Political Issues on the Horizon, Part 1

Americans went to the polls last Tuesday and, for the third time in as many election cycles, delivered a sharp rebuke to the incumbent party. No doubt concerned that the economic recovery seems to be stagnating and that unemployment remains high, the voters gave the House of Representatives back to the Republican Party. In the wake of the midterm elections in the United States, this is a good time to consider political issues on the horizon.

I generally shy away from making specific predictions about politics or the economy. Voters are fickle and economies are unpredictable, especially compared to the relatively simple trends that scientific and technological developments usually follow. However, I think we can at least speculate on the types of issues that are likely to become important, if not the precise way that they will be resolved by the voters and the government. In my next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some of the political issues that I think will grow in importance over the next decade, as well as a couple of oft-cited (and perhaps overblown) issues which may soon fade from the American political landscape.

Privacy. For the past couple decades, whenever a political gasbag has asked a judicial appointee about his or her views on “privacy,” it has typically been a code word for abortion. However, I believe privacy will soon become a political issue in its own right, spurred on by technological advances which encroach more and more on our privacy and demand access to sensitive information. Already, there have been court cases to determine if police can tag an automobile with a GPS tracker without a warrant, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is to come. RFID chips, which will soon replace bar codes on products, will be embedded in nearly everything we buy, allowing for constant surveillance and tracking of products (and by extension, of customers) from their point of manufacture to their point of disposal.

Additionally, we are probably no more than a decade from the point where sensors and face-recognition technology are commonplace in many public establishments, as in Minority Report, making it virtually impossible to step out of our own homes without appearing in a database somewhere. In the slightly more distant future (probably 10-20 years), insectoid-sized robots are on the horizon. DARPA is already designing them for use in military and spying applications, but eventually their spread to the general public is a virtual certainty as the cost of computing drops, allowing for practically anyone to monitor practically anyone.

In light of all of these emerging technologies, some erosion of our privacy seems almost inevitable. The extent of it remains open to debate. Will our governments pass privacy laws regulating how all of this information can be obtained and used? Or will our governments be part of the problem? Only time will tell.

Bioethics. The first decade of this century saw two important bioethical debates in the United States and Europe. In the United States, stem cell research was hotly debated in the first few years of the Bush presidency, but now seems to have decisively concluded in favor of scientific progress, as the huge benefits of stem cells become more obvious and the moral objections have fallen by the wayside. In Europe, the main bioethical debate of the past decade – genetically modified foods – is still ongoing. Many Europeans are concerned about the possibility of genetically modified foods wreaking unintentional havoc on the environment and public health. Although these fears do not have much scientific support, the controversy has nevertheless succeeded in quashing the industry in Europe, at least temporarily.

These are merely the first of many bioethical debates we will face in the 21^st century. Some will be relatively trivial. For example, concerns about athletes on steroids may soon give way to concerns about professional athletes with enhanced body parts. A few years ago, Tiger Woods opted to get superhuman 20/15 vision through Lasik surgery, and the range of upgrades available to those who can afford them will soon be much wider. If athletes are able to buy improved bodies, it will make it difficult for “natural” athletes to compete. Will we have separate leagues for enhanced athletes and natural athletes? Will we ban these superhuman enhancements entirely, and if so, what qualifies as a superhuman enhancement?

Other bioethical concerns will be much more profound, and the government will have to take a stand. For example, if the technology exists and is widely available to screen for genetic abnormalities, would it be child abuse to not tinker with a fetus’ genome to prevent birth defects? And if preventing birth defects is morally acceptable (indeed if it is the ONLY morally acceptable option), why not preventing other undesirable traits like ugliness, propensity to violence, or low intelligence? Where does one draw the line? Eugenics, long discredited due to its ties to Nazism, may make a comeback in a world of easy access to genetic therapy.

Many of the questions related to human augmentation and genetic engineering have no easy answer, and any government decision is bound to leave many people feeling morally queasy. Look for political parties to become increasingly divided along the lines of these bioethical questions, with conservatives preferring a more restrictive approach to avoid creating ghastly new moral quandaries, and liberals favoring a more open approach to improving humanity through reengineering our own biology.

To be continued in another blog post…

The Future of Privacy - Radical Openness

Generally, my visions of tomorrow are quite optimistic. But there is one area where I am decidedly a pessimist. The future of privacy seems bleak. Many of us who are relatively tech-savvy have already given up much of our privacy voluntarily for the sake of convenience, fun, or money. I am a member of a social network which tracks my every movement by allowing me to check in with my smartphone to nearly every location I visit. Another of my social networks allows me to publish my every thought in real time, as long as it doesn’t exceed 140 characters. A popular financial website requires that users turn over the passwords to their bank accounts, then analyzes the users’ financial habits. Nearly all young people belong to a social network which makes no secret of its desire to collect our personal information to mine the data.

Ten years ago, most people would have been shocked by these technologies. Who would have thought that the biggest threat to our privacy would come from us voluntarily giving up our information? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rightly received a lot of criticism by forcing Facebook users to publicly reveal their personal information by default, then claiming that Facebook was merely adapting to users’ declining expectations of privacy. Zuckerberg’s claim was certainly untrue – Facebook is one of the driving forces behind declining expectations of privacy, rather than merely a response to it – but his instinct is probably correct that users will tolerate more intrusions on their privacy once they are accustomed to it.

My fellow futurist blogger David Houle notes, “As technology advances, privacy declines.” I think this is unfortunately correct, and very little can be done to change it. Tech-savvy young people in developed countries certainly have less privacy than they did a decade ago, and are mostly OK with that. In the coming decades, society will have to radically redefine its notions of privacy. I imagine that there may come a time when it is no longer practical to expect to be able to travel anywhere without your visit ending up in an online database, perhaps publicly available to anyone who cares. In the not too distant future, there may be vast government or corporate databases of genomes and other biometric indicators from nearly everyone in the nation.

Does this mean that an Orwellian dictatorship is likely? I don’t think so. Chances are, people will be willing to adjust their privacy expectations downward for the sake of convenience, just as they do now for Facebook. It remains to be seen if lowered expectations of privacy will actually help dictatorships thrive. Repressive states are increasingly blocking the very same tools that are responsible for the declining expectations of privacy – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Foursquare. It seems that these governments view them more as tools for subversion than as useful ways to snoop on political opponents.

This past week, the US Senate voted to confirm Elena Kagan as the next Supreme Court Justice. Much of her testimony dealt with her constitutional views on the right to privacy. In the United States at the present time, this is mostly just a code phrase for a nominee’s views on abortion, but I think that the right to privacy will become a more important issue in its own right for future confirmation hearings. The Supreme Court will probably eventually need to define what the right to privacy entails, who it protects, and from whom it protects them.

In the legislature, stronger safeguards for privacy can help prevent the emergence of corporate Big Brothers. Google recently decided to withdraw from China instead of obeying China’s censorship laws or facilitating its eavesdropping on its citizens. As commendable as this is, most large corporations are not as civic-minded. Yahoo! has been known to turn over personal emails from political dissidents to dictatorships. A law modeled on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prevents US companies from infringing on their users’ privacy, wherever in the world they are located, would be a major step toward keeping Big Brother at bay. American companies would no longer have the excuse that they will be singled out for persecution if they refuse to participate in invasions of privacy by the governments of the countries in which they operate. Very few nations could feasibly ban every American company merely for obeying US laws.

Ultimately, government action and corporate good deeds can only slow the inevitable shift toward less privacy, and perhaps prevent some of its worst excesses. In the future, governments, corporations, and individuals can and will gain access to far more information about us than is currently available in the public domain. The totalitarianism of Big Brother probably isn’t going to happen…but hundreds of Little Brothers may be watching you soon, if they aren’t already.