J City: “Part of our world but isolated from it” (a look in the future through Toffy’s Divide)
J City is a fictional city in the year of 2049 that is very divided.
The haves of high town and the have-nots in low town are constantly monitored and forced to conform in a city controlled by a mega corporation — J Enterprise — run by a megalomaniac — James.
One of the goals while writing this story was to get the reader to ask themselves this question: “would I want to live in this city?”
If so, “why?”
Although it is projected to be a city in the near future (30 years from publishing), the reality is that the themes and topics in the book are not so far-fetched.
The main focus was to question whether the technology that’s being built will be used for or against the people.
This future may not be as distant as we think and that’s the beauty of using stories to address current day issues.
Let’s look at some of the themes and processes.
Downloaded Meals — The Future of Food?
3D printed food. Will this be adequate or too generic?
At J Enterprise, to focus on efficiency the establishment had 3D printers for the food of the employees.
Is utility (energy you get from the food) more important than the creativity involved in eating a handmade meal? Is it more important to keep the line moving than to focus on or the joy and connection you get from sharing different ordered or homemade meals with friends and family?
What’s Your Social Score?
As we move towards connected devices. Where cameras, laptops, home temperature guages, personal health monitors, and almost anything can be interconnected, we are moving to a state where we can be constantly monitored.
Where every action could be quantified to be praised or admonished. Where a score could be attached to everything we do. Giving or revoking our access to ammenities such as loans, schools, public transport.
A “social credit system”score is already being implemented in certain provinces in China. How does this look when we give away all our privacy for a sense of collective security?
When algorithms are making decisions over data feed to the system by us, do these systems go against our natural rhythms of compassion, trust, and empathy — the things that have made us more human.
Pink Money, and Economies of the Future
One of the main combinatorial elements of how technology can speed up in Gred Leonhard’s book “TECHNOLOGY VS HUMANITY: The coming clash between man and machine” is the exponential growth and combination of communication technology with bio-technoligy (bio-engineering).
In J City, “pink money” is an iris-integrqted financial system that makes transactions so frictionless that all the citizens have to do is look at a product and the money is taken out of your account.
When we move towards convenience of transactions, do we trust that the corporations making these new forms of technology have our best interest at heart?
How easily can we get manipulated at scale?
For the entrepreneurs and companies that prioritize profits and efficiency, can we put our hopes that they will prioritize our collective wellbeing?
What role will NFTs play in this new world?
Deleteron: Deleted thoughts
This is revisionist history at it’s max.
What happens when you can’t remember your history and you are bombarded with new content at a rate that is unheard of. With ubiquitous screens that makes you question reality.
Couple that with a attempt to delete not only previous thoughts, but numb you out long enough that no new memories can be formed.
We have seen societal powers go through the revision of history through burning books, hiding previous documents, and getting to control the narrative.
But imagine your mind being hacked that you can’t form new memories.
Some of that can already be happening where you are the provider and consumer of content that is keeping these mega tech companies a float.
If you are getting it for free, then you are the product
J Men and Robotics
J Men are the agents that keep the order in J City.
These are robots built to mimic human behavior but their main goal is enforcement. To keep the people of J City in line.
“The last thing that the powers that be want is people having original thought”. — Toffy’s Divide
When these robots are making programmed decisions based on how the citizens of the city are being monitored, their actions, and even their thoughts, how can we guarantee that their actions will be for the interest of the people.
The line
A clear line between the rich and poor. In J City, This is not a hypothetical line. It is an actual line on the ground that separates the citizens from hightown and lowtown. As time passes and with more automation, we see people being rendered useless with a shifting line that sees more people being jammed into lowtown while the hightowners continue to automate to build more resource-abundance for themselves. The hightowners are not free also — although they constantly being monitored, they fear that if they fall out of line they can end up in Lowtown.
All you have to do is a couple of missteps and your social score dips and it’s a hard climb up.
It begs the question: Collectively, are we really rich if the wealth gap is so high? If there is an economic, digital, and narrative divide between the haves and have nots, at what point do we lose our humanity?
Digital Ethics
The techno-progressives, that keep pushing the benefits of technological advacement with no caution with the “break things fast” approach, who are they doing this for? Themselves? The invisible hand of the market? or for the collective wellbeing of people.
As we look at the exponential, combinatorial, and recursive effects of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and human genome editing, coming together, are we ready for the world being built?
Will we be ready to make the technology work for us — to boost human flourishing or would will be caught on our back foot, unprepared, working for the technology and the few that the tech favors.
The changes we see in the next 20 years will be bigger than the changes we have seen in the last 300 years.
Does that scare you?
The goal of Toffy’s Divide is to foster dialogue. My hope is that each reader will have their own questions about the world that we are collectively building.
One of the main question is: Do we take a passive approach and let the technology happen to us or do we take an active role in determining the governance of these technologies and how they can be used to serve, empower and enrich human life?
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