The Future of Work and Death | Journeyman Pictures

Transcript

Time

Time	Person Speaking (or title/screen text)	Dialogue
00:00:42	TITLE "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Isaac Asimov
00:00:49	ISAAC ASIMOV Biochemist & sci-fi writer	Even if we can change human beings, in what direction do we change them, do we want to change them this way or that way? This is an example of the way in which technological advance impinges on sociological necessity.
00:01:26	TITLE Gadfly Productions Presents
00:01:27	WILL SELF	What we need to ask ourselves is where does my individual ability to control my life or to influence the political process lie in relation to these new forms of technology.
00:01:39	TITLE In association with Serious Wonder
00:01:41	VIVEK WADHWA	Governments and politicians don’t understand what’s happening, they don’t even realise this change is happening.
00:01:48	TITLE Executive Producer Gray Scott
00:01:49	PROF. JOHN HARRIS	It is very difficult, not impossible, to predict what the precise effects will be. And in many cases, like with other technologies we have to suck it and see. Who would have predicted the Internet?
00:02:03	TITLE Produced by Sean Blacknell & Wayne Walsh
00:02:05	STEVE FULLER	And I talk about this matter as humanity 2.0, because in a sense this is kind of where we’re heading, to some kind of new normal, as it were, of what it is to be a human being.
00:02:12	TITLE Narrated by Dudley Sutton
00:02:13	MARTIN FORD	It’s not a problem that we should dismiss or underestimate, it’s staggering in its proportions.
00:02:19	TITLE Associate Producer Carla Byrom
00:02:20	VIVEK WADHWA	Ignorance and disbelief at the same time – people don’t believe that change is happening this fast. That’s the problem.
00:02:30	TITLE The Future of Work and Death
00:02:33	NARRATOR	This is a stone. Formed naturally in the earths crust over millions of years through pressure and heat. It was discovered in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania Dated around 2.5 million years B.C., it is arguably one of the first examples of technology. Stone tools were first adapted for the use of cutting, scraping or pounding materials by Homo Habilis, one of our earliest ancestors. Over 1 million years later, mankind made one of the most significant of all technological discoveries; fire. The ability to control fire was a turning point for human evolution, it kept us warm, allowed us to see in the dark and allowed us to cook food, which many scientists believe, was a huge contributor to the ascent of mind. Each age, each empire, has brought with it the discovery and invention of numerous technologies, each in their own way, re-designing human life, leading us to now, modern day society. We are now more advanced, connected, knowledgeable and resistant to disease than ever before and it's all due to our ability to apply scientific knowledge for practical purposes in a bid to maximize efficiency. Just as the stone set us on a path of transformation the technologies of the future may bring with them a paradigm shift - changing two major features of the human experience. Two things that have defined our lives for as long as we can remember, two things that have always been involuntary constants; trading our time for sustenance and losing that time through senescence.
00:04:33	TITLE Written & Directed by Sean Blacknell & Wayne Walsh TITLE Part 1: Trading your time for sustenance WORK
	TITLE Out of the 7.3 billion people worldwide, 3.1 billion of them are employed. The average person spends 40 hours a week at work, for 45 years of their life. Technology could be about to change that.
00:05:16	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	The industrial revolution effectively freed man from being a beast to burden; the computer revolution will soon free him from dull repetitive routine. The computer revolution is, however, perhaps better compared with the Copernican or the Darwinian revolution, both of which greatly changed mans idea of himself and the world in which he lives.
00:05:36	NARRATOR	In the space of 60 years we have landed on the moon, seen the rise of computing power, mobile phones, the explosion of the Internet and we have sequenced the human genome. We took man to the moon and back with 4KB of memory, the phone in your pocket is at least 500,000 times more than that. We are ever increasingly doing more with less, one of the things that has been born out of the this technological revolution is the ability to replace human workers with more efficient machines. This is largely due to the speed at which we are advancing our technological capabilities.
00:06:21	RAY KURZWEIL	Information technology grows in an exponential manner, its not linear. Our intuition is linear, when we walked through the savannah a thousand years ago we made linear predictions of where that animal would be, and that worked fine. It’s hard wired in our brains. But the pace of exponential growth is really what describes information technologies, and its not just computation. There’s a big difference between linear and exponential growth – if I take 30 steps linearly, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 I get to 30. But if I take 30 steps exponentially 2, 4, 8, 16 I get to a billion. It makes a huge difference, and that really describes information technology. When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer, it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar that we’ve actually experienced since I was a student. And we’re going to do it again in the next 25 years.
00:07:22	NARRATOR	Currently on almost a daily basis, new algorithms, programs and feats in mechanical engineering are getting closer and closer to being a reliable and more cost effective alternative to a human worker. This process is known as automation.
00:07:42	MARTIN FORD Entrepreneur & author of ‘Rise of the Robots’	This is not just about automation where we expect it, which is in factories and among blue-collar workers and so forth. It is coming quite aggressively for people at much higher skill levels and that will only grow in the future as we continue to grow on this exponential arch.
00:07:58	STEVE FULLER Sociologist – Warwick University	This business of not having to work very hard because machines are taking care of things for you - I mean you see this in the 19^th century industrial revolutions and, in fact, I think one of the problems the industrial revolution had, and this is where Marxism got so much traction, was that machines actually did render a lot of people unemployed. Ok, that already happened in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. And it was only by labour organising itself that it was able to deal with the situation intelligently because there was no automatic transition to something else, it was just you know, we don’t need you anymore, we have these more efficient machines and so now you just have to find work somewhere else.
00:08:38	MARTIN FORD	Automation has clearly been happening for a long time and it has automated a lot of very laborious work we don’t want to do and this will continue to be the case in the future, but I think that this time is genuinely different. If we look at what has happened historically what we’ve seen is that automation has primarily been a mechanical phenomenon and a classic example of that is of course agriculture.
00:09:01	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	I’m a farmer, here’s what mechanical engineering has done for all of us on the farms and for you too.
00:09:07	MARTIN FORD	It used to be that in the United States and in most advanced countries that most people worked on farms. Now almost no one work on farms, it’s less than 2%, and of course as a result of that we are better off. We have more comfortable jobs, food is cheaper, we have a much more advanced society. The question is can that continue indefinitely, and what we’re seeing this time is that things are really quite different.
00:09:30	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	If this keeps up, it wont be long until machines will do everything, nobody will have work.
00:09:36	GRAY SCOTT Futurist & techno-philosopher	So as we move deeper into the automated future, we will see different stages take form. The first stage that we’re entering is the stage where automation and robots are working side by side with people in factories some of those jobs are slowly going away but in the near future within 2 to 3 years you’re going to see a huge percentage of those factories jobs be replaced with automated systems and automated robots. The next stage following that, is we could see up to a third of jobs in America be replaced by 2025 by robots or automated systems, that’s a huge percentage of people that could be unemployed because of this automated tsunami that’s coming basically.
00:10:23	DR STUART ARMSTRONG AI researcher – Future of Humanity Institute	We have a colleague here, called Carl Frey, who has put together a list of jobs by their vulnerability to getting replaced by automation and the least vulnerable are things like choreographers, managers, social workers, people who have people socials skills and people that have creativity
00:10:49	TITLE -The study examined over 700 types of occupation. -The analysis concluded that nearly 47% of all US jobs are plausibly at risk of being automated within the next 20 years -Fast food -Number of jobs worldwide - over 10 million
00:10:58	MARTIN FORD	One area that I look a lot at is fast food; I mean the fat food industry is tremendously important to the American economy. If you look at the years since recovery from the great recession the majority of jobs, somewhere around 60% are low wage service sector jobs a lot of those have been in areas like fast food and yet to me it seems almost inevitable that ultimately fast food is going to automate. There’s a company right here in San Francisco, called momentum machines which is actually working on a machine to automate a hamburger production that can crank out about 400 gourmet hamburgers per hour and they ultimately expect to sort of roll this out not just in fast food establishments but perhaps in convenient stores and maybe even in vending machines. This could be all over the place.
00:11:55	TITLE -Manufacturing -Number of jobs worldwide – over 250 million
00:11:53	VIVEK WADHWA Academic & entrepreneur	I can see manufacturing now becoming completely automated; I can see hundreds of millions of workers being put out of jobs. That’s almost certain that that’s going to happen.
00:12:01	GRAY SCOTT Futurist & techno-philosopher	So you have companies right now that are automating their factories and their warehouses. Amazon is a great example, they’re using robots to automate their systems - the robots actually grab the products and give to the people that put those products into the box. So there are still people within the factories working at Amazon but in the near future those types of jobs may go away as well.
00:12:23	MARTIN FORD	There is a company here in Silicon Valley called Industrial Perception and they built a robot that can approach a stack of boxes that is stacked haphazardly in some non standard way, and visually by looking at that stack of boxes figure out how to move those boxes. They’ve built a machine that will ultimately be able to move perhaps one box every second and that compares with about 3 seconds for a human worker who’s very industrious. This is a machine that you can imagine working continuously its never injured, never file a workers compensation claim and yet its moving into an area that up until now at least, we would have said that is really something that is exclusively the providence a human worker. I mean it’s this ability to look at something and then based on what you see manipulate your environment. It’s sort of the confluence of visual perception and dexterity.
00:13:27	TITLE -Transportation - Number of jobs worldwide – over 60 million
00:13:25	VIVEK WADHWA	We’ll see self-driving cars on the road within 10-15 years, 15 years from now we’ll be debating whether we should allow human beings to be on the road at all.
00:13:36	GRAY SCOTT	Tesla says that by next year their cars will be 90% automated.
00:13:42	VIVEK WADHWA	Which means that the jobs of taxi drivers and truck drivers go away. Suddenly we don’t need to own cars anymore. Humanity isn’t ready for such a basic change such as that.
00:14:00	TITLE -Customer service -Number of Jobs worldwide – over 40 million
00:13:55	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN Cognitive Roboticist, Imperial College London	Call centre jobs and voice recognition is pretty sophisticated these days and you can imagine replacing many kinds of helplines and things.
00:14:04	GRAY SCOTT	There’s a company called IP Soft that has created an intelligent software system, an automated system called Amelia. She cannot only understand what you say to her she understands the context of what you’re saying and she can learn from her mistakes. This is a huge deal, because what we’re are going to see is all of the customer service jobs, if she is successful, we could see all of those jobs go away.
00:14:33	DR STUART ARMSTRONG	These things tend to go to marginal costs, and marginal cost is copying a software which is nothing and running it on a computer which will probably be very cheap.
00:14:45	TITLE -Healthcare - Number of jobs worldwide – over 100 million
00:14:46	PETER COCHRANE Futurist & entrepreneur	Human doctors will be largely in some respect be pushed aside because machines can do a better job of diagnosis than they can.
00:14:53	VIVEK WADHWA	Now will they have the empathy our doctors do? I don’t know, but at least they’ll have the knowledge that our doctors do, and they’ll be more advanced. So I can see disruption in healthcare.
00:15:00	STEVE FULLER	The one that’s likely to be the biggest growth area from an economic standpoint is the android companions to help elderly people, because given the rise of elderly people over the next 20 to 30 years its unlikely they’ll be enough people going into the nursing profession to actually serve them especially if were thinking in terms of home based care.
00:15:24	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN	A robot surgeon I think is something that will happen in the not too distant future, because a lot of that is to do with manual dexterity and having the expertise to recognise and understand what you’re manipulating as a surgeon. Terrific amount of expertise as a human to accumulate, but I can imagine we’ll be able to build something that’s a specialised robot surgeon that can carry out particular operations such as a prostate operation - that’s one that people are working on right now and I think they’re nearly there at producing a reliable robot surgeon that can do that. You might not want to submit yourself to this thing, you might think, but in fact I think we’d be able to make a very reliable robot surgeon to do that sort of thing.
00:16:15	TITLE -Finance -Number of jobs worldwide – over 30 million
00:16:16	VIVEK WADHWA	I can see disruption in finance because we’re moving to digital currencies and we’re now moving to crowd funding and crowd banking and all of these other advances.
00:16:35	PETER COCHRANE	Lots of decisions like decisions about mortgages and insurance - already those things have been largely taken over by programs and I think that kind of trend is only going to continue.
00:16:50	TITLE -Total jobs -At risk worldwide – over 500 million
00:16:55	TITLE “For worker to win the race, they will have to acquire creative and social skills” -Carl Frey
00:16:58	PETER COCHRANE	Every time there is a technological change unfortunately we put a lot of people out of work. It happened with the cotton jenny, its happened with every single technological change, so sure, technology destroys jobs but it creates new ones.
00:17:13	GRAY SCOTT	Moving from the age of work that we’re in now into the abundant ubiquitous automation age, that bridge we have to cross is going to be a very interesting time period. I think in the very beginning of that time period you’re going to see automation start to replace jobs, but those jobs will transfer into other forms of work, so for example, instead of working in a factory you will learn to code and you will code the robots that are working in the factory.
00:17:42	PETER COCHRANE	When I was young man and I went for careers advice I don’t know what they would have made of me asking for a job as a webmaster, it didn’t exist ,there was no web at that time. And right now we have over 200, 000 vacancies for people who can analyse big data.
00:18:00	STEVE FULLER	And we really do need people and mechanisms for analysing it and getting the most information from that data, and that problem is only going to increase in the future. So I think that there is going to be a lot of employment moving in that direction.
00:18:59	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	The history of our country proves that new inventions create thousands of jobs for everyone they displace, so it wasn’t long before your grandfather had a better job at more pay, for less work.
00:18:32	MARTIN FORD	We’re always offered this solution of more education, more training – if people lose their routine job lets send them back to school, they’ll pick up some new skills and then they’ll be able to move into some more rewarding career. That’s not going to operate so well in the future where the machines are coming for those skilled jobs as well, the fact is, is that machines are really good at picking up skills and doing all kinds of extraordinarily complex things. So those jobs of jobs aren’t necessarily going to be there either, and a second insight is that historically its always been the case that the vast majority of people have always done routine work so even if people can make that transition and going back to school and learning something new. In percentage terms those jobs don’t constitute that much of the total employment out there. Most people are doing these more routine things, so were up a real problem, that is probably going to require a political solution, its going to require direct redistribution - that’s my take on it. And that’s a staggering political challenge, especially in the United States.
00:19:34	VIVEK WADHWA	This would be fine if we had generations to adapt to the change, so that the next generation could give up a different life style, a different value the problems is that all of this is happening within the same generation within a period of 15 years. Were going to start wiping out most of the jobs we know. That’s really what worries me.
00:19:54	NARRATOR	A term commonly used when describing the trajectory of technological progress and where it's leading us, is 'The Technological Singularity'. The term is borrowed from physics to describe an event horizon or a moment in space-time that you cannot see beyond. We are currently in the transistor era of information technology. In 1965 co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore made the observation that the processing power of computers doubles every 18 months. The prediction that this trend will continue is known as Moore’s Law. When Intel created their first Computer Processing Unit in 1971 it had 2,300 transistors and had a processing speed of 740 KHZ. Today, a typical CPU has over a billion transistors with an average speed of 4 GHZ. However, many predict that by 2020 the miniaturisation of transistors and silicon chips will reach its limit and Moore’s Law will fizzle out into a post-silicon era. Another way of describing the term, Technological Singularity – is a time when Artificial Intelligence surpasses human intellectual capacity.
00:21:15	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	But does that this mean that a computer can produce a new idea, or make an original contribution to knowledge.
00:21:21	STEVE FULLER	Artificial intelligence, AI, is a long standing project which has to do with basically trying to use machines as a way of trying to understand the nature of intelligence and originally the idea was in some sense to manufacture within machines something that could simulate human intelligence. But I think now as the years have gone on, we now think of intelligence in a much more abstract way. So the ability to engage in massive computations where you can end up making quite intelligent decisions much more quickly than a human being can, so in this respect Artificial intelligence in a sense is, you might say, as trying to go to the next level of intelligence beyond the human.
00:22:02	DR STUART ARMSTRONG	A proper AI could substitute for practically any human job, at some level of skill, so it would be a completely different situation.
00:22:13	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN	You can imagine any kind of job could in theory be replaced by technology if you build human level AI. That of course may or may not be a good thing, you’d be able to, for example make robots that could do all kinds of jobs that humans don’t necessarily want to do. There are the so called 3 D’s, jobs that are dirty, dangerous or dull which humans might not want to do, and yet where you might want a human level of intelligence to do the job properly.
00:22:45	INTERVIEWER	These are things that are achievable? This isn’t something of science fiction?
00:22:48	DR. IAN PEARSON Futurologist	I don’t think its science fiction, I think this is entirely feasible that we could build a computer which is vastly super human, which is conscious, which has emotions which is essentially a new species of self aware intelligence and conscious in every way and has emotions the same as you and I do. I don’t see any fundamental limits on what we can do and we already know enough basic science to start doing that now.
00:23:15	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN	So some people are concerned about possible risks of building AI and building something that is very powerful where there are unintended consequences from the thing that you build - where it might do things that you cant predict which are extremely dangerous. So, so-called existential risk as some people call it.
00:23:36	PETER COCHRANE	We are going to hand off to our machines all the multi dimension problems that we are incapable of coping with – you and I can take a problem with 2 or 3 or 4 or even 7 inputs but 300, 1000, a million inputs? We’re dead in the water, but the machines can cope with that.
00:23:56	VIVEK WADHWA	The advantage that computer s have is they communicate at gigabyte speeds they’re all networked together, we talk in slow motion so computers will achieve this level of awareness probably in the next 40 years.
00:24:10	DR STUART ARMSTRONG	It’s not that if its good or bad, or its evil – we’re probably good enough to not program an evil AI. It’s if it’s lethally indifferent – if it has certain things it has been tasked with accomplishing and humans are in the way.
00:24:28	STEVE FULLER	So there’s this concern that once we reach that moment where the computers out-perform us, in ways that are quite meaningful that then they will some how be motivated to dispose of us or take over us. I don’t really believe that because these kinds of developments, which probably are a little further off in the future than some of the enthusiasts think, there’s will be time for us to adapt to come to terms with it, to organise social systems that will enable us to deal adequately with these new forms of intelligence. This is not just going to be something that happens as a miracle tomorrow and then we’ll be taken by surprise. But I do think the key thing here is that we need to treat these futuristic things, as not as far away as people say they are, just because they’re not likely to happen in 15 years, doesn’t mean they wont happen in 50 years.
00:25:18	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN	Its going to be of historic dimensions and its very hard to predict, I think, whether it will take us in a utopian direction or in a dystopian direction or more than likely something in between, just something very different - very hard to predict.
00:25:35	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	You see it’s our job to take raw materials, adapt them to useful forms, take natural forces and harness them to do mans work.
00:25:43	NARRATOR	The automated systems of the future are a natural process of human innovation, it all comes back to the idea of doing more with less - this process of innovation is driven not by necessity but desire or to simply fill a gap in the market. Farm owners didn't really need to replace their workers with machines but they did so because they could foresee the benefits, it’s a natural cycle of business, doing more with less leads to greater prosperity.
00:26:17	MARTIN FORD	The hope is that we can adapt to this politically and socially and in order to do that we have to begin a conversation now and remember that we’re up against an exponential arch of progress - things are just going to keep moving faster and faster. So we need to start talking about this now and get the word out there, so people realise that this problem is coming at us, so that we can begin to discuss viable political solutions to this. Because again I think that it will require ultimately a political choice, it’s not something that is going to sort itself out as a result of the normal functioning of the market economy. Its something that will require some sort of an intervention and part of the problem is that in the United States roughly half of the population is very conservative and they really don’t believe in this idea of intervention in the market.
00:27:08	ZOLTAN ISTVAN	Its gonna be a tough transition and those that find themselves out of jobs because a robot has taken it are going to be pretty pissed off.
00:27:16	DR STUART ARMSTRONG	The effect of automation on jobs and livelihood is going to be behind this, like the original luddites - it wasn’t that they were against technological development in some ethereal sense, it was that this was taking their damn jobs.
00:27:31	ZOLTAN ISTVAN Journalist & Transhumanist	I absolutely think there could be a neo Luddite movement against future technologies because they’re going to say, “Hey you’re taking our jobs, you’re taking our livelihoods away, you’re taking everything away from us”. But I think that’s when its going to be important that leaders and government step in and say “It may seem this way but life is going to get better for everyone, were going to have more time to do things we want, more vacation, more passions”. This is the modern world we can create, the utopia we’ve always dreamt of.
00:27:59	GRAY SCOTT	Why are we saying “my jobs not safe” or “automation is going to steal my job” these are the phrases that keep getting pushed out there, they’re negative phrases and instead it seems that we would look at this, especially if someone had been working in a factory their whole life, that they would look at that system “thank goodness that this is starting to be automated”. I don’t want anyone to have to crawl into a hole in the ground and pull up coal. No human being should have to do that.
00:28:30	DR. IAN PEARSON	If you make enough computers and a lot of robots, and the computers can make those robots very sophisticatedly, you could eliminate most of the physical jobs and also most of the high value intellectual jobs. What you’re left with then are those jobs where you have to be a human being, so I find it quite paradoxical in some ways that the more advanced the technology becomes the more it forces us to become humans. So in some ways its very good, it forces us to explore what humanity is about - what are the fundamental things about being a human? It’s not about being able to flip a burger or carve something intricately; a computer or a robot could do that far better than a human being.
00:29:10	MARTIN FORD	One thing I’ve noticed if you talk to techno-optimists, about the future of work and how its going to unfold, very often they will focus on this issue of how will we all be fulfilled in the future, what will be our purpose in life when we don’t work? And you can sort of posit this is terms of – there was a guy called Maslow who came up with a hierarchy of human needs – Maslow’s pyramid. And at the base of that pyramid are the foundational things like food and shelter, and at the top of that pyramid are of course these intangible things like a sense of purpose in your life and fulfilment and so fourth. What you’ll find among most techno-optimistic people is that they will want to skip right over the base of that pyramid and jump right to the top and start talking about what the meaning of our life will be when we don’t have to work. But the reality is that at the base of that pyramid - food shelter all the things that we need to have a decent life, that s the elephant in the room, that stuff costs real money, that stuff is going to involve raising taxes on a lot of people that are doing really well right now and that’s probably part of the reason that they’d prefer not to talk about it
00:30:18	GRAY SCOTT	So what do we do with the 99% of the population on this planet if they don’t have jobs? The goal is to make this an efficient system; you put automation in the hands of everyone. In the near future we’re going to see systems where we can 3D print our clothing and food. If you automate these self replicating industrial machines to pull the raw materials and distribute those raw materials to everyone who has the capacity to 3D print their own house or farmbot. You’ve literally solved the equation – how do I automate my life and how do I automate my basic necessities.
00:30:59	MARTIN FORD	If we have the political will to take all of these new technologies and the wealth and abundance they create and distribute these across our society in the first world countries and also across the whole world, then of course the sky’s the limit. We could solve all kinds of problems. But we would have to have the political will to do that and I don’t see a whole lot of evidence for that right now.
00:39:19	WILL SELF Writer	There already is enough for everybody, certainly to have an adequate life, if not a life of superabundance. So you know, I don’t think the introduction of more labour-saving devices is really going to make any difference - the reason there are poor people is because there’s rich people.
00:39:42	TITLE The 85 richest people in the world own the same wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest
00:31:46	DR STUART ARMSTRONG	You’re simultaneously making a lot of people almost completely useless while generating a lot more wealth and value than ever before.
00:31:55	VIVEK WADHWA	So I worry about this, about this chasm between the superrich and the poor, the ultra rich, if they’re representative of some of the people we see in Silicon Valley I really worry because I wonder if they have a soul. I really wonder if they have an awareness of how regular people feel and if they share the values of humanity. It really bothers me that you have this ultra rich that is out of touch with regular people, with humanity.
00:32:22	MARTIN FORD	This is being filmed right now in San Francisco which is by all accounts one of the wealthiest cities and most advanced cities in the world and its pretty much ground zero for this techno revolution and yet as I came here I almost tripped over homeless people sleeping on the side walk. That is the reality of today’s economy and todays society. In a very real sense we already live in the economy of abundance and we have not solved this problem.
00:32:50	DR. IAN PEARSON	I think the future for the 4 billion poor people in the world is actually a very good one, we’ve seen the amount of food has more than doubled in the last 25 years, that’s likely to continue. Worldwide were seeing massive economic growth, that really means poor countries and today will be much better off in the future. So there will still be some poor people relatively speaking but compared to todays poor people they’re actually be quite well off.
00:33:19	MARTIN FORD	I think that this is an amplifier for inequality, its going to make what we see now much more amplified – the number of people that are doing really well in the economy is likely to continue to shrink. Those people that are doing well will do extraordinarily well but for more and more people they’re simply going to find themselves in a position where they don’t have a lot to offer. They don’t have a marketable skill, they don’t have a viable way to really earn an income or particularly a middle class income.
00:33:47	DR. IAN PEARSON	You should value the fact that we can spend more time doing human work and the robots will get on increase the economy. They’ll be taking the resources and converting them into material goods at very low costs so the economy will expand, we’ll be better off and can concentrate on what matters, its nothing to worry about.
00:34:06	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	A constant stream of dollars must flow into big and small business each year. These dollars help to buy the land, the buildings, the tools and equipment and create new job opportunities for our expanding population.
00:34:26	MARTIN FORD	We need consumers out there we need people who can actually buy the things that are produced by the economy. If you look at the way our economy works ultimately its driven by end consumption - by that I mean people and to a limited extent governments who buy things because they want them or they need them. You know, business in our economy also but things of course but they do that in order to produce something else and one business may sell to another business but at the end of that chain there has to stand a consumer or perhaps a government who buys that product or service, just because they want it or need it. So this is not the case that things just can just keep going like this and get more and more unequal over time and everything will still be fine. I think that it wont be fine, it will have an impact economy and on our economic growth.
00:35:14	STEVE FULLER	We need intelligent planning, because being unemployed is not a positive thing in itself, there has to be some sort of transition point to some other form of life after that. And again at the moment I really don’t see enough attention being paid to this. So we need to take this future prospect seriously now.
00:35:34	NARRATOR	If we manage to adapt to this expected wave of technological unemployment both politically and socially, it’s likely to facilitate a time when work takes on a different meaning and a new role in our lives. Ideas of how we should approach our relationship with work have changed throughout history. In Ancient Greece Aristotle said “A working paid job absorbs and degrades the mind” I.e. if a person would not willingly adopt their job for free, the argument can be made that they have become absorbed and degraded by it, working purely out of financial obligation. In 1844 Karl Marx famously described the workers of society as alienated from their work and wholly saturated by it. He felt that most work didn’t allow an individual’s character to grow. He encouraged people to find fulfilment and freedom in their work. During world war two the ethos towards work was that it was a patriotic duty in order to support the war effort. To best understand our current relationship with work, and perhaps by extension modern life itself, we can look to the writings of a man called Guy Debord. Debord was a French Marxist theorist and in 1967 he published a powerful and influential critique on western society entitled The Society of the Spectacle. He describes how workers are ruled by commodities and that production is an inescapable duty of the masses. Such is the economic system that to work is to survive. “The capitalist economy” he says ”requires the vast majority to take part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of its ends - a requirement to which, as everyone knows, one must either submit or die.”
00:37:37	WILL SELF	The assumption has crept in to our rhetoric and our understanding that we live in a leisure society to some extent, that we have flexible working time. You hear the term a lot relative poverty as against absolute poverty and all of these kinds of ideas suggest that in fact we should feel pretty pleased with ourselves, we should both fell quite leisured and we should feel less embondaged to work than perhaps somebody in the 19th century who was kind of shackled to a machine in a factory. But in fact were very unhappy. Its irrelevant how much you work in actual terms anymore, the way in which the spectacle operates is to make of leisure in itself in adjunct to work, in other words the idea of not working and working are in some sense locked into an unholy reciprocal relationship with each other. You know, the fact that you’re not working is only because you’ve been working and the fact that you’re working is only so that you cannot work. In other words so engrafted is that rubric in the way that we approach life that we can never be rid of it.
00:38:40	NARRATOR	Debord also observed that as technology advances, production becomes more efficient; accordingly, the workers tasks invariably become more trivial and menial. It would seem that as human labour becomes irrelevant, the harder it is to find fulfilling work.
00:38:19	WILL SELF	The truth of the matter id is that most people already in Britain are doing useless jobs and have been for generations actually. Most jobs in management are completely useless they basically consist in the rearrangement of information into different patterns that are meant to take on a semblance of meaning in a beaurocratic context, so most work is in fact a waste of time already. And I think people understand that intuitively.
00:39:26	PETER COCHRANE	When I go into companies I often ask the question why are you employing people? You could monkeys or you get robots to do this job. The people are not allowed to think, they are processing, they’re just like a machine, they’re being so hemmed down they operate with an algorithm and they just do it.
00:39:46	NARRATOR	We all have the need to find meaning in our lives, and it's our professions that define us. To work is to provide a service, either to yourself or for others and most of us would like our work to be purposeful and contributory to society in some way. It is an uncomfortable truth that with our present model of economics, not everybody is able to monetise their passions. If any of this were to come to fruition, if we learn to make automation work for us, the question remains what do we do with our days?
00:40:24	VIVEK WADHWA	Theres a good and a bad, the good is the cost of everything drops, we can solve the basic problems of humanity like disease hunger, lodging. We can look after all the basic needs of human beings; the dark side is that automation yakes jobs away and the question what do we do for a living. Some of us will seek enlightenment and rise and will keep learning and growing but the majority of people don’t care about those things. The majority of people just want to do grunt work. They want to socialise with people as they do at work.
00:40:59	DR JOANNA COOK Anthropologist - UCL	Sennett wrote in his book The Corrosion of Character that in late capitalism one of the great supports for human interactions and human meaning is the longevity of social relations and the interactions in working environments and if that’s taken away, if what’s required is to be t continually responsive and changing in a precarious world, then people no longer find the fulfilments or the substance in what they’re doing.
00:41:32	WILL SELF	There is an underlying desire for people to do things. You spoke about the idea that people what to be engaged creatively that want to be engaged, you know, going back to basic Marxist ideas of praxis, right back to John Locke they want to be engaged in what Locke thought of as primary acquisition mixing there labour, either their creative thinking or their physical labour even with the world in order to transform it. They want to do that and that’s a very basic human instinct to do that. And the idea of a leisured class, as it were, a class who is not involved in a praxis with the world but is simply involved in a passive way, as a recipient of things, is actually repugnant to people. They would sooner work for the man in a meaningless job and construct a false ideology of involvement and engagement, than they would actually sit on their arse.
00:42:25	MARTIN FORD	We cant get away from the fact that people work because they have to, that’s the primary motivation for most people - if you don’t work you’re going to be living on the street. If we ever move into a future where that’s not the case and people don’t have to worry, then we can begin to take on these more philosophical questions of, you know…but we’re not at that point yet. We can’t pretend we are living in an age where that necessity for an income doesn’t exist
00:42:57	NARRATOR	Douglas Rushkoff stated in 2009 that - “We all want pay checks, or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs? According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff. We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is.” At this stage its difficult to think of other possible ways of life. The need to earn a living has been a part of every cultural narrative in history; it’s a pre condition of human life. The challenge facing the future of work is politically unclear; it’s likely to require not only a re-distribution of wealth, but a re-distribution of the workload. But will working less mean living more and is our fear of becoming irrelevant, greater than our fear of death?
00:44:20	TITLE Part II: Losing that time through senescence DEATH
00:44:30	TITLE -Just 100 years ago the average life expectancy worldwide was around 31, today it stands at 71. - Approximately 152, 000 people die every day - Two thirds of them die from age related diseases
00:44:55	NARRATOR	The process of physical ageing is known as senescence and none of us are spared from it – it remains to this day an evolutionary enigma. Our cells are programmed to wane and our entire bodies are fated to become frail. It would seem that the laws of nature would prefer it if we dwindle and die. Negligible senescence however is the lack of symptoms of ageing. Negligibly senescent organisms include certain species of sturgeon, giant tortoise, flatworm, clam and tardigrade. One species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii has even been observed to be biologically immortal – it has the capability to reverse its biotic cycle and revert back to the polyp stage at any point in its development.
00:45:52	PROF. JOHN HARRIS Bioethicist	There is only one thing wrong with dying and thats doing it when you don’t want to, doing it when you do want to is not a problem, now if you put that bargain to anybody – look, this is the deal, you will die but only when you want to, who would not take that bargain?
00:46:07	NARRATOR	In 2014 a team of scientists at Harvard were able to effectively reverse the age of an older mouse, by treating it with the blood of a younger mouse through a process called parabiosis. For the first time in history it is deemed scientifically possible to gain control over the ageing process.
00:46:36	AUBREY DE GREY Biogerontologist	Ultimately when people get the hang of the idea that ageing is a medical problem and that everybody’s got it, then its not going to be the way it is today.
00:46:48	TITLE Aubrey de Grey believes that it is possible to develop a cure for ageing
00:46:52	PROF. JOHN HARRIS	He thinks its possible that people will be able extend they’re lifespan by considerable amounts, I think he’s on record as saying that the first 1000 year old person is already alive.
00:47:04	AUBREY DE GREY	Its highly likely in my view that people born today or born 10 years ago, will actually be able to live as long as they like, so to speak, without any risk of death from the ill health of old age.
00:47:18	AUBREY DE GREY	The way to apply comprehensive maintenance to ageing is a divide and conquer approach, it is not a magic bullet, it is not some single thing that we can do, let a alone a single thing that we can do just once. Ageing is the life long accumulation of damage to the body and that damage occurs as an intrinsic, unavoidable side effect of the way that the body normally works, even though there are many many types of damage at the molecular level they can all be classified into a very manageable number of categories. Just 7 major categories – so now the bottom-line; what do we do about it, how do implement the maintenance approach? There are 4 fundamental paradigms, they all begin with ‘R’, and they’re called replacement, removal, repair and reinforcement. We’ve got particular ways to do all these things, sometimes replacement, sometimes simply elimination of the superfluous material - the garbage that’s accumulated, sometimes repair of the material, very occasionally reinforcement, that means making the cell robust so that the damage which would have normally have caused the pathology no longer does so. I want to talk about one thing we’re doing in our labs which involves the number one cause of death in the western world, cardio vascular disease – it all begins with these things called foam cells, which are originally white blood cells. They become poisoned by toxins in the blood stream, the main toxin responsible is known as 7KC and we’ve found some bacteria that can eat it, we then found out how they eat it, we found out the enzymes that they use to break it down and we found out how to modify those enzymes so that they can go into human cells, go to the right place in the cell where they’re needed which is called the lysosome and actually do their job there and it actually works. Cells are protected from this toxic substance, that’s what the graphs are showing. So this is pretty good news.
00:49:22	AUBREY DE GREY	The damage that accumulates that eventually causes the diseases and disabilities of old age is initially harmless, the body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of it. That’s critical because while the damage is at that sub-pathological level, it means that its not participating in metabolism, so to speak, its not actually interacting with the way the body works. So medicines that target that damage are much less likely to have unacceptable side effects than medicines that try to manipulate the body so as to stop the damage from being created in the first place.
00:50:01	TITLE There are differences of opinion in the field of gerontology as to the approach that Aubrey is taking towards longevity
00:50:06	PROF. JOHN HARRIS	Its unlikely in fact by working on longevity per se that we will crack it, its seems to me more probable that we will crack longevity simply by getting rid of, sequentially, the prime causes of death.
00:50:25	PROF. RUDY TANZI Neuroscientist, Harvard University	When I hear people talk about living hundreds of years, inside I’m thinking yeah right. Because if you study the brain the dead end is the brain -we all stop developing pathology at 40 years old, it s not a matter of whether you get Alzheimer’s its when. Its when. And genetically we all have predisposition to when were going to get this disease, its part of the program. Lets fix that part of the programme. So we can live past 90 years old with an intact working brain to continue the evolution of our mind. That is number one in my book, because it’s a fact - lifespan is almost 80 right now on average, by 85 half of people will have Alzheimer’s, do the math. 74 million baby boomers headed towards risk age, at 85 50% have Alzheimer’s, current lifespans 80 its going to be 85 pretty soon – half our population at 85 will have this disease and then keep going up to 90 and 100 it gets even worse. This is enemy number 1.
00:51:34	PETER COCHRANE	It’s interesting, just this week it was discovered that an Egyptian mummy had died of cancer, so even way back in those times cancer was around. What seems to have happened is as we have lived longer the number of diseases that pop up to kill us starts to increase. And the reality is that I think this is sort of a whack-a-mole situation – as we beat cancer to death and it disappears, something else will pop up.
00:52:02	PROF. RUDY TANZI	Cancer is a specific disease and every cancer has a specify gene involved together with lifestyle, Alzheimer’s specific disease specific genetics, I could go on and on, diabetes, heart disease. These are diseases and as you get older your susceptibility to these diseases increases and your genetics will determine whether you get them and when you get them given your lifespan. That’s not ageing that’s just living long enough to be susceptible, so we may very well irradiate in our fantasy world all the cancers and strokes and heart disease and diabetes and Alzheimer’s we get right now and then what’s going to happen you’ll live to 110 – and guess what’s going to happen? – New other genetic variants suddenly rear their ugly head and say now were going to effect whether or not you live to 110 without Alzheimer’s and heart disease and cancer and diabetes and it will go on and on and on.
00:53:00	NARRATOR	There will undoubtedly be enormous challenges concerning the biological approach to longevity, there could however, be an alternative route to extreme longevity.
00:53:13	STEVE FULLER	When people are worried about death I guess the issue is what is it that they would like to stay alive. I think that’s often very unclear what the answer is because if you look at somebody like Ray Kurzweil for example, with his promises of the singularity and our merging with machine intelligence and then being able to have this is infinite consciousness projected outward into the cosmos. I don’t think he is imagining a human body living forever and if that’s what we’re talking about with immortality – the kind of thing Kurzweil is talking about - I can see it, I mean I can see it at least as something to work towards.
00:53:51	NARRATOR	In 2005 Google’s director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil published a book entitled The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend biology. He predicts that by 2045, it will be possible to upload our minds into a computer, effectively allowing us to live indefinitely. “Something is going on in the human brain, and there is nothing that prevents these biological processes from being reverse engineered and replicated in nonbiological entities.”
00:54:28	GRAY SCOTT	When people think of death at this point, they thin of a body into a coffin a coffin going into the ground. When in fact that age of death is dying. We are ending that stage, were entering a new stage where we could possibly upload consciousness into a silicon substrate.
00:54:47	DR. IAN PEARSON	You know a lot of these science fiction ideas from decades ago are becoming real and all ready people are spending millions of pounds in research today on making this happens. Nobody expects to do it before 2040 at the earliest my guess is 2050, it’ll be a few rich people a few kings and queens here and there, politicians - by 2060-2070 its reasonably well off people, by 2075 pretty much anybody could be immortal.
00:55:13	PROF. JOHN HARRIS	I’m not convinced that uploading my consciousness to a computer is a form of immortality, I would like to live forever but I’m not sure I would like to live forever as some digi-bytes of memory in a computer. I wouldn’t call that living forever, there’s things I want to do with my body that I wont be able to do in that computer.
00:55:35	DR. IAN PEARSON	Immortality is question that keeps arises in technology communities’ - its one that I think is entirely feasible in principle. We wont actually become immortal but what we’ll do is get the technology by around about 2050 to connect a human brain to the machine world so well that most of your thinking is happening inside the computer world, inside the IT. So you’ll brain is still being used but 99% of your thoughts, 99% of your memories is actually out there in the cloud, or whatever you want to call it. And only 1% is in your head, so walking to work this morning you get hit by a bus, doesn’t matter, you just upload your mind into an android and Monday carry on as if nothing had happened.
00:56:20	DR JOANNA COOK	The question with that kind of technology and the extension of human capacity and human life through technology, is where does the human end and the technology begin.
00:56:36	GRAY SCOTT	If we upload our consciousness into a robot, a humanoid robot that has touch, the ability to feel, all of the sensorial inputs - if they’re the same, there is the potential of continuity. So you can have the same type of experiences in that new substrate as you did as a human being.
00:56:57	PROF. RUDY TANZI	Its beyond a continuity issue, its an issue that you have the ability to record and recall without the content, the content being the sensations, images, feelings and thoughts that you’ve experienced your whole life that have associated with each other through your neural network - where are they stored?
00:57:14	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN	I don’t think consciousness and the brain is anything to do with any particular region in the brain but is something thats all about its distributed organisation. I don’t think there’s any mysteries, there are no causal mysteries in the brain and I think that there’s a perfectly comprehensible physical chain of cause and effect that goes from what I see and hear around me and the words that come out of my mouth - which encompasses consciousness I suppose, but the moment you say something like that you’re on the edge of the philosophical precipice.
00:57:55	PROF. RUDY TANZI	When you think about a machine the question is are simulating consciousness or are you simulating cognition, cognition requires inputs and reactions that are associated with each other to create an output and an outcome. And you can programme that all day and make that as sophisticated and as information dense as you want almost to the point that it mimics a real person. But the question will it ever have the consciousness that our species with our genetics with our brain has – no. A machine has its own consciousness, all you’re doing is programming it to be cognitively responsive the way you are.
00:58:36	PETER COCHRANE	I remember well when my father died asking my mother, if I could’ve captured the very being of my father in a machine and I could put him in an android that looked exactly liked him, had all the mannerisms, it was warm, it smelt and felt like him – would you do it? And she said absolutely not, it wouldn’t be your father, it wouldn’t be him.
00:58:58	PROF. RUDY TANZI	I think that some day you can upload your current neural network but that’s not you, that’s just your current neural map, right?
00:59:13	NARRATOR	As with any concept that proposes to change the natural order of things, the idea of extreme longevity can be met with disbelief. But there is currently an international movement called Transhumanism, which is concerned with fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing technologies to greatly enhance human beings in an intellectual, physical and psychological capacity.
00:59:42	ZOLTAN ISTVAN	I really want to just simply live indefinitely and not have the spectre of death hanging over me potentially at any moment taking away this thing that we call existence, so for me that’s the primary goal of the Transhumanist movement.
00:59:57	DAVID PEARCE Philosopher	Transhumanists believe we should use technology to over come our biological limitations, what does that mean? - Well very simplistically perhaps I think we should be aiming for what one might call a triple ‘S’ civilisation – super-intelligence, super-longevity and super-happiness.
01:00:20	ZOLTAN ISTVAN	We have been evolving through hundreds of thousands of years, human beings and transhumanism is the climax of that it’s the result of how were going to get to some kind of great future where we are way beyond what it means to be a human being.
01:00:36	DAVID PEARCE	Unfortunately organic robots grow old and die and this isn’t a choice its completely involuntary. 120 years from now in the absence of radical biological intervention everyone listening to this video will be dead and not beautifully so but ones last years tend to be ones of decrepitude, frequently senility and infirmity. And transhumanists don’t accept aging as inevitable, there’s no immutable law of nature that says that organic robots must grow old, after all silicon robots don’t grow old their parts can be replaced and upgraded.
01:01:21	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	Our bodies are capable of adjusting in ways that we’ve hardly dreamt of, if we can only find the key, I’m so close now, so very close - The key to what? To be able to replace disease and damaged parts of the body as easily as we replace eye corneas now – It can’t be done. It can be done!
01:01:45	DR JOANNA COOK	The relationship between life and death and the role of technology in forestalling death creates death in a way as a new kind of problem - death becomes something that needs to be solved.
01:02:00	WILL SELF	Oh why would it be good to live forever? Because if you have a shit day it dilutes the depression that within countless other days, all of these metrics are about failing to exist in the full light of your own autonomy. That’s all they’re about and the paradox of your own autonomy, which is that you’re simultaneously completely free and completely un-free at the same time.
01:02:26	STEVE FULLER	I have been to many conferences where you got the anti-transhumanist person saying this is just denial of death, at the end of the day, that’s all its about, and it’s the kind of last hangover of the Abrahamic religions, this idea that were going to come back to god and realise our godlike nature and this is really the last kind point for that. I think there’s a lot of truth to that especially in terms of the issues that we’ve been talking about, where everybody just takes for granted that if you’ve been given the chance to live forever you’d live forever. I think yes, that that s true, but I don’t know if its as problematic as people claim it is, in other words that there is something wrong with having this fear of death and wanting to live forever. I think the question is what do you do with your time, in what capacity do you want to live forever. So I do think it makes all the difference in the world whether were talking about Kurzweil s way or Aubrey de Greys way.
01:03:27	ZOLTAN ISTVAN	The way the human species operates is that we really never fully ready for anything however the prospect of living indefinitely is to promising to turn down or to slow down or to just go after at full speed. By enabling us to find technologies to live infinitely we’re not making it so we’re going to live forever, we’re just making it so we have that choice. If people what to pull out of life at some point in the future they’re certainly welcome to do that. However, it’s going to be great to eliminate death if we want, because everyone wants that choice.
01:04:01	NARRATOR	There are other socio-economic repercussions of living longer that need to be considered. The combination of an ageing population and the escalating expenses of health care, social care and retirement is a problem that already exists the world over. In the last century alone medicine has massively contributed to increased life expectancy. Consequently human population is rapidly ageing. According to the World Health Organisation the number of people aged 60 years and over is expected to increase from the 605 million today to 2 billion by the year 2050. As people live longer they become more susceptible to non-communicable diseases – this becomes an enormously expensive. Dementia alone costs the NHS £23 billion a year. Currently elderly non-workers account for a vast portion of our population and a vast portion of our workforce care for them. It is economically beneficial to end ageing.
01:05:11	STEVE FULLER	Social life is organised around people having occupying certain rules and certain ages, and you can already see the kinds of problems that are caused to the welfare system when people live substantially beyond the age of 65. Because when the whole number 65 was selected Bismarck when he started the first social security system in Germany the expectation was that people would be living 2 years beyond the retirement age to be able to get the social security so it wasn’t going to break the bank. Problem now is that you have people living 20years or more beyond retirement age and that’s unaffordable.
01:05:48	AUBREY DE GREY	There’s no question that within society as a whole there’s an enormous tendency to knee jerk reactions with regard to the problems that might be created if we were to eliminate ageing.
01:06:01	GRAY SCOTT	There have been people that have said you’ll be bored, you wont have anything to do. Speaking from a place of a lifespan that’s 80 or 90 years old saying that we re going to be bored if we live to 150 is really just invalid. We have no idea what well do with that time.
01:06:18	STEVE FULLER	Part of this transhumanism stuff where it gets some real policy traction is people that want us not to live to be 1000 but maybe if we can take that 20 years that were living longer now than we did 100 years ago and keep that productive. So in other words if you could still be strong and still be sharp into you 70’s and 80’s and so not have to pull any social security until quite late in life, so then you’ll have 20 extra years whether you’re actually contributing to the economy.
01:06:48	GRAY SCOTT	So one of the areas we’re going to be thinking about in the near future if we do achieve extreme longevity physically is the idea of overpopulation. This is a controversial idea of course, and we may face a time period where we have to say to people you have to be licensed to have more than one child.
01:07:09	RIVA MELISSA TEZ Transhumanist	The ideas around children, I hope will probably change when people start to realise that the values of children need to be defined first before we have them and that’s not something that we do. We just have them and we don’t define why or for what purpose. I’m not saying that there has to be a defined purpose but just to continue our gene line isn’t the biggest reason.
01:07:32	AUBREY DE GREY	At the moment ultimately we see in any society where fertility rate goes down because of female prosperity, emancipation and education, we also see the age of the average childbirth go up. We see women having their children later and of course at the moment, there’s a deadline for that. But that’s not going to exist any more because menopause is part of aging, so women who are choosing to have their children later now, you know, it stands to reason that a lot of them are probably going to choose to have their children a lot later. And that of course has an enormous depressive impact on the trajectory of global population.
01:08:09	STEVE FULLER	If we actually said to everybody, “ok you’re all now going to live for 1000 years” -we could restructure society so its on these 1000 year cycles, that’s possible. But the problem becomes when you’re still allowing people to live the normal length and also allowing people to live 1000 years - then how do you compare the value of the lives, the amount of experience, supposing an 585 year old guy goes up for a job against a 23 year old how do you message the experience? What the old guy always gets the job? I mean, these problems would arise unless there was some kind of legislation about permissible variation in age.
01:08:48	PETER COCHRANE	This is a bit of a conundrum because were all expanding our lifespan and the question is would you like to like to live for not 100 years but 200 years? Would you choose to if you could? It’ll be very difficult to say no. The reality is the replacement of human piece parts is probably going to take us in that direction but it will be market driven and those people with the money will be able to afford to live a lot longer than those without.
01:09:15	PROF. JOHN HARRIS	Pretty much most of the discoveries these days takes place in western Europe or United States or one or two other countries, China, Singapore and so on. But if they’re valuable enough and I don’t mean monetarily – if they’re worth having, then people extend them. We have to start somewhere and I don’t believe in the dog in the manger attitude where you don’t give it to any body until you can provide it for everybody.
01:09:38	WILL SELF	All technologies are discontinuous; there are people at this very moment who are walking 4 kilometres to get a bucket of water from a well. There are people who are having cornea operations that are done with a needle, where it’s stuck in their eye and they’re cornea is scrapped out. So these ideas totalising utopian technological intervention are part of a discontinuous technological world and the world will always be discontinuous technologically.
01:10:08	PETER COCHRANE	When a child has to drink dirty water and cannot find food and is dying of starvation and diseases and the solution is just a few dollars, there is something badly wrong. We need to fix those things, the only way that we could fix them in the past would have been at unbelievable cost because of the limitation of our industrial capacity and capability. Not anymore.
01:10:38	DR. NICHOLAS THADEUS KAMARA Physician, Kabale Hospital	What we need is the life saving drugs, not the ones that stop us from ageing.
01:10:42	NARRATOR	In the last 20 years healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa has greatly improved - HIV prevalence has gone down, infant mortality rate has gone down, immunisation rates have gone up and the drug supply in many areas has risen. However, healthcare and medication in developing countries is not always affordable or even readily available, its not just medicine, according to the World Health Organisation over 700 million people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking water. We still live in an age where over one billion people live off less than a dollar a day and live in extreme poverty. It is ultimately not a scientific issue, it is a geo-political issue.
01:11:40	DR. NICHOLAS THADEUS KAMARA	We really have a problem treating some of the diseases like cancer. We don’t have drugs for treating cancer. We don’t have enough drugs for example for the diagnosis of heart diseases and treatment. Another thing is that the drug companies don’t want to get drugs for example, for some of the diseases. I’ll give you an example of trichomoniasis, which until recently we were using a drug that was used in the pre-antibiotic era called sodium stibogluconate. You can imagine pharmaceuticals do not want to start looking for a drug like that. Why? Because there is no money in Africa if they discover it and they sell it here, who will buy it?
01:12:32	TITLE “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.” – Bill Gates
01:12:36	AUBREY DE GREY	Now a lot of people who are philanthropists are of the view that the most important thing to do is to address the trailing edge of quality of life, in other words to help the disadvantaged but some visionary philanthropists such as the ones that fund SENS research foundation, and the fact is I agree with this and that’s why I’ve put most of my inheritance into SENS research foundation too. We feel, that actually in the long run you lose out if you focus to exclusively on the trailing edge. You also have to push forward the leading edge so that in the long term everybody moves forward.
01:13:19	DR. NICHOLAS THADEUS KAMARA	It’s about really profits, because you see these are shareholders, these companies have shareholders and no one wants to buy a share in a company whose shares are not improving every year. And the reason why we have Coca Cola here is the same reason why we have Pfizer and Wyeth. And Pfizer will not bring their business to Uganda because the shares are not going to increase just by poor Ugandans buying one dose of their drug. I think it is a very complicated ball game which some of us do not have control over, we just have to think that as Ugandans we start having our own ways of seeing how to solve our problems.
01:14:07	NARRATOR	Due to a lack of funding from governments, anti ageing research is often pushed into the private sector.
01:14:14	PROF. RUDY TANZI	If we look at funding for disease, cancer heart disease they get 6 – 10 billion, AIDS still gets 2-4 billion. Lets look at Alzheimer’s disease, probably the most important disease of ageing, the brain, it gets under half a billion from the federal government. And a lot of that goes to programmes that are tied up in pharma trials where we don’t really see it in the labs, so you’re maybe down to 200 or 300 million, its not nearly enough to make a dent. The question is why when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease which is a problem in the elderly why do the federal government see it as a red-haired step child. Some people say “well it effects old people, they’ve lived their life, let them go” nobody wants to admit that but maybe subconsciously when congress is thinking about this that at play. Maybe its much more compelling to want to put money that effects young people who will still have their who life to live when that have AIDS or breast cancer or cancer that can strike at 30 -40 years old. Age may be a part of it, and even if you say “no, it cant be that” – you never know what’s happening subconsciously in those who are making the decisions, otherwise it just makes no sense at all. I don’t know how to explain it.
01:15:35	RIVA MELISSA TEZ	When you talk to people about ageing and rejuvenation medicine you’re talking about things they haven’t put in the same category as things that they can fight. They are willing to put money towards solving cancer, its something they might have the potential of experiencing but the thing that’s 100% in terms of probability, they haven’t classified that as in the same category when actually it is and actually its more dramatic because 100% of people experience it.
01:15:59	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	You need to have the will to be cured, beyond that medical science will play its part.
01:16:06	ZOLTAN ISTVAN	I think its essentially a crime to not support life extension science because if you support the other side you’re an advocate for killing someone, when you actually support a culture of death when you support embracing death what you’re really doing is not supporting and embracing life.
01:16:27	AUBREY DE GREY	Everyone ought to be healthy however long ago they were born. When some says “oh dear, we shouldn’t defeat aging, we shouldn’t fight to eliminate ageing” what they are actually saying is they’re not in favour of healthcare for the elderly. Or to be more precise what they’re saying is they’re only in favour of healthcare for the elderly so long as it doesn’t work very well. And I think that’s fucked up.
01:16:51	NARRATOR	In September 2013 Google announced the conception of Calico - an independent biotech company that remains to this day a little mysterious. Its aim is to tackle ageing and “devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives”. In September 2014 the life-extension company announced it was partnering with biopharmaceutical giant AbbVie and made a $1.5 billion investment into research.
01:17:25	STEVE FULLER	I think one of the biggest obstacles that we have at the moment to come to terms with this future world that were talking about is a lot of people that basically don’t want it to happen at all and so are placing all kinds of ethical and institutional restrictions on the development of this stuff so it becomes difficult in universities to experiment with certain kinds of drugs, to develop certain types of machines. And as a result of that, research ends up going into either the private sector or maybe underground or going into some country that’s an ethics free zone like China. And I think that’s where the real problems potentially lie, because we really need to be developing this stuff but in the public eye, it should be done by the mainstream authorities so we can monitor the consequences as they’re happening and then be able to take appropriate action. But I’m afraid a lot of this stuff is being driven outside because of all the restrictions that are placed on it, that I think is very worrisome because then you cant keep track of the results, and you don’t know exactly what s happening. And I think that’s a real problem already with a lot of this more futuristic stuff.
01:18:36	NARRATOR	Arguably, the human condition is defined by our anxiety of death - it’s of little wonder that throughout history mankind has built countless belief systems in a bid to pacify the fear of death through the promise of endless paradise. Ultimately death always wins, if its not so much death we fear – it’s dying.
01:19:01	DR JOANNA COOK	The relationship between life and death is often figured in terms of immortality and the quest for immortality. There’s a philosopher called Stephen Cave who in his book Immortality argues that our fear of death is the great driver of all civilisation and of all endeavour. He identifies 4 different ways in which people seek immortality. So firstly the idea of extending life, of living forever, secondly the idea of resurrection so that we might come back after death in some form, thirdly the idea of the immortality of some part of ourselves beyond the physical body, so perhaps the immortality of the soul for example or living on in heaven and finally the idea of leaving a legacy.
01:19:59	PROF. MURRAY SHANAHAN	I think that one of life’s challenges really is to come to terms with our finitude and mortality and human limitations. This is an enormous challenge.
01:20:28	ARCHIVE FOOTAGE	Technology; a reflection of our times, efficient, computerised with a sleek beauty all its own. Technology is the human imagination converted into reality. We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.
01:20:58	NARRATOR	It is impossible to say for sure where these new technologies will take us, and how we will prepare to implement them into society. It is likely that they will effect the sensibilities of global infrastructure. There are always anxieties surrounding new technologies – and this time is no exception.
01:21:21	GRAY SCOTT	I think people fear change and so the future represents this enormous amount of change that’s coming at us. I do think its overwhelming for people, they are afraid to change the paradigm they live in and when we talk about the future of work and death what were really talking about is changing a paradigm that has existed for us as long as we can remember.
01:21:42	STEVE FULLER	All of this scaremongering about harm and risk and stuff like that, really its based on a kind of psychological illusion, namely that you imagine that you see the bad state as a bad state when it happens, whereas in fact what more likely happens happen is that you kind of get adjusted to the various changed that are happening in your environment so that when you do reach that state were talking about it’ll seem normal. Because, look, when the automobile was introduced in the early 20^th century people were saying this is just going to pump a load of smoke in the atmosphere, its going to ruin our contact with nature because we’ll be in these enclosed vehicles, we’ll be going so fast we wont be able to appreciate things, there’ll be congestion blah, blah, blah. They were right, right? But of course by the time you get to that state, where the automobile has had that impact its already had all this benefit and your whole life has become restructured around it.
01:22:40	DR JOANNA COOK	Arguably people who are using or have been conceived using IVF are cyborgs way before they were ever even people, now that doesn’t mean understand kinship in a radically different way.
01:22:58	AUBREY DE GREY	Jut look at the industrial revolution, does anybody actually regret that the industrial revolution occur. Now it was fairly turbulent, we did actually go through a little bit of strife in the transition from a pre-industrial world to the world we know today. But the fact is we adapted.
01:22:58	ZOLTAN ISTVAN	The most important thing here is to try and compare it to something in the past, imagine it was 1914, a hundred years back and I told you that most people on the planet would have the ability to have a tiny little cell phone screen in front of them and video conference with 10 of their friends all at once. If it were 1914 you would look at me and say “that’s absurd, this guys insane”. However it’s the sort of same concept, when I tell you now that in 50 years we are going to be digital beings of ourselves its not so farfetched you have to look at it in historical context.
01:23:46	WILL SELF	All concepts of technological progress in that way are linked to post enlightenment ideas, they’re linked to the idea of the arrow of time being in free flight forward but they’re also chiliastic, they propose an end state. They propose the end state and the end state is the singularity. But they propose it as something desirable. Now any kind of philosophy like that, it s jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but never jam today – they’re all philosophies that are about except the shit you’re in work, consume, die because there is something better in the future, there is something more innovative in the future.
01:24:25	VIVEK WADHWA	There are good scenarios and there are bad scenarios, I don’t know where we are headed. I don’t think anyone really knows, if any one claims to, they’re guessing, they’re extrapolating forward and we can draw some lines and curves and see where technologies Is going to be. What that means I don’t think that any of us really understand.
01:24:42	MARTIN FORD	Everyone assumes that the future is going to be dramatically different from today and that’s absolutely true but it’s also true that the future will be an extension of today’s world. The problems that exist in today’s world are still going to be with us in the future, human nature is not going to change.
01:24:58	PETER COCHRANE	The end point of all of this game will become a bit moral and ethical question for society where decisions will have to be made.
01:25:10	NARRATOR	Like life itself, work and death - for better or worse - are two features of the human experience that are thrust upon us. Whether or not we define work and death as problems in need of remedy, human ingenuity is a progressive and natural extension of our own evolution. Advancing our technological capabilities is a way of dealing with our limitations as human beings.
01:25:46	ISAAC ASIMOV	Must we do something just because were capable of doing something or can we withhold our hands and say no this is not a good thing to do. This is something that the human species must decide for itself - you and I. We can’t just leave it to the scientists. We have to know what s going on and why.
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Film: The Future of Work and Death

http://www.journeyman.tv/film/7125

Transcript

Dialogue

GRAY SCOTT

MARTIN FORD

WILL SELF

VIVEK WADHWA

MARTIN FORD

WILL SELF

PETER COCHRANE

MARTIN FORD

PROF. JOHN HARRIS

PROF. RUDY TANZI