by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright August 2014
Aggression, violence and conflict are part of human instinctive thinking. This means they are going to be with us Post-Snap. But what forms they will take will be different and surprising.
Aggression and violence show up in many ways in human living. How they are displayed is assisted by tools, which means that how they are conducted varies with the level of civilization and prosperity -- Stone Age aggressors have clubs, Industrial Age aggressors have guns. In modern circumstances we have things as small scale and informal as schoolyard bullying, and as large and highly organized as wars. We also have the wide spectrum spanning from real to virtual -- murdering someone while mugging them being an extreme example on the real side, boxing being in the middle because it has rules and restraints, and first person shooter games being an example on the virtual side.
Cyber is going to bring more tools to all aspects of the aggression mix. This essay is about how conflict, violence and aggression will express themselves in the Post-Snap environment.
Cyber and aggression have been mixing since computers first got used for entertainment. Space War was developed on DEC PDP computers at MIT way back in the early 1960's when video displays were first put on computers. Now in the 2010's we have the whole genre of first person shooter games as well as other forms. As avatars are developed they will first be developed for entertainment uses because of the low risk in that use. They will then become part of the entertaining mainstream because they will be wildly popular in that use. Using avatars in entertainment will add another dimension in the aggression variety available on the virtual play side.
Because virtual is so entertainment-oriented and not terribly contest-oriented this will be where the pioneering and the most cyber-enhancing mixes with aggression will first happen. Avatar soldiers developed for shooter games will lead the way. These avatar shooter games will resemble contemporary paintball in that there will be lots of shooting, but not much damage done. This will keep the costs down. Then a bit later, as the avatars get better developed, the soldier concept will be adapted to whatever physical combat reality we are experiencing Post-Snap, as is covered below.
Boxing symbolizes ritual physical aggression, but all team sports contain elements of aggression. When you have a contest, and there will be one winner, ritual aggression in some form is how the contest is decided. And outside the contest proper we have spectator aggression such as cheering the team on, and hooliganism.
The interesting questions of the Post-Snap era are how much to let cyber mix into the ritual? An iconic conversation question as we enter the Post-Snap era will be "Should humans box robots?" (meaning avatars and creations) One early form of this that may happen would be "celebrity boxing" -- celebrities and regular folk can both man avatars and duke it out. This will be a form when avatars are rare, expensive and still considered exotic.
The more subtle question is how much enhancement can a human body have and still be considered human? Today this question centers around taking performance-enhancing drugs -- take too many and you're not "human" enough to participate in traditional sports contests. In Post-Snap, modifying DNA, adding nanotech, and prosthetics will also be part of the equation.
The answer is likely to be a range of answers. The answers will range from "all natural" on one end, with some elaborate definition of that, as in, "This is OK, but that isn't." The definition will need to be elaborate because of the numerous ways health care inventions will intervene in the various life processes of the human body. Examples: Is someone taking vitamins still all natural? Is someone fighting off flu with medicine still all natural? Is someone with a pacemaker all natural? The sports-oriented "wearables" are going to make this discussion become nearly endless.
At the other end will be some equivalent to the old drag racing term, "Run what ya brung" -- meaning there are no limits. As is true today, this kind of contest is likely to be much more informal and not highly publicized. "The first rule of fight club is: you don't talk about fight club."
Beyond ritual aggression we have serious physical aggression. This is when the contestants deliberately hurt people and destroy property to spread their beliefs in the practice of some cause. On the small scale side we have solo mugging and gang violence, and on the large scale side we have shooting wars. Examples of wars in the 2010's that are the full-of-shooting-and-atrocities are conflicts going on in the Middle East and Africa. In these conflicts of today we have many styles of participants who are engaging in aggression for many reasons, and engaging in may different styles of aggression.
In the Post-Snap era will cyber mix into these kinds of serious conflicts? Most certainly! They have the potential to get deeply involved. And they will change how these contests are conducted.
These days we have computer-assisted drones and other weapons. Humans are still in control of selecting targets, but they are getting more and more assistance from computer systems such as remote viewers and image recognizers. In the future we will find the line between human decision making and cyber decision making getting grayer and fuzzier as these computer recognition abilities increase. Within a few years, I'm guessing a decade, deciding how much computers will assist in target decision making is going to become an ethical issue rather than a practical one -- they will be able to choose targets as well as humans can, if we let them.
Another change will be ubiquitous surveillance. The more this is implemented the harder it will be to engage in anonymous violence -- if you mug someone, you'll be doing it on camera. This will reduce the cold-blooded violence, but probably not end it completely. Humans are inventive. If someone wants to be mean to other people in a violent way, that person will be experimenting, and ways of gaming the system will be discovered. Hot-blooded violence, as in, someone is being crazy when they are doing it, will be less affected. The difference is that in hot-blooded instances the person doing the violence will be identified very quickly.
Humans enjoy being aggressive on the conducting a war level. There are plenty of people who volunteer to fight in such circumstances. This means that some form of this kind of aggression will continue on in the Post-Snap environment. But how it is conducted will change dramatically.
The Post-Snap world is going to be different from the 2010's in many ways. What people will be doing as "jobs" will be different, how people will get paid will be different, how people will relate to other people will be different, and intelligent cyber entities will be mixing in with all of the above.
All this means that simple linear extrapolations of how aggression and violence will be expressed in the future are not going to be good predictors. Likewise, how cyber and aggression are going to mix is likely to be surprising.
Here are some examples:
o There will be cyber soldiers, but what a warrior is will be night and day different from what a warrior is in the 2010's. This will be an era of much more globalization and much more economic integration, so the combat will be taking place in a carefully circumscribed arena of some sort. This circumscribing may be concealed from the witnessing and participating humans, but the cyber involved will be aware of it. This will be part of how cybers lie to humans. Likewise, what tactics and strategies are used -- what rules of combat will apply -- are going to be quite different from what we are accustomed to now.
o On the domestic front, there will be people protesting. This is an activity humans won't give up on enjoying. And some of these will become violent confrontations. But because these will be taking place within the context of the TES (Total Entitlement State) these protests will be more a form of entertainment than a tool for righting wrongs. This means the cyber police will be there to entertain in some strange fashion. (strange when viewed from the 2010's context)
o How person-on-person abuse is conducted will change. Because of the ubiquitous surveillance there will be a lot of change. The surveillance means that rules and regulations can be quickly enforced. The big question of the Post-Snap era is what kinds of rules and regulations to have? How "nanny" should the Nanny State become? Hopefully, this will become a local-level issue and there will be lots of variety from place-to-place and culture-to-culture. The big issue here is enfranchisement -- the more Nanny the rules are the more disenfranchising they will be. This can lead to a vicious cycle where a person becomes pretty much totally obnoxious because they just don't care anymore, but the cybers limit how much these obnoxious people interact with meaningful parts and people of the community. This can become a new form of ghetto.
All of the above pointed out, there will still be the instinct for aggression. There will still be many people who at times want to get involved in causes where they feel the ends justify the means. For those that feel strongly about winning in any way possible, getting hold of the right weapons and using them to defeat those standing in the way is going to be deeply satisfying.
How is this deeply, instinctively satisfying activity going to be handled in the Post-Snap era? What will be the causes that will support warriors and violence? As in, what will be the equivalent of the proxy war that is being fought in Syria/Iraq today? This is a war where lots of outsiders are being paid by other outsiders to come in and take a side on a local cause. As Syria/Iraq is demonstrating, proxy warring is a popular activity. In Post-Snap era what will be the rules of engagement for these contests? Who is going to be eligible to be hurt so that the warriors can feel like they are fighting and winning?
These are unanswered questions as of now. They will be part of the challenge that humans and cyber face in setting up the Post-Snap world.