Future Imperfect!
Our planet would be unrecognisable to someone who lived here during our great-grandfathers' time. The rate of change was slow to start with, beginning in the nineteenth century with inventions like the Morse code, steam engine, and steamship. It gathered pace in the early part of the twentieth century in a kind of arithmetical progression when, at first, the automobile, telephone, radio and television broadcasting, cinema, rail, electricity, and airplanes started transforming our lives.
Later, with genetically modified seeds, fax machines, and computers, this rate of change gathered pace. In the twenty-first century, in a world defined by the internet, mobile telephony, information technology, nanosciences, robotics, and genetics, it has become exponential.
Every technological change affects values, social norms, and ways of thinking. When it becomes too rapid, its obvious advantages notwithstanding, it disrupts established ways of thinking. In his seminal work "Homo Deus" (Harvill Secker, 2016), Yuval Noah Harari, an eminent Israeli intellectual, imagines a future conversation between doctor and patient that goes something like this:
Patient: Doctor, I am depressed today.
Doctor: Why?
Patient: I feel that I'm a failure at my job. I'm losing self-respect.
Doctor: What would you rather have?
Patient: I want the happiness that comes from success - a fat salary, a big bonus, and a quick promotion.
Doctor: 'Afraid you'll have to work very hard for that. Even then, you can't be sure you'll get it. Is it really worth it? I can assure you the same feeling of elation without your having to slog. Just pop in this pill once a day, and you'll be fine.
The young may see such dramatic changes in their lifetime! Longevity will increase as dysfunctional organs of the body would be replaceable, and almost every disease curable, through advances in genetic engineering. And you will die only when you've had enough of life, feeling! When scientists have already cloned a sheep in a lab, how much longer will it really take before they can clone a human being? Aldous Huxley, a profound English twentieth-century philosopher, in his "Brave New World" (1932), visualises a society that routinely decides on its requirements of different types of human beings (scientists, engineers, workers, etc.) and produces them accordingly in special labs. In the future, sex might be needed only for erotic pleasure.
What freedom of thought and speech can we expect to have in a society in which everyone believes only what they are conditioned to believe? Methods of manipulating thinking already exist and have polarised societies so sharply that people are ready to cancel anyone with a contrarian point of view. Governments, political parties, and business organisations will, in the future, further weaponise AI to sell products, win followers, and create enemies. It will be possible to make people believe that all human beings are equal, but also, when convenient, that some are more equal than others.
Our worst fears of George Orwell's anti-utopia (apropos: "Animal Farm," Secker and Warburg, 1945) and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (Secker and Warburg, 1949) may yet come true, even though he expressed his views many decades ago.
Today, we are already grappling with some of these problems. Some will descend upon us soon, some others in the long run. The time to debate them all has come!
(The writer was the Chief Commissioner of Income-tax and is the author of "The Moral Compass: Finding Balance and Purpose in an Imperfect World," Harper Collins India, 2022)
