Suvudu Universe

In a few decades home entertainment may no longer be on a flat screen but beamed into the air in 3D images in living rooms through out the modernized world. On the strong chance that such entertainment is still based on an ad-supported business model, then around election time we'll doubtlessly have all kinds of 3D holographic political messages beamed into our homes. These will be incredibly sophisticated in terms of the communication strategy behind the ads, maybe even more so than the already sophisticated ads we see today. In fact they may push us or nudge us for or against certain things so perfectly that we go our whole lives never even realizing that they did this to us. That probably has happened to voters since the time of the first elections in ancient Greece. After all, a clever public speaker could always coax people into supporting or not supporting certain things. In our modern politics however the political persuaders have gotten better at what they do, and far more advanced in how they're pushing our little buttons. Today political ads use political science, but also psychology and even neuroscience. Yet as sophisticated, and perhaps creepy, as political persuasion is today, in the future it could be a quantum leap ahead of where it is today in sophistication. That may be because the top political staffers and consultants in the future might be a lot smarter than the already smart leaders of this field today, because many of those top consultants and staffers may be genetically engineered.

As I've talked about on here, our society may be just a few years away from having commercially viable technology that can allow parents to genetically manipulate their unborn children. This may allow parents to give their children certain elective desired genetic traits like greater height or more classically appealing looks. Most controversially of all, it may be quite possible to engineer your kids to be significantly smarter than they would have been otherwise.

Many fear that this will cause the rise of a new super class that dominates modern societies, perhaps with a rigid caste system like in the move Gattaca. I think however that our basic institutions like republican-democracy, free speech and strong elements of economic libertarianism, will likely all remain largely in place in America. Yes, there are shocking constitutional concerns about privacy right now (such as the spying Edward Snowden revealed), but American society is showing no sign of becoming badly non-democratic. Every living generation in America was raised with a strong democratic tradition (democratic meaning of democracy, not necessarily of The Democratic Party in case you didn't know). The American people therefore will demand nothing less than basic democratic rights. The Arab Spring, and related uprisings for democracy in Russia and other countries, has shown that in the internet-smartphone era dictators simply cannot hold down the new generations that will inevitably find out what democracy is. The internet has taught much of the world's youth about the glorious tradition of strong citizen rights in the Western world, and now the youth in the non-Western world are often demanding those same rights. Inevitably they are going to get at least part of what they want. There's also been in recent years a trend towards more speech rights in some countries like Taiwan, admittedly with occasional backsliding. But if there is overall a movement towards Western-style democracy in places like Russia, Asia and The Middle East where most people haven't experienced democracy much but yearn for it, then we have no reason to think that in the Western world the citizens will demand anything less. The North American, European Australian and New Zealand youth are not going to watch the rest of the world gain these rights and then allow them to drift away from their own countries.

As democracy continues to be the political system of the US we'll still see that an area where many ambitious people tend to flock to is in the running of political campaigns. Campaigns can be an intoxicating endeavor to be involved in because working in them gives you a sense that you are shaping society. Campaign work can be a fairly elite field to be involved in, demanding top talent and involving the complex challenges mentioned above. If political consulting is dominated by genetically engineered people just imagine how much we all might be manipulated? There are variables that can influence our political choices that we may not even realize are doing that. The Obama Campaign in 2012 was advised by an academic 'dream team', a self described 'consortium of behavioral scientists' that the campaign called on to help shape their message and tactics at the highest levels. Weaving together their collective expertise in psychology, behavioral economics and related fields, this team provided the Obama Campaign guidance on how to counter false rumors about the President ( being a Muslim), suggested how the campaign should negatively characterize Romney, and delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters. (See New York Times story discussing this). Some believed that the Obama campaign listened to this most in how they shaped their negative ads against Romney. These dream team advisers told the Obama campaign that voters simply could not be convinced that Mitt Romney was not a successful, competent businessman. They could however be made to believe that Mitt Romney's success would not benefit them, would never inure down to ordinary people. Hence the Obama campaign put a great deal of money into promulgating ads such as this one, pushing on that weak spot in the Romney narrative by severing the link in some swing state voters minds between Romney's personal success and the average person's success: See ad on YouTube

This is all plenty manipulative already, exploiting the way we think, appealing to some of our least intellectual and most prejudiced thought processes. You can intelligently disagree with the policies Romney proposed, and ask questions about his record, but this was not that type of appropriate critique. This was ugly, pyschological manipulation and little more. And I'm not just picking on the Democrats, as both major parties have had their share of such awful manipulative tactics, ones that sadly often were quite effective at shaping the democratic thinking of the populace. (The Willie Horton ads for Bush Sr.'s 1988 Presidential Campaign come to mind as a notorious racially tinged Republican example) Well what will it be like if this sort of advertising is designed by people significantly smarter than the smart people it is done by now? What if a subclass of genetically engineered political operatives is pushing our buttons so well, twisting our minds so effectively in so many different niche audiences that we all can't even tell it's happening anymore? What if even the savviest of journalists can't suss out exactly how they're working on our minds, and we all just end up being ruled in our voting by the piquing of our prejudices, just as the genetically engineered consultants in D.C. knew we would when they analyzed us?

In some ways, this voting based on how you were politically manipulated, that already goes on now and may continue into the future, says some very sad things about democracy. The voting public at the end of the day are malleable and may be acting as much out of these base psychological tendencies as they are out of any intellectual frame work for choosing policy priorities. We have to challenge ourselves and our own assumptions and tendencies and conclusions to make it so we're not manipulated so easily. The good news may be that if there are genetically engineered elites in many fields in the future, besides those who work in politics, there will of course be many bloggers or other types of journalists. Some of these very smart journalists and bloggers, engineered or not, will point out the ways in which this manipulation is occurring. Many in the public will awaken to the political manipulation, which is the crucial first step towards being inoculated against it. Unfortunately though, in all likelihood we'll also see many people sitting back and watching the holographic political ads come up on their home entertainment system. Many won't realize they're being manipulated and won't think much about these ads. Except subconsciously.