Mind Linkers: A Science Fiction Story

“Damn those robots!” yelled Ed Kapinsky. “It's like we're never going to get another job because of them.”

Ed was with his wife Linda in their apartment. The two of them were both software developers, but Ed hadn't worked in nine months, and Linda hadn't worked in more than a year. They kept applying for jobs, only to find out later that a robot had been hired.

Linda scanned the online job listings once again, and her face lit up.

“Now, this is the job I want,” she said. It was a high-paying government job opening for a programmer to develop software for an exciting new space mission.

“What are the job requirements?” asked Ed.

“They're asking for 5 years of Transcendent Java, 3 years of DB Universe, 4 years of Multi-3D, and 2 years of Self-Learning SQL,” said Linda.

“That's no good,” said Ed. “You have the 5 years of Transcendent Java and the 2 years of Self-Learning SQL, but you don't have the other two job requirements. I'm the one with 3 years of DB Universe and the 4 years of Multi-3D. Too bad we couldn't combine ourselves into a single person, then we could get that job.”

“Wait a second,” said Linda. “Maybe we could.”

“What do you mean?” asked Ed.

“Ed, have you heard about that new medical procedure called mind linking?” asked Linda. “Quite a few couples are having it done. It's been called the ultimate in marital intimacy. They link up the minds of a husband and a wife, by putting a big wire between their brains, a wire that connects their heads.”

“I've heard of it,” said Ed. “But what good would that do us?”

“Don't you see?” asked Linda. “Together we have all the requirements for that dream job. So we can have the mind link operation done, and then we apply for that job as a single applicant. We'll meet all the job requirements, so they'll have to give us the job test. If we ace that, then we've landed the job of our dreams.”

Ed had some objections, but Linda was able to overcome them. Her final argument was not based on employment considerations.

“Ed, think of it,” said Linda. “When a man and a woman get married, it's supposed to be a union. But what kind of a union is an ordinary marriage? It's just an agreement to stay together until one side wants a divorce. But when a man and a woman have a mind link operation, that's permanent. There's no way to reverse it. Now that's a commitment. Now that's a union. Now that's intimacy. If you really love me, you should want to take this step forward in our relationship.”

Ed found no way to wriggle out of this arm-twisting, so he agreed that they would have the operation to link their brains.

____________________________________

Ed and Linda woke up on the same hospital bed. The operation had been a success. Their two brains had been permanently linked by a red wire about three feet long. The wire could stretch to be a maximum of about seven feet long.

“Does it work?” asked Ed.

“Don't speak, just think, and let's see if I pick up your thoughts,” said Linda.

I love you, thought Ed.

I love you, too, thought Linda. The mind link worked. They could now share each others thoughts directly.

“Let's see if it works with images,” said Ed. “Let's see if I can see what you are seeing in your mind's eye. Visualize something in your mind.”

Linda thought for a moment, and then visualized the Statue of Liberty.

Ed picked up the image from Linda's mind. The image did not interfere with Ed's vision. Instead, Ed saw a kind of a small, transparent, ghostly image of the Statue of Liberty.

“It works!” exclaimed Ed. “You're thinking of the Statue of Liberty. I can see it.”

The doctors finished doing the final checks on Ed and Linda, and then released the patients. They walked home from the hospital.

On the street Ed saw a young blonde woman wearing a very short pair of shorts. She wore a short halter top which highlighted her abundant breasts, and left her navel exposed. Ed mentally undressed the woman in his mind.

“I see what you're thinking,” scolded Linda. “You're thinking of that woman with her clothes off! Oh, Ed, how could you?”

“I'm sorry, honey,” said Ed. “That was just a fluke. She was dressed in an unusually seductive manner. It won't happen again.”

As they walked further, Ed saw a young college student approaching who was prettier and more abundantly endowed than the previous woman he had lusted for. What could he do now to prevent his wife from reading his mind?

Ed remembered the classic science fiction movie Village of the Damned with a plot involving evil mind-reading children. At the end of the movie a man was trying to stop the children from reading his mind, so he kept visualizing over and over again: a brick wall.

As the sexy young college student passed by Ed and Linda on the sidewalk, Ed kept visualizing the same thing over and over.

A brick wall.

A brick wall.

A brick wall.

“Why are you thinking of a brick wall?” asked Linda.

“It's just a device to help me clear my mind, and come up with new ideas,” said Ed.

___________________________________________

Finally the day of the big job interview came. Ed and Linda walked into the interview room and handed the manager a single resume. The resume listed all the experience required for the job, but it combined Ed's work experience and Linda's work experience.

When they had emailed their resume, Ed and Linda had used the name of Edward L. Kapinsky. But now at the top of the resume was their full name, which they had legally changed to be Edward Linda Kapinsky. Ever since a notable legal case that they would discuss to the manager, it had been possible for mind-linked married couples to change their two legal names to a be a single name, reflecting their shared identity.

“This is most unusual,” said the manager. “When I got a resume for Edward L. Kapinsky, I was expecting to see a man walk through the door, not a man and a woman with their heads connected together by a wire.”

“You are required by current employment discrimination laws to give us full consideration for this job, without prejudice,” said Ed and Linda, speaking in unison. “Our two minds have been linked, so we should be treated as a single job candidate.”

“Legally, are you two people, or one?” asked the manager.

“We are legally one person,” said Ed and Linda in unison. “The laws were changed a few years ago because of a famous legal case. A man had been mind-linked with his wife, and the man had plotted and committed a murder. The prosecution argued that any mind-linked couple was legally a single person, and that the wife should also go to jail for the crime. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that, yes, any mind-linked couple was a single person in the eyes of the law. Ever since that court decision, it has been possible for mind-linked couples to legally change their legal identities to be a single legal entity. And that is what we did. Ed Kapinsky and Linda Kapinsky became a single legal entity: Edward Linda Kapinsky.”

“Very well, I guess I am legally bound to give you the computerized test,” said the manager.

Ed and Linda took the test together, and they got the top score of any applicant. They were notified that the position would be offered to them. Ed hugged Linda and kissed her tenderly.

“We finally have a job!” Ed said happily. “And the best thing is, we beat out those damn robots!”

On their first day at work Ed and Linda went through the normal co-worker introductions and orientation. They got some strange looks from co-workers, who weren't used to seeing a man and a woman with their heads connected by a big red wire.

“I think we have a gigantic problem,” said Ed. He looked at the red wire connecting his head and Linda's head. The wire could stretch to no longer than seven feet, and could not be removed. Ed also looked at the Men's Room in the office, which was 100 feet away from the Women's Room.

“What on earth are we going to do at this office,” asked Ed, “when one of us needs to go to the bathroom?”

Which Jobs Are Most Vulnerable to Automation?

Before you invest $100,000 or more on a college diploma that will prepare you for a particular job, you should consider what the chances are that automation advances in the future will reduce your chances of getting or keeping the job. Let us look at which jobs will be most vulnerable to advances in automation and robotics in the next few decades.

Driver Jobs

Google is currently working on driver-less cars, and their self-driven cars have already logged thousands of miles on the road. Nevada has become the third US state to authorize the use of driver-less cars on a test basis. We can anticipate that in the future there will be far fewer driver jobs because of this advance. Do not be surprised if you find yourself in a self-driven taxi within another decade or two.

Waitress and Cook Jobs

It is easy to imagine an automation advance that will sharply reduce the number of waitresses and waiters. When you arrive at your table in the restaurant, you could see a little sign with a web address and a table number. You would then access the web site using your smart phone (which almost everyone seems to have these days), and navigate through an interface allowing you to choose your food. You would then type in your table number and pay by credit card. There would be several advantages: no chance of the waiter writing down your order wrong, no chance of customers skipping out without paying, and no need for tipping. The technology for such a system is basically already available.

Cooking is a fairly hard thing for a robot to do, so it may still be safe to be pursuing a degree in the culinary arts. But we can certainly imagine robots cooking in another decade or two in some restaurants with a limited menu.

Teachers

In the next ten years, there is probably little risk of job reductions caused by teaching robots in the classroom. But as we go to out to a twenty or thirty year time frame, the risk grows much higher for elementary school teachers. Some type of elementary school instruction such as reading instruction involves a great deal of rote, repetitive work that is quite suitable for being handed over to a robot. We can imagine a slight modification in classroom procedures that might make teaching robots work quite well, such as a situation in which one half of the class works with a robot, and the other half with a human teacher.

As for college teachers, the threats to their jobs will not likely be from android robots, but from internet advances such as instructional videos on www.youtube.com and free online college courses, which have recently become very popular.

Pharmacists

Any student borrowing lots of money to pursue a pharmacy career might cringe upon looking at the wikipedia.org article on pharmacy automation. There are already medicine-dispensing machines available, and in California an entire hospital pharmacy has been completely automated. It is easy to imagine a system in which a large fraction of drugs could be dispensed without requiring a pharmacist. Your doctor could give you a prescription with a barcode, and you could take that to a drugstore machine (similar to a vending machine) which would read the barcode and dispense the medication. Or your doctor could send an electronic message to some large drugstore machine, which could dispense the medicine, and put it into a little envelope with your name on it, ready for you to pickup.

Doctors and Nurses

Nursing jobs and physician jobs are probably fairly immune to automation advances in the next two decades. However, it is possible to imagine two ways in which automation will reduce employment in these medical fields. The first possibility is robot surgery, which is becoming more popular, and may reduce demand for surgeons. The second possibility is that they may soon develop some type of android doctor or “doctor in a computer” that would be used purely for boring, common cases. A doctor finds that 90% of his cases are the same old thing, and 10% are interesting, uncommon cases. We can easily imagine a typical doctor visit twenty years from now going like this: if you have a very common case or some boring request for a prescription renewal, you would see a “doctor in a computer” or an android doctor, but if you mention anything unusual, you then see the regular “in the flesh” doctor. If that type of thing catches on, it might reduce employment prospects for doctors and nurses.

Factory Workers and Warehouse Workers

If you are planning out your life as a young person, you had better not count on 40 years of employment in a factory or warehouse, as your father may have enjoyed. Already millions of factory jobs have been replaced by automation, and the number will probably grow much greater, particularly given advances in 3D printing which may make obsolete many manufacturing techniques relying on human labor. They currently have in place astonishing robotized warehouse workers, based on a system in which everything is put on small shelves, and robots slide under the shelves, moving them around automatically to assemble an order consisting of multiple items collected from different places in the warehouse. As such systems get better and better, more and more warehouse workers may lose their jobs. 

Home Health Care Aides

As the tasks of a home health aide are usually fairly simple, rarely involving actual medical treatment, this is an area that is ripe for automation advances. It is not hard to imagine in about ten or fifteen years a type of robot that could replace many of the existing home health care aides.

Management Jobs

I am tempted to call management employment “the beast that will not die.” Given the fact that being a manager involves huge amounts of subtle interaction with humans, it seems unlikely that anything like a robot manager could be developed in the next few decades. Creating a robot manager would require creating artificial intelligence almost equal to that of a human being, with political skills comparable to that of a human being. So there seems to be relatively little danger of a management major losing his job to a robot in the next few decades.

Accounting, Sales and Marketing Jobs

Even though computers are very good at math, accounting activities in large corporations typically involve a huge number of subtle matters of interpretation and law that robots and computers are not good at. Sales and marketing jobs also involve a great deal of subtle psychology that no machine is likely to be good at any time soon. So jobs in accounting, sales and marketing are probably relatively safe from advances in automation.

Computer Programming and Information Technology Jobs

It is remarkable how little progress has been made in automating the writing of computer code. There are systems out there that can write thousands of lines of code. The problem is that almost always what is needed is something different in a hundred ways from what a code-writing system will produce. I think there is actually little danger that automation will decrease by very much your chance of getting or keeping a computer science or software developer job. The amount of code written by computers may double, but the total amount of code that needs to be written will probably quadruple, resulting in a net gain for human programming employment.

Cashier Jobs

Thinking of a long happy career as a Walmart cashier? Think again. When I'm done with this blog post I'm going to a discount chain where I'll use the “scan it yourself” automatic checkout line. The store currently has half of its checkout lines as automatic checkout lines, but how long will it be before there are no cashiers at any of the big stores?

Construction Jobs

The rise of 3D printing threatens jobs in the construction industry. It may be that the skyscrapers and houses of the future are built through a “layer by layer” process of 3D printing that requires little human labor, or built by a process in which humans just link together modules that were built by robots in a factory. But there will probably still be lots of construction work for renovations and cases when things break down. A 3D printer doesn't do you any good when a pipe springs a leak.

Blissful Doom: A Science Fiction Story

The little ball was like nothing Will Daniels had ever seen before: it glowed dimly, and it pulsated gently, slightly expanding and contracting in size. The ball also had a mysterious alluring scent. It was the scent that had attracted Will from thirty yards away.

Will and his teenage friend Bob had found the little ball in a field they were walking through. Will picked up the ball in his hand. Suddenly Will felt a surge of pleasure unlike anything he had felt before. It was as if he having the best sex he had ever had, and the best meal he had ever had, and the best swim he had ever had, all at the same time. But it was more than just physical pleasure. It was a mental pleasure better than anything he had experienced, better than he might feel if he had won the lottery and fallen in love and signed a movie contract all on the same day.

“You got to try this!” said Will. He gave the ball to his friend, who then felt the same all-encompassing ecstasy that Will had felt.

“This is mine: finders keepers!” said Will.

“No way, you got to share it!” cried Bob.

Then something very strange happened. The ball started to pulsate more strongly than before, and then it split into two. Both balls were about the same size as the original ball. The two teenage boys were delighted. Now they each had their own pleasure ball. Each went home to his bedroom, and began spending hours stroking one of the pleasure balls.

After several hours Will heard a knock on his door. It was his Dad, who came into Will's bedroom.

“Will, what are you doing spending all afternoon goofing off in bed?” asked Dad. “Look, I was a young man myself, and I know how it is, but you have to study for your midterms.”

“No, Dad, it's not like that,” said Will. “It's this.” Will showed his dad the pulsating pleasure ball.

“What on earth is that?” asked Will's dad.

“It's a ball I found in the field,” said Will. “All you have to do is touch it, and you'll feel more pleasure than you ever felt before. One hour rubbing this ball is a hundred times better than a trip to Disney World.”

“What kind of damn fool nonsense is that!” fumed Will's dad. “Give me that thing. I'm going to throw it away.”

Will gave the pleasure ball to his dad. As soon as Will's dad touched the ball, his face lit up like a lottery winner.

“My God, this is better than anything!” enthused Will's dad.

The father and son started fighting over who would keep the pleasure ball, but then the ball split into two. Now both Will and his dad could stroke a pleasure ball all day long.

Will stopped going to school, and his father stopped going to work. They stayed home, and spent all day rubbing their pleasure balls. The balls kept replicating inside their house.

By the time the self-replicating balls had grown to a set of twenty or thirty balls, Will felt a strange urge he had never felt before. It was almost as if someone was whispering in his ear: give away the pleasure balls, give away the pleasure balls. Will went around giving the balls away to other people in his town. Each time he put one of the pleasure balls in someone's hand, Will thought to himself: “Yes, yes, spread the bliss!”

All across the United States, the same thing was happening in other places, from California to Maine, in towns and cities all over the country. The pleasure balls had been discovered in every US state. Since the balls split into two after someone had rubbed them a while, and since people felt a strange urge to give the balls to other people, soon a large fraction of the population had their lives taken over by the pleasure balls. Students stopped going to school, and parents stopped going to work. Everyone who had touched a pleasure ball just wanted to spend most of his time at home rubbing the pleasure balls, and the rest of his time giving the balls away to other people.

Over a few weeks the number of self-replicating pleasure balls kept growing exponentially. When Will had found his pleasure ball, there were only 50 in the country. But a week later, there were 6000. A week after that there were almost a million of the pleasure balls. A week after that there were two pleasure balls for every person in the United States. Before long they were almost everywhere. With their pleasant, alluring scent and their mysterious, glowing pulsations, the pleasure balls lured in more and more people to touch them, and all who touched the balls became addicts. Once someone rubbed a pleasure ball, he was hooked for good, and wanted to do nothing else but keep rubbing the pleasure balls, and keep giving them away to other people.

The government organized groups to search for the pleasure balls and try to destroy them, but the effort was a waste of time. As soon as someone picked up one of the balls to dispose of it, he would become hooked on the ocean of pleasure supplied by the ball.

On a hilltop two beings with thin gray necks looked down on a community that had been taken over by the bliss of the pleasure balls.

“We see, Randorf, how easy it is for us to conquer this weak, pleasure-loving race,” said Alzon. “All we had to do was to drop off in about 500 places some of our self-replicating pleasure balls. The Earthlings happily allow themselves to be enslaved by the ecstasy of the pleasure balls.”

“Yes, Alzon,” said Randorf. “Soon the space ships from our planet will arrive, and we'll be able to conquer this planet without firing a single shot.”

A few months later a glowing disk-like craft finally landed on the White House lawn. There were only a few people left in the White House. Almost all of the White House employees were at home, rubbing their pleasure balls all day long. There were no soldiers nearby to defend the White House. They too were at home or their barracks, blissfully rubbing their pleasure balls. 

The invaders entered the building and placed pleasure balls in the hands of the few employees left in the White House. Then the invaders gently led the employees out into Lafayette Park overlooking the White House. The employees continued to blissfully rub their pleasure balls, and offered no protest or resistance.

The invaders took over the planet without directly killing anyone. Carrying out their construction plans, they vaporized the Washington Monument, and replaced it with a glowing 1000-meter tall statue of their god Rordrak.

None of the humans in Washington D.C. noticed the change in the skyline.

The Crystal Ball Formula: Forecasting the Future

John William Waterhouse, The Crystal Ball

Whenever we hear about some Cool New Thing that we might enjoy in the future as a result of technological innovation, our first question is usually: when will we be able to get that? Let us make this kind of speculation a little more systematic. Let us try to figure out whether there is some general formula or equation we can use to calculate when some future innovation will be available so the average man or woman can benefit from it. We can call this formula the Crystal Ball Formula.

The average unsophisticated technological prognosticator will use a very simple formula to calculate when a future invention will be available. The seer simply estimates how long it would take to produce the innovation, given generous funding. Then that length of time is added to the current year to produce an estimated arrival date for the innovation. For example, a writer might estimate that we could have robotic lawn mowers in ten years, so the writer might then say (in the year 2013) that you will not have to worry about mowing your lawn once it gets to be 2023.

This naïve formula can be expressed as follows:

Y_a = Y_c+ N

where Y_a is the year when the future innovation will arrive,

Y_c is the current year,

N is the number of years of development needed to produce the innovation.

However, this formula is too simple. For one thing, it works only in a case when well-funded scientists or inventors are working full blast on some future invention, and will keep working on it until we get it. Just as common (or more common) is a case when development of some future invention is delayed because of a lack of market demand or a lack of public interest.

For example, consider the possibility of lunar hotels. There is little market demand for lunar hotels. If companies started working full blast on lunar hotels, they might be able to develop them in fifteen years. But if we are to estimate when lunar hotels are available, we should really factor in a decade or more in which there isn't much work being done on lunar hotels. So we might assume that perhaps in the year 2025 development will speed up on lunar hotels, and that they might then be available around 2040 after fifteen years of work.

So let us make a revised formula that takes into effect cases in which technological development is slowed because of a lack of full-time current funding. The revised formula goes like this:

Y_a = Y_c+ N₁ + N₂

where Y_a is the year when the future innovation will arrive,

Y_c is the current year,

N₁ is the number of future years before Y_a when relatively little work will be done to achieve the invention (or when the development work is not well-funded),

N₂ is the number of years of well-funded, full-time work needed to achieve the invention.

This formula leads to more realistic estimates. For example, if we want to estimate when we will have floating villages, we might imagine that N₁ is 20, because there is currently no demand for floating villages. We might also estimate that N₂  in this case is 15, if we think that floating villages could be built after 15 well-funded years of development. So we would then estimate that floating villages will arrive in about 35 years.

But our formula still needs some additions, because there are two other things we need to consider. The first is the fact that technological innovations are often delayed because of regulatory roadblocks or social roadblocks. For example, newly developed drugs in the US often have to wait years before they are approved by the FDA. A recent paper by three professors complained that US “drug war” regulations are slowing to a crawl research on psychoactive drugs that could produce breakthroughs in treatments for conditions such as post-traumatic stress syndrome. Another example is restrictions on stem-cell research during the Bush administration. It may well be that many exotic future inventions will be delayed because of similar roadblocks.

Another thing we need to consider is that even after a technological breakthrough occurs, it may be a long time before it gets out of the laboratory and becomes available at a price that is affordable to the average person. This factor is typically ignored by technological prognosticators. We had video phones in the Bell labs around 1972, but it was only about the year 2000 or later that the average person could afford to have a phone conversation in which he would see the person he was talking to (through systems such as Skype). We had electricity working well in the laboratory about thirty years before the average person had an electrified home. Today we see numerous medical breakthroughs that are still ridiculously expensive long after they were developed. Some cancer drugs cost more than $100,000 per year.

To take these two factors into account, let us modify our formula again to make it look like this:

Y_a = Y_c+ N₁ + N₂ + D₁ + D₂

where Y_a is the year when the future innovation will be available and affordable for the average person,

Y_c is the current year,

N₁ is the number of future years before Y_a when relatively little work will be done to achieve the invention (or when the development work is not well funded),

N₂ is the number of years of well-funded, full-time work needed to achieve the invention,

D₁ is the number of years that the invention is delayed by regulatory delays or social restraints or cultural inhibitions,

D₂ is the number of years between the time the invention is created, approved and accepted and the time the invention is affordable by the average person.

So now we have our finished Crystal Ball Formula. The good news is that we have created a more realistic way of assessing when future inventions will be available to the average person. The bad news is that this more realistic formula leads us to believe that lots of those cool futuristic things we are hoping to have one day may not be available to us until much later than we had hoped for.

For example, consider a youth pill, one that makes old people young. In this case we might imagine that N₂ is 25, meaning that it would require 25 years of full-blast, well-funded work to create a youth pill. We might optimistically assume that N₁ is 0 (as might be true if the pharmaceutical companies are working full blast on such an innovation, and keep doing so until they succeed). But to be realistic we might estimate D₁ as 10, meaning that if someone invents a youth pill it is likely to be delayed for at least a decade by regulatory constraints and resistance from conservative opponents. We might also estimate D₂ as 10, meaning that if someone invents a youth pill and gets it approved, it will probably be at least another ten years before it is affordable. So alas, you aren't likely to get a youth pill in your medicine cabinet until another 45 years or more, unless you're a millionaire.

Depressing as these more realistic estimates may be, they help us plan our lives better. If it's really going to be 45 years before you get that youth pill, you had better eat your vegetables now and cut down on your red meat now and stop smoking now if you hope to live long enough to use that youth pill.