The Great Migrations of the 21st Century
Our species is a migratory one. Over the past seventy-thousand years it’s peoples have covered the earth in almost parasitic fashion with every move and change acutely marked by innovation and technology. With trends as they are today humanity stands on the edge of five great migrations in the 21st century:
Climate: as we face the consequences of industry;
Urban: as millions move out of the country and settle in cities;
Space: as homo sapiens becomes an multi-planetary species;
Virtual: as greater, more meaningful experiences occur in the digital;
and Intelligence: as humanity embraces evolution and applies technology to move from the individual to the collective.
Climate, urban, and space migrations are external, based around the physical. These will change where and how we live physically. Virtual and intelligence migrations are inward, based around what occupies our attention and how we interact in the digital world.
In studying migrations, a key point of analysis is the migratory driver, or the raison d'être for the shift. Sometimes this driver is a push (ex: a civil war produces refugees) and sometimes it is a pull (ex: Jews attracted to the modern state of Israel). These drivers may be random or specific, but in general a push is random (ex: persecuted refugees will go about anywhere) and a pull is specific (ex: the gold rush drew miners to hotspots).
Migration, it turns out, is an innovation accelerator. Regardless of the migratory driver, we see innovation and fresh ideas crop up alongside any movement of peoples. Let us keep this redeeming fact in mind as we explore the inevitable, often tragic migrations approaching our world in the next century.
Climate Migrations
In the most recent decades we have come to realize that our collective technological ability to mitigate climate change is wildly outmatched by our tendency to destroy it. Rising global temperatures create two issues, both of which are drivers pushing people to migrate: rising sea levels displace populations, and rising temperatures bring drought. A 2015 analysis by Climate Central expects the crisis to displace, in a best case scenario, 130-300 million people. Potentially, land housing up to 760 million people is under threat of being submerged, forcing a migration the likes of which we have not seen before.
For perspective, the largest forced migration to date was in 1947 as 18 million people were displaced during the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The rough estimate of the coming climate change displacement is 300 million.
Some countries have been able to adapt to this, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on reclamation projects. In the EU the Northern European Enclosure Dam is proposed to span from Britain’s northern isles to Norway and across the English Channel, turning the North Sea and the Baltic Sea into a manipulable ocean to regulate water levels through the low countries. Dubai, though lacking the population to utilize it, has demonstrated incredible skill with a massive reclamation project which relies on blasted rock from the local mountains to build artificial islands just offshore.
Others, without the geography to suit such ambitious projects, will suffer a forced migration. Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands are areas expected to be impacted the greatest but hardly have the governments which can pay for sea walls and imported stone.
The climate migration is quite a popular topic as much political debate is centered around our actions towards reversing the coming crisis. Make no doubt that these efforts are not under-sponsored or fruitless, but in truth they are like a few shovels holding back an ocean. The nature of planet Earth has been irreversibly altered by the industry of humanity; the climate migration is but one of the consequences we are now beginning to pay.
A news report during this article’s writing.
Urban Migrations
Urban migration was changed forever by the Industrial Revolution. In 1800, the portion of people living in cities had not crept any higher than 10% worldwide. By 2000 just over 50% of humanity lived “downtown”. And the 10 million resident mega-cities have just recently been overshadowed by some dozen and a half hyper-cities, home to 20+ million residents.
For perspective, the world’s entire urban population at the time of the French Revolution was 20 million. By 2025, Asia alone will house ten of these hyper-cities home to 20 million people.
As history will indicate, unplanned urbanization can quickly lead to crime, disease, and the cycle of poverty. In fairness, many advantages should also be acknowledged as the world population moves downtown. Urbanization has a positive relationship with innovation and overall productivity. Urbanization actually lessens the amount of actual resources a population must rely upon. With less travel expense and smart growing techniques, cities have less of a carbon footprint per resident per square foot than if the population were spread out across the countryside. The development of the smart city means efficiency by design and better resource allocation. Again, the tricky part is matching the vision with the technology and executing on excellent planning.
This migration is an important one to understand because people who live in the city act and think differently than those who live on, say, a farm; a different set of priorities exists in a more social and dynamic environment. This change of the earth’s population has really only begun in the last few centuries and is not only reflected in a people’s physical positioning but their mental positioning as well.
Urban migrations are typified by a “pull” factor as the migratory driver. Their population is attracted by the promise of jobs and prosperity. It is true that at times these prizes may seem in short supply to the inhabitants of the city but, overall, urban areas offer access to more and more diverse opportunities than rural ones.
The Space Migration
Some bold thinkers today (Musk, Bezos, Branson) are convinced that the best future for humankind is not on our current planet. The space migration is a longer-term mindset based around the question, “Is the earth’s surface really the best place for humanity to live?” The space migration does not appear as immediate or glaringly tragic as the climate crisis but does look to be an obvious next move for humanity. Jeff Bezos, prominent billionaire and owner of spaceflight company Blue Origin, sees off-world expansion as a natural extension of our species and access to a greater incubator of our innovation, and he has built systems to pursue it.
“The earth is the gem of our solar system. It should be zoned residential and light industry. Heavy industry should be moved into space… where there’s unimaginable room. The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be.”
Jeff Bezos
Industry rival Elon Musk of SpaceX too sees the space migration as an extension of our species’ growth, but also as a fail-safe against our own peril:
“History is going to bifurcate along two directions: one path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event… the alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planetary species. I think the future is vastly more interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planetary species than if we’re not.”
Elon Musk
In the early years this migration will not appear a significant one, due to high costs and quantity of unknowns. This migration seems inevitable for our species, but still has many years to develop before matching the numbers of any other migration. At present the migration experiences a pull driver: the beckon of the unknown frontier.
Virtual Migrations
The virtual migration is the first which is not necessarily a physical migration. This migration starts as life happens more often and more deeply within a virtual environment than in what we call real life. The migration occurs as millions of people turn to the internet to “head to work” or “catch a movie” or fulfill any other desire. In turn, the virtual world accessed via a fully interactive internet (through a virtual reality headset and haptics) will outpace the experience of both traditional internet access and the real world. This migration is not measured in the number of people moved from region to region but in the number of hours spent online.
Addiction is an issue: already dozens of studies and hundreds of experts confirm that video game systems and the digital world are little more than dopamine dispensers dressed up as joysticks and a keyboard. Research shows that new immersive experiences, like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) only enhance the addiction.
This migration will be internally driven beginning with our own addictive neurochemistry, against which we have no known defense. It will be driven almost exclusively by pull factors as opportunities attract virtual pioneers. The dopamine flush which greets them during the interaction guarantees a consistent pull to return. These two factors will amplify the migration: psychology and opportunity.
The psychological factors are a key difference as this migration is driven not by the external world but by things happening within our brain. We already understand why video games are addictive in the same way that we understand why crack cocaine is addictive. VR takes it up a level with immersive technology, which research shows spikes dopamine to levels “unattainable by traditional video games or any other kind of digital media”. Research also indicates that roughly 10% of the US population is already addicted to video games; immersive VR technology is expected to significantly increase that percentage. In addition to dopamine, a by-product of cocaine and traditional video games, the immersive nature of VR triggers five more reward/pleasure chemicals: norepinephrine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin. This cocktail of addictive drugs delivered by haptics and headset is the reward mechanism which our brain craves. Once the reward loop is established, users are hooked.
The second major psychological factor is based on the fact that immersive, virtual media is significantly better suited than other technologies for driving users into a state of flow. While in flow, users report not only the most productive and pleasurable experiences but also the most meaningful ones. The necessary flow environment which creates focus, stress, and awareness can be suitably designed in a virtual world.
What is flow? Flow state is “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best”. It is during this deep focus that the mind is most productive and most intuitive. Group flow is characterized by team focus and coordinated action, such as a rowing team thinking and working together.
As flow science and virtual reality converge we will gain the ability to create immersive, digital, alternative realities that are at the same time more pleasurable, productive, and meaningful than the real one. With this understanding of reasoning behind the brain’s addiction, let’s look at what there is to do inside a world which is so fulfilling.
The answer is: anything you want! Though the internet does offer virtually unlimited things to do, four opportunities await those venturing into the virtual world which will consume the attention of millions: games, jobs, education, and sex.
Games are self-explanatory and their level of addiction as immersive technologies develop will only grow.
The internet connects millions of employers with workers on a daily basis. Digital world profiteering has countless entrepreneurial and sinister examples (from Club Penguin to international arms trade). If robots and AI do start taking more jobs held by real people, then the virtual job market will gain even more potent migratory impetus.
VR’s ability to drive people into flow affects learning too: research shows that subjects trained using VR have up to 230% greater retention than traditional methods. Not only does immersive education teach facts and skills, but also opens the door to empathetic education: spending a few haptic-enhanced virtual reality hours as a homeless, aging veteran on the streets of Baltimore is a potentially world-view altering experience. Education will first be split between retraining techno-illiterate members of the population and educating the burgeoning global population.
Sex has been a driver for every major communications technology, from VCR’s to the internet; it is hardly a stretch to say that VR is the next wave. Augmented by haptics, pornography becomes an immersive, multi-sensory experience and an even bigger cocktail of addictive neuro-chemicals. Already research shows that millions globally are digital sex addicts. Considering that VR sex is better at producing dopamine than other digital sex, it is clear that another migratory driver is at play, one which mega-taps a primal evolutionary impulse.
As virtual worlds become more pleasurable, productive, and meaningful than a severely limited real world, the migration will gain momentum. The major limiting factor is currently the availability of the technology; it’s just too expensive. As VR equipment gains cost-efficiency, the migration will gain momentum.
Intelligence Migrations
Note: through this section I will use the term “brain” when referring to the physical organ and the term “mind” to refer to the non-physical consciousness which occurs inside the brain.
The story of the intelligence migration follows the story of life. From the eukaryotes to the Romans, the story has been a move from the individual to the collective. The greatest leap since the invention of writing has been the internet: the connected, ever-growing database of collective human knowledge. Today, it is nearly impossible for modern humans to pass a day without tapping into this huge network to contribute or extract a little value. Though the intelligence migration has been going on for millennia, it has in recent decades made leaps and bounds. Our communications technology is wielded with devastating effect: sometimes it seems scarcely anything exciting can happen on the planet (or near it!) without a video or documentation of it occurring on the web. Intelligence is everywhere, and these days it seems to be rarely surprised. One of the few uncharted territories is the human mind, and it is our study of the activities inside the brain which paves the way for the next step in the intelligence migration.
Science-fiction-y as they may sound, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are experiencing groundbreaking development each year. Their purpose is simple: to provide direct communication between a human brain and a companion computer system. Current BCI connections monitor the brain to pick up indicative synapse activity; future BCI’s will identify these synapses in much, much greater detail and move towards a “seamless link with the internet via the cloud”. This link forms the bridge of the intelligence migration.
Motivation
Figuring the motivation behind integrating a BCI is not a difficult value proposition, provided that the engineering proves safe and accurate. BCI’s represent a competitive edge for the workers of the 21st century, a proven medical augmentation, and a window to social fulfillment.
BCIs may be the upgrade we desperately need to fully participate in an AI-dominated world. Though the COVID pandemic redrew lines of employment with the work-from-home shift, it certainly made clear that an increasingly valuable trait is an agent’s ability to navigate and collaborate across the internet to accomplish their tasks. Installation of a BCI introduces a competitive edge. For example, a team of executives with BCIs could significantly cut down on meeting time; as soon as one member knows information, they all do. Decisions would be reached much more swiftly and with fewer delays.
The application of BCIs has also done incredible things when coupled with other medical technology. Amputees gain direct control over a robotic limb and epileptics are cured of seizures. Low level “telepathy” has experienced positive tests, with successful brain-to-brain interface users not necessarily exchanging thoughts, but accurately reading flashes of light as they correspond to a message. The principle is sound, but there is a way to go with R&D.
Finally, take into account that humans are not just a social species, we are an extremely social species. Loneliness, studies show, is a great and modern terror. Connection is a foundational human driver and it certainly plays its role in attracting to the digital environment. Similar to VR, drugs in the brain present a driver. Opioids are a known pleasure drug released by social interaction; the depth at which individuals will connect through a BCI is expected to stimulate significant opioid release. Further, BCIs will also augment flow state with greater group flow. The very best team performance is a product of group flow when actors synchronize to excel as a team. Many participants in group flow admit to it’s being their favorite and most meaningful experience, as they actively and intricately contributed to “something greater”. Direct connection and collaboration will redefine team play and begin the evolution of the “hive” mind.
Execution
In theory, a well designed and executed connection would grant the user access to a massive pool of knowledge in a split second’s time. They would retrieve the information needed or perform a function and proceed to disconnect.
In practice, though, any great connection would likely prove fatal. Just as a computer circuit will struggle, crash, and burn under a program which exceeds its run capacity, so too could the synapses of the human brain struggle and crash under the weight of exposure to a large data library in a small amount of time. In practice the user should only connect to a small, private network to begin, although even this may have to stay relatively small to protect the brain from an overwhelming torrent of data.
For perspective, the human brain is reported to process information at roughly 60 bits per second. The process of adding a single digit to any number requires approximately 7 bits (try it now: solve 5+6? simple). It’s easy to see how attempting to instantaneously connect to even a relatively small, by today’s standards, library of 5GB (42,949,650,970 bits) could stress the capabilities of the modern brain.
Over time the intrepid developer could expose themself to progressively greater libraries and programs as they train their brain to integrate; the strain of connection would lessen with each repetition and the brain, as a muscle, should grow robust. A training regimen could be constructed with the goal of strengthening the brain for direct exposure to greater and greater databanks and, one day, the open web.
Design Speculation
Because connection to the greater web could be painful and overwhelming, a personal BCI would run as an isolated node, ideally with a dedicated server. This would enhance the user’s personal mental capabilities, boosting both their brain’s memory capacity and its RAM. The user would experience greater cognizance of information and wield stronger processing power through this. The user and their node could voluntarily connect to progressively greater servers and share thoughts with others while accessing more variety of data (typical internet stuff, but with direct connection of the brain).
Since this poses a contradiction with the last section, it’s worth commenting about the “strength of the mind” regarding exposure to greater libraries. On the one hand I just described the boost as an increase in the brain’s RAM, indicating that the boost would come externally and be composed of technology. This directly contradicts what I claimed earlier, where I argue that the brain’s processing capacity can be strengthened through repeated training, like a muscle. A compromise of both ideas is where the vision accurately lies: the technology does offload processing from the brain to free up space. However, the brain is a living, reactive, muscle which grows or decays as it is trained or abused. Studies suggest that we can expect the brain, if permanently implanted with an interface device, would over time teach itself an effective mapping between its own internal cognitive states and the input/output of the implanted device.
Regardless of their stress training, the user should be aware that the greater the library/server they connect to, the greater the stress on their brain. While being all-knowing might sound great on paper, attempting to process an extraordinary, internet-sized amount of data will cause an amount of physical pain. As we might expect, researchers should approach larger and larger chunks of data with caution, fearing strain on the synapses of the muscle.
Impacts of the Intelligence Migration
The trajectory of evolution has without fail moved from the individual to the collective, and times of competition have produced victors who claimed the first-mover advantage. Where size mattered before, throughput matters now. Accumulation of data and analysis capability will attract others to the initial organization, adding to the accumulation and repeating the cycle. The snowball of data is a contagious momentum of energy.
Due to data tolerance levels, the community will likely splinter into tiered sectors depending on the amount of data one could tolerate. At the upper tiers data flows like a river and users possess years of training processing the flow in a useful fashion. Such an organization which had access to this depth of processing power would have such a competitive advantage on their rivals that the best option will adhere to the idiom “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. Such will be the beginning to the age of collaborative business.
Conclusions
These great changes approaching our species should be anticipated with caution and thorough planning. This commentary should spark conversation about these migrations, their drivers, and ways in which we can best plan to receive them.
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