Meaning for Miranda
By Robert Moran
In her conversations with friends and family, Miranda—a remarkably fit, thrice updated, 88-year-old freelance infominer—notes that the discussion always bounces between the four corners of humanity’s hollow valley:
1. Remarkable physical wealth.
2. Craving for authenticity.
3. Decline of traditional religious belief.
4. Redefinition of the age-old concept of “Free Will.”
Twenty-Second-Century Plenty: As any history app will tell you, an explosion in living standards triggered by the exponential growth of GRIN tech (genetics, robotics, information, and nanotech) meant that nearly every human inhabitant of the planet, excepting the feral and the warrior cults, had their basic needs met by the 2080s. And with home-based 3-D printers the norm for almost 70 years, nearly any product goes from idea to form in a flash.
With our basic needs anticipated and met, robots doing the hard work, and virtually free energy, the survival struggle that has defined humanity is now the twinkling of a fading star. Goodbye, resource wars. The question now is how a species adapted to scarcity responds to abundance. Miranda is disturbed by the answer set.
Authenticity: Is it “real”? Is it “craft”? These are invariably the queries Miranda hears about new clothing or home goods. Algorithmically nano-targeted experiences, “news” filtered by digital advisory agents and displayed on augmented reality (AR), and rapidly printed consumer goods all make authenticity a scarce commodity. No wonder “U-Build” kits, Route 66 “driving vacations,” tattoo artists, piano clubs, and farming are so popular with Miranda’s children.
Belief: Miranda remembers Sunday school as a child. Although she has heard of emerging religious groups meeting in parks, she hasn’t been to an actual church building in years. Miranda doesn’t believe in the God that her parents believed in, but there are days that she misses Him, the certainty, the rituals, the authority. Like her friends, when she was young she downloaded and tried the Christo-Confucian behavior-prompting avatars on her AR, and they did make her a better person. But she grew to resent the life-logging, and so she unsubscribed.
“Free Will”: By the time Miranda was 50, advances in neuroscience, predictive analytics, and response priming made her PhD in behavioral economics as quaint as all those “Silicon Valley” museums. Although some insisted that the noble lie of pure “free will” be maintained, that idea died with her parents. Now the memes on volition proliferate daily, but all posit a circumscribed will. We were always the muddled captains of our soul, but now we know it. Now we are less so. Now we grope for the meaning we have lost in the information.
Miranda and her friends are healthier and wealthier than her baby-boomer grandparents could have ever imagined, but with Hikikomori (social withdrawal) increasing despite the health chips and government-mandated AR messages, she wonders if they are any more fulfilled.
Everyone talks about the “Alexander problem” of having no more lands to conquer and wanting to achieve “hard things,” but that’s just talk between the idea and the reality.
About the Author
Robert Moran is an insight-driven strategist at the Brunswick Group in Washington, D.C., focusing on industry futures, market and opinion research, and communications strategy. Web site www.futureofinsight.com.