The other day I stumbled across a movie called ‘TiMER‘ which presents an interesting and enjoyable discussion of the use of technology in the world of romance, dating, and marriage.
As you can see in the trailer, the film’s basic premise involves complications resulting from the option to purchase an implant that (using a complex combination of factors including biometrics and personality profiling) is capable of telling you when you have met your soul mate.
The timer aspect opens up an interesting quandary for those who have a long wait before finding “the One.” Do they avoid other relationships in the meantime? After all, it would be akin to cheating on your future soul mate, right? And even if you do want to shack up with someone before meeting your one true love, can you even find someone to mess around with when they’ll know perfectly well that you’ll break their heart?
‘TiMER’ has fun playing with this concept. It is an enjoyable movie to watch, and I think that the overall conclusion is appropriate.
The most fascinating part about the future has little to do with what new technology can do. It's about how sociocultural and economic values with shift as a result. The fascinating questions are things like:
- When everyone has an electric car, what are the implications for resource distribution when everyone naturally tends to plug them in at the same time?
- As energy generation and production continue to decentralize (think: as xerox copiers revolutionized the distribution of documents/information, so too will 3D printing radically impact the nature of production), what will resource control - a primary source of political power - look like?
- When everyone lives longer, how does the value inherent in experience shift? What does class war look like when there are those who are both elderly and healthy?
- Or as in the above, when our methods of predictive analysis approach the ability to determine what will (presumably) make us happiest and when, what are the implications for the value in how we interact with other people?
[Even more fascinating on an "optimization" level is the idea of having something besides yourself that will tell you how to achieve happiness, that the TiMER concept points to. I often exaggerate this concept with the question "if a machine so intelligent that it truly understood everything that would make you genuinely happy both in the immediate and long term emailed you in the morning with a list - detailed to the minute - of decisions to make to perfectly optimize your life - and it was never wrong - would you follow the email?" The same question could be expressed as "if God told you what to do every moment of your life, would you do it?" The fact that no one finds this to be optimal or happiness helps illustrate that even optimization strategies have optimization strategies. And has lots of implications for our definitions of things like "happiness," "perfect," and "optimal"]
Edit: The New York Times just today published an article about the impact of the senior population on city development. An interesting and timely initial exploration of the third example I pointed to above:
New York City has always been known as a fast paced city-full of life, high on energy and with an abundance of choice. And now, it is slowing its pace somewhat for the sake of its seniors. The city is implementing several measures to make it friendlier to its older residents including creating two ‘aging-improvement districts’ that will be safer and more accessible for them.
