Flash Forward

Okay, you asked for it, and I finally did it. Today’s episode is about conscious artificial intelligence. Which is a HUGE topic! So we only took a small bite out of all the things we could possibly talk about.

 We started with some definitions. Because not everybody even defines artificial intelligence the same way, and there are a ton of different definitions of consciousness. In fact, one of the people we talked to for the episode, Damien Williams, doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence. He says it’s demeaning to the possible future consciousnesses that we might be inventing. 

 But before we talk about consciousnesses, I wanted to start the episode with a story about a very not-conscious robot. Charles Isbell, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, first walks us through a few definitions of artificial intelligence. But then he tells us the story of cobot, a chatbot he helped invent in the 1990’s. 

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Today we travel to a fully digital world, a world where paper is a thing of the past. 

 On this show we’ve tackled a huge range of futures — we’ve talked about things that are extremely likely, like, antibiotic resistance, and we’ve also talked about things that are simply never going to happen. Like space pirates dragging a second moon to earth for some reason.

 And when I started working on this episode, I assumed that this future was more on the likely end of the spectrum. Maybe not in a few years, but eventually, we’ll probably stop using paper, right? Well, pretty much everybody I talked to said I was wrong.

 The first person we talk to in this episode is Michael Makin, the President and CEO of Printing Industries of America, an organization that represents the printers all over the United States. And Printing Industries of America isn’t the only organization out there trying to keep printing alive. In 2014, a group called Two Sides launched a campaign arguing that companies who advertised paperless billing as “green” were violating guidelines set by the Federal Trade Commission. And they actually got over 20 companies to stop advertising their paperless billing options as “environmentally friendly.” And this is one of the big arguments that the paper industry makes against going without paper: that it's actually not nearly as environmentally friendly as people claim.

 Now, it’s hard to make blanket statements about whether paper or digital is better for the environment. Both have their upsides and downsides, but it's definitely true that many people don't realize the environmental cost of browsing things online using their devices. According to the Centre for Sustainable Communications at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, "the environmental impact of a web based newspaper is, in general, in the same range as a printed newspaper's environmental impact." 

 But Makin also says that he is totally convinced that paperlessness is just never going to happen. "I mean let’s be real, we are NEVER going to live in a paperless society," he says. 

 Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, "well duh Rose, of course the guy who represents the paper industry is going to say that paper will live forever." Yes, yes, I know, but he's actually not the only person who told me that they didn't think paperlessness was coming any time soon.

 Richard Harper told me the same thing. Harper is a researcher at Microsoft and the co-author of a book called The Myth of the Paperless Office. In the book Richard and his coauthor Abigail Sellen trace the phrase “paperless office” back to the 1970’s when Xerox founded a research group called PARC. And PARC was working on networked systems, ways for offices to talk to each other over all kinds of digital networks. But to push networks forward, they felt like they had to push something else out. So they villified paper as "the devil" and tried to propose the idea of a utopian future without paper.

 But what Richard and Abigail found in their research was that paper wasn’t a devil, and it wasn’t really going anywhere. And they also found that most people don’t really want paper to go away. In fact, there's no evidence that people are using less paper today than they were in the 1970's. 

 If we do wind up going more and more digital, one thing we'll have to worry about is how and where to store all those files. I can barely keep the files on my own computer in some kind of logical order, but when we’re all working digitally how do we preserve and archive anything? To find out I called up Lynda Schmitz Furig, who’s the electronic records archivist for The Smithsonian. Her job is to preserve everything digital that the Smithsonian creates. She tells us how they catalogue and store everything the Smithsonian creates.

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Today’s episode is a minipod, a smattering of time travel, future travel, and news about the show.

 In this episode we hear a bunch of messages from listeners: what folks think about past futures we’ve been to, and future futures we should travel to. 

 We also cover some show news! So, in bullet point form:

 Some of you might be new to the show this season. Maybe you didn’t even know this was the second season! Well, it is! Season one is available on Soundcloud, where you can download all the episodes for listening purposes. 

 The show now has a subreddit! So if you like Reddit and you want to talk about the show there, we’re at r/FlashForwardPod. I have some plans for the subreddit, including maybe some AMAs with guests of the show, and just general discussions of each future, and all that stuff.

 We also now have an online store! Where you can buy stuff! Right now there are a couple of different versions of the logo that you can put on anything from a tote bag to a mug to a cell phone case. It’s all very cool looking so if you’re the kind of person who likes to buy swag for shows you listen to, you can now do that at our store. And if there’s an item that you don’t see in the store that you wish you could buy, let me know. If you do buy something from the store, I would love to see pictures of whatever it is in your life! That would make me extremely happy.

 I mean come on check out these tote bags! 

 The last thing I do in the episode is reveal a few of the hidden references from this season. A lot of you have asked what you should be looking for, so hopefully this will help!

 In episode 2, Love At First Sexbot, the names of the different sex robots are references to particular people and characters. The Hadaly is named after a mechanical woman invented by a fictional Thomas Edison in the 1886 novel The Future Eve. She’s one of the first female robots to appear in literature. 

 The Leopold is named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose name lives on in the term “masochism.” 

 And here’s probably the hardest one from that episode: Margot’s Discount Closet Solutions is named after a character from a Ray Bradbury short story called “All Summer in a Day.” That one was hard, I admit. 

 In the mosquito episode, two of the names are references to Animorphs characters, and the repeated use of the number 18 points to the book in which the Animorphs turn into mosquitos.

 That’s often what you’re looking for. Other times it’s quotes and clips I play. So, go forth and find them! 

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Broke for Free. Other music used in this episode is by Ryan Lit and Decktonic. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook, by voicemail at (347) 927-1425 or by sending an email or voice memo to [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! 

 And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help. 

 That’s all for this future, come back next week and we’ll travel to a new one.

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Today we travel to a future without pets. What would it take for us to give up our fuzzy, slithery, fishy friends? Should our pets get more rights? And if we didn’t have dogs or cats, would we domesticate something else to take their place?

 This week's episode name is perhaps the worst pun I've ever committed. Sorry not sorry.

 Anyway. In this episode pets are outlawed, gone, we don't have them anymore. No more dogs, cats, fish, birds, bunnies, none of them. This might seem like a really outlandish future, who actually wants us to stop having pets? Well, it turns out, this actually something that some people currently do advocate for.

 To find out more about folks who argue that we should try to phase out pets, I talked to Doris Lin. She's an animal rights attorney and used to write the animal rights section for About.com. And she explains in the episode that she really does think that we should phase out pets.

 But she also wants to clarify something: she’s not about to show up at your door and confiscate your animals. She doesn't want to separate anybody's beloved pets from their good homes. (She herself has pet rabbits.) But she does believe that people should stop breeding animals to be kept as pets, and that eventually, after all the rescue animals get home and live their happy lives, we should try to live without them. 

 There are a couple of arguments for eliminating pets from our lives. Lin says that animals we keep aren't able to live out their "natural instincts" and that it's not fair for us to force them to live by "human rules." Some people point to the increasing body of research that shows that animals might be a lot more intelligent than we once thought.

 Today, studies show that dogs can actually understand pointing. So if we point at something, the dog knows that we’re trying to get them to pay attention to that thing. Cats might be able to do the same thing, but they’re harder to study because they don’t care about your stupid experiment. This pointing thing might seem like not that big of a deal. But chimpanzees, our closest living relative, can’t do that. Which might seem surprising, but as David Grimm points out in the episode, we've evolved with dogs for something like 30,000 years, and with cats for 10,000 years. 

 Grimm is the Online News Editor of the magazine Science, and the author of a book called Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs. And in his book, David talks about how the way we think about our animals has totally changed in the last century. They used to be considered lower than objects, less important than your table or toaster. But today, most people consider their pets far more important than their tables. There have been custody battled fought over pets, dogs have been appointed lawyers, and some animals have even inherited money.

 A 2015 Harris Poll showed that 95 percent of pet owners consider their pets members of their family. During Hurricane Katrina, some people decided to stay behind with their pets when they were told the rescue boats would only take human passengers. Some of those people died.

 So the idea of a world without these creatures in them is really hard to imagine, even for Lin who advocates for this future. But that never really stops us here on this show! And in the second half of the episode we talk about all the ways that this might happen. Listen to find out!

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Broke for Free. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

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Today we travel to a future full of spreadsheet approved lives. A future where everything we do is tracked and quantified: calories, air quality, sleep, heart rate, microbes, brain waves, finances, happiness, sadness, menstrual cycles, poops, hopes and dreams. Everything. 

 This episode is longer than our usual 20 minute jaunts to the future, because the future of quantified self is so huge. We cover everything from biased algorithms, to microbiomes (again), to the future of the calorie, and more.

 The first person we talk to this week is Chris Dancy, who is basically living in this future today. He’s been called the most quantified man in the world. Every day Chris wears and carries around over thirty devices that track everything from his heart rate to his brain waves. You can see a live stream of his data here. Chris started tracking his life in 2008, and has upgraded his system continuously to become more streamlined and include more forms of data.

 But, as I was watching a few of these videos (including the one above), I felt kind of uncomfortable. Because a lot of them treat Chris kind of like a freak show. Like this weirdo guy that we should all kind of laugh at, or shun, or see as this maniac with too many devices. But in talking to Chris it became very clear to me that he’s very thoughtful about what he’s doing. The point isn’t just to track for tracking sake, Chris is on a mission. And it’s the same mission that you or I might have when we start tracking steps or workouts or calories or menstrual cycles: to be better. To be healthier and happier. And, for Chris at least, it worked. He dropped 100 pounds, stopped drinking and abusing drugs, and feels way healthier now than he did before. 

 A lot of people have called Chris the most quantified man, or the most surveilled man, or the most tracked man. But he thinks about it another way. He calls himself a mindful cyborg. But being a mindful cyborg takes a lot of work. He spends $30,000 a year on his quantified self, and it’s essentially his full time job. Not everybody can do that.

 When you ask Chris what the future of the quantified self looks like, he’s actually not super optimistic about it. Because right now, Chris uses all these devices to gather data, but he sometimes has to fight companies to actually get access to it. In most cases, he has to buy his data back from them, in order to use it for what he wants. He says he sees us going to “the dark future,” where all our data is mined by companies, and not used to make us healthier or happier.

 To dig a little deeper into the possible dark side of personal tracking, I called Claire North, the the author of a book called The Sudden Appearance of Hope that’s coming out this summer. The main character, Hope, sort of has the opposite of face blindness, she is totally unmemorable to anybody who meets her. Which makes her an excellent thief, and the book started out as a book about thieving. But as Claire was writing it, she started getting interested in something else, the fact that without any friends or family or other humans that can even remember her, Hope has no real way of measuring her life. 

 There’s still plenty of thieving in the book (it’s very exciting) but there’s an added layer now. The story kind of centers around this app called Perfection. Users give it access to everything: their bank accounts, their location, what they’re eating and drinking, who they’re hanging out with, how they’re sleeping, everything. And in return, the app gives them suggestions. Don’t eat there, eat here. Don’t do that, do this. And when users link up their accounts, and comply with the app’s instructions, they get perks. Coupons to restaurants or access to special events. Users who get enough points even get plastic surgery. 

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Today we travel to a future where your microbiome becomes a key part of your identity. From health to your child’s kindergarten, here are all the ways knowing about your microbiome might impact your life. 

 Let’s start with a definition: what is the microbiome? Simply put, the microbiome is the collection of microbes (mostly bacteria) that live in and on your body. It’s hard to say exactly how many microbes make up the human microbiome, but researchers estimate that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 different species of bacteria live in the human gut. And that’s just the gut, there are microbial communities in our mouths, on our skin, in the vagina, all over the place. To put things in another perspective, the average human body is made up of 30 trillion cells. And on top of those 30 trillion cells, the average human also carries around in and on it, 40 trillion bacteria. 40 Trillion!

 To learn how those 40 trillion cells might be leveraged in the future, we talked to Ed Yong, the author of the upcoming book I Contain Multitudes; Rachel Feltman, a science blogger at the Washington Post; and Jessica Richman, the cofounder and CEO of uBiome, a personal microbiome company. The three of them walk us through the pros, cons and surprising ways the microbiome might be used in the future.

 The microbiome is a really promising area of research because it seems to interact with so many elements of our health. People are studying links between the microbiome and everything from autism to heart disease to body odor to cancer. But the gap between what we know right now, and what we’d need to know to develop microbiome based treatments for most of these things, is huge. 

 Right now there are no drugs on the market that are based on the microbiome, and there’s really only one microbiome related medical application that reliably works. And that’s for patients with an infection called Clostridium difficile or c. diff who get a fecal transplant. The c. diff infection is awful, and it totally ravages the guts of those infected with it. A jolt of health bacteria, in the form of donated fecal matter, can be life saving. 

 While the gut microbiome might get all the glory, there are lots of other microbiomes that impact our wellbeing as well. Doctors are trying to figure out whether children born by C-section might miss out on some crucial microbes that other children get when they pass through the vaginal canal. One recent study actually used wet wipes with the mother’s vaginal microbes on them on newly C-sectioned babies to see if it helped. There are concerns about that method too though. 

 Of course with any promising scientific breakthrough there will be people trying to apply it to pretty much everything. In the episode we talk about what happens when certain microbes start getting connected to talent or personality, or associated with negative traits. We’ve already seen that with genetic information, so why not microbial?

 This week we also bring a new segment to the show! I play a few voicemails that listeners sent about mosquitoes from last week. I really loved the funny and thoughtful messages you sent me so keep telling me what you think! I’ll feature them each week. Call us and leave a voicemail at (347) 927-1425. Or, send a voice memo to [email protected]. For instructions on how to do that, go here. And you don’t just have to tell us what you think about this future. If you want to suggest a future, you can do that too! I love hearing your ideas, so keep sending them! 

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Broke for Free. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

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Today we travel to a future where humans have decided to eradicate the most dangerous animal on the planet: mosquitos. How would we do it? Is it even possible? And what are the consequences? 

 Mosquitos have worked hard to earn the nickname “deadliest animal on earth.” According to the World Health Organization there are 20 million cases of dengue virus every year. And there are 214 million cases of malaria, 438,000 of which are deadly. In the United States, an outbreak of West Nile Virus that started in 1999 infected 41,000 people and killed 1700 of them. Since 2005, there have been 1.9 million cases of Chickungunya virus documented in East Asia, and as of last year 1.3 million cases of the virus had been documented in the US and Latin America. Yellow Fever infects 200,000 people every year, and kills about 30,000 of those people. 

 All of these diseases are carried by mosquitos. For comparison, snakes kill about 50,000 people a year. Humans kill about 475,000 other humans every year. And mosquitos, all told, kill 725,000 people each year. 

 And recently, with the rise of Zika, people have started wondering aloud once again why we don’t just get rid of the biting bugs. 

 Whenever you talk about eliminating a whole species, or, in the case of every mosquito, a few thousand species, the question of ecology looms. How important are these animals? What relies on them for food or protection or pollination? According to Cameron Webb, a medical entomologist with the University of Sydney, we still don’t know very much about the role mosquitoes play in the ecosystem.

 Unsurprisingly, most of the research that’s done on mosquitoes is done on either how to kill them, or what diseases they might give us. There’s not a ton of work done on their importance in the environment. So we don’t know what might happen to the ecosystem if we were to eliminate them entirely. 

 What we do know is that we’ve been fighting mosquitoes for a really long time. The CDC was actually founded in response to malaria. And Maryn McKenna, who you might remember from our episode on antibiotic resistance, came back for this episode to tell us about the history of trying to control these mosquito borne illnesses. 

 So how do we actually kill all these bugs? It won’t be easy. Mosquitoes are sneaky, particularly the species that transmit disease to humans. This future probably involves a combination of things: pesticides, land management, education, and genetic modification. Not on humans, like we talked about in episode 20 from last season. But of the mosquitoes themselves.

 To explain how genetically modified mosquitos worked, we talked to Hayden Parry, the CEO of a company called Oxitec that developed and grows these modified insects. The basic premise behind them is to engineer male mosquitoes that can’t produce viable baby mosquitoes. These males mate with regular females, and their offspring all die, thus controlling the population. 

 All that and more in this week’s episode, so have a listen. 

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Today we travel to a future without lies. What would it be like if we all wore accurate lie detectors around all the time?

 In this episode we talk about when children learn to lie, the different social functions of lying, and what might happen if we couldn’t ever fib. How would negotiations be different? How would we make small talk? Could we create art or music? All that and more in this week’s future. 

 This week’s show features four experts in the different facets of deception. Patti Wood is an expert in detecting non-verbal cues. She told me about her work, and the ways she uses body language to try and tell if someone is lying. Maria Konnikova is a journalist and the author of a book called The Confidence Game, all about con artists and people who are really good at lying. She says that while many of the people her book is about would have been thwarted, there would be serious downsides to not being able to lie to one another. Michael Lewis has studied lying and childhood development for over fifty years, and he says that children learn really early on that lying is something they should be doing. And Andrea Kupfer Schneider is a professor of ethics and dispute resolution at Marquette University Law School. She says that without the ability to lie, negotiations would actually be way better. 

 Right now there are tons of different technologies and methods that try to detect lying, which range from imperfect to totally bogus. According to the American Psychological Association polygraph tests, the lie detector setup you see in movies and TV all the time, don’t accurately tell if someone is lying. There’s also a device called a voice stress analyzer — what it does is listen to your voice and try to detect signs of stress, which suggests that you might not be telling the truth. But according to a study done by the National Institute of Justice, voice stress analyzers are often no better than chance at detecting lies. Of course, that hasn’t stopped some places from using them surreptitiously during phone interviews. 

 There are also all kinds of drugs that attempt to make people tell the truth. These are staples of movies and television shows, but like most things they don't work as well as they do on TV.

 If you’re interested in the history of lie detectors, check out this book by Ken Alder, which explores not just who invented the polygraph, but the long history of our obsession with finding a biological connection to “the truth.” And if you’re interested in a movie about a world without lies, try The Invention of Lying. 

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Broke for Free. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. 

 This week’s future voices were provided by Sarah Werner, Brent Rose, Kirstin Butler, Pablo Meier, Eddie Guimont, Guillermo Herrera, Justin Cameron and Jess Zimmerman, who also suggested this future to us, so thanks Jess! If you want to be a voice in the future you can do that, it’s one of the rewards we have for becoming a Patron of the show on Patreon. 

 If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at [email protected]. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. 

 And, as always, if you like the show please head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

 See you next week for a new future!

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Right now there’s a whole lot of buzz about sex robots. Some people are really excited about them, and think we’ll be marrying robots by 2050. Other people are really worried about them, and are organizing whole campaigns against sex robots. This week, we travel to a future where sex robots are realized, and talk about everything from warranties to ethics. 

 [A note: if you listen to our show with or near young kids be aware that today’s episodes discusses the future of sex, and goes into some detail about sex toys, sex work and other sexy time things. If your kiddos are ready for a calm, reasonable discussion of sex and the sex industry, carry on! If you’re not there yet, that’s cool, but maybe skip this one.]

 This week we have three experts helping us think through how we get to sex robots, and what we do when we get there. A.V. Flox is journalist who covers the intersection of sex, law and technology. She is very skeptical of all the sexbot hype, and says we have a long way to go before we’ll see anything remotely like an actual sex robot. Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist who’s been a guest on the show before. A few of her books involve sex robots, and she thinks that before we get anything human we’ll start to see cartoony looking forms. And Shelly Ronen is a sociology PhD student at NYU who studies sex and sex object production. Ronen says that it’s possible we won’t demand full-on humanoid robots, but instead be totally satisfied by less human-like machines. 

 Together the three of them walk us through all the things we might have to sort out before and after the rise of the sex robots. How do you keep them clean? Where do you store them? What happens if they break? What will they look like? How do you handle the uncanny valley? Who should use them, and how does their existence impact sex workers? 

 You can read an optimistic take on sex robots in the book Love and Sex With Robots by David Levy and you can find more on Levy’s outlook on robots here. Levy is optimistic about sex robots — not only does he think they’re coming quickly, he also thinks they could have some very positive impacts. On the other side of the table is the Campaign Against Sex Robots. You can guess how they feel about these devices, and their argument is generally summed up here. Essentially, they feel that prostitution is bad, and sex robots would be a form of prostitution and encourage it, therefore sex robots are bad. This is an argument that many people disagree with, including sex workers who point out that many of them enjoy and would like to keep their jobs. 

 To top everything off, here are some fun fact about our long tradition of wanting to create and love female robots:

 Robots were originally assumed to be male. The 1920's science fiction play R.U.R. that gave us the word robot also gave us the term for a female robot: a robotess.

 The term "gynoid" (which you don't see quite as much anymore) was coined by the writer Gwyneth Jones in her 1985 novel Divine Endurance.

 The term "fembot" first shows up in 1976, in a script for the show The Bionic Woman.

 Brigitte Helm played "Maschinenmensch," the female robot in the iconic 1927 movie Metropolis. Apparently her costume was extremely uncomfortable, and other actors would apparently slip coins into various openings out of pity for her. She used those coins to buy chocolate.

 Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Broke for Free. The illustration is by Matt Lubchansky. The music for our various sex robot commercials was by Alaclair, Strong Suit and BoxCat.

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