“The only way to save the Euro is to print it” (I can’t remember who said this, but it was possibly Niall Ferguson)

I’ve had an idea. I’m not sure if it’s really any good at this stage, but I’m going to try it out. The idea is the future in a box. A physical box containing a handful of movies, novels, factual books, articles and perhaps some physical items that help to explain, or at least illuminate, what the future will be like five or ten years hence.

The only thing is, what’s in the box? I’ll post my box contents in a week or two.

Not sure whether you will have seen this, but it’s very interesting indeed. It’s a video hologram of the dead rapper Tupac performing ‘live’ with Snoop Dogg. Beware of the language if this kind of thing offends, but it’s ****ing fantastic. Link here.

Things are speeding up right? You’ve got no time to yourself and it feels like you’re always working. Perhaps not. A couple of economists have studied how people in the US spend their time and the results are shocking. People have considerably more free time than they did forty years ago. This verdict is at odds with various studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau but their studies tend to focus on workplace trends. The findings looked at total time spent and found that the total amount of time spent ‘working’ has actually fallen consistently since 1965. There are problems of definition of course. If you are multi-tasking – listening to music while cleaning the house for example – is this work or relaxation?

Nevertheless, the technological revolution (for example, 24/7 services, home delivery, Internet banking) has delivered a more relaxed society where the average person has four to eight hours more leisure time each week than they did forty years ago. So why do we still feel so stressed out? The reason, apparently, is that we’ve got too much money! The growth in real incomes has made our time more expensive so lying in the sun for a day is much more expensive that it used to be.

The second reason is that we do too much. Connectedness means that we are ‘always on’ which also leads to a blurring of boundaries between work and home. Add a pinch of job insecurity due to outsourcing and you can see why we’re so rattled.

Following on from my last post about the fabric or reality here’s another in a similar vein. Both are from the cutting room floor in the sense that I’m doing a second (and hopefully final) edit of one of my new books (The Future: 50 things you really need to know) and these didn’t make the cut for one reason or another.

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Consciousness is difficult to get your head around. It’s essentially thoughts, or awareness, generated by the interaction between the human brain and the outside world, although some might argue that it’s your mind not your brain doing this. Perhaps it’s simply awareness of self or of one’s own thinking.

Consciousness is somewhat problematic in that we cannot currently define it let alone understand exactly how it works or replicate it. Where, for example, does consciousness reside? Is the brain separate from the mind, and if so, how is it separate? Until we can answer these questions, we will never be able to create an artificial intelligence (AI) that will truly rival human beings. Machines are already very smart, but they are a very long way away from being able to criticise their own thinking or create their own problems. In short, can a machine ever really be described as intelligent if it does not really think in the true sense of the word?

Thinking about this issue in a slightly different way, perhaps new forms of intelligence will emerge from new forms of chaos. For example, think of the way that shoals of fish move around or swarms of bees interact. Maybe, the wisdom of crowds will evolve into something resembling a ‘hive’ consciousness – billions of human brains unknowingly connecting with each other to create a superior form of instinctive intelligence.

In a book about the future, and the fringes of current thinking, it is worth probing two areas that relate to human consciousness, both of which are somewhat metaphysical and philosophical. The first is how do we know that what we currently understand as consciousness (i.e. being alive) is not merely a Matrix movie-like dream or simulation? How do we know that we even exist? If you are interested in this I would recommend another book in this series, which is 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know. That’s a cheap way of digging myself out of a large hole.

The second thought is whether or not it could be possible for human consciousness to reside or move outside of the human body. This will sound a little crazy, but we need to consider this for two reasons. First, this could link to discussions about a human soul, which links to various spiritual and religious ideas. Second, if we are trying to turn ourselves into immortal beings (transhumanism) or build true thinking machines (AI), this could lead to the development of devices that could ‘hold our souls’ – or at least an individual consciousness.

Some religions, of course, may argue that this happens already. Some faiths, for instance, believe that after a person dies, their spirit or soul leaves the old body and passes to that of another animal or even a plant. Maybe one day it will be discovered that this is true or that it is possible for a soul to pass into, or somehow inhabit, inert objects or materials such as rocks. Or that consciousness contains some kind of unknown energy that can be housed in things such as buildings or disrupt other unknown energy fields.

And what of animals? They have brains, but do they possess consciousness? This is an ethically charged area, not least because if you deny animals consciousness (or knowledge of their own existence) this can be used as a justification for killing them.

And what of plants? Could we one day discover that they possess some kind of limited consciousness? It’s not impossible that consciousness is actually a continuum and that all living things have some level of self-knowledge.

And if you think that’s a bit unlikely I have another idea for you. What if it were one day possible to introduce, or remove, memories from the head of an individual via pharmacological intervention. You could then make people believe that something had happened to them even when it had not or, conversely, remove the memory of real experiences. And, of course, the individual could be made unaware that such an intervention had ever taken place. The military would have an obvious interest in what could perhaps be termed ‘pharmaceutical reality’ due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and so to would some victims of serious crime. But what if governments or corporations (or even parents) started to alter reality in this manner? Perhaps it would start, innocently enough, with a desire to remove the stress and strain of everyday living via neural implants, but who is to say that it would stop there?

The traditional, classical, view of reality is that something only exists in one place, but what if objective reality was found not to exist? What if an object could be in more than one place at once? What if particles billions of miles away could communicate with each other faster than the time it takes for light to travel between them – or what if time could move in more than one direction?

Albert Einstein stated that if someone travelled into space at a sufficiency high speed and came back to Earth, they would experience less time than someone who stayed at home. So time, essentially, is relative, even at slower speeds.

There are limits to this theory because Einstein believed that nothing with mass could travel faster than light, but what if he was wrong? Could someone get back before they had left (time travel). It’s a bit like flying from London to New York on a supersonic jet and getting to the Big Apple before you’ve left old London town. Keep this thought in your head, but also consider another one.

In the 1920s it was thought that memories were stored in very specific locations in the brain. But in 1977, Karl Pribram, a Stanford University neurophysiologist, came to the opposite conclusion, namely that memories were not to be found in specific brain cells, but were more widely distributed throughout the brain. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense until he started to think in terms of holograms. Perhaps the human mind was functioning in a similar way?

If you are not familiar with holograms they are made by splitting a laser beam into two. One beam is bounced off an object and the second functions as a reference beam. If you cut a laser image of an object in two, each piece would contain the complete image, albeit at a slightly lower resolution. Hence, the possibility that each brain cell might be able to contain the same memory. If you think this is impossible, consider the fact that holographic storage is one way that computers could progress in the future. Quite what a neural equivalent of a laser reference beam could be is anyone’s guess, as is the ultimate nature of what the brain is perceiving.

In 2011 a Nobel Prize was awarded to work in relation to Dark Energy. This is a force believed to be responsible for the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Link this to some other astronomical ideas (for example, the belief that the universe is infinite) and you might arrive at the idea of a universe containing every conceivable combination of matter, which could mean other permutations of you reading this book. In other words, our universe is actually a multiverse. The universe is not the only one and neither are you. This idea is probably a bit of a stretch, partly because it’s unknown whether the universe is infinite or not and because there’s a big difference between a situation where everything must happen and one where anything could happen. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting way to give yourself a headache, a bit like trying to think about what infinite space – or it’s converse – or no outside beyond the universe would look like.

Going even further ‘out there’, perhaps there are not only things we cannot see, but there is another dimension hidden from human awareness. This takes us to the fringes of physics and into mainstream science fiction but, as we’ve seen, the two do sometimes collide. Take Black Holes, for instance. Technically nothing can escape from a Black Hole because to do so would require movement faster than light. But what if things could move far faster than light? Indeed, what if there was a tiny black hole inside every atom? What if travel, not only in time, but also between different universes, were possible? Perhaps the world really is inside a grain of sand.

As usual, someone has already thought of this and other strange possibilities.
For example, in Fritz Leiber’s book, The Big Time, war is waged across time. Perhaps inter-dimensional travel explains ghosts, although if this were the case, why do people only ever see visions of people from the past and never people from the future? What if memories were real and could exist outside of the brain or what if cracks in parallel universes allowed things to leak out? Maybe this would explain premonitions or deja vu? Indeed, what if nothing really exists? What if everything is just nothing except oscillating energy of various kinds that can exist in all places simultaneously?

Maybe our dreams or our intuitions are as real as reality ever gets.

This is fun – and slightly mind popping if true. A handful of psychologists, notably Michael Frank at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and Daryl Bem, at Cornell are conducting experiments into peoples’ ability to foretell the future or, more precisely, whether it’s possible for the future to influence the present.

In one experiment Bem asked people to briefly look at a list of words and remember them. They were then given an edited selection of the same list of words, which they were also asked to memorise. Weirdly, people were more likely to remember the edited selection of words during the initial test. In other words, later events appeared to influence earlier behaviour. Several studies have tried to repeat these results, one study succeeded but six others failed.

Source: New Scientist, 14.1.12 pages 39-41.

I’m feeling guilty about the lack of brainmail so here’s something that will end up there one of these days. Interesting start up from Mike McCue and Evan Doll that aims to turn links that appear on Facebook and Twitter into virtual magazines. www.flipboard.com

There used to be a saying that when large corporations built themselves fancy new headquarters featuring flags and a water feature they were usually in trouble.
A new spin on this is the so-called skyscraper index, which equates the building of tall buildings with economic collapse. According to Barclay’s Capital, China’s share of current skyscraper construction is 53%. Personally, I don’t quite buy it.