Tag: Freedom

Habitats for Humans

Animal welfare campaign organizations articulate their case around ‘five freedoms‘ that animals under human control should have: freedom from hunger or thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and disease, freedom to express normal behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress. Perhaps because we don’t like to see ourselves as being free rather than ‘under control’, nor indeed do we like to see ourselves as animals, it’s not clear to me that we seek to grant ourselves the same freedoms in the habitats we create for humans. There are parallels between the five freedoms and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second and sixth of these are ‘zero hunger‘ and ‘clean water and sanitation‘ for example, while the third is ‘good health and well-being‘. But discomfort, expression of normal behaviour, and fear and distress are more tangential.

In the UK, planning legislation has been relaxed allowing the conversion of unused office accommodation into flats, some with floor areas as little as 13m2. Though this might seem a pragmatic approach to resolving the country’s housing crisis, ‘zoning‘ in city planning can mean offices are built in places that do not provide convenient access to services that residents need. With accommodation such as this being chiefly aimed at the poor, this ‘inconvenience’ means exacerbating hardship.

The trend, however, as been more generally towards smaller room sizes in new build British homes, as developers seek to maximize returns on investment. While an article in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds little evidence of larger living space leading to greater subjective well-being, another article in Building Research & Information reviews various health issues that can be caused by being short of internal space in homes. The main basis for the health issues is argued on needs for privacy and space for socializing, and the article concludes by saying that one fifth of English households have insufficient internal space. Insofar as socializing and needing privacy are normal behaviours, these changes deny humans a basic freedom.

The question of what is ‘normal’ behaviour for humans is an interesting one. Our day-to-day lives are very different from those of people 100 years ago. As for our genes, evidently ‘native’ Europeans with lactose intolerance haven’t even caught up with the invention of agriculture. (To the extent that right-wing extremists drink milk to prove their ‘supremacy’ — don’t tell them about lactase persistence among African pastoralist communities.) Normality is heavily culturally determined, of course, and culture can change more quickly than genes, but still, it’s possible some cultures are out of step with what human bodies and brains have been programmed to expect. Is patriarchy ‘normal’? Or sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen? Or commuting? Or microwaving a TV dinner? Is there any part of our daily lives that really allows us to express normal behaviour for humans?

Freedom from fear and distress is interesting too. The film ‘The Matrix’ posits that the first ‘paradise matrix‘ was rejected by human brains — they kept trying to wake up from it. Indeed, in popular psychology ‘paradise syndrome‘ is described as a feeling of dissatisfaction despite having achieved a great deal.

That is a dark assessment of the human psyche: a belief that happiness is impossible or unbelievable. Normatively speaking it could almost be seen as a tool of mass-manipulation, encouraging people to accept unhappiness as a way of life. For the architects of the ecocyborg, it poses a difficult question. If we really believe the world needs a little fear and danger in order to keep us happy, the ecocyborg cannot be a 100% safe place. We may even already be seeing a reaction to this among those who pursue ‘adventure sports‘. What are the designers to do, then? Deliberately create places with the potential for harm?

The five freedoms are articulated around moral responsibility towards captive animals. We may not think of ourselves as animals or as captives, but clearly the more a society imposes constraints on its citizens, the greater the responsibility it should take for their welfare. If we cannot live anywhere we want, but only in built environments we can afford; if we cannot do whatever we want to enhance our lives, then to some extent we are confined. I contrasted urban and rural environments for the very different attitudes we have towards freedom in them in an earlier post. When the ecocyborg takes over, there will be no rural environment, no nature and no wilderness. Captivity will become the norm, and we owe it to ourselves to think about how we can enrich habitats for humans to maximize welfare.

Owning the Ecocyborg

The ownership of natural systems has been the subject of wars for millennia. But these are mere territorial disputes. Ownership of designed ecosystems is a matter of intellectual property rights. Designing an ecosystem that can sustain human life, one in which circularity is maintained, where all waste products are eternally converted into goods, is a significant intellectual challenge that will require a great deal of investment. That investment needs to be protected from freeloaders who would just copy what others have done without making any investment in developing the knowledge to do it. We have already seen this with some of the controversy around GM crops, such as farmers being sued for ‘copying’ seed.

But how might we see this ownership, as inhabitants of an ecocyborg? First, your living space would definitely be leased or rented. This is true for many people anyway, so at face value, no major implications except for those who are used to thinking in terms of home ownership. However, leasehold payments, which are used to keep the grounds attractive, are being exploited by some developers as a revenue stream. You might find you need to be able to continually generate economic value in order to sustain your rent. Life-as-a-Service, which currently is more lifestyle-as-a-service, could become rather more literal, especially if we develop cyborg functionality that allows you to be put into suspended animation, or otherwise shut down and rebooted later, whenever your skills and knowledge are worth paying for.

Building on LaaS as an idea, besides being able to sustain yourself, there is the question of your offspring. If you decide you want children, will you violate the licence terms of your habitation? Perhaps you will need to pay for a habitation upgrade in order to remain on the right side of your contract. The ecocyborg will also need to be able to sustain this additional life. It only has a certain designed carrying capacity, and if this is breached, there will be consequences for other inhabitants. To avoid any awkwardness, maybe the drinking water or food contains contraceptives, and these are switched off once you have the finances in place to support your habitation upgrade.

Third, there would need to be careful agreements about the ways in which you could personalize your space. Perhaps there would be predefined options you would choose from; or maybe some OEM certification process confirming interoperability with your ecocyborg. We already have planning law (in the UK at least) that imposes aesthetic as well as functional constraints on what you can do with your property. But gated communities take things further, with restrictions on plants you can grow, colours you can paint your house, pets you can have, and even leaving your garage door open.

Fourth, there might be constraints on who you have to visit. Our bodies interact constantly with the environment, exchanging chemicals, genetic material and viruses. For example, the food we eat and our gut flora entail a direct exchange of genetic material with our environment. People might even need some sort of modification to their genome to ensure compatibility with the ecocyborg they inhabit, or medication. There could be a need for visitors from ecocyborgs made by different manufacturers than yours to undergo a lengthy decontamination and quarantine process after visiting you.

It is the exchange of material from one ecocyborg to another that I imagine could be the most problematic. Concern about invasive species already imposes constraints on what you can take from one country to another. But rather than being an inconvenience (to humans — for native flora and fauna invasive species are an existential threat) as is the case currently, invasive materials in an ecocyborg could threaten its human life support systems: Did the designers of the ecocyborg consider the possibility of this material being brought into their system? If so, in what volume?

Industries would of course also be interested in knowing each others’ secrets and designs. This is where the exchange of material is so potentially dangerous to intellectual property. A visitor from an ecocyborg on the other side of the world could take material home and allow their ecocyborg manufacturer access to knowledge developed and owned by your manufacturer; and vice versa of course. You might then find there were constraints on where you could go as an inhabitant of your chosen ecocyborg. The ecocyborg might be designed to take steps to defend itself, using enzymes, nanobots, and terminator genes, but these too would be desirable intellectual property for rival ecocyborg manufacturers to try and get hold of.

In short, ecocyborgs are corporate spaces, owned and managed by their manufacturers. Inhabitants of ecocyborgs cannot be the owners in the traditional sense we have today of owning the property you live in and having the right to do what you like with it. In ecocyborgs, property is theft … from the manufacturers.