 
Love and Money, Sex and Death

In the 21st Century

Louis Shalako

This Smashwords edition Copyright 2014 Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-1-927957-00-4

The following is a work of speculation. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. The author's moral right has been asserted.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Foreword

The Thought Police

Building a Better Brain

The Body Hackers

Robo-Coppage

Geoengineering

On Human Cloning

How Many Cyborgs Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

Sexual Robots

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

What is Virtual Currency?

About the Author

Love, Money, Sex and Death

Louis Shalako

Foreword

The following is a series of essays on the subject of ten moral and ethical dilemmas, all of which represent important questions that will be dominant in the early part the 21st century.

With extensive hyper-linking to outside sources the author experiments with stream-of-consciousness story-telling as well as a new presentation of observation, speculation and opinion, with results that are surprising, poignant, and relevant as the world stands poised on the brink of a new tomorrow. It was only a short time ago, when we were madly reading about the science-fiction, comic-book world we presently inhabit and the conversation is just beginning. Due to formatting constraints photo credits are listed at the end of the book.

Thank you for reading this hyper-text.

— Louis

The Thought Police

Thought police may not be too far off into the future, and oddly, time-cops as well. Read the following passage very carefully and you'll see they use the term 'future crime.'

(Cops are already solving crimes long in the past. They do it in the present moment, not by time-travel)

"The National Institute of Justice defines predictive policing as 'taking data from disparate sources, analyzing them and then using the results to anticipate, prevent and respond more effectively to future crime.' Some of these disparate sources include crime maps, traffic camera data, other surveillance footage and social media network analysis. But at what point does the possibility of a crime require intervention? Should someone be punished for a crime they are likely to commit, based on these sources? Are police required to inform potential victims?* How far in advance can crimes be forecasted?"

They also mention 'social media network analysis.' (See:  intelligence-gathering network.)

Preventive policing sort of ignores any presumption of privacy on the part of the individual.

There are those who will say, "Well, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

Let's extend that.

"If you aren't thinking anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about..."

This is the door the thought police come in, isn't it? They might even kick it in.

The future is already here, for we have had instances of crime prevention when cops get a tip that someone is threatening someone through the use of social media. If an arrest is made, a future crime may well have been prevented.

But in the broader sense of the  article preventive policing takes a lot of numbers from a lot of places.

It assigns weights or values to each factor that goes into any person's make-up at any given time.

Over the course of our life, our circumstances change, and so would our 'personal algorithm.'

The risk factors change, and at some point in our life we may have reached a low point. This can be measured against a previous high point, a threshold of danger or risk may be reached, and a little bell goes off down at police headquarters.

If our subject, a guy called Edwin, living in Lincoln, Nebraska, has a personal algorithm, one based on all the data that can be gathered from monitoring his social interactions, using biometric recognitions and mood analyses from gas station security cameras, from his shopping habits, from recognizing his license plate at stop-light intersections, from semantic analyses of his postings on Facebook, by key-word recognition, the thought police might very easily determine that Edwin is 'at risk' to offend against the municipal, state, or federal laws.

Every thing Edwin says is being taken down so that it can be used against him, but the cops are just doing their jobs, right?

They may determine on an intervention. They may wish to prevent him from assaulting his ex-girlfriend, or from committing suicide, or robbing a bank or starting up a meth lab or violating any other recognizable statute.

What if Edwin has a history of alcoholism and the cops are notified that he just bought and insured a vehicle. Maybe he's been seen at a gas station, not too far from the liquor store.

Maybe they should put a car nearby and take a look at Edwin.

A lot of nice, well-meaning, thoughtful people would even applaud that. They might stop Edwin from going head-on into a minivan with a mother and four children in it later that night.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

Unfortunately, he hasn't actually done anything yet. He's merely 'at rick' and arguably others are at risk from Edwin—in the future. Maybe. Maybe even most likely.

The legislation which enables preventive policing has carefully written clauses regarding how an offender poses a 'public or private menace,' or whatever.

What are you going to do with Edwin?

Are you going to sentence him to thirty days in the county bucket?

Are you going to stick him in with other offenders of a more serious nature? Is his cell-mate a member of a drug-running bike gang? Is he a thief, a con-artist, does he grow dope, does he run illegal aliens over the border?

Edwin will be exposed to more criminality. Jail has been called a university of crime.

Will you take Edwin to the hospital for a period of observation?

Will a court order him to attend to a psychiatric program, one designed to help at-risk future offenders to work through their issues and move on with their lives in a more positive direction?

How are you going to pay for all of that?

And how is Edwin going to like being grabbed, losing his job, consequently losing his home, and ending up on the street because someone decided that he was a risk? Even though he never actually did anything? Except be an alcoholic, buy a car and get some gas, bearing in mind that he's upset with his ex-girlfriend?

If he gets desperate enough, out there on the street, he might just remember that he had a cell-mate that promised to set him onto something good, some easy money kind of operation and Edwin might not have much going for him to begin with, and so he might just look his new friend up.

What's really terrifying is the combination of privatized prisons, shrinking state budgets, the need to keep all those beds filled in a private jail to keep profits flowing to shareholders, and there have already been abuses.

Throw mandatory-sentencing legislation into the mix and some robot guards, and you have a potent brew.

That's because we have different levels of crime, and therefore we must have different levels of future crime. The corollary of this would be different levels of punishment.

The lowest level is simple larceny—and stealing someone's lawn mower is somehow seen as less serious when compared to sticking up a gas station attendant with a shot-gun in his face and running off with the proceeds.

Higher levels of crime (and punishment) involve assault, murder, and there is the whole range of crime from prostitution, domestic abuse, kidnapping, extortion, counterfeiting. The whole list.

Here's where Edwin's personal algorithm comes into play again.

If Edwin's prior history includes assault, and maybe he got picked up with an weapon when he was prohibited from owning one, maybe he's been convicted once or twice for little things, then the charge of the possible future crime he is being accused of being potentially able of maybe committing someday becomes more serious.

A conviction, would lead to a more serious sentence, wouldn't it, or at least shouldn't it? By any rationale measure...?

And a simple psychiatric intervention would involve a longer period of observation, wouldn't it, if the signs were serious enough, and if the risk to some other person was considered great enough, and if Edwin under further examination did not prove amenable to suggestion or did not sort of give all the right answers.

Who is going to pay for all the extra beds in local hospitals? Or special wards in local jails?

The goal of predictive policing is of course to prevent Columbine-style massacres and terrorist attacks, but it involves monitoring and profiling an entire population of individuals at all times.

Where do you set the filter? In other words, when do you cut it off as not serious enough and just ignore it?

And wouldn't that cut-off itself be abused, in a particularly bigoted jurisdiction, to take all the wrong sort of people off the street, so nice people could 'feel safe' in their own neighbourhoods, or maybe to take one racial group off the streets so they would no longer compete for unskilled jobs with poor folks of the dominant race?

That's already being done now, isn't it, in some jurisdictions?

In my opinion the best cops have no hate in them, no bigotry, no prejudice. But there's nothing to stop a bigot from joining the force and working his way up in it.

***

Preventive policing might even work, in that you would get arrests, and in the case of would-be terrorists, you might even find a truckload of explosive all ready to go, and a group or individual all set to carry out some plan.

In that sense, it would have been a success. That success would get high praise in the media.

Google has launched semantic search,** and I just read  Facebook*** is doing heavy research into artificial intelligence, using the vast quantities of data they have gathered from us, quite frankly.

Semantics is the analysis of meaning. Artificial intelligence would use semantics to determine meaning, and with all the world now wired through a number of networks, using our phones, our devices, computers, automobile navigation systems, surveillance cameras, and a whole host of other sources of information, artificial intelligence will be used in preventive policing because it would require an almost infinite amount of manpower just to crunch the numbers and interpret data.

Preventive policing requires software and computer time, lots of it.

While a light might come on or a buzzer might sound on some police dispatcher's board somewhere when Edwin tripped the threshold on his own personal algorithm, it is not quite clear whether the local police would consider it a high priority.

As long as people still had rights, they could always get a lawyer after some period of incarceration, or 'observation,' or even 'treatment,' and come back with a successful suit in a court of law.

My personal opinion is that the enabling legislation would have thought of that too—and done whatever was necessary to insulate the authorities from excessive responsibility for any mistakes that are made, or the inevitable civil and human rights violations that will surely occur.

But when you realize that most at-risk people really don't have the resources to defend themselves in the first place, nor the resources to come back later, nor even to appeal 'a wrongful conviction' while they sit in a jail and rot—how in the hell that would ever be proven is also a good question—then a vast prison population composed of 'at-risk' individuals like Edwin doesn't seem all that far-fetched.

It is almost a law of technology that all really revolutionary technologies bring disruption, they cause great and often unforeseen changes in the social context.

The infrastructure is already in place. It's just a matter of time before this happens to some extent.

Footnotes

*Are police required to notify future victims?

What about potential future perps? Would a record of warnings or tickets be kept, and of course wouldn't that also bear on the future outcome of a charge of 'being at risk of committing a future breach of statute law?'

We got us a real can of worms here, ladies and gentlemen.

**

Semantic search tries to predict the subject's intentions, which has wider applications.

***

Artificial intelligence would be used to draw conclusions based upon semantics, which may be defined as meaning, and multiple layers of deeper meaning. In the psychological sense, social theory would be used to define 'at-risk' indicative factors in any one person's algorithm based upon past statistical analyses of individuals within social groups.

When these theories are based both on statistics and bigotry, 'poverty breeds crime,' for example, the possibility of abuse arises.

Building a Better Brain

The quality of the answers that we get depends on the quality of the questions we ask.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

Will we be assimilated by the human-machine interfaces which researchers are presently contemplating.

From quiet contemplation comes chaos.

I've said it before, but 'chaos reigns supreme' in the natural world, which in my opinion is ruled by thermodynamics, from top to bottom and side to side, back to front in all conceivable dimensions.

The dimensions we can't conceive of are immeasurable, using any rational or scientific method.

"Thus far, the main purpose for developing brain-computer interfaces has been to allow amputees and those who suffer from paralysis to mentally control a mobile robot or robotic prosthesis. They have already made possible some remarkable feats, such as partial restoration of hearing in the deaf, direct brain control of a prosthesis, implanting false memories in a rat, and downloading a rat's memory of how to press a lever to get food and then uploading the memory after the original memory has been chemically destroyed. If this sounds like science fiction, consider that scientists have already moved beyond the interface technology and into nanoscale wiring implanted in synthetic tissue. A joint MIT, Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital research team led by Robert Langer, Charles Lieber and Daniel Kohane developed a technique for growing synthetic biological tissue on a substrate containing biocompatible, nanoscale wires. This announcement came seven weeks after the announcement in London of the first-ever successful implantation of a synthetic organ, a fully functional trachea grown from the patient's own stem cells, work led by the pioneering researcher Paolo Macchiarini. And if scientists can implant wiring, then, in principle, they can turn the body or any part of it into a computer. But while most people have no problem with prosthetic limbs, even those directly actuated by the brain, nor with pacemakers or cochlear implants, people may feel uncomfortable becoming part machine. At what point does the interface between body and machine dissolve? When bodies can be made part machine, is it necessary to redefine personhood? Will people all be assimilated?"

 \--Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

Here's the answer to that last question: no.

That's right, the answer is no.

What will happen is that the human race will assimilate all of the new technology. I really don't think we will let it eat us or enslave us. We're a little too practical a species for that.

Google just bought Boston Dynamics, maker of the famous Big Dog. Google, along with other companies, is heavily into artificial intelligence research. With modern brain imaging and mapping, at some point in these studies, hardware and software applications will be able to 'read' a thought.

That would be useful for airport security. Imagine an oblong or rectangular frame that you walk through much like a metal detector. It reads your brain and it checks a few things, like if you've been recently thinking of a criminal or anti-social act. Biometrics will detect if you are nervous. Biometrics will check your retina to match up with your records. As far as airport security goes, a lot of folks wouldn't have a problem with that, (as long as it doesn't take forever, right?) and as long as it's not too invasive, and if it serves a legitimate need, they might be able to live with it.

But if brain waves can be read and interpreted, they can also be recorded. They can be stored, and downloaded, and if the machine is accurate enough, it might even be admissible as evidence in a court of law.

As a benign example, (and yet most of us are immediately thinking of criminals cases) a plane crashes and one of the victims is identified solely by the retinal and brain scans made prior to take-off.

This is of some interest, for his surviving friends and family at least know for sure what happened. He or she can be presumed dead, and while the author acknowledges the trauma and grief for the friends and family, it is also necessary to provide through the provisions of the last will and testament for the survivors and heirs.

In that sense it's a kind of benign use of artificial intelligence, and the ability of a machine to record someone's last thoughts might be of great comfort—or a great tragedy, depending on what those thoughts were. Most likely the 'average' passenger probably did think fond thoughts about friends and family in the immediate time period.

The families might be comforted by having a recording of such thoughts. It is also true that some might be denied boarding privileges, and some potential criminal or anti-social acts would be prevented by detection before they could be brought into action.

It's not immediately obvious to this writer how the average person would end up like the Borg, with no real mind of their own and end up powerless thralls to a universal computer system that has taken on a consciousness of its own. Some human agent would have to make that happen, possibly a mistake in coding somewhere along the line, unintentional or otherwise.

Computer-brain interfaces are  making great leaps.

Scientists have learned how to plant false memories in a mouse, and the author also recently saw a story where scientists used the mind or brain of a human, and they  controlled a mouse's tail by thought alone.

"Scientists haven't yet found a way to mend a broken heart, but they're edging closer to manipulating memory and downloading instructions from a computer right into a brain.

Researchers from the Riken-M.I.T. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took us closer to this science-fiction world of brain tweaking last week when they said they were able to create  a false memory in a mouse.

The scientists reported in the journal Science that they caused mice to remember receiving an electrical shock in one location, when in reality they were zapped in a completely different place. The researchers weren't able to create entirely new thoughts, but they applied good or bad feelings to memories that already existed."

Maybe in a hundred years, if someone can control your neighbour, he can control you, and this doesn't necessarily need hard-wiring once we comprehend all the machine aids people are going to be hooking up to their brains and their bodies in the very near future.

We've all seen the runner with the springy artificial legs and carbon-fibre feet.

But being able to read a brain might also lead to the ability to 'reframe' someone's brain.

The most positive use of the new technology would be medical—they might cure mental illnesses, they might cure brain dysfunctions of any kind. They might be able to restore at least some memories, anything that might have been recorded of his life prior to losing his memory.

Let's say that happens to a guy, he was in a car accident. Let's call him Stan. He went into a coma, and lost all his memories. He has amnesia.

Stan could at least know that he really was Stan! Fragmentary memories might be restored to him, like shots from the security camera in his apartment building, his shopping list and his favourite grocery store would all be recorded somewhere in a vast database. Pictures of his wife and kids, his dog, and his mom and dad would be uploaded. He could be retrained by having relevant skills and experiences of his employment downloaded or uploaded to his brain, whichever way the reader prefers to express it.

This particular technology could obviously also be abused.

Conceivably, if Stan was killed, and yet his brain was successfully downloaded wirelessly before 'signal degradation' became too pronounced, Stan could be input into a machine intelligence that already existed. The machine intelligence would take care of all autonomic chores, making the legs go and providing the body with the equivalent of oxygen. In his new status that's electrical power for Stan as a purely electronic entity will no longer require oxygen, food or water.

Stan would be riding around in  Big Dog's head and yet this author thinks that if Stan still had all his memories, it would be seamless enough. Essentially we have transplanted the brain of a man into the body of a pig, which has always been a big dream of science.

(The author is kidding. – ed.)

In the future, if all or most babies are implanted with an ID chip upon birth, whether natural or otherwise, then all that would have to be done is to recover that chip from Stan's body, or recover that code sequence, and Stan's body, let's call it 'Big Dog,' has essentially become Stan in fact.

That's because our airport security robot now reads the ID chip, identifies the dog-like robot as 'Stan,' the guy who got killed but didn't die because his brain was downloaded into the robot previously known as Big Dog.

With artificial intelligence, a vast database and number crunching ability, Stan's whole life will flash before the airport security robot's virtual eyes and he will either be admitted or denied entrance.

***

The neuroplasticity of the brain makes it possible to learn new tasks. Future human beings will have bumps in different places on their brains!

But what bout the neuroplasticity of the mind, once freed from biological concerns?

It sounds funny, but it's true. Stan is going to have to get used to a few new ideas, not least of which is that he no longer has a physical body but now resides in a machine. He might not have to unlearn a few tasks, for they will always be with him as memories, but he will have to learn a few new ones.

What use is the ability to cook for Stan? He can make dinner for his family, that task can stay in his biological brain. But the machine's little doggy legs can carry him, and they are governed by the machine part of his makeup. It is the interface between biological and electronic brain that will really have to grow, and to adapt, and to learn. There's a lot more to it than an old-fashioned prosthetic arm, where patients would twitch a shoulder or bicep muscle to close the fingers so they could pick up a knife or fork and eat their dinner. The human brain learns that task well enough so that people no longer have to consciously do it, they just reach and pick up the object without thinking.

Stan has to get used to a whole new way of living, and he also has to get used to a whole new way of looking at life. Stan will redefine our ideas of what a person is, what consciousness is, and what life and death is.

We will have detached consciousness and personhood from the physical body and set it free of those limitations. Once you have removed all biological processes from Stan, and Stan from any need for them, all you have to do is maintain the machine, change the batteries or charge them up, and Stan can go on indefinitely. As long as backup copies of Stan exist, he could essentially live forever. Once a record of his mind has been made, we could make endless copies of Stan. Stan could exist in two places at once, and the two Stans could be linked in realtime so that they could enjoy two separate experiences, even at the same time.

Stan might be at a Leaf's game in Toronto, enjoying his day off, and his machine-double could be in Paris negotiating a business deal, and both Stan's could be aware of each other. Stan would be multi-talking, and muttering and talking to himself, but he would be able to cope with it.

Without the need to regulate the autonomous nervous system, the part of Stan's mind that was subconscious and operated his physical body for him is no longer necessary, however, he now has machine resources at his disposal. He has a memory bank, and his consciousness has essentially all the time in the world to learn how to use it. Without cell death, without aging, with more than one of him running around, Stan would just keep getting smarter and smarter.

More seriously, Stan's new life need not be a bleak hell of isolation and sensory deprivation. Let's give him a more human body, one with bipedal locomotion.

Will he be able to give and receive affection? His new body will need periodic cleaning. Would he enjoy a hot shower, that most basic of modern luxuries?

One might think so, especially with the development of 'haptics,' in this case some nice new  e-skin.

"The development of electronic skin, or 'e-skin,' brings the next milestone in the continuing symbiosis—and perhaps melding—of man and machine."

"The thin new material may soon imbue robotics with a more sensitive touch while wallpapering much of the world with touch-screen capability."

"With the interactive e-skin, we have demonstrated an elegant system on plastic that can be wrapped around different objects to enable a new form of human-machine interfacing."

Stan could not just give the wife and kids a hug but experience it in much the same way he used to before. He would feel their warmth, and their touch, and perhaps smell a bit of garlic on his wife's breath.

Here is the Wikipedia definition of a human-machine interface.

"Human-machine interface is the part of the machine that handles the  Human-machine interaction."

"Common practices for interface software specification include use cases,  constrain enforcement by interaction protocols (intended  to avoid use errors)."

Our friend Stan could be 'constrained' from interfering with his own internal systems, for surely he would have that capability. It might be wise to prevent him from switching himself off, or, alternatively, Stan or his doctors/builders/team (for that's what it would take, some kind of infrastructure) might be able to switch him off at night, and let the mind get a good night's sleep. Biologically, the mind needs rest because of the way our brains are structures, and so our minds are also structured to conform to those capabilities. Short-term memory fades quickly, and our night-time brain activity may be involved in reducing that and making sense of all our daily stimuli, and ultimately transforming it into long-term memory. Dreaming may be a part of this process, and Stan will dream.

Much of the need for sleep is tied to the needs of the body. How much the need for sleep is tied to the psyche, is a little less clear. Even sharks sleep, and while they process just as much sensory data as we do—their environment is just as all-enveloping as our own, it's also a little more monotonous. It's all water, every thing is blue all the time. Our environment is so much more colourful, and there's a lot more stuff in it. And yet it is also conceivable that Stan could go days without sleep when he wanted to, or when some necessity arose.

This author, and the average reader no doubt, has experienced a day or two of sleep deprivation once or twice in our more normal biologically-based lives, our 'carbon-based' life, but Stan need never get tired in the same sense that we do.

In purely psychological terms, it would require some orientation time and most likely some guidance, both carbon-based and perhaps from those who have gone before him. These might originally have been disabled people, as in terms of medical and scientific research, the disabled would be seen as prime candidates for the human-machine interface.

The blind will see, the deaf will hear, and the quadriplegics will walk again. They'll just have bits and pieces of plastic and metal sticking out of them, or holding it all together at first. Those will truly be hybrid human/machines. They might even look a bit like the Borg.

Our minds dream for a reason, and one would think that a system of artificial intelligence with our own unique personality imprinted upon it, would retain the need to rest, to play, and to engage in real human relationships.

It is a kind of immortality, one that goes beyond the limitations of the physical body.

The Body Hackers

In the future, will all babies have an identifying chip implanted at birth?

"It's already been done, as long ago as 1998, by what are described as  'hobbyists.') The first reported experiment with an RFID implant was carried out in 1998 by the British scientist Kevin Warwick. As a test, his implant was used to open doors, switch on lights, and cause verbal output within a building. The implant has since been held in the Science Museum (London)). Since that time, several additional hobbyists have placed RFID microchip implants into their hands or had them placed there by others. Amal Graafstra, author of the book "RFID Toys," asked doctors to place implants in his hands. A cosmetic surgeon used a scalpel to place a microchip in his left hand, and his family doctor injected a chip into his right hand using a veterinary Avid injector kit. Graafstra uses the implants to open his home and car doors and to log on to his computer. Mikey Sklar had a chip implanted into his left hand and filmed the procedure. He has done a number of media and personal interviews about his experience of being microchipped." (Wiki.)

What about Vernor Vinge's story, Rainbow's End, where people used contact lenses and glasses to overlay new, augmented realities on the real world around them? And what happens when they are no longer accessories, but installed or built-in to human beings?

"Pre-Google Glass, a Canadian professor had a pair of computerized glasses 'permanently' attached to his skull. When another person insisted he remove the glasses and then tried to rip them off his face, trans-humanist enthusiasts called it "the first hate crime against cyborgs."

But now we do have Google Glass. Now we can wire our enhanced spectacles, our satellite navigations systems, our Wikipedia, right into our heads. We could have night-vision, or watch our kids walking home from school from thousands of miles away.

 'Body hackers' are already among us. They're making the experiments in the classic Frankenstein sense, right in their own basements. Who knows where all this will lead, but with a chip implanted in your head, projecting text, images and sound directly into the brain, will mean that in the future you will be able to access all of human knowledge via Wifi, anytime you want it.

It seems only a matter of time before aficionados will use the same technology that will cure deafness in some folks, in order to implant  'headphones' in their ears. The technology used to cure blindness will be used in other, mass-market products.

Human beings (the more affluent ones) will be, like Steve Austin, 'bionic people,' and while the ability to leap a tall building at a single bound captures the imagination, it is the intellectual and even just the entertainment fields that are probably more relevant in normal daily life.

All of this will come to pass, for when has humanity ever passed up a good thing? Simple eyeglasses change our perception. We have come to accept false teeth, implanted teeth, hair transplants and mechanical heart transplants. We have come not to accept breast implants, which would have been a wonderful thing for women who had gone through a mastectomy, purely on grounds of self-esteem and psychological recovery from traumatic cancer surgery, but to demand them as our right in the case of less than well-endowed and very young women.

It is aspirational in the sense that some think it will help in their careers—actresses, models, porn stars yes, and of course there is that unspoken need to attract suitable mates and the unwritten laws that go along with it.

They have become status symbols in a way that the artificial hip has not.

***

I'm old school, I like typing away on my physical, plastic, electronic keyboard. I don't mind it, I've gotten used to it, and it's a hell of a lot easier than the old cast-iron framed typewriters.

But we're already seeing people walking down the street 'swiping' at their phones.* The person sitting in a coffee shop, head wired for sound and tapping away on an invisible keyboard while they write their magnum opus, one visible only to them, might not be too far away.

The guy sitting at the back of the room with his own system, trying to hack into their heads for the sheer hellery of it, isn't too far away either. New gifts bring new dangers.

Business executives might want to have a quick look around inside other business executive's heads before signing any contracts, just to see what sort of people they are dealing with.

There will be locks, and blocks, and hackers trying to get inside of your head and probably trying to make you do things you might not have done otherwise.

Why risk your own valuable skin to rob a bank if you can just find some other physically-fit specimen to do it for you? Someone you can trust, because you control what goes on inside of their head and can make their legs move even when they would prefer not to like some cyborg cockroach.

***

Convicted felons out on parole might be implanted with a chip.

If they strayed from home during prohibited hours, law enforcement could track and monitor their movements. If everyone in the world was chipped, there would essentially be no unsolved murders, (that's the theory) but any crime fiction writer could beat that—a killer simply cuts his hand open and leaves the chip at home on the bedside table while he goes out and does the dirty deed.

A surgeon in some rogue state cuts it out of your head and off you go to do your crime. When you come back, he has already filled in the blank time period with typical touristy stuff and he then re-implants it.

It will soon be illegal not to have a chip, and all sorts of detectors at airports would not just scan for metal, but for the embedded chip. A chip-less person would be suspicious in the extreme.

With chips embedded, employers would always be able to track employees. Such chips are relatively cheap. You can hardly buy anything worth more than about twenty bucks at a big-box department store without a chip somewhere in the packaging, and alarms will sound if you attempt to walk off without paying. In an environment where they now have self-serve checkouts, retailers see this as necessary, even desirable for just-in-time production and shipping, stock control, and tracking our buying habits, all of which demand streams and reams of data on a moment by moment basis. It hinders, but does not prevent shop-lifting because thieves learn quickly and know how to remove a chip before leaving the store.

A recurrent theme in the works of science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer involves uploaded consciousness. In Mindscan, a man with a fatal condition uploads his consciousness into a newer, healthier version of himself.

If consciousness could be uploaded, presumably it could also be downloaded.

So what about a downloaded consciousness? In the future, as a form of augmented reality, for a small fee, a person might be able to go to iTunes and download somebody else's conscious experiences.

You could be Lady Gaga for an hour or so. It would only cost $0.99 after all, and you would know exactly how it feels to be onstage as her. You would be Lady Gaga, or Ryan Seacrest, or any celebrity who has such programming available.

In the case of Lady Gaga, you would get to sing a hit song and be somebody else for a while—someone who could actually sing, and a longer program might involve her experiences in longer form.

You might arrive at a concert venue, meet with adoring fans backstage, sit through the makeup session, choose the wardrobe, and then go out on stage and perform the entire show as if that was really you and not her. You would feel all of her physical sensations, and the love of her audience.

I imagine the boys might prefer James Bond or even a porn star like  Johnny 'The Wad' Holmes.)

It wouldn't be long before purely artificial experiences become commonplace. The creator opf the work would own all rights and cut out the celebrity middlemen.

Sports stars, football players, will also be big revenue earners in this scenario.

It's a lot better than our own boring little lives, isn't it?

Be anyone you want to be.

The process, once the technology is in place, would be a fairly simple one. Lady Gaga would have her own chip, and it would simply record all of her perceptions during a concert tour. The data would be downloaded out of her mind, and stored on a hard-drive for later.

With some editing for time, and suitable bridges between scenes—the term 'commercial breaks' quickly comes to mind—what you end up with is just another entertainment product.

It's not the most noble endeavor, but it would certainly generate revenues, and for some that will always be enough justification.

It could also become a teaching and learning tool—anything is possible, and so far the limits of the new technology are still obscure.

***

"From locating lost children to keeping financial data and medical records handy, people are about to see a surge in data chip implants. Able to transmit and store data, chips will soon enable people to verify their identities, see if their children have traversed the boundaries (or 'hopped the geo-fences') set for them, give paramedics and doctors immediate access to their medical records, allow people to go wallet-free as they pay for groceries via a hand-swipe, or even store educational and employment data for a job interview. But what if the police can use it to track how fast someone is driving or monitor a person's whereabouts? Can these implants become a mandatory form of ID? How do people protect their privacy from hackers? Can this data be sold to law enforcement or other companies? Does the good outweigh the bad?"  (Laboratory Equipment.)

***

Now that we have the ability to map the brain, to detect, observe and identify brain-wave patterns, and with the whole world wired up with a chip in their heads, it would eventually be possible to know what every citizen was thinking at a given time. It would all be wireless and monitored by artificial intelligences working in real-time.

From there, it is a short step to the embedded Taser in the chest module and a long list of infractions, real and imaginary in the case of authoritarian or even just overly conservative governments.

Think the wrong thought and zap! You've been busted and punished all in one fell swoop in a scene reminiscent of an early Star Trek episode.

Hell is a little bit further down that road, but not too far. Don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, there is a very good chance that we will get there eventually.

That's why the time for debate is now.

*Such people will quickly find themselves waking up in the middle of the night and their hands are just swiping away in some subconscious locomotor patterns, which are very strong and become quickly ingrained.

Years ago, I set up a video camera at one end of the room and then went back to working on a book. It was amazing how often I reached for a smoke, a lighter, a handful of potato chips, a drink, or the ashtray, and that hand-to-mouth pattern became really distinct on fast forward. It was quite sobering.

One reason it's so hard to quit smoking: "What am I supposed to do with my hands?"

It's also one reason why so many people gain weight when they quit smoking. They keep wanting to stick something in their mouth.

Another good question: what deeply-rooted human need or desire is that major locomotion pattern attempting to feed without my even being conscious of it?

It's not necessarily just about food or drink, the very real and understandable needs of the body.

The mind and the psyche are involved too.

Retailers will take advantage of all this, I have no doubt of that. Retailers in a consumer society have always known about human insecurities, hence tooth-whitening, breast implants, high-end cars and all the usual cosmetic and prosthetic devices and products we buy on a daily basis.

Okay, now I'm done.

Robo-Coppage

The future is now.

Robot policing is already here.

"Police are already experimenting with robots, both armed and unarmed, and it's only a matter of time before robots become standard in the surveillance, analysis and enforcement of crimes. They are never tired, irritable, in need of a break or biased, but neither are they able to take in the context of any given situation. Police know there is future for robotic law enforcement in traffic violations (for example, will a car's onboard computer simply shut the vehicle down as soon as it starts speeding?), but how far will this extend? At what point is human instinct and judgment necessary in the enforcement of law or prevention of crimes? Is it most efficient to build a supposedly bias-free system of law that is responsible for determining, adjudicating and punishing crime?"  Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

I can only imagine how the bourgeoisie would feel if their $90,000 BMW, capable of 140 mph, shut down unexpectedly and when it was towed to a garage, they found out there was nothing wrong with it.

So that part is a bit overblown. Traffic chaos is counterproductive in economic terms, and the economy is the new God.

The most obvious use of robots, one that is already happening in the U.S. and Canada, is the use of drones or UAVs for police surveillance.

UAVs are increasingly used for domestic police work in Canada and the United States: a dozen US police forces had applied for UAV permits by March 2013. Texas politician and commentator Jim Hightower has warned about potential privacy abuses from aerial surveillance. In February 2013, Seattle Mayor Michael McGinn responded to protests by scrapping the Seattle Police Department's plan to deploy UAVs. (Wiki.)

The American Civil Liberties Union blog: Domestic Drones.

Driverless Cop Cars

Google's driverless car might make a pretty good adjunct to more mundane domestic policing.

In this scenario, the driverless car simply sets up on the U-turn provisions that all divided highways have for emergency vehicle turnaround. Since there is no human driver to look out the window, the radar-gun is already deployed in the front windshield and with license-plate recognition software, offending drivers will receive their ticket by mail, and if they wish to dispute the ticket, they can attend court on the day appointed and, in Canada, argue it out with the Crown's robot prosecutor and the robot-judge, which must sound very attractive to our presently very conservative government. People who run red lights are already subject to intersection surveillance cameras and ticketing.

Humanoid Robots sell Movie Tickets

I honestly think that humanoid robots like the sexy Peter Weller Robocop will definitely not be the norm. Small, tracked or six-wheeled autonomous robots are much more likely because bipedal locomotion will be seen as unnecessary and it takes up a lot of computing power.

The psychological effect of a big red robot Mountie can not be overlooked, and of course there will probably be a few of them purchased, to stand out in front of the Parliament buildings—tourists will love getting their pictures taken beside them of course; and in a real emergency, their memory banks will be downloaded looking for terrorist suspects. The metal and high-temperature plastic of their bodies will mean that in a fire or explosion, a human perpetrator taking a hostage, means they can intervene quickly while regular (warm-blooded) police are still in transit.

Here's some video of DARPA's police robot. A humanoid robot is not completely useless, people may be more inclined to obey orders from something recognizable, as opposed to a box on wheels or tracks.

In the film 'Fifth Element' starring Bruce Willis, Mila Vovovich and Gary Oldman, there is a scene where a robotic insect penetrates security, complete with camera and microphone pickup.

The president smashes it with his hand or something. But in surveillance, penetrating people's homes to eavesdrop, or better yet, clinging to a window and picking up conversations through the vibrations of the glass, seems a pretty likely scenario.

Here's Mythbuster's Adam Savage with his new spider robot. (Youtube.) This one's pretty big, but with miniaturization and nanotech, the new police 'bugs' would be quite small, and to the human eye, indistinguishable from a real insect.

When you consider just how murky convenience store and gas station security camera pictures usually are, and yet when you consider just how many convictions are obtained with what may be the only piece of evidence in a particular case, one would think that the camera and microphone technology would have to be vastly improved. Yet people are shooting some pretty good pics and videos on their smart-phones, and this is a mass-produced commercial application.

The cop-bugs will be state of the art where essentially cost is no object and the middle-class will no doubt support their use because after all, it's not their kids doing hard time on evidence that would have been inadmissible a few short years previously. By the time they figure out their mistake, it will of course be too late.

Robot Prison Guards

The Republic of South Korea has already rolled out their first robotic prison guards. At a cost of $879,000 each, they're not exactly cheap, but with mass production and economies of scale, the price will quickly come down. Here in Canada, a brand-new police officer starts off at about $78,000 a year in salary. They get other benefits as well, all bring the total up to about $100,000 a year in costs per officer. Prison guards don't get quite that much, but it's still expensive. It is also easy to see that a robot with a one time cost of perhaps $300,000 would, over the life of the product, result in some real cost savings.

Robot guards can't be bribed to being in guns, drugs or smokes—a pack of smokes is real currency in a jail and I've heard some astronomical prices for two or three smokes in a jail setting, i.e., fifteen bucks for three smokes. Inmates tear them apart and roll them up in smaller cigarettes and according to one source, 'That's your smoking for the day.'

Robot guards would have no resentment and at least on some theoretical level, would have no reason to mistreat prisoners, would have no bigotry in the sense that they wouldn't care about your skin colour, the nature of your offence, and all that sort of thing. They would also have no reason to look the other way, (paperwork being the bane of existence in bureaucratic systems) and would simply record everything for future reference.

They are also completely incapable of showing kindness or mercy to an inmate, something often overlooked in the sales brochures.

In a medical or psychological emergency, all the robots could do would be to call for human intervention, and in the prison setting, in the future, warm bodies of an official nature will be in short supply. Standard prison models in Canada, using modern prison design, use a minimal two officers per shift to supervise up to 192 inmates. With robot guards, inmate suicide numbers would probably see an increase in the number of fatalities.

In the movie Robocop, when two thugs grabbed a woman for a little 'rape-party,' Robocop intervened and the audience cheered. When he shot one of them in the balls, the audience clapped and applauded. That's what the cheerleaders for robotic policing want you to see, and to think about the coming robotic revolution in policing, a revolution that has already seen the first shots fired. But there is a dark side, and that dark side of law enforcement stems from the current social and political climate, not just in the U.S., or the U.K., where they also have a Conservative government as we do in Canada.

Perhaps Bill Moyers said it best:

The Unfinished Work of America

"In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others."

"I should make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize 'the people.' You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."

"But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy."

"Toward the end of Justice Brennan's tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said: 'We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses... Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.'"

"And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to 'the great task remaining.' That 'unfinished work,' as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America's founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving."  Naked Capitalism.

The Dark Side of Automated Policing

We are well on the way down that road to the dark side. That journey has already begun an there is no telling where it may lead.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that you have to have employment to have the rights of a citizen, there is no litmus test in terms of income or property. A lot of people don't get that, and if they don, they simply don't care.

What is disturbing, and this is not just in the U.S., is the amount of ignorance, prejudice and bigotry still present in the system.

The loudest mouths, and those with the biggest war-chest for lobbying, will have their way with society. The future of law-enforcement is very bright. For the citizens, the future will be very dark indeed if that is allowed to go on without some checks and balances in the system. The right to be left alone is one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Constitution. You might as well forget it, that one is long dead. This article explains the latest research, into methods of identifying someone by the reflections in the eyes of bystanders. When it comes to biometrics, and facial-recognition software, we are at the beginning of the curve, and the future of this technology is unknown—it's also somewhat fearful under authoritarian governments.

That's really the thing, isn't it. Under an authoritarian government, morality is so skewed that almost any activity becomes a crime. Guilt by association becomes so much more commonplace and citizens have to watch every word.

You Won't Need a Warrant for That

"Have no doubt: the  Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world."

"The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from 'unreasonable searches and seizures,' is that its representatives only get to invade people's private space -- their 'persons, houses, papers, and effects' -- after it convinces a judge that they're up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don't store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers."

Consider email.

"In a series of rulings from the 1970's, the Supreme Court created 'the third-party doctrine.' Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail."

Even weirder still: in the future, people who appear to be doing nothing at all will become suspicious.

For surely you must be up to something.

We will no longer have  the right to be left alone.

Our world will not be destroyed by terrorism, it will not be destroyed by socialism, or communism, or any of the other 'isms' that we all love to talk about as if we actually knew something about it.

"We simply must have order." This phrase has justified more ignorant laws than any other one thing I can think of.

In Canada, fifteen people can successfully lobby the government for a law that applies to all.

And if one kid is killed by a drunk driver, new calls for 'tougher laws' dominate the front pages of our newspapers, they're all over the internet, with their calls for 'justice.' and they are all nice, well-meaning folks doing all the screaming and the yelling.

Our world will be destroyed by our own lack of perspective, our own intolerance, our own strident calls that 'something must be done about it.'

The world will be destroyed by our own sanctimony.

And the meek, and their protectors, shall inherit the Earth.

And when that happens, the safest place to be will be behind bars.

Geoenginering

Human beings have been engineering the planet since the first trees were cut down to make room for agriculture, and since the first wells were dug, and since the first canals were used for irrigation.

What's different in the modern world is of course the scale of such operations.

"Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale manipulation of environmental processes to combat global warming. It involves two types of processes — carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management (SRM). SRM, the more controversial prospect, is a form of climate modification that reduces the amount of sun hitting the earth's surface. Sulfate Aerosol Geoengineering (SAG-SRM) would inject the stratosphere with aerosols and could be done at such a reasonable cost ($8 million per year) that it's possible one nation could take action for the entire planet. Whether used locally or globally, adopting a SAG policy would have long-term and far-reaching consequences. One nation's policy decision could immediately and adversely affect another country's economic well-being as well as affect human health over both the short and long term. Calls for environmental justice and adopting ethical guidelines have been raised." —  Reilly Center, Notre Dame.

Gone are the days when the 'gentleman virtuoso,' best exemplified by Newton and Hooke, Halley and Kepler, can make world-shattering discoveries in science by patiently working away over a period of years in their own homes and laboratories.

Science is now a huge collaborative effort. Such collaboration involves debate, conflicting opinions, and conflicting aims.

"The basic idea behind geoengineering (or climate engineering) is that humans can artificially moderate the Earth's climate allowing us to control temperature, thereby avoiding the negative impacts of  climate change. There are a number of methods suggested to achieve this scientific wizardry, including placing huge reflectors in space or using aerosols to reduce the amount of carbon in the air." –  Guardian.

Is it really just that simple? Spray a little sulfur-dioxide into the atmosphere, and it blocks out x-amount of sunlight? Of course things are never that simple. The debate over global climate change has raged for over thirty years. What's interesting is that just prior to the beginning of that debate, questions were being asked in the media if we were poised on the brink of a new ice age!

Last spring and summer, in southern Ontario, it was unusually cold. Spring was chilly, and summer really didn't start until late June—when according to the calendar, it should start.

Of course climate-change deniers see this as 'evidence.' Yet it has been clearly stated, many times in fact, that global climate change will result in disruption of regional climates. Records going back hundreds of years are simply not available. Is Canada warmer than it was five hundred years ago? No one can really say. Anecdotal evidence, my childhood recollections or statements to that effect by our parents and grandparents really aren't evidence at all.

But our natural human expectations is that we can go in shorts, take our shirts off, maybe go swimming by late June. Yet I also remember swimming on or about April 20, back in the early 90s, and that particular year I swam (in Lake Huron and the St. Clair River) up until about September 20.

Let's say we did have a cold summer of 2012. That sure doesn't sound like global warming. But of course a gradual warming of the entire planet, is only a statistical average. The problem has only been serious studied for about thirty years. Data is incomplete, in that the ability to study climate in a systematic, global way is very new. Assuming global warming is real, proving it is another thing.

Anecdotal evidence certainly exists. Edward Gibbon, writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire back in the 1770s noted that the grape vine had been introduced by the Romans to France and even southern Germany. He observed that the barbarians had crossed the frozen Danube, and the frozen Rhine, on their incursions into Roman territory, and that the freezing of the great rivers was unheard-of in his own 'modern times.' He also pointed out that settlement in Europe had resulted in the clearing of the great Hercynian Forest, and that the sun's rays now touched the earth in a way they could not before—resulting in a change of climate that could never be proven in modern scientific terms.

Also from the Guardian story:

"It's a hugely controversial theory. One of the main counter-arguments is that promoting a manmade solution to climate change will lead to inertia around other efforts to reduce human impact. But the popularity of geoengineering is on the rise among some scientists and even received a  nod from the IPCC in its recent climate change report."

What they're saying is simple. If there is a quick fix, and especially a cheap one, then everybody give a big sigh of relief, and efforts to reduce our human impact on the plant fall by the wayside.

Wind and solar power development is expensive. The fact that they are so expensive, at least in the development stages, means the electrical power generated is expensive when compared to hydro-electricity, or nuclear power generation. Advocates of clean coal would point out that compared to other fossil fuels such as natural gas and oil, it can be an effective solution for power generation needs. Climate change is best left out of their sales brochures and so that's what they do! It's human nature, really, to play up the benefits and play down the side-effects.

The hysteria surrounding wind power and windmills in farm country is another interesting factor, a psychological one. But then, change has often been hard and often unwelcome.

This leads us to the question of interest. In Canada, the shale-oil developments would never have gone ahead if the price of petroleum wasn't high enough to sustain it profitably.

Alternate power sources may threaten that profitability, and the conservative, knee-jerk reaction is of course nothing new. The conspiracy theory of climate change—that it's all a big lie, is not exactly unexpected, especially when we realize that someone's present interests are threatened by a change in the status quo.

Conspiracy theories abound in the modern world. They are nothing new. Speculation is rife that 'mystery contrails' spewed out by U.S. military aircraft are in fact chemical sprays designed to reduce the impact of global warming. This story dates from 1998. But I've seen one recently on Facebook, and the statement was made that commercial jetliners were using some form of fuel additive to produce similar mystery contrails. If so, it would have to be one of the best-kept secrets in history for it not to have been documented already. Or maybe it has been documented, or maybe it is being documented even as we speak. A photo on Facebook showing a funny-coloured trail coming out of a jet engine is not exactly the same as evidence or documentation.

"How to De-Bunk Chemtrails" is a website devoted to, as the name says, de-bunking chemtrail theorists.

But it is strictly true that contrails, the long white trails of vapour left behind by not just jet aircraft but piston-engined ones as well, go back a long ways, to the dawn of aviation, and in fact they persist for quite some time. Recently at sunset, on a drive in the country, the western horizon was crisscrossed by dozens, even hundreds of contrails. It all depends on atmospheric conditions at the time. The Battle of Britain, high above southern England, left all kinds of contrails. They show up in photos and even oil paintings of the conflict. Bomber pilots would change altitude even at night to reduce contrails so that enemy fighters could not so easily engage with them.

Are contrails evidence of the government spraying chemicals on the population?  (Examiner.)

From the same article:

"There are three main theories as to what purpose chemtrails serve."

"Weather modification -Chemtrails could indicated a chemical means to influence weather patterns. Whether suppressing undesirable weather phenomenon or attempting to create desired outcomes, the chemicals sprayed by planes are intended to alter normal weather patterns."

"Population control \- Are we running out of space on our planet? Is the government trying to control population growth by spraying chemicals? If you believe the chemtrail theorists, then the answer is yes. Newswithviews.com claims the government sprays flu strains each year in an attempt to control population numbers."

"Inoculation \- In direct contrast to the theory that the government is spraying chemicals to make people sick is the theory that the government is spraying the general population to vaccinate against diseases, and probably diseases like Anthrax that are typically used in bio-warfare. Chemtrails are used to avoid raising the potential alarm caused simply telling people to go get vaccinated at their local pharmacy."

It is amazing, and an interesting commentary on the human condition, what hysteria a little water vapour in the sky can do. Like Roswell, there people making a living by spreading what is essentially nonsense, but what the hell, if it sells books...right? Someone is pleased by all the attention. Feeding conspiracy paranoia is an easy way to get some web traffic to your site.

Other forms of geoengineering.

"A scheme to dump quicklime into the oceans to sequester more carbon in their depths is being revived by a British management consultant with backing from Shell."

"First proposed back in the '90s by Exxon engineer Haroon Kheshgi, the idea takes advantage of a series of simple chemical reactions. Limestone, at high temperatures, breaks down into carbon dioxide and quicklime, in a process that produces greenhouse gas. But dump that quicklime in seawater, and it absorbs roughly twice as much CO2 as was released in the first reaction."

"The heat required to decompose the limestone will probably come from fossil fuel, generating more CO2, but even so, the sum of the process could be a reduction of the CO2 in the atmosphere."  (Wired Science.)

"The quicklime scheme is different. It would go right at the heart of the CO2 buildup problem by removing the gas from the air and sequestering it in the world's oceans. It also makes the oceans more alkaline, directly combating ocean acidification."

"Of course, the scale of the project would have to be eye-poppingly large. The early calculations, Kruger told Wired.com, indicate that 56 billion cubic feet of limestone would be required to sequester each gigaton of carbon. Humans put out about 5.5 billion tons of carbon annually by burning fossil fuels, so a limestone offset budget could reach 300 billion cubic feet of limestone per year."

Where is all that limestone going to come from? Efforts to protect the Niagara Escarpment, the source of much limestone in Ontario, include environmental impacts. Some of the quarries are huge, if you've ever driven up there, and there's quite a few of them. Finding enough limestone would disrupt naturally-occurring habitats that are already under threat.

Here's another interesting one. In the science-fiction story 'The Hermit,' author Dusty Miller proposes to use a genetically-modified symbiote, the same one that causes hermit crabs to go from a soft-bodied nymph to an animal with a hard protective shell, and train it to eat or bond with plastic. It's a nice thought and elegant in its simplicity.

Huge mounds of plastic bottles now circle endlessly in the Pacific and Atlantic  gyres, (and probably the Indian Ocean as well.) The theory here is that the bottles become coated with a hard shell and sink to the bottom of the ocean—with unpredictable results, but as the saying goes, 'out of sight, out of mind.'

And maybe that's our real problem—looking for the quick fix, and doing almost anything rather than changing our lifestyles and attitudes towards our natural environment. Something like such a symbiote, once released from the lab, would of course affect everything in the ocean. Ships' bottoms would be coated with it, dock pilings, offshore drilling platforms, coral reefs...such a plan would have to be well thought out and take time to implement. A quick fix would inevitably cause more problems that it would solve, but in a crisis situation, desperate times might call for desperate measures.

The money that would have to be spent on ocean de-acidification might be better spent on retrofitting aging, low-rental apartment buildings with better insulation, doors, windows, putting high-efficiency furnaces in working-class homes, designing smaller or at least lighter cars that are more fuel-efficient, and all of that goes directly against someone else's self-interest, of course I am referring to the traditional energy industries.

So far, they have proven effective lobbyists and are holding back many significant changes that are already available and well within our projected budgets.

A quick fix simply isn't going to happen when a good percentage of the world is either unaware of the problem or living in a state of denial for reasons which they feel are best kept to themselves.

On Human Cloning

Dolly the sheep) was real, and proof that a clone could be created from a single cell, a specialized one at that.

"The cell used as the donor for the cloning of Dolly was taken from a mammary gland and the production of a healthy clone therefore proved that a cell taken from a specific part of the body could recreate a whole individual. On Dolly's name, Wilmut stated 'Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell and we couldn't think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton's.'" (Wiki.)

The technological capability is real enough.

Was Eve, Clonaid's alleged first-born human clone real? (They claim a number of clone births.) If so, she and her siblings would be ten or twelve years old by now. While there are sound reasons to keep her identity and location secret, Clonaid's close relationship with the Raelian cult is as troubling as their unwillingness to provide simple proofs. Gut reaction is that it was a stunt--to draw new members, to draw donations, to draw attention. Members of the cult, of course, would accept it as Gospel truth. All they really need is words from on high.

Are clones living quietly among us?

It's possible.

If her neighbour was a fundamentalist, of almost any sort, she would be a target. I get that much. Simple privacy is an understandable consideration with media scrutiny so invasive and insistent. Even so, would revealing the DNA samples of mother and daughter have been enough to prove it? Scientists would have wanted to take their own samples. They would have wanted to peer review it. In order to do that, habeas corpus, in other words produce the body. And some court, in whatever country she was in, would have been the forum where somebody would have taken the kid into custody, perhaps for years or decades, while the matter was hashed out by interested parties. Who those interested parties might be I leave the reader to speculate, as 'Right to Lifers' or 'Pro-Choicers' don't really fit the bill. Yet with money, lawyers can operate in any country. If I had a clone-kid, naturally, I don't want that to happen. Incidentally, while in state custody, she would have to be provided with health care. Considering the potential of real money at stake, her samples would command a high price--and if she's real, Clonaid has a proprietary process at stake. Question: has Clonaid attempted to patent their alleged process?

So I don't really know, but I have my gut instinct.

This is from Wikipedia:

"Canadian law prohibits the following: cloning humans, cloning stem cells, growing human embryos for research purposes, sex selection, and buying or selling of embryos, sperm, eggs or other human reproductive material. It also bans making changes to human DNA that would pass from one generation to the next, including use of animal DNA in humans. Surrogate mothers are legally allowed, as is donation of sperm or eggs for reproductive purposes. Human embryos and stem cells are also permitted to be donated for research."

"There have been consistent calls in Canada to ban human reproductive cloning since the 1993 Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. Polls have indicated that an overwhelming majority of Canadians oppose human reproductive cloning, though the regulation of human cloning continues to be a significant national and international policy issue. The notion of 'human dignity' is commonly used to justify cloning laws. The basis for this justification is that reproductive human cloning necessarily infringes notions of human dignity."

"In Romania, 'Human cloning is explicitly prohibited in the Charter of Romania's Constitutional rights. It is viewed as a basic violation of a human's right to safety of identity, and personality.'"

So in other words, my personality is copyright. Clone me and you are stealing something from me, the right to be a unique individual.

"How would you like a clone of yourself stowed away somewhere in case you need a new heart or liver, like a spare tire in the trunk of a car? That, in a nutshell, was the plot of the 2005 high-dollar low-attendance sci-fi movie, 'The Island.' Hollywood heartthrobs Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor play dual roles portraying the rich and famous--and their genetically identical clones. In an appropriate Orwellian twist, doctors must murder the 'spare' clones in order to harvest needed body parts." – Cristen Conger,  How Stuff Works.

She goes on to state, "What if you could eliminate the wait time and risky odds with traditional organ transplants by creating custom, cloned organs from your own cells that your body would recognize? Cloning advocates have touted this type of science as therapeutic cloning. This is different from reproductive cloning since therapeutic cloning deals with embryos only, not human babies carried to term."

First of all, when has ethics or morality ever stopped someone from doing something to extend or enhance their life? When has it ever stopped a government from perpetuating itself? When has it ever stopped a corporate entity when big dollars are at stake?

That one is right out of H.G. Wells'  Island of Dr. Moreau.

In therapeutic cloning, scientists force cells to grow into a liver, a kidney or even skin, which would mean the natural rejection of the body of foreign matter would be subverted.

In  'Under Your Skin' I took this one step further to include the possibility of growing the outer skin, a replica of a famous athlete, and lining it with more skin, in order to create a viable commercial product, 'Sports-Skins.' Want to be Jeremy Lin? Dennis Rodman? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

Pay the money, slip one on, and let's play basketball!

More seriously, burn victims would benefit greatly from fresh skin grown from their own healthy skin cells, a process which would alleviate the need to find suitable donors, and the use of anti-rejection drugs.

Stem-Cell Controversy. (Wikipedia.)

"Since stem cells have the ability to differentiate into almost any type of nucleus, they offer something in the development of medical treatments for a wide range of conditions. Treatments that have been proposed include treatment for physical trauma, degenerative conditions, and genetic diseases (in combination with gene therapy). Yet further treatments using stem cells could potentially be developed thanks to their ability to repair extensive tissue damage."

"Great levels of success and potential have been shown from research using adult stem cells. In early 2009, the FDA approved the first human clinical trials using embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, and thus can become any other cell type excluding the placenta. Adult stem cells, however, are generally limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin. However, some evidence suggests that adult stem cell plasticity may exist, increasing the number of cell types a given adult stem cell can become. In addition, embryonic stem cells are considered more useful for nervous system therapies, because researchers have struggled to identify and isolate neural progenitors from adult tissues. Embryonic stem cells, however, might be rejected by the immune system - a problem which wouldn't occur if the patient received his or her own stem cells."

"Some stem cell researchers are working to develop techniques of isolating stem cells that are as potent as embryonic stem cells, but do not require a human embryo."

"The status of the human embryo and human embryonic stem cell research is a controversial issue as, with the present state of technology, the creation of a human embryonic stem cell line requires the destruction of a human embryo. Stem cell debates have motivated and reinvigorated the pro-life movement, whose members are concerned with the rights and status of the embryo as an early-aged human life. They believe that embryonic stem cell research instrumentalizes and violates the sanctity of life, and some also view it as tantamount to murder. The fundamental assertion of those who oppose embryonic stem cell research is the belief that human life is inviolable, combined with the belief that human life begins when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell to form a single cell."

Is life 'sacred' or is that pure species-egoism? The soul may be one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated by man and religion.

"A portion of stem cell researchers use embryos that were created but not used in in-vitro fertility treatments to derive new stem cell lines. Most of these embryos are to be destroyed, or stored for long periods of time, long past their viable storage life. In the United States alone, there have been estimates of at least 400,000 such embryos. See also Embryo donation."

What are the moral issues involved in human cloning?

There are plenty of opinions, some more coherent that others.

"Many are against the idea of cloning, both human and animal. In the case of humans it undermines the child's individuality, stealing away what makes everyone an individual. Cloned children may feel depressed, knowing that someone else has already played their life out for them."

"The idea of cloning humans almost makes humans seem like objects. No longer are humans individual and created from love, but rather from scientists knowing exactly what they will look like and perhaps even act. The rich can get highly intelligent, model babies, pure objects of wealth."

"Human cloning could also cause separation in families. A child he or she is not from the same genetics as its family members could cause social problems, similar to what some adopted children feel."

"Human cloning also treads on many religious beliefs. For example, many Christians feel that scientists cloning human is a bit too much like playing God. Humans were meant to be imperfect, but could cloning bring about a perfect human?"

"Many feel animal cloning to be a violation of animal rights. Animal cloning undermines natures intent and could cause an upset in the diversity of each species. Animals will become customized tools, rather than individual, living creatures."

 Moral considerations, questions to be asked:

The Roman Catholic Church is opposed to human cloning. (Wiki.)

"The Roman Catholic Church, under the papacy of Benedict XVI, condemned the practice of human cloning, in the magisterial instruction Dignitas Personae, stating that it represents a 'grave offense to the dignity of that person as well as to the fundamental equality of all people.'"

"Many conservative Christian groups have opposed human cloning and the cloning of human embryos."

"They believe that life begins at the moment of conception. Other Christian denominations such as the United Church of Christ do not believe a fertilized egg constitutes a living being, but still they oppose the cloning of embryonic cells. The World Council of Churches, representing nearly 400 Christian denominations worldwide, opposed cloning of both human embryos and whole humans in February 2006. The United Methodist Church opposed research and reproductive cloning in May 2000 and again in May 2004."

With all the recent talk about cloning, I've got to know: Would a human clone have a soul?

(As an atheist, I don't even think I have a soul.)

"Yes, since every living thing has a soul. Plants have vegetative souls (capable of life and growth), animals have sensitive souls (capable of life, growth, and feeling), and humans have rational souls (capable of life, growth, feeling, and rational thought). Only the last kind survives death since only it is made of spirit; souls of plants and animals are made of matter and die when they die. Since a human clone would be alive, it would have a soul, and since a human clone would be rational and possess a human body, it would have the same sort of soul as every other human. The soul is created directly by God. The human soul is the substantial form and animating life principle of the human body. How you get that body, whether by natural generation, in vitro fertilization, or cloning is irrelevant. God still creates its soul." –  Catholic Answers

When people talk about the 'right to life,' the core belief is that life begins at conception. It is also an assumption that the state has the right to determine what a woman may do with her uterus.

Another fundamental belief is that all humans have a soul. To an atheist, this is not particularly rational, and when they talk about 'plant souls,' this writer just shakes his head.

The funny thing is, they care deeply about the unborn. As someone once said, "They don't give a shit about you after you are born"

Adoptive parents often struggle with the question of whether or not to tell their child that they are adopted. It's a question of trying to explain that the original parents 'didn't want you.'

That's a shitty thing to tell a kid.

Now imagine if the child is a clone. What if they ask, "Do I have a soul?" To a religious person, the answer may be yes and the answer may be no.

To an atheist parent, the answer is obviously no.

What rights would the larger community have? Would the neighbours have the right to know the kid next door is a clone? Obviously the knowledge might endanger the child and the family.

It is a complex question.

Do your neighbours have the right to know anything about you, anything at all? Most would say no, and yet that's not exactly human nature, is it? Some neighbours think they have the right to know quite a bit about you, and some of them think they have the right to judge you, and if they don't like you, they often feel some kind of justification for further acts of harassment, violence, and judgment.

In a world where race, creed, gender, age, economic status, and orientation, are considered important criteria when deciding how to treat someone or how to behave towards them, I think it is safe to say that some of us really aren't mature enough to deal with it in an ethical way.

Back to Clonaid. If a process is illegal, then it is by nature un-patentable. This holds true for human cloning, just as it would for someone who invented a better way to make methamphetamines, which is clearly illegal and arguably indefensible. Cloning might not be so indefensible, though.

Also, a patent application would require a person or organization of record. Clonaid may prefer not to do this, assuming they have actually succeeded.

Would the parents of such a child eventually tell them? Maybe not—but sooner or later someone would tell a literary agent, a Hollywood agent, or somebody.

A secret shared is a secret no longer, and one would think the mother and at least one doctor must know.

If human beings really have the ability to clone human beings, and have simply chosen not to do that on moral or ethical grounds, that really would be a historical first, wouldn't it?

Sooner or later, that Pandora's box will open, as history shows it inevitably must.

Here are some moral questions. If your family was killed by a drunk driver, and you had the money to produce clones of them, and assuming their consciousness had been recorded or uploaded as in a Robert J. Sawyer science-fiction book, would you do it?

Would they still be the same people?

What about the guy down the street, who doesn't have the money?

Assuming normal gestation of nine months, no accelerated growth and maturation process, and assuming you were thirty-five years old, would you be allowed to take custody of your wife before she was eighteen years of age? That's the age of consent. Would you be willing to wait much longer, bearing in mind our limited lifespan?

Why would she go back to a guy in his late sixties or early seventies, because for the last thirty-odd years she has been sequestered? Or, if she was eighteen, you would be fifty-three. You and she have been waiting, her mind full of all those memories, for eighteen years. What is she doing in the meantime, or do you expect her to be returned in 'good as new condition?' In other words, just the same as the day she died.

If cloned soldiers are a possibility, and the age of minority is eighteen, what freedom of choice would they have regarding their enlistment?

The state or corporation would be their mother, wouldn't it?

Mother knows best. She usually does!

Somewhere in the world, right now, someone is doing research into human cloning.

I'm convinced this will happen, even 'if only' to extend the lifespan of human beings in order to colonize the universe!

That's one hell of a big idea, and on that note I must close what is after all an incomplete and slightly schizoid piece of writing.

Here's Blade Runner. The seminal film on clones, or 'replicants.'

Notes. 'Test-tube' babies are not raised in test tubes, but in human wombs. The human womb could conceivably be replicated just as other organs can.

A factory of wombs, producing a secret army for some rogue state, corporation or wealthy individual is a hellacious concept.

How Many Cyborgs Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

How many cyborgs does it take to change a light bulb?

Well, that all depends, but...

The quality of the answers that we get depends on the quality of the questions we ask.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

But if we ask a smart question, we might get a smart answer.

Will we be assimilated by the human-machine interfaces which researchers are presently contemplating.

"Thus far, the main purpose for developing brain-computer interfaces has been to allow amputees and those who suffer from paralysis to mentally control a mobile robot or robotic prosthesis. They have already made possible some remarkable feats, such as partial restoration of hearing in the deaf, direct brain control of a prosthesis, implanting false memories in a rat, and downloading a rat's memory of how to press a lever to get food and then uploading the memory after the original memory has been chemically destroyed. If this sounds like science fiction, consider that scientists have already moved beyond the interface technology and into nanoscale wiring implanted in synthetic tissue. A joint MIT, Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital research team led by Robert Langer, Charles Lieber and Daniel Kohane developed a technique for growing synthetic biological tissue on a substrate containing biocompatible, nanoscale wires. This announcement came seven weeks after the announcement in London of the first-ever successful implantation of a synthetic organ, a fully functional trachea grown from the patient's own stem cells, work led by the pioneering researcher Paolo Macchiarini. And if scientists can implant wiring, then, in principle, they can turn the body or any part of it into a computer. But while most people have no problem with prosthetic limbs, even those directly actuated by the brain, nor with pacemakers or cochlear implants, people may feel uncomfortable becoming part machine. At what point does the interface between body and machine dissolve? When bodies can be made part machine, is it necessary to redefine personhood? Will people all be assimilated?"

 \--Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

Here's the answer to that last question: no.

That's right, the answer is no.

What will happen is that the human race will assimilate all of the new technology. I really don't think we will let it eat us or enslave us. We're a little too practical a species for that.

Google just bought Boston Dynamics, maker of the famous Big Dog. Google, along with other companies, is heavily into artificial intelligence research. With modern brain imaging and mapping, at some point in these studies, hardware and software applications will be able to 'read' a thought.

That would be useful for airport security. Imagine an oblong or rectangular frame that you walk through much like a metal detector. It reads your brain and it checks a few things, like if you've been recently thinking of a criminal or anti-social act. Biometrics will detect if you are nervous. Biometrics will check your retina to match up with your records. As far as airport security goes, a lot of folks wouldn't have a problem with that, (as long as it doesn't take forever, right?) and as long as it's not too invasive, and if it serves a legitimate need, they might be able to live with it.

But if brain waves can be read and interpreted, they can also be recorded. They can be stored, and downloaded, and if the machine is accurate enough, it might even be admissible as evidence in a court of law.

As a benign example, (and yet most of us are immediately thinking of criminals cases) a plane crashes and one of the victims is identified solely by the retinal and brain scans made prior to take-off.

This is of some interest, for his surviving friends and family at least know for sure what happened. He or she can be presumed dead, and while the author acknowledges the trauma and grief for the friends and family, it is also necessary to provide through the provisions of the last will and testament for the survivors and heirs.

In that sense it's a kind of benign use of artificial intelligence, and the ability of a machine to record someone's last thoughts might be of great comfort—or a great tragedy, depending on what those thoughts were. Most likely the 'average' passenger probably did think fond thoughts about friends and family in the immediate time period.

The families might be comforted by having a recording of such thoughts. It is also true that some might be denied boarding privileges, and some potential criminal or anti-social acts would be prevented by detection before they could be brought into action.

It's not immediately obvious to this writer how the average person would end up like the Borg, with no real mind of their own and end up powerless thralls to a universal computer system that has taken on a consciousness of its own. Some human agent would have to make that happen, possibly a mistake in coding somewhere along the line, unintentional or otherwise.

Computer-brain interfaces are  making great leaps.

Scientists have learned how to plant false memories in a mouse, and the author also recently saw a story where scientists used the mind or brain of a human, and they  controlled a mouse's tail by thought alone.

"Scientists haven't yet found a way to mend a broken heart, but they're edging closer to manipulating memory and downloading instructions from a computer right into a brain.

Researchers from the Riken-M.I.T. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took us closer to this science-fiction world of brain tweaking last week when they said they were able to create  a false memory in a mouse.

The scientists reported in the journal Science that they caused mice to remember receiving an electrical shock in one location, when in reality they were zapped in a completely different place. The researchers weren't able to create entirely new thoughts, but they applied good or bad feelings to memories that already existed."

Maybe in a hundred years, if someone can control your neighbour, he can control you, and this doesn't necessarily need hard-wiring once we comprehend all the machine aids people are going to be hooking up to their brains and their bodies in the very near future.

We've all seen the runner with the springy artificial legs and carbon-fibre feet.

But being able to read a brain might also lead to the ability to 'reframe' someone's brain.

The most positive use of the new technology would be medical—they might cure mental illnesses, they might cure brain dysfunctions of any kind. They might be able to restore at least some memories, anything that might have been recorded of his life prior to losing his memory.

Let's say that happens to a guy, he was in a car accident. Let's call him Stan. He went into a coma, and lost all his memories. He has amnesia.

Stan could at least know that he really was Stan! Fragmentary memories might be restored to him, like shots from the security camera in his apartment building, his shopping list and his favourite grocery store would all be recorded somewhere in a vast database. Pictures of his wife and kids, his dog, and his mom and dad would be uploaded. He could be retrained by having relevant skills and experiences of his employment downloaded or uploaded to his brain, whichever way the reader prefers to express it.

This particular technology could obviously also be abused.

Conceivably, if Stan was killed, and yet his brain was successfully downloaded wirelessly before 'signal degradation' became too pronounced, Stan could be input into a machine intelligence that already existed. The machine intelligence would take care of all autonomic chores, making the legs go and providing the body with the equivalent of oxygen. In his new status that's electrical power for Stan as a purely electronic entity will no longer require oxygen, food or water.

Stan would be riding around in  Big Dog's head and yet this author thinks that if Stan still had all his memories, it would be seamless enough. Essentially we have transplanted the brain of a man into the body of a pig, which has always been a big dream of science. (The author is kidding. – ed.)

In the future, if all or most babies are implanted with an ID chip upon birth, whether natural or otherwise, then all that would have to be done is to recover that chip from Stan's body, or recover that code sequence, and Stan's body, let's call it 'Big Dog,' has essentially become Stan in fact.

That's because our airport security robot now reads the ID chip, identifies the dog-like robot as 'Stan,' the guy who got killed but didn't die because his brain was downloaded into the robot previously known as Big Dog.

With artificial intelligence, a vast database and number crunching ability, Stan's whole life will flash before the airport security robot's virtual eyes and he will either be admitted or denied entrance.

The neuroplasticity of the brain makes it possible to learn new tasks. Future human beings will have bumps in different places on their brains!

But what bout the neuroplasticity of the mind, once freed from biological concerns?

It sounds funny, but it's true. Stan is going to have to get used to a few new ideas, not least of which is that he no longer has a physical body but now resides in a machine. He might not have to unlearn a few tasks, for they will always be with him as memories, but he will have to learn a few new ones.

What use is the ability to cook for Stan? He can make dinner for his family, that task can stay in his biological brain. But the machine's little doggy legs can carry him, and they are governed by the machine part of his makeup. It is the interface between biological and electronic brain that will really have to grow, and to adapt, and to learn. There's a lot more to it than an old-fashioned prosthetic arm, where patients would twitch a shoulder or bicep muscle to close the fingers so they could pick up a knife or fork and eat their dinner. The human brain learns that task well enough so that people no longer have to consciously do it. They just reach and pick up the object without thinking.

Stan has to get used to a whole new way of living, and he also has to get used to a whole new way of looking at life. Stan will redefine our ideas of what a person is, what consciousness is, and what life and death is.

We will have detached consciousness and personhood from the physical body and set it free of those limitations. Once you have removed all biological processes from Stan, and Stan from any need for them, all you have to do is maintain the machine, change the batteries or charge them up, and Stan can go on indefinitely. As long as backup copies of Stan exist, he could essentially live forever. Once a record of his mind has been made, we could make endless copies of Stan. Stan could exist in two places at once, and the two Stans could be linked in realtime so that they could enjoy two separate experiences, even at the same time.

Stan might be at a Leaf's game in Toronto, enjoying his day off, and his machine-double could be in Paris negotiating a business deal, and both Stan's could be aware of each other. Stan would be multi-talking, and muttering and talking to himself, but he would be able to cope with it.

Without the need to regulate the autonomous nervous system, the part of Stan's mind that was subconscious and operated his physical body for him is no longer necessary, however, he now has machine resources at his disposal. He has a memory bank, and his consciousness has essentially all the time in the world to learn how to use it. Without cell death, without aging, with more than one of him running around, Stan would just keep getting smarter and smarter.

More seriously, Stan's new life need not be a bleak hell of isolation and sensory deprivation. Let's give him a more human body, one with bipedal locomotion.

Will he be able to give and receive affection? His new body will need periodic cleaning.

Would he enjoy a hot shower, that most basic of modern luxuries?

One might think so, especially with the development of 'haptics,' in this case some nice new  e-skin.

"The development of electronic skin, or 'e-skin,' brings the next milestone in the continuing symbiosis—and perhaps melding—of man and machine."

"The thin new material may soon imbue robotics with a more sensitive touch while wallpapering much of the world with touch-screen capability."

"With the interactive e-skin, we have demonstrated an elegant system on plastic that can be wrapped around different objects to enable a new form of human-machine interfacing."

Stan could not just give the wife and kids a hug but experience it in much the same way he used to before.

He would feel their warmth, and their touch, and perhaps smell a bit of garlic on his wife's breath.

The Human Machine Interface

Here is the Wikipedia definition of a human-machine interface.

"Human-machine interface is the part of the machine that handles the  Human-machine interaction."

"Common practices for interface software specification include use cases, constrain enforcement by interaction protocols (intended to avoid use errors.)

Our friend Stan could be 'constrained' from interfering with his own internal systems, for surely he would have that capability. It might be wise to prevent him from switching himself off, or, alternatively, Stan or his doctors/builders/team (for that's what it would take, some kind of infrastructure) might be able to switch him off at night, and let the mind get a good night's sleep. Biologically, the mind needs rest because of the way our brains are structures, and so our minds are also structured to conform to those capabilities. Short-term memory fades quickly, and our night-time brain activity may be involved in reducing that and making sense of all our daily stimuli, and ultimately transforming it into long-term memory. Dreaming may be a part of this process, and Stan will dream.

Much of the need for sleep is tied to the needs of the body. How much the need for sleep is tied to the psyche, is a little less clear. Even sharks sleep, and while they process just as much sensory data as we do—their environment is just as all-enveloping as our own, it's also a little more monotonous. It's all water, every thing is blue all the time. Our environment is so much more colourful, and there's a lot more stuff in it. And yet it is also conceivable that Stan could go days without sleep when he wanted to, or when some necessity arose.

This author, and the average reader no doubt, has experienced a day or two of sleep deprivation once or twice in our more normal biologically-based lives, our 'carbon-based' life-forms, but Stan need never get tired in the same sense that we do.

In purely psychological terms, it would require some orientation time and most likely some guidance, both carbon-based and perhaps from those who have gone before him. These might originally have been disabled people, as in terms of medical and scientific research, the disabled would be seen as prime candidates for the human-machine interface.  
The blind will see, the deaf will hear , and the quadriplegics will walk again. They'll just have bits and pieces of plastic and metal sticking out of them, or holding it all together at first. Those will truly be hybrid human/machines. They might even look a bit like the Borg.

Our minds dream for a reason, and one would think that a system of artificial intelligence with our own unique personality imprinted upon it, would retain the need to rest, to play, and to engage in real human relationships.

It is a kind of immortality, one that goes beyond the limitations of the physical body.

Would You Have Sex With a Robot?

Would you have sex with a  robot?

The infrastructure (and presumably the technology) exists to create a robot with synthetic skin and artificial intelligence capable of learning its owner's preferences. Perhaps the most interesting part of the 'sexbot' phenomenon is that bot prototypes are not limited to sexual uses, but designed to express love and affection and develop a vocabulary suited to the buyer's interests.

"Obvious issues that accompany the introduction of such robots include: changing norms and values in human interaction; the possible formation of social bonds or exclusive sexual relationships with robots; sex addiction; transference of expectations from robot relationships to human relationships (including issues of dominance, behavioral expectations, and consent); the further commodification of sex; attachment issues."  – Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

Any robot specifically designed to replicate the female human form is a gynoid.

"Some argue that gynoids have often been portrayed as sexual objects. Female cyborgs have been similarly used in fiction, in which natural bodies are modified to become objects of fantasy. The female robot in visual media has been described as 'the most visible linkage of technology and sex' by Steven Heller." – Wikipedia.

What about the objectification of women?

"Feminist scholars say that the objectification of women involves the act of disregarding the personal and intellectual abilities and capabilities of a female; and reducing a woman's worth or role in society to that of an instrument for the sexual pleasure that she can produce in the mind of another. Although opinions differ as to which situations are objectionable, some feminists see objectification of women taking place in the sexually oriented depictions of women in advertising and media, women being portrayed as weak or submissive through pornography, images in more mainstream media such as advertising and art, stripping and prostitution, men brazenly evaluating or judging women sexually or aesthetically in public spaces and events, such as beauty contests, and the presumed need for cosmetic surgery, particularly breast enlargement and labiaplasty." – Wikipedia.

Sex robots would do nothing to counteract this of course, but is that in itself a bad thing? Or would women now find themselves forced to compete against robots, who have no physical needs, and no real status, never get tired and are always available?

There are any number of women willing to objectify themselves out of aspirational motives.

Now an android is of course androgynous—exhibiting a relatively human form, without secondary sexual characteristics such as a penis or breasts, etc.

Men get virtually intimate with  manga characters. Apparently the device allows for robotic handjobs. That's like having sex with an animated velvet painting of big-eyed children. All of these robots seem incapable of closing their mouths...kind of a no-brainer there, but with time, all of the human expressions, smiling, blinking, quirks and twitches of physical personality, will be tuned into future sex machines.

This all goes towards creating a more social robot, one that is not wooden and stereotyped, and one that could at least answer phones, sit at a reception desk, or serve coffee and sandwiches in a sit-down restaurant. If the thing could cook and vacuum, who knows, the real lady of the house might be tempted to buy one for hubby's birthday. The new robots might end up doing all kinds of duty.

There is such a thing as robot fetishism, most likely an offshoot of a paraphiliac tendency.

Wiki's article on sex-robots is here.

Robots could be the  ideal lover, some say.

"Jason Nemeth, in his essay, 'Should Robots Feel' believes love-companion robots will be practical in the future, and may one day satisfy all our intimate desires. Nemeth is not sure whether human/robot love will experience higher success rates than love between two humans, but he says tomorrow's robots will unlock the possibilities, and humans eager to experiment will take it from there."  – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

An artificial vagina is a simple electro-mechanical contraption. But of course that is only the objective description of one. An artificial vagina, combined with a  cloned womb, could conceivably, in the very near future, enable a robot to become pregnant. Presumably she'd have to be topped up periodically with suitable fluids in order to sustain the fetus to full term.

I, Robot, thee wed.  (Slate.)

Sooner or later, someone will want to marry one, perhaps a pastafarian, or the sort of fellow that writes letters to women on death row and eventually marries one.

"That at least some of us will be having sexual intercourse with robots in the future should be obvious by now. Somebody out there will make love to just about any consumer good that enters the home (and if that's not the first rule of product design, it should be). But will our robot-human relations be relegated to the bedroom, or will love enter the equation, too? Is our society headed in a direction that will support this transition? Looking at current trends, I'd say that the answer is a resounding yes."

Human-robot relationships:  why we should worry. This is someone's opinion, and there will be no shortage of opinions. As an atheist, one might have no real moral qualms about doing it with a robot, and presumably such a viewpoint would also have no problem with anybody else doing it.

Other belief systems held by other individuals will vary considerably, and no doubt those opinions will involve questions of what other people may or may not do with a robot.

There are various models of sexual robots available. One or two of them seem quite attractive, objectively speaking, although the esthetics are of course purely subjective.

An infomercial for True Companion.

A (Terrified)  User Review.

The  Ethics of Robot Sex.

 Another product. (Sexbots U.S.)

Are sex robots a  threat to prostitutes? Robot sex is safer sex according to this article.

Why would anyone go to another country just to have sex with a robot? They can have a robot stuffed into the back of their bedroom closet. In that sense, I don't agree with the article in question. Robots will not revolutionize the sex trade, although they may become an adjunct of it.

This would more likely revolutionize price-point marketing in places were prostitution is legal.

Want sex with a real woman? That would cost you a hundred dollars, but if you're cheap and not too particular, you can try out a sex-bot for five dollars. That is the only real sense where the new technology might be revolutionary, as to whether that threatens sex-trade workers is another story.

It will just be another kink, another lucrative revenue stream generated by serving a particular type of customer. Readers might cringe, but child-sex robots might actually serve an incurable psychosis and make real, human children safer. Without any evidence to go on, it is by no means clear that that is true, and it is also unclear whether the availability of sex robots would lower the rates of rape in general or make women any safer. Controversy is sure to arise where everyone is likely to have an opinion and where nobody has any facts.

It's all pure speculation at this point.

Making robot sex available might tend to further objectify women, in some opinions.

What sort of man would actually want a sex robot? What sort of relationship might he have with one, and could it lead to a kind of actual love? In my story,  Anna, the gentleman is kind of an emotional cripple after spending years in jail. He's also secretive and paranoid.

Nine percent  of respondents indicated they would go all the way with a robot. There are a lot of lonely people out there, and a life of celibacy can lead to sexual frustration. There are a lot of normal people who might benefit at least physically from a sexual robot.

How they deal with the guilt is all up to them, but it's better than sitting around reading Guilt Without Sex on a rainy Saturday night...

This would hold true for all of the same physiological reasons as masturbation. In fact, sex with a robot is nothing more than masturbation with an aid and an eye to maximizing pleasurable impact—it doesn't even seem as extreme, and it's certainly a lot less risky, than auto-erotic asphyxiation.

When a male gets to a certain age,  regular sex or masturbation can help to prevent enlargement of the prostate, a precursor to prostate cancer. Once a male gets beyond a certain age, sex is no longer about begetting children, and in the absence of the pair-bond with a partner, sex is purely recreational, or it is about status, it is about seeking stimulus) (as in Desmond Morris' Human Zoo) in an otherwise unfulfilling life.

In that sense, males even without any real or perceived neuroses might be interested in a sexual robot, but for that to catch on, barriers of social disapproval would have to drop significantly. In the future, as the social disapproval for same-sex marriage fades, as an alternative orientation becomes more acceptable, the truly deviant individual would be the one who does not declare a preference, remains celibate and does not masturbate.

'Cause that's just plain weird, man.

Considering media and public fascination with the sex-lives of anyone remotely appearing to be a celebrity, someone's non sex-life might be the most interesting thing in the world—for about a day.

Think of the scandal—a successful person, good-looking, nice clothes, a good house, a killer car, all the money in the world and they don't appear to have any sex life!

That would just drive 'em nuts, wouldn't it? (By that, I mean the audience or spectators.)

There is a gender-split in all of this, possibly an orientation-split. Virtually all of the sex robots available today are for heterosexual males.

There is apparently such a thing as 'Harry Harddrive,' a sexual robot for women, and presumably it could be in some way suitable for a homosexual man. There's an NSFW picture of Harry at this  restricted access blog-site.

As to whether a female sex robot would be suitable for a lesbian, one has to wonder just what the purpose of it all really is.

As someone once said, if you want companionship, get a dog! Yet one can only assume that unattached lesbians masturbate, or at least have needs too.

Otherwise how would anyone even know what their orientation actually is? The thoughts people have while masturbating would be a giveaway, unless one were in some total state of denial.

The sort of sex robot that you wouldn't be ashamed of being seen with on a date, where you go to a movie, go out to a club or restaurant afterwards, engage in stimulating conversation, flirt with, would appear to be still some ways down the road.

We'll call that desideratum the 'James Bond Companion Sex-Bot' for lack of a better term.

The sort of sex robot that would walk along beside you, holding hands, and hold their own in a human world, as you stroll through Central Park, is still a kind of scientific dream unrealized. She could play cards, mix a vodka martini, and hopefully, shoot well when the enemy Fem-Bots attacked.

Is it ethical to have sex with a robot? Some of the comments on this  Gizmodo article are kind of predictable.

"With robots becoming more and more sophisticated—Robodinho anyone?—scientists are working to come up with a code of ethics to be programmed into robots. This has shades of Asimov's Three Laws, and bigger science fiction nerds than I can clarify whether they were to be taken at face value or more of a lesson that absolute value systems are inherently flawed." – Gizmodo.

Sometimes it's hard being a robot. Should 'artifacts' be treated ethically? In other words, if an action would be considered abusive towards a human being, is the same behaviour abusive if it is done to a robot?

"This is a call for informed debate on the ethical issues raised by the forthcoming widespread use of robots, particularly in domestic settings. Research shows that humans can sometimes become very abusive towards computers and robots particularly when they are seen as human-like and this raises important ethical issues."

Uh, huh.

"The designers of robotic systems need to take an ethical stance on at least three specific questions. Firstly is it acceptable to treat artifacts – particularly human-like artifacts – in ways that we would consider it morally unacceptable to treat humans? Second, if so, just how much sexual or violent 'abuse' of an artificial agent should we allow before we censure the behaviour of the abuser? Thirdly is it ethical for designers to attempt to 'design out' abusive behaviour by users?"

"Conclusions on these and related issues should be used to modify professional codes as a matter of urgency." – Oxford Journals.

If I get pissed off and kick a dent in my car door, that might be stupid and ultimately, self-harming in that it detracts from the resale value. It might be wrong in that sense, but it's my machine, bought and paid for. I would think the same holds true for a robot, even if it portrays a woman or even if it's done in public.

In the story,  'My New Girl,' I speculate about such an individual. His new girlfriend is expected to take a certain amount of abuse, and that would be far preferable to treating a real girlfriend the same way.

I still think a lot of observers would draw moral conclusions about the subject's personality upon seeing such behaviour or attitudes.

This is just one more example of the kind of cultural schizophrenia that already revolves around sexual mores in this society.

Let's extrapolate to another culture, one where real human women are expected to be submissive to men. Pick any culture you want. The reader decides.

How would that culture perceive the role of the sexual robot?

Because in that sense, there are no inalterable moral values.

They vary by culture, by creed, by upbringing, custom and tradition, and they vary for their time and place.

Note: the author attempted to find the Roman Catholic Church's ruling, or any other considered moral opinion, on sex with a robot. The information is conspicuous by its absence, but one might assume the Church's ruling on onanism would cover it, and by extension, sex with a robot, as the author has already acknowledged, is a kind of masturbation in view of the lack of true humanity on the part of aforesaid robot.

Other than that, no one really knows anything as far as I can see.

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.

Would you help someone to die if they asked you?

Would you help your child to die if they were terminally ill and their lives were nothing but an unremitting hell of unbearable suffering?

Do we have the right to die on demand?

If we ourselves asked for an assisted suicide, should our wish be granted?

After much controversy, Belgium has approved euthanasia of children.

""Why wouldn't you give children, who are incurably sick and who are unbearably suffering the same possibilities adults have?" asked Dr. Jan Bernheim from the research team for terminal care at the Free University Brussels, speaking to DW before the law was approved."

"In Belgium euthanasia implemented by doctors has been legal for 11 years. Almost 1,432 elected to be euthanized in 2012 alone."

"The debate over euthanasia has heated up over the last few months after several spectacular cases emerged. In the October version of the Belgian magazine 'Panorama,' TV journalist Dirk Leestmans reported on a detainee who was granted the right to be euthanized.

"The inmate said the detention and the conditions in jail had caused him extreme psychological suffering and he therefore wanted to die. The case is still being reviewed by the courts. The inmate hasn't been euthanized yet, but his request seems poised for approval."

"This is not the only case that created an international sensation. At the beginning of October, a 44-year old, going by the name of Nathan, was euthanized after a failed sex change operation. He said his wish to die was legitimate because of unbearable psychological suffering."

"Carine Brochier of the European Institute of Bioethics in Brussels says, 'Family members, hospital staff and doctors are extremely burdened by the euthanasia law.'"

"Euthanasia is not easy. It's not fun to kill someone. Euthanasia is really killing and that's not good for the person doing it, even if it is to kill suffering. It's also killing society," Brochier said.

Euthanasia has been around for a long time. It's nothing new. It goes back to the Stone Age.

France is slowly moving towards assisted suicide.

"On the strength of the panel's recommendations, left-wing daily Libération expects the socialist government to present a draft text by next summer, although widespread grassroots opposition earlier this year to the legalization of same-sex "marriage" might make president François Hollande wary of bringing yet another sensitive issue to the fore.

"It is the President himself, however, who decided last September to have the National Advisory Ethics Committee (CCNE) assemble a representative panel of French citizens chosen by a commercial polling company, IFOP, so that it could express ordinary people's opinions on end of life. The 18 'sages' gathered for four consecutive weekends in order to hear officially mandated experts, many of them favorable to at least one form of voluntary ending of life, including Jean-Luc Romero, president of the Association for the right to die with dignity (ADMD)."

From the same story comes the following.

"'The possibility of committing suicide with medical assistance, as well as assisted suicide, constitute in our view a legitimate right of the patient who is in the end phase of his life or who is under the burden of an irreversible pathology, a right which rests mainly on his informed consent and full consciousness,' they write."

"In practice, this would mean non-terminally but incurably ill patients – such as tetraplegics – should be eligible for this type of assistance, which is in fact akin to homicide."  (Life Site News.)

(Tetriplegic is another term for quadriplegic. – ed.)

The wording is significant, as it entails the right, "...to obtain medical help in order to finish life with dignity."

The B.C. Supreme Court upheld the province's ban on  assisted suicide, which will now be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. It's important to see the distinctions.

Euthanasia is present in all societies. It is simply not much talked about. It's not exactly the same as assisted suicide.

A friend's dad was on a respirator after a major heart attack. A Canadian doctor spoke with the family after two weeks and told them there wasn't much hope for recovery.

Under Canadian law, patients or anyone who makes a will can specify that 'no extraordinary means' will be used to keep them alive in the event of a major medical event.

My friend's sister and mother could not bring themselves to do it. That left it up to my friend, and there's no doubt it affected him deeply. He and the doctor put their hands on the switch at the same time.

They turned the respirator off. His father died of complications resulting from a heart attack. They have to put something as the cause of death on the official death certificate. He was eighty-seven years old.

My own father suffered from Parkinson's Disease and after ten years, his condition was deteriorating on a daily and weekly basis. He was having a lot of falls, and a lot of choking incidents, and his quality of life was not very good. And yet he was prepared to continue living, which is only normal—he would have very much liked it if medical science had found a cure for Parkinson's Disease. Whenever something happened, he would be bedridden for some time, and then he seemed to be recovering, but never to the level he had enjoyed before. That is a feature of Parkinson's.

I got the call about six a.m. one morning. He'd had some kind of problem, and he was in the hospital. His lungs were full of blood, and he was unconscious, and yet with his eyes open, wide and staring at the ceiling. With my siblings all there, the doctor asked us what we wanted to do.

The sound of his breathing was horrifying. That great body wanted to live, but Parkinson's had killed him, or was killing him. Finally.

"We can operate, but there's no telling if we can really do anything for him...or what would be left if he did regain consciousness." The doctor's voice was calm and sympathetic, but he'd clearly seen all of this before. "I can give him something to make him more comfortable—"

We decided that that was the thing to do—to give him something to make him more comfortable, and my siblings left the room while I took a turn, holding onto my father's hand, and the nurse stuck a big ampoule of something into his arm.

It's hard. There's nothing harder than easing your loved one into the afterlife or the next world, which I don't really believe in.

I thought his breathing would just stop, and he kept going. My siblings really weren't prepared to deal with this, and in some sense as the eldest I took a lot of responsibility for my father that day.

I was glad they were out of the room and didn't have to see this. My sister just couldn't handle it and my younger brother wasn't much better.

It was a way of acknowledging him, for all the responsibility that he took for his own children over the years. It was the right thing to do for a first-born son. He had expressed his wishes clearly for us, and had signed the declaration while still of sound mind, although his body was ravaged by the disease.

My father's suffering was finally over, and there was really nothing there to bring back in any case. It would have done nothing more than to extend his suffering. It's not that I haven't thought about it since.

What if we had gone ahead with an operation? He might have lived another six weeks in a hospital bed, and the next medical crisis would have killed him anyways. Why put him through that suffering, why put the rest of the family through all that?

But to go against his wishes, clearly stated, would be wrong. To keep him alive by extraordinary means would have been wrong.

There was no doubt my father was going to die—the question was how long it would take. Three hours, three days, three weeks—it was going to happen.

The four hours between the time I got the phone call and the time he died was the toughest four hours of my life. When I think about it, I sure wouldn't want to take four hours when I die—

The really strange thing is that even with three full ampoules of morphine in him, the body still kept drawing in those deep racking, breaths, and that horrible drowning, sucking noise just kept going, on and on.

At some point the nurses came into the room and ushered me out. A few minutes later as I sat in a waiting room, one of them came out and told me that my father was gone.

But that's why there was more than one family member and more than one medical person involved in the decision. No one should be asked to shoulder that responsibility alone.

Euthanasia probably happens in the western world, it happens in Canada and the U.S., and in every other developed nation that the reader would care to name. It happens even more frequently in the undeveloped world, out of natural human feelings of compassion and empathy.

It happens because it is a necessity, even though we call it something else, palliative sedation.

So Belgium's decision to liberalize euthanasia, certainly of the elderly, simply regularizes a situation that already exists, it's just that no one really wants to talk about it. It's a serious subject and a troubling one at that.

Those laws will benefit the survivors. It will take some of the burden off of them, and the doctors, but with reasonable minds and loving hearts, it will never be easy. To take the life of a suffering child, even at the child's own decision, would be ten times worse for all concerned.

We have to think of the living, their survivors, as well in this debate.

Clearly there could and most likely would be abuses under more liberalized euthanasia.

Euthanasia is different from palliative sedation, and that is different from assisted suicide. It is a series of issues or questions.

 Polls reveal much about the debate and the issues raised.

"Widespread support in Quebec for Bill 52, legislation proposing to legalize 'medical aid in dying,' drops sharply when Quebecers are told of the dire consequences similar statutes have brought in other countries, a new poll has found."

"In the poll, conducted by Abingdon Research from October 24-26, respondents first gave their initial impressions of the legislation and then gave their final impression after being asked their opinion of various scenarios that have come up with similar legislation."

"Scenarios included doctors killing elderly or disabled people without their consent, doctors helping suicidal teens carry out their deaths, or abusive family members pressuring the elderly to seek 'medical aid in dying.'"

These concerns are certainly valid, and it's amazing how fast those poll results can change when the information changes and the presentation changes. But it's important for voters and citizens to be well-informed and to think about a decision, whether legislative or in their own personal life and circumstances.

"LifeCanada, the national pro-life educational group that commissioned the poll, said the results show that support for Bill 52 is 'a mile wide but a foot deep.'"

That seems like fair comment, but then this is a contentious issue—and respondents are sophisticated enough to know that. We probably don't spend enough time thinking about many of the political and social issues of the day.

What's interesting about the Canadian body politic is that it's not divided up solely on ideological grounds. People really had to scratch their heads a bit on this one.

In the twenty something years since the Sue Rodriguez case, has Canada's social landscape shifted?

A British Columbia group will ask the Supreme Court that question.  (National Post.)

"Four months after the 1994 decision, Ms. Rodriguez died by assisted suicide in her B.C. home. The procedure, a lethal injection, was carried out illegally by an anonymous doctor."

"'This is a matter of extreme urgency; the fate of gravely ill Canadians hangs in the balance,' said Grace Pastine, litigation director for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which launched the case in 2011."

There are some important distinctions to be made, questions to be asked.

What is the difference between the merciful easing of a terminally-ill elderly person into death, and the assisted-suicide of a younger person whose ailment makes life unbearable or unlivable?

The  ultimate vacation: traveling to Switzerland, the world's capital of assisted suicide. (National Post.)

Disclaimer: Under Canadian Law it is an offence to counsel to commit suicide, and it is an offence to harm yourself or to try to harm yourself or to threaten to harm yourself.

This author still encourages families and friends to ask themselves these questions, and to discuss them with each other, so that last wishes are known, and actions are open and responsible so that the dying may pass with dignity and so that the living can go on with their own lives without fear and regret.

Here is the  Roman Catholic Church's position on euthanasia.

"No matter how ill a patient is, we never have a right to put that person to death. Rather, we have a duty to care for and preserve life."

"But to what length are we required to go to preserve life? No religion or state holds that we are obliged to use every possible means to prolong life. The means we use have traditionally been classified as either 'ordinary' or 'extraordinary.'"

"Ordinary" means must always be used. This is any treatment or procedure which provides some benefit to the patient without excessive burden or hardship."

"'Extraordinary' means are optional. These are measures which do present an excessive burden."

Additional Resources.

Euthanasia.

Palliative Sedation.

 The Slippery Slope.

 The Terry Schiavo Case.

 Living Will. The living will should also provide some direction for end of life wishes, including a statement of whether the loved on would or would not prefer 'extraordinary means' to continue life in the absence of any real hope of recovery.

What is a Virtual Currency?

Love, money, sex and death is what makes the world go around.

It's what makes us what we are.

Let's talk about money.

There are of course moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding the issue of money. This being the future and all, the one we were all madly reading about when we were kids, there are new kinds of money.

Plastic debit cards, credit cards, in-store gift cards, have all changed the face of transaction in the sense that we do things our parents never would have done. Our parents, certainly our grandparents, would have never swiped a card through a reader, waved an electronic speed-pass in front of a gas pump, or bought and activated a plastic gift card.

Let's look at gift cards. When the 'credit' or 'money' is loaded up on the card, it is said to be 'activated.' That's backed up something on the front end, some kind of deposit somewhere. and on the 'back end,' when the card pays out in the form of groceries, gas, a pair of shoes, that transaction, is still backed up by coin of the realm, a stable 'real' currency, backed up by the assets of the state, and, or, its holdings in specie or bullion. This 'money' is backed by a state, who uses the currency to pay its bills, pay entitlements, and carry out its social and economic goals or programs.

If you want to purchase such a gift card, you have to hand over some cash, pay with a credit or debit card, or you simply won't get your purchase. No money, no card. U.S. or Canadian dollars are pretty stable. You have one year on a gift card to use the funds, or you lose your 'rights' so to speak, and that is one of the criticisms of the cards. If you are paying cash, it's just easier to use the currency of the country you are presently in—I once had problems buying a sandwich twenty miles inland in Michigan. I was on the way to Flint or something and the trip came up at short notice. No sandwich, end of story.

Virtual currency is different. It has no backing from any state or bank, there are no holding in gold, dollars, bonds, whatever has been used previously to covey the idea of value, of monetary worth. The bitcoin is worth what someone paid for it and no more, and it is also volatile over its short history.

 Bitcoins are traded like a commodity. A peck of soybeans is a commodity, a sow-belly is a commodity. Conventional commodities are traded electronically, on trust, by reputable and registered traders.

They own the right to the funds generated by the sale of some peck of soybeans or a sowbelly somewhere, and those trades are backed up by the intrinsic worth of the commodity itself.

An international, virtual currency is only worth what somebody has paid for it. Demand for it drives the worth of it up, and the same thing can happen to soybeans or sow-bellies or whatever.

The difference is that the commodity is real, as opposed to virtual.

Make no mistake, if I buy one bitcoin, real money is coming out of my account, otherwise I don't have the right to own it. If demand is high when I cash it in, real money comes out of some virtual font somewhere and if I want then I can go and buy what I want.

What's different about a virtual currency is that it's new, ladies and gentlemen, and it's also international.

Is it a threat, and by that, I mean is it a threat to me, personally? Enlightened self-interest, right?

How does this affect me?

This writer is not a hundred percent sure of just how I would go about buying a sandwich, 'twenty miles inland' in some country, any country, with a bitcoin. Debit card for sure, and that U.S. dollar transaction would be electronically calculated and converted instantly so the bill is paid in U.S. dollars from my Canadian account.

Right? That seems simple enough.

Bitcoin charts.

Business Insider  interview with Paul Krugman.

"Economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman says that "in principle, you can have assets, which are considered valuable, even though there is nothing backing them," but he is skeptical about what drives the recent surge of the bitcoin."

It also seems simple enough, that in the trading of bitcoins, simple electronic and mathematical rules apply. Conversions from and into bitcoin virtual currency would be relatively simple.

The question to a consumer, and we live in a consumer society just as much as in a 'money-trading' society, is, "What good is it? What is it for?"

But if a virtual currency like Bitcoin is to become a valid international consumer currency, it must be in denominational units of small enough for convenient use. One bitcoin worth say, $450.00 isn't much good if all you want to do is to buy a cup of coffee. If the coffee is valued at $1.60, that's 1/287th of a bitcoin. That would essentially mean nothing to the average consumer, and if it's volatile, one minute the value of your bitcoin is soaring, and the next minute it is plummeting.

So that is the starting point for the research to this story. I would like to know what it's good for.

Here's what people in  nine emerging markets had to say about bitcoin. Sounds to me like they know more about it than this writer, but the M-pesa digital currency in Kenya is interesting. At time of writing, apparently it's the most advanced such system in the world.

Bitcoin  shut out of Chinese market, second largest in world. If it didn't serve state policy, and if the government saw it as essentially chaotic, then it would be highly suspect in their eyes.

Will virtual currency break the  power of the state to control monetary policy?

"There is another concern about Bitcoin that gnaws at me. Control of money is the State's most important tool for maintaining power. Controlling money allows governments to engineer society, rewarding the politically connected while keeping the underclass content. It gives government the ability to promote the illusion that there is such as thing as a free lunch, and that the State is the fountainhead from which all good things flow. Thus, governments will crush anything that undermines their control over money. Absolutely no competition in this area is allowed."

"Perhaps it's my conspiratorial side, but something smells fishy here. If Bitcoin is as dangerous to the State as its proponents in the liberty movement claim, why isn't the State already moving to crush it?" – Lew Rockwell.

 Money Beat.

""Virtual currencies, perhaps most notably bitcoin, have captured the imagination of some, struck fear among others, and confused the heck out of many of us. Indeed, based on conversations my staff and I have had with dozens of individuals both inside and outside of government, it is clear that the knowledge and expectation gaps are wide. Fundamental questions remain about what a virtual currency actually is, how it should be treated, and what the future holds."

"Virtual currencies, perhaps most notably bitcoin, have captured the imagination of some, struck fear among others, and confused the heck out of many of us. Indeed, based on conversations my staff and I have had with dozens of individuals both inside and outside of government, it is clear that the knowledge and expectation gaps are wide. Fundamental questions remain about what a virtual currency actually is, how it should be treated, and what the future holds."

What's  so special about Bitcoin?

"The fact that Bitcoin advocates rely so heavily on the niftiness of its underlying algorithms and protocol is one of the best reasons to predict its demise. If all you have going for you is a cool algorithm, then at some point there will be someone else out there with an even cooler algorithm. And then someone else."

"Indeed, there is evidence that this process is already underway. If you don't want to use Bitcoin, you can always try Litecoin." – Forbes

How is Bitcoin  different from the dollar?

Steven Kinsella, as quoted in Forbes:

"Bitcoin has no use value, only exchange value, and because it is has no worth in use other than what others are willing to pay for it, it is always in a bubble: these happen when prices of assets get dislodged from their fundamental value. So Bitcoin is the perfect bubble."

"(Charles) Goodhart argues that states have essentially always been in control of monetary systems. He emphasizes that governments have always viewed seigniorage as a useful form of revenue and are unlikely to allow this source of revenue to be replaced by a private source of money."

The article concludes, "There's no doubt that Bitcoin is an interesting invention, useful at a minimum for provoking good classroom discussions in Money and Banking courses about what exactly is the meaning of money. But people should be wary of investing large amounts of their savings in Bitcoins. History provides plenty of reasons to suspect that private money is unlikely to work. Maybe this time is different. Usually it's not."

To go further than that, what are the ethical or moral considerations of allowing Bitcoin and other private currencies free reign, to conduct a global experiment that could, in the longer term be disruptive of national economies?

I have some philosophical sympathy with a new form of disruption, for it seems self-evident that at some point in the not-too-far distant future, new forms of international government will arise.

When the European Union came into being and adopted the Euro, some national powers had to be given up, and yet the currency is backed up by the combined holdings in all the member nations.

Their gross domestic product, the real wealth of the nation, (the more developed a nation is, the more it is 'worth,') the ratio of debt to income and expenditure, all these factors contribute to the worth, or value of the Euro. In relation to other similarly-baked currencies, its values fluctuates over time as circumstances and therefore demand the Euro as a holding currency, (a commodity of value) goes up and down. This only becomes volatile in moments of crisis. The fact the European Union is international really doesn't change the rule-set. And everyone involved at least understands the rules.

Issues of national sovereignty are touchy, hot-button issues, and yet civilization is advancing—we are becoming more organized, more knowledgeable. Social systems are getting more complex, and the demands for international cooperation are growing rapidly as the challenges of the 21st century become apparent or when they reveal themselves for the very first time.

It may be necessary to strip away some small portion of the sovereign powers of the state in its theoretical sense, in order to give some power to an international organization, one where all states and nations could hold membership, and have the right to speak, consult, debate, and set policy.

Also, if it is not to be completely powerless, such an international organization would have to have some funding, some revenue stream, generated by contributions on all members, dare I say 'international taxation,' and ultimately such an international entity would acquire assets. Their virtual currency, traded and used by consumers world-wide, might very well be backed up by an acceptable standard commodity—like gold, or even good old U.S. greenbacks as well as other high-value, stable currencies.

Such an international organization would of course use monetary policy to advance its social policies on a global basis, i.e., 'world government.' In its initial stages, that institution would be as experimental, and most probably just as potentially disruptive, certainly long term, as highly-speculative virtual currencies now in the marketplace.

In that sense, something very much like Bitcoin might be useful for an emerging world-wide electronic culture. Part of the usefulness of that tool might lay in its ability to subvert existing power structures and laying the groundwork for something both benevolent in principle, in so far as it can be said that commerce is essentially benevolent and a socializing factor in human relations.

In terms of science-fiction futurism, displaced people, refugees, stateless persons, would still be citizens of the globe. No one could seriously claim otherwise. They might not want to acknowledge them as citizens, for that gives them certain rights, but the unfriendly state in question could hardly suggest that they came from some other planet.

An international government might take some responsibility for those global citizens, but more importantly some virtual currency that they could take, send, receive, spend or trade anywhere in the world would appear to be their natural, supra-state currency. That currency would be a tool for further consolidation of a planetary government, once suitable institutional architecture is Iin place, and the world as we know it, might even be a better place for it.

Sorry, even I didn't see that one coming.

End

Additional Resources.

Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman:  Bitcoin is Evil.

India: Bitcoin trading halted after 'security warning.'

"India currently boasts a 50,000-strong bitcoin community, with at least 30,000 of them owning the digital currency, India Today reported. According to SourceForge, there have been 35,648 downloads in India since the launch of bitcoin on November 9, 2008."

Burgers to beer:  Businessweek. (Remember what I said about Bitcoin as a threat to established power structures.)

Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer virtual payment system. (Wiki.)

How It Works.

How to Steal Bitcoin in  Three Easy Steps.

Bitcoin units.

Weaknesses.

Transaction Fees.

Photo Credits:

Chapter One. Central Intelligence Agency

Chapter Two. (nil)

Chapter Three. (a) Neil Harbisson.

Chapter Four. (a) Collection of the author (b) Wikipedia (c) Steve Juvetson

Chapter Five. (a) La Responsible (b) Jean-Pol GRANDMONT (c) Public Domain

Chapter Six. (a) Morguefile (b) Pospiech (c) Toni Barros

Chapter Seven. (a) Richard Greenhill, Hugo Elias and the Shadow Robot Company

Chapter Eight. (a) Dollfriend (b) Gnsn (c) pinguino k

Chapter Nine. (a) Collection of the author (b) Collection of the author (c) Jacob Windham

Chapter Ten. (a) Wikipedia (b) Wikipedia

About the Author

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines. A writer of darkly humourous speculative fiction, his works have appeared in six languages. His stories have appeared in Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

Report a broken link here: Louis Shalako longcoolone@outlook.com

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