road trips from the dashboard of my vehicle. Before I show anyone the finished movie, I go through and blur out all recognizable faces and license plates in the video. It’s a ton of work, but I feel compelled to do it out of respect for peoples’ privacy, even though I’m not legally required to do it. I would hate for someone to get into trouble because I happened to document their presence at some particular coordinates in space-time.
I follow some people on Twitter who habitually post “checkin” messages when they arrive at favorite stores or restaurants. They use services like Yelp and Foursquare to do this, and it only takes a moment to do with smartphone integration. These messages arrive more or less instantly, and usually contain the address and website of the place they’re at. So right there I can correlate a person’s location at that point in time and their shopping or dining preferences – and since Twitter has an API, I could potentially do that automatically for large numbers of people and perhaps discover some interesting patterns.
It’d be a great stalker tool – find out where your special someone likes to go and what days and times of day they tend to go there – and get notification possibly in time to actually find them. I think the actual intended application (or selling point, anyway) is that it could let friends discover each others’ presence nearby and get together for company, and that’s great, but that effect seems, in my perception, tiny in comparison to the potential marketing fallout (somebody is gathering this demographic data, I guarantee). I won’t go so far as to say it’s an invasion of privacy since posting these checkin messages is voluntary, but it still makes me a little uneasy.
Satellite and aerial photographic maps. I love them a bunch, but if you have a unique vehicle everyone in the world now knows where you park it, and if you have something to hide on your property then you’d better make sure it’s concealed from the air too.
The recent Canada Post strike forced me to switch to paying my bills online. I love it. It’s quicker and more convenient, and no more messing around with paper records – I can get my bills already in PDF form rather than having to scan & shred them later. My bank already knows who I give money to, but now they know it in a much more automated way. It wouldn’t be hard for someone on the inside to make and secretly sell a list of everyone who has sent money to Organization X. It doesn’t matter that they’re not allowed to do that, because once it’s done the potential damage is enormous. And how about security? I now have accounts on a lot more websites – accounts that contain important personal information. More passwords means more risk of cracker stealing my identity and selling it – and while I minimize that by making all payments through my bank’s website, their security is actually among the worst – imagine not allowing passwords longer than 8 characters!
Social networks. Especially FaceBook. They are useful and I use them; they help me relocate old friends and keep in touch with current ones, and are a great source of interesting news. They also encourage us to share personal information about ourselves. The selling point is that it helps us facilitate our interactions with friends and strangers, and it does, but there’s demographic gold in them thar hills. You better believe someone is collecting and selling it and someone else is correlating it all.
Which leads to targeted advertising. I hate advertising passionately, but why?
- It’s trying to get my money.
- It’s often very repetitive; they’re always trying to sell me things I already know exist or that I could easily discover if I had a need for them.
- It doesn’t work anyway; they’re almost always trying to sell me something I don’t want.
But the reason marketers collect demographic information is in order to target their advertising – make it so people see ads that are more likely to be of interest to them, thus increasing sales and increasing the effectiveness of the advertising dollar.
But what I recently realized is that targeted advertising, if done right, actually eliminates all three of the above annoyances. If the ads that are presented to be really are selected based on my interests, then (3) they might try to sell me something I actually do want, (2) they might inform me of a product I didn’t know existed and therefore (1) make me glad to spend the money.
So targeted advertising isn’t really a big objection to demographic data collection any more, at least for me; if I must be subjected to advertising, this at least increases its utility. But that still leaves the disturbing and difficult to predict correlations that might pop out of all that poorly protected data. I don’t actually know what they might be, but I fear the worst. Suppose the police state to the south or our own dear nanny state demands access to that data and starts scrutinizing people based on suspicions arising from the correlations they find there? If you buy a lot of gardening supplies and household cleaning products, that must mean you’re a terra-ist, right?
I’m kind of jealous of kids growing up today in the world of ubiquitous digital cameras. I have only spotty photographic records of my childhood, and no audio or video recordings from back then. Without those memory aids most of my youthful memories are lost – few memories without photo backup have survived in my aging brain. While today’s children will be subject to many more humiliating displays of baby photos by parents to their prospective girl/boyfriends, I think they’ll find as they get older that the value of having the non-embarrassing memory aids more than compensates for it. Of course, there are some extreme examples…
No, I’m not approaching a conclusion of any sort here. Just tossing out some things that have been on my rabid privacy-advocate mind lately. I’ve had more occasion than usual lately to ponder issues of privacy and surveilance, and just thought I’d share some of those ponderings.
Wait. I don’t have a conclusion, but I do sort of have a summarizing feeling: The rapid growth of personal data collection, detection technology and ubiquitous digital cameras, combined with the rapid growth of data correlation and automated recognition capabilities, puts us in an era of rapidly accelerating erosion of privacy. So far it’s not enough to really alarm me, and in a few ways it has benefited me, but I worry that maybe my lack of alarm a stupid “frog in warming water” mistake on my part. I just hope we don’t all find ourselves in a bad place one day because of this.
TED round 3
More interesting talks:
Neuroscience:
Kwabena Boahen on a computer that works like the brain – Detailed comparison between transistors and neural ion channels, with application to brain enhancement.
Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us – Hell yes. More awareness like this please!
Sociology:
Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs – Basically a rant about American laziness, but the story is interesting. There is some truth to his conclusion but I think he’s over-romanticizing.
Ian Dunbar on dog-friendly dog training – Magical truth-saying! I’m glad to see some progress in the science of dog training.
Deb Roy: The birth of a word – Some really interesting data visualizations here, and he makes me envy (somewhat) kids growing up today in the world of ubiquitous digital photography. While it means having evidence to suppress, it also means having great memory aids.
Christopher “moot” Poole: The case for anonymity online – I don’t think he really makes much of a case for anything – indeed he talks about some things that could be called invasion of privacy. But it is interesting to hear the back-story of a little-understood web phenomenon.
Malcolm McLaren: Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture – Long but good. At first it’s not clear where he’s going, but it comes together when he gets to his art school story. He’s on about one of the things that really bothers me about western pop culture.
Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now – I love her visualization of the mass of the data we carry around with us.
Environmentalism:
James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss – Standard-issue environmental message aside, the time-lapse movies of glaciers moving are worth watching.
Michael Pollan gives a plant’s-eye view – A nice counterpoint to the typical view of man exploiting nature.
Technology:
David Pogue on cool phone tricks – Grab bag of useful clues about cell phone services.
Physics:
Aaron O’Connell: Making sense of a visible quantum object – Science!
Nanotechnology:
Angela Belcher: Using nature to grow batteries – Progress!
Law:
Philip K. Howard: Four ways to fix a broken legal system – “You can’t run a society by the lowest common denominator.” HELL YEAH!
Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity – Basically about remix culture versus IP law.
Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom – A great rant about how mindless rule-following and poorly constructed incentives have led to some of the social and legal insanity we suffer today.
Miscellaneous:
Benjamin Wallace on the price of happiness – Gets to my problem with a lot of “gourmet” culture, namely mistaking attributes like rare, special and expensive for the attribute “good”.
TED second helping
Some more TED talks I’ve enjoyed recently.
Futurism:
Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us – Basically a reiteration of the first part of his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. He lays out his case for the evolution of technology having always been an exponential process, and the near-future implications of that.
Kevin Kelly on how technology evolves – A good follow-on to Kurzweil’s talk. Here the case is made (something Kurzweil also claimed) that machines are on their way to becoming the 7th kingdom of life, and the progress of technology is actually us bootstrapping the next “meta” layer of evolution.
Psychology:
Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself – Aha. I always suspected something like this might be true, and I’ve seen the effects in myself. Good to know. My world domination plans are now extra-secret.
Michael Shermer on strange beliefs – Hillarious!
Srikumar Rao: Plug into your hard-wired happiness – A better restatement of happiness advice I’ve heard before.
Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice – Some interesting insight into the glut of similar products we have today and why it might be going a little overboard.
Jeff Bezos: What matters more than your talents – Mostly the standard exhortation to do what you love, but his story about his grandmother really hit home for me. Being clever instead of kind is one of my major failings that I feel has been getting worse lately.
Diane Benscoter on how cults rewire the brain – In talking about her experiences with the Moonies she makes the interesting point that many humans, especially young ones, have weak memetic immune systems. This is something we can fix and, I think, are fixing.
Robert Sapolsky: The uniqueness of humans – Some really interesting discussion about behavioral similarities and differences between humans and other animals.
Neuroscience:
Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – This stuff has come a long way. I remember one of my classmates when I was taking electronics in college was trying to develop something like this, but filtering out environmental EM noise was a major problem for him. That makes these recent developments more impressive for me.
Al Seckel says our brains are mis-wired – A bunch of new optical illusions I hadn’t seen before, as well as some old favorites.
Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep – Yup yup. I also discovered the hard way that sleep is grossly underrated.
Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing – Damn! This is probably the most personally relevant of all the talks I’ve watched. This guy just saved me a bunch of time in my line of thinking about the nature of mind. Plus, I want to work on what he’s doing.
Photography:
Miru Kim’s underground art – She seems shy on stage, but obviously she’s got some guts to do what she does. Great idea though, and I’m not liking it just because of the nudity – I also like urban archaeology photos.
Transhumanism:
Dean Kamen: The emotion behind invention – A bit drawn out and touchy-feely, but the video really drives home the point that cyborgism is here today. Not sure why Rose Tyler’s father is sitting on the stage though.
Biotechnology:
Paul Root Wolpe: It’s time to question bio-engineering – Wow, lots of stuff here I didn’t realize was going on. Interesting questions come out of this, as well as fantastic possibilities.
Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney – Cool! If this ends up working, no more need to grow clones to cannibalize for replacement parts!
Environmentalism:
Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental ‘heresies’ – Tons of clue in here, especially about nuclear power. He also changed my position on GM foods a good bit, though Monsanto is still the face of evil.
Richard Preston on the giant trees – I’ve always liked giant trees, and this talk adds some new information I didn’t know about the redwoods.
Physics:
Brian Greene on string theory – Good general introduction, with visualizations.
HCI:
Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology – Impressive prototype demos, but these things never seem to materialize in production – I think there are still some major problems needing to be solved.
Seth Godin: This is broken – A rant about an older form of defective-by-design.
General:
Becky Blanton: The year I was homeless – A short but interesting recount of a personal experience.
Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering – I’m glad someone still cares about teaching children useful stuff.
Stewart Brand on the Long Now – Interesting discussion of the search for the location to place their 10,000-year clock.
George Dyson at the birth of the computer – Some amusing computer history anecdotes I hadn’t heard before.
