"A History of Humanity to 3400 AD: Daily Life," by Thomas Donaldson (1979)

Mike Darwin recently posted on his Chronosphere not-a-blog about his efforts to scan and upload his archive of cryonics literature going back to the 1960's. He feels that no one really appreciates his project - but I do, and I would like to thank him for it.

I found the following article by Thomas Donaldson among Mike's scans, for example, which I've extracted and published separately here:

History to 3400 AD

I recall subscribing to this publication, which went through a name change from Life Extension to Long Life, in the late 1970's. Despite its hand-drawn graphs and illustrations and its cheap-looking format, the energy, enthusiasm and vision of this zine from the 1970's strike me. The current periodicals from Alcor and CI just don't compare. Does that say something about what the cryonics movement has lost in the last 30 years?

Donaldson in this piece from 1979 speculates about what "ordinary" goods could look like in the coming centuries based on several assumptions, some of which he doesn't state. Explicitly he says that we don't fall back into a Malthusian trap, so that the human population stabilizes after the year 2000. (That hasn't happened yet.)

Throughout history, rather than expand our population to the limit possible we have chosen to RAISE our level of life. What could make some one believe that we will differently in the future? With immortality we can even expect this tendency to increase: why should I create children as competitors for myself, who will only use resources that I MYSELF can use?

He also assumes exponential economic growth and a corresponding growth of real income per capita, ignoring inflation. In other words, he implicitly assumes that we don't reach hard limits to economic growth by, for example, entering into something like Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation and getting stuck there indefinitely. Therefore he extrapolates that in the far-future year 2000 we'd have a per capita income of $20,000_{1979 dollars}, and that this figure would increase by about a factor of ten every century.

Donaldson also assumes, implicitly, that no wild card events happen, and that we continue to enjoy relative social and political stability over the long run. The Singularity idea hadn't gotten into circulation until Vernor Vinge propagandized for it in the late 1980's, so Donaldson may not have known about it yet.

And Donaldson also assumes implicitly that additional wealth doesn't lose its marginal value above some level we may have nearly reached (like in Gunther Stent's scenario of the "Golden Age"); or that trends like "mindfulness" and voluntary simplicity don't come to dominate the culture and cause people to lose interest in additional economic progress.

With those conditions given, what does Donaldson forecast? He writes:

If we take Table No. 1 seriously it tells us something quite profound. The future is not just a matter of a lot of gadgets and electronics. We can understand a lot about daily life if we imagine a world where EVERYONE makes 1 million dollars in REAL MONEY, goods and services. People in 2200 will ALL have the kinds of things that millionaires have today. We will not gry to imagine gadgets and electronics at all, instead we will notice that there are right now an immense number of things needing no special technology in themselves but inaccessible to nearly everyone because of simple COST. It is technology that will reduce this cost so that everyone can have them.

And he gives some examples based on our current experiences with tangible things:

1. "We will privately own many goods of sorts that are now shared."

Just as we now own private automobiles, in the coming centuries more and more people will own their own aircraft. (Donaldson doesn't call them "flying cars"!) Donaldson also envisions that people will own private libraries comparable to city libraries. Years ago, the California businessman and former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan reportedly bought the entire library from a defunct Catholic college and set it up in his mansion; apparently Donaldson thinks that in the future many of us would have homes comparable to Riordan's with tens of thousands of books in them. Donaldson didn't foresee that instead we could have handheld electronic devices which can store entire libraries in digital format, along with digitized music and video, in addition to having access to an ever growing supply of information on the internet.

We could also have our own research laboratories and scientific equipment like particle accelerators; a lot of ordinary geeks would have the resources to play Tony Stark if they wish. And we could individually own more and more land just for the scenery, with no neighbors nearby and no uninvited visitors allowed; though I don't see how that could work for scarce scenery like the Grand Canyon.

2. "With wealth our possessions will also get bigger."

Donaldson thinks that land area owned per capita would increase by a factor of 100 every 200 years, though his figures in TABLE NO. 2 make no sense. Earth has a land surface area of ~150,000,000 km², so if you assume a stable population of 6 billion, that allows everyone about 0.025 km² of land per capita, roughly a square about 158 m on a side. Donaldson's table implies we would reach the crossover point before 2200. Where does all that extra "land" per capita come from, if the population doesn't shrink? From space colonization?

And who knows if we would want to own ever bigger tracts of land, vehicles, homes and spaceships? What would I do with a flying machine on the order of 1 km in length, for example? I could see having my own large spaceship, of course.

3. "Houses, vehicles, other possessions would become more differentiated."

So we could see the houses of "ordinary" people start to resemble the houses of the wealthy: Summer houses, winter houses, houses for special events, specially designed houses for unusual family and relationship arrangements which will become more common in the future. For example, I've heard that some home builders in Utah specialize in designing and building homes for polygynous families where the wives and their respective children require separate living spaces. If polyamory becomes more mainstream in the future, housing designs will probably evolve to reflect the needs for those currently uncommon relationships as well.

Houses in remote areas or in harsh climates might grow larger and larger and have specialized spaces for people who prefer cocooning so that they don't have to go anywhere for long periods. Robert Heinlein describes a house like that in Canada in his novel Friday. I could also see the desirability of a megahouse in metro Phoenix during its stillsuit season. When you double the linear dimensions of a structure, you increase its surface area exposed to the environment by a factor of 4, but its volume by a factor of 8; so that the ratio of surface area to volume halves, and you get savings on heating or cooling each unit of its interior air volume. In a sufficiently large house, you could have home entertainment rooms, fitness rooms, artists' studios, private art galleries, scientific or invention labs, libraries (if you want to own physical books), music rooms, greenhouses to provide fresh fruits and vegetables, private chapels for the religiously inclined, and possibly even automated clinics in the house for routine medical emergencies like diagnosing and setting a broken bone.

And then we could have rooms for purposes we can't even imagine now. Some people in 2011 have media rooms in their homes which resemble miniature command centers like the ones in movies. Imagine if you had to explain the function of that room to someone who lived before the invention of electrical power, photography, the telephone and the telegraph.

4. "Wealth means also that everyday things would be made far more elaborately."

Donaldson thinks that robots would prepare our meals and produce one-off goods at home for us, but he sets dates which seem too remote to me. The production of industrial-quality goods at home could happen well before 2100, if fabbing becomes practical and results in functional and aesthetically pleasing items. The the idea that people in Future World would groom and dress themselves more elaborately also shows up in science fiction.

And then Donaldson has a lengthy section about the economic institutions in his scenario. Automation won't create serious long-term unemployment, he thinks. Most importantly, machines can't make our decisions for us about what we want, and they can't consume the goods they produce for us in response to those desires. Donaldson writes:

Means by which we can express our desires about the future will therefore become more and more developed. Just as now, some political means will occur; however we can expect also an elaboration of present sharemarkets and futures markets to deal with development of all kinds of future goods. We may see, for instance, a FUTURES MARKET in ideas for inventions, so that people will buy and sell the right to buy (or sell) a holograpic picturephone not yet invented. To make such choices, people would need knowledge, and markets would become more and more differentiated, with people specializing in specific types of goods. Other than immediate consumption, this market would be the main economic activity engaged in by people of 2500 on. It will therefore dominate life and self-image in the same way as employment does now.

Donaldson, in other words, apparently thought of something like prediction markets as a mechanism for making decisions about the directions of progress in the coming centuries.

Donaldson also extrapolates that people over the long run will earn proportionately less income from wages, and more income from invested capital, just as wealthy people have done for generations. That will have consequences in the political sphere favoring economic conservatism.

Next Donaldson discusses longevity. Donaldson writes:

I do not expect many or even any changes in basic structural design of human beings (wings, a third eye, fur . . .). Biological changes, however, include much more than structural design; the leading change will be longevity. Means will be known to keep people alive for longer and longer times, and the standard of "health" will rise. Even now we see mortals of 60 who speak of themselves as "healthy"; common deformities such as diabetes, asthma, or myopia will become curable relatively soon.

However, even if people's probability of deanimation decouples from "age," they could still deanimate from misadventures and from "accidents of medical treatment." Donaldson thinks that you might need to go into cryonic suspension repeatedly, every time you deanimate from one of these causes over the centuries, to wait it out until a more advanced state of health care can revive and restore you. If you deanimate in 2700 from a cause of death with no known treatment in that year, by going into cryonic suspension you could benefit from the health care providers in the year 3000 who have learned in the intervening three centuries what they need to do to help you.

Donaldson also speculates about how this superlongevity will affect human behavior:

Increased longevity will affect society and values. Private organizations would support longterm projects, such as basic research, only funded by government now. People will concern themselves with cosmic disasters which may only happen in thousands of years: explosions of the Galactic Center, instabilities of the Solar System. Less need for constant creation of new people will cause roles of men and women to become quite close to one another; differences between the sexes in dress, ways of walking or talking, and social behavior will become far less.

I have my doubts about the last part because of the limits of human plasticity. The birth rate in the U.S. has declined dramatically since the peak years of the Baby Boom, yet men's and women's behaviors have diverged even farther in some respects. Many American women born since the 1970's talk in ways I find odd and annoying, for example, and not like the men from the same generations. If anything, male and female behaviors could become more distinct because of increased sexual competition as progress in medicine makes people more attractive.

Apart from modifications for longevity, Donaldson displays a bias against the idea of making more radical alterations to the human body:

Through history, we have adapted to new environments by invention rather than biological adaptation. Rather than changes in basic structural design of human beings, what is most likely instead is ability to design tools, artifacts, furniture, machines, all with attributes of life able to sense and respond to our internal states as if they were part of ourselves. We would not so much make people with wings, for example, as design an attachment to ourselves with which we could fly: a whole creature, with a brain to control its own motion and sense how we wished to move, that we could put on or off like a jacket. Every for sensory or brain tasks we would have the same devices: rather than a permanent third eye, instead an attachment letting us see X-rays with the same facility as we now see with our own eyes, or artificial brains giving their wearers powers to process information of many different kinds. We see this trend already in pocket calculators. People will wear these, and have them always with them, in the same way as they now wear clothing now [sic]. We will seem to them like naked savages.

Donaldson shows a lack of imagination here. Do people in 2011 who don't carry late-model smart phones with them seem like "naked savages"? The people in Future World might consider it gauche to go through daily life decked out with equipment, so that they either (1) do without, (2) have some of it embedded, or (3) have their robotic servants keep it handy for them nearby.

And then Donaldson ends his essay by arguing that with the giantism trend in wealth he foresees, our assumptions of an acceptable standard of living will change so that in a few centuries, for example, only "poor" people will own homes measuring 100 m on a side, which they bought second-hand instead of having them custom-designed and so forth. Again Donaldson shows a lack of imagination. In 2011 the Amish seem to live in "poverty" by many Americans' standards, but Amish families own businesses and real estate and often have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in net worth which they hide with their simple lifestyle. They have wealth in reserve for when it counts, in other words, like when a major illness strikes someone in the family; and they take justifiable pride in their self-reliance. No doubt communities with similar value systems will exist in future centuries where the members live quietly. obscurely and frugally among their more ostentatious neighbors.

On the whole Donaldson's essay has the merit of specificity. He presents some vivid and plausible examples of wealth in the future, without postulating anything extraordinary or weird apart from successful life extension, rejuvenation and revival from cryonic suspension.

And yet Donaldson's essay also reveals a conservative mentality in some ways. It reminds me of H.G. Wells's complaint about the futurology which existed in the early 20th Century:

'Let us admit,' said Keppel, 'that this is attempting the most impossible of tasks. The hypothesis is that these coming supermen are strong-witted, better-balanced, and altogether wiser than we are. How can we begin to put our imaginations into their minds and figure out what they will think or do? If our intelligences were as tall as theirs, we should be making their world now.'

'In general terms,' persuaded Dr. Holdman Stedding, gently obstetric as ever. 'Try.'

'Well, perhaps, in general terms, we may be able to say a few things at least about what their world will not be. You—what do you find in all these Utopias and Visions of the Future of yours? I suppose you get the same stuff over and over again, first of all caricatures of current novelties—skyscrapers five thousand feet high, aeroplanes at two thousand miles an hour, radio receivers on your wrist-watch. . .

In other words, Donaldson doesn't explore how people in future centuries might live if they did become vastly wealthier in real terms, but they didn't want to buy "caricatures" of current goods like houses the size of entire towns (with a town's goods and services built into them, in effect), flying vehicles the size of aircraft carriers and huge particle accelerators for their children's science fair projects. Donaldson also doesn't deal with the fact that even by the 1970's, rich people generally had to consume many of the same goods and services available to ordinary people. Billionaires in 2011 can't buy better electricity, gasoline, wireless phone services, prescription drugs, music recordings or books than everyone else buys. Their physicians graduate from the same medical schools as everyone else's physicians, and these physicians know just as much about keeping their patients healthy as the physicians with downscale practices know. The trend towards the collapse of billionaires' advantages as consumers will likely continue and put lower bounds on the stigma of having a house of "only" 100 m in length.

Nonetheless, I've always admired Thomas Donaldson, now in cryonic suspension, for writing about the future as a serious personal proposition, and in a way which challenges our usual presuppositions about it. I got to talk to Thomas a few times in the 1990's. I can't say that I liked him personally; he reminded me of the other Ph.D. mathematicians I've known who view themselves as a superior form of life, so he struck me as a bit arrogant. But I respect him immensely, and I hope we can resume our acquaintance some day, however many centuries we'll have to wait.