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They say that for your 25th anniversary you should give your spouse silver, and for your
50th, gold, I wonder what people might give in the future for their 500th anniversary? So today’s episode is coming out on Valentine’s
Day and it seemed a good time to turn our discussion to the various challenges, changes,
and advantages the future might bring us in terms of forging and maintaining relationships,
be they romantic, platonic, or familial. The future is not simply a place of giant
megastructures and advanced technology, we can’t discuss the civilizations that might
arise without contemplating that human component, and certainly romance is a big chunk of that. Of course it’s a popular topic in science
fiction too, and often challenges us to look at our core assumptions about human behavior
in the future. Unfortunately it also often paints a picture
in which marriages, or at least long term monogamous relationships, are very rare. And often the author makes it clear that’s
a sign of enlightenment in their eyes, rather than simple personal freedom of choice in
a society that need not worry so much about things like accidental pregnancies or STDs. That’s always rubbed me the wrong way, partially
because of the implied boredom, that people who lived for many centuries would have to
regard lifelong marriage as an unrealistic thing. They may be right of course, but boredom,
as we’ve discussed with life extension on other occasions, has always struck me as a
handwave. I can’t really imagine being bored with
existence and ending it because I’m a few centuries old, there’s just too much to
do to keep oneself occupied or amused, and by the same logic I can’t really imagine
getting bored of my friends or family either. Oh to be sure, like most of us, I’ve made
new friends but I never really drifted away from the others unless we weren’t in contact
for a long time. People do change and will diverge if they’re
not interconnected. Friendships are like sculptures, it helps
to start with a good block of stone, someone who is a good basic match, but you still have
to carve them out and, like any creation, you’re changed by the work too. That is one big advantage of the modern world
that will continue to improve, we all now have access to hundreds of millions of people,
increasingly tagged and indexed to make it easier to find good matches, and so it’s
fairly easy to find folks with multiple shared interests and compatible mindsets and to build
a genuine friendship or romance with them even if they live far away. That deserves a caveat though because back
in the old days folks only could interact with their village or tribe, a few hundred
people, and it can seem to offer a conundrum, were those folks just settling for less or
are we fooling ourselves about how compatible we are with others? The answer probably lies in between, because
if relationships are based out of shared interests, experiences, and adversity, when your whole
world is just your village, that actually is the place where everyone shares your interests,
experiences, and adversities. On the one hand, a lot of us develop friendships
with co-workers because they are there and we’re stuck in their company, on the other
hand, people are not randomly distributed and do not arrive at places randomly. Odds are two folks sharing a cubicle wall
at a programming company share a lot more than that wall with each other. They probably do have a lot of hobbies and
parallel experiences in common, and will probably come to share a lot of actual experiences
too, as they work together and chat and share hobbies and thoughts and challenges. Things change from when you first meet and
discover you share an interest in Scifi Conventions to ten years down the road when you can say
“Do you remember that time we were driving to that convention and the car broke down
and we had to change the tire in a thunderstorm?” Of course challenges and adversity are another
issue in the future, because in a very utopian society it’s rather hard to forge a relationship
with someone you’ve been through tough times together with, or distinguish your fair-weather
friends from proven ones who stuck with you through a rough patch, when neither of you
has experienced any tough times or rough patches. On the other hand, such things are relative,
a utopian society is likely to still have challenges and hardships, and I don’t think
our relationships are less genuine than our ancestors just because they objectively had
much harder lives than we do. For that matter, its varies even with the
individual too, a lot of my closest friends are my old warbuddies, but there are quite
a few of them I’m not really close with and I’ve plenty of other close friends who
I have not shared life and death experiences or epic stress and hardship alongside. You don’t necessarily need to experience
stress or tragedy with someone to be close to them. And it does have the opposite effect a lot
of times too. Lots of friendships and romances have ended
painfully by some shared stress or tragedy, with money problems or an early death of another
loved one being two of the big ones, though that latter is less common nowadays, and the
former probably will be too as civilization advances and grows more prosperous. Some would argue, with plenty of justification,
that relationships that end of such things were fundamentally flawed or doomed from the
outset, but I think that’s overly simplistic. Everyone’s got their kryptonite and you
generally do not get to pick which bombs life hurls your way. This arguably makes a good case for not limiting
yourself to friends or lovers selected by algorithms for maximum compatibility too,
since they might be less likely to be good at bracing you when something in life knocks
you askew. It’s good to have shared interests, but
it’s also good to have skills and strengths that cover over each other’s weaknesses. It also helps ensure they have something to
do which you are not expected to participate in, since often it’s not boredom ending
a relationship, but an intense desire to murder the other person because they’re always
there. Fortunately technology really does help with
that, since it makes travel so easy, literally and metaphorically. Also, since the channel always aims to stay
on the polite side of PG-rated, I’ll just opt to point out that the other type of boredom
with your partner might be something virtual reality can deal with, this channel does after
all get watched by kids sometimes, though I’d bet they do know exactly what I’m
inferring there. Such tech obviously helps with long distance
relationships too, but that implies the other person, or persons, are real and just joining
you in VR. I suspect most of us would still view that
as adultery, I certainly would, but if the other persons were strictly simulations it’s
a bit more debatable. It needn’t be quasi-adultery though, a couple
bored with things can switch up their own appearances as easily as they can switch around
the background and setting. This is where we start getting into some of
the potentially fatal challenges to civilization. One pathway we’ve already discussed is perfect
matching, where algorithms help you find the person who really is, according to those algorithms
anyway, your most optimum match. Even ignoring badly designed algorithms, people
lying on their profiles, and concerns of hacking, this has plenty of issues and arguably represents
a move back toward arranged marriages. It’s not hard to imagine there being a lot
of social pressure to follow the results, especially if it’s yielding good results
for other people and probably for you with normal friendships since you were a kid. Remember, dating aside, this is the same sort
of technology that’s advising you on what gifts to grab your friends that they’ll
like and what resort you’d enjoy visiting or movies you’d like watching or books you’d
like reading. If it’s got a great track record for all
the minor things for your whole life, and you know it’s playing statistics not hunches,
when it suggests you might want to ask out Jenny, particularly since she almost certainly
has been provided the same prediction and you know it, you’re probably going to ask
her out. As things proceed the models get better and
probably a lot harder to hack or lie in, it’s probably all based on data being collected
from discrete extrapolation anyway. You’re not putting in your favorite movies
or books or games, all the subtle little gadgets and software surrounding you are noticing
that you read a book, what its title was, and your various physiological responses indicating
how much you enjoyed it. It knows what your favorite songs are, even
that embarrassing pop song you’d never admit to liking. It also knows exactly which sorts of people
and looks make you turn your head discreetly for a prolonged view, you don’t have to
swipe right or swipe left, because it already knows what your Perfect 10 is, and what it
actually is too, not what you’d tell other people or even yourself. This is all assuming such things are handled
privately, under the radar by some machine that keeps it secret and renders no moral
judgments. The flip side is the high-tech equivalent
of the Scarlet Letter. We already warn people to be careful what
they post online because it stays forever, a warning a lot of people seem to ignore even
when not using pseudonyms. Even ignoring misinterpretation or outright
lies by someone you know who has an ax to grind, someone’s reputation can get wrecked
and have it follow them around every bit as visibly as if we branded it on them, and I
could easily see folks turning more and more to options that left them protected, like
virtual reality where anyone you are interacting with might be a simulation or genuinely anonymous. This gets into one of those big threats I
mentioned a moment ago, we’ve been discussing perfect matching but we’ve also got the
issue of tailoring. That’s first a problem with Virtual Reality
where you’ve got the option to make everything look and act the way you want, and that society
might collapse from folks losing interdependency on each other in favor of living in tailored
worlds with tailored people, something we looked at more in Post Scarcity & Reality
last year. This comes attached with worries about slavery
if you’re using artificial intelligence, especially very sophisticated ones, and that
whole conundrum we’ve discussed before about if it’s ethical to make an artificial intelligence
that specifically enjoys whatever it was built for, along with the blurry lines of what exactly
a person is, when we get into artificial intelligence or uploaded minds. But we also have to consider that people can
tweak themselves too. And not just in appearance. It’s quite likely cosmetic surgery will
get good enough, cheap enough, safe enough, and common enough that it becomes routine,
and I’ve no particular objection to that, in a society that tries to emphasize people
having control over their own lives it would seem a bit hypocritical to say you can wear
whatever you want and decorate your house however you please but should feel bad about
wanting to change your own appearance to be what you want it to be. Particularly if doing so isn’t dangerous
to you, either literally or because it leads you down a path of financial ruin or self-hate. If I don’t like my shirt or my hairstyle
or beard, I change them. This is obviously more extreme, permanently
altering things, but maybe not so much so if it’s easily reversible. But we wouldn’t be limited in tailoring
just our bodies, but our personalities too, and same as we already can change our appearances
fairly radically and often do so, we often change our personalities too, or try to anyway,
the success rates are not terribly high. We’ve talked before about how brainwashing
in the future is a threat both for fear of externally forced brainwashing and because
so many people would voluntarily do it, as proven by the existence of self-helps books
and the giant market for them. But being able to quit an addiction by voluntary
brainwashing is just half the story, everybody has habits that irritate the heck out of some
loved one or other and if brought to our attention we’ll usually make an effort to rid ourselves
of it or curtail it around them, or tell them off for mentioning it, or all of the above. It seems a bit different if you can get yourself
programmed to act differently. It’s also not too hard for me to imagine
wedding vows being enforced, entirely voluntarily and not even with coercion, but by some brain
implant or scrubbing or voluntary surveillance. Not many people want to get bored of a relationship
or be tempted to cheat on their significant other, so if there’s a safe and reasonable
way to get your brain tweaked just a little so you don’t do that, lots of people might
not only agree to it but enthusiastically line up for it. Ditto, folks with anxiety about commitment
might get a little tweak to quell that. Same for options like being able to replay
a log of your location or visual input to prove you’ve been behaving, though asking
a partner to do that strikes me as no better than insisting they show you their phone log
or sneaking in to read their emails, but as usual we’re discussing plausible options
and scenarios on the table in the future, not the ethics or underlying motivation to
choose such options. To an even more extreme end, it’s easy to
imagine someone getting infatuated with another and paying a hacker to crack a system to make
them appear as an optimal match, it’s also pretty easy to imagine someone putting out
software that could analyze someone, determine what would likely rank someone higher for
them, and then going out and getting all the necessary physical and psychological changes
to hit those marks. We’ll bypass the even more sinister scenario
of them kidnapping and brainwashing someone to want to be with them instead, or making
a copy of them. Still that is one option that might allow
for very long relationships to be normal, just tiny tweaks, voluntarily made, where
the person would do that anyway but either cannot or doesn’t want to invest the time
and will power to making the change the old-fashioned way. We’ve other scenarios on this high-tech
end too. For instance, last week we mentioned a Gardener-style
colony ship with people facing an issue of whether to get off at the newest world they
were colonizing or stay on board for the next one, and the heart rending choice someone
would have to make if one loved one was disembarking while another was staying on for the next
stop. We said there that a person might have the
option of dividing themselves, a clone or android or duplicate complete with memories,
and you and you-two go separate ways. That’s an option here too. A person torn between settling down in a marriage
or staying single could potentially do both, a person who wants to marry two people could
opt for this quasi-form of polygamy, and a person who loves their family but also wants
to try new things far away need not necessarily choose. There’s all sorts of problems and objections
to such a path, but it is a potential option on the table in the centuries to come. Just because technology allows an option doesn’t
mean we all jump on board either, and often because other techs offer options we might
consider more palatable personally. A lot of scifi features civilizations where
people were cross-matched to their genetically optimal partner, but we don’t really seem
to have gone that route thus far and I doubt we will, as the kind of genetic skill needed
to make that work also likely gives you the superior ability to correct genetic flaws
or add in traits. After all, your perfect genetic partner and
you merely have an optimized pair of templates, you don’t actually get to control, by normal
breeding, which combinations of traits is drawn off that template for your children. The same tech also opens the door to same-sex
couples having kids who were not adopted or only had one of them as the parent, and also
potentially broader parentage like 3 or more people having a kid who was genetically all
of theirs, like James Holden from The Expanse series, with eight parents, all contributing
DNA. I would tend to doubt this multi-parent route
would be super-common, but I could easily imagine societies with effective biological
immortality that were getting pretty full of people having low birth rates to achieve
replacement levels where not much replacing is needed, and opting to share kids. I’d imagine that would have a lot of downsides
too, but I can think of worse childhoods than having a dozen parents who were all full of
centuries of wisdom and doted on that kid. Note these options also open the door for
children whose parents were friends, rather than romantic partners, many of us already
have people we call aunt or uncle, or kids who call us that, who are no blood relations
of ours. One could imagine future societies where folks
planning a child asked many friends to add in a little DNA each, as a variation aking
to being someone’s godfather. You’ve also got some weirder options for
relationships too. We mentioned the option of folks having their
minds tweaked to be happier or more faithful in a relationship, but we also often talk
about how a marriage becomes a union into a new entity. I have to admit I usually roll my eyes at
that, but it’s on the table too. It would be pretty extreme for two people
to marry by literally having the brains intermingled into a single body and mind, but I could easily
imagine folks sharing some actual memories. Indeed that’s a common marriage ritual in
Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series, folks implant each other with a few precious
memories when married. With an increase in online relationships,
it’s not hard to imagine we’d start adapting gifts and tokens to be less physical. Instead of physical ring, here’s some memories,
that sort of thing. Similarly, it’s common to give people a
locket with a photo in it or share photos on social media sites, and as screens get
cheaper and power sources better, I could easily imagine lockets that show slideshows
of images or video clips instead. I don’t feel like checking but I’d imagine
someone already makes those and if not, I doubt we’ll go another decade before they
start appearing or getting more common. Giving people lockets with stored memories
or recordings they can experience by virtual or augmented reality might be normal too,
a little further down the road. Of course, we also have the option of technological
telepathy, which could take on all sorts of forms. Keeping to the conceptually simple, you might
both get implanted so you could talk to each other quicker and easier than a phone permits,
or know which direction they are, or share feelings or sensations to one degree or another. That might get very amusing or irritating,
I could imagine someone who hated chocolate but whose significant other loved the stuff
picking up a fondness for it because they can not only taste it every time the other
one eats it, but experience their pleasure for it too. We will obviously bypass the more adult applications
of shared sensations that I’m guessing almost everyone is thinking about right now anyway. Telepathy gets played with a lot in scifi
too, often with hive minds or group marriages, and we mentioned people dividing themselves
up to follow conflicting life options. Usually we picture a hive mind as many separate
minds merging together but an alternative on that would be something like you duplicating
yourself a dozen times over but keeping those minds all linked and synchronized, one could
imagine such an entity having multiple families that were themselves uninvolved. Of course a duplicate of you, a classic clone,
shares none of your memories, but a higher-tech version of you could have those memories,
or might have those memories but a different body. It’s not hard to imagine someone going that
particular hive mind route might have different looking bodies for all that they shared a
mind with, more like the classic hive mind. It’s also not too hard to imagine folks
might go the opposite gender with one, or various places in between or outside the normal
human templates. If the internet is anything to go by, somewhere
out there is not only someone who’d like to be a half-human and half-horse centaur,
but someone else who’d very much like to marry one too. On the notion of tailoring one’s partner
as opposed to seeking the perfect match, such cloning or duplication routes do raise the
option that you might copy yourself on the assumption you’re a pretty good match, be
that a straight copy or one tweaked in some fashion, again not limited to just physical
tweaking like a gender or appearance change but possibly a mental one too. If we’re assuming folks have the right to
brainwash themselves, that could arguably include your duplicates too. I think dating yourself would seem ultra-narcissistic,
even with a change of appearance, but one would have to at least acknowledge you’d
definitely share a lot of common interests and experiences. Though personally I would take that as another
good reason why perfect matching, if focused around shared interests, was maybe not the
optimum way to find partners or friends. Copies do diverge, and over a long enough
time, with folks changing over mind and body, that copy might be no more you than someone
who was raised in the same town or went to the same elementary school. Heck you might not even realize it was a copy,
bumping into them decades later because you both decided to go visit some place you shared
a memory of, and both of you have changed appearances. As we can see though, the future holds a lot
of potential options for relationships, romantic or otherwise, and it would seem like there’s
nothing really excluding people from having classic long term marriages in there. Lots of options for folks who want to go a
different way, but nothing excluding the traditional. Many of these we’ll need to tackle in the
near future, others not for a long time, but as we often note, there’s actually a decent
chance those of us alive pondering the distant future nowadays might actually live to see
that. Such being the case, you never know, your
Valentine’s sweetheart this year might be someone you’re shopping for a 100th anniversary
gift a century from now, or 1000th anniversary, or even longer. You might still even be around and together
long enough to watch the last sunrise before the world ends. Puts a new spin on the notion of living together
happily ever after… I was mentioning a moment ago some of the
stranger scenarios for clones and shared memories, and we see a lot more peculiar options for
that in science fiction, one of my favorite authors for such topics is Alastair Reynolds
and I’ve recommended his Revelation Space series many a time including today, but I’ve
also mentioned my favorite novel by him wasn’t in that series but was actually the standalone,
House of Suns. I don’t think there’s any book out there
that really slams home the scale of astronomical timelines better than this book, and to the
best of my knowledge it holds the records in scifi for both longest chase scene and
the longest romance, and as is often the case with this author, he really challenges concepts
like identity and what we mean by that. The audiobook also happens to be done by my
favorite narrator, John Lee, a good narrator can make a good book even better, and a great
narrator performing a great book adds so much to the story. Indeed i’ve often found picking new books
by who narrated them is at least as good a method for finding ones you’ll enjoy as
seeing what other books folks often recommend if you enjoyed a novel. However, tastes vary by listener, not everyone
will enjoy the same narrator and many books have more than one performance available on
Audible, and you can also listen to samples of each performance to see if you like them
before buying. If you’d like to grab a free copy of “House
of Suns”, just use my link in this episode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac or text Isaac
to 500500 to get a free book and 30 day free trial. I rarely describe a book as mind-blowing,
but House of Suns is a truly epic novel full of staggering concepts. Next week we’ll return to the Earth 2.0
series to discuss cloud cities, and look at possible human habitats sitting high among
the cloud tops of mountains or even floating in the sky, in “Cloud Cities”. After that we’ll close out the month with
a return to the Alien civilization series to discuss the idea of aliens civilizations
that infiltrate other civilizations covertly, the classic flying saucers case, in Secret
Aliens For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you enjoyed this episode, please like
it and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a Great Week!
