Suicide and Euthanasia. The long but compelling road to Logan's Run.

I doubt if I can add any great wisdom to this debate, but am blogging it anyway because it was the very first issue we did at school, in a religion class in 1974, when we looked at the future of euthanasia. It was the start of my futurology life.

Suicide is inextricably linked to the euthanasia debate, mainly because it is impossible to know for certain what is in someone's mind, and that is the basis of the well known slippery slope. The stages are reasonably clear, even without any invocation of religious morality. Was it a genuine suicide, originating from that person's free thoughts, based solely on their own interests? Or was it a personal decision influenced by the interests of others, real or imagined? Or was it a personal decision made after pressure from friends and relatives who want the person to die peacefully rather than suffer, with the best possible interests of the person in mind? In which case, who first raised the possibility of suicide as a potential way out? Or a personal decision made after pressure applied because relatives want rid of the person, perhaps over-eager to inherit or wanting to end their efforts to care for them? Guilt can be a powerful force and can be applied very subtly indeed over a period of time. Or if the person is losing their ability to communicate a little, perhaps a friend or relative may help interpret their wishes to a doctor. From here, it is a matter of degree of communication skill loss and gradual increase of the part relatives play in guiding the doctor's opinion of whether the person genuinely wants to die. Eventually, the person might not be directly consulted because their relatives can persuade a doctor that they really want to die but can't say so effectively? And not much further along the path until people make their minds up what is in the best interests of another person as far as living or dying goes. It is a smooth path between these many small steps from genuine suicide to euthanasia. And that all ignores all the impact of possible alternatives such as pain relief, welfare, special care etc.

Once the state starts to get involved in deciding cases, even by abdicating it to doctors, it is a long but easy road to Logan's run, where death is compulsory at a certain age, or a certain care cost, or you've used up your lifetime carbon credit allocation.

My concern is that the situation we are in now is at one extreme of this slope. There have been a few very clear cases where someone obviously able to make up their own mind has made a thoroughly thought-through decision to end their life because of ongoing pain, poor quality of life and no hope of any cure or recovery, the only prospect being worsening condition leading to an undignified death. Few people would argue with their decision to die, and I certainly think they should be permitted to do so, without any fear for their friends or relatives being prosecuted.

If it stops there, I would have no objections. But it won't. There are rarely razor-sharp lines between cases; situations always get blurred sometimes because of the complexity of individual lives, and because judges have their own personalities and differ slightly in their judgements. There is inevitably another case slightly further down the line that seems reasonable to a particular judge in the circumstances, and once that point is passed, and accepted by the courts, other cases with slightly less-defined circumstances will use it to help argue their's. This is the path by which most laws evolve. They start in parliament and then after implementation, case law and a gradually changing public mind-set gradually evolves them into something quite different.

So I think this is now the beginning of the end. The predictions we made in our religion class in 1974 will now come to pass as we thought. We will accept suicide, then facilitate it, then it will evolve into euthanasia by a million small but apparently reasonable steps, and one day we will have Logan's Run.

Judge Dredd, here we come

The papers reported the UK's new rules on assisted suicide this morning. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6845582.ece

I will blog the issue of assisted suicide separately since it is an important futures issue in its own right. I think one of the most disturbing things here is that this hasn't been passed through the democratic process via parliament, but rolled out by the DPP. If it was unique in that respect, I wouldn't worry too much, but it isn't. Baroness Deech has just raised attention to the fact that current divorce rules didn't get decided by parliament but by the judiciary too. It was judges, not our elected representatives, who came up with the current notion that wealth should be shared equally when a marriage fails, regardless of contribution or how much each party brought to the party. It is judges who interpret the EU's human rights laws in the UK and resulted in the ridiculous imbalance we have now between the rights of culprit and victim. Other countries don't seem to have the same problem. The local interpretation of EU law for the UK should be done in parliament, preferably by reference to politicians who were part of the original process and party to the spirit of the law when it was first debated.

Important laws should be made by parliament. It is its main purpose.We elect people to represent us, and they debate amongst each other what is the best way forwards. Then, once our representatives have decided what our laws should be, the judiciary is there as part of the implementation process. It should not be the other way round. In the suicide case, poor wording made the law very unclear, and people couldn't know whether assisting in a suicide by accompanying a relative to Switzerland would result in prosecution or not. Laws should always be clear, and say precisely what was intended when the politicians have finished their debate. It is parliament's job to make sure they get the law written up correctly, but if they don't, and an ambiguity becomes clear, then it is certainly their job to clarify the intent as needed to make sure the wishes of the people are properly implemented in law. It is not the role of the judiciary to do so, and should never be. Their job is clear, to  decide whether or not people are following or breaking it.

By following the current path, we are heading towards a state where judges make the law by themselves, where we end up with the Judge Dredd scenario, where a guy with a big gun says 'I am the law'. We must not let democracy evaporate by allowing our elected representatives to neglect their jobs, letting judges do it for them so that they can make someone else take the blame. Once this process becomes too regular, politicians will allow it more and more, trying to stay in power by abdicating the tough and potentially unpopular decisions. Then the most important things in life will be decided by Judge Dredd, instead of the people we elected to do the job.

Police, justice and DNA records

I do not want the police or any other authority to have a copy of my DNA because quite simply, I do not trust them, or the criminal justice system.

Firstly, juries are made up of ordinary people, with no requirement that they should be educated, intelligent people. Told that the DNA found matches only 1 in 10 million of the population, a jury with a poor grasp of statistics could easily be persuaded that the evidence of guilt is overwhelming. But with a match to 1 in 10 million people's DNA profiles, that means that in the UK alone, there are likely to be 6 or 7 matches. If the defendant is only one of 7 possible DNA macthes, the evidence looks much less convincing. Which argument the jury is led towards depends too much on the skill of the barristers.

Secondly, hair and skin samples are pretty easy to come by, so there is excellent scope for misdirection by planting DNA. Police could do it themselves of course, and criminality and corruption are just as high in the police as in the rest of the population. If financial or career incentives are there, and they are, then some police are likely to fall victim to the temptation. But of course, there will also be a black market in stolen DNA if it is used regularly. Anyone who works in a hotel, gym, train, cinema, restaurant or any other public place will easily be able to get hold of any number of hairs and skin flakes. So could beauticians, doctors, hairdressers, and many other people who offer personal services. And of course any colleague at work can find hairs on your chair while you are out. DNA can often easily be linked easily to specific named persons, and by working with others who steal electronic identity data, it will become easier and easier to construct decoy evidence and frame a totally innocent person. Over-reliance on DNA will makes the threat worse.

If I want to escape conviction, I would make some serious effort to limit the amount of DNA I leave at the scene, while planting DNA belonging to a realistic suspect. I would do my research in advance to decide who would be the best decoy and do a good job of framing them by planting a range of ID based pointers to them, and making sure I leave DNA traces in the form of their hair and skin flakes, and maybe even a fingerprint or two for good measure. Faced with a naive legal system and a dumb jury, the wrong person would most likely be convicted while I walk free.

DNA listings can be marketed just like any other kind of personal record. Aside from criminal justice, DNA gives clues about many of my other attributes. A corrupt police officer might sell my listing to a variety of buyers, used for all kinds of personal, blackmail, insurance, advertising or legal purposes. No thanks!

In the far future, if I ever become rich and famous, someone might even use my listing to create a child, by assembling the appropriate genes off the shelf. Not so far away as you might think.

I will not feel confident about staying free in a future where too much weight is placed on DNA evidence, or even if the police have my DNA at all. It is only a matter of time before someone with a partial match commits a crime somewhere, and then my freedom is partially down to the competence of PC Plod, in which I don't have a lot of confidence. On the other hand, I travel a lot and my DNA is out there in many places, and I do have a lot of confidence in the collective skill and marketing of the hacking and criminal classes. Finally, I would not want to rely on the intelligence of a jury or the competence of a barrister to keep me out of prison once misplaced or misinterpreted DNA evidence is out there.

If the police and the justice system were perfect, I wouldn't have so much objection to them having my DNA, but they are a very long way from perfect, and I simply don't trust them to hold and use my records properly. I do not want the police to get hold of my DNA under any circumstances, as long as I can legally avoid it.

Why the future will never be perfect thanks to upgrades

That's it, the final straw for me. I am sick of 'upgrades'. In the age of spin, the very word has been re-defined to mean change. Often 'upgrades' are actually significant downgrades. We are bombarded daily by spinners telling us how their company has wrecked a perfectly good system to give 'an improved customer service', or 'for our safety and security'. This morning's assault on our household is that we have finally been subjected to Sky TV's rollout of their terrible new 'upgrade' to their electronic programme guide (EPG). The old one was bad and a poor effort compared to what should reasonably have been expected given the importance of EPGs. I'd only have given it 1 out of 10 at best. However, the new one is much worse, and since they control the software on my box, I was never given a choice and can't go back to the old one (until enough of us complain I guess). The blurb highlights 'exciting new features', a  new search facility and a 'mini-TV'. I am certain that I will never want to use either of them. The improvements I really want is for it to take less time to lock on to each channel as I channel hop, or that I could adjust the speed at which the channels hop by to my own speed reading pace (too slow on my old box, too fast on the new one).  Or a major breakthrough for Sky: let me choose a full range of EPG options like any other company would have done in their first edition. But missing these real upgrades and adding useless ones is bad. They have no vision, but that's true of lots of companies. What is really bad is that they have actually removed one of the most important features. If you have dozens of programmes recorded (as I have), when you enter the guide, you could just hit the up arrow and it would take you straight to the last thing you recorded, which is what you want to watch probably about 90% of the time. Now you have to cursor very slowly through the entire list to get to it. That is not my idea of an upgrade. I imagine that every customer who ever records anything will be highly irritated by this loss, far more than they will be excited by any of the new features.

But Sky isn't the only company out there with some teenager on job experience deciding what is cool and trendy and another deciding that all the customers must be forced to use it without bothering to try it out first on real customers.

This trend is all too pervasive. Ipswich railway station used to be a friendly place, where you could walk onto the platform to say goodbye or greet your friends. Now, 'to improve customer service', they have made it impossible by introducing ticket barriers. You can no longer buy a coffee while waiting, and have to say goodbye in the station lobby. They used to have several staff to buy tickets from, now they only have one or two and a range of hard-to-use machines with a variety of 'not working' notices on them.

Just like Sky's disregard for what people really want to do, it's not a major deal I guess, but still a significant drop in quality of another small component of what makes up quality of life.

I could go on and on, the list is endless. The thoroughly incompetent re-design of Stansted car park, the regeneration of Ipswich docks that missed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fix the awful one-way system, and thereby locks in congestion for decades instead of solving it. The numerous Microsoft 'upgrades' that throw away important features or bury them deep in unintuitive menus, replacing them with ones you never wanted and will never use. The ones that make billing 'simpler' that actually make it incomprehensible.

Each time an 'upgrade' is imposed on us that is more difficult or unpleasant to use than the old one, or forces us to learn a new way of doing things for no good reason, our quality of life takes a small step backwards. Some of the gains made by genuine progress are wiped out.

I really believe that this a major flaw in the development cycle. Whatever new technology brings us in genuine life improvements, there will always be an idiot somewhere in the team with the loudest mouth and the smallest brain who totally misunderstands the customer. And worse, thinks that it is more important to show off to his peers about how up to date he is than to give the customer a truly great product. Because of these people and their poorly justified egos, we will never have a utopia, however good the technology becomes. Whatever it allows, someone somewhere will always decide that what we must have is a redesigned version that forces us to do things their way, however stupid it might be. The one thing we really need an upgrade to is the design of the upgrade cycle itself.

On-line dangers to children, parents shouldn't use IT ignorance as excuse

There has been a lot of debate the last few days since the police told parents off for not policing their kids access to social sites, that are regularly infiltrated by paedophiles intent on grooming their kids. I don't often agree with the police, I think they are usually far too politically correct and take the wrong side too often. On this occasion though, they are right. Parents should do more to alert their kids to the dangers. One line of argument that has been cited too often and too loudly is that parents can't possibly keep up with IT, which their kids can obviously manage to do much more easily. I am amazed that such an argument gets any support.

Do people really believe that kids are smarter than grown-ups. Of course they aren't. There is almost no difference in intelligence level as people grow up, and only when we get very old do our brains decay significantly compared to our youth. The kids use technology more, so they become more familiar with it. It's as simple as that. If adults use technology, they too become familiar with it. If adults use chat rooms and social networking sites, they understand perfectly well how they work and how to use them. All parents should become familiar with the kinds of stuff their kids use. To opt out and blame an age difference for inability is just laziness and neglect.

I introduced by daughter to chat rooms when she was 5. It was greatly amusing seeing how people responded to her, mainly not believing she was 5. I introduced her to Bebo, to Second life, to her email, her first web site, to chat and instant messaging, to Spotify, and Facebook. At each stage I pointed out the dangers, what to do and not do, what sort of information not to share. I don't need to spy on her usage because I know she knows what she is doing and is careful, and after that what she gets up to is her affair. My parental duty is to introduce her to stuff as she becomes old enough to handle it and use it safely, and to make her aware of any dangers. The same goes for other parents. It is just the same as showing them how to cross a street, it opens new doors for them but keep them safe. And they grow to become competent fully fledged adults. It's really not difficult to use any on-line stuff. It normally only takes a few minutes on a new kind of platform to understand the basics, and mostly that's all you need to know. You don't need to be an expert at manipulating fonts or page templates, but you do need to understand the capabilities in terms of what sorts of things you can do with other people, and hence what other people can do with your kids. You need to understand whether sites are moderated or not, or whether there are policed aged restrictions. But all of this is simple stuff to learn, and there really is no proper excuse for not doing so.

Having said all that, it's a pity that only the parents that are already following the advice are able to read this :(

Brain replica in 10 years?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090904071908.htm

The logic in this article is reasonable. If we can replicate it, and run the replica faster than the original, then we can improve greatly on human intelligence. We could presumably run lots of linked versions with slightly different 'minds' running on each one, to solve problems faster and without the drawbacks associated with a single mind doing it, in terms of bias and personal agenda. Fun eh?

Brain-computer link, electronic immortality

I get asked every other day by students how the brain might be connected to the machine world for purposes such as mind backup, and how we can live forever electronically in principle. So here for my own convenience at least is a quick summary of the concept as technology stands today. Note that I don't develop the technology, I just follow and predict it and figure out some of the implications and occasionally invent potential solutions to obvious bottlenecks.

Direct brain links already exist. Millions of people have cochlea implants, a few people have retinal implants, and a few more (severely disabled people) have chips on the brain surface to allow their thoughts to be picked up to control apparatus such as wheelchairs. Other direct links to nerves allow chips to relay signals to other nerves to bypass nerve damage, or to control prosthetics. Of course, technology progress will mean that these kinds of links will get better and even become commonplace. But I don't think much progress will happen without much more miniaturisation, which probably means lots of nanotech. Signals can be picked up from the brain by various techniques today, but apart from direct probes into individual synapses, there isn't much hope of doing a full link. And we can't do that yet, well, maybe a single synapse so far. But the limits of miniaturisation are still a way off, and we can make devices down to 10 nanometres easily by 2025. The other obvious problem here is that opening the skull and dissecting the brain to connect all the probes would seem a bit extreme, and I don't think many people would volunteer. But if a suspension of electronic particles could be injected into the blood, and each particle connects to a single synapse, them we can see how it might become feasible. Sure, you'd probably have to use coatings on the particles to avoid problems with the immune system and might even have to make mechnical or chemical hooks to allow attachment and detachment, and of course a radio or optical system to relay signals. The power supply could be the body's own energy, so at least that might not be a barrier.

If, and it is a far away if, but hopefully more of a when, we can do all this, and my guess is about 2035-2040, then it will be possible to make an electronic copy of the brain externally. Synapse for synapse, neuron for neuron. And of course, while all this development has been happening, neuroscientists will have progressed enormously, underdtanding in some detail how the various brain processes happen at microscopic scales. Materials scientists will have developed the coatings and materials needed. Computers will have progressed in speed, storage, and most of all, in scope. They will not be purely digital, but will harness coprocessors that use analog and quantum computing as needed. (Analog is due for a big comeback soon, but that's another blog some other time). Memristors might help solve a lot of the implementation problems too, as it is now thought that some synaptic processes work in a similar way. So with all the progress in nano, biotech, IT and cognitive science that we should expect as normal progress in the next few decades, it seems quite reasonable to me to expect that we should be able to make a full link between the brain, with each component relaying data bidirectionally to external replicas. So at that point, with an electronic replica of your brain, and (unless you believe the mind is something supernatural) ergo, a copy of the mind, we have digital immortality. Well, almost. The first decade after the technology is potentially there will be used up in R&D to establish the technology, so we won't really have a full working full direct brain link till 2045 at least. And it will be extremely expensive at first, so only the rich or powerful will have access to immortality in the first wave. But as always, costs will fall, and by 2075, I think that pretty much everyone will have access to electronic immortality in principle. Laws might prevent or delay it, but the technology will be possible in that time-frame.

There is an alternative, more likely route, which uses similar tech, but happens on a more gradual and feasible evolution path. Even without replicating the entire brain, we should expect a lot of brain augmentation. Electronic technologies to help cure or at least help with Parkinsons or Alzheimers are being researched and developed. Memory might be enhanced, and processing or sensory activities, here and there in the brain, as we learn how to do it. Gradually, more and more of the mind will 'exist' in the electronics. Over time, maybe only a small fraction of the mind still runs on the original grey matter. One day, when the body dies, most of the mind will keep running. The person invests in an android body, uploads, or simply links to it, and carries on. They attend their funeral, make a nice speech, and go back to some sort of normal life. Death is no longer inevitable. It might be only partial, more of a phase change than an end to existence. Death will no longer be a career problem.

We are told all the time that death and taxes are inevitable. I don't believe that. High tech will increase global wealth until taxes are no longer needed. High tech will also mean that by 2075, everyone could have electronic immortality. Putting that in perspective, with ongoing health tech improvements, we should expect most people to be living to 100 by then, so anyone born after 1975 has a very good chance of not dying, and some born before that.

It irritates me immensely that I will be the last generation of my family with no choice but to die. I am too old, and already have a poor health record, so won't make it. Damn! But my daughter will, unless she is daft or unfortunate enough to die early.

I'll write another entry shortly on some of the obvious implications of this technology, many of which are fun to debate.