Happy Mind: The Philosophy and Science of Happiness

Richard Power describes the world in 2030 as he imagined it would be in his novel Mistica, the first of a planned science fiction trilogy which attempts to anticipate developments during the 21st Century.

 

Domestic environment

The world in 2030 was in many ways unchanged since the end of the 20th Century. Most people lived in houses built before 2000; roads, pavements and gardens had changed little; tables, chairs, beds, cutlery and flooring were often several decades old; food was essentially the same. Of course novel products were available. New houses could be assembled from light prefabricated units, easily replaced or re-arranged if a change in architectural design was needed. Furniture could also be made from lighter, softer, more flexible materials, or seeded with useful devices such as network sensors or local information stores. As well as traditional food you could experiment with artificial meat or alcohol-free wine. But these novelties were not yet majority tastes: by and large people kept to cheaper traditional products that worked almost as well.

 

Despite these points of continuity, time-travellers from the late 20th Century would have been bewildered by a standard estate house in 2030. After approaching along a familiar garden path, they would have seen no way of entering the building or of attracting the attention of the owner. There was no hole for a key, usually no bell, usually no handle on the door. Instead there were sensors, probably hidden from view; while walking towards the front door the visitor could have been seen on any screen in the house, and an agent would announce the new arrival through a tone or a spoken message. Intercoms with low quality sound were common in the last century, but our time-travellers would have been startled by the natural quality of the voice. They would also not have realised that the speaker might be a computerised agent; nor would they have understood the importance of speaking in order to identify themselves to the network.

Inside the house, the most obvious change was the disappearance of box-like devices with buttons and dials, such as radios, televisions, music centres, telephones, and personal computers. The kitchen still had its boxes - its washing machine, cooker, and refrigerator - although these had lost their manual controls unless they were fairly ancient designs. But the other rooms had no bulky electronic devices at all: merely a large flat screen on the wall, along with speakers and sensors placed unobtrusively in the walls or the furniture. In a corner of the spare room you might find a colour printer, and perhaps too a keyboard, but these devices were rapidly becoming obsolete as people learned to rely on dictation for input and direct viewing of the screen for output.

Domestic life in 2030 was a conversation with network services. Wherever you went in the house, discreet computerised agents sensed your needs, monitored your environment, and awaited your instructions. In a modernised house, doors slid open as you approached, and a brief spoken command sufficed to open a window, pull down the blinds, run the bath water, or turn off the oven. You could give these commands from within your home, or from your office, or from the park as you took a stroll, or from your hotel in Majorca. In your absence, the house remained under constant observation: like thoughtful domestic servants, the agents quietly turned off the oven that you had left on by mistake, or closed the bedroom window to keep the rain out.

During the early part of the 21st Century, the change that most affected everyday life was the growth of the telecommunications network. Before 2000 a network existed, but it was small in scale and clumsily realised, focussing the attention of users as much on the medium as the message. By 2030 every room with the standard equipment could be linked to any monitored public space, or any private space for which the viewer had access rights. The image was clear, firm, and immediate, providing an experience almost equivalent to looking through a window. In addition, the user had access to vast libraries of documents, art, recorded music, films, personal broadcasts, and computer software. All these were controlled and navigated through a mixture of conversation and visual indexing services. The skills required by users were more like social conventions than technical procedures.

Little by little, the digital world had become normal. When the first houses were built they must have been dismal places, cramped and dark, useful only as a means of shelter. Their owners would have been shocked at the idea that one day people would spend most of their time indoors. Similarly, it was assumed in the 20th Century that the digital world offered only an impoverished experience, one that would always remain inferior to reality. By 2030 this had ceased to be an issue, especially among the young. People used digital and real communication interchangeably, often using videophone to connect two rooms in the same house - not because they were too lazy to walk along a corridor, but because it made no difference.

Social life

There were three main developments during the early decades of the 21st Century.   

 

1. High quality videophone enormously enhanced the potential for remote communication. It became possible to develop a satisfying social circle spanning the whole world, while remaining in your own home.
   

2. For the first time, the notion of a social relationship with a machine was beginning to make sense. Computerised agents could produce and understand speech well enough to conduct a simple conversation. Young children, or unsophisticated adults, were sometimes unaware of whether they were conversing with an agent, through a simulated image, or with a real person through an image relayed by videophone.

 

3. The aftermath of the catastrophic plague in 2011 had stratified society sharply according to access levels. Many people lived on enclosed estates with restricted access. Membership of your home estate might give you access rights to confederated estates, e.g. neighbouring estates with an Undernet link. However, the underclass, including anyone convicted of a serious offence, was obliged to live in the so-called `free' or `unrestricted' zones, where crime and poverty were rife, and public services were minimal.

Videophone

By 2030 the ultimate tendency of videophone was clear, even if it had not been completely realised. It was to link two people, located anywhere in the world, in an audiovisual experience equivalent to conversing from opposite ends of a room. As screens became larger, people envisaged a time, perhaps a decade hence, when a high resolution screen would cover a whole wall, which thus became like a glass partition through which you could join your living room with any other room in the world.

The final requirement on videophone was that its cost should be negligible. Again, this aim had by no means been achieved in 2030. The telecommunications network, even expanding by a multiple of 1000 every decade, was still unable to deliver robust high-quality videophone cheaply. Most families had to restrict their usage, more or less as a family in the 1990s had to economise on non-local telephone calls. However, cheap rates were available at lower visual resolutions, allowing even the poorest people to spend several hours a day talking over remote links.

Services based on videophone transformed many lives. Rather as documents and pictures had been indexed during the early years of the World Wide Web, and thus made accessible to navigation, so the social world acquired a virtual geography. As a participant in society you could put yourself on the map by disclosing details of your life to a club site; this would allow other club members to locate you, perhaps through a search keyed by special interests, to study your profile, and to request a meeting. The range of social groups was so vast that almost anyone could find satisfying company.

This new social medium had many advantages. No longer constrained by physical proximity, you could select companions from a much larger pool. You could investigate people before meeting them, so that social exploration no longer frittered hours of your precious free time in unproductive small talk. Finally, the medium was comparatively safe: you might suffer psychological abuse, but you could not be mugged or sexually assaulted. The timid could join clubs where anti-social behaviour was monitored, and where the real names and addresses of members were withheld; even your voice and physical appearance could be masked by audiovisual reprocessing, thus allowing full anonymity.

Although larger social groups assembled on party sites, videophone worked best as a means of linking two rooms. Sometimes two families joined their living rooms on special occasions like Christmas Day, many conversations taking place simultaneously over the link. But the prime use was for intimate, one-on-one interaction, allowing a degree of self-revelation and social exploration that had not been possible before. Inevitably sex clubs flourished. In anonymous clubs that supported image reprocessing, even the ugliest man or woman could experience the delight of making a sexual impact, perhaps uncovering an aptitude for flirting that they had never suspected.

Agents

The earliest speech interfaces, widespread by 2010, allowed users to choose among a set of well-defined alternatives by reading the desired option out loud. When this method became reliable, most people preferred it to point and click: it required a little less effort, and freed the user to walk around the room while viewing a display on a large screen. The technology of speech production was simpler, but there was less need for it: complex information could be assimilated more easily through vision. However, there were occasions in which a brief message or a short list of options could be read out without losing time or overloading memory, and so a conversation between user and system might develop, removing the need even for a screen. In this way, people began to interact with their media centres even in rooms that usually had no screen, such as the kitchen or bathroom.

By 2010 speech recognition could provide fairly reliable support for search applications using key words or simple questions. Someone wishing to listen to a comedy program from the BBC archives while preparing lunch could recite a series of attributes or names, obtaining in response a short list of options matching the requirements. You could always obtain the date, or the time, or a weather forecast, or a news bulletin, on spoken request; these options were so common that they could be expressed by almost any normal question. Requests to dictionaries or encyclopaedias were also fairly reliable. However, any more subtle request, perhaps depending on context, had to be met by an apology. While making a cake, there was no point in asking the media centre whether to add more flour: it was not able to monitor what you were doing, through vision as well as speech recognition, and to work out your objectives or your progress in fulfilling them.

Still, even in 2010, people found it natural to conceptualise their spoken interactions with a media centre as a conversation with another agent. They preferred this agent to have a characteristic voice and physiognomy. Just as in the 1990s you configured the layout and colour of your desktop, so in 2010 you configured the gender, appearance, voice, and even the personal manner of your agent. You could choose between a chirpy girl with a Cockney accent and a man who sounded like a Cambridge professor with an ironic sense of humour. Children could communicate with animals or their favourite media idols, so that your personal style became a marketable commodity, a type of intellectual property. The agent's voice could be accompanied by a face, typically placed in a window in the corner of the screen.

Once rudimentary conversation with agents was established, it improved gradually, year by year, rather like a child's general knowledge and command of language. There were no sudden breakthroughs -- the agent's response on Monday could not be distinguished from its response on Tuesday -- yet by 2030 it was already difficult to tell whether you were talking with an agent, or with another person over videophone. Of course, agents were not designed to deceive. Unless especially modified, an agent would not stutter, or correct itself in mid-sentence, or make any other of the typical performance errors of human speech. Its consistently pleasant personal style, and its smooth delivery, marked out the agent as non-human. But the other differences were subtle, and hard to detect unless you were expert. Agents were particularly clumsy at perceiving and reacting to social context, especially teasing and humour. However, since many humans were little better, this deficiency often went unnoticed.

In short, by 2030 people could envisage a future in which agents were incorporated into the social worlds of humans. Already, some people relied on agents for company, even though their responses were still stereotyped. Young children loved interacting with animals; socially inadequate people often preferred agents to humans precisely because of their simplicity and reliability; and flirting with simulated partners was the ultimate in customised sex. Even with audiovisual reprocessing, sexual encounters with humans were frustrating for those wishing to act out special fantasies: partners had their own wishes which rarely coincided with your own. However, an agent could be configured to behave in any way you desired, and would moreover appear to enjoy doing so. A few bishops condemned sex with agents; politicians solemnly debated whether the service should be available to children under 14; but in private few people could resist a pleasure that was so safe and reliable.

Access

At the turn of the century, centre-left governments were in power in most advanced countries, especially in Europe. Having discarded ideas linked to communism, such as state control over the economy, left-wing parties appealed to the public desire for good social services, for instance in health, education and travel, while no longer threatening those who dreamed of becoming rich. Suddenly marginalised, the right needed a new ideology. Appeals to fear and greed were pointless when Soviet Communism had collapsed and all major left-wing parties had embraced capitalism. Sensing a new public mood, theorists of the right gravitated towards the concept of local autonomy: of allowing small communities to set their own social rules. This was offered as an alternative to the current tendency of centralising the legal framework, through institutions such as the Council of Europe, which promoted the European convention on human rights.

By focussing on local autonomy, right-wing parties replaced the old public vs private debate with a new struggle between global and local regulation. Under the centre-left orthodoxy, New Labour and its European counterparts aimed to create a continent where people could move freely, enjoying not only a common currency but common rights and services. By and large people continued to support these freedoms, but there was also disquiet that a centralised council could impose social rules on local communities. Country dwellers resented regulations on hunting. Residents in wealthy estates were uncomfortable that their streets should remain open to all visitors.

After the shocking plague in 2011, which culled 5-10% of the male population in every European country, this sporadic discontent became a mass movement that swept the centre-left out of power. With intruders now seen as a source of disease as well as crime, the middle classes seized on the new menace of plague as a pretext for protecting their estates against the underclass. Like the city states of Renaissance Italy, they erected walls as barriers to unwanted visitors, re-siting schools and shops so that excursions outside the estate were rarely necessary. Within protected estates, crime rates among adults fell almost to zero. In Britain, the Conservative government quickly deregulated penalties for theft and other minor crimes, allowing stricter estates to evict families whose children were convicted of stealing or damaging property. Some estates went as far as banning cars, which had to be kept in a multi-storey park inside the main gate. Parents could once more allow their small children to roam freely around the village.

Of course protected estates were not entirely novel. They had been available to the very rich in New York or California since the 1930s. A block of prime apartments in London or New York during the 1990s typically had a doorman who would check through any visitors. Security might be lax, but it was sufficient to deter yobs and petty criminals. What changed after the plague was that protection gradually extended throughout the middle class. By 2020, almost everyone with money and a clean record had joined an estate, leaving the poor sharing the so-called `free' or `unrestricted' zones with the convicted criminals.

Having built their castles, the middle classes developed new objectives. They wanted security without such a dramatic loss of mobility. Of course the information highway helped: it opened up a window on the outside world, allowing people to work and play through remote access with no danger of violence or germs. However, there were obvious reasons why a family on estate A might wish to visit their friends or relations on estate B. Provided that the entry requirements for the two estates were similar, such a visit posed little risk to either estate. Fraternal agreements between neighbouring estates therefore became common, allowing anyone from one estate to visit anyone from the other estate without applying for entry permission. Such arrangements led to a pressure for easy travel from one estate to the other -- preferably avoiding the perils of the intervening free zone. Driving through the free zone was fairly safe, and children could be sent on taxis or coaches guaranteed not to admit passengers until reaching the haven of the other estate. However, the ideal solution was to bypass the free zone altogether through underground. The 2020s saw a massive expansion of the underground network -- the so-called `Undernet' -- serving not only to link neighbouring estates, but to transport people and goods to individual houses.

By 2030, every modern house on a modern estate was linked to the Undernet for goods delivery. A lift would bring up food, clothes, and other purchases, which could be collected from a cupboard in the hall or the kitchen. In the same way, packages of rubbish could be removed, or dirty clothes could be sent to the laundry. These facilities were standard; but a well-off family went further, investing in a link that allowed transport of people or furniture. After taking the lift to the basement, you could travel in a personal carriage along an automatic underground railway, sitting in a comfortable small room connected to the outside world through the usual Internet services. Of course this facility was expensive, and thus affordable only to a minority -- comparable perhaps to the proportion that used first-class rail travel during the 20th century. But the trend was clear: it would not be long before a full Undernet connection to your home was a normal expectation.

Throughout the world, society was now sharply polarised: either you lived on an estate, or you were condemned to the free zone. In addition to this major division, there were different levels within the estate community; these grew historically from the agreements among estates, which led to the formation of confederations. Essentially five levels were acknowledged, with some additional refinements to the top category. Estates with an access criterion of A were the most exclusive, normally implying great wealth or social distinction (e.g. a title); a grade of A* distinguished the crème de la crème. The fairly rich had a grade of B, which sufficed for entry to most good restaurants and hotels. C was the commonest grade, representing an average middle-class family, while D and E usually implied a recently established estate still tainted with its previous connection to the free zone. Any community in the free zone wishing to constitute an estate was allowed to join the general confederation of estates, with an E rating, provided it could be shown that access rights were reliably protected, and that members had committed no major offences, and no minor offences during the last 8 years. Your rating determined your access rights to other estates: a C could freely visit a D, but a D could not visit a C without applying for special permission. A rating of F was sometimes applied to the free zone, but this was essentially a ruse to disguise the vast divide between the free zone and even the E-rated estates.

Politics and Economics

Militarily the United States remained the dominant power, owing to its nuclear arsenal and its continuing lead in information technology. Although the European and Asian Unions had the wealth and technical ability to mount a challenge, they saw no advantage in doing so; it was easier to shelter under the American umbrella, leaving to others the delicate work of opening up any cultures that were still closed to modern trends, especially within Islam.

As the European Union expanded and flourished during the early years of the 21st century, it became a model for other continents. Turning a blind eye to ideological differences, the Japanese persuaded the Chinese and the tiger economies to set up a free trade zone, with common rules and eventually a common currency, to promote a more reliable expansion of Asian capitalism without the irrational investment policies that had provoked the collapse in the late 1990s. Africa remained the poorest continent, but the decade from 2000-2010 saw a surge in the tourist industry, along with a new sector of small digital businesses, offering cheap coding and data-entry services on lines already popular in India and Russia.

After the plague, the distinction between the developed countries and the third world became less significant. As the estate movement spread, the rich and poor worlds split up into little fragments, covering the earth's surface like a checker board. In every country there were white squares and black squares: the difference was that while in Europe perhaps half the squares were white, in Africa most were black. Of course this did not represent a dramatic change; even during the 1990s there were parts of the United States that resembled an undeveloped country, while every African or Latin American country had its rich elite. However, the restrictions on mobility now worked more effectively to isolate rich from poor. Immigration controls no longer applied to countries, but to protected areas. An African man from a C-rated estate could move freely around the world to areas with an access criterion of C or less, but would have to apply for special permission to enter a B-rated estate in his own country. Immigration controls only really affected people from the free zone: an African with no estate rating would have great difficulty travelling to another continent.

Cheap Internet access transformed economic life. Just as even the poorest families found ways of viewing television at the end of the 20th century, so unemployed people in the free zone managed somehow to connect to the Internet. In this way, bright children could escape from apparently hopeless backgrounds by educating themselves and offering information services. Companies quickly saw the potential of exploiting the intelligent poor in Russia, India and Africa. Tricky programming tasks were posted in open competitions: if a clever 12-year-old girl in Nigeria managed to outperform the opposition, she could earn a small remittance, insignificant to the company, but very significant to her. In such ingenious ways, companies could get their work done almost for nothing, evading any minimum wage legislation in their own economic areas. Subcontracting among the labour pool became common: an Indian boy might act as an intermediary between the company and the competing programmers, testing each program and choosing the best. The company would then pay the Indian boy, who would take his cut before paying the Nigerian girl who had written the actual code.

With increasing robotisation of factories, the industrial working class shrank to under 5% of the workforce, a level comparable with the agricultural sector. By 2020, almost all work belonged to the sector of information and social services, and could be performed through a videophone link. As agent technology developed, it became obvious that this sector too would soon come under threat. Already in 2030, a routine enquiry, purchase or booking could be accomplished by talking to an agent. Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals saw the writing on the wall. Agents were not yet reliable enough to be entrusted with medical or legal advice, except over the most routine problems, but every year their performance ratings advanced. The precise evaluation of agents had the embarrassing consequence that it depended upon a comparison with human professionals, whose performance had to be assessed by the same yardstick. This revealed enormous variations in ability among the professionals, many of whom were less reliable than agents.

In 2030, human skills and creativity still dominated many professions, and there were still influential people who claimed that they always would. However, the consensus had changed. To anyone not blinded by hubris, it was obvious that humans would eventually be overtaken by agents in every field, from routine legal work to the most advanced scientific research. Economists had been forced to abandon the desperate hope that unemployment could be defeated by education and training. Henceforth it was capital, not labour, that would produce wealth. Ownership of land and physical resources still mattered, but even more significant was ownership of intellectual property, including intellectual property that had been generated by computerised agents rather than people. With most income generated by capital, the distribution of wealth became crucial, and the phrase `minimum wealth' entered the political vocabulary. Left-wing politicians argued that every person should receive, as a basic human right, a portion of wealth sufficient to generate a minimum income. Holding this wealth would be a duty as well as a right: depleting your minimum capital by consumption would be forbidden.

The issue was not yet critical, yet the lines of future political battles had been drawn. Minimum wealth implied a massive shift in ownership of capital from the estate-based middle classes to the underclass in the free zone. This could only be contemplated through a tiny wealth tax through which the capital of each citizen could be gradually built up. Initially, the level of minimum wealth would be too low to generate useful income. Exploiting this fact, opponents ridiculed the idea, pointing out the absurdity of preventing hungry people from spending their allotted capital on food. Right-wing propaganda in the free zone presented minimum wealth as a restriction on your right to spend your own money as you saw fit.