PARIS (AFP) - Experts and visionaries attempting to make out the shape of technological advances in the coming century have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that in the future robots will do all the hard work. The bad is that robots might make the human race redundant.
The experts of a joyous, toil-free future are more than matched by the heralds who warn that the information revolution and the development of intelligent machines may lead to a sharply polarized dystopia of technologically rich and poor nations and, in a worst-case scenario, to human self-extinction.
Looking very much on the bright side is the British Telecom futurologist Ian Pearson, who foresees smart homes capable of cooking meals and cleaning up after parties, bionic mind-computer connections, micro-robots that roam our bloodstream cleaning out the arteries and even robotic pets.
Equally convinced that work will soon become a thing of the past, though uncertain of the consequences, is Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends whose 1995 best seller "The End of Work" predicted precisely that.
"Sophisticated computers, telecommunications, robotics and other information-age technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry," he notes.
Governments and economists "will have to grapple with the question of what to do with the millions of people whose labor is needed less, or not at all, in an ever more automated global economy," Rifkin says. He calls for major reductions in the working week comparable to that already being introduced in France.
Prominent among the dissenting voices is sociologist Manuel Castells, whose trilogy "The Information Age" dismisses the notion that work will be phased out, pointing to the high rate of job creation in the world's technologically richest nation, the United States.
Nonetheless, he warns, the changing patterns of labor required by the information economy will be radical in their effects, involving in particular the creation of a "network society" in which power will ebb from the traditional centers - states, corporations, media and church - and be diffused among global networks of wealth, information and image-control.
Among the consequences Castells predicts in his closely argued essay is a highly fragmented society involving the exclusion of large areas of the developing world, the rise of a global criminal economy.
The freelance French intellectual and former presidential advisor Jacques Attali believes, like Castells, that the middle classes will be squeezed hardest in the information society, "and something will be bound to happen: maybe a revolution."
Extending the paradox, Attali adds: "In the future, people will pay to work, as work gives you social standing. And they'll be paid to consume, or to enjoy leisure, or acquire training" since such activities are essential for the success of the network society.
However the most striking alarm call to date emerged last April from Silicon Valley, California, where many of the most significant developments in information technology first originated.
Bill Joy, chief scientist at the software giant Sun Microsystems, published a widely-remarked article in Wired Magazine in which he argued that the 21st century technologies of digital, biological and material science pose dangers comparable with those of nuclear weapons.
Among the horror evoked in "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" is the prospect that super-intelligent machines could take on a life of their own and exterminate the human race.
Another possibility is that with the widening availability of knowledge of genetic engineering techniques, malevolent individuals could unleash "white plagues" - artificially designed diseases that kill widely but selectively.
"I think it is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil ... and the terrible empowerment of extreme individuals," he warned. "We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control and no brakes," he continued in apocalyptic tones. "The last chance to assert control - the fail-safe point - is rapidly approaching."
Within Silicon Valley itself the response to Joy's findings has been cool, with many members of the scientific community dismissing his call to halt certain kinds of research as unrealistic and irresponsible. Some pointed out that others had articulated his warnings previously.
And robotics guru Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University believes that the die is cast: "We will turn into robots. It's both inevitable and desirable."
Moravec views the gradual transformation of human beings into robotic life forms as a natural part of the evolutionary process. "It's bigger than we are. We are merely components within it"
