If demography is fate, then emerging technologies’ political fate looks bright indeed.
Perhaps the most glaring paradox in the current debate about emerging technologies is the fact that high levels of public distaste for them -sometimes downright hostility- is coupled in daily life with their enthusiastic adoption: Viagra is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Electronic devices that would have been called nanotechnological marvels years ago are bought without a second thought. Bayesian spam filters and Google’s algorithm are gratefully used as informational gateways by most computer users. The demand for products and interventions capable of making us look and feel younger is, as always has been, nearly unlimited.
As a society, we generally don’t approve of most emerging technologies until we need them and they are available. Then the story changes.
Right now, by a combination of demographic and technological trends, the developed world is simultaneously facing a quick demographic transition to old societies (Japan’s median age is 42.9 years), together with tantalizing discoveries in biogerontology, neurobiology and information technology that point the way toward… Well, increased lifespans, cognitive enhancement and anti-aging research sound science-fictional or disturbing to most people, but as retirement ages are pushed back, cognitive demands rise in the workplace, and entertainment and social options are made more complex and shifting by technological mediation, what is seen now as speculative enhancement will most likely become basic tools to get by.
Two factors will combine, I think, to lower resistance to these developments: the political strengthening of the 50+ cohort -one of the fastest-rising populations in the developed world, and also, as that’s the point in life when cognitive productivity begins to decay, the most immediately eager for emerging technologies- and the fiscal and business realities of societies that will need to keep scarce and highly valuable information workers productive for as long as possible in order to remain competitive.
Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that all emerging technologies will get a political free pass, nor that we should want it to be so. The need to explore ways to insure the ethical, responsible use of these technologies will be made, if anything, more urgent as demand rises.
But -and this is the characteristic mark of all technological revolutions- it’ll certainly be a different game.
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